The Cult of Selfishness Is Killing America
The right has made irresponsible behavior a key principle.
By Paul Krugman
America’s response to the coronavirus has been a lose-lose proposition.
The Trump administration and governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis insisted that there was no trade-off between economic growth and controlling the disease, and they were right — but not in the way they expected.
Premature reopening led to a surge in infections: Adjusted for population, Americans are currently dying from Covid-19 at around 15 times the rate in the European Union or Canada. Yet the “rocket ship” recovery Donald Trump promised has crashed and burned: Job growth appears to have stalled or reversed, especially in states that were most aggressive about lifting social distancing mandates, and early indications are that the U.S. economy is lagging behind the economies of major European nations.
So we’re failing dismally on both the epidemiological and the economic fronts. But why?
On the face of it, the answer is that Trump and allies were so eager to see big jobs numbers that they ignored both infection risks and the way a resurgent pandemic would undermine the economy. As I and others have said, they failed the marshmallow test, * sacrificing the future because they weren’t willing to show a little patience.
And there’s surely a lot to that explanation. But it isn’t the whole story.
For one thing, people truly focused on restarting the economy should have been big supporters of measures to limit infections without hurting business — above all, getting Americans to wear face masks. Instead, Trump ridiculed those in masks as “politically correct,” while Republican governors not only refused to mandate mask-wearing, but they prevented mayors from imposing local mask rules.
Also, politicians eager to see the economy bounce back should have wanted to sustain consumer purchasing power until wages recovered. Instead, Senate Republicans ignored the looming July 31 expiration of special unemployment benefits, which means that tens of millions of workers are about to see a huge hit to their incomes, damaging the economy as a whole.
So what was going on? Were our leaders just stupid? Well, maybe. But there’s a deeper explanation of the profoundly self-destructive behavior of Trump and his allies: They were all members of America’s cult of selfishness.
You see, the modern U.S. right is committed to the proposition that greed is good, that we’re all better off when individuals engage in the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest. In their vision, unrestricted profit maximization by businesses and unregulated consumer choice is the recipe for a good society.
Support for this proposition is, if anything, more emotional than intellectual. I’ve long been struck by the intensity of right-wing anger against relatively trivial regulations, like bans on phosphates in detergent and efficiency standards for light bulbs. It’s the principle of the thing: Many on the right are enraged at any suggestion that their actions should take other people’s welfare into account.
This rage is sometimes portrayed as love of freedom. But people who insist on the right to pollute are notably unbothered by, say, federal agents tear-gassing peaceful protesters. What they call “freedom” is actually absence of responsibility.
Rational policy in a pandemic, however, is all about taking responsibility. The main reason you shouldn’t go to a bar and should wear a mask isn’t self-protection, although that’s part of it; the point is that congregating in noisy, crowded spaces or exhaling droplets into shared air puts others at risk. And that’s the kind of thing America’s right just hates, hates to hear.
Indeed, it sometimes seems as if right-wingers actually make a point of behaving irresponsibly. Remember how Senator Rand Paul, who was worried that he might have Covid-19 (he did), wandered around the Senate and even used the gym while waiting for his test results?
Anger at any suggestion of social responsibility also helps explain the looming fiscal catastrophe. It’s striking how emotional many Republicans get in their opposition to the temporary rise in unemployment benefits; for example, Senator Lindsey Graham declared that these benefits would be extended “over our dead bodies.” Why such hatred?
It’s not because the benefits are making workers unwilling to take jobs. There’s no evidence that this is happening — it’s just something Republicans want to believe. And in any case, economic arguments can’t explain the rage.
Again, it’s the principle. Aiding the unemployed, even if their joblessness isn’t their own fault, is a tacit admission that lucky Americans should help their less-fortunate fellow citizens. And that’s an admission the right doesn’t want to make.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Republicans are selfish. We’d be doing much better if that were all there were to it. The point, instead, is that they’ve sacralized selfishness, hurting their own political prospects by insisting on the right to act selfishly even when it hurts others.
What the coronavirus has revealed is the power of America’s cult of selfishness. And this cult is killing us.
this is an excerpt from a newsletter from my humorless queer friend…she’s starting a subscription newsletter focused on the financial markets, if anyone is interested…Alexis is a senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform and was a principal in Occupy the SEC and a co-author of the Volcker rule rewrite that was eventually included in Dodd-Frank, to say nothing of once being a VP at Deutsche Bank, so she knows her stuff…
With all of the insanity in the markets lately, both in terms of volatility and the irrational exuberance of valuations — like Tesla trading at 10,000 times its earnings, I’ve been paying closer attention than I have in a decade to the ups and downs of the markets themselves. As a result, I’ve decided to launch a weekly newsletter focused just on the financial markets. In addition to highlighting key data and trends, and thoughts on the latest market moves, I’ll be providing commentary on the ongoing, unprecedented response by the Federal Reserve to the pandemic. This is a labor-intensive endeavor, so it is a paid subscription (though I will occasionally make posts public, such as this one about JPMorgan’s massive earnings during the pandemic). If you are interested in supporting my work, you can subscribe here.
* Alexis is also one half of the podcast team Humorless Queers, with Kade Crockford of the Boston ACLU, covering a wide range of topics from the streets to the Halls of Congress, if anyone is interested in given them a listen…
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton defends slavery remarks (BBC)
… “America is a great and noble country founded on the proposition that all mankind is created equal. We have always struggled to live up to that promise, but no country has ever done more to achieve it.”
“Describing the *views of the Founders* and how they put the evil institution on a path to extinction, a point frequently made by Lincoln, is not endorsing or justifying slavery,” he tweeted after the backlash. …
Misquoted on slavery, Cotton says after furor (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)
… The senator is not disputing the accuracy of the original story, his spokesman said later Monday.
In the article, which focused on Cotton’s efforts to block a new school curriculum centered on slavery and its consequences, the senator criticized its portrayal of American history while acknowledging the importance of its central theme.
“‘We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country,” he said. “As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the Union was built, but the Union was built in a way, as [President Abraham] Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.” …
it appears that climate policy is screwed no matter who wins in November…Democrats don’t propose to curtail CO2 emissions; instead, they want to capture them and use them to make cement, plastics, and pump them down oil & gas wells to help get more oil & gas out….all of that will take building a massive interstate CO2 pipeline system to move the CO2 from where it’s emitted to where they plan to use it…creating jobs to dig an even deeper hole…
the following is an excerpt from an article from Steve Horn at Real News Network…
The Democratic National Committee’s Platform Committee has released its proposed policy platform, which will guide party members for the next four years, and climate got 5 pages out of 79.
The plan doesn’t call for any type of oil fossil fuel industry phaseout. The words “fracking” and “natural gas” are missing from the text altogether. The terms “coal” and “fossil fuel” only show up once, and not in the context of an industry phaseout:
“We will hold fossil fuel companies accountable for cleaning up abandoned mine lands, oil and gas wells, and industrial sites, so these facilities no longer pollutelocal environments and can be safely repurposed to support new economic activity, including in the heart of coal country.”
The 2016 platform had much more grassroots pressure behind it, and didn’t need to navigate the pressure of an ongoing pandemic. It called for a phaseout of fossil fuel extraction on public lands backed by the “Keep It in the Ground” movement, an end to industry exemptions like the Halliburton Loophole (Biden voted against the 2005 energy bill containing this provision). It said that fracking “should not take place where states and local communities oppose it.” It called for phasing out coal production and ensuring a just transition for industry workers, winding down fossil fuel subsidies and tax breaks, and legal accountability for the fossil fuel industry for misleading the public about the impact of the climate crisis by funding denial campaigns.
None of that stuff made it into the 2020 draft platform.
Instead, the 2020 version continues Biden’s call for a “double down” on the expansion of carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) technology, and for “breakthrough opportunities” for “direct air capture and net-negative emissions technologies.” As explained in last week’s edition, CCUS means capturing carbon at the point of emissions at the industrial smokestack, storing it in underground pipelines and then utilizing the CO2 for future industrial process like cement and plastics production (which are climate change-causing petrochemicals). In the U.S., most of the time the stored carbon is used to extract more oil in a process called enhanced oil recovery.
In reality, this all will mean more fracking for oil and gas and more growth of the sector overall.
Some of the people running climate policy for the Biden campaign may explain why this policy platform has arisen. Campaign advisor Heather Zichal, formerly a top climate aide for President Barack Obama, was until recently on the board of directors of gas exporting company Cheniere. Zichal’s fellow campaign advisor, Ernest Moniz, is partial owner of a proposed liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal called G2 Net Zero LNG. He is also currently on the board of directors of the predominantly gas-powered electricity sector giant Southern Company, a major proponent of CCUS and direct air capture. Both direct air capture and CCUS are technologies heavily advocated for by Moniz via his think tank Energy Futures Initiative and through the Labor Energy Partnership. The latter is a partnership that was formed between his think tank and several labor unions which launched on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in April.
As previously covered by The Real News, direct air capture is a form of geoengineering—a techno-fix aimed at reversing climate change—aiming to vacuum in greenhouse gas emissions from ambient air.
