Coyote Blog

Warning:  I am not a trained expert on infectious diseases, just a well-informed person with scientific training and a bias towards skepticism.   If you are a scientific Catholic (meaning your science can only come from officially-designated authorities) rather than a scientific Protestant (which allows you to take responsibility for your own understanding of the universe) then you might as well skip to the next article.

Hypothesis 1:  It is impossible for a large population in a modern society to hide from the disease.  It might be possible to delay or slow the onset of the disease in the larger group, but until some sort of herd immunity exists, reservoirs of the disease will still remain and spark new infections.   For God sakes we still have whooping cough outbreaks in this country.  Look at COVID disease curve shapes for states and counties -- Some locked down early, some late, some hard, some not at all.  Some required masks and some didn't.  But all the curves look the same shape.

Corollary 1:  All lockdowns do is delay the onset of the disease, not avoid it, and thus add severe economic dislocation, increased poverty, domestic violence, alcoholism, suicide and any number of other negative lockdown effects to the inevitable toll of the disease.  If we are doing anything at all to affect the course of the disease, we are stretching out the misery.

Hypothesis 2:  Individuals can, with some decent probability of success, hide from the disease.  There are those who see a conflict between hypotheses 1 and 2, so let me address that.  There is a very old joke about two men who are camping and are awakened by a very large, angry, hungry bear.  One man starts putting on his tennis shoes.  The other says to him, "you can't outrun that bear" and the first man responds, "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you."  In this story, no matter how much running or hiding is done, its likely unavoidable that 50% of the men will get chomped, but individual action can influence who that 50% is.

Corollary 2:  While we cannot do much about ultimate COVID case counts, because the disease is so selective in who it tends to kill we CAN do a lot to limit the death toll.  We should be protecting seniors and other vulnerable people.  Everyone nods their heads to this.  But logically we should also be encouraging everyone else to get the disease and get us to herd immunity.  I don't want to overstretch the bear analogy, but imagine now that one of the two men were wearing a Kevlar suit.  That person needs to face the bear while the other runs -- the experience may not be pleasant for him, but he will probably survive and thus the total bear death toll will be reduced 100%.

A while back when I was active on Twitter, I wrote that instead of closing colleges, we should have opened them for 8 weeks this summer with no teachers and administrators -- Just leave them alone with a few truckloads of alcohol and condoms.  Soon an entire generation would be immune.  The death rate from COVID in healthy 20-year-olds is microscopic (it appears to be lower than the flu, which killed my 25-year-old nephew btw).  Instead we sent them all home from infection hotspots of NY and Boston to potentially infect grandma.

The best way to test a series of hypotheses that are crafted from historic data is to see if they continue to make sense going forward.  So I bring you this recent story on COVID and Hawaii:

After initially defying fears that its proximity to Japan and popularity with tourists might lead to a massive outbreak, Hawaii is finally facing its very own COVID-19 reckoning.

The state is now struggling with a genuine surge in the month of August after remaining at or near the bottom of the US league tables for the first four months of the pandemic.

For a small state with just 1.4 million residents, Hawaii has a total of 7,260 confirmed cases, 5,549 of which were confirmed within the last month, according to Johns Hopkins data. The state has gone from last or near last to No. 19 in terms of new cases reported daily over the past few weeks.

From mid-March to mid-June, the state saw an average of just 7.9 new cases reported per day. Last week, that average number climbed to 219.

This is terrible news for a state that, at the end of July, had the highest unemployment rate in the US (more than 13%) due to its reliance on tourism.

For me, given my hypotheses about virus responses, this is the least surprising story ever.  But apparently the "experts" are scratching their heads

One infectious disease specialist says the surge is surprising given Hawaii's geography, and the plunge in tourism-related traffic.

"As a public health professional, I expect this to look like New Zealand," he said, referring to the Pacific island nation that isolated itself and had few Covid-19 cases.

Postscript:  I am not a fan of "check your privilege" retorts, but if one accepts that framework for a moment, one might notice just how privileged the exhortation to "Lock down, work from home, and stay in touch with friends over Zoom" really is.  Listen to the folks rooting for lockdowns and you will find that the vast majority

• have professional jobs that can be done from home
• continue to get paid even when they don't work at all (e.g. teachers and politicians)
• have a lot of savings

A large number also tend to ignore the rules they foist on everyone else.

