Trump created a situation that's shaky as hell. I'm glad something happened that makes him suffer at least some consequences for once.
Too bad it had to be this bad an event.
Too bad it had to be this bad an event.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22525433.
You do get that a reasonably conservative projection is that within a year most people in the world would have gotten COVID-19? How the heck did Trump do that?
The only means of slowing COVID-19 has massive effects on the economy. There is now way in hell this would not have had a massively negative impact on the world economy. If you could give some meaningful argument for why US is handling it worse than the rest of the world, by all means. But just saying "Trump is bad" seems to be completely disregarding the reality.
To continue the automotive analogy, supercharging an engine with major fragilities usually sets it up for a reckoning, just waiting for a trigger.
Covid-19 is just a particularly powerful trigger since it is globally correlated, and also has its primary effects at the local level. It would have shocked any economy, Obama's or Trump's, but there is much farther to fall in the latter's, because of the huge market rallies and the expectations that drove and emerged from it.
Agreed, but massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy are something he campaigned on and delivered on, like it or not (I surely didn't like it).
> And his growth rate hasn't been particularly different than Obama's despite the super stimulus of deficit spending during a non-recession.
On main street and the overall economy, sure, the growth rate hasn't been much better, and wealth and income inequality haven't reduced [1], although they didn't reduce under Obama either.
On Wall St however, growth has been blockbuster since his election (S&P up more than 30%) with investors reaping the rewards of stock buybacks and lower overall taxes. A good deal of this rise was right after his election, on the expectation of the tax cuts that eventually passed. The stock market is what crashed. Main street might follow, we'll see.
> Maybe it was the trade war or maybe there's just a limit to giving corporations huge tax cuts when they're already awash in abundant profits and capital.
I think we're in agreement here. The massive tax cuts to corps and wealthy people are what juiced the market and set expectations sky high. The trade war probably didn't help either.
1. https://www.cbpp.org/income-concentration-at-the-top-has-ris...
https://www.cbpp.org/share-of-wealth-held-by-wealthiest-1-pe...
(Also, note that Trump doesn't get to run deficits. That's Congress's territory.)
1. Many people do not care about the deficit to a great degree on either side of the political aisle. This despite a lot of rhetoric by one party or another.
2. The party in power seems to always find a way to blame their predecessor for their ills. I've personally seen Trump supporters blame immigration for the current rising deficits.
I am blaming him for taking Obama's legacy of stability and growth and destroying it for short-term profit. It would be a tragedy if he did not have to answer for that before the primary elections.
Certainly doesn't help that he fired the US's pandemic response team a few years ago (that pesky "deep state" he's been ranting about). The rest of the world has their own responsibility to some extent but the US usually takes point on these kind of things.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/
He's also had the CDC sandbagging testing for it. He's been claiming coronavirus is a liberal hoax for weeks now, and anyone who contradicts him gets fired.
One of the side effects of that has been the CDC refusing to approve states that developed their own testing (as they are required to get CDC approval). Because they don't want to be seen as arguing that COVID is not a liberal hoax.
The US has 330M people. The rest of the world has over 7B. The rest of the world needs to get over this idea that the US is the leader on everything; the election of Trump should have been the canary in the coalmine that the US just can't be trusted for global leadership any more, and continuing to do so is dangerous and foolhardy. As you said, it's been "a few years" since the pandemic response team was fired; so why would any country have trusted the US since then for pandemic response ability or competence?