2020 was the year when Reaganism was laid to rest

Maybe it was the visuals that did it. It’s hard to know what aspects of reality make it into Donald Trump’s ever- shrinking bubble but it’s possible that he became aware of how he looked, playing golf as millions of desperate families lost their unemployment benefits.

Whatever the reason, on Sunday he finally signed an economic relief bill that will extend those benefits for a few months. And it wasn’t just the unemployed who breathed a sigh of relief. Stock market futures rose.

So this year is closing out with a second demonstration of the lesson we should have learned in the spring: In times of crisis, government aid to people in distress is a good thing. Or to put it a bit differently, 2020 was the year Reaganism died.

What I mean by Reaganism goes beyond voodoo economics, the claim that tax cuts have magical power. After all, nobody believes in that claim aside from a handful of charlatans and cranks, plus the entire Republican Party.

No, I mean something broader — the belief that aid to those in need always backfires, that the only way to improve ordinary people’s lives is to make the rich richer and wait for the benefits to trickle down. This belief was encapsulated in Ronald Reagan’s famous dictum that the most terrifying words in English are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Well, in 2020 the government was there to help — and help it did.

True, there were some people who advocated trickle- down policies even in the face of a pandemic. Oh, and the new recovery package does include a multibillion- dollar tax break for business meals.

Reagan-style hostility to helping people in need also persisted. There were politicians and economists who kept insisting, in the teeth of the evidence, that aid to unemployed workers was actually causing unemployment.

Overall, however U.S. economic policy actually responded fairly well to the real needs of a nation forced into lockdown by a deadly virus. Aid to the unemployed and business loans that were forgiven if they were used to maintain payrolls limited the suffering. Direct checks sent to most adults weren’t the best targeted policy ever, but they boosted personal incomes.

All this big-government intervention worked.

And there was no visible downside. As I’ve already suggested, there was no indication that helping the unemployed deterred workers from taking jobs when they became available.

Nor did huge government borrowing have the dire consequences deficit scolds always predict.

So the government was there to help, and it really did. The only problem was that it cut off help too soon. Extraordinary aid should have continued as long as the coronavirus was still rampant — a fact implicitly acknowledged by bipartisan willingness to enact a second rescue package.

Some of the aid we provided should continue even after we have widespread vaccination. What we should have learned is that adequately funded government programs can reduce poverty. Why forget that lesson as soon as the pandemic is over?

When I say Reaganism died in 2020 I don’t mean that the usual suspects will stop making the usual arguments. Voodoo economics is too deeply embedded in the modern GOP to be banished by inconvenient facts.

Opposition to helping the unemployed and the poor was never evidencebased; it was always rooted in a mix of elitism and racial hostility. So we’ll still keep hearing about the miraculous power of tax cuts and the evils of the welfare state.

But while Reaganism will still be out there, it will now, even more than before, be zombie Reaganism — a doctrine that should have been killed by its encounter with reality, even if it’s still shambling along, eating politicians’ brains.

For the lesson of 2020 is that in a crisis, and to some extent even in calmer times, the government can do a lot to improve people’s lives. And what we should fear most is a government that refuses to do its job.