Political logic: We can’t pay for the essentials, so let’s spend $1.5 trillion on new stuff

by philg

From West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s official site:

Every Member of Congress has a solemn duty to vote for what they believe is best for the country and the American people, not their party. Respectfully, as I have said for months, I can’t support $3.5 trillion more in spending when we have already spent $5.4 trillion since last March. At some point, all of us, regardless of party must ask the simple question – how much is enough?

What I have made clear to the President and Democratic leaders is that spending trillions more on new and expanded government programs, when we can’t even pay for the essential social programs, like Social Security and Medicare, is the definition of fiscal insanity. Suggesting that spending trillions more will not have an impact on inflation ignores the everyday reality that America’s families continue pay an unavoidable inflation tax. Proposing a historic expansion of social programs while ignoring the fact we are not in a recession and that millions of jobs remain open will only feed a dysfunction that could weaken our economic recovery. This is the shared reality we all now face, and it is this reality that must shape the future decisions that we, as elected leaders, must make.

We can’t pay for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and they are “essential” (like marijuana and liquor stores in Massachusetts during coronashutdowns?) so we should probably actually cut spending wherever we can until we can pay for these essentials, right? Certainly, it would be “insane” to spend “trillions”.

Let’s compare the above, from September 29, to “Manchin says $1.5 trillion is his limit on Biden economic agenda amid battle with progressives” (CNN, September 30):

Moderate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia made clear Thursday that $1.5 trillion was the price tag he was willing to settle on for his party’s plan to expand the social safety net, putting him $2 trillion away from the lowest number progressive Democrats have said they would accept.

I would love it if Senator Manchin came to help us with our household budget: “You haven’t saved enough for retirement, you’re feeding the kids ramen noodles, your supply of essential-for-anyone-from-Massachusetts marijuana and liquor is critically low, and your health insurance bills are past-due, so there is simply no way you can buy Paul Allen’s 414-foot superyacht. That would be fiscal insanity. I recommend that you buy a $15 million Riva 110 instead.”

(The CNN article also has a fun quote from Democratic Party thought leader Ilhan Omar: “We didn’t envision having Republicans in our party”)

Related:

  • Understanding Congress’s solution to the federal deficit problem (2011): “The deal cuts $38 billion from last year’s budget. It’s being called the largest domestic spending cut in U.S. history” … The FY 2011 federal budget is approximately $3.82 trillion (3.82×10^12). Of that, approximately $2.17 trillion will be paid for by taxes collected and the remaining $1.65 trillion will be borrowed from our grandchildren. If we divide everything by 100 million, the numbers begin to make more sense. We have a family that is spending $38,200 per year. The family’s income is $21,700 per year. The family adds $16,500 in credit card debt every year in order to pay its bills. After a long and difficult debate among family members, keeping in mind that it was not going to be possible to borrow $16,500 every year forever, the parents and children agreed that a $380/year premium cable subscription could be terminated. So now the family will have to borrow only $16,120 per year.
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The last person that I saw in Massachusetts

by philg

It’s October, the month when rich people show up to their South Florida houses (folks without kids in school don’t rush back to catch the 90-degrees-and-humid high temps of August and September; see Weather Spark for an analysis of the climate and the opinion that mid-October through early May is when a rich/flexible person should be in Palm Beach). Starting in mid-September, we noticed that it was pleasant to be out walking Mindy the Crippler in the mornings and evenings.

I’ll take this moment to reflect on the last person whom I saw in Massachusetts. It was a hot August day. He was alone on the South T hangar ramp at KBED. There is no FBO there, just individual hangars to which aircraft owners must drive in private cars. As such, there was nobody within 300′ of him other than myself (taxiing past inside a Cirrus SR20 being ferried to its new Florida home).

He was wearing an N95 mask.

