The Trump administration has set yet another record. As result of the still-runaway COVID-19 pandemic and continued lack of response, the United States saw its worst GDP drop ever recorded. The U.S. GDP declined by a staggering 32.9% annual rate in the period from April to June.
That is the sharpest drop ever recorded. It’s sharper than the economic collapses of the Great Depression.
This is one record that Donald Trump and allies can genuinely claim for themselves. Other nations are also experiencing steep economic declines due to pandemic measures, but have also begun to bounce back as social distancing measures, widespread testing, and robust contract tracing reduces pandemic outbreaks to smaller, more manageable levels. Those same testing and contract tracing measures were discarded by the Trump administration after early management failures. The ongoing dismissal of social distancing measures as a supposed partisan ploy and Trump's demonization of mandatory measures have left the United States in a worse position to contain outbreaks than it was in March or April.
It should be noted that this unprecedented collapse of the national economy happened with the disbursement of trillions of dollars in pandemic response measures. The expiration of expanded unemployment benefits, however, will lead to mass homelessness and chains of economic collapse in the coming quarter. It is likely that pandemic lockdown measures will have to be expanded going into fall, substantially worsening employment numbers yet again.
If Congress does not act to stabilize the economy by providing at least enough aid to each family to provide for food and housing, we will soon be in a depression matching or exceeding the 1929 version.