A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
Here’s a luxury resort in the Catskills that you might not want to visit… Federal Correctional Institution, Otisville:
As we looked down from the Cirrus SR20 (IFR training), it occurred to me that the prison is lacking one thing: a rainbow flag. I’m hopeful that President Harris will correct this and then the prison can be renamed “Ministry of Love is Love”.
Full post, including commentsI didn’t watch the debate (my vote is irrelevant here in Maskachusetts), but now it is time to look at the transcript…
Trump and Biden on COVID-19:
[1:03] Trump: So, as you know, more 2.2 million people, modeled out, were expected to die. We closed up the greatest economy in the world in order to fight this horrible disease that came from China. It’s a worldwide pandemic. It’s all over the world. You see the spikes in Europe and many other places right now. If you notice, the mortality rate is down, 85%. The excess mortality rate is way down, and much lower than almost any other country. And we’re fighting it and we’re fighting it hard. There is a spike. There was a spike in Florida, and it’s now gone. There was a very big spike in Texas, it’s now gone…
In other words, humans are in charge of the virus.
[3:12] Biden: 220,000 Americans dead. If you hear nothing else I say tonight, hear this. Anyone who’s responsible for not taking control — in fact, not saying, I take no responsibility, initially — anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as President of the United States of America. We’re in a situation where there are thousands of deaths a day, a thousand deaths a day. And there are over 70,000 new cases per day. Compared to what’s going on in Europe, as the New England Medical Journal said, they’re starting from a very low rate. We’re starting from a very high rate. The expectation is we’ll have another 200,000 Americans dead by the time, between now and the end of the year. If we just wore these masks — the President’s own advisors told them — we could save 100,000 lives.
Humans are in charge and it is as simple as wearing masks (why are the fully-masked-for-months Europeans now suffering from exponential infection?). If true and if obvious, why does it matter what a U.S. President says and does? State governors and mayors can and did order masks (typically starting in April and May; see also Dr. Fauci on masks).
The moderator then asks about a vaccine and when it will show up. Is this a fair question for politicians with zero training in biology or medicine? They’re supposed to have special insight into when a drug or vaccine gets approval and whether the drug or vaccine is effective? Trump eventually gets around to something that a politician could potentially influence, i.e., distribution:
I think my timeline is going to be more accurate. I don’t know that they’re counting on the military the way I do, but we have our generals lined up, one in particular, that’s the head of logistics. And this is a very easy distribution for him. He’s ready to go as soon as we have the vaccine, and we expect to have 100 million vials as soon as we have the vaccine, he’s ready to go.
For Joe:
[6:12] Welker: Vice President Biden, your reaction? Just 40% of Americans say they would definitely agree to take a coronavirus vaccine if it was approved by the government. What steps would you take to give Americans confidence in a vaccine if it were approved?
[6:25] Biden: Make sure it’s totally transparent. Have the scientific world see, know, look at it, go through all the processes. And by the way, this is the same fellow who told you this is going to end by Easter last time. This the same fellow who told you that, don’t worry, we’re going to end this by the summer. We’re about to go into a dark winter, a dark winter, and he has no clear plan and there’s no prospect that there’s going to be a vaccine available for the majority of the American people before the middle of next year.
Why would a U.S. president need to be involved in “transparency” regarding vaccine trials. Isn’t it likely that most of the vaccines will be developed outside of the U.S. and the results published outside of the U.S.? We don’t have a monopoly on pharma research.
An argument about who wanted to shut down China earlier ensues. Trump then makes my Your lockdown may vary point!
We can’t lock ourselves up in a basement like Joe does. He has the ability to lock himself up. I don’t know, he’s obviously made a lot of money, someplace, but he has this thing about living in a basement. People can’t do that. By the way, I, as the president, couldn’t do that. I’d love to put myself in the basement or in a beautiful room in the White House and go away for a year and a half until it disappears. I can’t do that.
(See Town and Country for photos of Joe Biden’s mansions, the first of which was a 10,000 square foot former DuPont mansion purchased in 1974 “as a young senator”.)
Biden succumbs to gender binarism:
That man or wife going to bed tonight and reaching over to try to touch their, out of habit, where their wife or husband was, is gone.
