Tim Taylor: Winning the "War on Poverty"--And Now What? [feedly]

Luv the way Tim Taylor drills down on key questions.

Winning the "War on Poverty"--And Now What?
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2020/03/us-poverty-over-time-how-to-compare.html

resident Lyndon Johnson declared "war on poverty" during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. But the official poverty rate has remained disturbingly high. Here are figures showing the total number of people below the US poverty line and the poverty rate from the US Census Bureau:

Notice that the number of Americans below the poverty line falls sharply in the 1960s. But since about 1970, the number of people below the poverty line has generally trended upward with the growth of population, and the poverty rate hasn't moved much. 

It's mildly amusing to watch responses to these patterns from across the political spectrum. For example, liberals often are quick to embrace the basic interpretation of these figures--that poverty remains an enormous and unsolved social problem--but don't much like the implication that US programs to reduce poverty have been pretty ineffective over the decades. On the other side, conservatives are quicker to embrace the implication that US anti-poverty programs haven't worked well, but are less comfortable with accepting the idea that poverty remains as big a social problem as it was 50 years ago.

Of course, one can also argue that the official measure of poverty is misleading for various well-known reasons. For example, the official poverty measure is based on before-tax income received, and thus does not take into account how the poor might benefit from non-cash programs like Medicaid or food stamps, or from poverty benefits that involve reducing taxes or providing refundable tax credits. Another issues is that the official poverty lines (which vary according to number of people in a household) are increased each year according to the level of inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index--but is that the most appropriate adjustment? Another more subtle issue is whether poverty should be measured across a "family," which refers to people who are related by marriage or parent-child status, or or whether it should be measured across a "household," which includes all of those living together at a certain address.

Richard V. Burkhauser, Kevin Corinth, James Elwell, and Jeff Larrimore recalculate what the official poverty rates would look like with an alternative set of adjustments for these factors in "Evaluating the Success of President Johnson's War on Poverty: Revisiting the Historical Record Using a Full-Income Poverty Measure"  (December 2019, IZA DP No. 12855). Here's how the patterns change:

The top line is the official poverty line, with an adjustment for what is called the "equivalence scale," which refers to how much the poverty line should be adjusted based on the number of people in a household. The authors write: "For our equivalence scale, we adjust poverty thresholds based on the square root of the number of people in the household. For example, the poverty threshold for a 4-person household is twice that for a 1-person household." As they point out, this equivalence scale is fairly standard for a lot of work on poverty lines across different countries. Using a single equivalence scale doesn't make a big difference, but holds this factor constant for the calculations that follow.

Using the household as the unit of measure, rather than the family, takes into account how families live together and share resources, and thus reduces the poverty rate as shown. Looking at after-tax income, not before-tax income, reduces the poverty rate further as shown by the orange line. Accounting for non-cash, non-health insurance benefits like food stamps reduces the poverty rate further as shown by the green line. Adding health insurance benefits like Medicaid, together with all the other changes, reduces the poverty rate as shown by the orange line.

An additional step is to think about the appropriate level of inflation to use over time. The official poverty rate uses the Consumer Price Index. But one interesting fact about the CPI is that after it is calculated, it is never revised--not even when the US Bureau of Labor Statistics later makes changes in the technical formulas used to adjust the CPI. Because various contracts and laws depend on the CPI, this lack of adjustment makes some sense. But if you want to know how the poverty rate should have been adjusted over time, it makes sense to use the most current methods for calculating inflation. One prominent measure of buying power that is adjusted over time is called the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index. There is also a Consumer Price Index "Research Series" that uses modern methods to calculate what the CPI would have been in the past. The authors write:

Compared to 1963 thresholds, in 2017 the CPI-U used by the Official Poverty Measure generates a threshold that is 8.0 times as high in nominal dollars to hold the real value of the thresholds constant. To the degree that this is an overstatement of inflation, it will effectively raise the real level of these poverty thresholds and exaggerate the share of people in poverty in 2017 relative to 1963. In contrast, all of the other measures of inflation shown result in smaller changes in nominal thresholds. In particular, the PCE—which we use for the Full-income Poverty Measure—generates nominal thresholds in 2017 that are 22 percent below the thresholds using the Official Poverty Measure's CPI-U, whereas using the Meyer-Sullivan adjusted CPI-U-RS would generate thresholds that are 46 percent below that using the CPI-U.

