Covid’s Deadliest Effect Took Five Years to Appear
— Reinold O.B. Gans (@gansrob.bsky.social) March 11, 2025 at 11:56 AM
Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. at the NYTimes: [gift link]
… It has been five years since the world was blown into the tumult of a lethal pandemic. Back then, deserted streets and distant coughs, to say nothing of ambulances docking into hospitals, would have carried a very different meaning. But as Proust wrote, the moments of the past do not remain still. We have metabolized a global trauma — millions of deaths, nations brought to their knees, a generation scarred by grief, isolation and loss — so rapidly that it seems, at times, not to have happened at all.
As the pandemic rose, I saw my patients get sick and in some cases die, including a 42-year-old mother of two young children whose loss is seared into my soul. As it receded, I served on then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s commission to rebuild New York’s health infrastructure. Back then, the overwhelming public sentiment was: never again. Today, it seems: never what?
But Covid didn’t just change billions of individual lives. It changed our country’s basic approach to public health, in fundamental ways that are becoming fully visible only now — and that the Trump administration looks likely to render irreversible….
It came as a surprise for me. when Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious disease doctor and a member of President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 Advisory Board, said that public health was nearly dead. It was October 2024, and we were seated in a chilly tent at the National Academy of Medicine meeting in Washington.
Dr. Gounder was referring to what she calls the “unglamorous public infrastructure” — the interlocking institutions that function constantly and invisibly and don’t depend on private enterprise or personal decisions. Yes, we conquered Covid, but “if we are inclined to think of our victory against Covid as a public health success,” she warned me, “we should really reconsider.”
What seemed to succeed, instead, was a deployment of private enterprise (backed by state subsidies): the invention of vaccines by pharmaceutical companies; their delivery in significant measure through private hospitals and clinics; the ascendancy of private decision making by individuals, schools and businesses; and the surveillance of the pandemic by private institutions.
Covid was a privatized pandemic. It is this technocratic, privatized model that is its lasting legacy and that will define our approach to the next pandemic. It solves some problems, but on balance it’s a recipe for disaster. There are some public goods that should never be sold.
Dr. Gounder checked off the basic mechanisms by which public health experts confront a pandemic: They create systems to understand and track its cause and spread; they identify the people most at risk; they deploy scalable mechanisms of protection, like air and water sanitation; they distribute necessary tools, such as vaccines and protective gear; they gather and communicate accurate information; and they try to balance individual freedoms and mass restrictions.
In the case of Covid, each of these responsibilities became increasingly relegated to the private sphere. In one of President Trump’s first national speeches about Covid, he told the nation, “You’re going to be hearing from some of the largest companies and greatest retailers and medical companies in the world.” And so we did.
As the new administration engulfs Washington, we are witnessing the further, and perhaps final, phase of this retreat. In its first weeks, the Trump administration announced far-reaching cuts in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as reportedly severe restrictions on the kind of research its employees can conduct. It moved to dismantle the U.S.A.I.D., even though the agency funds crucial health efforts around the world, including an early detection system for epidemics. The president proposed slashing funding for medical research at universities. And of course, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, he chose Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who might have done more than anyone else alive to recast the miracle of vaccines as a dark and dangerous conspiracy…
Later that afternoon, as I returned home to Chelsea, I walked past the triangular park that marks the AIDS memorial. I doubt New York City will build a Covid memorial park any time soon, but if it does, it will probably be “sponsored.” Perhaps some of the “largest companies and greatest retailers” would chip in, and maybe they’d charge admission (with a percentage no doubt donated to a good cause of their choosing). No names of the deceased would be carved in stone. The memorial sculpture would be some rendition of a strand of mRNA. Or a great glass bubble representing, simultaneously, the lipid nanoparticles within which some of the vaccines were suspended and the ultimate separation of the public air outside and the private air inside.
On The Road – frosty – 2024 National Park Road Trip (2) – Trans Canada Highway
Baud
I’m not against properly regulated private enterprises. No government is going to operate a pharmaceutical company.
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: But to these conservatives any regulation of their businesses is improper.
Suzanne
At the beginning of the pandemic, I said that when it was over, we would need a new national holiday to commemorate it. That was a swing and a miss.
lowtechcyclist
And charged all the people a dollar and a half just to see ’em.
