Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged relief funds

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

We could stop the pandemic by July 4 if the government took these steps - The Washingto... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-9f5e-56d8239bf9ad_story.html

pandemic government testing strategies

shared by Javier E on 18 May 20 - No Cached
  • We, too, favor markets and share the president’s eagerness to stop economically ruinous shutdowns.
  • the choice between saving lives and saving the economy, the latter of which Trump has endorsed implicitly, is a false one.
  • In fact, framing the issue that way could kill many Americans and kill the economy.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • in a pandemic, encouraging the sick to haul themselves into work can be disastrous. The plan backfired. Hundreds of Smithfield employees were infected, forcing the plant to shut down for more than three weeks. If we stay the current course, we risk repeating the same mistake across the whole economy.
  • The economy consists of people who have hopes and fears. As long as they are afraid of a lethal virus, they will avoid restaurants, travel and workplaces.
  • The only way to restore the economy is to earn the confidence of both vulnerable industries and vulnerable people through testing, contact tracing and isolation.
  • To pull off this balancing act, the country should be divided into red, yellow and green zones. The goal is to be a green zone, where fewer than one resident per 36,000 is infected.
  • Here, large gatherings are allowed, and masks aren’t required for those who don’t interact with the elderly or other vulnerable populations.
  • Two weeks ago, a modest 1,900 tests a day could have kept 19 million Americans safely in green zones. Today, there are no green zones in the United States.
  • A disease prevalence greater than 1 percent defines red zones.
  • even in yellow zones, the economy could safely reopen with aggressive testing and tracing, coupled with safety measures including mandatory masks.
  • Today, 30 million Americans live in such hot spots — which include Detroit, New Jersey, New Orleans and New York City.
  • Most Americans — about 298 million — live in yellow zones, where disease prevalence is between .002 percent and 1 percent
  • In addition to the yellow-zone interventions, these places require stay-at-home orders.
  • by strictly following guidelines for testing and tracing, red zones could turn yellow within four weeks, moving steadfastly from lockdown to liberty.
  • Getting to green nationwide is possible by the end of the summer, but it requires ramping up testing radically. The United States now administers more than 300,000 tests a day, but according to our guidelines, 5 million a day are needed (for two to three months)
  • Researchers estimate that the current system has a latent capacity to produce 2 million tests a day, and a surge in federal funding would spur companies to increase capacity. The key is to do it now, before manageable yellow zones deteriorate to economically ruinous red zones.
  • States can administer these “test, trace and supported isolation” programs — but Congress would need to fund them. The total cost, we estimate, is $74 billion, to be spent over 12 to 18 months
  • That amount is a lot, but not compared to the cost of a crippled economy. In Congress’s latest relief package, $75 billion went to struggling hospitals alone, $380 billion to help small businesses and $25 billion toward testing.
  • Economists talk about “multipliers” — an injection of spending that causes even larger increases in gross domestic product. Spending on testing, tracing and paid isolation would produce an indisputable and massive multiplier effect.
  • Nations that have invested the most in disease control have suffered the least economic hardship: Taiwan grew 1.5 percent in the first quarter, whereas the United States’ gross domestic product contracted by 4.8 percent
  • Looking forward, we will see stark economic contrasts across states, depending on their investment in disease control.
  • When local and state governments become accountable for adopting strategies that work, we can expect more innovation.
  • How do we know that testing, tracing and supported isolation would work? It already has worked in New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan
Javier E

Nancy Folbre: Conservatives and the Zombie Apocalypse - NYTimes.com - 1 views

economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...ives-and-the-zombie-apocalypse

metaphor conservative liberal narrative political US

shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • two competing horror-show narratives that increasingly dominate political discourse in this country
  • The basic right-wing story line evokes zombie apocalypse: The shambling, diseased living dead — Obama Zombies — are threatening human civilization.
  • A forthcoming book by Nicholas Eberstadt is titled “A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic.” Charles Sykes contends that we have become “A Nation of Moochers.”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • the left-wing narrative of vampire threat, which warns of a small group of powerful, almost immortal beings who invest in blood funds, suck out the profits and stash them in Transylvanian tax shelters.
  • Zombies and vampires represent archetypal middle-class fears: the fear of being pulled down by the needy or stomped on by the powerful.
  • who exactly are these zombies (or “takers” or “moochers”)?We know who they are not.
  • They are not those who paid no federal income taxes last year, because many of these can point to a record of hard work.
  • They are not those stuck at the very bottom of the income distribution: When all taxes (rather than merely federal income taxes) are taken into consideration, the share of all taxes paid by different income groups corresponds pretty closely to their share of total income
  • They are not those who get more in government benefits than they pay in taxes in a given year, because many of these families include children, elderly people, or adults who are eager to resume wage-earning as soon as they can find jobs but for now are unemployed.
  • Maybe the zombies are those likely to receive more in government benefits over their lifetime than they have paid in taxes. At the top of this list would be seriously injured military veterans in need of continuing care, along with those receiving costly Medicare-financed interventions in the last two months of their lives.
  • Alternatively, one might point to all those who have received means-tested public assistance. If so, Mr. Romney’s father George, who received public relief at one point, falls under suspicion.
julia rhodes

Why Pakistan Lionizes Its Tormenters : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...n-lionizes-its-tormenters.html

US culture politics policy pakistan martyrs drones

shared by julia rhodes on 14 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • He tried to make a handful of minced meat stick to a skewer, and said, sardonically, “See here, true Sharia has finally arrived in Swat.”
  • 2009, the Pakistani Army launched an offensive to drive the Taliban out of Swat—and forced Fazlullah across the border, into Afghanistan. These days, the valley is relatively peaceful, and Pakistani tourists have returned in droves.
  • Mehsud, who had been “killed” by American drone strikes on at least two previous occasions, was actually killed by another drone strike at the start of November—transforming him overnight, in the eyes of Pakistani politicians and commentators, from a mass murderer into a marty
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • No longer were they just tribal men fighting to preserve their way of life; they started dreaming they could convert everyone to it.
  • Pakistan’s rulers have developed a strange fetish for lionizing its tormenters.
  • Why does Pakistan’s political and military élite celebrate the very people it is fighting? The logic—or its absence—goes like this: Hakimullah Mehsud was our enemy. But the United States is also our enemy. So how dare the Americans kill him? And how dare they kill him when we had made up our minds to talk to him? If the United States is talking to the Afghan Taliban, why can’t we talk to our own Taliban?
  • he popular narrative in Pakistan holds that the Taliban’s fight is simply a reaction to American drone strikes: it’s a war between American kids sitting in front of LCD screens eating their TV dinners and our own men in the north, who are better Muslims than we are.
  • When Mehsud was killed, instead of celebrating or letting out quiet sighs of relief, politicians and journalists reacted as if they had lost a favorite son. He had killed many of us, but we weren’t craving vengeance; we were ready to make up and cuddle.
  • “This is not just the killing of one person,” Pakistan’s interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, said. “It’s the death of all peace efforts.”
  • As a result, we now have a raging national debate, in which serious-minded journalists are asking even more serious-minded politicians and religious scholars if the godless Soviet soldiers killed by American-funded mujahideen in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties should also be declared martyrs.
Javier E

Why the Rich Are So Much Richer by James Surowiecki | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...tz-why-rich-are-so-much-richer

