As Job Losses Mount, Lawmakers Face a Make-or-Break Moment
The United States just lost 20 million jobs. The wrong federal response could make those layoffs a permanent fixture of the U.S. economy and sentence thousands of companies to bankruptcy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/business/a...e=Homepage
Never forget: none of this had to happen.
If Trump had been smart and on top of things, the virus could have been contained quickly, like it has been in Taiwan, South Korea, Iceland, New Zealand, etc. Instead, he dithered and treated it as a PR problem.
If Trump had been a real leader, instead of shirking his responsibility and insisting the states do everything themselves, plunging the nation into chaos, the impact of the virus would have been much less .
If Republicans weren't suffering from the delusion that the federal government should never get involved, even in a national emergency, we could have had a financial aid package that would have guaranteed wages to workers for as long as lockdowns were needed, like they've done in the UK and elsewhere. Unemployment wouldn't have been an issue.
Instead, we're now dealing with a catastrophe: more Americans dead in 3 months than in the entire Vietnam War, and more jobs lost than any time since the Great Depression. All because of bad leadership.
None of this had to happen.
Trump is now saying that the virus will disappear magically even without a vaccine. He is in denial that a virus is not political or economic; a virus is a scientific fact and phenomenon that needs to be dealt with as such.
Strong federal leadership has never been more necessary. Tragically, our country missed that opportunity with Trump in the Oval Office, given his refusal to take responsibility or exercise sound leadership.
The window of opportunity has passed for a shorter, stringent lockdown coupled with scientifically sound levels of testing and contact tracing. Countries, like NZ and Australia which followed that national approach, are now able to begin phased reopening with far less long term damage to their economies.
By contrast, we will keep muddling along, our economy hobbled by the pandemic, as the virus keeps burning through our ill-equipped nation.
His advisor Stephen Moore, clearly a Norquist devotee, views our federal government as “only making things worse.” Imagine if President Franklin Roosevelt had become tired of worrying about how to fend off the needs of the American people during the Great Depression, because it was too hard and complicated, and abdicated all responsibility on the theory that it would “disappear” someday.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/business/a...sContainer
The United States just lost 20 million jobs. The wrong federal response could make those layoffs a permanent fixture of the U.S. economy and sentence thousands of companies to bankruptcy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/business/a...e=Homepage
Never forget: none of this had to happen.
If Trump had been smart and on top of things, the virus could have been contained quickly, like it has been in Taiwan, South Korea, Iceland, New Zealand, etc. Instead, he dithered and treated it as a PR problem.
If Trump had been a real leader, instead of shirking his responsibility and insisting the states do everything themselves, plunging the nation into chaos, the impact of the virus would have been much less .
If Republicans weren't suffering from the delusion that the federal government should never get involved, even in a national emergency, we could have had a financial aid package that would have guaranteed wages to workers for as long as lockdowns were needed, like they've done in the UK and elsewhere. Unemployment wouldn't have been an issue.
Instead, we're now dealing with a catastrophe: more Americans dead in 3 months than in the entire Vietnam War, and more jobs lost than any time since the Great Depression. All because of bad leadership.
None of this had to happen.
Trump is now saying that the virus will disappear magically even without a vaccine. He is in denial that a virus is not political or economic; a virus is a scientific fact and phenomenon that needs to be dealt with as such.
Strong federal leadership has never been more necessary. Tragically, our country missed that opportunity with Trump in the Oval Office, given his refusal to take responsibility or exercise sound leadership.
The window of opportunity has passed for a shorter, stringent lockdown coupled with scientifically sound levels of testing and contact tracing. Countries, like NZ and Australia which followed that national approach, are now able to begin phased reopening with far less long term damage to their economies.
By contrast, we will keep muddling along, our economy hobbled by the pandemic, as the virus keeps burning through our ill-equipped nation.
His advisor Stephen Moore, clearly a Norquist devotee, views our federal government as “only making things worse.” Imagine if President Franklin Roosevelt had become tired of worrying about how to fend off the needs of the American people during the Great Depression, because it was too hard and complicated, and abdicated all responsibility on the theory that it would “disappear” someday.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/business/a...sContainer