What about spouses with the 48 other gender IDs who die from the Trump-caused Covid-19?
How about young slender healthy American Progressives voting themselves into another year or two of lockdown in order to protect old fat unhealthy Republicans?
[12:33] Welker: OK, let’s talk about your different strategies toward dealing with this. Mr. Vice President, you suggested you would support new shutdowns if scientists recommended it. What do you say to Americans who are fearful that the cost of shutdowns, the impact on the economy, the higher rates of hunger depression, domestic and substance abuse, outweighs the risk of exposure to the virus?
[12:51] Biden: What I would say is I’m going to shut down the virus, not the country. It’s his ineptitude that caused the country to have to shut down in large part — why businesses have gone under, why schools are closed, why so many people have lost their living and why they’re concerned. Those other concerns are real. That’s why he should have been — instead of in a sand trap at his golf course — he should have been negotiating with Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats and Republicans about what to do about the acts they were passing for billions of dollars to make sure people had the capacity.
[13:21] Welker: You haven’t ruled out more shutdowns
[13:24] Biden: Oh no, I’m not shutting down the nation but there are, look, they need standards. The standard is, if you have a reproduction rate in a community that’s above a certain level, everybody says, slow up. More social distancing. Do not open bars and do not open gymnasiums. Do not open until you get this under control, under more control. But when you do open, give the people the capacity to be able to open and have the capacity to do it safely. For example schools — schools, they need a lot of money to open. They need to deal with ventilation systems, they need to deal with smaller classes, more teacher, more pods, and he’s refused to support that money, or at least up to now
Is Biden disavowing his previous promise to listen to the Science Karens and shut down whenever they say to do so? (CNN, August 22, 2020) Also, if the schools needed better ventilation systems (like my idea!) and they are under state and local government control, why weren’t they already installed over the summer?
Maskachusetts is featured! We had a powerful shutdown in mid-March, masked city residents starting in April, and a statewide mask law with high compliance starting in early May. We’ve been at least as successful as the early-shut early-masked Peruvians!
[14:46] Welker: Let me follow up, President Trump. You’ve demanded schools open in person and insisted they can do it safely. But just yesterday, Boston became the latest city to move its public school system entirely online after a coronavirus spike. What is your message to parents who worry that sending their children to school will endanger not only their kids, but also their teachers and families?
[15:04] Trump: I want to open the schools. The transmittal rate to the teachers is very small, but I want to open the schools. We have to open our country. We’re not going to have a country. You can’t do this, we can’t keep this country closed. It is a massive country with a massive economy. People are losing their jobs, they’re committing suicide. There’s depression, alcohol, drugs at a level that nobody’s ever seen before. There’s abuse, tremendous abuse. We have to open our country.
Trump is totally out of step with his cower-in-place fellow citizens! He hits many of the same points as “The COVID-19 shutdown will cost Americans millions of years of life” (The Hill) without recognizing that Americans now care only about COVID-19 deaths, not deaths or loss of life-years from any other cause. Biden is more aligned with the American people that I recognize:
[15:51] Biden: Simply not true. We’re gonna be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. We ought to be able to safely open, but we need resources to open. You need to be able to, for example, if you’re gonna open a business, have social distancing within the business. You need to have, if you have a restaurant, you need to have plexiglass dividers so people cannot infect one another. You need to be in a position where you can take testing rapidly and know whether a person is, in fact, infected. You need to be able to trace. You need to be able to provide all the resources that are needed to do this and that is not inconsistent with saying that we’re going to make sure that we open safely. And by the way, all you teachers out there — not that many of you are going to die, so don’t worry about it.
In other words, trillions of dollars have been spent so far, but if Americans spend another few $trillion on Plexiglas, we will show coronavirus who is boss. Biden is also in sync with American priorities. Marijuana and liquor stores are essential and can never be closed. Schools should be the last institutions to reopen. (Contrast to Ireland; in the most severe lockdown so far, everything is closed except for schools, universities, and adult education.)