inequality redistribution rent politics economics economic policy

shared by Javier E on 21 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Historically, inequality was not something that academic economists, at least in the dominant neoclassical tradition, worried much about. Economics was about production and allocation, and the efficient use of scarce resources. It was about increasing the size of the pie, not figuring out how it should be divided.
  • “Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and…the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.”
  • Stiglitz argues, what we’re stuck with isn’t really capitalism at all, but rather an “ersatz” version of the system.
  • ...42 more annotations...
  • Stiglitz has made the case that the rise in inequality in the US, far from being the natural outcome of market forces, has been profoundly shaped by “our policies and our politics,” with disastrous effects on society and the economy as a whole. In a recent report for the Roosevelt Institute called Rewriting the Rules, Stiglitz has laid out a detailed list of reforms that he argues will make it possible to create “an economy that works for everyone.”
  • his entire career in academia has been devoted to showing how markets cannot always be counted on to produce ideal results. In a series of enormously important papers, for which he would eventually win the Nobel Prize, Stiglitz showed how imperfections and asymmetries of information regularly lead markets to results that do not maximize welfare.
  • He also argued that this meant, at least in theory, that well-placed government interventions could help correct these market failures
  • in books like Globalization and Its Discontents (2002) he offered up a stinging critique of the way the US has tried to manage globalization, a critique that made him a cult hero in much of the developing world
  • Stiglitz has been one of the fiercest critics of the way the Eurozone has handled the Greek debt crisis, arguing that the so-called troika’s ideological commitment to austerity and its opposition to serious debt relief have deepened Greece’s economic woes and raised the prospect that that country could face “depression without end.”
  • For Stiglitz, the fight over Greece’s future isn’t just about the right policy. It’s also about “ideology and power.
  • there’s a good case to be made that the sheer amount of rent-seeking in the US economy has expanded over the years. The number of patents is vastly greater than it once was. Copyright terms have gotten longer. Occupational licensing rules (which protect professionals from competition) are far more common. Tepid antitrust enforcement has led to reduced competition in many industries
  • The Great Divide is somewhat fragmented and repetitive, but it has a clear thesis, namely that inequality in the US is not an unfortunate by-product of a well-functioning economy. Instead, the enormous riches at the top of the income ladder are largely the result of the ability of the one percent to manipulate markets and the political process to their own benefit.
  • Inequality obviously has no single definition. As Stiglitz writes:There are so many different parts to America’s inequality: the extremes of income and wealth at the top, the hollowing out of the middle, the increase of poverty at the bottom. Each has its own causes, and needs its own remedies.
  • his preoccupation here is primarily with why the rich today are so much richer than they used to be.
  • the main reason people at the top are so much richer these days than they once were (and so much richer than everyone else) is not that they own so much more capital: it’s that they get paid much more for their work than they once did, while everyone else gets paid about the same, or less
  • while incomes at the top have risen in countries around the world, nowhere have they risen faster than in the US.
  • One oft-heard justification of this phenomenon is that the rich get paid so much more because they are creating so much more value than they once did
  • as companies have gotten bigger, the potential value that CEOs can add has increased as well, driving their pay higher.
  • Stiglitz will have none of this. He sees the boom in the incomes of the one percent as largely the result of what economists call “rent-seeking.”
  • from the perspective of the economy as a whole, rent-seeking is a waste of time and energy. As Stiglitz puts it, the economy suffers when “more efforts go into ‘rent seeking’—getting a larger slice of the country’s economic pie—than into enlarging the size of the pie.”
  • The work of Piketty and his colleague Emmanuel Saez has been instrumental in documenting the rise of income inequality, not just in the US but around the world. Major economic institutions, like the IMF and the OECD, have published studies arguing that inequality, far from enhancing economic growth, actually damages it. And it’s now easy to find discussions of the subject in academic journals.
  • . After all, while pretax inequality is a problem in its own right, what’s most destructive is soaring posttax inequality. And it’s posttax inequality that most distinguishes the US from other developed countries
  • All this rent-seeking, Stiglitz argues, leaves certain industries, like finance and pharmaceuticals, and certain companies within those industries, with an outsized share of the rewards
  • within those companies, the rewards tend to be concentrated as well, thanks to what Stiglitz calls “abuses of corporate governance that lead CEOs to take a disproportionate share of corporate profits” (another form of rent-seeking)
  • This isn’t just bad in some abstract sense, Stiglitz suggests. It also hurts society and the economy
  • It alienates people from the system. And it makes the rich, who are obviously politically influential, less likely to support government investment in public goods (like education and infrastructure) because those goods have little impact on their lives.
  • More interestingly (and more contentiously), Stiglitz argues that inequality does serious damage to economic growth: the more unequal a country becomes, the slower it’s likely to grow. He argues that inequality hurts demand, because rich people consume less of their incomes. It leads to excessive debt, because people feel the need to borrow to make up for their stagnant incomes and keep up with the Joneses. And it promotes financial instability, as central banks try to make up for stagnant incomes by inflating bubbles, which eventually burst
  • exactly why inequality is bad for growth turns out to be hard to pin down—different studies often point to different culprits. And when you look at cross-country comparisons, it turns out to be difficult to prove that there’s a direct connection between inequality and the particular negative factors that Stiglitz cites
  • This doesn’t mean that, as conservative economists once insisted, inequality is good for economic growth. In fact, it’s clear that US-style inequality does not help economies grow faster, and that moving toward more equality will not do any damage
  • Similarly, Stiglitz’s relentless focus on rent-seeking as an explanation of just why the rich have gotten so much richer makes a messy, complicated problem simpler than it is
  • When we talk about the one percent, we’re talking about two groups of people above all: corporate executives and what are called “financial professionals” (these include people who work for banks and the like, but also money managers, financial advisers, and so on)
  • The emblematic figures here are corporate CEOs, whose pay rose 876 percent between 1978 and 2012, and hedge fund managers, some of whom now routinely earn billions of dollars a year
  • Shareholders, meanwhile, had fewer rights and were less active. Since then, we’ve seen a host of reforms that have given shareholders more power and made boards more diverse and independent. If CEO compensation were primarily the result of bad corporate governance, these changes should have had at least some effect. They haven’t. In fact, CEO pay has continued to rise at a brisk rate
  • So what’s really going on? Something much simpler: asset managers are just managing much more money than they used to, because there’s much more capital in the markets than there once was
  • that means that an asset manager today can get paid far better than an asset manager was twenty years ago, even without doing a better job.
  • there’s no convincing evidence that CEOs are any better, in relative terms, than they once were, and plenty of evidence that they are paid more than they need to be, in view of their performance. Similarly, asset managers haven’t gotten better at beating the market.
  • More important, probably, has been the rise of ideological assumptions about the indispensability of CEOs, and changes in social norms that made it seem like executives should take whatever they could get.
  • It actually has important consequences for thinking about how we can best deal with inequality. Strategies for reducing inequality can be generally put into two categories: those that try to improve the pretax distribution of income (this is sometimes called, clunkily, predistribution) and those that use taxes and transfers to change the post-tax distribution of income
  • he has high hopes that better rules, designed to curb rent-seeking, will have a meaningful impact on the pretax distribution of income. Among other things, he wants much tighter regulation of the financial sector
  • t it would be surprising if these rules did all that much to shrink the income of much of the one percent, precisely because improvements in corporate governance and asset managers’ transparency are likely to have a limited effect on CEO salaries and money managers’ compensation.
  • Most importantly, the financial industry is now a much bigger part of the US economy than it was in the 1970s, and for Stiglitz, finance profits are, in large part, the result of what he calls “predatory rent-seeking activities,” including the exploitation of uninformed borrowers and investors, the gaming of regulatory schemes, and the taking of risks for which financial institutions don’t bear the full cost (because the government will bail them out if things go wrong).
  • The redistributive policies Stiglitz advocates look pretty much like what you’d expect. On the tax front, he wants to raise taxes on the highest earners and on capital gains, institute a carbon tax and a financial transactions tax, and cut corporate subsidies
  • It’s also about investing. As he puts it, “If we spent more on education, health, and infrastructure, we would strengthen our economy, now and in the future.” So he wants more investment in schools, infrastructure, and basic research.
  • The core insight of Stiglitz’s research has been that, left on their own, markets are not perfect, and that smart policy can nudge them in better directions.
  • Of course, the political challenge in doing any of this (let alone all of it) is immense, in part because inequality makes it harder to fix inequality. And even for progressives, the very familiarity of the tax-and-transfer agenda may make it seem less appealing.
  • the policies that Stiglitz is calling for are, in their essence, not much different from the policies that shaped the US in the postwar era: high marginal tax rates on the rich and meaningful investment in public infrastructure, education, and technology. Yet there’s a reason people have never stopped pushing for those policies: they worked
Javier E

