If coronashutdown is to protect the old, why do young people have to pay for it?

by philg

The average age of a Covid-19-tagged death here in Massachusetts is 82. Thus, presumably to the extent that any lives are saved from Covid-19 by our educational, social, and economic shutdown, they will be roughly 82-year-old lives.

Let’s assume for sake of argument that the shutdown makes sense as a mechanism for saving lives. Flatten the Curve will save more people from Covid-19 by delaying their infection than will be killed from (a) the shutdown of regular health care, (b) poverty and unemployment, (c) starvation in poor countries, (d) the suspension of clinical trials for new drugs, (e) the suspension of clinical training for the next generation of medical doctors, etc.

Now that we’ve assumed shutdown is an actual life-saving mechanism, we come to the cost and who pays. Just this year’s federal budget deficit is on track to be $4 trillion. So that’s $4 trillion that will be borrowed before the inevitable bailout of the big-spending state governments (not allowed to issue bonds so they borrow by making public employee pension promises that they don’t fund).

The ordinary borrowing mechanism of the federal government imposes the costs onto people who are still young enough to work and pay taxes, right? And since federal government tends not to repay debt, but merely roll it over and pay more interest, the younger the person the more he/she/ze/they will have to pay, right? Is it fair to say, then, that Americans who are currently in their 20s will bear the highest burden from coronashutdown? (current children will pay too, but they won’t start paying taxes for a few years yet so their future payments have to be discounted)

Is this our revenge on them for saying “OK Boomer”?

(The young folks above would be violating our Massachusetts town’s mask order, but the photo is from Portsmouth, New Hampshire (“Stay Home or Die” will be the new license plate motto?) so they’re not breaking the law there.)

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Science-denying Covidiots in Pittsburgh reopen their business

by philg

Science-deniers defy and deny the settled science and, what’s worse, suggest that Covid-19 may not be a more serious problem than influenza:

Yealy was asked whether people should worry about COVID-19 more than the regular flu. He said people should be “worried differently,” pointing out that both take their heaviest toll on the elderly, especially nursing home residents, and people weakened by other medical conditions.

Yealy said he “would not think of it as more or less, just two different illnesses that share some features, but have some distinct differences.”

These people are reopening their business, prioritizing money over human life, justifying their lust for cash by claiming that “the death rate for people infected with the new coronavirus may be as low as 0.25%”.

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Rapunzel’s mom inspires our media and politicians?

by philg

Happy Mother’s Day to those readers who identify as “mothers”!

Conversation with a 10-year-old:

  • Why do they tell us to wear masks and avoid crowds if we can’t catch coronavirus?
  • When adults want children to do something for their benefit, one good strategy is to tell the children that it is actually for their own benefit.
  • Like Mother Gothel in Tangled!

For readers unfamiliar with this epic retelling of the Rapunzel story, the senior citizen Mother Gothel (a witch who identifies as Rapunzel’s mom) keeps the healthy 18-year-old imprisoned by telling her that the outside world is full of danger and peril.

Look at you, as fragile as a flower
Still a little sapling, just a sprout
You know why we stay up in this tower

That’s right, to keep you safe and sound, dear
Guess I always knew this day was coming
Knew that soon you’d want to leave the nest
Soon, but not yet

Listen to your mother
It’s a scary world out there
Mother knows best
One way or another
Something will go wrong, I swear
Ruffians, thugs
Poison ivy, quicksand
Cannibals and snakes
The plague

(Lyricist Glenn Slater should get a prize for that last line!)

Although the typical Covid-19-tagged death in Massachusetts is of an 82-year-old with “underlying conditions” (more than 98 percent), our media tends to feature healthy young people cut down in their prime by the evil virus, an ever-present lurker in any activity that young people might formerly have enjoyed. The result is a remarkably high number of healthy young people isolating themselves out of personal fear, just as Rapunzel isolated herself voluntarily until shortly before the movie picks up her story.

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Is it more difficult to be a mother today compared to 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 years ago?

by philg

From our local public radio station: “I Love My Kids But I Loathe Mother’s Day — Especially This Year”.