“The various forms of carbon capture are still an unproven, hypothetical techno-solution,” Dru Jay, a communications officer for ETC Group, an NGO which opposes geoengineering, told The Real News. “What we know about them for certain is mostly negative: at scale they will pollute, suck up precious renewable energy, create a giant infrastructure, feed the political and financial power of the fossil fuel industry, lead to more ecologically devastating extraction, and delay the global transition away from fossil fuels.”
The platform also boosts nuclear energy, CCUS and all broadly defined “clean energy” by calling for “technology-neutral standards” to achieve “net-zero” by 2035 in the electricity sector. As recently reported by me and my colleague Aman Azhar, a legislative proposal maintaining a similar “clean energy” framework is in the works in Congress and wouldboost the fortunes of the biomass industry. Climate scientists have pointed to wood-based biomass—its predominant commercial form—as dirtier than coal when examined on a lifecycle basis.
Defending Enhanced Oil Recovery
CCUS, enhanced oil recovery, and direct air capture are also part of the proposed 1,160-page National Defense Appropriations Act (NDAA) in a provision called the USE IT Act, S. 383. The NDAA recently passed through the Senate in a 86-14 vote. The USE IT acronym stands for Utilizing Significant Emissions with Innovative Technologies Act, and the NDAA now awaits a House vote and President Donald Trump’s signature.
The USE IT Act calls for more research and development of direct air capture and CCUS, as well as expedited permitting of CO2 pipelines to ship the commodity to enhanced oil recovery projects. It has received lobbying support from oil companies such as ExxonMobil, BP, Marathon Petroleum, Chevron, and Occidental Petroleum; coal mining giants Peabody Energy, Arch Coal and Cloud Peak Energy; fossil industry trade associations like the National Mining Association, American Petroleum Institute, Independent Petroleum Association of America; business lobbying groups like Business Roundtable and U.S. Chamber of Commerce; and establishment environmental groupslike Nature Conservancy and Natural Resources Defense Council. Industry group lobbying on these issues has proven robust, OpenSecrets.org reported back in February 2019, extending well past the USE IT Act legislation.
Moderna Shows All Those Lazy Unemployed Workers How to Really Rip Off the Government
By Dean Baker
Moderna, a relatively new biotech company, has generally been seen as the leading U.S. contender to develop a coronavirus vaccine, although it trails several Chinese companies. Whether or not its vaccine pans out, it should certainly get an award for milking the government.
It was the big winner in initial contracts, getting $483 million back in April for developing a vaccine. While that may have seemed adequate to get it through both the development and testing process, the company decided to go back to the trough and have the government pay $472 million for the Phase 3 testing of the vaccine.
Together these payments virtually guarantee that the company will make a substantial profit on its development and testing of the vaccine. Yet, Moderna will still get a patent monopoly on the vaccine, which will allow it to charge people in the United States and elsewhere in the world as much as it wants for the vaccine.
Some simple arithmetic shows that Moderna almost certainly has made a profit already. The company reported having 892 employees at the end of the 2019. Let’s suppose that they paid each one $20,000 a month for the three months between signing the contract and when they had their first round of clinical tests. (It was actually more like two months.) That would come to $53,520,000. If we double this for equipment and other inputs, we get $107,040,000.
The Phase 3 trials are projected to involve 30,000 people. Recent research indicates that the average per person cost in a Phase 3 trial for vaccines is $10,000. That would come to $300 million. Let’s raise this by 50 percent because Moderna is in a hurry, that gets us $450 million.
Since the government paid $483 million for the pre-clinical research and $472 million for the Phase 3 trials, it looks like Moderna is making a healthy profit on both. Yet, the government is still giving Moderna a patent monopoly, which means that it will arrest anyone who tries to produce the vaccine without Moderna’s permission.[1]
If we go back to Economics 101, the rationale for the government granting patent monopolies to drug companies or anyone else is to give them incentive for doing research and developing new products. The monopoly will allow them to both recoup research costs and compensate them for the risk that they won’t have a successful product.
The Moderna story won’t fit here. It was already compensated for its research costs by the government. Furthermore, it has zero risk. If its vaccine turns out to be ineffective or have harmful side effects, the company has already been paid for its work.
The patent monopoly means that we are paying Moderna twice. We first picked up the tab for the research and the testing and now we are giving the company a monopoly so that it can charge people around the world as much as it wants for the vaccine.
This should be a huge scandal, but I guess everyone knows that drug companies rip us off. Besides, economists and media types are too busy worrying about unemployed workers getting too much money.
[1] To save literalists some trouble, people don’t actually get arrested for patent violations. They get served with an injunction telling them to stop violating the patent. They would then get arrested for defying the injunction, if they continued to produce the vaccine without Moderna’s permission.
Real estate demand (private home purchasing) is
said to be very high in the north east also. And
mortgage rates are said to be very low. That
should provide impetus.
But for investors (speculators?) who choose
between bonds & stocks, if only for income,
equity shares make more sense currently.
… Before his holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, bought shares in Amazon this year, Warren Buffett had spent years ruing not buying them earlier on.
But Buffett is surely glad Berkshire bought before Amazon’s most recent earnings report. The company beat Wall Street expectations on both revenue and profit Thursday, sending the company past a $1 trillion market capitalization as trading opened Friday.
Buffett announced Berkshire had bought Amazon stock last May. He discussed the investment in a CNBC interview, explaining that though Buffett himself didn’t execute the buy: “I’m a fan, and I’ve been an idiot for not buying.”
By August, Berkshire had raised its stake in Amazon by 11%, according to a regulatory filing reflecting the company’s holdings as of the second quarter. …
(Berkshire Hathaway usually prefers dividend-paying stocks,
even though they don’t pay dividends. No dividends
from Amazon. How odd is that?)
AMZN shares are up about 6.7% since a market high
last February. So are Apple, Microsoft & Google.)
Every nerd dreams of saving the world with some technical solution or another to whatever big problems we’re facing. Trouble is, most of their technical solutions do more harm than good. Nerds need to go back and take those liberal art courses they so disdained.
Israel was gaining control of the coronavirus spread when businesses and schools were opened with little caution and little testing, the results have been unfortunate but should have been understood.
“Every nerd dreams of saving the world with some technical solution or another to whatever big problems we’re facing.”
Sounds like me (cut-and-paste):
Earth’s atmospheric temperature is already high enough to melt the permafrost (part of year freezing, part melting, more melting than freezing). The permafrost (I’m not exactly sure what that is) reportedly contains twice as much carbon as there is in the atmosphere now (may not be all in gas form but believe will all end up in gas form eventually: one and a half trillion tons to add to 750 billion tons now). The more it melts, the more carbon dioxide is released, the hotter it gets, the more it melts, etc.: more than enough to eventually turn the earth into a pole to pole swamp — the normal condition of the earth for the majority of the last 500 million years (see video). Indisputable — without any additional human help. https://www.pbs.org/video/polar-extremes-mfaum5/
****************************
At first (last year) I thought the only way out was for all electric output to go nuclear — that was the physics of course; not the politics, good luck. My reasoning was that in 100 years the human population would need 10X more electricity — and I couldn’t see doing all that with windmills and photovoltaic).
[cut-and-paste]
Carbon capture technology: practicably end global warming – even reverse it — for 5% of GDP with a reasonably lo-tech process – once the price to gets down to $100 a ton?
According to a Businessweek article, worldwide we add 34 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. Said article says Squamish Engineering, in B.C., Canada expects to launch a plant that will remove a million tons a year, located somewhere in the Permian Basin in Texas. Squamish says it can do this for $200 a ton.
My back-of-the-envelope calculates that, when the price reaches $100 a ton, then, worldwide we can keep cool for $3.4 trillion a year – less than 5% of world GDP. US kick-in about one trillion – out of $20 trillion GDP. That figure would grow as US economy grows – but: for every trillion of growth only additional $50 billion would go for removal, leaving us $950 billion ahead: set for the life of the planet. (closest link I could find) https://www.magzter.com/article/Business/Bloomberg-Businessweek/A-Big-Step-for-the-Sky-Vacuums
[snip]
Snag: where to put all the carbon we capture — there is reportedly room for two trillion tons of captured carbon in some kind of rock formations. (can’t get back to link)
If we are putting 34 billion tons or carbon in the air now — could we be doing 340 billion tons a year 100 years from now — if we don’t replace carbon with thermonuclear? 100 years from now hopefully earth will be rich enough to go completely thermo. And here comes 1.5 trillion tons from the permafrost.
Better get busy. Better get busy finding room to hide lots more carbon — if that is possible — or whatever. Did somebody say: The Green New Deal … is not remotely sufficient to stabilize global warming at a non-catastrophic level?
****************************
Where to find or create enough storage space for many trillion of tons of dry ice (captured CO2) while the world awaits totally nuclear, thermonuclear and renewable energy:
At 100 pounds per cubic foot of dry ice (frozen CO2), a 100 foot X 100 foot X 100 foot block would contain a 100 million pounds, or 50,000 tons. At a cost of $100 a ton to capture CO2 from the atmosphere, it would cost 5 million dollars to capture enough to fill one cube.
