Amid the grim coronavirus news of death and unemployment, at least there is the comic relief of the left embracing the Tenth Amendment.
Suddenly trendy is the provision of the Bill of Rights that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”
The rush to the Tenth came in response to President Trump’s statement on May 22. “I call upon governors to allow our churches and places of worship to open right now,” Trump said. “The governors need to do the right thing and allow these very important, essential places of faith to open right now, for this weekend. If they don’t do it, I will override the governors.”
The editor of Mother Jones, a left leaning magazine, Clara Jeffrey, wasn’t having it. “To be clear, Trump can’t do [expletive] to force churches/temples/mosques to open. Little thing called the 10th Amendment,” she tweeted.
The White House correspondent of the PBS Newshour, Yamiche Alcindor, made the same point. “Pres Trump says he will ‘override the governors’ if they don’t follow new CDC guidance and open places of worship this weekend. Context: The 10th Amendment of the Constitution says powers not delegated to federal government are reserved to the states,” Alcindor tweeted.
A Democratic congressman from California, Jared Huffman, and a Democratic congressman from Maryland, Jamie Raskin, issued a joint statement accusing Trump of “breathtaking arrogance,” and of threatening “to trample the sovereign powers of the states under American federalism…and the rights of the people under the First Amendment and the Tenth Amendment.”
Rachel Laser of Americans United for Separation of Church and State insisted that Trump lacks the power to override the governors. “The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution forbids the federal government from strongarming the states,” Laser said, as quoted by Politico‘s Josh Gerstein.
What’s amusing about this? Well, it’s the humor of contrasting it with the attitude toward federal supremacy and states’ rights that had obtained some years back, when the Democrats controlled the White House, and when “states rights” was the cry of segregationists, not social-distancers.
A front-page news article in The New York Times back in 2010, when President Obama, a Democrat, was in the White House, cast doubt on states’ rights efforts.
“Article 6 of the Constitution says federal authority outranks state authority, and on that bedrock of federalist principle rests centuries of back and forth that states have mostly lost, notably the desegregation of schools in the 1950s and ’60s,” the Times reported then. The Times quoted a law professor, Ruthann Robson, who claimed, “Article 6 says that that federal law is supreme and that if there’s a conflict, federal law prevails.”
A different New York Times article from 2010 described the Tenth Amendment as “The Tea Party’s favorite part of the Constitution,” a reference to the grassroots “Taxed Enough Already” movement that was then organizing protests against Obama’s policies.
And a third Times article from 2010, reporting on Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearing, observed, “Tea Party supporters believe that much of what the federal government regulates should be left to the states, where voters hold a shorter leash. For this reason, they embrace a strict interpretation of the 10th Amendment, which says that the powers not delegated to the federal government by the Constitution ‘are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.'”
Back in 1996, when a different Democrat, Bill Clinton, controlled the White House, a Timeseditorial complained, “A headstrong five-justice majority is driving the Supreme Court toward a revolutionary, indeed reactionary, interpretation of federalism, tilting the balance dangerously toward states’ rights at the expense of Federal power.”
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that support for states’ rights or federal power is dependent on whether your guy is the one in the White House giving the orders or the one in the governor’s mansion being ordered around. It’s less principled or consistent that it is partisan and situational.
The right can vacillate on these matters, too. That’s particularly true in religious freedom cases. A strong historical legal case can be made that the First Amendment prohibition on establishing a religion was intended as a restriction on the federal government, not the states. So some conservatives have resisted using federal power to strike down, say, state school prayers or depictions of the Ten Commandments in state courthouses. But many of these same folks are glad Trump is encouraging governors to allow in-person worship, an expression of the free-exercise protection in the same First Amendment.
If the left presses the “state sovereignty” argument against Trump too far, it may find that clashes will be refereed in federal courts, and that Trump is commander-in-chief of a military with firepower that dwarfs any state police or National Guard unit. But Trump, too, may wish to recall a lesson of the Tea Party, which is that if voters are angry enough at Washington that they’ve discovered the often-obscure Tenth Amendment, there may be some price to be paid by incumbents in the upcoming election.
For skeptics of Washington-imposed central authority or big government, the left’s embrace of the Tenth Amendment may be a positive effect of the pandemic. What are the chances that it would last into a Biden administration?
