I want to see breakdowns by STATE to see if there are some areas impacted harder than other areas. I'd like to know if the state lockdown policies helped or hurt small businesses. We know some states never locked down. Some did for only a short period of time. Others for a long time. Which state's small businesses fared well, which state's policies killed the independent businessmen?
This source is pretty much a right wing news agency and they show their bias, but if the data is correct then policies need to be changed.
(Credit: Womply)
This source is pretty much a right wing news agency and they show their bias, but if the data is correct then policies need to be changed.
COVID shutdowns championed by U.S. governors and D.C. bureaucrats are responsible for destroying nearly 40% of small businesses since the virus was unleashed on the world—and we know now that it was for little to no damned good reason. A study by the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences revealed recently that shutdown orders made little to no difference in COVID’s impact. From the abstract of the study:
And it should have been evident for those caring to look.
While bureaucrats gave Walmart, Costco, Lowe’s, and other big-box stores “essential” status, allowing them to stay open during the COVID pandemic, 38.9% of America’s small businesses, the providers of most of the country’s jobs, were forced to closebased on fear, hackneyed social-distancing rules, early ignorance about transmission, and an insatiable desire by governors to micromanage the affairs of men.
In short, small businesses could have operated the entire time, exactly like big-box stores did, had it not been for tyrants in statehouses and mayor’s offices around the country destroying lives in the name of “science.”
Twitter user Mark Changizi showed the precipitous drop in small businesses in a series of charts from both Womply and Harvard. When he first checked, 37.5% of businesses had been closed. That number is now 38.9% as of June 13. That’s far worse than when he used the word “decimated” to characterize it.
Most of the destroyed businesses were in the hospitality industry.
The states hardest hit were those dependent upon those industries: California, Florida, New York, and Washington, D.C.
Some governors, among them West Coast governors Gavin Newsom of California, Jay Inslee of Washington, and Kate Brown of Oregon, still refuse to give up the emergency powers invoked during the pandemic so they can drop the hammer on people’s freedom at their next whim.
Reason magazine characterizes the clinging to emergency powers by these governors as tyrannical.
In addition to Newsom’s body count, governors in other West Coast states, Pennsylvania, and New York—from their orders putting sick grandmas into nursing homes to the huge increase in suicide rates—have a death count of businesses and the economic calamity that resulted.
And that’s not a small number.
Small businesses –- those with fewer than 500 employees -– are 98% of the businesses in America. They are responsible for 62% of all U.S. jobs. Fully 89% of these small businesses employ 20 or fewer employees. They are the backbone of job creation and an expression of American enterprise, entrepreneurial spirit, and individualism.
You’ll also notice on the graph above that the latest stimulus payments appear to have had little to no impact on the ability of small businesses to stay open.
We’ve learned a lot since China unleashed this virus on the world. These small business shutdowns are just another example of destroying the village to “save” it … with good intentions and police powers.
