Blackbird restaurant in Chicago closed in June, one of thousands of business affected by the coronavirus pandemic. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)

Will he tell us when it’s over, or will he keep America dangling on his string?

We know that President Joe Biden is big on having “plans.”  One of his biggest criticisms of former President Donald Trump was that he had “no plan” for fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

(Even though not only did Trump have a plan, but that plan was being executed as Biden was yakking about Trump not having one.)

Having a “plan” or a “program” always is a big deal for Democrats, liberals and progressives. It fits right in to their ideology that “planners” have superior knowledge about how everything works, that action plans need to be centralized (mostly at the federal level) and that everyone must march in step with the “plan.”

Yet here the COVID-19 pandemic is showing persuasive signs that it is abating, and Biden has no real plan for re-opening America. Infection and death rates have dropped dramatically, yet Biden has no real plan. Vaccinations are speeding up and herd immunity is approaching, yet Biden has no real plan. No variants of the coronavirus are showing up, but scientists are coming up with vaccines they believe will effective fight them. Unemployment claims have fallen sharply.

Yet, Biden has no real plan.

Oh sure, Biden’s scribblers have posted something called “THE BIDEN PLAN FOR AN EFFECTIVE RE-OPENING THAT JUMPSTARTS THE ECONOMY”.

It’s chuck full of the usual liberal/progressive/far left/hard left malarky: More money, more regulation, more centralized control, more nose in your business, more bureaucratic structures, more this and more that. For example, it would

Ensure workers and unions have a voice in reopening plans, and that reopening decisions by tribal governments are respected. (Read Joe Biden’s plans for establishing a Pandemic Testing Board to surge testing nationwide, and ramping up the production and fair distribution of PPE.)

That’s a thinly disguised promise to government employe unions to bow to their bidding. Those are huge, powerful special interests that heavily fund Democratic candidates–precisely the kind of big lobby that liberals once despised for corrupting the will of the people.

And a Pandemic Testing Board? What the? Biden says it would be like the War Production Board of World War II that would massively scale up COVID-19 testing. You’ve got to read it in detail to get an idea of just how massively bureaucratic, utopian and certain-to-fail it is.

Just like Biden’s wide-ranging, all -inclusive, complex plans for supposedly reopening the economy and schools.

Like so much that comes out of the bureaucratic lairs these days, Boden’s so-called plan unleashes an army of academics, grant writers, social scientists, planners and the like whose job is to basically take an idea and load it down with so much verbiage, required studies and and other first-required steps that by the time the plan would into the action, if it ever does, the problem will be long gone. Those “planners” hated Trump for launching what was an effective campaign to discover, test, produce and distribute the vaccines–without the “benefit” of their cumbersome and utopian “plans.”

Trump’s plan was simple: Make life miserable for the bureaucrats who said “it couldn’t be done” or “we’ve never done it that way before.” In Trump’s supposed ignorance, he said it must be done, and, miracle of miracles, it was.

On the other hand, Biden’s “plan” was to carry out Trump’s framework and organization, add a bunch of ornaments and pretend that the resultss his. Despicable.

If Biden feels compelled to make a plan, it should guide us to know when we can “emerge from the other side.” He can start with a couple of Atlantic magazine articles: (1) “A Simple Rule of Thumb for Knowing When the Pandemic Is Over: At some point—maybe even soon—the emergency phase of the pandemic will end. But what, exactly, is that magic threshold?” and (2) “The most likely timeline for life to return to normal.”

You and I might disagree about the timelines and standards that the authors use to create their outlook. But it raises the issues and discusses the data that should be at this exact moment debated.

Instead of the hollow “plans” take Biden has read off this teleprompter.

Related: “You’ve gotten your second COVID-19 vaccination. When will your life get back to normal?“

[email protected]

www.dennisbyrne.net 

My historical novel: Madness: The War of 1812

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