Worst President Ever + Worse Senate Majority Leader Ever = Bad Pandemic

The lede picture for Neil Irwin's chilling NY Times essay-- How Bailout Backlash and Moral Hazard Outrage Could Endanger the Economy wasn't of Trump or Mnuchin; it was a silhouette of a chinless, bespectacled turtle with this caption "Mitch McConnell at the U.S. Capitol. He opposes federal bailouts of Democratic-leaning states with large public employee pension obligations." Irwin wrote that the economy is "in free fall, with tens of millions of people unemployed and countless businesses at risk of collapse" but that almost instantly "the political conversation has pivoted from whatever-it-takes determination toward a different feeling: outrage." Austeritarian conservatives are increasingly "focused not on preventing a potential depression, but on litigating which recipients of federal rescue are morally worthy and which are not." Republicans are adamantly opposed to-- and angered by-- "federal government support for state and local governments, and at expanded unemployment insurance benefits supporting the jobless."

In Bush's 2008 global financial crisis, the same worthless sacks of senatorial shit-- Irwin described them differently because it's The Times-- bitched and whined "about mortgage relief for home buyers who had borrowed more than they could afford-- a televised rant about one such program helped spawn the Tea Party movement."

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, raised the possibility in an April interview that states that found themselves short of cash should be able to allowed to go bankrupt. Though he later backed away from that position, he and other Republicans have made clear they don’t want Democratic-leaning states with large public employee pension obligations to be bailed out with federal money.

States are uniformly facing collapsing revenue because of the pandemic, raising the prospect that even those with sound pre-crisis finances will have to make deep cuts in the coming years. This could hold the economy back even once the private sector rebounds.

The Paycheck Protection Program, the government’s signature effort to pump money to smaller businesses that agree to keep their employees on staff, has proceeded amid recriminations over whether businesses are truly worthy if they have access to funding elsewhere.

Part of the problem was Congress’s decision to initially fund the program with $350 billion, far below the needs of smaller businesses looking to cover their payrolls, and to expand it in a second round. The limited availability of money created an atmosphere of scarcity in which any business that gets aid-- including large restaurant chains like Shake Shack and Ruth’s Chris Steak House, and firms with venture-capital funding-- does so at the cost of another firm that might seem more worthy.

“The fact that there is more outrage over one bad business getting a P.P.P. loan than 100,000 companies deserving one but not getting one because of the anemic funding is ludicrous,” Mr. Lettieri said. “People have been chasing the shiny object of ‘who is most deserving, who isn’t, and where do you fall on the spectrum of need,’ which is a completely misguided way to approach this.”

The pandemic has no moral logic of its own. The steps that are most likely to revive the economy don’t depend on some abstract notion of what is fair. And outrage that some group you don’t like received help probably won’t make things better.

Mike Broihier, one of the progressives trying to defeat McConnell, told us last night that "Not surprisingly, McConnell's pitch to allow states to go bankrupt was couched as a Red State/Blue State conflict. Constantly appealing to what he believes are the worst angels of his fellow Kentuckians, McConnell wrongly bets that all evidence that blue states are net tax payers and red states, Kentucky among them, are net tax takers, will be ignored. This crass, classist appeal will only work with the Commonwealth's dimmest bulbs.  Fortunately, McConnell's visits to the Bluegrass State are so infrequent and brief that he doesn't realize he's played this trick too many times. Loathsome and unmissed ex-governor, Matt Bevin, tried this crap in 2019 and was send packing by teachers, grassroots organizers and, well, right thinking Kentuckians."

Early yesterday morning-- as it was announced that the U.S. was about to pass the 70,000 deaths milestone-- Trump was playing on his Twitter account, boasting about his "great reviews... for how well we are handling the pandemic." It almost made me feel sorry for whichever White House stooge is tasked with finding news clips to tickle his ego every morning.

As for McConnell, he's still polling as the most hated U.S. Senator and is increasingly vulnerable to go down the electoral tubes the same way Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin did last year when Democrat Andy Beshear beat him by just over 5,000 votes in a shocking repudiation of Trumpism. It's ironic that Beshear's hate line against the pandemic-- certainly at odds with what Bevin would have done-- is keeping the pandemic at bay in Kentucky. Other Trump extremist governors-- in effect, Bevin dopplegängers-- have catastrophic through-the-roof rates of infection:

• Pete Ricketts (R-NE)- 3,103 per million
• Eric Holcomb (R-IN)- 3,090 per million
• Kristi Noem (R-SD)- 3,087
• Kim Reynolds (R-IA)- 3,098 per million
• Brian Kemp (R-GA)- 2,850 per million
• Tate Reeves (R-MS)- 2,636 per million
• Bill Lee (R-TN)- 2,040 per million
• Ron DeSantis (R-FL)- 1,791 per million

Thanks to Beshear's relatively hard line, Kentucky's rate is just 1,155 infections per million, below the national average and a more manageable pandemic in McConnell's home state, despite McConnell and his party's approach.