How Do We Start The Economy Again?

collapsing all around us. So we've got so much to get to. Ten million Americans have lost their jobs in two weeks. At what point does this shutdown become economically untenable. Well, we've got two disasters that are playing out simultaneously. We've got the public health crisis, and it is real. The numbers keep growing, the fatalities keep growing, and that all

of us are struggling to deal with that. At the same time, we've got an economic crisis that's playing out, and the economic crisis is caused by the government's policies put in place to deal with a public health crisis. That economic crisis is producing devastation. Ten million people have lost their jobs in the last two weeks, small businesses are shutting down, one after the other after the other. Restaurants, bars, nail salons, movie theaters. People are hurting and we don't

know how long this is going to last. That being said, we're seeing I think the federal government, the legislation that was passed last week will begin to provide some much needed relief to a lot of people who are hurting. But we got to get through this crisis. We've got to defeat the pandemic. That's when the economic calamity is going to end, when we defeat the disease. Well, because I noticed that there's this balance that people are trying

to strike. And yet you are some people like New York Governor and R. Cuomo who said, if we can save just one life, then all of these policies will have been worth it. But but of course people die in economic collapse as well. Suicide spike, drug overdoses spike. So is there any pushback within the government people that you're talking to that perhaps, as we've heard, the cure might be worse than the disease here, Look, of course

there is. I mean there's very real debate. I mean, if we're looking at two three months from now, twenty percent, twenty five percent, thirty percent unemployment. I mean, I mean those are great depression numbers. You and I've never been alive for that. I mean, if we end up destroying our domestic economy and destroying the international economy, that legacy could last a long, long time. And you're right that that that kind of poverty and suffering will also take lives.

That inevitably, when you see economic devastation, you know the consequences of that are to be. With an increased poverty, you're going to have increased depression, increased suicides, substance abuse, all sorts of problems flow from economic devastation. So there is a tradeoff that has to be made. But on the public health side, look, my view is we need to listen to the science and the physicians about how to combat this epidemic, how to contain it so that

we don't overwhelm our health system. We haven't seen that happen yet, but we have seen it happen in places like Italy. What is happening in Italy none of us want to see happen here, and so I think there has to be a balance between the two. We have to see when we've got the virus under control, when it's not spreading at dramatic rates, that's when we're going to have to be be looking to ease up on some of the restrictions. But if we do it early and look, part of the problem is think for a

minute about the political dynamic. Let's say, Michael, you woke up tomorrow and you were the mayor of a large city. Would you want to be the mayor who said, Okay, everybody go back to work, Everyone go back to the restaurant. And then two weeks later, five hundred people die in your city and they all say it was mayor knows who killed them. The blood is on your hands. And look, Pete, as you know, people will use rhetoric that hot and

nasty and personal. The incentives are such You've got a lot of leaders who are struggling with what to do because you do you want to say people's lives, but there does over time, there has to be a balance, of course. This is what keeps running through my mind when I'm thinking, is President Trump overreacting? Is Andy Quom overreacting? Is Gavin Newsom overreacting? Is what if I were in that position. What if any of us were in that position? And you just don't know. None of us can predict

the future. A lot of the models are disagreeing with one another. Do you want to be the guy where the headlines all say enitor so and so? Or I suppose in this case governor President so and so is responsible for killing all of these people? Of course not. However, we don't want this thing to go on forever. And I know initially the President had said that he was hoping this would be over by easter. Then that became April thirtieth. Then now doctor Fauci is suggesting we might

have to maintain the mitigation efforts after April thirtieth. I think what a lot of people want to know is not even when is this going to end? But what criteria is the government using to determine when this will end? Is it when there are no more cases? Is it when we're past the top of the curve? Is it when they're no more deaths? And what are we looking at? Well?

I started this morning on a conference call with doctor Faucci and also with Stephen Manuchen, the Treasury Secretary, and Faucci this morning was talking about how There are all sorts of measures that we're looking at. We're looking at cases, we're looking at hospitalizations, we're looking at those who are in critical conditions, and we're looking at deaths, and we want to see each of those indicators start to slow. The rate of new cases, the rate of new hospitalizations,

the rate of new deaths. But each of those is a lagging indicator to the other. So even as we begin to see hopefully a decline in new cases, the rates of deaths is typically lagging several weeks behind, and so we may see those numbers one set of numbers going down while another is still on the upswing. But one of the challenges is testing. Still there are not that many people who've been tested, so we don't know really how widespread things are. We have the numbers from

the United States. The United States is starting to test more widely. It was a big problem three weeks ago getting a test. It's still challenging in some circumstances getting tested. But what we're doing a lot more testing, which is one of the reasons our numbers are going up. It's clear are there are places like New York City. The outbreak there is serious and it's concentrated. You have a lot of people close in and in a close geographic location,

