— Governor Gretchen Whitmer (@GovWhitmer) March 27, 2020
I don’t want to make much of this—I just thought it was a funny glitch, of the sort that all of us fall prey to from time to time. But it might also be a reminder for writers to be careful about using figurative phrases, especially ones that are so familiar that we don’t really think about their literal meaning: Sometimes, circumstances bring up that literal meaning, and make the phrase jarring or unintentionally funny.
This is closely connected to the problem of mixed metaphors (e.g., “the political equation was thus saturated with kerosene”). There, the literal meaning one half of the metaphor is highlighted by its mismatch with the literal meaning of the other half. Here, the literal meaning of “lock arms” is highlighted by its mismatch with the substance of the situation.
Are you seeing friends and family using Zoom or some such application? Which one, and how is it working out technically?
Have you found some tricks to making it work better, whether they are technical tricks or social ones (e.g., dressing up, eating dinner during the call, drinking during the call, etc.)?
Are you finding that you’re actually seeing out-of-town friends and family more now? Or are you actually enjoying having some more time at home by yourselves? Please let us know in the comments.
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— Governor Gretchen Whitmer (@GovWhitmer) March 27, 2020
I don’t want to make much of this—I just thought it was a funny glitch, of the sort that all of us fall prey to from time to time. But it might also be a reminder for writers to be careful about using figurative phrases, especially ones that are so familiar that we don’t really think about their literal meaning: Sometimes, circumstances bring up that literal meaning, and make the phrase jarring or unintentionally funny.
This is closely connected to the problem of mixed metaphors (e.g., “the political equation was thus saturated with kerosene”). There, the literal meaning one half of the metaphor is highlighted by its mismatch with the literal meaning of the other half. Here, the literal meaning of “lock arms” is highlighted by its mismatch with the substance of the situation.
25-Year-Old California Man With No Underlying Conditions Dies Of COVID-19
While coronavirus deaths have primarily been in those above 50-years-old, the disease has also been sending younger people to the ICU in larger than expected numbers – and in some cases, claiming younger victims.
In France, doctors have reported that 50% of ICU patients are under 60-years-old, while in the Netherlands, half are under 50.
Nearly 50% of critically ill coronavirus patients in Brazil are under 60 https://t.co/g0M07bTDXN
On Saturday, the Los Angeles Times noted the COVID-19 death of a 25-year-old pharmacy technician with no underlying health issues, whose body was found on Wednesday at a home in the Coachella valley neighborhood of La Quinta where they were in self-quarantine. The San Diego resident’s identity has not been disclosed.
“This is a deeply saddening reminder that COVID-19 kills the young and healthy too,” said Riverside County public health officer Dr. Cameron Kaiser. “Stay safe. Keep travel and errands to essentials, and observe social distance no matter how young or well you are. Our condolences and thoughts are with everyone this pandemic has touched.”
According to the Times, the majority of coronavirus cases in the county are under 50-years-old:
This is the California age range for coronavirus patients:
Age 0-17: 45 cases
Age 18-49: 1,906 cases
Age 50-64: 967 cases
Age 65 and older: 847 cases
Unknown: 36 cases
For more on the flood of younger patients, read this article in The Atlantic.
“My deepest condolences go out to the family of the young adult who passed,” said Fourth District Riverside County Supervisor V. Manuel Perez. “The virus does not discriminate and age doesn’t matter. This tragedy demonstrates the need to stay in place. It’s safer at home.”
Health officials report that the deceased 25-year-old was exposed to the virus outside of Riverside county. It is important to note that while the man had no underlying health conditions, he did not go to the ER, where he could have been given one of several experimental treatments and been put on a life-saving ventilator.
His death will be added to San Diego’s number of coronavirus-related fatalities, which as of Friday afternoon stood at three. But Dr. Wilma Wooten, San Diego County’s public health officer, said that data would be updated to include three more deaths, with the 25-year-old technician among them.
Wooten said the other two deaths included a male in his mid-50s and another male in his early 80s. –LA Times
There have been a total of eight COVID-19 deaths in riverside county in individuals over the age of 70 – most of whom had underlying health problems. As of Friday afternoon, there were 183 cases in the county.
