Why and How?
Because their government officials came down HARD for the first few months….
Something Governor’s and officials in other parts of the country have and still resist doing for political, not health reasons…
And?
People there have accepted the concept of caution to give them their ‘freedom’ to go back to a healthy living WITHOUT the virus infection numbers other have…
Last week, as Dr. Emily Wroe left her home in Boston and drove west to see her parents in Idaho, she watched as signs of the pandemic became fewer and farther between.
After she left Ohio, customers at gas stations no longer wore masks. In Nebraska, when she needed a repair to her truck, the mechanic seemed to look at her strangely because she was wearing one. In Montana, motorcyclists clustered in groups of 20.
The farther she was from the East Coast, the more she found Americans treating the threat of the virus as “faraway, and not important.”
“I wasn’t surprised, but it is striking,” said Dr. Wroe, who spent the spring preparing contact tracers for Massachusetts. “We’re in the middle of a global pandemic, and there are a lot of towns and businesses along the way where nothing has changed.”
Six months since the coronavirus crisis was first detected in the United States, the Northeast stands in sharp contrast with the rest of the nation.
Along the East Coast, from Delaware through Maine, new case reports remain well below their April peak. As of Wednesday, six of the country’s 11 states with flat or falling case levels are in that Northeastern corridor.
“It’s acting like Europe,” Dr. Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said of the Northeastern United States.
…
New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island have reported the country’s most deaths per capita over the course of the pandemic, with more than 61,000 combined. And the economic wounds from prolonged shutdowns are deep: Massachusetts’s unemployment rate in June climbed to 17.4 percent, the worst in the country, according to federal data released on Friday.
But polls, so far, suggest that voters in the Northeast are prepared to tolerate prolonged economic pain in order to stop the spread of the virus. Governors from the states that were hit early in the pandemic have sustained the highest approval ratings in the country….
Trump has caved on his demand that the proposed second coronavirus relief bill provide for a payroll tax cut.Such a cut would of course do little for average working people but would have been a boon to the wealthier.
Trump through his economic advisors ,Larry “blow” Kudlow and the inveterate mouthpiece for the Millionaire class , Stephen Moore , had argued strenuously for this giveaway to the wealthy in typical Republican fashion, even loudly threatening a veto if his demands weren’t met.
Republican Senators afraid of a backlash in an election year never warmed to the idea.Why should they?They already gave the wealthy a huge tax cut back in 2017.Still Trump persisted until today.
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was delegated to announce the surrender.Such sets the stage for another Socialistic type cash stipend to be sent out.(Republicans are against “Socialism,”except when they’re not)
The debate will now center on how much and who gets it.
Another post with ur name on it Jack on the payroll tax coming in a bit…
Good piece….
And I see this as the beginning of the lawmakers blunting Trump’s power to led them into the November election’s possible debacle …
As with the mask messaging….
It’s time for Trump to be dragged back to the middle by a scared group of party lawmakers…
In purely craven political terms the Northeast getting a handle on COVID as compared to the South and Southwest is terrible for Republicans.
Northeastern states weren’t going to vote for Trump anyway. The only one that is vaguely a toss up is Pennsylvania and Biden has been leading fairly comfortably there
However FL, GA TX and AZ all seeing spikes after their GOP governors got “attaboys” from the White House for early openings and being anti mask is going to keep those states in the battleground column instead of moving back into red.