Month: February 2021

About a week ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom responded to our state's slow vaccine rollout by doing away with "tiers" and going to a purely age-based system. This is what lots of people have been recommending, but every decision like this leaves someone out in the cold:

“They act as if we do not exist. Or if we do, we’re expendable,” said [Ntombi] Peters, who uses multiple inhalers and daily medications to control her severe asthma and is on immunosuppressant drugs to treat multiple sclerosis, both of which put her at severe risk from COVID-19. “It’s very disheartening.”

....“Clearly, we are living in a culture that still sees people like me as disposable,” said Alice Wong, 46, a disabled activist in San Francisco, who created the hashtag #HighRiskCA in response to the change. “This is clearly erasure, this is eugenics, and I consider this a form of violence. It is a form of violence against the most marginalized communities.”

The problem, of course, is that someone has to make up rules about which disabilities qualify you for an early vaccination, and then someone else has to verify that the people applying really do have the disabilities they say they do. This is a huge amount of work that generates ever yet more blowback from whatever group finds itself on the wrong side of the line, and in the end it slows down the vaccine rollout.

This is the dilemma, and I can't pretend to have the answer. One thing I'll say, though, is that I think activists would have more success if they'd drop the pseudo-academic language of "erasure" and "eugenics" and "violence." It's none of that, and it accomplishes little except to make people less sympathetic to their cause. It's just a very difficult problem.

I woke up around the crack of noon today. Apparently the Evil Dex has completed its transformation from a drug that keeps me up all night into a damn sleeping pill. I was asleep for nearly ten solid hours last night.

In any case, since this is officially an old-school blog, I was pleased to be greeted by one of the oldest-school blog debates around: why do Democratic presidents outperform Republican presidents on the economy? David Leonhardt provides us with the following ranking:

For starters, I'll say that it's a little unfair to begin with FDR, since growth rates were fundamentally higher in the era of 1945-1970, which featured almost exclusively Democratic presidents. On the other hand, the one Republican president during that time, Eisenhower, presided over a series of recessions and ranks pretty low even though he was smack in the middle of the high-growth era. And it's not just GDP and jobs:

It’s true about almost any major indicator: gross domestic product, employment, incomes, productivity, even stock prices. It’s true if you examine only the precise period when a president is in office, or instead assume that a president’s policies affect the economy only after a lag and don’t start his economic clock until months after he takes office. The gap “holds almost regardless of how you define success,” two economics professors at Princeton, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, write. They describe it as “startlingly large.”

....The big question, of course, is why. And there are not easy answers. First, it’s worth rejecting a few unlikely possibilities. Congressional control is not the answer. The pattern holds regardless of which party is running Congress. Deficit spending also doesn’t explain the gap: It is not the case that Democrats juice the economy by spending money and then leave Republicans to clean up the mess. Over the last four decades, in fact, Republican presidents have run up larger deficits than Democrats.

That leaves one broad possibility with a good amount of supporting evidence: Democrats have been more willing to heed economic and historical lessons about what policies actually strengthen the economy, while Republicans have often clung to theories that they want to believe — like the supposedly magical power of tax cuts and deregulation. Democrats, in short, have been more pragmatic.

For what it's worth, my explanation has always been a bit different. Republicans spent years wedded to austerity economics while Democrats, largely thanks to broad support from unions, were explicitly dedicated to job growth for the middle class and high taxes on the rich. After 1980 Republicans finally gave up on austerity, but instead of focusing on the middle class they adopted policies aimed at making life easier for corporations and the wealthy. Democrats, by contrast, continued to focus on the poor and the working class even as their union support dwindled.

Neither party was consistently successful in meeting its goals, but both were successful enough that over time their policies had a broad effect that was obvious in historical retrospect. This isn't because Democrats are especially more virtuous about "heeding economic and historical lessons," but simply because their goals were more genuinely aimed at building a strong economy, while Republican goals were aimed primarily at helping the rich.

One more thing: if you're wondering how Ds and Rs do on average over the entire period, I have the answer for you. For the sake of fairness I started in 1961, thus cutting off all the high-growth New Deal Democrats, but it hardly matters. On GDP growth over the past 60 years, Democratic presidents averaged 3.5 percent growth vs. 2.5 percent for Republican presidents. On jobs growth, Democratic presidents averaged 2.2 growth vs. 1.2 percent for Republicans.

