The Mills plan for reopening the economy is no plan at all

When a crisis happens, I think most of us try our best to band together and be on the same team.

In the year 2000, this country lived through one of the most bitter and miserable elections in American history. In the end, after a month of legal battles and uncertainty, George W. Bush became president. To say he inherited a divided country would be an understatement.

And yet, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, Bush’s approval rating in Gallup surveys reached as high as 90 percent. 

Generally speaking, this is a good thing about human nature. When the chips are really down, we put away a lot of the ridiculous pettiness that defines us in normal times, and we try to all push the rock in the same direction.

Here in Maine, this is why Gov. Janet Mills has seen a recent bump in approval ratings. In the spring of 2019, polling firm Critical Insights put her approval rating at 47 percent, while in October, Morning Consult had it sitting at 46 percent.

Last month, Critical Insights published a poll showing her approval rating had risen to about 60 percent.

I’m not immune to this sentiment. To be perfectly frank and honest, in the early and middle stages of the state’s response to COVID-19, I had very little to say in the way of criticism of Mills.

However, I began to grow rather uncomfortable with that silence when more time passed. 

Overly broad orders that curtailed the constitutionally protected civil rights of Maine citizens was a major mistake in my opinion, as was the threat of fines and arrests for non-compliance.

Now, in the past two weeks the release of her initial “vision” for the state’s reopening, followed by the four-point phased reopening plan has caused me to lose my patience with what I consider a lack of leadership coming out of the Blaine House.

Mills is not taking the social costs of the economic cataclysm they are creating seriously, and it has led to her prioritization of heavy-handed, internally inconsistent and illogical attempts to control behavior, to the detriment of every core area of Maine’s social and economic life.

This isn’t just about money. As we sit and debate when Maine should open, many of us — Mills included — have fallen into an insidious trap. Positive COVID-19 tests and fatalities are tangible, easy to understand things. You can clearly identify them. They are simple, uncomplicated and scary.

But how do you quantify the impacts of 26 million people being out of work, 100,000 of which are in Maine? The truth is, we can’t understand it as easily, because so many of those social costs are intangible, or difficult to even identify. But they are real, and they are devastating. Depression, suicide, poverty, destitution, broken families, children falling through the cracks, and utterly destroyed lives.

No government program or rescue package can truly mitigate what we are doing.

A leader in a crisis like this needs to be able to balance those costs with the need for protecting public health.

I think it is possible, but issuing a plan that says barber shops, hair salons and pet groomers can open in May, but nail technicians can’t open up until June and tattoo and piercing parlors can’t open up until July is not a serious plan. Telling restaurants they can open in June, but bars can open in July is not a plan. Telling the state that Walmart, Target and Home Depot can remain open, while general purpose retail stores cannot open until June is not a plan.

No one is arguing that things should “go back to normal” immediately, or that everything should open at once. And everyone that I know has been trying to give the governor as much latitude as possible. This plan is not a plan at all, and we deserve better.

Matthew Gagnon of Yarmouth is the chief executive officer of the Maine Policy Institute, a free market policy think tank based in Portland. A Hampden native, he previously served as a senior strategist for the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C.