This article originally appeared on Fox News on March 11, 2020.
Showing strong and effective leadership when we need it most, President Trump addressed the nation Wednesday night and unveiled a two-pronged program of health and economic actions to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.
The president’s action plan should win bipartisan support to respond to the most serious health and humanitarian crisis our nation has faced in my nearly seven decades.
“We are all in this together,” the president correctly said. “We must put politics aside, stop the partisanship.” He called on America to fight the pandemic “together as one nation and one family.”
We can only hope that those on both sides of the political aisle will heed his call to respond as one nation and one people, as our leaders have done so often in our past when facing a crisis.
While the coronavirus pandemic is a medical crisis, President Trump pointed out that it “is not a financial crisis.”
That’s a crucial point we should all remember. This pandemic is unlike the savings and loan crisis of the late 1970s, the tech bubble in the late 1990s, or the real estate bubble of 2007. Our nation’s economic fundamentals are strong.
There is no underlying economic fault that must be corrected before our economy can recover. As the president noted, “our banks and financial institutions are fully capitalized and incredibly strong.”
Unemployment is consistently at 50-year lows and we have 1 million more job openings than people unemployed. The Atlanta Federal Reserve’s GDPNow forecasting model is projecting 3.1 percent gross domestic product growth for the first quarter of this year, with only three weeks left in the quarter.
When the coronavirus pandemic subsides – and it will – our economy and the financial markets will come roaring back.
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