… our culture has a pretty long rap sheet of under-appreciating women. And day in and day out, those moms tend to not get the credit they deserve because they make so much look easy: holding together infinite moving parts to accomplish the mission of the family machine, plus adding glitter. Metaphorical glitter. Sometimes real glitter, added by real children. Which the moms are usually stuck cleaning up.

The truth is, of course, that at this moment nothing’s okay for anybody. And I get that it isn’t the holiday’s fault that we need to adjust gender and work roles and laws and unwritten rules. But right now, it’s easier to imagine a marginally improved version of Mother’s Day (minus the false pedestal mess) than to dare to dream of civilizational change.

Solidarity, moms. Each and every one of you: Happy sub-optimal holiday in these sub-optimal times to some of the most superoptimal people on Earth.

In other words, something humans have been doing for 200,000 years is now intolerably burdensome, despite a climate-conditioned home packed with labor-saving machines.

Readers: Is motherhood in fact now more burdensome than in earlier eras? Or it was always intolerably burdensome, but mothers did not have as many outlets for complaining about the burden so we don’t how unhappy women were in Ancient Athens, Siddhattha Gotama’s India, or the China of Confucius?

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Swiss: children can’t transmit coronavirus, but teachers shouldn’t rush back to work

by philg

BBC story, April 29:

Swiss authorities say it is now safe for children under the age of 10 to hug their grandparents, in a revision to official advice on coronavirus.

The health ministry’s infectious diseases chief Daniel Koch said scientists had concluded that young children did not transmit the virus.

This week, garden centres and hairdressers have been allowed to open their doors. Schools and shops selling items other than food will be allowed to reopen in two weeks’ time.

Dr Koch told a news conference this week that the original advice to keep distance between children and their grandparents was made when less was known about how the coronavirus was transmitted.

“Young children are not infected and do not transmit the virus,” he said. “They just don’t have the receptors to catch the disease.”

So they have known for a while that there was no way that children could be involved in coronaplague transmission, but the teachers still needed at least two more weeks of vacation!

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Unemployed Teenagers in the Age of Corona

by philg

A friend harvested this from a (helicopter?) mom’s discussion group:

I want to vent but don’t want blow back. Our 18 year old who works 6-7 hours a week filed for unemployment benefits and then filed for the additional federal benefit of $600 a month,unbeknownst to us. She has received 1950 so far and spent 1200 already on clothes etc over 800 today alone. We found out about this earlier tonight. We are horrified and ashamed and at a loss. No federal money should ever have come her way. She’s a full time student and a dependent completely cared for. She made at most $2600 a year and she’s receiving the salary if someone who makes 40k a year at least (her benefits aren’t taxed). Right now we are deciding what to do. You can’t give the money back. By the time it’s over she will have received $8000!!!!! What do i do? We are contemplating have her give it to the charity of her choice. She is not loving that idea. I’m disgusted and just want her out of the house. I’m resisting that impulse but it’s a strong one

Personally, I think the soon-to-be-well-clothed gal is entitled to the money (but, unless she heads to the South, where can she go and wear her new clothing?). Before this started, she took the initiative to get a W-2 job, even if only one day per week. Despite her near-zero personal risk of dying from Covid-19, she has lost what used to be her Constitutional freedoms, e.g., of assembly. Unless she chooses a career of harvesting tax-free child support cash from a portfolio of married dermatologists, dentists, and radiologists, she will be paying for all of the costs of coronapanic via higher tax rates for her entire working life (the shutdown was sold as an attempt to protect Boomers, but the shutdown is being paid for with bonds whose interest payments will fall due mostly after Boomers are long-retired and/or dead).

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Get Off My Lawn, Coronaplague Version

by philg

A journalist friend posted on Facebook asking how people greet each other in the mask age.

Her friend:

I greet someone who is wearing a mask this way “GOOD MORNING, thanks for wearing your mask.. oh by the way, I am smiling” To the people that aren’t wearing one I turn my back and walk away.. I’ve started saying “nice mask, so clear, where did you get it?”

Me:

I like to scold unmasked teenagers here in our suburb who are having fun on skateboards and scooters on the road near our house. I remind them that their personal risk of dying of Covid-19 is at least as high as their chance of being struck by debris from the International Space Station and therefore I expect them to be diligent in mask-wearing.

“Get off my lawn!” has become “Stop breathing into my air!”