History News Network | What Makes People Do What They Do? - 0 views

historynewsnetwork.org/...158826

history US foreign policy bias failure origins

shared by Javier E on 24 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • what about us "experts?" What have we learned? Are there really any significant new insights? Do we know much more today than we did a generation ago?
  • France uplifted the downtrodden people of Algeria and Indo-China
  • My generation was deeply influenced half a century ago by economists and mathematicians. We scholars all wanted to be - and particularly to show -- that we had mastered all the techniques of our professions as social scientists, that we could build models, make graphs, juxtapose trends, etc. After all, we were writing our learned books and essays for our academic colleagues and our paymasters, not for those we were describing. So, at least those who were paid by our government and its proxy think tanks often became, as the English say, "too clever by half." They and their counterparts in universities, after all, had to prove their "smarts" in order to get funded, promoted or kept on
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • The basic question we face is, I suggest, what makes people do what they do?
  • I will offer a few suggestions in the following six categories. There may well be others, but these are mine. Top of the list, I think, is ignorance. Closely following ignorance is the issue of memory. Next, I suggest is suspicion. Somewhere down the line is escapism. "Why didn't we..." and "why do you remind us...." Then, there is the development process and its downside, corruption. Hard to "objectify" and impossible to "quantify," is my fifth category, the sense of identify. Finally, I reflect on the sense of dignity and its and itsviolation in shameandthe terrible burden of embarrassment.
  • Every survey on what Americans know about our world shows, objectively speaking, what can only be described as ignorance.  Few Americans know even where any foreign place is, who lives there, what language they speak, or what shapes their daily lives.
  • Casual conversations with people all over America indicate that few care. Such information is just not a significant part of their lives.
  • If one could have taken a poll in England at almost any time in its history one would have found the same results.  I suggest that what is different, operationally, is that in England the ordinary citizen did not play a role in determining policy.  That was the job of the small aristocracy. What the people knew or did not know was unimportant.
  • above all in America, which is the operational head of the world community, what "the people" know or don't know but believe is no longer irrelevant. It sometimes is crucial. That is because elections are more common, even if not always free, and because people almost everywhere, but particularly in the West, have been to some extent politicized. Thus, Ignorance is not new but today it is often determinant.
  • ignorance is not just unidirectional; it occurs in a context. What "we" think we know about others fits into what other people think "they" know both about themselves and about us. People everywhere tend to know quite a bit about their own circumstances and the actions that shaped those circumstances. That is, much more than foreigners know about them. This necessarily creates a lopsided worldview
  • These forms of mutual incomprehension or mutual misreadings often cause wars. Consider three examples:
  • Dirty tricks like our attempt to murder Nasser were and probably still are not uncommon. The Senate Committee headed by Senator Frank Church provided a chilling record, including cooperation with the Mafia, to assassinate Fidel Castro. Assassinations and attempted assassinations by the Russians, the British, the Israelis and others have been less subjected to sustained inquiry than Church provided, but their involvement in many deplorable incidents is not in doubt.
  • Britain developed Iran
  • The ancient Hindu who told the parable of the elephant was right. Those who grab the tail cannot understand those who handle the trunk. Understanding of the whole is always and everywhere necessary for intelligent action.
  • for how long does memory prevent people from doing the same things again?
  • long-term memory, memory of big happenings like wars, may be crucial but, it seems to me, last only about a decade.  Who today remembers much about American participation in the wars in Greece, Korea or even Vietnam.
  • Even when we get the sequences right, we usually stop short of determining the causes, that is, the connections between events.
  • my hunch is that as rapidly as we can, we put aside what we don't want to remember.
  • we have been able virtually to remove costly and painful events from the immediacy of daily life
  • Those who dwell on the costly and painful aspects of rising militarism are at best a nuisance who soon wear out their welcome. We find it so much easier to mesh our thoughts and attitudes with those of the people with whom we eat, work, sleep and play.  Better not to pay attention to those who challenge "conventional wisdom" or buck the tide.
  • Conventional wisdom and going with the mainstream are, arguably, necessary to make society function.
  • Sometimes, it seems to me that our questions get in the way of our answers and that our analytical tools themselves distort what our eyes are seeing.  We get so sophisticated that we may, to use the old saw, fail to see the forest for the trees.
  • These activities have created throughout the world a pervasive sense of illegality and immorality. And it cannot be restricted just to foreign affairs. It spills over into domestic affairs not only, as it commonly does, into societies with fragile legal systems but also into ours.
  • What is important, I suggest about all these -- and many other suspicious events which have never been fully illuminated -- is two fold: on the one hand, a climate of suspicion has been created that makes the achievement of security and peace far more difficult throughout the world and, on the other hand, trust in government, including the government of the United States, has been compromised.
  • Johnson charged Nixon with treason, but did not hold him accountable. Johnson's successors in the presidency have, similarly, not applied to political leaders the sort of legal standard to which we, as citizens, are held. Nor have they shared with the citizenry what they know has been done in our name. This is a fundamental attack on our system of government. Those who have "blown the whistle" on such activities, not the perpetrators, have been stigmatized or punished.
  • This adds up, I suggest, to a political form of corruption even worse than the financial corruption that so corrodes the nation "salvation" activities we have mounted in such countries as Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • What about escapism?  I suggest that escapism is the child of suspicion. I would wager that if one could stop a hundred or so people on the streets of any village, town or city almost everywhere, he would find that only a handful of those he badgered would want to talk about issues some of us keep warning them that could ruin their lives. Most Americans and probably most people everywhere, simply do not want to think about them.
  • I have found that when such issues as war, environmental degradation, over population, hunger, pandemics, nuclear accidents or even financial collapse are raised, conversation dwindles. As the familiar expression has it, "eyes glaze over," and as quickly as politely possible, Americans flee from the person who raised the issues as though he had made a bad smell
  • For most people they are better kept at least out of sight if not totally out of mind. Real life, enjoyable life, life that gives amusement or pleasure right now is at hand. It is available even for the very poor on television.  Sports, even in countries where hunger is widespread, jobs few, life constricted and governments oppressive, these annoyances recede before the immediate excitement of football.
  • we think we are the doctors but really we are the disease. I don't want to believe that, but there is ample proof that much of what we have done with the best of intentions has made many people suffer
  • we all sought in the late 1950s and early 1960 to "objectify" and "quantify" the study of international affairs.
  • Insofar as it dealt with the struggles in the Third World, our analysis suggested to some of us that what we were seeking came down to achieving a growth rate of about 3.5 percent
  • It seems to me that to the degree possible, everything must be done to avoid attacks on dignity and humiliation.
  • So, what is a sense of identity, how is it manifested and how do outsiders relate to it?
  • when the first cities were formed about 3,000 years ago, the inhabitants became too numerous to identify themselves by kinship. So, they elaborated their sense of belonging into custom, religion, dress, diet and language. Gradually, and over centuries, they often elaborated their definition of their identity
  • whatever form "belonging" takes, it is the "glue" that hold societies together and make it possible for the members to live together.
  • What the residents needed was to stay put, to improve their housing, of course, but more important to be assisted in taking charge of their lives in their own pattern and at their own speed.
  • For me, this experience threw into relief the American efforts to remake other societies as the neoconservatives urge. Their proposals urge not only to "regime change" but also to "culture change" -- indeed to disassemble -- whole societies. As played out, particularly during the George W. Bush administration, they have caused or exacerbated unrest and war. To the degree we insist on overturning what the people believe to be normal and right -- in effect of undermining the sense of identity, belonging and self-respect even to improve their physical well-being -- we can expect unrest and war to continue
  • For what we have done, even with statistically proven improvements and with the best of intentions, both we and they have paid and will pay more. The Third and mainly Islamic world is now in revolt.
  • Last, and closely related to the sense of belonging and identity, I suggest is the deep need of human beings to avoid attacks on their dignity
  • Close analysis of almost any confrontation shows that it sets the parameters within which rulers have to act or are likely to be overthrown. We neglect it at our peril.
  • What had happened was that, unwittingly, the governments, at our urging and with our help, had undermined the fundamental "possession" of their peoples, their sense of identity.
  • Avoiding humiliation is the essence of diplomacy. But when one has overwhelming power, the temptation is always present to push one's advantage, to put the other person in the corner, to make him "blink," to humble him, even to destroy him.
katyshannon

Who are the winners and losers of the COP21's climate deal? - CBS News - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/...-the-cop21-climate-change-deal

winners cop climate deal cbs news crisis history Politics economics

shared by katyshannon on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • "The problem's not solved because of this accord, but make no mistake, the Paris agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis," the president said late Saturday in a speech from the White House's Cabinet Room. "It creates the mechanism, the architecture, for us to continually tackle this problem in an effective way."
  • But who benefits from the new "architecture" the accord creates? And what will the deal cost for others?
  • On its face, the plan agreed to on Saturday affects just about every nation. It requires countries to limit the rise in global average temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. It also sets an even more ambitious goal to slow the warming further -- down to just 1.5 degrees Celsius. (In the years since global industrialization, the world's temperature has already risen 1 degree Celsius.)
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • To achieve this goal, countries that signed on to the agreement promised that they would focus on cultivating clean, renewable energy sources and shift from the use of fossil fuels. They will also be required to report on their progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions every five years.
  • The deal also commits countries to deliver $100 billion a year in aid for developing countries by 2020, with a promise to increase financing in the future.
  • In a preamble, the deal doubles down on a pledge made six years ago, that richer, industrialized countries will contribute at least $100 billion of aid a year to poorer nations to help them battle the effects of climate change by 2020. It also promises that countries will consider increases to that amount in the future.
  • So there may be many vested parties with a stake in the climate change deal -- but there are also a few key winners and losers. We take a look at them here:
  • According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre's (IDMC) 2015 Global Estimates report, "an average of 26.4 million people per year have been displaced from their homes by disasters brought on by natural hazards" since 2008. These threatened populations are largely found in developing countries, which tend to be more vulnerable to rises in sea level, droughts, and floods.
  • The climate accord in Paris, however, have many in the developing world cheering.
  • According to President Obama, the targets are bold, but they also empower "businesses, scientists, engineers, workers, and the private sector -- investors -- to work together."
  • Mohamed Adow, senior climate change adviser from the disaster relief agency Christian Aid, told CBS News that this is one of the most important aspects of the COP21 accord: the promise provides poorer nations with the "assurance that the international community will not leave developing countries to deal with climate impact."
  • Some nations were not entirely satisfied with the final language -- there is still, after all, no legally binding provision that holds industrialized countries to this pledge for "adaptation" funds -- but nonetheless, Adow said, it gives significant hope to those countries hit especially hard with the threat of displaced citizens.
  • In fact, the aid money already seems to be flowing in light of the Paris negotiations: early this week, the U.S. promised to double its own aid to affected countries to $861 million as part of last-ditch efforts to push the climate deal through.
  • The effects of climate change in poor and developing nations also pose an increasing terror threat to the United States -- a connection that President Obama has made in the past, when he called global warming "an economic and security imperative" just weeks after the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris.
  • As Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders explained it on CBS' "Face the Nation" in November: "If we are going to see an increase in drought, in flood, and extreme weather disturbances as a result of climate change, what that means is that people all over the world are going to be fighting over limited natural resources... When people migrate into cities and they don't have jobs, there's going to be a lot more instability, a lot more unemployment, and people will be subject to the types of propaganda that al Qaeda and ISIS are using right now."
  • Military reports have also viewed climate change as a "catalyst for conflict," and the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review last year dubbed its effects as "threat multipliers" that ultimately lead to "conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence."
  • But the climate change deal seeks to mitigate these possible conflict catalysts so that "countries that don't have the resources to address these problems head on, now will," Jon Powers, who served the Federal Chief Sustainability Officer and Special Advisor on Energy to the U.S. Army in the Obama Administration, told CBS News.
  • One important target put forth by the deal was to ensure that parties would "undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century."
  • Here, the deal aims to strangle heavy carbon-emitting industries -- the "anthropogenic emissions" -- and cut down on total fossil fuels burned worldwide. Importantly, it's also a nod to investment in and development of new technologies that would remove carbon dioxide from the air.
  • U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz told CNBC in an interview, "We recognize fossil fuels will continue to be a part of the portfolio for quite a long time," but that the popularity of other power sources are on the rise.
  • "Wind energy has gone up by several fold just in the last five to six years," Moniz said, "and now (wind) provides about 4.5 percent of our electricity. You add that with solar, we're talking 5 percent."
  • Kathleen McLaughlin, the chief sustainability officer for Walmart, said in a statement that the company would "support the U.N.'s call for the U.S. corporate sector to commit to science-based targets to reduce emissions."
  • Ahead of the Paris summit, China -- the world's biggest coal consumer -- said it would aim to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by nearly two-thirds of its 2005 levels. In the past, international monitoring of those numbers would have been difficult to do, but the COP21 deal changes that.
  • The agreement holds nations accountable for reporting their progress on their climate goals in a global "stocktake" every five years starting in 2023. It also means countries will be monitoring, verifying and reporting their greenhouse gas emissions in a single accounting system.
  • According to one report released last month by the carbon investment think tank Carbon Tracker, fossil fuel companies could risk over $2 trillion dollars of current and future projects being left valueless as the market for fossil fuels narrows with recent global climate change action.
jayhandwerk