The updated figures come a day after Riverside University Health System officials released new estimates indicating coronavirus cases in Riverside County will grow — possibly doubling every four to five days — and deaths stemming from viral complications could rise 125 times the current figure in the next month.
“We’re trying to change the curve and slow down the rate of infection,” RUHS Dr. Geoffrey Leung said during a news briefing at the county’s Emergency Operations Center in downtown Riverside on Thursday. “But based on forecasting and modeling … there could be a doubling of the rate of COVID-19 infection every four to five days … If we stay on the same doubling rate, (by early May) we could have over 1,000 deaths and 50,000 new cases.”
Leung said he based his estimates on local approximations and nationwide trends.
“By April 12, all hospital beds (in the county) will be used up, and if we stay on the same doubling rate, we’ll be out of ventilators in the April 22-May 5 period,” Leung said.
The one ray of hope that he referenced was a dramatic slowdown in the rate of infection in New Rochelle, New York, where a major cluster of COVID-19 infections was documented two weeks ago, but after closely monitored isolation measures were implemented, the rate dropped precipitously. –NBC Palm Springs
Following the 25-year-old’s death, Dr. Kaiser ordered all short-term lodging in the county, including home rentals such as AirBnB – to limit their business to COVID-19 response only, which includes housing patients in self-isolation, the homeless, and essential personnel.
Tenants, owners, and marketing agents are not allowed to lease any short-term rental, vacation rental, or timeshare lodging while the order is in effect throughout Riverside county.
“Now isn’t the time to visit Riverside County,” said Kaiser. “Slowing the spread of COVID-19 means folks need to stay put in their own neighborhoods. Unless you’ve got nowhere else safe to be, please visit later.
On Friday, members of the California National Guard continued setting up a temporary, 125 bed “federal medical station” hospital at the Riverside County Fairgrounds in Indio ahead of an anaticipated surge in coronavirus cases. Another temporary hospital will be set up in western Riverside county which will have an additional 125 beds.
If a hospital runs out of ventilators to treat its patients, will it be liable when patients die as a result?
Courts have at times imposed malpractice liability when a hospital failed to provide a service that might have benefited a patient. For example, in Herrington v. Hiller, 883 F.2d 411 (5th Cir. 1989), the plaintiff alleged that a baby was born with brain damage as a result of a hospital’s failure to provide 24-hour-a-day anesthesia services, and the court found admissible earlier discussions among hospital personnel about whether such services might be needed. More generally:
Hospitals and other institutional providers have a duty to provide adequate staff and services to deal with unexpected medical problems.Hospitals, like physicians, are expected to keep up with an evolving standard of medical practice, particularly if its cost-benefit ratio is high. The failure of a hospital to maintain adequate services to deal with medical emergencies can create liability.
Barry R. Furrow, Enterprise Liability and Health Care Reform: Managing Care and Managing Risk, 39 St. Louis U. L.J. 77, 91 (1994) (footnotes omitted). Also:
Both hospitals and hospital management companies have been found negligent for failure to exercise reasonable care in the maintenance of the hospital’s facilities and equipment. The duty to maintain adequate facilities and equipment requires hospitals to have the facilities and equipment necessary to safely carry out the medical treatment it offers.
Mindy Nunez Duffourc, Repurposing the Affirmative Defense of Comparative Fault in Medical Malpractice, 16 Ind. Health L. Rev. 21, 28 (2018) (footnote omitted).
Hospitals, of course, would argue that they have an obligation to maintain sufficient equipment for ordinary times, not for pandemics. Assuming a hospital maintains a typical ICU capacity for hospitals, it would have a strong argument to having met the community standard of care.
If a court in its instructions emphasizes custom, hospitals may mostly be free of liability. But if a court instructed juries to apply the Hand formula, or instructed juries in a way that would implicitly allow them to consider cost-benefit type considerations, the result might well be different. A pandemic was not unpredictable, and a likely cost-benefit analysis would likely suggest that ventilators should have been purchased. If a ventilator costs $25,000, then at a value-per-life of just $5 million, the purchase would have been cost-justified if there were a 1 in 200 chance that it would be necessary–or an even lower chance if a single marginal ventilator might be used for more than one patient.