(No photo, sadly, since capturing the scene would have required a telephoto lens and I was solo in the airplane. Taxiing is an operation that demands concentration and avoiding distraction. There are a lot more taxi accidents than in-flight accidents, though obviously the consequences are less severe when something bad happens on the ground.)

What’s the current COVID-19 situation in a state that is fully vaccinated and fully masked? It’s an “emergency” according to this email from yesterday:

An Act extending COVID-19 Massachusetts emergency paid sick leave, H.4127, was signed into law on September 29, 2021. This legislation modifies the Massachusetts COVID-19 Emergency Paid Sick Leave program in two ways:

Extends the program until April 1, 2022 or the exhaustion of $75 million in program funds as determined by the Commonwealth, whichever is earlier; and

Effective October 1, 2021, permits employees to use Massachusetts COVID-19 Emergency Paid Sick Leave to care for a family member who needs to obtain or recover from a COVID-19 immunization.

During this period, employers must continue to offer Massachusetts employees leave time for qualifying reasons related to COVID-19. Further information on the updated law is available at https://www.mass.gov/info-details/covid-19-temporary-emergency-paid-sick-leave-program.

Employers may continue to apply for reimbursement by logging into the Department of Revenue’s MassTaxConnect website. Further information, including detailed instructions, is available here: https://www.mass.gov/info-details/covid-19-temporary-emergency-paid-sick-leave-program#how-to-apply-for-reimbursement-.

As the federal Emergency Paid Sick Leave program comes to an end, the extension of this state leave program will assure continued support for businesses of all sizes, including smaller businesses that to date have relied primarily on federal financial support for employees’ COVID-related leave time.

(Note in the above that the COVID-19 vaccine isn’t in any way harmful, but you might need to take some taxpayer-funded days or weeks off work to help a family member “recover from a COVID-19 immunization.”)

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Buy Berkshire Hathaway?

by philg

With tax law and tax rate changes on the horizon, is it time to buy Berkshire Hathaway? Nobody is better connected to the current rulers than loyal Democrat Warren Buffett (he thinks tax rates are too low, but somehow hasn’t ever found that box on the 1040 return where one can make a voluntary contribution to the U.S. Treasury). The complexities of the current tax code have been awesome for Buffett/Berkshire (see “Warren Buffett’s Nifty Tax Loophole” (Barron’s 2015), allowing for near-infinite deferral of taxes due at the corporate level.

Is it a reasonable bet to assume that Buffett/Berkshire will come through whatever happens in Congress and at the White House with less damage than suffered by the average publicly traded company?

On January 19, 2017, I asked Berkshire Hathaway now that Warren’s friend won’t be in the White House? Under the hated Republican dictator, how did Buffet do? Significant underperformance relative to the S&P 500:

And maybe the situation for Buffet fans is actually worse than the chart suggests because the S&P 500 paid a divided every year during this period while Berkshire Hathaway did not.

How about our friend Toucan Sam?

I sold my share because it is my belief that brk.a has a huge cult of personality with Buffet and he will be dead soon. It is hard to say what premium we are paying for Buffet but my guess is around 30%. It is a certainty he will be dead soon and it is a certainty that it will affect the share price so why risk it? I put the earnings from my brk.a sale into a vanguard fund called VTSMX

How did our favorite bird brain do? (He didn’t say exactly when in 2016 he sold, so I picked June 30)

Again, Toucan Sam did better than the chart suggests because the Vanguard fund pays a dividend.

This underperformance by Buffett calls into question Thomas Piketty’s work on inequality, which rests on the assumption that rich people can get better returns on their money than average people. Hardly anyone is richer than Warren Buffett (though sex-with-the-boss-then-divorce-lawsuit family court entrepreneurs MacKenzie Scott and Melinda Gates are pretty close). He didn’t get a better return than someone who put $10,000 into a 401k S&P 500 index fund.

Toucan Sam might have been wrong about Warren Buffett (now 91) being “dead soon”! Even the mighty coronavirus could not fell this tall oak of finance.

