Though at least this past Friday, it had seemed the United
States was on the way to getting out of the coronavirus pandemic. Now it doesn’t look that way at all. I’m not basing that on a bad outcome, on one
or two pessimistic predictions, or even on general disappointment about jobs,
the economy, or our progress in daily life.
Here I have eight different articles with varying things worth worrying
about.
Whether we label it a second wave or not, the word, over
three months after the Covid-19 turned the nation upside down, that “U.S. Sets
Record for Daily New Cases as Virus Surges in South and West” (The New York
Times, June 25th) is seriously bad news. Although states in the Northeast are far
below their infection peaks, those in the South and West, especially Florida,
Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and South Carolina, are doing the worst. As a result, New York, New Jersey, and
Connecticut, the first two the most dangerous American places in March, are, in
an indication of deficient federal action, requiring that Americans arriving from
states with the highest rates quarantine themselves for 14 days.
On the economic front, we have settled in to a typical 1.5
million state unemployment claims per week, putting the lie to any idea that all
job movement is now people returning to work.
Ben Casselman and Tiffany Hsu’s “Continued Layoffs Signal an ‘Economic
Scarring’,” from the June 18th New York Times, documented
that we had 13 consecutive weeks with at least one million filings, up to 14
with The Washington Post’s June 25th Economy Alert that
“another 1.48 million people filed for jobless claims last week.” Amazingly, there had not been more than a
weekly 695,000 for the previous 37 years.
As well, “Millions of Job Losses Are at Risk of Becoming Permanent,” per
Olivia Rockeman and Jill Ward on June 14th in Yahoo Finance. That is because efficiency, the largest
reason for the number of jobs to decrease long-term after automation and
globalization, has jumped with companies’ discoveries that they can run
remarkably well without workers laid off or furloughed. In March, almost all employees losing their
income expected that, after the pandemic, they would be back on the job, but
now we and they strongly suspect otherwise.
It is true that many people are resuming their pre-coronavirus
employment, but, overall, we are still in serious trouble.
Over the past four weeks there were three broader looks at
how we are doing with Covid-19, and all were negative. Yascha Mounk’s The Atlantic “The Virus
Will Win,” subtitled “Americans are pretending that the pandemic is over. It certainly is not” almost forecast attitude
changes since then manifested in this past Wednesday’s 700-point Dow Jones
drop. Since per one poll, the share of Republicans
trusting “the information you hear about coronavirus from medical experts” went
from “nearly nine out of 10” to “just about one in three” in two months, “it is
now difficult to imagine that anybody could muster the political will to impose
a full-scale lockdown for a second time,” especially in the states listed
above, all of which Donald Trump won in 2016. Similar sentiments were expressed by Michelle
Goldberg in the June 22nd Times “America is Too Broken to
Fight the Coronavirus,” along with “Republican political dysfunction” making “a
coherent campaign to fight the pandemic impossible,” and the statistic that
after “slowly declining,” “the number of new cases” are “up a terrifying 22
percent over the past 14 days.”
More ambitious in scope if not longer is Annie Lowrey’s June
23rd Atlantic “The Second Great Depression.” She projected a recovery, instead of looking
on a graph like a V or a U, resembling “a kind of flaccid check mark, its long
tail sagging torpid into the future.”
Given the steady and way-high unemployment claim numbers that may be
most realistic, also with the Congressional Budget Office not only projecting
an $8 trillion next-decade economic activity cut but expecting consumer
spending to drop “$300 billion to $370 billion” each quarter through 2021
year-end. Now, per Lowrey, “economists expect
that 42 percent of people recently let go will not return to their former
employers,” and, with lower tax revenues, we will have “a budget crisis for
state and local governments.” She also pointed
out that “never getting the pandemic under control means never unleashing the
economy.”
The good news is that Trump is, for the first time in years,
a substantial reelection underdog. I say
that not because of poll results, but from sportsbook.ag, an offshore betting
facility located where it is legal to wager on elections, which, as of yesterday
morning, had the Democratic candidate, presumably Joe Biden, as slightly better
than a 3 to 2 favorite. This company
cannot afford to be biased, as bettors would exploit that, so its lines are the
most realistic actual probabilities. Yet
it is still more than four months until November 3rd, and a lot more
can and will happen.
Otherwise, we should root for a vaccine to be available by
Christmas or sooner. But until then, we
need to keep evaluating our choices – and to keep our expectations in line.