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Regulation run amok? Prosecutors in Columbus, Georgia, say doing donuts in a city parking lot without a permit is a multiple-felony offense. And they’re using this to arrest people who appeared in a video for a district attorney candidate who wants to decriminalize marijuana.
On Friday, Columbus cops arrested and jailed 23-year-old Christopher Mandel Black and 24-year-old Erik Deangelo Whittington for allegedly “destroy[ing] government property.”
Their offense? Appearing in a music video in support of Mark Jones, who is running for district attorney of the Chattahoochee Judicial Circuit and challenging incumbent Julia Slater.
The video ad, titled “Get Out and Vote!” features rapper JawGa Boi and includes lyrics like “Freedom and legalize weed, the people’s D.A. who we need.” The video also includes aerial shots of a car driving circles around the parking lot of the Columbus Civic Center.
“Nobody had been notified with the city,” Columbus Mayor Skip Henderson told the Ledger-Enquirer. “What they did was destroy government property.”
Destroy is a bit strong, though the donuts done by the car in the video do appear to leave some skid marks.
Ana Cecilia Grimmett, Black’s girlfriend, told the Ledger-Enquirer that Jones had paid Black $100 to be photographed next to the car and told them not to worry about the legality of doing donuts in the parking lot because the campaign had it covered.
Rather than simply take this up with Jones himself, however, Columbus cops went after two of the young people paid to appear in Jones’ campaign ad—and the cops said more arrests (plural) are coming.
Not only that, but cops seem to have thrown as many charges as they could at the two men, all while a local judge attempted to keep them locked up in jail for days during a pandemic.
Black and Whittington now face two felony charges (interfering with government property and first-degree criminal damage to property) as well as three misdemeanor charges (reckless conduct, reckless driving, and laying drag). On Saturday, a judge ordered them held in jail without bond and set bond for the other charges at more than $200,000.
“The chief Recorder’s Court judge, Julius Hunter, reviewed the bonds later Saturday and reduced them so both suspects could be released,” reports the Ledger-Enquirer. “Otherwise they could have remained jailed over Memorial Day weekend, until Hunter returned to work Tuesday. Each suspect’s felony bonds were cut to $20,000 for criminal damage and $10,000 for interference with government property.”
On Facebook, Jones posted that “these charges obviously need to be dropped against Chris Black and Erik Whittington.”
“The police and DA are coming after me because this campaign is shining a light on things they want hidden from the public,” he said in a Saturday statement. “I will defend in court or pay the legal fees for anyone being maliciously prosecuted by the Government.”
FREE MINDS
A church in California is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene after Gov. Gavin Newsom declared via executive order that in-person church services must cease during the stay-at-home mandate. Last Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit rejected their request for emergency relief.
“Challenges to Covid-19-related emergency edicts have met with mixed results in federal courts,” notesPolitico. “The New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit and the Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit have granted churches emergency relief from state orders, while the Chicago based 7th Circuit joined the San Francisco-based 9th in declining to step in.”
FREE MARKETS
In lieu of continued enhanced unemployment benefits, a new Republican proposal in Congress would award temporary $450 per week back-to-work bonuses. “Republicans are concerned that the current $600 a week unemployment payment—on top of state unemployment benefits—is so generous that it is discouraging people from going back to work and damping the economy’s reopening amid the coronavirus pandemic,” notes the Wall Street Journal. More:
A return-to-work bonus stands as an alternative to a measure being pushed by Senate Democrats, who are rallying behind a plan led by Sens. Mark Warner (D., Va.), Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) and Doug Jones (D., Ala.). The Democratic plan relies on a wage subsidy—the employee tax credit—to keep people on payrolls. It would cover 100% of wages and benefits, up to $90,000. Some Democrats say they might be open to ending the $600 in extra jobless benefits if Republicans rallied behind a wage subsidy.
In a virtual nominating contest over the weekend, the Libertarian Party (L.P.) nominated Jo Jorgensen—a Clemson University psychology lecturer and the L.P.’s 1996 vice presidential candidate—as its 2020 presidential candidate. Anarchist Spike Cohen was voted in as the party’s vice presidential nominee.
“The downstream health effects” of COVID-19–related lockdowns “are being massively under-estimated and under-reported,” states a letter signed by more than 600 U.S. doctors and sent last week to President Donald Trump. “This is an order of magnitude error.”
