How the US dropped the ball with this pandemic

Hahahaha. This is way out of the area of my expertise. I see lots of people that don't let that issue stop them though as they weigh in forcefully on whether Trump disbanded a critical task force or reasonably 'streamlined' it. I couldn't say which is more accurate so I won't try.

However, I can look back and try to detect signs or significant information. Using Google with a limited window on dates showed me that school closures were considered well before social distancing became the watchword. This was true in Massachusetts, but also true in Italy, where schools were closed on March 4, but orders to avoid contact weren't issued until 3/9, if I'm not mistaken. By that time, Italy had had 366 deaths due to covid-19 and the hospitals in Lombardy had been slammed.

The school closures in Italy should have been on the radar in the US, but they weren't. However the lockdown in northern Italy did finally penetrate the thick skulls in North America, and the topic of the week from 3/9 - 3/14 was closures--colleges and universities closing, schools closing, sports events cancelled, etc.

But how about before that? What was on the radar in January and February? Too much confidence, like this:

In coming weeks, if the virus begins to spread through U.S. communities, health authorities want to be ready to adopt school and business closures like those undertaken in Asian countries to contain the disease... The CDC is taking steps to ensure frontline U.S. healthcare workers have supplies they need, she added, by working with businesses, hospitals, pharmacies and provisions manufacturers and distributors on what they can do to get ready.

The reality was quite different. Local entities and governments took the lead, with governors announcing closures without guidance from the CDC. Leadership at the federal level was sorely lacking.

Trump suddenly changed tack on 3/16, having daily press conferences starting then. But his lack of leadership had already been demonstrated. There will be plenty of time to dissect what Trump did wrong though of course it's already started. The head of the CDC is a political favorite of religious conservatives. And here's a blistering account of how the Trump administration disrespects scientists, again and again and again and again. I couldn't read it all.

Italy was a wake-up call to me. However, the federal government is supposed to be more aware than a single individual, what with all its resources and intelligence gathering. This has been quite a failure, even worse than 9-11 because the virus wasn't hiding. Thank God for the governors who did take the lead. They are more the model for our next president.

Image: ourworldindata.org

Extras. A resource of states' healthcare capacities, and how they are likely to fall short. I switched my dashboard to this one.  Also, I only look at deaths. The number of cases is too dependent on test availability, whereas deaths are more solid. However there can be undercounts (for those who die at home with no test) or even overcounts (attributing deaths to covid-19 without ample evidence).

Update 3/30/20. While New York City is slammed, ICU usage in Los Angeles doubles overnight. LA appears to be managing it thus far. How Congress was distracted in January and February. Trump has a short attention span when he's supposed to be saving the country. But he gives up and takes the experts' advice. These are the times that try men's souls ... especially libertarians. A supermarket chain that carefully prepared for a pandemic.

Update 4/2/20. I started wondering about the cruise ship overrun by covid-19, and found this overview of several cruises and this firsthand account from a worker. The story of another cruise ship and one of its passengers who died.

Herd immunity wasn't ever the plan in the UK--it was bad communication and maybe someone picked up on the wrong term. Well, maybe. I'm not convinced because it looks like the plans got changed rather swiftly to 'shelter-in-place.' One of the big names in the confusion thinks there's some good news. Been there, and then tomorrow came and smashed it. Canada did good! Hungary declares Orban as dictator indefinitely. Wisconsin's governor won't/didn't take the fucking step to postpone the primary. Uhhh, clueless. (I got this wrong. It was the GOP-led legislature that wouldn't act. They put partisan power above the good of the citizens.) And don't have a cardiac arrest in New York City right now. You won't be going to a hospital. However, bear in mind that the survival rate is less than 10% in these circumstances in the best of times.

I'll check back here when I want to compare covid to the flu.

No one solves the problems

Trump is promising to bring good jobs back to the US. He doesn't say how this will happen, but we're supposed to trust him because he knows how to make good deals.

Is he different from other politicians (both right and left) who have promised good jobs? Were the earlier politicians (right and left) different from one another when they promised good jobs?

In many ways, they weren't different. Both sides failed. Their promises were half-baked words meant to get them elected, but not suitable to be implemented. Trump's promises look a lot like this.

I'm not an economist--not that economists have delivered all that well on their predictions/solutions (i.e. promises). I haven't seen an economist discuss which economies in the world are working well, and whether the US can emulate their success. I suspect that the US can't emulate their success. If we are to recapture our former higher level of economic success, we'll have to figure out our own path there.

The GOP path was tax cuts for 'job creators' and the trickle-down economy. Since Bush Jr., that path has clearly been a failure. The Democratic path seems like a hodge-podge of security nets programs and tax increases on the wealthy. How that brings more jobs isn't clear. I'd have to classify as a redistribution program, not a jobs-creation plan.

The failure of both the GOP and Dem plans have left the door wide open for Trump, and he has taken full advantage. I don't know how many of his supporters actually believe him. But for sure, they know that the GOP and the Dems have failed, so maybe it's time to try something else.

Ask the question: Is this working?

Worst of all, neither the Dems nor the GOP have grappled with their failures. Dems are doubling-down on the social safety net, while the GOP continues their trickle-down fantasies. Dems, for electoral reasons, won't consider that large-scale immigration has hurt average Americans. Many in the GOP elites won't talk about it either because they benefit from cheap immigrant labor, and they're looking at electoral demographics too.