Back in the day I would have also calculated these numbers using a lag, on the assumption that a president's policies didn't have any effect in the first year or two of office. But that never made any difference, so I'm not going to bother.

Anyway, the message is clear: if you want real economic growth for the middle class, vote for Democratic presidents. If you want low taxes for the rich, vote for Republican presidents. It's pretty easy.

The pandemic news has been relatively good lately. After the holiday surge, cases started declining in January and deaths started to follow suit three weeks later. Most places are now showing a sustained decline—or at least a plateau—from their peak of a few weeks ago. If we can manage to keep this up, we should be in good shape to accelerate the decline as more people get vaccinated.

The bad news, of course, was that so many countries, including the US, had a holiday surge in the first place. I wonder how many people were killed because we collectively decided to visit our relatives come hell or high water—with full and conscious knowledge of what we were doing?

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 1. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Vox and Data for Progress have teamed up to conduct a new poll on a variety of issues that have been in the news recently. Many of them are related to the coronavirus bill, but not all. Here's how they fared among Republicans:

If these issues become live, the right-wing media machine will be able to knock 15-20 points off any of them if they choose to. For that reason, I'd rank the top five issues as having fairly solid Republican support; the next three having a bare majority; and the rest not really having much Republican support at all.

The takeaway here is that the top five are all COVID-19 related and even Republicans mostly support them. (The exception is allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower prescription drug prices, which has strong support even though it's unrelated to the pandemic.)

Among the COVID-related issues that don't receive strong GOP support are a moratorium on evictions and continued unemployment bonuses. Why? Probably because most of the respondents aren't unemployed and aren't in danger of being evicted. Conversely, many of them do have kids in school and would receive $1,400 checks sent out to everyone. So they're in favor of those.

And the free vaccines and free testing? Well, everyone could use those too, couldn't they?

The basic message is Politics 101: Republican voters tend to support things that will benefit them personally, but aren't that thrilled about things that only benefit other people. The same is true of other voters as well, but not nearly as strongly.

I was out shooting pictures of something else at Seal Beach and happened to come across this pair of lovebirds on the beach. This picture may be a cliche, but then, there's a reason things become a cliche.

Over at National Review, Jim Geraghty runs down several recent stories about shipments of COVID-19 vaccine that have gone astray or been allowed to spoil:

When a pharmacist discovered that 57 vials....Nearly 2,000 doses of the coronavirus vaccine....More than 1,100 doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine....165 Moderna COVID-19 vaccine doses....the majority of the 11,900 doses in the shipments.

When all of these anecdotes are laid out, it feels like a small miracle that anyone ever gets vaccinated.

This adds up to about 15,000 doses out of 49 million that have been distributed so far. That's 0.03 percent.

Geraghty asks, "Is this the most rage-inducing Corner post I have ever written?" I'd say it's not only not rage inducing, it's positively miraculous. If the number were ten times higher, it would still be pretty good.

This is yet another example of what I (clumsily) call the "America is a big country" syndrome. It's easy to find examples of almost anything, and it's just as easy to come up with large-sounding numbers. But that's only because our country has a population of 330 million. There's always somebody doing something stupid. And even a hundredth of a percent is still 33,000 people.

So: good job, vaccine distributors! Now if we can just figure out what happened to the 20 million doses the Trump administration apparently failed to account for.

The Congressional Budget Office is bullish on the economy in its latest report. Here's their forecast:

Real GDP expands rapidly over the coming year, reaching its previous peak in mid-2021 and surpassing its potential level in early 2025....Labor market conditions continue to improve. As the economy expands, many people rejoin the civilian labor force who had left it during the pandemic, restoring it to its prepandemic size in 2022. The unemployment rate gradually declines throughout the period, and the number of people employed returns to its prepandemic level in 2024.

There is, of course, a chart:

At its current growth rate, CBO projects that GDP will be less than potential GDP for three years, after which it reaches its full potential. This compares to nine consecutive years of below-potential GDP following the Great Recession.

If you trust the CBO, this is a good argument that we don't need any further fiscal stimulus. However, it says nothing about whether we need to continue helping those who have suffered the biggest income losses from the pandemic shutdown.¹

¹Hint: Yes, we do.

Dan Froomkin of PressWatch wrote a widely-linked piece yesterday about the role of the press in modern-era Washington. Here's a piece of it, framed as a speech that a new editor delivers to her newsroom:

First of all, we’re going to rebrand you. Effective today, you are no longer political reporters (and editors); you are government reporters (and editors)....Historically, we have allowed our political journalism to be framed by the two parties. That has always created huge distortions, but never like it does today.