“As Americans emerge from their homes and try to return to some semblance of normal life, we have a small window of time to remove regulations that are nuisances in the best of times and deeply damaging in the worst. We can start with child care,” suggests Shoshana Weissmann.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “best estimate” for the death rate among Americans with symptoms of COVID-19 is 0.4 percent.
“We’ve reached kind of an inflection point in the privacy debate,” says Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.).
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US Consumer Confidence Stops Collapsing As Hope Rebounds Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/26/2020 – 10:18
Consumer confidence in May rose to 86.6 vs. 85.7 prior month, according to The Conference Board, with “expectations” rising as the current situation worsens…
Present situation confidence fell to 71.1 vs. 73.0 last month.
Consumer confidence expectations rose to 96.9 vs. 94.3 last month.
Source: Bloomberg
Current Business Conditions are seen as their worst ever (blue) but according to the survey, expectations for better business ahead are also at record highs…
Source: Bloomberg
Presumably, if you’re told enough times that there will be a ‘v’-shaped recovery, you start believing it, but we do note that the modest rise in the headline confidence data pales in terms of the liquidity puked into the markets to keep the stock market dream alive.
Notably, it is the youngest households that are the least confident…
Source: Bloomberg
Maybe ‘hope’ is a strategy after all?
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZzPDtj Tyler Durden
Donald Trump is winning the propaganda war against China today. But saying that doesn’t imply he either should be fighting this war or is capable of winning the real war.
What is that real war?
Retaining U.S. dominance over the flow of international capital for the next four generations.
Because that is what is at stake.
Trump’s slash and burn policies towards China have always been fraught with inconsistencies. From “trade wars are easy to win” (a lie) to the current over-reaction to COVID-19 (“the China Flu”) Trump is conflating the two main wars he is fighting into one.
Ending the Institutional Rot
The first main war he is fighting is against the globalists I call The Davos Crowd. His fundamental distrust of the post-WWII institutional architecture is at the forefront of why he deals with Europe the way he does.
Trump understands that The Davos Crowd’s goal is the cultural and economic destruction of the U.S. by creating a transnational superstate that exists as a regulatory and monetary framework built on top of the European Union.
This is why his first moves after taking office were to pull out of the Paris Accords on Climate Change and put the kibosh on the TPP and the TTIP.
It’s also why he wanted the JCPOA torn up. It had the added benefit of assisting Israel’s goals in the Middle East, but I think that is tangential to his main purpose, which was to reverse the dynamic of ceding U.S. sovereignty to Europe while they bled us dry.
Cue his complaints about NATO.
China is a willing partner with The Davos Crowd’s plan and because of that is part of Trump’s war strategy. He understands, rightly so, that China has been courting Europe, buying strategic assets there — Greek ports, the London Bullion Metals Exchange, etc. — and increasing their influence in international institutions the U.S. created and has dominated for decades.
He also sees, rightly, how the U.S. hollowed itself out giving the money to China to begin, in U.S. foreign policy terms, colonizing Asia, specifically Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran
These institutions are now, from Trump’s perspective, wholly compromised. And he’s willing to throw out as chum to his supporters in an election year as much anti-China propaganda as possible to win that point. At the same time he’s allowing his State Department and CIA, run by arch-Neocons Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel, to run wild setting off brush fires in China’s backyard, namely Hong Kong, Kashmir and Taiwan.
But, remember, Trump sees this as a defensive war, not an offensive one. And I think he’s right to think of it in these terms. There really is a transnational oligarchy trying to destroy the U.S. His narcissism and limbic nature however, make him susceptible to over-reaction and misinterpretation.
He’s been fighting an unfairly fought media and political war for nearly four years domestically and he’s finally going on the offensive for this election. Most of the people he’s fighting have been selling the U.S. out to China but are also in thrall to The Davos Crowd.
The real rot that he’s fighting is here at home, which he’s done excellent work exposing.
That makes it easy for him to be manipulated into seeing things about COVID-19 that are likely not reality. So, as I said in my last article …
I’m convinced that the circumstances surrounding COVID-19 were a plot by evil people to kill millions of people and usher in a bleak, authoritarian nightmare they’ve had legislation and action plans written to execute for years. I’m just not convinced it was China that was wholly behind it.
