Shooting the Moon And The Sacrificial Lambs
It’s now official (well almost official). The Trump administration has no intention of abandoning its efforts to restart the nation’s economy even in the face of a resurgence of COVID-19 deaths as predicted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (“IHME”). In his televised town hall broadcast last Sunday on Fox News (where else?) the President warned the American people that they would have reconcile themselves to the fact that the planned reopening of the nation’s economy could cause as many as 100,000 deaths. That would be more American lives than were lost on 9/11 and in the Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq wars combined. Nor did the President feel any need to revise his thinking later in the week when the IHME projected that the current efforts to restart the nation’s economy would likely raise the U.S. death toll from COVID-19, not to 100,000, but to 135,000. This would be more than all of the Americans who died in every war fought by this country since World War II including the Korean War in which over 36,500 Americans died. The President’s former surrogate, Chris Christie even suggested that such lives needed to be sacrificed in order to save the country, just as lives were sacrificed in World War II.
In my last article I wrote that the soul of the Republican Party would be revealed by how it would respond to a resurgence in deaths resulting from a premature reopening the nation’s economy. I had not expected that the answer would come so quickly. Not only has no elected Republican publicly questioned the wisdom of not waiting until the conditions recommended in the President’s own guidelines have been satisfied, several Republican governors have since announced their plans to move forward at this time even though the IHME had previously recommended that most states wait until the end of May or even early June. At last count, 31 of the nation’s governors are currently moving forward, all but three of whom are Republicans.
At this point we all have to wonder what is prompting the President and his party to boldly move ahead against the near-unanimous advice of public health experts. David Frum has suggested that the Administration is trying to do everything in its power to revitalize the nation’s economy as quickly as possible in the hope that a rising economy in the third quarter of this year would provide the President with the best chance of his being re-elected. From all appearances, not even a staggering amount of additional deaths is going to deter him from this path. Some might call this a “Shoot the Moon” strategy.
Gambling Strategies
I first encountered the expression “Shoot the Moon” many years ago when I and the other communications officers serving with me on board the USS Newport News would fill our off-duty hours playing Hearts, a card game in which the object is to accumulate the lowest number of points. Thus, the normal strategy in Hearts is to accumulate low cards and discard the high cards so at the end of the hand you would have the fewest number of points. A highly risky alternative strategy is to try to accumulate all of the highest ranking cards and, if successful, your score would be reduced by the value of those cards. The danger in this strategy is that if you don’t accumulate all of the high cards you would be charged with all of the points in your hand which would be a terrible result.
While a “Hail Mary” strategy is often thought of as being the same as a “Shoot the Moon” strategy, there is a fundamental difference between the two. The “Hail Mary” strategy is most frequently associated with the game of football when the losing team in the final seconds of the game tries a desperate play in an effort to tie or win the game. It usually involves a long pass into the opponent’s end zone with the hope that one of the team’s receivers, surrounded by a crowd of defensive backs, will catch the pass. Those who employ a “Hail Mary” strategy have nothing to lose; whereas those who employ a “Shoot the Moon” strategy could have safely acted and possibly benefitted from employing a more conventional strategy. Thus, the President’s actions is better characterized as a “Hail Mary” strategy. The Republican governors, who are following the President’s urging to prematurely reopen their states’ economies, are effectively following a “Shoot the Moon” strategy because they are running the risk that they could be voted out of office if the death toll in their state rises and the economy does not bounce back.
You might wonder why a Republican governor in a red state who can generally count on being re-elected would take such a risk, particularly to help bail out a President who has jeopardized his own chances of being re-elected by having caused the nation to incur the largest number of coronavirus cases and deaths than any nation on the earth. Certainly, this is not what candidate Trump had in mind when he adopted the slogan “America First”? Three reasons immediately come to mind. The first is that in the Republican party, party loyalty is valued above almost everything else. A party loyalist who has been rejected by the voters can usually count on getting employed to a high government position or as an executive or lobbyist for a business that generously supports the party. Secondly, the President is immensely popular among Republican voters and going against the President’s urging could hurt even an incumbent governor’s re-election chances. In this same vein, the President has a well-earned reputation for mercilessly attacking those who prove disloyal to him. (Think of Michael Cohen, Jim Comey, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, etc.) The third reason is that President Trump has enormous resources at his disposal to dispense to governors loyal to him, including large quantities of desperately needed virus test kits and personal protective equipment.
