President Trump has announced that he won’t be approving any more economic stimulus or relief legislation until after the election. This may or may not be a wise move — it depends upon your views of what sort of recession we’re in right now. A rational view would be that it’s good news, for the bad news is that we have two different recessionary events to deal with.

The first recessionary event is obvious: close down large chunks of the economy, and we lose 30% or so of the GDP we had. Open it up again, and we get 30% growth (that being the current best estimate for the third quarter, the period that just ended about a week ago). Of course, a 30% drop followed by 30% growth from that smaller number doesn’t get us back to where we started from. We can check this with the unemployment rate of 7.9%. That’s half of what it was at its worst point during the coronavirus recession, but still twice as high as the pre-coronavirus rate.