Tag: coronavirus

How Many Trillions Will It Take to Defibrillate the US Economy Back to Life?

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Returning the country to prosperity is the most important thing President Trump can do to ensure his re-election.  But it is also a herculean task on a scale that’s hard to even imagine.  Think of all the mom and pop businesses like restaurants and beauty parlors that have been shut down, all the bars and dollar stores that have had to lay off their workers and are quickly eating up their cash reserves on overhead while revenues have dropped to zero.  It’s going to take the wisdom of a Solomon combined with the strategic skills of Napoleon to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.  It’s going to require cash infusions on a scale that hasn’t been seen since the Second World War.  We’ve been getting used to the word trillion because of idiots like Bernie Sanders and AOC tossing it around in their Green New Deal but unfortunately, we’re about to find out what that word really means.  We’re about to find out how many trillions of dollars it takes to defibrillate the US economy back to life.  But it has to be done.

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are going to drag their heels and try to poison pill the whole thing with their liberal wish list.  Luckily the President can call them out on it and use the bully pulpit to paint them as villains starving the American people when they’re in need of a crust of bread to get them on their feet again.  And that’s exactly what he will do.  He’ll need to use all his skills to battle both the Democrats and the medical bureaucrats who think the country can last until the 22nd century without a paycheck.  But he’ll do it.  He’s aware that this is the fight of his life and one he has to win both for himself and for the country.  Letting the Democrats kill the small businesses of the United States would effectively change this into a third world nation.  And that’s exactly what they want.

I think the President realizes that he is going to have to bail out just about everybody but the billionaires.  And he’ll have to be shrewd enough to recognize how the billionaires are going to try to game this thing to their advantage.  Corporations that try to use the handouts to feather their nests while throwing their employees onto the bread lines need to be given a taste of the stick instead of the carrot.  Small businesses will be the hardest hit.  They will need hefty grants and basically interest free loans to restart.  And some businesses whose profitability was already marginal before this catastrophe are just not going to make it at all.  And so that means providing public works projects that will soak up a lot of the unemployed who worked for companies that aren’t coming back.  But it also means the government is going to have to encourage big business to expand domestic employment.  The only way to do that is to force industrial production back to the United States.  But you can’t start something like that on a dime.  That won’t be ramped all the way up for a year or two.  For now, the Federal government will be the money supply that funds corporations to employ the masses.  What an awful mess that’s going to be.  But that’s what’s going to happen.  A full court press to save the victims of this crazy lockdown from ending up on welfare.

My guess is when all is said and done it will cost ten trillion dollars basically half of the GDP of the United States for 2019.  That’s $10,000,000,000,000.  That’s a ridiculous number.  But shutting down a country of three hundred and thirty million people is a ridiculous thing to do.  So here we go.  This will be D-Day, the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Program, the Marshall Plan and the Civilian Conservation Corps all rolled up into one and accelerated into a couple of months.  What an awful mess it’s going to be.  Well, I’ve always enjoyed a good action adventure story.  Let’s hope this one is a happily ever after story.  Ten years ago, we saw the one that didn’t end well.  Luckily the hero of the story is different this time.

Laughing at the Corona Virus

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One of my oldest friends sent this to me today.  I’ll have to say that as ridiculous as it is, the laugh I got out of it did me a lot of good.  And the vindictiveness of the last holiday decision rang completely true to the spirit of all the paisans I grew up with.  Revenge and spite were their two favorite past times.  Tell me what you think.

 

 

Perhaps the Scope of the COVID-19 Crisis Won’t Be as Bad as Predicted

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The “Murray” model is the one being used by the White House task force.  But it seems to be overestimating the numbers.

“The discrepancies are also stark when looked at on a state-by-state basis. The model estimated that 65,434 patients would need hospital beds in New York State on Friday. In reality, there were 15,905 hospitalizations in that state by Sunday morning, according to the COVID Tracking Project.”

“The forecast predicted, for example, that the United States would need around 164,750 hospital beds for COVID-19 patients on Saturday. Yet the COVID Tracking Project, a team of journalists and data analysts who collect and tabulate coronavirus data from state tallies around the country, reported only around 22,158 currently hospitalized coronavirus patients nationwide on Saturday.”

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A Little More Information Comes In

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Some information I’ve gotten in the last day or so:

  • A Chinese clinical study that included a control group found that patients taking hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) had a shorter time to clinical recovery, as well as improved pneumonia. Even the NY Times reported on this although they downplayed the President’s role in touting HCQ.
  • One of our family relations in New York City was in critical condition on a ventilator with the COVID-19 virus. His wife had to sign a release to allow the doctors to use a treatment.  A couple of days after the start of treatment he is off the ventilator much improved and talking to relatives on the phone.
  • I had a chance to do some back of the envelope calculations to see how the death statistics look for this thing with respect to patient’s age. Here it is:

So over 88% of people who die are over 60.  82% are over 70.  That tells me that dosing all the old age homes with an anti-viral (which HCQ is) would go along way to knocking these death rates down by almost a  factor of 10.

