Rep. Greg Murphy (R-NC) predicted it will take “a couple years” to get consumer confidence back after the coronavirus pandemic but said restarting the economy will be “a lot better because we kept the infrastructure in place.”

“In my opinion, we don’t’ have to have everything perfect before we start getting our economy back,” Murphy told Breitbart News Saturday host and Washington Political Editor Matthew Boyle on Saturday, providing a war-time analogy to drive the point home.

“If General Eisenhower had waited until everything was perfect to launch D-Day, then we would have gone a month later, and there was not a single American that would have made it off the beach,” he said.

We are moving at “lightning speed,” he explained, in all aspects of our economy.

“Personal, private industry. You know public industry for that matter. And I think we’re really doing a damn good job to be honest with you,” he said.

Murphy noted that roughly 26 million Americans are unemployed, estimating a 20 percent unemployment rate.

“At the height of the Great Depression, it was 24.5 percent,” he said, noting that the current crisis is not fundamentally rooted in financial issues or financial structures. That is why programs, like the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), are so critical.

“You know they wanted to slow roll it because they wanted to get all this nonsense in that had nothing to do with COVID-19, with the virus, you know to get in there about voter ID, to get in there about climate change,” he said of Democrats initially stiff-arming efforts to replenish the program.

It is essential to keep jobs in tact “so when we roll out of this we will be able to hit the ground running with the infrastructure, with the employees we had before,” he added.

While Murphy supports reopening the economy, particularly a regional approach, he is not sure consumer confidence will bounce back quickly.

“It’s going to take a little while,” he said.

“I would suspect that to get the concern about the economy, to get confidence back, is going to take us a couple of years,” he predicted. “I don’t think it’s going to be a six months kind of thing, but it’s going to be one that we can slowly start back. But it’s going to be a lot better because we kept the infrastructure in place.”

As for his state, North Carolina, Murphy said it is not out of the woods yet, but he can “see some light at the end of this tunnel.”

He added that officials could begin reopening things “today” while maintaining safety precautions like social distancing, hand washing, and use of masks.

We “can safely open a small number of small businesses to actually just start slowly getting our economy back,” he said. “And I think we could do that today to be very honest with you.”

Murphy also praised President Trump in taking decisive action on halting travel from China January 31.

“If we had not done that, if we had not stopped people who were infected from coming from China … essentially the country, we would look like Italy,” he added.