Adding this different measure of inflation, the preferred "full-income poverty rate" for these authors looks like this:

Clearly, one's beliefs about whether the "War on Poverty" was a success depends the extent to which these kinds of changes seem reasonable to you.  It's also worth remembering that attempts to measure the number of people in poverty using consumption data, rather than income data, also show a dramatic fall in the poverty rate.

Of course, while it might seem that evidence suggesting that that US poverty level is actually far below the official rate is good news (to the extent that it is true), nothing is simple in a politically polarized world. Conservatives would have to accept that a number of government programs have had a dramatic effect in successfully reducing poverty rates. Liberals would have to accept that poverty is now a much smaller problem than several decades ago.

A deeper problem here is that "poverty" is a judgement that always applies in the context of a specific place and time. US poverty isn't the same as what it means to be in poverty in Brazil or Nigeria or India. US poverty in 2020 isn't the same as what meant to be in "poverty" in the US in 1964 or in 1920 or in 1820. Burkhauser, Corinth, Elwell, and Larrimore suggest this conclusion (citations and footnotes omitted):

President Johnson's War on Poverty—based on economic standards when he declared that war—is largely over and a success. ... Nonetheless, societal views on poverty evolve over time. In 1971, Robert Lampman observed that "by present-day American standards most of the several billion people who have ever lived, and most of the three billion people alive today, were or are poor". He also suggested that the goal of eliminating poverty based on these initial standards "should be achieved before 1980, at which time the next generation will have to set new economic and societal goals, perhaps including a new distributional goal for themselves"... Nevertheless, the dramatic reduction in poverty by 2017 based on President Johnson's standards suggests that policymakers might consider setting new poverty thresholds that reflect modern-day expectations for what it means to be impoverished.

For a sense of what poverty meant back practical terms in the late 1950 and early 1960s--in terms of malnutrition, poor health, and lack of education--a readable starting is Michael Harrington's 1962 book: The Other America: Poverty in the United States. My own sense is that what one might call "consumption poverty" has dramatically decreased in the last 50-60 years, both because of government programs like Medicaid and food stamps and also because of how technologies from the microwave to the smartphone have become widespread even among those with lower incomes.  However, what one might call "opportunity poverty"--those who reach their late teens and early 20s with considerably less preparation to take participate in what 21st century America has to offer--remains a severe and ongoing issue. 

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

The Fiscal Fight Against COVID-19 [feedly]

Interesting and, I think, excellent, advice from leading econ advisor to Japanese PM Shenzo Abe

The Fiscal Fight Against COVID-19
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/governments-must-use-fiscal-policy-to-tackle-coronavirus-by-koichi-hamada-2020-03

Governments should rely on fiscal rather than monetary measures when responding to natural disasters or epidemics such as the new COVID-19 coronavirus. Above all, policymakers must act quickly, and – particularly in the case of Japan – not be swayed by misleading statements regarding the level of public debt.

TOKYO – As the new COVID-19 coronavirus continues to spread rapidly outside China, medical professionals and policymakers around the world are fighting to contain the outbreak. But what role can or should governments play in this situation – or, for that matter, when natural disasters strike?


Add to Bookmarks

PreviousNext

The Chinese authorities already have loosened monetary policy in response to the outbreak, an understandable move in view of the virus's serious effect on key economic sectors, notably manufacturing and transport. But monetary measures are a roundabout way of coping with real disruptions such as epidemics or natural calamities. Fiscal policies, on the other hand, are more likely to have a direct impact on economic challenges.

Alongside the efforts of medical professionals, therefore, governments should introduce various initiatives and regulations to contain the COVID-19 epidemic – such as ensuring adequate medical supplies and providing airplanes to evacuate citizens from affected areas abroad.