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
They now support back door pressure on corporations in support of their social engineering agenda.
lowtechcyclist
Certainly the privatization of hospitals has been going on forever. How many formerly publicly owned and run city and county hospitals now have a name like ‘Inova’ tacked on the front of their names?
Baud
People trust rich people and corporations more than they trust government. Maybe Trump and Musk will destroy that trust, but that’s what we are faced with.
It probably doesn’t help that we talk about how captured government is all the time. It’s not wrong, but it’s an incomplete picture.
Searcher
@Suzanne: As a technocratically inclined introvert, I was hoping for some sort of commemorative “lockdown week”, the opposite of the Chinese New Year Golden Week, where everyone gets a week off and avoids public places, ideally never leaving their home. Everyone masks up in public.
Ideally we’d do the full three weeks, but even one week of coordinated semi-isolation should have a substantial impact on the spread of communicable disease.
And maybe I’m just too introverted to understand the perverse needs of extroverts, but if you take out the surprise and uncertainty of having it sprung on you as a pandemic unfolds, I think it could be a fun and relaxing week.
Barney
Not, I think, specifically mentioned in the article, but Trump has also stopped US funding of Gavi – which saves millions of lives, but they’re all foreign, so they don’t count to the Selfish Party (for some of them, it may even be a bonus – either because they see any other country as a competitor, and the more deaths it has, the less future workers it has, so America Wins; or because they are fully paid-up white supremacists who want more white and less non-white people in the world):
Trump administration to cut vaccine aid to developing countries | Trump administration | The Guardian
The Trump administration is planning to end funding for Gavi, a global health organization that helps provide vaccines and other life-saving care to developing countries.
A 281-page spreadsheet obtained by the New York Times lists the Trump administration’s plans for thousands of foreign aid programs, including financial cuts to the organization that buys vaccines for children, as well as scaling back on programs that combat malaria in developing countries.
Gavi is estimated to have saved the lives of 19 million children since it was set up 25 years ago with the US contributing 13% of its budget, the Times said.
Suzanne
@Searcher: One of the things that absolutely radicalized me about the pandemic was how the general tenor of the discussion was about getting back to eating in restaurants. As if that was a thing we couldn’t exist without.
I said at the time, we should have kept nothing open except for hospitals, grocery stores, and K-12 schools. Absolutely nothing else. The pandemic really shifted my viewpoint on how this country views children, which is to say, it hates them.
different-church-lady
COVID didn’t change our approach to public health. Trumpism did.
rikyrah
@Suzanne:
You are correct. Will never forget that
Baud
@different-church-lady:
It’s about Jim Crow 2.0. Destroy common goods so white people can segregate.
Same with anti DEI and private school subsidies.
NotMax
@Suzanne
Pretty draconian list.
Pharmacies/druggists? Gas stations? Banks? Public transit? Ports and airports? Power plants? Prisons? Postal service? Food processors, dairies and the like? Firehouses? Refineries?
To name just a few.
prostratedragon
@Baud:
True, the manufacture and to some extent the development of vaccines and treatments are where the government might recruit private companies who will make some king of profit. But these other necessary activities,
require steady, ongoing effort that is not likely to be profitable if it is effective. Government is the only thing around that will do these things around the clock even where there is no immediate, obvious danger, or in the case of distribution, even where there is no profit to be had..
Baud
@prostratedragon:
Most of these things would be done by private people working under the direction of health authorities.
The Dems actually put money into many of the things you mentioned. Voters didn’t value it.
Baud
@Baud:
New Deal democrat
COVID deaths in the 52 weeks ending March 1 once again were at a new all time low, down -600 to 37,800. For that week the final total was 602. As of the last preliminary reporting week of March 22, deaths were down to 183, the lowest since December 28, and suggesting a final count of about 425-500.
Wastewater levels resumed their regional and National declines as measured both by Biobot and the CDC for the week of March 22. The CDC reported a level of 2.58 per mL, vs. the low last autumn of 1.80 and the all time low of 1.13. The Holiday peak a few months ago was 5.48. This is also consistent with about 500 deaths per week.
The only fly in the ointment is that wastewater particles are higher now than they were one year ago. But deaths from the last few comparable weeks this year have been only half of what they were one year ago.
As of last Friday, variant LP.8.1 is now half of all cases, but there is no indication that it is especially virulent.
New Deal democrat
Old Libertarianism held that “my right to privacy ends at your face.”
New Libertarianism, speared on by Milton Friedman’s economic ideology is, “It is your responsibility to get your face out of the way of my fist.”
