Do you disagree with the notion that the more we spend the more lives we can save? Because we can lockdown even further and save even more lives than we are saving now, but it would cost more. Unless you are claiming we can save even more lives than we are saving now without spending more money, I don’t see how it is a false binary that there a tradeoff.
This is true even when we aren’t in a pandemic. We could spend way, way more on our medical systems and save way, way more lives. But we don’t. This isn’t new. The pandemic is just amplifying it.
Ok, I’m out. Your “responses” are so out-of-touch with what anyone has argued, it’s like you aren’t reading anyone’s posts.
Good luck with your crusade against people who listen to doctors, and good luck explaining why they should end up on government benefits too given your opinion that we don’t deserve any money.
Yep. I’ve been broke before, and as Dave Chapelle’s father told him, it’s a temporary situation. Unlike dying, or debilitating effects of a serious illness.
The concern about the economy is the most puzzling thing about the whole crisis, because anyone who knows anything knows it will be temporary. People worrying about market crashes are like Fred Sanford saying “This is the big one!”
I have no idea what other conversation you are talking about. I have no way of knowing the context in which you cited those numbers nor why other people told you the cite was “obviously wrong.” Do you want to know why I’m not willing to defend you in that other discussion? Because I literally don’t know what on earth you are talking about.
I understand if you think it is pointless. I admit, I don’t understand how you can call the position I’ve offered as binary and my question was intended to ask if you saw a continuum in the tradeoff between money and lives. The fact that I think you are calling that a binary choice when clearly you don’t seem to be since you are saying I’m completely missing the point does mean I’m obviously blind to the point you were making.
I think it was unfair to call my position binary, but such is life.
You can’t eat checks, which is the situation millions will find themselves if production chains stay closed for long enough. Personal protection equipment was the first domino to fall in that regard, huge demand plus raw material and manufacturing closing does that sort of thing.
If the food related dominoes begin to fall what are your checks going to do?
Do you know what where some of the effects the Great Depression had in the course of history?
Just as a pointer it laid down the conditions for the rise of Fascism and the outbreak of WWII.
Will you take personal responsibility for excess deaths and for those who die after “opening-up” leads to further waves of contagion? With the next wave, the economic shutdown will be deeper and longer. Have you a reference that more deaths will restart the national economy?
The ships were sent to relieve shoreside hospitals of non-COVID patients; they were not reconfigured. Meanwhile, you advocate massive movement of patients to non-specialized facilities. What is your professional experience with medical transport?
One’s death is only beneficial to an undertaker who is not overwhelmed with stiffs. Death and disability won’t boost most markets. We have a lesson from a century ago: economies that shut down fastest, hardest, and longest recovered quickest. [del]Putin’s puppets[/del] Those arguing for immediate openings do NOT have the US national interest at heart.
…a nuanced position would be “lockdown until we get the cases under control, we have ramped up testing, we can protect our healthcare workers and we have an effective contact testing regime. Then we can start to open up the economy.”
But the position you have consistently taken in this thread is exemplified by the following quotes:
“Are you willing to give up your paycheck until the lockdowns are lifted?”
Binary.
“Do you disagree with the notion that the more we spend the more lives we can save?”
Binary.
“We can open up and quite possibly cost some lives, or we can keep locked down and create a lot of misery through economic toil and quite possibly a non-zero death toll.”
Binary.
I presented the NZ solution to you, which was developed based on an understanding of the science, that has resulted in a death toll of under 20 and a plummeting of new cases, which will see our economy effectively reopen (with restrictions, including closed borders) after two months, and your response was this.
You aren’t actually looking for a solution.
I’ve given you a solution on a platter, that can be adapted to what is happening in America (if the powers-that-be actually came to the table) and which some states are actively perusing, modified to suit each states individual circumstances.
But you’ve effectively dismissed this in a sentence. You will look at it again in a year and “see how its going.” Don’t you think a year down the track is a bit late for looking for effective solutions?
