Here is the short cut to the full COVID report for Friday.

Well, it seems that the “fourth wave” has begun. Versus the same day of last week, US new cases were up 21%, US hospital admissions for COVID were up 9%, global new cases were up 20% and global fatalities were up 26%.

India again shattered its previous record for the most new cases in a single day.

Michigan continued to top every state and every country in the rate of new cases per capita.

496 thoughts on “COVID update

  1. Scoop, the comparisons to France are not appropriate. France isn’t much larger than California. It doesn’t have 50 States, each with its own uniquely diverse environmental, social, and economic conditions and resources. It has nowhere near the ethnic diversity of the US. It has nowhere near diversity of thought of the US. France doesn’t have the extent of generational diversity of newer immigrants. In short, France is the result of hundreds of years of shared identity and values. Dissent has been dealt with harshly at times and eliminated on occasion. The EU, which is more appropriately compared to the US in terms of geography, population, and climate is completely dysfunctional. And they just had a “state” succeed from their union.

    Let our states handle policy. Let the feds handle national security and federal infrastructure. This is the only path to efficiency.

    1. I assume you typed this in the wrong place and intended it to be in the comments on high speed rail, which is where I compared France to California.

      First of all, the dramatically overpriced high-speed rail projects in California are being run out of Sacramento (although they have gotten some federal grants for various parts of the project), not out of D.C. That makes your argument particularly inappropriate, since you are suggesting to leave the job to the states!

      In addition, pretty much everything you wrote is factually incorrect. 28% of all children born in France have at least one parent born outside of Europe, and the percentage rises to a third if the definition changes to “outside of France itself.” That is a higher percentage than the USA. North Africans alone, not even including other non-European ethnics, now account for a full 10% of the French populace.

      Of course it doesn’t matter that your facts are wrong, because they would be irrelevant even if they were accurate. Ethnic diversity is not germane to the cost of high speed rail.

      So, to summarize:

      You posted in the wrong thread.

      Your facts are wrong.

      Your facts, even if they had been accurate, would have had no relevance.

      And the actual facts lead to a conclusion exactly the opposite of your conclusion that the states should handle their own matters.

      So – well done!

  2. Idea doing the rounds: Surge vaccinations. This’d be a wider. regional version of “ring vaccination”. We send “SWAT teams” into hot zones to mass vaccinate… IOW, the way we fight fires.

  3. Again, thanks, Uncle Scoopy. In the news: Ontario, Canada goes on 4wk strict lockdown. Even outdoor dining shut, offices & stores except grocery, drugs & garden shut, big box open at reduced capacity, curb pickup OK. Seems draconian to me. New case rate would be #20 as a state. It’s 3x Cali & 1/3 of Mich. Doesn’t seem so bad to me, but it’s well into the red zone. The reason I find this notable is its proximity to Mich.

  4. Yes, Scoopy, as you say. Calculation: 60 x 1K / (1/3) x 1B = 60×3 / 1M = 180 daily new cases per 1M. So U.S. avg is in the red. Nearby (San Fran), daily cases bottoming below 50 /1M. That’s still away from 0 & stagnant. Even a slight rise, but a “wave” is not inevitable. And I’d say, not yet a clear path to 0. Vax rate climbing, demand steady, reluctance waning… good signs. Room for optimism. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

    1. I’d pt out a diff betw facts = what we know as opposed to speculation & facts = what’s true even when we don’t know it.

      This past year our science has been far behind what we’ve really known from the epidemic itself. The science is still inconclusive about hand sanitizer, but the absence of evidence of anyone being infected from surface contact strongly suggests these precautions have all been more for show than effective. The 6 feet apart advice was ill-advised since there’s no magic about that number, nor is 15min of being close even with a mask on, magic. Some bars shuffled the room every 14m, a completely stupid take on a dumbed-down rule. Underlying these are hidden assumptions.

      Like, that we can’t tell people to wear masks since we didn’t *know* for sure they’d work & were necessary. And that ventilation was too big an ask, so we got lesser measures to follow. We didn’t know that outdoors was safe. Again, had we known, certain aspects of lockdowns we could’ve gone without. These plastic barriers are ridiculous. In place of ventilation, which works… while the barriers do approximately zilch.

      Also, bear in mind when TX numbers don’t soar, voluntary mask wearing is still 70%. It’s only 80% in locked-down CA. That’s a funny thing that happens when community spread drops. And, as if we needed to be reminded, effectiveness is due to the actual wearing, not the policy.

      Where I’m at: In an emergency, strict adherence to meticulous rules of scientific precision need to be tempered with insight enough to know when to fudge a little. I learned that, but I don’t think *we* have.

      1. Your post is a whole lot of “the best is the enemy of the better”. We don’t “know” a lot of things. But we can still take a lot of educated guesses about them and be better off, like it’s pretty safe to say that dipshits in charge could *not* ban cities from forcing people to wear masks.

      1. My guess is the Breitbart spin on the CDC Director’s Today Show (NBC) interview. Asked if cases dropping from 55k to say 20k or 30k might amount to “turning a corner”, she said “it’s hard to put a number on that”. She said the most important effect of vaccination that we should focus on is less deaths. More widely reported in other media, from her full briefing, she points to signs the drop in cases & deaths is starting to stall. She now fears the possibility of a 4th wave due to the recent changes in policy & behavior.

        breitbart . com / clips / 2021 / 03 / 26 / cdc-director-hard-to-put-a-number-on-daily-case-count-that-would-mean-were-turning-corner

    1. Do you feel better now, Darius? Did screaming with rage and pain help? Think how much you achieved doing that!

      Or would watching some Tucker Carlson make you feel better? Or maybe Alex Jones? He’s got the inside scoop on EVERYTHING! And he probably sells something that will calm you down. Buy lots of it. Then both of you will be happy!

      Remember to write Trump a big check, and have a NICE day.

  5. 2 adds. 1. When I said “too soon for vax fx”, I neglected something. We know a lot more people that we don’t know of were touched by the virus; we know that from several sources. But to be expected as we aren’t testing gen pop. Not exactly “herd immunity” but it will be a damping force, not unlike vax fx.

    2. Just got my 1st shot thanks to PWS. Happy about that. Also, our numbers in my county are really good. It almost seems reasonable to separate the states having troubles & lump them with the countries doing terribly. But no one’s safe till we all are. Vax-decliners being apparently so numerous worries me. Manaus has me almost frightened. Predicting how things are going to go still doesn’t seem safe to bet on right now.

  6. This site 1) fully admits to being other crap; 2) usefully points out that this isn’t the only site that’s crap; 3) and though Uncle Scoopy may be on the irreverent side, he consistently demonstrates the value of rationality… of not being slave to sentiments & prejudices.

  7. Could not agree more, i don’t understand the doom and gloom here. Constant terms like ‘this can’t be good’ and ‘we’re doomed’. Please just post the boobies and STFU. At least finally, a year into this, the ‘heckava job Trumpy’ tag got removed. Took a whole year for this crayon chewer to realize the whole world is in the same boat, regardless of leader.

    1. Be fair, Trump DOES blow and Scoopy’s coverage of Covid is better and more thorough than the evening news’s. The doom and gloom is a response to knowing that we still have a plague out there. Please just get back to singing for Styx and STFU yourself until you’ve got something more than whining.

    2. Nothing could be further from the truth. The actions of leaders have had an enormous impact, and that’s one of the reasons for staying on top of the numbers – to see what works.

      Comparing countries with the same COVID timeline and cultures (per million population):

      Example 1:
      USA to date: 92,000 cases, 1,681 deaths
      Canada to date: 25,000 cases, 599 deaths

      So the actions of America’s leaders are responsible for approximately tripling the fatality count. That amounts to more than 1,000 deaths per million – about 330,000 lives.

      Example 2:
      Sweden to date: 76,000 cases, 1,318 deaths
      Norway to date: 17,000 cases, 120 deaths
      Finland to date: 13,000 cases, 147 deaths

      Sweden is one of two or three countries that actually did worse than the USA. Their actions probably multiplied the fatality count times ten, compared to x3 for the USA. (One might also say their actions cost the country about 1,100 lives per million population, about the same as the USA by that metric.)

      As for doom and gloom, the reason is obvious. The more seriously you take a pandemic, to better your chances of escaping or minimizing its impact. Moreover, extreme action also reduces the virus’s ability to mutate. (The more it spreads, the more chances for mutation, or as Fauci put it, “Viruses cannot mutate if they don’t replicate.”)

      As I’ve noted elsewhere, President Trump bungled the country’s response to the pandemic in terms of masks, testing, social distancing, super-spreader events, snake oil cures, and perhaps several other things that escape me without reviewing my notes: but he get one very important thing right, better than the rest of the developed world: he got government and industry engaged in partnership to develop vaccines, taking a proactive stance rather than waiting to be a customer. That’s an important reason why we are now among the top three countries in charts ranking the percentage of the population fully vaccinated.

      1. I came for the boobs. I stayed for the discourse. This site has always been an awesome blend of pop culture, in depth film and baseball analysis and world events. Trump and COVID were world events. Of course they will be discussed here. And if all you care about is the T&A, how hard is it to ignore the other posts? Why should Scoop cater to your whims editorially on his FREE blog? The entitlement of feeling comfortable dictating free content is staggering.

    3. ‘Please just post the boobies and STFU.’

      More right wing cancel culture.

      1. Hey, it’s kinda like telling Lebron “shut up and just play ball.”

        So that puts Uncle Scoopy on the same level as Lebron James!

  8. It’s becoming more and more certain that the virus actually originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (e.g. search Google news for WIV), with multiple sources providing evidence that there was prior and ongoing work in risky coronavirus research, that the facilities were not up to code, and that the provided explanation that it was a natural source from a local live market is not realistic. Given the lack of evidence of natural origins, the virus was likely a strain developed to test increased infection capability. Whether or not the goal of the research was intended as a bioweapon is not known. While accidents happen, the government of China is complicit in covering up the initial release, silencing (and worse) whistleblowers, leading investigators astray with the “live market” explanation, and possibly illegal research activities. For this reason, I think the governments of the world should seek reparations from China for lives lost, people permanently disabled, real economic losses, and personal hardships endured by all. Probably in the order of trillions, and maybe tens of trillions USD. Will take payment in debt forgiveness. Nothing has ever gone wrong with seeking reparations, right?

  9. Thank you for writing about the minimum wage here, Adam T. I missed UncleScoopy’s remarks about it, and I am glad to know what well-informed and sensible people think about it.

  10. Greg Abbott . . . whatta guy. With such rank incompetence and disregard for human life, I fully expect him to be near the front of the 2024 GOP Presidential Sweepstakes.

    1. Look, disregard for human life, yeah, but incompetence? I doubt it. Roughly half the GOP, especially pols, sense which way the wind’s blowing, trim their sails accordingly. Many of the grass roots jumped on that bandwagon up to 4 years ago because tax cuts were high on their wish list. To the well-off, soaring stock indexes signal their chunk of the econ is doing fine. Did you fail to notice how heavily Trump weighted that?

      Yes, thanks to a lot of brainwashed chumps, the conservative base of Trump cultists are the lion’s share of the GOP. Those like Cruz who voted against rubber-stamping the electors on Jan 6 as well as the majority of the House GOP who voted not to impeach, are taking advantage of Trump’s support, but see him for the animal he is. That, I’m sure, is how they look at it.

      There’s one additional angle that goes unremarked about the “irrational”, “incompetent” moves of GOP governors & other actors. They’re aware the GOP’s steady line since Reagan that govt can’t work was a big lie. Sucker Dems thinking everyone shared at least the goals, compromised over & over. With the outcome that their well-meant do-gooding always wound up being half-measures. The rank & file quickly learned that the left’s approach was more symbolic than effective.

      The GOP is scared as hell about the prospect that Dems will be effective & get due credit. That Keynes econ will be proven right. Even the timing of these seemingly counterproductive actions suggests it: It’s a last-ditch attempt to sabotage the pandemic recovery for fear the econ might then rebound.

      Dems are finally starting to get it that compromise with bad faith actors takes the power out of their punches. But their misconception remains: What Dems see as everyone’s interest, including self-interest, is only their opinion. Albeit widely shared within their own bubble. Not everyone everywhere shares Dem goals & beliefs as universal. Not even when it comes to democracy itself & the principle of “one person, one vote”.

      1. There was a time when I would have seen your view as overly cynical and not giving enough credit to the good-faith beliefs of thoughtful Republicans.

        Yeah… not so much any more. I think you’re right on the money, or at least a lot more right than wrong. The Republicans seem to be locked into a situation where they constantly have to lie blatantly to their constituents to stay in power, and by necessity have to cultivate a constituency of suckers and rubes.

        To some extent this aspect has always been there, because one of the things Republican politicians and large donors believe is that taxes are too high on rich people, and this is not a popular belief among the American population. Not even close. So they constantly have to do this bait and switch where they rile people up with cultural grievances to get power, then use that power to enrich the wealthy.

        These last few years have been a painful process of scales falling from my eyes and truly understanding how many charlatans and flim-flammers are in the leadership class of the Republican party, and how many idiots and loons there are in this country.

        1. I agree with Don, and especially with his third paragraph. And I have been through the same awakening about Republican’s and many other American “conservatives”.

          I disagree with some of what MikeP says about Republicans trimming their sails because of what he himself points out: “thanks to a lot of brainwashed chumps, the conservative base of Trump cultists are the lion’s share of the GOP.” This seems to me to make it impossible for the GOP to move toward the political center or even common decency.

          Their ability to remain a significant force in American politics will rely on their ability to get people to believe lies. That is very dangerous for America; the attempted coup at the Capitol on 1/6 shows that.

          1. Shoot, Roger. It seems to me you’re often a bubble off of plumb.

            trim one’s sails: Modify one’s stand, adapt to circumstances, as in His advisers told him to trim his sails before he alienated voters and bungled the election completely. This metaphoric expression alludes to adjusting a ship’s sails to take full advantage of prevailing winds. [Late 1700s]

            That is, trimming their sails doesn’t mean pulling back or them being brainwashed too. They remain unmoved, but egg on the mythos that the base already believes in.

            Did you hear the hoary old joke about the Smart Pills? Patient goes to psych doc complaining about feeling dumb, doc gives Smart Pills. Patient complains again, not getting any smarter.

            “And you know what, these pills look a lot like rabbit droppings.”
            Doc: “See? Now you’re getting smart!”

            You bet, that’s exactly what I’m saying: It’s very dangerous for us!

            And it isn’t “impossible” for them to move to the center. They have zero interest in sharing ground with the left or even with moderates. Sure, they played the game that way as long as it meant they could water down every single one of the left’s attempts at good governance. Now the burden of proof’s on the other foot already & they can just coast. Are you well & truly out of bed yet, Roger? Or are you still asleep at the switch?