But for Trump, the circumstantial evidence of wrongdoing and China’s own statecraft makes the Coronapocalypse a convenient excuse to take things with China to the next level.
He’s doing this even though the real enemy he is fighting is right here at home, some of whom are in his cabinet.
The China Paradox
And this is where Trump’s conflating his two wars is not only dangerous but wholly counter-productive.
Because U.S. adventurism and the vestiges of its colonial mindset, inherited and still shaped by the British, are rooted in its military and intellectual classes which shape foreign policy.
We are still dominated by Brzezinski’s warming over of Halford Mackinder’s Heartland view of the world. He who controls the Heartland — the central Asian landmass — controls the world.
Pepe Escobar’s latest reminds us of this in relation to Trump’s stepping up his attacks at every level against China’s advances in Eurasia, especially in Hong Kong. Speaking about H.R. McMaster’s latest policy memo on U.S. foreign policy objectives, Escobar says:
He {McMaster} suggests – what else – “containment,” which should be “firm and vigilant.” And he recognizes, to his credit, that it should be “based on an understanding of Chinese history and Indo-Pacific geography.” But then, once again, he gives away the game – in true Zbigniew Brzezinski fashion: what matters most is “the need to prevent a hostile power from controlling the key power centers of the Eurasian landmass.”
It’s no wonder the US Deep State identifies Belt and Road and its spin-offs such as the Digital Silk Road and the Health Silk Road across Eurasia as manifestations of a “hostile power.”
The whole fulcrum of US foreign policy since WWII has been to prevent Eurasia integration – now actively pursued by the Russia-China strategic partnership. New Silk Roads across Russia – part of Putin’s Great Eurasia Partnership – are bound to merge with Belt and Road. Putin and Xi will meet again, face-to-face, in mid-July in St. Petersburg, for the twin summits of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and will further discuss it in extensive detail.
Hong Kong has been in the sights of the U.S. and U.K. for year now, going back to theprotests over the Extradition Treaty. And China’s latest Security mandate for Hong Kong is aimed directly at foreign interference into the city-state’s future.
This move by China was long overdue since last year’s attempt at a color revolution failed. The fallout from the Coronapocalypse economically is here and it is the perfect moment for China to push back.
Because with China’s move to end the “One Nation, Two Systems” approach of the past 23 years, Hong Kong as we’ve known it is gone. And China just upped the stakes on U.S./U.K. activity there to spark an overthrow of its rule.
Because what comes into focus next is a breaking of the peg between the Hong Kong dollar and the U.S. dollar which has fueled so much of what we think of as Hong Kong.
The property bubble will burst now as upward pressure on the HKD threatens to blow out yield spreads between Hong Kong and U.S. debt, the fulcrum on which the peg rests. As I said in the article for Money and Markets linked above:
That {yield} spread across maturities should blow out wider as the situation on the ground worsens and there is upward pressure on the Hong Kong dollar due to the collapse of the global economy. Short-term rates will rise faster than long-term rates, and this could happen while rates in the U.S hold serve or continue to drop.
There is no way the HKMA {Hong Kong Monetary Authority} can maintain the peg under those conditions.
Those protests the typically volatile admixture of organic social unrest and NGO-sponsored agent provocateur activity will grab headlines for the next few weeks.
And this is why Trump’s multi-pronged assault on China is ill-advised. China and Russia both have asked the U.S. to come to the negotiating table on what the post-Unipolar world would look like and they have been met with nothing but insane hostility.
So, the responses from here from them will be to attack pillars of U.S./U.K. financial system and erode their hybrid war effectiveness. Hong Kong as a money laundering operation under Western control is a major one of these pillars.
That’s what China just attacked. It’s a massive move. And Trump would do well to trust his instincts about maintaining an Empire around the world while his budget deficit to GDP balloons out to levels beyond those seen during WWII.
Meanwhile China is looking at mild deficit spending (3.6% of GDP) and a mild contraction given the global circumstances.
Trump thinks he’s fighting a new Cold War against China but he’s really just fighting the next round in an old war on Asia that’s over 200 years old.
And it’s a war he cannot win.
Because most of the world, thanks to his weaponization of the dollar on top of decades of geopolitical abuse and adventurism, now views the U.S. unfavorably. And with every further act of financial and diplomatic aggression will accelerate their perceived need to ditch the dollar in favor of anything else.
