Trump Proposes Assistance to Hourly Workers

While I support that portion of the plan, this all seems like a marketing ploy to essentially toss a kitchen sink out publicly and thereby try to satisfy investors. The devil is in the details and specifically how quickly those details will yield anything tangible, especially in light of statements like John Cornyn saying that he believed a payroll tax cut was premature.

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and hope that he is serious about putting some political muscle behind the proposal.

 

Handouts do people will stay home with the sniffles? Wtf happened to the gop?!?

 

To be fair to the prediction, the only technical requirement for the phrase "a couple" is "more than one."

But if you assume logarithmic growth, you get to millions infected and thousands dead in like 3-4 months.

 

Someone told Trump that he had just publicly agreed to cut entitlements during an election season and that this was a better plan.

Trump always goes with the "better" (read: most recent) plan from the advisers he thinks are friendly.

 

The curve in China is already flattening out, which would indicate that the most vulnerable people got sick and the most resistant didn't.

The rest of the world didn't start getting infected for a few weeks after China started.

Actual:



Logarithmic:

 

Here he is talking about it. Go to the (red bar) 1.27 mark. The moron is obsessed with 'fault.' No wonder people use the words 'Trump' and 'fault' together. He keeps raising it himself!

 

The flattening of the line in China is encouraging, assuming it is accurate.

And yes, and we can hope that every country (or the vast majority) will experience a similar growth curve as China. But I have my doubts as to the validity of the recovery there and doubts as to likely chance of success for every country to match that growth case curve.

Especially in light of the fact that China achieved that curve by essentially locking down everywhere for ~2 months.

 

They think that about 3 million visitors to Wuhan left Wuhan a few weeks before the lockdown. Most of those people lived in other areas of China. Some would have been U.S. Asian-American citizens, people on work- or study-visas, or international businesspeople. I think the "rest of the world" outside China has fewer "seeds" for the virus to sprout.

We'll see how well the containment strategy worked in a few weeks now that we have 4 million tests out this week and they are planning for manufacturing capacity of 4 million tests per week.

 

After reviewing the worldometers graph for China a little more in depth, it seemed to take them about a month before the active case count to start leveling off (i.e. the number of recovered started to match and then outpace the number of new cases). We are roughly three weeks into the outbreak in South Korea and Italy and Iran. So, if the China trend holds to those countries, then hopefully we will see their active case load start to level off in about 1-2 weeks.

The US is slightly more than one week into its outbreak (I am essentially using the first person to person transmission of unknown origin as the starting point).

 

The thing about that though is that we have confirmed cases in what? Like 115 countries? It does not take a doomsday prepper to worry about the capacity of some of those countries to control or manage an outbreak. So even if the US manages to contain its own outbreak, this virus is likely going to take root in a bunch of places and people who avoided infection on this round will likely pick it up elsewhere and they could start the US cycle all over again.

 

At some point everyone here will have some exposure I suspect, so what's going on in other countries isn't going to impact the Trump - Pelosi negotiation over tax cuts versus bigger social safety net. That will happen while the public is distracted and "alarmed"...and while we have highly-restricted travel.

 

We'll have the payroll tax cut/holiday/something for sure. What politician would dare oppose it? Trump wants it, and so does every American. And it will probably help. If you let people keep more money, they'll spend it. Americans are terrible savers. We won't spend it on travel, but at least on stuff. It will mitigate some of the hit that's coming to manufacturing. It might even prop up the market until the numbers reach a new level of awfulness (less than a week).

But the deficit will be insane. It will make Obama look like Scrooge. And this thing will go on for months. Is Trump going to do a tax holiday and then rescind it in the middle of a crisis? No way. People could care less about the deficit right now. This virus is probably going to cost us trillions in spending and lost revenue.

If Trump were smart he would ask Congress for the same amount of money that was spent to bail out the banks in TARP: $700 billion, SPECIFICALLY to prop up the middle class during this crisis. And to build extra hospitals and quarantine centers. And with the understanding that he would be back for more. It wouldn't be bearly enough to stop what's coming, but it would help and it would calm people. It would look like we're seriously responding to this.