Update:  Relevent to my sort of tongue in cheek college suggestion above

COVID on Campus - Nearly 26,000 Students on 29 Campuses Identified with COVID - But ZERO Hospitalized, ZERO Deaths https://t.co/jJ9wIPl7vk via @gatewaypundit @joehoft

— Jim Hoft (@gatewaypundit) September 8, 2020

• Arizona ICU beds in use for COVID patients fell to 16%, the lowest number of beds in use for COVID since April 10.
• COVID patients, even at the nationally ballyhooed Arizona peak, never reached 60% of ICU beds.   Total ICU capacity utilization never exceeded 91%  (note that these likely overstate the numbers, as a shooting victim who tests positive for COVID can be listed as a COVID patient).

Source

There is something weird about the COVID test and/or test process we are using in AZ.  We are still testing a lot of people every day and the test positive rate for the state is still high, like 5-8% each day.  But the number of new cases is falling rapidly to levels we last saw in May, and the number of hospitalizations have fallen into early April levels.  So what gives?

One anecdotal data point is an employee of ours who tested positive without symptoms (he has other medical issues that brought him into the hospital).  Weeks and weeks later he continues to test positive on followup tests and continues to be entirely asymptomatic.   My hypothesis is that we are retesting the hell out of people and using a test that is overly sensitive and does not really indicate disease activity.

One other note on this same fellow -- he and we are in somewhat of a bind on his employment.  We are working under contract to a division of the Federal government and they require that employees test negative before they return to work.  Many corporations have the same internal policy.  So what do folks in this situation do?  They are likely perfectly safe to everyone but can't get a negative test.  Do they ever get to work again?

Now that the COVID wave in Arizona is receding, the ADHS Data Dashboard finally has come up with a better way to show COVID-related hospital bed use.  Had this been in use at the peak, I think the general panic about overwhelmed hospitals might have been reduced.  I would consider this serious but not disastrous, with some squeezing out of less urgent or delay-able procedures but still with substantial non-COVID capacity remaining.

Postscript:  I have an acquaintance, a man in his late 70's, who passed away this week.  He had a long history of heart issues and had something go wrong again.  The ICU in his area of California was apparently full -- could have been COVID, could have been the fires in the area, but he had to be flown to another.  He passed away at the new location, and I don't know if the ICU shuffle was the cause or a contributor but it certainly did not help.  So I am not arguing ICU loads are not important -- this is why we all were mostly OK with "flatten the curve" (but not necessarily with "hide for months or years until the disease completely goes away").  But the situation has been grossly exaggerated to scare people and that makes me angry.

In many other posts, I have credited BLM for bringing attention to police accountability issues but have criticized them for not doing the hard local work to start fixing things ("defund the police" and looting Apple stores both being, to my mind, equally ineffectual approaches).

My son made me familiar with Campaign Zero, which does seem to be doing the hard local work to change laws and union contracts.  They have state by state and city by city progress lists at passing key pieces of their reform agenda, model legislation, etc.  I also like the fact that while they acknowledge racism as part of the problem, they frame the issue more broadly as a general issue of police violence and accountability.  I don't agree with 100% of their program but as a libertarian I long ago got comfortable making common cause at less than 100% levels of agreement.

Their solutions page is really very impressive, and head and shoulders above most of the popular discourse I see on this topic.  here for example are subpoints under "End For Profit Policing", just one of their 10 action planks.  I love the links to actual model legislation where it exists.  This is how change will happen on this issue.

Police should be working to keep people safe, not contributing to a system that profits from stopping, searching, ticketing, arresting and incarcerating people.

POLICY SOLUTIONS

End police department quotas for tickets and arrests

Ban police departments from using ticket or arrest quotas to evaluate the performance of police officers

(Ex: Illinois law)

Limit fines and fees for low-income people

Pass policies requiring local governments to:

• ban issuing fines or arrest warrants for civilians who fail to appear in court for a traffic citation (Ex: Ferguson Policy)
• ban generating more than 10% of total municipal revenue from fines and fees (Ex: Missouri law)
• allow judges discretion to waive fines and fees for low-income people or initiate payment plans (Ex: Pennsylvania law)
• prohibit courts from ordering individuals on parole or probation to pay supervision fees and other correctional fees

Prevent police from taking the money or property of innocent people

Prohibit police from:

• seizing property of civilians (i.e. civil forfeiture) unless they are convicted of a crime and the state establishes by clear and convincing evidence that the property is subject to forfeiture
• keeping any property that has legally been forfeited (instead, this property should go to a general fund)
• participating in the federal Equitable Sharing program that allows police to engage in civil asset forfeiture

(Ex: New Mexico law)

Require police departments to bear the cost of misconduct

• Require the cost of misconduct settlements to be paid out of the police department budget instead of the City's general fund
• Restrict police departments from receiving more money from the general fund when they go over-budget on lawsuit payments

As I observe it currently, the three strategies currently being taken by Progressives to increase police accountability are

1. Demonizing all police officers, good and bad
2. Making large cuts to police budgets and/or salaries
3. Looting Apple stores

I have lamented before that none of these approaches are likely to succeed at reforming police accountability or more broadly at helping black Americans.  Remember that while black Americans disproportionately come in contact with police and the justice system, they also are disproportionately victims of crime.  All the current approaches listed above are unlikely to improve the police and justice system but may make crime worse.

