Toilet Paper Trumps Stimulus

It is not yet known how many Americans will die while politicians in Washington decide how to avoid giving the other side any success in fighting the virus.

Have you been to the grocery store lately? People are beginning to hoard toilet paper. I needed to normally buy toilet paper yesterday and could not find any because of all the panic buying. Social media is full of people storming grocery stores and fighting over 2-ply. It’s like Black Friday, but for poop. Hand sanitizer is extremely difficult to find. The Clorox plant up the road from me is running 24 hours to keep up with demands.

But the toilet paper?

The run on toilet paper should be the biggest signal that an economic stimulus plan is not going to work right now. People are being driven by fear and they are being told to stay out of crowds. People are stocking up on toilet paper because they are convinced they are going to get quarantined or otherwise stuck in their homes.

Giving businesses money, making loans cheap, and encouraging people to get out and shop is not going to help.

What might actually help is giving people exactly what they expect — ordering everyone to stay home.

But this presents a way more complicated solution than some want to acknowledge. Shut down schools and what about the nurses and doctors who have small children. What do we do with those kids?

What about the workers in the restaurant industry who work hourly and won’t get paid if there are no customers? If the restaurant can’t get revenue, it can’t meet payroll. Should the restaurant apply for a loan from the government to pay the workers and possibly risk the financial future of the restaurant? Perhaps — if the restaurant is going to go out of business otherwise, why not try to keep it afloat for some time.

But for how long?

Do we make people apply for unemployment in person when we want them not to congregate? Do we just start paying people money and, if so, what about the debt and inflation and the value of the currency?

If the government isn’t ordering people to essentially shelter in place ASAP nationwide, how is this going to contain the virus? If the government does order people to shelter in place ASAP, what about the workers who cannot get paid? What about vacation deposits?

These are not easy answers. But they are demanding answers at this point.

What we know about this virus is that it is orders of magnitude more deadly than the flu and highly contagious. What we know is that people are already convinced they are going to be quarantined in their houses and are stockpiling. What we know is that restricting travel will restrict the spread of the virus.

What I also know is that I’m driving to the beach in a few weeks and have a rental house so I can limit my contact with the world around us while also having a vacation. So I don’t want my travel restricted. But I’d be fine with everyone else’s travel being restricted.

I write that partly in jest, but therein lies the rub on this. The public is panicked and needs to see serious, grown-up leadership in Washington right now and some bipartisan unity. The public is expecting draconian efforts and has already baked it into their toilet paper buying habits.

The President can fly Air Force One over major cities and dump freshly printed hundred dollar bills out of the belly of the plane, but if people think they’re going to get the coronavirus they still are not going to take that cash and go shop, eat out, or mingle in large crowds. They won’t even go to the bank to deposit it. They will, like with the toilet paper, simply stockpile it till the crisis is over.

Before any stimulus can work, the public must trust the healthcare response. To trust the healthcare response, the President cannot be competing with his own administration’s message. The economic fall out is going to grow far worse than the virus unless the Trump Administration gets publicly very aggressive and gets buy-in from Congress.

So how is that going? Consider just the last few hours. The President spoke to the nation in somber tones from the Oval Office and managed to say that we were suspending cargo shipments from Europe. We are not. He also left out a significant detail related to the suspension of travel with Europe that probably should have been put in the speech. It also seems he misstated what insurance companies have agreed to cover. As for the Democrats, they unveiled their 124-page economic relief package after 11:00 pm last night and intend to get it passed, largely sight unseen, today and dare the President and Republicans to stop it.

Unfortunately for all of us, there is a bipartisan problem in Washington. Both sides have electionitis and the only cure is denying the other side any sort of public successes, one-upping the other side with Bernie Sanders-style spending binges, and beating the other side in November. It is not yet known how many Americans will die in the process.