and the challenges. Listen, I've asked the CDC, I've asked the medical experts over and over again. Okay, how long is this going to last? Is this another two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks? What are we talking about? The simple answer is they don't know. They have lots of models. But the models, if you adjust the variables even slightly in terms of the rates of contagion, how many people have it, it makes a massive difference in

terms of how widespread this is. So listen, when the President said that he hoped everything would be opened by Easter, I think that was a perfectly good aspiration to say, listen, we all want to get back to work, we want to get back to normal. And you saw the media kind of lose their minds about it. And obviously, if if the numbers are spiking in more and more where people are getting sick, nobody is going to step in and say, all right, all right, let's let's let's all go.

Let's all go to a you know, a basketball game. I mean, that's that's not It's also the case so for example, all of the American press really gullibly reported that America has now passed China for infections. Well, that's only because China is absolutely lying about every aspect of this pandemic, including Look, China claims in the last month that their cases went from eighty thousand to eighty one thousand. What utter garbage. So it's spread like it spread like

an epidemic and then suddenly halted all together. I don't think anyone believes that. And and to see the American media just just parrot propaganda, I don't think is helpful. We do know the Chinese Communist government, they tried to cover up this outbreak. They try to suppress this outbreak. They were complicit, and I think they didn't want to be embarrassed. So imagine a different world of when this

outbreak first started in Wuhan. If the Chinese government had brought in health experts, if they'd quarantined the first people, we could have stopped maybe this epidemic from becoming a pandemic. We could have held it to a regional location. But instead they covered it up and tourists and travelers went

from Wuhan all over the world. You had Chinese travelers going to Italy, which produced a big outbreak there, and so their cover up played a big part in the worldwide catastrophe we're seeing right, And speaking of parroting this Chinese communist propaganda, I mean, one of the institutions that did that most persistently and successfully was the World Health Organization. A lot of people were looking to them, and yet for some reason it would seem that they've installed a

patsy to run the who they covered it up. They didn't send experts over there for months and months. I think the quest on a lot of people's minds here is how are we going to hold people responsible? And one how are we going to ascertain the guilt here? I mean, one study said that China could have reduced the spread of this pandemic by ninety five percent if they had just acted three weeks earlier. How are we going to hold them responsible once this is all said

and done. Well, Look, I think the first step is accountability. We need to find out what happened. We need to find out where the virus originated. We've talked before about how where the virus originated is just miles away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, one of only about three dozen P four testing facilities that test and contain very deadly viruses. Not only that, we know that at that institute they weren't just testing viruses. They were testing coronaviruses.

And it wasn't just coronaviruses, they were testing coronaviruses from bats. And the odds I mean, if you think of all the towns, all the cities in the world, the odds that this outbreak just happens to occur miles away from a lab that is testing coronaviruses and bats, that those odds are minuscule. Now here's here's what a lot of

the American mainstream media is. There was a very concerted effort to respond to questions like that, but by screaming this is a tinfoil hat conspiracy and conspiracy theory, right, and we know they say that this virus wasn't manufactured. That that was their response. And I'll tell you that's what the CDC doctors have told me. I asked them early on. Look, there were questions about is this a bioweapon? I asked our doctors, is there any evidence of that?

They said no, they said, looking at the genome and the sequencing. It does not appear to be anything that was manufactured in a lab. It appears to be something that occurred in nature. So that's what the experts have

told me. But the next and obvious question is, okay, fine, if it wasn't created in a lab, was this novel coronavirus a virus they were studying at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that they'd gotten from nature, that had occurred naturally in a bat or some other creature that they were studying, And was there some sort of accident, did someone get in effected, did an animal get infected? Did

it somehow get out? There'd been numerous stories written in the press before this outbreak about the poor, poor efforts at security in keeping the viruses contained at that particular institutions from the Chinese government. They more or less admitted it in certain documents that were distributed at that Institute of Virology rather, and so it strikes me as entirely

plausible that it accidentally escaped. That explains why the Chinese government would be so embarrassed about it, why they would work so hard to try to suppress any evidence of it, why they would punish the whistleblowers, including the doctor who lost his life to COVID nineteen but who first blew the whistle where the Chinese government came down on him,

and that that dynamic. And I got to say, with the exception of a handful of journalists, and I'll give a shout out to Tucker Carlson, I think Tucker Carlson has been courageous and addressing this. I actually called Tucker yesterday as I was going for my walk with my family. I called him in the cell phone. I just said, hey, Tucker, thank you, thank you for having the backbone to ask these questions. Because most of the mainstream media, they're so desperate.

