March 20-21, 2020: The Ghost of Herbert Hoover

 

3/20-21/20: President Trump continues to flail away as the coronavirus spreads and the U.S. economy tanks. He can’t lie his way out of this mess because the damage is clear and omnipresent. 

President Herbert Hoover.

 

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The ghost of Herbert Hoover is rattling his chains.

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As of 11:43 a.m. on Saturday, the U.S. has 19,931 confirmed cases of COVID-19, exactly 19,916 more than Dr. Zero predicted on February 26. We don’t have a “pretty close to airtight” grip on the disease as Larry Kudlow, White House economic adviser said the same day. We don’t have much of a grip at all. And this disease isn’t like a common cold, as Rush Limbaugh claimed. Nor is it something that “should be compared to the flu. Because at worst, at worst, worst case scenario it could be the flu,” as a guest on Sean Hannity’s show said fifteen days ago. 

Dr. Zero can’t blame Obama this time – although he’s tried. He can’t brag about how the stock market is going up because of him, and if we elect Democrats, the market will tank. The market has tanked. And he’s in charge. The ghost of Herbert Hoover is now rattling his chains. 

Dr. Zero can’t blame the media for his problems – although he tries – because the media folks don’t determine how soon, or how aggressively the government starts testing for COVID-19. The president fumbled the ball weeks ago. Reporters didn’t rip the ball from his grip. The media doesn’t control how many ventilators hospitals have or whether doctors and nurses have the safety equipment they need. The free press doesn’t decide how much financial aid to get to waves of workers who are suddenly unemployed. Trump can determine all of that; and, to this point, he has failed.

 

Let’s start with the last. The U.S. Senate, under the guidance of Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell is trying to get a vote on a rescue package – that, as of now, has a price tag of $1 trillion. Kudlow – he of “pretty close to airtight control” fame – now says the package may need to be much larger, perhaps $2 trillion. 

The problem is clear. 

The projected federal deficit for this year was $1 trillion before the crisis. That was assuming solid three percent growth. The budget was already been blown.

 

And may we take a moment to mention the incredible hypocrisy of those on the right? When it looked as if Bernie Sanders was going to be the Democratic nominee for president, we heard the howling from Tucker Carlson, Judge Jeanine Pirro, and the rest of that zany Fox News crew. The U.S. was going to end up like Venezuela! Socialism would rot our children’s brains. Socialists are homicidal maniacs. Only Mitch and Donald and the GOP could save us from a terrible fate. 

Now, McConnell thinks we need to pass out checks to most Americans – “socialism” by any other name. The plan is still in the works, and to say that fiscal conservatives are having trouble swallowing the medicine McConnell wants them to take, is a fantastic understatement. Most adult taxpayers would get checks for $1,200. Married couples, filing jointly, would get $2,400. Some adults would get only $600. A family of six, with four children, aged 17 or younger, would get an extra $2,000 ($500 per child). But not so fast. If you made more than $75,000 last year and you’re single, or more than $150,000, and you’re married, you’ll get less – and at some point, depending on how much you made, you’ll get zero. 

Plus, the McConnell plan is to bail out all kinds of businesses that find themselves in trouble. That goes double for businesses that can afford high-priced lobbyists to roam the halls of Congress (at least when social distancing is not in play) and fight for what they need.

 

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TO BE FAIR, Dr. Zero is not to blame for a large percentage of this mess – although we know if Hillary had won the election, and this happened on her watch, he’d be blasting her at every chance. 

So far, what are the damages? First, the coronavirus caseload: worldwide, as of 3:43 a.m. on Saturday morning, there were 275,452 confirmed cases. Less than ten hours later, that number has grown to 287,239. China, if Chinese communist officials can be believed (they can’t), has nearly halted the spread. Italy has 47,021 confirmed cases and 4,032 deaths. Spain has 25,374 and 1,375. Iran has 20,610 and 1,566. And those mortality rates are what rattle healthcare experts. By comparison, Germany, with 21,652 confirmed cases, reports only 73 deaths. The United States is in sixth place: 19,931 cases, with roughly 190 dead (if we use the figure from Johns Hopkins). 

Worldometers, has higher totals but the websites are usually more or less in sync, the only real difference being when they update. According to the latter the U.S. now has 22,132 cases, with 282 dead.

 

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WITH EACH PASSING HOUR, the damage increases. Worst-case predictions one day prove rosy the next. A headline Saturday, from Newsweek, sums it up: GOVERNORS LOCKDOWN A QUARTER OF THE U.S. ECONOMY AS AMERICA HURTLES TOWARD RECESSION. Some experts fear the U.S. has lost two million jobs in the last week. “Recession is now unavoidable,” analysts at ING Bank warned Friday. “Our current best guess,” they said, “is for the economy to contract by around 10 percent in the second quarter although even this figure is looking increasingly too optimistic.” 

The bad news piles up. As Newsweek notes, California, New York, and Illinois are locked down. If they were nations, they would represent the fifth, twelfth and twenty-second largest economies in the world. Florida, where tourism brings in $40 billion annually, is in store for a massive hit. The governor has ordered “all beaches, movie theaters, concert houses, auditoriums, playhouses, bowling alleys, arcades, gymnasiums and fitness studios to close in Palm Beach County and neighboring Broward County.” Here in Hamilton County, Ohio, jury trials have been halted. The Kentucky Derby is likely to be postponed or run without spectators. That would put a huge dent in the “Big, Weird Hats for Ladies industry.” Home sales, which hit a 13-year high in February, have been slowed by, among other problems, a bottleneck in the supply of marble for countertops, which come from Italy. Walmart if handing out small cash bonuses to employees, and the company that runs Olive Garden and Outback Steakhouse restaurants has promised to pay all 190,000 hourly employees two week’s wages if they are laid off. Abercrombie & Fitch has closed all its stores for the week. 

The Trump Organization itself has laid off workers at hotels in Washington and New York City and at golf courses across the land. In Washington D.C., where occupancy had tumbled to only 5%, 160 workers were handed pink slips. In New York, the carnage was not as severe, but 51 workers were let go. In fact, with Trump so heavily invested in tourism-related hotels and golf resorts, and many of his properties carrying significant mortgage debt, it’s possible that he will be in a position to order the federal government he runs to bail himself out. 

Occupancy drops - employees laid out of work.

 

POSTSCRIPT: South Korea seems to have slowed the spread of COVID-19 by means of aggressive testing: 300,000 tests so far. 

The U.S., with six times the population has apparently tested only 170,000 individuals to this point. 

Asked yesterday, if the U.S. had the needed testing capacity in this crisis, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, admitted, “We are not there yet.”