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by: JD Heyes<\/p>\n
(Natural News<\/a>) For the first time in recorded history, world leaders who are supposed to have access to cutting-edge research and science, closed down their countries, shuttered their economies and ordered their people locked away, for the most part, in response to a new virus pandemic, COVID-19.<\/p>\n Predictably, thousands of businesses and firms closed. Factories shut down, producing shortages of consumer goods. Hundreds of millions of people, worldwide, lost their jobs, many for good since a sizable percentage of those jobs are never coming back.<\/p>\n And, according to the World Bank, tens of millions, globally, are now living in \u201cextreme poverty<\/a>,\u201d allegedly because of the Chinese Wuhan virus.<\/p>\n The Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0reports<\/a>:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The coronavirus pandemic has thrown between 88 million and 114 million people into extreme poverty, according to the World Bank\u2019s biennial estimates of global poverty.<\/i><\/p>\n The reversal is by far the largest increase in extreme poverty going back to 1990 when the data begin[s], and marks an end to a streak of more than two decades of declines in the number of the extremely impoverished, which the World Bank defines as living on less than $1.90 a day, or about $700 a year.<\/i><\/p>\n The World Bank now estimates a total of between 703 million and 729 million people are in extreme poverty, and that the number could rise further in 2021.<\/i><\/p>\n Let\u2019s get one thing straight: \u2018The virus\u2019 hasn\u2019t caused this poverty, it was caused by our\u00a0reaction<\/i>\u00a0to the virus. The vast majority of the world\u2019s countries believed the early models \u2014 those grossly inaccurate, criminally incorrect models \u2014 predicting death on a \u201cBlack Plague\/Spanish Flu\u201d scale. Within a month of the pandemic, however, the world already had enough data on illnesses and deaths to prove that COVID-19 was never going to be anything like a black plague\/Spanish flu.<\/p>\n But still, the lockdowns of economies continued. Jobs were lost; businesses began to go bankrupt and close.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In the U.S., these ridiculous lockdowns and other business activity and social gathering restrictions are continuing\u00a0nearly seven months later<\/i>, after we were told that we\u2019d only have to \u2018shut down\u2019 for a few weeks to a month, at most, to \u2018bend the curve\u2019 of the virus.<\/p>\n The smartest among us knew that was a recipe for disaster. The smartest among us being the Swedes, of course;\u00a0they never shut down<\/a>\u00a0and now the country is practically virus-free.<\/p>\n In America, states like South Dakota that did not shutter their economies and order citizens to cower in fear (instead of just ensuring that we take care of our most vulnerable populations) are doing better, economically, than we are doing nationally. Overall, the U.S. economic recovery that began in June and ran into July and August has now stalled again thanks to new coronavirus restrictions in some of our biggest, wealthiest states like Texas, California and New York.<\/p>\n What\u2019s also clear by now is that the sustained lockdowns are an effort by Democrats and #NeverTrump Republican governors to destroy the magnificent economy President Trump and Republicans built through a combination of tax cuts, trade deals and cutting of regulations and red tape. In three years\u2019 time, Trump and the GOP had the U.S. economy completely turned around; it was the polar opposite of Barack Obama\u2019s moribund 1.5-1.8 percent average GDP growth.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So while its true that the \u2018coronavirus\u2019 pandemic is real, what\u2019s also true is that the pandemic did not cause the poverty we\u2019re seeing now. The lockdowns and the policies of\u00a0purposeful economic depravation<\/a>\u00a0are what is driving the dramatic increases in poverty \u2014 increases that can and\u00a0would<\/i>\u00a0be reversed, quickly, if these policies went away and the coronavirus was allowed to burn itself out by moving through our populations, as though it isn\u2019t already.<\/p>\n Sources include:<\/b><\/p>\n