While Congress continues to debate whether to provide more stimulus funding to businesses and individuals, it is worth remembering that at the onset of the pandemic, the United States’ current trajectory was not a certainty.
The failure of the Trump administration to take the coronavirus crisis seriously and its inadequate and delayed testing regime led to a public health crisis that required workers and consumers to shut down their activity.
The failure to implement a speedy response to keep people employed—whether through supporting small businesses, preventing state and local job cuts, or maintaining workers’ connections to payrolls—has resulted in millions of layoffs that may have otherwise been avoided.
Already, this has caused the United States to experience far higher unemployment levels than other countries. And now, with the Trump administration and its allies refusing to take steps that could prevent further and deeper pain, the U.S. economic fallout is likely to be far worse than that of other developed nations.
Even as the United States approaches a 20 percent unemployment rate and suffers the highest COVID-19-related death toll in the world, President Trump continues to downplay the importance of testing. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has projected that GDP in the United States is expected to contract at an annualized rate of 40 percent in the second quarter of 2020 and 5.6 percent for the year overall.
As other countries begin to reopen and experience economic growth, it is important to remember that though a recession in the United States was likely unavoidable, there is strong evidence from other countries that shows that President Trump’s botched response made the U.S. recession significantly longer and deeper than necessary.
Ryan Zamarripa is the associate director of Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
