The Next Disaster Is Just a Few Days Away

[Zorro]

Millions of unemployed Americans face imminent catastrophe.

Some of us knew from the beginning that Donald Trump wasn’t up to the job of being president, that he wouldn’t be able to deal with a crisis that wasn’t of his own making. Still, the magnitude of America’s coronavirus failure has shocked even the cynics.

At this point Florida alone has an average daily death toll roughly equal to that of the whole European Union, which has 20 times its population.

How did this happen? One key element in our deadly debacle has been extreme shortsightedness: At every stage of the crisis Trump and his allies refused to acknowledge or get ahead of disasters everyone paying attention clearly saw coming.

Blithe denials that Covid-19 posed a threat gave way to blithe denials that rapid reopening would lead to a new surge in infections; now that the surge is upon us, Republican governors are responding sluggishly and grudgingly, while the White House is doing nothing at all.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/opinion/coronavirus-economy-unemployment.html

[louis-t]

1. Oh, the White House IS doing something.

Selling black beans.

[Liberty Belle]

2. And hiding COVID numbers on the CDC site.

[Grasswire2]

3. WH is doing something - sending armed agents into "troubled" cities to put down unrest.

Beware. This is the precursor to something very dark and bad.

[stopbush]

4. Krugman nails it again.

[dalton99a]

5. Sadistic assholes

Delusions about the state of the economic recovery, in turn, allow conservatives to indulge in one of their favorite zombie ideas — that helping the unemployed in a depressed economy hurts job creation, by discouraging people from taking jobs.

Worrying about employment incentives in the midst of a pandemic is even crazier than worrying about those incentives in the aftermath of a financial crisis, but it seems to be at the core of White House thinking (or maybe that’s “thinking”) about economic policy right now.

One last thing: My sense is that Republicans have a delusional view of their own bargaining position. They don’t seem to realize that they, not the Democrats, will be blamed if millions are plunged into penury because relief is delayed; to the extent that they’re willing to act at all, they still imagine that they can extract concessions like a blanket exemption of businesses from pandemic liability.

Maybe the prospect of catastrophe will concentrate Republican minds, but it seems more likely that we’re heading for weeks if not months of extreme financial distress for millions of Americans, distress that will hobble the economy as a whole. This disaster didn’t need to happen; but you can say the same thing about most of what has gone wrong in this country lately.

[RussBLib]

6. GOP Senate will probably wait until the last minute

and then restore some of the aid. I think they can see that things have not gotten better and more stimulus will be required. I am trying to be reasonable about it, and I think that, eventually, the GOP Senate will do the right thing.

Am I out of my mind?