By Lewis K. Uhler and Peter J. Ferrara, National Tax Limitation Committee
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.
The recession was primarily a blue state phenomenon because blue states were the ones who shut down the economy. Public health is largely a state and local power, which is why Democrat Governors and Mayors have made such a difference, as they have thrown the economy into lockdown purgatory and misery.
The concurrent demand of the left that police departments be defunded and shut down has resulted in widespread mayhem.
The most recent example of irrational anti-police conduct has been the ambushing of innocent Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputies. The gunman, caught on video, walked up to the deputies and opened fire without warning or provocation while they were sitting in a parked patrol car. The officers were taken to a hospital where protestors were blocking the entrance and exit yelling “We hope they die”.
This incident is a sidebar to the unprecedented conduct that has grown out of the shutdown upheaval. It is being accommodated – even encouraged – by the same liberal progressive mayors, governors, and their followers. It is time to restore order, civility and common sense to our nation by reopening our economy and restoring the rule of law.
Lew Uhler is Founder and Chairman of the National Tax Limitation Committee and of the National Tax Limitation Foundation (NTLF). He was a contemporary and colleague of Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman in California and across the nation. Peter Ferrara is a Senior Fellow of NTLC and of the Heartland Institute. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under President George H.W. Bush, and as the Dunn Liberty Fellow in Economics for The King’s College in New York.