Stephen Gillers has noted that although the Hand Formula is often treated as black-letter law, jury instructions rarely mention it, but nor do they forbid the jury from applying similar considerations:
[A] puzzle lies in the gap between the authoritative blackletter status of the Hand Formula and the standard instructions given to juries in negligence cases. The proposition that negligence means creating an “unreasonable risk,” defined as one whose expected costs exceed the costs of avoiding it, has been explicitly endorsed by the Restatement of Torts, by the leading treatises, and by courts in most states. Indeed, despite the vigorous normative debates over cost-benefit analysis among legal academics, no modern decision to my knowledge squarely rejects the Hand Formula interpretation of negligence. Yet, rather than telling juries to balance the costs and benefits of greater care, courts ordinarily instruct them to determine whether the actor behaved as a “reasonably prudent person” would have under the circumstances. Even on appeal, many courts make surprisingly little use of cost-benefit analysis in reviewing negligence cases. Often, the only question on appeal is whether a reasonable jury could have found a party negligent under the reasonable person standard.
Some scholars claim that these practices demonstrate that the actual meaning of negligence in American law is defined by a reasonable person standard that marginalizes or even supplants the Hand Formula. Although these accounts vary in important particulars, their common theme is that the determination of negligence rests on a noneconomic conception of practical reasonableness that looks to community values and norms rather than to any form of cost-benefit analysis.
But the crucial feature of the pattern jury instructions on negligence is that they explicitly adopt neither of these competing theories—nor any other. Juries are told neither that a reasonable person is one who complies with community values and norms nor that a reasonable person is one who balances costs and benefits (or behaves “as if ” balancing them). Instead, the reasonable person standard is given to the jury without elaboration.
A jury would not likely engage in explicit cost-benefit balancing. But it seems to me plausible (though I would welcome comments from those with more immediate experience) that a jury might well conclude that hospitals should have recognized the need to purchase enough ventilators to handle a surge in patient capacity. A plaintiff’s case might be especially strong if a hospital had time between when an emergency loomed and when a patient died to purchase a ventilator that would have saved the patient. Juries, meanwhile, would likely be more sympathetic to hospitals that, early in the emergency, contracted to purchase ventilators (at least simple models) as soon as they were available.
Normatively, I am not sure whether hospitals should be liable. There is a strong argument that if one opens a 1,000 bed hospital, one should not be liable for not opening a 2,000 bed hospital. Liability might create a disincentive for small hospitals to open in the first place. On the other hand, it is difficult to identify an actor in a better position to anticipate potential needs for emergencies or to identify an actor that now will have strong incentives to provide demand for ventilators.
A related but separate question is whether doctors and medical professionals should be held to a lower standard of care during emergencies:
[I]n the wake of events like Hurricane Katrina and the H1N1 pandemic, there have been proposals to change the ordinary standard of care during declared emergencies. This idea is called “altered standards of care,” and suggests that there should be different standards that health care workers are held to during an emergency. Broadly, a public health emergency exists when a health situation’s “scale, timing or unpredictability threatens to overwhelm routine capabilities.” There has been significant research into, and creation of, altered standards of care for volunteers and Good Samaritans who help during emergency situations. Many of these regulations provide immunity to these individuals.
Rebecca Mansbach, Note & Comment, Altered Standards of Care: Needed Reform for when the Next Disaster Strikes, 14 J. Health Care L. & Pol’y 209, 209 (2011) (footnotes omitted). One would not want to discourage a doctor from working during the emergency because the doctor cannot provide care of the same quality as the doctor would ordinarily provide. But that is a different question from whether health care institutions should anticipate emergencies and stock up.
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If a hospital runs out of ventilators to treat its patients, will it be liable when patients die as a result?
