If this crop of federal leadership is rotten, I'm not seeing much hope in the possible followup cohorts. The US government has effectively delegated responsibility for the crisis to state governments, and they all seem to be following the same stupid "stay in your home" model. Federal and state, their only solution has been to throw money at the problem, but that doesn't work when you've got no one around who can execute.
Taking control and centralizing all testing? Still barely happening. Isolating infected people? We've got thousands of non-critical COVID-19 patients and we are sending them home to infect their families. Anyone thought to use the hundreds of thousands of vacant hotel rooms for something? But there's no self-starters here. The option of least resistance is to just tell everyone "stay home it will be fine" and hope for the best.
I expected some failures in leadership but this is far beyond what I could've imagined. It's not Republican or Democrat, it's failures all down the line. No one is bringing anything to the table.
Only the federal government has the ability to borrow money. States have to balance their budgets every year, and whoops, half their tax money has now vanished, because so many can't work. Delegating responsibility to state governments and simultaneously refusing to provide the needed resources is a recipe for failure. Allowing unlimited profiteering on essential supplies and forcing states to bid against each other, while national stockpiles are withheld to be used for political purposes, means it isn't going to get better.
So we need to stay at home until we're able to test on a much larger scale.
There are also often limits on the purpose the money is borrowed for: in many states they can borrow to fund infrastructure or pay for some other project that spans many years, but they can't borrow to just meet a deficit. The result is that without federal aid we'll see a repeat of 2008 and just after: firing schoolteachers and other state workers, making those who remain take a pay cut, jacking up university expenses even more. And the impact on revenue is going to be much larger than 2008/2009.
Governors are just locking people in their homes and shuffling off blame. None of them think probabilistically or listen to anyone that does.
We are looking at an economic collapse that rivals late 80's Japan. People are viewing the "economy" as money. They need to rethink their smugness. Japanese salarymen work harder and longer hours than any American yet their salaries and purchasing power are half that of equivalent positions in America. The Nikkei has still not recovered from the crash 30 years ago.
That is our future if we just keep staying locked in houses. Also this "remote work" revolution people are cheering on should be rethought pretty damn fast. If this truly is the new normal, people are not going to hire Americans for $25/hr with benefits if we never meet them. Managers will just hire Indonesians for $4/hr since it's all the same to them.
At some point we need to let businesses reopen and ues temperature tracking + mandatory face occlusion. This isn't perfect, or even that good, but widespread testing won't happen anytime soon (it's not cheap and our government agencies are completely incompetent at large project design), so we just need to accept some risk.
But since no one thinks in a probabilistic way - since we are afraid to - it's gonna be shelter in place for a few months while the governors just cover their asses instead of actually searching for an 80% good solution, and blame Trump for not figuring it out either.
There is no leadership in our government, you are right. State, federal, local. Embarrassing.
Taking control and centralizing all testing? Still barely happening. Isolating infected people? We've got thousands of non-critical COVID-19 patients and we are sending them home to infect their families. Anyone thought to use the hundreds of thousands of vacant hotel rooms for something? But there's no self-starters here. The option of least resistance is to just tell everyone "stay home it will be fine" and hope for the best.
I expected some failures in leadership but this is far beyond what I could've imagined. It's not Republican or Democrat, it's failures all down the line. No one is bringing anything to the table.