Better off

To the Editor:

Are you better off now than four years ago? In 2020, 1,700 Americans were dying from COVID per day. We needed refrigerated trucks for the bodies. Each day, 25,000 Americans were hospitalized. Many suffered permanent lung, heart, or brain damage.

People working from home were less exposed. Masks could protect them during grocery shopping. Bus drivers, meat packers, factory workers, truck drivers, grocery clerks, police, fire, doctors, nurses, teachers, and first-responders couldn’t work from home. They and their families contracted COVID at high rates.

In 2020, led by Trump, we had the highest rates of hospitalization and death in the world. Other countries required masks, closed businesses and limited social contact. They aggressively checked the spread. Trump opposed restrictions. People went to spring break in Florida, or to a motorcycle rally in South Dakota, came home, and spread COVID. One Sonora grocery clerk was incensed, “Wear the damn mask. I don’t want to get sick.”

A bad economy would hurt Trump’s reelection. He signed two COVID relief bills. He advocated for a third, with a check to every American, that Biden implemented. Did these bills cause inflation? No. Inflation is worldwide, caused mostly by a worldwide shutdown of factories and parts shortages. Corporations used the shortages and inflation to jack up prices. Coca-cola doubled their price. Sugar and water costs didn’t double.

People remember a good Trump economy before COVID and want to forget his mishandling of COVID. Biden inherited a terrible economy. He did a great job of getting COVID behind us and rebuilding our economy. The U.S. now has the lowest inflation and the best economic growth in the world. For the first time in 40 years, middle-class incomes are growing, after inflation. Let’s give Biden credit for digging us out of the hole that COVID and Trump created.

Marvin Keshner

Sonora