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Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
A month ago it was Wuhan that was feeling the pain; by last week the streets of Venice and Rome were empty. If a lot of people get sick in coastal cities, a lot of people are going to get sick in the heartland, and it's not going to take very long. As always, I am impressed by your Marxist conviction that politics follows so directly from economics, but this is a case where I think you're missing something. I'm not sure whether the epidemic is going to cause people to rally to authoritarianism or turn them off Trump's particular combination of braggadocio and incompetence, but I think the political impact will be sui generis and not simply a function of pocketbook issues. Though I do think we're going to get a recession out of this, but I wouldn't assume that people will react the way they ordinarily do in a recession.
eta:
One of the problems in the US has been the testing for Covid-19. We haven't been testing many people, in part because we didn't have the capability, and it's a reasonable guess that there are more cases that haven't been found yet because the symptoms are much like flu symptoms and the CDC's protocol about who gets the test (plausibly necessary to keep everyone from asking for tests and overwhelming the function) meant that until quite recently you could have the symptoms but wouldn't get tested unless you had, e.g., traveled to China. In the last day, Pence and the White House (who are now preventing scientists at the CDC from talking to anyone) have stopped reporting the number of tests being done. The White House seems to view this all from a partisan lens, or at least they have found that a useful way to deflect criticism, but I don't think it's going to play well with voters once more people start dying.
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The sole attractive feature of Trump was the economy doing well. (He's done some alright things on foreign policy, as well, but no one wins or loses an election on that.)
This disease only has a 2% death rate. Worst case scenario we have a few thousand deaths. Mostly old and infirm people. Kids don't seem to be impacted much by it. So I don't think you'll see a significant number of dead kids, which would the only type of deaths shocking enough to get people angry.
I thin RT put her finger on the issue that's going to adversely impact Trump. The Main Street economy is going to be be negatively impacted in a way that cannot be addressed with rate cuts. Rate cuts take time and their curing effect comes from propping asset values and (theoretically) increasing lending. The economic damage coming from consumer pullback comes fast, is acute, and can't be fixed with lower rates. If there's no economic activity, it doesn't matter how cheaply banks can borrow from the Fed, as there will be nothing to lend into and no one looking to borrow except bad credit risks looking to replace lost revenue with borrowed dollars to survive until economic activity rebounds.