....Defining our job as “not taking sides between the two parties” has also empowered bad-faith critics to accuse us of bias when we are simply calling out the truth. We will not take sides with one political party or the other, ever. But we will proudly, enthusiastically, take the side of wide-ranging, fact-based debate.

....Political journalism as we have practiced it also too often emphasizes strategy over substance. It focuses on minor, incremental changes rather than the distance from the desirable – or necessary — goal. It obfuscates, rather than clarifies, the actual problems and the potential solutions.

....Tiresomely chronicling who’s up and who’s down actually ends up normalizing the status quo. I ask you to consider taking — as a baseline — the view that there is urgent need for dramatic, powerful action from Washington, not just when it comes to the pandemic and the economic collapse, but regarding climate change and pollution, racial inequities, the broken immigration system, affordable health care, collapsing infrastructure, toxic monopolies, and more.

The reason I'm highlighting this is because it distills a widely held belief on the left: namely that national political reporters are consumed with both-siderism; horse race coverage; faux balance; and giving too much exposure to bad faith arguments. Instead, as Froomkin suggests, they should take a broader view that downplays insider politics and instead focuses on the big picture.

But there's a problem here: we already have media outlets that do this. They're called monthly magazines, which often focus on analysis and broad trends.

By contrast, a daily newspaper (or TV news show) reports on the news. That is, the stuff that happened that day. This is totally legitimate, since lots of people want to know what's happening on a day-to-day basis. In fact, since you're reading this on the internet, you're most likely someone who wants to keep up with the news on an hour-by-hour basis. Waiting a whole day is for your grandparents, amirite?

So what's a daily political reporter to do? If President Biden proposes a $1.9 trillion coronavirus bill, you have to report it. If a group of Republicans counteroffers with $600 billion, you have to report that. And if Biden agrees to meet with them, once again we have news. And there's really no way to report this except through a partisan lens. The entire thing is fundamentally driven by the fact that Democrats and Republicans disagree about what should be in the package. And as with so many things, there is no disembodied truth about who's right.

Unless, of course, you simply assume that liberals are always right, as Froomkin gives away in the last paragraph I excerpted. If that had been written by a conservative, it would look something like this:

I ask you to consider taking — as a baseline — the view that there is urgent need for dramatic, powerful action from Washington, not just when it comes to the pandemic and the economic collapse, but regarding a ballooning welfare state, a stifling culture of political correctness, a broken immigration system, and increasing hostility to religious freedom.

There's something to the lefty critique of political reporters, but not because they report the news that actually happens on a daily basis. Nor because they ignore background and context. Generally speaking, I find that they usually do a good job on that score. For my money, I'd say they spend too much time on Twitter and too much time printing rumors from anonymous sources without much backup.

I am, of course, talking here about legitimate news outlets like the New York Times or CBS News. I am decidedly not talking about places like Fox News, which don't even attempt to provide any kind of balanced treatment of the day's events. That's a whole different topic.

A "Gang of Ten," if you will, has made a counteroffer to President Biden's $1.9 trillion coronavirus bill:

Ten Republican senators are set to meet with President Biden on Monday to push a much smaller alternative to his $1.9 trillion stimulus bill to address the toll of the pandemic, including scaling back another round of direct payments from the government.

The coalition of mostly centrist Republican senators, led by Susan Collins of Maine, on Monday outlined their $618 billion plan, which they are billing as a way for Mr. Biden to pass a pandemic aid bill with bipartisan support and make good on his inauguration pledge to unite the country....After receiving a letter from the senators on Sunday requesting a meeting, Mr. Biden called Ms. Collins and invited her and the other signers to the White House, where they are scheduled to meet Monday evening.

This is drawing scorn from lots of progressive observers, but it shouldn't. This is precisely what Biden ran on, and a few days of back-and-forth will do no harm. The "lesson of 2009," conversely, is to avoid getting stuck in months of bad-faith negotiations.

That said, the Republican group is going to have to show some serious flexibility if they want to be taken seriously. Their plan takes a chainsaw to assistance for individuals and the unemployed, and there's no way that's a sustainable proposition. Biden's best strategy is to meet with them, talk with them, and then insist on a better proposal within a day or two. Meanwhile, there's no need for things to slow down in the House.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through January 31. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.