What if Things Are About to Get Better?
Krugman the optimist?! Omg.
That was the summer of our discontent. Early this year many of us were expecting to see dramatic improvements in the quality of our lives. ...
But it was not to be. ...
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The result has been widespread frustration, with many people predicting that things will stay bad or get worse in the months ahead.
But what if the current gloom is overdone? As regular readers know, I’m not an optimist by temperament — and I’m as terrified as everyone should be by the threat right-wing radicalism poses to U.S. democracy. But there’s a good case that in the quite near future we’ll see substantial progress against the three C’s: Covid, containers (i.e., supply-chain issues) and crime. We didn’t get our summer of joy, but we might be heading for a spring of relief.
Well, Paul, by the spring of 2021 more, far more, Americans will have died under Joe Biden than under Donald Trump. That threatens democracy in America in 2022 and POJO, or Kamala Harris, in 2024. This needn't have been. It ought not to have been. If someone asked now, "Are you better off now than under Trump?", what do you think the answer would be?
Start with the state of the pandemic. At this point the Delta wave is clearly receding in the United States. Furthermore, there are reasons to hope that this won’t be another false dawn...
It is (and it's "dusk" not dawn, you ever heard of Helen Reddy?) but Delta's dawn caught Biden's CDC flat-footed. Biden didn't warn of Delta until July; by that time it represented 95% of all U.S. cases. Too late. Our summer was ruined. The vaccines work, the mandates have worked, the first was Trump's doing, and the second Biden's, belatedly. As you know, Biden resisted mandates, even in the military. If he had mandated in July we would be seeing a fall of relief.
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But I find myself feeling cautiously optimistic. Maybe it was something I ate?
Most endearing column he ever wrote.
