What a curious exchange.
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No poo-poo my friend. I beat ya to it so that it actually reversed the historical lib mindset. Cool, eh? 
Look at all the libs cheering for a bad economy because they think it will hurt Trump. IT WON’T!
Indeed. And it will fully send us deep into recession territory. We have had the longest stretch of economic growth in the nation’s history. Not a bad run by any measure. Covering about 2.5 full Presidential terms.
I predicted a recession would eventually come. Of course there was no way to predict that a global pandemic would be the cause. I suspected it would not occur until late 2021 though. But here we are.
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Everything revolves around Trump with certain segments of the population.
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Well speak of the devil…or was that TDS?
Good post.
It is hard to not see Trump’s responses to this crisis as largely failure. We are currently 1/4th of global deaths and 1/3rd of global infections. And we only account for 4% of the global population AND are the sole superpower in the world. This is an epic level of failure by virtually all measures.
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Hmm…interesting. I will read those.
I wonder if Sweden releases similar details regarding their GDP because that could provide the “model case” for handling the virus without a lockdown.
So we could further tease out economic reductions due to the pandemic itself and reductions due to locking down.
Because we cannot assume BAU if no country had locked down.
Yep… and we have been left with few tools to fight a recession/depression other than Quantitative Easing and Wildly increased Government spending.
So… we got that.
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And man alive if we are not trying our best to Government spend our way out of this financial mess. 
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It might be less than a quarter because I firmly believe that even with their recent updates China is lying about their infection rate and death totals. And I am not 100% convinced we are getting accurate numbers from the Third World (not to mention other autocratic nations like Russia).
However even if we were to model for those, I doubt we’d reduce infections/deaths down to 4% of the world’s total.
However you can also add Cuomo and DeBlasio to the failures list. Their handling of NY and NYC, respectively, has also been abysmal.
But the thing that screwed this up from the get go was the failure to test/trace. That failure put us in the position of having to make decisions while flying blind.
And every day now we are finding out this likely was spreading in this country long before we knew it was…even earlier into Jan/Feb than we originally thought.
That is failure on a colossal scale. Anyone that tries to spin it any other way is dreaming.
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Here is an interesting spread sheet I made yesterday. It seems this is hurting western countries more than others, maybe that has to do with climate? Age? In any event, taking the top 4 countries in Europe, it’s hard to consider the US an “Epic failure”. . . Our cases as a % of the population are right in line with these nations, yet our deaths per population is less than half that of those nations.
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**[quote=“NebraskaFootball, post:30, topic:230699, full:true”]
And man alive if we are not trying our best to Government spend our way out of this financial mess.
[/quote]
It’s the only thing that is left.
Too bad we are going into it with an already exploded deficit from corporate tax cuts where the bulk of the savings went to stock buy backs.
I mean… I am not a deficit hawk… it is absolutely necessary for the Government to run a deficit… even huge ones depending on the circumstance… but there are two dangers of inflation and a threat to our currency losing world reserve status.
That is bothersome.
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Yep… I think by the time that we know everything it will be like the 2008 collapse… there will be plenty of blame to go around.
I do hold a special place for the President though. He is the head of the Federal response that has been a clown show from the beginning, We now know that he had it in his PDB’s about the severity of this threat and basically ignored it.
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I don’t look at success/failure on a relative scale.
Italy and Spain had their own failures for different reasons. The UK was deliberately pursuing a Sweden-like strategy for several weeks before they changed course.
Western nations as a whole (save for maybe Germany) had a weak response to this.
But that they failed doesn’t make me feel any better about our own failures.
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Oh, I think some TDS could be involved - though we may disagree on the definition of that term. 
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I think it’s relevant that we have similar cases per population, yet our mortality rate per cases is less than half. I know they had some failures but relatively speaking, I think we’ve done pretty well. I always wonder why 50K deaths is worthy of a massive recession while 50K per year from the Flu is just accepted as normal.
I just don’t buy into the “we had an epic failure”, I think that’s a lazy argument to make the current administration look bad and it goes right along with the same nonsense we’ve been hearing for 3.5 years now. I also don’t believe the data from many countries in the world, especially China. . . but I like to compare like for like systems. The closest countries to us in the world would reside in Europe.
Oh and this NYT article was published today, where CDC data from seven states is showing a huge surge in deaths from the typical five year average that is not solely attributable to the official count of COVID deaths.
This article provides evidence we are likely undercounting both the number of actual cases (well we already knew that…but the article is talking about cases we still would have detected with a strong testing regimen, not just asymptomatics) and the number of deaths.
Now…not all these “excess deaths” would be COVID…but some of them would be…and some of them would be “excess deaths” from other causes.
Indeed if there was one failure in these lockdowns that looms large, it is the failure to make sure we had robust “non-COVID” resources in place as well as COVID resources.
Because we are neglecting a lot of health care that should be happening except either we have shut down too much by calling it “elective” or people are scared of seeking out care.
This is going to bite us in the ass if it isn’t already happening.
Hell…I’m living with a tooth that has a giant hole all the way down to the root. It needs to be extracted…but I have to wait until there are enough emergency cases so an oral surgeon is allowed to come into the office to work on it.
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Context matters.
We’ve had 58k deaths in a little more than a MONTH (likely more than 58k as I have pointed out).
WITH social distancing and other measures in place.
The 50k from the flu happen over the course of several months…and remember this is on top of the flu. And in a bad season the flu by itself can stretch our health care resources thin.
From a progressive perspective, I want to see how effectively Trump acts to mitigate the damage and lead us out of it.
We’re in the situation we are in… and nothing of what got us here is going to be changed.
