Urban beat: New York’s One-Note Mayor
Mayor Bill de Blasio doesn’t want to just restart the city’s economy, sighs Seth Barron at City Journal — he wants to “transform” it. “For six boom years,” he spent “tens of billions” pursuing his “equity agenda” and hiring “tens of thousands of new municipal employees.” Yet his message as the city faces the coronavirus “sounds strikingly similar to his message pre-crisis.” In fact, de Blasio “has spoken of the ‘transformative’ nature of his administration so often that it prompts groans from anyone outside his closest orbit.” Meanwhile, “homeless people fill New York’s subways,” crime is on the rise and tenants have “no idea” how to pay their rent. With the city “spiraling into crisis,” the mayor “continues to sound the one note he knows how to play — about unfairness and inequality” — even though “his instrument is out of tune.”
Professor: The False Choice About Reopening
Claiming we have to decide between protecting those “most vulnerable to coronavirus” and reopening most of our economy is “largely a false dilemma,” Harvard eminence grise Graham Allison argues at The Hill. We know, after all, that those “older than 65” are at “great risk of death from coronavirus,” while “fewer than 100” people under 25 and “fewer than 1,000” under 45 have died from it. Officials should take steps to reflect that, including encouraging universities to reopen and letting governors “exercise their ingenuity,” while taking care to protect the elderly — rather than just carry on with the lockdown. We can “reduce the risk of death from coronavirus for the most vulnerable” and still allow “most of society to return to their livelihoods and lives.”
2020 watch: Good News From Wisconsin
Nearly half a million people voted in Wisconsin’s presidential primary on April 7, National Review’s John McCormack reports, yet the state has seen no “spike in COVID-19 cases” from the election, as many had feared. Infectious-disease expert Oguzhan Alagoz, for example, predicted that in-person balloting would boost the numbers who came down with the disease but now believes it had no “major effect.” Gov. Tony Evers, who tried postponing the voting but lost in court, also expected a spike, as did his nominee for health secretary, who “expressed absolute certitude that in-person voting would result in more COVID-19 deaths.” We now know that wasn’t true, cheers McCormack — a “small piece of good news in an otherwise grim month.”
Foreign desk: Treat China as We Did the USSR
At The Washington Post, former Ambassador Nikki Haley recalls Winston Churchill’s warning that the only way to resist the Soviets, short of war, was to “convince them that you have superior force.” Today’s challenge from China, she contends, “must be seen the same way.” After all, Beijing’s “deceit” about the coronavirus “is not the worst danger” it poses. “In the past month alone, China has brazenly expanded its reach,” arresting activists in Hong Kong, increasing hostile actions in the South China Sea and triggering State Department concerns over its apparent illegal nuclear-weapons testing. We now “face an expansionist Communist China whose economic power vastly exceeds anything the Soviets had,” and it is “manifestly in our security interest to counter this threat.”
Small-biz owner: Trump’s Loan Program a Godsend
The coronavirus has “been a wrecking ball” to the construction firm C.R. Services — so its owner, Corina Morga, “applied for a loan from the Paycheck Protection Program,” she writes at The Washington Examiner. “The centerpiece of President Trump’s economic relief efforts,” the PPP lets small companies “borrow money for critical business expenses.” If they use the loans to “keep all staff employed,” the feds fully forgive the debt. That’s an immense relief for Morga and many “brick-and-mortar businesses” like hers. After all, “47% of the domestic workforce,” including “struggling” minority and female entrepreneurs, have put their “blood, sweat and tears” into these businesses — so when they do well, it will be “great news for everyone.”
— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Adam Brodsky