God Bless the Child – Blood Sweat and Tears, 1968
Blood, Sweat and Tears
I’m pretty sure I went to my first rock concert during ninth grade year in high school. We lived in Dayton and my older sister Terry and her husband Ed took me to Dayton’s Hara Arena to see Blood Sweat and Tears, a fantastic mix of rock and jazz. They were amazing, and so was the opening act, a guy named Don McLean. It was almost fifty years ago, but there was one song most people would remember today from that concert. It was a ballad in the opener with a chorus that we all sang by the end of the extended song: “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie…”.
Blood Sweat and Tears were the “headliners” though. They covered a lot of other artists as well as their own work, with Laura Nyro’s And When I Die and Barry Gordy’s You’ve Made Me So Very Happy. But the most haunting song of the night was Billie Holliday’s song to injustice: God Bless the Child.
The lyrics ring true today, just as much as they did when Holliday wrote then in 1939.
Them that’s got, shall get
Them that’s not, shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news.
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own, that’s got his own.
By the Numbers
Today’s essay isn’t about Trump or Biden. It’s about “them that’s got, and them that’s not” in 2020. Here is the first jarring statistic to think about. Yesterday it was announced that 885,000 folks filed for unemployment insurance last week. More than 20.6 million have filed in the last month. Total employment for the United States is near 160 million. Just simple math: 13% of Americans who are in the work force are filing unemployment. That is in spite of the “official” 6.7% unemployment rate announced by the Department of Labor.
Second jarring statistic: the measurement of the “temperature” of the American economy, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is at record highs. Yesterday the Dow closed at 30,300, just 3 points short of the all time high. The Dow Jones Average is definitely slanted towards the biggest corporations. The big winners yesterday have familiar names: Dow Chemical, Proctor and Gamble, Boeing, Disney, Wal-Mart, Merck, Coca-Cola and Johnson and Johnson.
If you have money linked to the Dow Jones Average, and had the patience to “ride out” the COVID crash last March, you are doing better than ever before. And if you happened to “buy in” at the lowest of the crash, your “nest egg” has grown by 30% in the past six months.
Them That’s Got
.
So here’s the question: how can a nation that has demonstrably been the worst at handling the COVID crisis, with more than double the deaths of any other country in the world, have the best financial year on record?
Thank the Federal Reserve Bank. They pumped $3 Trillion into the market between February and July. Thank the US Government. They pumped close to $4 Trillion into the economy in the early days of the COVID crisis, though funding has been notably absent since then. To put those numbers into some perspective, the yearly Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States (in 2019) was $21.44 Trillion. The $7 Trillion pumped in this year amounts to almost a third.
We are still in a “trickle down” mode. The theory is if we can support the market and businesses, then that will eventually result in greater employment, and more money available for “them that’s not”. But by the numbers, that ain’t happening. What is happening is that folks are required to make a choice in our COVID world. To protect themselves and their vulnerable family members, the best thing they can do is to “lay low” and stay at home. But the huge amounts of government aid money isn’t directed to help them do that.
Them That’s Not
Instead, they are forced to go out “into the COVID world” and work so they can make ends meet. But then there’s the next problem – many of the jobs where they can meet “those ends” are gone. And since they are “out in the world” the COVID infection rates are climbing. Increased infections means increased hospitalizations, and ultimately increased deaths.
And what also is happening is that “them that’s got” are finding ways to “squirrel” that Government money away. Like squirrels they are storing away for the “winter” when the Federal Reserve money runs out, and the reality of Great Depression levels of unemployment kicks in. But they aren’t spending the money, they aren’t generating jobs, and they aren’t “spreading the wealth”. They are taking care of themselves.
God Bless
If COVID is the problem, then vaccine is the cure. The United States, no matter how badly we’ve botched the COVID response so far, is looking at a “short term” problem. Assuming the vaccine works as well as advertised, by July we will be in President Trump’s “herd mentality” (immunity) world. Once the risk of infection is over, then the economy will begin to rebuild naturally, instead of needing the “steroid-like” government cash infusions artificially holding it up.
And we can mitigate the suffering of the next seven months. Fewer people can die. More folks can be supported in staying home and protecting their families. The next round of government aid can be directed away from Wall Street to Main Street, supporting small businesses trying to survive the crisis.
We can be a kinder, gentler nation, helping everyone through COVID rather than just “them that’s got”.
