Muda69

Actor and comedian Jerry Stiller has died of natural causes, Ben Stiller says https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/11/us/jerry-stiller-death-natural-causes/index.html Truly an American Icon. He will be missed, especially by you fans of festivus.

The canard about U.S. Presidents somehow having power over the U.S. economy just won't die: https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/11/presidents-do-not-control-economies-or-gdp/ If you have a little basic mathematical literacy, you’ll see some problems. A little political literacy will lead to your detecting several more. But let’s consider it. Ten recessions back gets us to 1953. Since then, we have had 30 years of Democratic presidents and 35 years of Republican presidents; if recessions were randomly distributed, we’d still expect to see more of them coinciding with Republican presidencies simply because there have been more of them. In fact, most presidencies have coincided with one or more recessions. On the specifics, the argument is weak. But how much should we make of that coincidence in general? Democrats plead on behalf of Barack Obama that he came into office during a terrible economic crisis, and that he and his policies should not be blamed for the weak growth and disappointing labor-market performance that marked his time in office. That’s not unfair. But the same could be said of, e.g., Gerald Ford, who had to deal with an OPEC-inflicted quadrupling of oil prices in 1973. Does anybody think Gerald Ford’s policies caused that? John Kennedy came into office at the tail end of a recession, which officially ended in February of his first year in office. Does any serious person believe that in the course of less than a month President Kennedy implemented policies that ended the recession? That would be a deeply silly contention. Even more juvenile is assuming that business cycles are inextricably linked to election cycles — without offering a lick of evidence or even a plausible mechanism for that being the case. Recession-counting also ignores the fact that some recessions are the result of excellent public policy. The Reagan administration came into office with the country suffering from a serious inflation problem, and the tight monetary policy that the administration undertook to rein in that inflation produced a recession, as it was expected to. The recession was the price we paid for getting inflation under control. Inflation rose again toward the end of the Reagan-era boom, and once again, monetary tightening was used to control inflation at the cost of inflicting the mild recession that Bill Clinton rode to power. Oddly, Jere Glover ignores inflation. I wonder why. Besides the most obvious economic stupidity, there is some pretty deep political stupidity at work here, too. For one thing, presidents have to deal with Congress, which actually does things like set tax rates and appropriate money. People talk about “Reagan deficits” and the “Clinton surplus,” but it would be much more sensible to talk about the Tip O’Neill deficits and the Gingrich surplus: Reagan wanted substantial spending cuts that were never implemented, and Clinton resisted even modest fiscal reform until he couldn’t. These things get a little more complicated than the R-vs.-D, black-hats/white-hats mode of analysis would suggest. And, of course, there’s the hard-to-quantify fact that Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald J. Trump (“One of these things is not like the others / one of these things does not belong!”) pursued radically different economic policies. As, indeed, did Democratic presidents: There’s a great deal of daylight between Jack Kennedy’s economic thinking and Barack Obama’s. On the GOP side, Ike was a Republican throwback who pursued a policy agenda that he himself described as “progressive” while keeping an eye on the nickels and dimes, and he presided over a federal government that, in 1957, saw slightly lower taxes than we have today, three times the military spending, and a modest budget surplus. (Modern conservatives could live with a progressive like that, I think.) Nixon was a Wilsonian statist who imposed price controls on the economy. Reagan was a libertarian optimist who put growth over balanced budgets. Trump is an economic illiterate with no substantive policy agenda at all. But he will crow about that 3.3 percent GDP growth last quarter, and will insist that it is the result of his policies. Which of those policies, I wonder? He may get his tax cut, but, for the moment, Trump has done almost nothing of substance on the economy, and what his administration has done — a bit of excellent regulatory reform — is unlikely to affect growth dramatically in the short term. Regulatory reform is a good investment, but one with a long timeline for payoff. When you hear someone crediting a president with an economic boom or strong wage growth, ask them in some detail about the actual mechanism they believe to be at work, some plausible chain of causality. You’ll rarely get a satisfying answer. Regulatory reform is a good investment, but one with a long timeline for payoff. Presidents are one small piece of the public-policy picture — and public policy as a whole is only a small part of what shapes and moves a complex modern economy. We tend toward a destructively immature and ahistorical view: The regulatory reforms that made the Internet boom of the Clinton years began decades before; the confluence of terrible policies that created the subprime meltdown and financial crisis of 2008–09 began in the 1930s, with housing and banking reforms and regulatory development occurring under presidents and Congresses of both parties in ways that would frustrate any intellectually rigorous attempt at laying blame on a partisan basis. The Asian currency crisis of the Clinton years, Communist aggression and Mideast conflict in Eisenhower’s time, the terrorist attacks during George W. Bush’s first year in office: None of these was the result of some decision taken in the White House. George W. Bush wanted to be a school reformer and economic booster, not a president overseeing a long and thankless campaign against distant desert savages. But history doesn’t wait for anybody to vote on it. That affects everything, including the economy. The belief that GDP growth or this month’s jobs report provides a meaningful judgment on the performance of the president isn’t economics — it’s superstition. It is the modern version of the ancient belief that a crop failure means that the king has displeased the rain god or the wheat goddess. It is a primitive disposition from which we should liberate ourselves — and could, if we were willing to do the hard work of citizenship rather than take our ease in lazy partisanship.

Don't let yourself be muzzled, Mr. Fauci says so himself: http://nomasks.org

Robert Boucher, Jr. would have made an excellent soccer player, don't you think?