One of the seldom discussed differences between Progressives and libertarians in this country is their skill set for change.  Progressives are very good at creating a "moment" where everyone in the country is forced to look at an issue and potentially agree that change is needed.  Progressives can grab both the streets and the headlines.  But they often suck at the hard work making real change happen in a Democratic system.  They don't seem to have an interest in the drawn out 3-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust offense needed to make reforms city by city.  Libertarians are just the opposite.  We suck at building mass desire for change -- we write 5000 word think pieces with lots of graphs but you don't see us in the streets.  But we can be good at actually getting change to happen -- I think of ALEC (which is really more Conservative than libertarian, but work with me here) and how it works.  Let's say we decide it would be a good thing to have legal authority and process to build private toll roads.  ALEC goes out there city by city and starts working the local government process.  It finds a location, no matter how small, where it makes progress and gets laws changed.  It then bundles this work into case studies and model legislation and takes it to other communities.

This is exactly the hard ground work that is needed to take the goodwill BLM has built up with the public and convert it to real change.  And, correct me if I am wrong, I have seen exactly zero interest out of anyone in BLM to do this -- it's all street protest and, among the richer folks, high-profile virtue signaling.

Walter Olson had a link on Twitter to an article my Mailee Smith that really gives one an idea how hard the local work is going to be:

Reformers are calling for broad changes. Many of the contemplated reforms—such as making it easier to fire problem officers—are meant both to protect citizens from police brutality and to protect the vast majority of police officers who serve honorably from having their reputations tarnished by the conduct of a few.

These efforts could prove meaningless, though, in states like Illinois that give public-employee union contracts greater power than state law. Buried deep in the Illinois Public Labor Relations Act, which gives collective bargaining power to police unions, is Section 15, entitled “Act Takes Precedence.” Section 15 explicitly provides that when a government-union contract conflicts with any other law or regulation, the contract prevails.

It would be unthinkable, in any other context, to permit an agreement negotiated by unelected third parties to trump state law—but that’s exactly what Section 15 demands. Illinois could enact the best police reforms in the nation, but those reforms won’t matter if they run contrary to a police-union contract.

Good God, this is awful.

Postscript:  There are a couple of added barriers, I think, beyond just skills and interest that keep Progressives from digging down into these issues

1. Public employees unions have always been a keep political bulwark of the Left, and I think folks on the Left struggle to challenge a public employee union
2. A cynical interpretation is that hard-core Progressives want to chuck democracy altogether, and thus see no reason to do the hard work of making change happen in a democratic system

Update:  One idea that has been raised by Progressive of late is unbundling the police force, taking social work or civil enforcement tasks from them into other groups.  These seem like approaches worth considering -- I always have wondered why traffic or parking enforcement have to be police functions.  However, this would not have addressed recent high-profile shootings that are driving a lot of the anger

@kevindrum writes this yesterday at his blog:

How long will taxpayers put up with threats to stop doing their job every time police forces are asked to make even the smallest change or sacrifice? It’s childish stuff and before long it’s likely to create a backlash that does the police no good.

Long time readers know at this point I am fed up with everyone in the debate on police.  I have been frustrated for years, long before the advent of BLM, at the structural and cultural barriers to holding police accountable for violence against citizens.  But I am equally frustrated at BLM and the Left for frittering away the moment, focusing on violence and looting Apple stores rather than the hard, city by city work of real reform.

Drum is right that the police and their unions tend to oppose even the smallest reforms.  But I do think he is unfair in that he is leaving out the background that the Left is demonizing their entire profession and threatening to cut budgets and salaries -- a lot of folks would get snippy if the world were suddenly demonizing their profession.

But it is an interesting exercise to take the two sentences I quote from Drum and substitute "teachers", another group of government employees currently refusing to fully do their jobs, for "police".

