In my opinion, if you have a business running consistently without any slack, you don't have a real business, it's a zombie business. It's a risky gamble on whether things may improve. Sure, you're paying the bills, today, but when something happens you're toast, and unfortunately, things do tend to happen. I'm not sure it's possible to gesture to many times in history where there wasn't changes occurring, and that's not even factoring in people's personal turmoils either.

And I do think governments have a direct role they can play here, but, maybe also, something that they don't do much of is messaging. I wonder if there's a place to reach out to people running businesses like these and provide some sort of free business counselling, advice or guidance. Maybe some of these business owners would benefit from being reminded about their situations. Many won't, as they have emotional investments in their businesses and probably won't want to hear bad news, but maybe some can be helped? My impression of Americans is that many of them truly believe themselves to be temporarily embarrassed millionaires and also believe that rewards and stability come through the liberal application of enough hard work and years of unrewarded effort. Sometimes that is true, but there are scores who don't achieve what they're after with these methods, particularly because failure is basically invisible (!). Generally I think that it may be time to look at retiring these memes.