Lies and Policies

 After the hurricane hit North Carolina, Mr. Trump lied about FEMA. He claimed that FEMA was unfair in allocating its help. His lies were so destructive that some victims refused to accept  FEMA's help.

Trump seems now to believe those lies. He is contemplating closing down and abolishing FEMA (Trump says states should manage disasters and weighs shuttering FEMA, New York Times, January 24, 2025). That would be a big mistake.

President Trump muses about letting each state be independent and stand on its own two feet. Does that mean no more Massachusetts money going to red states? Perhaps Massachusetts would like that; but I don't think so: from John Adams on down, Massachusetts has always believed in the United States of America.

 Senator Graham believes it was wrong for President Trump to pardon the January 6th rioters. I agree.

In that case, why on earth did he vote for Mr. Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, the unqualified Secretary Hegseth?

Doesn't he know that the "tit for tat" strategy (i.e., a vote against the nominee) is the best way to stop someone from doing the nation harm?

Maybe next time.

Trump's punishment

 

I think the appropriate sentence for soon-to-be President Trump is community service  (A New York Judge Upholds Trump's Conviction, New York Times, January 4th., 2025: A1, A15).

For one day each week of his Presidency he should help clean the streets of New York or Washington, DC. This would substitute for his golf-playing or entertaining tech moguls.

Dr. Bhattacharya, Covid, Sweden, and the Future

 The nomination of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to head up NIH reminds me that there was one country, Sweden, that tried to follow the principles outlined in the Great Barrington Declaration. That is, it tried to protect the elderly while allowing most other people to carry out their day to day activities unimpeded.

How did that work out? I think the results were mixed. Early in the pandemic, 2020, Sweden had over 1½ times the number of excess deaths(that is, deaths from all causes, including Covid) proportionate to the population than did other Scandinavia countries (Denmark, Finland, and Norway).  This is to be expected, as few measures were taken in Sweden to reduce the incidence of the disease in the general population.

However in 2022 with the introduction of vaccination, Sweden’s excess death rate was about ½ the rate in the remaining Scandinavian countries. Sweden reduced its excess death rate while the rate in the other Scandinavian countries increased. This is what the Great Barrington Declaration predicted: that lock-downs and other restrictions at the front end of the epidemic would result in additional excess deaths when the epidemic was over. It is too early to judge whether this long tail will continue.

 Finally, Covid deaths in Sweden, as opposed to excess deaths from all causes, over the whole course of the epidemic from 2020 to November 2024 showed Sweden doing badly: over 1½  times as many Covid deaths, proportionate to the population, as in the other Scandinavian countries.

We should note that Scandinavia as a whole, including Sweden, did better than many other European countries and much, much better than the USA where Covid death rates were higher than those in Scandinavia (leaving out Sweden). At the height of the pandemic, states controlled by Republicans had higher excess death rates than those controlled by Democrats.

As the threat of a new pandemic (a bird flu crossover to humans) approaches, we need to decide carefully which restriction over our behavior are necessary and which can be ignored. We must follow the data painfully gained from the recent Covid pandemic.

Appeared in Cambridge Day, Jan 2025

Trump's Bureaucracy

 This was in Cambridge DAY

Tariffs and Exclusions

 I was angered to read that crony capitalism would soon be returning to the United States (Firms Elbowing to Lobby Trump over his Tariffs, New York Times, November 22, 2024: A1, A22). In the first term, the Trump administration excused some firms from having to pay the tariffs on goods imported from China and other countries around the world.

Exclusions from paying the tariff are usually given to firms if a reduction in the quantity of goods they import would harm Americans. However, the Times reports that one study, of 7000 applications for exclusions, found that firms that increased their donations to Republican political entities had a better chance of receiving an exclusion than firms that increased financial support of Democratic entities.

Of course, large firms with a sophisticated lobby staff or consultants, were better able to put forward requests for exemptions, greatly disadvantaging small businesses. I wonder if firms booking into Trump’s hotels had a better chance of getting an exclusion?

We can expect that in the second term, firms will be even better placed to lobby. They have had four years to build up their capacity. Or can we? Trump has always maintained, that it is the Chinese exporter who will pay the tariff not the importer or the American consumer; so shouldn’t the exporter get the exclusion, rather than the lobbying importer?

Krugman made the same point in today's NYT

Republican Mind-Set

I was just reading Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas’s The Wise Men, an account of the foreign policy work undertaken by Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, and their colleagues during and after the Second World War.

According to Isaacson and Thomas (Chapter 19), during Joe McCarthy’s rampage through the State Department looking for Communists and other undersirables, one of Dulles’s subordinates, responsible for internal security, being “vindictive and shrewd, hired 350 zealous but inexperienced investigators who quickly went to work ferreting out Foreign Service officers deemed drunkards, homosexual, incompetent, or ‘incompatible,’ a flexible category. They were replaced by true believers.”

Replacing civil servants seems to be a long standing part of the Republican play-book. This time will it end in another tragedy or in farce? I fear tragedy.