Senate Approves $36.5 Billion Aid Package as Hurricane Costs Mount - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...aster-aid-hurricanes-fire.html

politics US hurricane aid

shared by jayhandwerk on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • As the costs of this year’s hurricanes continue to rise, the Senate gave final approval on Tuesday to a $36.5 billion disaster relief package that includes a bailout of the financially troubled National Flood Insurance Program.
  • In addition to providing hurricane and wildfire funding, it would help Puerto Rico’s government avoid running out of cash in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
  • The measure approved on Tuesday is intended in part to prop up the National Flood Insurance Program, which is facing an influx of claims from this year’s hurricanes
brickol

'I have no money': debt collection continues despite pandemic | Money | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-wage-garnishment-coronavirus

COVID-19 us economics

shared by brickol on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • One out of every six Americans has an unpaid medical bill on their credit report, amounting to $81bn in debt nationwide. Every year, about 530,000 Americans who file bankruptcy cite medical debt as a contributing factor.
  • In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, several legal groups across the US are calling on federal and state governments to halt private and public debt collection, including wage garnishment, and preventing any federal stimulus checks to Americans from being garnished by debt collectors. For now the debt collection continues unabated.
  • Millions of US workers have wages garnished from their paychecks for consumer debts every year, and those with low incomes are disproportionately affected.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • “The garnishment came with no warning. You don’t know until your bank account is locked and your money is gone,” said Walker, who didn’t receive the order of garnishment in the mail until 24 March, after money was taken from his account, and he has already started to fall behind in paying bills.
  • “Unlike the rest of my bills that I can see, the debt collection agency doesn’t send you one. You can’t arrange to auto-pay and they don’t send anything showing what you paid. It’s like they are set up to make you fail. With the coronavirus they shouldn’t be allowed to harass and garnish bank accounts while Americans are in this crisis.”
  • “Garnishment is a really important issue, especially for low-income, economically vulnerable families, the exact workers being laid off in the US right now,”
  • He noted it is still unclear if any federal stimulus checks will be subjected to wage garnishment, but warned courts can freeze bank accounts over debt, making these funds inaccessible if they are deposited.
  • “It’s $350 to $400 a month. I don’t deny I owe this money because they saved my life, but it is detrimental to my health now because I don’t have the money for what I need. I have no money for groceries – I’m only paying my rent and utilities, there’s no money left over,” Johnson said.
  • Among the Americans still experiencing wage garnishment through the coronavirus pandemic are those who have defaulted on their federal student loans. About 45 million Americans owe more than $1.7tn in student loan debt. According to an analysis by Student Loan Hero, between July 2015 to September 2018, 18 private student debt collection agencies contracted by the US Department of Education added $171bn to their debt inventory, and collected $2.3bn during the same period through wage garnishments.
  • “The Department of Education has not decided to do anything, as far as I know, to ease the burden from the coronavirus,” said McKinnon. “They took my tax return also, in the middle of this epidemic. It’s heartless.”
  • She noted the federal stimulus relief package for the coronavirus pandemic is supposed to increase social security income by $200, but that she will still be receiving less than she would before the garnishment. “Even though I paid for years and I’ve tried to utilize their system to take care of my student loans they still decided to garnish my already-below-poverty-line social security income,” Tavares added.
Javier E

How Will the Coronavirus End? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...608719