Courts have at times imposed malpractice liability when a hospital failed to provide a service that might have benefited a patient. For example, in Herrington v. Hiller, 883 F.2d 411 (5th Cir. 1989), the plaintiff alleged that a baby was born with brain damage as a result of a hospital’s failure to provide 24-hour-a-day anesthesia services, and the court found admissible earlier discussions among hospital personnel about whether such services might be needed. More generally:
Hospitals and other institutional providers have a duty to provide adequate staff and services to deal with unexpected medical problems.Hospitals, like physicians, are expected to keep up with an evolving standard of medical practice, particularly if its cost-benefit ratio is high. The failure of a hospital to maintain adequate services to deal with medical emergencies can create liability.
Barry R. Furrow, Enterprise Liability and Health Care Reform: Managing Care and Managing Risk, 39 St. Louis U. L.J. 77, 91 (1994) (footnotes omitted). Also:
Both hospitals and hospital management companies have been found negligent for failure to exercise reasonable care in the maintenance of the hospital’s facilities and equipment. The duty to maintain adequate facilities and equipment requires hospitals to have the facilities and equipment necessary to safely carry out the medical treatment it offers.
Mindy Nunez Duffourc, Repurposing the Affirmative Defense of Comparative Fault in Medical Malpractice, 16 Ind. Health L. Rev. 21, 28 (2018) (footnote omitted).
Hospitals, of course, would argue that they have an obligation to maintain sufficient equipment for ordinary times, not for pandemics. Assuming a hospital maintains a typical ICU capacity for hospitals, it would have a strong argument to having met the community standard of care.
If a court in its instructions emphasizes custom, hospitals may mostly be free of liability. But if a court instructed juries to apply the Hand formula, or instructed juries in a way that would implicitly allow them to consider cost-benefit type considerations, the result might well be different. A pandemic was not unpredictable, and a likely cost-benefit analysis would likely suggest that ventilators should have been purchased. If a ventilator costs $25,000, then at a value-per-life of just $5 million, the purchase would have been cost-justified if there were a 1 in 200 chance that it would be necessary–or an even lower chance if a single marginal ventilator might be used for more than one patient.
Stephen Gillers has noted that although the Hand Formula is often treated as black-letter law, jury instructions rarely mention it, but nor do they forbid the jury from applying similar considerations:
[A] puzzle lies in the gap between the authoritative blackletter status of the Hand Formula and the standard instructions given to juries in negligence cases. The proposition that negligence means creating an “unreasonable risk,” defined as one whose expected costs exceed the costs of avoiding it, has been explicitly endorsed by the Restatement of Torts, by the leading treatises, and by courts in most states. Indeed, despite the vigorous normative debates over cost-benefit analysis among legal academics, no modern decision to my knowledge squarely rejects the Hand Formula interpretation of negligence. Yet, rather than telling juries to balance the costs and benefits of greater care, courts ordinarily instruct them to determine whether the actor behaved as a “reasonably prudent person” would have under the circumstances. Even on appeal, many courts make surprisingly little use of cost-benefit analysis in reviewing negligence cases. Often, the only question on appeal is whether a reasonable jury could have found a party negligent under the reasonable person standard.
Some scholars claim that these practices demonstrate that the actual meaning of negligence in American law is defined by a reasonable person standard that marginalizes or even supplants the Hand Formula. Although these accounts vary in important particulars, their common theme is that the determination of negligence rests on a noneconomic conception of practical reasonableness that looks to community values and norms rather than to any form of cost-benefit analysis.
But the crucial feature of the pattern jury instructions on negligence is that they explicitly adopt neither of these competing theories—nor any other. Juries are told neither that a reasonable person is one who complies with community values and norms nor that a reasonable person is one who balances costs and benefits (or behaves “as if ” balancing them). Instead, the reasonable person standard is given to the jury without elaboration.
A jury would not likely engage in explicit cost-benefit balancing. But it seems to me plausible (though I would welcome comments from those with more immediate experience) that a jury might well conclude that hospitals should have recognized the need to purchase enough ventilators to handle a surge in patient capacity. A plaintiff’s case might be especially strong if a hospital had time between when an emergency loomed and when a patient died to purchase a ventilator that would have saved the patient. Juries, meanwhile, would likely be more sympathetic to hospitals that, early in the emergency, contracted to purchase ventilators (at least simple models) as soon as they were available.
