In 2020 when state leaders arbitrarily decided to deem certain businesses as "non-essential," despite those companies being very essential to the livelihood of the owners and employees, it was hard to gauge the extent of the damage being done.
A year later and we see the data, reported by multiple sources, and the numbers are chilling.
The results suggest that the pandemic had already caused massive dislocation among small businesses just several weeks after its onset and prior to the availability of government aid through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Across the full sample, 43% of businesses had temporarily closed, and nearly all of these closures were due to COVID-19. Respondents that had temporarily closed largely pointed to reductions in demand and employee health concerns as the reasons for closure, with disruptions in the supply chain being less of a factor. On average, the businesses reported having reduced their active employment by 39% since January. The decline was particularly sharp in the Mid-Atlantic region (which includes New York City), where 54% of firms were closed and employment was down by 47%. Impacts also varied across industries, with retail, arts and entertainment, personal services, food services, and hospitality businesses all reporting employment declines exceeding 50%; in contrast, finance, professional services, and real estate-related businesses experienced less disruption, as these industries were better able to move to remote production.
That was at the start of the COVID lockdowns, with a president that was not decreeing national mandates, whether it be mask mandates of vaccine mandates of vaccine passport (show us your papers).
By July 2020, the numbers started trickling in on businesses bankruptcies, just in the first few months of the lockdowns.
As of this week, the Tracker showed there were 37.5% fewer small businesses open nationwide compared with January 2020, two months before the pandemic hit the United States. In California, the share of small businesses decreased 39.1% over this period.
In August 2021, an ANP reader and regular commenter, Jan, described what she was seeing in her neighborhood, which takes the percentages and data reported on so casually and gives it a human face.
Pulled into a parking lot I haven't been to in awhile. Normally it's packed. There were no cars. I thought "what's going on?". I look around and all the business were gone! It was a group of small stores and restaurants. All gone! Empty! So the shut down of non essential killed them. While big box stores and liquor stores stayed open. I'm sickened.
These are not just "numbers," they are human lives, affected negatively because of state/city leaders deciding to shut down an entire state or city, leaving only businesses they deemed as "essential" to stay open for businesses.
They quite literally crippled their own economy, cost millions of jobs, sent tens of thousands of extra families to the food banks for the first time in their lives, because they could no longer feed themselves with no money coming in.
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THEN CAME DICTATOR BIDEN & TYRANNICAL STATE LEADERS
Now we see the man that occupies the White House, Joe Biden, pushing national decrees, some of which have already been deemed unconstitutional or illegal by the courts, but between those and liberal state leaders "mandates" is causing even more people to lose their jobs.
Once again small businesses will bear the brunt of the loss of revenue as they lose the income from families no longer allowed to visit their establishment simply because those families refuse to allow a drug that has had no long term testing into their bodies.
The petition led by the Independent Restaurant Owners Association Rescue and filed in the New York Supreme Court condemns the city's vaccine mandate for indoor restaurants as "arbitrary, irrational unscientific, and unlawful."
"We're representing the restaurants, the gym owners — any small businesses affected by this mandate," attorney Louis Gelormino, who is representing plaintiffs in the suit, told Fox News. "What we're looking for is a permanent injunction against the mandate to test people as they walk into restaurants and gyms or require [proof of] vaccination."
New York has begun firing and suspending healthcare workers who refuse to get inoculated with the experimental Covid-19 shot, proving the mandate from the state that once praised its ‘frontline heroes’ is really just about power.
Monday was the deadline for New York’s healthcare workers to receive their first vaccine dose, and the state’s facade of blissful obedience has already begun to crack. While New York City Health + Hospitals head Dr. Mitchell Katz has reported that just 5% of city nurses were unvaccinated (and presumably kicked to the curb), the number across the state is significantly higher – 16%, according to Governor Kathy Hochul, who spoke on Saturday of potentially filling the staffing void with National Guard service members or out-of-state medical workers as she declared yet another statewide disaster emergency.
Nearly 80,000 more workers, in just one state, being barred from earning an income because of a personal medical choice.
Democrats want to force people to play guinea pigs with a vaccine that has no long term testing, and if they cannot force them to, they seemingly want them forced to use government assistance, which of course the predictable next step will be to deny the unvaccinated any social benefits.
In 2020, when the first set of lockdowns began, we saw chilling images of empty streets, empty businesses, and empty airports, and now that liberal leaders, following Joe Biden's lead, are putting more people out of work, more businesses into bankruptcy and more families into the foodbank lines, we can expect to see more of the images shown above and below, from 2020.
Need I go on? These were during the first wave of lockdowns, and some states are reinitiating restrictions, which will lead to more "ghost towns" because more than 30% of businesses from 2019, are out of business, most permanently.
BOTTOM LINE - THE WORST IS YET TO COME......
As Americans keep hoping that these tyrannical mandates will end at some point, a look at the food crises we are facing, with some stores reinstating purchase limitations of toilet paper, cleaning products, water, and more, this tells us more than what "hope" does, and is indicative that the worst is yet to come, especially since America has not recovered from the first round of lockdowns.
We never will.... the businesses deemed "non-essential" that have permanently closed, are not reopening, so the damage is already done, and anything more will just make it worse.
Many believe the Democrats are attempting a massive power grab, to keep "control" of Americans, all under the guise of "safety" in order to push the implementation of their socialist agenda.
The more I listen to Democrat politicians speak on this issue, the more I believe this is all by design, and they are using the playbook of former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who famously said "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
That is exactly how liberals are treating COVID.... as an opportunity.
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