15 trillion tons of dry ice would take up the volume of 300,000,000 such cubes (15,000,000,000,000/50,000). At 50 blocks per mile — both width and length — that would come to 120,000 square miles of frozen CO2 (300,000,000/2500). That would fit into a space 3000 miles long and 40 miles wide.
5% of GDP to capture, 5% of GDP to contain = 10% of GDP to keep C02 from turning our world from turning into Venus — while awaiting a completely non-carbon fueled civilization. May have to contain the stuff forever, but shouldn’t cost much.
Possible design: storing dry ice containers at the bottom of the oceans could utilize the massive pressures at that level to hold the containers intact.
***************************
Since I wrote the above (recently), I’ve been apprised that carbon fixation in basalt formations is very likely the cheaper and may be the most practicable way to go. Here are my notes on basalt so far, in case you want to get there first: 🙂
https://www.pnas.org/content/105/29/9920
Among geological storage techniques, CO2 injection into deep saline aquifers, or its reinjection into depleted oil and gas reservoirs, has potentially large storage capacity and geographic ubiquity (6–10).
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/05/scientists-in-iceland-are-turning-carbon-dioxide-into-rock/
Two years later, almost all of the CO2 had morphed into carbonate minerals. * * * * *
The team’s breakthrough, reported in the journal Science in 2016, led to the scaling up of the CarbFix project – fixing CO2 into rock, literally – at the Hellisheidi geothermal power station * * * * * The process does, however, require large amounts of desalinated water – about 25 tonnes of water per tonne of stored CO2 – so they are working on adapting it to saltwater.
https://eos.org/articles/basalts-turn-carbon-into-stone-for-permanent-storage
Climate researchers have long recognized that highly reactive basaltic rocks could be a solution to the carbon storage problem. In addition to being common around the world, basalts contain high concentrations of calcium and magnesium ions that chemically react with CO2 to make calcite, dolomite, and magnesite. Moreover, dissolving the CO2 in water aboveground and then injecting it into subsurface basalts bypasses the slower and less secure stages of conventional carbon storage. * * * * * The team found that over 90% of the injected CO2 had been converted into minerals within 2 years of injection. * * * * * “But also the way that we inject is that we dissolve the CO2 in water prior to or during injection. This means increased security as well, because by dissolving the CO2 we’re killing the buoyancy of the CO2. The CO2-charged fluid is heavier than the groundwater in the formation where we are injecting, so it has the tendency to sink rather than to rise up. This increased storage security.” * * * * * Mineral carbonation has been gaining interest in recent years, Snæbjörnsdóttir said. “People often believe that this can only be done if you have geothermal [heat], but that’s not the case,” she said. “The things that you need for this to work are just a source of CO2, [water], and reactive rocks.” * * * * * “We know that basalts like we have here in Iceland are perfect for this method,” she said, “but there might be rock types that are less reactive but still reactive enough. If some of those rock types are feasible to use for this method, we could broaden the applicability even more.” * * * * * The team is also looking into how well offshore injections using seawater might work.
https://www.bgs.ac.uk/discoveringGeology/climateChange/CCS/howCanCo2BeStored.html#ocean
We need to understand more about saline aquifer storage, but current research shows that several trapping mechanisms immobilise the CO2 underground, reducing the risk of leakage. The IPCC says that for well-selected, designed and managed geological storage sites, CO2 could be trapped for millions of years, retaining over 99 per cent of the injected CO2 over 1000 years.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/06/underground-injections-turn-carbon-dioxide-stone
What happened next startled the team. After about a year and a half, the pump inside a monitoring well kept breaking down. Frustrated, engineers hauled up the pump and found that it was coated with white and green scale. Tests identified it as calcite, bearing the heavy carbon tracer that marked it as a product of carbonation. * * * * * Measurements of dissolved carbon in the groundwater suggested that more than 95% of the injected carbon had already been converted into calcite and other minerals. “It was a huge surprise that the carbonation happened so fast,”
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6291/1312
The scaling up of this basaltic carbon storage method requires substantial quantities of water and porous basaltic rocks (9). Both are widely available on the continental margins, such as off the coast of the Pacific Northwest of the United States (12).
https://phys.org/news/2019-05-iceland-carbon-dioxide-cleaner-air.html
Around 25 tonnes of water are needed for each tonne of carbon dioxide injected. * * * * * “That is the Achilles’ heel of this method,” says Snaebjornsdottir. * * * * * “I agree that the process uses a lot of water, but we gain a lot by permanently getting rid of CO2 that otherwise would be floating around the atmosphere,” says Aradottir. * * * * * Experiments are currently under way to adapt the method to saltwater.
interest rates are not in my wheelhouse but my thought is if that one expects the value of your currency to appreciate, then are “negative” interest rates at a smaller percentage rate than your expected appreciation really negative?
Beyond a failure of national and state leadership, this remarkable spread of coronavirus infections through the country and the terrible number of deaths represent a failure of the healthcare system.
The ratios of deaths to confirmed coronavirus cases in the United Kingdom, France and Mexico are 15.3%, 16.4% and 11.1% respectively. These notably high deaths ratios need to be studied and explained, but possibly because of the domestic political implications there have been no evident studies.
A wonkish thread on the economics of unemployment insurance. Why? Because Republicans are talking nonsense, but also because it seems to me that even some of the people calling for maintaining generous benefits are missing the point 1/
A wonkish thread on the economics of unemployment insurance. Why? Because Republicans are talking nonsense, but also because it seems to me that even some of the people calling for maintaining generous benefits are missing the point 1/
2:40 PM · Jul 28, 2020
The key point is that to evaluate the impact of the GOP’s plan to slash UI while making business lunches 100% deductible, we need to do *macroeconomics*; it’s not just about worker incentives 2/
A good starting point is the Phillips curve: the hypothetical tradeoff between unemployment and inflation 3/
I’m well aware that there are some conceptual issues with this curve, and also that these days it’s hard to find in US data. But there must be some effect of labor market tightness on inflation; clearly visible in countries with more extreme variation (Spain’s GDP deflator) 4/
So, where do we find ourselves on that curve? It could be a policy choice, e.g., the Federal Reserve sets policy to achieve its inflation target. But maybe policymakers can’t or won’t do enough to assure adequate demand. In that case, the level of demand sets unemployment 5/
And since 2008 we’ve consistently been limited by the demand constraint: the Fed has almost never achieved its 2% inflation target, bc monetary policy constrained by zero lower bound, and fiscal support almost never sufficient 6/
So what happens if you expand UI? It might — might — reduce incentives to work, shifting the Phillips curve up and to the right. But it also increases aggregate demand. And because demand, not inflation, is the binding constraint it REDUCES unemployment 7/
Just to add that the demand constraint is far more tightly binding now than at any time in the past dozen years, because now we have a pandemic that requires people to NOT work. Crazy to talk about UI without that as the central point 8/
Now, the work incentives of UI are still interesting, although of little macro significance for the time being. My read is that the disincentive effect seems to be surprisingly small. You can see this just by looking at aggregate data. 9/
Generous UI didn’t prevent a rapid rise in employment during the abortive reopening recovery of May-June 10/
This tells you that the workers accepting jobs were precisely the workers who by and large were receiving more in unemployment benefits than from work. Presumably they nonetheless preferred the reality of a job that might last than depending on benefits that might soon vanish 12/
The bottom line is that all those concerns that we were keeping unemployment high by making it too comfortable had zero basis in reality. UI was helping employment, not hurting it — and the massive fiscal contraction now being perpetrated will be a disaster fin/
More Thought on the Post-Pandemic Economy
By Dean Baker
I have written before * ** on the post-pandemic economy and how it should actually provide enormous opportunities, but it is worth clarifying a few points. First and most importantly, there is an important measurement issue with GDP that people will need to appreciate.
It is often said that GDP is not a good measure of well-being, we see this in a very big way in the post-pandemic period. It is likely that many of the changes in behaviour forced by the pandemic, first and foremost telecommuting, will be enduring.
Most immediately, this will show up as a sharp drop in GDP. We will be consuming much less of the goods and services associated with commuting to and from work. This means that we will be driving less. That means we will be buying less gas and needing fewer cars, car parts, and care repair services. We’ll also need less auto insurance. In addition, there will be many fewer taxi or Uber trips, as well as trips on buses, trains, and other forms of public transportation.
There is also an economy built up around serving the people working in downtown office buildings. This includes the offices themselves and the people who service and clean them. There are also the restaurants, gyms, and other businesses that serve the people who come into the city to work each day. And, there are all the items that people have to spend money on for office work, such as business clothes and shoes and dry-cleaning services.
We will see a huge reduction in demand in all these areas if much of the work being done on-line stays on-line. We will also see less business travel, which means fewer air plane trips, taxi rides, and stays in hotels.
This fall into demand will translate into a large loss of GDP, but it translates into very little by way of real loss in well-being. This doesn’t mean there will not be some loss. People may miss seeing work colleagues on a daily basis, or the opportunity to meet up with friends for lunch near the office. Some people may actually enjoy business travel. But the drop in GDP will dwarf whatever losses of these sorts people may feel, and in most cases they will be offset by gains, such as not having to spend two hours a day commuting and having more time to spend with friends and family.
