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Class inequality in the pandemic

Trump’s trade advisor, Peter Navarro, predicted on January 29, 2020, that the COVID epidemic would cause 500,000 deaths and trillions of dollars in economic damage. Yet the U.S. government continued to let the virus run its course, and one important reason is that the ruling class that controls the country has suffered very little from the epidemic. Among the 12 U.S. billionaires who have died over the past two years, none of them died from COVID-19. The wealthy U.S. bourgeoisie has a larger per capita living area and better community infrastructure, does not need to clock in and out of crowded factories or offices, and enjoys expensive and superior medical care. As a result, in the two phases that caused large numbers of deaths (late 2020 to early 2021 and August to November 2021), residents in high-income counties in the United States were less than 20% as likely to die from COVID as those in low-income counties.29 When affluent Americans say that no one around them has died from COVID, the odds are that it’s true.

The rich even benefit from the pandemic. In March 2020, the Federal Reserve launched uncapped quantitative easing, expanding its balance sheet by $5.2 trillion by the end of the year. Trump and Biden signed economic bailouts of $2.2 trillion and $1.9 trillion, respectively. These additional monetary issuances quickly brought the U.S. stock market back to all-time highs, thus making ultra-rich stockholders even wealthier. By October 2021, the total wealth of U.S. billionaires reached $5 trillion, a 70% increase compared to March 2021, with the wealth of the top five billionaires (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page) increasing by 118%.30 So, it’s no surprise that Musk tweeted “Give people back their godamned freedom” as the epidemic was causing its first spike in deaths at the end of April 2020. After all, every day that workers were quarantined at home meant that his accumulation of wealth was slowed down a little bit. Musk’s wealth, during the epidemic, grew sevenfold, making him the richest man in the world.

Contrary to common perception, the working class has benefited very little from U.S. economic growth over the past few decades. Since 1980, the richest 10% of the U.S. population has grabbed more than half of all economic growth, while the working class, whose incomes are lower than the median, have received only 10% of economic growth. In each of the three periods of economic growth over the past three decades, the top 10% of income earners received about half of all income growth.31 Households with incomes below the median have seen almost no income growth over the two decades from 2000 to 2020.32 The working class are a silent group in the U.S. political environment, and while Trump (with his chief strategist Stephen Bannon) liked to boast about the support of the “white working class”, it was actually the racist far-right lower middle class that was mobilized by his fascist policy. They are mostly white, mostly from small towns or rural areas, running small businesses or doing professional jobs, and they make up about a quarter of the country’s population; they are better off than the working class (though also on the decline), and are often employers of the working class.

After a short period of containment, the U.S. government relaxed controls of the epidemic, guided by a policy of “herd immunity” that had not proven effective for the current phase of COVID. Business owners strongly demanded that all control measures be lifted because they needed their employees back at work to resume production and operations, at the expense of the working class. Working class individuals are four times more likely to die from COVID-19 than people of higher social and economic status,33 but debt pressure and a lack of savings forced them to return to work. Of households earning less than $35,000 a year, 57.3% experienced job loss or income decline during the pandemic, and 60% of households struggled to cover daily expenses; 47% fell behind on housing payments, and 7 million feared eviction or foreclosure within two months; 25% (nearly 11 million people) experienced food hardship.34 In order to make ends meet, the working class has to return to work at the risk of dying from COVID or suffering from chronic symptoms, which Musk calls “freedom”.

While most effective means of preventing and controlling the epidemic were abandoned in the name of “individual freedom” and “restoring society to normalcy,” in reality the bourgeois elite was only concerned with keeping their money-making businesses up and running. In fact, despite the reluctance of the U.S. government to implement lockdown measures, social activity has been severely disrupted, and after more than two years there is still no sign of pre-COVID normality. In the education sector, for example, by the end of 2020, 24 million elementary school students had already lost an average of 54 days of instructional time.35 By the end of November 2021, U.S. elementary and middle schools had experienced a total of 71 weeks of complete or partial suspension (compared to 27 weeks in China).36 In August 2021, the U.S. Department of Education issued a Return to School Roadmap to support school reopening.37 As a result, only days after classes resumed, 120,000 children were infected across the United States and many schools had to close again.38

The long-term inability to resume regular schooling has shown clear negative effects, with students suffering learning losses observed in several states, such as in Texas, where two-thirds of 3rd grade children tested below grade level in math in 2021, an increase of more than 30% from previous years.39 Meanwhile, children from lower-income working-class families who have less access to good IT facilities and distance learning environments, are more severely impacted by school closures. According to estimates from consulting firm McKinsey, children from low-income families lose an average of 12.4 months of learning time (national average 6.8 months) and are expected to lose 4% of their total life earnings (national average 2.2%).40

The U.S. media can’t wait to announce that the U.S. economy has returned to normal after dropping COVID controls; according to CNN’s “Back-to-Normal Index”, the current U.S. economy is back to 93% of its pre-pandemic (March 2020) level.41 The Dow Jones and S&P 500 hit record highs in late 2021, but then fell sharply. From January to April 2022, the S&P 500 fell more than 13%, its worst four-month performance since 1939.42 More importantly, the stock market does not truly reflect the economy, even with the massive stimulus package, real U.S. GDP only grew by a combined 2.11% between 2020 and 2021,43 accompanied by severe inflation and rising prices. The “normality” that the media is so fond of touting, has not materialized for the working class. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Pulse Survey, taken between April 27 and May 9, 2022, indicates that nearly 138M people had difficulty paying their household expenses; more than 31M people had lost employment or received no wages; and almost 74M people had, either sometimes or often, not enough to eat.44 In June 2022, there was an 8.6% year-over-year increase in CPI, the highest rate of inflation in 40 years.45

More significantly, while GDP, to a degree, can indicate the health of an economy, it is a pathological way of thinking to worship GDP growth as the ultimate goal of the country. When adverse events (e.g., widespread natural disasters, wars, pandemics, etc.) occur, commodity prices rise abnormally and this is also counted as GDP growth. Under the GDP Supremacy mindset, it is not optimal to reduce social activities for a short period of time to control the spread of the epidemic; rather, it is optimal to let the virus spread and go on with business and life as usual. The spread of the virus will instead increase medical and pharmaceutical consumption, thus increasing GDP. This is key to why the U.S. government chose to “coexist with the virus,” and the pharmaceutical and testing companies received huge subsidies thanks to the long-lasting epidemic.

The average price of a PCR test in America is $130 ($185 without health insurance),46 which has allowed hundreds of billions of dollars to flow to the companies involved, while at the same time being an argument for the infeasibility of mass testing and a zero-COVID strategy. In comparison, China has reduced the price of a PCR test to RMB3.5 (about $0.52), and the country spent RMB21.6 billion in April 2022 for normalized mass PCR testing, about 0.2% of GDP. This spending will be significantly reduced again after outbreaks are contained. This is a choice made to put people’s lives over short-term economic interests.

One hundred million Americans are currently in debt due to healthcare costs; one in seven people say that they have been denied access to a hospital or other medical facilities because of unpaid bills; and two in three people have stopped treatment because of the cost.47 The complete dominance of capitalist private property rights and the constant curtailment of public goods in the U.S. political system have given Big Pharma a staggering $10 billion increase in revenues, profits, and assets. Pfizer is on track to become a juggernaut with a $100 billion market cap by 2022, with sales of $53.9 billion just for its two major COVID-related drugs,48 and profit margins likely to reach more than 27%.49