The network executives want to be in the Chinese market. The Chinese market is billions of dollars, and because of the money, they won't raise these questions. And the first step is ensuring that we have accountability, that we know what actually happened. You know, I have to tell you yesterday was April Fool's Day, as you know, Senator, and I was just waiting for that government bulletin to come out and say, hey guys, it was all a big April Fools. You can all go back to work. Now.

Unfortunately that didn't happen. Well, I will say last night, as I was going to bed, the girls you know, called called me in. Heidi said come into bed, and she was already going to bed, And as I walked in, Caroline had set a cup of water on the on the door to dump on my head. Then as I was putting him to bed, it was kind of late, as about eleven thirty at night. I was trying to get him down to bed, and Catherine said, I'm not going to bed until you pull an April Fools prank

on us. So I went to our bathroom and I got a can of shaving cream and came in and sprayed the girls with shaving cream, which which obviously they run and scream, and they run into Caroline's room. Then the door opens and Caroline has a full can of shaving cream she had hidden in her room. So we had a giant shaving cream fight last night. I finally got the girls in bed. A note to self, never

get on the wrong side of Senator Cruz's daughters. They really it sounds like they were We're planning this out long before April Fool's Day. I think also another bit of evidence that all of us staying at home, whether we're in California or in New York, or even if we're a US senator, we're all going a little bit crazy with this quarantine, and so now shaving cream everywhere and a couple of water on dad's head when people are cooped up together, I mean, there are only so

many things you can do. I've just been binge watching Tiger King. Is Tiger King not the most surreal thing you have ever seen? I Like, every episode you're like, all right, it cannot get any more insane, and then the episodes ends and you go, you gotta be kidding. Mean, it's just turned into the next one, you know. I mean, those are all the positive aspects of it, And I think it is very important in times like this not to panic, not to only look at everything that's awful.

We're getting a lot of mail bad questions in because because people are sitting around at home, they're not allowed to go out anywhere, and so I think it's important if we can get to as many as we can, because there are a lot of specific questions. I obviously don't know the answer to any of them, but possibly Senator, you do. A first question from Mimi, I heard that if you're on Social Security you have to file a

new and separate tax return. How is that going to work? Well, there was guidance that came out earlier this week in which the Treasury Department said that if you hadn't filed a tax return in twenty eighteen, if you're on Social Security and you didn't make enough that you had to file a tax return, that you had to file a new special tax return. That was a stupid policy. It was a stupid idea. A number of us were quite critical of it, and thankfully yesterday Treasury rescinded it. They said,

you don't need to file this special tax return. If you're receiving a Social Security check, you will receive your relief check. That was the right outcome. It's where it's where they should have started. But I'm glad they got there right. Of course, you don't want people who are on a fixed income who are particularly vulnerable to this virus to be specifically the ones excluded from receiving the relief.

That makes a lot of sense. That's exact from JJ JJ asks can required minimum deductions from four oh one ks be relaxed due to stock market due to the stock market being depressed, meaning every year there at a certain point you will have to pull a certain amount of money from your four oh one K. But if you do it now, obviously we're in the midst of an economic crisis. Is there any way to stop that? So good news on that. The answer is yes, and

that was in the bill that passed Congress. So the required distributions from four oh one ks and iras are halted for the year precisely for that that. You don't want to force people if they don't have to withdraw the money, you don't want to force them to do it. But also in the legislation pass last week, there is the ability if you need to access your retirement savings

just for cash flow to provide for your family. The penalties have also been lifted for accessing those as well, So there are positive policies on both ends on on that front great well for those of us who haven't read every single page of that relief bill, that's a very useful information from Mike. When is the Small Business Administration going to provide responses to applications and inquiries? The application format has changed nobody's getting any information or updates

or funding. So how can small business owners who are probably under a lot of constraints right now get that relief money from the SBA? So that should be coming it. It is supposed to be live and starting as soon as tomorrow, as soon as Friday, and it's being administered. I'd say your resources. I'd go number one to the Small Business Administration website. That's one resource there that should

be able to answer some questions. And number two, if you're a small business owner, go to your local lenders. The way that this program will be implemented is through local and community banks, and any small business and any business that has five hundred employees or fewer will qualify for a guaranteed loan. That loan can be up to

ten million dollars. And that loan if you use those loan proceeds to pay for payroll for your employees, to pay for mortgage or rent for your business, or to pay for utilities, that amount of the loan that is paid for that is used for those purposes will be forgiven. It becomes a grant. Wow. And so that's designed. The whole purpose of that is to keep as many people as possible employed and getting a paycheck. And and so

