We begin today’s roundup with John Cassidy’s piece at The Atlantic pleading for a “wartime footing” to deal with the coronavirus pandemic:
To alleviate some of this damage, economists of many different political persuasions agree that the Trump Administration and Congress need to introduce a substantial stimulus package on top of the coronavirus spending bill that the House of Representatives passed on Saturday. How big should these measures be? “I am in the one-trillion-to-two-trillion-dollar camp, preferably by dinner time,” Shepherdson said. “I think they should be just throwing money at people and businesses that are in the front line. Cash has to be given out to households. Cash has to be given out to small businesses. Cash has to be given out to gig workers. I don’t know what the figures are for Uber drivers, but they are probably catastrophic.” [...]
Shepherdson isn’t the only economist making an allusion to the emergency measures that governments make in a war economy. “The world is de facto at war (against the virus, rather than against each other—this is the good news . . .),” Olivier Blanchard, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, tweeted on Monday. He went on to point out that, during the Second World War, the federal deficit as a percentage of the G.D.P. rose to twenty-six per cent, as the Roosevelt Administration spent heavily on armaments and other programs. “Let’s not be squeamish,” Blanchard added.
Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post:
it doesn’t make sense to hold up further votes on the good-if-not-perfect House-passed template while each and every possible improvement is debated, as Republican lawmakers such as Rep. Louie Gohmert (Tex.)and Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.) have been doing. A global recession is likely already here; there will be opportunities later to top up this bill. After all, it’s not as though lawmakers will be able to pass one and only one response to the coming health crisis. We should count ourselves exceptionally lucky if that’s all that is eventually required.
Philip Rucker analyzes Donald Trump’s change in tone at his press conference yesterday:
“We have an invisible enemy,” Trump said at a news conference Monday, where he presented a notably changed demeanor and tone from his previous coronavirus briefings.
But...
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin drew a parallel from today to the Great Depression in the early 1930s, when President Herbert Hoover was so lacking in leadership and unwilling to commit federal aid to help those suffering that it fell to governors to protect their citizens. That was when a New York governor named Franklin D. Roosevelt rose to national prominence by talking about the government’s responsibility to lift up society and launched the first public works programs for unemployed citizens. Roosevelt was elected president in 1932. “We have to have this national leadership right now, which the country is crying out for,” Goodwin said.
At The Atlantic, former DHS official Juliette Kayyem analyzes the state response:
The United States is about to find out whether the Articles of Confederation would have worked. The nation’s Founders scrapped that early charter because it left states to fend for themselves in moments of crisis. The Constitution that replaced it created a stronger federal government. But yesterday, President Donald Trump seemed to turn back the clock. In a conference call with the nation’s governors about the coronavirus pandemic, the president declared, “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment—try getting it yourselves.”
Until now, our country has not faced a disaster that directly threatened all 50 states at the same time.
On a final note, on the election front,
Ed Kilgore emphasizes the need for states to adopt vote by mail strategies and the challenges presented to adopt such a move nationally:
The obvious way to separate elections from the fear of coronavirus is to encourage remote voting — usually by mail, but “mail” ballots can also sometimes be placed in drop boxes or even picked up by intermediaries. But moving in that direction nationally is easier said than done, since many states actively discourage this mechanism, and others accept or promote it in widely varying degrees. And in case you haven’t gotten the memo, states and localities run even “federal” elections in this country, with the Constitution and the federal government regulating them around the edges. There is no “national election system,” so big changes like the one we may need this year will probably have to be enacted on a state-by-state basis.