Benefit-Cost Analysis and the Coronavirus

We are in the middle of a flurry of decision-making on how to deal with COVID-19.  After much resistance, officials are now canceling public events, closing schools and discouraging other activities that put us in contact with each other.  Travel restrictions and possible shutdowns of workplaces, as we’ve seen in Italy, may be up next.

It’s interesting we haven’t heard anything about benefit-cost analysis in all this.  Nearly all economists profess to think that BCA is the single best decision method.  Almost every introductory economics textbook is built around benefit-cost thinking, and for decades federal regulations have mandated BCA for proposals with significant economic impacts.

But now we are facing immense choices—what could have a more drastic impact than shutting down most of the economy by fiat?—and BCA is nowhere to be found.

As a public service, here’s a quick and dirty.  Coronavirus policy is primarily about saving lives, right?  So, if you believe in this sort of thing, the official “value of a statistical life” (VSL) as determined by the Environmental Protection Agency is $7.4 million.  According to BCA wisdom, we should spend up to this amount to save the life of a currently unknown (statistical) person, but not a penny more.*

In order to get a first impression, suppose the more stringent measures proposed will shave 1% off US GDP for the year.  Based on last year’s figure, that would eliminate $214 billion in economic value.  Using the value of life metric, that means we shouldn’t do this unless we expect to save at least 28,919 lives.  If not, let’em die.

Actually, I think it’s likely that we will see even greater economic costs from stringent social distancing policies, especially taking into account that the economy would probably have grown by a couple percent or so this year had the virus not struck.  Maybe these actions would pass the BCA test, maybe not.

Personally, I think it would be madness to stick a monetary value on people’s lives and base our policy choices on whether the dollars on one side of the ledger outweigh those on the other.  I wrote a book about that a while ago.  The considerations that lead us to think primarily in public health terms at a time like this apply just as well to other issues, from food safety to climate change.  The economists who crank out monetary values of life and believe all choices should be based on benefit-cost thinking have not yet had the integrity to step forward and make their case.  This silence speaks volumes.

*On a technical point, economists at EPA and elsewhere argue that the VSL should vary based on the population at risk.  Since mortality from the novel coronavirus is higher for those in the highest age brackets, and death from the disease would eliminate fewer years of life for them than for younger people, their VSL should be lower.  It may also be the case that mortality will be lower among those with higher incomes, who can afford better preventive measures and treatment, further depressing the relevant VSL metric.  But these considerations would require even more lives saved to justify the expense.

Europe’s Response to Coronavirus and the Implications for the U.S.

As I listened to the morning news about the coronavirus crisis, I was reminded of this critique of the Eurozone:

In a recent conference, the distinguished economist Paul Krugman repeated the oft-heard critique that the eurozone is not an optimal currency area. Waltraud Schelkle disagrees with this characterisation, and argues that no country or group of countries represents an optimal currency area – one region or country always loses out from a single monetary policy. But countries can use fiscal, social and regulatory policies to overcome these difficulties. When Americans criticise the eurozone’s currency policies, she writes, they are forgetting the US dollar’s shaky start and the adjustments which had to be made to the financial system in the 19th century.

Why mention the optimal currency area debate in reference to this health crisis? This morning I heard statements like this one:

By contrast, the coronavirus crisis has started to look more like the European migration and financial crises: a symptom of globalization that can’t be held back where it started. The exploding outbreak around the Continent — officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on Wednesday — highlights both the promises and limitations of the European Union: a single, largely borderless market made up of 27 countries, each with their own governments, electorates, bureaucracies, health care systems and, as has become painfully obvious, national interests. For weeks, officials in Brussels and national capitals have called for pan-European coordination. Yet even as Italy, the bloc’s third largest economy, embraces a made-in-China solution — putting the entire country under preventative lockdown — the modus operandi across the EU remains fragmented and reactive.