That is what will ultimately fuel the switch from a Unipolar world to the so-called Multi-polar one. Trump had the opportunity to make this change a more amicable one. But I think that opportunity is now behind us.
Sadly, I don’t think he’s got any intention backing down here, not in an election year, and not when he’s finally convinced more than half of Americans that China is our biggest problem.
But now that we know Trump thinks these wars are necessary, at least we can be clear as to what to do next.
US New Home Sales Unexpectedly Rebound In April Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/26/2020 – 10:08
Following the collapse in existing home sales in April, new home sales were also expected to plummet 23.4% MoM but through the magic of seasonal adjustments, new home sales rose 0.6% MoM (following an upwardly revised 13.7% drop in March).
Source: Bloomberg
This is a 5-sigma beat…
Source: Bloomberg
Year over year, new home sales remain lower…
Even with the gain, sales are unlikely to rebound to pre-coronavirus levels, said Alex Barron, an analyst with the Housing Research Center in El Paso, Texas.
“We’re still trying to understand what is the new normal,” Barron said. “Is it sales down 20% from the 2019 level or down 40%?”
This is extremely different from the collapse in existing home sale…
Hard to say the reason for this unexpected rebound but we note that median prices tumbled 8.6% YoY to $309.9K…
One final caveat on this data as the commerce department notes, today’s release includes revisions to seasonally adjusted data.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3ghGjA2 Tyler Durden
Yesterday, Rep. Iihan Omar, D-Minn., became the latest member to declare that she believes that Biden did rape a Senate aide and is continuing to lie about the crime in public statements.
Many Democratic politicians and commentators have struggled with the clearly hypocritical position of declaring Biden innocent while previously insisting that women “must be believed.” The problem is that, if you declare that no one has a right to be simply believed, it requires a full and fair investigation.
Omar told the British Sunday Times. ““I do believe Reade, Justice can be delayed but should never be denied.” She then however proceeded to deny any sense of justice beyond saying that Reade will be believed and then ignored. Omar insisted that she would work to elect Biden even though she believes him to be a rapist.
I fail to the moral high ground in this statement or how it is better than saying that you do not believe Reade. The most principled position is to agree that Biden should open up all of his records, including those under lock and key at the University of Delaware, to a search for any sexual abuse allegations by anyone. However, I have previously said that I believe that Biden has the stronger case thus far in the controversy. Yet, politicians like Omar want to maintain that they believe all women but that it does not matter. It does not matter if such women were raped or that Biden is the rapist under their logic. It is a position that risks moving from the role of a denier to that of an enabler. Omar is saying that she will campaign for a politician who not only, in her view, raped a staffer but is going around the country lying about the rape. It is hard to imagine the parallel universe where that is a morally superior, or even a morally cognizable, position
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2yz1Z9X Tyler Durden
In the saga of the virus and the lockdown, the wisdom of the crowds, that is the wisdom of each of us, was thwarted by bad data, perhaps intentionally bad. On the other hand, the ersatz wisdom of the collective bureaucracy in federal, state and local health agencies was based on crafted data. In the end data didn’t matter, as the bureaucracies were more concerned with their natural territorial imperative, which is to rule and control.
The most frightening aspect of the coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) epidemic in the US is that it brought about exaggeratedly heightened fear of death. That fear, once magnified to proportions which become palpable to the individual, became the basis for dreadful economic and medical policies from governments and crushed the natural optimism of the public.
In early days, we were caught in a squeeze of conflicting information. Was COVID-19 a bioweapon gone rogue and destined to indiscriminately wipe out young and old? Or, was it another bad flu or perhaps an extremely bad flu? After all, initial information showed the victims were concentrated in a nursing home in Kirkland, Washington.
No cases were reported amongst the homeless on West Coast streets. No deaths among children were reported. And in the closed world of cruise liners and later a military ship, there were lots of early cases and some deaths. As time passed, there was little more bad news. We should have been suspicious of the data.
We were mainly focused on the case fatality rate (CFR: deaths as a percent of diagnosed cases) which were frighteningly high. We worried about the infection fatality rate (IFR), but there was too little data and testing available to have any idea how many people were or ultimately would be infected.
