1. This bears repeating: as harmful as Trump has been politically, his administrative impact has been even worse. The US has always been a poorly governed country by developed nation standards—too much blind faith that capitalism can work itself out—but... nytimes.com/2021/01/18/opi…
2. ... the sheer volume of its innate economic endowments usually meant that it didn’t suffer much from that. Under Trump, however, I suppose Americans are finally experiencing the consequences of catastrophically inept governance, and at the worst time possible. It turns out...
3. ... that interstate problems, duh, really do require interstate action that only the federal government can provide, and therefore that having the federal government MIA in the middle of a pandemic is a recipe for disaster. Contrary to some of my colleagues, I’ve long felt...
4. ... that the legal and administrative balance between the federal government and the states has been tilting towards the latter since at least the Reagan years, which finally culminated in Trump’s extremist stance on “leaving everything to the states” this time. If the US...
5. ... wants to modernize its crumbling infrastructure, have a coherent industrial policy, improve its public education system, etc., the trend has to be reversed, and very quickly. Perhaps the latter stages of the pandemic will provide a political opening for this, and if so...
6. ... then that’ll be a significant silver lining to what has otherwise been a grotesque, almost criminal, example of federal administrative negligence.
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