Stoll my opinion on all of this stuff is different than the vast majority of posters on this board. i am and have been involved in both the service and manufacturing sectors of the economy. prior to this virus we were absolutely humming in both areas. people can say it's obama's economy but it's been 3.5 years since obama was in office and in my entire working life i have never seen as much confidence as we've had under trump. cheap gas. cheap loans. lowest unemployment in 50 years. lowest minority unemployment in 50 years. manufacturing coming back home. new deals abroad where we're not subsidizing the world with trade etc. really, really good times. literally everyone i know was doing great.
then the virus hit and now the economy is toast. imo trump as president could have prevented this disaster. we didn't need to shut down the entire country and trash everything so many have spent years building. with a plan we could have had testing in place, we could have locked the borders, we could have implemented internal travel restrictions, we could have isolated places and regions like ny and the ne to prevent spread, we could have isolated nursing homes and prisons.
When you look at the majority of cases, nursing homes, prisons, certain regions, with proper leadership this thing could have been contained and controlled and 80 percent of the country could have continued working with masks, social distancing, and hand sanitizing. we didn't need to lockdown the entire country. instead we rolled out dr. fauci and birx and models to do a solid month of worst case scenarios and doomsday predictions that changed day-to-day if not week to week - masks, surface contamination etc. Trump should have brought fauci and birx out twice and that's it. follow the science was the mantra. the science has been nothing but a moving target. what we've learned is that the population impacted is very small and with proper planning could have been isolated.
we can say hindsight is 20/20 but this virus wasn't a first impression for us. we had the benefit of the best (and worst) practices from the countries already dealing with the virus. yes pelosi is a dumb shit with her comments in china town, and deblasio in ny, and the gov of fla and spring break, but i think had we had a plan from the genesis of this we could have prevented much of the spread and saved our country and people's ability to provide for their loved ones.
the economy and life was great under trump. he deserves credit for it. now the economy and life is shit. trump deserves the most blame for it as the leader. just my opinion.