[Note by JW – please see the must-read comment on this editorial by Mark Skousen below]

Financial markets paused their slide Thursday (3/19), but no one should think this rolling economic calamity is over. If this government-ordered shutdown continues for much more than another week or two, the human cost of job losses and bankruptcies will exceed what most Americans imagine.

This won’t be popular to read in some quarters, but federal and state officials need to start adjusting their anti-virus strategy now to avoid an economic recession that will dwarf the harm from 2008-2009.

The costs of this national shutdown are growing by the hour, and we don’t mean federal spending. We mean a tsunami of economic destruction that will cause tens of millions to lose their jobs as commerce and production simply cease. Many large companies can withstand a few weeks without revenue but that isn’t true of millions of small and mid-sized firms.

Want to know why the U.S. economy is in free fall?

Why restaurants and bars are closing, putting millions out of work, and why the airline industry is facing possible bankruptcy? Why schools across the nation are shutting down, leaving students to fall behind and parents without safe places to send their children everyday?

Why the stock market is plummeting, wiping out the retirement and college savings of millions of Americans? Why the elderly are isolated in nursing homes and tens of millions who don’t have the option of teleworking have no idea how they will pay their bills?

Answer: Because China is a brutal totalitarian dictatorship.

As nations across the world struggle to contain the Wuhan coronavirus, they should realize it is also long past time to quarantine the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The people of China must understand that their future under the Communist Party is as outcasts, lepers, pariahs – isolated and quarantined by the civilized world. If that is not the future they want, the time to rise up and overthrow the Communists is now.

The future of China is warehouses stuffed full of rotting and decaying goods no one will buy, accounts filled with money they can’t spend, travel instantly blocked at the first sign of pandemic because that’s the only responsible way for the world to handle the Communist Party.

China is far too opaque, far too dismissive of basic human rights, to be welcomed into reputable international organizations as a full member. The CCP corrupts every organization it joins. It should be expelled from all of them, or relegated to observer status only.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee Agreed to have a battle; For Tweedledum said Tweedledee Had spoiled his nice new rattle. Just then flew down a monstrous crow, As black as a tar-barrel; Which frightened both the heroes so, They quite forgot their quarrel.

^{—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland}

But these two old codgers are beyond grumpy; they are both tethered to the already done or distant past.

Like Lewis Carroll's Tweedledum and Tweedledee, these two curmudgeons are barely distinguishable from one another but for their sheer idiocy. No American who watched their Sunday night debate will be inclined to vote for either of them.

With fear and panic spreading across the land and threatening to take down the economy, Trump is facing the greatest test of his presidency. Although battle-hardened by brutal fights with Democrats, the biased media and foreign adversaries, he is presented with problems of a different magnitude with the coronavirus.

It is a global menace that has declared war on America. Thankfully, the President left no doubt that he is all in on the battle against this deadly scourge. Now effectively a wartime president, Trump’s repeated assurances of victory were music to the ears of a rattled nation.

Why, when Joe Biden's mental decline is so obvious, are so many former Obamaphiles pledging their spurious support for the man?  Something's up.

It is beyond clear that Biden is not up to the job. This fact cannot escape the notice of Susan Rice, James Comey, John Brennan, et al., all those conspirators who tried so treasonously hard to destroy Donald Trump.

They surely know better than most that Biden is a dead man walking.  So why the all-out campaign to support his candidacy?  Hmmm.

They must have a plan.

Nations are closing borders, stocks are plummeting and a New York Times headline reads: “The Coronavirus Has Put the World’s Economy in Survival Mode.”

Both political parties have realized the crisis could severely impact the November elections — House, Senate, Presidency.

And sacré bleu, they’ve even shuttered the Louvre!

Some of these reactions are understand­able, but much of it pure hysteria. Meanwhile, the spread of the virus continues to slow.  Odds are very high it will be gone by the end of next month.  Here’s why.

If you listened to Chinese state-run media, you'd think President Trump went to Wuhan, China and released vials of COVID-19 on groups of unsuspecting men, women and children.

Beijing has been bending over backward in a massive global propaganda effort to convince the world that the United States is the real culprit behind the quickly spreading virus that's already claimed more than 4,946 lives (3,169 in China, 1,016 in Italy, 429 in Iran, and 332 in the rest of the world).

It's a high-stakes strategy for the Asian nation fighting to keep its superpower status amid a national lockdown and palpable anger that Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the Wuhan Virus, at first covered it up, triggering a worldwide health and economic crisis.

Not for the first time, let’s wonder how much Vladimir Putin and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (widely known as MBS) really know what they’re doing.

Oil has crashed to $32 a barrel thanks to a sudden feud between Russia and Saudi Arabia, which comes amid the Covid-19 shock to the global economy. The upshot could bankrupt a lot of U.S. shale companies, if that’s either man’s thinking.

But the U.S. may be the world’s biggest producer but oil is a tiny share of its economy. What America loses in terms of oil-industry wages and profits it gains in lower gas prices for consumers and energy costs for downstream industries.

The strongmen’s desperation is understandable but nothing else about their feud is: Saudi Arabia and Russia have zilch to offer the world except oil and gas.