 

Yup, but not cheap socialism. Socialists at least pay for everything. This will be a two trillion dollar deficit this year. This could be another Bush style debacle.

 

The flu infects 30 million people a year. Remember, a new strain of flu always starts off infecting one person. Then two. Then four, eight, 16, etc. Coronavirus is MORE contagious than the flu. 1 person gets it, than 3, than 9, than 27, etc.

What's kept the infection rate low is China locked down half a billion people. That dropped the infection rate over there. Japan and S. Korea shut down their schools very early on and took other measures. Italy has followed suit, but they waited too long, and now it's overwhelming them.

And we still continue to do nothing. We're still short on tests. You don't think it's bad now. It's going to get bad. Bookmark this post.

Of course it's a good excuse! What, you think we should have focused on balancing budgets after Pearl Harbor? ROFL!

Interest rates are practically zero, people are fleeing to bonds, and you want to solve the budget deficit during a pandemic. Really, now.

 

Sounds like a jobs program to me.

Trump may, ironically, usher in two liberal fantasies: socialized medicine and a federal jobs guarantee. And he would still lose in 2020.

 

No, the budget deficit won't be solved until there's a global collapse and the governments who keep spending our money shove the rest of us into the austerity abyss....whichever generation that happens....and the banks tell us it's time to "pay them back". As others have mentioned, not many people care anymore...as long as it's not our generation which takes the hit.

Anyway, there's no need to bookmark your post. You post the certain doomsday virus scenario several times every single day.

 

I had a brief moment of optimism the other day. Watch Tucker's monologue.

 

This is just American politics.

Here are the asks/demands.

Trump wants tax cuts.

Schumer/Pelosi asking for lots of money in exchange for tax cuts, using the virus as the pubic pressure excuse to get permanent stuff they've been trying to get for over a decade:..plus a couple of items which actually help with easing the pressure from current new strain of the cold/flu.

 

If it is unemployment, its not very socialist. I don't get any of your unemployment if mine runs out...

I suppose backing it with fed money should some folks run out in a prolongued quarantine would make it a bit more socialist... but still not a 'jobs program' unless folks not working before the crisis suddenly get benefits because of it. But they're not 'hourly workers', so if thats the case, then OP is very misleading.

 

So what's the plan? Any idea?

 

You can already have a good idea on containment from the death rate.
The number infected is about 3,000. So now what?

 

We'll be testing people who are sick, and testing everyone we can trace who they may have had contact with. So far, the people who are contacts with no symptoms have been being placed under voluntary quarantine. A lot of governors and mayors are declaring their states or cities Emergency situations, so that they can change voluntary quarantines into forcible quarantines.

We're transitioning between containment mode and mitigation mode. Someone on the task force called it "surveillance" when talking about the additional availability of million of tests. We can test PUI's and all contacts.

Once (or if) the community spread gets too large to trace down everyone who had contact with an infected person and quarantine them, we go to full mitigation mode. That is when we may need the four million tests per week, and they'll start testing more broadly. Hopefully, the virus will turn out not to be so severe by then that going to get tested for coronavirus won't be too much different from going to get tested for the flu....and there won't be much point in locking people in voluntary/mandatory quarantine. Everyone will probably get exposed at some point....maybe.

Lots of unknowns right now. We'll know more in a few weeks after we see how many cases there are with this first massive set of tests. We're at 752 confirmed cases now with more testing...the numbers are spiking, as the government has been telling us to expect.

No one really knows what will happen as far as severity or duration, and what other steps they may take. We don't know until we know.

 

Fortunately, you and those of your ilk don't get to define what a Conservative believes should be done about, well, ...anything.

 

Great! Hopefully Conservatives will not be against helping people in need.Hopefully Liberals and Conservatives will join for Human Rights of all people -- including the poor.

 

Maybe Conservatives can stop discriminating people who need help. Conservatives did give up racism and opposition to LGBT. Another positive step.