There are plenty of smart people who want his thing to end sooner and without hundreds of thousands of deaths.  I’m hoping they start looking at the numbers and figure out that targeting the elderly is the key to dropping the mortality from this thing way down.

Treatments for COVID-19?

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As the President mentioned today, there are a few medicines that are being tested out for effective treatment of this corona virus.  Some of them are existing medicines that were used for  other diseases like malaria.  It’s too soon to say anything with certainty but maybe in a week or two we’ll be able to emerge from our bunkers and breath the air like free men again instead of hunkered down like troglodytes.

Killing Time

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Sitting around at home trying to wait out the quarantine reminded me of an old story from Herodotus about a people trying to wait out a bad situation.  A famine isn’t the same as a plague but something about the story seemed appropriate for our present predicament.

The customs of the Lydians are like those of the Greeks, except that they make prostitutes of their female children. They were the first men whom we know who coined and used gold and silver currency; and they were the first to sell by retail. And, according to what they themselves say, the games now in use among them and the Greeks were invented by the Lydians: these, they say, were invented among them at the time when they colonized Tyrrhenia. This is their story: In the reign of Atys son of Manes there was great scarcity of food in all Lydia. For a while the Lydians bore this with what patience they could; presently, when the famine did not abate, they looked for remedies, and different plans were devised by different men. Then it was that they invented the games of dice and knuckle-bones and ball and all other forms of game except dice, which the Lydians do not claim to have discovered. Then, using their discovery to lighten the famine, every other day they would play for the whole day, so that they would not have to look for food, and the next day they quit their play and ate. This was their way of life for eighteen years. But the famine did not cease to trouble them, and instead afflicted them even more. At last their king divided the people into two groups, and made them draw lots, so that the one group should remain and the other leave the country; he himself was to be the head of those who drew the lot to remain there, and his son, whose name was Tyrrhenus, of those who departed. Then the one group, having drawn the lot, left the country and came down to Smyrna and built ships, in which they loaded all their goods that could be transported aboard ship, and sailed away to seek a livelihood and a country; until at last, after sojourning with one people after another, they came to the Ombrici,1 where they founded cities and have lived ever since. They no longer called themselves Lydians, but Tyrrhenians, after the name of the king’s son who had led them there.

Luckily OCF won’t allow me to get bored.

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Turning Over a New Leaf

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You would think that living in the world we do; nothing would faze us anymore.  We saw 9/11, we lived through the endless wars in the Middle East.  We dealt with the 2008 crash.  We even dealt with Obama and all his attendant madnesses; gay marriage, BLM, white privilege and of course transgender everything.

After all that, what would faze us?  And yet, this petty plague is truly tiresome.  All the little annoyances and work arounds.

But enough!  I’m banishing the plague along with the Democrat primary from my list of topics.  They’re just too damn boring.  Talking about them makes me boring.  And that’s the beauty of having Donald Trump as president.  He’ll take care of it.  And that’s what I’ll assume, he’ll take care of it.  If he can’t then we’ll start the revolution.

If something exciting breaks out, like the dead start rising from their graves (other than Joe Biden) and attacking the living then I’ll opine on this miserable pandemic.  And if I run across any good coping mechanisms that I think are especially valuable I’ll pass them along.  But otherwise, enough is enough.  Let’s talk of happier things.  St Patrick’s Day!

Now a reason why St Patrick’s Day has significance here at the compound is the fact that it’s Camera Girl’s birthday.  And because of that we have the traditional corned beef and cabbage which is associated with her heritage.  Begorra, she is Southern Irish with her people coming from the counties of Bari and Messina.  But in the New York City of my youth, everybody was Irish on St Patrick’s Day because he was the patron saint of the city and the parade was an occasion of civic pride and religious celebration and an excuse for drinking that everyone enjoyed.  Of course, today, I can only imagine the outrages that must be celebrated in the name of tolerance.  I’m sure if the actual St Patrick could see it, he’d disown the whole thing.

And a strange St. Patrick’s Day it is in New England.  No parades and the pubs shut down.  But even more shocking, today, Patriot Nation (which I guess is also Red Sox Nation) is officially in mourning over the end of Tom Brady.  Tommy boy has flown the coup.  He’s packed up his underinflated footballs and his overinflated wife Gisele Bündchen and said goodbye to New England.  The amazing thing is that what inevitably will happen will be that the most rabid Brady fans will turn on a dime and trash poor old Tom and claim that losing him is the best thing that can possibly happen to the Patriots.  Within hours the talk will be how it was always Bill Belichick that made Tom look good and without Belichick, Brady will be just an old stumblebum staggering down skid row toward oblivion.  This same script has played out every time a Red Sox hero has gone onto greener pastures.