Placing a Value on Lives
This country has always placed a very high value on human life. Exhibit A would include a list of the countless jury verdicts in wrongful death actions in excess of one hundred million dollars. Exhibit B would be the very large number of voters who characterize themselves as “Pro-Life” and make their electoral decisions on this factor alone. In addition, hospitals regularly refuse to remove a patient from life support even though continuing to do so is a costly process and the chances of the patient’s recovery may be nil. Similarly, our armed forces go to extraordinary lengths to save the lives of wounded soldiers cut off behind enemy lines, often putting the lives of many other soldiers at risk. When Iranians revolutionaries overran the American embassy in 1979 and took 52 American diplomats and citizens as hostages, the U.S. government staged a highly costly attempt to rescue them. Yet another measure of the value we place on lives can been seen in the reluctance of our police forces to storm banks in the process of being robbed when the lives of hostages are at stake. Thus, economic considerations are not normally even taken into consideration in this country when lives are at stake.
Because of the reverence that most American place on human life, some Republicans have shied away from justifying their intention to press ahead with the reopening of the nation’s economy on economic grounds. Instead, they argue that if social distancing orders remain in effect, more lives will be lost through increased suicides and domestic violence. Such arguments, however, deserve little consideration. Although suicides are the seventh major cause of death in the U.S., in 2018 they averaged a little over 4,000 a month, which pales in comparison to the roughly 2,000 deaths per day now being claimed by COVID-19. The domestic violence argument is even more frivolous as annual homicides from domestic violence in this country do not annually even exceed 2,500.
Nevertheless, there are clearly times when the loss of life is a price that should be paid to achieve an important national goal. This is undoubtedly what former Governor Christie may have had in mind when he analogized the Trump administration’s willingness to sacrifice another 65,000 COVID-19 patients to the sacrifice made by U.S. soldiers fighting in World War II. While I question whether effecting a quicker economic recovery (or any economic goal) is the moral equivalent of putting an end to a tyrant’s efforts at world domination, I recognize that others may differ on this issue because of the very large number of people who are going to be seriously adversely affected if the nation has to endure another Great Depression (which may not be an exaggeration).
It would be a mistake to assume that we are simply discussing whether it is wise, or even appropriate, to endanger tens of thousands of Americans in order to successfully restart the nation’s economy. I don’t think we even have to reach that issue. The more immediate issue is whether it would be more economically effective to try to reopen the economy now or after the pandemic has been brought under control. There are many factors that will be in play which makes this an uneasy question to answer.
Problems of Restarting the Economy
Virtually all economists who would agree that the longer our (or any) economy is allowed to remain in a moribund state, the harder it will be to rejuvenate it. Moreover, if the economy is allowed to come to a complete stand-still, it would be extremely difficult to restart it. Restarting a collapsed economy was the very problem that President Roosevelt faced in the Great Depression and his efforts to bring the nation’s economy back to life took a decade. The Roosevelt administration adopted a strategy “pump priming” in which it had the federal government employ millions of unemployed workers in important infrastructure projects as well as in relatively mundane projects like constructing pathways in the National Parks. Underscoring the difficulty of restarting a moribund economy is the fact that it took World War II to truly get the nation’s economy back into high gear following the Great Depression.
The difficulties involved in restarting a moribund economy explains why the Congress rushed to enact the CARES Act to keep economic activity ongoing while the nation was requiring the closure of all non-essential businesses. While both major political parties voted in favor of this economic rescue legislation as well as a follow-up economic package, there is reason to doubt whether the roughly $2.7 trillion that has already been appropriated will be enough. Unfortunately, like so many undertakings of our national government, the current effort to keep the nation’s economy alive during its self-induced economic coma has been a chaotic jumble of ill-conceived and often conflicting programs whose impact is likely to be very short-lived. Most of the loans and grants provided for in these acts are only designed to carry the nation’s economy for a couple of months which means that if the economy is not restarted within the next 60 days, it will begin to grind to a halt.
Evaluating Re-opening Strategies
Simply rescinding orders closing non-essential businesses will NOT automatically restart the nation’s economy for a number of reasons. First, not every owner of a “non-essential business” is ready to reopen his/her business. Many may feel that they cannot adequately protect their employees and, therefore, may be reluctant to take action which might precipitate ruinous liability claims by infected employees. They may not have protective gear to provide to their workers or be equipped to determine which, if any, of their employees might already be infected with the virus. Mitch McConnell has already recognized this concern and is ready to legislate liability protection for business owners in order to eliminate reticence arising out of this concern.
