For the second straight day, I'm going to write about numbers and their relation to the current reality on the ground. Yesterday, it was the case numbers for COVID-19, and today we've got new unemployment numbers to examine.

The Department of Labor just announced a rather staggering number -- almost 3.3 million new unemployment insurance claims nationwide in the past week alone. That sets a grim new record for this one-week statistic, far outpacing any previous spike (it's never even gone above one million before, ever). But this record is almost certain to be a huge undercount, which means that next week could be much worse. And by the time they get around to releasing the adjusted numbers (which usually takes a few months) which show the actual reality of the situation, we'll all have moved on.

Continue Reading »

Tracking the spread of the coronavirus is tough to do on a real-time basis because of several inherent instabilities in the data, and also because of the built-in lag time. We'd all do well to remember this in the next few weeks, when considering when lifting all the social distancing restrictions. President Trump is already leading the charge to get the country back to normal, so this pressure is obviously only going to grow.

As of this writing, there are over 60,000 Americans who have tested positive for COVID-19. This is not the full picture, because of the massive delays that have happened in getting the test kits out to the states where they are needed. Everyone with the coronavirus has not been tested for it, to put it another way, even if they have asked to be tested. Tests are being rationed in several states, meaning there are sick people out there who do not show up in the official statistics. Testing regimes vary from state to state, as well -- some states are aggressively testing, others not so much. This also skews the numbers. This is part of the fallout from the federal government's lackadaisical response to the crisis, but this situation could improve over time. As more and more tests are sent out, hopefully they can be used more universally, rather than being rationed for those hospitalized and most at risk. But if the test shortage is eliminated over the next week or so, it will probably mean the numbers will continue to spike upwards, as more and more sick people actually get tested. This may not be a spike in the spread of the disease more than just the data collection efforts getting good enough to accurately track the spread, though.

Continue Reading »

President Donald Trump is well known for flat-out lying to the American public. Indeed, he does it so often it has become a defining trait. But what hasn't gotten a lot of attention in the whole White House coronavirus crisis response fiasco is how much Mike Pence is also lying to us all, on the specific issue of the availability of coronavirus tests. We haven't even gotten close to the point where Pence promised us all we'd be at eleven days ago, in fact -- which shows the true magnitude of his lies. In fact, we're only a little over five percent of the way there (from numbers provided by Mike Pence himself, mind you).

Continue Reading »

I am not a macroeconomist. In fact, I am not an economist of any type whatsoever. I begin with these admissions because what I'm about to write is probably wrong in some major way, and/or impossible to accomplish, and/or would have some sort of counterproductive effect that I just haven't thought about. In other words, any real economist could probably shoot this idea full of holes without even breaking a sweat. But I feel I have to at least toss it out there for the purposes of discussion.

The COVID-19 crisis is deepening by the day. America is fast approaching (if we haven't already gotten there today) the point where 10,000 new cases will be announced on a daily basis. And those numbers are now going to be suspect, from this point on, because officials are now saying they won't even test people they are all but certain have the coronavirus unless they are hospitalized with a major case -- which means thousands and thousands of sick people won't even get tested, and therefore will never show up on the official statistics. The problem is not only bad and getting worse, it is now so out of control that we're essentially abandoning hope that we'll even have accurate statistics to track its exponential growth.

Continue Reading »

The big political news this week was that former Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter was sentenced to 11 months in federal prison for using money from his campaign to pay for all sorts of personal items. Oh, and also that one of the few remaining anti-abortion Democrats, Dan Lipinski of Illinois, was successfully primaried by a progressive candidate this week. Lipinski was also previously against both Obamacare and gay marriage, so this will be a real ideological changing of the guard.

We're kidding, of course. Neither of these stories -- which, in normal times would have been covered extensively by the media -- even caused a blip on the radar this week. Because the nation is gripped in the midst of a viral pandemic and we've got the Keystone Kops running the response. Which, admittedly, is a much bigger story to focus on.

A quick review of where we stand is in order. Less than a month ago, on February 24, President Trump tweeted: "The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.... Stock market starting to look very good to me." Two days later, during a press conference, Trump exuded optimism once again: "And again, when you have 15 people [in the country infected with COVID-19], and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done." Got that? "Within a couple of days" the number of infected people would get "down close to zero." OK, less than a month later, let's check the numbers, shall we?

As of this writing, that number is -- surprise! -- nowhere near zero. In fact, it currently stands at 19,382. By the time you read this, it will be higher -- much higher (when we began writing this article, it stood at 18,755). And it's probably far from accurate, since not everyone who is sick and should be tested is currently being tested. The administration cannot now even predict the date when enough testing will be available to achieve this rather fundamental goal. Until then, those numbers should be seen as a mere fraction of the reality. And that number just climbed by 5,000 people in a single day, as more and more testing is being performed.

Continue Reading »

It's time for Bernie to make an exit from the Democratic presidential nomination race. I don't say this lightly, as I'm actually a Bernie supporter myself. I voted for him this year and back in 2016 as well. I feel free to now say this because I never admit to my own preferences while I think the race is still up in the air -- my own way of attempting to limit my bias in my writing. But I do feel free to say it now, because the race is now essentially over.

Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee this time around. At this point, barring any completely unexpected and drastic changes in circumstance, it is realistically impossible for Bernie Sanders to catch him in the delegate race. This was not true until the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, but it is true now. Which is why Bernie needs to concede this reality.