The United State of America like the European Union as we are a single borderless market made up of 50 states. One would hope we would have pursued for a pan-America coordinated response but until yesterday we saw leadership at the state level but not much from the Administration:

States are scrambling to prepare and respond to the coronavirus outbreak, petitioning Washington for changes to federal health insurance programs that could help them save lives ... With thousands of Americans infected and dozens dead, the Trump administration has yet to find a way to effectively test for the presence of the novel coronavirus. But it’s the President’s ongoing refusal to declare an emergency over the disaster — which would unleash aid, funds, and FEMA — which continues to hamper state-level planning… Medicaid Health Plans of America, the program’s trade association, issued a statement on Wednesday demanding that CMS set consistent guidance for state departments of health that would include waiving cost sharing for people who are testing for or have been diagnosed with COVID-19 … Different states have addressed the crisis differently.

We should applaud our local governments as well as the prudent responses of private sector agents like the professional sports team. We should also be glad that this White House decided to finally shown a wee bit of belated leadership. But the delay in declaring a national emergency has been incredibly costly to both the economy as well as the health of many of our citizens. But this is what we get when we elect a President who does not like agencies like FEMA or the Pandemic Task Force.

What Might That Compromise On Health Care Between Biden And Bernie Look Like?

As discussed in an earlier post it looks like there is an as yet undetermined compromise between the ACA plus public option with some other items supported by Joe Biden that unfortunately lacks the crucial matter of universal health care coverage (although he professes to support such) with the single payer plan supported by Bernie Sanders, somewhat modeled on the system of Canada, although more generous and less open to private insurance than Canada's but definitely including universal coverage.  Obviously Biden's plan has the problem of lacking universal coverage while that of Bernie appears to call for the end of private insurance, which might save money but also seems to be unpopular and thus damages his potential electability.

It certainly looks like a possible compromise should be out there, and according to polls of Kaiser, such a compromise that has a mixed public/private system with universal coverage is well ahead of all other alternatives in the eyes of the US population.  And, indeed, the vast majority of other high income nations have just such a system.  They are the ones that are not the UK or Canada or US, pretty much all the others, although they have wide variations among them of their systems.  The Obama admin sort of tried to get there by imposing the individual mandate to ty to get everybody covered, but it was unpopular from the start and never seriusly enforced, before the Trump admin got rid of it.

So here is a bit of coverage of what is out there in nations that have mixed systems and universal coverage, noting that it is much easier for all of them to manage it compared to the US given their lower costs.  So some look like what ACA almost was, essentially an enforced individual mandate system although with varying patterns of subsidies and backups for the backup public health care system. Among the highly rated systems the Netherlands and Switzerland fit this pattern with Switzerland having more of a private system while the Netherlands has more of a public one.  Switizerland's reuqires higher co-payments, much like what came out of Obamacare/ACA, although Switzerland does have that universsal coverage.

Most of the other systems have larger public portions, although with private elements in various ways.  Let me note as simply one example the widely praised system of France.  The payment is upfront, labeled as an insurance premium but essentially a tax, and individual mandate if you will, but enforced.  With that one has a choice of vsrious systems.   Three are public, with the dominant one covering 84% of the ppulatoin while the other two cover another 12%. The remainder are covered by various non-profit private plans. People using one of the public plans can also get supplemtnal privare insurance from one of those non-profits, and the ultimate divide is 78% public and 22% private in terms of the provision of insurance. The whole thing costs 11.3% of GDP compared to the 17.1% in the US for health care.  And, of course, France does much better on botom line life expectancy and other health outcomes than the US, although apparently the system has been suffering in recent years from some doctor shortages and is probably not the top rated in the world as it once was.

But then, all systems are imperfect, even if so many of them seem to do better than that in the US.  Somehow it does not seem that it should be so difficult to get to one of these intermediate systems that are so pupular among Americans, but somehow for now no presidential candidate is proposing.

Barkley Rosser

Are US Treasuries Really Facing A "Liquidity Crunch"?

