I can be wrong 11/21
Revisiting a blog post from early in the pandemic
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I think that this makes it unlikely that President Trump will suffer a political setback because of the coronavirus. Closing the border is his signature issue, and the Democrats have staked out a position as the “resistance” to that. I know that they think they can benefit from this crisis, but I would be surprised if they do.
That turned out to be wrong. But in that same post I also wrote,
I would suggest that instead of monitoring the Fed, one should watch the transportation hubs–especially ports–and manufacturing centers. To the extent that the attempts to contain the virus cause those places to be shut down, patterns of specialization and trade will be broken, and there won’t be anything that the Fed can do about it.
That was not wrong.
The critical thing about the coronavirus is that it allowed Dem govs and pressure groups to use lawfare to change election rules. All the same, Trump fumbled the response in that he should have stuck with the just the flu line, closed our borders, and offered incentives for the vulnerable (mostly elderly and/or obese people) to quarantine, while pushing hard on the vaccine as he did (but then Pfizer arranged not to announce the good news until after the election).
I've still seen no good proof the virus is not a net benefit to society, mod our costly economic interventions. If we let it rip it would burn off the dry timber that costs a ton in healthcare, while claiming only modest quality life years lost relative to the counterfactual no virus world. Trump's initial "just the flu" instinct was thus dead on target, but he got bad advice from the moron advisers he hired as usual.
I found Arnold more wrong than right on virus policy. I still do. It all started at this link (3/17/20) and kinda went downhill from there:
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/macroeconomics-of-the-virus-crisis-5/
I was the “reader” mentioned in the link above and my thoughts were nothing more than a poor man’s version of what ultimately became the Great Barrington Declaration several months later.
In hindsight, FL/TX > the other 48. Anyone disagree?
That said, Arnold was very early in being able to identify the inflation issue (since at least 3/28/20). Wow!!!
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/virus-policy-and-inflation/
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/the-inflation-virus/