A sense of what is at stake

The NCAA is going to cancel all audiences for March Madness. Games will be played with only families of players and key personnel present. That will hurt the tourist industry and the hotels, airlines, and restaurants in places like Atlanta.

The NBA has just postponed its season. If you want to get a sense of what happened, last night the Utah Jazz and Oklahoma City Thunder were just about to take to the court when the game was canceled.

Jazz player Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19. Now, consider this tweet from just two days ago:

Eric Walden @tribjazz

As part of the Jazz’s COVID-19 response, shootaround availability was done in the ZBBC media room today rather than on the court. As Rudy Gobert got finished discussing the situation, he stood up, leaned over and made it a point to touch every mic and recorder in front of him. 😂

Like a lot of people, Gobert and others were dismissive of the concerns and he acted in an irresponsible manner to show how the virus was no big deal. God has not just a sense of humor, but a sense of irony as well.

There are lots of people pointing out higher deaths from other diseases that had longer to spread. But in two weeks, Italian cases went from a few hundred to over 12,000. In the United States, the number has skyrocketed.

People need to take this very seriously.

Here’s the rub — I suspect if people take it seriously and we are successfully able to arrest the spread of the disease, many people will loudly claim the concerns were always overblown. Do nothing, and a lot more people die. Successfully stop its spread, and people believe the experts have cried wolf.

John Roberts v. Jim Acosta

I conducted an interesting experiment last night. I had two televisions going at the same time with one tuned to CNN and the other tuned to Fox. Interestingly enough, the televisions were both calibrated identically, but the CNN picture sure was better. That, though, was all.

Chris Cuomo, who I don’t really care for, started off his show by attacking the president. It wasn’t news and fact, but commentary about the news. Hannity started off as a commentary show, but there’s truth in that. Cuomo tries to be a straight news guy, and he is not. Hannity is who he claims to be.

But after the President’s speech is where things got interesting.

Cuomo had Jim Acosta and Hannity had John Roberts. I actually like both Acosta and Roberts quite a bit.

Acosta largely gave a meta-commentary on Trump’s speech. Roberts dove in with a recap, more expansive details, and facts.

Roberts did not give his opinion and Acosta did.

Let me get on my soapbox about this

I have a love affair with CNN. I will admit it. I am critical of the network because I feel betrayed often by so much of its on-air talent slipping from the news to partisan commentary. Just give me the facts and let me decide. It has an enormous bench of talent and I strongly think the network is letting too many voices on the air pull the network in the direction of MSNBC instead of being the reliable news network.

Likewise, some of CNN’s staff have an obsession with Fox News and refuse to acknowledge that their own competing overnight shows are increasingly partisan commentary shows. At least Fox News is honest. Hannity is not news, but commentary and he and everyone else know it.

I was reminded again last night how Fox News really does shine these days at the straight news game. As some of the straight news reporters at CNN, like Acosta, are now offering up their opinions and commentary, Fox News’s straight news reporters are increasingly just reporting.

Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but I would love a news network that gives me solid reporting, just the facts, and analysis that is not predicated on partisanship. Call it Headline News or CNN circa 1990. Give me a news network with Bill Hemmer, Bret Baier, Martha MacCallum, Mike Emanuel, Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, John King, Gloria Borger, and Dana Bash. And give me Joe Scarborough, who I genuinely like and respect even when we disagree. I’d never change the channel. But you’d have to give me Fox & Friends too. Its success is not in that the President watches it or that it is a partisan red meat generator. Its success is that it has three hosts who are deeply likable, deeply relatable, and deeply vulnerable — they’re real people who expose their personalities, don’t take themselves too seriously, but actually get to real news.

We should be valuing the straight news journalists at places like CNN. But we should be valuing the relatable people of the press too who will never win Pulitzers because they are entirely too human and actually want to cover news that interests people who live more than 25 miles from a coast. (And Steve Doocy’s cookbook is great, as an aside.)

And on election night, give me John King and his magic wall of election knowledge and let me be happy. Now get off my lawn.