Of course, these measures entail additional spending. Fiscal conservatives, who believe that governments should limit the size of budget deficits wherever possible and focus on paying down public debt, typically resist immediately financing such expenditures. When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's cabinet announced a $120 billion package to help the areas worst affected by last October's Typhoon Hagibis, for example, the plan encountered precisely this type of resistance from fiscal conservatives and the finance ministry.

But such objections miss the point. I remember an exam question in the linear-programming course I took as a student at the University of Tokyo more than a half-century ago: What is the optimal way to solve the transportation problem when a Japanese island is hit by a natural disaster such as an earthquake? We students thought of minimizing the cost or distance of the transport. But our professor, freshly returned from Harvard, said we should have focused instead on minimizing the time required to transport goods and services needed for emergency relief.

When natural disasters or epidemics strike, the desired goals must be achieved quickly. As long as the response is delayed, the economy, institutions, and everyday life in affected areas will remain paralyzed. Unless the damage is rapidly and properly addressed, its effects will lower the quality of life, and often prevent productive facilities from recovering. Both current and future generations will suffer from the destruction of social overhead capital caused by disasters and from insufficient economic recovery.



In the case of Japan, however, conventional economists and journalists seem to think in different ways. For example, a December 5, 2019, article in The New York Times by Motoko Rich provided a timely account of the Abe government's stimulus package. But its depiction of Japan's public debt was inaccurate, or at least misleading, both from a statistical point of view and in terms of current macroeconomic thinking.

For starters, when we evaluate the soundness of a firm's financial health, we look at its (real and nominal) assets and its liabilities. We do not judge a business's performance merely by its gross debt. But Rich's description of Japan as having "the biggest debt load in the developed world relative to the size of its economy" referred to gross government debt, and neglected the government's financial as well as real assets.

The International Monetary Fund's October 2018 Fiscal Monitor shows that although Japan's public wealth is slightly negative, its ratio of net debt to GDP is better than that of France and the United Kingdom, and similar to that of the United States. Thus, when we look at net rather than gross debt, Japan's fiscal position is much healthier than The New York Times and other media outlets often suggest. Perhaps Japanese economic journalists and foreign media, including those with correspondents in Japan, are too credulous toward the finance ministry, which supposedly wants higher taxes in the future.

Moreover, the need to run tight government budgets is no longer the received wisdom in macroeconomic policy. Economists since Paul Samuelson have pointed out that, when interest rates are low and an economy has excess savings, deficit financing of government expenditure can improve the welfare of both current and future generations. Today, not only radical advocates of Modern Monetary Theory hold this view; so do mainstream economists and policymakers such as Olivier Blanchard and former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi.

That is why I also disagree with Motoshige Itoh's article, "Economics of Anxieties," in The Yomiuri Shimbun on February 2. The article seems aimed at indirectly instilling fear on the part of readers, and eventually makes the groundless claim that the fiscal deficit is currently the biggest source of uncertainty in Japan.

With Typhoon Hagibis and now COVID-19, Japan has been confronted with two emergencies in the space of a few months. The government – like others elsewhere – must now act quickly and decisively, and not let conservatives' fiscal phantasms distract it from its task.


KOICHI HAMADA

Writing for PS since 2013
39 Commentaries

Follow

Koichi Hamada is Professor Emeritus at Yale University and a special adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Simon Wren Lewis: The economic effects of a pandemic [feedly]

Some very thoughtful insights on the impact of pandemic-like events on social consumption, and how much consumption is indeed social -- from Simon WRen Lewis' blog

The economic effects of a pandemic
http://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-economic-effects-of-pandemic.html

The economic effects of a pandemic

A little over ten years ago I was approached by some health experts who wanted to look at the economic effects of a influenza pandemic. They needed someone with a macroeconomic model to look at the general equilibrium impacts. In the 1990s I had led a small team that constructed a model called COMPACT, and these health experts and I completed a paper that was subsequently published in Health Economics. We reference to other studies that had been done earlier in that paper.

