A16| Saturday/Sunday, April 4 - 5, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Keeping Government From Playing Catch-Up
The March 28 Review section in-
cluded interesting essays from Jeb
Bush (“Local Leaders Showing The
Way Forward”) and Rahm Emanuel
(“It’s Time for Washington to Step
Up”) pointing in opposite directions
regarding the usefulness of the federal
government in times of crisis.
Mr. Bush points toward governors,
mayors and assorted local leaders
stepping up, taking charge and striving
to solve problems—the more local, the
more effective. The ask was less about
the federal government stepping in
and taking over and more about Wash-
ington staying out of the way or re-
moving roadblocks to progress.
Mr. Emanuel similarly lists a few ex-
amples of local leaders making a posi-
tive difference in their communities.
Of course, he lists Democrats almost
exclusively. Mr. Emanuel proceeds to
document the federal government’s
failure to “show up” in one crisis or
another over multiple administrations,
and how he and other local leaders
went above and beyond to fill the gap.
Oddly, he pivots to the traditional lib-
eral talking point—we need more fed-
eral assistance in national issues. Why
would we want help from our friends
in Washington if they are as incompe-
tent as he has argued? I’ll take Mr.
Bush’s consistent logic over Mr. Eman-
uel’s disjointed thinking.
SCOTTROSNER
Orange, Calif.I find it quite interesting that Mr.
Emanuel discusses the failure of the
federal government, saying that: “For
decades, we’ve failed to invest suffi-
ciently in the nation’s public health
system” and “too often the federal
government simply doesn’t show up.”
He was a senior adviser to President
Clinton (1993-98), a major leader in
the House (2003-09) and a White
House chief of staff (2009-10). Is this
his public mea culpa for the lack of
ICU beds, ventilators, physicians,
nurses and respiratory and laboratory
technicians in America today?
His fingerprints are all over the
1997 Balanced Budget Act, the cre-
ation of Medicare’s sustainable growth
rate, the American Recovery and Rein-
vestment Act of 2009 and the Afford-
able Care Act: massive pieces of legis-
lation that balanced the budget and
stimulated the economy on the backs
of the health-care system. The BBA ar-
tificially limited Medicare growth to
less than medical inflation; the SGR
created cost shifts to the private pur-
chasers of health insurance; ARRA had
massive gifts to Silicon Valley and
hardware manufacturers as well as
subsidies to the Medicaid system; and
the ACA financed subsidies to the
lower-middle class and expanded
Medicaid, making massive profits forinsurance companies.
None of these bills honestly dealt
with the needs of a growing popula-
tion. For two-and-a-half decades,
those of us on the front lines (trying
to help indigent people get high-qual-
ity health care) and the leaders of
safety-net hospitals have been warn-
ing Washington and those in our state
capitals that they were underinvesting
in the American health system and
workforce. ICU, ventilator and work-
force shortages have been created by
Washington’s failure to be honest with
the American people. Unless we have
honesty from our elected leaders,
we’ll never be safe from health-care
disasters.
HOWARDC.MANDEL,M.D.,FACOG
Los Angeles
Dr. Mandel is president of the Los
Angeles City Health Commission.If it weren’t for the courageous
leadership of mayors and governors,
such as New York’s Gov. Andrew
Cuomo and others who are willing to
tell us the truth, implement sound sci-
entific interventions and assume re-
sponsibility for their decisions, we
would be in a much worse place than
we currently are. Mr. Emanuel’s state-
ment that in this crisis “the federal
government has been caught with its
pants down” is unfortunately accu-
rate. What makes things worse is how
politicized and personalized some of
the interactions have been among
those in the federal government who
need to closely collaborate with the
local and state leaders who have been
left having to beg and compete for
critically needed resources such as
personal protective equipment, venti-
lators and other medical supplies and
equipment.