So, let’s say that we see GDP drop by 3.0 percent ($660 billion a year), how should we think about this? (This is a very crude guess, not a careful calculation) On its face, that would look like a very severe downturn. In the Great Recession, GDP only fell by 4.0 percent from peak to trough, so this looks like a very serious hit to the economy.
But that really misses the story. To take an analogous situation, let’s say for some reason, such as better diet, more exercise, or an act of god, everyone’s health got hugely better. Imagine that we could have the same outcomes in terms of life expectancy and quality of overall health using half as many health care services. This would mean half as many doctors’ visits, surgeries, MRIs, prescription drugs and everything else in health care that costs money.
This reduction in health care consumption would mean a drop in GDP of more than 8.5 percent, yet everyone’s health would be just as good as it had been previously. In this story, no one in their right mind would be concerned about the loss of GDP, what we value is health, not the number of times we see a doctor or the amount of drugs we take. The decline in the resources needed to maintain our health is effectively an increase in productivity. We have seen a jump of 8.5 percent in the level of productivity, as we can get the same output as we had previously, with 8.5 percent fewer inputs. *** In other words, we are much richer as a result of this remarkable improvement in the public’s health.
We should think about my hypothesized savings of 3.0 percent of GDP on work-related expenses the same way. We had been expending a large amount of resources to maintain an office work system that is no longer needed. This is effectively a huge jump in productivity. By comparison, over the last 15 years productivity growth has averaged just 1.3 percent annually.
This matters hugely in how we think about the post-pandemic economy. If we look at the lost GDP associated with fewer work-related expenses we would think that the economy is really suffering. However, if we think of this as a big jump in productivity, then it effectively means that we have extra resources to address long-neglected social needs.
And, these resources should be readily visible in the form of all the workers who are no longer employed in restaurants, gyms, dry cleaners, or the making, servicing, or driving of cars. These are people who can be instead employed providing child care, senior care, doing energy audits of buildings, installing solar panels and energy conserving appliances, or other tasks that address neglected needs.
As I have pointed out before, we need not think that every person who lost their job waiting tables will get a job installing solar panels or as a child care provider. That’s not the way the labour market works. People in fact switch jobs frequently. In a normal pre-pandemic economy more than 5.5 million people lose or leave their job every month. If we create jobs in installing solar panels, energy audits, and child care, people will leave other jobs to fill these newly created positions, which can leave openings for laid off restaurant and hotel workers to again get jobs in hotels and restaurants, as well as other sectors.
The fact that we have a large number of idle workers, because of this effective jump in productivity, means that we should not be shy about large amounts of government spending to address these unmet needs, even though it will mean large budget deficits. For the near-term future, we will not have to worry about deficits creating too much demand in the economy and causing inflation. In the longer term, excessive demand and the resulting inflation can be a problem, which will require addressing the factors that redistribute so much money upward (e.g. patent and copyright monopolies, a corrupt corporate governance structure, and a bloated financial sector), but that will not be a problem as we recover from the recession.
If we do let obsessions with government deficits and debt curtail spending, then we can expect to see a long and harsh recession. To set up the analogy, suppose there was a 3.0 percent jump in productivity, but there was no increase in workers’ real wages. Assume all the money went to higher corporate profits. Since profits have little relationship to investment, there is no reason to expect any notable increase in investment. Let’s assume that consumption spending out of dividends and share buybacks is limited.
In this case, the economy can produce the same output with 3 percent fewer workers, meaning that 4.8 million people will be out of jobs. And, that situation can persist for a long period of time, since there is nothing inherent to the workings of the economy to bring us back to full employment.
That would really be a disaster story, especially if the correct figure for this implicit jump in productivity is something more like 5 percent, or even more. The key to preventing this sort of disaster is to understand that the reduced spending on work-related expenses is effectively an increase in productivity.
And, we also have to recognize that when we have a serious problem of unemployment, the failure to run large deficits is incredibly damaging to the country. Millions of workers will needlessly suffer, as will their family. And the failure is increased when it means not spending in areas that will have long-term benefits for the country, like child care and slowing global warming. It is tragic that deficit hawks are able to do so much harm to our children under the guise of saving our children.
*** For those being technical, I am not using “productivity” precisely here. A reduction equal to 8.5 percent of GDP in the value of goods or services devoted to health care, does not necessarily mean that the amount of labour used in the health care sector has fallen by an amount equal to 8.5 percent of the economy’s annual labour usage. But I’m ignoring this point for now.
A Viral Epidemic Splintering Into Deadly Pieces
There’s not just one coronavirus outbreak in the United States. Now there are many, each requiring its own mix of solutions.
By Donald G. McNeil Jr.
City Praises Contact-Tracing Program. Workers Call Rollout a ‘Disaster.’
The contact tracers said the program was confusing and disorganized in its first six weeks, leaving them fearful that their work would not have an impact on the virus.
By Sharon Otterman
The Dominican Republic has been the fastest growing country in per capita GDP in the western hemisphere since 1971. Nonetheless, Cuba has had markedly better healthcare outcomes even though Cuba has been continually under United States sanctions. The coronavirus experience reflects the differences in healthcare systems.
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Federal agents who have clashed with protesters in Portland, Oregon, will begin a “phased withdrawal” from Oregon’s largest city, Gov. Kate Brown said Wednesday.
Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said in a statement the plan negotiated with Brown over the last 24 hours includes a “robust presence” of Oregon State Police in downtown Portland.
“State and local law enforcement will begin securing properties and streets, especially those surrounding federal properties, that have been under nightly attack for the past two months,” Wolf said.
The agents will begin leaving the city’s downtown area on Thursday, Brown said.
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Before departing Wednesday for a trip to Texas, President Donald Trump insisted federal troops would not leave Portland until local authorities “secured their city.”
“Either they’re gonna clean up Portland soon, or the federal government is going up, and we’re gonna do it for them. So either they clean out Portland — the governor and the mayor, who are weak — either they clean out Portland or we’re gong in to do it for them,” he said.
The U.S. Marshals Service and Department of Homeland Security had been weighing this week whether to send in more agents. The marshals were taking steps to identify up to 100 additional personnel who could go in case they were needed to relieve or supplement the deputy marshals who work in Oregon, spokesman Drew Wade said. …
More Than 6,300 Coronavirus Cases Have Been Linked to U.S. Colleges
By Weiyi Cai, Danielle Ivory, Mitch Smith, Alex Lemonides and Lauryn Higgins
As college students and professors decide whether to head back to class, and as universities weigh how and whether to reopen, the coronavirus is already on campus.
A New York Times survey of every public four-year college in the country, as well as every private institution that competes in Division I sports or is a member of an elite group of research universities, revealed at least 6,300 cases tied to about 270 colleges over the course of the pandemic. And the new academic year has not even begun at most schools….
The U.S. economy’s contraction in the second quarter was the worst on record.
Economic output fell at its fastest pace on record last spring as the coronavirus pandemic forced businesses across the United States to close their doors and kept millions of Americans shut in their homes for weeks.
Gross domestic product — the broadest measure of goods and services produced — fell 9.5 percent in the second quarter of the year, the Commerce Department said Thursday. On an annualized basis, the standard way of reporting quarterly economic data, G.D.P. fell at a rate of 32.9 percent.
The collapse was unprecedented in its speed and breathtaking in its severity. The only possible comparisons in modern American history came during the Great Depression and the demobilization after World War II, both of which occurred before the advent of modern economic statistics.
Unlike past recessions, this one was a result of a conscious decision to suspend economic activity to slow the spread of the virus. Congress pumped trillions of dollars into the economy to sustain households and businesses, limit long-term damage and allow for a rapid rebound.
The plan worked at first. In recent weeks, however, cases have surged in much of the country. Data from public and private sources indicate a pullback in economic activity, reflecting consumer unease and renewed shutdowns.
“In another world, a sharp drop in activity would have been just a good, necessary blip while we addressed the virus,” said Heather Boushey, president of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a progressive think tank. “From where we sit in July, we know that this wasn’t just a short-term blip.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/opinion/us-republicans-coronavirus.html
July 27, 2020
The Cult of Selfishness Is Killing America
The right has made irresponsible behavior a key principle.
By Paul Krugman
America’s response to the coronavirus has been a lose-lose proposition.
The Trump administration and governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis insisted that there was no trade-off between economic growth and controlling the disease, and they were right — but not in the way they expected.
Premature reopening led to a surge in infections: Adjusted for population, Americans are currently dying from Covid-19 at around 15 times the rate in the European Union or Canada. Yet the “rocket ship” recovery Donald Trump promised has crashed and burned: Job growth appears to have stalled or reversed, especially in states that were most aggressive about lifting social distancing mandates, and early indications are that the U.S. economy is lagging behind the economies of major European nations.
So we’re failing dismally on both the epidemiological and the economic fronts. But why?
On the face of it, the answer is that Trump and allies were so eager to see big jobs numbers that they ignored both infection risks and the way a resurgent pandemic would undermine the economy. As I and others have said, they failed the marshmallow test, * sacrificing the future because they weren’t willing to show a little patience.
And there’s surely a lot to that explanation. But it isn’t the whole story.