Postscript:  It is interesting to note in this comparison that no one has suggested that police stay home and get paid because of COVID threats, even though their risk is certainly far greater than that of teachers.  I can't believe it, but after years of being a critic of abuses of police and prosecutorial power, the Left is this close to having me leap to the defense of police.  Incredible.

Years ago I was arguing with my mother-in-law about Executive power and the Presidency.  She, like many Obama supporters, was arguing that gridlock in Congress over legislation she considered critical was sufficient justification for President Obama to wield new executive powers and go around Congress.  I told her this was a terrible precedent, and asked if she would be just as happy to have President Lindsey Graham wielding such power (this being the prime Republican bogeyman for her, neither of us even imagining Trump).

So now, Obama (and Bush) precedents firm in hand, Trump is reacting to deadlock in Congress over further stimulus by picking up his pen and firing off some executive orders.  I want to discuss one of these, which is to allow at least temporary non-collection of the employee share of social security and Medicare taxes (a bit over 7.6% of wages).

Leave aside as to whether this is really appropriate stimulus for the current economic problems.  A tax break to people who still have jobs might help in certain recession scenarios, but the current situation of having large numbers of people unemployed because their workplaces have been forcibly closed by the action of various governors probably will not be helped a lot if the employed have more money in their pockets -- the problem is that local government officials are not allowing them to spend it. (I will note that no one ever suggests reducing the employer share of these taxes, which might actually increase employment by reducing total employment costs in a way that changing the employee share does not).

The problem I want to discuss is the terrible situation this potentially creates for businesses like mine.  All Trump can do is defer collection of the tax -- he cannot actually set it to zero or forgive it, which must be done by Congress.  This means that if our business does not withhold these taxes from employees, they accrue and build up as a debt still owed to the government by the employee.  Six months from now, when a new administration takes over and ends the deferral, our employees (who are paid twice a month) might get a deduction in their next paycheck not for 7.6% of wages but 91.2% of a paycheck (12 missed paychecks times 7.6%).

But here is why our company is really screwed:  We have 400 employees today, but since we are a summer seasonal business we will have fewer than 100 in January.  If there is a catch-up repayment in January (meaning Congress chooses not to forgive the taxes altogether), most of my employees who would need to repay the tax will be gone.  Do you think the government is just going to say, "oh well, I guess we lost that money"?  Hah!  You don't know how the government works with tax liens.  My guess is that for every employee no longer on the payroll for whom back employment taxes need to be collected, the government is going to say our company is responsible for those payments instead.  We could be out hundreds of thousands of extra dollars.  President Biden will just say, "well I guess you should not have participated in a Trump program."

So this is the vise we are in:  Either we participate in the program, and risk paying a fortune in extra taxes at some future date, or we don't participate, and have every employee screaming at us for deducting payroll taxes when President Trump told them they did not have to pay it anymore.  And what happens if Congress does come along later and forgive the taxes, what kind of jerk am I for not allowing my employees to benefit from the tax break?

Essentially I am forced to guess what legislation might be in the future.  Sort of the opposite of ex post facto law.  Pre facto law?

Update:  LOL, I r stupid, had "vice" instead of "vise"

I thought this was a really interesting idea.  The COVID lockdowns and colleges going to remote classes has revealed a pretty strong preference among folks paying for the college experience -- they want the classes (or at least the piece of paper that comes from attending the classes) and they want the social experience.  With classes going online, many college students are deferring college for the year, hoping to get both parts of the package next year.  But what if someone unbundled the experience, providing the group social experience in location A while all their customers were taking classes remotely at colleges B, C, E, etc.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to temporarily — or perhaps permanently — alter the college experience, two Princeton graduates have come up with a new idea: instead of students taking online courses from their bedrooms and couches, they'll take them from a luxe "bubble" hotel full of other students in the same boat.

It's called The U Experience; come fall, it may be hosting 150 students at hotels in Arkansas and Hawaii — and it's currently accepting applications.

The idea began, according to 24-year-old cofounder Lane Russell, when Harvard said it would shift to remote learning for the fall, but would continue to charge full tuition.

"It really made us think about, 'What is the thing that college is offering, and what are students getting out of it?" Russell said. "And we think that, even if a college is announcing something that indicates that the experience is actually worth $0, a lot of students probably do value it much higher than that."

And in the social and extracurricular void that colleges shifting to remote learning leave behind, "disruption and unbundling is called for," according to 27-year-old cofounder Adam Bragg.  That "unbundling" will take the form of two bubble "campuses": one in Waikiki, Hawaii, and the other in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Both are in hotels that Bragg and Russell said they have bought out.