It has been very disheartening to
see some of the expert members of the
national task force dance around the
facts and what truly needs to be said in
order not to offend the president and
his views. There have been numerous
public announcements of questionable
assertions and what appear to be im-
provised comments presented as fact,
such as the premature announcement
that the Food and Drug Administration
approved as an effective treatment of
Covid-19 the use of antimalarial drugs
and azithromycin. Leading by example
seems to be forgotten as at numerous
press conferences, the president and
his team are gathered close together as
they speak of the importance of social
distancing. Actions do speak louder
than words. It’s time that the federal
government becomes a close collabo-
rating partner and truly supports our
state and local officials in combating
this deadly pandemic.
JOSEPHA.STANKAITIS,M.D.,MPH
Honeoye Falls, N.Y.Ration Books From the Shortage of Long Ago
Bob Greene’s “Coronavirus and
the Ration Book” (op-ed, March 28)
about the ration books issued dur-
ing World War II brought back many
memories to me. My father, Joseph
Scuderi, had an Italian grocery in
South Philadelphia. Many of his cus-
tomers were immigrants who spoke
very little English and found it diffi-
cult to manage the ration books.
They trusted Dad and asked him to
keep the books and take out what-
ever stamps were needed, though it
was illegal to do so. After adding
the purchase price, he would take
off the correct stamps. I was a teen-
ager at the time and it was my job
to add them up and deposit them at
the bank just like money. One day a
salesman came into the store and
told my father that there were two
government agents at a neighboring
grocery. Dad was adding up the gro-
ceries for one of his oldest custom-
ers when the two agents entered thestore. After telling her the dollar
amount, Dad also told her the
amount of stamps she owed. She
was indignant and said that he was
supposed to take care of them for
her. He remained adamant about the
stamps. This was all carried out in
Italian. She stomped out of the store
and said that she would not come
back. Shortly afterward, the agents
left. Dad immediately picked up her
groceries and ran after her shouting,
“Comare! Comare!” His explanation
was accepted by her, and this re-
mained a great story in our family.
DIANNESCUDERILORDI
Chesterfield, Mo.Carrying Social Distancing
To Very Unhelpful Extremes
Regarding your editorial “Parks
and Virus Recreation” (March 25): I
am an 86-year-old Californian who
walks in the park daily. It’s a nice
part of the day, plus my cardiolo-
gist insists on it. Since we are all
shut-ins now, I have seen more
families and dog walkers lately in
the park. Everybody says hi, but we
keep our distance. We are friendly,
not stupid.
Obviously, the bureaucrats think
we don’t have enough smarts to
take care of ourselves. Yesterday
they closed our park. So today I
walked the streets and saw many of
my unhappy neighbors doing the
same. Now when we meet, one
walks on the sidewalk and the other
walks in the street. Ridiculous!
BILLGRAVES
Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.The Shutdown Crash Arrives
A
mericans have been understandably fo-
cused on the human toll of Covid-19, but
the damage from the national economic
shutdown that governments
are imposing to combat the
coronavirus will compound the
agony. We don’t mean in stock-
market points or profits. We
mean in the human cost of lost
jobs and paychecks, ruined
businesses, and the psychological toll on Ameri-
cans who can least afford it.
If that sounds melodramatic, take a spin
through Friday’s March jobs report from the Bu-
reau of Labor Statistics. There’s no redeeming
news as the economy shed 701,000 jobs. The big-
gest single-month decline during the Great Re-
cession was 800,000 in March 2009 near the end
of the downturn. This economic crash is only
getting started.
The news is all the worse since the state lock-
downs and federal social-distancing guidelines
didn’t begin in earnest until mid-March and
later. Economists had predicted a decline of
100,000 or so jobs. But leisure and hospitality
employers alone shed 459,000 jobs, which re-
flects the closure of restaurants, bars and public
entertainment.
The jobless rate jumped 0.9 percentage point
to 4.4%, the biggest jump in a month since Janu-
ary 1975. But that understates the harm because
the civilian labor force shrank by 1.63 million, as
many of the jobless simply stopped looking for
work. The expectation for April is a loss of per-
haps 10 million jobs and a jobless rate that rises
above 10% as the shutdown strategy extends
through the month. If it extends into May, expect
more carnage and a jobless rate that could reach
heights not seen since the 1930s.
