When the coronavirus epidemic passes, Americans can’t simply return to their old habits, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio has said.
“We won’t properly absorb the lessons from the coronavirus crisis if we fall back into the traditional Republican and Democratic model of politics. We need a new vision to create a more resilient economy,” the Florida Republican said in an April 20 column in the New York Times.
“The economy should be at the service of the common good,” Rubio said. “It should work for us, not people for the economy.”
The senator called for a renewed focus on the common good, a shift in priorities from short-term economic efficiency to long-term resiliency, and a better model of manufacturing to evaluate and address shortcomings in the response to the COVID-19 virus.
As of Tuesday, the spread of the coronavirus has killed more than 45,400 people in the U.S., with more than 810,000 known to be infected since early March. The virus usually causes mild or moderate flu-like symptoms, but severe cases can require hospitalization and become fatal.
Civil authorities, fearing that rapid increase in severe cases could overwhelm hospitals, ordered public health measures including orders for most people to stay at home.
Both the arrival of the virus and its response have had major effects on the U.S. economy, with 22 million Americans known to have filed for unemployment claims in recent weeks, CNN reports.
Only last week did the Trump administration release a three-stage plan to remove restrictions on social and economic life while also limiting contagion and responding to new cases.
The coronavirus medical response has been severely hindered by a shortage of appropriate protective gear and other medical equipment.
Rubio argued that some of the problems revealed in the epidemic are the consequences of decades-long trends.
“Over the past several decades, our nation’s political and economic leaders, Democratic and Republican, made choices about how to structure our society — choosing to prize economic efficiency over resiliency, financial gains over Main Street investment, individual enrichment over the common good,” Rubio said.
“Any prudent policymaker should recognize that both efficiency and resiliency are values we should prioritize and seek to balance. But that’s not what we have done in recent decades,” he said.
The senator warned that in a crisis, a lack of resilience in the economy can be “devastating.”
“Though I believe resilience is one of the defining traits of an American, I also believe it’s been absent from our public policy for too long. And this has become devastatingly clear in the current crisis,” he said. Continue reading
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