Back in the spring when Trump decided for about a week that the battle against Covid was like a war and thus he was a wartime president, debates broke out over whether the analogy was dangerous or potentially useful. [thread]

My colleague @ProfLupton & @jblankshain effectively delineated the dangers of war rhetoric and of militarizing policy problems. ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/20/this-is-problem-with-calling-it-war-against-coronavirus/) @margaretomara drew a more hopeful analogy to the econ development effects of WWII & the Cold War. ( https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/opinion/coronavirus-trump-war.html)

The discussion was rendered somewhat moot by Trump's swift reversion to a hands-off decentralized laissez faire approach. But the CARES Act, last month's stimulus bill, and Biden's just-announced American Rescue Plan do bring back to my mind the econ dimension of the war theme.

There's lots of work on the "leveling" effects of large wars, probably most famously Piketty but also Scheve and Sastavage's work on war and taxation: https://www.amazon.com/Taxing-Rich-History-Fiscal-Fairness/dp/0691165459/.

Mobilization for mass war has both grown states and driven redistribution in ways no other force has.

Even with the federal gov’s mobilization at low ebb and American society hardly in a wartime footing, it’s worth contemplating the scale of that gov’s economic response, including a Biden plan that, among other things, claims to cut child poverty in half. https://twitter.com/jasonfurman/status/1349856722563850241?s=20

Obviously something about the impact & disruption of the pandemic has occasioned a state economic response that, whatever its shortcomings, outstrips typical peacetime efforts. Moreover, the incoming admin’s plans seem to echo more clearly a framework of wartime mobilization ...

… most notably through reclaiming federal responsibility for a national public-health response, both on vaccine production & distribution (including use of the Defense Production Act) and a nationalized mitigation effort (testing, funding 100,000 new public health workers, etc).

Wars can sanction heretofore unimagined levels of public spending and state mobilization. And they can bolster political calls for shared sacrifice and economic fairness that have redistributive implications. In this regard, there are echoes. /end