          2. Thank you so much, Adam. I always learn a fair amount from your posts. When you talk about stuff I know at least vaguely, it tends to jive with what you tell me. That’s all peachy. There’s much to respond to that I won’t be able to get to today.

            First, I do need to deny keeping my powder dry about the CBO score. It didn’t occur to me that anyone would bring it up. It shocked me the weight you seemed to be giving to their scoring. Both OMB & CBO are somewhat political beasts. In particular, they’ve been especially unreliable sources for the past 4 years. Thus, I’ve been discounting them. I was also distressed to learn how egregiously slanted the Tax Foundation turned out to be, making up fairy tales in support of the GOP’s big tax cut’s projected economic impact. They turned out to be dead wrong, too. Imagine that. And FYI, I did *read* the CBO’s work of fiction. I’ll come back to this, briefly.

            As I said, most of what you’re feeding me jives fine & I’m happy. We’re obviously not going to agree on the minimum wage. I could extend you the same wager I offered Scoopy. That’s how convinced I am that your opinion on this issue is so much less valuable than the rest of your knowledge, which is mostly deeper than mine (by far).

            As for the college econ experience, I have a fair amount of 2nd hand exposure to college & grad students experiences. Eg, on “Econ Jobs Blog” where students opine frequently, often quite un-PC-ly. I’ve read 1st hand accounts of what I’m claiming about how econ is taught. Not least, econ women bitching about their shabby experiences even in the most prestigious schools. So while I know next to nothing 1st hand, I have much to go on 2nd hand.

            My brief response on the CBO score is their bogus figure of 1.4M jobs should be spread over *5* yrs. Because it becomes $15 *after* 4 yrs. We need to give it 1yr at that level. That comes to monthly job reports of 23k to the downside. Not exactly chump change but monthly job losses are at or above that figure quite often. Notice I didn’t say net. I strongly doubt there won’t be even bigger job gains during this period. So I believe even if true this -23k will not look so awful in context. That said, if Brad’s right & the elasticity is only -0.15 worst case instead of -0.5 as CBO apparently wants to assume, that monthly impact would be only -7k, *nation-wide*. Now, that’s starting to look a bit like a drop in the bucket to me. And, that’s on top of my guess that the net will never fall on the side of jobs lost. I mean, if that does turn out to be true for 5 yrs running, you’ll have to grant that this was no trivial prediction.

        2. Your last paragraph describes the feeling of many educated people who love America. Pre-Trump, we thought that the far-right extremists were a tiny coterie of lunatics, and that Republican politicians were often honorable people with conservative positions, ala Barry Goldwater.

          That Goldwater/Johnson election is a good demonstration of the way things once were. The conservative Goldwater was a principled man who spoke with complete candor and was always willing to admit when he was wrong. The liberal Johnson was a slimy, lyin’, schemin’ bully who seemed to possess the lowest possible level of character that the American presidency could ever descend to (until a certain orange-faced fellow appeared on the scene).

          Goldwater and JFK were such good friends that they were planning to tour the country together and do a series of mutually respectful whistle-stop debates in the Lincoln-Douglas manner. Of course, Kennedy’s death scotched that snake, and the mutual respect was replaced by Johnson’s famous commercials portraying Goldwater as a maniac with a happy finger on the nuclear trigger.

          So it goes. The Republicans once had the high ground on character. The Democrats once had a firm grasp on the votes of the blue-collar workers. Things change. I get that. But what I don’t get is how I was willing to vote for a Republican for President as recently as 1988, and still respected guys like John McCain and Mitt Romney during a period that was just days in the past. How did that party turn from “conservative” to “evil” so quickly. How did that group of lunatics, a group that seemed like a tiny portion of the population, turn out to be somewhere between 35 and 40% of the electorate? How could their national leaders turn out to be so dishonest and corrupt?

          I suppose Trump really is some kind of messiah. Apparently he freed a lot of closet racists and fascists to come out into the open, and even to take pride in their ignorance, and in so doing he forced Republican politicians to follow him, because if they do not, they will face primary challenges from those who do.

          Not just challenges. Defeats.

          What scares me is that the Democrats may not be able to stem that ultra-right tide. They have the path – just be the party of common sense – but they are facing the same types of pressure from their own nutbag wing. This creates a dilemma that they may not be able to solve. They can embrace notions like slavery reparations, and therefore lose general elections by energizing the opposition and alienating the moderates; or they can come out against such ideas and lose general elections by alienating important parts of their own constituency, and therefore failing to turn out their own base. They face a future of hemming and hawing and dodging such questions. Can they do that forever?

          After this latest stimulus check, I’m almost ready to become a Republican. They are sending $2800 checks to couples making $149,000 per year. They are sending ME a $1400 check because I’m retired and in theory I have virtually no income (they don’t look at net worth). Hey, no problem. I will accept the money, but I will only use it stimulate the economy of Italy and Portugal.

          As somebody pointed out, they see a sick patient and are operating on him with a chainsaw instead of a scalpel. Sure, let’s get money to the people that need it. Bar and restaurant owners are devastated by COVID. Many unemployed people can’t get jobs because of COVID, and therefore can’t pay their monthly expenses. By all means, get money to people who need it for food and shelter. But let’s ease up on sending it to people who will use it to take an extra vacation.

          And as for tacking a minimum wage increase onto a COVID bill. Gimme a break. If you want to raise the minimum wage, create a bill for that purpose and debate it through, while studying all the repercussions. What will happen to all the middle-class people who own franchise fast-feeders and convenience stores, and will suddenly have expenses greater than their gross profits? Will you offer them some assistance? Because if you do not, they will fold, and then all those $15-per-hour jobs will be replaced by no jobs at all, and a trip back to the unemployment office. If you don’t plan to assist those small businesses, then maybe you need to raise the minimum wage gradually rather than instantly, so the small businesses can raise their prices gradually enough to keep their customers, and thus keep everyone employed in the long run. Or maybe you have to get the money elsewhere. I’m sure there are many other repercussions from a sudden, drastic increase in the minimum wage.

          Don’t get me wrong. I believe that every worker who busts his butt 40 hours per week should get enough compensation to allow for a decent place to house and feed his or her family, while still allowing him/her to set aside some money for entertainment as well as some savings for retirement and their kids’ education. That should be the goal of every developed and civilized society. But we have to think about where that money is coming from. If you tax the rich, or even the upper middle class to provide that money, I’m completely OK with it. Lower the withholding taxes and income taxes to zero on people making less than, let’s say, $40,000 a year, so that when they make $40,000, they actually have $40,000 to spend. Make up for that by raising the corresponding taxes (and other taxes) on rich people and large corporations. OK by me.

          But if you just force that poor schmuck running a 7-Eleven to go out of business because his labor line suddenly doubles, you aren’t helping anyone in the long run.

          1. I agree with some of what Uncle Scoopy says. There I things I don’t want to agree with, but I am willing to concede that he is significantly smarter and better informed than I am.

            I might suggest that the handouts of $1,400 and $2,800 to people who don’t need them that he mentions pale in comparison to the billions handed out by the Republicans to corporations in Covid relief, let alone the handouts to the rich in the Trump-era tax cut, but that may be a point that can be refuted too.

            Also, MikeP talks too fast for me to really grasp his posts, so I am not going to say anything more about them now.

          2. Republicanism works on low level knee jerks anecdotal emotions. Almost ready to vote against people getting checks when Trump JUST dropped the corporate tax rate 15% funneling millions so executives could use the breaks on tax buybacks, raise the price of their own compensation stock, and cash out in droves?

            The real problem is, we’re just a stupid tribalism species doomed to extinction because people can’t see beyond their nose with quick anecdotal responses based on ‘fairness’ of the economy.

            You’ll get 10 times the anger at someone proven to rip off the government for an undeserving small stipend than you will the systemic manipulation of trillions by the small group of people who own half the world’s wealth. Those who utilize their power and greed to steal more wealth and power through manipulation of the legal system, politics, technology, and carefully crafted intellectual property constructs that allow them to steal from others.

            But well, since people aren’t actually in the board rooms to SEE it, or spend the time on longform journalism as the very least – or research papers or books to see how it’s done – they don’t care. They care more about 144 characters and a kneejerk reaction to a 10 second GIF than the truth.

            Of all the bullshit I’ve never understood, IF this supposed ‘welfare socialist state’ existed – then why do the hell do the rich KEEP GETTING RICHER? Wouldn’t the bottom anchor most of the wealth, and not the top for the biggest differential in human history?

            A simple concept, but humanity is doomed to never learn it, or put the time in to understand how and why it happens. Why do that when you can sit on your ass and turn on FOX News and hear some white supremacist propaganda artist making eight figures a year yell at you about Dr Seuss?

          3. Thanks for that, Sir Scoopy. You are making commonsense errors. The same errors as right-wing economists who base everything they believe on theory. The kind of theory promulgated famously by Uncle Milty. Which he cleverly made very convincing by crafted stories (i.e., concocted anecdotes). Whereas left-wing economics is heavily invested in looking at real data. We are, after all, now living in the age of Big Data. So right-leaners consequently are indirectly relying on stories, while us sort-of-southpaws are taking our cues indirectly from facts.

            Thus, we have Matt Lewis, a mainstream media Bill DeeCee type, like Frum, Brooks, Kristol, Will, Stevens, well, there’s a long list on Wikipedia of anti-Trump conservatives specific to the 2020 cycle. He was mad as hell at Biden for promising inclusiveness & then throwing in that $15 min wage. I have 2 rebuttals to him. 1st, Matt thinks raising wages costs jobs & that’s the effect of min wage. Because he gets his facts from respected conservative experts.

            But the theory behind that hot take is Econ 101, not professional econ. In real life, the truth is more complicated, as it always is. But as it turns out, there’s lots of data on this & the reality just happens to be rather close to the left’s wishful thinking about it. Sure, downsides are possible, but that figure of $15 is actually in the not yet too dangerous range, where any negatives are likely to be mild, unlikely severe. In short, expected value of job loss is 0, or extremely close to. This is not theory. It’s fact.

            My 2nd rebuttal is broader. The reason the left’s experts are so data-driven is that’s a misnomer. They’re economists. Economics is almost another word for libertarian. They start to the right & only lessons from the real world shift them gradually to the left of center. The majority of “lefty” economists seldom venture too far in that direction. It’s just that they seem to be contradicting everything conservatives fervently believe practically 100% of the time. As many lefty econs are putting it nowadays, the facts have a liberal bias.

            And so it is with means-testing. Common sense turns out to be wrong. Economists have looked carefully at the costs & benefits. Take Soc Sec for example. Not means tested. There are caps on both how much you put in & how much you can get back out, in fact how much you get as a function of both input & age. None of that requires you to report either income or assets. Now, as it turns out, there are 2 big downsides to such detailed reporting.

            1) Administration. It takes a lot of bureaucracy to stay on top of that mass of data. Need I say more than “IRS”? 2) The burden is more manageable the greater your means. This inevitably leads to the folks you cut out being precisely those with the greatest need. Like, people whose income was too low to file didn’t get their universal flat dole from the CARES act. That was the fault of the income cap routinely supported by both left & right, but most fervently by the left. The difference now is that so-called “lefty” economists happen to have the ear of Dem pols including our POTUS at the moment. Guess what, all good conservatives still listen to their long-trusted experts, unaware that facts on the ground prove them so full of crap all these decades.

            Now, to your point that what the hell’s a wage policy doing in a disaster relief bill? OK, lessee, which side was it who raised the issue that pandemic countermeasures were killing the economy? Mostly, lefties have been shy about their emergency aid being confused with mere economic stimulus. This situation is not really comparable, after all, to what caused 2008’s recession. But the truth is, the recovery’s success will be seen in two ways: the pandemic stats you’re tracking; and the breadth & depth of the economic rebound. Seemingly irrelevant tack-ons like a min wage rise are actually pretty easy to implement & not costly, at least in terms of govt spending. It turns out min wage laws are essentially self-enforced by employers. The intended effect, that is also likely to occur, is more equitable splitting of the recovery pie. Better still, this is a “redistribution” that takes place *before* taxes. We make the economy itself do the adjustment naturally instead of taking away hard-earned income arbitrarily just so we can give it back in entitlements, to the “taker” class.

            Don’t get me wrong, there are job shifts (mostly lateral from one to another type at a similar wage level). But really quite modest, compared to the disastrous, evil picture typically envisioned by conservatives. The data economists do look not just at the bottom of the wage scale, either. They also looked for knock-on effects on wages & job loss at all wage levels. Even though $15 seems so big (over double what it is now) — it’s been artificially suppressed for years while the job market has actually been creeping up with inflation as the min wage stagnated — a big portion of that rise has the effect of simply reinstating the cost of living adjustments that normally would’ve been done had it not been for the obscene politics at play.

            To recap, paying you a windfall you don’t deserve SAVES MONEY, making the program cheaper to run & costing less to taxpayers than administering the exact same dole program but cheating you of your ill-gotten gains. And at the same time, it’s FAIRER where it matters most. Economics at govt scale is no place for amateurs. You’re well-meaning, but let’s face it, just as bad as your average, much-derided liberal. OBTW, “if you don’t plan to assist those small businesses…” WTF?

            Why the hell else do you think the tab ran up to that whopping figure? Exactly to factor in that kind of knock-on needs. There’s relief targeted to businesses big & small, to local & state govts, because they have more limited revenues & the most-harmed, neediest folks depend more on local programs than so-called “entitlements” (aside from the direct dole). There’s one other great thing that happens when money manages to get to poorer people: They spend it. You (and I), OTOH, can afford to just add it to your (my) savings acct or what-you(I)-will. The reason rich people’s money doesn’t trickle down is they don’t spend it. They don’t even hire more workers or raise wages. Because you don’t add plant or labor to create demand. You satisfy the demand you project. Since our economy is mostly driven by consumer demand, shoving excess money to business & the wealthy gets redirected to other purposes that turn out not to stimulate the economy. The term of art economists call such other purposes is “savings”. I don’t know econ half as well as Adam Tondowsky but I don’t think he’s straightened out either me or anyone else’s misconceptions half as much as we need straightening out, so somebody’s gotta try & fill in that gap. So I’m nominating myself. 🙂

          4. Mike

            Your math is wrong because you are looking at it in averages rather than in specifics. Sure, there’s no problem with Google paying $15.00 per hour to all its janitors and secretaries. They would probably barely notice it in their bottom line. For convenience stores, however, which is my area of expertise, the total labor costs are greater than the total profit before taxes. If you double those labor costs, you plunge the AVERAGE convenience store into loss. (Not the marginal ones, but the average.) I have never analyzed fast-feeders, but I’m guess they probably have a similar P&L.