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U.S. after Afghanistan loss is like Russia after World War I defeat?

by philg

Fresh from losing a war, we’re in the midst of a transformation of the role and size of government, e.g., “From Cradle to Grave, Democrats Move to Expand Social Safety Net” (nytimes). Since the old system was plainly broken, as evidenced by the failure of our most diverse people, best technology, and $trillions to prevail over villagers armed with rifles, the typical American voter now has nothing to lose but his/her/zir/their chains.

(In U.S. states other than South Dakota and Florida, Americans actually started and lost a second war in 2020, this time against coronavirus. We poured all of our money and effort into the fight. Governors suspended what had been considered Constitutional rights, e.g., to assemble. After 1.5 years sitting at home growing (more) obese and less educated/skilled, Americans managed to rack up a COVID-19 death rate higher than in give-the-finger-to-the-virus Sweden.)

A leader with near-absolute power has run out of patience with the peasants. Scapegoats for our woes have been identified:

Have we seen this movie before? Let’s look back 100 years…. “How World War I Fueled the Russian Revolution” (History):

Ineffective leadership and a weak infrastructure during the war led to the demise of the Romanov dynasty.

World War I saw the crumbling of empires, and among those to collapse was the Russian empire of Czar Nicholas II. When Nicholas declared war against Germany and Austria-Hungary in July 1914, he was absolute ruler of a realm of nearly 150 million people that stretched from Central Europe to the Pacific and the edge of Afghanistan to the Arctic.

Less than three years later, in March 1917, after soldiers in Petrograd joined striking workers in protest against Nicholas’ rule, the czar was forced to abdicate. The following July, he and his family were herded into a cellar by Bolshevik revolutionaries and shot and stabbed to death, ending the Romanov dynasty’s three centuries of rule. Soon, amid the ruins of the Russian empire, the Soviet Union arose to become a world power.

The war quickly turned into a disaster, with Russia suffering a brutal defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg just a few weeks into the war. Some 30,000 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded, and nearly 100,000 were taken prisoner by the Germans.

“Things didn’t Improve as the months dragged on,” Hartnett says. “By the end of the year, the Russian empire had lost more than one million men.” Russia’s ammunitions were all but exhausted and the country’s infrastructure was not equipped to efficiently resupply troops.

Though peasant soldiers suffered the most casualties, “for regime stability, the most serious losses were among the officer corps,” Miner explains. Their loss weakened the army so much, he notes, “that when push came to shove in 1917, the army was not a reliable defender of the monarchy.”

The parallels aren’t exact. Russia lost one war. The U.S. has lost maybe three (Afghanistan, COVID-19, and Iraq?). The Soviet Union had some elderly leaders, but never anyone as old and confused as Joe Biden, and it was decades after their war losses before they turned into a gerontocracy.

Also, is it truly the case that American voters have nothing to lose but their chains? We can’t say “Americans workers” for an exact parallel because the signature feature of the U.S. today versus the Soviet Union is that every able-bodied adult in the Soviet Union had to work while the U.S. is a work-optional society. Nobody in the Soviet Union lived on alimony or child support profits. Nobody in the Soviet Union could live indefinitely in a luxurious means-tested apartment, get free health care, shop with food stamps/EBT, and chat on an Obamaphone simply because he/she/ze/they preferred not to work.

Senorpablo, in a comment on Shut down the U.S. Army now that we know more about our limits?, expressed what has become a common American point of view:

The premise put forth by you and averros, was that the private sector would make better, more productive use of the money that would otherwise flow into the military and defense industries via the government. That represents an increase in GDP, does it not? And we know from the last 40 years, if not much longer, the vast majority of the benefit from increases in GDP flow to the top 10% and above, but mostly the top .01%. Why then, would your average American be in favor of downsizing the military? So they can work part time at Taco Bell, rather than playing will guns outside, or building tanks?

