30 June 2030
Reader's question:
"During covid, the government pour many scheme to help pour people to survive with money. But there is question about : is that effective?"
For example, Government gave money for those who are eligible, an amount of money to live but in real life, they spend money on new clothes.. remember this is poor people….
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The governments faced four challenges in dealing with the covid pandemic. The first was to develop medicines and treatments against the virus itself.
The second was to take care of the health of the people affected by Covid and this was their physical health as well as their mental health. The third was to deal with the economic consequences, both to businesses and to the individual. And the last challenge was to deal with security issues that might arise when groups of people, who resist the lengthy confinement and isolation required to control the virus, become disaffcted and challenge the authority of the state.
At the beginning of the outbreak, there was no vaccine to counter the virus. Covid was believed to be a highly contagious and lethal disease. The health of the nation was under threat.There was also a risk that the very large numbers of people in need of hospitalisation would overwhelm and shut down the National Health Service.
Pending a vaccine therefore, people had to be kept apart and very often were forced to stay at home. This meant businesses could not operate, would go banktupt and close, and people would lose their source of income.
An economy is made up of many many businesses that employ people to transform resources into saleable goods and services. Businesses make profits, out of which they pay taxes to their government. Thus, there was a problem for governments who wished to give financial assistance because with income from taxes, they would have to borrow money.
When a business has to close, for lack of profits, its assets are sold off and its employees are made redundant. If people have no income, they face starvation and the state faces the possibility of serious and widespread social disorder. To avoid starvation and disorder, most states chose to give social assistance to citizens, in place of their salaries, and in addition to medical care. But not only that.
If a pandemic is allowed to dissolve large swathes of business, at the end of the pandemic, it would be almost impossible to restart the economy from nothing. Therefore, because businesses could not pay the salaries of their employees, the government stepped in and began to pay the salaries, just to keep the businesses open, although not trading, ready for restart.
Citizens were taken care of financially and medically - although there was a lot of mental illness that was impossible to deal with, caused through isolation and disruption of social routines.
So this is why governments poured money into schemes to help poor people to survive when, through the pandemic, they had lost their livelihoods.
But there remains a question. While these government schemes were effective in dealing with the problems of citizens and business, were they too generous?
Many people think that the cause of the high inflation that is the scourge of economies today, lies in the enormous demand from people coming out of covid with large surpluses in their bank accounts. A demand that could not be met because there was no supply because businesses had closed. This created a large imbalance in supply and demand and as as we know, excess demand leads to a high inflation.
For example, Government gave money for those who are eligible, an amount of money to live but in real life, they spend money on new clothes.. remember this is poor people….
====
The governments faced four challenges in dealing with the covid pandemic. The first was to develop medicines and treatments against the virus itself.
The second was to take care of the health of the people affected by Covid and this was their physical health as well as their mental health. The third was to deal with the economic consequences, both to businesses and to the individual. And the last challenge was to deal with security issues that might arise when groups of people, who resist the lengthy confinement and isolation required to control the virus, become disaffcted and challenge the authority of the state.
At the beginning of the outbreak, there was no vaccine to counter the virus. Covid was believed to be a highly contagious and lethal disease. The health of the nation was under threat.There was also a risk that the very large numbers of people in need of hospitalisation would overwhelm and shut down the National Health Service.
Pending a vaccine therefore, people had to be kept apart and very often were forced to stay at home. This meant businesses could not operate, would go banktupt and close, and people would lose their source of income.
An economy is made up of many many businesses that employ people to transform resources into saleable goods and services. Businesses make profits, out of which they pay taxes to their government. Thus, there was a problem for governments who wished to give financial assistance because with income from taxes, they would have to borrow money.
When a business has to close, for lack of profits, its assets are sold off and its employees are made redundant. If people have no income, they face starvation and the state faces the possibility of serious and widespread social disorder. To avoid starvation and disorder, most states chose to give social assistance to citizens, in place of their salaries, and in addition to medical care. But not only that.
If a pandemic is allowed to dissolve large swathes of business, at the end of the pandemic, it would be almost impossible to restart the economy from nothing. Therefore, because businesses could not pay the salaries of their employees, the government stepped in and began to pay the salaries, just to keep the businesses open, although not trading, ready for restart.
Citizens were taken care of financially and medically - although there was a lot of mental illness that was impossible to deal with, caused through isolation and disruption of social routines.
So this is why governments poured money into schemes to help poor people to survive when, through the pandemic, they had lost their livelihoods.
But there remains a question. While these government schemes were effective in dealing with the problems of citizens and business, were they too generous?
Many people think that the cause of the high inflation that is the scourge of economies today, lies in the enormous demand from people coming out of covid with large surpluses in their bank accounts. A demand that could not be met because there was no supply because businesses had closed. This created a large imbalance in supply and demand and as as we know, excess demand leads to a high inflation.
4 June 2022
Germany is rearming like the Nazis, says Putin. The story goes back further than this, according to George Friedman.
https://youtu.be/r-8KV_GurLY
Remember that prior to Bismarck, Germany was just a collection of many little different states, so while from 1492 onwards, Britain, the Netherlands, France and Spain had their empires, with whom to trade and grow rich; Germany had nothing.
The Germans unite together very well, they work together very well, they are super efficient and also from looking at the historic record you can see that they are a very aggressive people.
Germany has an industrial base that produces twice what it needs but unlike the other European powers it had no Empire to export to. This is why Germany abandoned the deutschmark for the euro : because it could set the exchange rate and thus found an export home for its surplus production ... at the expense most of these so-called Club Med countries who, by their Catholic or Latin culture, could not keep up.
500 years of war in Europe. Europe was a slaughterhouse that lost 20% of its population. But still, overall Europe is more populous and wealthier than the United States od America.
America created all those institutions after the last war, including the EU and the Marshall plan, and as a sea power it made safe the world's sea lanes for trade. It did all this in order to stop the slaughter in the birthplace of culture, and have a stable block with whom to trade, and to nobble any would-be European hegemon that might form alliances and come back and challenge it.
But it meant that Europe lost much of its sovereignty and the world was dominated by the two powers, America and Russia.
Then in 1992 the Soviet Union collapsed and in that same year, Europe united under the Maastricht Treaty. One of those American institutions, NATO, should have gone out of business at this point, but Europe had disbanded its militaries to a large extent, so NATO remained and began kicking Russia while it was down, rolling in all those newly-independent states along the Russo-central-European fault line. Why? Because it could, as America now had no challenger to check its behaviour.
And this is what led to the present war : as in the past, as soon as Russia regained its strength, it responded to the beating.
So in conclusion, I think it's true to say that while this war is completely unnecessary, but America is never in a mood to listen, if America loses and has to withdraw from Europe, then yes, German re-armament could be a big problem. America will not be there to bully Germany into considerate behaviour for its neighbours, and there is a real risk that if the southern debtor nations stop repaying their debt, they will have problems with Germany, in the same way Sri Lanka currently has problems with China and we could see sovereignty, and the power to make war or peace, flow to a newly militarised Germany.