The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I recently had a buddy who advocated that the government, rather than pay out trillions in Covid unemployment compensation and business relief, pay each of us 125,000 dollars to infect ourselves with the virus, thereby achieving herd immunity and sparing us further deficit spending. Basically the Administration is promoting the same idea. But without the 125,000 buck incentive.

Lately I’ve been feeling happily isolated from the Herd. Course, I don’t have kids sequestered at home learning their ABC’s from a laptop instructional video, we don’t have rent payments backing up like a plugged toilet, we aren’t worried about the jobs we lost or the jobs that aren’t coming back, we live in a part of the world where social distancing was pretty much the norm and our routine wasn’t disrupted greatly by the plague. If you offered me a quarter million dollars for the two of us to infect ourselves, I suspect I might have to turn it down. Not just because one or both of us might die or be greatly diminished by the virus, just that money seems like a poor incentive when we’re already living in a South End paradise.

It’s a grand thought experiment though. How many of us would take the money? I suspect quite a few, especially if you were younger. You got a couple kids, you could walk away with half a million. Not bad for snorting up a shot of covid. If you were old with underlying medical conditions, maybe the gamble would look like a sucker’s bet.

My buddy thinks this would save the economy. Sweden thought the same way. Nice try, Stockholm. Course, Sweden never quite reached herd immunity, just ratcheted up their mortality rate. But they didn’t have to pay anybody to catch the coronavirus. The reward was the right not to wear masks and drink in crowded bars. For a lot of Americans that would be incentive enough, forget the cash incentives, some big savings!

For the good of the herd! Try that as a slogan for the upcoming election. Probably about as rallying a cry as Wear Your Damn Mask, Dimwit!

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