#what i care about is congress and local which predictably no one wants to talk about

[gallows-into-oblivion]

unfollowing anyone who puts stuff about the US presidential debate on my dash

[qonqr]

I’m Still Here

Many of you may have been asking yourself where did Silver go? Is anyone still working on QONQR?  I admit I’ve been very quiet the past year and from the outside, it looks like not much is going on.

 Before I give my QONQR update I want to share a major accomplishment for me. I’m a little less of a hoarder than I was a month ago. As the 11th year anniversary approached, I decided I had too much old QONQR merchandise I needed to get in the hands of my players. However, I hate shipping. I should be the spokesperson for one of those shipping providers that make shipping easy because I hate doing it so much. Many of you know that the player Rayndel has an Etsy store where she sells QONQR merchandise with my permission. I sent her a 65lb (30kg) box of QONQR stuff. Coffee cups, T-shirts, dog tags and stickers. She is liquidating all of it for me. You can find it all right here.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/DragonHoardCrafts?section_id=19648949

 2020 and 2021 have been challenging for most people, and I’m no exception.  Both our kids are off to college. We are getting older and so are our extended families. Medical issues become more frequent for us and them. The stress of the pandemic doesn’t help. There are days when I can sit at my computer all day, and never write a line of code. Things are hard, they impact our ability to work as hard as we once did.

 A little over two weeks ago, QONQR hit its 11th birthday. The milestone passed quietly. I always spend time reflecting on how QONQR has changed my life and the stories you’ve shared about how it has changed yours. We’ve built something great together. Together we keep it going.

 Despite outward appearances. Things are happening at QONQR. I am working, albeit at an admittedly slow pace. I’ve let go of the stress of pushing QONQR as fast as I can, and instead I’m working on QONQR at a pace that is comfortable. It is important to me and my family that I end my day without being drained of all my energy by the awful decisions and quality that Apple and Google hand me every day.

 The next release of QONQR will include the following features. Many of these are mostly done, so I’m happy to share them, with the caveat that I have no idea when these will actually hit the store. Tons of testing is still needed.

 New Sync Lock Rules

 Sync lock will now last much longer, perhaps a week or even a month before it automatically expires. Along with that Sync Lock Protection will also last longer. The more times you gain sync lock protection, the longer it will last. We want to protect legitimate family members from daily locks, but also want to avoid situations where multi-scoper can get infrequent help to unlock an army of devices and accounts. In addition to longer locks, Sync lock may also hurt resource collection with your bases depending on how play testing goes.

 As with everything pertaining to multi-scoping, it is a blurry line between stopping those who play unfair, and those that are punished for inviting family and friends to play.

 Notifications

I have wanted push notifications for most of the past 10 years. In fact, we were very close to having them implemented about 5-7 years ago, but Google changed their push notification system. We used a unified messaging system created by Microsoft to push to both Google and Apple simultaneously. There were incompatibilities between the new and the old Google system for a long time. We gave up on trying to finish that implementation back then, waiting for Google and Microsoft to get their stuff fixed, and it was years before it became a priority again.

 I spent most of the past 3-4 months working on notification. This area is quite possibly one of the worst technical implementations I’ve had to work with in all my time working in software. For example, if you kill an iPhone application, you also remove the ability to get push notifications until the next time you start the app. It appears to be almost random when Android will decide to beep your phone when receiving a notification, and when it will be silently added to the notification center. For both Apple and Google, the documentation is frustratingly inaccurate or out of date. There are multiple different ways a notification can be processed depending on whether the application was terminated by the user, suspended by the operating system, in the background or in the foreground. Was the notification scheduled locally or sent from a remote server?  Honestly, as a developer, it would be difficult to purposely design a worse system.

 The good news is that I believe I have it working as good as it can possibly work. In the next release you will be able to enable or disable notifications as a whole, or selectively choose which notification you want to receive. Notifications will include: Atlantis, New Wire messages, Mentions in Chat and Forums, Bots and Bases Full.

 A Major Overhaul to the Scope

The changes to Sync Lock mandated that overheat have additional logic to control bots and energy regeneration. More significantly, if we want to have a notification that your scope is full, so I needed to know exactly when the scope would be full.  Currently your regeneration rate is based on the number of launches in the past hour. Launching a few seconds before or after an old launch rolls off that 1 hour mark can mess up the prediction of when you will be full again. To make that prediction accurately, without checking every minute to see, “Are my bots full now”, we changed the formula for when bots will be full, and scheduled a notification based on that time.

 The new regeneration is very similar to the old, but we predict you may get 1 or 2 more launches per hour. I’m hedging the formula towards more not fewer launches to make sure this is seen as a positive change.

 As long as we are messing with the scope, let’s talk about the Bot Regen Accelerator.  Hard core players have pointed out that players who launch on a timer, always hitting the “optimal” launch interval, don’t gain any advantage when purchasing this $0.99 upgrade. In the new release this upgrade will reduce your overheat level by 1 level and you will never be in maximum overheat due to deploying bots. The impact of the upgrade will be noticeable by everyone with this change. The name of this upgrade will probably change to “Scope Coolant” or “Heat Diffuser”. Send me your name ideas.

  Subscriptions, Ads and Elite Players

This is a change that probably won’t be in the next release, but it is something I’m thinking about before the end of the year. Apple has had a bug in their subscription logic for years. If you purchase a subscription on an iPhone, then get a new iPhone, you need to cancel the subscription in the App Store, then renew from your new phone. Apple keeps charging you, but the new device can’t see the subscription, so QONQR doesn’t know you are a subscriber. Why wouldn’t Apple fix this? Well Apple only takes half the percentage of a subscription after the first year. By making you start a new subscription, they can double their cut of the money you pay QONQR for the subscription. Another problem with subscriptions is that they result in many support requests because they honestly aren’t 100% reliable in either Apple or Google’s implementation.

 Many people know that earlier in the year, Apple introduced a change to advertising that blocks tracking. This is great in theory, and I get it as a consumer that I don’t like to be tracked, but this tracker blocking also blocks my ability to make any revenue on advertising. Why would I continue to give away free advertising?

 Elite players are those that have spent over $100 in QONQR over the life of their gaming experience. Over the years the benefits of being “Elite” have dwindled. Features have changed, and incentives have ended. I’d like to invest more time and energy to build features for players that continue to support QONQR but I think it makes more sense to lower the bar and make the benefits for “active” spenders.

 With these three things in mind, there is a chance that QONQR will move to a monthly “pass” option rather than a subscription. There seems to be a trend with games, where players buy a monthly pass that offers benefits, rather than using subscriptions. Subscriptions are buggy and in the case of Apple, a shady business practice.

 The same benefits available to subscribers would remain under the “pass”, but you would have to explicitly purchase the pass each month.  Secondary missions may move to the “pass” model with non-pass players getting only a handful of secondary missions per month. Ads would be completely removed from the app in this scenario since they no longer generate much revenue.

  What’s in the Plans for 2022?

 If you have read my blog over the years, you know that Apple and Google make it harder and harder to stop cheating (primarily multi-scoping).  It is being reported that Windows 11 will have the ability to run Android apps. I don’t know yet how that will impact QONQR, but I’m guessing it won’t be good. At best it will have no impact because I’ll be able to stop QONQR from running on Windows, at worst it could be a nightmare.

 March 2022 will mark the 10 year anniversary QONQR hit the Apple App Store. I can say with a high level of confidence that QONQR is now the longest running location-based, multi-platform, mobile game.

 Personally, I think 2022 needs to be a transformational year for QONQR. I’m not sure we can survive if the game doesn’t change. Apple, Google, and Microsoft have never cared about supporting mobile developers. Outrageous fees and abusive rules (recently acknowledged by the US Congress) have been part of the ecosystem from the start. There are dozens of apps that you can download from the official Google Play store that make it a simple tap to attempt to hack and manipulate an Android app, so players can do something the developer is attempting to prohibit. Once again Microsoft broke the tools I use to help secure the app from hackers, causing weeks of work to find a solution that would maintain the same level of security.  Apple and Google both purposely hide information from developers that would help them ensure real people are using their apps instead of bots. They do this under the façade of privacy, but ignore simple solutions that could maintain privacy, while helping developers ensure the integrity of how their apps are used.

 I’ve said for years, the only way to stop hackers and cheaters in QONQR is to make it irrelevant. That requires a major shift in gameplay. Together, you the players and me the developer, we need to decide if we want QONQR to have such a major shift. I don’t know what that shift would look like, but 2022 might be the year we figure it out.

 2020 was a year of making sure QONQR can survive. Through tons of work that year, massive software rewrites and updates, I was able to cut the cost of hosting QONQR. Today the cost of hosting QONQR all year, matches what we spent in three months during 2019. So far 2021 has been a year of slow work toward significant improvements to the game, but without major strategic impact to your daily playing. I’ve taken my time to avoid burn out. I’m enjoying the pace of my current work week. It has been good for my family and me.

 I’m not sure what 2022 will look like for QONQR yet, but I’m excited to try something new. Maybe we’ll break things, maybe we will create something ten times better than what we have had for the last decade. Time will tell. We’ll figure it out together.

 Thanks for keeping the lights on.

-Scott (aka Silver)

[casnonotbcofspn]

Why WW3 Jokes Are Terrible

So if you have been literally anywhere on the internet in the last two weeks, you’ll have been exposed to a lot of WW3 jokes. The hashtag started trrending on twitter - the point is that it’s blown up, and WW3 is the hot comedic topic of the moment. 

For context, this all started after a US drone airstrike killed one of Iran’s military leaders, Qassem Soleimani. This strike was approved by Donald Trump, and many are seeing it as a declaration of war, and therefore as the start of WW3. 

That’s what lead to a huge amount of WW3 jokes circulating online, and I want to outline my problems with them.

Firstly, the major themes in these jokes is the reintroduction of the draft. The draft was abolished in America in 1973 by President Nixon, who hoped to squash the anti-war movement, as he thought middle class protesters only cared about the Vietnam War because they didn’t want to be drafted or have their friends drafted (that’s not relevant, but historical context is helpful). Now, there has been rumblings about bringing back the draft for the past five years or so, but there is no actual evidence that this is going to happen.

 So for the draft to come back, what would need to happen? It would need to pass through Congress, with the majority voting in favour of it. President Trump would also have to finalise the process by approving the draft.

 If the draft came back, what would happen? Firrstly, would women be included in the draft? As of a recent federal court ruling, women not being in the draft would be unconstituional. However, this doesn’t mean that women would be included in the draft, because as we’ve seen the currrent administration has no problem with doing things that are unconstituional. So we know that women and men would be involved in the draft and the draft usually composess of people age 18-26. However, the system by which people are selected for military service is unkonown. Many different systems have been used in US military history.It usually starts with everyone (or all men) in the selected age range registering for the draft. What happens next is a different matter.It could involve local draft boards reviewing those registered and deciding who and wouldn’t be drafted (as it was at the start of the Vietnam War), or it could be a lottery system, where birthdays are drawn out in the same way as other lotteries, and those registered and born on those days would be drafted (as it was to the end of the Vietnam War). The draft was used during Americcan Civil War, WW1, WW2, The Korean War and The Vietnam War in America, and each time it was slightly different, so we have no idea how the draft would work if it was introduced again today. 

But back to the jokes. I’m going to say this once. The Draft Is Not Funny. It’s not a quirky topic for you to make a tiktok about. It’s conscription. It’s a system that has always been biased, regularly calling POC, working class people and rural workers to serivce, and allowing the upper classes, the wealthy and those in positions of power to escape, claiming that they have bone spurs in their foot (no shade Donald). It’s not funny, and there’s no concrete proof that it’s going to be reintroduced.

 Also, a slight sub genre of jokes about the draft I’ve seen are people saying they would revert back to stereotypes if the draft was reintroduced. For example, young girls saying that they would rather simply become a housewife and a mother to avoid the draft, or gay people saying that they don’t think they should get rid of the clause in the draft that says homosexuals cannot be drafted, as it would help them avoid being drafted. It is horrendous that it is considered funny in our society to accept and welcome opression rather than fight against the draft, a biased and militarisitc system. Seriously, would go rather “know your purpose” as a glorified dishwasher, baby-maker and sex toy (in reference to a popular TikTok) than fight against the draft? It makes me sad that this is how my generation has been socialised.

My second problem is the least relevant, hence why I am only going to devote a small paragraph to it. We do not know if this war with Iran (which may happen) will be WW3. WW3 may have already happened. Are any of the conflicts that have happened acorss the world since 1945 going to be considered WW3 by historians in the future? We don’t know. WW1 and WW2 are terms that were not used during those wars. They are historical terms applied after the event, so we cannot say that this is going to be WW3, when we have no idea if a) it has already happened or not, or b) how historians will view this conflict that has arisen between America and Iran. Calling it WW3 only serves to dramatise the events ocurring.

A slightly more personal topic for my third problem. I have had severe anxiety surrounding “end of the world” type situations/jokes/news reports my whole life. I am also (un dx) autistic, meaning I struggle to understand when these things which may be jokes are jokes. Instead, I assume that they are peoples actual predictions of what is going to happen. As you can imagine, going on the interent this year has caused me to have a lot of anxiety and panic. With a WW3 joke on every meme account I follow, a refference to WW3 in every YouTube video I watch and every other TikTok I watch being about the draft, the interent is currently a minefield of anxietyr. I look at the wrong thing, and boom I’m having a panic attack. Now this is only my personal experience, Think of how other people with anxiety may be feeling at this time. Think of how other people with doomsday phobias may be feeling. Think of how other autistic people may be feeling. Now these may be cute quriky jokes to you and your neurotypical friends, but for many of us, they are seriously affeecting our mental health. But of course, most of you would disregard how those who are neurodivergent or with mental illnesses feel to get your TikTok about the end of the world trending.

Please consider us, and how these “jokes” are affecting us.

Fourthly (I know, I’ve got a lot of problems with this), I’m going to be talking about the astounding levels of priveledge that western teens have to be making these jokes online. The jokes are usually made by Americans, and I know it’s happening a lot in England too (as that’s where I live), but I don’t know about other western countries. A tweet from (@shraywavy) sums it up well:

“priveledged ass americans making this all ab them/ making jokes is completely absurd, how can yall belittle this situation when multiple brown ppl are about to be killed/displaced n the entire region is ab to be completely destroyed due to continuous imperialist agression”

Americans may find this funny. Americans may find WW3 jokes hilarious. Here’s the thing  - they need to examine their priveledge. They will be okay. Everyday Americans will be okay. Yes, people in the military will die. I think that is horrific, I think that anyone who is coerced by Republican propoganda into volunteering in this war that may happen is a victim, and I feel awful for anyone who loses a relative or friend in this war, if it happens. I will go on to talk about the treatment of American troops in this post. But the majority of US civilians will be fine.  Your country will not be invaded, or bombed. No one will destroy your cultural landmarks. Buildings around you won’t collapse and there won’t be fighting in the streets. Those things may very well happen to Iranian people. And you’re making a joke about it? It is not funny. The spilt blood of good people, people who did nothing wrong is not a joke. How much priveledge and ignorance does it take for you to think making a joke about this  situation when in reality it will not have that much of an impact on your life?

You may think I’m being overdramatic, linking memes to the deaths that may happen. But I’m not. If you make a WW3 joke. You are saying that this situation is a joke. That this situation is funny. Jokes are supposed to be funny. This situation may very well lead to death and destruction in Iran. And that’s funny to you? The majority of people making and liking WW3 jokes obviosuly do not endorse the confliict with Iran. They don’t want Iranian people to die. In fact,  the whole WW3 jokes movement has an anti-war undertone. But you need to think about the implications of the media that you create and consume.

Now, there has already been some backlash against these jokes online. I’m not the first one. Many people have come back at the backlash, saying that these jokes are a coping mechanism for the genuine fears they have about a war. As a big advocate for those with anxiety (and as a person with anxiety and with a lot of weird coping mechanisms), I don’t want to bash people’s coping mechanisms. I just want to analyse them.

Firstly, what is a coping mechanism? A coping mechanism is  an adaptation to environmental stress that is based on conscious or unconscious choice and that enhances control over behavior or gives psychological comfort, as defined by dictionary.com. What is the environmental stress here? The impending conflict with Iran. What is the choice you make to give yourself control or to physcologically comfort yourself? Making a joke. 

Now there is evidence both for and against the idea that humour is a good coping mechanism. There are plently of articles and pieces of research on Google Scholar about black humour as a coping mechanism that I would reccomend you check out.  Personally, I am of the belief that humour can be used a coping mechanism. It’s dicassosiation from the problem. The question is, what is the problem? You’re afraid of the conflict with Iran. Of what might happen. Now it is unlikely that any direct action will be taken against US domestic territories, so I don’t think fear of your everyday life being disrupted comes underneath this. *If it does, please tell me. This entire post is based on my assumptions and I want to be challenged if you feel differently to what I say. 

I personally find ignoring the problem the best coping mechanism in this situation. I will still be politically active about the fact that Trump alone seems to have declared war on Iran, but I need time-out from it to  cope. I want to know from the people that are using these jokes to cope specifically what they are afraid of. I  turned to Instagram for this, but if you want to tell me on here then that’d be helpful (I am aware that no-one is going to read this fucking huge post but still). An instagram acccount (@sapphic.in) reposted a tweet from (@uhhhhmad) which read:

“stop saying ur making memes about war as a “coping’ method every single one of you will be fine the people of iraq and iran will continue to suffer u people have nothing to be fucking coping for”

The comments underneath the instagram retweet of this post don’t really explain what people are afraid of (this post had a series of other posts on it so not all the comments are about this particular tweet). A few people refrenced being afraid of their boyfriend or brothers etc. (basically men they know elidgble for the draft)  being drafted. There are some comments which basically say “it’s a joke calm down liberal”, and if you need me to explain why “it’s just a joke” is a terrible justification for anything, tell me and I’ll explain. But back to the fear of relatives being drafted.