For one thing, people truly focused on restarting the economy should have been big supporters of measures to limit infections without hurting business — above all, getting Americans to wear face masks. Instead, Trump ridiculed those in masks as “politically correct,” while Republican governors not only refused to mandate mask-wearing, but they prevented mayors from imposing local mask rules.
Also, politicians eager to see the economy bounce back should have wanted to sustain consumer purchasing power until wages recovered. Instead, Senate Republicans ignored the looming July 31 expiration of special unemployment benefits, which means that tens of millions of workers are about to see a huge hit to their incomes, damaging the economy as a whole.
So what was going on? Were our leaders just stupid? Well, maybe. But there’s a deeper explanation of the profoundly self-destructive behavior of Trump and his allies: They were all members of America’s cult of selfishness.
You see, the modern U.S. right is committed to the proposition that greed is good, that we’re all better off when individuals engage in the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest. In their vision, unrestricted profit maximization by businesses and unregulated consumer choice is the recipe for a good society.
Support for this proposition is, if anything, more emotional than intellectual. I’ve long been struck by the intensity of right-wing anger against relatively trivial regulations, like bans on phosphates in detergent and efficiency standards for light bulbs. It’s the principle of the thing: Many on the right are enraged at any suggestion that their actions should take other people’s welfare into account.
This rage is sometimes portrayed as love of freedom. But people who insist on the right to pollute are notably unbothered by, say, federal agents tear-gassing peaceful protesters. What they call “freedom” is actually absence of responsibility.
Rational policy in a pandemic, however, is all about taking responsibility. The main reason you shouldn’t go to a bar and should wear a mask isn’t self-protection, although that’s part of it; the point is that congregating in noisy, crowded spaces or exhaling droplets into shared air puts others at risk. And that’s the kind of thing America’s right just hates, hates to hear.
Indeed, it sometimes seems as if right-wingers actually make a point of behaving irresponsibly. Remember how Senator Rand Paul, who was worried that he might have Covid-19 (he did), wandered around the Senate and even used the gym while waiting for his test results?
Anger at any suggestion of social responsibility also helps explain the looming fiscal catastrophe. It’s striking how emotional many Republicans get in their opposition to the temporary rise in unemployment benefits; for example, Senator Lindsey Graham declared that these benefits would be extended “over our dead bodies.” Why such hatred?
It’s not because the benefits are making workers unwilling to take jobs. There’s no evidence that this is happening — it’s just something Republicans want to believe. And in any case, economic arguments can’t explain the rage.
Again, it’s the principle. Aiding the unemployed, even if their joblessness isn’t their own fault, is a tacit admission that lucky Americans should help their less-fortunate fellow citizens. And that’s an admission the right doesn’t want to make.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Republicans are selfish. We’d be doing much better if that were all there were to it. The point, instead, is that they’ve sacralized selfishness, hurting their own political prospects by insisting on the right to act selfishly even when it hurts others.
What the coronavirus has revealed is the power of America’s cult of selfishness. And this cult is killing us.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/opinion/coronavirus-reopening-marshmallow-test.html
July 27, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,433,410)
Deaths ( 150,444)
India
Cases ( 1,482,503)
Deaths ( 33,448)
Mexico
Cases ( 390,516)
Deaths ( 43,680)
UK
Cases ( 300,111)
Deaths ( 45,759)
Germany
Cases ( 207,379)
Deaths ( 9,205)
France
Cases ( 183,079)
Deaths ( 30,209)
Canada
Cases ( 114,597)
Deaths ( 8,901)
China
Cases ( 83,891)
Deaths ( 4,634)
this is an excerpt from a newsletter from my humorless queer friend…she’s starting a subscription newsletter focused on the financial markets, if anyone is interested…Alexis is a senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform and was a principal in Occupy the SEC and a co-author of the Volcker rule rewrite that was eventually included in Dodd-Frank, to say nothing of once being a VP at Deutsche Bank, so she knows her stuff…
* Alexis is also one half of the podcast team Humorless Queers, with Kade Crockford of the Boston ACLU, covering a wide range of topics from the streets to the Halls of Congress, if anyone is interested in given them a listen…
Speaking of curses…
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton defends slavery remarks (BBC)
… “America is a great and noble country founded on the proposition that all mankind is created equal. We have always struggled to live up to that promise, but no country has ever done more to achieve it.”
“Describing the *views of the Founders* and how they put the evil institution on a path to extinction, a point frequently made by Lincoln, is not endorsing or justifying slavery,” he tweeted after the backlash. …
Misquoted on slavery, Cotton says after furor (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)
… The senator is not disputing the accuracy of the original story, his spokesman said later Monday.
In the article, which focused on Cotton’s efforts to block a new school curriculum centered on slavery and its consequences, the senator criticized its portrayal of American history while acknowledging the importance of its central theme.
“‘We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country,” he said. “As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the Union was built, but the Union was built in a way, as [President Abraham] Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.” …
it appears that climate policy is screwed no matter who wins in November…Democrats don’t propose to curtail CO2 emissions; instead, they want to capture them and use them to make cement, plastics, and pump them down oil & gas wells to help get more oil & gas out….all of that will take building a massive interstate CO2 pipeline system to move the CO2 from where it’s emitted to where they plan to use it…creating jobs to dig an even deeper hole…
the following is an excerpt from an article from Steve Horn at Real News Network…
Defending Enhanced Oil Recovery
CCUS, enhanced oil recovery, and direct air capture are also part of the proposed 1,160-page National Defense Appropriations Act (NDAA) in a provision called the USE IT Act, S. 383. The NDAA recently passed through the Senate in a 86-14 vote. The USE IT acronym stands for Utilizing Significant Emissions with Innovative Technologies Act, and the NDAA now awaits a House vote and President Donald Trump’s signature.
The USE IT Act calls for more research and development of direct air capture and CCUS, as well as expedited permitting of CO2 pipelines to ship the commodity to enhanced oil recovery projects. It has received lobbying support from oil companies such as ExxonMobil, BP, Marathon Petroleum, Chevron, and Occidental Petroleum; coal mining giants Peabody Energy, Arch Coal and Cloud Peak Energy; fossil industry trade associations like the National Mining Association, American Petroleum Institute, Independent Petroleum Association of America; business lobbying groups like Business Roundtable and U.S. Chamber of Commerce; and establishment environmental groupslike Nature Conservancy and Natural Resources Defense Council. Industry group lobbying on these issues has proven robust, OpenSecrets.org reported back in February 2019, extending well past the USE IT Act legislation.
Rjs
This stock market thing is a puzzle. This from John Quiggin @ Crooked Timber is a bit of a reach, but …
https://crookedtimber.org/2020/07/26/the-end-of-interest/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53550882
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2020/jul/28/misquoted-on-slavery-cotton-says-after-furor/?news
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/07/27/nation/tom-cotton-under-fire-after-suggesting-slavery-was-necessary-evil-interview-with-arkansas-paper/?event=event25 via @BostonGlobe
https://cepr.net/moderna-shows-all-those-lazy-unemployed-workers-how-to-really-rip-off-the-government/
July 28, 2020
Moderna Shows All Those Lazy Unemployed Workers How to Really Rip Off the Government
By Dean Baker
Moderna, a relatively new biotech company, has generally been seen as the leading U.S. contender to develop a coronavirus vaccine, although it trails several Chinese companies. Whether or not its vaccine pans out, it should certainly get an award for milking the government.
It was the big winner in initial contracts, getting $483 million back in April for developing a vaccine. While that may have seemed adequate to get it through both the development and testing process, the company decided to go back to the trough and have the government pay $472 million for the Phase 3 testing of the vaccine.
Together these payments virtually guarantee that the company will make a substantial profit on its development and testing of the vaccine. Yet, Moderna will still get a patent monopoly on the vaccine, which will allow it to charge people in the United States and elsewhere in the world as much as it wants for the vaccine.
Some simple arithmetic shows that Moderna almost certainly has made a profit already. The company reported having 892 employees at the end of the 2019. Let’s suppose that they paid each one $20,000 a month for the three months between signing the contract and when they had their first round of clinical tests. (It was actually more like two months.) That would come to $53,520,000. If we double this for equipment and other inputs, we get $107,040,000.
The Phase 3 trials are projected to involve 30,000 people. Recent research indicates that the average per person cost in a Phase 3 trial for vaccines is $10,000. That would come to $300 million. Let’s raise this by 50 percent because Moderna is in a hurry, that gets us $450 million.
Since the government paid $483 million for the pre-clinical research and $472 million for the Phase 3 trials, it looks like Moderna is making a healthy profit on both. Yet, the government is still giving Moderna a patent monopoly, which means that it will arrest anyone who tries to produce the vaccine without Moderna’s permission.[1]
If we go back to Economics 101, the rationale for the government granting patent monopolies to drug companies or anyone else is to give them incentive for doing research and developing new products. The monopoly will allow them to both recoup research costs and compensate them for the risk that they won’t have a successful product.
The Moderna story won’t fit here. It was already compensated for its research costs by the government. Furthermore, it has zero risk. If its vaccine turns out to be ineffective or have harmful side effects, the company has already been paid for its work.