For a guy who owns hundreds of $millions of NYC real estate, Trump is not going to be selected by the Chamber of Commerce to promote the city:
[16:39] Trump: I will say this, if you go and look at what’s happened to New York, it’s a ghost town. It’s a ghost town. And when you talk about plexiglas — these are restaurants that are dying. These are businesses with no money. Putting the plexiglas is unbelievably expensive, and it’s not the answer. I mean, you’re going to sit there in a cubicle wrapped around with plastic? These are businesses that are dying, Joe, you can’t do that to people, which again, take a look at New York and what’s happened to my wonderful city. For so many years, I loved it. It was vibrant. It’s dying. Everyone’s leaving New York.
Joe Biden doesn’t see color:
[17:34] Biden: Take a look what New York has done in terms of turning the curve down, in terms of the number of people dying. And I don’t look at this in terms of what he does, blue states and red states. They’re all the United States. And look at the states that are having such a spike in the coronavirus. They’re the red states.
In other words, Biden beats up the red states (not that he looks at states in terms of “red” and “blue”) for doing exactly what the
Full post, including commentsFrom a single house near our local airport (in Lincoln, Massachusetts):
One of my big concerns with the above is that the LGBTQIA+ rainbow flag, part of the Biden-Harris sign, is placed in an inferior position to the American flag, which the 1619 Project informs us is a symbol of oppression (not to mention treason against legitimate British rule that would have ended slavery decades earlier!). In what moral universe does the Flag of Slavery (TM) get to be placed higher than the Rainbow Flag of Tolerance?
(Note that “Science is not a Liberal Conspiracy” is illustrated with lithium, useful for treating poor mental health occasioned by forgetting to take away the Deplorables’ right to vote.)
Full post, including commentsCatching up a bit here on the news… “Twitter Won’t Let The New York Post Tweet Until It Agrees To Behave Itself” (Forbes):
Twitter TWTR +1.2% has kept the Post’s official Twitter account locked since Thursday, the Post says, when the newspaper shared several tweets about its story on Hunter Biden that has been increasingly called into question.
On Thursday, Twitter blocked sharing of the Post story and said the piece violated several of its rules, including a prohibition on sharing personal information and hacked materials. Facebook also reduced distribution of the Post report, but the brunt of conservative displeasure over the social media sites’ limiting access to the Post story fell on Twitter.
The New York Times published information that it says came from Donald Trump’s personal tax returns (but they haven’t published the actual returns so we can’t see for ourselves?). Yet the NYT wasn’t banned by Twitter or Facebook. Aren’t personal tax returns “personal information” and/or “hacked materials”?
I’m sure that there is a justification for how the banning of the Post is consistent with the celebration and approval of the Times, but I wonder what it is!
Related (some NY Post stories you won’t see in the NYT):
Readers: How are the Amy Coney Barrett hearings going? Did she truly sit through five (5!) hours of opening statements on Monday? Why couldn’t she have been resting at the Trump Hotel while the politicians talked about themselves?
This video shows that Judge Barrett’s daily driver is a Honda Odyssey minivan. Have the senators therefore questioned her on the big question for 2021: should we loyal Honda owners jump ship to the new Sienna minivan?
If you can live with seven seats, the top-of-the-line Siennas feature these Gulfstream-style recliners:
An expensive option? The Court disagrees! The entire top trim Sienna costs less than a single FAA-certified seat for a business jet.
How about this grille?
For comparison, the 2021 Toyota Avalon:
And the Audi e-tron (electric!):
Who decided that we needed cars with huge grilles?
Circling back to the Supreme Court nominee, let’s check my Facebook feed… From a Democrat who fled Manhattan:
A woman who hates women for the Supreme Court; it’s great, she can join a black man who hates black people (tap dancers get the bad rap but Clarence Thomas IS the ultimate Uncle Tom) and sit with the white guy majority who hates everybody. Bye-bye civil rights, bye-bye civil behaviour. Voting T-rump is the greatest act of self-hatred (and planetary destruction) currently available. Unmasked rage disguised as pride; wear it well. My absentee ballot has been counted in Maine.
From a righteous computer programmer:
I don’t know what Barrett will do once she’s seated on the Supreme Court. But it’s perfectly clear to me what the man who nominated her expects her to do. And it’s perfectly clear to her, as well.