New Libertarianism explains the GOP collapse of support for public health. It will probably take several health disasters that primarily strike young people to change their minds.
Glory b
@Suzanne: No, they hate black people.
We were “all in thus together” and the Trump administration was acting reasonably until numbers came out showing that black people were over represented among those catching and dying from Covid.
THEN, continuing safety measures became unbearable for so many.
Baud
@New Deal democrat:
Also, too, gun.
Chetan Murthy
@NotMax: I don’t know what @Suzanne: means, but for myself, I feel the same way, and what I mean is mostly that the retail establishments — the restaurants, salons, bars, gyms, etc, should have stayed closed. I remember when “line cook” was literally the most dangerous job in the country …. and for -what-?
Matt McIrvin
I think some of what was going on here was that a few unusual social-political phenomena we ought to welcome happened… and then there was a gigantic backlash to it from people with too much money and power.
It all had to be quashed, and ignoramus resistance to public-health measures was the opening.
(*oh no, did he personally sign all those hundreds of millions of checks with his hand? Maybe they were null and void!)
Suzanne
@NotMax: Pharmacies can stay open (and many could have gone to outdoor walk-up service). Firehouses, police stations, banks, prisons, postal service could absolutely have been physically closed to the public and services moved to walk-up windows or online or delivery. Transit could have been limited to essential transport only.
Hospitals were providing care in parking garages, FFS. It absolutely could have happened. We put burritos and “collaboration by the water cooler” ahead of kids’ schooling.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Chetan Murthy:
IIRC, meat packing plants or poultry facilities were the most dangerous.
Regardless, some places “shut down” more draconian (in a good way) than others.
Here in Denver, it was a ghost town. The issue as it went on was when to start opening things up again, that’s when we started to see all the push and pull being discussed here.
Matt McIrvin
Agh, my previous comment is in moderation because I accidentally entered “2.” as my name. It’s me, Matt McIrvin.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: You could (and I occasionally did) make a public-health case that restaurants and bars should have been banned forever. But of course that was never going to happen.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Professor Bigfoot:
Not just conservatives. Friedman’s crap is baked in on both sides of the aisle in a lot of areas, we can call it neoliberalism, Reaganomics, whatever, but it’s there. It’s fostered a distrust of government/government inefficiency tropes at all levels by a lot of self-professed “progressives” all these years.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@New Deal democrat: more like “What kind of monster hits back?” and a lot of sobbing. Trumpism isn’t based on men of iron.
Suzanne
@Glory b: This country hates children. We constantly cut at the social programs that feed them and provide them healthcare, we don’t give their parents paid leave when their kids are born or when they’re sick or disabled, we disinvest from public schools and universities. I could go on.
Baud
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
I agree. That school of thought has gone way overboard, causing a lot of harm. I think our difficulty is that there no consensus on what to replace it with.
prostratedragon
@Baud:
Continous monitoring to standard? I doubt that kind of thing would be as efficient or effective in the long run as doing a goverment shop. The tax bill would hardly be smaller unless the effort were less. Private industry makes our weapons, but it does not monitor our security or provide ongoing analysis.
Chetan Murthy
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Yes, I remember that very well also: the initial shutdown had great effect, so Gov. Newsom (of course) had to relent and allow reopening ….. which had the expected effect (predicted by the health director of Santa Clara county Sarah Cody) of causing a resurgence in the rate of infection.
As for meat packing plants and such, yes, they were dangerous too, and their owners/operators were simply unwilling to make the changes that could have made them safer. Again, something we could have forced.
Baud
@prostratedragon:
That’s not the part I highlighted in my quote.
In any event, I can’t say what would be more efficient or effective without detailed study of the nature of the monitoring. I generally think the more permanent and unchanging the task is, the more likely the government can do it at least as well as the private sector, if not better.
Glory b
@Suzanne: AND about 13 years ago, we reached the tipping point in the US where white births were in the minority.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2012/05/17/explaining-why-minority-births-now-outnumber-white-births/
DougL
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
I always think of the movie “Miracle on 34th Street”, where the defense “proves” the existence of Santa Claus because the US post office accepts and “delivers” mail to him. The defense thunders “are you accusing the federal government of lying??!?!”, to which the prosecution meekly says “no, of course not.” Then by the late 70s, who is the real villain of the movie “Ghostbusters”? Why that dastardly EPA. The arc of that 20+ years between those movies led to the election of the wealthy’s frontman, the soap salesman Ronnie Raygun. Which was truly the end of the American experiment. Just took 40 years to reach its logical conclusion. Fascism. And of course it is fronted by another carnival barker, Trump.