But those concepts – CFR and IFR – are not the most important strategic measures of the severity of the disease. It is the death rate, properly defined and understood, that should matter for long-term policy makers, our erstwhile more level-headed thinkers, in determining policy.
In the past few weeks, we have obtained more useful data in the US. There were secrets lurking in the data, waiting to be uncovered, that could help ascertain what was really happening. The purpose of this report is to do just that – to ascertain what the data are telling us. It also gives us the basis for judging the appropriateness of past and present policies
So, let’s begin with a simple question: what is the relevant death rate due to COVID-19? There are many definitions in the epidemiological world such as the CFR and IFR mentioned above. My focus is on the overall death rate – actual and projected. Until we have more widespread testing for COVID-19, we cannot know with any accuracy how many people were infected by the virus. We cannot know what proportion of the population has some sort of natural or acquired immunity.
We do not even have accurate data on how many people have died from COVID-19 alone versus COVID-19 plus some other complications that were already present such as diabetes, morbid obesity and prior respiratory complications, any one of which might equally have been the proximate cause of death. There is ample evidence, especially in the Northeast region that there has been “over classification” (a euphemism for data bias). We do not have the demographic details for those infected and those who died. But we do have death data, and it is more accurate than the number of cases and the number of infections.
To understand how our minds have been misdirected in understanding the real risks associated with COVID-19, let’s begin with a brain teaser. It will awaken our numerate minds in preparation for understanding the data deception and misunderstandings that prevail.
When is 1.7% greater than 98.3%?
In the bizarro world of COVID-19 reporting that is the case – 1.7% is greater than 98.3%. Specifically, deaths among a narrow 1.7% group of the population are greater than deaths from the other 98.3%. Numerically a death may be a death, but from a policy point of view, to be blunt about it, not all deaths are the same.
Fact #1: 1.7% of the population in the US resides in long-term medical care facilities (LTMCFs) and total 5.7 million.
Fact #2: The residents of LTMCFs accounted for 38,800 or 53% of all COVID-19 deaths (based on recent data). The rest of the country, the 98.3%, have experienced approximately 34,600 deaths, or 47% of the nation’s total COVID-19 deaths.
The Death Rate at LTMCFs Is Stunning
That means the death rate, deaths expressed as a percent of those living in medical care institutions, is 0.682%, more than 50 times the death rate of the rest of the population at 0.012%. The death rate for the overall populations is 0.022%.
That should leave you speechless.
We have a COVID-19 problem, but we have an even greater and more serious LTMCF problem that is clouding our understanding of the contagion and therefore what our best public health policies should be. Shutting down the economy, the world wherein the 98.3% live and prosper was too draconian. The feared overloading of the hospital system with emergency patients, which was short-lived, was disproportionately coming from the residents of LTMCFs, not the general public.
The data have been there all along, but they were not properly collected, catalogued and analyzed.
Much of the data in this report came from a landmark study by Gregg Girvan and Avik Roy of the Foundation for Research of Equal Opportunity. Their work was based on data collected through May 10th, 2020 for most states. Since their publication, revisions have been incorporated as states have corrected or updated their data since the original report. The calculations given above are imputations from the updated data.
At this point, we do not know what the ultimate count of deaths and the death rate will be, but what we have in hand are statistics that are very indicative and telling of the gross misunderstanding that the public and federal, state and local decision-makers have been working with on which to base their decisions.
Long-term medical care providers to the aged and medically infirm (per the Girvan-Roy study) consist of: Nursing homes and skilled nursing facilities; Assisted living facilities, i.e., residential care communities or personal care homes; Adult day service centers; Home health Agencies; and Hospices.
The first two medical care providers for seniors are referred to as long-term medical care facilities (LTMCF) and are the source of the data. Data for the other three elder care facilities are not collected or were not available for the Girvan-Roy study. In fact, it has been acknowledged that there continues to be underreporting of deaths related to LTMCFs. Some providers are just not reporting. In other cases, the residents die in hospitals and they are not categorized as LTMCF deaths. Nonetheless, the data are sufficient to draw some useful if not stark observations.
What about the Flu and Pneumonia Death Rates in Earlier Years?
To even better understand these death rate figures, it is useful to put them into the context of what we know about death rates from the flu before the arrival of COVID-19. Is the COVID-19 death rate worse, better or about the same as prior flu seasons? We should expect the rates to be worse because there is no vaccine whereas most people get a vaccine shot for the routine flus that are expected each year.