Perhaps an even bigger problem is that a business owner’s customers may not feel sufficiently safe to visit the owner’s place of business. This concern is readily apparent from the fact business activity dropped off sharply in advance of state and local government closure orders and did not further decline after those orders went into effect. Thus, merely rescinding those orders might only have a minor impact on increasing economic activity. Stated another way, “If you reopen it, they still may not come.” This is the reasoning underlying the advice of a restaurant consultant to his clients to further postpose the reopening of their restaurants until it is clear that their customers are no longer afraid to return. He also pointed out that if restaurant, either by law or economic necessity, are required to reduce the number of people they can serve at any given time, they simply might not be able to operate at a profit.
This latter consideration appears not to have eluded the Trump administration which recently decided to “shelve” the CDC’s detailed recommendations regarding the precautions and operating procedures that should be taken by restaurants, retail establishments and churches that plan to restart their operations. The administration obviously feared that these guidelines would discourage business and restaurant owners from proceeding with their re-opening plans and immediately determined that the CDC’s guidance “should not see the light of day.” Officially, the administration couched its objections to these guidelines in terms of their being an undue restriction on religious freedom, a rationalization they were confident would resonate with Republican voters
Large retailers have been under stress for some time because of the growing popularity of on-line shopping. In response, many of them have begun their own on-line sales divisions so as to compete with Amazon and other on-line retail operations. The pandemic has greatly magnified this problem as customers have not been allowed in their stores and may not want to return after restrictions have been lifted. The problems of large retail operations made the newspapers this weekend when Neiman-Marcus announced that it was filing for protection under the Bankruptcy Act. This is likely to be the first of many such bankruptcy filings. The overwhelming possibility is that Neiman-Marcus and other large retailers will use bankruptcy as a vehicle to restructure their operations, placing a much greater emphasis on on-line sales. In fact, many large retailers may simply decide to use the low interest loans they received under the CARES Act, not to continue the employment of their workers as Congress had intended, but to reconfigure their operations. This may also be true of large restaurant chains who will use their loans to transition into more automated operations.
Manufacturers face different problems. Their most immediate problems will be two-fold: (1) demand for their products will be reduced because of an overall slow-down in commerce as a result of the global impact of the pandemic; and (2) providing for the safety of their workers will make their operations less efficient. We have already seen how the slowdown in the world economy has affected the petroleum industry and most other areas of manufacturing will have to similarly reduce their output to better match demand. This, in turn, could affect their operational profitability because there will be no immediate reduction in their fixed costs. In those industries in which profit margin were slim before the pandemic, reopening may not even be warranted. While the President has issued an Executive Order compelling meat processor to continue their operations (which also includes a grant of immunity for liability claims by infected employees), it seems unlikely that he will be able to provide all manufacturers with similar immunity. As noted above, Mitch McConnell would like to pass legislation providing such immunity; however, the cost of Democratic support of that legislation could be a very large employee protection fund which may be a non-starter for many members of his caucus.
The long-term issues facing manufacturers will be how they must modify their product lines to accommodate for how people conducting their lives in the future and how they must revamp production operations so as to minimize their use of human labor. This will launch a new wave of artificial intelligence into business, just as the information revolution changed manufacturing techniques twenty years ago. In fact, it would not be surprising to see that most of the low-interest loans made available to large companies under the CARES Act will be used to make these changes. Thus, many of the jobs that currently exist in large manufacturing companies may be permanently eliminated.
There is an assumption underlying the Republican strategy that an earlier recommencement of economic activity will result in an earlier rebound of the economy. There are a few reasons to suspect that this is not a valid assumption. First, the Republican strategy does nothing to assure members of the public that they will be safe patronizing restaurants and retail stores. Quite the contrary, expanding human contact before the pandemic is under control will undoubtedly cause a resurgence of the virus which will actually make the public even more reticent to dine in restaurants or visit retail stores or seek the services of personal service providers like barber shops and beauty salons. Moreover, this fear will continue unabated (if not actually increase), making any recovery much slower than it otherwise would have been.
Secondly, if the manufacturing sector of the economy is restarted before the virus is under control, companies will have to take significant measures to protect their workforce which will slow production and increase costs. By waiting until after the virus is under control, those efforts can be less disruptive. While the President has shown in his Executive Order directed to the meat processing industry that he would prefer to continue business as usual and let many infected employees die, I am not sure that most manufacturers would take a similar attitude, especially if they believe that it might result in work stoppages and a lot of bad press.
