The Daily Signal - How and When Should States Reopen? Rep. Andy Biggs Has Answers

Episode Date: April 21, 2020

Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., a member of President Donald Trump’s congressional task force on economic recovery, joins The Daily Signal Podcast to discuss the economy's devastation by the coronavirus and how America should get back to work. The House Freedom Caucus chairman talks about how the nation should balance the contagiousness of COVID-19 with the economic damage, what might happen if the country's reopening is delayed too long, and technology to track those who are infected. We also cover these stories: Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is the latest site for a massive protest over coronavirus lockdowns. The U.S. continues increased travel restrictions with Mexico and Canada. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says the federal government should give essential workers a 50% bonus. The Daily Signal Podcast is available on Ricochet, Apple Podcasts, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, April 21st. I'm Kate Trinko. And I'm Rachel Dald Judas. Congressman Andy Biggs of Arizona is the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus and a member of President Trump's Congressional Economic Recovery Task Force. He joins me on today's podcast to talk about why it's important that the economy opened back up and how that should happen. And don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. encourage others to subscribe. Now onto our top news. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is the latest site for a massive protest over the coronavirus lockdowns. Here's what happened there, according to WFMZ and Allentown, Pennsylvania TV station. This is a backlash over the quarantine. Now, the capital is closed, but that hasn't stopped all these people from gathering this morning. About 1,000 are expected. It's been a lot of music,

A lot of chanting and a lot of signs, a lot of pro-Donald Trump signs, a lot of anti-governor wolf signs, and a lot of signs saying they want Pennsylvania to get back to work. Now, today's rally is a mix of several groups that have decided to meet here today. Some organizers have asked people to stay in their cars, to wear masks, to keep six feet apart. Obviously, that is not happening. We did ask people who are not wearing masks. why they said they're not scared of the virus and if they get it they'll beat it now what they want they want pennsylvania to get back to work they want these restrictions that lifted now just last

week governor wolf outlined a plan to get the state up and running but there was no timetable with that asked about the protests on good morning america dr anthony fouchi a top health care official on president trump's coronavirus task force warned that the protests could backfire we're seeing these protests crop up all across the country right now, including those protests in Texas and other places where they're saying fire, Anthony Fauci. Fauci is wrong. They're resisting these stay-at-home orders from governors. What's your message back to those protesters? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, the message is that clearly this is something that is hurting from the standpoint of economics, from the standpoint of things that have nothing to do with

the virus. But unless we get the virus under control, the real recovery economically is not going to happen. So what you do, if you jump the gun and go into a situation where you have a big spike, you're going to set yourself back. So as painful as it is to go by the careful guidelines of gradually phasing into a reopening, it's going to backfire. The United States is continuing its increased travel restrictions with Mexico and Canada, expanding the barring of non-essential travel with the two countries for another month due to the coronavirus pandemic. In a statement, Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said,

as President Trump stated last week, border control, travel restrictions and other limitations remain critical to slowing the spread and allowing the phased opening of the country. Governor Andrew Cuomo, Democrat of New York, wants to see the federal government give essential workers a 50% bonus. Here's what he had to say. I would propose hazard pay for frontline workers. We all say, boy, they did a great job. The health care workers did a great job. The police, the heroes. Yes, they are. but you know what? Thanks is nice, but also recognition of their efforts and their sacrifice is also appropriate.

They are the ones that are carrying us through this crisis, and this crisis is not over. And if you look at who they are and the equity and fairness of what has happened, I think any reasonable person would say we should write. this wrong. 40% of the frontline workers are people of color. Forty-five percent in public transit, 57% of the building workers, 40% of the

health care workers. People of color are also disproportionately represented in delivery services and child care services. Right? The economy closed down. The economy did not close down. It closed down for those people who frankly have the luxury of staying at home.

All those essential work who had to get up every morning to put food on the shelves and go to the hospitals to provide health care under extraordinary circumstances and the police officer who had to go out to keep you safe and the firefighter who still had to go out and fight the fire. Those people worked and they went out there and they exposed themselves to the virus. A little later, Cuomo speculated that the reason behind higher coronavirus death rates for some racial population in the U.S. could be higher exposure through work. We see the infection rate among African American and brown Americans higher proportionately

than other groups. Why? Because they were out there exposing themselves. That's why. And you can talk about health disparities, et cetera. But I believe all the studies are going to wind up saying, yes, when you were home with your doors locked, Dealing with cabin fever, they were out there dealing with the coronavirus. And that's why they are more infected. Pay them what they deserve. I would say hazard pay, give them a 50% bonus. And I would do that now.

