By Cathy Burke, NEWSMAX 23 April 2020
Former Reagan administration Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman on Thursday blasted the “lockdown nation” triggered by the coronavirus outbreak, alleging public officials have conducted “fraud on a massive scale.”
In a fiery interview on Newsmax TV’s “The Chris Salcedo Show,” Stockman, who also served as a GOP congressman from Michigan, decried the economic fallout from policies aimed to stem the virus spread.
“I have a news flash for [New York Democrat] Gov. [Andrew] Cuomo and most of Washington,” he said. “We are heading for a disaster fiscally at speeds that are breathtaking.”
According to Stockman, “revenue is collapsing … because of the disaster lockdown.”
“Lockdown nation is the greatest disaster of all times… put the entire economy under house arrest by creating almost hysteria… about the coronavirus,” he charged.
Stockman claimed more than 90% of the country “is not in harm’s way.”
“It is not an across-the-board Grim Reaper,” he asserted.
And he said he’s appalled at how public officials have responded to the crisis.
“It’s flat-out fraud on a massive scale,” he declared.
@ Fred Alexander:
I think the safety of multitudinous numbers of people had to take precedent.
That is what the W DC kleptocrats want in order to recover control and power over the American people.
Hopefully the American people know better.
@ Shmuel Mohalever:
The president in his wisdom let it up to the governors to open up the economy. Can you imagine the flax the president would get if he opened up the economy as soon as the first virus case was reported. Once again Trump turned the tide on the Trump haters.
“It’s time to carefully reopen the country to pull the United States out of its great economic “catastrophe,” former Reagan administration budget director David Stockman told Newsmax TV.
“Lockdown nation is the greatest government-imposed catastrophe of modern times. It’s administering a shock to the American economy and workers and business like we’ve never seen before,” Stockman told Thursday’s “Greg Kelly Reports.”
He point to the 5.24 million unemployment claims from this week as a sign of how low the U.S. economy has sunk.
“That’s 22 million [jobs unemployment claims] in four weeks, which is equal to wiping out all 22 million jobs that have been created since the end of the great recession 10 years ago,” Stockman said. “We’re heading into the soup and for no good reason. We have a hysteria going on in this country that is probably worse than what we had in the McCarthy era or even during the Salem Witch Trials.”
Stockman called coronavirus a “very bad contagious flu” that largely poses a threat to the elderly and people with pre-existing conditions. He said people in those groups should practice social distancing and take extra precautions.
But, he said, the vast majority of Americans won’t likely be affected in “any fatal way” by coronavirus. So the president needs to open up the economy as quickly, and safely, as possible.
“We can’t open the economy up soon enough. We’ve got to get people back to work. We’ve got to get commerce functioning. We’ve got to get the economy off its back,” Stockman said.” From a second interview Stockman gave Newmax TV.