By Randy Rossi -
We have just learned that 3 million more Americans have lost their jobs and filed for unemployment because of the COVID 19 shutdown bringing the total of unemployed Americans to 36 million. That will crush our economy and the lives of those millions of Americans for years. As a result, experts say that because of the depression caused by losing their jobs and potentially losing their homes and cars, 77,000 more Americans may die from suicide, drug overdoses, and severe alcoholism this year.
As bad as all that pain is, it gets worse. We have just added $3 trillion of debt to our nation to help those 36 million unemployed Americans and the 1 million businesses that are at risk of going out of business. That massive debt will get much worse as federal and state income taxes and state sales taxes rapidly decline because nobody is buying anything as they hide in their basements. That huge debt could bankrupt our country and it will be an incredible burden on our kids and grandkids for decades. If you were worried about Social Security and Medicare going bankrupt before the COVID 19 crisis, you are going to be scared to death when you see what this additional debt will do to all of us!
Why did we inflict so much pain on ourselves? Because current “expert” forecasts are that roughly 100,000 Americans will die from COVID 19. So we are potentially destroying the lives of 36 million Americans because 100,000 may die from COVID 19. Does that mathematically make any sense at all? Especially when you consider that 30,000 to 60,000 Americans die every year from the annual flu and in 1968 100,000 Americans died from the Hong Kong Flu. Because our population back then was only 200 million, that meant that 0.05% of all Americans died from that flu. Yet we did not shut down our economy, our schools, our theaters, or our churches. Back in 1968 Americans bravely “Stayed calm and carried on”. Today the 100,000 that will die from COVID 19 represents 0.03% of our population, 40% less than in 1968. But back in 1968 we were the “Land of the free and home of the brave”. Sadly today, we have allowed irrational fear to dominate over our individual rights to have the freedom to live our lives and take risks as we see fit.
The good news is that there is a growing outrage from the American people who are tired of being told that they must ruin their lives by hiding in their basements because politicians tell them to. Businesses are demanding the right to open and Americans are suing states who have taken away their freedom of religion by not allowing them to go to church. Those states say it is OK to go to Walmart or buy lotto tickets or marijuana as they are considered “essential business”, but they say the people can’t go to church because those politicians don’t consider churches an “essential business”. My fellow Americans, this is a test to see if we still deserve our freedom. People who want to isolate themselves because they are afraid of catching COVID 19 have every right to do so. But people who are willing to take a 0.03% risk of dying from COVID 19 and go to work, have their kids go to school, and go to church have the Constitutional right to do so as well. It is time for Americans who believe in freedom and our Bill of rights to speak up, peacefully protest, take the politicians to court, and demand that freedom our Founding Fathers gave us. I assure you that if the politicians who took our freedom away from us see that they will get voted out of office if they don’t give us back our rights, they will back down and meet our demands. Our freedom and prosperity is in our own hands if we have the courage to stand up for it.
