Here is what my concern is. I think the financial ramifications may end up causing the loss of a lot more lives than the corona virus ever will cause. Why do I say that? We know heart attacks, strokes are vastly more prevalent when people are under severe financial pressures, or under long term joblessness. We know suicides will spike. 20% to 30% of all suicides are tied to joblessness. Overdoses. This country has been running at over 60,000 deaths, largely young people, to overdoses, for over a decade. A lot of that started in our last great financial crisis. So I think you're going to have a whole ramification of secondary or primary deaths more to our younger generations than clearly coronavirus because it typically doesn't impact the young very much.
Well, clearly a good chunk of the younger generation, as well as many of my generation stopped saving money. And saving matters because it allows you to build capital to invest in assets. And one thing I learned a long time ago is one good investment is worth more than a life's worth of toil. That means if you can accumulate enough capital and buy assets that produce income, and over time build that, uh you don't have to get up every day and work hard to generate your own income. You have assets working for you. Um, you can't just do that overnight. But it takes building savings, being smart, being frugal and prudent with your resources.
If there's ever a point in your life when you want to take a risk to go start a business it's when you're young. Because when you're my age in your mid 50's, if you fail, it's a lot harder to recover from it, because your life span is much shorter, and you may not have the same level of energy.
When you look at the 2nd and 3rd world, the developing and least developed countries. We have made enormous progress over the last 20 years of eliminating starvation, of reducing diseases and infections like malaria. And with this economic collapse its going to have profound impact on those countries. Because a lot of these countries manufacture products and send them to the United States. So when we stop buying apparel here in the United States, what's going to happen? Those factories are going to be shut down. Those people won't have a job. And they don't have long term unemployment insurance. They don't have food stamps. They don't have any of those things. So I'm very concerned what's going to happen to a spike of starvations throughout the 3rd world. I'm very concerned about the economic collapse, the social unrest that will come from it.
Well, there's no way to fix it by the government doing another round of stimulus. The only way to fix it is getting people back working again. Our economy, our modern day economy with the amount of leverage we have in the system... That means the amount of debt that we have in our country, can't absorb everybody just sitting idly. And it's very hard just to flip the switch back on and have everything resume like it was prior. We have to get back to work. We have to get our economy going. And again, for me, it's not just about, ya know, financial impact. Again, I think of it in people's livelihoods, and their lives.
But it's hard if you've taken a significant amount of losses in your business, and you may not have the capital. A lot of these businesses are going to fail. Unfortunately my projection is that you'r probably going to lose 25% to 30% of all restaurants. We'll probably lose a quarter of all hotels. And there's just going to be a whole host of businesses that won't restart. And why is this so important? It's not just that that one restaurant fails or multitudes of restaurants. But they're the job engine. Small businesses are the job engine for America. It's when small businesses go from small businesses to medium, to big companies. That is what creates job and opportunities for Americans. So I'm really concerned that we're going to be in kind of a long term higher level of unemployment. Maybe a permanent 10% unemployment for a number of years. Because it's not going to just snap back on.
But it will help a lot of these businesses over this short period of time. But the problem is, if we don't reopen our economy, then all that money, all these hundreds of billions of dollars we as taxpayers have funded... Because ya know the government's money is not some nebulous money that grows on a tree. It's our money. And we're just borrowing from our future. So if we don't get this economy reopened all those loans are going to go for naught. Because those businesses come June 30th, ok, they have to survive.
Politicians... ya know it is very easy for them to give out money because it make them popular at that moment. But they're not thinking about what they're leaving our country.
Here is what my concern is. I think the financial ramifications may end up causing the loss of a lot more lives than the corona virus ever will cause. Why do I say that? We know heart attacks, strokes are vastly more prevalent when people are under severe financial pressures, or under long term joblessness. We know suicides will spike. 20% to 30% of all suicides are tied to joblessness. Overdoses. This country has been running at over 60,000 deaths, largely young people, to overdoses, for over a decade. A lot of that started in our last great financial crisis. So I think you're going to have a whole ramification of secondary or primary deaths more to our younger generations than clearly coronavirus because it typically doesn't impact the young very much.