(i.e., even after she gets her lifetime job, her thoughts and actions will be determined by a man)
From Maskachusetts Congresswoman Katherine Clark:
#AmyConeyBarrett says she doesn’t have an agenda. But she does have a record—and it stands as an affront to women’s health and rights.
From a divorced mom, part of the most reliable Democrat voting bloc, over a YouTube of Senator Klobuchar’s opening statement:
Please Vote. We can’t just stand by. We have to turn out. #vote2020 #vote
(but her friends are mostly in coastal elite states that are already 100 percent guaranteed to vote for Presidents Biden and Harris!)
From a university employee who describes herself as a “cat person, voter”:
This is not a drill. If Barrett is named to the Supreme Court, I and millions of others will lose access to health care.
(she needs some tips from folks who arrive via caravan over the southern border! Show up at the hospital, don’t give an address, and say “I’m undocumented”!)
Related:
The first of my five mail-in ballots has arrived. 3 out of 7 candidates are Democrats running unopposed. The remaining 4 races are 100 percent guaranteed to be won by Democrats. A potential contest: Question 2 is whether to adopt ranked choice voting.
As someone whose political beliefs are most aligned with the libertarians, a last-choice party in a nation where people want a planned economy (my 2012 document after watching both the Republican and Democrat candidates promise that government would create jobs, ensure fair wages, etc.), is this for me? I could vote for a libertarian candidate and then also pick a second choice from a party that has a chance in a country whose citizens want government to cater to their every need? Yet in a Massachusetts general election it is almost inconceivable for a non-Democrat to win. So how can this have any practical effect?
The “Independent Women’s Law Center” opposes this question. We don’t know what people identifying with the remaining 50+ genders say. Wikipedia says that Estonia had something like this, but abandoned it in 2001. As government in Estonia is radically more efficient than here in the U.S., that’s a strike against the idea.
Readers: What do you say about this proposal?
Update, 10/16: a friend highlighted “The Ancient Greeks Teach Us The Perils of Ranked Choice Voting”, by a political science professor:
Full post, including commentsAs this list [of supporters] makes clear, RCV supporters fall overwhelmingly into two (mostly overlapping) categories: Democrats and groups whose members vote heavily for Democratic candidates; and groups that (Libertarians aside) have practically no chance of winning elections even under RCV, except at the local level. Given Massachusetts’s status as a heavily Democratic state (the state’s congressional delegation consists solely of Democrats, who also have long held a substantial supermajority in the legislature), Democrats have little to fear from losing elections to Republicans as a result of RCV. Rather, they need to court members of left-liberal fringe groups, as well as public-employee unions, to ensure that they turn out to vote — knowing that those groups’ supporters would almost surely make the Democratic candidate, at worst, their second-choice candidate, further guaranteeing the defeat of any Republican contender.
A young Swedish scientist who predicted the worldwide shutdown of schools and universities as early as September 2019 and who has deep experience with the coronavirus has endorsed Joe Biden to be the head of state in a country in which she does not live:
“The upcoming US elections is above and beyond all that. From a climate perspective it’s very far from enough and many of you of course supported other candidates. But, I mean…you know…damn! Just get organized and get everyone to vote #Biden,” the [Swedish scientist] tweeted.
(source: New York Post)
Related:
The New England Journal of Medicine has endorsed Joe Biden (without mentioning him by name) in “Dying in a Leadership Vacuum”. Once we get over the shock that a group of physicians support the political party that made it illegal for Americans to refrain from purchasing insurance policies that make payments to physicians, what are these doctors/editors actually saying?
the United States leads the world in Covid-19 cases and in deaths due to the disease, far exceeding the numbers in much larger countries, such as China. The death rate in this country is more than double that of Canada, exceeds that of Japan, a country with a vulnerable and elderly population, by a factor of almost 50, and even dwarfs the rates in lower-middle-income countries, such as Vietnam, by a factor of almost 2000.
We know that we could have done better. China, faced with the first outbreak, chose strict quarantine and isolation after an initial delay.
This is consistent with what the Swedish MD/PhDs said, i.e., that lockdowns could work in a police state. But how was Donald Trump supposed to arrogate police state powers to himself? Supposedly, only state governors had the ability to terminate Americans’ First Amendment rights to assemble, terminate children’s rights to go to school, etc.
