At The Hill former Pennsylvania Ed Rendell proposes some immediate action items for the incoming Biden Administration. They are:

• An beefed-up COVID-19 relief bill
• $15/hour minimum wage
• Reduction in prescription drug costs
• A major infrastructure bill

In the past I’ve mentioned that it is quite typical for incoming administrations to “throw a sop” to their bases. For incoming Republican presidents that has been cuts in the personal and corporate income taxes. For Democrats it’s been infrastructure spending bills and new or expanded entitlements.

Given the composition of the new Congress, I think that accomplishing any or those let alone all of them will be a tall order. I expect that the most notable effect of a $15/hour minimum wage will be to subsidize increased immigration from Mexico and Central America. Some benefit might go to poor people in rich states. It will mean that the jobs of other people people in those same states will be eliminated.

For Red states where wages tend to be lower from a political standpoint it will be roughly equivalent to reducing the state and local tax deduction for Blue states so I expect it will receive substantial support from Democrats in the House. Don’t expect it to receive a lot of Republican support in the Senate.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal think that over-politicization of inoculation is slowing the process:

Blame convoluted and rigid eligibility rules that have focused too much on “equity”—i.e., politics. Operation Warp Speed apportions doses to states, and then states decide how to allocate them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance to states on how to prioritize vaccines focuses on worker occupation, but many states have added to the morass.

New York has been one of the worst, creating a complex formula for ranking health-care employees based on underlying risk factors, age, occupation and hospital department, among other things. Many hospitals had spare vaccines because large numbers of health-care workers declined to be vaccinated. Yet state rules barred offering shots to others.

To some extent that echoes my point that simplicity is a virtue and the more complicated the plan the more difficult it will be to follow. They advocate prioritizing based on age:

The risk of severe illness increases with age, which is why the Administration was right to urge states to administer the vaccine to anyone 65 and older. By one estimate a 70-year-old is about four times more likely to die than a 60-year-old and seven times more likely than a 50-year-old. Age is also a bigger risk factor than underlying health conditions like diabetes. There’s no reason a 25-year-old teacher or grocery worker should get a shot before a 65-year-old.

The development of Covid vaccines in record time is a tribute to private innovation and political will that cut through bureaucracy. The vaccine distribution has been an example of too much political interference. We hope the Biden team is paying attention.

That makes a certain amount of sense but there actually are reasons to inoculate a 25-year-old teacher or grocery worker. Age is the among the most important risk factors but it isn’t the only risk factor. State of health and contacts are risk factors, too.

There are any number of possible inoculation strategies. For example, we could prioritize the zip codes with the highest number of infections, going as far as to move the inoculation sites to the people being inoculated rather than the other way around. Inoculating everyone in a high risk zip code should be simpler, easier, and faster than inoculating the individuals who are notionally at the highest risk in all zip codes.

The lesson I think we are learning is that achieving “herd immunity” through inoculation won’t be as fast as people have been assuming it would be.

I don’t believe that Twitter has violated President Trump’s freedom of speech by deleting his Twitter feed or that Amazon has violated Parler’s or its customers’ freedom of speech by canceling the company’s AWS contract.

I think there’s a much better case that Amazon has engaged in tortious interference with respect to Parler as well as illegal monopoly activities. It will be interesting to see how Parler’s case plays out.

I don’t usually stick my nose into the politics of states other than my own but I wanted to bring this observation by Ross Barkan at Jacobin to your attention:

Andrew Cuomo, New York’s governor, has always embodied a dark irony of the COVID-19 pandemic. While Cuomo’s state has a higher death toll than anywhere else in America and his austerity-driven politics continue to cripple public institutions, he has won hysterical praise from many of the nation’s leading newspapers, magazines, and television shows. People have literally declared themselves “Cuomosexuals” and hawked his merchandise on Etsy. The inexplicable cult of worship, birthed at the height of the pandemic in New York last spring, has managed to linger on through the carnage.

Cuomo’s failure to contain the virus in the earliest weeks of the outbreak doomed New York to far more suffering than it needed to endure. Now, with a vaccine here, he is again proving his lack of fitness to lead New York through the worst crisis it has faced in modern history. For weeks, unused vaccine doses have sat in freezers, with some even being thrown out. After imposing extremely complex and rigid guidelines over who can receive a vaccine, Cuomo threatened health care providers with million-dollar fines if they didn’t follow the rules he had created for who can get a shot first.

When you exclude New York and New Jersey, the northeast of which is essentially a New York bedroom community, our stats on COVID-19 aren’t that much worse than those of the very best European countries and better than Italy or Spain. It’s New York’s and New Jersey’s high case count and large number of fatalities that drags U. S. stats down.

Our handling of COVID-19 is practically a microcosm of our policy problems. It’s too bad we’ll probably take all of the wrong lessons from the experience. Policy doesn’t help as much the advocates of government action tend to believe but it does have the ability to hurt a lot more than they will let themselves believe.