strategies effects pandemic culture politics history crisis

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. In recent years, hundreds of health experts have written books, white papers, and op-eds warning of the possibility. Bill Gates has been telling anyone who would listen, including the 18 million viewers of his TED Talk.
  • We realized that her child might be one of the first of a new cohort who are born into a society profoundly altered by COVID-19. We decided to call them Generation C.
  • “No matter what, a virus [like SARS-CoV-2] was going to test the resilience of even the most well-equipped health systems,”
  • ...56 more annotations...
  • To contain such a pathogen, nations must develop a test and use it to identify infected people, isolate them, and trace those they’ve had contact with. That is what South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong did to tremendous effect. It is what the United States did not.
  • That a biomedical powerhouse like the U.S. should so thoroughly fail to create a very simple diagnostic test was, quite literally, unimaginable. “I’m not aware of any simulations that I or others have run where we [considered] a failure of testing,”
  • The testing fiasco was the original sin of America’s pandemic failure, the single flaw that undermined every other countermeasure. If the country could have accurately tracked the spread of the virus, hospitals could have executed their pandemic plans, girding themselves by allocating treatment rooms, ordering extra supplies, tagging in personnel, or assigning specific facilities to deal with COVID-19 cases.
  • None of that happened. Instead, a health-care system that already runs close to full capacity, and that was already challenged by a severe flu season, was suddenly faced with a virus that had been left to spread, untracked, through communities around the country.
  • With little room to surge during a crisis, America’s health-care system operates on the assumption that unaffected states can help beleaguered ones in an emergency.
  • That ethic works for localized disasters such as hurricanes or wildfires, but not for a pandemic that is now in all 50 states. Cooperation has given way to competition
  • Partly, that’s because the White House is a ghost town of scientific expertise. A pandemic-preparedness office that was part of the National Security Council was dissolved in 2018. On January 28, Luciana Borio, who was part of that team, urged the government to “act now to prevent an American epidemic,” and specifically to work with the private sector to develop fast, easy diagnostic tests. But with the office shuttered, those warnings were published in The Wall Street Journal, rather than spoken into the president’s ear.
  • Rudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated, America has mishandled the COVID-19 crisis to a substantially worse degree than what every health expert I’ve spoken with had feared. “Much worse,”
  • “Beyond any expectations we had,” said Lauren Sauer, who works on disaster preparedness at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “As an American, I’m horrified,” said Seth Berkley, who heads Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. “The U.S. may end up with the worst outbreak in the industrialized world.”
  • it will be difficult—but not impossible—for the United States to catch up. To an extent, the near-term future is set because COVID-19 is a slow and long illness. People who were infected several days ago will only start showing symptoms now, even if they isolated themselves in the meantime. Some of those people will enter intensive-care units in early April
  • A “massive logistics and supply-chain operation [is] now needed across the country,” says Thomas Inglesby of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That can’t be managed by small and inexperienced teams scattered throughout the White House. The solution, he says, is to tag in the Defense Logistics Agency—a 26,000-person group that prepares the U.S. military for overseas operations and that has assisted in past public-health crises, including the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
  • The first and most important is to rapidly produce masks, gloves, and other personal protective equipment
  • it would also come at a terrible cost: SARS-CoV-2 is more transmissible and fatal than the flu, and it would likely leave behind many millions of corpses and a trail of devastated health systems.
  • This agency can also coordinate the second pressing need: a massive rollout of COVID-19 tests.
  • These measures will take time, during which the pandemic will either accelerate beyond the capacity of the health system or slow to containable levels. Its course—and the nation’s fate—now depends on the third need, which is social distancing.
  • There are now only two groups of Americans. Group A includes everyone involved in the medical response, whether that’s treating patients, running tests, or manufacturing supplies. Group B includes everyone else, and their job is to buy Group A more time. Group B must now “flatten the curve” by physically isolating themselves from other people to cut off chains of transmission.
  • Given the slow fuse of COVID-19, to forestall the future collapse of the health-care system, these seemingly drastic steps must be taken immediately, before they feel proportionate, and they must continue for several weeks.
  • Persuading a country to voluntarily stay at home is not easy, and without clear guidelines from the White House, mayors, governors, and business owners have been forced to take their own steps.
  • when the good of all hinges on the sacrifices of many, clear coordination matters—the fourth urgent need
  • Pundits and business leaders have used similar rhetoric, arguing that high-risk people, such as the elderly, could be protected while lower-risk people are allowed to go back to work. Such thinking is seductive, but flawed. It overestimates our ability to assess a person’s risk, and to somehow wall off the ‘high-risk’ people from the rest of society. It underestimates how badly the virus can hit ‘low-risk’ groups, and how thoroughly hospitals will be overwhelmed if even just younger demographics are falling sick.
  • A recent analysis from the University of Pennsylvania estimated that even if social-distancing measures can reduce infection rates by 95 percent, 960,000 Americans will still need intensive care.
  • There are only about 180,000 ventilators in the U.S. and, more pertinently, only enough respiratory therapists and critical-care staff to safely look after 100,000 ventilated patients. Abandoning social distancing would be foolish. Abandoning it now, when tests and protective equipment are still scarce, would be catastrophic.
  • If Trump stays the course, if Americans adhere to social distancing, if testing can be rolled out, and if enough masks can be produced, there is a chance that the country can still avert the worst predictions about COVID-19, and at least temporarily bring the pandemic under control. No one knows how long that will take, but it won’t be quick. “It could be anywhere from four to six weeks to up to three months,” Fauci said, “but I don’t have great confidence in that range.”
  • there are three possible endgames: one that’s very unlikely, one that’s very dangerous, and one that’s very long.
  • The first is that every nation manages to simultaneously bring the virus to heel, as with the original SARS in 2003. Given how widespread the coronavirus pandemic is, and how badly many countries are faring, the odds of worldwide synchronous control seem vanishingly small.
  • The second is that the virus does what past flu pandemics have done: It burns through the world and leaves behind enough immune survivors that it eventually struggles to find viable hosts. This “herd immunity” scenario would be quick, and thus tempting
  • The U.S. has fewer hospital beds per capita than Italy. A study released by a team at Imperial College London concluded that if the pandemic is left unchecked, those beds will all be full by late April. By the end of June, for every available critical-care bed, there will be roughly 15 COVID-19 patients in need of one.  By the end of the summer, the pandemic will have directly killed 2.2 million Americans,
  • The third scenario is that the world plays a protracted game of whack-a-mole with the virus, stamping out outbreaks here and there until a vaccine can be produced. This is the best option, but also the longest and most complicated.
  • there are no existing vaccines for coronaviruses—until now, these viruses seemed to cause diseases that were mild or rare—so researchers must start from scratch.
  • The first steps have been impressively quick. Last Monday, a possible vaccine created by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health went into early clinical testing. That marks a 63-day gap between scientists sequencing the virus’s genes for the first time and doctors injecting a vaccine candidate into a person’s arm. “It’s overwhelmingly the world record,” Fauci said.
  • The initial trial will simply tell researchers if the vaccine seems safe, and if it can actually mobilize the immune system. Researchers will then need to check that it actually prevents infection from SARS-CoV-2. They’ll need to do animal tests and large-scale trials to ensure that the vaccine doesn’t cause severe side effects. They’ll need to work out what dose is required, how many shots people need, if the vaccine works in elderly people, and if it requires other chemicals to boost its effectiveness.
  • No matter which strategy is faster, Berkley and others estimate that it will take 12 to 18 months to develop a proven vaccine, and then longer still to make it, ship it, and inject it into people’s arms.
  • as the status quo returns, so too will the virus. This doesn’t mean that society must be on continuous lockdown until 2022. But “we need to be prepared to do multiple periods of social distancing,” says Stephen Kissler of Harvard.
  • First: seasonality. Coronaviruses tend to be winter infections that wane or disappear in the summer. That may also be true for SARS-CoV-2, but seasonal variations might not sufficiently slow the virus when it has so many immunologically naive hosts to infect.
  • Second: duration of immunity. When people are infected by the milder human coronaviruses that cause cold-like symptoms, they remain immune for less than a year. By contrast, the few who were infected by the original SARS virus, which was far more severe, stayed immune for much longer.
  • scientists will need to develop accurate serological tests, which look for the antibodies that confer immunity. They’ll also need to confirm that such antibodies actually stop people from catching or spreading the virus. If so, immune citizens can return to work, care for the vulnerable, and anchor the economy during bouts of social distancing.
  • Aspects of America’s identity may need rethinking after COVID-19. Many of the country’s values have seemed to work against it during the pandemic. Its individualism, exceptionalism, and tendency to equate doing whatever you want with an act of resistance meant that when it came time to save lives and stay indoors, some people flocked to bars and clubs.
  • “We can keep schools and businesses open as much as possible, closing them quickly when suppression fails, then opening them back up again once the infected are identified and isolated. Instead of playing defense, we could play more offense.”
  • The vaccine may need to be updated as the virus changes, and people may need to get revaccinated on a regular basis, as they currently do for the flu. Models suggest that the virus might simmer around the world, triggering epidemics every few years or so. “But my hope and expectation is that the severity would decline, and there would be less societal upheaval,”
  • After infections begin ebbing, a secondary pandemic of mental-health problems will follow.
  • But “there is also the potential for a much better world after we get through this trauma,”
  • Testing kits can be widely distributed to catch the virus’s return as quickly as possible. There’s no reason that the U.S. should let SARS-CoV-2 catch it unawares again, and thus no reason that social-distancing measures need to be deployed as broadly and heavy-handedly as they now must be.
  • Pandemics can also catalyze social change. People, businesses, and institutions have been remarkably quick to adopt or call for practices that they might once have dragged their heels on, including working from home, conference-calling to accommodate people with disabilities, proper sick leave, and flexible child-care arrangements.
  • Perhaps the nation will learn that preparedness isn’t just about masks, vaccines, and tests, but also about fair labor policies and a stable and equal health-care system. Perhaps it will appreciate that health-care workers and public-health specialists compose America’s social immune system, and that this system has been suppressed.
  • Attitudes to health may also change for the better. The rise of HIV and AIDS “completely changed sexual behavior among young people who were coming into sexual maturity at the height of the epidemic,”
  • Years of isolationist rhetoric had consequences too.
  • “People believed the rhetoric that containment would work,” says Wendy Parmet, who studies law and public health at Northeastern University. “We keep them out, and we’ll be okay. When you have a body politic that buys into these ideas of isolationism and ethnonationalism, you’re especially vulnerable when a pandemic hits.”
  • Pandemics are democratizing experiences. People whose privilege and power would normally shield them from a crisis are facing quarantines, testing positive, and losing loved ones. Senators are falling sick. The consequences of defunding public-health agencies, losing expertise, and stretching hospitals are no longer manifesting as angry opinion pieces, but as faltering lungs.
  • After COVID-19, attention may shift to public health. Expect to see a spike in funding for virology and vaccinology, a surge in students applying to public-health programs, and more domestic production of medical supplies.
  • The lessons that America draws from this experience are hard to predict, especially at a time when online algorithms and partisan broadcasters only serve news that aligns with their audience’s preconceptions.
  • “The transitions after World War II or 9/11 were not about a bunch of new ideas,” he says. “The ideas are out there, but the debates will be more acute over the next few months because of the fluidity of the moment and willingness of the American public to accept big, massive changes.”
  • One could easily conceive of a world in which most of the nation believes that America defeated COVID-19. Despite his many lapses, Trump’s approval rating has surged. Imagine that he succeeds in diverting blame for the crisis to China, casting it as the villain and America as the resilient hero.
  • One could also envisage a future in which America learns a different lesson. A communal spirit, ironically born through social distancing, causes people to turn outward, to neighbors both foreign and domestic. The election of November 2020 becomes a repudiation of “America first” politics. The nation pivots, as it did after World War II, from isolationism to international cooperation
  • The U.S. leads a new global partnership focused on solving challenges like pandemics and climate change.
  • In 2030, SARS-CoV-3 emerges from nowhere, and is brought to heel within a month.
  • On the Global Health Security Index, a report card that grades every country on its pandemic preparedness, the United States has a score of 83.5—the world’s highest. Rich, strong, developed, America is supposed to be the readiest of nations. That illusion has been shattered. Despite months of advance warning as the virus spread in other countries, when America was finally tested by COVID-19, it failed.
Javier E

The Coronavirus in America: The Year Ahead - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oronavirus-america-future.html