(Why cite Vietnam? Laos and Cambodia have had zero deaths! See “Vietnam miracle escape from Covid may be down to ‘natural immunity'” (Telegraph) for a report on Oxford professors poking into this question)
The unkindest cut of all:
Yet our leaders have largely chosen to ignore and even denigrate experts.
(But Trump can just say that he wants to follow the 15,000ish doctors and MD/PhDs who say that shutdown is the wrong policy. Sunetra Gupta, Oxford professor, doesn’t qualify as an “expert”? Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard, is not an “expert”?)
To minimize COVID-19 deaths, therefore, what we really need is a police state that can take dramatic muscular action unfettered by a written constitution. This reminds me of Looking at Covid-19 death rate is like the old saying “An economist is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”?
Is asking an epidemiologist whether to keep schools and playgrounds open like asking your accountant whether you should buy a dog? Yes, the expert can give you a bit of insight (“my other clients with dogs spend $4,000 per year on vet, food, and grooming”), but not a life-optimizing answer.
In this, the NEJM simply ignores its own content, e.g., “The Untold Toll — The Pandemic’s Effects on Patients without Covid-19” Shutting down every other part of society in order to focus on COVID-19 necessarily results in a lot of deaths. “The COVID-19 shutdown will cost Americans millions of years of life” (The Hill) takes a stab at calculating the cost.
Maybe this is a good window into what would have happened if technocrats had been allowed to run the White House!
(Separately, if you work at a hospital or medical school, one fun thing to do is listen for when a physician criticizes Donald Trump for trying to stem the tide of undocumented low-skill migrants. Most of these folks eventually end up on Medicaid and/or have children who are on Medicaid, thus becoming revenue sources for physicians. Then ask “Should a Swiss, German, French, English, or Taiwanese doctor who is fluent in English be able to come over here and practice?”)
Related:
Full post, including commentsA friend’s Facebook post:
Nate Silver’s project 538 gives odds for Trump vs. Biden as 17 vs 82 … I am not a glorified data scientist with a bunch of other data scientists developing predictive models for me, but I dare to make a risky prediction contradicting Nate Silver’s. My “data model” is pretty simple, it is based on very subjective observations that I know/observed quite a few people who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, or even voted for Clinton, and who are planning to vote for Trump now. And I am yet to encounter one, just ONE case when someone who voted for Trump in 2016 is going to vote for Biden. It looks like a very one-directional flow of votes.
Of course, it is very subjective and prone to some selective bias – thus I am curious if someone-somewhere knows ANYBODY who voted for Trump in 2016 and is going to vote for Biden now.
As there is nobody here in Maskachusetts who will admit to having voted for Trump, I want to bounce this question to the readers in other states, preferably swing states. (Nobody’s vote matters here, since the candidates are either running literally unopposed (no other choice) or practically unopposed (outcome already known).)
Has anyone met a person who said “I voted for Trump in 2016, but now I prefer the prospect of President Biden/Harris”?
Maybe the real answer is that nobody changes party affiliation and the only reason elections have different outcomes is turnout?
Full post, including commentsThe World’s Best Infrastructure (TM) here in Maskachusetts was unequal to a cold front passing through and therefore we, along with 200,000 other residents, lost power prior to the Vice Presidential debate. What did I miss?
Checking the transcript…
The very first question seems to rest on false premises.
Senator Harris, the coronavirus is not under control. Over the past week, Johns Hopkins reports that 39 states have had more COVID cases over the past seven days than in the week before. Nine states have set new records. Even if a vaccine is released soon, the next administration will face hard choices. What would a Biden administration do in January and February that a Trump administration wouldn’t do? Would you impose new lockdowns for businesses and schools in hotspots? A federal mandate to wear masks?
Yet we were informed months ago by the NYT that the federal government did not have the power to shut down or reopen a state, that only a state governor could do these things (and therefore nobody should listen to the Orange Man in the White House).
Harris’s very first response seems to be untrue: “The president said [coronavirus] was a hoax.” (AP: “In fact, Trump pronounced Democratic criticism of his pandemic response a hoax.”)