            And you will literally double their labor costs. If you have businesses like c-stores where everyone makes less than fifteen dollars an hour, you can’t just raise everyone to fifteen. Your assistant manager, who was making $13.50 wants to know why his salary is now the same as the trainee, who was making $8.00. Obviously, everyone has to be adjusted.

            As I mentioned, there is a much better way to accomplish the same end. Eliminate all payroll deductions and income taxes for people making up to a certain amount, let’s say $30,000 per year. The result is exactly the same, but the money comes from people who can afford it rather than the poor schmuck barely scraping by as a 7-Eleven franchisee.

            While I’m on the subject, why is there a cap in the income subject to social security taxes? When I did not need it at all, my net wages always were much higher in the second half of the year, after I passed the SS cap. Eliminating that cap would probably go a long way to compensate for not taking SS out of the lower wage earners.

          5. OK, Roger makes a good enough pt. Tho arguably it’s a little bit whatabout-ish. Indy makes a number of pts I also agree with.

            I mostly agree with our Uncle Scoopy’s pts, too. But he’s showing a common tendency, that conservatives tend to suffer from to an even greater extent, of getting the wrong sign. In some cases due to a minor misconception about a deceptively simple-seeming but actually technical & significant pt. That in fact propels them headlong into that sign reversal. Sorry, I really don’t mean to sound so dismissive. But I look at it the way I do, because that’s the way I think I know what I’m doing, and it just turns out that I can’t see it your way. If I’m wrong, Mea Culpa. Mea Maxima Culpa.

          6. FWIW, my younger self was pretty right-wing. I mean I wasn’t very sophisticated & for me “rational” equaled libertarian. In that sense I’m exactly like Frum et al. Only, I’ve been getting clued & shifting gradually left for decades. These folks think they had an epiphany & suddenly see all. They’re barely started on a long trek with many misconceptions yet to knock over. Which generally takes quite a long time. Based mainly on my own experience, admittedly. But then I’ve also witnessed how resistant to change deeply indoctrinated people tend to be. I like to believe I’m just a smidge left of center. I might be wrong. But relative to me, most moderates are much more than a smidge to right of center. Because of the rightward pull of the Overton window, across these decades, they’re a lot more to the right end of the spectrum than they’re aware.

          7. OK, good. Thanks for your reply, Scoopy. I’ll start by admitting the obvious: I’m not an economist. I didn’t do this work. Wasn’t involved in these regions & cities where min wage went up. I trust economists who looked into what happened & did some stats. You showed me why opinions vary. Why controversy persists in the face of acceptable outcomes. We all have tunnel vision. You have your POV. I have mine. You think I can’t see the trees. You won’t look at the forest.

            Again, these data come from real life. Not theory. So, facts can be dug up. Min wage laws stick. They don’t get repealed. There are scofflaws. But bizzes like to be legit. Abide the law. IIRC, yes, bizzes did shut. Not many. A biz that’s otherwise OK adapts. Everyone gets hit by a new law. There’s other variables. Prices went up. Not by much. Inflation didn’t soar. Was there reluctance? Grumbling? Sure. Adjustments were made. Life went on. You say numbers lie. I say they don’t. People lie.

          8. Hi again, Scoops. Your counterproposal & substantive question merit answers.

            SSI is wise. Withstood the test of time. It’s a pay-in plan. Paid out accordingly. Pay in less? Get less out. Apply that to both your examples. $0 now = $0 later. As for no cap… Can we still cap payout? Go ahead. You make the rule. You’ll offend someone’s sense of fair. If no limit, how’s it work? The $ doesn’t come from this fake “trust fund”. It’s from present day pay-in. Deductions today pay retirees today. How would workers feel about their deduction going to millionaires? Right now. Today.

            As for income tax, it already has the weird structure it does toward the goal of what you suggest. There’s a no tax tax bracket. There’s EITC & child credits or deductions. Which is to say you have a good idea there. We should do more of that. But bear in mind the dark side of means-testing. It costs a lot & filing is a barrier to the poor & struggling. So much so that refundable credits go unclaimed by those most in need. That’s the appeal of UBI. That it could dispense with red tape & just go to everyone. I agree with economists who argue UBI could leave needs unmet if say, it got rid of SNAP. But not getting rid of SNAP would reduce conservative support for UBI. So, sure, there’s ideas. Good ones. Then, there’s politics.

          9. I’ll bet you $100, if the fed min wage goes up to $15 in the next 5yrs or sooner & 10% of 7-11s in the U.S. go out of biz, I lose. If present owners sell & new owners make a go of it & the store stays a 7-11, I still win.

          10. The math just doesn’t work. The average c-store owner/franchisee, assuming he works full-time and draws $30,000 in salary as his own manager, makes $45,000 per year pre-tax operating profit over and above that salary.

            The average labor cost for a c-store is $325,000 per year, including that manager’s salary of $30,000 and about $12,000 “burden” on the manager’s pay (other labor expenses like SS, unemployment, benefits, etc.) Let’s subtract that out since our hypothetical owner/franchisee is taking that salary. That leaves about $280,000 as the total cost of the hired hands, including labor and burden. The average c-store hourly salary is $11.00. If we raise the average salary to $16.50, assuming some of them will have to make more than minimum wage, the math is easy – just multiply all the current labor costs times 1.5. That means he will have an additional $140,000 in labor costs, leaving him with a $95,000 pre-tax loss rather than a $45,000 profit.

            Of course, he may be able to recoup some of that with price increases, and he’ll have to make some layoffs to pare his staff down to bare essentials, but he has no legitimate path to survival. On the other hand, if a minimum wage increase is gradual (or if government shoulders the burden of the increase), he can probably survive. If the increase happens overnight, the smartest ones will probably attempt to cash out any equity they may have before potential buyers realize that the entire business has become unprofitable.

            This is the only industry where I can give definitive answers. Fast food franchisees make a lot more money than c-store owners, but they also pay for many more labor hours, and I don’t know precisely how things will work out for them. I do know that they will have to pay the additional labor directly out of their own pockets, and those additional costs can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Unlike c-store guys, many of those franchisees are quite wealthy, but facing the instant loss of hundreds of thousands from their bottom lines will definitely force them to rethink their business models. If they currently pay an average of ten bucks an hour (thirteen bucks after “burden”), and have to increase to an average of $16.50 (twenty-one bucks after burden), then they will have to pay out about an extra eight dollars per hour per employee including the “burden.” I’m going to guess that they use no less than 600 labor hours per week on average, so that means the average fast food franchisee will pay out an additional quarter of a million in labor per year. A lot of those people on the top end make some hefty profits, but that’s a big bite out of anyone’s wallet. The guys on the lower end of the totem pole are struggling just to make ends meet, like c-store operators, and can’t survive the wage increase at all. They guys in the middle make somewhere between $65,000 and $150,000 profit (McDonald’s is at the high end of that spectrum, but McDonald’s is exceptional.)

            All of this means to me that a sudden and drastic increase in the minimum wage is not something that can be carelessly tacked on to another bill. It could be an extremely disruptive policy, so the consequences need to be studied carefully. As I noted earlier, there’s generally no problem with rich corporations absorbing the increases. I’m guessing that Google and Microsoft can pay their janitors $100 an hour without batting an eyelash, and even Amazon, with the zillions of people they employ, easily absorbed the blow of setting their own minimum at $15.

            But in the retail segment, a huge chunk of the raise will come directly out of the pockets of people who are not much better off than the people they employ. The c-store segment is, I admit, kind of insignificant. As outlets on the bottom shake out, the remaining outlets will experience volume increases without needing much additional labor, so the industry might lose only 100,000-200,000 jobs or so, which is a drop in the giant bucket of American labor. But when you start to add in other retailers and fast feeders, the consequences start to mount. Adam mentioned 1.4 million lost jobs, assuming a gradual increase to $15 over four years, so it would be more than that if the minimum is raised overnight.

          11. Mike P, I agree with much of what you say regarding economics in general, but on the specifics of the minimum wage debate, I agree with Scoopy. The CBO itself, i.e government economists, predicts an increase in the minimum wage to $15 over 4 years will result in job losses of around 1.4 million (that’s the median estimate.)

            I also agree with Scoopy’s alternative. I may have written about this here. The Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne, who happens to be one of the rare journalists who writes on economics to actually be educated in economics (he has a masters) has written a number of columns that some form of basic income makes a lot more sense than increasing the minimum wage.

          12. On the broader issue of economic theory. I agree that many people who have taken just first year economics (especially those with MBAs or Commerce degrees) tend to be right wing on economics. That is likely in part because those people tend to lean right wing, but I think it’s also in part because in the United States the first year macro and micro economics textbook mostly still in use were written by Greg Mankiw, who was George W Bush’s economics advisor. Greg Mankiw is another of the Never Trump Republicans.

            There are also many assumptions in that textook that are increasingly being questioned.

            In regards to economic theory in the United States, like many academic disciplines, it is influenced by current and recent passed events. From 1933-1980 with the Great Depression and the election of FDR, economics was dominated by Keynesians. The analogy was that macro economics policy was like physics or especially chemistry: if a change was introduced by the government, equations could determine the products of that change.

            Beginning around 1966 with the start of inflation and the big Republican midterm Congressional gains, academic economists began to debate whether they should be so certain about their equations.

            With the election of Reagan in 1980 and the rise of Monetarist economic theory, academic economists used the analogy that economics was most similar to biology: that just as with complex eco-systems, introducing large scale changes by the government would most likely cause significant unintended consequences and so, the best policy was hands-off, or laissez faire.

            In the 40 years since then, that has also largely broken down, both due to the advancements in economics knowledge, the big data and analytics, you mentioned, and the breakdown of right wing economic theory.

            One obvious example of that is ‘what exactly is a ‘fiscal conservative.’ The left wing period of 1933-1980 had lower government deficits and debts than the period from 1980-2020.

            With the exception of raising interest rates to combat inflation early in his term, Reagan’s economic policies of tax cuts, deregulation and anti union legislation have been increasingly regarded as ‘short term gain for long term pain.’ Even without the increase in knowledge from ‘big data’ many economists after about 2000 or so began to realize that the increase in income and wealth inequality was so great that the unintended consequences from attempts to address these things could not be worse than laissez faire.

            Now, many economists, especially younger economists, have extended the marginal analysis used in environmental economic theory to analyze policy proposals. This is known as the equimarginal principle: as the marginal benefit of a policy declines and the marginal cost increases, the appropriate level of government policy is where those lines on a graph meet.

            In the case of a basic income, that would be the point where the declining marginal benefit of increasing the income meets the increasing marginal cost of the taxes or forgone government revenue (in the form of a negative income tax) to pay for the benefit.

            I agree that different people have different self interests, but at the macro level, there is general consensus among economists and seemingly the public, that governments should ‘market failures.’

            That is a general term economists use to describe anything where the free market does not produce the optimal outcome. There are three broad categories of private sector market failures:

            1.where one side has more information than the other side (asymmetric information.) This is why government agencies like the FDA exist. There is a problem if the drug manufacturer knows that its drugs are harmful, but their consumers don’t.

            2.Market concentration. Monopolies and oligopolies produce inefficient outcomes most of the time. This is where trust-busting and public utilities regulation comes in.

            Regulatory capture and, more broadly, rent (profit) seeking, are two examples of how private businesses have evaded for the last 40 years or so, effective government regulation. It is frequently argued that the FDA has been captured by the industries that they are supposed to regulate.

            3.Negative externalities. Pollution is an obvious example of this.

            Part of the problem with an effective government here is that the right wing propaganda of the last 40+ years seems to be deeply engrained in many people. Many people still believe that decreasing taxes is inherently good for the economy at the macro level or that attempting to address global warming is going to be inherently bad for the economy at the macro level.

            As Reaganomics showed, in both of those cases, there is a short term gain to cutting taxes (for the wealthy) or to not regulating pollution, but equimarginal analysis in both those cases suggests they lead to long term pain.

          13. Thank you, Adam, for your 2 posts, especially the 2nd. On the fed min wage debate, I trust my usual econ popularizers. In this case, I have Brad DeLong & Noah Smith’s podcast:

            braddelong . substack . com / p / podcast-hexapodia-iii-e-minimum-wage

            (Brad has an odd habit in his headlines of writing “th” as a glyph called a thorn.)

            On this page, we see Brad’s slide on the CBO’s report where he expresses what I can only label incredulity:

            “I am disappointed with the CBO here. They nowhere say what they assume for the own-wage elasticity. But their estimates seem to assume an own-wage elasticity of -0.5. I think it is in the range of between 0 and -0.15. Where does -0.5 come from? I cannot follow the logic here at all.”

            I’ll come back to DeLong on the CBO report.

            Meantime, their guest expert was Prof A. Dub’e, who wrote a 2019 report for the UK govt assessing the wisdom of a further raise in min wage from 60% of median to 66%. Our median wage is something like $22. Thus $15 is a roughly similar target. Dub’e said he favors a raise but is somewhat agnostic as to the precise figure. That report is at:

            gov . uk / government / publications / impacts-of-minimum-wages-review-of-the-international-evidence

            A month ago, Brad wrote on his position on the min wage topic in some detail. In that post, he wrote the below paragraph opining the above on the CBO report but expressing not just disbelief, clear scorn for CBO director Phill Swagel. Trump appt-ee, served Bush, ties to Brookings, AEI, UoChi: safe to call a conservative economist.

            U.S. min wage: What should it be, technocratically?
            braddelong . substack . com / p / delongtoday-the-us-minimum-wagewhat

            Brad writes: “What’s the answer? Unfortunately, you cannot look at Phil Swagel’s CBO report for that answer. It says that the employment elasticity, the amount by which employment falls when the minimum wage rises, is -0.48. Or, rather, it does not **say** that. As Jordan Weissman wrote: “in a stark & slightly suspicious failure of wonk transparency, the CBO did not actually state outright the number they chose to use anywhere in their report.” It’s not a slightly suspicious failure, Jordan: it’s an unprofessional lapse. I expected professional behavior from Phil. How did they get to -0.48? Since they do not say that that is what they use, they choose not to defend it at all. Again, unprofessional. I know of no economist of note and reputation who believes that that is true in the range from the current minimum wage to $15/hour. I simply see no professional method at all here.”

          14. Adam: One more serious disagreement with your take on the Econ 101. The problem scarcely lies with the newbies. It’s the eminent lights who are so full of BS. Dogma that’s worked for them for ages. Their magic. Powerful incantations without substance or empirical evidence. (Discounting twisted defensive dodges that even newbies are able to see thru…) In truth, their mad science…

            Old masters so used to deference — reverence — that when persistently challenged to defend the indefensible claims they make, they accuse their questioners of bad faith & storm out in a huff. Back to the safety of their fortress redoubts. The truth about all this dogma is the reason it so resembles Econ 101 is it’s political. Uncle Scoopy & smart Americans everywhere command a fair amount of economic knowledge, mostly at the level of basic econ with a good amount of detail added thru experience — ample 1st & 2nd hand knowledge.