The tragedy is all the worse because the main
layoff victims are the low-skilled and blue-collar
workers who had been gaining the most in the
last couple of years. February was a bang up
month, with job gains of 275,000, rising wages,
buoyant consumer and small-business confi-
dence, and big companies poised to invest more
with the end of U.S.-China trade tensions. The
government policy response to the virus has re-
versed it all.
Tens of millions of white-collar employees—
including us—can work at home. That’s not true
for most workers in construction (down 29,
jobs for the month), retail (-46,000, before
Macy’s furloughed 130,000), and education and
health services (-61,000). The jobless rate for
those without a high school degree climbed by
1.1 percentage points to 6.8%, and 1.6 percentage
points to 6% for Hispanics. These are not people
with homes in the Hamptons who appear on
CNBC.
Chief White House eco-
nomic adviser Larry Kudlow
spoke to the press Friday and
was suitably grave. He ex-
plained that this debacle was
the reason President Trump
and Congress had passed the $2.2 trillion relief
bill. But he also suggested that the task for the
country was to power through, wait for the so-
cial-distancing to flatten the infection curve, and
then get back to work with a sharp rebound later
in the year.
We hope he’s right, or that private innovators
come up with a vaccine or treatments to ease
Covid-19 symptoms. But he may be underesti-
mating the long-term damage from taking a
sledgehammer to a modern economy. No amount
of government relief money can make up for all
of the lost production, bankrupt businesses and
jobs that may never return.
Mr. Trump has put his health experts front and
center and turned April over to their policies. But
it’s far from clear that they will give the green light
to ease their restrictions in May or even June. It’s
increasingly clear that even if the curve flattens
in California or New York, and even with social
distancing, the coronavirus is persistent enough
to return in some form in the autumn.
There’s no plan we can see at the White House
for reopening anything any time soon—espe-
cially after Mr. Trump courted catcalls with his
off-the-cuff desire to see the country back to
normal by Easter (next Sunday). His aspiration
was understandable, but the country needs a
careful explanation for this shift after he has
spent day after day saying the opposite. He set
himself up for a retreat.
Philanthropist Bill Gates now says the entire
country should close down for at least 10 weeks
with little recognition of the tradeoffs and eco-
nomic harm. The media elites all nod in agree-
ment from their home offices. How much of an
economy will we have left by then?
No one can say, but the White House is court-
ing political trouble if it merely keeps predict-
ing the sharp V-shaped recovery of legend.
What the country needs, and jobless Americans
will increasingly demand, is thinking about a
more sustainable anti-virus strategy—one that
saves lives but also includes somehow taking
the national economy off the ventilator that
government has placed it on.The government anti-
virus strategy is putting
millions out of work.
Britain Falls Out of Love With China
W
hat a difference two months make. U.K.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson in late
January riled many Britons and Wash-
ington by allowing Chinese telecom firm Huawei
to supply parts for British communications net-
works. Nine weeks and one global pandemic later,
that deal and many others are in doubt.
British anger at Beijing’s deceitful handling of
the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan has bubbled
up in recent days. Senior minister Michael Gove
on Sunday blamed Beijing for stymieing Britain’s
response to the pandemic: “Some of the report-
ing from China was not clear about the scale, the
nature, the infectiousness of this.”
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab on Monday
called for a “lessons learned” review in answer
to a reporter’s question about Chinese obstruc-
tionism. These public statements reinforce
press reports over the weekend that govern-
ment officials privately suggest China should
face a “reckoning” after the health emergency
has abated.
Skeptical voices are rising outside the admin-
istration, too. Iain Duncan Smith, a member of
Parliament and former Conservative Party
leader, cited Beijing’s coronavirus cover-up as
the final straw that should prompt Britain to
“rethink” its relationship with China. That argu-
ment won’t be a hard sell to many Conserva-
tives. Mr. Johnson faced a rebellion by 38 of his
own party members in Parliament who recently
voted against his plan to allow Huawei to sell
equipment to Britain.