 There is no proof that the draft is coming back. In fact, the only reaso that people are afraid of the draft coming back IS BECAUSE OF THESE JOKES. They are the primary soure of media that all of us are consuming about the situation. They mainly refrence the draft - so everyone thinks the draft is coming back. Then larger news outlets pick up on the fact thatt the draft coming back is a hot topic - not politcially but in teen-created media, so they make media about it. They make it sound as real or as serious as they want - American news outlets have no obligation to tell the truth, and they have a motivation not to (they are businesses, so if they make drastic headlines about the draft people will read them and watch them and they will get more money). So suddenly because of these jokes about the draft coming back everyone thinks that there is a eerious threat of the draft coming back so they need the jokes about the draft coming back to cope?

This leads into my final big problem, but before I go onto that, I’d like to ask anyone who has a family memeber, relative, partner, friend of a friend etc. serving in the US military in the areas where this conflict is happenning (and where this war might happen), how do these jokes make you feel? Honestly, I want to know. I have no idea if they help you to cope or if they make you more afraid, as I have no relatives in the military so I don’t know how it feels.

My final big problem is that these jokes are the primary source of media that people are consuming about this situation. Does everyone read the news etc., making sure they know the latest on what’s going on? I know I don’t. I’m not commenting on the situation though. I’m commenting on the memes, and beleive me I’ve seen A LOT of them. So we rely on the memes etc. to be our informant. That could potetntially leave us well informed, but it doesn’t. Who’s making these memes? Is it journalists, politcial correspondents, military spokespeople, anyone really who works in the military or politics or who knows what’s happening? No, it’s not. It’s teens just like you and me who have no real clue beyond the headlines and the instagram posts what is happening. We’ve created this media hysteria. What do you look at more? The memes/jokes/tiktoks or news articles about it? How the hell are we supposed to stay reasonably informed and take anti-war action when the source of information we use is people making memes because they think they’re funny who have no real idea what’s going to happen next. Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but this is really distracting us from what’s really happening. What the US gvernment is actually doing. These jokes may be anti-war but they are helping those who are pro-war immensely.

The people who do serve in this war will not be positively affected. The American government doesn’t care about the troops. The people who will lose the person in their family who provides them with income in this war will not be cared for by the US. The people who get injured in this war will be victims of the poor veterans healthcare system. The people who get PSTD from this war will be mocked and ignored. Most pro-war people like Trump couldn’t give a flying fuck about the troops and the ordinairy people they’ll affeect. So please don’t make jokes about getting drafted. People who lost people to wars aren’t laughing. People who got drafted in Vietnam or Korea aren’t laughing. Serving in the millitary can have horrific consequences. It’s not funny to make a joke about being forced into that situation.

Finally, I’d like to refrence a tweet by (@eclipsecassette). It’s about the impact that this war may have if it happens. 

“this war will likely bring another wave of islamophobia and xenophobia against anyone visibly brown just like after 9/11 so we should probably worry about that more than getting drafted”

They’re right. We don’t know what this war will bring but know that it cannot bring good. It will bring more xenophobia disguised as nationalism. It will bring more violence and hate crimes. It will bring veterans left injured and in poverty. It will bring destruction to Iran. It will make our world a much worse place. That’s why I say no to war with Iran, and I say no to making a joke out of it.

However, I am just a white teenager living in Britain who’s never experienced war, never known anyone who’s experienced war. Please tell me if I’ve said anything factually incorrect or if you disagree with anything I’ve said. I want to be as well informed on this topic as I can. Also, if I used your tweet in here and you want me to take it out I will. If you’ve got to this point, thank you so much for reading this.

[johnmauldin]

When This Liquidity Bubble Pops, We’ll Face The Biggest Crisis Yet

Debt is a huge a drag on the economy. It’s especially true after it rises over the 80 to 90% of GDP level.

US government debt is now 106% of GDP. And if you add state and local debt, total government debt is over 120% of GDP.

Shades of Italy and Greece.

Off-Budget Deficits Congress Glosses Over

Congress wants you to believe last year’s deficit was $779 billion. They don’t mention the off-budget deficit, which adds a lot to total debt.

It is not easy to find that number, but fortunately, my friend Michael Lewitt writing in The Credit Strategist brings us this pithy note:

Our current prosperity is built on an explosion of debt; it is therefore unsustainable. The US added roughly $1.3 trillion of GDP in the fiscal year that ended in September but also added $1.271 trillion of debt. Interest rates, while still running well below real-world inflation, are rising in a heavily leveraged economy. The $1.271 trillion increase in federal debt was nearly $500 billion or 39% higher than the official annual deficit of only $779 billion, which means that politicians are keeping significant amounts of debt off-balance sheet. I don’t know who they think they’re fooling, but they aren’t going to be able to keep this con game running much longer. Over the past five years, the official deficit was reported as $2.977 trillion whereas the federal deficit grew by $4.777 trillion, meaning that 38% of the actual shortfall was hidden by our feckless leaders. And all of these figures do not include trillions of more dollars of off-balance sheet entitlement obligations promised by the government to future retirees and other voters.

That deficit was for fiscal year 2018, which ended on September 30. The CBO’s latest projection is we will add close to $1 trillion of debt in 2019 and over $1 trillion in 2020.

The off-budget deficits have averaged around $360 billion for the last five years, generally increasing over time.

But if we take just that average and add it to the projected deficits, the US government deficit will be (drumroll, please) approximately $1.4 trillion per year for the next five years, which will mean $29 trillion total debt by 2024.

And that’s without a recession. Throw in a recession, and we’ll get to $30 trillion long before then. Care to speculate what interest rates will be? What quantitative easing will look like? What all the other market disruptors will look like?

A Sea of Liquidity That Will Soon Drain Away

My friend Chris Cole at Artemis Capital writes a rather brilliant client letter. He graciously sends it to me. Here’s a quick bite.

Chris notes that investors have been swimming in a sea of liquidity for so long that we notice it only when it disappears. Then central banks provide more liquidity. And things go back to what we think is normal.

But liquidity is simply investor willingness to buy and sell. It is as much about market and investor sentiment as any true “fundamental.” Here’s Chris Cole:

In markets and in life, we swim in mediums of thought abstractions… the same way a fish swims in water. When the medium collapses, so does the reality… causing us to question the nature of both. As Foster Wallace eloquently explains, “The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.” Volatility is always the failure of medium… the crumpling of a reality we thought we knew to a new truth. It is the moment where we learn that we are a fish living in a false reality called water… and that reality can change... or there are other realities. True volatility isn’t the change of the thing, it’s the changing of the medium around it and the realization that the thing never really existed in the first place.

This is all you need to know to understand when the volatility storm will truly come. It is not about valuations, money printing, or where the VIX is at any point. When the collective consciousness stops believing growth can be created by money and debt expansion, the entire medium will fall apart violently, otherwise it will continue to be real. The belief that the medium is the reality is what holds the edifice together temporally.

You might dismiss this as way too bearish.

Maybe it is, right now and for the next few years. But when global debt starts suffocating economic growth and liquidity, the relative Sea of Tranquility in which we have been swimming for a while could become quite stormy indeed.

That is why I keep harping on The Great Reset. I think we will set a new standard for what the word volatility (absent a shooting war) really means.

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[multipleservicelisting]

McConnell Seeks Impeachment Trial Delay as Senate Dysfunction Reigns

WASHINGTON — Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, asked Democrats on Thursday to delay former President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment trial until mid-February, complicating their hopes of reaching a swift agreement to prevent the proceeding from interfering with the crucial first weeks of President Biden’s tenure.

Mr. McConnell made the request on a day when Mr. Biden’s call for unity was already running into partisan dysfunction in the Senate. Mr. McConnell and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, were locked in a separate stalemate over how they would share power and whether Democrats would promise to preserve Republicans’ ability to filibuster legislation.

The deadlock highlighted Mr. McConnell’s determination to maintain his leverage to thwart Mr. Biden’s priorities and the difficulty Democrats would have doing business with a one-vote majority.

The result: On Mr. Biden’s first full day in office and Democrats’ first in total control of Congress, the Senate was in a state of suspended animation, unable to move forward with even the basic tasks of organizing committees or setting rules for getting virtually anything done.

It was not clear whether Mr. Schumer would agree to Mr. McConnell’s request for an impeachment trial delay. Justin Goodman, Mr. Schumer’s spokesman, said the leader would review Mr. McConnell’s proposal and discuss it with him.

In a statement, the Republican leader argued that the former president’s defense team needed “a modest and reasonable amount of additional time” to prepare a case for trial after the House raced to charge Mr. Trump with incitement of insurrection for his role in encouraging the violent mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. Mr. McConnell proposed that the House bring its case late next week and then give Mr. Trump’s defense team — to be led by Butch Bowers, a lawyer from South Carolina — until Feb. 13 to begin oral arguments.

“At this time of strong political passions, Senate Republicans believe it is absolutely imperative that we do not allow a half-baked process to short-circuit the due process that former President Trump deserves, or damage the Senate or the presidency,” said Mr. McConnell, who has told colleagues that he is open to convicting the president.

Democrats had been preparing to begin a trial as soon as Monday, and hoped to reach a resolution in a week or less to try to minimize the effects of a divisive and all-consuming proceeding during Mr. Biden’s first days in the White House. But they also want to claim that they held a fair trial, and they could end up embracing a delay to quickly confirm more of Mr. Biden’s cabinet.

Earlier on Thursday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi had declined to say when she planned to send the House impeachment charge to the Senate, which would immediately start the clock for beginning the trial. She said only that she would do so “soon.”

The lingering disputes over how to proceed with Mr. Trump’s trial and the Senate’s business reflected the speed with which Mr. Biden’s optimistic calls to sweep aside partisan animus and tackle a daunting set of overlapping crises were dissipating in the realities of the polarized Congress.

Republican leaders in the House and Senate, who not 24 hours before had extended warm congratulations, were swiftly retreating into their partisan corners. Even as they pledged to keep open minds, they criticized Mr. Biden’s decision on Wednesday to re-enter the Paris climate agreement and his proposal to overhaul the nation’s immigration system.

“Several big steps in the wrong direction,” Mr. McConnell warned on the Senate floor.

“The wrong priorities at the wrong time,” declared his counterpart in the House, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California.

Mr. McConnell in particular was returning to a familiar role as the chief tactical antagonist to the majority, trying to use negotiations over a typically anodyne set of rules for operating the Senate to weaken Democrats’ power to push through Mr. Biden’s agenda over unified Republican opposition.

The Biden Administration

Updated 

Jan. 21, 2021, 8:45 p.m. ET

Because the chamber is split 50-50, Republican cooperation is needed to settle the rules. But Mr. McConnell has made his signoff contingent on a promise by Mr. Schumer not to eliminate the filibuster, which effectively imposes a 60-vote threshold to advance legislation.

“If the talk of unity and common ground is to have meaning,” Mr. McConnell said, “then I cannot imagine the Democratic leader would rather hold up the power-sharing agreement than simply reaffirm that his side won’t be breaking this standing rule of the Senate.”

The demand has placed both Mr. Biden and Mr. Schumer in a difficult spot, accelerating a debate that was always going to be tricky for Democrats. Progressives favor getting rid of the filibuster to allow them to bypass Republicans altogether and win crucial pieces of Mr. Biden’s agenda. Others say it is the only way to adopt the kind of change needed to confront climate change, racial injustice and the nation’s faltering health care system. But centrists like Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, are opposed; some Democrats caution that scrapping the rule could quickly backfire if their party loses Senate control next year.

Mr. Schumer, who has remained publicly undecided about the filibuster, insisted on Thursday that Democrats would not let Mr. McConnell prematurely tie their hands or divide them.

“Our caucus is strongly opposed to any extraneous provisions,” he told reporters, “and so we are going to keep working to try and get a bipartisan agreement.”

He appeared to have Mr. Manchin’s backing.

“Chuck is right to do that, he’s the leader,” Mr. Manchin said. “I’m not worried about that at all. They will work it out. I just haven’t changed where I’m at.”

With Democrats’ margin of control so narrow, Mr. Manchin’s opposition alone would be enough to prevent the change. But it was unclear his assurances were enough to get Mr. McConnell to back down.

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, declined to say what Mr. Biden thought about the prospect of scrapping a rule that has been a mainstay of the Senate, where he served for 36 years.

“The president has been clear,” Ms. Psaki said. “He wants to work with both parties and find bipartisan paths forward.”

Though the dispute was arcane, its practical effect could be significant if it persists. Without an organizing resolution, Democrats’ ambitions for advancing another coronavirus aid package or any tax, infrastructure or health care legislation that gathered dust when Republicans controlled the Senate were essentially paralyzed.

In the short term, the dispute created a surreal dynamic, where Mr. Schumer claimed the mantle of majority leader, even as the chamber’s influential committees — way stations for Mr. Biden’s agenda — continued to be overseen by Republican chairmen.

Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat, who is expected to take over the Judiciary Committee, said dryly that he did not know who was in charge of his panel.

“We know it could be one of three people,” he said. They included him; Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who held the gavel last term; or Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, who was expected to take the top Republican slot from Mr. Graham this term.

A spokesman for Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, who was in line to lead the Armed Services Committee, warned reporters not to call his boss “chairman” just yet, or anytime soon.

“When will the official change happen?” the aide, Chip Unruh, wrote. “I wish I knew.”

Some committees, including the one overseeing the coronavirus response, simply could not convene at all because their former Republican chairmen had retired.

Others were more optimistic. Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, predicted a swift end to the haggling over the organizing resolution. “It just looks kind of churlish not to,” he said. “They have plenty of tools in the minority.”

He added: “To stop the organizing resolution and block committee assignments and things like that just seems kind of petty. I just have a feeling we’ll get there.”

Emily Cochrane contributed reporting.

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[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Welcome, everyone, to our final chat before the one-year anniversary of President Trump’s inauguration!!!

Or is it just “the anniversary of President Trump’s inauguration”?

In any case … we’re going to mark the occasion by looking back on what’s been most surprising about Year One of the Trump epoch.

My first question: What did Trump do in his first year that you found the most surprising?

Nate, you answer first.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): I was surprised by the lack of surprises.

micah: That’s a cop-out.

natesilver: It’s also super annoying, like when people ask you what your greatest weakness is in a job interview and your response is, “I’m too hard on myself.”

micah: I’m a perfectionist.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): I’m gonna call bullshit here. You did NOT foresee him firing FBI Director James Comey.

micah: (I love when things get acrimonious less than three minutes into a chat.)

clare.malone: Actually, I went back and looked at a timeline of events, and I agree with Nate to a certain extent — a lot of the things I was surprised at weren’t policy things, but modes of communication things.

natesilver: Of course there have been some surprises, but there have been fewer surprises than I would have thought.

micah: Well then … WHAT WAS THE MOST SURPRISING?!?!?!?!?!?

natesilver: I mean, Comey does come to mind. Plus a Democrat winning a U.S. Senate race in Alabama.

And maybe how explicit the saber rattling toward North Korea has been, which sometimes reads like a bad parody.

harry (Harry Enten, senior political writer): Well, I’m not surprised Trump reneged or didn’t follow through on some campaign promises, but I guess the fact that he really has moved to the right and capitulated so easily to congressional Republicans on policy is at least a little surprising to me.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): Yeah, I was surprised that he largely, on policy, governed as a President Ted Cruz or a President Marco Rubio would have. He really was a Republican president on policy, except on a few issues. I expected more populism, a less-traditional GOP foreign policy, maybe infrastructure or a health care bill that was not as conservative.

clare.malone: My most-surprising Trump actions are: his North Korea tweets, his both-sides response to the white supremacist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Anthony Scaramucci hiring and firing (what a fun week!), the Comey firing, and the immigration shutdown in his first week.

natesilver: See, I’d put Charlottesville on the list of the least surprising developments.

perry: I was also surprised by the racial stuff, which he said during the campaign but I assumed he did not really mean. I thought the race-baiting was just a way to win the primary. But the travel ban, the immigration raids, the NFL stuff, Charlottesville, and the recent shithole/shithouse episode all suggest otherwise.

clare.malone: On his Charlottesville response … I dunno. It felt different from the times during the campaign when he flirted with racist themes. It felt more explicit and weird.

harry: IDK … I think Trump’s rhetoric has remained fairly constant, while his positions on issues have seemingly changed. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by that.

natesilver: Trump has flirted with sympathy toward racist conduct all his life.

micah: Yeah, as Perry said, I guess it comes down to whether you thought Trump’s race-baiting during the campaign was political calculation or genuine.

We have to conclude it’s genuine now, right?

natesilver: That’s probably what we should have concluded before also, though.

perry: I might say I was hoping it was not genuine.

So maybe that changed my expectations of it.

micah: I mean, I’ve always been of the feeling that it doesn’t matter whether it’s genuine or not. The actions are what matter. If someone punches you in the face and breaks your nose, but it was an accident … well, you still have a broken nose. And if they accidentally punch you in the face over and over again …

natesilver: There’s a tendency in the media to assume politicians’ behavior is strategic instead of sincere.

clare.malone: So … I don’t think people thought he wasn’t racist. People thought he would be more restrained in the Oval Office, probably.

perry: Right. That is what I expected. Wrongly.

harry: To Clare’s point, most people thought Trump was racist during the campaign.

clare.malone: Maybe that’s a surprising thing, to Perry’s point — how disorganized the White House is.

natesilver: I mean … part of the problem with this framing is that there’s like a normal range of uncertainty, and I think he’s within that normal range for the most part.

It wasn’t totally out of character for Trump to fire Comey, for instance, even though you might not have predicted it specifically. And his lack of restraint also had lots of precedent on the campaign trail — and throughout his life — even though your median expectation might be that he would have checked himself a little more.

harry: Dare I say that people thought there would be some sort of pivot, and there hasn’t been?

perry: Obviously, yes, I expected this White House to be topsy-turvy, which is why I did that “power centers of the White House” piece. But the firing of the communications director so quickly, the chief of staff who lasted less than a year … the year has been a bit beyond “topsy-turvy.”

clare.malone: Yeah, remember those “wings” we talked about so much?

natesilver: People who said we ought to take Trump “seriously but not literally” should be pretty surprised. We aren’t those people, though.

micah: I guess that would be my answer to what’s been most surprising: That the normal Republicans have seemed to lose so much power in the White House, and yet at the same time normal Republicanism has won the day policy-wise.

