US COVID DEATH RATE - 10 TIMES THAT OF EUOPEAN UNION

…President Trump, lying again to Jonathan Swan about US and the coronavirus

No evidence that unemployment benefits are discouraging workers from taking jobs

Well, due to the lack of a national approach to the pandemic, over 1,000 Americans are dying from COVID-19 every day.  We are now the worst in the world by far, and the US is 10 times the rate of the European Union.

Thanks to the Trump administration’s failure to deal with the pandemic, we are still suffering from Great Depression levels of unemployment.  After a brief recovery, driven by Trump’s premature attitude to resume business as usual, we have stopped the bit of recovery we saw as the states pause or reverse their business openings.  That is, those states that aren’t following the directions of the US president.

Those enhanced unemployment benefits, that were helping a starved US economy, and that were a crucial lifeline for tens of millions of Americans, those have expired.  And negotiations of whether to restore aid…. those are now, stalled.

You now see some headlines describing this crisis as a result of "congressional dysfunction."  Such headlines reveal a severe case of some in the media for placing blame exactly where it belongs.

House Democrats passed a bill specifically designed to deal with this mess over 2 1/2 months ago. The Trump administration and Senate Republicans had plenty of time to propose an alternative. Instead, they didn't even focus on the issue until just days before the benefits ended. And even now, they are refusing to offer anything that might actually help to alleviate the workers' plight.

This is an astonishing failure of governance, right up there with the mishandling of the pandemic itself.

So, what explains this disfunction?

Was it pure ignorant ill-will, or just spiteful ignorance?

Let's just talk about the total ignorance.

The COVID recession that began in February may have been the simplest, most understandable business downturn in history.

The main goal of the then economic policy was to make this temporary lock-down tolerable.

The Republicans, however, have shown absolutely no sign of understanding any of this. Their policy proposals being floated by the White House aides and advisers are delusional in their disconnect from reality. 

Think about it!  Cutting payroll taxes on workers who can't work?  That makes perfect nonsense. Letting business people deduct the full cost of their three-martini lunches, that they can't even eat at the closed restaurants?

They don't even seem to understand the basics of how the state unemployment checks are paid out. They proposed continuing state benefits for a brief period while negotiations continue.  But this literally can't be done through the unemployment systems.  That’s because the state offices that disburse unemployment aid couldn't handle the necessary reprogramming.  (Remember, these old state computer systems are from the 60’s and 70’s.)

Above all, the Republicans seem obsessed with the idea that the $600 per week unemployment benefits are making workers lazy.  They really believe that most workers would rather sit back and lose their jobs while making the extra, temporary, $2400.00 per month.  And besides, right now there are few jobs available.

This would all be a bizarre claim, even if unemployment benefits really were reducing the incentive to seek work. After all, there are right now more than 30 million workers receiving benefits, but there are only 5 million available job openings.  No matter how harshly you treat the unemployed, they can't take a job that doesn't exist.

It's a secondary concern to note that there's virtually no evidence that unemployment benefits are, in fact, discouraging workers from taking jobs. Multiple studies find no significant incentive effect of receiving unemployment benefits.

By the way, a great majority of economists believe that the $600 per week unemployment benefits have helped sustain the economy, by supporting consumer spending.

So the attack on unemployment aid is rooted in very deep ignorance, but with the Republicans, there's also a strong element of their desire to do evil.

Republicans have a long history of suggesting that jobless workers are moral failures.  That they'd rather sit home watching TV than work.  And today, the Trump years have been marked by a relentless assault on programs that help the less fortunate, from Obamacare to food stamps.

One indicator of GOP dishonesty is the sudden re-emergence of the "deficit hawks" claiming that helping the unemployed will add too much to the national debt.  They make these claims, but not one of these politicians has raised any objections to Donald Trump's $2 trillion tax cut for corporations and the wealthy that surely added to the national debt.

The recent Vanity Fair report about why the Trump administration didn’t have a national testing strategy.  That fits with a lot of evidence showing that Republicans spent months believing that COVID-19 was a blue-state problem.  They thought that it was not relevant to the people that they cared about.

By the time they realized that the pandemic didn’t care about what party you belonged to, and that the virus was exploding in the Sun Belt, it was once again, too late to avoid total disaster.

From this point on, it's hard to see how we avoid another massive catastrophe. The lack of initiative, or the lack of any strength of character of the Trump administration and its allies, that means that millions of Americans will again soon be in dire financial straits. 

God help us all, until Trump & company are gone.

Copyright G. Ater 2020