Letting down both the country and their party

Robert Rubin and Jacob Lew are both former Treasury Secretaries. The wrote an impassioned op-ed in the Post this morning titled “Congress needs to address the pandemic economic crisis. This is not the time to worry about deficit spending.” 

You should read the piece – I don’t have much to add to it. The point is that there will be huge damage to a) the economy and b) lots of people, including the 14 million unemployed, unless Congress passes a real relief bill, not the emaciated joke that Mitch McConnell tried to pass yesterday. I found one statement particularly appalling: “In August, 1 in 10 adults reported that their household sometimes or often didn’t get enough to eat, and the rate is significantly higher in families with children.” 

The other amazing aspect of this is that not passing a real bill will definitely hurt the GOP – both Trump and Republican Senators up for re-election – much more than the Democrats. Yet, given that McConnell refuses to face reality, Trump won’t put his weight behind a real deal with the Democrats – and even Steven Mnuchin has said the stakes are very high. Trump – supposedly the great negotiator – hasn’t even talked with Nancy Pelosi since last October, but at least he could give Mnuchin the authority to negotiate a real bill with her (as Mnuchin did with the CARES Act, which Trump proudly claims credit for). But he’s not doing that. 

I of course would like to see both Trump and the GOP Senators soundly defeated in November. But I’d certainly be quite willing to take the chance that the Senate won’t change hands if those Senators would do what’s right for the American people and for once stand up to Trump. But it doesn’t look very likely that will happen. Both sad and truly amazing.

  

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The tragedy in India

For a great account of what’s going on in India, read this WaPo article. And read this Atlantic article for a good commentary on how India’s wealthier class ignored the lessons of the 1984 Bhopal disaster and let the health care system stagnate, leaving the country unable to handle this sudden surge in the virus. Although it's wrong to say the system stagnated. For the wealthy, it became (and remains) world-class. Does this remind you of another health care system that, at least in the early days of the pandemic, was overwhelmed?  Both articles call attention to the Modi government’s failures, but they both try to spread the blame around. Yes, others are responsible, but the fact that – after a terrible response to the first wave of the virus – the government got lulled into thinking they’d beaten it, so they could open up completely (including holding big political rallies and allowing the annual Kumbh Mela to take place – this year in Haridwar, which I’ve visited and can ...
Read more

The Indian variant

The numbers keep improving every week. Both new cases and deaths grew at the same 0.7% rate in the past week, vs. 0.9% for both cases and deaths the previous week. And average daily deaths in the past week were 573. For perspective, the last time deaths were this low was March 31, 2020. But given that daily deaths hadn’t gone above 10 until March 15, the fact that they’d accelerated to 468 on March 31 was a bad sign (at the time, my big concern was that total deaths would end up in the low tens of thousands. In fact, they passed 600,000 last week). This morning, WaPo ran a story on the new Indian variant’s arrival in Britain, where it passed 2,000 cases recently. It seems to be at least 50% more transmissible than what we used to call the UK variant, but which is now the dominant variant in both the US and Britain. And that variant in turn easily displaced what had been the previous dominant variant in both countries, since the beginning of the pandemic (in fact, I remember a lot o...
Read more

Deaths and Recoveries

I’m not bothering with my usual Numbers section today, since the 1-day and 7-day rates of increase in deaths and cases haven’t changed at all, and the ratio of deaths to closed cases remains at 17%. The projected deaths numbers are close to what they were yesterday. I haven’t discussed the ratio of deaths to closed cases for a while, although I’ve been reporting it. To refresh your memory, this is the ratio of total Covid-19 deaths so far to “closed cases”; closed cases is the sum of deaths so far and “recoveries” so far. The fact that the US rate is 17% means that, of all closed cases so far in the pandemic, 17% of them have resulted in death. This is down substantially from the initial value of 41%, in late March, when Worldometers started reporting recoveries. But it is still quite high – it seems to mean that, if you’re determined to have a “case” of Covid-19, the odds are close to 1 in 5 that you will die. I’ve been periodically comparing the US performance in this ar...
Read more