That is what I just saw on an internet report, with 30-year Treauries supposedly especiallly hard hit. Rather stunning was a figure showing trading costs, which have supposedly massively spiked in the last week or so, reaching the highest levels since 2008.  Apparently this may be tied to exceptionally high volatility in the bond markets, especially the long term ones, which may explain it, although this has not bee much reported, I guess with so much attention on the volatile and mostly crashing stock markets.

What makes me wonder about this is that usually a lack of liquitdity results in higher yields on bonds, but this report also noted that in the last few days we saw for the first time ever the entire U Treasuries yield curve below 1 percent.  Indeed, I am under the impression that the old "safe haven effect" is operating, with foreign money flowing into US securities for safety.  But this report claims that people trying to sell 30 year bonds in particular have been having trouble finding buyers.  I confess that all this does not seem to hold together, although it may be that there have been brief moments of such lack of liquidity interspersed with periods of lots of it. 

Needless to say, the US Treasuries market is about as foundational to the entire global financial system as any market.  If somehow it seizes up in a serious way, the situation is going to get far worse in the financial markets and the economy than anybody has been talking about so far.

Barkley Rosser

McCoy Tyner Dies, RIP

Several days ago, McCoy Tyner died at age 81.  He was one of the greatest living jazz pianists at the time of his death, with perhaps only Keith Jarrett his serious rival, although others might beg to differ.

He was most  famous for having been the pianist in John Coltane's "classic quartet," along with Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums.  Their most famous album was "A Love Supreme," one of the greatest jazz albums of them all.  He also produced a prodigious body of excellent work after he left that group, and was active up until near his death.  In later years he sometimes played with Coltrane's son, Ravi.  He had known John Coltraane from when they were both young in Philadephia before they became jazz musicians.

I saw him perform several times over the years, although when I saw Coltrane, Tyner was no longer in the group.  The last time I saw him was just a few years ago at the Blue Note in New York (he lived in New Jersey).  He had to be helped to walk to the piano, which we were sitting very close to (and even spoke with him briefly) but once he started playing ne was all there, those strong pounding chords mixing with his fine lyricism.  He was immensely influential, but there will be none like him.

RIP, McCoy Tyner.

Barkley Rosser

How Low Can You Go?

This is not a prediction. Only an observation. From 1952 to 1996, U.S. nominal net worth of households and non-profits tracked nominal GDP pretty closely. Net worth remained pretty close to 15 times GDP. That consistent relationship ended after 1997. In the third quarter of 2007, net worth was nearly 20 times GDP but by the second quarter of 2009 it had reverted to just 17 times GDP. One might argue that it was roughly 15 times what trend GDP would have been at that time.

In the second quarter of 2019, net worth was 21 times GDP  or about 28% above the historical norm from 1952 to 1996. To revert to that historical norm would entail a loss of asset valuation of around $32 trillion.

 

Why International Womens' Day Barely Celebrated In US Despite Starting In US

Today, March 8, is International Womens' Day, recognized as such by the United Nations since 1975.  But probably a majority of American women have never even heard of it, much less celebrate it.  There have been marches on it (or around it) here in Harrisonburg, VA for the last four years, but these have been small and led by women born outside the US, with most of the native born participants highly educated and very progressive politically, the latter very much the case for most native born American women who celebrate it, although it is gradually getting more celebrated here.  But it started here.  What happened?

The first International Womens' Day celebration happened on February 28, 1909 in New York City, organized by the Socialist Party of the US at the behest of Teresa Malkiel.  The following year, Clara Zetkin from the US got the Second Socialist International to adopt it as a day to be celebrated, although without a specific date set.  It was in 1914 in Germany that it began to be celebrated on March 8, which spred from there to be the day, with the US Socialist Party slow to move to that date, and it never really spreading beyond its original leftist circles in the US.

What really reinfoced that is that it became a major holiday within the international communist movement.  This came about after Russian women in then Petrograd (later Leningrad and still later back to its original name, St. Petersburg) demonstrated against the tsarist government's keeping Russia in WW I.  Famously they were banging on pots and pans as they marched in the streets.  Tsar Nicholas II called on troops to suppress them, but the troops ended up siding with the women, and four days later the tsarist government fell, replaced by a socialist regime eventually led by Alexander Kerensky.  While it was March 8 outside Russia, it was February 24 in Russia, still on the Julian calendar.  Hence tis was known as the February Revolution.

