Today, reports the Times in above-the-fold placement, we can expect the Commerce Department to report that America's GDP, in 2020's last quarter, rose all of about 1 percent — rendering the year as a whole a near record-breaking economic calamity.
Blame not the devastating effects of the coronavirus alone, or even principally. In the preceding quarter, the GDP soared by 7.5 percent, as congressional aid to consumers and businesses in March reenergized the economy. Yet by the last quarter that assistance was a spent force, and so the economy retracted once again.
In the decimating wake of supply-side resistance to re-legislating the demonstrably effective, Congress did manage to pass a $900 billion relief package in the fourth quarter. Though much less than needed, the economy once again began to lift and now, in 2021's first quarter, there is realistic hope that the GDP will reach its pre-pandemic level sometime this year, not next year, as previously predicted.
As the Times summarizes our economic recrudescence, "Aid passed by Congress in December has begun to flow in enhanced unemployment benefits, small-business loans and direct payments to households…. Democratic control of the Senate [makes] further rounds of assistance more likely." The aid included $600 stimulus checks, extended unemployment benefits, billions in rental assistance, another ban on evictions, more money for food insecurity, another round of the Paycheck Protection Program for businesses, and $68 billion for covid vaccine distribution.
But that aid will expire. The only path to reaching the economy's pre-pandemic level in 2021 — as is now "hoped" — is by enacting the Biden administration's nearly $2 trillion relief package.
And that, we should add, presents a national problem even larger than any imminently failed economic recovery. Not only is relief at stake: "For Republicans," notes the AP, "the final roll-call vote will indicate whether they plan to be constructive advocates of the minority party or just-say-no obstructionists." Meanwhile, "Democrats are operating as if they know they are borrowed time."
The evidence of Keynesian macroeconomics' efficacy is incontrovertible — as are the vast benefits of the administration's designs on climate control, immigration and, among many other intents, health care. And yet Republicans' aggressive insistence on dreary supply-sideism, science denial, xenophobia and chicken-bartering for a doctor's appointment goes on and on. This blind, arrogant, pseudoconservative attitude of obstructionism is actually less any sort of ideological resistance than just a plain hatred of Democrats.
And that, no amount of reasonable debate or persuasion will cure. It's who they are, it's the Dorian Gray they've become, it's by now a deep-set grotesquerie. There is another hope, however. The Republican ranks are splintering like a hovel bombed by a howitzer, and this, in time, will thin their numbers in Congress — perhaps to a non-pre-pandemic level of virtual insignificance.