Donald Trump thinks he can somehow separate public health and the economy, allowing tens of millions of people to get sick and millions to die without damaging the economy. He’s wrong, as are the markets-first people pushing him in that direction.
If stay-home guidelines are reversed and coronavirus spreads, “The loss of life we’re talking about exceeds wars we’ve been in,” Diane Swonk, chief economist at the accounting firm Grant Thornton in Chicago, told The Boston Globe. The damage to the U.S. economy “would be hard to ever recover from. As hard as all of this is, the cost-benefit is pretty easy,” she said. As in, the benefits of restrictions on normal life outweigh the costs.
“A warning to the president,” Michael Strank, the director of economic policy studies at the far-right American Enterprise Institute, wrote at Bloomberg. “Trying and failing to reopen the economy before economic activity is organically ready to resume could have dire economic consequences.”
University of Michigan economist and former Obama adviser Betsey Stevenson emphasized that you can’t detach the economy from people’s lives, saying “There is no such thing as ‘the economy.’ We are a group of people who get together and trade in order to improve our own well-being and welfare.”
Right now our leaders need to be thinking three to six months ahead. Trump and the Wall Street boosters who are pushing him to forget about public health and reopen the economy aren’t thinking even three weeks ahead—as has been true all along. Hospitals are running out of beds, morgues are running out of room, and the numbers are getting sharply worse. Even if all they cared about was the economy and not human life, leaders looking at the data and thinking even three weeks ahead would realize how devastating to the economy it would be if this gets even worse.
