So we are on the same page that pork is bad, particularly with a bill of this nature. But I still stand by my assertation that not all of those items should be considered pork but strings attached to money which should not just be a gift.
I agree with the 08 comments. I still think it’s despicable what the banks and their CEO’s got away with.
For reference the last 5 years of Boeing’s revenue were $96B, $94B, $93B, $101B, and $76B. It sounds like Boeing isn’t taking money, for now, because there were strings attached. The $60B they allegedly asked for is a phenomenal amount of their yearly revenue.
Well I haven’t been able to keep up with the numbers but I’m sure you all know they have been getting worse and worse at a terrible rate. We’ve passed China (us us us #1) for the most cases. We have 10X the deaths (2185) we had 8 DAYS ago. We have 7X the cases (124,217) we did 8 DAYS ago. But don’t worry if you watch one of the daily press briefings there are just a bunch of people saying how smart everyone is and how great a job they are doing.
I’ll keep beating the dead horse. Trump fucked the testing so it spread like wildfire and now we are paying the price. He’s panicking a bit because he’s dying to open up the economy again (supposedly by Easter) but even he probably realizes that nothing about our case numbers will support his wish. In the last week he’s pivoted to calling it the “invisible enemy” and called this a war. It’s a nice change from his dismissive attitude but I feel like it’s more of a move to be a “war time” president that often gets re-elected than anything. It wouldn’t be so invisible if he had the proper testing in place. He also started calling it the “Chinese Virus” which just exacerbated the problem of racial aggression against Asian Americans, but supporting racism is nothing new for DT. Trump and Dr. Fauci have also had a little beef this week because Fauci has publicly admitted that some of what DT says is a lie. I’m shocked Fauci hasn’t been fired yet since DT usually can’t handle blows to his ego like that.
Where do we go from here? I’m guessing the numbers continue their steep climb for at least a week. I bet we get to over 250k pretty quickly. This week or next will be a bad week for hospitals as they will be getting into Italy territory. If we keep flying blind and Governors keep refusing to shut things down it will continue to get worse. If we had confidence in our testing it would be a lot more clear how to proceed. Most signs point to complete quarantines for 2 weeks IMO.
A $2T bill just got signed with an ability to expand to $6T somehow…haven’t had the time to digest all of this. I know money isn’t too much of a factor in emergencies but these are staggering numbers that have serious debt implications. I swear Trump just loves setting records. It’s almost like he doesn’t get that its kinda a bad thing that it’s so large. If you still need some emergency cash from your bank get it before the stimulus money hits the banks, which I’ve heard will be 4/12 but haven’t confirmed. It will be a bloodbath (and virus) getting to the bank after that money drops.
Unemployment will continue to skyrocket despite the stimulus. Trump set a record with 3.3M Americans filing for unemployment and likely a lot more were unable to due to the system crashing. Even my PA girlfriend might get laid off as her small plastic surgery practice can’t do operations on non-cancer patients right now. Apparently some hospitals are offering $13k PER WEEK for medical professionals so she may feel inclined to step out her comfort zone but all of that could change quite rapidly.
Personally I’m stocking up on a few supplies and hopefully will be picking up a pistol soon. As long as I can still drive to have access to my 90 YO grandma I’ll be content. She’s who I’m most worried about in all this. All of my construction projects are full bore and corporate is shoving more and more useless paperwork down our throats every day. If yall are still working I would recommend making sure your loved ones at home know how to protect themselves. If we’re 2 weeks out on the checks and millions lost their jobs crime will be a problem.
To put all of this in context 4.5 weeks ago Trump was telling us that “the risk to Americans was very low” and talking about the 15 cases.
So you are saying electing a competent leader and not a con man is a smart thing to do if you actually love your country? One who, regardless of politics, takes all threats seriously, worries about the country more than his own self, and doesn’t favor states who support him over other states who didn’t?
A guy who would follow the playbook left to him by the previous administration for this exact situation, maybe?
A person who doesn’t expect praise and soberly assesses problems, listens to experts first, doesn’t spread falsehoods, and actually leads? If that is what you are saying… I agree. The question is, shouldn’t everyone?
I am read in on the response in South Carolina. SC is doing well but nationally I suspect in the end it will be about 150-200k dead nationally. SC will end up with several hundred of those I suspect. The peak is still a few weeks off for the palmetto state. Bad but not as bad as it could have been had state governors not stepped up into the void…we were on a path to millions had the drastic steps not been taken by local leaders.
Some hoax huh? Those Democrats really pulled a good one. To think they actually stopped Trump from sending money to his own company too…the gall of those America haters.
So we are on the same page that pork is bad, particularly with a bill of this nature. But I still stand by my assertation that not all of those items should be considered pork but strings attached to money which should not just be a gift.
I agree with the 08 comments. I still think it’s despicable what the banks and their CEO’s got away with.
For reference the last 5 years of Boeing’s revenue were $96B, $94B, $93B, $101B, and $76B. It sounds like Boeing isn’t taking money, for now, because there were strings attached. The $60B they allegedly asked for is a phenomenal amount of their yearly revenue.
Perhaps some shouldn’t be considered pork, you can have a discussion about any individual clause.
