Lewis K. Uhler and Peter J. Ferrara
The nightly news networks continue their Covid-19 fear campaign as they watch the nation’s employment levels improve to the advantage of President Trump and Congressional Republicans. They continue to emphasize masks, distancing, outside eating while they denigrate group settings (except for “peaceful” protests, often anything but) – always siding with delays in returning to normalcy.
But now the verdict on the shutdown is in, per Donald L. Luskin, Chief Investment Officer of Trend Macro, who in a recent Wall Street Journal article said “Counter intuitive though it may be, statistical analysis shows that locking down the economy didn’t contain the diseases’ spread and reopening it didn’t unleash a second wave of infections. Considering that lockdowns are economically costly and create well documented long-term public health consequences beyond Covid-19, imposing them appears to be a large policy error.”
Luskin continues “At the beginning, when little was known, officials acted in ways they thought prudent. But now evidence proves that lockdowns were expensive treatment with serious side effects and no benefit to society.” (emphasis added).
Fortunately, the economy is recovering rapidly from the Covid-19 lockdown. Unemployment peaked as high as 14.7% this summer, before falling to 8.4% in August. The recovery is already restoring the Trump/Republican economic boom which the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act legislation launched.