With so much bad news about the more than 60,000 Americans who have died from COVID-19, the more than 20 million others who have lost their jobs, and President Trump's scandalous inaction during the first weeks of the pandemic, I have a less-depressing story to share that I heard from a friend.
It doesn't minimize the severity of this crisis, but it might help some Americans put it in perspective.
Carlos Galan is the owner of several well-known restaurants in Miami and in Spain. In Miami, he owns, among others, Dolores But You Can Call Me Lolita and Crazy About You. In Madrid, he has La Mision, El Recuerdo and El Olvido.
He travels constantly between the two cities and personally manages his restaurants. "I have one foot here and one foot there," he says.
Until last month, Galan employed 180 people in Miami and 90 in Madrid. In mid-March, he had to close all of his restaurants, laying off his employees in both cities. Almost a month and a half later, he sent me a message comparing how he and his workers are doing in Miami compared with how they are doing in Madrid.
In Miami, laying off his employees to allow them to collect unemployment took him one day of paperwork, with zero costs, he told me. In Madrid, it took him two weeks of paperwork and cost more than $3,000 in document fees.
More important, as of April 29, virtually all of his laid-off workers in Miami were receiving $600-a-week unemployment checks. In comparison, he said that his employees in Madrid by that date "have received zero" from the Spanish government.
In addition, in the United States, he has received significant help to reopen his businesses and rehire employees, thanks to the payroll-protection packages approved by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress.
Galan said he has received $980,000 in payroll-protection funds that _ if spent to rehire his workers _ he will not have to repay. He told me he plans to rehire almost all of his employees in Miami with that money, at the same salary as they were getting before.
In comparison, he has not received any payroll-protection funds from the Spanish government. In other words, neither he nor the laid-off employees have received any financial aid.
"My case offers a pretty good comparison of what's happening in the United States and Spain, because I run similar restaurants in both places, and I closed them down almost at the same time," Galan said.
"The United States is far from perfect," he said, "but there's more support for business people and workers, and much less bureaucracy than in Spain and other countries."
Granted, Galan and his employees have been relatively lucky. While most jobless Americans are receiving their unemployment checks, that's not always the case in Florida.
Largely because of Gov. Ron De Santis' incompetence, Florida had only processed 664,158 of 1,941,807 coronavirus-related unemployment claims by April 28, the Miami Herald reported. That was one of the slowest rates of disbursements in the nation.
And granted, none of this exonerates Trump's disastrous failure to take the COVID-19 pandemic seriously after the first U.S. COVID-19 case was reported Jan. 21 _ and even after the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency on Jan. 30.
Instead of launching a full-fledged campaign to promote social distancing and ordering tests and ventilators, Trump consistently downplayed the pandemic. Other than blocking travel from China, he fell asleep at the switch and tweeted as late as Feb. 24 that the situation "is very much under control." By then, more than 2,600 Americans had died of the virus.
Trump notwithstanding, many Americans may come out of this crisis less financially crippled than people in Spain and other countries.
In the long run, China is likely to become the world's most powerful economy. But for now, as long as America keeps printing dollars and other countries keep trusting the U.S. currency, millions of laid-off Americans may be rehired, the current huge unemployment rate may start to come down and the U.S. economy could start to recover next year.