I wouldn’t have predicted both of those things happening together.

There’s an unbelievably big gap between Trump rhetoric and Trump policy.

natesilver: Maybe because his appeal wasn’t based on “economic anxiety” to begin with? (Although, then again, maybe it was, which is why he’s so unpopular.)

harry: Congressional Republicans are controlling what they can control. They pass the bills they want and tell Trump to go you-know-what himself on bills they don’t want.

micah: OK, next question …

What have you been most surprised hasn’t happened?

natesilver: Perhaps the lack of economic protectionism, trade wars, etc.

clare.malone: Yeah, I continue to find it fascinating that Trump got convinced to follow House Speaker Paul Ryan’s agenda, not his own, on, e.g..e., trade stuff, infrastructure.

natesilver: Another one: Trump’s response to terror attacks, like the one in New York City in October, has been relatively restrained compared to how I might have expected him to react.

micah: I guess I also think the fact that Trump hasn’t sparked a trade war is the most surprising — I agree with Nate.

harry: I find the lack of a breakdown in Trump/Ryan relations kind of surprising. Ryan, if you remember, didn’t endorse Trump right away. And yet, Trump’s biggest problems seem to be with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

micah: That’s a good answer.

clare.malone: Well, if we believe the Ryan retirement rumors, that relationship might not be too long for the books

natesilver: I wouldn’t go overboard in declaring it a great relationship. They got a tax bill through, but not much else.

harry: They would have gotten a health care bill done if McConnell had come through.

micah: This kinda gets us into my next question …

What have congressional Republicans done in Trump’s first year that you’ve found most surprising?

natesilver: See, on this point I’m gonna really stick to my guns and say I’m not surprised by the Congressional GOP’s reaction to Trump. It’s about how you’d expect them to calibrate it given high partisanship on the one hand, but lots of private concerns about Trump on the other hand — and his also being very unpopular.

perry: The amount of time the GOP spent on health care was surprising, once it became clear in March that the members didn’t really want to vote on Obamacare and had always been talking a big game on repeal without any real plan to do it. The fact that they came back to it in September was bizarre, looking back.

clare.malone: It’s boring, but I’ll echo that the health care failure was the most surprising.

micah: Harry and Nate?

harry: I’m surprised by how cozy Sen. Lindsey Graham has been with Trump, while Sen. John McCain has, well, not been.

natesilver: I was surprised that GOP members of Congress from California, New York and New Jersey didn’t do more to protest the capping of the state and local tax deduction. That’s a pretty obscure one, though.

perry: I think — and I know there a lot of people who view Congress as only enabling Trump — that Sen. Richard Burr inviting Comey to a major hearing (after Trump fired Comey) and generally defending him was actually a fairly big slap at the president of his own party. Senators have backed up the Russia investigation in a lot of important ways, especially compared to House members. The gap between Rep. Devin Nunes (very pro-Trump in terms of Russia) and Burr is interesting.

natesilver: Overall, the Republican Congress has not always turned the other cheek toward Trump. Although the most important decisions it might make are still ahead of it. (What happens if Trump tries to pardon Jared Kushner, for example?)

micah: IDK … the extent to which congressional Republicans have let Trump get away with stuff depends on the issue. I agree that Senate Republicans have done some real stuff on Russia (relative to the House, at least), but what about on Trump family business stuff/conflicts of interest?

harry: The House has been more supportive of Trump, it feels. That’s interesting if only because there’s a higher shot that they lose their majority because of Trump.

clare.malone: How do congressional Republicans act post-midterm?

micah: Clare is really asking the million-dollar question, right?

Let’s say Democrats win the House but not the Senate.

Which seems like the modal outcome.

natesilver: I mean … the thing people get wrong — because it feels like Trump has been president forever — is that it’s still really early.

harry: It feels like no time at all to me, to be honest.

perry: In this era, I’m not sure running away from the president of your own party really ever makes sense. Fox News and other parts of the Republican Party enforce discipline. The moderates in the GOP will be the ones who lose in the midterms. I think the remaining House Republicans will stand with Trump pretty closely. Senate is different.

clare.malone: So here’s my scenario: Let’s say the Democrats win the House and vote to impeach Trump. Let’s say the GOP holds the Senate, but by a very slim margin. Do they vote to impeach in the Senate? Get a President Pence?

perry: No. Not a chance.

natesilver: Yes, a chance.

clare.malone: Because they think they would lose in 2020, Perry? Lose the base?

micah: It all depends on what he’s getting impeached for, doesn’t it?

perry: Well, if Trump called Putin in July 2016 and said, “Hack Podesta’s email on Sept. 12,” then yes. But based on the information we have right now, not a real chance.

micah: Right, I think it would take something toward the more extreme end of potential findings.

natesilver: What if Trump fires the special prosecutor or pardons his son-in-law?

micah: No.

natesilver: I just don’t think there are a lot of useful precedents for Trump, so predictions that he won’t be impeached seem overconfident.

People need to default more toward an uncertain prior.

micah: I’m just judging based on how congressional Republicans have been reacting to smaller stuff and scaling up.

natesilver: Also, I think the mentality changes a lot after a big Democratic wave election, if there is one.

harry: I’ll just say what I’ve always said: The chance of impeachment is underrated and the chance of conviction is probably overrated.

natesilver: I mean … it’s more likely than not that Trump gets impeached, right?

micah: I’m not sure of that.

harry: There’s a pretty good shot, but that’s a rather bold statement.

clare.malone: Well, it’s basically like answering the question of whether or not you’re confident in a Democratic House wave in 2018.

perry: So Democrats are likely to win House. Correct. There will be a huge push from liberal activists for impeachment.

Is that 50 percent? Let me think about that.

natesilver: Let’s say a 65 percent chance of Democrats winning the House, which is about where betting markets have it. Conditional upon their winning the House, what’s the chance Trump gets impeached? Maybe 75 percent? Plus a small chance that he does something so egregious that even if Republicans hold the House, they impeach him. I think you come out at about 50 percent or a bit higher.

perry: I think Rep. Nancy Pelosi and some of the more cautious Democrats will feel that Trump is very unpopular, and beating him in 2020 is a safer bet than trying to remove him.

I don’t know if that view will win out, but that will be the D.C. strategist view. And she listens to those people.

micah: What do betting markets peg impeachment at?

natesilver: Betting markets say there’s about a 45 percent chance Trump doesn’t finish his term, which is probably too high. But impeachment (setting aside the conviction/removal part) is fairly likely.

clare.malone: What if Pelosi isn’t speaker?

perry: I think this gets to an interesting question. If the Democrats win the House, will they only elect a pro-impeachment person as speaker?

micah: Fair question, but I have to steer the convo in another direction …

clare.malone: Boooooo!

Thank you for engaging, Perry!

micah: What have congressional Democrats done that has most surprised you?

harry: Total blockage. They’ve learned their lesson from the Republicans during the Obama years. It’s no-holds-barred.

micah: But is that surprising?

clare.malone: Yeah.

You’re surprised by total blockage?

What other option did they have?

micah: None, I don’t think. We haven’t really seen Trump or Republicans put them in a position where deal-making is really even an option.

clare.malone: If it were a different GOP president, maybe, but the Democratic base is out for blood with this one.

harry: I guess I thought there would be more compromising from the moderate Democrats in the Senate. Perhaps that was conditional on Trump having governed differently policy-wise in his first year (not as typical GOP president).

micah: Right, that last part hasn’t happened.

clare.malone: I guess there is the banking regulation stuff.

natesilver: Yeah, that’s an underrated surprise, I think. How rarely the moderate Democrats have lined up with Trump on key issues.

At the same time, I think people might underrate the likelihood of a Trump attempt to p—t if Democrats win both chambers of Congress in November.

micah: OMG

Nate, I expect more from you.

natesilver: See, the very fact that it’s socially unacceptable to suggest Trump might p—t is a good reason to think he might p—t.

I’m not saying it would be a particularly competent p—t. But could he agree to pass a big infrastructure bill with mainly Democratic votes? Sure.

micah: It’s only socially unacceptable here.

natesilver: No, you’ll get ratioed on Twitter too.

harry: Pivot.

There, I said it.

natesilver: One could argue that Trump’s legislative affairs strategy has been expedient. He wants “wins,” doesn’t want to crash the stock market, and otherwise doesn’t care too much about the details of domestic policy. So why wouldn’t he deal with Pelosi/Chuck Schumer, if it’s a bill that he thought business interests would like and that he thought might make him more popular?

micah: Why hasn’t he done that yet?

perry: Democrats have been more unified than I expected, as Nate is hinting at. I figured splitting the more moderate Democrats like West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin from the more anti-Trump liberals like New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand would be easy. It might be for a more competent White House — Bush did it in 2001.

micah: Last question …

What has the media done that’s most surprised you in Trump’s first year?

harry: How openly anti-Trump the coverage has been.

micah: In a good way or a bad way?

clare.malone: Yeah, I actually think I’m basically on that wavelength. It’s interesting how adversarial the media has been, but I think that’s almost a reaction to what they think the reading/watching public wants? Like, when The New York Times reporter got pilloried for the way he interviewed Trump — that really surprised me. (I don’t have time here to get into how people expect print interviews to be the same as TV ones and it’s not the same skill.)

natesilver: I mean, I have some relatively petty gripes here, mostly related to the election. I’m continuously surprised at how a certain major publication that got a whole lot wrong in 2016 hasn’t really owned up to it. And I’ve been surprised that there hasn’t been more self-reflection from the media about how it treated Hillary Clinton and the email stories. But I actually don’t have that many complaints about how the media handled Trump’s first year in office. It has, for the most part, been trying to evolve.

clare.malone: What you’re getting at — that people haven’t reflected on 2016 coverage — is why coverage is more adversarial. I mean, it also should kinda go without saying at this point that this is a really unusual White House and the president lies a lot/makes a lot of claims that people need to push on.

natesilver: I also think coverage has gotten better over the course of the year. Like, the media seems more willing to deal with the reality of Trump’s attitudes toward black people than it was back in April or May of last year.

perry: Interesting. I actually think some parts of the traditional media (let’s say CNN’s Jake Tapper and Don Lemon, and The Washington Post at times) have been fairly direct describing Trump’s racial moves in an honest, straightforward way. People are saying “racist” when it applies.

clare.malone: But especially in the first weeks, it felt like some stories lacked context.

perry: Harry is right: The coverage has been more anti-Trump than I expected. I think much of it is appropriately anti-Trump, but the shift from kind of “both sides are at fault” coverage has been more pronounced than I expected.

Another thing: There has been some outstanding work from less well-known reporters because there is so much news happening, so there is more opportunity for new voices to emerge, which is good. Some example: the coverage of Trump’s immigration policies from Vox’s Dara Lind; Josh Dawsey at the Washington Post (who broke the shithole story); and Eric Lipton of the NYT’s coverage of the federal agencies under Trump.

micah: Closing thoughts?

perry: I found 2017 totally odd. I didn’t think Trump would be this traditionally Republican on policy. I didn’t think I would write basically a whole series of articles about how he played racial politics constantly. The president having to say, “I am not a racist,” (and reporters feeling compelled to ask him about it) was something I didn’t expect. Even for Trump, the staff upheaval was wild. I didn’t think Doug Jones would win in Alabama until it was called for Jones in Alabama. I expected the Obamacare repeal to pass, and the tax cut to pass with Democratic votes. 2016 was of course stunning on a bunch of different levels. I think 2017 was not that surprising by that standard. But it was unpredictable. McCain voting down a health care bill!

natesilver: I think 2017 (Trump as president) was less surprising than 2016 (Trump winning the general election), and 2016 was less surprising than 2015 (Trump rising to the top of the Republican Party in a field of 17 candidates).

perry: I agree with that. Well said.

micah: So things are getting less and less surprising!

clare.malone: #thenewnormal

perry: And in 2018, if the out party wins the House, it will be downright normal.

harry: 2017 felt normal to me.

micah: OK, on let’s end things on that ridiculous statement.

perry: LOL

harry: LOL

[wsmith215]

House Democrats readying new $1.2T coronavirus stimulus bill

The White House has started informal talks with Republicans and Democrats in Congress about what to include in another round of coronavirus relief legislation.

At the same time, Democrats have crafted a $1.2 trillion-plus package without input from the administration or Hill Republicans, Axios reported Monday, citing Congresional sources.

House Dems may bring their phase 4 coronavirus relief package — aka CARES 2 — to the floor for a vote as early as this week.

But it’s going nowhere, at least for now, according to the website.

Republicans say they are still waiting for billions of aid allocated in the first $2.2 trillion CARES Act to be spent before considering an additional package.

The dueling comes as more than 80,000 Americans have died during the coronavirus pandemic, and US unemployment has surged to 14.7 percent, a level last seen when the country was in the throes of the Depression

On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Kevin Hassett, one of President Trump’s top economic advisers, said the unemployment rate could rise to somewhere “north of 20 percent” in May or June, even as the commander in chief urges more states to reopen to fire up the economy.

Despite the predictions that their package will be DOA in Congress, House Dems see their plan as a way highlight their priorities and prod Republicans and Team Trump toward more economic relief individuals, state and local governments, and the US Postal Service.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her caucus also want to show voters that they’re still on the job, despite members remaining in their districts.

Their legislation, which is still being written and is subject to change, according to Axios, is expected to include:

About $1 trillion for state and local governments, which many state and local officials say are going broke as their spending soars to deal with the outbreak. Roughly $25 billion to keep the US Postal Service in business. Expanded food and other nutritional benefits, Medicaid funding and a continuation of increased unemployment insurance payouts, which are set to expire at the end of July. Another round of direct payments to all Americans to juice spending.

House leaders also want to narrow down the guidelines for how the funds are allocated to ensure that people aren’t “double dipping” into the different sources of money, a senior Democratic aide told Axios.

For example, they don’t want someone who is getting increased unemployment money to also get cash through the Paycheck Protection Program.

“We’re trying to limit the amount of overlap so people aren’t abusing the system,” the aide said.

The package will not include liability protection for businesses that reopen and whose workers catch the virus as a result, which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says is a top priority for the GOP.

It also will not include a payroll tax cut, something Trump has championed, but which Democrats say will never happen.

Administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow, said they were holding discussions with lawmakers on issues including potential aid to states.

Hassett said future legislation could also include food aid to help Americans struggling with hunger amid widespread job losses.

It also could include broadband access for those who lack it, Hassett added.

But the White House signaled it is in no hurry to pass another relief bill.

“Let’s take the next few weeks,” Mnuchin told “Fox News Sunday.”

“We just want to make sure that before we jump back in and spend another few trillion of taxpayers’ money that we do it carefully,” Mnuchin said.

“We’ve been very clear that we’re not going to do things just to bail out states that were poorly managed.”

Kudlow said he took part in a Friday conference call with House lawmakers from both parties, and plans to do the same on Monday with members of the Senate, which is controlled by Trump’s fellow Republicans.

“If we go to a phase-four deal, I think that President Trump has signaled that, while he doesn’t want to bail out the states, he’s willing to help cover some of the unexpected COVID expenses that might have come their way,” Hassett said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

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[easyfoodnetwork]

The Ugly Legal Battle Over Restaurant Insurance Has Begun

Outside Jean-Georges at the Trump International Hotel and Tower | Photo by RBL/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images

As restaurant owners struggle to get government aid for their coronavirus-related losses, they face a separate battle with the insurance industry

It took a group of chefs with names that Donald Trump would recognize — Thomas Keller, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Daniel Boulud, and Wolfgang Puck — and about five days of scheduling to arrange a call with the president to discuss the devastating effects of COVID-19 on independent restaurants. As representatives of a trillion-dollar industry facing an estimated $225 billion in losses, the chefs told Trump that restaurant operators need a larger stake in the economic stimulus — and help convincing insurance companies to pay out business interruption claims, which have so far been denied.

“[Trump] was very open and attentive, and had some good comments,” says Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who laid off 4,000 workers and temporarily closed 36 restaurants, including two in one of Trump’s Manhattan buildings. “But what will happen now, we don’t know.”

While many restaurant owners focus their efforts on securing government assistance for their businesses, some see their existing insurance coverage as a potential, and equally crucial, lifeboat. But because business-interruption insurance typically covers losses related to physical damage, such as from fire or flood, insurance companies have argued that they’re not liable for losses related to the coronavirus.

That’s an infuriating stance for the roughly one-third of small-business owners who have been making steady payments for business-interruption insurance this whole time. “We pay so much insurance, we think it should be able to kick in,” says Vongerichten, who estimates he paid around $25 million in business-interruption insurance over the last 10 years in New York City alone.

To better make their case that COVID-19 closures do, in fact, merit coverage under existing contracts, the chefs on the call with Trump have formed an advocacy organization called the Business Interruption Group. “We were closed because of government obligation, and also because the virus is staying on surfaces, which is a damage to the property,” says Daniel Boulud, who recently closed 16 restaurants and laid off 810 employees.

“The argument that the coronavirus doesn’t create a dangerous property condition is a lie.”

Although the Business Interruption Group was formed by chefs with notable names and relatively large restaurant groups, its members say their effort isn’t just about protecting well-known industry players; ideally, they could set a precedent that helps all small businesses. “Our well-known chefs are our best advocates, but this is an everyman’s game,” says Jeff Katz, general manager and partner of the Manhattan restaurant Crown Shy, and another member of the Business Interruption Group. “You wanna put Michael Jordan up on the podium when you’re talking about something he can help you with.”

Pressure from the executive and legislative branches — or even a tweet from the president — might help motivate the insurance industry to pay out claims. But the real battle is bound for the courts, and it’s there that John Houghtaling II, a media-savvy, New Orleans-based lawyer who secured hundreds of millions for policyholders in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, is leading the charge for the Business Interruption Group.

“The argument that the coronavirus doesn’t create a dangerous property condition is a lie,” Houghtaling says. “The insurance industry has a PR campaign which misrepresents the policies and what they owe, and they gaslight everyone.”

