In an attempt to own his former pal President Trump, Bill Clinton decided to bring up other nations’ economic performances in the wake of the coronavirus.
“We have just 4% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s COVID cases,” Clinton said, taking the Chinese Communist Party’s lies about its coronavirus caseload at face value. “Our unemployment rate is more than twice as high as South Korea’s, 2 1/2 times as the United Kingdom’s, and more than 3 times Japan’s.”
Sure, nations like Japan and South Korea that immediately implemented test and trace systems and mask wearing had a leg up over the West, which culturally lacked the predisposition for the domestic surveillance of contact tracing and the optics of wearing masks. But what the former president forgot to mention was where these nations started from and, more importantly, what the net impact of the coronavirus was on their economies.
America suffered a 9.5% contraction from the first quarter to the second of this year, with our unemployment rate peaking in April at 14.7% and falling to 10.2% in July. The speed of our recovery, which has roughly restored 40% of our peak pandemic losses, is nowhere in sight for much of the developed world, the U.K. included.
Consider that the U.K.’s unemployment rate has remained artificially stagnated thanks to self-employed workers and older workers leaving the labor force entirely, a fact reflected in its devastating economic losses. From the first to the second quarter of this year, the U.K.’s economy contracted by more than 20%, or more than twice the United States’s loss. Spain’s economy contracted by more than 15%, and France and Italy lost more than 10% of their economies.
And most of these European nations came from the position of sub-zero interest rates thanks to the ripple effects of the European Central Bank, even on the Bank of England, as well as an economy that had never quite recovered from the Great Recession. Of course, we had the most to lose: After all, we’ve been the engine pumping the rest of the economy for the past decade.
And as for that recovery of Joe Biden’s that Clinton lauded, it’s worth noting that it was the slowest since World War II. By contrast, our economy is on pace to recover half of our extraordinarily short downturn’s losses by the end of the third quarter.
Nice try, but clearly Bubba has lost a step.
