Why Do Progressives Want To Keep The Economy Shut Down?
/As noted in my post a few days ago (“Republican Governors Are Kicking The Butts Of Democratic Governors On Covid-19 Response”), a clear dichotomy has opened up between left and right over whether and how quickly the economy should reopen, now that our pandemic is in decline. Republicans advocate for a quicker reopening, and many Republican governors are well into implementing that. The President has also come down on the side of optimism and early reopening. On the Democratic side, the response is something like “YOU WILL HAVE BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS!!!”
The upper right-hand corner of the front page of the New York Times is a place where in the old days you would look for the most important news of the day. These days the article occupying that spot generally has little to do with real news, but instead informs you of the official Democratic Party talking point of the day. Today the headline (print edition) is “OPENING TOO SOON POSES DEADLY RISK, SENATE IS WARNED.” Excerpt:
Two of the federal government’s top health officials painted a grim picture of the months ahead on Tuesday, warning a Senate panel that the coronavirus pandemic was far from contained, just a day after President Trump declared that “we have met the moment and we have prevailed.” The officials — Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, and Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — predicted dire consequences if the nation reopened its economy too soon. . . .
Do you find it as odd as I do that the number one official Democratic talking point is now advocacy for having the government forcibly keep about 20% of the labor force out of work? And it’s not some random 20%; rather, it’s a 20% mostly concentrated in the bottom half of the income distribution, including workers in retail, restaurants, hospitality, and personal service. These are people who often have little in the way of savings and no way to provide for their families if they can’t work. Wasn’t it just yesterday that the core of the progressive project was the effort to have governments raise these people up, and reduce or eliminate the income gap between them and “the rich”? Then suddenly, in the blink of an eye, the official talking point changed to being that the government must keep these people out of work for a longer and longer period, and throw them into destitution.
What is the thinking going on here? The cynic in me can’t get past the idea that they believe that a bad economy is the best way to beat Trump in November, and therefore every effort must be made to make the economy as bad as possible for at least the next six months. In this theory, the 20 million or so people forcibly thrown out of work by government edict are just collateral damage on the route to the far more important project of evicting the imposter from the Oval Office.
I put this demoralizing theory to one of my daughters today, and she responded that there are at least a couple of other reasons why a good progressive could be advocating to keep the lockdown orders in place:
The 20 +/- million people can be provided for by government handouts à la the CARES Act precedent. In the progressive model, passing out multiple borrowed trillions from the infinite pile of free government loot has no negative consequences of any sort. Meanwhile, the vastly increased dependency would be regarded as a feature rather than a bug.
The progressive does not believe in the competence of ordinary people to make decisions for themselves, and regards as superior an economy run by government order rather than one based on freely made individual decisions.
Neither of these rationales is particularly flattering to the advocates of indefinite lockdowns, but at least they don’t paint a picture of the progressive as caring about nothing but power no matter how many people may starve along the way.
To be fair, at one point there could realistically have been a concern that a reopening of the economy may cause deaths to surge. I would submit that the data that are rapidly emerging make that theory completely unsupportable at this point. For example, back on April 20, when Brian Kemp of Georgia became one of the first governors in the country to begin reopening, Stacey Abrams (Kemp’s erstwhile opponent for the governorship) called the decision “dangerously incompetent.” We’re now more than three weeks later, and if there was going to be a surge of cases, you would think that there would be at least some sign of it in the data by now. But according to data from the Georgia Department of Public Health, the number of new Covid-19 cases hit a peak of 933 on April 20 and again on April 27; and since then, the number has steadily and dramatically dropped. On May 12 the number was 61, and on May 13, 21. Kemp is looking rather prescient at this point; Abrams, not so much.
Meanwhile, here in New York, our governor has extended the stay-at-home order to June 6, with no real indication that that will be the end of it. Tax revenues are plummeting, but both New York State and City think that massive additional federal bailouts will.make that all go away. Governor Cuomo’s current demand for a next-round federal bailout— just for the State itself — is $61 billion. Florida had a much less restrictive lockdown and is already reopening. It has about 7% our level of deaths, with a higher population. And despite the reopening cases there are continuing to decline.
It sure seems that Democrats are placing rather a huge bet on the proposition that reopenings are going to lead to a surge of cases — without any real evidence that that is likely to prove true. Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit asks: “[D]o Democrats really want to go into November with all the Blue states broke and all the Red states flourishing?”