Literary Corner: Time Will Tell

Mark, Rothko, No. 6 (Yellow, White, Blue over Yellow on Gray), 1954. Via WikiArt.

This Administration Will Not

by Donald J. Trump

According to some estimates, a national lockdown

costs fifty billion dollars a day and hundreds of

thousands of jobs every single day. Ideally,

we won’t go to a lockdown. I will not go.

This administration will not be going to

a lockdown. Hopefully, whatever happens in the

future, who knows which administration it will be.

I guess time will tell, but I can tell you,

this administration will not go to a lockdown.

Heritage Foundation on 20 April guessed that an 8-week national shutdown would lower economic output by $2 trillion, which only comes to $357 million a day, and cost 14 million jobs from February's 152 million total employed, or 250,000 jobs per day. This was under the assumption that the only region of the country seriously affected by the coronavirus was the New York area, and that this would remain true. 

In the event, in the real world as opposed to Heritage's modeling factory, total US economic output declined at exactly that rate, for a total of $3 trillion in the second quarter of 2020, while the number of jobs declined by 25 million or nearly 300,000 jobs per day, without a national shutdown, so if Heritage's estimates were correct a national shutdown would actually have led to a small but significant improvement, but never mind that.