My thought is that if it’s intended to prop up the economy, make it about that and don’t attach strings to advance a political cause on the back of a struggling economy. The bill could just have who qualifies and on what basis, limits on how the money can be spent, and terms of payback.
By the rationale that we should attach strings to it, the Republicans could say companies are getting taxpayer money, and unions increase the cost of business. In order to get the funds and to be efficient with taxpayer dollars, companies have to take steps x, y and z to dissolve unions. It would be a string attached and would actually be more directly associated to the use of money than a lot of these items. In my opinion it would also be inappropriate and would stall the bill.
Completely agree on ‘08. That was a disaster.
That’s good information on Boeing. That is a huge number.
The qualification and spending restrictions are basically the same as the other strings. Just another side of the same coin. Money in exchange for a particular action. To steal Mr. Clayburns words, I think it’s a good opportunity for the government to mold the country without purely being the big brother forcing you to do it. Prosperity is not guaranteed to man and certainly isn’t guaranteed to corporations. It’s only right that they pay a price for a handout, it sets a precedent. I was in college in 08 and didn’t digest all of the political happenings of Bush and Obama in regards to stimulus but my understanding was that the US taxpayer paid for all the toxic assets (fuckups guided by greed) and then gave bank gobs of 0% loans which they used to make free money off the American people. All the while we established some, not enough, regulations to help reduce the odds it happens again and CEO’s continues to get $100M bonuses. THAT is a bad precedent and why I support adding strings to bills.
I thought on the USPS debt bailout situation more and maybe it was a way to help USPS with cash flow. Our postal (public and private) has never been more important than during this shutdown. I’m sure they are spending extra money to make the working environment and packages safer for everyone. Freeing up some cash for them makes sense and is relevant to the virus. For instance Amazon employees walked out of a distribution center up North today. They didn’t feel they were getting paid enough and that enough cleaning and PPE resources were available. If this happened at USPS, UPS, and FedEx you would see anarchy. But I could be completely off base here.
Your union comments are interesting but would be argued to be unconstitutional and in violation of existing contracts. They would also seem a bit counter-intuitive when the overall stimulus is based around keeping jobs and companies alive. It would be interesting to see some potential clauses in for unions too but it would probably be a sloppy process. I may be Blue and I believe that unions have their place but I work in the least unionized state in the country and I get disgusted by some of the union activities I hear of. The “I only screw in black screws not red screws” or “I can only hang 10 sheets of sheetrock a day” crap has no place in the world IMO. But corporations squashing the voice of the people isn’t the answer either.
US Count 163,429 cases. I know of cases that got tested 10 days ago and still don’t have results…
Pines, I would be interested in testing you “follow the playbook of the previous administration”. Though the lack of testing seems to be an absurdly egregious failure I’m not sure previous situations matched our current barring the 1918 Spanish Flu and plagues. As I recall Obama had a pretty robust handling of Ebola as it is an extremely dangerous virus but Ebola doesn’t spread the same way COVID19 does. Though COVID19 is “unique” it certainly could have been prepared for much better. Trump pissed away 2 months of time in which a fully functioning economy could have been producing goods to combat it and testing could have been in place to isolate the cases. I’m guessing most of the countries in the world have learned a lot about their lack of preparedness.
I wouldn’t say we had a system in place to stop this virus but we probably did have protocol in place for it. The scale of COVID19 may require some new measures in place, particularly in establishing private-public partnerships, but the overall system to attack a virus should be relatively the same for each virus.
The global backlash against China for not being transparent about cause, timeline, lethality, etc will be interesting. IMO they really fucked over their own people and the entire world by somewhat hiding this virus. (Though Trump still burned more time than the Chinese)
The qualification and spending restrictions are basically the same as the other strings. Just another side of the same coin. Money in exchange for a particular action. To steal Mr. Clayburns words, I think it’s a good opportunity for the government to mold the country without purely being the big brother forcing you to do it. Prosperity is not guaranteed to man and certainly isn’t guaranteed to corporations. It’s only right that they pay a price for a handout, it sets a precedent. I was in college in 08 and didn’t digest all of the political happenings of Bush and Obama in regards to stimulus but my understanding was that the US taxpayer paid for all the toxic assets (fuckups guided by greed) and then gave bank gobs of 0% loans which they used to make free money off the American people. All the while we established some, not enough, regulations to help reduce the odds it happens again and CEO’s continues to get $100M bonuses. THAT is a bad precedent and why I support adding strings to bills.
I don’t see it as the same. If I take out a mortgage to buy a house, I have to use it to purchase the home,and the loan defines the monthly payment, interest rate, loan period etc. They’re pretty clean yet restrictive. These things seem more akin to having clauses in the loan that I also have to install solar panels, replace all appliances and plant a garden in the back. You can make a link to them, but it’s additional and unnecessary and intrusive.
As in the case of the government molding the country, it’s not the government molding the country, it’s one party or the other inserting their stuff in situations where people don’t have much choice. If it were the entire government, they could pass it legislatively rather than making it ride piggy back on a company’s attempt to stay in business.
