Despite the current uptick in my consumption of tequila and bourbon, this has been a ridiculously sobering week.
I have been on a work treadmill for the past six or seven months, working between 50 and 60 hours per week on a variety of projects. Thru last weekend, nothing had changed except for a slight feeling of reduced deadline stress. That was then.
Monday was still business as usual, sort of.
Tuesday the bottom began to fall out. It became clear that many of my existing projects were being put on hold and that there was not much coming in the door behind them. I had several conversations with clients, assisting them with tough decisions to ensure the survival of their entities. None of the conversations had a great outcome. During the day, the government finally began addressing the economic cost of Covid-19, thankfully.
Wednesday reality hit. We have a pipeline of projects, some of which will continue, some of which will not. For the foreseeable future nothing new will be started. I will be out of a job in a hurry if nothing changes.
Small and big businesses across America and the world are fighting for survival, shedding payroll dollars as fast as they can. For every Amazon that is hiring, 100s of entities are shutting down. The government will need to print money like never before to prevent social discord.
No one is immune. Or at least very few. Those are the ones that are lucky to be employed in industries that produce essential goods and services. For the rest of us jobs will disappear by the droves. Unemployment will spike over the next several weeks, of that there is no doubt.
What is in doubt is how we as a country will redeploy all the human resources we have voluntarily put on the sidelines. Many industries will pick back up from where they left off. Many won’t. In my opinion the relief funds in the short term will bridge some of the financial gaps,but we need a longer term solution. A much larger handout.
We need to rebuild our infrastructure with a vengeance. We have paid lip service to it for years. It is time for the government to open the spigots for real and rebuild America. We need to do it as an American First program using American owned companies, supplying American made parts using American labor. Period. It is not time for political correctness. It is not time to save the world. We can get to that later. We owe this commitment to our people.
Hopefully, we have learned a very important lesson over the past couple of months. We cannot continue to abdicate this much of the production of the goods in our supply chain to any other country. We have to rebuild our own. It won’t be easy. It won’t be quick. It will cost more, but I believe it is worth it. Covid-19 may just have given us the reason to do it.
I welcome your comments.