Harris says that the virus is airborne:
And here’s the thing, on January 28, the vice president and the president were informed about the nature of this pandemic. They were informed that it’s lethal in consequence, that it is airborne, that it will affect young people and that it would be contracted because it is airborne. And they knew what was happening, and they didn’t tell you.
If so, how could any politician or policy beat this virus? Unless each American retired to an individual bunker until a European or Asian pharma company developers a cure or vaccine, how would Americans have avoided an infection that is truly airborne? From a set of graphs of infections versus mask mandates:
This does not look like a chart of humans being in charge!
Pence:
But I want the American people to know that from the very first day, President Donald Trump has put the health of Americans first. Before there were more than five cases in the United States, all people who had returned from China, President Donald Trump did what no other American president had ever done. And that was he suspended all travel from China, the second largest economy in the world. Now, Senator Joe Biden, Biden opposed that decision. He said it was xenophobic and hysterical, but I can tell you, having led the White House Coronavirus Task Force, that that decision alone by President Trump bought us invaluable time to stand up the greatest national mobilization since World War II. And I believe it’s saved hundreds of thousands of American lives. Because with that time we were able to reinvent testing. More than 115 million tests have been done to date
A buttload of tests were done at the White House, right? And everyone there got coronavirus. How have tests helped? Also, how does the Federal government get credit for “the greatest national mobilization since World War II”? Shouldn’t Zoom, AWS, Verizon, and Comcast get this credit? Who would have imagined that the Internet and these services could scale up to Americans sitting at home on video chat 50 hours/week?
More from Pence:
But when you say what the American people have done over these last eight months hasn’t worked, that’s a great disservice to the sacrifices the American people have made.
Is it obvious that the sacrifices that Americans have made have done anything more than prolong the epidemic? The death rate here is higher than in “give the finger to the virus” Sweden (COVID-19 deaths by country). Plus we have the millions of life-years lost to the shutdown (delayed health care, poverty, lack of education, long-term unemployment, alcoholism, drug addiction, depression/suicide, etc.). Trump was an early Church of Sweden adherent, until Americans desperate to cower in place rejected his advice to sweep up and move on. Now Pence and Trump will say that they crushed the virus?
Pence:
Because the reality is that we’re going to have a vaccine, Senator, in record time, in unheard of time, in less than a year. We have five companies in phase three clinical trials. And we’re right now producing 10s of millions of doses.
My Russian IFR students say that their parents back in Russia have already had a COVID-19 vaccine (CNN). If the American vaccine is months or years later than the Russian one, how is that “record time”?
(Separately, when will the Russians give us a common cold vaccine? I have gone through enough Sudafed this month to start my own meth lab and enough other people are sick here in sanitized-and-masked Boston that the meth labs are converting their product back into Sudafed…)
Later in the debate, Pence noted that “China is to blame for the coronavirus.” I.e., maybe the U.S. can’t direct whom the virus infects, but the Chinese can. When does the virus get to be in control? (see also, the Chinese response to this idea)
Harris:
We now know Donald Trump owes and is in debt for $400 million.
Can this be correct? Here in our electricity-free town, we provide sanctuary undocumented migrants who can afford a two-acre lot and a $1 million house to be constructed on said lot. If the final property is worth $2 million and there is a mortgage for $1 million, do we say “The virtuous migrant is in debt for $1 million” or “The virtuous migrant has accumulated assets of $1 million”? By Harris’s standards, nearly every commercial real estate developer and owner in the U.S. is insolvent.
Here’s a tough question!
Senator Harris, the Biden Harris campaign has proposed new programs to boost the economy and you would pay for that new spending by raising $4 trillion in taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations. Some economists warn that could curb entrepreneurial ventures that fuel growth and create jobs. Would raising taxes for the recovery at risk?
Harris:
On day one, Joe Biden will repeal that tax bill. He’ll get rid of it. And what he’ll do with the money is invested in the American people. And through a plan that is about investing in infrastructure, something that Donald Trump said he would do. I remember hearing about some infrastructure week. I don’t think it ever happened. But Joe Biden will do that. He’ll invest in infrastructure. It’s about upgrading our roads and bridges, but also investing in clean energy and renewable energy.