On November 7, still in October on the Julian calendar, the Bolsheviks under Lenin overthrew the Kerensky government, an event officially known as The Great October Socialist Revolution.  But as its precursor, the Bolsheviks would officially celebrate March 8 after they switched calendars as International Womens' Day, with it becoming a full holiday in 1965.  After that it would spread into other Communist Parties, with the Chinese one celebrating it from 1922 onwaed.  Needless to say, along with its origins in the Socialist Party, led to it not ever becoming a general holiday or celebration in the US, and knowledge of it being actively suppressed as time went on.  It was only after 1967 that  it began to get somewhat recognized in the US, but still remains not widely known.

Anyway, happy International Womens' Day, everybody!

Barkley Rosser

Ranking Health Care Systems By Country

As promised earlier, I am going to provide several lists of rankings of nations by the supposed quality of their health care systems. For only one of these do I have a breakdown for specific aspects.  Given that the US generally does not do well on any of these, I do note that studies have shown the US is especcially good for certain cancers, especially colon, wiith France and Japan its main rivals on that one. We are also tops for various unusual elective surgeries that are expensive.

Also for this list I note that pretty much all of the nations appearing have universal coverage except the US.  UK has full-blown socialized mediicine with health care workers central government employees.  Canada and Taiwan are supposedly single payer, with South Korea having close to such a system.  Several Nordic nations have single payer for service, but not a full system.  But then Canada does not have a full system with all the private supplemental insurance there.  The rest are all some public/private mixe, with several major nations having it about three to one public to private.

The most widely cited ranking, and the most complete, is that of the World Health Organization.  But it is also now 20 years old. Anyway, here are its top ten, with Canada coming in 21st, Denmark 34the, US 35th, and Cuba, 36th:

1. France
2. Italy
3. San Marino (yes, this is a thorough list)
4. Andorra
5. Malta
6. Singapore (this one is actually 3 to 1 private to public, but has universal coverage)
7. Spain
8. Oman
9. Austria
10. Japan (which has the world's longest life expectancy)

Then we have a list from International.Insurance.co, with only 11 nations listed:

1. UK
2. Australia
3. Netherlands
4. New Zealand and Norway
6. Sweden and Switzerland
8. Germany
9. Canada
10. France
11. US

World Population Review lists the following nations as having good systems, but does not say that this llist's order indicates anything, and the following discussion starts with Switzerland first and then moves to Finland, which is not on the list, so unclear what is what, although this one does have Canada at the front of the list whose meaning is unclear. Anyway, no numbers, but here is the list in order, for what that is worth, which does not include the US:

Canada
Qatar
France
Norway
New Zealand
Germnay
Hong Kong
Netherlands
Switzerland
Singapore
Luxembourg
Japan
Sweden

Here is a list from Numbeo, clearly ranked, a  long list that I shall only show the top 10 for, with Canada at #24 and the US not even on the list.  This one is more Asia-centric:

1. Taiwan (which has handled the coronovirus especially well by many reports)
2. South Korea
3. Japan
4. Denmark
5. France
6. Spain
7. Austria
8. Thailand
9. Australia
10. Finland

Here is a list of the top 10 from the Cigna insurnce company (again, no US):

1. Denmark
2. Sweden
3. Canada
4. UK
5. Germany
6. Netherlands
7. Australia
8. France
9. Austria
10. New Zealand

Finally I show one from soething calling itself Health Care Tracking, which shows top 10 for both ovwrall as well as some specific cattegories.  I show the overall and then mention thr tops and bottome for a few categories:

Overall
1. Netherlands
2. Australia
3. Sweden
4. Japan
5. Austria
6. Comparable Countries
7. Germany
8. France
9. UK
10. US (only list where US beats Canada apparently, although maybe it is in #7)

For lab delays, The US is the worst and Canada is third worst.  Best three are Germany, France, and Netherlands.

