Unsanitized: Republicans in Disarray this Time

Also, vaccine insider trading. This is The COVID-19 Daily Report for July 25, 2020.

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First Response

Depending on how your state designates the end of the week, you may be getting your final unemployment check with a $600 federal stipend in it. That’s on top of the federal eviction moratorium that ended last night. This comes as first-time unemployment claims went up last week for the first time since March, and as small businesses run out of federal aid and begin to resort to layoffs.

Those essential workers still on the job, who early in the crisis benefited from bonuses and hazard pay, are starting to see those quietly dropped, and this is as clear a sign as any that the economy has taken a turn for the worse. With a reserve army of the unemployed, businesses can go back to just calling their workers heroes instead of paying them that way. If they don’t like it, they can quit, because there are plenty of people in increasingly desperate straits willing to take their place.

So we’re in a real dangerous moment, and it’s not the best time to rely on the policymaking acumen of the Republican Party.

Senate Republicans still haven’t released their bill, which they only began crafting about a week ago, despite knowing that this fiscal cliff was in place for months. The new plan is for a release on Monday. We’ve heard bits and pieces about the tentative agreement between Mitch McConnell and the White House, none of which is very good. But this week of delay follows months of delay, as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer finally jumped on yesterday.

Read all of our Unsanitized reports

When McConnell had a clear vision in March that aligned with his caucus—protect big business at all costs—he was able to put out a baseline bill and deliver it through Congress relatively quickly. McConnell tried to create that dynamic again with corporate immunity for coronavirus-related lawsuits. While there has been substantial lobbying from the business sector, the urgency seems lacking, and there has been substantial disagreement with the White House and among the Senate caucus over other matters, like payroll tax cuts (now out), where to set the unemployment increase (we still don’t know), and the overall price tag of the bill. The presence in negotiations of the new White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who spent his time in Congress running the Freedom Caucus and blowing up deals, isn't helping matters.

The dithering actually might strengthen the Democrats’ hand. If their votes are needed for a final bill because of conservative defections, they may be able to dictate terms.

Republicans just don’t really have a policy arm. That’s not why their members get into politics; owning the libs is more of a north star than actually doing something with the job. Most of the policy options we’ve heard for this bill are more truncated extensions of the last one, with many of those ideas brought in by Democrats. If it’s not a tax cut or deregulatory maneuver or corporate bailout it doesn’t have a place in the Republican agenda. And none of those things really makes sense for this pandemic.

You’re going to see a lot of hot takes about how racism or corruption or some other factor brought Republicans low in the election. But in crisis, policy really does matter. And policy, or the lack thereof, has created the conditions for a wave.

Odds and Sods

I was on Rising with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti talking about the inclusion of deficit reduction proposals in the next stimulus. Watch here.

I was on Rising Up with Sonali Kolhatkar talking about Monopolized. Watch here.

If you missed my discussion with HuffPost’s Zach Carter about my book Monopolized and his book The Price of Peace, you can watch it here, courtesy the Prospect’s YouTube channel.

I’m running a contest for Monopolized. If you tweet to @ddayen with a photo of your copy of the book, I will send you a personalized and signed bookplate that you can put inside. It’s my way of doing a virtual booksigning. Supplies are limited, so tweet me your photo of Monopolized today!

Because Of Course

Here’s a story about a little pharmaceutical concern called Vaxart, which identified itself part of the government’s “Operation Warp Speed” program for developing a coronavirus vaccine in June. Vaxart has received no money from the government through Operation Warp Speed; they were only part of a preliminary study. But Vaxart sent out a big press release announcing “Vaxart’s Covid-19 Vaccine Selected for the U.S. Government’s Operation Warp Speed.” The stock soared on the strength of this, and insiders saw their shares increase by six-fold.

This is known sometimes as a “pump and dump” scheme. Insiders hype the stock with dubious information, it rises, and then they sell their shares. Ordinary investors caught up in the wash are stuck with a bad bet. The Times finds eleven different companies exhibiting this type of behavior.

I’m not going to weep too much for the unlucky investors who got manipulated. The problem here is that the market expects pharmaceutical companies to profit from a vaccine at all. These are, as is clear here, a government-funded set of vaccine trials. Participation in it means that research can be carried out, but the expectation is that the companies that win the race to a vaccine will get to profit wildly in the aftermath. Why? The government is paying the freight. The license for the final vaccine should cost nothing to any patient. Market-moving announcements shouldn’t move markets on a publicly-funded public health initiative. But we have this expectation that pharma will profit, so stocks go wild and fortunes get created. Nobody should have to pay twice to protect themselves from a deadly virus; we already paid for the research.

Days Without a Bailout Oversight Chair

120. We’ve had more days without a bailout oversight chair than there are days until the presidential election.

Today I Learned

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