Saturday, May 16, 2020

Our country's dire condition

Our country is in the grips of an epochal, nationwide natural disaster.

The scale of the destruction the COVID pandemic is causing will be upwards of 50 times the most destructive natural disasters of hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires the country has experienced before.

Such previous natural disasters were localized, and the costs of the destruction were able to be managed with the resources and wealth of the United States.

Hurricane Katrina, which is rated the costliest of the country's natural disasters, cost 166.3 billion dollars. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/most-expensive-natural-disasters-us-153351513.html

The total costs of  the 9/11 attacks are very much higher than Katrina and can be deemed to include things such as the costs of operating Department of Homeland Security ($408 billion for first 10 years), the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ($1.3 trillion through 2011 and a total projected cost of  wars through 2050 of $4 trillion), and there are other separate categories of costs of tens of billions of dollars each. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-cost-of-9-11-in-dollars/

The pandemic natural disaster is, in a short time frame of a few months, causing trillions of dollars of lost income to the American people.

Tens of millions of Americans, through no fault of their own, have been deprived of jobs they need to provide for themselves and their families.

Many other tens of millions of Americans, and the businesses they work in, are experiencing significant reductions in income.

The Federal government is providing trillions of dollars of funding to cover this huge lost income of the American people. The trillions of dollars are being paid and distributed to the American people in various ways.

State governments are providing funding through unemployment insurance programs.

Congress is confronting having to spend additional hundreds of billions of dollars to help state and local governments provide essential services, which governments have lost wherewithal to do, because of the pandemic natural disaster's impact on the economy and the resulting loss of tax revenues to the governments.

There is great uncertainty about when the economy will sufficiently recover so that Americans who have been impacted by the pandemic natural disaster will have jobs so they can provide for themselves and their families, and don't need further governmental funding to stay alive. In other words, more trillions of dollars of governmental funding may be needed.

All of the trillions of dollars of government funding are an imperative both for getting funds into the hands of Americans to be able to purchase food and other necessities they need to live, and also to keep the economy going by such Americans spending the funds to purchase things as they would do if they had not lost their incomes.

Currently, a main occupation of our Federal and state governments is managing the distribution of the trillions of dollars of Federal and state government funding to the American people. The distribution is being done on a necessarily rushed basis, and it is likely that much time and effort will be expended to try to "correct" "unjustified" distributions of governmental funds.

For years to come, our Federal and state governments will confront using their taxing, monetary and other powers to reduce the trillions of dollars of governmental debt that  has been and will be created in dealing with the pandemic. How the Federal and state governments do this will have large effects on businesses, workers, schools, hospitals and state and local governments, and this will result in years of political vying of competing economic interests of such persons.

In all of this, the United States is facing a national challenge probably on the scale and complexity of the challenge the country faced in fighting World War II.

The challenge calls for a unity of commitment by Americans to do what is necessary to reach the end goal, and that will entail a willingness of Americans to endure hardships and make sacrifices for the common good.

The national challenge needs a President whose leadership all Americans are willing to accept and follow.  This in turn needs the President to have the trust and confidence of the American people.

An important component of having the trust of the American people is that they believe the President is honest and inspires their loyalty because the President shows his paramount commitment to the country and them.  

Donald Trump fails the foregoing tests in the eyes of more than half the country, and it seems clear that Donald Trump is unable to do anything to change that.

The failures of Trump in the eyes of more than half the country impairs the ability of the country to succeed in getting through the nationwide natural disaster that has befallen the country.



11/24/21

2/26/22
In January Katie Britt tweeted "President Biden is directly responsible for the inflation crushing hardworking Alabama families." In response I tweeted the below comment:

Today I sent the below email to Dr Sutter, the author of the above article:

From: Rob Shattuck 
To: dsutter 
Sent: Sat, Feb 26, 2022 1:14 pm 
Subject: Follow up on your "Supply chains and the shortage economy"

Dear Dr. Sutter,

The GOP says the United States' supply chain and inflation problems are the fault of Biden's policies, which the GOP calls "failed" and "disastrous."

Your November 12, 2021 Alabama Today article  "Supply chains and the shortage economy" discusses why there has been a supply chain problem and that the government cannot be viewed as the cause of the problem or be looked to for solving the problem.

In May of 2020 I expressed that, as a result of COVID-19, the United States was facing a national challenge probably on the scale and complexity of the challenge the country faced in fighting World War II. I said, "For years to come our Federal and state governments will confront using their taxing, monetary and other powers to reduce the trillions of dollars of governmental debt that has been and will be created in dealing with the pandemic."  See Our country's dire condition.

After your article was published, I added to Our country's dire condition a link to your article, with my saying "The long, complicated slog to dig out of the dire condition into which the United States was plunged by COVID-19 continues."

The United States had never experienced anything like the pandemic that hit it in March 2020. No one knew what was needed to defend America and Americans against the onslaught of COVID-19 and no one knew what amount of stimulus/relief was needed to keep the economy from crashing or how the stimulus/relief could be most efficiently and effectively provided. In the mammoth governmental response that was undertaken, I think it was accepted that hundreds of billions of dollars could be ineffectively distributed or be subject to fraud, but t was also accepted that it was beyond human and legislative capabilities to fine tune the mammoth program to have notably better effectiveness and much reduced fraud, without risking not doing enough to keep the economy from crashing and providing the needed relief.

In the first half of 2021, inflation warnings about the effects of the stimulus and relief were made by Larry Summers and others. On the inflation question, I think it bears saying again that the United States was in an unprecedented situation, and no one knew how bad inflation could get or what could be done starting in mid-2021 to ward off bad inflation, taking into account what was still needed in the form of stimulus and relief to keep the United States going.

We have now learned a lot that we did not know before. We learned that a lot of relief money was saved and not spent when received, and then supported pent up demand that later got unleashed and contributed to the inflation problem. We have learned about the problems of restarting (or getting back up to speed) significant sectors of the economy, and these problems greatly contribute to the supply chain and inflation problems.

The GOP goes bonkers over Biden's policies, such as not maximizing energy production and paying people not to work, and the contribution those factors have made to the supply chain and inflation problems. Not maximizing United States energy production can be accepted to have had some effect on the supply chain and inflation problems, but the question is how much effect - negligible, substantial, quantifiable, not quantifiable. Part of the reason for this email is to solicit you, as an economist, to comment on much less would be the supply chain and inflation problems if Biden in January 2021 had taken steps to maximize United States energy production.

I think the "paying people not to work" matter is complex. All I would say on that is I think it gives little support to GOP charges of "failed" and "disastrous" policies of Joe Biden. Your view on this is also solicited by this email.

In January, Katie Britt tweeted "President Biden is directly responsible for the inflation crushing hardworking Alabama families." In response, I tweeted .  "Katie Britt: You are very deficient in your understanding of what has caused the current inflation," and included in my tweet a link to this webpage.

After I send this email to you, I will copy and paste it at the end of Our country's dire condition.

I very much hope you will respond to this email, and, if you do, I will add your response to Our country's dire condition.

Thank you very much for your attention to this email, Dr. Sutter.

Sincerely,
Rob Shattuck

7/10/22

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)