In 2017 the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that annual deaths from all causes were 2.8 million or 0.866% of the population. The leading causes of death, in order of magnitude, were heart disease, accidents, respiratory disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, flu & pneumonia and suicide.
Just looking at the Flu & Pneumonia (FP) cause, in 2017 it accounted for 55,672 deaths or 0.017% for the population as a whole. Death from FP, as you would expect, fell hardest on people over 75 totaling 38,078 deaths. That translates into a FP death rate of 0.180% for those over-75 group, which is a little more than 10 times the death rate for the overall population. For the rest of the population under 75 the death rate was only 0.006%, or 30 times greater than those over 75.
DEATH RATE FOR COVID-19 AND THE FLU FOR SELECTED DEMOGRAPHICS
What this means at this point is that in the aggregate the overall COVID-19 death rate is slightly worse than the flu death rate in a prior year (0.022% vs 0.017%). However, for seniors in LTMCFs, the COVID-19 death rate is 100 times greater than the flu and pneumonia DR was for those over 75 in 2017.
In summary the COVID-19 death rate is far more skewed to those older than 75 and those residents in medical care facilities for the aged.
Looking ahead we obtained the most recent forecast from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. They are considered by many medical professionals as the most thorough modelers. On May 18, 2020 the IHME released the results of the third run of its new model. They predict that by August 4, 2020 a total of 143,357 Americans will die of COVID-19. That forecast nearly doubles the number of COVID-19 deaths. It is worth noting that each run of the model has produced lower forecasts for future deaths. There are detractors of their modeling procedures, but it is the best we have at the moment.
One interesting medical research report suggests that a significant portion of the population has natural immunity to COVID-19. In the May 14 edition of Cell, published by Elsevier, the researchers found:
T cell responses were detected in 40-60% of unexposed individuals. This may be reflective of some degree of cross-reactive, preexisting immunity to SARSCoV-2 in some, but not all, individuals… suggesting cross-reactive T cell recognition between circulating ‘common cold’ coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2.
This might be why there are so many reports of asymptomatic cases of COVID-19. That also may mean the IHME forecast will be revised down even more.
However, COVID-19 has brutal consequences for people over 75. That detail cannot be minimized. But what policies would that suggest?
Did We Adopt the Right Policies?
What do these data suggest about the medical and economic policies that have been adopted by the federal, states and local governments?
The carnage of COVID-19 is concentrated in elder care facilities not in the population at large. The policies and procedures, including lockdowns and state-of-the-art personal protection practices for those facilities, should have been more thoroughly thought out based on useful data.
Keep in mind, about 70% of the elder care facilities are for-profit. Yet they are not free-market enterprises; enterprises free to do what they think is best. These for-profit facilities are licensed and regulated by the several Departments of Health of the states. They do what the state tells them to do.
The governors and mayors, and their medical and science advisers, made the decision to pack them in, force them to house and retain infected and returning infected patients. They chose to divert PPE supplies to hospitals, not the elder care facilities. This characterization is based on reports in the press. One certainly hopes there were some communities that did a better job. There is reason to believe that is the case because some assisted living facilities have reported no deaths.
As COVID-19 deaths mounted, not a word was officially spoken about where they were occurring. Fear was stoked that it was a population-wide epidemic. We should ALL lock down.
What a costly mistake, a mistake that continues to this day. Governors and mayors with fresh data insights into the truth still want to be central planners and determine which businesses can re-open and to what degree, who should still shelter or socially distance. They send out teams to draw circles in the grass defining where groups can camp out and place police monitors in all the parks to warn people to stay within the circles. At this point they are just imaginary prisons, but they are prisons.
Madness, sheer madness.
Though that is an easy and superficial observation to make, what is really unsaid, and not easy to admit, is that large numbers of politicians and bureaucrats have revealed their true nature. Speeches decorated with declarations of “better safe than sorry” and “planning is better than no planning” reveal they are authoritarians by nature; central planners of the worst kind.