The patent monopoly means that we are paying Moderna twice. We first picked up the tab for the research and the testing and now we are giving the company a monopoly so that it can charge people around the world as much as it wants for the vaccine.
This should be a huge scandal, but I guess everyone knows that drug companies rip us off. Besides, economists and media types are too busy worrying about unemployed workers getting too much money.
[1] To save literalists some trouble, people don’t actually get arrested for patent violations. They get served with an injunction telling them to stop violating the patent. They would then get arrested for defying the injunction, if they continued to produce the vaccine without Moderna’s permission.
“This stock market thing is a puzzle.”
Interest rates are almost non-existent currently.
Investors are drawn to equities. Microsoft &
Apple offer decent quarterly dividends.
Their shares are up a lot this year,
as is Amazon, which offers no
dividends. Go figure.
Fred
Here, in the SF Bay Area, housing prices are, much as in 2006 and 2007. driven by speculation. Is that now the case with the Stock Market?
Real estate demand (private home purchasing) is
said to be very high in the north east also. And
mortgage rates are said to be very low. That
should provide impetus.
But for investors (speculators?) who choose
between bonds & stocks, if only for income,
equity shares make more sense currently.
July 28, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,445,146)
Deaths ( 150,713)
“This stock market thing is a puzzle.”
Warren Buffett’s big Amazon investment is finally paying off
Business Insider – January 31
… Before his holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, bought shares in Amazon this year, Warren Buffett had spent years ruing not buying them earlier on.
But Buffett is surely glad Berkshire bought before Amazon’s most recent earnings report. The company beat Wall Street expectations on both revenue and profit Thursday, sending the company past a $1 trillion market capitalization as trading opened Friday.
Buffett announced Berkshire had bought Amazon stock last May. He discussed the investment in a CNBC interview, explaining that though Buffett himself didn’t execute the buy: “I’m a fan, and I’ve been an idiot for not buying.”
By August, Berkshire had raised its stake in Amazon by 11%, according to a regulatory filing reflecting the company’s holdings as of the second quarter. …
(Berkshire Hathaway usually prefers dividend-paying stocks,
even though they don’t pay dividends. No dividends
from Amazon. How odd is that?)
AMZN shares are up about 6.7% since a market high
last February. So are Apple, Microsoft & Google.)
Rjs
It appears …
Every nerd dreams of saving the world with some technical solution or another to whatever big problems we’re facing. Trouble is, most of their technical solutions do more harm than good. Nerds need to go back and take those liberal art courses they so disdained.
Do the Yankees have a black catcher who can toss the ball or hand the ball to Trump? I think it would be very, very appropriate right now.
July 28, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 65,791)
Deaths ( 486)
Deaths per million ( 53)
———————————–
July 4, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 29,170)
Deaths ( 330)
Deaths per million ( 36)
Israel was gaining control of the coronavirus spread when businesses and schools were opened with little caution and little testing, the results have been unfortunate but should have been understood.
July 28, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,453,985)
Deaths ( 151,518)
Rjs,
“Every nerd dreams of saving the world with some technical solution or another to whatever big problems we’re facing.”
Sounds like me (cut-and-paste):
Earth’s atmospheric temperature is already high enough to melt the permafrost (part of year freezing, part melting, more melting than freezing). The permafrost (I’m not exactly sure what that is) reportedly contains twice as much carbon as there is in the atmosphere now (may not be all in gas form but believe will all end up in gas form eventually: one and a half trillion tons to add to 750 billion tons now). The more it melts, the more carbon dioxide is released, the hotter it gets, the more it melts, etc.: more than enough to eventually turn the earth into a pole to pole swamp — the normal condition of the earth for the majority of the last 500 million years (see video). Indisputable — without any additional human help.
https://www.pbs.org/video/polar-extremes-mfaum5/
****************************
At first (last year) I thought the only way out was for all electric output to go nuclear — that was the physics of course; not the politics, good luck. My reasoning was that in 100 years the human population would need 10X more electricity — and I couldn’t see doing all that with windmills and photovoltaic).
I’m figuring thermonuclear to come along in about 50 years — for however that feeds into all of this. The technological way is well charted but it will take tremendous R&D working out. (see The Future of Fusion Energy by Ian Kershaw — must be good; I could only read about half of it). https://www.amazon.com/Future-Fusion-Energy-Popular-Science-ebook-dp-B07MYTCRNS/dp/B07MYTCRNS/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=
Then, I came upon carbon capture technology.
[cut-and-paste]
Carbon capture technology: practicably end global warming – even reverse it — for 5% of GDP with a reasonably lo-tech process – once the price to gets down to $100 a ton?
According to a Businessweek article, worldwide we add 34 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. Said article says Squamish Engineering, in B.C., Canada expects to launch a plant that will remove a million tons a year, located somewhere in the Permian Basin in Texas. Squamish says it can do this for $200 a ton.
My back-of-the-envelope calculates that, when the price reaches $100 a ton, then, worldwide we can keep cool for $3.4 trillion a year – less than 5% of world GDP. US kick-in about one trillion – out of $20 trillion GDP. That figure would grow as US economy grows – but: for every trillion of growth only additional $50 billion would go for removal, leaving us $950 billion ahead: set for the life of the planet. (closest link I could find) https://www.magzter.com/article/Business/Bloomberg-Businessweek/A-Big-Step-for-the-Sky-Vacuums
[snip]
Snag: where to put all the carbon we capture — there is reportedly room for two trillion tons of captured carbon in some kind of rock formations. (can’t get back to link)
If we are putting 34 billion tons or carbon in the air now — could we be doing 340 billion tons a year 100 years from now — if we don’t replace carbon with thermonuclear? 100 years from now hopefully earth will be rich enough to go completely thermo. And here comes 1.5 trillion tons from the permafrost.
Better get busy. Better get busy finding room to hide lots more carbon — if that is possible — or whatever. Did somebody say: The Green New Deal … is not remotely sufficient to stabilize global warming at a non-catastrophic level?
****************************
Where to find or create enough storage space for many trillion of tons of dry ice (captured CO2) while the world awaits totally nuclear, thermonuclear and renewable energy:
At 100 pounds per cubic foot of dry ice (frozen CO2), a 100 foot X 100 foot X 100 foot block would contain a 100 million pounds, or 50,000 tons. At a cost of $100 a ton to capture CO2 from the atmosphere, it would cost 5 million dollars to capture enough to fill one cube.
15 trillion tons of dry ice would take up the volume of 300,000,000 such cubes (15,000,000,000,000/50,000). At 50 blocks per mile — both width and length — that would come to 120,000 square miles of frozen CO2 (300,000,000/2500). That would fit into a space 3000 miles long and 40 miles wide.
5% of GDP to capture, 5% of GDP to contain = 10% of GDP to keep C02 from turning our world from turning into Venus — while awaiting a completely non-carbon fueled civilization. May have to contain the stuff forever, but shouldn’t cost much.
Possible design: storing dry ice containers at the bottom of the oceans could utilize the massive pressures at that level to hold the containers intact.
***************************
Since I wrote the above (recently), I’ve been apprised that carbon fixation in basalt formations is very likely the cheaper and may be the most practicable way to go. Here are my notes on basalt so far, in case you want to get there first: 🙂
Turning carbon dioxide into rock – forever
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-43789527
https://www.pnas.org/content/105/29/9920
Among geological storage techniques, CO2 injection into deep saline aquifers, or its reinjection into depleted oil and gas reservoirs, has potentially large storage capacity and geographic ubiquity (6–10).
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/05/scientists-in-iceland-are-turning-carbon-dioxide-into-rock/
Two years later, almost all of the CO2 had morphed into carbonate minerals. * * * * *
The team’s breakthrough, reported in the journal Science in 2016, led to the scaling up of the CarbFix project – fixing CO2 into rock, literally – at the Hellisheidi geothermal power station * * * * * The process does, however, require large amounts of desalinated water – about 25 tonnes of water per tonne of stored CO2 – so they are working on adapting it to saltwater.
https://eos.org/articles/basalts-turn-carbon-into-stone-for-permanent-storage
Climate researchers have long recognized that highly reactive basaltic rocks could be a solution to the carbon storage problem. In addition to being common around the world, basalts contain high concentrations of calcium and magnesium ions that chemically react with CO2 to make calcite, dolomite, and magnesite. Moreover, dissolving the CO2 in water aboveground and then injecting it into subsurface basalts bypasses the slower and less secure stages of conventional carbon storage. * * * * * The team found that over 90% of the injected CO2 had been converted into minerals within 2 years of injection. * * * * * “But also the way that we inject is that we dissolve the CO2 in water prior to or during injection. This means increased security as well, because by dissolving the CO2 we’re killing the buoyancy of the CO2. The CO2-charged fluid is heavier than the groundwater in the formation where we are injecting, so it has the tendency to sink rather than to rise up. This increased storage security.” * * * * * Mineral carbonation has been gaining interest in recent years, Snæbjörnsdóttir said. “People often believe that this can only be done if you have geothermal [heat], but that’s not the case,” she said. “The things that you need for this to work are just a source of CO2, [water], and reactive rocks.” * * * * * “We know that basalts like we have here in Iceland are perfect for this method,” she said, “but there might be rock types that are less reactive but still reactive enough. If some of those rock types are feasible to use for this method, we could broaden the applicability even more.” * * * * * The team is also looking into how well offshore injections using seawater might work.