The current coronavirus outbreak will have different characteristics to the pandemic we studied, and hopefully it will not become a pandemic at all. (In terms of mortality it seems to be somewhere in between the 'base case' and 'severe case' we looked at in our work.) But I think there were some general lessons from the exercise we did that will be relevant if this particular coronavirus does become a global pandemic. One proviso is that a key assumption we made about the pandemic is that it was mainly a 3 month affair, and obviously what I have to say is dependent on it being short-lived.

It is worth saying at the start that the bottom line of all this for me is that the economics are secondary to the health consequences for any pandemic that has a significant fatality rate (as coronavirus so far appears to have). The economics are important in their own right and as a warning to avoid drastic measures that do not influence the number of deaths, but beyond that there is no meaningful trade-off between preventing deaths and losing some percent of GDP for less than half the year. 

Let me start with the least important impact from an economic point of view, and that is the fall in production due to workers taking more time off sick. It is least important in part because firms have ways of compensating for this, particularly if illness is spread over the quarter. For example those who have been sick and come back to work can work overtime. This will raise costs and might lead to some temporary inflation, but the central bank should ignore this.

This 'direct' impact of the pandemic will reduce GDP in that quarter by a few percentage points. The precise number will depend on what proportion of the population that get sick, on what the fatality rate in the UK turns out to be, and how many people miss work in an attempt not to get the disease. The impact on GDP for the whole year following the pandemic is much less at around 1% or 2%, partly because output after the pandemic quarter is higher as firms replenish diminished stocks and meet postponed demand.

All this assumes schools do not close once the pandemic takes hold. School closures can amplify the reduction in labour supply if some workers are forced to take time off to look after children. On the basis of the assumptions we made, if schools close for around 4 weeks that can multiply the GDP impacts above by as much as a factor of 3, and if they close for a whole quarter by twice that. If that seems large, remember nationwide school closures impact everyone with children and not just those with the disease.

But even with all schools closed for 3 months and many people avoiding work when they were not sick, the largest impact we got for GDP loss over a year was less than 5%. That is a one quarter very severe recession, but there is no reason why the economy cannot bounce back to full strength once the pandemic is over. Unlike a normal recession, information on the cause of the output loss, and therefore when it should end, is clear.

All this assumes that consumers who have not yet got the disease do not alter their behaviour. For a pandemic that spreads gradually this seems unlikely. The most important lesson I learnt from doing this study is that the pandemic need not just be a supply shock. It can also be a demand shock that can hit specific sectors very hard, depending on how consumers behave. This is because a lot of our consumption nowadays can be called social, by which I mean doing things that bring you into contact with other people. Things like going to the pub, to restaurants, to football matches or travel. Other sectors that provide consumption services that involve personal contact (e.g haircuts) and can easily be postponed may also be hit.

If people start worrying about getting the disease sufficiently to cut back on this social consumption, the economic impact will be more severe than any numbers discussed so far. One reason it is severe is that it is partly a permanent loss. Maybe you will have a few more meals out once the pandemic is over to make up for what you missed when you stayed home, but there is likely to be a net fall in your consumption of meals out over the year. What I realised when I did the analysis was just how much of our consumption was social.

This is why the biggest impacts on GDP occur when we have people reducing their social consumption in an effort not to get the disease. However falls in social consumption do not scale up all scenarios by the same amount, for the simple reason that supply and demand are complimentary. If school closures and people taking more time off work increase the size of the supply shock, the demand shock has less scope to do damage. The largest fall in annual GDP in all the variants we looked at was 6%.

Could conventional monetary or fiscal policy offset the fall in social consumption? Only partially, because the drop in consumption is focused on specific sectors. What is more important, and what we didn't explore in the exercise, is what would happen if the banks failed to provide bridging finance for the firms having to deal with a sudden fall in demand. The banks may judge that some businesses that are already indebted may not be able to cope with any additional short term loans, leading to business closures during the pandemic.

It is in this light that we should view the collapse of stock markets around the world. In macroeconomic terms this is a one-off shock, so Martin Sandbu is right that the recent stock market reaction looks overblown. But if many businesses are at financial risk from the temporary drop in social consumption, that implies a rise in the equity risk premia, which helps account for the size of the stock market collapse we have seen. (I say 'helps' deliberately, as much of the impact will be on smaller businesses that do not find their way into the main stock market indices.)  

