VDH: Was COVID-19 Our Neutron Bomb?
Shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline, opening up the border in a time of pandemic to illegal immigration, nominating a number of big-government zealots, and institutionalizing unproductive, commissar-like wokism do not promote economic growth.
Yet natural processes are underway that Joe Biden likely will be unable to thwart immediately by his redistributionist policies. So we should imagine that the now labeled “Trump virus” will at some point sooner than later grow dormant. The “Trump quarantine” will then lift, and with it the “Trump recession.” The “Biden vaccination” will help to end the pandemic, along with the number of those previously infected with “Trump antibodies,” as the “Biden recovery” will take off, at least for a few months.
All sorts of known unknowns follow. When will Biden’s tax hikes, new regulations, subsidized green add-ons, gas and oil curtailment, and massive accumulating debt begin to slow things down?
Will a near $30 trillion debt growing at $2 trillion a year, with a progressive laundry list of ever more “essential” entitlements, finally lead to inflation, or stagflation, or permanent zero interest rates—or an abrupt recession, or worse?
No one knows.
But in the political sense, Republicans might wish to prepare for an artificially inflated but robust economy that could last until late in the midterm year 2022. It will do no good to argue that Operation Warp Speed, an end to the failed New York-California blue-state lockdown model, and the remnants of the Trump economic package mostly account for the upswing. The president in power when economies tank or roar gets commensurate blame or credit.
All the talk of a dismal Trump response to the virus will soon and reluctantly wane, as our vaccination rate, our prior national leadership in creating vaccines, and our earlier end to the pandemic will be positively compared with other nations, especially those in Europe. As a result, Biden will transmogrify from a shrill critic of what he inherited to a plagiarist of that recovery.
If Biden and his team get what they wish—a neo-socialist, big government transformation—we will enter tough times. But not yet and perhaps not until after 2022.
As a prominent member of Biden’s earlier administration famously said, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”