There were indeed a lot of problems in the stimulus and how it got abused. I agree with having controls for that. I would just prefer it to be controlled by strict guidance about how the money can be used in support of it’s original purpose rather than to add things that are tangential.
Ancient Orange - 30 March 2020 09:15 PM
I thought on the USPS debt bailout situation more and maybe it was a way to help USPS with cash flow. Our postal (public and private) has never been more important than during this shutdown. I’m sure they are spending extra money to make the working environment and packages safer for everyone. Freeing up some cash for them makes sense and is relevant to the virus. For instance Amazon employees walked out of a distribution center up North today. They didn’t feel they were getting paid enough and that enough cleaning and PPE resources were available. If this happened at USPS, UPS, and FedEx you would see anarchy. But I could be completely off base here.
I don’t have a problem with funding the USPS in general, but as a federally funded service, I’m not sure how that factors into a package specifically designed to support the general economy. The virus has had an impact on everything and everyone. You could literally make a case for funding about anything.
Ancient Orange - 30 March 2020 09:15 PM
Your union comments are interesting but would be argued to be unconstitutional and in violation of existing contracts. They would also seem a bit counter-intuitive when the overall stimulus is based around keeping jobs and companies alive. It would be interesting to see some potential clauses in for unions too but it would probably be a sloppy process. I may be Blue and I believe that unions have their place but I work in the least unionized state in the country and I get disgusted by some of the union activities I hear of. The “I only screw in black screws not red screws” or “I can only hang 10 sheets of sheetrock a day” crap has no place in the world IMO. But corporations squashing the voice of the people isn’t the answer either.
Sure, you could argue that about unions. Then you’re in a political argument about unions that holds up the passage of the relief bill which is exactly the point and how we got on this topic. When that kind of stuff is added, it delays things and muddies the waters.
I think we have some agreement on unions in general though. I think many have outlived their usefulness though they were clearly needed at times. Much of what they rightly fought for is now captured in labor laws, and once you reach a good deal for the employees, the next step tips the balance to being unfair to companies that can reach the level of your examples. That’s my broad perspective though I think they’re certainly still useful in some industries and exist on a continuum of usefulness.
Ancient Orange - 30 March 2020 09:15 PM
US Count 163,429 cases. I know of cases that got tested 10 days ago and still don’t have results…
Yep - a lot of cases and that number is going to climb.
We have over a million cases globally now and nearly a quarter of them are in the US. Our testing is STILL failing. I heard the Minnesota Governor on NPR this morning saying he get’s rationed 600 new test only after he uses those does he get new ones. People are still waiting 10 days to get results. It makes me wonder how many have died before they would have normally gotten their test results.
Trumps deflection of responsibility to Governors is predictably causing major problems with supply distribution. Yesterday there were reports of Utah out bidding, Maryland who out bid New York and so on for ventilators. In SOME cases FEMA places a bid and tells others not to counter bid but sometimes FEMA gets out bid too. We don’t have CENTRAL LEADERSHIP and all levels of our government are just pissing away time and money because of it. This is a complete failure of the Federal arm of our “Union” due to our weak president being scared of the responsibility when he know’s he already ruined things.
Speaking of Governors, apparently YESTERDAY Brian Kemp of Georgia stated he became aware of the possibility of Asymptomatic spread WITHIN THE LAST 24 HOURS. Are you fucking kidding me? THIS is who Trump left in charge of protecting Georgia. To make it worse the CDC headquarters is in Atlanta.
Now that we are becoming overrun with cases just hours away from hitting 250,000 cases. We need testing to verity numbers so we can allocate our limited resources. We need a federal government that is buying basically all the essential equipment and materials needed and distributing it per the needs of the area. If the distribution of this medical equipment isn’t optimized we will be killing people due to our continually subpar leadership is either too scared to too incompetent to make a decision. People that need respirators will die in New York because Omaha has more than they actually need. But Omaha paid more so they got it.
Per Dr. Birx this evening we have 160k ventilators and 70k anesthesia machines. Doesn’t sound like nearly enough to me. 242,000 cases in the US right now. 4/2/20 7pm.
Trump set back to back records for unemployment applications. 3.3M and then 6.6M, 3% in 2 weeks.
The captain of an aircraft carrier got fired for “copying too many people on an email” that was asking for immediate help as his ship was getting overrun with COVID19. Why should he be worried? It’s almost like the president has a history of abandoning large ships with tons of sick people on them. OH WAIT HE DOES
“This week will be our 9/11 moment.”
Thank god those words are coming from the president. Oh wait. They didn’t. We are being lead by the surgeon general. So glad we elected him.
Fortunately the beaches are open in Georgia. Who knew you could be asymptomatic and still spread the disease?
At least you have a real American as your governor instead of that “you know what.”
This is what Republican leadership has brought us to….when you hate government why is it a surprise that you can’t govern? When you hate science, I wonder why you have no idea about basic science.
Our slope is still pretty terrible and is by far the worst globally of the top countries. Is this really from testing??
Boris Johnson (British PM) is in the ICU.
Still have PPE shortages.
Governor McJackass started the mandatory stay at home unless you are working, working out, getting goods, or go to church today. He’s one of the last governors to act.