So you feel as if your religious preference was why you didn't get the position you interviewed for? After all the descriptions of the county in that article describe it as a virtual heaven on earth, a complete opposite of the hedonist environs of Las Vegas.

Why don't you move to Lincoln County NV if you love watered down tackle football so much?

Meh, 8-man football. Not the real game of American tackle football.

Well played CVS, well played.

I'm sure the governors of all fifty states had zero to do with those numbers. TDS.

If a simple observation equals an "answer" then yes. But most intelligent people would not equate the two, unlike you.

IU student files lawsuit, seeks reimbursement after class moved online due to coronavirus https://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2020/05/08/iu-student-files-lawsuit-seeks-reimbursement-after-classes-moved-online-coronavirus/3094828001/ An interesting case.

Since I'm not a member of the Libertarian Party I can't answer for them.

Why yes, only the GOP side of the uni-party has ever staged an action for PR purposes.

Andrew Cuomo's Morally Grotesque Rationale for Maintaining COVID-19 Lockdowns https://reason.com/2020/05/07/andrew-cuomos-morally-grotesque-rationale-for-maintaining-covid-19-lockdowns/ It's becoming increasingly clear these politicians insistence on maintaining lock downs is more about controlling the populace and the power it gives those officials.

https://mises.org/wire/governments-are-real-price-gougers Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Let’s consider the circumstances of Pusateri's price gouging, but let’s also consider the circumstances related to the price charged by the government for its so-called universal healthcare system. This seems appropriate in light of Ford’s concern about providing adequate healthcare resources during the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to Pusateri’s price gouging. Pusateri's charged $30 for Lysol disinfecting wipes, which is roughly ten times the prepanic price. In contrast, as I have written before, the cost of socialized healthcare in Canada in 2018—approximately $4,389 per capita—was twenty-three times the cost of private healthcare in the early twentieth century, measured by how long a person must work to pay for healthcare. And that’s a conservative estimate. At this point, someone might say “Ah, but the high price of health care is not caused by the government's monopoly. Rather, it reflects the rising cost of modern medical technology.” This argument is unconvincing. There are many complex products—e.g., computers—for which competition and technological innovation produce lower prices. The government's price gouging is more than twice as bad as Pusateri's price gouging. Unfortunately, government price gouging—through taxation—is hidden from view because healthcare is free to consumers at the point of service, whereas consumers must pay Pusateri's directly for their disinfecting wipes. Because the phrase “price gouging” has ominous implications, it should only be used to describe a situation where people are forced to pay a specified price, such as when the government forcibly taxes people for healthcare. This is not the case with Pusateri's, which cannot legally force people to buy disinfecting wipes. If no one buys disinfecting wipes from Pusateri's, they will eventually lower their price. On the other hand, if people voluntarily purchase the wipes, Pusateri's higher profits will prompt other retailers and manufacturers to increase the supply of wipes to meet the increased demand, which also leads to lower prices. This is the effect of competition in an unhampered market. It is equally important to remember that if you pay Pusateri's $30 you know for certain that you are getting what you pay for—the disinfecting wipes. Not so with the government's socialized healthcare, as revealed by the Fraser Institute's 2014 study: Justices of the Supreme Court of Canada have noted that patients in Canada die as a result of waiting lists for universally accessible health care. Our analysis estimates that between 25,456 and 63,090 (with a middle value of 44,273) Canadian women may have died as a result of increased wait times between 1993 and 2009. As we can see, Canadians have universal access to waiting lists, but not to actual healthcare. Thus, socialized healthcare is best described as a government scheme which forces you to purchase a product which you may not want or need at a price which the government dictates, raises, and confiscates annually. Then, the government often refuses to deliver the product, without refunding your purchase price, while forbidding you from purchasing a replacement product from competitors elsewhere within its jurisdiction. Therefore, Ford’s holier-than-thou complaint should not be directed toward Pusateri's,1 but toward the government itself: "It is absolutely disgusting that the government forbids competition and lines the pockets of highly paid bureaucrats by forcibly price gouging the public on healthcare that is often denied to them when they desperately need it." Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of economics can see that Ford's diatribe reveals a political double standard. Understanding the economics of so-called price gouging in the private sector requires us to turn a deaf ear to politicians. Instead of complaining about price gouging and empty store shelves, we should learn how market participants filled those shelves in the first place—before the onset of panic buying. This will enable us to consider so-called price gouging—and the government’s response to it—with the proper context. I promise you that young teenagers can easily understand these basic economic principles, which is probably why the subject matter is not properly taught in government schools. After all, we can't have all those graduates questioning government policies. It is therefore ironic that the government's school closures present a golden opportunity for parents to educate their own children, including in basic economic principles, which is not a difficult task, even for the younger ones. Yep, virtually anything government gets it's finger into becomes higher in price and lower in quality.

U.S. Field Hospitals Stand Down, Most Without Treating Any COVID-19 Patients https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals-stand-down-most-without-treating-any-covid-19-patients

No, I'm not.

Keeping the purple paint factory in business I see.

Post-Lockdown: Insist on the Old Normal https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/post-lockdown-insist-on-the-old-normal/

“Community standards” now means no way are you to be allowed to decide for yourself. : https://spectator.org/the-youtube-memory-hole/

Has he collected your vote yet?

Still doesn't make the question any less valid: The U.S. Congress declared war on Vietnam?

It happened in Frankfort about 10 years ago.