Stephen C. Meyer: Trump Needs To Appoint A Medical Red Team

Red teams are almost always a good idea. 

   But I'd say he also needs what I guess you could call a green team: a team of economists and suchlike who do cost-benefit analyses that take the medical judgments--but not only the medical judgments--into account.

   My own layperson's dumbass, on-the-fly WAG is that we're well past the point at which the shutdown is doing more harm than good. But such a judgement is virtually valueless.

   If Mulligan's calculations are anywhere even remotely in the vague vicinity of correct, we're more-or-less killing ourselves with the shutdown. And killing ourselves by a wider and wider margin every day. Right now, his view is that the net cost of the shutdown to the U.S. at this point is well over $1.1 trillion. The cost per household is over $9k.

   That's one economist's view, at least.