Tuesday Open Thread

12 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread”

1. Did our junior senator miss this memo? 

   Trump campaign lashes out over ‘Don’t defend Trump’ memo

   Earlier this month, the Senate Republican campaign arm circulated a memo with shocking advice to GOP candidates on responding to coronavirus: “Don’t defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban — attack China.”

   The Trump campaign was furious.

   The 57-page memo, which was authored by a top GOP strategist, was perceived by Trump aides as giving candidates leeway to avoid backing the president on what could be the defining issue of the 2020 campaign. And they held a series of conversations on Friday and over the weekend figuring out how to respond.

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2. New polling from Magellan Strategies.

   The survey, commissioned by Healthier Colorado and The Colorado Health Foundation and conducted by the Colorado-based polling firm Magellan Strategies, included telephone and online surveys from April 15 to April 21….

   A majority (57%) of respondents rated the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment as extremely or very trustworthy in providing accurate information about the new coronavirus, while the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (55%) and Gov. Jared Polis (50%) also received higher marks. President Donald Trump (29%) and the news media (20%) received low grades for their trustworthiness related to the virus.

   Coloradans also put far more trust in the state government to lead it through this crisis, with 56% saying states should take the lead, and 35% saying the federal government should be at the helm.

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   1. "news media (20%)" is very disturbing.

      I watch: MSNBC.
      I read: Bloomberg, NY Times, Wapo, FT, Guardian.

      I see consistency among all of them.

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      1. @Dave: perhaps you need to vary a bit. I read, via paid subscriptions, National Review and Washington Examiner from the Right; Mother Jones and Hightower Lowdown from the Left; The Economist in the middle. Reason (magazine) is somewhere in the mix, but seems to wander around. Same for Wired magazine.

         Yes, I watch MSNBC and once in a great while, Fox. Carlson is slightly more tolerable for me than Hannity, Ingraham, Pirro, Dobbs, all four of the latter falling into the “refugee from electric bozo land” category.

         On line, I tend to go with Colorado Sun and The Bulwark.

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3. Who pays for disaster relief?  Paul Krugman with a surprising analysis (be sure to follow the link below if you want to really understand how this is likely to work).

   You might ask how the money will be repaid; actually, the odds are that it never will be repaid, which is OK but that’s a story for another time. There are also potential problems created by a high level of federal debt, although to be honest it’s unlikely that U.S. debt will be a real problem any time soon.

   The key point for now, however, is that this debt-financed disaster relief isn’t coming at the expense of America’s future growth; it’s not making the country poorer, and it’s not cheating future generations. The debt we’re incurring now is money we owe to ourselves.

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   1. smh

      Krugman misses the point, again

      "… unlikely that U.S. debt will be a real problem any time soon. "

       

      Almost no one will follow his economic or mathematical analysis.
      The number is BIG, and politicians will use the number to scare voters and talking heads

      Then we'll have to cut Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security just because that foreigner Obama.

       

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      1. As long as Trump and McConnell are in power, you unfortunately, are absolutely correct.

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      2. Yes, BIG numbers are scary! The number is even BIGGER if you express it in pennies rather than dollars. I mean Texas has a lot of square miles, and it has even more square acres; I can't imagine how scary big Texas would be if we expressed it in square inches.

         A big deficit however is not scary at the moment because the real interest rate is negative.

         Wow! I borrow money, and I pay it back with fewer dollars. I'd personally like to be in on that deal for my mortgage. And, then I'd hope for some inflation to come along.

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         1. I think what you (“they”, that is) mean to say is something about how deficit spending is bad. That argument depends entirely on what you use the money for and whether you are in the middle of a disaster/depression, recession or a boom economy,

            In a depression, you use deficits to get keep people from starving and businesses from disappearing. There is absolutely ZERO risk of a wage-price spiral because wages aren’t going anywhere. 

            Secondly, it really matters whether you use deficit spending to build infrastructure (create jobs), or to give tax breaks to the wealthy. In the present climate (disaster plus depression), the former is necessary; the latter is bonker-balls. Supply side economics doesn’t do shit if businesses are just using the stimulus to buy-back their stock or off-shore their operations.

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            1. But McConnell and Trump can't resist the opportunity to make a bad situation worse

               Mr. McConnell took heat even from some members of his own party. “The last thing we need in the middle of an economic crisis is to have states all filing bankruptcy all across America and not able to provide services to people who desperately need them,” Maryland’s governor, Larry Hogan, the current chairman of the National Governors Association, told Politico in an interview on Thursday.

               Representative Peter King, a New York Republican, took particular exception to Mr. McConnell’s suggestion that states were looking for “free money.” “To say that it is ‘free money’ to provide funds for cops, firefighters and health care workers makes McConnell the Marie Antoinette of the Senate,” Mr. King tweeted.

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            2. Yeah, rational analysis with historic facts – that's definitely how this works.

                

               Scary.
               Fear. Insecurity. Desperation.  No place in this discussion. got it.

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4. More easily digestible economic analysis from Paul Krugman

   Peacocks and Vultures Are Circling the Deficit

   The only fiscal thing to fear is deficit fear itself.

   We haven’t heard much from the deficit peacocks in recent years, even though the budget deficit, which declined sharply during the Obama years, soared again under Donald Trump. Funny how that works. But you can be sure they’ll be back in force if Joe Biden wins this November.

   What about deficit vultures? That’s the term I’ve been using for politicians who exploit real or imagined fiscal distress to feed a reactionary policy agenda.

   After the last crisis, conservatives used deficits as an excuse to cut social programs — for example, a number of states made it much harder to collect unemployment benefits. This time around, McConnell and Trump are trying to exploit deficit fears to force state governments to downsize, undermine (and possibly privatize) the post office and more.

   It goes almost without saying that the deficit vultures are hypocrites. After all, Trump and McConnell rammed through a $2 trillion tax cut in 2017, with no apparent concern about the effects on the deficit. Nor have I heard any Republican complaints about Trump’s huge bailouts for farmers, whose distress is largely the result of his own policies.

    

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