            Political arguments are tailored to reach this American. The reason the old masters are unwilling to argue freely is they have become mere political animals. In politics, you are punished for not sticking to the script. You must simply repeat your carefully crafted, tried-and-true sound bites, more loudly if need be. I don’t know about you, but to me their manner of argument closely resembles 8-year-olds in its mentality.

            The reason the newbies are carrying the tune they do is not their textbook’s undermining the wisdom of the lectures & discussions. It’s that they parrot the wisdom of their high-status priests elaborating at length on the true meaning of the textbook’s sacred scripture.

          15. Mike P, I don’t really agree with that. There are a few points here, I’ll see what I think of.

            First though, that’s interesting from Professor DeLong. I have a feeling you held back on his criticism of the CBO report, waiting to ambush anybody who brought up that report.

            As Admiral Stockdale said in the 1992 Vice Presidential debate: “I’m out of ammunition on this.”

            1.I agree that most people have a general understanding of economics, but that is mostly micro economics, which is what people personally live, and not macro economics.

            I personally think that macro economics is just common sense of following a process of cause and effect, but it does seem to stymie most people.

            The areas here are the false claims that ‘checks to rich people are just wasted because they just put the money in the bank and don’t spend it.’ True enough, but this has to do with the Keynesian concepts of ‘the marginal propensity to consume’ and ‘the velocity of money.’

            Unnecessarily complicated names which simply mean that
            1.people can do two things with money: save it or spend it. The spending is the marginal propensity to consume.

            2.When money is saved, the bank doesn’t lock it in a vault. They loan it out. How frequently in a time period that money is loaned out over and over again is the velocity of money.

            And, as I’ve discussed at length here, Donald Trump and other opponents of free trade are wrong when they say that America dollars going overseas to pay for imports are ‘lost.’ The people who receive that money (currency traders) sell those American dollars so that foreigners can buy either U.S exports or U.S capital.

            The best description I’ve seen of this process is from Tim Harford’s book The Undercover Economist. This process might at first seem random and bizarre, but it’s nothing more than common sense cause and effect.

            As is mentioned, this process only works exactly like this when all markets are perfectly competitive because imperfect markets skew the price signals a little because goods and services in these markets don’t sell at the point where supply meets demand. However, that doesn’t alter this description all that much.

            “What if other industries were also perfectly competitive? That would mean that for every product, the price equaled the marginal cost. Every product would be linked to every other product through an ultracomplex network of prices, so when something changes somewhere in the economy (there’s a frost in Brazil, for instance) everything else would change – maybe imperceptibly, maybe a lot – to adjust. A frost in Brazil, for example, would damage the coffee crop and reduce the worldwide supply of coffee, this would increase the price coffee roasters have to pay to a level that discourages enough coffee drinking to offset the shortfall. Demand for alternative products, like tea, would rise a little. encouraging higher tea prices and extra supply of tea. Demand for complementary products like coffee creamer would fall a little. In Kenya, coffee farmers would enjoy bumper profits and would invest the money in improvements like aluminum roofing for their houses, the price of aluminum would rise and so some farmers would wait before buying. That means demand for bank accounts and safety deposit boxes would rise, although for unfortunate farmers in Brazil with their failed crops, the opposite may be happening.

            That may seem like a ridiculous hypothetical scenario, but economists can measure and have measured some of these effects. When frosts hits Brazil, would coffee prices do indeed rise, Kenyan farmers do buy aluminum roofing, the price of roofing does rise, and the farmers do, in fact, time their investments so that they don’t have to pay too much.

            Pages 59-60 (paperback edition.)

          16. 2.I think this goes much further than economics professors. I might be biased on this, but especially on the right, there seems to be a willingness to believe myths and this is not just related to economics.

            I just saw on twitter today with the passage of the Covid relief, one right winger again posting the old line: ““A democracy…can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.”

            – Alexander Fraser Tytler

            Of course, the actual evidence, at least in the United States, of over the last forty years is right wing politicians voting to cut taxes mostly on behalf of the wealthy. The average middle class voter may or may not be concerned about the deficit, but collectively they’ve clearly restrained themselves from attempting to bankrupt the treasury. Yet, this bullshit line is still routinely trotted out by right wingers whose politicians have nearly bankrupted the treasury.

            The other line off the top of my head routinely thrown out is ‘if a business was run like the government, the executives would be in jail.’

            To be sure, there have been the odd executive who has gone to jail, but it’s about as rare as a politician going to jail.

            However, as I said initially it isn’t just those on the right and it isn’t only those who have studied economics. It seems engrained in many people that tax cuts are inherently good for the economy or that cutting regulations is inherently good for the economy. I don’t accept any attempt to blame only economists for these myths.

          17. Thanks again, Scoopy. Your business acumen is quite impressive. OTOH…

            I don’t think even c-stores are as eager to buckle as you advise me. I do suppose owners become more likely to quit when unfairness impacts their business. But if the same storm hits everyone, motivation to adapt & not look more badly run than competitors kicks in. Or so I believe, about human nature.

            Another reason I’d still ask you to consider my wager offer is that I have an edge on you. Your emphasis on the folly of a sudden doubling tells me I know a thing you don’t. But I’ll tell you anyway. Shortly.

            BTW, what Adam says here seems to be true of you a bit more than me: “I agree that most people have a general understanding of economics, but that is mostly micro economics, which is what people personally live, and not macro economics.”

            Which is to say, you have an admirable picture of micro at a certain scale. I’d like to understand how much direct experience you have of stores on the verge of collapse. My own personal experience included lots of tech startups. Broadly, they hung on often for years in bad shape & jumped thru many hoops before finally throwing in the towel.

            And here’s a thing about me. As a STEM major, I learned to look down on my fellow students majoring in “communications” headed for jobs as journalists. Unlike maybe a lot of people, I try not to rely too much on the news. I’ve shown you that several times now. You’ll catch on someday.

            “If a minimum wage increase is gradual, he can probably survive.”

            “All of this means to me that a sudden and drastic increase in the minimum wage is not something that can be carelessly tacked on to another bill.”

            “Adam mentioned 1.4 million lost jobs, assuming a gradual increase to $15 over four years, so it would be more than that if the minimum is raised overnight.”

            What Adam mentioned was the CBO score (Congressional Budged Office).

            The reason CBO assumed a 4yr phase-in is they were scoring the bill passed by the House in Feb & sent on to the Senate titled “American Rescue Plan Act of 2021”.

            congress . gov / congressional-report / 117th-congress / house-report / 7

            Refer to Sec 2101 Raising the Federal Minimum Wage. This is the provision the Senate had to strike to meet Senate “budget reconciliation” rules.

            My summary: Bump up from $7.25 to $9.50 for year 1; then up $1.50/yr; til capped at $15. Tipped workers up from $2.13 to $5 yr 1; then up $2/yr til caught up; equal to general minimum wage thereafter. Annual COLA based on rise in median national hourly wage. This ends the evil political game: tipped wage was frozen in perpetuity, the general got stuck at $7.25 for years w/no COLAs (used to be ritual).

            If a law were named after me, I’d love it to be this: There’s no substitute for actually knowing stuff.

          18. Oops, sorry Adam, scanning visually backwards for a Reply button, I guess I missed one. You should search for a reply to you from me dated today March 12.

          19. Re: Adam T, March 10, 2021 at 3:41 am
            Re: rare econ journalists with econ degrees

            That’s not my experience. I guess you aren’t reading where I do. Like Bloomberg, Financial Times, The Economist, not to forget the NYT (I hate NYT, but that doesn’t extend to a particular aging columnist there).

            WSJ & Forbes are packed to the gills with rightwing ideologues. They aren’t always wrong, and I do like the WSJ’s compact presentation of important news, but they’re always slanted. Often they’re correct just because what they say is widely believed in business & it’s self-fulfilling religious faith. They’re also often wrong, seldom admitting it. Remind us of anyone?

          20. I can slip in 1 random note on the topic of pedagogy: What we’ve both observed about the basics of econ that many Americans have a good handle on happens to be why MMT can be a useful way to explain macro. IOW, it’s not a great fit for a professional economist’s toolkit. But much of a business economist’s job, as well as that of political economists, being communication, can make MMT a somewhat helpful different direction to get an idea across from.

  11. Wow. I don’t see anything dated after February 9. I guess we got tired of talking about Covid.

    I hope Tanner is all right.

  12. All of this couldn’t have heppened since Jan 20, I wonder what happened before that to cause this drop?

    1. Some of it is caused by an easing of the post-Christmas spike. Think of the first two weeks, approx Jan 9-22, not as a sudden downward turn, but rather as a return to the (already quite high) pre-Christmas levels.

      The decline since then is presumably related to vaccinations, or at least I have no alternate or supplementary explanation at the moment.

    2. No, still too soon to see vax effects. It’s social. Vax in CA is going very slowly. Supply shortages.

      Think about it. Surge on top of surge didn’t happen. People had thought they were experienced–savvy. Thought they could pull it off. Break the rules safely. The surge proved them wrong. They were chastened. At least, those who believed. Which is most of us. They backed off. Got careful again.

      I’m seeing lotta double masks in my county. That’s new. Cases cut in half. Precipitous drop in positivity–2 whole tiers. Widespread to substantial to moderate in 2-3 weeks.

  13. About that $30 home covid test. We need to get that price down & ditch the smartfone app. ANTIGEN TEST. Dammit.

  14. The US: “Wisconsin pharmacist who destroyed more than 500 vaccine doses believes Earth is flat, FBI says” Only in the US.

    1. Stuff it. You have your own collection of flaming loonies and fascists.
      Does the name Geert Wilders ring a bell? And even the beloved Queen Juliana had a wackola obsession with extraterrestrials and reincarnation.

      1. Can’t we all just agree that everyone is garbage (excepting, of course, commenters on this website, who are models of probity) and Covid just sets fire to them?

      2. Bill, the irredeemable awfulness of the United States is Tanner’s personal flat earth theory. Rational arguments about that are not going to get anywhere with him. That is why I approve of your telling him to stuff it.

        After granting that he is a model of probity, as Nature Mom suggests, of course.

      3. Everyone’s right, here. Especially Nature Mom. Yes, there are bad things anywhere. Wherever there’s relative freedom, there are outliers.

        But whatabout whatever Tanner’s country is a deflection. Misdirection is always the goal of any of the related rhetorical tactics, including the one where it happens to be holding up a mirror back at the accuser.

        I mean, the U.S. has problems right now. They’re big problems, not small ones. As far as I’m concerned, I couldn’t care less about the problems in Europe or China. Well, I do care. But if America stays the way it is now, that’s the ballgame. If the Dems don’t get rid of the filibuster, little good gets done in the next 2 years. In the meantime, the GOP across the country keeps up the good work of rigging voting rules. So the GOP takes back the Senate. Then democracy dies in darkness. Ha ha. I just mean, it dies.

        So, don’t stuff it, Tanner. Make anyone here who’s a blind flag-waver sick of your anti-American negativity.

        1. Tanner is suggesting the USA is the worst place on earth. We are pointing out others that have the same issues. That does not seem like whataboutism to me. But if you feel America is the worst, feel free to actually make that case.

          1. Didn’t mean it to smell like that. My point is that there’s one (or, to your point, three) horse’s ass in any crowd. Probably some astonishingly cool people too, but they rarely make the news. This shouldn’t be generalized to an entire country, or its population.

  15. According to NBC news article posted to Fark.com on Sunday: “Protesters torch Covid test center in Holland on first day of curfew”.

    A) I am sorry to hear this is a problem in a place like the Netherlands.

    B) I await Tanner’s explanation of how this shows the US is awful.

    1. Per the GF, nothing yet in Haarlem where she lives but it’s been nasty in A-Dam. Whole thing started in a spot called Urk – which has now displaced Bergen op Zoom as my favorite Dutch place name.

  16. I’d like to add 2 updates with slightly softer takes on the new variants than my last. Afterward, if you’ll please forgive a couple of digressions tying off loose ends from closed threads.

    Troubling pattern of CoV mutants

    South Africa mutation may weaken effect of vaccines

    The term of art is antibody resistance. Anyway, it seems the thrust is, we might need to reformulate our vaccines to mop up hopefully smaller “aftershock” epidemics a few months later. IOW, 1 or more added rounds of shots.

    2. At the end of the Vox article there’s a typo “arm’s race”. My feeling is this sort of slip was rare in the heyday of print, but is all too commonplace now. In a direct quote, a speaker can’t misspell words. The reporter is to blame. In a like vein, MidCon deserves a Mrs. Malaprop Medal for his contributions to humor: “eutopia”, gotta say that’s good; and “both sides of the isle”. Gilligan’s, I presume.

    3. What bugs me about “unlikeable” is it’s passive aggressive. “X is unlikeable” isn’t the same as “I don’t like X”. This diff is insidious. The latter is mutual — just between us. X can say “I don’t like you either.” This isn’t a claim, really. Veracity isn’t in doubt. No evidence is called for. It stands at face value.

    But how do you counter the claim that you’re unlikeable? That’s an opinion, not a fact. But it’s unfair. The opiner has shed the onus. “Hey, I’m just the messenger.” The burden of proof falls on the receiver. Who’s placed on their heels. Forced to make a case in their own defense not to their accuser but relative to bystanders. In short, this move is dirty pool.

    4. About that rioter shot by a cop. The blame lies not with that officer. Security forces were outnumbered & unprepared — without nonlethal means. Individual cops didn’t know who was still in harm’s way nor whether any of the rioters might be armed.

    WaPo: Rioter shot dead in the act of Capitol B&E

    Rioter shot to death climbing thru smashed window

    Includes an eyewitness account by a Republican house member.

    1. MyKep, thanks for making all these good points. I do have a question about your point 4 – are people saying that the woman who was shot dead in the January 6 insurrection should not have been shot? I hadn’t heard that, and I am surprised.

      1. Yes&no. In ripples. No, AFAICT, most people aren’t saying not a “clean shooting”. Cop did his job. In the moment. Made a call. Like a ref. But yes, she should be alive. She should never have been there.

        Defenses should’ve been prepared. Nonlethal means should precede deadly force. The crowd should’ve been held at bay. Out beyond a wider perimeter. Intel should’ve been heeded. Then there’s the incitement. Gullible people were baited. Mis-led. By lies.

        In a wide angle lens, armed cops shouldn’t be our catchall problem-solvers. In gun training it’s said, never point a gun at a living thing unless you truly intend to kill it. (Set aside drug darts.) Cops should be a last resort. As enlightened minds say rightly of soldiers.

        If we can’t deal with a good citizen like Ashli Babbitt — who IMO was nuts — short of killing them, then arguably a “free country” is not possible.

