Monday on MSNBC, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) compared President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic to President Herbert Hoover handling of the beginning of the Great Depression.
Markey said, “Obviously there has been a complete underestimation of the magnitude of this problem right from the get-go by the Trump administration. They continue to downplay it. They continue to leave the misimpression that it is going to be something that will be relatively brief. It’s very clear now that it won’t be. This is going to go on for a long time. Their own FEMA analysis indicates that 3,000 persons a day could be dying by June 1st. This is going to be something that requires a systemic and massive intervention by the federal government to keep families alive and to keep businesses alive. And what we’ve been doing so far is insufficient to the magnitude of this problem, which is why Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris and I are introducing legislation to say that per month every individual should receive $2,000, a couple $4,000 a month, and each child $2,000 per month up to three children in the family. We have to get the resources into the hands of the families of the workers so that they have the economic life raft to make it through this health care crisis.”
He continued, “We have to think back to Herbert Hoover in denial all the way up to 1932 when FDR came in, he began to put together solutions that were the match for the problem. Well, Trump is just the latter-day Herbert Hoover. And so we just have to basically say it’s a crisis, it’s only been seen by the Great Depression. If that’s the case, we need a Rooseveltian response put in place. That’s what we’re proposing in terms of the aid that we are going to give to individuals all across the country until we come on the other side of this crisis.”
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