Congress managed to put together a $1.8-2 trillion (depending on how one measures it) rescue package to blunt the initial economic effects of the COVID pandemic. That helped for about the first 60-90 days. But the pandemic hasn’t gone away. In fact in some parts of the country infections and deaths are still spiking.
What I find interesting, and disconcerting, is that neither political party seems to have any long-term plan for dealing with the economic disruption. Congress is fighting over another short-term fiscal stimulus, which is certainly needed. But again, it is just short term (and they can’t even agree on that). But this is a huge long-term problem. Lots of businesses, especially small businesses that make up almost half of the US GDP, have closed their doors permanently. And lots of large businesses, especially in the travel and leisure and services industries, are in the process of downsizing drastically, which will have a huge impact on unemployment. Where is the long-term thinking about how to deal with this?
It is another indication of how dysfunctional our government has become. It would be easy to blame Trump for all of this (and he certainly hasn’t been any help), but that would be shortsighted and naive. This dysfunction has been coming on for a long time, decades at least, and is certainly one of the things that has driven the populist uprising that put Trump in office, for better or worse.
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