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Small business owners whose lives have been permanently upended are going to be a whole new political faction around the world. Doctors and nurses are at least getting tagged heroes and will likely still have jobs even if hospitals end up bankrupt. But this group will be...angry.
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Wuhan's 11 million people are free to dine out. But they aren't trib.al/YFE4ZfQ
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There’s not going to be enough money printer go brr money. Many will turn to loan sharks and scammers in a desperate attempt to salvage their life and buy time to last through the recovery. In the process they’ll dig themselves into a bigger hole that will eventually claim them.
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Every life saved now is going to cost a few lives ruined. The human cost of this effort is going to be *very* unevenly distributed. Basically restaurateurs (and the class of businesses they represent) are destroying themselves to save lives, mostly disadvantaged ones.
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The free-riding groups of society are *hoping* that sacrificers will just accept their fates, content to suffer for their enforced altruism. Not gonna happen. They will (correctly) view Covid19 balance sheet as deeply unfair, and demand restitution from relatively unscathed ones.
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At the moment much of the push to reopen the economy is coming from the protected wealthy who merely want their net worth back. The truly economically afflicted class hasn’t even activated yet. When they do, it will get actually ugly.
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This can’t be avoided. For completely arbitrary reasons, no other class can make the sacrifice. They have to be the ones to front the sacrificial wealth here. The best that can be done is to try and socialize their costs 100% later. Easier said than done.
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Crucial difference: restaurants aren't gone forever, so restauranteur skills will still be valuable in the future. Restaurants aren't (generally) going to be replaced by robots or shipped to China. A failed COVID-19 restauranteur could be one loan away from a new restaurant.
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