Trump Screwed Up The Economy With Wrong Pandemic Response

P

PoliTalker

Diversity Makes Greatness
By now it is crystal clear. The USA took the wrong economic approach to deal with the pandemic.

Europe did the right thing. The USA did the wrong thing.

Here's the difference. In Europe, their economy was successfully placed on pause, then restarted when it was safe. They did this by making certain that jobs were preserved even when workers were unable to come to work. Governments made social assistance payments to employers to maintain payrolls even though no work was getting done.

The USA allowed workers to get laid off, businesses to fold. Instead of paying employers to keep workers on the books and maintain their health care coverage, direct payments were made to everybody whether they were laid off and needed it or not. That is not where the money should have gone.

Retrospectively, we can see all this now.

Europe has more experience at socialism. They know how to do it right.

The USA needs to learn some lessons from the far more mature countries in Europe.

We are so busy proclaiming we know how to do government better we don't pay attention to those who have more experience at this than we do. And if we know how to do government better then why do Americans have such a low view of the government we created? It makes no sense.

Europeans value their government more than Americans value ours. In Europe, the governments fear the people. In the USA, the people fear the government. How did this happen? How did we end up with trainwreck Trump and why do we refuse to admit it was a huge mistake?
 
First he denied there even was a pandemic.

Then he tried to claim it would all be over in a few weeks.
 
Even when Trump had experts telling him what to expect, Trump wrongly thought he knew better than the experts.

Trump was so wrong for America that we are still paying the price.

Had we done the right thing, the economy would be in better shape then and now.
 
The first wave of the coronavirus pandemic led the European Commission to announce the worst recession in the EU’s history in its Spring Forecast. Between April and June, the EU economy shrunk by 11.4% and the eurozone economy by 11.8%.

The impact of the pandemic was worse in Europe than in the United States, which reported a 9.5% drop. It was also worse than the previous financial crisis of 2009 when the EU contracted by 4.3% and the eurozone by 4.4%.
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https://www.euronews.com/next/2020/...virus-pandemic-affected-the-economy-in-europe

And, the EU's economy still hasn't fully recovered...

There’s no sugarcoating it—last year was hard on the economy. However, we discovered that consumer spending bounced back quickly. Although spending dropped between 50% and 60% across Germany, France, Italy, and Spain during the first lockdown in April 2020, it stabilized across all four markets as the year went on. Here’s what our research found:

After dropping to 60% below typical spending in the first lockdown, Germany reached about 85% of its pre-pandemic spending in the second lockdown—a recovery of +42%
France made the highest jump in spending recovery, rising to 80% after dropping about 50% in the first lockdown—making a +60% recovery
In Spain, spending dropped to 50% below average in the first lockdown and then went up to 75% in the second lockdown—showing a recovery of +50%
Spending dropped to 50% below average in Italy during the first lockdown and then rallied to about 70%—a recovery of 40%
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https://n26.com/en-eu/blog/how-covid-19-has-impacted-the-european-economy

In fact, the one nation in Europe that didn't lockdown its economy did the best--Sweden.

Sweden, which avoided a lockdown during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, saw its economy shrink 8.6% in the April-to-June period from the previous three months.

The flash estimate from the Swedish statistics office indicated that the country had fared better than other EU nations which took stricter measures.
However, it was still the largest quarterly fall for at least 40 years.
The European Union saw a contraction of 11.9% for the same period.
Individual nations did even worse, with Spain seeing an 18.5% contraction, while the French and Italian economies shrank by 13.8% and 12.4% respectively.
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https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53664354

But even Sweden took a hit as the rest of the EU locked down.

So, European socialism didn't work. Europe got hit harder than the US where more of the economy stayed open due to states--primarily Red ones--not taking the sort of draconian measures Europe and Blue states did.
Sweden did the right thing. The US response was a mixed bag. Europe's response was the wrong one.
 
Hello leaningright,

leaningright said:
Yea, that ain’t flying with the voters no matter how much the left wants it to.
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Well, it's certainly not flying with Trump voters. That's for sure. But there are now fewer Trump supporters than there were. Thousands of them got COVID and died.

People needed monetary help while it was unsafe to work. Europe had the right idea. It made so much sense. Keep everybody employed, keep the businesses solvent. Let the government make payments to do that as long as it was necessary. The government is really the only institution which could do that.

That keeps all the workers on the books and it preservers their employment-related health care.

A creative way to put the economy on 'pause' until it was safe to mingle again.

But because of Trump, there was too much confusion about whether there was even a pandemic in the first place, and then since there actually was one whether people wanted to believe it or not, what to do about it.

If people can't agree on a problem then it is impossible to arrive at an agreeable solution.

All Trump needed to do to screw up the pandemic response was to create great suspicion and confusion.

No problem. He excels at that. Whipping up hatred and division is his specialty.
 
"If people can't agree on a problem then it is impossible to arrive at an agreeable solution."

This is the essence of plutocratic power.

Feed the Republicans BS, which they will take to heart. Throw confusion into any dispute. Thus, any initiative which might be taken by government to deal with a problem is thwarted before it can begin.

Legalized government corruption? - it's all because of 'elite Democrats.'

Lost a major election? - maybe there was fraud.

Rampant gun slaughters? - maybe we just need more guns.

Climate change? -maybe it doesn't exist.

Pandemic? - maybe it's a Chinese hoax.

Toss enough confusion out there and Republicans will believe anything.
 
PoliTalker said:
By now it is crystal clear. The USA took the wrong economic approach to deal with the pandemic.

Europe did the right thing. The USA did the wrong thing.

Here's the difference. In Europe, their economy was successfully placed on pause, then restarted when it was safe. They did this by making certain that jobs were preserved even when workers were unable to come to work. Governments made social assistance payments to employers to maintain payrolls even though no work was getting done.

The USA allowed workers to get laid off, businesses to fold. Instead of paying employers to keep workers on the books and maintain their health care coverage, direct payments were made to everybody whether they were laid off and needed it or not. That is not where the money should have gone.

Retrospectively, we can see all this now.

Europe has more experience at socialism. They know how to do it right.

The USA needs to learn some lessons from the far more mature countries in Europe.

We are so busy proclaiming we know how to do government better we don't pay attention to those who have more experience at this than we do. And if we know how to do government better then why do Americans have such a low view of the government we created? It makes no sense.

Europeans value their government more than Americans value ours. In Europe, the governments fear the people. In the USA, the people fear the government. How did this happen? How did we end up with trainwreck Trump and why do we refuse to admit it was a huge mistake?
Click to expand...

Decades of Republicans cheating in elections did this


All documented by our own USA courts


Cold hard proven fact that the Republican Party has cheated in elections from the time of Nixon
 
PostmodernProphet said:
we were more successful in 2016 than we were in 2020....
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depends on what you consider success. I would think a man such as trump, who presided over the most corrupt administration in our history, who ran up the latest 4 year deficits in our history, who attempted to steal an election he lost by 7 million votes, will go down in history as a failure
 
floridafan said:
depends on what you consider success. I would think a man such as trump, who presided over the most corrupt administration in our history, who ran up the latest 4 year deficits in our history, who attempted to steal an election he lost by 7 million votes, will go down in history as a failure
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so would I......fortunately for Trump, those are all lies....
 
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