Outflanked XV: the Hoover Outflankening
By 
As Jamelle Bouie observes, Trump and McConnell seem determined to go into the general election with a nice dose of Hoovernomics, preferring wishful thinking to providing material aid to people:
“You’ve seen the talk from both sides about acting,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said last month, “but my goal from the beginning of this, given the extraordinary numbers that we’re racking up to the national debt, is that we need to be as cautious as we can be.” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina echoed this sentiment. “The real stimulus that’s going to change the trajectory that we’re on is going to be the economy, not government checks,” he said. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, also a Republican, was less diplomatic about his opposition to another round of assistance that would increase state and local government funding. “Well people in hell want ice water too,” he told reporters.
And President Trump appears unmoved by the prospect of economic devastation, except insofar as it affects his chances for re-election. The White House halted talks with Congress over any further stimulus.
All of this — the passivity, the indifference, the refusal to embrace the tools at hand for ideological reasons — is reminiscent of Herbert Hoover, who also presided over a catastrophic economic downturn, the mismanagement of which plunged the United States into a crisis that tore at the seams of American society.
[…]
At the same time, Hoover was a staunch conservative, who opposed government intervention on principle. The historian Joan Hoff Wilson reports that after reluctantly backing a modest public works and relief program (“$2 billion for public works and $300 million for direct loans to the states ‘to be used in furnishing relief and work relief to needy and distressed people in relieving the hardships resulting from unemployment.’”), Hoover told a friend that all such emergency legislation had to be repealed to prevent the country from being “plunged into socialism and collectivism with its destruction of human liberty which pursuance of those measures are bringing.”
The American people, Hoover insisted, didn’t need aid. They needed confidence. The day after the stock market crash, he told reporters that “The fundamental business of the country, that is the production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis.” The next month, he declared that “Any lack of confidence in the economic future or basic strength of business in the United States is foolish. Our national capacity for hard work and intelligent cooperation is ample guarantee of the future.”
And it’s even worse this time, since we actually know about Keynes and Trump is expecting the economy to quickly bounce back with a raging pandemic in progress.
Meanwhile, House Dems passed a $3 trillion stimulus package. However, it doesn’t contain literally everything that I would want such a package to have so really the Dems are about to be outflanked by Donald Trump’s bold economic populism again!