Governor Sununu and all elected leaders need to show us their economic projections, month by month. Just like they showed us models of how many deaths and hospitalizations they predicted from Coronavirus, we need to see the consequences of continued lockdown.
People need to know the cost we’re facing. I don’t mean the cost in terms of dollars. I mean the cost in terms of human suffering from business closures, bankruptcies, foreclosures, unemployment, hospital closures, bank failures, tax increases, etc.
Here is a sampling of headlines on CNBC from just the past two hours:
- The economic data is even worse than Wall Street feared: ‘The economy is clearly in ruins here’
- New York manufacturing hits record low reading of -78.2 amid coronavirus collapse
- Homebuilder confidence index takes biggest one-month dive in its history as coronavirus slams economy
- Best Buy to furlough about 51,000 employees as coronavirus-related sales surge ends
- Coronavirus delivers record blow to US retail sales in March
The models don’t need to be accurate, and they likely won’t be. Lord knows the Coronavirus models weren’t. But what they will do is force a public conversation about how much human suffering is ahead and hold leaders accountable for either underestimating or overestimating those costs. At the moment, there’s very little evidence they’re even thinking about the economic impact, aside from oblique references and insulting minimalizations like “tough” and “struggle” and “inconvenient.”
Throughout March, we were bombarded with doomsday models that showed us how much time our respective states had left to contain the virus. Politicians and business leaders throughout NH cited them while pressuring the Governor to order everyone to shelter in place. It’s their duty and responsibility to produce the same projections for the other side of the equation. And make no mistake; it is an equation. Everything has a cost, but most of the conversations right now don’t acknowledge that fact. There’s one extreme that wants to go back to normal immediately, which ignores both the cost in lives and the economic disruption from the disease. The other extreme ignores the cost of remaining locked down until the risk is zero (or some arbitrary and undefinable threshold like “safe”).
We must get to a place where we can have a rational, adult conversation about how to begin to end these lockdowns. Quickly. If our leaders can’t “show their work,” we have to presume they’re either not doing it or deliberately hiding it from us. Neither of those options is acceptable any longer.
Show us your models, Governor.
