Fair. The political decisions I was referencing would be more economic policy - We had a Debt to GDP of ~110% coming into the pandemic. This is well beyond wha

Fair. The political decisions I was referencing would be more economic policy - We had a Debt to GDP of ~110% coming into the pandemic. This is well beyond what would have been a consensus reasonable amount 40 years ago. - We had interest rates near 1.5% coming into the pandemic, again, something which would have been a consensus viewpoint bad idea 40 years ago except as a temporary measure during a recession. - In connection with the other two, the Fed balance sheet was already bloated coming into the pandemic. All of these things were IMO bad policy decisions but were unlikely to blow up by 2022 or 2023 without the Pandemic. The reason you don't do these things isn't because the world immediately catches on fire once you do, it's because it makes you less resilient in the event you have other serious problems to deal with, and it turns out that was the year we ended up with other serious problems. In terms of epdidemiology stuff, I'm not really qualified to comment on any of it, I don't feel like our response went well, but i don't have any cohesive alternatives to suggest. I guess my high level criticisms would be that it felt like a weird combination of arbitrary, authoritarian, and inconsistent. I guess I'd expect a pandemic response to be a bit authoritarian but the other two bits made the authoritarian parts feel low value and unfair.