Covid-19

* suffering and economic hardship demonstrably not inevitable.

The U.S., we are told, is helpless against the powerful inevitabilities that come with the Coronavirus. Its spread cannot be halted, at least not without destroying the economy and turning America into one big communist gulag. For those who need treatment, particularly hospitalization, the costs will be staggering. Typical insurance won’t cover much of it. Those without job-provided insurance are really on the button. Mass unemployment and economic hardship are inevitable for many who don’t get sick as well. Both public and personal safety inevitably cause severe economic slowdown, resulting in record high unemployment, inevitably followed by bankruptcy, evictions, and widespread personal suffering.

It’s all so inevitable, except it isn’t. In fact, these calamitous outcomes are easily avoidable. And it’s not some great mystery how to avoid them. Much of the world is avoiding them quite well.

This article in the New York Times give a good overview of just how inevitable mass suffering is not.

Some key takeaways:

The pandemic has ravaged Europeans and Americans alike, but the economic pain has played out in starkly different fashion. The United States has relied on a significant expansion of unemployment insurance, cushioning the blow for tens of millions of people who have lost their jobs, with the assumption that they will be swiftly rehired once normality returns. European countries — among them Denmark, Ireland, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Austria — have prevented joblessness by effectively nationalizing payrolls, heavily subsidizing wages and enabling paychecks to continue uninterrupted.

NYT

Of course that first sentence isn’t true. The pandemic has not ravaged Europeans and Americans alike. The European Union, with almost 200 million more people, has fewer and fewer new cases every day while the U.S. is spinning rapidly out of control.

In fact, the state of Florida alone, with a population of 21 million, had more new Covid-19 cases last week than the populations of the EU, China, Australia, and Korea combined. That’s like a billion and a half people – doing significantly better than a failed state of 21 million.

So clearly, it doesn’t have to be this way. Most of the population getting Covid-19 is not inevitable. The U.S. is failing. Failing miserably.

But what about economically? The EU had a much stricter lockdown than the U.S. Won’t are economy be in much better shape? Is that what we are buying, according to the Republicans, with all of those otherwise needless deaths and economic ruin for millions?

Sadly, no. The EU covered people’s paychecks during the crisis, and top quality healthcare was already available to all, paid for through taxes rather than by employers.

As cases increase at an alarming rate in much of the United States, the reliance on an overwhelmed unemployment system — the next infusion of money perpetually subject to the whims of Washington— leaves Americans uniquely exposed to a deepening crisis of joblessness. Europe appears poised to spring back from the catastrophe faster, whenever commerce resumes, because its companies need not rehire workers.

As cases increase at an alarming rate in much of the United States, the reliance on an overwhelmed unemployment system — the next infusion of money perpetually subject to the whims of Washington— leaves Americans uniquely exposed to a deepening crisis of joblessness. Europe appears poised to spring back from the catastrophe faster, whenever commerce resumes, because its companies need not rehire workers.

As cases increase at an alarming rate in much of the United States, the reliance on an overwhelmed unemployment system — the next infusion of money perpetually subject to the whims of Washington— leaves Americans uniquely exposed to a deepening crisis of joblessness. Europe appears poised to spring back from the catastrophe faster, whenever commerce resumes, because its companies need not rehire workers.

“You just send an email, and that’s it — you’re ready to go,” said Jonathan Rothwell, principal economist at Gallup, the American polling firm, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “There’s no recruitment or negotiation…

” In many European countries, wage subsidies have enabled paychecks to continue without a hitch, sparing people the anxiety of managing bills while awaiting relief. For Americans, hellish tangles with bureaucracy have become legion as tens of millions of people have deluged the unemployment system, crashing websites, tying up phone systems and standing in parking lots for hours outside benefits offices.”

The unemployment rate in the United States has soared nearly eight percentage points since February — it registered 11.1 percent in June — while France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands have all limited increases in the jobless rate to less than one percentage point.

“By and large, the European social model has proved quite adept and robust for this kind of crisis,” said Jacob F. Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

The American approach, by contrast, has barraged the unemployment system with people in dire straits, exceeding its capacity to deliver.

NYT

So you see, these calamities are not inevitable. Oh sure, the anti-American propagandists will tell you we can’t have healthcare and economic security because “Socialism,” but the fact is, what the far right propagandists call socialism is what normal, decent people refer to as “Democracy.’