That hasn’t stopped you from writing giant walls of text repeating the same talking points over and over again. A solution that fits outside of the binary parameters you’ve set up for yourself is of absolutely no interest to you, even if that solution will both save lives and get the economy started faster, because it simply doesn’t fit into your paradigm.
Sherred got it right in the very first response to the thread. This is a fake “choice.” Its the False Dilemma fallacy. Its a relatively interesting thought experiment but you haven’t bought anything new to the table since the OP.
You are locked into binary thinking. Its either “lockdown” or “the economy.” It doesn’t have to be either or.
The model you are holding up proves my point. New Zealand chose to spend a bunch of money to control the virus. It stopped 5% of its GDP cold to control it. That is trading money (and jobs) for saving lives.
One can argue that it will end up saving the economy in the long run. But for now, the reality is that more money spent saved more lives.
About the reasons on the rise of Fascism during the Great Depresion:
Soon after, Adolf Hitler was elected. He canceled all payments in 1933. And the rest is History. (The point here to me is that
It is true that there is a rise of Fascism nowadays, and many dictatorships and authoritarians are using the crisis to increase their power; however, they are having a hard time to explain away how their way of doing “business” is making things worse.
Sure, I agree that a depression would be bad and could increase fascism, but nowadays there is still a super majority of Americans that agree to follow what the scientists recommend about the lockdown, social distancing, etc. And then it was just timing but usually the current rulers get sacked when they can not shake the blame, so it is very unlikely that Americans will continue supporting the Meathead Fascist Cosplayer.
…at this stage you literally don’t have a point. We’ve reached the “arguing for the sake of arguing” stage of the debate. For example:
I simply don’t know where to start with how you have decided to frame your response. Spending money to fight a pandemic is an obvious response to a pandemic. New Zealand choosing to do what **every nation in the world **is doing right now, including the USA, is not an extraordinary decision, and doesn’t fit into your binary framework. This thread isn’t predicated on the premise that “we shouldn’t spend money to combat a global pandemic.” Its predicated on the premise that “We can open up and quite possibly cost some lives, or we can keep locked down and create a lot of misery through economic toil and quite possibly a non-zero death toll.” The New Zealand response literally doesn’t “prove your point.” It does the complete opposite.
But isn’t this what you want? You agree the lockdown was necessary. So don’t you think it would be optimal to have a lockdown last the shortest possible amount of time to be effective, then open the economy up again? We went through two incubation cycles at the harshest lockdown to ensure as best as we could that there was no community spread. We’ve locked down our borders. We are going through a transition phase, opening up slowly for yet another incubation period before we get back to as-close-to-normal as we can get until we get this under control. So about a two month lockdown with only five weeks of that a complete lockdown. Do you think two months is too long?
Isn’t this the best possible outcome we can get at the moment? A perfect trade-off of saving lives and maintaining the economy? An outcome that isn’t reliant on a binary outcome?
What do you propose as an alternative? Do you want to come all of America to come out of lockdown now with insufficient testing and contact tracing and hospitals still not having enough PPE? If that were to happen what do you think that would do to the rate of infections, and how do you think that would effect the economy?
You’re hanging your hat on this theory that the lack of health insurance kills more people than Covid. Why wouldn’t you be interested enough to look for a cite? It took about a minute.
From factcheck.org, according to multiple studies, there is a correlation between lack of health insurance and premature death. The numbers range from 13K to 45K. The causality is not really known. It’s possible that the type of person who doesn’t buy health insurance is the type of person who puts themselves at higher risk. Here are potential other reasons that I alluded to:
Obtaining health insurance fixes the problem of premature death from lack of health insurance, according to one study. There’s no reason for unemployed people to go without health insurance, so there’s no reason for unemployed people to be dying from a lack of it. I’ll explain more in the next section.
What the premature death is not from is hospitals not treating people with no health insurance. All hospitals are required by law to treat people who are in a life-threatening condition.
Besides being snarky, it’s also inaccurate. If, as you say, people are dying from a lack of health insurance, and that’s the biggest reason unemployed people are dying, it stands to reason that they should prioritize getting some.