In other words, whether the economy is growing or shrinking is a matter of indifference to 90 percent of Americans. If the economy expands, the benefits will go to the top 10 percent. Necessarily, then, the flip side is that if the economy stagnates or shrinks, it will be the top 10 percent who suffer.

More concretely, if the “safety net” is expanded just a little more (or perhaps we’re already there), most Americans should rationally be indifferent to the overall health of the economy. If the economy sags, they’ll transition to 18+ months of unemployment checks and enjoy a lot of leisure time to catch up with friends and family, play Xbox, etc. If the economy booms, they’ll maybe get off the couch and give up 50 hours/week to commuting and work for wages in order to purchase some luxury items. Thus, these folks actually have nothing to lose from proposing, e.g., a 99 percent tax rate on income above $100,000 per year. If the tax discourages economic activity, they’ll go back to their couches and video games until the next government check comes. Thus, why not at least try radical transformation in order to address inequality, which is, after all, a “crisis” (see the March 17, 2021 Senate hearing “The Income and Wealth Inequality Crisis in America”).

You might ask what the point of the above question is. Whether the U.S. 2021 is like Russia 1917 or not won’t affect what happens next, right? But maybe it could affect what happens to you and your family. You could, for example, buy some assets in a country that won’t be affected by the Democrats’ transformation of the U.S. If you own an apartment in Taipei or a basket of European stocks in a European account, you should be okay even if the U.S. spins down (maybe invest in an EU passport too!).

My personal default is to predict that the future will look a lot like today, so I would ordinarily bet against a dramatic change in the U.S. After all of the “reform” talk and think tank results, we’ll continue to piss away 20 percent of GDP on health care inferior to what folks in Singapore get for less than 5 percent of their GDP. Having sex with a dermatologist and harvesting the child support will continue to pay better than going to medical school and working as a primary care doctor (at least in Maskachusetts; see also Arkansas for a lump-sum $2.5 million tax-free profit). The rich will be able to avoid Joe Biden’s new estate taxes via Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts and perhaps some insurance action (Trump made it tougher to use the captive insurance escape). But I wonder if all of the war losses makes my stability prejudice unfounded.

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How did the U.S. run out of coins if more people are paying by credit cards?

by philg

One of the things that struck me when I first began visiting Central America 30 years ago was the inability of some governments to manage what I had taken for granted in the U.S.: producing enough coins so that businesses could accept cash and make change.

Lately, however, it seems that we Americans have joined our brothers, sisters, and binary resisters south of the border. Here’s a gas station right next to Dulles Airport, almost walking distance from the center of American power:

To add to the Latin American authenticity of the experience, the sign is in Spanish (“No Tenemos Monedas”) and the cashier was apparently a native Spanish speaker. Note that he/she/ze/they is touching his/her/zir/their mask, thus negating any conceivable benefit from the non-N95 device.

Maybe the situation is less dire in our largest stores? From Septembrer 14, 2021 at Home Depot in Jupiter, Florida:

What caused the U.S. circa 2021 to be like Guatemala circa 1991, at least with respect to the ability of conducting transactions in cash?

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When you love books enough to murder them: 1DollarScan.com

by philg

A couple of months ago: Has anyone tried a book scanning service for Kondoization or pre-move preparation?

I’ve got the first batch of results from 1DollarScan now and the scanned pages are in paper recycling Heaven. This is a review of their cheapest possible service: $1/100 pages and no OCR, no enhancement, and no naming of the files. Mailing books to San Jose via USPS Media Mail costs roughly $1 per book. Once the scans come back, you start with a page like this:

I downloaded them, opened each up to see what it was, and then renamed the file using Windows File Explorer. I then let my state-of-the-art PC (circa 2015) do a batch OCR via Adobe Acrobat Pro (a few clicks and then 4 hours of runtime for 28 books). Maybe due to watermarking, the files are epic in size, 70-100 MB for a regular book-type book and 200-300 MB for the technical manuals and cookbooks. A couple of the books hit 400 MB, but were reduced in size somewhat after the OCR process. (If you want to preserve the original quality from 1dollarscan, use the “Searchable Image (Exact)” setting for OCR in Acrobat; that leaves the scans unmolested and just builds the OCR database in a separate data structure behind it.) The Acrobat Pro Preflight tool says that the images within the PDFs are “300 ppi”.