For quick access to a physician (which many in the US thinik we are great at), Canada is the worst (10th), followed by Sweden, and then the US (8th worst out of 10).  The best Netherlands and Australia.

Finally we have amount of use of emergency rooms. On that Canada is tops followed by the US. Least use is Germany, Australia, and the Netherlands.

So, hard to come to any conclusoins on this.  Again, the US does pretty badly on many things. Canada easily ahead of it except for curiously these last two items and generally a pretty good performer (possibly #1 foro World Populaton Review and definitely #3 according to Cigna), but there are also some systems that are usually ahead of it, easily figured out from looking at these lists.

Taiwan may be evidence of serious success with single payer (I do not know details of system there), and the socialized medicine of UK gets wildly different rankings, tops on two lists but then substantially lower on others.  I suspect those where it is tops are looking at expenses for patients where those are especially low in UK.  Costs are ovrall lower there, with lower health care worker pay.  In UK health care spending is only 8% of GDP while it ranges between 10-12% for most of the European nations on these lists as well as Canada, while the US is way ahead of the others at our ridiculous 17%. 

What we clearly need is universality and lower costs, with it unclear that either the Bernie or Biden plans bring us both of those, although both improve on our current system, which is also better than the pre-Obama system, which it seems Trump is trying to take us back to with the GOP-states lawsuit against ACA backed by the Trump DOJ now sitting at the SCOTUS.

Barklley Rosser

A "Wild and Dangerous" Scheme, Part Two: What's "fixed" got to do with it? Do with it?

“…we have seen a calculation… which shows that the fixed charges, for machinery and the general management of a mill, are as nearly as possible equal to the cost of wages in the process.”

In my earlier post on the "Wild and Dangerous Scheme" I teased the "egregious accounting error" committed by the author of the 1844 article in the Economist. In plain terms the error was double counting -- the author deducts 16.5% from wages to compensate for a decrease in output and then attributes a second loss of 16.5% to the decrease in output resulting from it's effect on "fixed charges."

That double-counting error seems self-evident to me but there is also a semantic smoke screen at play that obscures it for some readers. The term "fixed charges" seems to refer to an immutable absolute quantity of costs and -- implicitly perhaps? -- an unalterable production process. It doesn't. It refers to accounting entries, as the term "charges" indicates.

Let’s Talk About Biden’s Tax Plan

Barkley Rosser elevates the political debate by trying to find common ground regarding health care reform. I posted a link to an interesting tax proposal, which I want to mention briefly after acknowledging this comment:

As to Biden's fiscal plan, I'm assuming this is really Jared Bernstein's plan. Biden has a lot of virtues, but he's never been known for being the smartest guy in the room. And with age he's definitely lost a step. Sometimes I listen to him and wonder if he hasn't had a few mini-strokes. But whatever his faults, he does seem to have a knack for surrounding himself with smart folks, and Jared Bernstein is clearly one of the smart guys...a trained sociologist who is also an accomplished economist.

OK I get the Twitter and Facebook is lit up with pathetic attacks on Biden’s mental health. I hope this is not coming from the “Bernie Brothers” as this is the kind of garbage we expect from MAGA wearing hat stooges and those people in Moscow who are hoping to re-elect President Stooge. But 2slugbaits raises a good point about who one’s economic advisers. After all, Trump selects people like Lawrence Kudlow as his chief economic advisor so President Stooge can pretend to be the smartest person in the room. For a recovering Republican, Greg Mankiw elevated our political debate:

Most noteworthy is the huge increase in taxes on high-income households. The top one percent would see a 40 percent increase in federal taxes (all federal taxes combined). Their average federal tax rate would rise from 29.7 to 41.7 percent. If enacted, this plan would give us the most redistributionist tax code in many years. For comparison, in 1979, as the Reagan tax revolution was starting to pick up steam as a political movement, the tax rate for the top one percent was 35.1 percent--a rate that has never been reached since. By contrast, the middle quintile under the Biden plan would pay a federal tax rate of 13.5 percent, which is about the same as it has paid in recent years and much lower than the 19.1 percent rate it paid in 1979.

