Krugman Speaks

Paul Krugman, NYT: (pay wall)

Covid-19 has had a devastating effect on workers. The economy has plunged so quickly that official statistics can’t keep up, but the available data suggest that tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, with more job losses to come and full recovery probably years away.

But Republicans adamantly oppose extending enhanced unemployment benefits — such an extension, says Senator Lindsey Graham, will take place “over our dead bodies.” (Actually, over other people’s dead bodies.)

They apparently want to return to a situation in which most unemployed workers get no benefits at all, and even those collecting unemployment insurance get only a small fraction of their previous income.

Because most working-age Americans receive health insurance through their employers, job losses will cause a huge rise in the number of uninsured. The only mitigating factor is the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, which will allow many though by no means all of the newly uninsured to find alternative coverage.

But the Trump administration is still trying to have the Affordable Care Act ruled unconstitutional; “We want to terminate health care under Obamacare,” declared Donald Trump, even though the administration has never offered a serious alternative.ign Up

Bear in mind that ending Obamacare would end protection for Americans with pre-existing conditions — and that insurers would probably refuse to cover anyone who had Covid-19.

Finally, the devastation caused by the coronavirus has left many in the world’s wealthiest major nation unable to put sufficient food on the table. Families with children under 12 are especially hard hit: According to one recent survey, 41 percent of these families are already unable to afford enough to eat. Food banks are overwhelmed, with lines sometimes a mile long.

But Republicans are still trying to make food stamps harder to get, and fiercely oppose proposals to temporarily make food aid more generous.

- and -

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.

As many pundits have said over the years, even when it's plain that their philosophies aren't working, "conservatives' will double down.

We've gone along with a "tough love" approach to poverty (eg) - "weaning the poor from the government teat" (which has turned out to be a very PC way of saying "kick 'em when they're down") - and when it becomes clear that it's not working, Republicans decide it's because we haven't been kicking them hard enough.

Democracy is supposed to be a Free Market kind of thing. You bring your ideas to the marketplace, and voters decide if those ideas are worth something.

Republicans insist that their ideas - the ones the voters keep rejecting - are perfectly sound, so if there's a problem, then it must be that we've got the wrong voters, and so we'll fix it by gerrymandering and caging, and when that's not enough, we'll go with flat-out voter suppression.