How do the scans look? Here’s a book on bicycle maintenance that I thought would be tricky:

A cheaply printed book with 40 years of acid destroying the pages (how to slice a banana without peeling using needle and thread):

A book where the color is not from the acid:

A Wall Street Journal book on estate planning (timely topic now that the Democrats say they are working to change all of the rules!) in which color is used as a sidenote background:

(If your child lives in Massachusetts, a family court predator can easily take all of the trust assets via child support (over the 23-year period during which child support is ordered, not all in one lump). A parent creating a trust in Nevada or South Dakota cannot necessarily undo the child’s mistake of being exposed to the family courts in other states. Your child can simply be put in prison by the judge (“contempt of court”) unless the amount ordered is paid, either by the child or by the trust and therefore it may not matter, from a practical point of view, what the trust documents say.)

Perhaps the toughest challenge of all, some handwritten bound journals from the late 1980s. Some notes on a finite-state machine implemented in Programmable Array Logic (PALs). I think this is for reading the bits from and syncing the clock to a digital audio output of a CD player.

There wasn’t much they could do about my handwriting, but the scans are sharp and zooming in from the PDF should be just as good for deciphering as having the physical page (not that I have the physical page anymore).

So far, I would say that this service delivered everything promised.

More:

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Zoolander and what it would have taken to get Democrats to support a border wall

by philg

President Biden has ostentatiously deported, contrary to international law, at least a small percentage of the Haitians who walked across the river in Texas. This has been done in a manner far more aggressive than anything Donald Trump ever did and thus has revealed that a Democrat-ruled U.S. will roll out the welcome mat for almost anyone, but not absolutely everyone.

In light of this new information, i.e., that there are some migrants whom the Democrats will not welcome, I wonder if the best way to understand the 2016-2020 conflict between Trump and the Democrats regarding the border wall is by studying the Derek Zoolander versus Hansel conflict:

  • Derek Zoolander: “And all he had to do was turn left. [to win the walk-off]”
  • Matilda: “What do you mean?”
  • Derek Zoolander: “I’m not an ambi-turner. It’s a problem I had since I was a baby. I can’t turn left.”
  • Matilda: “Derek, that’s nothing to be ashamed of. I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who can’t turn…I mean, there have got to be some people out there just like you who can’t…turn…turn…left.”

Is it fair to say that all Donald Trump would have had to do to get Democrats in Congress to fund his border wall was find some Black people who would agree to show up on the southern banks of the Rio Grande?

Related:

  • “‘They treated us like animals’: Haitians angry and in despair at being deported from US” (Guardian): The Biden administration’s decision to deport thousands of Haitians under such circumstances drew opprobrium around the world, and prompted the US envoy to Haiti to resign in protest. Haiti is “a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs in control of daily life”, he wrote in his resignation letter. “Surging migration to our borders will only grow as we add to Haiti’s unacceptable misery.” Last week, the world was shocked by images of police officers on horseback charging at desperate Haitian migrants near a camp of 12,000, set up under the Del Río-Ciudad Acuña International Bridge. Delva was on his way to buy food and water for his family when the cavalry charge sent him and dozens of his compatriots running in a frenzy. “We were rounded up like cattle and shackled like criminals,” he said, having spent the six-hour flight from San Antonio with his hands and legs tied. US authorities were so slapdash in their rapid deportation of the migrants that they also swept up an Angolan man who had never set foot in Haiti. “I told them I am not Haitian,” said Belone Mpembele, as he emerged, dazed, from the terminal. “But they didn’t listen.” New arrivals each received about $50 in cash as well a hygiene kit including toilet paper, soap and toothbrushes, emblazoned with the USAID logo and slogan: “A gift from the American people.”
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Best paint treatments for cars and airplanes?

by philg

I am concerned that there hasn’t been enough disagreement here on this blog on religious topics, e.g., whether mask use by the general population reduces or delays coronavirus infection (masking K-12 students doesn’t help, according to the CDC, but let’s order it anyway!). So it is time to introduce the topic of wax, polish, and other paint treatments.

