Member of Trump's reopening council warns we'll 'have body bags of businesses' if they remain closed

Stephen Moore has a questionably worded prediction for what will happen to businesses that don't reopen soon.

Moore, President Trump's former economic adviser, who was once nominated to the Federal Reserve Board, is now part of Trump's council on reopening the economy. He's also a big fan of the way Georgia, Iowa, and Oklahoma have been letting businesses reopen, and warned in a Monday news briefing that the U.S. will see "body bags of businesses" if it doesn't follow those red states' leads, Politico reports.

Moore discussed a study his conservative group, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, had issued to rank states on their reopening strategies. "States that open up the soonest and the safest ... will have much swifter and stronger recovery than states that stay closed," Moore claimed the study showed. "The major reason for that is because businesses cannot go another month without revenue. … If they stay closed for another month, month and a half, you're gonna have body bags of businesses that will never recover."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Nearly 70,000 people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19, with thousands of other deaths likely going uncounted due to a lack of testing. That number could grow even faster if businesses reopen too early or unsafely, experts say.