On March 20, Houghtaling filed his first suit, seeking a declaration of coverage for coronavirus-incurred losses at the French Quarter seafood restaurant Oceana Grill. “[The] deadly virus physically infects and stays on the surface of objects of materials [called ‘fomites’] for up to twenty-eight days, particularly in humid areas below eighty-four degrees,” the complaint argued. According to the World Health Organization, it’s uncertain how long COVID-19 can persist on surfaces; similar viruses can last for a few hours or up to several days in certain conditions. The case would likely require expert testimony. The insurance company named in the complaint, Lloyd’s of London, declined to comment on the lawsuit.

A week later, Houghtaling filed suit against the Hartford Fire Insurance Co. on behalf of Thomas Keller’s Napa Valley restaurants the French Laundry and Bouchon Bistro, seeking another declaratory judgment to establish that coverage is warranted. Hartford declined to comment on the lawsuit.

It’s a strategic start: Unlike many business-interruption insurance policies, which contain virus-exclusion clauses widely implemented after the outbreak of SARS, Oceana Grill and the French Laundry don’t have virus exclusions. In fact, the French Laundry’s contract contains virus inclusion, for which the restaurant paid a premium.

But Steven Badger, a Dallas-based attorney for Zelle LLP who represents major insurance companies, is skeptical of arguments about physical damage from COVID-19. “The insurance policies will be interpreted and applied according to their terms — that’s what always happens when you have disputes as to coverage,” Badger says. “What cannot happen and should not happen is the expectation that insurance companies should pay claims that aren’t covered simply because we’re in a crisis situation.”

Some insurance policies also contain civil-authority order provisions, which cover claims when businesses are closed by government order. A third lawsuit, brought this week by a New Jersey attorney on behalf of Restaurant Nicholas in Monmouth County against Liberty Mutual insurance, cites Gov. Chris Murphy’s order to close nonessential businesses in the state. A fourth suit, also citing civil-authority coverage, was filed yesterday on behalf of a sports bar called Proper 21 in Washington, D.C.. Many more business-interruption suits are likely to follow.

“If the civil authority mentions that the virus creates property damage by sticking on surfaces, that triggers business-interruption coverage for certain restaurants,” Houghtaling told Eater in a March interview. Based on that interpretation of the law, Houghtaling has even encouraged elected officials to call attention to property conditions when making public statements.

“The insurance industry misrepresents the policies and what they owe, and they gaslight everyone.”

Insurance money isn’t the only lifeline available to restaurants, but it’s among the most viable. Restaurateurs can also seek Small Business Administration disaster grants of $10,000, and forgivable Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) Loans, a $350 billion program created as part of the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus, known as the CARES Act.

PPP loans let businesses with fewer than 500 employees seek government-guaranteed loans from banks and local lenders. The loans are capped at $10 million, or 2.5 times a business’s average monthly payroll. To get loan forgiveness, 75 percent of PPP loans need to go toward payroll — restaurants that don’t fully rehire their staffers by the end of June will have their loan forgiveness reduced. Complicating matters, a flood of loan applications and delayed guidance to banks means actually getting PPP loans is difficult.

“The Payroll Protection Program is a great step for us,” says Katz of Crown Shy. “But the truth is, it’s an eight-week program, and my gut tells me we’re not eight weeks away from reopening.” Katz wants funds that can go beyond payroll, and toward fixed costs like rent, utilities, and supplies, so that he can reopen his restaurant and rehire his 140 workers.

In a letter to Congress, the Independent Restaurant Coalition — a group that represent nearly 5,000 chefs and restaurant owners, led by well-known figures like Tom Colicchio — demanded improvements to the PPP program. The coalition also asked congress to compel insurance companies to pay business interruption claims

State politicians have introduced a wave of legislation to mandate the same. Bills in Ohio, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania would require insurers to pay business-interruption claims related to COVID-19. But many experts are skeptical of a legislative approach to the issue. “Insurance companies will likely challenge those bills, arguing that it violates the U.S. Constitution because it rewrites insurance policies,” says Alan Lyons, chair of insurance and reinsurance at Herrick Feinstein LLP. Even advocates like Houghtaling are against bills that meddle with existing contracts. “I don’t believe it’s constitutional, nor do I believe it’s fair,” Houghtaling says.

A declaratory judgment, as in the French Laundry and Oceana Grill cases, could arrive in mere months. But realistically, litigation could take years, Lyons predicts. “It could depend on scientific evidence as to whether the virus was actually present in a particular building, and [whether] it can remain on certain surfaces for a certain part of time,” he says. “Dealing with expert witnesses will take longer, and there could be appeals.”

Based on his experience with insurance companies during Katrina and Sandy, Houghtaling isn’t holding his breath for results. “The [insurance] tactic is always the same,” he says. “Deny everything you owe, slow the payments, don’t pay the emergency funds you owe, and then, because there’s such carnage, the industry goes with their lobbyists, with their advocacy groups, and with the senators, and they say [to the government] we need disaster relief funds.”

Something like that has already begun. According to data from ratings firm A.M. Best Co., the insurance industry as a whole has $18.4 billion in net reserves for future payouts. But insurance trade groups like the American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA) say they don’t have the funds to pay out all claims from a pandemic at once. “Pandemic outbreaks are uninsured because they are uninsurable,” says APCIA president David A. Sampson. If insurance is forced to pay claims by legislation, for example, their reinsurers might not cover them.

Some policyholders, like the restaurateur Wolfgang Puck, want insurers to pay restaurants first, then seek their own bailout from the government. “If [insurers] would just pay for business interruption, life would be so simple, and then the government can help the insurance companies with the money,” Puck says.

But Steve Badger doesn’t like that idea. “You’re transferring the bailout from one industry to another,” he says. “Why not use government funds immediately to put them in the hands where they’re needed?”

“I’ve seen what happens to people when the insurance company denies the figurative life preserver... I’ve seen them drowned.”

The APCIA supports the creation of a COVID-19 fund for small businesses, which it likened to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. But that’s no comfort to Houghtaling, who says he’s seen this play out before with Sandy and Katrina funds. “It’s not just about the pot of the money, it’s the mechanism for distributing money,” he says. Federal funds have fewer safeguards for policyholders, and could quickly evaporate.

“I’ve seen firsthand what happens to people in an area when the insurance company denies the figurative life preserver that they’ve got,” Houghtaling says. “I’ve seen them drowned. And now it’s everybody, and we don’t have much time.”

So far, the most tangible outcome of the Business Interruption Group’s call with Trump has been his expressed support for their final request — unrelated to insurance — regarding business tax deductions for meals and entertainment. “At the end of the conversation, [Trump] was asking us, is there anything else you wish to ask us about?” recalls Boulud. “It was Sunday and he had a little more time for himself and seemed to be in no rush, so I popped the question at the end about the business deduction.”

Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which slashed corporate tax rates, also cut how business could deduct entertainment expenses, which could potentially include dining. Restoring the deduction could boost restaurant businesses, once workers return to corporate spending accounts, Boulud suggested. Trump liked the idea, mentioning it on TV and even tweeting about it. But, according to the IRS, the 2017 Act only cut deductions for entertainment, not meals, which can still be deducted if they aren’t considered “lavish or extravagant.”

No matter. “Congress must pass the old, and very strongly proven, deductibility by businesses on restaurants and entertainment.” Trump tweeted. “This will bring restaurants, and everything related, back — and stronger than ever. Move quickly, they will all be saved!”

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2JVHPZy https://ift.tt/2VdyRME

Outside Jean-Georges at the Trump International Hotel and Tower | Photo by RBL/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images

As restaurant owners struggle to get government aid for their coronavirus-related losses, they face a separate battle with the insurance industry

It took a group of chefs with names that Donald Trump would recognize — Thomas Keller, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Daniel Boulud, and Wolfgang Puck — and about five days of scheduling to arrange a call with the president to discuss the devastating effects of COVID-19 on independent restaurants. As representatives of a trillion-dollar industry facing an estimated $225 billion in losses, the chefs told Trump that restaurant operators need a larger stake in the economic stimulus — and help convincing insurance companies to pay out business interruption claims, which have so far been denied.

“[Trump] was very open and attentive, and had some good comments,” says Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who laid off 4,000 workers and temporarily closed 36 restaurants, including two in one of Trump’s Manhattan buildings. “But what will happen now, we don’t know.”

While many restaurant owners focus their efforts on securing government assistance for their businesses, some see their existing insurance coverage as a potential, and equally crucial, lifeboat. But because business-interruption insurance typically covers losses related to physical damage, such as from fire or flood, insurance companies have argued that they’re not liable for losses related to the coronavirus.

That’s an infuriating stance for the roughly one-third of small-business owners who have been making steady payments for business-interruption insurance this whole time. “We pay so much insurance, we think it should be able to kick in,” says Vongerichten, who estimates he paid around $25 million in business-interruption insurance over the last 10 years in New York City alone.

To better make their case that COVID-19 closures do, in fact, merit coverage under existing contracts, the chefs on the call with Trump have formed an advocacy organization called the Business Interruption Group. “We were closed because of government obligation, and also because the virus is staying on surfaces, which is a damage to the property,” says Daniel Boulud, who recently closed 16 restaurants and laid off 810 employees.

“The argument that the coronavirus doesn’t create a dangerous property condition is a lie.”

Although the Business Interruption Group was formed by chefs with notable names and relatively large restaurant groups, its members say their effort isn’t just about protecting well-known industry players; ideally, they could set a precedent that helps all small businesses. “Our well-known chefs are our best advocates, but this is an everyman’s game,” says Jeff Katz, general manager and partner of the Manhattan restaurant Crown Shy, and another member of the Business Interruption Group. “You wanna put Michael Jordan up on the podium when you’re talking about something he can help you with.”

Pressure from the executive and legislative branches — or even a tweet from the president — might help motivate the insurance industry to pay out claims. But the real battle is bound for the courts, and it’s there that John Houghtaling II, a media-savvy, New Orleans-based lawyer who secured hundreds of millions for policyholders in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, is leading the charge for the Business Interruption Group.

“The argument that the coronavirus doesn’t create a dangerous property condition is a lie,” Houghtaling says. “The insurance industry has a PR campaign which misrepresents the policies and what they owe, and they gaslight everyone.”

On March 20, Houghtaling filed his first suit, seeking a declaration of coverage for coronavirus-incurred losses at the French Quarter seafood restaurant Oceana Grill. “[The] deadly virus physically infects and stays on the surface of objects of materials [called ‘fomites’] for up to twenty-eight days, particularly in humid areas below eighty-four degrees,” the complaint argued. According to the World Health Organization, it’s uncertain how long COVID-19 can persist on surfaces; similar viruses can last for a few hours or up to several days in certain conditions. The case would likely require expert testimony. The insurance company named in the complaint, Lloyd’s of London, declined to comment on the lawsuit.

A week later, Houghtaling filed suit against the Hartford Fire Insurance Co. on behalf of Thomas Keller’s Napa Valley restaurants the French Laundry and Bouchon Bistro, seeking another declaratory judgment to establish that coverage is warranted. Hartford declined to comment on the lawsuit.

It’s a strategic start: Unlike many business-interruption insurance policies, which contain virus-exclusion clauses widely implemented after the outbreak of SARS, Oceana Grill and the French Laundry don’t have virus exclusions. In fact, the French Laundry’s contract contains virus inclusion, for which the restaurant paid a premium.

But Steven Badger, a Dallas-based attorney for Zelle LLP who represents major insurance companies, is skeptical of arguments about physical damage from COVID-19. “The insurance policies will be interpreted and applied according to their terms — that’s what always happens when you have disputes as to coverage,” Badger says. “What cannot happen and should not happen is the expectation that insurance companies should pay claims that aren’t covered simply because we’re in a crisis situation.”

Some insurance policies also contain civil-authority order provisions, which cover claims when businesses are closed by government order. A third lawsuit, brought this week by a New Jersey attorney on behalf of Restaurant Nicholas in Monmouth County against Liberty Mutual insurance, cites Gov. Chris Murphy’s order to close nonessential businesses in the state. A fourth suit, also citing civil-authority coverage, was filed yesterday on behalf of a sports bar called Proper 21 in Washington, D.C.. Many more business-interruption suits are likely to follow.

“If the civil authority mentions that the virus creates property damage by sticking on surfaces, that triggers business-interruption coverage for certain restaurants,” Houghtaling told Eater in a March interview. Based on that interpretation of the law, Houghtaling has even encouraged elected officials to call attention to property conditions when making public statements.

“The insurance industry misrepresents the policies and what they owe, and they gaslight everyone.”

Insurance money isn’t the only lifeline available to restaurants, but it’s among the most viable. Restaurateurs can also seek Small Business Administration disaster grants of $10,000, and forgivable Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) Loans, a $350 billion program created as part of the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus, known as the CARES Act.

PPP loans let businesses with fewer than 500 employees seek government-guaranteed loans from banks and local lenders. The loans are capped at $10 million, or 2.5 times a business’s average monthly payroll. To get loan forgiveness, 75 percent of PPP loans need to go toward payroll — restaurants that don’t fully rehire their staffers by the end of June will have their loan forgiveness reduced. Complicating matters, a flood of loan applications and delayed guidance to banks means actually getting PPP loans is difficult.

“The Payroll Protection Program is a great step for us,” says Katz of Crown Shy. “But the truth is, it’s an eight-week program, and my gut tells me we’re not eight weeks away from reopening.” Katz wants funds that can go beyond payroll, and toward fixed costs like rent, utilities, and supplies, so that he can reopen his restaurant and rehire his 140 workers.

In a letter to Congress, the Independent Restaurant Coalition — a group that represent nearly 5,000 chefs and restaurant owners, led by well-known figures like Tom Colicchio — demanded improvements to the PPP program. The coalition also asked congress to compel insurance companies to pay business interruption claims

State politicians have introduced a wave of legislation to mandate the same. Bills in Ohio, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania would require insurers to pay business-interruption claims related to COVID-19. But many experts are skeptical of a legislative approach to the issue. “Insurance companies will likely challenge those bills, arguing that it violates the U.S. Constitution because it rewrites insurance policies,” says Alan Lyons, chair of insurance and reinsurance at Herrick Feinstein LLP. Even advocates like Houghtaling are against bills that meddle with existing contracts. “I don’t believe it’s constitutional, nor do I believe it’s fair,” Houghtaling says.

A declaratory judgment, as in the French Laundry and Oceana Grill cases, could arrive in mere months. But realistically, litigation could take years, Lyons predicts. “It could depend on scientific evidence as to whether the virus was actually present in a particular building, and [whether] it can remain on certain surfaces for a certain part of time,” he says. “Dealing with expert witnesses will take longer, and there could be appeals.”

Based on his experience with insurance companies during Katrina and Sandy, Houghtaling isn’t holding his breath for results. “The [insurance] tactic is always the same,” he says. “Deny everything you owe, slow the payments, don’t pay the emergency funds you owe, and then, because there’s such carnage, the industry goes with their lobbyists, with their advocacy groups, and with the senators, and they say [to the government] we need disaster relief funds.”

Something like that has already begun. According to data from ratings firm A.M. Best Co., the insurance industry as a whole has $18.4 billion in net reserves for future payouts. But insurance trade groups like the American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA) say they don’t have the funds to pay out all claims from a pandemic at once. “Pandemic outbreaks are uninsured because they are uninsurable,” says APCIA president David A. Sampson. If insurance is forced to pay claims by legislation, for example, their reinsurers might not cover them.

Some policyholders, like the restaurateur Wolfgang Puck, want insurers to pay restaurants first, then seek their own bailout from the government. “If [insurers] would just pay for business interruption, life would be so simple, and then the government can help the insurance companies with the money,” Puck says.

But Steve Badger doesn’t like that idea. “You’re transferring the bailout from one industry to another,” he says. “Why not use government funds immediately to put them in the hands where they’re needed?”

“I’ve seen what happens to people when the insurance company denies the figurative life preserver... I’ve seen them drowned.”

The APCIA supports the creation of a COVID-19 fund for small businesses, which it likened to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. But that’s no comfort to Houghtaling, who says he’s seen this play out before with Sandy and Katrina funds. “It’s not just about the pot of the money, it’s the mechanism for distributing money,” he says. Federal funds have fewer safeguards for policyholders, and could quickly evaporate.

“I’ve seen firsthand what happens to people in an area when the insurance company denies the figurative life preserver that they’ve got,” Houghtaling says. “I’ve seen them drowned. And now it’s everybody, and we don’t have much time.”

So far, the most tangible outcome of the Business Interruption Group’s call with Trump has been his expressed support for their final request — unrelated to insurance — regarding business tax deductions for meals and entertainment. “At the end of the conversation, [Trump] was asking us, is there anything else you wish to ask us about?” recalls Boulud. “It was Sunday and he had a little more time for himself and seemed to be in no rush, so I popped the question at the end about the business deduction.”

Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which slashed corporate tax rates, also cut how business could deduct entertainment expenses, which could potentially include dining. Restoring the deduction could boost restaurant businesses, once workers return to corporate spending accounts, Boulud suggested. Trump liked the idea, mentioning it on TV and even tweeting about it. But, according to the IRS, the 2017 Act only cut deductions for entertainment, not meals, which can still be deducted if they aren’t considered “lavish or extravagant.”

No matter. “Congress must pass the old, and very strongly proven, deductibility by businesses on restaurants and entertainment.” Trump tweeted. “This will bring restaurants, and everything related, back — and stronger than ever. Move quickly, they will all be saved!”

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2JVHPZy via Blogger https://ift.tt/2yIPYOJ

[howtocalculatecpi]

What is Inflation, Consumer Price Index (CPI), And What Does it Mean to My Portfolio-Investments?

First I want to define these topics and in the end give you my personal opinion on what will happen (and why) in the near term:

Inflation: The rise of prices of goods and services in an economy over a period of time. In other words, think of any merchandise you purchase (iPod, books, camera, movie tickets) and places or people you pay such as a mechanic, an attorney, an accountant, and/or a Doctor. In time the prices always go up. Now when this happens, the currency (US Dollar, Euro, Peso, etc.) buys fewer of these goods which in short LOWERS your purchasing power (The ability to buy...anything). This is a loss of real value, which happens over time. To make this even simpler, for those that have been around in the 80's and earlier, what can a dollar USED to buy you? There was a time when the.99 cents store sold things that were actually.99cents. Now it is not the case.

