Why The Buck Stops With The Orange Man

Harry Truman famously had a sign on his desk which read “the buck stops here”. The Donald probably never heard of it, but that doesn’t exempt him from its truth.

The most outrageous outbreak of statist excess in US history happened on Donald Trump’s watch with his full complicity. In turn, these Covid-lockdown assaults on normal economic function transformed what was a mediocre economic record during his first 38 months in office into a complete disaster during the last 10 months.

Moreover, the record makes crystal clear that the sheer economic mayhem of the Lockdown period was triggered on March 16, 2020 by the then President of the United States. During the course of a White House briefing, where the Donald was flanked by the incipient Virus Patrol led by Deborah Birx and Tony Fauci, there was released a fact sheet instructing among other things that,

……bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”

As Jeffrey Tucker later succinctly noted, the tone of the press briefing and the handout’s instructions amounted to an instantaneous “lights out” order to large swaths of the $22 trillion US economy:

Shut it all down. Everything. Everyone. As if the whole economy were a nightclub closing early.

In fact, a large part of the club focused in the the above named services sectors did exactly that. For instance, employment in Leisure & Hospitality (L&H), which encompasses bars, restaurants, hotels, resorts, museums, movies, sports arenas etc, literally dropped into an economic black hole.

In February 2020 the BLS reported 14.8 million nonsupervisory jobs in this sector, which number plunged by 52% to just 7.1 million in the April report. As it happened, the 7.7 million jobs lost in a veritable heartbeat were equivalent to all the employment gains in the sector since August 1986. That is, 34 years of job gains were wiped out by the Donald’s 90 minute press conference.