An aircraft mechanic here in the Florida Free State swears by Nu Finish for boats and planes and says that it actually does last for nearly a year. This product is top-rated by Consumer Reports as well, being super durable and almost as easy to apply as the other top-rated product, Meguiar’s NXT Generation Tech Wax 2.0.

Here are the patients:

  • 2005 Cirrus SR20 with original white paint plus some decals. It looks reasonably good after a wash, but could be glossier. The plane has lived in a hangar for its whole life, but is exposed to the sun for days at a time when on trips.
  • a 2022 Chevrolet that will be arriving soon. It will be garaged, but exposed to the sun when driving and this might be a car worth handing down to the kids so they can remember when internal combustion was like before President Harris banned it

(Our beloved 2021 Honda Odyssey won’t get any treatment because it is leased and will go back to Honda in January 2024. When turned in, the 2018 Odyssey still had new-looking paint despite never having been treated in any way.)

Both Nu Finish and Meguiar’s claim to offer UV protection. Does anyone have experience with these? Each bottle is supposed to be enough for one regular-sized car? So you’d need two bottles for a pavement-melting SUV and three bottles for a four-seat airplane? What kind of rags do you use for application?

Also, what about ceramic coatings for paint? I haven’t seen an objective comparison of this expensive process (many $thousands for an airplane) versus spending $7.59 every year on Nu Finish. The people who make money applying ceramic coatings swear by them, but consider that the people who made money putting COVID-19 patients on ventilators back in the spring of 2020 also said that was the best possible medical idea. If ceramic coating is such a great idea, why don’t Ferrari and Rolls-Royce do it at the factory?

A friend owns a car wash/detail operation. Here’s what he had to say:

We do lots of detailing on exotic cars etc. c8 [Corvette] more impressive in person than just about anything. Gm also finally figured out how to make a good looking interior. The detail shop team prefers c8 over Mclaren’s!

Be sure to get a ppf film on hood and ceramic coat as soon as u get. Worth money. GM paint is quite soft. As a result they pick up swirl marks easily.

[follow-up after I queried “Ceramic coating is not a snake oil scam? What about for airplanes ? We had some exotic formula tested on a square in our PC-12 near exhaust stack. Made no difference in glossiness or ease of cleaning.”]

Not snake oil at all.

Works 100x better than wax. The key though is the paint correction step. You have to buff paint to a very smooth finish then seal it.

The airplane stuff is a joke bc airplane paint is garbage in most instances. On cars you are actually sealing the clear coat.

The cost for ceramic on a car isn’t the coating, it’s the labor on the buffing step.

It really helps with acid rain degradation dulling of clear coat on east coast.

He’s smart and I respect his opinion, but I can’t get over my Efficient Market Hypothesis question: If ceramic coating makes sense, why isn’t it the final step at the car factory? The paint shouldn’t ever be smoother than when the car is brand new, right? Why not apply the magic elixir when the paint is new and doesn’t need the expensive “correction” step?

The PPF film that he mentioned is made by 3M, so that suggests it isn’t a total scam. On the third hand, despite the heavy truck traffic on the roads here in Florida, there doesn’t seem to be enough gravel to create a significant paint chip risk. God ran out of rocks somewhere in Georgia? And, again, if this is such a great idea why don’t they put it on at the factory, at least as an option?

