Paul Krugman offers an elegy for the ‘thousands about to die for the Dow’

It’s not entirely clear what is motivating Republican politicians across the country to agitate for the premature reopening of businesses, boldly ignoring the all-but-certain increase in human deaths from the COVID-19 virus that will doubtlessly follow. But Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, writing for the The New York Times, tries to distill it into three possible rationales.

The first is that Republicans, sensing an electoral disaster looming for their party in November, are desperately offering up American citizens as human sacrifices in a ritualistic obeisance to their Dow Jones deity, in hopes that Americans flooding back into an infected and potentially deadly work environment will magically “turn around” the economy.

One answer is that thousands of Americans may be about to die for the Dow. We know that Trump is obsessed with the stock market, and his long refusal to take Covid-19 seriously reportedly had a lot to do with his belief that doing otherwise would hurt stock prices. He may now believe that pretending that the crisis is over will boost stocks, and that that’s all that matters.