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This is not the first time a GOPster has suggested old people just die for the good of the economy.
Trump has all along been more concerned about the stock market than the virus.
Too, it has turned out that putting so many out of work and the need to incentivize and even just enable them to stay away from work has created a very strong case for extensive government control of the economy as well as a number of social democratic reforms that Republicans hate and fear.
They think the damage to the economy caused by a more widespread and more widely lethal virus episode would be less than the damage caused by lockdowns, and that might be right.
But enough less? How do you even determine that?
A comment found at Steve M's.
For all the reasons you cite, but also out of dread of the increased government intrusion on the economy and the wave of social democratic measures needed to enable and incentivize people to not go to work, the Duce, his Republican White House, Republicans in the congress, and GOPsters out in the states and locales are now moving toward urging acceptance of a much more widespread disease and many more deaths, especially among the elderly, in order to allow a shift back toward Republican normality.
And this is not by any means the first time in recent memory the GOP has publicly urged "let them die" is much, much better than "spread the wealth around", or any policy at all that would diminish the wealth and power of the wealth and power elites.
Like stopping all or most non-essential economic activities in order to diminish the health and mortality impact of a virus, for example.
And that's why 20% unemployment for a few months is much, much worse in their eyes than an increase in the number killed by the bug.
How much of an increase?
We are about 330 million Americans.
If 40% get the bug and lethality is 3.4% that's 4,488,000 dead.
If 80% get the bug because the Republicans rebel against these efforts and the lethality is the same, well, do the math.
Those unemployed by social distancing measures won't stay unemployed, on the whole.
Those killed by the virus will, on the other hand, not recover.Juan Cole today on the relative values.
Trump was somehow convinced to go along with this policy for two weeks, but now is increasingly restive.
At his news conference on Monday, he kept saying that Fauci’s cure was worse than the disease. Unfortunately for the country, Trump is a hotelier, and his own businesses are being badly hit by the pandemic.
Moreover, leaks by aides to journalists allege that he is deathly afraid that a prolonged period of social isolation in the US will put the economy into a deep recession and sink any chance he had of being reelected.
. . . .
Certainly, the cure is not worse than the disease, in the sense that a deep economic recession such as we had in 2008 is not worse that losing two million dead (the upper end estimate of some medical modellers).
But I also have a sinking feeling that the billionaires have crunched the numbers and decided that the loss of 2 million elderly Americans would be worth it for their bottom line.
I think they are wrong about this, because you can’t have a normal economy if the pandemic is running wild, anyway.
But they are used to getting what they want, and are contemptuous of the lives of the little people– which is why they have striven so hard to destroy Obamacare so as to save themselves from having to pay taxes for it.
Trump, in other words, combines in himself the worst dimensions of plutocracy and looniness, and the American people will rue the day they decided to give him the levers of power for the whole country.
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