New York City is continuing to cancel concerts, parades, and summer festivals through June. Here's what New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio, had to say Monday during a news conference via CBS News. A few days ago, I said that city permits for events scheduled for the month of May have been canceled. I told you we were going to talk to the organizers of events in June, which includes some really big, important annual events. We have had those conversations. And this probably will not surprise you, but I'm now reporting today that we will cancel city permits for June events as well. It's not a happy announcement, but it's one we have to make. And look, a lot of these events will be postponed.

I want to be clear, the permits are being canceled for June. But the event organizers, a lot of them are looking at doing something later in the year. And we're going to work with them on that. And again, I think the fact that they're postponing now is actually going to help us get to that point later in the year where things can open up and be better. And then we're going to work closely with them to find the right time and place to do what they do each year. Facebook has long been. a favorite organizing tool for activists, but the social media network is saying it will delete events that violate state orders about staying at home, including events that organize protests.

A Facebook spokesperson said, per Politico, events that defy government's guidance on social distancing aren't allowed on Facebook. According to the New York Post, Facebook removed events in New Jersey, California and Nebraska, organized by lockdown protesters. Next up, we'll have Rachel's interview with Representative Andy Biggs. Conservative women. Conservative feminists. It's true. We do exist. I'm Virginia Allen, and every Thursday morning on problematic women, Lauren Evans and I sort through the news to bring you stories in interviews that are of particular interest to conservative leaning or problematic women.

That is women whose views and opinions are often excluded or mocked by those on the so-called feminist left. We talk about everything from pop culture to policy and politics. Search for problematic women wherever you get your podcast. I'm joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by Congressman Andy Biggs of Arizona. Congressman Biggs, it's great to have you again on the Daily Signal podcast. Rachel, it's good to be with you. Well, it's great to have you with us. You recently had an op-ed, Congressman Biggs and the Washington Examiner talking about how coronavirus has taken a toll on the American economy due to the amount of jobs that have been basically shut down right now.

What kind of impact is this having and will it have on the country? Well, you're seriously at almost at Depression-era levels of unemployment in this country. And so that causes enormous economic stress in families and individual lives. And so you're going to deal with those pathologies that arise because of that. On the other hand, you've got people whose pensions and retirement are in the market. And those markets, as you know, have taken a beating. And so you've had a loss of that type of savings. Then you've also have people who have gone to with reits or some kind of real estate investments.

And those are going to play out negatively in the long term as well because as business is shut down, there's no one to pay the rent to the landlords. Landlords then can't pay the mortgage on that property. And so you have a tremendous cascading effect going on. And it could be very, very difficult to get yourselves out of it. of this, particularly if we're going to remain closed as so many people in the medical profession, not even everybody, it's not even uniform. There are people who are advocating staying closed a long time until no one could possibly

contract the coronavirus. And that's really dangerous to the economy and to the physical and mental health of Americans. Yeah, that's such a good point. Well, something that Democrats are pushing right now is looking at sending checks of $2,000 a month to Americans until the economy hits pre-coronavirus levels. Do you think that their thought on that is an appropriate response? No, I don't really like that thought. I think that's kind of what it does is it furthers dependence on the federal government and, quite frankly, everything we're spending now. we don't even have the money for now.

But then on the other hand, if you're going to send out a couple trillion dollars every few weeks, it might be less expensive, quite frankly, to just do that, give everybody $2,000. But they're not going to be, even if you were doing that, let's just say everybody's now an Andrew Yang guy. You know, even if you're doing that, you do not restore the economy. You do not create an incentive. you actually devalue the currency which will result in inflation. And it's just wrongheaded thinking to think that that's the way you're going to solve it. Just like to think that we can have $4, 5, 6, 7, 8 trillion dollars in structural deficit this year

without creating inflationary pressures on the other side. Well, President Trump said last week that he wants to reopen America as soon as May 1st, but that he would leave it up to states governors to decide, when to open their state. How do you think states should attempt to reopen? I appreciate what President Trump said because I do think it's the states that have to be in charge of their own reopening. And I think states really need to reopen the soonest they possibly can, which for me in many places is going to be yesterday. What they should be doing is the first thing they should do is they should make sure that their hospitals are set and ready to go

and then allow each hospital to make the determination whether they're going to get back to elective surgeries. That's why you're seeing rural hospitals under incredible stress and duress under this time is because their main revenue source has been curtailed completely. Let them come back on. Let's not further emasculate the medical care facilities in this country. And the second thing, as I would say, you just open up and counsel people to, to follow the guidelines with regard to social distancing and limiting the spread of the virus.