The Supreme Court has suspended hearings because of the plague.  This will be an interesting situation.  Many schools have already called off the rest of the school year.  Might the Supreme Court do same thing?  It seems to me with the magic of video conferencing the Court could equally just handle everything remotely from the safety of their individual bunkers.  But we’ll have to see how this all plays out.  And the plague will also slow down progress on everything else that was slowly wending its way through the government and the courts like the various investigations that Bill Barr has going.

For all those reasons I expect it to be a slow news cycle for the next few weeks at least.  And for that reason, I’ll attend to things on the cultural side in order to provide some interesting topics to distract us as the Angel of Death stoops down and decides which of us he’ll drag away.

Sanity Check on the Doom and Gloomers

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I live and work in New England.  Except for the crazies in the Northwest this is the home base of woke insanity for the country.  Even the moderates in New England have drunk deeply of the Kool-Aid.  Even the Republicans think like moon bats.  Remember Mitt Romney was Governor of Massachusetts.

So, the “normal” people hate Donald Trump with a passion.  Mostly they hate him because if they didn’t hate him their neighbors would call them racists, sexists and homophobes.  And there is nothing scarier to a New Englander than being called bad names.

For that reason, I shouldn’t have been surprised when a coworker came over to me last week and smirkingly told me that the coronavirus was going to tank the economy and thereby throw the election to Biden.  This guy isn’t a flaming liberal.  He’s what I’d call an aspiring elitist.  He comes from a middle-class background but would like to make the move up a couple of rungs to the outer periphery of the elect.  And in order to fit in he has learned the party line and made their platform his.

I wasn’t expecting this from him.  After all, hoping the economy crashes doesn’t scream patriotism and in the past he had never seemed unpatriotic.  But you live and you learn.  My only answer to him was, in a more or less bored manner, to inform him that my money is on Trump and if he wanted a wager, I was always looking to pick up some extra cash.

After the impeachment vote by the House I announced that I no longer considered any other possible outcome from November’s election than President Trump’s re-election.  And I continued in that belief up until this week.  But my co-worker’s taunt got me thinking.  Could the coronavirus pandemic change the outcome of the presidential election?  As a theoretical question, the answer is obviously yes.  If millions of people died and if millions more were unemployed that could definitely affect the minds of the voters.  So, I figured it was a good thing to consider what the reality of the pandemic meant for the election.

Looking at what happened in China and what is happening in Italy it is plain to see that even with draconian measures being taken to limit its spread, globally, tens of thousands of people will die.  The impact of those deaths is the political question that needs to be answered.  And the answer is that as long as the government is seen to be actively using the best scientific information available to keep the public safe and wasn’t negligent in allowing the introduction of the virus to the country, then there won’t tend to be public anger at a relatively small number of deaths such as several thousand, as long as they do not overwhelm the emergency healthcare system.

With respect to our present situation, there are something less than three thousand cases and about fifty deaths in the United States.  These numbers will continue to increase for at least a couple of weeks.  But, if at that point, they level off then public opinion on the pandemic won’t cause excessive political trouble for the President.

But what about the economic impact.  Multiple industries are being severely impacted by the measures being used to prevent transmission of the disease.  Airlines and other means of mass transportation are severely impacted.  All forms of mass entertainment from sports games to movies to music concerts are being postponed or cancelled.  It’s certain that all restaurants will be at a virtual standstill.  Daycare for pre-school age children will be a big problem.

All of these disruptions are going to have a large affect on the economy and employment rates.  And in addition, many companies are concerned that the virus may incapacitate or even kill key individuals in their workforce.  For this reason, they are instituting fever screening, telecommuting and teleconferencing to limit exposure to the virus among employees.  All of these control measures will have a negative effect on the economy.  Without any intervention, layoffs and loss of revenue will cause a contraction in the economy that could be quite severe.  And that could very easily have an effect on the election.

So, is my co-worker right, will the pandemic necessarily throw the election to Biden?  No.  What needs to be done is for the President to provide incentives for business owners to hold onto their employees during the business interruptions and some kind of stimulus to offset the losses they are experiencing.  And that is exactly what President Trump is attempting.  Eliminating the payroll tax for employers and employees until the end of the year would be an enormous stimulus to the economy.  Trying to get it through the House will be very difficult.  But just trying to get it passed may be enough to shift the blame to the Democrats.  And within a state of emergency possibly an executive action could accomplish what the Congress won’t.  And there are other measures that he can institute to target help to the particular industries hardest hit.  The one that immediately comes to mind is the airline industry.  With bans on travel to both Europe and Asia in place it isn’t hard to imagine that the always vulnerable airlines could head into bankruptcy almost overnight.

To sum it up, it will be necessary for President Trump to carefully oversee the federal and local disease control measures in place to ensure that health impact from COVID-19 is limited.  And he will have to act decisively and effectively to limit the economic impact of the pandemic on the US economy.  If he performs these two assignments competently, and based on his track record I anticipate he will, then he should be able to win re-election against the visibly decrepit and clearly demented Creepy Uncle Joe Biden.