Continue Reading »

The coronavirus outbreak is going to change the fabric of American life in many ways. "Social distancing" is just one of them; one which might last a lot longer than anyone now fully realizes. The coronavirus could be successfully fought this spring, and could be brought under some semblance of control by summer -- but then still come raging back next fall, even worse than before. That's precisely what happened with the Spanish Flu, one hundred years ago. Everyone thought it was over, but in fact the worst was yet to come. This is a very real danger, even though most people haven't even begun to focus on it yet.

Congress is currently taking drastic action to counteract the effects of the pandemic, and the Senate just passed the second coronavirus measure so far. President Trump is expected to quickly sign it, which will make sick pay available for millions of American workers who don't currently have it. This will help, but as the Trump administration fully admits, this is only "the second inning" of the legislative response efforts. The next coronavirus bailout bill is being drafted right now by Senate Republicans, who seem somewhat miffed that they were entirely left out of the process for the second bill (which was hammered out between Nancy Pelosi and Steve Mnuchin, while McConnell sat on his hands). But no matter if Mitch McConnell has finally woken up and spurred his Republicans to do something (for once), Democrats still hold a lot of power over the shaping of the next must-pass coronavirus bill. And they should use this power to insert a measure which might just turn out to be critical for the continuation of American democracy: mandatory universal voting by mail, in every state in the Union.

Continue Reading »

Conventional wisdom, when it comes to politics, is usually proven wrong. If you don't believe me, go look at anything anyone was saying about the Democratic primaries about a month or two ago. The primary season was going to be endless. It was going to go right down to the wire. A brokered convention was a real possibility, or perhaps even inevitable. There were so many candidates in the field that the vote would be impossibly split. The candidates were all so well-funded that they'd stay in the race for a very long time. Bernie was too strong and would sweep everything. Amy was surging. Pete was surging. The nomination would surely come down to the last primaries in June.

Well, here we are on St. Patrick's Day (which reminds me: Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig! everyone...) and the race may be over tonight. Joe Biden, once given up for dead, has all but secured the nomination, and the only real question remaining is when Bernie Sanders is going to drop out -- tonight, or perhaps later on? That's a stunning turnabout in political conventional wisdom in a very short period of time.

Continue Reading »

The administration of President Donald Trump is showing us all, in real time, how not to tackle a widespread medical crisis. Because things are moving so quickly, though, it's tough to tell how much of their woefully inadequate response has been the fault of Donald Trump himself, Trump's scorn for experts of any type who know more things than he does (a category which includes many people, for obvious reasons), or Trump's advisors and aides who have been put in charge of a massive problem but whose main worry seems to be not ever contradicting Trump in public (no matter how wrong Trump gets things). It all adds up to making a bad situation much worse, which is precisely where we find ourselves now. Decisions are made for political reasons, or -- worse -- to avoid making Trump himself look bad in any way. This has shattered the confidence of the stock market, as evidenced by today's record-busting 3,000-point drop. The more time goes by, the more Trump's inadequacies are becoming impossible to ignore, even by his staunchest supporters. Donald Trump, quite obviously, does not have a clue what to do next, is instead out there blatantly lying about the situation on a daily basis, and we're all going to suffer as a direct result. No wonder the market's tanking.

Last Friday, the market seemed to recover somewhat, as Trump finally (finally!) managed to sound presidential for 10 or 15 minutes in a press conference. Of course, the market closed before he actually took questions, but his scripted remarks were precisely what they should have been -- calming and showing some confidence, backed up by private-sector business leaders who were eager to help. The only problem was, the two big things that Trump promised would happen very soon were soon proved to be nothing more than two gigantic lies, once again. Trump distinctly said the new website for people who were experiencing symptoms would be up and running by "Sunday night." He also implied that drive-through testing would be widely available within days. Neither is remotely true. The company working on the website hastily issued a statement saying the website would definitely not be ready when Trump said it would, would initially only work for people in the San Francisco Bay Area, and no timeline was even given as to when it would be ramped up nationwide. One drive-through testing center opened in New Rochelle, New York, but few others have been set up, three days later.

Continue Reading »

In a surreal bit of coincidence this week, America saw a simultaneous broadcast of President Trump stumbling and lying his way through a primetime Oval Office address, while on another channel former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin danced around in a frilly pink bear costume while rapping "Baby Got Back," which contains the memorable line: "I like big butts and I cannot lie...." Signs of the impending apocalypse? You be the judge. What flashed through our mind was the old quote from Hunter S. Thompson: "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." Or, as we might put it (with a fake Sarah Palin accent): "How's that 'stable genius' stuff workin' out for ya now?"

Yes, that's the type of week it was. The stock market went completely crazy, with wild swings up and down that mostly added up to it sinking like a rock. Before this week, trading had only ever been halted by the "circuit breaker" now built in to it (which is only triggered if the market loses seven percent or more in a single day) once previously, back in the 1990s. This week, it happened again -- twice. The market dropped by more points in one day than it ever had before, and then a few days later it blew through that record and dropped over 2,300 points. That was immediately after Trump addressed the nation (and Palin gyrated on stage).

So, America, the question now is: can we take much more of this Trumpian "winning"? Donald Trump keeps flailing about in an effort to make the coronavirus go away, but the problem is that you can't just insult it on Twitter or make up lies about it and everyone's going to forget about it. That's not going to work, as we've already seen.

Continue Reading »