If you go to healthcare.gov, you can check out who qualifies for policies. At random, I put in a zip code in Kentucky. I put the income down to zero. The website directed me to get a Medicaid application. Medicaid is free of charge. If I put in $30K in income for 2020, a list of policies pop up. There were a couple zero cost policies, subsidized by the government. They were bronze level policies, so the deductible is $12K and the out of pocket max is $16K. But all policies come with free preventive care and free routine care. Now, if someone has a chronic condition, they’d have to come up with the $16K if the policy doesn’t cover their condition. But that limits the amount someone would owe. And that’s a different thing than dying from lack of health insurance which unemployed people can generally get for free.
If the person’s income was so high that they didn’t qualify for subsidies just based on the few months they’ve already been working this year which would be more than $15K/mo, they could probably afford either COBRA or a subsidized ACA policy.
Yes, you’ve claimed that unemployment is costing lives. But you don’t quantify the number of lives or give the cause, except for lack of health insurance, which isn’t true since most unemployed people can get free health insurance.
I’ve already shown that in recessions, there are less deaths and the same amount of suicides. Some articles are also claiming that the reduction in air pollution from the shutdowns is saving more lives than Covid is taking.
It’s important to identify the cause of the deaths you’re claiming from unemployment because the problem can at least be dealt with.
If the problem is starvation, then food programs need to be strengthened. I like California governor Newsom’s idea of using the restaurants to deliver food to seniors and other vulnerable people. That gives business to the restaurants and tax back to the governments. It’s funded by FEMA.
He is also partnering with Walmart and Amazon to allow online ordering for food with increased EBT. That effort is funded by an increase in stimulus bills and philanthropy.
I’m partial to the Universal Basic Income solution, giving everyone a monthly stipend, that is being considered by Spain. I’ve been writing about UBI for months. UBI was the basis for Andrew Yang’s Presidential campaign for 2020.
Andrew Yang’s UBI would have been paid for by a number of taxes such as a financial transaction tax and a carbon tax, that would impact businesses more than individuals and a value added tax that would exempt essentials and be weighted heavily toward luxury goods, creating a bigger tax for those who can afford luxury items like yachts and planes.
You read that wrong. All 120 restaurants are NOT opening as of yet. It was 50 owners who owned those 120 restaurants who decided not to open. The only restaurants that the article talked about opening was the dozen or so.
Maybe. But you’re weighing that off against the damage to the unemployed people that you also don’t define. Perhaps that’s also a sunk cost that won’t change with the opening of the economy either. If people don’t go back to their old spending patterns because of fear of the virus, then maybe those businesses wouldn’t survive anyway. You haven’t made a case that they would.
Wait, what?! You’re not sacrificing your entire salary and going broke to give to the unemployed? How hypocritical.
btw, there are other organizations that are taking donations and giving them to people affected by the coronavirus. Andrew Yang set up a non-profit called Humanity Forward which has now given over a $1M to people who have been affected by covid. Charities don’t scale to the need which is why government changes are needed as well. Humanity Forward also funds campaigns of people who are running on a UBI platform to change the social safety net for people who become unemployed.
I never said lack of insurance will kill more than Covid. It will kill people that otherwise wouldn’t have died. It means it isn’t free of mortality consequences.
There are limits to how far a hospital will go to save a life of someone without insurance. In a sense, the US has universal healthcare, as you indicate. We just happen to have the most insanely expensive universal health care in the world.
And if people are dying from heart attacks and cancer, they should prioritize exercise and good nutrition.
If insurance is as easily affordable as you indicate then there really is no need for universal healthcare. Why is there a health care crisis in this country if people can get insurance at such affordable rates? Why is healthcare the #1 cause of bankruptcy in this country?
I’m familiar with it. It does have a lot of merit. We tend to treat the lower class in this country horribly and programs like this would go a long way in helping with that.
Gotcha. I did read that wrong.