Thirdly, while governors might be willing to proceed in a measured fashion to reopen their state’s economy, that does not mean they would be willing to continue down that path if their constituents become alarmed over the resulting increase in infections and deaths. As I mentioned as the beginning of this article, the President is in a different position from the Republican governors; he has nothing to lose. Like Admiral David Farragut in the Battle of Mobile Bay, he appears prepared to take a “damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead” approach. Almost all Republican governors, however, have a very good chance of being re-elected as long as they don’t do anything that raises the ire of the public. Pressing forward with a premature reopening of their economies in the face of a public backlash could well be a “bridge too far” for them. While turning back might only further retard the nation’s economic recovery, they are likely to conclude that it is their best alternative.
Realizing that public pressure will mount as the death toll rises, the President, aided by right wing media, has embarked on a disinformation campaign to discredit the number of deaths caused by COVID-19. Without citing any evidence, he has made public pronouncements that the death figures are “inflated.” This theme was amplified by Fox News that showed a video produced by Project Veritas featuring several funeral directors opining that hospitals are intentionally inflating the number of deaths caused by COVID-19 to defraud the government into overpaying them. While hospitals receive reimbursement from the federal government for treating COVID-19 indigent patients and that reimbursement is roughly 20% higher than normal Medicare reimbursement rates. Thus, there is an economic incentive for hospitals to classify their indigent patients as COVID-19 patients. The sad fact is that this reimbursement formula does not begin to compensate them for the enormous losses in revenues that they are experiencing as a result of their having to treat COVID-19 patients and not being able to perform elective procedures. In this sense, it is the government that is ripping off the hospitals.
More importantly, there is no real evidence beyond unsubstantiated testimony that hospitals are actually mischaracterizing their patients. If anything, the number of deaths caused by COVID-19 is understated for two important reasons: First, for at least 30 days into the pandemic, there was a complete lack of testing kits with the result that deaths could not be confirmed as having been caused by the virus. Second, many patient deaths did not take place in a hospital and therefore were never confirmed as having been caused by the virus. A multi-state study by the New York Times of the number of deaths during the month of March compared to prior years revealed that there were approximately 25,000 excess deaths (i.e., deaths over a 20-year average number of deaths not otherwise attributed to COVID-19) in the U.S. which most likely also represented deaths attributable to COVID-19. In short, the President’s claim is simply another of his famous diversionary tactics, wholly without substance.
In the final analysis, the President probably doesn’t care which strategy to reopen the nation’s economy will be best for the country in the long-term, only which strategy will make economic prospects look the most promising on election day. In that sense, his strategy should not be characterized as an economic strategy, but rather as a political strategy in which he’s willing to sacrifice tens of thousands of American lives to advance his prospects for re-election.
The Sacrificial Lambs
This brings us back to Governor Christie’s assertion that those who will die will have sacrificed themselves for the good of their country. The term “sacrifice, when used as a verb, is generally used in the active voice. For example, a sacrifice is something that someone consciously chooses to do, like a parent who works long hours under wretched conditions so his/her children can get a good education and live a better life. The soldiers who fought in World War II referred to by Governor Christie, chose to place themselves in danger in order to achieve what they considered was an important national goal. The deaths of additional Americans resulting from a premature reopening of the nation’s economy does not fit into that category. Their lives are being destroyed, not as a matter of their own choice, but rather as a result of a choice made by a political leader. Thus, the sacrifice of their lives will more resemble the slaughter of a lamb on the altar of a high priest, a practice which the western world abandoned over two thousand years ago.
At this point, we have a pretty good idea who will be among those roughly 60,000 Americans who will die as a result of the President’s decision. They will be medical worker who have spent the past four months trying to save lives in hospitals all around the country and who have been pleading that the nation’s economy not be restarted until the virus has been brought under control. They will be residents in nursing homes and long-term care facilities trying to make the most of their declining years. They will be workers in meat processing plants (and the members of their households) who are being compelled to work in dangerous conditions by a Presidential Executive Order. They will be inmates and in state and federal prisons and detention centers who did not commit crimes calling for capital punishment; and they be member of the nation’s “undeserving poor” whose economic plights did not afford them the luxury of staying safely in their homes, far from the danger posed by the Coronavirus. These will be our President’s sacrificial lambs.