Tag Archives: responsibilities

“State Governments are Broke”

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That’s New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s (D) claim as he pitched President Donald Trump for a Federal bailout of his State.

“You know the state governments are broke, to use a very blunt term. You know the state governments are now responsible for the reopening and the governors are going to do the reopening, and they have no funds to do it,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said….

No, no one “knows” that State governments are broke. They most assuredly are not. Not as long as they have taxing power, which they do.

Not as long as they have absolute control over their own spending, which they do.

Cuomo knows this full well. He’s just ducking away from having to make those hard decisions and ducking away from the fight with New York’s legislature as those politicians duck just as thoroughly from the same decisions.

All the politicians populating those governments need do is have the political will and the integrity to act on those authorities.

Sunset Clauses

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Here’s another example of their utility. To help out the furloughed and fired during the current Wuhan Virus situation, the Federal government enhanced existing unemployment insurance payouts with an extra $600 per week. The plus-up doesn’t expire until the end of July, more than three months hence.

Many businesses, especially the small and mom-and-pops that are at the heart of our employment environment, are starting to re-open as they figure out ways to operate at least partially or as State-level restrictions start to ease.

However.

Employees say they’ll take the unemployment check for as long as they can make more money by not working. One internal Trump Administration analysis estimates that this work disincentive applies to millions of Americans.

That’s not laziness, as the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial correctly emphasizes. That’s workers making economically sound, rational decisions. Especially at the lower end of the economic scale, taking a functional pay cut to go back to work is…suboptimal.

Such a plussing up of unemployment payouts could have been made marginally acceptable—this particular jobless spike came about due to Government fiat rather than business decisions or economic cycles—had the addenda been accompanied with a hard milestone rather than an arbitrary date. A milestone like, oh say, an employer being ready to hire back and offering to do so, or a more blanket State-level easing of restrictions that would allow ranges of businesses to start re-expanding their operations or re-opening altogether—and so hiring or re-hiring.

It’s possible this oversight can be fixed in the next round of Wuhan Virus situation responses, but I’m not holding my breath.

Death Panels or Triage?

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A New York City hospital has explicitly instructed its ER doctors to “withhold futile intubations” and that they have the sole discretion for that decision and the decision to use a ventilator on any particular patient.

What draws my attention to this order is that ER doctors have always had triage authority in their decisions regarding use of limited resources when potentially lethally injured or sick patients arrive in numbers that could overwhelm those resources.  New York State’s triage guidelines, in particular, were established in 2015.

What are this hospital’s administrators hinting at?

Holding Some Back

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Forty-three million students are doing homework at home due to the current Wuhan virus situation.

Here’s the shocker about that:

Some public schools are calling online work “enrichment,” not part of the curriculum, because they can’t guarantee that all students will have access to it.

The work, which was part of the curriculum when school was in session, won’t be graded, won’t count.  This is another example of the Left’s view of equality: hold back the successful because the less successful don’t, or can’t, keep up.  Don’t take steps to help the less successful do better. No, that’s too hard.

Remember this view of equality next November.