Today's Grim Economic News

How bad is it getting with the economy effectively shut down?

The Detroit News: Uneasy about coronavirus, record number of Michiganians face unemployment

Across the nation, a record 6.6 million people filed jobless claims last week, according to the Labor Department, double that of the record set the previous week.

Oh, and our governor wants to extend the shut down by another 70 days. I'

So our national unemployment rate which was a Goldilocks 3.5% prior to the Wuhan Flu hitting, is going past the Great Obama Recession level and heading for levels not seen since the Great Depression and is already calculated to be past the unemployment numbers for 1930 and 1931. We just hit an estimated 17% Unemployment and rising estimated to hit 32%, which blows past the Great Depression's unemployment peak of 24.9% under the New Deal in 1933.

This is what happens when you shut everything down.

Unless China or Iran get all sorts of frisky, we're also not going to be sucking the unemployed up into the armed forces, and given the nature and needs of today's armed forces, unlike in World War 2, we most likely wouldn't do that even if they did get really, really, frisky.

Two, our deficit ratio is hitting World War 2 levels without fighting a world war. Our debt level is already past World War 2 levels and the levels in the Cold War.

Three, the national debt is likely to hit $29 trillion. To put that in perspective, that's $94,722 per man, woman, and child in the United States. If you divide it by the number of actual taxpayers who will actually be the ones to have to pay it off, its $210,134.00 per taxpayer. I personally don't know anyone that pays that much in taxes. We're going to need a heckuva lot more taxpayers to pay that down, eventually. Eventually that kind of debt won't be sustainable, but no one knows at when that unsustainability level will hit nor what the effects of that will look like.

We may not have sufficient tools and room for deficit spending to get out of this mess, especially if we keep the economy in neutral by keeping things shut down as they are.

We can certainly hope that once things reopen that people will go out and spend based on their pent-up demand and the fact that they can't buy anything now except for bare necessities as everything else is shut down.

The problem is will they have anything left to spend to get the economy going again once this ends, especially as they aren't making money now and their expenses of living didn't go away?