Trump's former White House chief economist says coronavirus so far has cost $8,074 per household

The deadly coronavirus so far has cost $8,074 per household, says Casey Mulligan, former White House chief economist under President Trump.

The estimate includes the projected costs of coronavirus deaths and effects of the virus-related economic shutdown. Mulligan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, has a new website, titled CoronavirusCosts.com tracking the daily economic cost of the virus response. 

Image

Estimate of Coronavirus Pandemic Costs

Casey B. Mulligan, Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago

"The cumulative costs through April 28, 2020, were $8,074 per household ($1.0 trillion in aggregate)," Mulligan stated Wednesday on his website. "26 percent of these are mortality costs (valued at $4.3 million VSL; over the past seven days, the percentage was 27). The rest are the market and non-market costs of shutting down the economy, for the categories documented by Mulligan (2020). The costs above do not necessarily reflect the drop in stock prices, because much of that drop indicates costs expected to be incurred after April 28."

Mulligan has questioned the structure and size of government coronavirus relief packages, including the $2.2 trillion package adopted last month, along with an additional nearly $500 billion package adopted last month.

"Roughly half of all U.S. workers stand to earn more in unemployment benefits than they did at their jobs before the coronavirus pandemic brought the economy to a standstill," Mulligan tweeted Tuesday.

Mulligan served as chief economist of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under Trump and as a visiting professor teaching public economics at Harvard University, Clemson University, and the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. The Wall Street Journal named Mulligan "The economist who exposed Obamacare."