        1. I agree, Ms. Babbitt should not have been able to get to where she was in a position to need to be shot. That is because of Trump and his appointees, IMO. They deliberately refused to mobilize against the rioters.

          As for your third paragraph, I further agree that armed cops should not be where so many problems get dumped. That is what “defunding the police” is REALLY about. Unfortunately, that label was a godsend to the right.

          Finally, per your last point, I think in a free country it is not practical to prevent people from committing suicide. Some people do that by forcing others to kill them in self defense.

          Changes there will await improvements in funding for mental health care and improvements in psychological science (or non-lethal weapons?), but it is hard to see how it can be stopped entirely in a way consistent with personal liberty.

          1. Yup. To amplify rather than disagree, gun-control advocates argue misleadingly in that statistically, the serious reason to have fewer guns in circulation isn’t violence but suicide prevention. Especially handguns. That’s the means of choice for most males. Any delay in doing the deed is often enough to halt the decision.

          2. Add: Another maxim we’re taught is there’s no such thing as an unloaded gun. Except for a brief moment after you’ve actually looked & know for a fact that the chamber, barrel & magazine are all empty.

          3. No, it’s that they don’t *stress* suicide. They talk about accidents & assault. Both of which are just blips compared to suicide. Often they don’t even *mention* suicide. Because suicide isn’t polarizing. It lacks the emotional/political juice they want to drive the issue with.

          4. BTW, I’d point out the distinction between “in that” in my original sentence & just a naked “that”.

          5. M: “arguably a “free country” is not possible.”

            R: “In a free country it is not practical to prevent people from committing suicide. Some people do that by forcing others to kill them in self defense.”

            1) That doesn’t rebut my claim. There’s no such thing as a free country. It’s an aspiration. My position contra extremists is that given we have conflicting aspirations, we can never get there. It’s good to have these aspirations. But realistic expectations will let us improve. Progress in our good directions is the most we should expect. We should appreciate what we’ve achieved. Not only bemoan our shortcomings.

            2) I had just talked about that very thing. That reducing guns in homes would in fact prevent suicides. Not all. But some. Your attempt to move the goalposts on me was well-meaning but if you think about it, my point was we obsess over the pathological cases, disregarding their rarity.

            Sure, it might’ve been much better had I been able to propose a way to reduce “suicide by cop” incidents to 0. Had I offered that & we did cut that to 0, that would still be far less impact than the reduction in boring suicides by more conventional means that gun control could do for us. But here, right here, we’ve just illustrated why that’s such a hard case to make. We can’t keep our eye on the ball.

  17. Roger: What JorJor Wells misses is that “chance” is opportunity, not merely unpredictable. What’s at stake in equality of opportunity vs. outcome isn’t only “innate capacity”. Moreover, the 2 kinds of inequality overlap. Yes, everyone benefits from public utilities & stable, free & fair markets. All will so admit. Except for the rich.

    That’s in that inch they won’t give. They lifted themselves up by their own smarts & sweat. Conditions of the civilization around them had nothing to do with it. Must be. Otherwise, it might make some sense to give something back in the form of taxes. They cannot, must not, ever give 1in on that.

    That’s the essence of Ayn Rand libertarianism. Most mainstream libertarians, people who join the party so-named, are more naive. Conservatives weaponize their naivete. They’re their useful idiots.

    There are what I call “reform libertarians” who have somehow acquired a modicum of understanding of how the real world works. I could be said to be one of those.

    I’m a centrist as I keep a notion of how much common good is too far left. World history, even if we limit to recent attempts, tells us that too much of a heavy hand in either taxes or paternalism drowns the baby. Floods the engine. Stifles prosperity. We need freedom & sometimes a helping hand. Both. Life’s complicated. As is human nature. Ideologues haven’t come to grips with that.

    1. MikeP, I would suggest that your definition of chance is not broad enough, because chance can intervene in a person’s life in many way, such as chance meetings. It is often said “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”, or who your parent are.

      Why do you call George Orwell “JorJor”? Yes, he is misused by many people, especially on the right, but that is not his fault. His novels are not great, but his essays are.

      Except for those nitpicks, I agree with everything you say, especially your second paragraph and your final paragraph.

      1. You’re aware “George Orwell” was a pen name? I revere no one. Chris Hitchens was a marxist. He was for US intervention, including Iraq. Orwell had his own lens. No one is above reproach.

        Opportunity: a favorable combination of circumstances, time, and place. Seems plenty broad to me. (Also see happenstance, serendipity.)

        Whoever’s narrowminded here, it isn’t me. It’s clear to me that “who you know” & “who your parents are” aren’t the sort of things people I know mean when they talk about happenstance or serendipity. That kind of opportunity isn’t random, it’s systemic. And the only way to figure out that it’s going on is by looking at the statistics of outcomes. There remains no theory known to us that can figure out what’s the best way to write our code from first principles. No high-priced gunslinger who finds all our bugs. We test the hell out of our software. Even then, we can’t get out all the kinks without slow-rollout stages we call Alpha & Beta.

        This is why extremists are always wrong. They don’t see. Because they won’t look.

        1. I did not claim anyone was above reproach, And I know George Orwell was a pen name. What I asked is why you called him JorJor.

          Generally, giving someone a juvenile nickname has a purpose, usually denigration. (See debates featuring Donald Trump for examples.) But I guess it’s just your irrepressible irreverence or sense of humor. It doesn’t really matter.

          Nor should I have encouraged hairsplitting about the meaning of “chance”, I suppose. The definition of such a word in more or less in the eye of the beholder, and arguments about it are not going to reach any conclusion.

          I am a bit baffled by your detour into computer programming (I think that is what coding used to be called). I had no idea it was so subject to anything that could be called chance. But I know next to nothing about it, so that is hardly surprising. It is an interesting application of the idea of chance, to say the least.

          1. Arose by an udder name would smell like itself, not whatever else our name for it may make us think of.

            Freedom absolutists claim among many absurdities that American ideals promise equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes. I was saying to look at results of policy or political theory is necessary feedback toward improvement. That’s as much as we can & therefore should expect. Reality has to overrule dogma. Just as when facts & scientific theory conflict, facts win. Computers are complicated. Many effects are unforeseen. If we had an effective theoretical approach that’d let us predict all of them, they wouldn’t be unforeseen. When what we have as our theory is less powerful than that, basically the only scientific recourse we have left is to add “random variables”, also called “parameters”, AKA knobs. That gives us unwieldy models which are also unreliable. What remains to us is testing. We try to run new software thru a gauntlet & try to catch the major malfunctions. This is a basic lesson reality teaches us. Ideas don’t stand because they “make sense”. They stand if & only if they actually work.

            You can’t test a political theory without experiments. And yes, looking at “outcomes” & applying statistical techniques will be among our most essential tools. This is nothing more nor less than common sense. Which said ideologues lack in spades.

  18. I chuckled at “Canada’s response has been less than perfect”. The metric in Canada is always to compare ourselves to the U.S. and just try to be better than them, not best in the world, just less mediocre. Our healthcare really isn’t all the great compared to other industrialize nations.

    As an example, it’s really hard to get a decent, competent family doctor, as in one who tries to find underlying causes, then refer you to a specialist, instead for every doctor you get rushed through, prescribed some crap, out in five minutes or less, then given a followup appointment for the same thing next time.

    A lot of this is the fault of the governments, federal and provincial. Because of all the limitations, rules, and regulations, dues, and taxes, it basically isn’t possible to make a living doing competent family medicine in Canada. But there’s no way to fix it, the funding is federal, but the programs are provincial, so it’s like who do you talk to? Sixty seconds in, it’s “that’s not our responsibility, talk to federal (or provincial)”.

    This confusion is intentional, because it ensures the medical profession is not an organized entity. So for example, federally they could cut fees by half across the board for a discipline like chronic pain management, let the provinces administer, then when doctors are weakened by a year or two on “half rations”, take steps to remove all funding. This is for real happening right now in chronic pain management, word is next in line is cardiology.

    What was the medical associations’ responses to defunding chronic pain management? After hemming and hawing a while, they decided to “enter a dialog” with the federal and provincial governments. That’s politics-speak for wasting time. I was seeing this and thinking: FFS, you don’t “dialog”, instead, you influence byelections, get longstanding incumbents out of office, or at least make them promise the right things for their seats. Hit the governments where they notice.

    It’s a long rant, just angry right now that some provinces are looking to cut costs by administering only a single dose of COVID-19 vaccine to the elderly. SMH.

    1. I don’t know that what you say isn’t also correct, but the problem with chronic pain management in Canada is the same as that in the United States (and maybe in other countries): the demonization of opioids based on their illicit status outside of pain management.

      Opioid based pain-killers are now greatly restricted in both Canada and the United States. A specialist can lose their license, face financial penalties or be sued for ‘overprescribing’ prescription pain medication.

      This is more than ironic since this is occurring at the same time assisted death became legal in Canada after those arguing against this for years claiming that better palliative care, including more/better use of pain killers was all that was needed, not assisted death.

      1. Back in 2012, I was rear-ended by a garbage truck while stopped at a red light. It totaled my car and really screwed up my back. The first orthopedist I saw offered me painkillers, but I declined. I was very concerned about getting addicted. But after a year of trying everything short of surgery, I finally started taking Oxycodone. It has been the only thing that worked. I did end up having surgery but it didn’t help. My primary care doctor writes the prescriptions. Fortunately, he doesn’t prescribe opioids for many patients so I don’t think he will be pressured to stop prescribing them for me. I have been taking them for almost 8 years and I have accepted that I will probably be taking them for the rest of my life. What I strive to do is to take as few each day as I can so as to postpone needing to increase my dose due to tolerance.

        A few years ago, I tried medical marijuana as a way to take less Oxycodone. I had made it through high school, college, and law school and never used pot. I didn’t really like the way it made me hungry (gaining weight is not good for my back) but I discovered if I took a “balance” pill (50/50 CBD/THC) 2 hours before bed, I would sleep really well without having to take Oxycodone. In NY State only certain doctors are authorized to certify you for medical marijuana. I had certified via a web cam appointment with a service that just certified people. But went I went to recertify a year later, I was told I never should have been approved because of the opioid. If you take an opioid you can only be certified by a doctor providing ongoing treatment. But my doctor isn’t authorized to certify and because the organization he works for receives federal funding, technically he isn’t even allowed to talk to me about medical marijuana. So I could take less of an opioid if I was allowed to use medical marijuana, but that’s not allowed. But because pain I tolerate during the day can keep me up at night I often end up taking more at night than I do during the day. At least I save money. The Oxycodone copay is less than $5, but the balance pills are 30 for $120. It’s almost enough to make a guy want to legalize marijuana completely. Forget the almost. Honestly, if I were Biden I would call on Congress to repeal the laws making marijuana illegal and leave it up to the states. If Congress refused I would threaten to start enforcing the laws in the states that had legalized it. That would probably get enough recalcitrant Republicans to go along.

        1. It’s miserable that you have chronic pain, Michael McChesney. I’m glad there is something that helps. We agree about marijuana; I send a little money to the Drug Police Alliance every month or so.

        2. Sorry to hear of your troubles. Was wondering if you had ever tried kratom? It is legal in most places in the U.S. don’t know about elsewhere. But it can be effective for pain and energy but people tout it as a miracle drug with no downsides and that is simply not true. It is also physically and mentally addictive…but if you have already accepted you will be on opiates the rest of your life…it could be helpful to alternate between the two help prevent a tolerance increase. Best of luck.

          1. I had never heard of it but I googled it. The 2 things that concern me about are is the psychotropic effects and how difficult it might be to find a reliable supplier. But I will raise it with my doctor the next time I see him. Thank you for the suggestion.

  19. Potentially bad news…

    Reuters
    Scientists are not fully confident that COVID-19 vaccines will work on a new variant of the coronavirus found in South Africa, ITV’s political editor said on Monday, citing an unidentified scientific adviser to the British government.

    1. I will paste URLs & suffer the human intervention.

      Some facts here: gisaid.org

      You can click thru In Focus slideshow (see dots at bottom).

      2 in particular:
      http://gisaid.org/references/gisaid-in-the-news/comment-on-recent-spike-protein-changes
      http://gisaid.org/references/gisaid-in-the-news/uk-reports-new-variant-termed-vui-20201201

      These comments pre-date variants from Brazil & now US. None of these mutations increase severity. Probably because severity is connected to vigorous immune response more than underlying virus replication. These are all spike (S) protein mutations. It’s established the UK one apparently doesn’t affect vaccine efficacy.

      There are 2 preprints on medRxiv reporting anecdotally (negligible case count) on convalescent plasma from covid survivors. SA variant resists those antibodies. Brazil & US new variants are more similar to SA than UK. Our miracle 95% effective mRNA vaccines are toast.

      Not that they’re useless. But they’ll simply hasten transition to prevalence of more infectious cousins. It’s just what happens when we just let a virus run wild. That’s why we’re supposed to take massive steps early to nip the epidemic in the bud. Not just pols, but elites, doctors & scientists alike, let the perfect stand in the way of stopping the spread.

      We don’t have N-protein tests that can be done conveniently in the home, cheap enough for asymptomatic citizens to check daily. We’re living in a capitalist purgatory where the private sector won’t develop such things because our elites already signaled they’re unwanted. There’s no funding for masspro.

      If you never heard of PittCoVacc, it would’ve been cheap to make, easy to masspro & it’s a patch, not a shot, no vials, no freezer, no need for syringe training. Our vaunted Warp Speed notwithstanding, only the shiny hi-tech of mRNA got greenlit. Competitors were snuffed out. Slow walked by FDA simply never approving trials.

      Ordinary people, ie lowlifes, can’t be relied on to do the tests right. They can’t be trusted to report themselves. I say, it takes a certain mentality–to begin with, belief–to bother with home testing. If I’m +, I’ll quarantine. The test tells me I’m infectious–right now. A negative definitely tells me I’m not infectious today. There are false positives. I stay home & take the test again tomorrow. If you won’t go all-out to stop an epidemic cuz you’re so high&mighty you can’t trust me just that far–you’re going to hell. FUCK YOU.

  20. As coronavirus death toll surpasses 350,000, Trump calls U.S. count ‘far exaggerated.’

    Hell of a leader you got there….

    1. It’s difficult to see how he can reach such a conclusion. The number of excess deaths in 2020 was MORE than the number officially attributed to COVID, so if anything the coronavirus number is probably an undercount. (And we know of a couple of states that got caught hiding coronavirus fatalities back around early summer.)

      Of course the excess deaths could be indirectly caused by COVID disruptions to the medical care chain.

      Or they could be unrelated.

      In no case does it appear that the corona numbers are exaggerated.

