'Painful Truth About Covid & The Economy-Trump Is To Blame.' Millions About To Be Hurt: Robt. Reich
'The painful truth about Covid and the economy- Trump is to blame.' By Robert Reich, The Guardian, Sun., Aug. 2, 2020. Lies about the economy are as dangerous as lies about the virus. Thanks to the GOP, millions are about to be hurt.
The recovery has been very strong,” Donald Trump said on Monday. Then the commerce department reported the US economy contracted between April and June at the fastest pace in nearly three-quarters of a century, which is as long as economists have been keeping track. The drop wiped out 5 years of economic growth. But pesky facts have never stopped Trump. Having lied for 5 months about the coronavirus, he’s now filling social media and the airwaves with untruths about the economy so he can dupe his way to election day.
The comeback “won’t take very long”, he reassured Americans on Thursday. But every indicator shows that after a small uptick in June, the US economy is tanking again. Restaurant reservations are down, traffic at retail stores is dwindling, more small businesses are closing, the small rebound in air travel is reversing. What’s Trump’s plan to revive the economy? The same one he’s been pushing for months: just “reopen” it. He wants the public to believe the shutdown orders that began in March caused the economy to tank in the first place, so reversing them will bring the economy back. Rubbish. It was the virus that caused the downturn, and its resurgence is taking the economy down again.
The virus is surging back because governors reopened prematurely, before the virus was under control – at Trump’s repeated insistence. The sequence of cause-and-effect is clear. The virus has surged most in states that were among the first to reopen, such as Florida, South Carolina, Texas and much of the rest of the sun belt. People can’t go back to work because there is very little work for them to do.
Because of this resurgence, many states are pausing plans to reopen and some are reimposing restrictions. But these restrictions are not the reason the economy is slowing. They are the necessary consequence of allowing the pandemic to get out of control. Even the White House’s own coronavirus taskforce concludes that 21 states have outbreaks serious enough to justify more restrictions. Notably, the economy is sliding again even though the government has pumped trillions of dollars into it. What happens when the money stops? We’re about to find out.
Senate Republicans can’t agree among themselves, let alone with House Democrats, about more funding, while Trump says “we really don’t care” about reaching a spending agreement...
More, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/02/covid-19-coronavirus-us-economy-donald-trump-republicans
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- Could this anti-Trump Republican group take down the president? The Lincoln Project. Savage attack ads from a well-funded group of dissident Republicans are aiming to sway a key sliver of opinion in swing states,
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/01/lincoln-project-donald-trump-republicans-campaign-ads
"Mourning In America," May 4, 2020. The Lincoln Project.
