by Karl Denninger
Market-Ticker.org
I’ve said since the beginning of this: Your base case has to be that there will be no vaccine. Now even CNN is running articles talking about it, without any pushback on the impossibility of what “public health” people recommend.
This means you must calibrate whatever measures you take as a politician on that basis — that whatever you do you cannot expect a vaccine to bail you out in six months or a year, because the probability is that it won’t happen at all.
Further, you cannot realistically expect the tax base to survive any sort of durable “lockdown” measures — including so-called “social distancing” (which is no such thing at all; it is in fact forced separation of people at gunpoint.) There is not one full-service restaurant that will survive at a 50% occupancy level, and few will survive at 75%. Doubling prices to try to compensate will simply bankrupt everyone involved in running such a business.