If I was running the central bank or government, I would have already started having conversations with banks about not forcing firms into bankruptcy during any pandemic. 

But economics can also influence health outcomes, and not just in terms of NHS resources. For a minority of self employed workers there will be no sick-pay and those without a financial cushion will be put under stress. One of the concerns as far as the spread of the pandemic is concerned is that workers will not be able to afford to self-isolate if they have the disease. So if I was in government I would be thinking of setting up something like a sick-leave fund that such workers could apply to if they get coronavirus symptoms.

The government also needs to think about keeping public services and utilities running when workers in those services start falling ill. In fact there are a whole host of things the government should now be doing to prepare for a pandemic. It is at times like these that we really need governments to act fast and think ahead. Do we in the UK, and US citizens, have confidence that the government will do what is required? One lesson of coronavirus may be never put into power politicians that have a habit of ignoring experts.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

OK. I have got to stop playing my position, because this is more important for America today: Jill Lepore : The Last Ti... [feedly]

OK. I have got to stop playing my position, because this is more important for America today: Jill Lepore : The Last Ti...
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/02/the-last-time-democracy-almost-died-the-new-yorker-1.html

OK. I have got to stop playing my position, because this is more important for America today: Jill Lepore: The Last Time Democracy Almost Died https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/03/the-last-time-democracy-almost-died?: 'The endless train of academics were also called upon to contribute to the nation's growing number of periodicals. In 1937, The New Republic, arguing that "at no time since the rise of political democracy have its tenets been so seriously challenged as they are today," ran a series on "The Future of Democracy," featuring pieces by the likes of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. "Do you think that political democracy is now on the wane?" the editors asked each writer. The series' lead contributor, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, took issue with the question, as philosophers, thankfully, do. "I call this kind of question 'meteorological,' " he grumbled. "It is like asking, 'Do you think that it is going to rain today? Had I better take my umbrella?' " The trouble, Croce explained, is that political problems are not external forces beyond our control; they are forces within our control. "We need solely to make up our own minds and to act"...

...Don't ask whether you need an umbrella. Go outside and stop the rain. Here are some of the sorts of people who went out and stopped the rain in the nineteen-thirties: schoolteachers, city councillors, librarians, poets, union organizers, artists, precinct workers, soldiers, civil-rights activists, and investigative reporters. They knew what they were prepared to defend and they defended it, even though they also knew that they risked attack from both the left and the right. Charles Beard (Mary Ritter's husband) spoke out against the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, when he smeared scholars and teachers as Communists. "The people who are doing the most damage to American democracy are men like Charles A. Beard," said a historian at Trinity College in Hartford, speaking at a high school on the subject of "Democracy and the Future," and warning against reading Beard's books—at a time when Nazis in Germany and Austria were burning "un-German" books in public squares. That did not exactly happen here, but in the nineteen-thirties four of five American superintendents of schools recommended assigning only those U.S. history textbooks which "omit any facts likely to arouse in the minds of the students question or doubt concerning the justice of our social order and government." Beard's books, God bless them, raised doubts.

Beard didn't back down. Nor did W.P.A. muralists and artists, who were subject to the same attack...

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Brad DeLong: As of the end of February the stock market is forecasting a very sharp, sudden recession in the probability of a recess... [feedly]

from Brad DeLong's blog (former depy Sec of Treasury)

As of the end of February the stock market is forecasting a very sharp, sudden recession in the probability of a recess...
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/02/as-of-the-end-of-february-the-stock-market-is-forecasting-a-very-sharp-sudden-recession-in-the-probability-of-a-recession-fr.html