Steve in the ATL
@Suzanne: @Chetan Murthy: I remember telling the owners of a consumer packaging plant that under the governor’s (Maryland, I think) orders that they had to shut down as they were non-essential. Their argument was that since nail salons were forced to close women had to do their own manicures and pedicures thus the packaging their plant made for those products was essential.
Hmmmm….
Steve in the ATL
@Suzanne:
Fortunately, the private sector has stepped up with NIL collectives
Suzanne
@Steve in the ATL: The office I worked in at the time (successfully) appealed to an AHJ that reopening the office was essential because our clients provide healthcare.
Chetan Murthy
@Steve in the ATL: What was the cynical gibe about those times? Oh yes …. it wasn’t a lockdown per se. Instead, rich and well-off people stayed at home, and working-class people scurried around bringing them stuff. For the latter, there was no lockdown, b/c they couldn’t afford it.
Baud
@Suzanne:
“Would you shut down God while he’s in the middle of designing the world?”
Steve in the ATL
@Chetan Murthy: yes, *I* moved out to a lake and worked from there by phone and email and Zoom and Teams, while the guys in that packaging plant and others had to go in to their crowded workplace and operate machines which, apparently, can’t be done by phone and email and Zoom and Teams.
bjacques
@Baud: We’re getting the worst of both worlds under Trump. Public health via private companies no longer responsible to the public but to the (only somewhat predictable) whims of demagogues. They don’t have to provide affordable quality health care and are banned from providing abortions.
Baud
@Glory b:
That was before we had a fertilization president.
Which I assume refers to the amount of natural fertilizer he spreads around.
Baud
@bjacques:
100%
Also known as the Greater Evil.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Biden was not neoliberal at all. His policies were Keynesian. You stated them in an earlier comment on this thread. Did he get any credit from the left flank? If he did, I haven’t seen it.
Its not just the MAGA that badmouths treaties remember. Remember TPP at the end of Obama’s second administration? Elizabeth Warren led the charge against it and there were many posts on this blog about how it was the work of the devil.
The overwhelmingly white left flank has been opposed many initiatives of Democratic presidents. FWIW this opposition does zero to endear them to WWC which they are so desperate to court. Ask Sherrod Brown how bad mouthing Biden’s policies worked out for him.
Chetan Murthy
@schrodingers_cat: I’d prefer not to relitigate the TPP, but there were good reasons to oppose it. Once the US left it, IIRC the remaining participants actually were able to produce a better outcome. B/c our richies weren’t perverting the outcome.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I don’t know where the exact line is where neoliberalism ends and something else (socialism?) begins.
But I agree that there’s going to be a steep cost to not rewarding progress.
Librettist
The bean counters realized they could send lots of back office functions home and come out ahead by dropping the cube counts. Also, “no, you don’t need to go to Austin this week…. or ever”.
tobie
I think the thing that shocked me the most during COVID was the lickspittle rage from the right about any public health restrictions (social distancing, masking) and public health recommendations (vaccines). COVID became the political virus that destroyed the body politic.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: The truth is, the government never would have been willing to spend the money necessary to support that many people not working for months and months. Plus, we needed people to produce and package the food. I went to work every day, we were never closed because government was considered essential. We had to keep cleaning sewers, repairing potholes, maintaining infrastructure, etc., and none of that can be done from home.
I hate the word “lockdown”, we never had actual lockdowns here except in a few places.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
It was not a good reason to refuse to support Hillary over Trump. IMHO.
catclub
@NotMax: plumbing supply stores. Newspapers, radio stations
Baud
@Soprano2:
Yeah. Other countries really had a severe lockdown, at least for a while.
Ohio Mom
@Searcher: I don’t think that would fly here in the U.S., where we moved Thanksgiving to give an extra week to Christmas shopping, and the same with Daylight Saving Time, we extended it because more evening daylight = more money spent.
Your idea would slow down spending, so it will never happen. Though like you, I remember the lockdown weeks fondly, they were liberating in a way. No pressure to do anything. Like a very long snow day.
