David Stockman on the Real Reason Why the Government Shutdown Caused an Economic Collapse
International Man: Is the government’s reaction to COVID-19 worse than the virus itself? What are your thoughts?
David Stockman: I think for once, Donald Trump was right when he worried out loud the other day that the cure may be far worse than the disease.
Governors—mostly Democratic governors and mayors of major areas of the country—have imposed Lockdown Nation. It’s a complete economic disaster.
It’s a wrong policy from a public health point of view and an economic point of view.
It is hitting, like a ton of bricks, a highly fragile and vulnerable economy that was living hand to mouth anyway because of the kind of highly counterproductive monetary and fiscal policies and debt build-up we’ve had over the last 30 years.
If you look at the data for New York—which is the epicenter of the whole COVID-19 pandemic—it is abundantly clear that COVID is not some kind of latter-day Black Death plague that takes down the young, the old, the healthy, the sick, and everyone in between.
It is a kind of super winter flu that strikes fatally, almost entirely, the elderly population that is already afflicted with many life-threatening medical conditions—or what the technicians call comorbidities.
The shutdown, which I call the “plenary lockdown policy,” is wrong. Closing all the businesses except a tiny, arbitrary set of essential operations is courting disaster for no good reason.
Here’s what the New York data showed us recently.
New York is ground zero and the epicenter. But if you look at the breakdown of that number by age and by medical condition, it’s startling.
For those under 50 years of age in the state of New York, the death rate is slightly under 5 per 100,000.
That isn’t a disaster. That isn’t a plague or a calamity.
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