There are lots of things that could have been done in New York, e.g. shutting down the public transport systems as China did, but they weren’t done because of how difficult they would have made things. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

I agree with Matt Taibbi’s latest essay. Our media are broken:

The moment a group of people stormed the Capitol building last Wednesday, news companies began the process of sorting and commoditizing information that long ago became standard in American media.

Media firms work backward. They first ask, “How does our target demographic want to understand what’s just unfolded?” Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to emphasize.

It’s why Fox News uses the term, “Pro-Trump protesters,” while New York and The Atlantic use “Insurrectionists.” It’s why conservative media today is stressing how Apple, Google, and Amazon shut down the “Free Speech” platform Parler over the weekend, while mainstream outlets are emphasizing a new round of potentially armed protests reportedly planned for January 19th or 20th.

What happened last Wednesday was the apotheosis of the Hate Inc. era, when this audience-first model became the primary means of communicating facts to the population. For a hundred reasons dating back to the mid-eighties, from the advent of the Internet to the development of the 24-hour news cycle to the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the Fox-led discovery that news can be sold as character-driven, episodic TV in the manner of soap operas, the concept of a “Just the facts” newscast designed to be consumed by everyone died out.

Without defending Fox News at all, the problem goes back long before 1996 as Mr. Taibbi himself acknowledges:

I came into the news business convinced that the traditional “objective” style of reporting was boring, deceptive, and deserving of mockery. I used to laugh at the parade of “above the fray” columnists and stone-dull house editorials that took no position on anything and always ended, “Only one thing’s for sure: time will tell.” As a teenager I was struck by a passage in Tim Crouse’s book about the 1972 presidential campaign, The Boys in the Bus, describing the work of Hunter Thompson…

The emphasis is mine. He didn’t come into the news business until about 25 years ago, just around the time that Fox News was born. By then J-schools had already abandoned Aristotle’s 5 Ws of writing, that objective style he calls out, in favor of point-of-view reporting. That started in the 1970s. Ah, yes. Objective reporting. You’ll miss it when it’s gone.

He concludes:

Media companies need to get out of the audience-stroking business, and by extension the politics business. They’d then be more likely to be believed when making pronouncements about elections or masks or anything else, for that matter. Creating that kind of outlet also has a much better shot of restoring sanity to the country than the current strategy, which seems based on stamping out access to “wrong” information.

What we’ve been watching for four years, and what we saw explode last week, is a paradox: a political and informational system that profits from division and conflict, and uses a factory-style process to stimulate it, but professes shock and horror when real conflict happens. It’s time to admit this is a failed system. You can’t sell hatred and seriously expect it to end.

They don’t know anything else. They can’t afford to do anything else.

Not only do the new kids coming along deride the old objective style as much as he did when he was their age, they castigate, dox, and cancel those who pursue it. I can’t see anything good coming of that.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal weigh in on the development about which I posted earlier:

It’s amazing that he still received 51 votes. Mr. Madigan’s associates have been indicted in a corruption probe in which Commonwealth Edison agreed to pay a $200 million fine for a scheme to curry favor with the speaker. He says he did nothing wrong. He is also chair of the state Democratic Party, which he can use to make or break legislative careers.

Since he’s been speaker, the once great Prairie State has seen its credit rating fall from one of the highest to the worst in the country. Its citizens are fleeing for better-run neighbors and low-tax Florida. But even at 78 years old, he has managed to hold on to power like the Chicago ward boss he once was. Mr. Madigan’s political demise won’t save Illinois by itself, but it would be a start.

In my view that Mr. Madigan might think he has done nothing wrong is indicative of the problem with our entire political class. They don’t realize that what they’ve been doing is wrong any more.

Replacing Mr. Madigan won’t even be a start if whoever replaces him just picks up where he left off.

The big news hereabout is that Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan is “suspending” his campaign for remaining the Illinois’s House’s speaker. ABC 7 Chicago reports:

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (WLS) — Longtime Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan released a statement Monday saying he is suspending his campaign to maintain the position he has held for decades.

Madigan would need 60 votes to maintain his speakership. He released a statement saying that, “This is not a withdrawal. I have suspended my campaign for Speaker. As I have said many times in the past, I have always put the best interest of the House Democratic Caucus and our members first. The House Democratic Caucus can work to find someone, other than me, to get 60 votes for Speaker.”

Nobody really knows what this means. He could well be re-elected speaker without campaigning for it if support does not coalesce around someone else. Maybe that’s his objective. Maybe he’s just reacting in a fit of pique over the lèse-majesté over not being elected on the first ballot. He’s still chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party so he will still wield considerable power even if he’s not speaker.

It could be the result of the cloud hanging over him due to the criminal investigations surrounding him or it could be a sign of the changing Democratic Party or both.