Why I remember that fondly, instead of how petrified I was that I could die, is a question for a pyschologist.
prostratedragon
@Baud: Then we certainly agree on the last point. My guess at the inwfficiency of of some kinds of public-private partnership comes about because both paying them, and paying to monitor and evaluate them, is likely to wind up costing more than doing the same task in-government.
Soprano2
@tobie: We found out that a lot more people than we thought had a version of Oppositional Defiance Disorder.
RaflW
Maybe we metabolized the trauma of COVID in some keto-fueled nightmare meaning, but we didn’t grieve it as a society. We didn’t pause and reflect on what was lost, and what we fleetingly gained in our sense of community, connection and shared fragility.
No, we just GWB’d it. He famously, crassly told us post 9-11 to shop through our pain. And we largely had a similar, retail consumerist response to Covid.
And I believe the unprocessed trauma of both 9-11 and Covid are significant antecedents to Trump II.
Soprano2
@Baud: Yes, China was literally sealing people inside their apartments. Places in Italy had actual lockdowns, where you had to have permission from the government to go places. We characterized “my favorite restaurant has capacity restrictions” as a lockdown, which it wasn’t. It’s baked in now, but it makes me crazy because it’s not really right.
catclub
Barack Obama might like a word.
sentient ai from the future
@Suzanne: even otherwise sensible people I know thought “wearing masks is bad for child development because faces” and since someone I had regular contact with was immunocompromised, we were absolutely religious about masking to the extent that was possible.
People are fucking dumb. Kid seems to not have been especially affected by the online school or lack of facial expressions thing, they are extremely socially intelligent, more so in a lot of respects than their peers.
I am still shocked at how many people seem to have seen their children as a burden. We made some great memories during the pandemic because we had individual time together and I was being paid (thanks NANCY SMASH) to stay home and do childcare so we had freedom to go road tripping.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: oh of course, 100% agree. And I don’t think Warren ever said differently. The way I’d put it (using more recent issues) is:
Clearly the rich benefited more from the Biden economy than the poor did. That wasn’t a reason to decide to install an oligarch and his oligarch buddies into power, as if somehow they’d do a better job by the poor, than Biden had done. It was a reason to push the Dems further left. Ah well.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Neoliberal in macroeconomic terms means those who favor monetary policies over fiscal policies to counter macroeconomic problems like inflation or unemployment. Reducing inflation is very important neoliberals. They are opposed to most fiscal policies.
Keynesians favor reducing unemployment over reducing inflation. Biden pursued Keynesian policies after almost 30 years of neoliberal policies.
DSA leftists and their adjacents label any economic policy they don’t like as neoliberal.
Librettist
Balloon Juice commenters vs. the large number of Americans who rely on restaurants and pre-packaged foods for daily calories.
schrodingers_cat
@Chetan Murthy: My point was that opposition to trade treaties is not just from MAGA.
The horseshoe is real. As is what Prof. Bigfoot says about it. And the horseshoe hates Democrats.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
That will always be true at first because stock prices rise faster than wages when the economy is heading in the right direction. But under Biden, workers would have had more leverage to obtain higher wages and extract a greater share of the gains.
Conservatives love to say that income inequality was low during the Great Depression as a way to mock the problem. But we’ve fallen into the opposite problem where we can’t make long terms progress because we can’t handle the transition process.
Professor Bigfoot
@Suzanne: Because white people perceive “poor” children as being Black.
If white Americans could keep any public benefits all to themselves, they’d have a social safety net to shame the Finns.
They hate Black people the most, followed by anyone else who isn’t straight, white, and Christian.
suzanne
@Soprano2:
Yes, I know. We lacked the will. That’s exactly my point.
Also, I will note that we could have kept repairing sewers and roads without government office workers being back physically. Food processing could have been made much safer. Retail of essential items could have gone to ordering with delivery or walk-up. My point is that all of these were choices, and we chose to deprioritize kids.
Ohio Mom
The irony is that it was the 1918 pandemic that birthed the public health system as we know it. Before that, there might have been very localized efforts in various places but nothing national, with international adjuncts.
I read an entire book on this, The Great Influenza, and that’s all it remember. In one eye, out the other. I probably could have saved time and read the review on the Amazon page.
