An Epidemic of Hardship and Hunger

By now everyone who follows the news has a sense of how badly the Trump administration and its allies botched and continue to botch the medical side of the Covid-19 pandemic. Weeks of denial and the failure to implement remotely adequate testing allowed the virus to spread almost unchecked. Attempts to restart the economy even though the pandemic is far from controlled will lead to many more deaths, and will probably backfire even in purely economic terms as states are forced to lock down again. But we’re only now starting to get a sense of the Republican Party’s cruelty toward the economic victims of the coronavirus. In the face of what amounts to a vast natural disaster, you might have expected conservatives to break, at least temporarily, with their traditional opposition to helping fellow citizens in need. But no; they’re as determined as ever to punish the poor and unlucky.
 What’s remarkable about this determination is that the usual arguments against helping the needy, which were weak even in normal times, have become completely unsustainable in the face of the pandemic. Yet those arguments, zombielike, just keep shambling on.

 By Paul Krugman
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