In a somber address from the Oval Office, President Trump said last evening that “we are all in this together.” That statement has never been more true than now, while we attempt to save one another from being infected with the coronavirus. Exactly how we work together is where the rubber meets the road.
During this first phase, federal, state and local agencies have each been allowed to map out their own strategies and outline the remedial actions they’ll put in place in an effort to achieve containment. This is a fragmented approach, while Americans are allowed to freely travel domestically, and at some point along the viruses’ “bell curve” referred to by health care officials, the remedial actions deployed by some government officials will be in conflict with others.
More important is the issue of timing. Staggered timing of those remedial actions minimizes the impact of the disease, and it is compounded by duration of delay in implementation. A nationwide incident plan should be developed, and governors of the respective states should be charged with the authority to implement that plan.Many leaders are saying that the fiscal health component should take a back seat to the public health issue. I would disagree. The health of the country’s financial state is crucially important, and the two aren’t even mutually exclusive. When planning and executing the response to this pandemic, public health and fiscal health should be considered on concurrent parallel paths. The government’s level of fiduciary responsibility is the same as the level of the health of each individual in this country. Where they are different, however, is that inadequate fiscal remediations will have much longer lingering effects than the pandemic itself.
That said, let us not fool ourselves. There will be fierce competition amongst all the political jurisdictions in this country for the federal dollar grab, and the jurisdictions that treat fiscal health as though it were important as public health will be in a much better position than those who do not!