Chetan Murthy
@schrodingers_cat: Mmmm …. I think that definition of neoliberal isn’t quite correct. What you’re referring to is usually called -monetarist-. E.g. people who believe that all you gotta do is control the money supply (e.g. by manipulating interest rates) rather than other means (e.g. “macroprudential regulation”).[1]
The official meaning of “neoliberal” is someone who believes that instead of regulation, we should just let the market free with minimal regulation, and private enterprise will inevitably produce the best outcomes. Which goes along with (of course) reducing the size and impact of the state. In all things. So for instance, neoliberalism argued for privatizing the water systems of the UK, and of course reducing regulation, b/c hey, they’d do a better job than the government could! Huzzah! Ditto rail. Ditto the NHS (a work in progress, but they’re making great strides!)
[1] that is to say, don’t bother trying to regulate the quality of mortgages, just raise interest rates. Sigh. That worked so well.
schrodingers_cat
Biden did everything that the progressives said they wanted and they never had his back.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
Under that definition, neither Obama nor Biden was close to neoliberal. Or Hillary or Kamala.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: we’re 100% in agreement. At least under Biden, workers had a seat at the table, and were getting gains. That could have continued, ah well.
Ohio Mom
@Professor Bigfoot: That’s the tagline I’ve always heard, Scandinavia can do those things because they are small, homogeneous countries, and because of that their people trust each other.
The speakers always mean that as neutral observation, not the confession it is.
schrodingers_cat
@Chetan Murthy: Your definition is based on what? I can give you papers written by Friedman and other Chicago school economists. Have you heard of the Philips curve? The Fed’s dual mandate?
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: The misuse of “neoliberal” is rivaled only by the misuse of “performative language.”
Baud
@Ohio Mom:
In addition, a lot of other countries established these social programs when they socialism was more en vogue. Who knows if they could do it today if they didn’t already have it.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Heh. That guy you mentioned yesterday would be proud.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: Mmmm …. Obama’s approach to the Great Recession was definitely neoliberal. Remember that he eschewed any kind of actual oversight and prosecution, in favor of “let the markets work” ? That was the essence of neoliberalism. But for sure, since then there’s been a swing against neoliberalism among the kind of economists we view as good guys. Brad Delong, Simon Wren-Lewis, others, have pointed out the failures of neoliberalism. Delong, for instance, has publicly turned in his “neoliberal card” (as in “card-carrying neoliberal”) and argued that that branch of economics has no solutions for our problems, and we need to turn to the left for new ideas.
schrodingers_cat
@Ohio Mom: That’s what my Danish macro econ professor confessed. Just see how Denmark has treated their more recent nonwhite immigrants.
Chetan Murthy
@schrodingers_cat:
Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more
ne·o·lib·er·al
/ˌnēōˈlibər(ə)l/
adjective
favoring policies that promote free-market capitalism, deregulation, and reduction in government spending.
noun
an advocate or supporter of free-market capitalism, deregulation, and reduction in government spending.
WaterGirl
@Matt McIrvin: Changed your nym and freed the comment.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: Indeed. It gets on my last nerve.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
I remember Dodd Frank, which was the biggest regulation of Wall Street and the financial sector since the New Deal. It’s been a thorn in Wall Street’s side until now, since they beat us when Trump was elected.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: J. L. Austin?
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Is that the performative speech guy?
suzanne
@Professor Bigfoot:
I don’t disagree with this, but I think that plenty of white people also hate other white people, if they’re poor, or fat, or disabled, or Catholic or Jewish or atheist, or LGBT.
The thing about hate: there’s always more.
zhena gogolia
@Baud:
Thanks, wikipedia:
Chetan Murthy
@schrodingers_cat: I’m not arguing that things like the way the Fed manipulates interest rates (instead of the Treasury using stricter regulation) isn’t neoliberal. It -is- neoliberal. But neoliberalism is -more- than that: it encompasses all the ways in which market fundamentalism pushed aside and suffocated government regulation and provision of services, in favor of encouraging the private sector to do it all. Untrammeled by regulation (of course).
schrodingers_cat
@Chetan Murthy: Yes that’s what it has come to mean. I was describing what the original neoliberal focus was as described by the original neoliberals.
It upended the Keynesian consensus that had prevailed from the aftermath of the great depression until the 70s that government’s focus should be on reducing unemployment.
In the 70s when the inflation was sky high, the neoliberals insisted that the focus of the government should be reducing inflation. And one way to reduce inflation is reducing government spending.