So, it is no surprise that Trump wins the GOP presidential nomination, since he is the only candidate who will talk about immigration in forceful, if ugly, terms.

As for the general election, I'm not confident that Trump will lose. Hillary represents one failed plan, so she certainly doesn't deserve to win. Trump doesn't deserve to win either. No one seems to deserve the office. No one has strong, new ideas.

I recently read a history of the US from 1932 to 1972 (The Glory and the Dream by William Manchester). It was enlightening how Roosevelt tackled the depression. The problem is that the US is so much larger now with so many more layers of spending. Can we actual do anything major now? I have strong doubts.

Nonetheless, I wish more politicians were making big proposals that are outside of the same-old partisan failures. Instead of Trump vs. generic-Dem, we should have had the choice of a half-dozen new ideas. But we didn't, and that's the shame and the pity.

Image: deliberatemeans.com

Extras. Are there countries we can learn from? HuffPost's top ten. US News and their ranking of 60 countries. Also by quality of life.

No-budget Obama

I hope you noticed this: Obama doesn't want the sequester to go ahead as is, but he isn't offering a replacement plan. That's the job for Congress. I guess Obama's job is to give lofty speeches and run our foreign policy. But his job evidently doesn't include providing meaningful leadership on difficult domestic issues.

His budget is AWOL too. So far, he seems to favor more revenue--from closing tax loopholes this time-- and unspecified cuts. It's disappointing that Obama can't state any cuts, even for the good of the country. He doesn't name cuts because they would automatically become incorporated in any future deal, and Obama doesn't want to give up any ground that isn't part of a package. There's a certain sense to this in an adversarial negotiation, but it's sad that other factors aren't a larger consideration, such as good budgeting and leadership on issues.

I don't think the sequester is horrible, largely because I'm for restraining government spending, but in gentle ways that are less likely to send us into another recession. However, Dems apparently have a different opinion. It is so damn hard to get Dems to agree to cuts that we ought to take the sequester as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and also as an experiment to find out how painful cutting actually is. This is something we have never tried at the federal level, while it's common at state, town, family, and personal level. I'm unconvinced that it's too dangerous to run this $85 billion experiment (the savings in the first year, or appoximately 0.5% of GDP).

Obama claims that the sequester should be replaced by a balanced approach of spending cuts and revenue increases, but this ignores something very important. The sequester was the cut-only piece of deficit reduction passed in August 2011. The end of the some of the Bush tax cuts, passed Jan. 2013, was a tax-increase piece of deficit reduction. Between the two, that is balanced deficit reduction. If the sequester is to be replaced, it should be replaced with cuts. It's also pretty obvious that the GOP agrees with that, so only a new menu of cuts has any chance of passing. 

With no viable alternative on offer, I think that finally the cuts will happen, starting shortly after March 1. That's a long time coming.

Cuts are coming

Image: sxmdailyphoto.com

Extra: Spinning the sequester for future electoral gain

Obama's budget dilemma

Obama has a constitutional requirement to submit a budget. It makes sense, but I didn't realize this was a constitutional requirement. [Correction, it's not a constitutional requirement--see comments below.]

So many times the budgets have been DOA (dead on arrival), so they didn't matter. The budgets were ridiculed, often well-deserved, and the real deals were worked out as continuing resolutions (CR). We've been funding our federal spending with continuing resolutions are several years in a row, and we've probably done that before under other presidents too. Big deal, what's the difference, meh...

This time the GOP is trying to make this budget matter. Their new stance is that the budget has to be something that can pass, so it will have to include enough cuts to satisfy the GOP-controlled House, and Obama will have to name the cuts.

Last year Obama offered a ridiculous, partisan budget which didn't receive a single vote (if that right-wing talking point is true). By the way, it didn't matter because the debt ceiling deal of August 2011 had settled the spending questions: there was going to be a CR describing the federal expenditures for 2012. It was settled, minor squabbles aside.

Obama's Challenge

So, this year Obama has to decide:

• Is he going to present another partisan budget that goes nowhere, or
• Is he going to present a real budget that can be the basis of negotiations?

I don't know which Obama is going to choose. I can tell you one thing, though, I'm not holding my breath waiting for the second/better option. Obama has disappointed when it comes to forward thinking.

Equal Opportunity Challenge

It's really too bad. I believe that the first party that develops a reasonable budget wins big for being realistic and credible leaders. They have a great chance to guide our governmental focus for the next generation. Yet no one is leaping up to do it out of fear of  'owning the cuts' and taking the backlash.

I don't think that's what will happen. The backlash won't land on the reasonable, it will land on the most unreasonable. The Dems won the 2012 election because they negotiated in 2011, and they showed that they were ready and willing to settle on a reasonable compromise. In the 2012 campaign, they sounded like they weren't going to reverse that compromise in 2013 if reelected.

The Republicans have yet to show that they will negotiate. They end up in negotiation, but too late, only after the Dems show they won't simply capitulate. It's no wonder the GOP didn't win the presidency. Who wants to give too much power to people like that?

So, Mr. Obama, please recognize that you can take that big step and grab the mantle of a reasonable, clear-thinking leader. You'll never have a better chance to do this, because, ha!, you've already been reelected. Do it. Lead on this one.

(Still not holding my breath. It's less than a 50% chance. Lots of room to be pleasantly surprised,  though.)

Hasn't happened yet. Will it?

Image: leadershipspirit.wordpress.com