Normatively, I am not sure whether hospitals should be liable. There is a strong argument that if one opens a 1,000 bed hospital, one should not be liable for not opening a 2,000 bed hospital. Liability might create a disincentive for small hospitals to open in the first place. On the other hand, it is difficult to identify an actor in a better position to anticipate potential needs for emergencies or to identify an actor that now will have strong incentives to provide demand for ventilators.
A related but separate question is whether doctors and medical professionals should be held to a lower standard of care during emergencies:
[I]n the wake of events like Hurricane Katrina and the H1N1 pandemic, there have been proposals to change the ordinary standard of care during declared emergencies. This idea is called “altered standards of care,” and suggests that there should be different standards that health care workers are held to during an emergency. Broadly, a public health emergency exists when a health situation’s “scale, timing or unpredictability threatens to overwhelm routine capabilities.” There has been significant research into, and creation of, altered standards of care for volunteers and Good Samaritans who help during emergency situations. Many of these regulations provide immunity to these individuals.
Rebecca Mansbach, Note & Comment, Altered Standards of Care: Needed Reform for when the Next Disaster Strikes, 14 J. Health Care L. & Pol’y 209, 209 (2011) (footnotes omitted). One would not want to discourage a doctor from working during the emergency because the doctor cannot provide care of the same quality as the doctor would ordinarily provide. But that is a different question from whether health care institutions should anticipate emergencies and stock up.
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On Tuesday, in anticipation of several trillion dollars of Congressional pork, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) rallied 11.37 percent. This marked its best day since 1933. Some Dow 30 stocks did much better.
For example, Chevron was the top performer; closing up 22.74 percent. American Express, which increased 21.88 percent, was a close second. But do you know what company came in third?
None other than the posterchild for corporate financialization and cronyism: Boeing. The company closed up 20.89 percent.
By all honest metrics, Boeing is circling the toilet bowl. On Tuesday, for example, Fitch cut Boeing’s credit rating to BBB. And according to Bill Ackman, head of Pershing Square Capital Management, “Boeing is on the brink [and] will not survive without a government bailout.”
The scuttlebutt on Tuesday was that the government’s imminent coronavirus bailout package would earmark $60 billion to keep Boeing solvent. One would think that in its moment of striking failure the company would practice a little humility. But, apparently, humility’s not part of its coddled culture.
In fact, in an interview on Tuesday with Fox Business, CEO Dave Calhoun clarified that Boeing would command the terms of its bailout. Specifically, the U.S. government, as dictated by Calhoun would get no stake in the company:
“I don’t have a need for an equity stake. I want them [the U.S. government] to support the credit markets, provide liquidity. Allow us to borrow against our future.”
Yet investors are committed to rewarding Calhoun’s hubris. On Wednesday, Boeing was the top Dow 30 stock; shares ran up 24.32 percent. That was more than double the second highest increase of a Dow 30 stock for the day, United Technologies, which was up 10.87 percent. Then, on Thursday, Boeing led the pack again, closing the day up 13.75 percent.
Make of it what you well. Something stinks. Naturally, the seeds of Boeings rancid, rotten fruits were planted several decades ago…
Guided By Bean Counters
William Boeing, the man responsible for the rise of Boeing during the first half of the 20th century, died in 1956. We don’t know much about the man. We’ve never read his biography. But we suspect the culture that William Boeing instilled in his company faded from its corporate principles by the turn of the new millennium.
You see, William Boeing’s cohorts likely continued the company in the William Boeing way after his death. These associates likely passed on the culture of exacting engineering to the next generation of Boeing management. However, once management was three generations removed, they had little connection to what had made the company great.
No current Boeing employee – management, engineer, or mailroom clerk – has ever met William Boeing. What’s more, it’s highly unlikely that any current Boeing employee has ever met someone who has met William Boeing. By all practical matters, the culture of William Boeing no longer exists at the Boeing Company.
