
White House Economists Warned in 2019 a Pandemic Could Devastate America - laurex
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/business/coronavirus-economy-trump.html
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downerending
I find stories like this bizarre and exasperating. You don't have to be any
kind of expert to know that a pandemic would devastate the world. And it
certainly isn't something that was discovered in 2019. Planners have been
contemplating this sort of thing for decades, if not centuries.

The question is not "Should we not have done more knowing this might happen?",
which is useless. Rather it's "Considering _all_ of the various awful things
that might happen, are we allocating our resources correctly?" It may very
well be that we forseeably did not, but there are a _lot_ of other really
serious risks, and getting this tradeoff right isn't trivial.

We can't spend an infinite amount of money on everything.

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aledalgrande
Also watch Trump backtracking on his stance:
[https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/31/politics/trump-
coronavirus/in...](https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/31/politics/trump-
coronavirus/index.html)

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IXxXI
Trump closed US borders.

Even as democrats and the media called him racist for it.

The only backtracking that matters.