pandemic response strategies US

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • More than 20 experts in public health, medicine, epidemiology and history shared their thoughts on the future during in-depth interviews. When can we emerge from our homes? How long, realistically, before we have a treatment or vaccine? How will we keep the virus at bay
  • The path forward depends on factors that are certainly difficult but doable, they said: a carefully staggered approach to reopening, widespread testing and surveillance, a treatment that works, adequate resources for health care providers — and eventually an effective vaccine.
  • The scenario that Mr. Trump has been unrolling at his daily press briefings — that the lockdowns will end soon, that a protective pill is almost at hand, that football stadiums and restaurants will soon be full — is a fantasy, most experts said.
  • ...76 more annotations...
  • They worried that a vaccine would initially elude scientists, that weary citizens would abandon restrictions despite the risks, that the virus would be with us from now on.
  • Most experts believed that once the crisis was over, the nation and its economy would revive quickly. But there would be no escaping a period of intense pain.
  • Exactly how the pandemic will end depends in part on medical advances still to come. It will also depend on how individual Americans behave in the interim. If we scrupulously protect ourselves and our loved ones, more of us will live. If we underestimate the virus, it will find us.
  • More Americans may die than the White House admits.
  • The epidemiological model often cited by the White House, which was produced by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, originally predicted 100,000 to 240,000 deaths by midsummer. Now that figure is 60,000.
  • The institute’s projection runs through Aug. 4, describing only the first wave of this epidemic. Without a vaccine, the virus is expected to circulate for years, and the death tally will rise over time.
  • Fatality rates depend heavily on how overwhelmed hospitals get and what percentage of cases are tested. China’s estimated death rate was 17 percent in the first week of January, when Wuhan was in chaos, according to a Center for Evidence-Based Medicine report, but only 0.7 percent by late February.
  • Various experts consulted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March predicted that the virus eventually could reach 48 percent to 65 percent of all Americans, with a fatality rate just under 1 percent, and would kill up to 1.7 million of them if nothing were done to stop the spread.
  • A model by researchers at Imperial College London cited by the president on March 30 predicted 2.2 million deaths in the United States by September under the same circumstances.
  • China has officially reported about 83,000 cases and 4,632 deaths, which is a fatality rate of over 5 percent. The Trump administration has questioned the figures but has not produced more accurate ones.
  • The tighter the restrictions, experts say, the fewer the deaths and the longer the periods between lockdowns. Most models assume states will eventually do widespread temperature checks, rapid testing and contact tracing, as is routine in Asia.
  • In this country, hospitals in several cities, including New York, came to the brink of chaos.
  • Only when tens of thousands of antibody tests are done will we know how many silent carriers there may be in the United States. The C.D.C. has suggested it might be 25 percent of those who test positive. Researchers in Iceland said it might be double that.
  • China is also revising its own estimates. In February, a major study concluded that only 1 percent of cases in Wuhan were asymptomatic. New research says perhaps 60 percent were.
  • The virus may also be mutating to cause fewer symptoms. In the movies, viruses become more deadly. In reality, they usually become less so, because asymptomatic strains reach more hosts. Even the 1918 Spanish flu virus eventually faded into the seasonal H1N1 flu.
  • The lockdowns will end, but haltingly.
  • it is likely a safe bet that at least 300 million of us are still vulnerable.
  • Until a vaccine or another protective measure emerges, there is no scenario, epidemiologists agreed, in which it is safe for that many people to suddenly come out of hiding. If Americans pour back out in force, all will appear quiet for perhaps three weeks.
  • The gains to date were achieved only by shutting down the country, a situation that cannot continue indefinitely. The White House’s “phased” plan for reopening will surely raise the death toll no matter how carefully it is executed.
  • Every epidemiological model envisions something like the dance
  • On the models, the curves of rising and falling deaths resemble a row of shark teeth.
  • Surges are inevitable, the models predict, even when stadiums, churches, theaters, bars and restaurants remain closed, all travelers from abroad are quarantined for 14 days, and domestic travel is tightly restricted to prevent high-intensity areas from reinfecting low-intensity ones.
  • In his wildly popular March 19 article in Medium, “Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance,” Tomas Pueyo correctly predicted the national lockdown, which he called the hammer, and said it would lead to a new phase, which he called the dance, in which essential parts of the economy could reopen, including some schools and some factories with skeleton crews.
  • Even the “Opening Up America Again” guidelines Mr. Trump issued on Thursday have three levels of social distancing, and recommend that vulnerable Americans stay hidden. The plan endorses testing, isolation and contact tracing — but does not specify how these measures will be paid for, or how long it will take to put them in place.
  • On Friday, none of that stopped the president from contradicting his own message by sending out tweets encouraging protesters in Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia to fight their states’ shutdowns.
  • China did not allow Wuhan, Nanjing or other cities to reopen until intensive surveillance found zero new cases for 14 straight days, the virus’s incubation period.
  • Compared with China or Italy, the United States is still a playground.Americans can take domestic flights, drive where they want, and roam streets and parks. Despite restrictions, everyone seems to know someone discreetly arranging play dates for children, holding backyard barbecues or meeting people on dating apps.
  • Even with rigorous measures, Asian countries have had trouble keeping the virus under control
  • But if too many people get infected at once, new lockdowns will become inevitable. To avoid that, widespread testing will be imperative.
  • Reopening requires declining cases for 14 days, the tracing of 90 percent of contacts, an end to health care worker infections, recuperation places for mild cases and many other hard-to-reach goals.
  • Immunity will become a societal advantage.
  • Imagine an America divided into two classes: those who have recovered from infection with the coronavirus and presumably have some immunity to it; and those who are still vulnerable.
  • “It will be a frightening schism,” Dr. David Nabarro, a World Health Organization special envoy on Covid-19, predicted. “Those with antibodies will be able to travel and work, and the rest will be discriminated against.”
  • Soon the government will have to invent a way to certify who is truly immune. A test for IgG antibodies, which are produced once immunity is established, would make sense
  • Dr. Fauci has said the White House was discussing certificates like those proposed in Germany. China uses cellphone QR codes linked to the owner’s personal details so others cannot borrow them.
  • As Americans stuck in lockdown see their immune neighbors resuming their lives and perhaps even taking the jobs they lost, it is not hard to imagine the enormous temptation to join them through self-infection
  • My daughter, who is a Harvard economist, keeps telling me her age group needs to have Covid-19 parties to develop immunity and keep the economy going,”
  • It would be a gamble for American youth, too. The obese and immunocompromised are clearly at risk, but even slim, healthy young Americans have died of Covid-19.
  • The virus can be kept in check, but only with expanded resources.
  • Resolve to Save Lives, a public health advocacy group run by Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the former director of the C.D.C., has published detailed and strict criteria for when the economy can reopen and when it must be closed.
  • once a national baseline of hundreds of thousands of daily tests is established across the nation, any viral spread can be spotted when the percentage of positive results rises.
  • To keep the virus in check, several experts insisted, the country also must start isolating all the ill — including mild cases.
  • “If I was forced to select only one intervention, it would be the rapid isolation of all cases,”
  • In China, anyone testing positive, no matter how mild their symptoms, was required to immediately enter an infirmary-style hospital — often set up in a gymnasium or community center outfitted with oxygen tanks and CT scanners.
  • There, they recuperated under the eyes of nurses. That reduced the risk to families, and being with other victims relieved some patients’ fears.
  • Still, experts were divided on the idea of such wards
  • Ultimately, suppressing a virus requires testing all the contacts of every known case. But the United States is far short of that goal.
  • In China’s Sichuan Province, for example, each known case had an average of 45 contacts.
  • The C.D.C. has about 600 contact tracers and, until recently, state and local health departments employed about 1,600, mostly for tracing syphilis and tuberculosis cases.
  • China hired and trained 9,000 in Wuhan alone. Dr. Frieden recently estimated that the United States will need at least 300,000.
  • There will not be a vaccine soon.
  • any effort to make a vaccine will take at least a year to 18 months.
  • the record is four years, for the mumps vaccine.
  • for unclear reasons, some previous vaccine candidates against coronaviruses like SARS have triggered “antibody-dependent enhancement,” which makes recipients more susceptible to infection, rather than less. In the past, vaccines against H.I.V. and dengue have unexpectedly done the same.
  • A new vaccine is usually first tested in fewer than 100 young, healthy volunteers. If it appears safe and produces antibodies, thousands more volunteers — in this case, probably front-line workers at the highest risk — will get either it or a placebo in what is called a Phase 3 trial.
  • It is possible to speed up that process with “challenge trials.” Scientists vaccinate small numbers of volunteers, wait until they develop antibodies, and then “challenge” them with a deliberate infection to see if the vaccine protects them.
  • Normally, it is ethically unthinkable to challenge subjects with a disease with no cure, such as Covid-19.
  • “Fewer get harmed if you do a challenge trial in a few people than if you do a Phase 3 trial in thousands,” said Dr. Lipsitch, who recently published a paper advocating challenge trials in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. Almost immediately, he said, he heard from volunteers.
  • The hidden danger of challenge trials, vaccinologists explained, is that they recruit too few volunteers to show whether a vaccine creates enhancement, since it may be a rare but dangerous problem.
  • if a vaccine is invented, the United States could need 300 million doses — or 600 million if two shots are required. And just as many syringes.
  • “People have to start thinking big,” Dr. Douglas said. “With that volume, you’ve got to start cranking it out pretty soon.”
  • Treatments are likely to arrive first.
  • The modern alternative is monoclonal antibodies. These treatment regimens, which recently came very close to conquering the Ebola epidemic in eastern Congo, are the most likely short-term game changer, experts said.
  • as with vaccines, growing and purifying monoclonal antibodies takes time. In theory, with enough production, they could be used not just to save lives but to protect front-line workers.
  • Having a daily preventive pill would be an even better solution, because pills can be synthesized in factories far faster than vaccines or antibodies can be grown and purified.
  • Goodbye, ‘America First.’
  • A public health crisis of this magnitude requires international cooperation on a scale not seen in decades. Yet Mr. Trump is moving to defund the W.H.O., the only organization capable of coordinating such a response.
  • And he spent most of this year antagonizing China, which now has the world’s most powerful functioning economy and may become the dominant supplier of drugs and vaccines. China has used the pandemic to extend its global influence, and says it has sent medical gear and equipment to nearly 120 countries.
  • This is not a world in which “America First” is a viable strategy, several experts noted.
  • “If President Trump cares about stepping up the public health efforts here, he should look for avenues to collaborate with China and stop the insults,”
  • If we alienate the Chinese with our rhetoric, I think it will come back to bite us,” he said.“What if they come up with the first vaccine? They have a choice about who they sell it to. Are we top of the list? Why would we be?”
  • Once the pandemic has passed, the national recovery may be swift. The economy rebounded after both world wars, Dr. Mulder noted.
  • In one of the most provocative analyses in his follow-up article, “Coronavirus: Out of Many, One,” Mr. Pueyo analyzed Medicare and census data on age and obesity in states that recently resisted shutdowns and counties that voted Republican in 2016.
  • He calculated that those voters could be 30 percent more likely to die of the virus.
  • In the periods after both wars, Dr. Mulder noted, society and incomes became more equal. Funds created for veterans’ and widows’ pensions led to social safety nets, measures like the G.I. Bill and V.A. home loans were adopted, unions grew stronger, and tax benefits for the wealthy withered.
  • If a vaccine saves lives, many Americans may become less suspicious of conventional medicine and more accepting of science in general — including climate change
honordearlove