it is. And by the way, if you're a small business owner, let's say two weeks ago you laid off or you furloughed a bunch of employees, you can bring them back and the loans will apply to their salaries as well. So it's designed so if you've already laid off workers, don't it's not just the workers you have today. If if you have workers that you laid off a week or two ago, you can hire them back, so

that employees will get a paycheck. But from the small business owners perspective, that amount will be forgiven, will be a grant. I'm not seeing that information anywhere, and I know that nobody's read this entire bill. So that is extremely hopeful news and good news for small business owners and for employees of small businesses that even if you're one of the ten million people who lost your job in the last couple of weeks, if you're working for a small business, you can be rehired. There is a

path to do that. Next question, is there a limit to how much money the federal government can borrow without severe consequences? You know, now President Trump is talking about a possible infrastructure bill that could I mean, we're not talking in even one trillion anymore. We're talking about many trillions of dollars. Is there a limit where we say we can't do anymore? Look, Michael, we don't really know. It depends how bad this crisis gets. Last week, Congress

spent two trillion dollars in an afternoon. I mean, that's nearly ten percent of total national death. That is breathtaking, and it's worth noting. In the Senate it passed unanimously. There's ninety six to nothing. That means Bernie Sanders voted yes, and I voted yes, and every senator in between voted yes. I mean, I mean that. And the reason is this, This is a crisis unlike any we've ever seen. And it's a crisis that the people who were hurting, they

didn't do anything to cause this problem. All the restaurant owners, the bar owners, the movie theater owners, that they didn't. This is not like TARP. This is not like where the financial firms were taking advantage of the system and created a crisis. Here it's not their fault that this, this worldwide pandemic began and from a governmental perspective, the costs are coming anyway. So for example, let's take the loans to small businesses that three hundred and seventy seven

billion dollars was appropriated. Well, we could have not done that, in which case those small businesses all would have gone out of business, and those employees would all filed for unemployment, and and you would have seen more and more employees

on unemployment on welfare. That's those are massive government expenditures anyway, And so we made the determination, you know what, it's we're in a better situation to try to essentially give a bridge loan to the small business owners to try to keep that business in existence, try to keep them, hopefully in in a few weeks or or or maybe longer, we will get past this this shutdown and go back to work, and we'd like to have as many of those small businesses still viable and as many people still

have the jobs that they had a month ago. Right, of course, I mean you've only got bad options here, right, You're this is going to have a major cost just by virtue of it being a pandemic. So the question is do you have that cost and lose all your businesses trying to keep some of your businesses. Very difficult decision. Last question is a little controversial, but people sometimes forget there's a presidential election going on. I know that it's not exactly in the news these days, but we will

elect a president in November. Question is from Twitter uncomfortably quarantined. What happens if Joe Biden is found to legitimately have competency issues by a physician, yet he was selected as the nominee. What happens then? As far as who is on the ballot? You know who knows Listen Biden. I'll tell you one of the odd things about Biden. It seems like the guys in a witness protection I mean,

what has happened to him? I mean it's can you recall in your lifetime ever seeing anyone effectively wrap up a nomination and then disappear. I mean, I guess he did did what was it? A Facebook live town hall that he like wandered off the run and didn't go very well. Look, I like Joe personally, He's an affable guy. But but you know, I gotta say he has slowed

down more than a step or two. And I've heard more of the little speculation that get to the convention, Democrats are going to want to pull the plug and abandoned ship. I don't know if that happens under their rules. The superdelegates. You know, it's interesting that the Democratic Party believes believes in the state and believes in government, so they're much more authoritarian. So they have these things called superdelegates, which are elected officials that are basically free to do

whatever they want at a convention. Republicans don't have super delicates. Yeah, no, no, it's interesting Republicans. Republicans don't have superdelegates. Republicans actually follow the votes of the people. The Democrats have a much more top down, power driven system. You know, I've heard interesting spec elation about Andrew Cuomo suddenly becoming the dark

horse candidate. I don't know it. I will say this, the longer this crisis continues, the more the question for every voter is going to be what leader do I trust to lead this country in a time of crisis and calamity, whether it's a public health crisis or an economic crisis. And I think that issue is likely to become the only issue for the Democrats at their convention, and the only issue, or at least the dominant issue

in November the general election, of course. I mean that's the theme that everybody's talking about, is unemployment, and it could affect a restaurant worker, and it could affect the Democratic nominee for president. There's a wide spectrum here in a lot of uncertainty. We will try to clear up more of it next time, as things are changing day by day. But that's all the time we have for today. Thank you, senator. I'm Michael. This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.

This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs, Freedom and Security Pack, a political action committee dedicated to supporting conservative causes, organizations, and candidates across the country. In twenty twenty two, Jobs Freedom and Security Pack plans to donate to conservative candidates running for Congress and help the Republican Party across the nation.