That deal was supposed to advance the
warmer economic ties with China that were a
central plank of Mr. Johnson’s post-Brexit trade
agenda. Beijing’s dangerous virus cover-up
could scupper those plans by forcing British
leaders to question whether an authoritarian
China is a trustworthy economic partner.
There’s a lesson for both sides. Britons who
voted for Brexit backed a vision of their coun-
try as a democratic, free-trading beacon for the
rest of the world. There are dangers to deviat-
ing from that path solely for the sake of com-
mercial gain.
As for Beijing, the repression of the Xi Jin-
ping era is not winning China respect abroad.
Instead, that repression and its sour fruits—
whether Uighur detention camps or a clumsy
attempt to diminish or conceal the risks of
what has become a global pandemic—are culti-
vating global distrust of the Communist Party.
The price that the regime pays in lost respect
and economic opportunities may be large and
unpredictable.The Navy Captain and the Coronavirus
S
ocial distancing is a luxury you don’t
have aboard a nuclear-powered aircraft
carrier. So a word about Thursday’s fir-
ing of a Navy officer who
showed up in the news asking
for help containing a corona-
virus outbreak on his ship,
the USS Theodore Roosevelt.
Many have been quick to
lionize Capt. Brett Crozier as
a hero who spoke up in defense of his crew. His
March 30 four-page letter, which leaked to the
press this week, said he urgently needed to off-
load some 4,000 deployed sailors to quaran-
tine in Guam to arrest the virus. It is bracing
reading. “If we do not act now,” Capt. Crozier
wrote, “we are failing to take care of our most
trusted asset—our Sailors.” It isn’t clear who
leaked the letter.
Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly said
Thursday that he’d relieved Capt. Crozier for
showing “extremely poor judgment.” Mr.
Modly said the captain sent his letter to 20
or 30 people over an unclassified channel
and was operating outside normal proce-
dures in the chain of command. These are se-
rious, fireable offenses, and Capt. Crozier
could have offered his resignation instead if
he felt he’d exhausted his ability to care
properly for his sailors.
More substantively, adversaries are now
aware that a U.S. aircraft carrier is said to be
in rough shape in the South Pacific. China and
Russia would be delighted to exploit American
weakness amid a pandemic. Capt. Crozier’s let-
ter said the U.S. is not at war but that doesn’t
mean it isn’t under threat.
Then again, there are
questions. What would moti-
vate a captain with more than
25 years in the Navy to torch
his own career? Anyone who
reaches such a prestigious
position in the Navy tends to
be a company man. Mr. Modly says that none
of the more than 100 people on the ship who
have tested positive have been hospitalized,
and that his office had already been working
with Capt. Crozier.
But it is tough to square the divergent
stories between the Navy Secretary in Wash-
ington and the captain leading a warship. Mr.
Modly in his Thursday press conference said
this firing doesn’t mean local commanders
shouldn’t speak up about problems, though
many will doubtless conclude otherwise
from this episode.
Videos have surfaced on the internet ap-
pearing to show the Roosevelt’s sailors
cheering Capt. Crozier as he departs the ship.
Most of the rank-and-file seem to see Capt.
Crozier as defending their interests at great
personal cost. Navy brass should take this as
an indication of dysfunction in the chain of
command, which starts at the top. Why do so
many sailors and veterans find it plausible
that Capt. Crozier was getting the brush off
from his bosses?A sad episode raises
questions of judgment
and chain of command.
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
OPINION
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returned.“Just saying, if you can’t trust
your software upgrades,
what can you trust?”THE WALL STREET JOURNALNew Under the Sun? Not
This Can-Opener Design
Regarding the Gangy can opener,
as the adage goes, “What’s old is new,
and what’s new is old” (“Power Tool:
Open for Business,” Off Duty, March
21): I’ve been carrying a P-38 around
for 50 years, ever since I was dis-
charged from the U.S. Army. Not as
snazzy as the current version, but
just as functional. I opened many a
can of C-rations with mine, and on
occasion, still do.
HARVEYLUTSKE
Los AngelesPepper ...
And Salt