And at the same time, you need to target your hotspots like assisted living facilities and make sure that the people who are treating them like first responders, elderly care workers and medical care workers, that they are getting tested more often. so we're not carrying it. The disease is not going through them into the most vulnerable populations. You just talked about the needs for hospitals to make sure that they're ready before everything is reopened again. But what would you say to some Americans, we've seen people in mainstream outlets talking about how afraid people are to go back to work because they don't want to be exposed to COVID, but then balancing that with the reality that we do need to get back to work to. make sure our economy doesn't get worse.

Well, I appreciate that. I understand because of some of the statements that are made and repeated it by the mainstream media, with the left stream media, that it creates in genders fear and panic. And that is important, and we want to address that. But that's where I say, you know, you've got to make sure that you're setting ready to go. It's in Arizona. We are last week versus the last week. We were at 266 cases statewide.

Then it went to 230. And then by the end of the week, you were down to another 40 or 50 cases down to 190 and 188. So you've got to get that information out. You also have to talk about the people who actually have been cured. You also have to talk about the test rate. And you also have to talk about the declining case fatality. rate. Because if not, then if you start moving towards shutting down your economy, whenever anybody's afraid they're going to get sick, guess what? Every year we have a flu epidemic

where it infects 30 to 40 million people. We hospitalized well over half a million, sometimes closer to a million people. And we have a case fatality rate of multiple tens of thousands. we realize that we operate that way. And so I would just say we're going to emphasize good social hygienic practices. But if you can go to the grocery store to your restaurant and get takeout food, if you can go to a big box store, hardware store to get stuff, that these people have claimed are essential. Guess what?

You could probably open up a furniture. store, bookstore, some other retailer, and they can follow the same guidelines, and we'll be fine. We'll be fine. On that note, looking at a slightly different angle, many Americans are frustrated by the increased amount of government influence in their lives during this time. And for example, there was an incidence in Mississippi where some churchgoers were ticketed $500 after they attended a drive-in church service for Easter. this going too far? Oh, yeah, it's way too far. These these governments are acting like petty

tyrant. The reality is the constitutional, recognized, and protected rights do not dissipate because of a crisis, an epidemic, whatever. We still have those rights. If you're going to abrogate those rights, you must do so in the least restrictive way possible. You must tailor everything very narrowly. And they didn't do that here. So if you're going to let liquor stores, maybe the marijuana dispensary stay open, if you're going to let restaurants stay open,

then why can't you have a drive-in church service or a church service where everyone has some form of PPE on and is social distancing? This notion that you're going to curtail religious liberty or associational liberty or any other freedom of speech. Imagine if the cameras were there, the media was there, which they go to these things, and they were basically shut down because they weren't following social distancing guidelines. Well, you'd never hear the end of it.

So why is it okay with religious liberty? Well, Congressman Bigger, part of the president's Congressional Economic Task Force Recovery, program. What does this work of the task force look like? Well, what we're doing is we're trying to put together ideas to the president about how to incentivize, this is my role. This is what I view my role as being, how to incentivize the states to get going and opening these businesses and the economy in their states. And that's what I'm doing. And it's a lot of what we're talking about now with maybe a few more specific. thrown in. And we, we, we, we're debating that. And I'm hopeful. I'm just hopeful that the American

people, which are starting to see Rachel stand up and, and make claim on their rights, making claim for the economy, understanding that they, they don't want to spread a virus, but what they also don't want to do is lose life savings or lose their employment. And these are business, small business owners that want to get back to work. That's what I'm trying to implement. I'm trying to give anecdotal stories of folks that are losing their businesses to the administration. Speaking of your home state of Arizona, how have Arizona been affected by the coronavirus lockdown? Well, I mean, this morning early, a medical group told me, they sent me information telling me that they had basically reduced salaries enormously in order to try to keep their employees on.

