I’m against ballooning national debt.

Balanced budgets, meaning not running continual deficits year after year, is an admirable goal.

The whole time I was talking about debt when saying I don’t want to get benefits put on credit / a tab that someone else down the road - a future generation - will have to pay for. A balanced budget is better than continual deficit spending year after year after year. 

"Aha, the 'asking questions' tell for cognitive dissonance! Dogbert turned me on to this in 1997 at a seminar in Las Vegas! I don't agree with everything he says, sometimes he's wrong about everything, but he's totally right about this one! You've automatically lost the argument!"

I know you thought this was clever when you wrote it, but it really isn't.

- The "so" tell is pretty well established, which consists of "So" followed by a complete misrepresentation of what the person is saying.
- The reason I am asking gogators! if he did the math and concluded he had made a good point is because I genuinely want to know if he did the math and thought he made a good point.

The reason for this is anyone with a brain (which apparently excludes both you and gogators! because otherwise you would realize how moronic his point was) would look at that $7 billion figure, divide it either between the number of small businesses or the number of small business employees and realize that it is nowhere near enough to keep businesses afloat if they are experiencing a 75% decline in sales.

Question Mayor Haggar- Do you think $7 billion is enough to keep the small businesses of Korea afloat?

What "long-term economic catastrophe"? You're begging the question.

You don't think that a 75% decrease in sales over 2-3 years will lead to mass economic disruption and eventual catastrophe for millions? What planet are you on?

You can't give me a number but you continue to bang on about doing the math.  "something like"--are you just making these numbers up? How about a link or three?

I've given you a number. The fact that you're mathematically illiterate is not my fault. It is a death rate twice that of influenza- 15~30/100k.

But so far you're OK with killing off anyone over 50 and the obese. Who's next--the mentally handicapped, the physically handicapped, babies with birth defects?

I'm focused on the long-term health and well-being of people under the age of 50. That doesn't mean we don't try and help people over the Age of 50, just we have different priorities. There's a reason children are saved first in a disaster.

Why are you prioritizing the elderly over children?

As for government stimulus, not every business would qualify and the government could use more than the surplus if necessary. That number just shows your claim that a stimulus would bankrupt the government is without foundation.

Small businesses across the board are seeing a 75% reduction in sales. Yes, some are doing okay. Many more are really hurting. You would need to spend something like 1500 per person, per month just to keep them in survival. And still many would fold. Have you done the math on that? Korea doesn't have that kind of money.

Just because you can't accept that there isn't enough money, doesn't mean it isn't true.

For reference:


I'm not posting these to embarrass you. I just want to know if your perspective has changed now that you know you've been using a massively inflated number (about 55-60% higher than what small business actually reported). A lot of your arguments are rooted in the 75% decline in profits being catastrophic (your word, not mine).

Hey, no problem. Good that you did a deeper dive on the numbers. Of course we're all trying to sort through things.

Yes, I was basing thijgs on that figure. 20% is more manageable but still concerning. And I thinj you'd also agree that $7 billion is not a great sum of money over the course of this.

It's also worth noting that this is all pre-Stage IV numbers. I think you might see much bigger impacts then, but then again, it depends on how long it lasts.

Regardless, good catch on the data. It certainly shows things not being as bad, and I think you'd agree that if they were that bad, one would have to consider opening things up to some degree because those #s would be calamitous.

Yes, I don't think that the budget surplus is sufficient to make a long-term impact or cover all losses. It could fund some short-term stimulus, but it's not going to save every struggling business.

It doesn't have to save every business, but at enough to try and stem the bleeding.

That said, the rules have shifted so many times that it might not have much of an impact at all. For example, there was a period late last year when cafes had to convert to take-out only, but that was at Level 3 (if I remember correctly). I think gyms and certain other businesses were forcibly closed at one point, again at a lower level, while now they can operate under certain guidelines. This is anecdotal, of course, but several people have said they don't really notice any difference between Levels 3 and 4 in terms of what they can / can't do. The sparser number of people on the street may be due to self-imposed social distancing.

Look, we all know Korean post-work dining habits and how Koreans hang out under normal conditions. We know the big dinners, we know the groups of 4-8 going out for dinner and drinks, and round 3, and kareoke and up until midnight or later and all that.

We also know that given the degree of activity during the daytime, that people are not so crippled with fear as to cause daytime commerce and such to evaporate. The degree of daytime activity suggests that any decline in activity at night is linked to the laws, not perceptions of risk.

This is before we get to the issue of ballooning household debt that has taken place. It's not a good thing if in order to get through this, people take on enormous amounts of debt. The bill for that is going to come due at some point. You can't have this massive of a disruption to the entire global economy and to the national economies of the respective countries without some severe impacts. Think the Great Recession of 2008 and everything that led to (cough cough Trump cough).