Coronavirus

[Oracle]

The parts of the economy that pay the tax that pays for the NHS you mean?
Is football necessary ? No. But it pays a lot of direct and indirect tax.

I often wonder whether those in public sector know where the money comes from that pays them, and how hard it is to make it.

The key workers are those that make the money that everyone else wants to spend.
Any fool can spend it, on an ever growing list of good causes, it takes no skill or compassion, only more money. Sadly it is mostly fools promoted to positions that do spend it, which is why our services are so shockingly inefficient. There’s no shortage of people willing to do public sector jobs: if only there was more money to spend.

I do agree as a society we throw too many serviceable things away.

I applaud resources such as freecycle that allows things to find new homes.
The preserve of rich countries.

In Portugal you see markets of people selling broken things found by bins.
Much of EU is desperately poor. Not least because of economic migration away.
Not that EU - or remainers give a fig.

There is of course no such thing as fewer deaths, all deaths are just postponed - but give me and others a flatter curve and therefore delayed death please, if possible. The problem is the economic impact this will have. We have seen that many parts of the economy are in fact unnecessary, and bad for the planet as well - a simple example being the fast fashion trade. But this is a huge can of worms.