True, but that gets into a debate as to what good it does to keep things shut down if people are going to stay away anyway. Sweden is an example of a country that didn’t severely lock down. I don’t know the rate at which businesses are having to close there, though.
Except, you know, for the ones that aren’t. Like Sweden. They didn’t close their borders, didn’t shut down their economy and didn’t lock everyone away. They lost more lives than New Zealand. It is an inescapable fact that New Zealand took more drastic measures, spent more money, to save more lives.
No, not too long. But the question is, as you open up, will there be at least 1 person that will die that otherwise wouldn’t have died had you stayed locked down? Is it worth staying locked down to save at least 1 life?
You have two options. Deny that opening up, albeit slowly, will cost lives or admit that you are willing to open the economy at the cost of at least some lives. Which is it?
It would appear New Zealand is extremely well situated to start opening up again and allow the economic recovery to begin. Do you agree New Zealand is in a good position to start opening despite the fact it very well could cost some people their lives?
I would not point at Sweden as a great example, I remember reading reports that over there there are more people living alone, put that together with voluntary social distancing and a higher than usual internet infrastructure to work at home, and a lot of what is expected from a strong lockdown is taking place with little effort.
Still, yes, even there; the results of no hard lockdowns are not so encouraging, again do not forget how separated the Swedes are already; even with that, the voluntary separations are not quite working and it may get worse, as even some conservative media and Trump noticed:
Sweden and New Zealand are great examples of something, but we aren’t sure yet of what.
It is far too early to start comparing the results of the different approaches. Only history will be able to make the final determination. Based on the Spanish Flu and epidemiologists, this could just be the first wave of several. The economic, political and social impacts of multiple waves won’t be known for at least a year and probably more.
…this is a preposterous claim that demands a cite. My statement was that “Spending money to fight a pandemic is an obvious response to a pandemic.” Are you asserting that Sweden hasn’t spent any money in response to the pandemic?
No that question isn’t really worth asking. Its kinda like asking “have you stopped beating your wife?” The lockdown has had a flow on effect in other areas. The Easter road toll was zero for only the second time ever and we are heading towards the lowest road toll in NZ history. 20% drop in ocean rescues.ACC claims down a massive 70%.
Your musings don’t mean jack-shit in the face of empirical evidence. We know the direction the rate of infection was heading. 10 out our 19 deaths came from a single rest home. We locked down before we even had a single death. And when the first death came a week into the lockdown the entire nation mourned. I feel fortunate that I live in a place where we can mourn the life of a single person and that we don’t have to endure what is happening in the US or the UK. 2390 deaths yesterday in the US. And you aren’t even close to being able to get this under control.
Which is what?
What is it with you and the binary options?
Didn’t you lament that it was “unfair to call (your) position binary?” Then why do you continue to present binary positions?
You are arguing for the sake of arguing again. Another binary position, demanding I choose one option or the other when more nuanced positions (that I have already patiently explained to you) exist.
But since you are in the mood to post binary-barely-relevant gotcha questions, I’ll remind you that you never answered the question I put to you the other day.
LOL.
A detective walks into a room. A man stands over a dead body, smoking gun in his hand, a big huge bullet hole in the dead body. “I did it. I killed him” said the man.
“Hmmmmm.” Said the detective. “I wonder what it was that happened here?”
You are the detective looking at overwhelming evidence of a crime who is unable to put the pieces together. You don’t have to wait for “history”. You can express an opinion now if you like. Go on. Speculate. Just a little.
Because you aren’t in a position to wait a year and probably more.to figure out what you should be doing right now. Thousands of people are dying from Covid-19 daily in America, and there are many people arguing that "you have lockdown enough, its time to be opening back up again.
You can wait a year, or probably more if you like. But I’ll tell you right now that the only way to combat this is to ramp up the testing, ramp up the contact tracing, maintain social distancing and protect your healthcare workers. I still don’t know what this thread is all about. But if you want to flatten the curve, save as many lives as possible, and open the economy then the way forward is clear and obvious and it isn’t a binary way forward.