This is part of the economic cycle. Yes, we have to go through a cycle in order for economics to perform correctly (in order not to side track, we will remain on this topic). Inflation is not positive or negative for the economy, it's both. Negative that your purchasing power goes down, which in turn makes people more reluctant to purchase goods, investments, and savings. In turn, it is positive in which the economy can recover from a recession and debt relief by reducing the level of debt. There is also Hyperinflation but I will speak of this later in the blog.

Now, after reading this, you should be thinking of the recent events and reports (if you know them) regarding how the national debt has been recently reduced and savings have gone up (more people are paying off debt and saving money). This is signs of beginning inflation. But what else are signs of inflation? Consumer Price Index that's what!

Consumer Price Index (CPI): Also known as the "True Cost of Living Index". This is simply a measurement of the average consumer (buyer) goods and services by household. Usually the goods are based on urban products that most households will need/want. Without getting too technical, it is also measured in weight (as in kilograms, LBS, etc). So weight+price=CPI. Now some countries report the CPI annually while some quarterly. As I mentioned before, the other name pretty much speaks for itself (True Cost of Living Index), in which CPI measures the rise and fall of cost of living. Why? CPI not only helps measure inflation but also wages, salaries, and pensions. In a nutshell, this index lets you know how much INCREASE you need to have PER YEAR in order to maintain the lifestyle you are currently living. For example: If CPI rose 2.4% for 2009, if you do not have an annual increase of that amount, you will (in a couple of years) not be able to maintain your current lifestyle because that dollar/peso/euro will not be able to buy you that same product that you normally purchase (because that price WILL go up eventually and yet you make the same leaving you with less money). *To see the numbers for yourself, I have included a link (located at the bottom of this article) from the Department of Labor that has a simple calculator.*

So this is a very important index! But how important is it to YOUR portfolio? If you only measure your investments and portfolio on the current stock market such as the Dow Jones, S&P, and/or Nasdaq, you are doing it wrong. As we have seen from the recent crash last year (Fall of 2008) the market drop to levels that set your portfolio back nearly, if not, 10 years (or more, depending on how NOT diversified you were) however CPI was at ZERO of 2008. So if you made 1% return AFTER TAXES then you did EXCELLENT for 2008. Please note that I said "after taxes" because a CD @ 2% for +12 months after taxes long term will not beat CPI, I will explain this on another blog in the near future. If you interview an adviser who wants to manage your money and says he measures your portfolio based on the markets and fails to mention CPI and YOUR expectations, run away!

What may happen in the near term (prediction for the USA): With talks of health reform, what we have already spent on companies not to fail, the stimulus packages, tax cuts that happened during the years of Bush, unemployment extensions, and everything else in between (such as the cash for clunkers), we have no choice but to make cuts and raise/add taxes. For example, congress may pass a law to tax EACH trader's transaction. Now I won't comment on this however you understand the idea. Tax increases will occur (but stated "in the future" which means it WILL happen). In addition, the City of New York's Governor Paterson is planning on raising taxes on film/television/theaters performed here in the great city of New York. At the same time, he has cut education and health care funding. I mention NYC because NYC is supposed to be one of the major benchmark cities in the United States, so if they are doing it, most likely your city might do the same! (with the exception of a few smaller cities)

This leads to what I believe will be a "Hyperinflation". This is, as the words "hyper" means, an out of control inflation which everything I have mentioned above but with extreme higher numbers of price increases and massive drop on currency value. In addition, history of "hyperinflation" is usually caused by the following: Aftermath of wars (We are withdrawing from Iraq by end of 2011), economic depressions (The major recession we are currently in that I feel will end by the end of 2009 or early 2010 THE LATEST), and political/social upheavals (Healthcare reform? Changes in Wall Street?).

The ONLY way to avoid this hyperinflation is if Bernanke (Chairman of the Board of Governors of the United States Federal Reserve), Geithner (US Secretary of the Treasury), and the President do not take pressure from the outside community and SLOWLY raise rates and taxes because face it, with the rates and taxes at these levels, we enjoyed are tax cuts and lowered credit card rates but it was bound to come to an end.

What to do with your money during inflation? Invest in HARD consumer products. What do I mean by "hard"? Products and goods that you can actually touch, that the price will rise such as precious metals (my favorite). Gold does exceptionally well when the dollar decreases. Now you know that inflation, value of the currency goes down, so precious metals like Gold will rise. Not to mention the prices on products that use gold, silver, bronze, etc. will rise due to inflation. So that's where I would put my money. Other places would be in is Blue-Chip stocks that pay a dividend (stock price may go up or stay the same but you receive an income from that dividend). Equities may very well outperform during the upcoming inflation (saving rates will stay the same but most likely drop due to many non-educated investors just putting everything in CD's and savings). But there is something for you non-equity traders/investors: TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protection Securities) which pays you a decent yield but also the price of the bond adjusts with inflation making sure you do not go under that CPI keeping you at par. Not to forget, it is backed by the full faith and credit (and taxing power) of the United States. Plus TIPS are exempt from Federal taxes (growth & income) but subject to state and local. Not a bad deal!

So instead of worrying about inflation, just prepare for it (what we in the industry call a "Hedging"). Best case scenario is we just have a regular inflation and I was overestimating...but isn't it better to be safe than sorry?

[ozma914]

Yesterday I Couldn't Spell Emergency Telecommunicator; Today I Are One

National Emergency Telecommunicators Week is this week. It's a tough time for emergency services this year, so I figured I should write something original, to talk about the times we live in.

But I didn't, so part of this is an update to a blog I wrote in 2017. (I wonder if anyone would have noticed? Too late.)

In 1991, after an unfortunate encounter with a teething baby, a Congressman from Delaware became the very first person to yell, "What's the number for 911?"

Okay, I was kidding about the baby: He just wanted to complain that the Congressional Dining Room coffee had gone cold. Still, he made a basic mistake that led to a delayed emergency response: He tried to dial "nine eleven".

In an effort to get the word out that the number for 911 is "nine one one", Congress declared the second full week in April to be National Public Safety Telecommunications Week. (They declared the third full week of April to be Teething Baby Awareness Week.)

Indiana made that same declaration in 1999, and this year it's April 12-18. That's why, being a public safety telecommunicator myself, I tried to take that week off.

I mean, it was my week, right? Daiquiris in Hawaii for all dispatchers! But it turns out emergency dispatch centers have to be manned 24 hours a day, something they didn't tell me when I signed on.

(Okay, it's possible they did tell me that. It was twenty-eight years ago--and while I haven't slept well since then, I have slept.)

Personally, I would have called it Emergency Dispatchers Week. It's not quite as accurate, but it's shorter. But no Congressman ever used one word, when a paragraph would do. In bigger dispatch centers, one dispatcher might take 911 calls, another might page out ambulances, a third radio police, a forth may be dedicated to fire departments, and so on. In a smaller dispatch center (like mine), the dispatcher might do all those.

They might also enter calls into the computer, do other computer work like arrest warrants, stolen vehicle calls and missing persons reports, run licenses for traffic stops, and take business line calls. They might empty the trash, make coffee, and operate the security doors for the county or city jails. They might set off the local tornado sirens (hopefully during tornado warnings). They might enter missing person and Amber Alert reports into national databases, try to talk down suicidal people, or talk somebody through doing CPR on their loves ones. They might have to do any combination of the above at the same time.

So "dispatcher" doesn't really cover it.

Part of the time you don't really need all the people who work in a dispatch center. The rest of the time you need three times as many. Sadly, no one has yet come up with a way to predict which time will fall at which--well--time. But there are certain ways to tell if it's going to get busy:

If you just heated up your meal.

If there's a full Moon, regardless of what the research "experts" say.

If some moron just said, "Say, it's been quiet tonight".

If you just realized your bladder is screaming at you to take a break.

In the emergency services, breaks are just an obscure theory. They're best taken at the dispatch console, with a microwave nearby. My record for reheating soup is eight times, but hey--I'm a slow eater, anyway.

When 911 calls you away from that already lukewarm chimichanga, it might be to help someone whose little toe has been hurting for three days. Or, it might be that you're about to become the very last person someone ever talks to. Not knowing is a large part of the stress.

I'm told the average career length for a 911 dispatch is 7-10 years, give or take. If you do it longer than 10 years, you qualify as legally insane. I've done it for more than twice that long.

In that time, some of the really serious stuff has actually been the easiest. Your house is on fire? Send the fire department. You're having chest pains? Send an ambulance. Many of my least favorite calls come in on the non-emergency line, and start with "Can I ask you a question?" In my business, there's a fine line between "question" and "complaint", but either way it's bound to end up being one of those head scratchers.

There's also the fact that many 911 calls aren't emergencies, and sometimes business line calls are.

So yeah, I think it's great that people in this job get a week of their own--they earned it. Last year we got a lot of attention, from individuals, businesses, and organizations that not only thanked us, but showered us with free food and gifts ... which is very cool, because according to the research I just did, my household is holding onto the lower edge of middle class income by our fingernails. This year, with the coronavirus and general ick going on, I don't think we even advertised our upcoming week.

You have to be careful with those treats, anyway. Two years ago I brought a great treat bag home, and the dog ate it. But has he taken a single 911 call? Noooooo......

http://markrhunter.com/

https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

[kansascityhappenings]

U.S. House passes historic $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package

WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives on Friday approved the historic $2 trillion stimulus package that passed the Senate earlier this week, overcoming last-minute drama by using an unusual procedural move to thwart a demand by a conservative Republican to force members to vote in person.

The Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, infuriated members in both parties by bringing them back to Washington amid uncertainty over whether he would request a full roll call vote. That uncertainty forced many to travel during the public health emergency simply to deny his demand in order to ensure swift passage of the measure on Friday.

The bill now goes to President Donald Trump’s for his signature as the American public and the US economy fight the devastating spread of Covid-19.

The far-reaching legislation stands as the largest emergency aid package in US history. It represents a massive financial injection into a struggling economy with provisions aimed at helping American workers, small businesses and industries grappling with the economic disruption.

Key elements of the package include sending checks directly to individuals and families, a major expansion of unemployment benefits, money for hard-hit hospitals and health care providers, financial assistance for small businesses and $500 billion in loans for distressed companies.

House leaders face pressure to pass the legislation as quickly as possible and minimize the risks to their members in the process — and the bill had been expected to be taken up by voice vote, a move that would allow for quick passage and was designed to permit most House members not to return to Washington for a full roll call vote.

But Hoyer’s office advised members Thursday evening they are encouraged to be in Washington on Friday at 10 a.m. ET because the bill may not pass that way after all. “There is now a possibility,” the notice from the Maryland Democrat’s office said, that a Republican may force a recorded vote.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky announced Friday that he will request a full roll-call vote, though sources have told CNN there may be procedural steps to deny Massie’s request from requiring a recorded vote.

“I swore an oath to uphold the constitution, and I take that oath seriously,” Massie tweeted just before noon ET, on Friday.

“In a few moments I will request a vote on the CARES Act which means members of Congress will vote on it by pushing ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘present.'”

Despite that, House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy said that the bill will pass Friday without a roll-call vote.

“We are going to get it through today,” McCarthy said. Asked how, McCarthy said, “Stay tuned.”

The House will say that Massie does not have a sufficient second to request a roll-call vote, according to three sources familiar with the matter.

Members still had to return to the Capitol, however, because they need to establish a quorum to do this. Members are currently sitting in the upstairs gallery overlooking the House floor to ensure they have enough for a quorum and to maintain social distancing.

Massie needs 1/5th of the members to rise and be counted to get a sufficient second for a roll call. That won’t happen, sources said.

This is highly unusual, sources said, to say a member doesn’t have enough for a second.

Massie calls for full vote

Massie had been viewed as the most likely member to try to force the vote after indicating publicly his reservations about a voice vote.

President Donald Trump sharply criticized the congressman on Friday, saying in a pair of tweets that he “just wants the publicity” and should be thrown out of the Republican party.

“Looks like a third rate Grandstander named @RepThomasMassie, a Congressman from, unfortunately, a truly GREAT State, Kentucky, wants to vote against the new Save Our Workers Bill in Congress. He just wants the publicity. He can’t stop it, only delay, which is both dangerous & costly,” Trump tweeted.

“Workers & small businesses need money now in order to survive. Virus wasn’t their fault. It is “HELL” dealing with the Dems, had to give up some stupid things in order to get the “big picture” done. 90% GREAT! WIN BACK HOUSE, but throw Massie out of Republican Party!,” the President said.

Massie did not responded to a request for comment Thursday.

But the congressman told a local radio station Thursday that he’s “having a really hard time” with the bill, and didn’t seem too concerned about lawmakers’ difficulties in getting back to Washington.

“If congressmen are complaining that it’s hard to travel, well, what about the truckers that I saw on the road when I drove to DC? Hitch a ride with the trucker. … If you’re a congressman making $87 an hour and find it hard to get to DC, well, hitch a ride with the trucker,” Massie said on 55KRC talk radio.

Lawmakers return to DC

Many members were scrambling to book flights and return to Washington on Thursday night amid concerns that they could be asked to vote in person on the stimulus, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

The fear is that one member could prevent the House from approving the bill by voice vote, forcing them instead to cast a roll call vote in person. That has angered many members worried about traveling during the public health emergency.

Two House members have already tested positive for Covid-19, while more than three dozen others have self-quarantined after experiencing flu-like symptoms, interactions with infected individuals or potential exposure.

Rep. Pete King, a New York Republican, tweeted on Friday morning: “Heading to Washington to vote on pandemic legislation. Because of one Member of Congress refusing to allow emergency action entire Congress must be called back to vote in House. Risk of infection and risk of legislation being delayed. Disgraceful. Irresponsible.”

Rep. Dusty Johnson, a South Dakota Republican, tweeted a picture on a plane with Reps. Pete Stauber, a Minnesota Republican, and Minnesota Democratic Reps. Angie Craig and Betty McCollum. “A bipartisan (and socially distanced) flight to DC this morning to vote on Coronavirus economic relief,” Johnson wrote.

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York told CNN on Wednesday that she might force a recorded vote, but Democrats don’t believe she will.

The congresswoman signaled on Friday, however, that she would not request a recorded vote.

“I don’t believe I will,” Ocasio-Cortez said on Friday morning. “There’s just a lot of members whose lives are at risk right now.”

She did, however, criticize the stimulus bill.

“But I think this bill has a lot of problems with it. And I’m extraordinary concerned about what Mitch McConnell has done. I’ve had more constituents call concerned about this bill than in support of it. It’s a very hard day. It’s a very very hard day for this body,” she said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy both made clear on Thursday that they want the $2 trillion stimulus bill to be approved by their chamber Friday by voice vote.

On a conference call with Democratic members on Thursday, Pelosi said that if they are unable to pass the bill by voice vote, they will have a roll call vote Friday, according to three sources on the call.

Pelosi told CNN that while she can’t say for sure how or when the bill will pass, it will be approved Friday.

“There are a few scenarios but at the end of the period of time, we will have passed the bill so I am excited about that with strong bipartisan enthusiasm,” she said as she walked from her office to open the House floor.

Asked to confirm the bill will definitely pass Friday, she said: “Yes.”

Pelosi on Thursday predicted that the House will approve the stimulus package with a “strong bipartisan vote,” adding that “if somebody has a different point of view, they can put it in the record.”

“We expect to have a voice vote on it, but if we don’t, we’ll be prepared for whatever it is,” she said.

McCarthy said at a news conference on Thursday that the House will operate differently than it usually does in order to promote social distancing.

He said the members won’t sit next each other, they’ll alter where the members stand, and staff will be cleaning as members come and go. He also said that members will have to enter one designated door and leave out the other.

“We have members on both sides of the aisle who have the virus. We have members who are quarantined. We have members who have challenges with airlines, getting their flights canceled. We will have enough to get this through, but the floor will look different,” McCarthy said, explaining the modifications that will be made.

House officials detailed steps to limit member interactions in a notice to all House offices Thursday.

In the notice, obtained by CNN, the House Sergeant-at-Arms and the Capitol physician’s office outlined new procedures ahead of the vote, explaining that access around the House chamber and on the floor will be limited. To that end, the House is closing the Speaker’s Lobby, an area right off the House floor where reporters stake out and interview lawmakers and members frequently congregate.

Hard-fought negotiations led to a massive aid package

The stimulus package came together after intense and drawn-out negotiations between congressional Republicans and Democrats and the Trump administration that spanned multiple days and involved ongoing talks that stretched late into the night.

Democrats initially took issue with the package, which was crafted by Senate Republicans at the outset, arguing that it put corporations ahead of workers. Partisan tension over the legislation came to a head when Senate Democrats blocked two procedural votes to move ahead with the package, on Sunday and again on Monday, a setback to the bipartisan efforts to find a consensus deal.

A deal was ultimately announced mid-week, however, paving the way for the Senate to take up and pass the measure.

Key provisions in the stimulus

A centerpiece of the stimulus package is that it will provide direct financial assistance to Americans in the form of checks with the amount received based on income.

Individuals who earn $75,000 in adjusted gross income or less would get direct payments of $1,200 each, with married couples earning up to $150,000 receiving $2,400 — and an additional $500 per each child.

The payment would scale down by income, phasing out entirely at $99,000 for singles and $198,000 for couples without children.

In addition, the bill would provide billions of dollars in aid to hard-hit hospitals struggling to deal with the outbreak as well for state and local governments that are cash-strapped due to their response to coronavirus.

One point of contention in negotiations centered around a fund for distressed industries, with Democrats worrying that there would not be adequate oversight. In a compromise move, the final deal provides for accountability through an independent Inspector General and congressional oversight panel.

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/tracking-coronavirus/u-s-house-passes-historic-2-trillion-coronavirus-stimulus-package/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2020/03/27/u-s-house-passes-historic-2-trillion-coronavirus-stimulus-package/

[lauramalchowblog]

A Healthcare System, If We Can Keep It

By KIM BELLARD

We are in strange days, and they are only going to get stranger as COVID-19 works its way further through our society.  It makes me think of Benjamin Franklin’s response when asked what kind of nation the U.S. was going to be:  “A Republic, if you can keep it.” 

