Category Archives: Business and Economy

I met Alex in the Kroger parking lot this morning when I was making my weekly grocery-store run. It was a beautiful sunny day. Joggers, walkers and cyclists were out everywhere, and Alex was serenading passers by with his accordion. A home-made sign said he was out of work and needed money for rent. His wife and little girl were sitting nearby in the shade. I tossed him a dollar and he briefly played a sad song.

Alex has a slight accent, and I asked him where he is from. Moldavia, he said, a former republic of the old Soviet Union bordering on Romania. He plays the piano for a living and he worked at restaurants. Now the restaurants are closed, he’s unemployed, he applied unsuccessfully for assistance from social services, and he’s out of money.

If I had had a notepad on me, I would have gone all journalist on him, but I didn’t, so I didn’t. But he did allow me to take his photo (which I botched by letting the sun shade his face). Let Alex from Moldavia serve as a reminder of the hundreds of thousands of economic victims of the COVID-19 epidemic and the business shutdown put into place to fight it. We don’t see many of them. They usually don’t advertise their presence. But they’re out there. We cannot forget them.

— JAB

by James A. Bacon

Governor Ralph Northam is one of four governors in the United States to be slapped with an “F” rating by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a think tank associated with supply-side economists Stephen Moore and Art Laffer.

Northam joins Governors Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, and Tony Evers of Wisconsin, in the estimation of the group, for putting their state economies, state budgets, and even state populations in peril through continued shutdowns. 

The report assesses how the 50 governors have handled the shutdowns by measuring how restrictive and damaging their edicts have been for their state’s economies. States the report:

It may not seem of much consequence whether a state has opened in April or a governor like Ralph Northam has decreed that the Commonwealth of Virginia will stay closed down to the middle of June. But the start date emphasized in this study matters a lot. A recent study by Laffer Associates finds that states that open up earlier will have substantially better economic recoveries than states that stay closed for another month or so. …

Continue reading →

Map credit: Virginia Department of Health. Click for larger image.

by James A. Bacon

The impact of the COVID-19 virus in Virginia varies widely by age and medical condition, afflicting some groups far more than others. That foundational reality gave rise to a key principle, which, I suggested four days ago, should guide Governor Ralph Northam as he deliberates about how, and how fast, to roll back his emergency shutdown measures: Public action should focus on protecting the most medically vulnerable members of society while allowing the least medically vulnerable to return to normal life and work as quickly as possible.

Today I explore a second principle: Recognizing that the virus is far more prevalent in some regions of the state than others, emergency restrictions should be tailored to the unique conditions of each region. Measures that are suitable for Arlington (1,106 confirmed cases) are not suitable for Dickenson County (zero confirmed cases).

The map above, taken from the Virginia Department of Health COVID-19 dashboard, shows the incidence of the virus per 100,000 population. (Click here to view the interactive map directly and view the data for each locality.) The virus has penetrated the population of the eastern half of the state to a much greater extent than the western half. Virginia’s Appalachian counties in Southwest Virginia, especially those off the Interstate 81 corridor, have barely been affected.

It is legitimate to ask, as several Southwestern legislators have, why draconian lockdown standards that may (or may not) be appropriate for the eastern part of the state should apply to western Virginia where the disease is far less widespread yet the economic pain is just as prevalent. Why kick these counties when they’re down? Continue reading →

Click for more legible image.

Between March 4 and April 18, unemployment claims in Virginia amounted to 10.9% of baseline jobs, according to this map issued by the Virginia Economic Development Partnership. That’s horrendous, but things could be worse. The U.S. average is 14.3% — and the Old Dominion’s job loss is less than half that of Michigan’s at 23.9%. (With the evaporation of 21.3% of Georgia’s jobs, you can better understand why the Governor Brian Kemp is taking big risks to roll back the shutdown and salvage the economy.)

VEDP President Stephen Moret provides this explanation for the Commonwealth’s less-dire circumstance: “Virginia is doing better than most other states in large part because we have a larger-than-average proportion of our total employment in professional jobs and federal government-related jobs that are less sensitive to social distancing policies.”

— JAB