David Calhoun, the current CEO, the guy that doesn’t have a need for an equity stake, isn’t even an aviation engineer. He’s an accountant. He has no clue how airplanes fly or how jet engines work. But he does possess a special skill that’s inherent with his technical discipline…
One of the chief skills of accountants who are granted the controls of corporate management is the unmatched aptitude for eroding industrial capital in favor of shareholders. When all business decisions are guided by bean counters a company’s reason to exist ceases.
For Boeing, the con job can be traced back to its acquisition of McDonnell Douglas in 1997. Here we’ll turn to Matt Stoller, and his article What Happened at Boeing?, for edification:
“Unlike Boeing, McDonnell Douglas was run by financiers rather than engineers. And though Boeing was the buyer, McDonnell Douglas executives somehow took power in what analysts started calling a ‘reverse takeover.’ The joke in Seattle was, ‘McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing’s money.’
“The merger sparked a war between the engineers and the bean-counters; as one analyst put it, ‘Some of the board of directors would rather have spent money on a walk-in humidor for shareholders than on a new plane.”’
Boeing’s Bean Counter Culture and Mass Financialization
The demise of Boeing culminated in late-2018 and early-2019 when the company’s revamped 737, the 737 MAX, suffered two systems malfunction induced crashes. This prompted aviation authorities around the world to ground the 737 MAX. More from Stoller:
“The testing in 2012, with air flow approaching the speed of sound, allowed engineers to analyze how the airplane’s aerodynamics would handle a range of extreme maneuvers. When the data came back, according to an engineer involved in the testing, it was clear there were serious issues to address.
“The old Boeing would have redesigned the plane’s control surfaces to fix the faulty aerodynamics, but the McDonnell Douglas-influenced Boeing now tried to patch the problem with software. And it was bad software, some of written by outsourced engineers in India. The Federal Aviation Administration, having outsourced much of its own regulatory capacity to Boeing, didn’t know what was going on, and Boeing didn’t tell airlines and pilots about the new and crucial safety procedures.”
All the while, as the 737 MAX was being patched up with cheap software and rolled out the world over, Boeing management was engaged in the mass financialization of its business. The kind that enriches management and shareholders to the demise of the real business.
Aerospace analyst Dhierin Bechai took a look at Boeing’s share buybacks and dividend payments in relation to cash flow between 2014 and 2019 and discovered several fun facts:
“Boeing spent roughly $60B ($59,994 million to be exact) in buybacks ($40.6B) and dividends ($19.4B) in the past years while it generated roughly $55B in cash flows. Boeing returns all of its cash flow from operations to shareholders. The $5B excess is caused by 2019, the year in which Boeing spent money on dividends and buybacks while operating cash flow fell. Excluding 2019, we found that Boeing returns 92 percent of its operating cash flow and 113 percent of its free cash flow to shareholders.”
No doubt, the bean counters running Boeing were personally rewarded for this mass financialization. Coincidentally, or not, the $60 billion returned to shareholders is the exact amount Boeing requested in federal support for the aerospace industry.
From what we gather, this week’s $2 trillion federal bailout includes a $17 billion federal loan program for businesses deemed “critical to maintaining national security.” The provision does not mention Boeing by name, but is largely for the company’s benefit.
They’ll also likely get their grubby hands on a piece of the $454 billion the Treasury Department intends to have the Fed lever up to $4 trillion in loans for corporate America.
Just another example of financialization, cronyism, and everything that’s wrong with everything. We’re doomed!
Russia To Close All Borders Monday After Banning International Flights
Though official numbers of confirmed coronavirus cases out of Russia have remained comparatively low to other large countries, there’s alarming signals coming out of the country of some 150 million people that authorities understand the true numbers to in reality be much higher.
Russia will “temporarily” initiate a complete shutdown of its borders staring Monday in order to curb the pandemic, impacting all automobile, railway, pedestrian and river checkpoints along all Russian border points.
The total border closure looks to be among the most comprehensive measures any country has yet taken to halt the spread of the virus, even as China has belatedly closed its borders to all foreign passport-holders this week.
Image: AFP via Getty
This after on Friday it was announced all international flights in and out of the country are grounded by a government decree.