"Something like this could have never been done before — mainly because the separation of a college experience from colleges was never possible. They held the college experience for ransom, and now that they've shifted to online learning, there is an opportunity to do something like this," Bragg said. He added that, pre-pandemic, a complete buyout "wasn't necessarily an interesting thing for a lot of the hotels, or at least they didn't know they had the interest for this thing. And so on both sides, the levels of coordination are a lot higher than was ever possible before."

Postscript:  yes, I know that with poor execution this becomes the Fyre Festival, but I am always a sucker for unbundling models

Here is John Hinderaker at Powerline:

In 2017, Professor Knijnenburg wrote that “all Trump supporters, nay, all Republicans, are racist scum.”...

Why should the people of South Carolina fund this bigot? Why should they allow him to teach their children? They should fire him. Yeah, sure, tenure. But tenure should not protect a professor who is guilty of this kind of overt bigotry.

I am racking my brain to figure out how Hinderaker's plea for a public institution to fire a tenured professor is any different from the run-of-the-mill Leftist cancel culture that the Powerline bloggers often lament?  Narrowly defining an Overton window based on one's own beliefs and then demanding that anyone whose speech falls outside that window should be muzzled and denied a living sure sounds like cancel culture to me.   And there is not even a hedge here like, "well it's a private institution so the 1A does not apply" -- this is a public institution.

I have only seen selected bits of Professor Knijnenburg's academic work that have been cherry-picked by critics such as Hinderaker, but I am willing to believe that this professor does not represent the values I would want to see upheld in an institution of higher learning.  But the solution is to ignore Professor Knijnenburg as the trivial scholar he likely is and go after the folks that run these institutions and demand that they justify their standards for putting together the faculty and awarding tenure.  The problem here is not speech, but the absurdly low standards that obtain in much of academia, even at Ivy League Universities.

I got this in my email today from the state of New Mexico:

Dear Employer,

As of Wednesday, August 5, 2020, the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) filed an emergency rule that requires employers to report positive COVID-19 cases to NMED within four hours of being notified of the case. The employer must notify NMED by email at:

Email: NMENV-OSHA@state.nm.us

This kind of thing actually makes it harder for us to keep our workplace safe.  We depend on our employees completing a daily health self-assessment each day and the only way we could coax a number of them into being honest on this survey was to promise them that a) we would take care of them financially through any quarantine and b) their self-assessment would remain confidential.  But now it can't remain confidential in NM.  This is going to make it much harder for us to get honest information from our employees on potential infection, as they are all worried about  -- as they put it -- getting into some government system.  Arguing that this fear is irrational (and I am not sure it is entirely in a world where mayors are turning off power and water to homes they don't obey them) is beside the point, as it is a fear they have and will prevent an honest discussion with some.

Inspired perhaps by back episodes of the Sopranos or his experience with payoffs required in New York to get any real estate development project going, Donald Trump is attempting to establish a regulatory regime right out of any kleptocracy

President Trump confirmed Monday he is open to a deal in which Microsoft Corp.  or another U.S. company buys the video-sharing app TikTok, but said the government should receive payment for clearing a purchase.

“I did say that ‘If you buy it…a very substantial portion of that price is going to have to come into the Treasury of the United States, because we’re making it possible for this deal to happen.’ Right now, they don’t have any rights unless we give it to them.”

Mr. Trump, a former real-estate developer, compared his demand for a piece of the purchase price to the “key money” a tenant who wants a lease pays a landlord.

“It’s a great asset,” Mr. Trump said of TikTok. “But it’s not a great asset in the United States unless they have the approval of the United States,” he said, reiterating that the Treasury should get “a lot of money.”

Great.  Already there are too many regulatory hurdles to doing about anything, and Trump wants agencies to use regulatory approvals to hold up corporations for payments.   And you can be sure this is a precedent the Democrats will be only too happy to latch onto -- want a pipeline built, where's our vig?  Who wants to be that this is the first Trump decision AOC comes out in support of?  The Republican Party sure has come a long way in my lifetime.

As I mentioned last week on twitter, I have retreated from that platform for a variety of reasons and will focus again on long-form blogging of the style this site has been pursuing for 16 years.

