Monthly Archives: May 2020

New York’s Nursing Home Intakes

Posted on by
Reply

You may recall that New York’s Progressive-Democrat Governor, Andrew Cuomo, ordered all New York nursing homes to accept into their midst folks who were “recovering” from, but not yet cleared of, their Wuhan Virus infections and folks who might only have been exposed to the virus.

Nursing homes house the demographic most vulnerable to the virus: the aged, many of whom also have the most virulent comorbidities.  Residents, within days, began dying of the Wuhan Virus to the extent that their deaths alone make up a significant fraction—roughly a sixth—of all the Wuhan Virus deaths in a State that has the nation’s highest number of such deaths.

Of course, Cuomo is trying to weasel out from under his disastrous order, having rescinded it only after a couple of months of dead and dying. He’s blaming the whole thing on President Donald Trump and his administration’s medical experts. Cuomo, after all, was only

following guidelines issued by the Trump administration.
The guidance [Cuomo] says [is] “nursing homes should admit any individuals that they would normally admit to their facility, including individuals from hospitals where a case of COVID-19 was/is present.”

Here’s his secretary and top aid, Melissa DeRosa, last Saturday:

Not could. Should. That is President Trump’s CMS and CDC…There are over a dozen states that did the exact same thing.

That’s a cynical and dishonest quibble. “Should” is just a strong version of “could;” neither remotely amounts to “required.”

Beyond that, DeRosa carefully omitted to mention that there also were a number of States who did not require nursing homes and the like to take Wuhan Virus-infected or -exposed patients, and none of those States’ equivalent facilities have had anything like the death rates of New York’s nursing homes.

Cuomo and DeRosa just as carefully continue to omit to mention that CMS and CDC also mandated separation/isolation criteria for the Wuhan Virus patient intake, or that these were not well followed in New York.

Censorship

Posted on by
Reply

Twitter has made itself an open, enthusiastic censor of political speech.

Twitter applied…fact-checking notices late Tuesday to two tweets from the president about the potential for fraud involving mail-in ballots. With a small label—”Get the facts about mail-in ballots”—and a link to more information, Twitter alerted its users that those claims were unsubstantiated.
The tweets “contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots,” a Twitter spokesman said.

Never mind that Twitter’s “fact” checking is done by the likes of CNN and The Washington Post.

Pay no attention to the man behind the Twitter curtain either, Twitter’s Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, whose job entails “election security and misinformation,” is virulently anti-Republican and anti-Trump, and he’s quite crude about it:

Today on Meet The Press, we’re speaking with Joseph Goebbels about the first 100 days…—What I hear whenever Kellyanne [Conway] is on a news show.

And

I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.

And

Yes, that person in the pink hat is clearly a bigger threat to your brand of feminism than ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE.

And

How does a personality-free bag of farts like Mitch McConnell actually win elections?

From all of that, it’s clear: if @Jack thinks a tweet is…inaccurate…especially since he’s relying so heavily on CNN and WaPo and a person like Roth for his “checking,” than the tweet likely isn’t that far off.

Those tweeting who get one of those Get the facts labels should wear those labels like the badges of honor they are, and they should put those labels on their cars under their driver’s side window. Accumulate five, and they’re Twitter Aces.

Another Study in Contrasts

Posted on by
Reply

I last week about the difference in performance between Republican-run Florida and Progressive-Democrat-run New York.

Here are some more contrasts.

Notice that California, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York all are Progressive-Democrat governed. And there’s that Republican-governed Florida.

This is the degree of economic dysfunction we can expect from a Progressive-Democrat-run nation.

Notice another thing. Employment by government, of either party, has been remarkably stable. This is the sinecure of jobs in government, the remarkably deep entrenchment of the bureaucrats in the Bureaucrat State.

A “Careful” Economy

Posted on by
Reply

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed about the dangers we’re facing because we’re reopening our economy much too soon to suit him, John Cochrane had this remark:

…the most important thing government can give us is accurate and timely information on how widespread the virus is in each community—how dangerous it really is to go out—something we don’t have now.

The truly Critical Item on how dangerous it might be to go out is the mortality rate, and that’s down around 1% for Americans younger than 60-ish, which includes children and working age Americans, and it’s not much higher for those older.

That mortality rate is going down further as we learn more about the components of the denominator.

Of course, getting sick can be more than an inconvenience, but even hospitalization rates are falling, both in absolute terms and as we learn more about those denominator components.

Mortality rate information, contra Cochrane, in fact is well known to those of us who seek it out—which we have to work too hard to do because the press and Progressive-Democrat State governments studiously ignore it.

In the end, the medical dangers of restarting are overblown and the economic dangers of not restarting are underestimated if not ignored outright.

There’s nothing uncareful about reopening now or of pushing the pace of reopening.

Do This In Parallel

Posted on by
Reply

There’s a movement afoot in Congress to subsidize employees, lost employees, and prospective employees through employers and prospective employers.

The House plan would give employers enough money to cover up to 80% of their wages and benefits, up to $45,000 per worker, plus a credit for fixed expenses like rent. Eligible companies would simply keep taxes withheld from employees’ paychecks. If that isn’t enough to equal the credit, they could get additional money from the Internal Revenue Service.
Smaller businesses would get the subsidy for all workers, while larger ones would get it only for furloughed workers still receiving wages or benefits. The break would be scaled to each employer’s revenue loss during the coronavirus pandemic.

There are a couple of tweaks needed, stipulating purely arguendo that this is a useful idea:

Don’t make the thing a one-size-fits-all arrangement. Weight the $45k by the regional- or MSA-based cost of living.

Put a milestone-based (not calendar-based) automatic expiration on the subsidy and credit, something along the lines of the unemployment rate in the region/MSA falling below a specified threshold that’s consistent with the region’s/MSA’s [5-yr pre-Wuhan Virus average] unemployment rate multiplied by a greater-than-one factor or a return of the region’s/MSA’s GDP to [80%] of its pre-Wuhan Virus level.

Such a move, reducing revenue flowing into government as it would, should come with a parallel: a reduction of government spending commensurately. After all, the only Constitutional purposes for Federal spending are three: to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.

The long pole in that is defense spending—an especially important pole in an environment of aggressively acquisitive Russia and the People’s Republic of China and of a nuclear and nuclear wannabe northern Korea and Iran.

General Welfare spending, limited as it is (for all that the limit has been winked at for too long) to the 16 purposes enumerated in Art I, Sect 8, doesn’t take many dollars.

Our Debts will become much more manageable and repayable with spending held within revenues.

Encourage employers to hire—with, of course, that caveat of an automatic expiry to the incentive—but spending cuts must be done in parallel with the revenue reduction.