SAUL LOEB / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

The versions of that response that COVID-19 have me wondering about are: “A federal system, if we can keep it,” and, more specifically, “a healthcare system, if we can keep it.”  I’ll talk about each of those in the context of the pandemic. In times of national emergencies — think 9/11, think World Wars — we usually look to the federal government to lead.  The COVID-19 pandemic has been declared a national emergency, but we’re still looking for strong federal leadership.  We have the Centers for Disease Control, infectious disease experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, and a White House coronavirus task force.  But real national leadership is lacking. 

Credit: Dayton Daily News/Marshall Gorby

States and cities are forming their own responses.  Schools are being closed.  Other types of businesses — e.g., malls, movie theaters, gyms, casinos — are being closed.  Bars and restaurants are only allowed to do carryout/delivery.   Curfews are being imposed.  Primaries are being delayed.  But none is being done on a national level, and, in many cases, not even on a state-wide basis.  As Gerald Seib said in The Wall Street Journal:

Put differently, Americans have learned they can’t really count on Washington to deal with this crisis for them. Local leaders, businesses, churches, sports leagues—all have taken up the task, and done so more effectively than the political leadership in Washington.

The House passed an emergency coronavirus bill last week, and now the Senate is  coming up with its own ideas.  When Congress finally passes what bill remains to be seen, after how much further damage has been done to our health and our economy.  Anne Applebaum minces no words in her article in The Atlantic:

The problem is that American bureaucracies, and the antiquated, hidebound, unloved federal government of which they are part, are no longer up to the job of coping with the kinds of challenges that face us in the 21st century.

“The United States,” she says, “is about to be proved an unclothed emperor.”  Derek Thompson, also writing in The Atlantic, is equally blunt: “…executive branch of government—drained of scientific expertise, starved of moral vision—has taken on the qualities of a failed state.”  In New York Magazine, David Wallace-Wells says: “America is broken…This is not how a functioning society responds to a crisis.”  These are descriptions of the United States, and it’s hard to argue with them. Pandemics are, by definition, catastrophes.  They’re going to cause damage.  The question is how societies prepare for them, and respond when they hit.  So far, the U.S. is failing on both counts. In our federal system of government, we delegate many duties to the states, which delegate many to localities. Public health is one such duty.  Michele Barry, senior associate dean of global health at Stanford University, told The New York Times:

We have a completely decentralized public health system.  It is difficult to mobilize a large containment strategy. That’s what Singapore did, or what China did. We don’t even work from the states up. We work from the counties up.”

Unfortunately, as The New York Times also reported: 

A widespread failure in the United States to invest in public health has left local and state health departments struggling to respond to the coronavirus outbreak and ill-prepared to face the swelling crisis ahead…Many health departments are suffering from budget and staffing cuts that date to the Great Recession and have never been fully restored.

Our failure to have testing done earlier, and then quickly made widely available, is a public health failure, and it means we are still in the dark about many key questions.

Credit: Getty Images

Now we’re worried about COVID-19 patients overwhelming our entire healthcare system.  Elective surgeries are being postponed.  We may not have enough ICU beds.  There may be a shortage of ventilators for those ICU patients.  People are stealing personal protective equipment, posing additional risks to medical personnel.  When COVID-19 hit Wuhan, China scrambled to build new hospitals in little over a week.  I don’t have much faith in our ability to accomplish that (although there are calls for the Army Corps of Engineers to try).  The pandemic didn’t create the problems in our healthcare system.  The failure to prioritize public health is longstanding.  Worry about how people pay for testing is symptomatic of the problem people have paying for healthcare generally.  Our inability to determine how to prioritize where necessary supplies and equipment go reflect the fact that our healthcare system is, for better and for worse, a largely capitalistic system where money rules, not need.  We decry pharmaceutical company profits but look to them to quickly develop COVID-19 vaccines. Charley Grant of The Wall Street Journal says: “The issues exposed by the crisis are likely to linger far beyond the worst of the outbreak.”  He goes on to predict:

How effectively the U.S. can beat back the novel coronavirus, and what parts of the system shine or disappoint, may well determine whether the federal government expands its role in the system or reduces it.

I’d go further: how we get through this crisis may well determine what kind of healthcare system we want to have, and perhaps even how much power the federal government should have.   We’re going to spend a lot of money on the pandemic.  Not all of it will be spent as it perhaps should have been.  Many people will get infected and many of them will die.  Parts of the healthcare system will flounder; some will fail.  There will be heroes and probably a few villains.  These are all in the nature of pandemics.

The key questions with the current crisis are how quickly we can act, how effective that action will be, and, perhaps, most importantly, what lessons will we learn?  How much power should the federal government exercise in such crises, or over healthcare generally?  What problems with our healthcare system are unique to pandemics, and which need broader fixes?  How best to ensure public health on an ongoing basis?  There are no easy answers.  The next few months are not going to be pretty.  We’re going to make some decisions that, in retrospect, will seem like mistakes.  But we will get through this. But, as economist Paul Romer once said: “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

Let’s not waste this one. 

Kim Bellard is editor of Tincture and thoughtfully challenges the status quo, with a constant focus on what would be best for people’s health.

The post A Healthcare System, If We Can Keep It appeared first on The Health Care Blog.

A Healthcare System, If We Can Keep It published first on https://venabeahan.tumblr.com

[kristinsimmons]

A Healthcare System, If We Can Keep It

By KIM BELLARD

We are in strange days, and they are only going to get stranger as COVID-19 works its way further through our society.  It makes me think of Benjamin Franklin’s response when asked what kind of nation the U.S. was going to be:  “A Republic, if you can keep it.” 

SAUL LOEB / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

The versions of that response that COVID-19 have me wondering about are: “A federal system, if we can keep it,” and, more specifically, “a healthcare system, if we can keep it.”  I’ll talk about each of those in the context of the pandemic. In times of national emergencies — think 9/11, think World Wars — we usually look to the federal government to lead.  The COVID-19 pandemic has been declared a national emergency, but we’re still looking for strong federal leadership.  We have the Centers for Disease Control, infectious disease experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, and a White House coronavirus task force.  But real national leadership is lacking. 

Credit: Dayton Daily News/Marshall Gorby

States and cities are forming their own responses.  Schools are being closed.  Other types of businesses — e.g., malls, movie theaters, gyms, casinos — are being closed.  Bars and restaurants are only allowed to do carryout/delivery.   Curfews are being imposed.  Primaries are being delayed.  But none is being done on a national level, and, in many cases, not even on a state-wide basis.  As Gerald Seib said in The Wall Street Journal:

Put differently, Americans have learned they can’t really count on Washington to deal with this crisis for them. Local leaders, businesses, churches, sports leagues—all have taken up the task, and done so more effectively than the political leadership in Washington.

The House passed an emergency coronavirus bill last week, and now the Senate is  coming up with its own ideas.  When Congress finally passes what bill remains to be seen, after how much further damage has been done to our health and our economy.  Anne Applebaum minces no words in her article in The Atlantic:

The problem is that American bureaucracies, and the antiquated, hidebound, unloved federal government of which they are part, are no longer up to the job of coping with the kinds of challenges that face us in the 21st century.

“The United States,” she says, “is about to be proved an unclothed emperor.”  Derek Thompson, also writing in The Atlantic, is equally blunt: “…executive branch of government—drained of scientific expertise, starved of moral vision—has taken on the qualities of a failed state.”  In New York Magazine, David Wallace-Wells says: “America is broken…This is not how a functioning society responds to a crisis.”  These are descriptions of the United States, and it’s hard to argue with them. Pandemics are, by definition, catastrophes.  They’re going to cause damage.  The question is how societies prepare for them, and respond when they hit.  So far, the U.S. is failing on both counts. In our federal system of government, we delegate many duties to the states, which delegate many to localities. Public health is one such duty.  Michele Barry, senior associate dean of global health at Stanford University, told The New York Times:

We have a completely decentralized public health system.  It is difficult to mobilize a large containment strategy. That’s what Singapore did, or what China did. We don’t even work from the states up. We work from the counties up.”

Unfortunately, as The New York Times also reported: 

A widespread failure in the United States to invest in public health has left local and state health departments struggling to respond to the coronavirus outbreak and ill-prepared to face the swelling crisis ahead…Many health departments are suffering from budget and staffing cuts that date to the Great Recession and have never been fully restored.

Our failure to have testing done earlier, and then quickly made widely available, is a public health failure, and it means we are still in the dark about many key questions.

Credit: Getty Images

Now we’re worried about COVID-19 patients overwhelming our entire healthcare system.  Elective surgeries are being postponed.  We may not have enough ICU beds.  There may be a shortage of ventilators for those ICU patients.  People are stealing personal protective equipment, posing additional risks to medical personnel.  When COVID-19 hit Wuhan, China scrambled to build new hospitals in little over a week.  I don’t have much faith in our ability to accomplish that (although there are calls for the Army Corps of Engineers to try).  The pandemic didn’t create the problems in our healthcare system.  The failure to prioritize public health is longstanding.  Worry about how people pay for testing is symptomatic of the problem people have paying for healthcare generally.  Our inability to determine how to prioritize where necessary supplies and equipment go reflect the fact that our healthcare system is, for better and for worse, a largely capitalistic system where money rules, not need.  We decry pharmaceutical company profits but look to them to quickly develop COVID-19 vaccines. Charley Grant of The Wall Street Journal says: “The issues exposed by the crisis are likely to linger far beyond the worst of the outbreak.”  He goes on to predict:

How effectively the U.S. can beat back the novel coronavirus, and what parts of the system shine or disappoint, may well determine whether the federal government expands its role in the system or reduces it.

I’d go further: how we get through this crisis may well determine what kind of healthcare system we want to have, and perhaps even how much power the federal government should have.   We’re going to spend a lot of money on the pandemic.  Not all of it will be spent as it perhaps should have been.  Many people will get infected and many of them will die.  Parts of the healthcare system will flounder; some will fail.  There will be heroes and probably a few villains.  These are all in the nature of pandemics.

The key questions with the current crisis are how quickly we can act, how effective that action will be, and, perhaps, most importantly, what lessons will we learn?  How much power should the federal government exercise in such crises, or over healthcare generally?  What problems with our healthcare system are unique to pandemics, and which need broader fixes?  How best to ensure public health on an ongoing basis?  There are no easy answers.  The next few months are not going to be pretty.  We’re going to make some decisions that, in retrospect, will seem like mistakes.  But we will get through this. But, as economist Paul Romer once said: “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

Let’s not waste this one. 

Kim Bellard is editor of Tincture and thoughtfully challenges the status quo, with a constant focus on what would be best for people’s health.

The post A Healthcare System, If We Can Keep It appeared first on The Health Care Blog.

A Healthcare System, If We Can Keep It published first on https://wittooth.tumblr.com/

[easyfoodnetwork]

Outside Jean-Georges at the Trump International Hotel and Tower | Photo by RBL/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images As restaurant owners struggle to get government aid for their coronavirus-related losses, they face a separate battle with the insurance industry It took a group of chefs with names that Donald Trump would recognize — Thomas Keller, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Daniel Boulud, and Wolfgang Puck — and about five days of scheduling to arrange a call with the president to discuss the devastating effects of COVID-19 on independent restaurants. As representatives of a trillion-dollar industry facing an estimated $225 billion in losses, the chefs told Trump that restaurant operators need a larger stake in the economic stimulus — and help convincing insurance companies to pay out business interruption claims, which have so far been denied. “[Trump] was very open and attentive, and had some good comments,” says Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who laid off 4,000 workers and temporarily closed 36 restaurants, including two in one of Trump’s Manhattan buildings. “But what will happen now, we don’t know.” While many restaurant owners focus their efforts on securing government assistance for their businesses, some see their existing insurance coverage as a potential, and equally crucial, lifeboat. But because business-interruption insurance typically covers losses related to physical damage, such as from fire or flood, insurance companies have argued that they’re not liable for losses related to the coronavirus. That’s an infuriating stance for the roughly one-third of small-business owners who have been making steady payments for business-interruption insurance this whole time. “We pay so much insurance, we think it should be able to kick in,” says Vongerichten, who estimates he paid around $25 million in business-interruption insurance over the last 10 years in New York City alone. To better make their case that COVID-19 closures do, in fact, merit coverage under existing contracts, the chefs on the call with Trump have formed an advocacy organization called the Business Interruption Group. “We were closed because of government obligation, and also because the virus is staying on surfaces, which is a damage to the property,” says Daniel Boulud, who recently closed 16 restaurants and laid off 810 employees. “The argument that the coronavirus doesn’t create a dangerous property condition is a lie.” Although the Business Interruption Group was formed by chefs with notable names and relatively large restaurant groups, its members say their effort isn’t just about protecting well-known industry players; ideally, they could set a precedent that helps all small businesses. “Our well-known chefs are our best advocates, but this is an everyman’s game,” says Jeff Katz, general manager and partner of the Manhattan restaurant Crown Shy, and another member of the Business Interruption Group. “You wanna put Michael Jordan up on the podium when you’re talking about something he can help you with.” Pressure from the executive and legislative branches — or even a tweet from the president — might help motivate the insurance industry to pay out claims. But the real battle is bound for the courts, and it’s there that John Houghtaling II, a media-savvy, New Orleans-based lawyer who secured hundreds of millions for policyholders in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, is leading the charge for the Business Interruption Group. “The argument that the coronavirus doesn’t create a dangerous property condition is a lie,” Houghtaling says. “The insurance industry has a PR campaign which misrepresents the policies and what they owe, and they gaslight everyone.” On March 20, Houghtaling filed his first suit, seeking a declaration of coverage for coronavirus-incurred losses at the French Quarter seafood restaurant Oceana Grill. “[The] deadly virus physically infects and stays on the surface of objects of materials [called ‘fomites’] for up to twenty-eight days, particularly in humid areas below eighty-four degrees,” the complaint argued. According to the World Health Organization, it’s uncertain how long COVID-19 can persist on surfaces; similar viruses can last for a few hours or up to several days in certain conditions. The case would likely require expert testimony. The insurance company named in the complaint, Lloyd’s of London, declined to comment on the lawsuit. A week later, Houghtaling filed suit against the Hartford Fire Insurance Co. on behalf of Thomas Keller’s Napa Valley restaurants the French Laundry and Bouchon Bistro, seeking another declaratory judgment to establish that coverage is warranted. Hartford declined to comment on the lawsuit. It’s a strategic start: Unlike many business-interruption insurance policies, which contain virus-exclusion clauses widely implemented after the outbreak of SARS, Oceana Grill and the French Laundry don’t have virus exclusions. In fact, the French Laundry’s contract contains virus inclusion, for which the restaurant paid a premium. But Steven Badger, a Dallas-based attorney for Zelle LLP who represents major insurance companies, is skeptical of arguments about physical damage from COVID-19. “The insurance policies will be interpreted and applied according to their terms — that’s what always happens when you have disputes as to coverage,” Badger says. “What cannot happen and should not happen is the expectation that insurance companies should pay claims that aren’t covered simply because we’re in a crisis situation.” Some insurance policies also contain civil-authority order provisions, which cover claims when businesses are closed by government order. A third lawsuit, brought this week by a New Jersey attorney on behalf of Restaurant Nicholas in Monmouth County against Liberty Mutual insurance, cites Gov. Chris Murphy’s order to close nonessential businesses in the state. A fourth suit, also citing civil-authority coverage, was filed yesterday on behalf of a sports bar called Proper 21 in Washington, D.C.. Many more business-interruption suits are likely to follow. “If the civil authority mentions that the virus creates property damage by sticking on surfaces, that triggers business-interruption coverage for certain restaurants,” Houghtaling told Eater in a March interview. Based on that interpretation of the law, Houghtaling has even encouraged elected officials to call attention to property conditions when making public statements. “The insurance industry misrepresents the policies and what they owe, and they gaslight everyone.” Insurance money isn’t the only lifeline available to restaurants, but it’s among the most viable. Restaurateurs can also seek Small Business Administration disaster grants of $10,000, and forgivable Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) Loans, a $350 billion program created as part of the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus, known as the CARES Act. PPP loans let businesses with fewer than 500 employees seek government-guaranteed loans from banks and local lenders. The loans are capped at $10 million, or 2.5 times a business’s average monthly payroll. To get loan forgiveness, 75 percent of PPP loans need to go toward payroll — restaurants that don’t fully rehire their staffers by the end of June will have their loan forgiveness reduced. Complicating matters, a flood of loan applications and delayed guidance to banks means actually getting PPP loans is difficult. “The Payroll Protection Program is a great step for us,” says Katz of Crown Shy. “But the truth is, it’s an eight-week program, and my gut tells me we’re not eight weeks away from reopening.” Katz wants funds that can go beyond payroll, and toward fixed costs like rent, utilities, and supplies, so that he can reopen his restaurant and rehire his 140 workers. In a letter to Congress, the Independent Restaurant Coalition — a group that represent nearly 5,000 chefs and restaurant owners, led by well-known figures like Tom Colicchio — demanded improvements to the PPP program. The coalition also asked congress to compel insurance companies to pay business interruption claims State politicians have introduced a wave of legislation to mandate the same. Bills in Ohio, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania would require insurers to pay business-interruption claims related to COVID-19. But many experts are skeptical of a legislative approach to the issue. “Insurance companies will likely challenge those bills, arguing that it violates the U.S. Constitution because it rewrites insurance policies,” says Alan Lyons, chair of insurance and reinsurance at Herrick Feinstein LLP. Even advocates like Houghtaling are against bills that meddle with existing contracts. “I don’t believe it’s constitutional, nor do I believe it’s fair,” Houghtaling says. A declaratory judgment, as in the French Laundry and Oceana Grill cases, could arrive in mere months. But realistically, litigation could take years, Lyons predicts. “It could depend on scientific evidence as to whether the virus was actually present in a particular building, and [whether] it can remain on certain surfaces for a certain part of time,” he says. “Dealing with expert witnesses will take longer, and there could be appeals.” Based on his experience with insurance companies during Katrina and Sandy, Houghtaling isn’t holding his breath for results. “The [insurance] tactic is always the same,” he says. “Deny everything you owe, slow the payments, don’t pay the emergency funds you owe, and then, because there’s such carnage, the industry goes with their lobbyists, with their advocacy groups, and with the senators, and they say [to the government] we need disaster relief funds.” Something like that has already begun. According to data from ratings firm A.M. Best Co., the insurance industry as a whole has $18.4 billion in net reserves for future payouts. But insurance trade groups like the American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA) say they don’t have the funds to pay out all claims from a pandemic at once. “Pandemic outbreaks are uninsured because they are uninsurable,” says APCIA president David A. Sampson. If insurance is forced to pay claims by legislation, for example, their reinsurers might not cover them. Some policyholders, like the restaurateur Wolfgang Puck, want insurers to pay restaurants first, then seek their own bailout from the government. “If [insurers] would just pay for business interruption, life would be so simple, and then the government can help the insurance companies with the money,” Puck says. But Steve Badger doesn’t like that idea. “You’re transferring the bailout from one industry to another,” he says. “Why not use government funds immediately to put them in the hands where they’re needed?” “I’ve seen what happens to people when the insurance company denies the figurative life preserver... I’ve seen them drowned.” The APCIA supports the creation of a COVID-19 fund for small businesses, which it likened to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. But that’s no comfort to Houghtaling, who says he’s seen this play out before with Sandy and Katrina funds. “It’s not just about the pot of the money, it’s the mechanism for distributing money,” he says. Federal funds have fewer safeguards for policyholders, and could quickly evaporate. “I’ve seen firsthand what happens to people in an area when the insurance company denies the figurative life preserver that they’ve got,” Houghtaling says. “I’ve seen them drowned. And now it’s everybody, and we don’t have much time.” So far, the most tangible outcome of the Business Interruption Group’s call with Trump has been his expressed support for their final request — unrelated to insurance — regarding business tax deductions for meals and entertainment. “At the end of the conversation, [Trump] was asking us, is there anything else you wish to ask us about?” recalls Boulud. “It was Sunday and he had a little more time for himself and seemed to be in no rush, so I popped the question at the end about the business deduction.” Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which slashed corporate tax rates, also cut how business could deduct entertainment expenses, which could potentially include dining. Restoring the deduction could boost restaurant businesses, once workers return to corporate spending accounts, Boulud suggested. Trump liked the idea, mentioning it on TV and even tweeting about it. But, according to the IRS, the 2017 Act only cut deductions for entertainment, not meals, which can still be deducted if they aren’t considered “lavish or extravagant.” No matter. “Congress must pass the old, and very strongly proven, deductibility by businesses on restaurants and entertainment.” Trump tweeted. “This will bring restaurants, and everything related, back — and stronger than ever. Move quickly, they will all be saved!” from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2JVHPZy

http://easyfoodnetwork.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-ugly-legal-battle-over-restaurant.html