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Old rich white people can play golf again in Massachusetts

by philg

Do you belong to a dark-skinned inner-city victim group? Even if you’re under 20 years old and nobody your age has ever died from Covid-19 in Massachusetts, stay in your public housing 2BR with 4 or 5 additional family members please. Wear a mask if you venture out onto the sidewalk or be fined $300.

(The mask law also applies to 3-year-olds, despite the Swiss saying that the science is settled regarding children under 10 not being able to spread the virus.)

What if you’re old, rich, and white? Fore!! “Golf courses in Massachusetts can open, effective immediately”

“We’re All In This Together” is the banner across the main street of our town. Good reminder as one drives one’s $130,000 Mercedes SUV to the golf course!

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Will we need caravan-loads of immigrant workers after we are done with coronapanic?

by philg

Immigrants may have played a substantial role in the American coronaplague. Via immigration and children of immigrants we grew our population from 200 million to 330 million (Pew) with no corresponding increase in health care system capacity. So our terror regarding overburdened hospitals was in some ways a result of the immigration. The worst-plagued cities in the U.S. have been New York (40 percent foreign-born) and Boston (25 percent foreign-born).

But the shutdown plus policies that have made collecting unemployment more lucrative than working for the typical American are winnowing the natives out of the labor force. See “Since coronavirus crisis began, one-fifth of Massachusetts workforce has filed for unemployment” (masslive, April 30), for example. Also, “Labor Markets During the Covid-19 Crisis: A Preliminary View” (Berkeley and U. Chicago agree that Americans don’t like to work!):

First, job loss has been significantly larger than implied by new unemployment claims: we estimate 20 million lost jobs by April 8th, far more than jobs lost over the entire Great Recession. Second, many of those losing jobs are not actively looking to find new ones. As a result, we estimate the rise in the unemployment rate over the corresponding period to be surprisingly small, only about 2 percentage points. Third, participation in the labor force has declined by 7 percentage points, an unparalleled fall that dwarfs the three percentage point cumulative decline that occurred from 2008 to 2016. Early retirement almost fully explains the drop in labor force participation both for those survey participants previously employed and those previously looking for work.

In other words, a lot of existing Americans are done working! This is consistent with past periods of unemployment, in which Americans who get accustomed to lying on the couch watching TV while consuming alcohol and opioids transition seamlessly to SSDI (see “Long-Term Joblessness and Disability Benefits Receipt” (ssa.gov): “At 20 years after their job loss (voluntary or involuntary), these workers had a 25 percentage point higher likelihood of receiving DI or SSI benefits”).

Could it be, then, that to replace the Americans who stop working we will need to grow the population to 400 million or so? (we don’t have an Australia/New Zealand/Canada-style policy favoring working-age skilled immigrants so we will probably need 10-20 immigrants to replace each skilled American who has gone into SSDI/opioids or conventional retirement) And then, when the next plague hits (evolution may just be a theory, but it seems to produce a steady supply of new viruses…), we’ll get into a double secret panic regarding hospital capacity.

Related:

  • When Swedish infidels do business in the U.S… the IKEA Covid-19 page says “we have made the decision to furlough hourly U.S. co-workers in store locations and our Service Office effective April 19, 2020. This will allow our hourly co-workers, who are no longer able to work due to closures, to apply for expanded unemployment benefits.”
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God of Shutdown is Punishing Belarus

by philg

“DESPITE ONE OF WORST CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAKS IN EUROPE, BELARUS REFUSES TO CANCEL MILITARY PARADE” (Newsweek, May 6):

Belarus will continue to hold its annual military parade this week, despite experiencing one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in Europe.

According to a tracker provided by Johns Hopkins University, as of Tuesday, Belarus had 7,000 confirmed cases of the virus and at least 103 deaths.

103 deaths? In a country of 9.5 million, that’s “one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in Europe”? Wouldn’t Belgium, with 8,000 deaths out of a population of 11.5 million, be a better candidate for “worst”? Or Switzerland, with nearly 1,500 deaths and a population of 8.6 million?

What could account for the journalist and editors at Newsweek describing Belarus as a Covid-19 disaster area?

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic that has impacted countries across the world, Belarus has remained one of the only European nations to not impose a lockdown, to fight the spread of the virus.

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