“The authorities said they so far had recorded 1,264 confirmed cases, an increase of 228 in 24 hours, and ordered that all vehicle, rail and pedestrian checkpoints, as well as the country’s maritime borders, be closed from Monday,” the independent Moscow Times reports.
The only exemption to the drastic measure applies to diplomats and drivers of freight trucks, according to Russian media.
Meanwhile, according to US state-funded Radio Free Europe, “a consumer watchdog reported on March 28 that more than 166,000 citizens were under medical supervision for signs of coronavirus infection.”
Early in the crisis Russia closed all crossing points along its lengthy border with China, which health officials in the West attributed to the country’s initial low numbers of Covid-19 infections.
This past week Russian President Putin declared next week a paid ‘work holiday’ as the entire country goes on lockdown. Most countries have thus far preferred to put in place quarantines on a city by city, region by region basis.
Should the drastic Russian action to shutter all borders produce good results, other countries with a growing outbreak crisis in their midst could follow suit.
Singapore is set to punish people who stand too close to strangers with 6 months in prison as the true scope of “social distancing” measures begins to be felt around the world.
According to a press release from the country’s Ministry of Health, Singaporeans who fail to maintain a distance of one meter from other people during “non-transient” public interactions can be fined 10,000 Singapore dollars ($6,985) or hit with 6 months in jail.
The measure is obviously designed to target groups of people who congregate or people who visit their friends and relatives.
As the resentment of being forced to live under quarantine lockdown for weeks and possibly months builds, authorities across the world are undoubtedly going to face a growing backlash from the citizenry, no matter how bad the spread of coronavirus.
In France, a 35-year-old man was sent to prison after repeatedly violating lockdown measures after being found guilty of “endangering the lives of others.”
Another 19-year-old man was handed a 4 month suspended prison sentence for repeatedly flouting the measures 10 times in just a few days.
In Jordan, authorities initially banned everyone from going outside, even to buy food, leading to the arrest of 800 people.
More than 90,000 Italians have also been hit with fines for violating quarantine while transgressors in Spain can face up to 18 months in prison.
As we highlighted yesterday, one police force in the UK is using drone surveillance technology to spy on people who walk their dogs in remote areas and then track down their home address.
Meanwhile, in “troubled” areas of European cities such as Seine-Saint-Denis in Paris, migrants are virtually immune from quarantine measures because large groups of them intimidate police if they try to enforce them.
“We are not going to give up. But we also know where these people live and how they live. Strict containment, for them, is just impossible,” a police officer working in the area said.
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Trump Bails Himself Out? Overlooked Provision In Stimulus Bill Affords $170 Billion In Real Estate Tax Breaks
The recently signed $2 trillion in fiscal stimulus includes a little known provision for the country’s largest real estate investors.
On the overlooked page 203 of the recently passed 880 page bill, there’s a provision that allows for wealthy investors to use losses generated by real estate to minimize taxes on profits from other things, like capital gains. Over 10 years, the cost of the change is slated to be $170 billion, according to the New York Times.
Under the current tax code, when real estate investors generate losses from writing down the value of their properties, they can use some of those losses to offset other taxes. But the 2017 tax cut package limited some of those losses to shelter $500,000 of a married couple’s non-business income. Leftover losses got rolled out to subsequent years. The new bill lifts the $500,000 cap.
Does anyone happen to know any wealthy real estate investors this could benefit?
The new bill not only lifts the cap for this year, but for two years retroactively. Which means if you’re a couple more than $500,000 in annual capital gains or income from sources other than business, you could be getting a massive tax break. The break was found to be “the second-biggest tax giveaway in the $2 trillion stimulus package,” according to the NYT.
Peter Buell, who runs tax services for Marcum, said:
“It’s a pretty big deal. A separate provision in the stimulus bill, which removes restrictions on losses that people can carry over from previous years, would make the tax break even more lucrative.”
And not only could Trump benefit from such a break, so could those close to him. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kusher was already accused in 2018 of not paying federal income taxes due to paper losses from depreciating his company’s properties. This was despite the fact that Kusher has “significant wealth” and earnings from other sources.
But hey, with the Fed printing trillions of dollars and doing hundreds of billions in QE weekly, what’s another $170 billion among friends?