Won’t all U.S. corporations then be acquired by Irish, English, Canadian, and Swedish companies so that the profits can be brought back to lower-tax jurisdictions? Any given basket of assets has to be worth more to an Irish conglomerate that pays 12.5 percent in tax than to a U.S. entity that will pay 45 percent federal and state corporate tax, right?
Also, if the U.S. is the world’s least efficient country in terms of building infrastructure (example: NYT), why does it make sense to take $trillions away from private investment and pour it into government-run projects?
Why do we need upgraded roads if Americans are going to be cowering in place for the next few decades (even if we beat coronavirus, there will be additional viruses right behind it, no? And Americans have generally developed an aversion to contagion that only hiding in a bunker can address)?
Harris:
If you come from a family that makes less than $125,000, you’ll go to a public university for free.
So anyone who earns more than $125,000 and has college-age children will cut back on hours and/or try to push compensation into a four-year deferral program so as to earn exactly $124,999 per year? (See Fast-food economics in Massachusetts: Higher minimum wage leads to a shorter work week, not fewer people on welfare for how this has worked at the lower end of the American wage scale.) See also “Biden Affirms: “I Will Eliminate Your Student Debt”” (Forbes): “I’m going to eliminate your student debt if you come from a family [making less] than $125,000 and went to a public university.” and “Under his plan, Biden would forgive all undergraduate federal student loan debt for borrowers with annual incomes under $125,000 who attended public colleges and universities, as well as historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and private minority-serving institutions (MSIs).” (should everyone who owes on student loans and falls into these categories stop making payments now in hopes of relief in 2021? President Harris will forgive debt, not provide a refund for absurd amounts already paid, right?)
Pence:
And Joe Biden wants to repeal all of the tariffs that President Trump put into effect to fight for American jobs and American workers
If we’re going to all sit on our butts at home while Europeans and Asians are back to work, why do we want tariffs? If U.S. manufacturing is effectively shut down by governors’ orders, what industry are we protecting from hard working foreigners?
Harris:
Joe Biden will not raise taxes on anyone who makes less than $400,000 a year. He has been very clear about that. Joe Biden will not end fracking. He has been very clear about that.
But if corporate tax rates are cranked by up (except for Apple, Google, Facebook, and the other big Democrat donors who can stuff their money into Irish and Dutch sandwich structures that would once again start working), isn’t that essentially a tax increase on any U.S. resident who owns shares in U.S. corporations? (see Harvard professor Mankiw’s analysis of how an individual’s total tax rate depends also on corporate tax)
And why not end fracking? Aren’t we trying to be green?
Pence:
You yourself said on multiple occasions when you were running for president that you would ban fracking. Joe Biden looked his supporter in the eye and pointed and said “I guarantee, I guarantee that we will abolish fossil fuels”.
(See also “World’s largest solar plant goes online in China”, selling power at about 5 cents/kWh for a capital investment of roughly what it costs to build a mile of subway track in New York City).
A bizarre question, about Pence’s religious beliefs:
This year we’ve seen record-setting hurricanes in the south. Another one, Hurricane Delta is now threatening the gulf. And we have seen record-setting wildfires in the West. Do you believe, as the scientific community has concluded, that man-made climate change has made wildfires bigger, hotter and more deadly? And it made hurricanes wetter, slower and more damaging?
What difference does it make what Pence believes? A person who believes that humans have changed the climate could still be unmotivated to do anything about it, e.g., saying “We’ll let the Chinese and German engineers deal with that in 50 years when technology is better” or “It’s a shame, but the U.S. is a shrinking percentage of the world economy, so India and China will be in control of this going forward.”
A remarkable argument about hurricane frequency ensues between the moderator, confident regarding “science” despite having no scientific education, and a politician with no scientific education. Eventually a second politician with no scientific education weighs in on climate modeling.
Harris on foreign policy:
Full post, including commentsSo, you know Joe is – I love talking with Joe about a lot of these issues, and you know, Joe, I think, he said, quite well. He says, you know, ‘Foreign policy: it might sound complicated, but really it’s relationships there – just think about it as relationships. And so we know this, in our personal, professional relationships – you guys keep your word to your friends. Got to be loyal to your friends. People who have stood with you, got to stand with them. You got to know who your adversaries