Anti-government ideology is crippling pandemic policy.
So Donald Trump’s name will, in a break with all previous practice, appear on the checks that will slightly mitigate the Donald Trump depression caused by the Donald Trump pandemic. Hey, we’re supposed to put his name on everything, right?
The operative word, however, is “slightly.” Those $1,200 checks, it turns out, are only a small fraction of the rescue package Congress passed a few weeks ago. And the CARES Act, in turn, fell far short of meeting the nation’s needs.
Given the scale of the economic carnage — 22 million jobs lost in four weeks — we need another huge relief program, both to limit financial hardship and to avoid economic damage that will persist even when the pandemic fades.
But we may not get the program we need, because anti-government ideologues, who briefly got quiet as the magnitude of the Covid-19 shock became apparent, are back to their usual tricks.
Right now the economy is in the equivalent of a medically induced coma, with whole sectors shut down to limit social contact and hence slow the spread of the coronavirus. We can’t bring the economy out of this coma until, at minimum, we have sharply reduced the rate of new infections and dramatically increased testing so that we can quickly respond to any new outbreaks…
To read the entire article from The New York Times, click https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/opinion/trump-coronavirus-economy.html