They have also, they basically have gone from maybe a month or two backlog in visits to same-day visits because that's how few people come in anymore. I talk to them. I talk to builders, home builders, big industry in Arizona. they've got enough in their pipeline the last three months. But when you get four or five months out, there'll be no pipeline because nobody's buying houses now. One company told me they went from over 100 houses in March, but they're down to a negative 7 in April. Why?

Because people canceling contracts because they no longer feel they can afford it. It has had a tremendous impact on the economy here. and quite frankly, we're seeing that all around the country as I talk to people from all over the country. So if opening up is delayed further for some reason, whether it's Democrats in Congress, who knows, or if governors of various states decide that they really want to take it extremely slow, what could that look like, you know, on a whole economically for the whole country if this happens at a glacial pace? Well, if it happens, you know, my opinion is for every couple of days you delay here, you foreclose the ability to keep the foundation of the economy stronger. Because we don't forget, just six weeks ago, the foundation of this economy is very strong.

And people want to open up and get back to work. But a couple of things. Number one, if you don't get open this week and get people back to work, and even if you do, because it'll take a while to sort this thing out, you're going to, you're going to, probably add three to five million more people on your unemployment rolls this week. Once you do that, you're going to be pushing 25 to 30 million. That's depression level at unemployment. You're going to see banks have difficulties in the long run because so many commercial and residential landlords, they have debt to banks and other financial institutions and investment partnerships. And guess what? They're not getting, they're not collecting rent.

that means that they can't turn around and pay their mortgage. That means that the bank is going to have to eat that or sit on that. So you're going to see this thing's going to cascade through for quite some time. We stopped on a dime, but it'll be very difficult to start it up on a dime. I mean, you'll see people start getting back to work, but it will actually take some time to sort through all the cascading effects that will be a result. of what we've done to the economy. So when America does, in fact, start to get back to work,

what do you think the new normal, so to speak, might look like? Well, I think, and I pray that the new normal is less regulation, fewer taxes, because Congress is going to have to step in and do, provide those kind of incentives to make sure that these businesses can open up. I think you're going to see, at least for a period of time, people, wearing PPE, trying to socially distance as we work through this. And the new normal will be a lot more in the way of teleworking, telecommuting, conference calls, those types of things that I think people have gone to.

But I mean, you just can't do that in every business. And the new normal has got to be working hard as we can. to get government out of the way and to get these businesses open. I think too often what we're seeing now, Rachel, is everybody's going to the government asking for the solution. And so what's happening is the national government is irrigating planning and power to itself.

And what we should be, the lesson we should be learning here is that our economy is so complex that truly it's the markets that are the most efficient way of governing an economy, not government itself. And Congressman, as you alluded to, some states are asking for bailouts from the federal government during the pandemic. What do you think of all these requests that we're starting to see?

Well, first of all, understand this. We gave $200 billion just a couple weeks ago, and then we've given right around a trillion dollars in money out to their residents, their businesses, etc. What we have seen, though, is that these governors have taken a lot of authority under themselves. They've shut down businesses in the economy. And as if this wouldn't happen, and they couldn't foresee this, there's a cascading effect where they're not going to get the tax revenue that they normally would get.

So they say, well, okay, we're down because of the virus. No, you're down because of the bad economic policies that you guys. put in place with regard to your desire to handle the virus in the way you did. Well, that's your choice. I think this is an opportunity. It's a crossroads for us to say the states, you should be responsible for yourselves. We should get back to a new federalism where the states take care of that. And the federal government should not be bailing out states and local jurisdictions for people

like Governor Gavin Newsom to say, okay, we're going to give every illegal alien in the state 500 bucks or 1,000 bucks, whatever that is because we want to, because we, as if they have money, when they need a bailout themselves. And lastly, Congressman, there's been a lot of talk about using technology to track people who have come down with coronavirus. What's your perspective on this that we're starting to see across the country? People are starting to talk about this. Well, this is, so you're seeing everything with the tracing that they want, with the cards that they want people to carry to right now drones, where they want to have drones to get out there to see if you're violating some kind of social distance policies.

This is Big Brother. This is 1984. This is Brave New World. This is Animal Farm. This is not the United States of America. That should not ever happen. We don't do that with the flu. we should recognize that that is an abrogation of rights. And I hope my colleagues in Congress will join me in fighting that. Congressman Biggs, it's been a pleasure to have you on. Thanks, Rachel. Always good to be with you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast.

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