In conclusion, the relevant death rate for policy purposes has been obscured. The consequence has been inappropriate policies. They have resulted in a bizarro world of highly restricted commercial functioning and immense economic destruction, alongside no evidence that lives were saved and growing evidence of second-tier loss of life resulting from lockdown.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2XK6O95 Tyler Durden
Stock Market up BIG, DOW crosses 25,000. S&P 500 over 3000. States should open up ASAP. The Transition to Greatness has started, ahead of schedule. There will be ups and downs, but next year will be one of the best ever!
Helicopter Money Could Be Coming To New Zealand Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/26/2020 – 09:35
The latest on the list of Central Banks to do away with any thoughts of moral hazard in favor of simply printing and distributing money comes from New Zealand.
Finance minister Grant Robertson said late last week that the country is considering “distributing free cash directly to individuals as a way of policy stimulus” to deal with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, according to Reuters.
He was asked about the government’s ideas for “helicopter money” and exactly how the central bank would get the money to the country’s citizens. While he says the concept is still being discussed, “it’s not something that has got to that level of discussion at all,” he told the media.
“I am pretty keen on making sure that fiscal policy remains the role of the government,” he said.
We’ll give it a couple more days and ask again…
The idea of helicopter money continues to gain in popularity with Central Banks across the globe as governments look to a way to try and stimulate their way out of a pandemic-induced recession that has made even some numbers from the Great Depression look meaningless.
Despite its appeal, no major countries have embarked on direct helicopter money (money has been issued from the state after Central Bank asset purcahses, but not directly from Central Banks), as it calls further into question Central Bank independence (we’ll pause for laughter) and – even for the MMT crowd – raises the question of inflation.
New Zealand’s economy is export-reliant and expected to contract a stunning 21.8% in the current quarter due to the pandemic.
For now, New Zealand’s Central Bank has cut interest rates to a record low of 0.25% as a result and has doubled its bond buying program to NZ$60 billion. It has also telegraphed a potential coming shift to negative rates.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2zzGUwz Tyler Durden
There are no shortage of opinions on the Michael Flynn case. President Trump’s former National Security Advisor wants to withdraw his guilty plea and the Department of Justice now wants to dismiss the case, despite Flynn’s prior plea and a judicial ruling affirming the Department’s original theory of the case. Rather than grant the government’s motion to dismiss, Judge Emmet Sullivan has sought briefing from amici and appointed retired judge John Gleeson to argue against the motion. In response, Flynn’s attorneys are seeking a writ of mandamus from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to force dismissal of the case, and the D.C. Circuit has ordered Judge Sullivan to respond to this petition.
What should the D.C. Circuit do? Today’s Washington Post features an op-ed by the Honorable J. Michael Luttig, a former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit appointed by President George H. W. Bush and one-time Supreme Court short-lister.
Judge Luttig is critical of Judge Sullivan’s handling of the case. At the same time, he rejects the core argument of Judge Sullivan’s critics, that Sullivan is obligated to grant the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss. After all, that’s not what Rule 48 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure says or means.
Judge Luttig writes:
The rule of law instructs that U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan has the power — indeed, the obligation — to determine whether dismissal of Flynn’s case would be in the public interest and whether the integrity of the judicial process would be compromised by granting the government’s dismissal request. This authority stems from the federal criminal rules of procedure and the trial judge’s inherent authority. If this authority were properly exercised, the judge’s refusal to dismiss the case would not impermissibly usurp the executive’s exclusive constitutional power to decide whether to bring or maintain a criminal prosecution.
Judge Luttig believes Judge Sullivan erred by inviting amici submissions and appointing Judge Gleeson to argue against dismissal. In his view the D.C. Circuit should grant the writ insofar as it seeks a reversal of these orders. According to Judge Luttig, the D.C. Circuit should also consider whether the case should be remanded to a different district court judge.
Judge Luttig concludes:
Were either Sullivan or another judge eventually to decide that it would be contrary to the public interest to dismiss the prosecution or that to do so would undermine the integrity of the judicial process, that judgment could be appealed.
The appeals court would then confront a novel and nettlesome question. The trial court has indisputable, but very limited, power to refuse the government’s request. Here, because the government contends that the case should be dismissed because of its own confessed misconduct, and therefore the government’s prosecutorial interest is at its zenith, it would be exceedingly difficult for a court to substitute its view and override the government’s contrary assessment. Under our Constitution, the decision whether to prosecute to the final stages of conviction and sentence is committed wholly and exclusively to the executive branch of the government — almost.
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