Jared Bernstein:
It is, of course, a concern, and one we’re tracking carefully.
But let me give you three contextual points that I think are really important to think about in this context. First of all, we have already talked about one of them. That’s economic momentum. When you have a labor market adding over 800,000 jobs per month, when you have cut the unemployment claims by half in almost six months, a trend that typically takes more than a year to occur, when your GDP is back above its trend at least a year before forecasters expected that, you have got real momentum.
Two, vaccinations. When this president came into office, 1 percent, 1, percent, Judy, of adults were vaccinated. Now that number is 60 percent. Obviously, that’s critically important to get that number up, but it’s one of the reasons why we’re not going back to lockdown, we’re not going back to March 2020, or even January 2021.
And, three — and maybe this is the most important in terms of forward-looking — we have the public health scaffolding in place to meet this Delta challenge. Now, people are going to have to chip in. They’re going to have to make sure that they get vaccinated. We are going to have to work carefully with state and local policy-makers to make sure both relief dollars get out, particularly to people in the rental sector, but also to make sure that we keep getting those shots in arms.
But we have that public health policy infrastructure in place. And that should give Americans a lot of confidence that these trends that we’re seeing should persist.