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Correlation versus Causation (COVID-19 is now killing Republicans)

by philg

Today’s New York Times carries an article saying that COVID-19 is now almost exclusively a disease of Republicans: “Red Covid; Covid’s partisan pattern is growing more extreme.” The article is festooned with scientific-looking charts.

(Note that the above chart is just a recent snapshot and does not show total COVID-19 deaths.)

If we are to believe the New York Times,

  1. support for Republican political candidates leads almost directly to death via COVID-19
  2. Democrat-controlled media and Democrat-controlled government are deeply concerned about deaths of Republican voters

(Proposition #2 confuses me the most. Back in the summer of 2020, our former neighbors in Massachusetts were positively gleeful at the prospect of conservative Floridians dying en masse due to their governor’s failure to order masks and shutdowns. Despite a year of open schools versus a year of closed schools, FL never did catch up to MA)

Here’s the explanation of how science-denial leads to death:

What distinguishes the U.S. is a conservative party — the Republican Party — that has grown hostile to science and empirical evidence in recent decades. A conservative media complex, including Fox News, Sinclair Broadcast Group and various online outlets, echoes and amplifies this hostility. Trump took the conspiratorial thinking to a new level, but he did not create it.

When they break up the stats by county, the differences are even larger and the correlation becomes more impressive.

But what else is correlated by county? There is a huge rural-urban divide in the U.S. in terms of party affiliation. Government tends to do its great works, and therefore its great spending, in cities. See What will rural American taxpayers get in return for spending on infrastructure?

Big Government spends nearly all of its money in cities so a bigger government accelerates the process of looting from rural Americans to enrich those who live in cities, e.g., with free public housing, improved transportation systems, fancier hospitals, etc.

It makes sense that people who live in more spread-out areas aren’t going to vote for Democrats promising huge spending in cities that they seldom visit.

Why does this matter? If coronavirus is simply taking its time to reach out-of-the-way places, the purported “Republican wave of death” is actually just the virus finally reaching people who couldn’t be reached in the spring of 2020.

Let’s look at South Dakota, where 62 percent of voters failed to vote for the Party of #Science. Is COVID killing the never-masked never-shutdown infidels right now? The NYT says “no”:

Why not? Maybe everyone in South Dakota is vaccinated? Actually, SD is below Florida and has almost the same rate as Texas (ranking; note that California is protected because its vaccination rate is 58.76 percent while Florida is doomed because its vaccination rate is only 56.89 percent), states that the NYT highlights as full of wicked and evil people who are being killed by a Just and Benevolent CoronaGod. If voting Republican leads to death via COVID-19, as the NYT suggests, and salvation lies in having a high vaccination rate, not-very-vaccinated South Dakota should be getting hammered right now. If, on the other hand, the current “Republican wave of death” is merely “the virus getting around to places it didn’t already saturate” then South Dakota is spared current misery due to the virus having killed everyone who could be easily killed by COVID back in November 2020.

Readers: Do you think that the current large differences in COVID-19 daily death rates among states are actually caused by party affiliation? If there is some other cause that we can be confident in, what is it?

What if we hear from an MD/PhD professor at the Stanford medical school?

(Note that I disagree with the Stanford prof’s interpretation of these data. Yes, it is true that a Florida Free State resident of a given age actually had a lower risk of death from COVID-19 than did a locked-down Californian (California has a somewhat lower aggregate death rate due to having a younger population than the U.S. average and than Florida’s). But it is not true that California has made policy mistakes. As demonstrated by the recent governor recall vote, Californians want to be locked down.)

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Will Kathy Hochul be Florida health care worker Recruiter of the Year?

by philg

Folks in the South Florida real estate industry dubbed Andrew Cuomo the “Florida Realtor of the Year” in gratitude for all of the money that they made selling houses to people fleeing New York’s lockdowns, school closures, and mask orders. (This was before Mr. Cuomo became famous for his efforts in other areas.)