https://www.bgs.ac.uk/discoveringGeology/climateChange/CCS/howCanCo2BeStored.html#ocean
We need to understand more about saline aquifer storage, but current research shows that several trapping mechanisms immobilise the CO2 underground, reducing the risk of leakage. The IPCC says that for well-selected, designed and managed geological storage sites, CO2 could be trapped for millions of years, retaining over 99 per cent of the injected CO2 over 1000 years.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/06/underground-injections-turn-carbon-dioxide-stone
What happened next startled the team. After about a year and a half, the pump inside a monitoring well kept breaking down. Frustrated, engineers hauled up the pump and found that it was coated with white and green scale. Tests identified it as calcite, bearing the heavy carbon tracer that marked it as a product of carbonation. * * * * * Measurements of dissolved carbon in the groundwater suggested that more than 95% of the injected carbon had already been converted into calcite and other minerals. “It was a huge surprise that the carbonation happened so fast,”
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6291/1312
The scaling up of this basaltic carbon storage method requires substantial quantities of water and porous basaltic rocks (9). Both are widely available on the continental margins, such as off the coast of the Pacific Northwest of the United States (12).
https://phys.org/news/2019-05-iceland-carbon-dioxide-cleaner-air.html
Around 25 tonnes of water are needed for each tonne of carbon dioxide injected. * * * * * “That is the Achilles’ heel of this method,” says Snaebjornsdottir. * * * * * “I agree that the process uses a lot of water, but we gain a lot by permanently getting rid of CO2 that otherwise would be floating around the atmosphere,” says Aradottir. * * * * * Experiments are currently under way to adapt the method to saltwater.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/26/climate/oman-rocks.html
https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/11/27/carbon-dioxide-removal-climate-change/
July 28, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,468,657)
Deaths ( 151,850)
Ken @ 9:26 am
interest rates are not in my wheelhouse but my thought is if that one expects the value of your currency to appreciate, then are “negative” interest rates at a smaller percentage rate than your expected appreciation really negative?
July 28, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,498,343)
Deaths ( 152,320)
India
Cases ( 1,532,135)
Deaths ( 34,224)
Mexico
Cases ( 395,489)
Deaths ( 44,022)
UK
Cases ( 300,692)
Deaths ( 45,878)
Germany
Cases ( 207,951)
Deaths ( 9,207)
France
Cases ( 183,804)
Deaths ( 30,223)
Canada
Cases ( 114,994)
Deaths ( 8,912)
China
Cases ( 83,959)
Deaths ( 4,634)
July 28, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,498,343)
Deaths ( 152,320)
Beyond a failure of national and state leadership, this remarkable spread of coronavirus infections through the country and the terrible number of deaths represent a failure of the healthcare system.
The ratios of deaths to confirmed coronavirus cases in the United Kingdom, France and Mexico are 15.3%, 16.4% and 11.1% respectively. These notably high deaths ratios need to be studied and explained, but possibly because of the domestic political implications there have been no evident studies.
Paul Krugman @paulkrugman
A wonkish thread on the economics of unemployment insurance. Why? Because Republicans are talking nonsense, but also because it seems to me that even some of the people calling for maintaining generous benefits are missing the point 1/
2:40 PM · Jul 28, 2020
The key point is that to evaluate the impact of the GOP’s plan to slash UI while making business lunches 100% deductible, we need to do *macroeconomics*; it’s not just about worker incentives 2/
A good starting point is the Phillips curve: the hypothetical tradeoff between unemployment and inflation 3/
[ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EeCMTmgWAAEc-zG?format=png&name=small ]
I’m well aware that there are some conceptual issues with this curve, and also that these days it’s hard to find in US data. But there must be some effect of labor market tightness on inflation; clearly visible in countries with more extreme variation (Spain’s GDP deflator) 4/
[ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EeCMxXjXgAUPiPL?format=png&name=small ]
So, where do we find ourselves on that curve? It could be a policy choice, e.g., the Federal Reserve sets policy to achieve its inflation target. But maybe policymakers can’t or won’t do enough to assure adequate demand. In that case, the level of demand sets unemployment 5/
[ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EeCNUCJXYAIrXoN?format=png&name=small ]
And since 2008 we’ve consistently been limited by the demand constraint: the Fed has almost never achieved its 2% inflation target, bc monetary policy constrained by zero lower bound, and fiscal support almost never sufficient 6/
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=nKoK
So what happens if you expand UI? It might — might — reduce incentives to work, shifting the Phillips curve up and to the right. But it also increases aggregate demand. And because demand, not inflation, is the binding constraint it REDUCES unemployment 7/
[ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EeCOb1nWoAI4d_M?format=png&name=small ]
Just to add that the demand constraint is far more tightly binding now than at any time in the past dozen years, because now we have a pandemic that requires people to NOT work. Crazy to talk about UI without that as the central point 8/
Now, the work incentives of UI are still interesting, although of little macro significance for the time being. My read is that the disincentive effect seems to be surprisingly small. You can see this just by looking at aggregate data. 9/
Generous UI didn’t prevent a rapid rise in employment during the abortive reopening recovery of May-June 10/
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=twzL
And the workers called back had relatively low wages, as you can see from the fall in average wages, which soared during the initial jobs plunge 11/
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=twAi
This tells you that the workers accepting jobs were precisely the workers who by and large were receiving more in unemployment benefits than from work. Presumably they nonetheless preferred the reality of a job that might last than depending on benefits that might soon vanish 12/
The bottom line is that all those concerns that we were keeping unemployment high by making it too comfortable had zero basis in reality. UI was helping employment, not hurting it — and the massive fiscal contraction now being perpetrated will be a disaster fin/
https://cepr.net/more-thought-on-the-post-pandemic-economy/
July 29, 2020
More Thought on the Post-Pandemic Economy
By Dean Baker
I have written before * ** on the post-pandemic economy and how it should actually provide enormous opportunities, but it is worth clarifying a few points. First and most importantly, there is an important measurement issue with GDP that people will need to appreciate.
It is often said that GDP is not a good measure of well-being, we see this in a very big way in the post-pandemic period. It is likely that many of the changes in behaviour forced by the pandemic, first and foremost telecommuting, will be enduring.
Most immediately, this will show up as a sharp drop in GDP. We will be consuming much less of the goods and services associated with commuting to and from work. This means that we will be driving less. That means we will be buying less gas and needing fewer cars, car parts, and care repair services. We’ll also need less auto insurance. In addition, there will be many fewer taxi or Uber trips, as well as trips on buses, trains, and other forms of public transportation.
There is also an economy built up around serving the people working in downtown office buildings. This includes the offices themselves and the people who service and clean them. There are also the restaurants, gyms, and other businesses that serve the people who come into the city to work each day. And, there are all the items that people have to spend money on for office work, such as business clothes and shoes and dry-cleaning services.
We will see a huge reduction in demand in all these areas if much of the work being done on-line stays on-line. We will also see less business travel, which means fewer air plane trips, taxi rides, and stays in hotels.
This fall into demand will translate into a large loss of GDP, but it translates into very little by way of real loss in well-being. This doesn’t mean there will not be some loss. People may miss seeing work colleagues on a daily basis, or the opportunity to meet up with friends for lunch near the office. Some people may actually enjoy business travel. But the drop in GDP will dwarf whatever losses of these sorts people may feel, and in most cases they will be offset by gains, such as not having to spend two hours a day commuting and having more time to spend with friends and family.
So, let’s say that we see GDP drop by 3.0 percent ($660 billion a year), how should we think about this? (This is a very crude guess, not a careful calculation) On its face, that would look like a very severe downturn. In the Great Recession, GDP only fell by 4.0 percent from peak to trough, so this looks like a very serious hit to the economy.
But that really misses the story. To take an analogous situation, let’s say for some reason, such as better diet, more exercise, or an act of god, everyone’s health got hugely better. Imagine that we could have the same outcomes in terms of life expectancy and quality of overall health using half as many health care services. This would mean half as many doctors’ visits, surgeries, MRIs, prescription drugs and everything else in health care that costs money.
This reduction in health care consumption would mean a drop in GDP of more than 8.5 percent, yet everyone’s health would be just as good as it had been previously. In this story, no one in their right mind would be concerned about the loss of GDP, what we value is health, not the number of times we see a doctor or the amount of drugs we take. The decline in the resources needed to maintain our health is effectively an increase in productivity. We have seen a jump of 8.5 percent in the level of productivity, as we can get the same output as we had previously, with 8.5 percent fewer inputs. *** In other words, we are much richer as a result of this remarkable improvement in the public’s health.
We should think about my hypothesized savings of 3.0 percent of GDP on work-related expenses the same way. We had been expending a large amount of resources to maintain an office work system that is no longer needed. This is effectively a huge jump in productivity. By comparison, over the last 15 years productivity growth has averaged just 1.3 percent annually.
