Tag Archives: Featured Stories

bu Dale Coberly WHAT THE TRUSTEES REPORT REALLY MEANS REALLY “DOING THE MATH” [a few years ago the word “du jour” among journalists about SS was “it’s the math.” Of ourse none of them actually did the math.] [note: i use the tax rate for each the worker and the employer because this is what the worker “sees” and it is what the employer sees. It is also the legally correct division. The Trustees Report usually combines the separate tax rates into one...

Infections in US States by population density Since COVID-19 is a communicable disease, it should hardly be a surprise that the most densely populated States have the most cases per capita, and conversely the least densely States have the least cases.  But since that basic point is lost in a lot of the analysis, let’s take a look. Below are two charts consisting of the 12 most and least densely populated States, their respective population densities,...

by Ken Melvin The Road to Calvary From: What to Think To: What to Believe From 15 to 30mins of TV Evening News in 1970 to 24hr TV News in 1980; then on to Fox News in 1996. From the 1950s print journalists and radio news broadcasts, to TV Evening News, to 24hr TV telegenic news readers, to Fox News, to Donald Trump. From the trusted Cronkite, and Huntley – Brinkley nightly news, to cable 24hr CNN opining/news, to Fox News (the most-watched cable news)...

The widely followed IHME model of coronavirus cases has been much too optimistic The IHME model by the University of Washington has gotten a lot of attention in the past month, most likely because it has always forecast a much lower number of total deaths caused by coronavirus than, for example the Imperial College of London’s model, that forecast over 1 million US deaths if no quarantine measures were put in place. But that model has come in for a lot...

An Update on Shadow Government Not only is the current level of testing for the coronavirus insufficient, the tests themselves are flawed.  Read this summary by infectious disease specialist Michael Osterholm and a coauthor for particulars.  Their key policy conclusion is A blue-ribbon panel of public health, laboratory and medical experts, ethicists, legal scholars and elected officials should be convened immediately to set out a road map with...

Oil prices are collapsing as West Texas intermediate is now trading at just over $11/bbl Oil prices move to the point where the marginal supply is profitable or unprofitable. In today’s world the marginal oil supply is US fracked oil. But the economics of fracked oil differs from traditional oil in that the current cost of production is very high as compared to most traditional sources where current costs are relative insignificant and the bulk of the...

In the last two weeks of March and the first week of April, 2020 16.5 million new claims for unemployment were filed in the U.S. After the novel coronavirus is successfully contained some but not all of those jobs will return. The post-pandemic economy will not be the same as the economy before and to assume a return to business-as-usual economic growth would be folly. There will need to be immediate share-the-work policies along with basic income...

Why was the PREDICT Program Suspended Last Fall? A discussion from October 29, 2019: A crucial federal program tracking dangerous diseases is shutting down. Predict, a pandemic preparedness program, thrived under Bush and Obama. Now it’s canceled … Ever since the 2005 H5N1 bird flu scare, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has run a project to track and research these diseases, called Predict. At a cost of $207 million during its...

Lessons from the Pandemic First, all who produce things we need or want are “essential workers”.  Health care practitioners are essential, but so are the people who stock pharmacies and grocery and hardware stores or staff customer service phone lines.  Truck drivers are essential.  Farmworkers who pick the crops we plan on eating are too.  Nothing demonstrates whose work matters in this world better than a pandemic that threatens to pull them off the...

Coronavirus dashboard for April 9: Are new cases peaking? Or is a lack of testing failing to pick up continued spread Here is the update through yesterday (April 8) (NOTE: significant new developments in italics) I’ve changed the format, moving the “just the facts, ma’am” data to the top, and comments to the end. The four most important metrics are starred (***) below. Number and rate of increase of Reported Infections (from Johns Hopkins...