Want to Make a Deal, Mr. Trump? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-to-make-a-deal-mr-trump.html

Trump policy Us politics economics

shared by honordearlove on 12 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Was President Trump’s bipartisan hurricane relief/debt ceiling/government funding deal last week simply a “bipartisan moment,” as the House speaker, Paul Ryan, put it? Probably, given this president’s pattern of poor impulse control and of reverting to base politics. But it’s tempting nevertheless to imagine what Mr. Trump might achieve if he could see beyond momentary, tactical wins.
  • leeful at media coverage of his shockingly bipartisan move, Mr. Trump called Mr. Schumer last week to talk about keeping up the good work. So how could these unlikely allies actually make headway?
  • this is a ripe moment for Congress and Mr. Trump to get behind an overhaul of an outmoded program that does nothing to discourage people from building, and rebuilding, in areas prone to catastrophic flooding.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The DACA program will now expire in six months, plunging these immigrants into limbo, and so far, Congress has done nothing but talk about helping them. Democrats see some hope in Mr. Trump’s seeming lack of commitment to his own draconian edict — last week, “Nancy” persuaded him to tweet reassurance to those affected. It’s a slim reed, but they hope he will pressure Republicans to act on the Dream Act, a 16-year-old proposal to resolve these immigrants’ legal status permanently.
  • Mr. Trump and his new Democratic friends could work on more. They could raise spending caps set to kick in next month by matching increases in military spending that Republicans want with increases in domestic spending that Democrats favor. They could back a proposal to automatically increase the debt ceiling, ending perennial partisan battles over what used to be a routine vote essentially recognizing the debts Congress has already incurred
davisem

Trump sides with Democrats on fiscal issues, throwing Republican plans into chaos - The... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-89fa-bb822a46da5b_story.html

shared by davisem on 07 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • President Trump, a man of few allegiances who seized control of the Republican Party in a hostile takeover, suddenly aligned himself with Democrats on Wednesday on a series of key fiscal issues — and even gave a lift to North Dakota’s embattled Democratic U.S. senator.
  • The episode is the latest turn in Trump’s separation from his party as he distances himself to deflect blame for what has been a year of gridlock and missed opportunities for Republicans on Capitol Hill.
  • agreeing with Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on plans for a bill to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling for three months
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • In siding with Democrats, Trump overruled his own treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, who was in the middle of an explanation backing a longer-term increase when the president interrupted him and disagreed, according to a person briefed on the meeting who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
  • Trump opened his speech by recounting his “great bipartisan meeting” at the White House. “I’m committed to working with both parties to deliver for our wonderful, wonderful citizens,” Trump said, citing Schumer and Pelosi by name before mentioning the Republicans who were in attendance.
  • The plan for now is to suspend the debt ceiling until Dec. 15 and then revisit it with a vote by Congress before then, but the Treasury Department would retain flexibility to take emergency steps, two congressional aides said.
ethanshilling

Stimulus and Biden Administration News: Live Updates - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...joe-biden-news

US politics biden trump

shared by ethanshilling on 05 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The Senate is set to debate President Biden’s nearly $2 trillion stimulus plan on Friday as Democrats prepare to barrel past widespread opposition from Republican lawmakers and approve billions of dollars in funding for unemployed Americans, vaccine distribution, small businesses, schools and hospitals.
  • Senators will reconvene with three hours of debate before engaging in a rapid-fire series of votes on proposed amendments.
  • The threat of yet another late night in the Senate comes after Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, demanded that a group of Senate clerks read all 628 pages of the legislation on the floor before debate could continue.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • But the efforts to slow action on the Senate floor to a crawl are expected to have little effect on the final legislation.
  • “The horrific events of January 6 were a direct and foreseeable consequence of the defendants’ unlawful actions,” asserts the civil suit, filed for Mr. Swalwell in Federal District Court in Washington. “As such, the defendants are responsible for the injury and destruction that followed.”
  • A House Democrat who unsuccessfully prosecuted Donald J. Trump at his impeachment trial last month sued him in federal court on Friday for acts of terrorism and incitement to riot
  • The suit brought by Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, accuses Mr. Trump and key allies of inciting the deadly attack and conspiring with rioters to try to prevent Congress from formalizing President Biden’s election victory.
  • If the sweeping pandemic relief package makes it to Mr. Biden’s desk, it will mark the first major legislative accomplishment of his administration.
  • Though not a criminal case, the suit charges Mr. Trump and his allies with several counts including conspiracy to violate civil rights, negligence, incitement to riot, disorderly conduct, terrorism and inflicting serious emotional distress
  • A majority of the Senate, including seven Republicans, voted to find Mr. Trump “guilty” based on the same factual record last month, but the vote fell short of the two-thirds needed to convict him.
  • In a statement, Jason Miller, an adviser to Mr. Trump, blasted Mr. Swalwell as a “a lowlife with no credibility” but did not comment on the merits of the case.
  • During the Senate trial, Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers flatly denied that he was responsible for the assault and made broad assertions that he was protected by the First Amendment when he urged supporters gathered on Jan. 6 to “fight like hell” to “stop the steal” he said was underway at the Capitol.
delgadool

Lawsuit Challenging NYC School Segregation Targets Gifted Programs - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hools-segregation-lawsuit.html

politics crisis Culture

shared by delgadool on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A major new lawsuit filed Tuesday could force fundamental changes to how New York City’s public school students are admitted into selective schools, and marked the latest front in a growing political, activist and now legal movement to confront inequality in the nation’s largest school system.
  • it will likely prompt scrutiny of New York’s school system, considered among the most racially and socioeconomically segregated in the country.
  • If the plaintiffs are successful, the city could be compelled to restructure or even eliminate current admissions policies for hundreds of selective schools, including gifted and talented programs and academically selective middle and high schools.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “This is the first case in the nation to seek a constitutional right to an anti-racist education,” said Mark Rosenbaum, one of the lawyers suing the city and state.
  • In the Detroit case, a federal court found last year that the district had been so negligent toward the educational needs of students that children had been “deprived of access to literacy.” The court then declared that public school students had a constitutional right to an adequate education. The plaintiffs later reached a settlement with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan to fund more literacy programs in the Detroit public schools.
  • The city’s gifted and talented classes for elementary school students are about 75 percent white and Asian-American, and there are relatively few gifted programs located in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods. White students, who make up just 15 percent of the overall district, are starkly overrepresented in selective middle and high schools.
  • “We absolutely think that all students across the country have a right to an anti-racist education,” Ms. Savage said, noting that the extent of New York’s segregation made it a “particularly powerful place” to bring the lawsuit.
  • The plaintiff’s request for relief includes the elimination of selective admissions processes for all grade levels, which would amount to the most dramatic change to the city’s school system in decades.
rerobinson03

Biden Poised to Raise Taxes on Business and the Rich - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-taxes-business-rich.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Now, under President Biden, they have a shot at ushering in the largest federal tax increase since 1942. It could help pay for a host of spending programs that liberal economists predict would bolster the economy’s performance and repair a tax code that Democrats say encourages wealthy people to hoard assets and big companies to ship jobs and book profits overseas.
  • he package, which follows on the heels of Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic aid bill, is central to the president’s long-term plan to revitalize American workers and industry by funding bridges and roads, universal pre-K, emerging industries like advanced batteries and efforts to invigorate the fight against climate change.Mr. Biden plans to finance that spending, at least in part, with tax increases that could raise upward of $2.5 trillion in revenue if his plan hews closely to what he proposed in the 2020 presidential campaign. Aides suggest his proposals might not be entirely paid for, with some one-time spending increases offset by increased federal borrowing.
  • iberal economists say this year could be different, thanks to the unique political and economic circumstances surrounding the recovery from the pandemic recession. With Mr. Biden’s signing of a $1.9 trillion economic relief bill, financed entirely by federal borrowing, forecasters now expect the economy to grow this year at its fastest annual clip since the 1980s. Republicans and some economists have begun to warn of overheating growth spurring runaway inflation, which could reduce the salience of warnings that tax increases would cause growth to stall.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Mr. Biden has pledged not to raise taxes on people earning less than $400,000.
  • “The purpose of the tax system is to both raise enough revenue for what the government wants to do, and to make sure that as we’re doing that we are encouraging activities that are in the national interest and discouraging ones that are not,” said Heather Boushey, a member of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers.Key Democrats are trying to bring the party to consensus. The top tax writer in the Senate, Ron Wyden of Oregon, is drafting a series of bills to raise taxes, many of them overlapping with Mr. Biden’s campaign proposals.
  • A report from the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation this month showed that multinational companies paid an average U.S. tax rate of less than 8 percent on their income in 2018, down from 16 percent in 2017. The report also found that those companies did not slow their practice of booking profits in low-tax havens like Bermuda.
yehbru