This matters hugely in how we think about the post-pandemic economy. If we look at the lost GDP associated with fewer work-related expenses we would think that the economy is really suffering. However, if we think of this as a big jump in productivity, then it effectively means that we have extra resources to address long-neglected social needs.
And, these resources should be readily visible in the form of all the workers who are no longer employed in restaurants, gyms, dry cleaners, or the making, servicing, or driving of cars. These are people who can be instead employed providing child care, senior care, doing energy audits of buildings, installing solar panels and energy conserving appliances, or other tasks that address neglected needs.
As I have pointed out before, we need not think that every person who lost their job waiting tables will get a job installing solar panels or as a child care provider. That’s not the way the labour market works. People in fact switch jobs frequently. In a normal pre-pandemic economy more than 5.5 million people lose or leave their job every month. If we create jobs in installing solar panels, energy audits, and child care, people will leave other jobs to fill these newly created positions, which can leave openings for laid off restaurant and hotel workers to again get jobs in hotels and restaurants, as well as other sectors.
The fact that we have a large number of idle workers, because of this effective jump in productivity, means that we should not be shy about large amounts of government spending to address these unmet needs, even though it will mean large budget deficits. For the near-term future, we will not have to worry about deficits creating too much demand in the economy and causing inflation. In the longer term, excessive demand and the resulting inflation can be a problem, which will require addressing the factors that redistribute so much money upward (e.g. patent and copyright monopolies, a corrupt corporate governance structure, and a bloated financial sector), but that will not be a problem as we recover from the recession.
If we do let obsessions with government deficits and debt curtail spending, then we can expect to see a long and harsh recession. To set up the analogy, suppose there was a 3.0 percent jump in productivity, but there was no increase in workers’ real wages. Assume all the money went to higher corporate profits. Since profits have little relationship to investment, there is no reason to expect any notable increase in investment. Let’s assume that consumption spending out of dividends and share buybacks is limited.
In this case, the economy can produce the same output with 3 percent fewer workers, meaning that 4.8 million people will be out of jobs. And, that situation can persist for a long period of time, since there is nothing inherent to the workings of the economy to bring us back to full employment.
That would really be a disaster story, especially if the correct figure for this implicit jump in productivity is something more like 5 percent, or even more. The key to preventing this sort of disaster is to understand that the reduced spending on work-related expenses is effectively an increase in productivity.
And, we also have to recognize that when we have a serious problem of unemployment, the failure to run large deficits is incredibly damaging to the country. Millions of workers will needlessly suffer, as will their family. And the failure is increased when it means not spending in areas that will have long-term benefits for the country, like child care and slowing global warming. It is tragic that deficit hawks are able to do so much harm to our children under the guise of saving our children.
* https://cepr.net/the-post-pandemic-economy/
** https://cepr.net/more-thoughts-on-the-post-pandemic-economy-think-1970s-stagflation/
*** For those being technical, I am not using “productivity” precisely here. A reduction equal to 8.5 percent of GDP in the value of goods or services devoted to health care, does not necessarily mean that the amount of labour used in the health care sector has fallen by an amount equal to 8.5 percent of the economy’s annual labour usage. But I’m ignoring this point for now.
July 29, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,515,787)
Deaths ( 152,729)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/health/coronavirus-future-america.html
July 29, 2020
A Viral Epidemic Splintering Into Deadly Pieces
There’s not just one coronavirus outbreak in the United States. Now there are many, each requiring its own mix of solutions.
By Donald G. McNeil Jr.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/nyregion/new-york-contact-tracing.html
July 29, 2020
City Praises Contact-Tracing Program. Workers Call Rollout a ‘Disaster.’
The contact tracers said the program was confusing and disorganized in its first six weeks, leaving them fearful that their work would not have an impact on the virus.
By Sharon Otterman
July 29, 2020
Coronavirus
Dominican Republic
Cases ( 66,182)
Deaths ( 1,123)
Deaths per million ( 103)
Cuba
Cases ( 2,588)
Deaths ( 87)
Deaths per million ( 8)
The Dominican Republic has been the fastest growing country in per capita GDP in the western hemisphere since 1971. Nonetheless, Cuba has had markedly better healthcare outcomes even though Cuba has been continually under United States sanctions. The coronavirus experience reflects the differences in healthcare systems.
Oregon governor says US agents will start leaving Portland
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Federal agents who have clashed with protesters in Portland, Oregon, will begin a “phased withdrawal” from Oregon’s largest city, Gov. Kate Brown said Wednesday.
Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said in a statement the plan negotiated with Brown over the last 24 hours includes a “robust presence” of Oregon State Police in downtown Portland.
“State and local law enforcement will begin securing properties and streets, especially those surrounding federal properties, that have been under nightly attack for the past two months,” Wolf said.
The agents will begin leaving the city’s downtown area on Thursday, Brown said.
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Before departing Wednesday for a trip to Texas, President Donald Trump insisted federal troops would not leave Portland until local authorities “secured their city.”
“Either they’re gonna clean up Portland soon, or the federal government is going up, and we’re gonna do it for them. So either they clean out Portland — the governor and the mayor, who are weak — either they clean out Portland or we’re gong in to do it for them,” he said.
The U.S. Marshals Service and Department of Homeland Security had been weighing this week whether to send in more agents. The marshals were taking steps to identify up to 100 additional personnel who could go in case they were needed to relieve or supplement the deputy marshals who work in Oregon, spokesman Drew Wade said. …
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/28/us/covid-19-colleges-universities.html
July 29, 2020
More Than 6,300 Coronavirus Cases Have Been Linked to U.S. Colleges
By Weiyi Cai, Danielle Ivory, Mitch Smith, Alex Lemonides and Lauryn Higgins
As college students and professors decide whether to head back to class, and as universities weigh how and whether to reopen, the coronavirus is already on campus.
A New York Times survey of every public four-year college in the country, as well as every private institution that competes in Division I sports or is a member of an elite group of research universities, revealed at least 6,300 cases tied to about 270 colleges over the course of the pandemic. And the new academic year has not even begun at most schools….
https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?reqid=19&step=3&isuri=1&select_all_years=0&nipa_table_list=5&series=q&1=5&2=2007&3=2018&4=q&5=x&first_year=2017&6=0&7=survey&last_year=2020&scale=-9&thetable=
June 30, 2020
Defense spending was 59.3% of federal government consumption and investment in January through March 2020. *
$866.0 / $1,460.2 = 59.3%
Defense spending was 22.5% of all government consumption and investment in January through March 2020.
$866.0 / $3,852.0 = 22.5%
Defense spending was 4.0% of GDP in January through March 2020.
$866.0 / $21,539.7 = 4.0%
* Billions of dollars
July 29, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,529,658)
Deaths ( 152,995)
July 29, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,539,168)
Deaths ( 153,150)
July 29, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 68,299)
Deaths ( 491)
Deaths per million ( 53)
———————————–
July 4, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 29,170)
Deaths ( 330)
Deaths per million ( 36)
When Israel had evidently controlled the coronavirus, but opened businesses and schools too early.
July 29, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,555,166)
Deaths ( 153,458)
July 29, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,568,037)
Deaths ( 153,840)
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/07/30/business/stock-market-today-coronavirus
July 30, 2020
The U.S. economy’s contraction in the second quarter was the worst on record.
Economic output fell at its fastest pace on record last spring as the coronavirus pandemic forced businesses across the United States to close their doors and kept millions of Americans shut in their homes for weeks.
Gross domestic product — the broadest measure of goods and services produced — fell 9.5 percent in the second quarter of the year, the Commerce Department said Thursday. On an annualized basis, the standard way of reporting quarterly economic data, G.D.P. fell at a rate of 32.9 percent.
The collapse was unprecedented in its speed and breathtaking in its severity. The only possible comparisons in modern American history came during the Great Depression and the demobilization after World War II, both of which occurred before the advent of modern economic statistics.
Unlike past recessions, this one was a result of a conscious decision to suspend economic activity to slow the spread of the virus. Congress pumped trillions of dollars into the economy to sustain households and businesses, limit long-term damage and allow for a rapid rebound.
The plan worked at first. In recent weeks, however, cases have surged in much of the country. Data from public and private sources indicate a pullback in economic activity, reflecting consumer unease and renewed shutdowns.
“In another world, a sharp drop in activity would have been just a good, necessary blip while we addressed the virus,” said Heather Boushey, president of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a progressive think tank. “From where we sit in July, we know that this wasn’t just a short-term blip.”
— Ben Casselman
https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?reqid=19&step=3&isuri=1&select_all_years=0&nipa_table_list=5&series=q&1=5&2=2007&3=2018&4=q&5=x&first_year=2017&6=0&7=survey&last_year=2020&scale=-9&thetable=
July 30, 2020
Defense spending was 58.1% of federal government consumption and investment in April through June 2020. *
$877.5 / $1,509.2 = 58.1%
Defense spending was 22.9% of all government consumption and investment in April through June 2020.
$877.5 / $3,839.3 = 22.9%
Defense spending was 4.5% of GDP in April through June 2020.
$877.5 / $19,408.8 = 4.5%
* Billions of dollars
July 30, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,583,595)
Deaths ( 154,186)
July 30, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,593,699)
Deaths ( 154,400)