For the last several months, I have been a lockdown skeptic, at least for the healthy population under 55 or 60 years old.  I will confess my early tendency toward skepticism was driven as much by the behavior of lockdown hawks as any data or knowledge on my part.  Whenever I hear appeals to authority, use of non-transparent computer model results as facts, politicization of scientific positions, and restrictions on dissent in any scientific issue, I immediately get skeptical of the orthodox position.  As I have watched things unfold, I am increasingly convinced that this virus is (like most new viruses in history) going to run its course until large sections of the population have gained immunity.  Lockdowns, while they may have salutary effects in preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed, just seem to be delaying the inevitable -- when we come out of hiding, reservoirs of the disease are still there and infections mount again.  "Flatten the curve" made sense to me, but that seems as far in the past of political rationals as does the Tiger King mania.

But to some extent my opinion on lockdowns does not matter.  The one thing I AM sure of is that, whether lockdowns are effective or not, it is perfectly reasonable to balance the costs of such interventions against their benefits.  But I remember clearly when this commitment to making thoughtful tradeoffs marked one as practically Hitler.  Many of our intelligentsia, particularly on the Left, argued that it was immoral even to consider effects on the economy of COVID interventions.  I always thought this was ironic, because the worst economic effects were sure to hit lower income folks first -- they had jobs you had to, you know, show up for and they had less savings to weather the storm.   Paraphrasing one of my commenters, "Stay at home, work remotely by computer, and keep up with your family on Zoom" has to be one of the most white privilege government orders ever.  But nevertheless there was the Left self-righteously advising exactly this, with pundit after pundit who had portable jobs writing on a computer criticizing any hair dresser who wanted to actually be able to ply their trade as well.

So I was floored when I saw these charts on Kevin Drum's site as part of a criticism of the Republican reluctance to extend rich unemployment benefits:

You know what my reaction to these charts is?  No sh*t, Sherlock.  Many of us warned of EXACTLY this when the lockdowns began.  And folks on the Left treated our warning as not just irrelevant but evil. They would say, "How can you be so callous as to suggest jobs are more important that lives?"

But wait, now the economic impact of the lockdowns IS a problem?  I refuse to defend the Republican morons in Congress or the White House, but I can say that many of them warned of exactly this problem with the lockdowns while the Democrats were full steam ahead on economic shutdown.  I could accept Drum's post as self-criticism of the sort like "Wow, I really underestimated this when I was advocating for lockdowns" but now, he uses this as a platform to blame other people for the problem.

Libertarians have often highlighted how the government tends to create problems by their actions and then gains more power by saying that it needs to fix the problem its own actions created.   I can't imagine we will ever have a better example of this effect -- here is Drum advocating that the government simply must send more money to help people who were willing, even eager, to work but were not allowed to do so by the government.  COVID has been a socialist dream, converting payment for productive work to payment for breathing.

And let's discuss the exact program he is advocating.  He wants an extension of the Federal unemployment supplement of $600 a week which takes most state benefits to $1000 to $1200 a week.    Realize that is $50,000 to $60,000 a year we are paying people to not work (one only qualifies for these benefits if one does not work -- take a job and they are gone).  Look at the former income levels in his chart -- who is going back to work with this kind of government payment?  We are training people that they should be paid this much for not working and encouraging them not to seek actual employment -- this is a terrible message (and one reason a UBI makes far more sense if we are going to transfer this much money).   I think this is contributing somewhat to the position of the teachers' unions.  The public game now is to get paid and not work.

We have 13+% unemployment and our company has to struggle to hire anyone in these conditions.   I posted this on twitter as a comment on a Paul Krugman post, and his followers dutifully lined up to tell me that it was because I did not pay a fair wage.  People are making $25-$30 an hour on unemployment.  I thought $15 was our idea of "fair" -- are we really going to set $30 as our minimum wage?  Will anyone be employed?

Postscript:  I have one other rant related to employment and COVID.   Every blue check mark and Hollywood star bends over backwards on every occasion to thank health care workers during the pandemic.  Good, I agree, health care work is particularly fraught right now.  But you know who else worked through the pandemic?  I will give you a hint:  I bet you never had problems filling your car with gas, that you always had gas and electricity at home, and that (with a few brief exceptions) you always had plenty of food choices.  There are a lot of folks out there who showed a lot of commitment during COVID on whom we rely, and a lot of them are in industries (oil, manufacturing, farming) the elite of the Left tends to look down its nose at as backwards and inferior.

Postscript #2:  I am well aware that Drum has had significant medical issues that make him likely particularly vulnerable to this virus.  I am thrilled that he has a career he can pursue without endangering himself via public contact.  Our family made certain choices we might not have to protect my 85 year old mother in law.  But I am exhausted with people applying their own personal preferences and risk trade-offs to others who may be in very different situations.