The Tax Policy Center notes:

In this brief, we estimate the revenue and distributional effects of former vice president Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign tax proposals. Biden’s spending proposals would also have important distributional and economic effects, but we have not estimated the distributional effects of those initiatives. Our modeling assumptions are based on information released by the Biden campaign and conversations with its staff; we detail these assumptions in appendix B. We analyze Biden’s proposals as of February 23, 2020. Biden would increase income and payroll taxes on high-income individuals and increase income taxes on corporations. He would increase federal revenues by $4.0 trillion over the next decade. Under his plan, the highest-income households would see substantially larger tax increases than households in other income groups, both in dollar amounts and as share of their incomes.

The political debate should focus on Biden’s fiscal proposals in contrast to Sander’s fiscal proposals. And following up on what 2slugbaits suggested, I would like to see who Biden is using as his economic advisers as well as who Sanders is using as his economic advisers.

A Compromise Health Care Proposal Between Bernie and Biden

Bernie supports a singly  payer system resembling that of Canada's. Biden supports an extension of ACA(Obamacare) tp add a public option such that anybody can buy into currently existing US Medicare, but not guaranteeing uinversal coverage.

So, my proposal intermediate between theiir proposals undoes the two biggest political economic problems with each sides.  Bernie's problem is that eliminating private insurance he alienates 2/3 US voters who like their employer-supplied insurance. Biden's problem is that he has not offered universal coverage, which every other high income nation has.

So, here is my proposal. Let there be "Medicare for All," but make it what most people think that means, not just what Biden proposes of letting people buy into Medicare, but simply making any uninsured person on Medicare as it is.  It is not all that good, so most will buy supplemental private insurance like nearly all actually existing Medicare recipients. So we shall achiieve the universal coverage that all other high income nations have,  But this will avoid the politically disastrous proposal of Bernie to simply end  all private insurance.

Barkley Rosser

A "Wild and Dangerous" Scheme!

"...a scheme at once wild and dangerous."
"...a trick, too, of the clumsiest description..."

I was hunting for the exact location of "Prince's Tavern" in Manchester in 1833 when I stumbled upon an Economist article from March 30, 1844 addressing the "practical consequences" of  reducing the length of the factory working day from 12 hours to 10. I am always fascinating by the profound and enduring hostility of a faction of employers -- amplified by their mouthpieces in academia and the press -- to the reduction of working time. I'm amazed how often their bile and zeal leads them to compound the error of biased, unfounded assumptions with boneheaded accounting mistakes. There is nothing so edifying as the sharp-eyed calculation of a businessman who has naught but the most important boon (far beyond any amount of benevolent sympathy or charity!) to the moral and physical independence of the operative at heart!

I'm going to leave this snippet here and invite commentators to identify the egregious accounting error the author commits. Later, I will demonstrate another instance of the exact same error, performed some 27 years later by an employer. These people weren't merely wrong, they were systematically and consistently mathematically illiterate and intellectually bereft. Frederic Harrison was on the mark when he called the purported "economic science" of his day "this magazine of untruth."

An Unsolicited Speech for Sanders

Friends, there are two parts to what I have to say to you today.  The first is humanitarian, the second is political—but also humanitarian.  It’s about the coronavirus silently making its way through our communities and the obligation of government to step up and protect public health.

Health professionals agree on the most important measures that need to be taken.  We need a *lot* more testing, and the testing should be free for everyone, period.  Treatment should also be free, not only for reasons of fairness, but also because it’s not in anyone’s interest to have people with symptoms avoiding or even just delaying seeing a doctor about them.  We need a big increase in government’s commitment to researching potential vaccines and therapies.  The federal government should make sure that testing kits are effective and produced and distributed as rapidly as possible.  And finally, in a country where so many of us live precariously paycheck to paycheck, we need a guarantee that no one who is laid up or quarantined has to forego the income they depend on.  In other words, we need paid leave for the coronavirus.

