Question

What has caused our most recent economic crisis? How are ordinary Americans enduring the hardships of today? How is the federal government responding to the current economic downturn?  Include with your response the link to a current event news article that reflects this answer. 100 words please

Answer 1

COVID-19 has caused an economic shock three times worse than the 2008 financial crisis.Europe and emerging markets have been hit hard economically, China has escaped a recession.The June 2020 Global Economic Prospects describes both the immediate and near-term outlook for the impact of the pandemic and the long-term damage it has dealt to prospects for growth. The baseline forecast envisions a 5.2 percent contraction in global GDP in 2020, using market exchange rate weights—the deepest global recession in decades, despite the extraordinary efforts of governments to counter the downturn with fiscal and monetary policy support. Over the longer horizon, the deep recessions triggered by the pandemic are expected to leave lasting scars through lower investment, an erosion of human capital through lost work and schooling, and fragmentation of global trade and supply linkages.

The virus also has impacted Americans’ religious behaviors. More than half of all U.S. adults (55%) say they have prayed for an end to the spread of coronavirus. Large majorities of Americans who pray daily (86%) and of U.S. Christians (73%) have taken to prayer during the outbreak – but so have some who say they seldom or never pray and people who say they do not belong to any religion (15% and 24%, respectively). Adults younger than 30 are particularly likely to say they have used a food delivery service because of the coronavirus outbreak: Three-in-ten in this group say they have done this. A quarter of adults ages 30 to 49 also say they have used a food delivery service because of the coronavirus outbreak, while smaller shares of those ages 50 to 64 (15%) and those 65 and older (14%) say the same.

Federal government response:Roughly $339.8 billion is set aside for programs carried out by state and local governments. Of this $339.8 billion, $274 billion will be allocated to specific COVID-19 response efforts, and $5 billion will go toward Community Development Block Grants, $13 billion for K-12 schools, $14 billion for higher education, and $5.3 billion for programs for children and families.Yet the federal response has been alarmingly slow to develop, fostering confusion about the nature of the virus and necessary steps to address it. States and localities have been at the leading edge of the response but have exercised their public health powers unevenly. Because science-based social distancing and targeted quarantine measures can succeed only if implemented wherever the virus is spreading, the lack of interjurisdictional coordination has and will cost lives.

Our constitutional structure rests primary responsibility for public health with the states and, through delegated authority, cities and counties. In ordinary times, states can exercise broad “police power” to protect citizens’ health, subject to constitutionally protected individual rights such as due process, equal protection, and freedom of travel and association. The federal government’s ordinary public health legal authority is more limited and focuses on measures necessary to prevent the interstate or international spread of disease.Despite its epochal effects, COVID‑19 is merely a harbinger of worse plagues to come. The U.S. cannot prepare for these inevitable crises if it returns to normal, as many of its people ache to do. Normal led to this. Normal was a world ever more prone to a pandemic but ever less ready for one. To avert another catastrophe, the U.S. needs to grapple with all the ways normal failed us. It needs a full accounting of every recent misstep and foundational sin, every unattended weakness and unheeded warning, every festering wound and reopened scar.