Make Your Predictions for 2021

Here are the instructions, as given last year and the years before that:

The custom on this blog on New Year’s Day is for readers to predict what they think will happen over the course of the year ahead. Then, once the year is over, on or around the next New Year’s Eve, we will revisit those predictions and see who made the best one. . . .

The predictions can be weighty or light, serious or whimsical. Winning predictions will likely be highly specific. They tend to seem highly unlikely at the time they are made, but then, to our surprise, they happen anyway. The winning prediction makes us think, “How could anyone possibly know THAT was going to happen?”

The vaccines will go better than expected and will bring an end to the COVID epidemic.  (The U.S. government has already purchased 200 million doses from Pfizer, with an option for 400 million more, and 200 million from Moderna.Vaccines from Johnson & Johnson and AstraZenica should soon be approved, and another from  Novavax is in trials. The population of the U.S. is 333 million, so even though two doses are necessary for most of these–though Johnson & Johnson will only need one–there will be plenty to go around, including for other countries, where 236 vaccines are in development worldwide.)

This success will be accompanied by an economic boom that President Biden will (incorrectly) get credit for.  The Democrats will consolidate their power and their new popularity with new spending initiatives, such as Medicare for All, reasoning (incorrectly) that spending trillions on COVID-related giveaways worked well so that the “New Monetary Theory” that holds governments may print money at will must be valid. (The reckoning will come later.)

Donald Trump will not retain his hold on the Republican Party.  Once out of office, his many enemies will hound him mercilessly, aiming to ruin him financially and put him in prison.  Recall that today’s leftists tend to believe in retribution and revenge.  Trump’s 70 million supporters will not be able to help him, since they do not have the power of our ruling class.  Meanwhile, the Republican Party will revert to the Establishment mode, revising its rules to make it more difficult for a populist outsider candidate to take it over as Trump did.

Besides, a backlash against all of the “negativity” and “polarization” of the 2020s will result in an Era of Good Feeling.  For an “era,” though, this will be very short-lived.  Progressives will over-reach.  The bills will become due.  The unintended consequences will unfold.  But those incursions of reality will come mostly later, just as the Great Depression came after the last century’s “Roaring Twenties,” which also came after a major pandemic.  This century’s “Roaring Twenties” will unfold in a similar manner.