      1. It goes without saying that the things Trump says are not based on fact or reason, but are what he wants to be true and what he wants other people to think are true. I said it anyway, though, because I enjoy saying it, pretty much like Tanner enjoys reminding us how awful Trump is. As if we didn’t know.

  21. We have hospitals turning people away, meanwhile Trump is going on his greatest hits tour once again. You know, blackmail, sedition, the usual. I was ready to move on and get this era of total hell out of mind, but fuck it, I hope the piece of shit gets thrown into federal prison. Two weeks left and the orange fucktard is still committing crimes. I’m assuming he’ll attempt a self pardon, but fuck it up somehow.

    1. It’s on tape…. ‘I just want to find 11,780 votes’: In extraordinary hour-long call, Trump pressures Georgia secretary of state to recalculate the vote in his favor. Face it…you live in Bananistan.

      1. There’s no spinning the intent of the audio either. Listening to it does it justice, he sounds a D-tier wanna be mob boss. After being mostly able to be ignored since November, I guess the POS just needs to give everyone one last reminded of how terrible him and his cult are.

        Apparently, he can be impeached once out of office to be prevented from running ever again. I’m not sure the point of going through all of that if there’s not the votes, but maybe the Republicans will want to purge him from their party to end it all and help their own potential 2024 prospects …

        Nah he’ll still hang over them like the spineless cowards they are.

  22. “Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.”

  23. Meanwhile, the GOP House is less than concerned about the pandemic. Apparently 140 members that are going to challenge the electoral votes – not that it matters – but it shows what a fucked up system we live in.

    It’s not a democracy, because as it turns out, you can just overturn the Presidential results if you own the House and Senate apparently. Which is what would have happened had the Democrats had not taken the house two years ago.

    The country is indefinitely fucked because of the brainwashed waste of life cult that exists here.

  24. “Wisconsin health-care worker ‘intentionally’ ruined more than 500 coronavirus vaccine doses, hospital says.” Home of the crazies?

    1. The guy who did it (he confessed) is a 46 year old pharmacist. A pharmacist, for pete’s sake.

      Grafton is a somewhat upper crust exurb of Milwaukee. Lots of people who have been Republican for generations. Maybe he only listened to the “right” news, or maybe he’s a nut. He must have figured he was saving peoples’ lives. Or maybe their IMMORTAL SOULS. Who knows? He believes lies, and he may have killed people. That’s where 40 years of Fox News and their ilk have gotten us.

  25. Don’t worry, the minuscule amount given to keep people afloat will make up for 340,000 dead. If there’s a Hell, Mitch McConnell and everyone who supports him will have a VIP seat there. And I don’t expect the brain dead rural morons in Georgia will be the ones to give anyone a fighting chance to turn this around.

    1. Sure, the BDRMs (or “bedrooms” as they like to be called) are a factor. But if they were able to swing to Biden, there’s hope. C’mon black folks! Get out there, vote, & knock Mitch’s block off!

  26. Texas posted a record 26,990 new Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, shattering the previous all-time high established less than a week ago.

  27. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now predicts the U.S. will see 400,000 coronavirus deaths by Jan. 20, when President Donald Trump is to leave office.

  28. More than 16 million Britons are now required to stay at home as a full lockdown came into force Sunday in London and southeast England, part of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s effort to contain an “out of control” new strain of the coronavirus. The U.K. reported the most Covid-19 infections since the start of the pandemic.

    The U.S. doesn’t need to suspend flights from the U.K. based on a coronavirus mutation that helped prompt an emergency lockdown for London, a member of the White House virus task force said.

    “I really don’t believe we need to do that yet” Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.

    Yeah, I’m real optimistic….

  29. Yet you have evil scum like the senator from Wisconsin preventing people from getting not even the bare minimum in support in relief, with he himself worth $40 million and voting for hundreds of thousands in tax cuts – for himself.

    Supposedly a deal is close to being reached, but I’m sure it will consist of the usual: plenty of money the wealthy will get their hands on one way or another with more welfare for the rich, and more hardship and death for everyone else.

    1. and you watch the news, they don’t even mention whether McConnell’s wet dream of a corporate license to kill (or “liability protection” as they bvlandly call it) is in or out.

  30. Florida is also the state, don’t forget, that *purposefully* designed its unemployment system to fail in order to keep numbers artificially low.

    So yeah, the fact that they’ve falsified COVID numbers is not only unsurprising, but also expected.

    1. We have to be very thankful that so many Republican officials were NOT like these in Florida, at least when it came to the election. I suppose they will be purged from the party ASAP.

  31. To MikeP, thanks for your replies. Re the post WWII boom: You may be right, but there were a LOT of white males before Pearl Harbor who were definitely NOT part of anything that could be called an in-group. My father, for one, since HIS father was employed as a chauffeur (a servant-class job) and was a compulsive gambler too boot. Dad became solidly middle class, something that was not on the radar before the war, and worked hard to stay there.

    IMO, it was still one of the greatest lifting-all-boats booms in American history, and if others did not benefit as much as white males, those others still benefited substantially from the 25-30 years long boom.

    He and my mother both worked in the field of insurance (auto and property, not health). I am not surprised that Kaiser is run like any other insurance company. BTW, traditionally, most insurance companies only more or less broke even on premiums vs, expenses. The profit came from investing their cash reserves. Has that changed? (Apologies if you said exactly that, I cannot go back from here to check your reply.)

    1. Roger, yes. It’s significant that the postwar prosperity in the U.S. was broadly shared. Relatively, vs. more recent decades. It’s a big enough deal to hold it up as an icon for the ideal.

      OTOH, the U.S. can’t lift up the entire world to our standard of living by sharing our wealth. That’s just too much dilution. How much we can raise all boats by soaking the rich all by itself isn’t a settled question. Fairness is complicated. We need a hodgepodge of mostly counter-measures precisely because the ideal will be more of an aspiration than directly realizable. There just isn’t any one silver bullet.

      Sure, that’s not a unique story. My dad was born in 1927. His family migrated to Lo-Cal from the show-me state. Call that a dustbowl adjacent movement. They “moved around” a lot & were sometimes homeless. He got drafted AFTER the Korean armistice in his late 20s. A skilled carpenter, he was placed in the corps of engineers. On return got his builder’s licence & became a contractor. He built the house I now own & live in on spec for $50k in the early 60s. He benefited from govt subsidies including the G.I. Bill. He was a white dude with an English surname. I want to repeat what I said about privilege.

      It never occurs to you when you have it. That’s why rich men think of themselves as self-made. To think otherwise puts in doubt that they “earned” it. Even when Obama tried to point out that running a business depends on opportunity, labor supply & infrastructure somehow provided by the milieu they operate in, successful businessmen attribute their success vs. failure of others to their own sweat & brains. Even after being shown that people of similar talent, situation & effort failed. Luck still played no role. AKA motivated thinking.

      A peer in my physics club (half dz of us) was heir to a tech pioneer, now a poobah in the skeptics community that puts out the Skeptical Inquirer. He’s so not disillusioned that even after I ran off the litany of Jim Crow, Chinese Exclusionary Act, Japanese internment, he still denied racist sentiments were a significant strain in American history. His exact words: “No, I can’t believe that!” A goddamn skeptic, he is. A worshiper of rational, scientific thinking. I was flabbergasted.

      You’re basically right about insurance, but stop one step shy. Let’s drop the unfair term “protection racket” & say what I’d really meant: Their business arises from people’s fears. The extra step is that, OK, sales is important. But once you get a customer to sign a contract, premiums are pretty reliable. All investments from premiums are typically top-rated bonds. An insurance company can stably last a century or more. But the claims side of the business is far from reliable, or else why would anyone want insurance in the 1st place?

      Insurance companies therefore investigate claims. They can’t afford to incur extra costs from false claims. Actuarial techniques could figure in some amount of fraud. But in general, if you can’t keep a lid on systematic but unexpected payouts, you’d go bankrupt. For much the same reason airlines overbook anticipating cancellations, claims adjusters deny claims on technicalities & moreover don’t go out of their way to make sure claimants execute every jot & tittle exactly as they must, unless they specifically ask for guidance. In short, claims excluded for nebulous reasons help offset any undetected fraud that may slip through the cracks. In short, there’s an understandable incentive to deny claims. Some adjusters pay close attention to ethics. But if there’s anything we’re learning right now, we ignore incentives at our peril.

      1. MikeP: Thank you for your reply. I guess we are using the words “privilege” or “in group” in two different ways. When I think of privileged people, I tend to think of people like George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, or Donald Trump. People who, in the classic phrase, were born on third base yet think they hit a triple.

        Yet you are right about your father and mine. They were not born to privilege in that sense. They were born poor, were given an opportunity (in exchange for military service) and took it.

        But if they had been black, they would not have been able to take it, at least not to anything like the same extent. Or if they had been women, they also would have had reduced scope to prosper, as well as a greatly reduced opportunity for military.

        So I am agreeing with you. I am just pointing out why it is a bit jolting to me to hear my father – who shot rabbits to put food on the table in the Depression – described as privileged. But I see what you mean, and your point is good.

        BTW, my father was a claims adjuster for most of his post-war career, so I am very familiar with the concept of insurance fraud. (Mom was in underwriting, if that is the correct term for calculating premiums. I can still remember her explaining on the phone how “extended forks” really increased your motorcycle insurance bill.)

        1. Here on the left coast my usage is the vernacular. Often conjoined: white privilege. Talking about the Karen who called 911 on a black man for pointing out to her dogs in the park are supposed to be leashed. She didn’t really make the call but pretended to tell the dispatcher the man threatened her & she was scared. She knows the man knows if the cops come he’s going to leave in custody. We call that privilege. Karen wasn’t her actual name, I believe. That too is just the idiom.

          I’d been going to point out that even when women got the vote, black suffragettes didn’t get it & weren’t even ever allowed to march alongside the white women. But happily that observation has become extraneous.

          I see that I started 2 sentences in a row with “In short”. At my age, we call this getting old. Were we straighter shooters, we’d call it by its name: dementia.

          1. MikeP, in reference to dementia: overuse of convenient phrases only means you are writing rapidly and frequently. Dementia would show in the inability to be coherent or form arguments. That is, you start sounding like Donald Trump.

            BTW (which is something I overuse), Mark Twain once wrote that in other languages people do not worry about repeating words or phrases that way. That would have been about 150 years ago, so it may no longer be true, but I still find it comforting when I see that I have done that.

        2. BTW, particularly insidious form of privilege: white folks reflexively think of themselves as just Americans. They’re unique in getting away with it & take it for granted. Black folks can easily test for this by referring to white folks as an “interest group” & wait for the strenuous denials that that term can apply to them. Whites don’t see themselves as special — precisely what makes them so. Whites are still 70% of citizens counting Hispanics & I do so. But the majority simply sees itself as the default. They use “interest groups” to separate themselves from anyone who might have a “civil rights” agenda.

          1. I’m white and don’t take any offense at the word privilege or take it for granted. Its just sad that individuals can’t think deeper than phrasing. All that really needs to be understood is that given all else being equal, if you split two universes parallel to one another at certain point, gender or race will always face hardship compared to a white counterpart in the eyes of opportunity or authority.

            I’m not sure why many white people take offense at it, because not being looked at as suspicious or being given the benefit of the doubt being white is just ingrained in some people that its like that for everyone, and it’s ridiculous how some people assume they can speak to walking in someone’s shoes.

            I do wish regardless of race, people would look through token identity call outs in political positions though. There are a lot of minorities that have much worse policy positions than counterparts, and individuals like Cornel West have called this out. Biden has put a variety of minorities and women in his cabinet, but in the end it’s the policies that matter. He’s already been on audio brushing aside police reform. In the end all that matters is the polices and reform being implemented to benefit everyone, and some of the most damaging individuals involved in all these mess were people like Kentucky’s Attorney General.

            Hopefully eventually knowledge is attained and understood that what’s in the books is what matters, and not the voice or person it comes from.

          2. Indy, so you’re the exception that proves the rule. I’m almost always an exception to trends I spot. These are anecdotes. My mom & dad are both anecdotal exceptions to my present broad brush assertion, too.

            Not that we didn’t benefit from white privilege. We live in an area where Jews don’t hide their id. But, all the same, there’s plenty of disparate impacts going on for all to see, if you aren’t sleepwalking. My dad did think he was better than everyone else & that was a misconception.

            My mom doesn’t see herself as superior. She wants nothing but to be left to live her own way. She can see that her friends aren’t as well off. She made some good moves. Still, the big difference in her life story was she had a union job. 4 decades a teamster. Defined benefit pension. Not spousal but own SSI from own wages. Has a rental income. Still paying income & property taxes, quarterly. All the good stuff of the American dream. I won’t generalize from her.

            Now, though my tone may be combative, I recognize we’re in basic agreement. My “exceptions” are fairly commonplace in the sense there’re a lot of us with similar stories. OTOH, as you did say, there’re “many” white people who insist the relative freedom they enjoy from being watched with suspicion is a normal, “American” thing, not just a “white” one. It’s a comforting idea & consistent with their experience.

            We also agree on your 2 ancilla. 1) That liberals tend to project their own observations of discrimination on the people who happen to be, it can be argued, the victims. But, counter such expectations, latinos or hispanics self-identify as whites. Surprisingly many vote “against their own [presumed] interests”. Someone is spending too much time swimming in their own koolaid.

            2) I’ve said Biden IMO is no panacea. I agree we need big changes in law enforcement.

            OTOH, I think the more we focus on how many cops & how we train them, the more we keep bashing our head into the wall. We need to define “disturbances” better. So more incidents don’t need cops. Anyway, excessive force is hardly the leading order term in what’s wrong with our legal system.

            My biggest beef though, is I put more stock in what Job Eiden has to say than Cornel West. Cornel’s a marxist. A nut. Also, self-aggrandizing. A narcissist.

            Moderates are his enemies not for their competing viewpoint but because their truth refutes his hype. His polemics is all about stolen thunder. Nothing else really matters to him. In that way, he’s Trump.

      2. I didn’t claim a more specific disorder: Alzheimer’s. I don’t claim to understand the exact mechanism. But this is def a failure of short term memory. At one point I had planned to sum up. I began my close, the summary lead-in ran a shade long, and elapsed time was enough to let me forget I’d begun the sum-up already. Had I been able to hold that thought in mind, I could’ve simply omitted the redundant sum-up signal. When I later saw what I’d done, that was a facepalm moment. I’d never have made such a blooper 20 years ago. It crept up on me during the past 15yrs, has accelerated & is now a regular occurrence.

        Such self-consciousness is one of my ugly faults.

  32. I imagine a rather significant number of the 1918 roster of physicians were either:
    -serving in the military, and consequently unavailable to the civilian population, or
    -down sick with the flu themselves. In my home town of about five thousand people, at the epidemic’s worst there were just two doctors to deal with the maybe 1000 people stricken.