[rolandfontana]

Can Your Business Afford/Stomach the China Risks?

Two months ago, Steve Dickinson wrote a post listing his top 14 “PRC/U.S. trade war wild cards,….at least for today.” It is interesting to look again at those risks to see which have already come true, in just this short time.

The below were Steve’s China wild cards, followed by my updated assessment (in italics) of each:

1. The Dow and other U.S. stock markets continue to respond negatively to the various reports of increased tariffs and other U.S. – China trade issues. If the markets suffer a serious decline in the next several months, it will be hard for the Trump administration to continue to take a hard line on China trade. The same issue applies for the economic damage that has been inflicted on the U.S. farm sector. This sector is a major supporter of President Trump. Negative impact on the farm states could also soften the U.S. position against China. The U.S. stock market has not declined since Steve’s post but farmers have gotten a bit angrier. I though do not see trade resolution no matter what.

2. The situation in Hong Kong has continued for over two months, with no resolution in sight. The PRC government has already blamed the U.S. and Taiwan for the unrest and it has warned the HK protestors against starting a color revolution (the CCP’s biggest fear). The PRC has massed 12,000 riot police on the border and the PLA is on alert. If the PRC takes military action in HK, the impact on trade will be immediate and severe. Sanctions against China will likely come from the U.S., Japan, Australia, and Europe, disrupting trade for many years. The troubles in Hong Kong are escalating and, more importantly, the widening positions between those in the West who are calling for freedom and democracy and those in China is bringing big trouble to foreign businesses like the NBA. This is going to be a huge issue. I see boycotts and I see valuable millennial employees leaving companies that do business with China. 

3. The South China Sea and the Taiwan straight are getting “hot.”  Armed vessels and warplanes from a number of countries are moving in this region in direct defiance of PRC claims that such movement is prohibited. In this chaotic situation, armed conflict could easily break out by mistake due to the actions of “hot headed” local military officers. Keep in mind the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the Corfu Channel Case. One led to a hot war and one led to a cold war. Either could happen here. Still at about the same level of risk. 

4. China has started importing oil from Iran in direct defiance of U.S. sanctions. Violation of Iran sanctions is the reason for the U.S. banning sales to Huawei and detaining Meng Wanzhou in Canada. The U.S. might impose sanctions on the companies importing Iranian oil. More significantly, the U.S. might impose sanctions on the China banks financing these oil trades. Some in the U.S. have even proposed a “nuclear” option where the entities and banks involved would be cut out of the CHIPS and SWIFT systems. Still at about the same level of risk. 

5. The FBI says it is currently investigating more than 1000 IP/trade secrecy thefts involving China. Reports are that most of these cases also allege Chinese government participation. If formal proceedings are commenced, normal trade in many sectors will be disrupted and cooperative R&D with Chinese companies, research centers and universities will be curtailed or even eliminated. Finally, U.S. hiring of PRC nationals in the tech sector will be impacted or even eliminated. Still at about the same level of risk. 

6. Huawei is still on the Entity List and sales of technology of all kinds is still banned. The tentative commitment to ease the sanctions President Trump made at the G20 meeting has not resulted in any change. In fact, U.S. actions against PRC companies in the tech sector have expanded with the recent announcement that the U.S. government cannot make purchases from five PRC companies, including Huawei, ZTE and Hikvision. It is not unlikely that this purchase ban will extend beyond government contracts to a more general ban on all U.S. purchases from Huawei and other PRC tech companies. There has also been talk of late of the United States banning China tech companies that facilitate surveillance of Chinese citizens. The U.S. just added eight tech companies to its banned list, along with 20 Chinese government agencies. China is extremely unhappy about this and is promising to retaliate. I see a 50-50 chance of this spiraling so out of control as to reduce US-China trade by 25% or more.

The six above are the most critical wild cards, but there are plenty more, including the following:

7. The Taiwan election is in full gear. At one point, some politicians in Taiwan were pro-PRC, seeking to expand and improve relations with the Mainland. But with the recent events in Hong Kong, the ban on travel from the PRC to Taiwan and the open military threats against Taiwan, no Taiwan politician who wants a future can take any form of pro-PRC position. This all could lead to escalating conflicts in the Taiwan Strait. The continued support of Taiwan by the U.S. will strain relations with the PRC on the military level. Still at about the same level of risk. 

8. The U.S. Congress continues to propose anti-PRC legislation. In the past, such legislation has been symbolic and has not been adopted. If the Trump administration shows weakening in its trade war position, some or all of this legislation may be adopted. This would then take the anti-PRC policy out of the hands of the president, leaving no room for negotiation. The risk of this is sky-high right now and I see this happening and soon. I see this angering both the Chinese government and the Chinese people and I see this greatly impacting trade.

9. The SEC seems intent to cut PRC companies out of the U.S. securities markets. If the SEC will not take action, Congress has threatened to step in. PRC companies see the writing on the wall and most are shifting their big IPO plans to the Hong Kong markets. This trend then further decouples the PRC from the U.S. with impacts both on the U.S. and the PRC. See China and the U.S. Stock Market: Nowhere to Go. Trump floated this idea and then withdrew it. I think the odds of this happening higher now than two months ago and I predict it will happen within the next 2-4 months. 

10. There may be a tipping point when consumers in the US and the EU and elsewhere become so troubled with how China treats its Uyghur and Tibetan populations (see this and this) or how it is acting against Hong Kong or Taiwan or with its efforts to exert control outside China. These sorts of things are leaking out more of late as the bloom is off the rose and we are hearing more and more from our own clients (American and otherwise) saying that they are having employees refuse to go to China or consumers complaining about their goods being made in China. Take a company like Patagonia which has a stellar reputation for caring about the environment and people and even goes so far as to call itself The Activist Company; how much longer can it maintain its moral high ground while still having some of its products made in China? This is happening. See the NBA. See the Houston Rockets. See Blizzard. See what our own clients are telling us. I have been predicting for the longest time that this would occur but even in my own firm nobody saw this with the same urgency as me. The floodgates have opened so everybody better step aside. Go to social media if you don’t believe me and then wait until you (and China) see more than half the attendees at opening night at Staples Center wearing these free t-shirts. The anger and counter-anger will escalate to the point that trade will be greatly impacted. Bet on it. 

11. The U.S. has identified the PRC as a currency manipulator for the first time since 1994. The PRC has responded by continuing to weaken the RMB. If this trend continues, the U.S. could respond by raising tariffs rates even higher than the current 25% rate. The back and forth on this currency issue would then further disrupt purchase of PRC manufactured product.Still at about the same level of risk. 

12. Countervailing duty and anti-dumping cases against PRC industry sectors continue to increase. Higher and higher duties against Chinese industry are being ordered. These actions are independent of the administration. Continued action in this area threatens major sectors of trade with the PRC. No change in administration will have any impact. See Yet Another International Trade (AD/CVD) Petition Against China: This Time it’s Metal File Cabinets. This has continued apace. As one of our international trade lawyers is always saying, the tariffs may not kill you but the duties will. 

13. To avoid the impact of tariffs, many companies are leaving China. But it is not unlikely that the U.S. government will expand the current tariffs to other countries, particularly countries in S.E. Asia that are seeing the first wave of moves. Moreover, as more product is made outside of the PRC, it is likely that countervailing duty/antidumping actions will be expanded to cover those other countries as well. This may mean there will be limited options to avoid U.S. tariffs and other duties. We are constantly hearing of the FBI investigating illegally transshipped product. If you are aware of a competitor that is illegally transshipping, please call or email us because there is a good chance our international trade lawyers would be interested in your case. See How To Get Rich From Your Competitor’s Illegal Transshipping: Moiety and the False Claims Act.

14. There are a host of internal factors in the PRC that could have a major impact. Factors I look at are: a) the inability of the PRC leadership to take any stand other than defiance, leading to no chance of any resolution of issues by diplomacy and mutual agreement, b) African swine fever cuts Chinese pork supply in half, c) African army worm substantially reduces Chinese grain crop, d) consumer price inflation coupled with factory price deflation. The first two are happening but not necessarily at levels greater than two weeks ago, so overall little change here, as of now anyway. 

Overall, the risk of doing business with China has gone up substantially in just the last two months — heck, it’s gone up substantially in just the last two days. See also China’s New Company Tracking System: Comply, Comply, Comply and China’s New Cybersecurity System: There is NO Place to Hide.

Many are no longer asking whether China is too risky; they’ve already decided that it is.

What are you seeing out there?

Can Your Business Afford/Stomach the China Risks? syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/

[thisdaynews]

The Secret of Bernie’s Millions

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-secret-of-bernies-millions/

The Secret of Bernie’s Millions

BURLINGTON, Vt.—Early on in his eight years as the mayor of this city, when he typically dressed in a tieless ensemble of work boots and corduroys, Bernie Sanders one day left City Hall and found a ticket on the windshield of his rusty Volkswagen Dasher. The offense: This was the mayor’s spot, and surely, a cop had thought, this was not the mayor’s car. But it was. It matched perfectly with both Sanders’ image as a scrappy advocate of the little guy and his own consistently shaky financial reality. It was the beginning of the 1980s, and he was approaching 40, a single father of a not-quite-teenage son, renting a sparse, second-floor apartment and having a hard time keeping up with his bills. “Not only,” he wrote on his yellow, coffee-splotched legal pads, kept in archives at the University of Vermont, “do I not pay bills every month—‘What, every month?’—I am unable to …” His scribbles in barely legible cursive in the margins read now simultaneously like reminders and afterthoughts: “gas,” “light,” “water.”

He was, said Bruce Seifer, a friend of Sanders, an economic aide in his administration and one of many people who know him who told me this, “frugal.” Seifer paused and considered the right way to put it. “That’s a nice way of saying he’s a cheap son of a bitch.”

Story Continued Below

Today, he might still be cheap, but he’s sure not poor. In the wake of his 2016 presidential run, the most lucrative thing he’s ever done, the 77-year-old democratic socialist is a three-home-owning millionaire himself—with a net worth approaching at least $2 million, taking into account his publicly outlined assets and liabilities along with the real estate he owns outright. In a strict, bottom-line sense, Sanders has become one of those rich people against which he has so unrelentingly railed. The champion of the underclass and castigator of “the 1 percent” has found himself in the socio-economic penthouse of his rhetorical bogeymen. This development, seen mostly as the result of big bucks brought in by the slate of books he’s put out in the last few years, predictably has elicited snarky pokes, partisan jabs and charges of hypocrisy.The millionaire socialist!

Sanders himself has been impatient to the point of churlish when pressed about this. “I wrote a best-selling book,” he told theNew York Timesafter he recently released the last 10 years of his tax returns. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.” Asked on Fox News if this sort of success wasn’t “the definition of capitalism,” he bristled. “You know, I have a college degree,” he said.

Based, though, on a deeper examination of his financial disclosures, his tax returns, property records in Washington and Vermont and scarcely leafed-through scraps of his financial papers housed here at UVM, Sanders’ current financial portrait is not only some stroke-of-luck windfall. It’s also the product (with the help of his wife) of decades of planning. The upward trajectory from that jalopy of his to his relative riches now—as off-brand as it is for a man who once said he had “no great desire to be rich”—is the product of years of middle-class striving, replete with credit card debt, real estate upgrades and an array of investment funds and retirement accounts.

As an immigrant’s son who started close to the bottom and has ended up nearer to the top, Sanders has a narrative arc that would form the backbone of the campaign story of almost any other candidate. But it’s more complicated for him. There’s never been anybody like Sanders in the modern political history of this country—somebody who made a career out of haranguing millionaires … and who is now a millionaire himself. There is no set strategy for how to run for president as a democratic socialist with an expensive lakefront summer house. Americans generally don’t begrudge millionaires their millions—and, as Donald Trump has confirmed, the aura of wealth can serve as a useful means of self-promotion—but what to make of Sanders’ apparently conflicting narratives?

“He became the very thing he criticized others for becoming and at the same time didn’tfixany of the problems he’s been railing about that got him to this point,” Boston-based Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh told me.

“He almost at times sounds like he thinks it’s inherently evil to be well-off,” veteran Democratic strategist Bob Shrum said this week in an interview.

Does all of this make Sanders’ abiding calls for economic justice more authoritative or compelling, especially as the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee argues on the 2020 hustings for costly programs like tuition-free college and universal health care, or does it defuse his drilled-home political brand and somehow muffle his message?

“I think it’s only awkward if someone has sort of a facile understanding of what Bernie is trying to accomplish,” senior Sanders adviser Jeff Weaver told me, “which is to give lots of people opportunities to have a modicum of security.”

“It depends on how it plays out,” Shrum said.

What’s certain, though, is that how Sanders has become wealthy, and how he has managed his money, is one of the least radical things about the self-identified radical Sanders.

***

Before he had three homes,Sanders grew up in a rent-controlled apartment with three and a half rooms. The national economy boomed in the years following World War II, but in Sanders’ corner of the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, New York, life meant cut-rate groceries and hand-me-down coats.

His parents, a Polish paint salesman and a homemaker, were “solidly lower-middle class,” as he once put it, and they argued frequently about money—“arguments and more arguments,” Sanders has said. “Painful arguments. Bitter arguments. Arguments that seared through a little boy’s brain, never to be forgotten.” There was some talk at the outset of his second presidential candidacy that Sanders now was reluctantly ready to share more of his personal past, but this at least is a piece of it he’s been talking about for as long as anybody’s been listening to him and writing it down. “Money was a constant source of anxiety,” he said to a reporter from theWall Street Journalin 1983. “Money was something the family, the whole neighborhood, was constantly preoccupied with,” he toldThe Atlanticin 1985. “The money question to me,” he said in 2010, in a book calledThe Jews of Capitol Hill, “has always been very deep and emotional.”

Sanders’ mother died when he was 18, and his father when he was 20. He got “a few thousand dollars” of inheritance. And for $2,500, the summer after he graduated from the University of Chicago, he and his first wife bought 85 acres of meadow and woods in Middlesex, Vermont, an out-of-the-way plot that came with an old maple “sugarhouse.” With no electricity or running water, life in the ascetic, dirt-floor, shack-like structure didn’t work out, and neither did his marriage.

Toward the end of the ‘60s and throughout the entirety of the ‘70s, as he ran twice for governor and twice for the United States Senate as a member of the anti-war, left-wing, little-but-loud Liberty Union Party, Sanders worked sporadically as a carpenter and a freelance writer and eventually made and sold to schools filmstrips about largely regional history. “He was always poor,” friend Sandy Baird told me. Sanders collected unemployment during one of his political campaigns, borrowed gas money for his battered beater of a VW bug and dangled extension cords to share electricity with a downstairs neighbor. He got evicted. He didn’t seem to those around him to be too worried about it. “Everyone has to make sure that they survive, so obviously money was a concern,” remembered Linda Niedweske, a nutritionist at the time who got to know Sanders and later would become a political aide, “but it was never an overriding goal.” Fellow pal Dean Corren agreed. “I don’t think he ever really worried about that on a personal level,” he said.

“He didn’t give a shit about clothes,” said Tom Smith, a progressive activist and former city councilor. “He didn’t care about his car.”

In this respect, according to local attorney John Franco, a longtime confidante who’s known Sanders since the ‘70s, he fit in with many of the congenitally parsimonious citizens of his adopted home. And it’s more than even that, Franco added. It’s not just that he didn’t and doesn’t want to spend money. “He doesn’t want to bebothered.”

