With 4% of the world’s population, the US has 25% of the world’s COVID deaths, with public health experts predicting as many as 800,000 deaths by the end of the year. 

The economy is now in a depression, with over 35 million unemployed, over 32 million receiving unemployment benefits, though the unemployment expansion has been allowed to lapse, and six million dropping out of the labor force entirely since February. An estimated 27 million people have lost their employer-linked health insurance. 

The housing crisis is becoming more acute. Even before the economic collapse, US cities suffered from chronic homelessness for hundreds of thousands of people. And now with the expiration of the federal eviction moratorium the crisis threatens to deepen further. The Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey found 30 percent of renters had little or no confidence that they could meet housing payments in August. Up to 43% of renters, 40 million people, are at risk of eviction.

Big businesses are getting bailed out. Much of the money designated for small businesses has been snatched up by big businesses before small business’s applications were even considered. The half a trillion allocated for big businesses is being doled out to Trump cronies without disclosure of the recipients and without restrictions against firing workers or bonuses for executives. The Federal Reserve has cut its overnight borrowing interest rate for banks to zero and is engaged in unlimited trillions of dollars of quantitative easing to backstop corporate debt.

The last six months of the pandemic and economic collapse show that the two governing parties are presiding over a failed state. Most other organized societies have test, contract trace, and quarantine programs that have suppressed community spread of the virus and enabled a safe reopening of businesses and schools. The two major parties in the US have continued their dogmatic faith that private enterprise alone can deliver health care and economic recovery. It has been a dismal failure.