I wonder if Kathy Hochul, the current governor of New York, will be remembered for solving every Florida health care enterprise’s HR problems. The nursing shortage in FL could be over by the end of next week, according to the NYT:

Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York is considering calling in the National Guard and recruiting medical professionals from other states to cover looming staff shortages at hospitals and other facilities as the likelihood grows that tens of thousands of health care workers will not meet the state’s deadlines for mandated vaccinations.

New York State is one of the first major testing grounds for stronger vaccination edicts rolling in across the country in the health care sector. California and Maine have also set deadlines for health care workers to be vaccinated. President Biden has said his administration will issue a national vaccination mandate expected to ultimately affect some 17 million health care workers at hospitals and other institutions that accept Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements.

Hospital and nursing home employees in New York are required to receive a first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine by 11:59 p.m. on Monday night, while workers working in home care, hospices and other adult care facilities must do so by Oct. 7, according to state regulations and a mandate issued on Aug. 16 by former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

For health care workers seeking freedom, Florida may not be a complete solution (since President Biden and, if necessary, the U.S. military could step in to deprive Floridians of the freedoms that Governor DeSantis has tried to arrange), but moving to Florida certainly will ensure as much freedom as is possible to obtain as an employed American (folks on welfare, of course, are completely free from requirements to wear masks, get vaccines, etc., since they are not going to work).

It doesn’t usually take a huge nudge to move someone from New York to Florida. A high percentage of the above-mentioned workers probably had planned to move to Florida after retirement. For those doctors and nurses who don’t want their pharmaceutical intake to be determined by two lawyers (Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul), could this be the final nudge that sends them down I-95?

Separately, how much do we love it when people with no technical or scientific training say that MDs and RNs are rejecting science and have fallen prey to “misinformation” about the vaccines whose long-term disease-prevention capabilities and side effects are apparently best-known to politicians and journalists? (from state-sponsored NPR: “In The Fight Against COVID, Health Workers Aren’t Immune To Vaccine Misinformation”)

Also, as a vaccinated person I do appreciate the “blame-the-unvaccinated-for-all-of-our-woes” strategy being pursued by our leaders. But I wonder how long we can keep it going. If someone is a front-line health care worker and feeling young/healthy enough to be out and about without a vaccine shot, isn’t it likely that he/she/ze/they has already had a SARS-CoV-2 infection and therefore has at least as good immunity as someone who is vaccinated?

Last night, from the Juno Beach Pier:

Related:

  • “These Health Care Workers Would Rather Get Fired Than Get Vaccinated” (NYT, 9/26): a selection of those who might be easily recruited
  • “Mount Sinai hospital leaders holed up in Florida vacation homes during coronavirus crisis” (New York Post, March 28, 2020): While heroic staffers beg for protective equipment and don garbage bags to treat coronavirus patients at a Mount Sinai hospital, two of the system’s top executives are waiting out the public health catastrophe in the comfort of their Florida vacation homes, The Post has learned. Dr. Kenneth Davis, 72, the CEO of the Mount Sinai Health System who pulled down nearly $6 million in compensation in 2018, is ensconced in his waterfront mansion near Palm Beach. Davis has been in the Sunshine State for weeks and is joined by Dr. Arthur Klein, 72, president of the Mount Sinai Health Network, who owns an oceanfront condo in Palm Beach.
  • No exceptions for “people who are pregnant, lactating, or planning to become pregnant” from the New York Department of Health: … all pregnant individuals be vaccinated … Vaccination of pregnant people against COVID-19 also serves to build antibodies which may protect their baby from COVID-19 infection. … pregnant people with COVID-19 might be at increased risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes, such as preterm birth, compared with pregnant women without COVID-19… If pregnant people have questions about getting vaccinated… If someone is pregnant or thinking about becoming pregnant, healthcare providers should discuss the risk to the pregnant person … Vaccinations for Lactating People … A lactating person may choose to be vaccinated… . Pregnancy alone is not a valid “health condition” upon which to base a medical exemption.
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