And Trump is dumping on them right and left.President Trump’s political narrative often depends on bashing cosmopolitan blue America as an archipelago of dirty, infested hellholes. At one point, he even entertained quarantining off parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, because, as the Associated Press reports, he “thought it could be a signal to supporters elsewhere that he was walling off a virus hot zone comprised of three Democratic states.”
But at the same time, because of an odd intersection of political, economic and pandemic geography, Trump’s reelection hopes may depend in no small part on the speed of the rebound in those very same parts of the country.
This irony is neatly illustrated by a new analysis done by the Brookings Institution for Ron Brownstein, who describes its top-line finding this way:
The big cities that drive America’s economic growth and innovation are the same places straining under the heaviest burden of the coronavirus outbreak.
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Trump has sometimes treated these areas as gangrenous limbs that could — or even should — in effect be lopped off from (or at least held up and derided in relation to) virtuous red America.
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It’s the subtext of his suggestion that blue-state governors criticizing him should actually be “appreciative” of all he’s done for them, even as his posture has largely been (though this has evolved) that they’re on their own.
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Though conservatives pretend elitist liberals draw secret smug pleasure from these developments, they have long been a serious preoccupation of Democrats and progressive economists, who have spoken about this problem and proposed ambitious policy responses to it.
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What Brookings’s new analysis shows is that, if you throw the geography of the coronavirus into this political-economic mix, you come away with the following remarkable findings, per Brownstein:
While there are about 3,100 counties in America, the 15 counties buckling under the largest number of coronavirus cases account for just over 16 percent of the nation’s economic output, and nearly 13 percent of its jobs, or nearly 26 million jobs in all, Brookings found.
That list includes New York City and the surrounding suburban counties of Westchester, Nassau, and Suffolk in New York State; Bergen in New Jersey; and Fairfield in Connecticut, as well as the counties centered on Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Miami. These counties alone generate $3.3 trillion of the nation’s $20 trillion economic output.
The impact grows from there. The 50 counties with the most cases account for 36 percent of the nation’s total output and 30 percent of its jobs — some 60 million positions. That list brings in the counties centered on other major cities.
As Brownstein notes, this overlap is the true obstacle to Trump’s hope of getting America back to work to get the economy going by relaxing social distancing in defiance of experts. “Reopening the economy” would cause the carnage to soar in part because of these realities.
But there’s another layer to this as well: It’s precisely because of this overlap that Trump’s long-term political hopes also depend on the speed of the rebound in these very same places.
That’s because, as we head into a brutal recession, the long-term national economic recovery heavily depends on the economic recovery in those places — which, in turn, depends on the recovery from the coronavirus in them.
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“The U.S. recovery is heavily dependent on the recovery of a short list of its hardest-hit counties, which lie almost entirely in its biggest urban economic hubs,” [Mark Muro, who conducted this analysis for Brookings,] told me. “There can be no truly vibrant recovery without the return to health of these big urban centers.”
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“Without their recovery we will likely see a more anemic national recovery than otherwise,” Muro continued. “So in that sense Trump — and all of us — are deeply dependent on their speedy recovery.”
WaPo
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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