As of the end of February the stock market is forecasting a very sharp, sudden recession in the probability of a recession from near zero a week ago to better-than-even today: that is the only way to make sense of the S&P 500 over the past week. Thus it is not too late to plan. It is, rather, time to act to offset the likely spending contraction we now see much closer than the horizon. Here are the plans we should have made: Alyssa Fisher: Planning for the Next Recession by Reforming U.S. Automatic Stabilizers https://equitablegrowth.org/planning-for-the-next-recession-by-reforming-u-s-macroeconomic-policy-automatic-stabilizers/: 'Equitable Growth has joined forces with The Hamilton Project to advance a set of specific, evidence-based policy ideas for shortening and easing the impacts of the next recession... _Recession Ready: Fiscal Policies to Stabilize the American Economy.... Six concrete ideas... expand eligibility for Unemployment Insurance and encourage take-up of its regular benefits... reduce state budget shortfalls during recessions by... increasing the federal matching rate for Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program... eliminate work requirements for supplemental nutrition assistance during recessions... expand federal support for basic assistance during recessions... an automatic infrastructure investment program... boost consumer spending during recessions by creating a system of direct stimulus payments to individuals that would be automatically triggered when rising unemployment signaled a coming recession.... Congress should consider them now, because when the next recession appears on the horizon, it may be too late...  

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Lack of paid sick days and large numbers of uninsured increase risks of spreading the coronavirus [feedly]

Lack of paid sick days and large numbers of uninsured increase risks of spreading the coronavirus
https://www.epi.org/blog/lack-of-paid-sick-days-and-large-numbers-of-uninsured-increase-risks-of-spreading-the-coronavirus/

COVID-19—commonly known as the coronavirus—is now a potential threat for the United States and we all "need to be preparing for significant disruption of our lives," warned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) this week.

Unfortunately, preparing for the "significant disruption" will be economically unimaginable for one group of Americans—the millions of people in the United States who do not have access to paid sick days or have health insurance with a regular health care provider.

The CDC released very clear instructions to help prevent the spread of respiratory diseases, including staying home when you are sick. Not everyone has that option.

Overall, just under three-quarters (73%) of private sector workers in the United States have the ability to earn paid sick time at work. And, as shown in the figure below, access to paid sick days is vastly unequal. The highest wage workers are more than three times as likely to have access to paid sick leave as the lowest paid workers. Whereas 93% of the highest wage workers had access to paid sick days, only 30% of the lowest paid workers were able to earn sick days. In this way, access to paid sick days increases with wages among workers, disproportionately denying workers at the bottom this important security. And, low-wage workers are more likely to be found in occupations where they have contact with the public—think early care and education workers, home health aides, restaurant workers and food processors. When workers or their family members are sick, they shouldn't have to decide between staying home from work to care for themselves or their dependents and paying rent or putting food on the table. But, that is the situation our policymakers have put workers in.

Figure A

Meaningful paid sick leave legislation is incredibly important for low-wage workers and their families and important to reduce the spread of illness.

The ability for workers to earn paid sick days varies greatly across the country. In lieu of federal action, many states have passed legislation to guarantee paid sick days, but many workers have been left behind. The figure below shows vast differences across Census divisions in the ability for workers to use paid sick time to take care of themselves or their family members. The share with access to paid sick days ranges from only 62% in East South Central United States (composed of Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee) up to 91% in the Pacific (California, Oregon, and Washington). Notably, many local municipalities in the East South Central region have been preempted by their state governments from passing paid leave and sick day policies.

Figure B

The second recommendation from the CDC is to contact your healthcare provider.

We know in that the United States, millions of people delay getting medical treatment because of the costs. The latest Census numbers tell us that over 27 million people in this country are uninsured, up nearly two million over the previous year. These trends are moving in the wrong direction, notably because of losses in Medicaid coverage. Without health insurance, many do not have a regular source of careand simply won't go to the doctor to get the attention and information they need to not only get better but reduce the spreading of disease.

The CDC recommendations all seem well and good but how does someone with no paid sick days or insurance cope?

Luckily, policymakers can choose to act. Federal legislators can require employers to provide paid leave for workers to stay home when they are sick, as many states have done. And, policymakers can finally pass legislation that gives everyone the right to affordable health care when they need it.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Krugman: When a Pandemic Meets a Personality Cult [feedly]

PK nails it. Watch out for Trump  "states of emergency" once he abandons "its a democratic hoax" position.

