In his weekly column, economist Stephen Moore noted that Republicans shouldn’t work with Nancy Pelosi to bail out blue states that decimated their economies with lockdowns. Moore began by noting that the economy isn’t as bad as people think and that the economic pain hasn’t been equally distributed because the actions by local governments have been different,
Judging from the liberal news media’s collective primal scream in recent days, you would think the American economy was lying flat on its back in the intensive care unit.
Yes, the economy has been battered in blue states that have masochistically shut down their hometown businesses. And more Americans are signing up for unemployment benefits as stores, restaurants and travel shutdown.
But in most red states that are keeping commerce flowing, despite the second deadly wave of the virus, unemployment is typically below 6%.
The jobs recovery has been so strong that we have 94.5% of the jobs we had before the worst pandemic in a century, and total wages and salaries are back up to 99% of their previous all-time high. The latest Labor Department reports that at the end of October there were 6.7 million unfilled jobs.
In other words, the coronavirus did some damage to the economy across the board. However, the damage is much worse where the governments overreacted and crushed the local economy. For example, there are a lot of places where restaurants are still closed by government mandate. On the other hand, I went to dinner with 5 friends Friday night. The restaurant was at maximum capacity, so we had to sit at an outside table. So economically, where are people better off? Where they can work or in some city where a restaurant like that would be out of business because they’ve refused to let them open?
Moore added,
…That hasn’t stopped House Speaker Queen Nancy Pelosi from demanding another $1 trillion stimulus. (Doesn’t it seem like Washington is passing out trillions of dollars like they are M&Ms?)
We don’t need it, and the bailouts to teacher unions, blue state governors and mayors, and airlines would do more harm than good.
The only way to give money to blue states is to take it from red states.
We all support a safety net for people who lose their job during the pandemic through no fault of their own. But paying people more for not working is no “stimulus” for the economy. Moreover, getting the schools reopened so kids are in the classroom would allow three or four million more Americans (mostly working mothers) to go back to work.
Democrats spent much of 2020 destroying their own economies lockdowns and allowing rioters to run wild in the streets of their cities. What the rest of us absolutely should not do under any circumstances is step up and pay all those bills for them because if we do, how will they learn anything? They made really bad choices this year and there need to be real, long-lasting consequences for that. The only thing that needs to be done for that to happen is not to save them from their own mistakes.
John Hawkins is the author of 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know. You can find him on Parler here, Twitter here, and his Facebook page is here.