    Also, with hospitals not an option for so many 1918 Americans (especially in rural areas), that meant that victims suffered (and maybe died) at home, with family members or volunteers forced to deal with the Spanish flu’s dreadful symptoms. However you want to crunch the statistics, you’ll never convince me that Covid-19, as bad as it is, even approaches the 1918 pandemic for overall horrendousness.

  33. check your math. The population of the US was less than 1/3 what it is today (103m vs 328m), so even with 1/7 the number of doctors, it’d be much much less than 20x the workload.

    Also take into account about 95% of today’s “covid deaths” are octogenarians already dying from something else in nursing facilities, and the doctors’ workload is reduced astronomically.

    1. My math is right.

      • In October of 1918, they had 195,000 fatalities for 140,000 doctors. That’s 1.39 per doc.
      • In December of 2020, we will have about 65,000 fatalities this month for 1,000,000 doctors. That’s .065 per doctor.

      Therefore, they had more than 20 times the fatality workload per doctor.

      The reason you got confused is that the absolute population size is irrelevant to the case load of a specific pandemic. It’s just the number of patients and the number of doctors that determine the case load. The number of non-patients in the population isn’t relevant.

      • The real impact of the 1918 pandemic was probably much greater than the raw numbers indicate because the doctors were farther apart than today, and travel methods were more primitive, and thus the docs may have had to travel much longer to administer to their patients.
      • This is further supported by your other point about today’s work load being less than is apparent because of the location of the patients. If today’s work load is less than apparent, and the 1918 workload was at least as as heavy as apparent, then the strain on 1918 doctors may have been much MORE than what can be calculated by the patient/doctor ratio.

      In other words, if I made any incorrect estimate on the the impact of the October 1918 situation, it’s that the doctors’ workload then was far MORE than 20x what it is in December of 2020. They were fortunate in one respect: After that terrifying month, the fatality numbers plummeted and the doctors were able to get some relief. That one month represented nearly a third of the total fatalities from that pandemic. In contrast, our trailing months are expected to be similar to December (if not worse), and our doctors will get no relief until the vaccine is distributed widely.

      Of course the size of the population is relevant to another stat. In October, 1918, the death rate was approximately one per every 500 Americans. In December of 2020, the death rate will be about one per 5,000 Americans. So in that respect, the greatest one-month impact of the Spanish Flu on the population was about 10 times as much as today’s.

      The difference between the two calculations (impact on doctor’s caseload and impact on population) is that they had something like 14 doctors per 10,000 people in those days, while we now have approximately 30.

  34. One more political point. Not that there can’t be changes to the Electoral College (like getting rid of the actual electoral college voters who are pretty much pointless now that the Supreme Court has ruled that states can bar ‘faithless electors.’)

    Aside from the immediate concerns with the Electoral College, I do think this election once again showed the validity of the Electoral College. It is revisionist history to claim that the E.C was designed to protect the small states, it was designed to protect the slave states. However, the way it did that was through ‘balance of power’ politics that I do think has validity, in that the E.C prevents a candidate from simply appealing to one region of the nation and running up votes in that one region.

    In 2016 Hilary Clinton won the North East and split the West, but lost the Midwest and the South. So, Trump won more regions even as he lost the popular vote.

    In 2020, Joe Biden won the North East, arguably won the West and split the Midwest and only lost the South. So, Joe Biden won by doing better on a regional basis as well as on a popular vote basis.

  35. There hasn’t been a political thread here recently, but for anybody who wants solid evidence the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, I think this should provide it, especially since this is the same argument that showed the 2016 Presidential election wasn’t stolen (not by altering ballots anyway.)

    Joe Biden ended up with 51.3% of the vote, Hillary Clinton had 48.3% in 2016.
    Joe Biden received a higher share of the vote relative to Hillary Clinton in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

    Donald Trump ended up with 46.9% of the vote, he had 46.2% in 2016.
    Donald Trump received a higher share of the vote relative to his 2016 vote in 33 states and the District of Columbia, the same share of the vote in 3 states and a lesser share of the vote in 15 states.

    The gap between Trump and the Democratic candidate improved for Biden relative to Clinton in 42 states and the District of Columbia and remained the same in two states. For instance, in Ohio, Trump won in 2016 by 8.5% and he won in 2020 by the same 8.5%. So this was one of the two states where the gap remained the same (Nevada was the other.)

    So, in order for Joe Biden to have cheated with altering ballots or using otherwise fraudulent votes, he not only would have had to have cheated in the four states Trump is refusing to concede, he would have had to have cheated in virtually all 50 states and the district of Columbia. Even Trump has not seriously made this allegation (outside of vague claims of mail in votes.)

    For those interested, these are the seven states where Trump did better over his Democratic opponent in 2020 relative to 2016.

    1.Arkansas
    2.California
    3.Florida
    4.Hawaii
    5.Illinois
    6.Utah
    7.D.C

    Florida has been much discussed and Utah isn’t a surprise given the large number of Republicans who voted 3rd party in 2016 (remember Evan McMullin?) I think Trump’s slight gain in D.C is based on him improving on young black voters and his improvement in California was due to his improvement with rural Latino voters. That factor was most strongly seen in Texas where he did significantly better in the Rio Grande Valley relative to 2016, but in Texas it was more than offset by largely white suburban voters voting for Biden in much larger numbers than they did for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

    I suspect the reason why Biden did worse against Trump relative to Hillary Clinton in Illinois and Arkansas was Hillary Clinton’s home town advantage in those states. I’m not sure how much this can be argued for Illinois though. However, for instance, while we see that Biden nationally did 2.3% better against Trump than Hillary Clinton did (a 4.4% gap as compared to Hillary Clinton’s 2.1% gap) Biden did only 0.7% better in New York against Trump than Hillary Clinton did. Clinton having been a New York Senator for 8 years.

  36. To Roger, Tanner: I disagree w/u on that well-seasoned NYT Op. It’s pollyannish & triumphal & believes the playing field has utterly changed when in fact we’ve eked out a narrow escape from hell by the skin of our teeth. Any road back to “normal” is going to be a hard fight up a steep, muddy slope.

    To Roger, Adam: No, Trump isn’t leader of the conservatives. He’s not even a conservative. Yeah, a lot of conservative politicians feel Trump has had them by the balls. But the actual GOP leader McConnell (Ryan before he took a tumble) put the bit in Trump’s mouth. Trump needed to look successful. That’s all he cared about. It was transparent & easy to manipulate him to be a conservative. They laid out his policy agenda, made him drink their koolaid. His rank was ack-ack gunner, not the CinC.

    I’m not saying all conservatives are alike. But those who matter most who’re still driving the bus at this moment are who I was talking about. It’s Mitch who’s said this over & over, that “elections have consequences”. It’s him & many other GOP stalwarts all across the nation who believe in hardball, not polity. For whom vote suppression for the sake of their supremacy, over democracy, fair governance & norms, are fair play in their bare metal “letter of the law” worldview. IOW, civil cold war. These attitudes were evident in Pat Buchanan’s campaign, the tactics made landfall when Newt was speaker. Kasich was Newt’s sidekick then, serving as the tip of the spear spreading the lie that budget cuts were increases, failing to disclose to the press & the public that his disingenuous figures weren’t in constant dollars — that was not the norm. Grandstanding. And the Tea Party. Good lord. Stephen Miller & Bannon ought to have died in the wilderness, but no, they thrived in a paradise the GOP laid out in front of them. If Fox hadn’t become the voice of the right’s wingnuts, meaning Trump’s bandwagon, and I’d toss in all 70M voters because at least half of them are intelligent & affluent, the same market demand would’ve created the same bullhorn somewhere else. Even the present turncoats who BTW are still persona non grata to the in-crowd, went along with the party’s underhanded tricks for decades. But my head tells my heart to turn the other cheek. That is, to be grateful for allies. We need each other.

    Here’s an example of such a one who went on TV to fully endorse my opinion.

    Lincoln Project Steve Schmidt: Trump even now still poisoning democracy.
    youtube . com / watch?v=QjaygqD3m1I

    1. Yep. Your remarks would be better addressed to Michael McChesney than to me. As I understand it, he still thinks the Republicans are a conservative party. They are not, they are oligarchical and authoritarian, at least at the top. And the right wing media is too, no matter what they claim about themselves.

    2. I may have slipped up on occasion and used the term ‘conservative’ or used the term ‘conservative’ because that’s the term the person I was replying to used. But, like Roger, you also have no disagreement from me.

      I’m not a conservative, but there is a genuine ideology behind conservatism and an honorable tradition of conservative politicians including the likes of George H W Bush.

      Modern Republicans, like McConnell and most Republican voters are frequently nihilists with no consistent beliefs. So, the term I use for them is either ‘right winger’ or ‘reactionary.’

      Unlike Republican voters though, I do think McConnell has an ideology, which is to make the United States into a Theocratic Oligarchy controlled by a small number of genuine wealthy elites and ministers of evangelical mega churches.

      1. The Trumpists, 9-Commandment Christians and Tea Baggers have pretty much run off with the term conservative the way Baltimore ran off with the Browns (25 years ago this weekend). Which leaves a big problem for the small group of the real thing such as myself. If we use the C word to identify ourselves, it is assumed we are scummy lowlife cultists because most people calling themselves that nowadays are. “Center/right” lacks sizzle and is more of a European concept. Funny thing is that we most resemble 1800s English liberals but that name seems to have been taken. And Lincolnonian-TRite-Ikeist is a little cumbersome. Guess I’ll keep working on it.

          1. Whig? Well if we’re talking early 1700s England when they were backing Marlborough, one of my faves, maybe, otherwise not. Ghibelline or Black Guelph no – enemies of my main man Dante (White Guelph). Bull Moose – TR was sui generis. Roundhead – only in the strange Southern interpretation that the Damn Yankees were their descendants and the Southies were descended from the superior Cavaliers (overlooking who had won) -very proud of my direct ancestor in blue. But no big Oliver Cromwell fan if even less of a fan of Charles I. Still working on it.

        1. Mugwumps?

          Pretty similar situation. They abandoned the Republican party to support a Democrat because the Republican was a corrupt scumbag.

        2. I should see if I can find it in the textbook I read, but this is more what I was thinking of in terms of the prouder history of conservatives.

          This was a Republican politician probably in New England sometime in the late 1980s who got elected on a platform not to eliminate some government program but to make it more efficient, using the terminology of today ‘transparent’ and easier for citizens to access.

          Using the new technology available at the time, this conservative achieved these three goals.

          So, a name I’d suggest, even though it’s more Canadian, but is used commonly used in some states, is a ‘good government Conservative.’

          (The United States was founded on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Canada was founded on peace, order and good government.)

          1. A politician? Running on the promise to do a good thing? He got elected? He actually did that good thing? This is sounding like George not being able to tell a lie about a cherry tree. Did you get a name?

          2. The politician was a woman. I’ll look for the article and the textbook. There was a time, especially before Ronald Reagan, but also during the George H W Bush Administration when Republicans ran on platforms of providing efficient services.

          3. I found the textbook and the article, it was a man, but I was right about the rest, the Republican was from New England (Maine) and he was elected in 1986.

            I mentioned the new technology aspects to this and this is from a textbook called “Business Information Systems: A Problem Solving Approach” (1991) Kenneth C Laudon and Jane Price Laudon

            Page 170 Focus on Problem Solving

            A Promise Fulfilled

            “Desktop publishing may not help balance the budget or lower taxes, but it did help Governor John R. McKernan Jr of Maine keep his campaign promise to give voters more and better information on the status of their public schools. In his inaugural address, McKernan called for a ‘report card’ on Maine schools. When he made the promise, however, the governor did not realize he would have to overcome serious technical barriers to achieve it.

            The task of developing report card for each of the nearly 300 school administrative units fell to Maine’s Commissioner of Education, Eve M. Blitches. She created a task force of about 20 people, who met monthly for most of the year.

            The group faced several problems. Not only would the report have to be completed two weeks after the data had been accumulated, but the report would have to convert dry, sometimes unpalatable data into fare for mass consumption. “We had a diverse readership for the report card, technical educators and administrators, as well as the public with an interest in the school budget” the the director of management information systems. “It had to be self-explanatory, avoiding overly technical statistics, while still addressing the audiences without compromising the quality of the information. We knew that to communicate to the man on the street, we had to do it graphically.”

            Using Aldus Pagemaker desktop-publishing and Full Impact presentation graphics software, the group was able to complete the Report Card for Maine Schools on schedule. The report had an immediate impact and was widely discussed. Furthermore, the Department of Education was able to increase public awareness of the schools by producing new versions of the report, changing the format and presentation of the data.”

            From Clay Andres, A Promise Fulfilled: Maine’s Department of Education Uses Automated Report Generation to Keep a Campaign Promise” ITC Desktop 5, Novembe-December, 1989 pages 38-42

          4. The Maine School’s Report Card led to the development of an educational system starting in 1992 called “Common Core.” However, don’t let that terrible name fool you.

            Although there was some focus on national standardized testing, the primary focus of this Common Core was on interdisciplinary teaching. I am a strong advocate for interdisciplinary teaching. As a high school teacher at a non profit private school I teach two courses where I frequently interconnect the content from one course to the other : concepts of economics and modern history.

            Modern history meaning from roughly 1888 to 2000. (From when Kaiser Wilhelm II took power in Germany to when Vladimir Putin took power in Russia.)

            I teach one class before that in both history and concepts in economics that goes from the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688-1689 to 1888. 200 years of history in two classes.

          5. Glad it was real. Common Core is not the Devil, it’s just that any top-down educational initiative has to overcome the stank of No Child’s Behind Left.

        3. Bill, your problem isn’t branding. Seeing that all the labels that have been suggested to you so far are obsolete, it ought to be clear to all that you’re a homeless person.

          There’s no available shelter anywhere near where you’re shopping. Another obsolete label that used to apply to you might’ve been “liberal”. Nowadays that’s moved way off to your left, if you squint you might just be able to make it out. If you head off that way, ASAP, you should be able to reach it before you succumb to the elements.

          My job experience as a well-paid engineer at tech startups afforded me fortuitous perspective. I was a libertarian small gov conservative. From that perch one sees capitalism as conservatives do: Wage slaves are suckers. Joining a startup is consistent with that. The incentives made us participants in capitalism. But as such, I got exposed 1st & close-2nd hand to a few IPOs. Negotiated between top execs & a bank. Guess who got the gold mine & who got the shaft? Whose options got reverse split + multiyear embargo? Hint: Everyone who wasn’t a top exec or venture funder.

          That made me think about wage slaves in general in a new light. Maybe they didn’t just lack entrepreneurial spirit. Maybe they lacked financial wherewithal to risk failure. Maybe they were doing the best they could. And just maybe, trickle-down economics really was voodoo.