When a Pandemic Meets a Personality Cult
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/opinion/coronavirus-trump.html
text only:

So, here's the response of the Trump team and its allies to the coronavirus, at least so far: It's actually good for America. Also, it's a hoax perpetrated by the news media and the Democrats. Besides, it's no big deal, and people should buy stocks. Anyway, we'll get it all under control under the leadership of a man who doesn't believe in science.

From the day Donald Trump was elected, some of us worried how his administration would deal with a crisis not of its own making. Remarkably, we've gone three years without finding out: Until now, every serious problem facing the Trump administration, from trade wars to confrontation with Iran, has been self-created. But the coronavirus is looking as if it might be the test we've been fearing.

And the results aren't looking good.

The story of the Trump pandemic response actually began several years ago. Almost as soon as he took office, Trump began cutting funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, leading in turn to an 80 percent cut in the resources the agency devotes to global disease outbreaks. Trump also shut down the entire global-health-security unit of the National Security Council.

Experts warned that these moves were exposing America to severe risks. "We'll leave the field open to microbes," declared Tom Frieden, a much-admired former head of the C.D.C., more than two years ago. But the Trump administration has a preconceived notion about where national security threats come from — basically, scary brown people — and is hostile to science in general. So we entered the current crisis in an already weakened condition.

And the microbes came.

The first reaction of the Trumpers was to see the coronavirus as a Chinese problem — and to see whatever is bad for China as being good for us. Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, cheered it on as a development that would "accelerate the return of jobs to North America."

The story changed once it became clear that the virus was spreading well beyond China. At that point it became a hoax perpetrated by the news media. Rush Limbaugh weighed in: "It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus. … The coronavirus is the common cold, folks."

Limbaugh was, you may not be surprised to hear, projecting. Back in 2014 right-wing politicians and media did indeed try to politically weaponize a disease outbreak, the Ebola virus, with Trump himself responsible for more than 100 tweets denouncing the Obama administration's response (which was actually competent and effective).

And in case you're wondering, no, the coronavirus isn't like the common cold. In fact, early indications are that the virus may be as lethal as the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed as many as 50 million people.



Financial markets evidently don't agree that the virus is a hoax; by Thursday afternoon the Dow was off more than 3,000 points since last week. Falling markets appear to worry the administration more than the prospect of, you know, people dying. So Larry Kudlow, the administration's top economist, made a point of declaring that the virus was "contained" — contradicting the C.D.C. — and suggested that Americans buy stocks. The market continued to drop.

PAUL KRUGMAN'S NEWSLETTERGet a better understanding of the economy — and an even deeper look at what's on Paul's mind. Sign up here.

At that point the administration appears to have finally realized that it might need to do something beyond insisting that things were great. But according to The Washington Post's Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman, it initially proposed paying for a virus response by cutting aid to the poor — specifically, low-income heating subsidies. Cruelty in all things.

On Wednesday Trump held a news conference on the virus, much of it devoted to incoherent jabs at Democrats and the media. He did, however, announce the leader of the government response to the threat. Instead of putting a health care professional in charge, however, he handed the job to Vice President Mike Pence, who has an interesting relationship with both health policy and science.

Early in his political career, Pence staked out a distinctive position on public health, declaring that smoking doesn't kill people. He has also repeatedly insisted that evolution is just a theory. As governor of Indiana, he blocked a needle exchange program that could have prevented a significant H.I.V. outbreak, calling for prayer instead.

And now, according to The Times, government scientists will need to get Pence's approval before making public statements about the coronavirus.

So the Trumpian response to crisis is completely self-centered, entirely focused on making Trump look good rather than protecting America. If the facts don't make Trump look good, he and his allies attack the messengers, blaming the news media and the Democrats — while trying to prevent scientists from keeping us informed. And in choosing people to deal with a real crisis, Trump prizes loyalty rather than competence.

Maybe Trump — and America — will be lucky, and this won't be as bad as it might be. But anyone feeling confident right now isn't paying attention.


 -- via my feedly newsfeed