Opinion: The global economy won't recover if we don't get vaccines to developing countr... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Politics Global Covid Vaccine Pandemic Economy

shared by yehbru on 07 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The International Monetary Fund recently projected global GDP growth at 5.5% this year and 4.2% in 2022
  • As our note to the recent G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors points out, there is a major risk that as advanced economies and a few emerging markets recover faster, most developing countries will languish for years to come.
  • We estimate that, by the end of 2022, cumulative per capita income will be 13% below pre-crisis projections in advanced economies — compared with 18% for low-income countries and 22% for emerging and developing countries, excluding China.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Before the crisis, we forecast that income gaps between advanced economies and 110 emerging and developing countries would narrow between 2020 and 2022. But we now estimate that only 52 economies will be catching up during that period, while 58 are set to fall behind.
  • Last year, advanced economies on average deployed about 24% of GDP in fiscal measures, compared with only 6% in emerging markets and less than 2% in low-income countries
  • Insuring vaccine producers against the downside risks of overproduction may be an option worth considering.
  • Faster progress in ending the health crisis could raise global income cumulatively by $9 trillion between 2020 and 2025. That would benefit all countries, including around $4 trillion for advanced economies — which beats by far any measure of vaccine-related costs.
  • One risk going forward — especially in the face of diverging recoveries — is the potential for market volatility in response to changing financial conditions. Major central banks will need to carefully communicate their monetary policy plans to prevent excess volatility in financial markets, both at home and in the rest of the world.
  • For its part, the IMF has stepped up in an unprecedented manner by providing over $105 billion in new financing to 85 countries and debt service relief for our poorest members. We aim to do even more to support our 190 member countries in 2021 and beyond.
  • The alternative — to leave poorer countries behind — would only entrench abject inequality. Even worse, it would represent a major threat to global economic and social stability. And it would rank as a historic missed opportunity.
aidenborst

The world went on a debt binge last year. There could be a nasty hangover - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics US history crisis Culture Policy Pandemic economics Biden UK Italy Interest

shared by aidenborst on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Desperate to save their economies from complete collapse, governments borrowed unprecedented amounts of money on the cheap to support workers and businesses during the pandemic. Now, with recovery in sight, a big risk looms: interest payments.
  • Spurred on by rock-bottom rates, governments issued $16.3 trillion in debt in 2020, and they're expected to borrow another $12.6 trillion this year, according to S&P Global Ratings. But fears are growing that an explosive economic comeback starting this summer could generate inflation, potentially forcing central banks to raise rates sooner than expected.
  • Should that happen, the cost of servicing mountains of sovereign debt will jump, eating up government funds that could otherwise be spent on essential services or rebuilding weakened economies.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • "A big jump in interest rates would be very costly," said Ugo Panizza, professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. "Central banks will face very, very complicated tradeoffs if inflation does go up."
  • The moves have been triggered in part by growing confidence about the next phase of the pandemic. As vaccination campaigns allow governments to lift some restrictions, consumers are expected to rush to restaurants and hop on planes. That could push up prices, which central banks have pledged to keep under control.
  • US lawmakers approved a mammoth $1.9 trillion stimulus package on Wednesday that could send prices higher and increase pressure on the Federal Reserve.
  • The Congressional Budget Office projects that publicly-held government debt in the United States will climb to nearly $22.5 trillion by the end of fiscal 2021. That's equivalent to 102% of annual gross domestic product. In Italy, the ratio stood at 154% at the end of September, while Greece was almost at 200%.
  • Interest costs are even more sensitive to inflation and rate hikes because of the pandemic response.The UK government borrowed £270.6 billion ($377 billion) between April 2020 and January 2021, and higher interest rates mean increased payments on that debt.
  • "Just as it would be irresponsible to withdraw [economic] support too soon, it would also be irresponsible to allow future borrowing and debt to be left unchecked," he said.
  • "It is a real concern," said Randall Kroszner, who served as a Federal Reserve governor from 2006 until 2009. If US debt payments suddenly go "from being quite low to being quite significant," that could weigh on the recovery and slow economic activity, he added.
  • Panizza said that Italy needs to refinance or extend the due date of about one-seventh of its debt every year. If interest rates were to go up by 2%, that would add about half a point of GDP, or roughly $9.9 billion, to debt servicing costs annually. That's a "substantial" amount, he emphasized.
  • "This is not something that we have a lot of experience with," Kroszner said.
anonymous

A COVID-19 Vaccine Could Get West Virginians Cash, Guns Or Trips : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...rizes-for-vaccinated-residents

shared by anonymous on 06 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • West Virginia is giving its vaccine incentive program a boost to get more residents immunized from the coronavirus, Gov. Jim Justice announced on Tuesday.
  • All residents who get a COVID-19 vaccine will be enrolled in the chance to win a college scholarship, a tricked-out truck, or hunting rifles, in addition to a $1.588 million grand prize. The program, which will run from June 20 through Aug. 4, will be paid for through federal pandemic relief funds.
  • Justice announced in April that West Virginians ages 16 to 35 who got vaccinated could get a $100 savings bond. The immunization drive in the state has since drastically slowed after showing a strong early start.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The state reports that 51.1% of West Virginia's population has received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine. Justice hopes the state's new offers of a $588,000 second prize, weekend vacations to state parks, lifetime hunting and fishing licenses, and custom hunting shotguns will boost that number.
  • West Virginians who have been fully vaccinated will need to register to be entered to win the newly announced prizes at a later date.
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported as of Tuesday night that 40.9% of the population has been fully vaccinated. President Biden is aiming for at least 70% of the U.S. adult population to have one vaccine shot and 160 million adults to be fully vaccinated by July 4..
anonymous

HUD: Growth Of Homelessness During 2020 Was 'Devastating,' Even Before The Pandemic : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ating-even-before-the-pandemic

shared by anonymous on 18 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The nation's homeless population grew last year for the fourth year in a row. On a single night in January 2020, there were more than 580,000 individuals who were homeless in the United States, a 2% increase from the year before.The numbers, released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development Thursday, do not reflect the impact of the pandemic.
  • "And we know the pandemic has only made the homelessness crisis worse," HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge said
  • Among the report's more sobering findings: homelessness among veterans and families did not improve for the first time in many years.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • more than 106,000 children were homeless during the once-a-year count,
  • While the majority of homeless children were in shelters or transitional housing, almost 11,000 were living outside.
  • "I think it's tragic that we have increasing unsheltered numbers," said Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. "We know that unsheltered people have horrible health conditions."
  • Twenty-three percent of those who were homeless last year identified as Hispanic or Latino.
  • California was home to the largest number of people experiencing homelessness — 161,548 — according to the 2020 count. A quarter of all homeless individuals in the United States were living in either New York City or Los Angeles.
  • As has been the case for years, a disproportionate share of those experiencing homelessness were Black
  • For the first time since the government began doing the annual count, the number of single adults living outside — 209,413 — exceeded the number of individuals living in shelters — 199,478.
  • Some individuals have been worried about contracting COVID-19 staying inside, and many shelters have been forced to limit bed space to meet health and safety protocols. This has led to an increase in street homelessness in communities that were unable to provide alternative housing, although some have taken advantage of hotel space left empty during the pandemic.
  • Becky Gligo, executive director of Housing Solutions Tulsa, said her Oklahoma county raised money to move more than 400 unsheltered individuals into a hotel or other housing after a major storm hit the area this winter, leaving fewer than a dozen people on the streets.
  • John Mendez, executive director of Bethesda Cares, a service provider in Montgomery County, Md., said his group was able to permanently house some individuals who had lived outside for more than a decade
  • "I think we're going to see homelessness increase," said Sean Read,
  • Homelessness is "generally a delayed response" to economic setbacks,
  • Read and other providers are hopeful that billions of dollars in housing aid included in a recent $1.9 trillion COVID relief package will go a long way toward alleviating the crisis. The amount of aid is unprecedented. The bill provides $5 billion in homelessness assistance, more than $20 billion in emergency rental aid and $5 billion in new housing vouchers.
  • Roman, of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, noted that the measure also includes direct payments for families, which could keep many in their homes. She said some communities are also planning to use the funds to buy empty hotels that can be used to house more individuals, both temporarily and permanently.
rerobinson03

Biden's Task: Overhaul the Economy, as Fast as Possible - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...en-economy-infrastructure.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In navigating those obstacles, Mr. Biden faces a strategic dilemma: how to pass as much of his potentially transformative agenda, as quickly as possible, through the narrow window afforded him by Democrats’ thin margins in the House and Senate.
  • Liberal economists stress that if he wants to truly upgrade the economy, Mr. Biden needs both.
  • Inside the administration, aides disagree on the likelihood that both halves of the plan — the physical piece and the human piece — could pass Congress this year. Some see hope that Republicans, spurred by the business community, could join an effort with Democrats to muster 60 votes to pass a bill that spends heavily on roads, bridges, water systems and other traditional infrastructure. Some Democrats, like Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a key swing vote, have insisted that Republicans be involved in the effort.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The “Build Back Better” plan that his economic advisers recommended Mr. Biden pursue this week would lead with those physical investments: a combination of spending and tax incentives on traditional infrastructure, high-growth industry cultivation and carbon-reducing energy investment that documents suggest could top $2 trillion
  • At the same time, Democratic leaders will most likely prepare to move at least one part of Mr. Biden’s plans quickly through the budget reconciliation process, which allows senators to skirt the filibuster and pass legislation with a bare majority, as they did for the coronavirus relief bill. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the chairman of the Finance Committee, said in an interview that he is drawing up legislative text for tax increases to fund the Biden spending: “I’m going to start rolling out specific proposals so that people can have ideas about how they might proceed,” he said.
« First ‹ Previous 61 - 80 of 94 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page