Michael Barone, Washington Examiner: Will post-coronavirus America see a post-war boom, or will people just hunker down?
On my daily walk down a side street, I saw a restaurant with a diagonal cross made of adhesive tape on its sign. Gone was the notice that it would open for takeout; now it looked to be closed for good.
Although I’m aware that most restaurants go out of business within a few years or even months, I felt a certain sadness. The owners and staff lost their jobs and perhaps their dreams, through no fault of their own and for reasons they couldn’t have anticipated just a few weeks ago.
I’m guessing that they’d like to go back to that time now, as most of us would. I have been thinking about this amid news reports that social isolation and other measures have made sufficient progress against the virus.
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WNU Editor: Certain industries are definitely going to be experiencing hard times for a few years. The airline industry. Tourism. Sport franchises. Anything that will involve large gatherings of people. The hospitality/restaurant industry is facing a massive shake-up. Commercial real-estate is kaput. And then there is the politics and the policies that certain governments are going to pursue. I live in Canada, and I am confident that the policies that will be pushed by the government will benefit some industries, while harming other parts of the economy. The Canadian government's antipathy to the oil industry comes to mind. The same can be said about the U.S.. I am confident that President Trump will continue to pursue the same economic policies that helped the economy boom for the past three years. Will a President Biden pursue the same policies. Definitely not. Bottom line. We are in uncharted waters right now, and it is going to take more than a year to have a better understanding on where all of this is going.
6 comments:
Yes!
Hopefully we won't be dealing with president Biden. It seems to me that this would only mean even more power for the likes of Fauci, Birx, the CDC whose policies have wrecked our economy and I don't see that they've learned anything from their mistakes or perhaps they've hurt good people by design.
Your commentary on the restaurant industry is especially spot on. Also, the antipathy that many in the "west" have toward the oil industry has never made sense. Oil and oil related products are literally the lifeblood a modern economy. These industries and the skilled people in them are national treasures and should be treated as such.
"Will a President Biden pursue the same policies. "
Biden will not pursue policies opposite to Trump, if elected.
How do I know? Because Biden is a puppet. If Uncle Mumbles is lucky, he might be able to read the teleprompter without error, reading the words that his staff give him.
February was a tipping point for some experts.
The concern these medical experts had been raising in late January and early February turned to alarm by the third week in February. That was when they effectively concluded that the United States had already lost the fight to contain the virus, and that it needed to switch to mitigation. One critical element in that shift was the realization that many people in the country were likely already infected and capable of spreading the virus, but not showing any symptoms. Here Dr. Lee discusses this conclusion with Dr. Robert Kadlec, the head of the virus response effort at the Department of Health and Human Services and a key White House adviser.
Dr. Kadlec and other administration officials decided the next day to recommend to Mr. Trump that he publicly support the start of these mitigation efforts, such as school closings. But before they could discuss it with the president, who was returning from India, another official went public with a warning, sending the stock market down sharply and angering Mr. Trump. The meeting to brief him on the recommendation was canceled and it was three weeks before Mr. Trump would reluctantly come around to the need for mitigation.
This slow pace of action was confusing to the medical experts on the Red Dawn email chain, who were increasingly alarmed that cities and states that were getting hit hard by the virus needed to move faster to take aggressive steps.
A former high-ranking Trump official weighed in with criticisms.
When Mr. Trump gave a speech to the nation on March 11 in which he announced limits on flights from Europe to the United States — but still no move to curb gatherings in cities where the virus had spread — the experts on the email chain grew angry and fearful. Among those questioning Mr. Trump’s decision was Tom Bossert, who had previously served as Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser.
Participants were angry the C.D.C. did not push for school closures.
The Red Dawn participants were even more upset when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in mid-March, questioned the value of closing schools, at least for short periods of time. Soon enough, governors ignored this advice, and most schools in the United States were shut. But it happened largely without federal leadership.
See all of the email exchanges.
The New York Times has collected more than 80 pages of these emails, from January through March, based in part on Freedom of Information Act requests to local government officials. Here is a collection of many of these emails, which have been arranged by The Times in chronological order. This file includes a list of many of the medical experts on the email chains. It also contains related emails from certain state government medical experts who were reaching out to the federal government during the same time period.
The Trump administration announced Friday afternoon that employers outside of the health care industry generally won’t be required to record coronavirus cases among their workers, a decision that left some workplace safety advocates incredulous.
COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, is classified as a recordable illness, meaning employers would have to notify the Occupational Safety and Health Administration when an employee gets sick from an exposure at work. But the nation’s top workplace safety agency now says the majority of U.S. employers won’t have to try to determine whether employees’ infections happened in the workplace unless it’s obvious.
“OSHA is kidding, right?” tweeted David Michaels, who helmed OSHA throughout the presidency of Barack Obama.
It is not a joke. OSHA, which is part of the Labor Department, released an enforcement memo Friday spelling out the recording rules.
Employers in health care, emergency response and corrections would have to inform the agency when they become aware of a COVID-19 case that probably resulted from work. But other entities would not have to do so unless there was “objective evidence” that the transmission was work-related, or there was evidence “reasonably available to the employer” ― for example, if a whole slew of people who work right next to each other got sick.
The rationale: Those employers outside of health care “may have difficulty making determinations about whether workers who contracted COVID-19 did so due to exposures at work,” the memo stated.
But if employers don’t have to try to figure out whether a transmission happened in the workplace, it could leave both them and the government in the dark about emerging hotspots in places like retail stores or meatpacking plants.
“So all you infected bus drivers, grocery store clerks, poultry processors ― you didn’t get it at work,” tweeted Jordan Barab, a former OSHA official now with the House Committee on Education and Labor.
The announcement is part of an ongoing fight between the Trump administration and occupational safety experts who say OSHA is failing to fulfill its obligations under the president. Employer record keeping has been a key issue in that spat. Early in his presidency, Donald Trump loosened the recording requirements employers must follow, a move critics said would make it easier for companies to fudge their data and hide their injuries.
So, #OSHA says the employers outside of health care no longer have to determine whether employees’ COVID infections may be work-related. So all you infected bus drivers, grocery store clerks, poultry processors — you didn’t get it at work. https://t.co/3kjXjx7gaM
— Jordan Barab (@jbarab) April 10, 2020
Safety advocates say recording injuries and illnesses like COVID-19 helps officials discover growing hazards and shape sound public policy to address them. The Labor Department, under Trump and Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, has portrayed those kinds of employer obligations as burdensome red tape.
Oil. The ores. The geological riches made America powerful, a machine for death, decay, renewal and all-pervasive violence.
America is Europe's death cult, it spreads its disease to every corner of the planet. Get your cut well you can.
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