I appeal to President Trump, to the health officials within his administration, and to the nation’s governors to use all the powers our system of government gives them to take these steps immediately.

Now, the second part of this talk is political.  Consider again what is absolutely necessary in the face of the coronavirus: free testing, free treatment, public responsibility for comprehensive and affordable health care.  And paid leave so no one has to choose between getting care and paying the bills.  This is Medicare for All, and it’s also about ensuring that all workers in this country have their basic rights recognized and respected.  This virus has cast a piercing light on America’s fragmented, inefficient and grossly unequal health system, and what we have learned from it should set us on the path to real solutions—not just for this epidemic, but for the next, and the one after, and for all the health care needs we face as a society.  So: begin today to implement a sensible and inclusive program to meet the coronavirus challenge, and see it as the start of a new era in American life, the first pieces in Medicare for All and government support for essential worker rights.

Yes, I am making a political appeal here.  I want you to support the movement to finally deal with the health care mess, the mistreatment of workers, rampant economic injustice and the other failures that have been allowed to fester unattended in this country, decade after decade.  I’m asking for your vote, and beyond that, for your personal participation in this movement.  But, as the coronavirus reminds us, fighting for these things is also a struggle for humanitarian values.  The health of our people and the health of our economy depend not only on containing this virus and the damage it does, but also on addressing all the other preventable illnesses, the scourge of opioids, and the dental, vision and hearing problems that constitute their own epidemic among the un- and underinsured.  They also depend on providing care and support for the health needs none of us can avoid: maternity care and care for newborns, elder care, and the injuries and diseases that come with just living one’s life.  For a healthier society we also need a fairer economy, one where diagnosing and treating an illness is not a financial catastrophe for any worker.

The coronavirus is a dangerous threat, but it’s also an opportunity to see clearly what this country needs so all of us can live healthier, happier and more productive lives.

Medicare for All.  Workers rights.  Economic fairness.  Thank you.

Some Instant Thoughts on Super Tuesday

1. Biden benefitted from a wave of (orchestrated) last minute endorsements.  One effect of this wave was to divert attention from Biden the candidate to the endorsers and their combined bandwagon effect.  Particular endorsements helped in specific states: O’Rourke in Texas, Klobuchar in Minnesota.  But Biden has flamed out in all his previous runs for president because he is a weak campaigner, not very bright and prone to own goals.  He would be mincemeat for Trump.  Sanders, however, has vowed to make an issue only of political differences, not personal qualities.  We’ll see if that’s enough of an umbrella for Biden to get through to the nomination.

2. There must be immense pressure on Warren to remain in the race.  By any logic, she should drop out now and not soak up any more scarce resources, whether money, staff or her own time and energy.  If you look at the non-southern state results yesterday, however, her vote share had a big impact on the outcome.  If her support would break, say, two-thirds for Sanders and one-third for Biden, this would be enough to put Bernie over the top in close races.  I have no doubt the preferred lineup for the Democratic Party, donors and staff, is Biden-Warren-Sanders.  It will be interesting to see if she keeps playing the game.

3. I’m not surprised that the party apparatus is so determined to defeat Bernie, even at the cost of re-electing Trump.  Sanders has never been a Democrat.  He caucuses with them in the Senate, but, aside from the inevitable vote-rustling in congress, he has never coordinated with them politically.  His donor base minimally overlaps with theirs.  His staff consists of political professionals who were either outliers in the Party or outside it altogether.  If he were elected the result would be a hostile takeover of the national apparatus, and almost everyone who is a part of it today would have to find another line of work come January.  It’s existential for them.  The same probably holds in many or most state parties.

4. To recap #1, the Democrats have decided to place their full bet with Biden.  It may well work for them, but based on the man’s history, it’s a risky move.  If Biden self-destructs again their only fallback is to put forward a third party spoiler in the general election.

Protecting Healthcare Workers from Infected Patients, United States vs South Korea

Seattle:

Korea:

Those bedsheets will do a great job preventing the virus from spreading.