          The truth is, we’re a long way from what I here referred to as moving TOO FAR to the left. My leftward shift has been animated by “raising all boats”. Not like our post WW2 boom that benefited only the in-group but broad enough to truly justify the lies we sold the world on, not to mention spreading them among ourselves. In a way, communist China saw thru our rhetoric & instated our plan just as well as we had, minus all this freedom BS.

          I see the liberals, who plucked the low-hanging fruit of “neoliberalism” that conservatives could swallow while essentially disregarding hardships both regional & for middle & lower income brackets (the wage slaves), as guilty of omission sins. That’s the insidious & therefore more perilous kind. It’s a point Kurt Anderson makes in Evil Geniuses, that liberal elites were the right’s “useful idiots”. But I say he’s wrong to pin most of the blame on a handful of plutocrats or even “the 1%”. We affluent brats played pretty much the role of Nazi collaborators.

          So, what do I mean by TOO FAR? Well, I do think the financial system is rigged to glom money to money & the tiny role of most citizens in this layer of capitalism is no good for a “free” country. But Marx was nuts, marxism a fable & “end capitalism” is no way to frame financial reform. Likewise, while cop training isn’t the solution to our awful law enforcement & 1st responders to noncrime situations should be professionals of some sort, not crime-fighters armed with a deadly weapon, still, “defund the police” & “abolish ICE” — though such slogans do get the cause into the news — are negatives begging to be summarily rebuked. In short, “reform” is too little, but we need better ways to say “overhaul”.

          Brass tacks time: Adding a Public Option to healthcare is risky but probably a needed stick. Eliminate private insurance? In this country? I don’t think so. I mean, the very business model of any successful insurance co is effectively organized crime, eg, protection racket, deny claims, &c, but still.

          [Employee-owned Kaiser a case in pt. Everyone there is aware Kaiser is foremost insurance, medical provider 2nd. They’re short-staffed, especially on the weekend. Must route patients to big impersonal centers for fancy equipment — just 2 of many reasons they kill patients that’d otherwise receive care & live. Reasons we need a stick to threaten them with.]

          UBI? No, its appeal is as a complete replacement for targeted supports. More limited form? If too small, no good at all. Would need to be big enough to make a noticeable impact but then could be expensive.

          Wealth tax? Aye. “Starve the beast” has been outed as an empty lie. For the U.S., govt deficits haven’t mattered since WW2. It’s plagued us only as a psychotic disorder. Recent GOP tax cut proved it, but everyone knew it was a loser already, so just a last desperate cash grab.

          Labor market? Need to restore balance of power betw mgmt & workers. In absence of collective bargaining, govt must intervene. Dunno how, but somehow.

          In short, social conscience. Not “socialism”, but some elements of a fit future for a free country must look a little bit like it. IMHO. OUT. (You say ROGER.)

          1. I am not going to argue with much that you say here, MikeP, because I agreed with a lot of it, and you sound like you know a lot more than I do. Also because I did not follow some of it well enough to know whether to argue with it, like the part about Kaiser.

            I am curious why you say that “our post WW2 boom…benefited only the in-group”. I thought that it was one of the classic examples of a boom that benefited almost everyone. Well, I guess primarily white males, but most of them, and it was a rising tide that did lift all boats, I thought. Do you think differently?

            The economy since 1973 or 1978 or whenever you figure the post-war boom ended certainly has benefited mainly the in-group, I think.

          2. Roger, Yes. I do think differently. Is “most of primarily white males” somehow not a good delineation of an in-group?

            Eg, a woman or minority didn’t “need” as much money as a white male because of lower lifestyle expectations & family responsibility, both in private compensation or govt subsidy.

            Eg, institutionalized housing racism. Much of middle-class legacy wealth descends from govt handouts. White families, by which I mean head-of-household & that did mean the fathers, got subsidized home ownership in new-built whites-only suburbs near brand new schools. All of these projects were racially segregated.

            Blacks got urban high-density units… which we now call slums. The myth about all boats having risen together has a grain of truth to it & that’s indeed the ideal I’m hewing to. It’s just that like our soaring Declaration of Independence neglects to precisely define “all men” — it turned out to mean “white male land-owners” (and only according to a white male legal system) — “all boats” in our postwar prosperity turns out to have left a good many of our “less-than-equal” fair citizens out in the cold.

            The phase change you speak of starting in the 70s was a separation of the then-in-group into the rich & the left behind. The new in-group doesn’t bother to tell the new out-group, who still self-identify with those they continue to admire & aspire to become.

            Mistakenly, as it turned out, but they still don’t get it. Maybe some of them recently figured it out, but the numbers are still stubbornly small.

          3. Hi again, Roger. Re: Kaiser.

            Premiums are revenues.
            Treatments are costs.
            Employees get a cut.
            Of the net.
            Profit = revenues minus costs.

            To 1st order this describes a health insurer.
            2nd order, some vertical integration tacked on.
            Purpose: Carve out cost.

            Anything else you need to know?

          4. Also, see Sutter Health settlement. A “nonprofit”. Ha ha. Top execs highly compensated. It’s a giant corp.
            Think of them like Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, or Microsoft. They made predatory acquisitions for market share. Cornered the market on needed care to extort deals from major employers. Can set prices as they see fit.

            They got a slap on the wrist & hands loosely bound. That’ll last — for a NY minute. Business incentives are what they were. That’s why we need to monkey around in the gears. Because the engine keeps going ka-wham ka-wham ka-wham.

          5. Re: in & out groups.

            Kurt Anderson said we liberal elites were comfortable because our ox was not gored. That’s the thing about privilege. The privileged take it for granted. IOW, it’s invisible to us unless we don’t have it.

          6. Seen on Noahpinion twitter.

            Person 1: In the last 5 years I’ve been pulled over or stopped while walking/jogging/walking my dog ~ +20 times.

            Person 2: I have NEVER been pulled over or stopped by the police while walking, jogging, or walking my dog. Not once. In my whole life.

            Noah was #2. Bets on if it turned out there might be a race angle here?

        4. How to be a 3rd Millennium conservative: Where has the 1800s English Liberal moved to on the American political spectrum? Hint: If I’m not mistaken, Noahpinion still calls himself a libertarian. threadreaderapp . com / thread / 1339039198016200704 . html

      2. Nobody took this up, maybe because everybody here already knows the history, but a theocratic oligarchy is not only not new, but has been the reality for a great deal of history.

        In the Middle Ages, the three real Estates of the Sovereign, the Nobility and the Church (the commoners as an Estate, ha!) The Church historically sided with the Sovereign and the Nobility over the commoners.

        In the United States, this right wing ideology is dominated by the Calvinist Prosperity Gospel. I’m not an expert on the history, but although there aren’t a lot of Calvinists in the United States, Evangelicals, especially I believe Baptists are directly descended from Calvinism.

        One maybe interesting factoid, despite the name “Calvin” and “Calvinists” the founder was actually a French man named Jean Cauvin.

        1. I don’t think religion means much to the people at the top on the right in the US, except as a money-making scam and a vote-getting scam. But I don’t really know. Maybe it helps them justify what they are doing to themselves. Or maybe that is what you meant.

          I did not know the King was considered an Estate. I thought that is why journalism was considered the Fourth Estate (after aristocrats, church, and commoners). Or are they the Fifth? I have lost count, I guess. How many are there, by now?

          Also, I am said they have used up the name Calvinist, since then we cannot have a movement by that name based on Calvin and Hobbes.

          1. 1.Yes, I would not dismiss the sincerity of the religious views from those at the top on the right. They are heavily into the moralizing aspects (moralizing against others) and the justification of wealth aspects found in the Calvinist Prosperity Gospel.

            2.The King (Sovereign) isn’t officially part of the Estate. I was just mocking the idea that the commoners (peasants really, were an Estate equivalent to that of The Lords and the Churches.)

            3.The media is sometimes regarded unofficially as either the Fourth Estate or, more jokingly, the Fifth Estate.

        2. John Calvin (born Jehan Cauvin) is more associated with Switzerland than France…he died in Geneva.

        3. Evangelicals may be built upon the “reformed” foundation, but their eschatology is a new wrinkle. The fascination with Rapture Theology is a relatively recent phenomenon in the grand historical sweep of things.

          If I were a completely cynical man who wanted to be a cult leader, like a certain President we all know, and I wanted a completely gullible cult to blindly believe any bizarre claims that I made, I would build my cult upon the foundation of those who believe in the Rapture.

          Why? Because if you’ll believe in that, you’ll believe anything.

          And frankly the whole phenomenon is terrifying to me. The Trump sheep will believe anything he says based on the logic that he said it. Anything that contradicts the dear leader, by virtue of the fact that it contradicts him, must be false. The entire cult is immune from facts and science. That’s where humanity has evolved in the 2300 years since Aristotle died.

          1. This is, indeed, the story of cults.

            Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter wrote about this in their 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, about a cult called the Seekers created by a woman who believed that a UFO was about to take the Seekers away from earth while a cataclysm destroyed the planet. When this did not occur, the woman told her followers that she had been told that their faith led God to decide to not perform this cataclysm.

            Instead of rolling their eyes at her, this reinforced their beliefs. Of course, non believers rolled their eyes.

            The Heaven’s Gate movement was similar years later, but they carried out their suicide. It is interesting that Heaven’s Gate was immediately mocked by Saturday Night Live and I recall very few people if anybody saying the SNL sketch was in poor taste.

            Festinger himself described this cult behavior as a form of cognitive dissonance writing “The psychological opposition of irreconcilable ideas (cognitions) held simultaneously by one individual, creating a motivating force that would lead, under certain conditions, to the adjustments of one’s belief to fit one’s behavior – instead of changing one’s behavior to fit one’s belief (the sequence conventionally assumed.”

            However, these cults operate at the micro level. I’m not aware of anything like this brain-dead Trump cult that operates on this macro-level of, more or less, 74 million+ people.

            I will say for myself, I don’t think I’m part of any cult. Even with that SNL sketch, I thought it was gutsy thing to do, mocking a group of people who had just committed suicide, but the sketch itself wasn’t all that funny.

          2. I just saw a Youtube MSNBC news clip with a Republican Party official in Wisconsin spouting the party line that there was massive fraud in Wisconsin. He was a grey haired guy around my age, wearing a nice suit.

            I knew there were a lot of people doing that, but I pictured them as all being like Stephen Miller or Tucker Carlson, or the racists in “Mississippi Burning”, not somebody who could live down the street. It’s a shock, and it’s enraging. These bastards could set the country on fire because they won’t stop believing lies.

  37. Lies, damn lies and statistics. Re: Antietam/Chickamauga, etc. probably hard to keep accurate stats during the Civil War. Almost impossible to keep accurate stats nowadays notwithstanding.

    One of the first things I remember my dad, a Civil War nut/buff/expert, telling me was Antietam was the bloodiest day of the Civil War and American history depending on one’s definition of “bloodiest day.”

    Growing up visited all the Civil War battle sites on vacations ~ go figure! 😮 Oddly enough to this day have never visited Shiloh. Digressing …

    After Shiloh the South never smiled!

    1. As you say, the count of Civil War battles hinges on your definition:

      1. Is it only on American soil? In that case, battles fought inside the Confederacy don’t count. Also, Hawaii was not a state in 1941, so it is debatable whether to include Pearl Harbor at all. (If it can go either way, then D-Day, for example, edges out Pearl Harbor, even if one excludes allies that fought with us.) If we restrict the criterion to American deaths on American soil, Antietam would still be on the list.

      But …

      2. Does it include enemy fatalities? If it’s Blue deaths only, then Antietam drops to 2,100 fatalities, probably not anywhere in the top 50.

          1. I expect the numbers then weren’t all that accurate. Certainly didn’t have diagnostic tests. Is this based on the number of excess deaths?

          2. I think their estimates are based on the prevalence and concentration of deaths in an area. During that October, there would have been too many deaths to diagnose each case individually. The entire USA had only 30% of today’s population, and only 14% as many physicians.

            That means the estimated October number from 1918 (195,000 deaths) was about triple the current monthly rate, but they had only 1/7 as many doctors then. That means the strain on the medical community was 20 times the current level, even without accounting for the greater expertise and professionalism today. As you can well imagine, most victims were not receiving a careful diagnosis, and pretty much nobody was autopsied, if for no other reason than that everyone was overwhelmed by the case load.

            (From what I have read, the “Spanish flu” diagnosis was generally based on the victim’s blue skin color.)

  38. Sweden faces a shortage of health-care workers as the number of resignations ticks up after a relentless year of caring for Covid patients. For Sweden, the danger now is that more people will die because there aren’t enough qualified health-care professionals left to look after them. Looks like their strategy gets an “F.”

  39. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates there have been as many as 381,896 so-called excess deaths identified since Feb. 1, a number that represents mortality above normal statistical expectations. That’s significantly more than the number of confirmed Covid deaths, and may point to fatalities missed due to limited initial Covid testing and other factors.

    1. It may also indicate that there were people who were afraid to go to health care facilities to get care for other things.

      (Those would be COVID-related, of course, but COVID would never appear as the cause of death.)

  40. “CDC director: Daily deaths tolls will exceed 9/11 for the next two to three months.”

    Shades of 1918…

    1. I bet Igor is proud of his ability to refute any argument and deny any evidence used to get him to believe in the coronavirus. Keeping him in that job will say a lot about Wyoming.

  41. The coronavirus was circulating in Italy as early as the end of November 2019, according to a new report published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, lending weight to other studies that have suggested an earlier appearance of the disease in Europe.

  42. There was a list that I saw the other day.

    DEADLIEST DAYS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
    1. Galveston Hurricane ~8000
    2. Antietam 3600
    3. 9/11 2977
    4. Last Thursday 2861
    5. Last Wednesday 2762
    6. Last Tuesday 2439
    7. Last Friday 2439
    8. Pearl Harbor 2403

    There wasn’t a date on it, but the point is pretty clear. And now Pearl Harbor has been pushed off the list.

    1. I am surprised Antietam is on that list but not other Civil War battles like Gettysburg or Chickamauga. I know Gettysburg took several days, so that make explain its absences, but I thought Chickamauga was just one day. And this website gives a combined total of 34,000 plus casualties. Back then, I would have thought at least 6,800 of those would be deaths.

      1. Re: Chickamauga. Per Wiki the total dead was “only” 4000, over 3 days. The rest of the casualties were wounded, captured, or missing.

    2. The Galveston Hurricane may or may not be #1, but the others are probably not in the top 30. They did not keep day-by-day numbers in 1918, but about 195,000 people died of the Spanish Flu in October alone. That is an average of more than 6,000 per day, and I suppose some of those days in mid-October may have gone over the Galveston total.

      2020 is bad, but it’s in the minor leagues compared to 1918, especially that grim October.

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