In April alone the shutdowns destroyed more than 20 million jobs as the national unemployment rate surged to nearly 15 percent. Unemployment was even worse than it initially appeared because the rate didn’t account for the millions of people who had recently been on a payroll and had not even started looking for another job during the lockdown.
But the unemployment rate was still historically awful. “The U.S. jobless rate eclipsed the previous record rate of 10.8% for data tracing back to 1948,” reported Sarah Chaney and Eric Morath in the Wall Street Journal. Economists estimate that the unemployment rate during the Great Depression was much worse—close to 25 percent. Still, by one measure the U.S. economy really did fall all the way back down to 1930s-style disaster territory: “The job losses due to business closures triggered by the pandemic produced by far the steepest monthly decline on records back to 1939.”14
It will take a long time to identify and measure all the negative consequences of the enforced isolation of Americans in response to the virus. Right now America needs economic revival. And American economic revival is the cause that has defined Donald Trump’s presidency. The Trump agenda to remove the tax and regulatory barriers to growth resonated with U.S. voters in 2016. After taking office, he delivered on his promises to enact historic reductions in business regulation and slash what until 2017 had been the industrialized world’s highest tax rate on corporate income. Business investment soared in response and the number of U.S. job openings set a series of new records.
In 2020, after a global economic catastrophe, the growth agenda may now resonate with voters worldwide. When the U.S. economy experiences a sudden contraction, it’s not just a catastrophe for Americans. When it comes to the health of the poorest countries on the planet, it’s clear they suffer humanitarian disasters when the United States and other advanced economies suddenly demand fewer goods. You won’t hear it on many college campuses, but a faltering America is a disaster for the world.
For example, according to New York Times East Africa correspondent Abdi Latif Dahir, “Already, 135 million people had been facing acute food shortages, but now with the pandemic, 130 million more could go hungry in 2020, said Arif Husain, chief economist at the World Food Program, a United Nations agency. Altogether, an estimated 265 million people could be pushed to the brink of starvation by year’s end.”
Reporting in April and May, Mr. Dahir described a deadly stampede in Kenya at a flour and cooking oil giveaway, and red flags hanging from the homes of starving people in Colombia. The Times correspondent also told the story of Nihal, a migrant worker at a soup kitchen in New Delhi, India: “ ‘Instead of coronavirus, the hunger will kill us,’ said Nihal, who was hoping to eat his first meal in a day. Migrants waiting in food lines have fought each other over a plate of rice and lentils. Nihal said he was ashamed to beg for food but had no other option. ‘The lockdown has trampled on our dignity,’ he said.”15
The people of the world need a prosperous America, and not just because they want to be fed. The worldwide public health crisis of 2020 is a sober reminder of how the world would suffer without a vibrant medical research enterprise in the United States. This jewel of the U.S. economy is also the hope of patients worldwide as they await vaccines and therapies to fight diseases for which there is currently no cure.
BIO (Biotechnology Innovation Organization), a biotechnology trade association, notes that in 2018 emerging medical companies in the United States received a record $12.3 billion in venture capital funding, more than twice the total raised by such companies in the rest of the world combined. That same year emerging U.S. therapeutic companies also raised more than twice as much in initial public offerings as the rest of the world combined.16 This is the financial fuel for innovation, funding the new discoveries and clinical trials that will yield new medicines and save lives in years to come.
Why does so much of this activity happen in the United States? Because inventors trust that the traditional American rule of law that protects our liberty also protects our property. Creators of new medicines and new technologies are free to grow their businesses and profit from their inventions. Intellectual property is constitutionally protected. In Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution, America’s founders gave Congress the power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Well beyond the issues of intellectual property and medicine, America’s open markets, protected by a reliable and predictable application of the law, give people around the world the confidence to invest in U.S. companies.
No president has done more than Donald Trump to appoint judges who will faithfully interpret the Constitution and protect the American rule of law. Even the president’s harshest critics concede the quality of the more than two hundred judges he has appointed and the Senate has confirmed to seats on America’s courts. Left-wing legal activist Ian Millhiser probably didn’t enjoy writing the following words, but give him credit for acknowledging the truth: “There’s no completely objective way to measure legal ability, but a common metric used by legal employers to identify the most gifted lawyers is whether those lawyers secured a federal clerkship, including the most prestigious clerkships at the Supreme Court. Approximately 40 percent of Trump’s appellate nominees clerked for a Supreme Court justice, and about 80 percent clerked on a federal court of appeals. That compares to less than a quarter of Obama’s nominees who clerked on the Supreme Court, and less than half with a federal appellate clerkship.” Adds Millhiser: “In other words, based solely on objective legal credentials, the average Trump appointee has a far more impressive
