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As the title of this video suggests, we are talking déjà vu all over again which I believe is a quote from Yogi Berra who basically was kind of the king if you will of these sayings that didn't make any sense but at the same time they did sort of make sense.

I immediately thought of it when I read the following article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: A bad case of déjà vu for Thai tourism. Quoting directly: "The emergence of the COVID-19 variant Omicron, which has tallied 104 confirmed cases in Thailand," just bring this back. "104 confirmed cases at the time this was written" Quoting further: "is bringing back bad memories of last year when the second wave stomped on the festive season just a few weeks before the New Year holiday." Quoting further: "The Tourism Industry," (and this, I can't stress this enough) "the Tourism Industry which contributed up to 20% of GDP during boom years plummeted to 1.79% of GDP during the first half of 2021 largely as a result of border closures." Now let's think this through for a minute. Let's round up and say it went from 20% down to 2%. That means 18% of GDP was knocked out of the Thai economy as a result of this.

I also take issue with the way this is framed. Quoting directly from this article, Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, "bringing back bad memories of last year when the second wave stomped on the festive season." Well, as we have talked about, is it the second wave or was it the response. At the end of the day it is the Government that stated that things had to close; at the end of the day it was the lockdown, the shutdown of the economy that resulted in the loss of 18% of overall GDP. That is what happened and the way that this gets framed constantly and I am not picking on the Bangkok Post, I see this all the time. It is easy to do, I do it. People say "oh well, it is the result of this!" No it is not. It is the result of the response. At the end of the day that is what we are looking at. Well now here we are. The situation as it has presented itself appears to me, again I don't want to get into the data, that is not the focus of these videos, that is not the function but we know, 18% of GDP. We know what the economic ramifications are; we know that for certain, okay? There is still and I will gladly stand corrected, put it in the comments, I have still yet to see any data that any of these lockdowns work. I am almost at a loss for words; nobody has been able to show it to me. That stated, we know how bad this can be; we have seen it already. We are just getting going here and I am praying that we are not going to see déjà vu all over again because I really have to ask the question: "What is going to be left if we knock it back in even further at this point?"

Again, I don't really like making these videos. I kind of want to make videos just about legal stuff but at this point this really is the only issue out there and at what point do we get on with it and put this behind us and just say “look we are going to learn to have to learn to live with this to one degree or another because we are either going to have to deal with this or we are just not going to have an economy”. You can't run an economy by up and down, up and down. I mean I have talked to many business owners, clients and otherwise who say “no, it is the up and down; it is the uncertainty; it is the open and then close." There is a lot of money that is put in to getting a business reopened to only have it turn around and close again. So I hope this isn't déjà vu all over again as Yogi Berra said. I hope what we are looking at and I hope cooler heads prevail and we move forward and get past this.