You are much better off than you were four years ago

were 40 percent higher in the United States than in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom, according to a committee assembled by the British medical journal The Lancet. According to the commission, this was not all Trump’s fault, but Trump’s policies, such as eliminating the National Security Council’s global health security team and cutting 700 jobs not filled in responsible for “tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Georgetown economist Harry Holzer noted in a September 2020 report that Covid significantly more people unemployment, per capita, in the US than in other OECD countries. During the crucial period from January to April 2020, the impact in the US was 11 times that in the other OECD countries. Trump acts as if health care policy is somehow separate from economic policy, allowing him to endlessly delay finding a replacement for, or “improvement” to, Obamacare in a way that he would never dare to do about, say, taxes. Over the past nine years, he has gone from “something great” Unpleasant “I have drafts of a plan,” which is to say, none at all. It’s just health care, which Republicans have shown little interest in. But health care, to a large extent, is the economy.

Will the economic problems continue? Of course. We have a affordable housing crisisand now that the Fed is finally admitting that inflation is under control, it needs to cut rates dramatically this month to avoid a recession in 2025. As I noted yesterday, banks that too big to fail are also becoming too powerful to regulate. The political influence of the working class has waned. And the stock market has behaved really weird.

But for Christ’s sake, Naturally we are better off than we were four years ago. Four years ago was one of the worst times I have ever experienced in this country. I lost my job in a sudden recession, I was terrified of contracting a deadly disease, and while we were waiting for a vaccine, some idiot in the White House told everyone to inject Clorox into their veins. A few months later, we had a deadly insurrection on Capitol Hill to stop Congress from counting the presidential electoral votes. We haven’t fully recovered from Covid or Trump, because a lot of furniture got destroyed between the two. But we are much, much better than we were then, and Harris shouldn’t hesitate to explain why.