Sanders also used his meager means to buttress his political aims, wielding it almost as a kind of authenticator for the crux of his lodestar view of the haves and have-nots. He lambasted “a United States Congress composed of millionaires.” He said again and again that it wasn’t right that their elected representatives appeared in his estimation to disproportionately serve “the interests of corporations and big business—their fellow millionaires.”

In 1974, waging one of his quixotic campaigns for the Senate, he practically ran more against Nelson Rockefeller than he did his actual opponents. And in 1976, in releasing his financial disclosure as a candidate for governor, he attached a short statement that sat on the page actually not like an apology so much as a chest-out boast. “Unfortunately,” he said, “there is not too much to report. At the present moment, I am ‘worth’ about $1,100, which includes a savings account and a 1967 car. I own no real estate, stocks or bonds.”

This steadfast posture got necessarily more locally focused when he ran for mayor starting in the fall of 1980. As the election of Ronald Reagan ushered in nationally a more conservative, pro-business age, Sanders prioritized tenants’ rights, pledged no hikes in property taxes and promised a “people-oriented” waterfront instead of an enclave of high-priced condominiums. “It is my belief, if present trends continue,” he wrote in a crinkled newsprint pamphlet tucked in the UVM files, “the City of Burlington will be converted into an area in which only the wealthy and upper-middle class will be able to afford to live.” He knocked on door after door in the cold in the city’s poorer wards.

“Not having money, he was able to identify with these people,” Garrison Nelson, a Vermont political science professor and veteran Sanders watcher, told me, “and they were able to identify with him.”

“He would walk into a home where people were fairly poor,” said former city councilor Gary De Carolis, “and he’d be absolutely right at home.”

He won by 10 votes. His new job came with a yearly salary of $33,824, plenty hearty at that time, the equivalent of more than $100,000 in today’s dollars and easily more than he had ever made. “It’s so strange, just having money,” he marveled to a reporter from the Associated Press.

Nearing a year into his tenure, he bought a new car, a silver Honda Civic station wagon—paying $6,400 and taking out a three-year loan, committing to monthly payments of $239.69, according to records of the transaction in his files. After three fender benders, he would come to regret the splurge. “I knew I should never have bought a new car,” he toldNew England Monthly.

And shortly after his first re-election, in 1983, perhaps feeling a smidge more secure and emboldened, he finally stopped renting. With a mortgage of $49,500—records don’t show what he put down, or the total price of the sale—he purchased a two-story, six-room, 1,900-square-foot house on Catherine Street, a mile south of City Hall. The décor remained spartan. “Not a whole lot of furniture,” De Carolis recalled. Even so, and even then, the fact that the socialist mayor owned justonehome caused some critics to tut-tut. “I can remember lefties criticizing Bernie when he bought his first house,” Franco told me, their suggestion, he said, “that he was a bourgeois sellout when he didthat.”

***

“My political philosophy,”Sanders penned in one of his legal pads, underlining his mid-‘80s chicken scratch.

“Ultimately, I believe in democracy—that we should live in a society whereallof our citizens help decide what happens—and whereallof our citizens enjoy the fruits of their labor. In practical terms, the development of a democratic society in our nation would mean a far greater degree of citizen participation, public ownership of production, and a far more equal distribution of wealth and power,” he said.

“Essentially,” he continued, “I believe that 200 people years after the 1st American Rev.—we need a 2nd American Revolution.”

In these private writings, he returned to this theme regularly.

“There is a great deal of confusion in this country as to what politics isreallyabout,” he said. What it wasn’t about: ads, TV, how a candidate looks, “inane debates between Dems and Reps, saying the same thing.” No, he said. “In politics, there are winners and losers,” and the losers, Sanders believed, were “the majority of our population who work hard—day after day, year after year—and often have nothing in the bank to show for their years of efforts.”

Those were the people he sought to represent.

“My view of politics,” he wrote elsewhere in his notes, “is that you can’t always represent everybody. Which side are you on? The Class Issue is the major issue.”

When he was mayor, the monomania of Sanders’ theory and rhetoric didn’t change, obviously—but something else about him definitely did. Because in retrospect, a step toward improving his personal finances in some sense was stabilizing the city’s.

Surprising skeptical and even fearful local businessmen, surprising both Republicans and Democrats on the city council, surprising his friends and many say even himself, “Hizzoner the socialist,” as theBoston Phoenixcalled him, proved to be a diligent and able steward of the municipal purse. “He’s not a spender,” Peter Clavelle, one of his top economic staffers who ultimately succeeded him as mayor, told me. “He was in fact a fiscal conservative that managed the city’s resources quite well.”

With the help of a savvy treasurer in accountant Jonathan Leopold, Sanders found an unexpected surplus of $1.9 million, which he used to pave roads without hiking taxes. Putting out to bid the city’s fuel and insurance contracts, instituting the first audit in nearly 30 years of the city’s pension fund and streamlining cooperation between different departments, he saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. He upped fees for large-development building permits. He raised taxes on commercial properties, but opponents’ ads saying Sanders “does not believe in free enterprise” fell flat. From his third-floor office, with a Eugene Debs poster hanging on the wall—“Unionist. Socialist. Revolutionary,” it said—he launched an economic task force that led to the creation of the Community and Economic Development Office. “It is my view that there is probably no more important area of concern for the City of Burlington than the issue of economic development,” he wrote in announcing the endeavor.

“The Republicrat administrations were acting just like a big corporation,” Sanders said in 1982 in an article in New York’sIthaca Times, emphasizing his conviction that there was little difference between the two major parties. “They were sluggish, without motivation or ideas. We had the good fortune to inherit that moribund system and revamp it.”

“Socialist Mayor Presides Over a Spell of Prosperity,” read a headline in theHartford Courantin 1985.

City staffers sometimes claimed that Sanders was “out-Republicaning the Republicans.”

“Trotskyites for Sound Fiscal Management,” they joked.

The “red mayor in the Green Mountains,” asRolling Stonehad dubbed him, was reelected the first time around with 53 percent of the vote, and then in 1985 with 55 percent, and then in 1987 with 56.

If he wanted to talk about what he really wanted to talk about, which was income and wealth inequality and the burgeoning American “oligarchy” as well as foreign policy, he knew, say his advisers and friends, that he first and foremost had to get right the dollars and cents. “If he did a good job there,” De Carolis said, “then he could talk about what’s going on in Nicaragua. But he couldn’t talk about the inequalities of various parts of our country if he didn’t take care of that home front.”

He was, Bill Conroy wrote in the 2016 preface to his 1990 book about Sanders that started as his doctoral thesis in the ‘80s, a “pragmatic socialist.”

“Bernie himself may or may not have been a good financial manager,” Steven Soifer told me. Now the chair of the Department of Social Work at the University of Mississippi, he is also the author of a 1991 book on Sanders’ time as mayor. “However,” Soifer said, “Bernie always had the skill of surrounding himself with very competent, sometimes brilliant people.”

One of them was Bruce Seifer, a higher-up in the Community and Economic Development Office, or CEDO. “It’s about fairness and democracy with a small ‘d,’” he told me. “You run government effectively and efficiently, number one, and then you make sure that everybody does the job they’re supposed to do, and everybody pays their fair share of taxes.” But Sanders was at the helm. “And the thing is, he’s not a radical,” Seifer said. “He’s just, like, your common sense uncle.”

***

Looking back,the last two years of the ‘80s can be seen as the start of the rest of Sanders’ life—because that was the moment when he really started using traditional tools of the country’s capitalist financial system to put himself on firmer footing.

In May of 1988, he married the former Jane O’Meara Driscoll, a divorced mother of three who had been his significant other the entire time he was mayor while also serving as the director of his administration’s youth office. And that summer and fall, nearing the end of his fourth and final term at City Hall, he ran for Congress, as an independent, of course—and lost. But he lost only by 3.7 percentage points, and he beat the Democrat, effectively becoming for the first time in his career a realistic electoral option in a statewide race. “A real breakthrough for him,” Nelson, the UVM professor, told me. It was a hint of what was to come.

At the time, though, that’s all it was—latent potential in a moment marked more by unknowns and unease. Biding time and weighing his options, Sanders scrambled for paying gigs. In January of 1989, he contacted the chair of the sociology department at Hamilton College, four hours away in Clinton, New York. “I believe,” Sanders wrote to Dennis Gilbert, “that I could offer your students an unusual academic perspective.” After spending a semester as a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, he taught classes on urban sociology and social democracy at Hamilton. Leaning on the last hunk of his salary as mayor and speeches at colleges and universities, Sanders made more than $45,000 in 1989—given inflation and the rising cost of living, effectively less than he had made when he was first mayor. Staring at 50 and mulling another crapshoot of a congressional bid, he fretted. “At Hamilton,” Steve Rosenfeld, his 1990 press secretary, would say, “Bernie would often confide in Dennis, saying he was worried about his professional future and financial security.”

Sanders and his new wife responded by pooling resources. Central to their efforts? One of the most reliable ways that millions upon millions of Americans have used to leverage and try to improve their financial fortunes: real estate.

In September of 1988, according to local property records and kicking off a spate of activity, Jane Sanders changed the house she owned on Isham Street to a housetheyowned—shifting legally from “sole owner” to “Jane O’Meara Sanders and Bernard Sanders, husband and wife, as tenants by the entirety.” Just two days later, together, they used the house to take out a mortgage of $50,000. The following February, according to a three-line recording of the transaction in theBurlington Free Press, Sanders sold the house he had bought in 1983 with a $49,500 mortgage for $82,000—a fine return on that first investment. Not quite three months later, leaving the more “urban” portion of Burlington and moving to a neighborhood closer to picturesque Lake Champlain, Bernie and Jane Sanders got a $140,000 mortgage to purchase for $175,500 a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, not-quite-1,600-square-foot house on Killarney Drive—“a red-paneled, boxy, split-level house,” as Rosenfeld would describe it, “that could be in any middle-class suburb in America.” Barely more than a month after that, they sold the house on Isham for $135,000.

In 1990, sometimes wearing a blue blazer with a missing button, working out of a cramped basement office in the Killarney house that had plywood tables, a painted-shut window and green, glued-on, indoor-outdoor carpet, and getting into hot water in the press for paying his staffers as contractors instead of full-time employees, Sanders tried again to win Vermont’s sole seat in the House—and this time did. In the aftermath of his victory, he was a mixture of exultant and indignant. “I’m not an insider,” he said. “I know who I am. I know where I came from. I don’t need to get down on my knees and ask rich people for help.” After having excoriated members of Congress for voting themselves pay raises two years before—“quite beyond comprehension,” he huffed in a letter he wrote to the three members of Vermont’s congressional delegation that he made public with a mayoral press release—Sanders started making considerably more than he had ever earned: $125,100 a year.

In the first half of the ‘90s, though—as the crotchety independent butted heads with Democrats in Washington while attempting to navigate the topsy-turvy political terrain of the time, the election of Bill Clinton spawning the rise of increasingly virulent, Newt Gingrich-led hyper-partisanship—Sanders’ prospects were far from assured. And he used his house to hedge his bets. Signing over power of attorney to his wife, they refinanced in 1991 and then again in 1993, both times with mortgages larger than the one they had agreed to in 1989—$140,500 in ’91, $145,600 in ’93.

Sanders settled in, though, as a more and more fixed political presence in Vermont. His race in ’94 was the last one he could have lost, really, as he cemented his status and security.

In 2000, with a real estate boom underway, and with a mortgage of $62,100, he and his wife bought in essence their first second home—a condominium in Burlington, which they bought initially for Jane Sanders’ elderly mother, according to Weaver, and used intermittently as a place for extended family or a rental property.

In 2004, Jane Sanders was hired as the president of Burlington College, a small, middling liberal arts school. Making a six-figure salary of her own, her tenure would end in acrimony, after her decision to pursue a campus expansion by making a $10-million land purchase crippled the institution. She resigned in 2014 and took with her a $200,000 severance some called a “golden parachute.” In 2016, the debt-beset college closed for good, felled by “an inexperienced president,” in the barbed words of Jane Sanders’ successor.

In the meantime, Bernie Sanders’ career was heading in the opposite direction—up. In 2006, he was elected to the Senate. In 2007, with his congressional salary now at $165,200, and adding to the condo and the house on Killarney, quietly climbing some financial stairsteps when far fewer people were paying him any attention, Sanders bought at the top of a surging real estate market a row home in Washington for $489,000.

And in 2009, with markets crashing, when half of the 100 senators still were worth a million dollars or more, Sanders’ estimated net worth clocked in at $105,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics—at the bottom of the Senate wealth chart. Back in Burlington, Bernie and Jane Sanders returned to real estate, using a mortgage of $324,000 to purchase for $405,000 an upgrade—a four-bedroom, 2,352-square-foot house that sits atop a slow slope of a hill up from the street on Van Patten Parkway. (They bought the house, interestingly, from her son, David Driscoll, and his wife. In 2012, for $265,000, Driscoll and his wife bought from Jane and Bernie Sanders the Killarney house. Effectively, they swapped houses. Driscoll, Weaver said, wanted to live in “his childhood home.”) In 2013, Bernie and Jane Sanders refinanced the Van Patten house, taking out a mortgage of $312,275.

And in 2015, when he started running for president, he had a net worth of a little more than $700,000, according to CRP calculations, a financial picture that had all his assets in his wife’s name and liabilities from a pair of mortgages as well as credit card debt he listed as between $25,002 and $65,000. It made him, a spokesman said at the time, “a regular American.” More “regular,” perhaps, than he should have been: According to the Federal Reserve, the average household in 2015 had credit card debt of about $10,000.

“Unfortunately,” Sanders said during his 2016 campaign, using the same effacing opening clause and striking the same tone that he had in his financial disclosure of 40 years before, “I remain one of the poorer members of the United States Senate.”

But for the politics he practiced—always—it was a useful note to sound.

He all but compared his finances to those of the frontrunning Hillary Clinton, she of the high-dollar speaking fees. “That type of wealth,” he said, “has the potential to isolate you from the reality of the world.”

It wasn’t long before unprecedented money for Sanders started rolling in.

***

Driving from address to address, I recently made a quick, self-guided tour of Sanders’ sequence of houses here in the Queen City of Vermont, tracing from Catherine to Isham to Killarney to Van Patten the almost 40 years of the socialist’s slow climb to the upper class. I stared at his car, a red 2010 Chevy Aveo, parked in his driveway.

Then, though, I carried on an hour so north, to bucolic North Hero, some 20 miles south of the Canadian border, to see the emblem of the economic altitude to which Sanders has ascended—the third house, the summer house, the house with rustic wood sides and a silver tin roof and four bedrooms and 500 feet of waterfront that Bernie and Jane Sanders bought for $575,000, cash, through an entity they created called the Islands Trust. “Jane’s idea was to have something that would stay in the family,” Weaver told me, “over generations, and that sort of structure was the way to help accomplish that.”

Past horses and silos and campsites and apple farms, it’s nestled at the end of a gravel private lane, hidden behind a cluster of evergreens, looking out over the wide, resplendent blue of Lake Champlain.

Much has changed in these last four years. In 2015, Sanders had that credit card debt and two mortgages that ranged from $250,001 to $500,000, according to his Senate financial disclosure of that year. In 2016, the credit card debt was gone, and one of those mortgages had been halved. By 2018, only one of the mortgages remained at all; that January, records show, he paid off what was left of the $312,275 mortgage he had on his main house in Vermont.

In 2015, he published a book calledThe Speech, basically a transcript of his memorable 2010 filibuster on (what else?) corporate greed, income inequality and the decline of the middle class. Sanders made $3,035, which he donated to charity. In 2016, though, book money began to pile up. He got a $795,000 advance to writeOur Revolution. He pocketed an additional $70,484 in royalties. In 2017, the book royalties added up to $880,091.14. And last year, while they dipped, they still were a hunk of money: $392,810.37.

The Sanders’ tax returns, too, tell the tale: From 2015 to 2018, their total income went from $240,622 to $1,073,333 to $1,150,891 to $566,421. Some of that, along with money from a retirement account, according to Jane Sanders, plus proceeds from a sale of a share of a family home of hers, helped pay for the nice place on the lake that I sat and looked at while listening to birds chirp in the chill of spring here in the northern reaches of New England.

“Bernie is a known quantity in any socialist paradise,” GOP consultant Rick Wilson told me, “the party apparatchik with the dacha …”

This kind of characterization makes Sanders’ friends and others who’ve known him for years all but roll their eyes.

“He’s still the same cranky guy,” said Terje Anderson, the chair of the Vermont Democratic Party. “I run into him at Hannaford shopping for groceries.”

And in his cart, I asked, aren’t the finest meats and cheeses?

“Hell no,” Anderson said.

“There’s no change,” Niedweske added. “His priorities remain the same.”

“I mean, I don’t think any of Bernie’s supporters said, ‘Oh, well, now that he’s made a lot of money selling a book … I can’t support him anymore,’” Terry Bouricius, a former Burlington city councilor and progressive who’s known Sanders since the ‘70s, told me. “No—I don’t think that happened to anybody.”

A spectrum of politicos I talked to don’t think this is that big of a political problem for Sanders. He has problems, actually, they said, that are bigger than his bottom line—his persistent lack of appeal to female voters and black voters, for instance, and his generally sagging poll numbers ever since an evidently formidable Joe Biden entered the race, and the slap-in-the-face mathematical fact that this time around he’s running against not only Hillary Clinton but 20-plus other Democrats. He is, in other words, no longer the beneficiary of the anybody-but-her voters.

“The least of his problems,” Marsh, the Democratic strategist from Boston, said of his wealth.

“Detractors will needle and pester and continue to push that argument,” said Joe Trippi, the Democratic strategist who’s been working on presidential campaigns for almost 40 years. “But I don’t think in the end it’s going to have much impact.”

“On the list of stuff that bothers me about Bernie,” said Stuart Stevens, the GOP consultant who was the chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 run, “the fact that he wrote a book and made some money doesn’t bother me at all.”

Ditto Democrat Bakari Sellers.

“I’m not going to sit here and shit on Bernie Sanders for being a millionaire,” the former South Carolina lawmaker and current Kamala Harris supporter told me.

Why not?

“I want to be a millionaire, too!”

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