Relatively few Illinois voters remember a time when Mike Madigan wasn’t speaker.

I’m honestly not sure what the editors of the LA Times are arguing in favor of in their latest editorial. I do know what they’re arguing against: inoculating the rich first. They say they want to prioritize “by need” and here’s their conclusion:

Any healthcare rationing decision is going to be politically fraught, especially when the government is playing a role in the decision-making. The best approach is to ensure that emergency triage, and leaving some people to die in this pandemic, remains a hard-fought but strictly theoretical matter.

If we can’t do that by rapidly increasing our supply and distribution of medical equipment, emergency physicians and specialists, then we do it by holding down the surge. That’s why Americans can tolerate a temporary infringement on personal liberty. That’s why we stay at home instead of going to the movies or to the beach, and why owners of restaurants, bars and other retail businesses have closed their doors: to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed by critically ill patients, and to not have to take a ventilator away from a patient whose life could be saved.

The economic and social costs are huge. But we pay them in order to reject the process of assigning a different value to different human beings, and to reject the affront to human dignity that such calculations entail.

Before that there’s a lot of hand-wringing about the poor, disenfranchised, and people of color being short-changed.

An old client of mine used to talk about “too many oars in the water” by which he meant trying to accomplish too many conflicting goals at the same time. I think the LA Times has too many oars in the water. Let’s just give one example. A bit fewer than half of all practicing physicians, that’s a half million people, earn enough to put them among the top 1% of income earners, a category referred to as “the rich” by some. Said another way you can’t prioritize health care workers without prioritizing the rich at the same time.

My own view is that the highest priority for using the limited supplies of vaccine should be with those for whom it will do the most good. That means the first priority should be given to frontline health care workers. I also think that, for example, the State of Florida, has erred in prioritizing the elderly. Although they’re more at risk of dying from COVID-19 should they contract it IMO there are just too many of them to prioritize and there are other ways open to reduce the likelihood of contracting the virus than using the limited supplies of vaccine on them. I would inoculate people who work in long-term care facilities (who are disproportionately “people of color” by the way) and shut those facilities as tight as a drum. We don’t even have enough vaccine at this point to inoculate all the health care workers and people who work in long-term care facilities. We can talk about other priorities later. By the way, the elderly have higher wealth than the non-elderly as well. You can’t prioritize the elderly without prioritizing the rich.

I hate to advocate sticks before carrots but it should be made clear to frontline health care workers and people who work in long-term care facilities that they are free to accept or reject inoculation but they’re not free to keep their jobs unless they’re either already contracted COVID-19 and recovered or been inoculated.

Ideas for carrots, anyone?

Meanwhile, complicated rules are just plain foolish. The simpler the better. Setting up elaborate point systems borders on the insane.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal point out, correctly in my view, that the Europeans have pre-announced their disinterest in rebuilding ties with the U. S.:

Democracies have to deal with unsavory countries, but this is an especially bad time to reward Chinese leadership with a de facto endorsement. The last year brought new revelations about Beijing’s repression of minorities—notably Uighur Muslims—and the crackdown in Hong Kong has escalated. Beyond Australia, China’s “wolf warrior” diplomats threaten critics around the world, and Europeans are no exception.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel dismissed concerns from some smaller EU countries in a late push for the CAI. But her “change through trade” mantra is out of date. We once hoped that would be true too, but China’s predatory behavior is a special case. Germany’s political class, including her own center-right party, is increasingly skeptical of Chinese aggression. The Green Party is perhaps Germany’s most hawkish on China, and even some Social Democrats want a stronger stance.

This new political reality recently led Berlin to place restrictions on Chinese telecom provider Huawei, which poses a security risk. But a comprehensive EU ban on Huawei in European 5G would be better, and it’s possible with determined effort from the bloc’s biggest states.

The investment agreement’s ratification is far from guaranteed. Both sides still have to finalize the text, which needs approval from the European Parliament and every European head of state or government. Finding a way to kill the deal, and start a new negotiation alongside Europe and the U.S., is an early test for Mr. Biden’s promise to rebuild America’s alliances.

The countries of continental Europe have never been our friends. We’ve been their patrons for the last 80 years but many, especially France and Germany, have chafed at that relationship. The Brits were our friends for many years but it was a different Britain then. Will the new United Kingdom reassert the “special relationship” between our countries or will it prefer to be non-aligned? I honestly have no idea.

I sincerely hope the Biden Administration reaches the conclusion, undoubtedly kicking and screaming, that we have no friends among other nations. We have enemies, rivals, competitors, “hostile non-belligerents”, and clients but no friends. Maybe they will grow to question as I do why we continue to patronize countries that aren’t our friends. The editors hit it on the nose: “democracies have to deal with unsavory countries”. But “dealing” isn’t the same as “subsidizing”.