Scamp Dog
@Suzanne: I think it’s more like most Americans say “We love our children” while implementing that as “I love my children, you love your children, and we’ll be god-damned if any of our tax dollars go to help anyone else’s children!”
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: I negotiated a whole bunch of off-cycle wage increases for union members during the Biden economy. None since! But of course half of the ones who received these increases voted for the orange felon
Probably about to shift to effects bargaining for shutdowns and reductions in force. FAFO, as it were.
Chetan Murthy
@Scamp Dog: “We love our children, as long as they’re not under foot all damn day, can’t they go someplace so they’re out of the fuckin’ way? Who cares if they spread a deadly disease while they’re there?”
Baud
@Steve in the ATL:
I wish there are a way you could screw them over while protecting the Dem voters who act as their human shields.
tobie
@Chetan Murthy: One should always be ready to question one’s premises. Free market orthodoxy failed. Will Modern Monetary Theorists and UBI proponents take to heart the criticism that flooding the market with funds is inflationary? I would take them more seriously if they did.
Chetan Murthy
@schrodingers_cat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#:~:text=As%20a%20development%20model%2C%20it,those%20of%20a%20minimal%20state.
Soprano2
@suzanne: Oh yes, a lot of things could have been done much better, I don’t disagree with that at all. For myself, I did not want to work at home and I’m glad I wasn’t forced to. I would have needed a significant upgrade in my internet service, and I don’t have a good place at home to work anyway. Our bar was closed for nine weeks, and when people came back to work most of them were happy to be there. They enjoyed the break, but they were ready to work again. I think for lots of people it’s human nature to want to be together, and unnatural to all be apart. It’s hard to fight against that tendency.
I don’t think we “hate” kids, I think we were rattled and didn’t know what was the best thing to do. I always remind people that there are a lot of adults in schools, and many of them are older.
Chetan Murthy
@schrodingers_cat:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#:~:text=As%20a%20development%20model%2C%20it,those%20of%20a%20minimal%20state.
* As an ideology, it denotes a conception of freedom as an overarching social value associated with reducing state functions to those of a minimal state.
* As a public policy, it involves the privatization of public economic sectors or services, the deregulation of private corporations, sharp decrease of government budget deficits and reduction of spending on public works.
Soprano2
It used to be this way, and there wasn’t much controversy about the benefits. People started being angry about the safety net after civil rights laws were passed, that’s not a coincidence.
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: it’s the free rider problem writ large
Chetan Murthy
@tobie: I think they do take those criticisms seriously. And there is a simple answer: -taxation-. You tax that money out of the economy at the top end of the income scale. This has a double-benefit, as compared to deficit spending:
(1) when you deficit spend, you’re effectively locking in transfer payments to the rich (who are the ones who will buy that debt)
(2) when instead you tax the rich, you’re taking money out of their pockets
When you take money away from the rich, you prevent them from bidding up assets, and that helps everybody else in the economy: houses, education, and every other sort of asset that the rich would otherwise bid up.
Baud
@Soprano2:
My read of history is that conservatives always opposed more benefits. But regular folks got them because they voted Dem or for the now mythical reasonable Republican.
suzanne
@Soprano2:
Well, yeah. Of course.
But that’s the nature of priorities: you have to make hard choices. We….. made bad choices, IMO.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
Never quite understood that, since tax money goes right back into the economy.
Professor Bigfoot
@suzanne: Oh, they’ll get around to those white people, as Pastor Niemöller so pointedly told us.
But their first hate will always be Black people, just as the OG NAZI’s first hate will always be Jews.
Melancholy Jaques
@Suzanne:
Schools were closed because we didn’t know. If we had kept them open & were wrong . . . Let’s not even imagine it.
I was teaching in a Los Angeles middle school. By the time school’s were closed on March 13, 2000, many parents were keeping their children home. When re-opening the schools was on the table for August 2000, our parents overwhelmingly said that they wanted to wait until there was a vaccine. Even when we opened in April 2021, very few students came to school. The first day we had fewer than 20 and never had more than 60 by the end of the school year.
Maybe things were different in other places, but I get really tired of the ret-conned story that “everybody knew” schools were safe, but were closed by corrupt teachers ‘unions & pointy headed bureaucrats determined to destroy America.
lowtechcyclist
@schrodingers_cat:
I can see no connection between these two paragraphs. Is Liz Warren a Democrat-hating horseshoe person?
Chetan Murthy
I don’t remember the history, but I remember remembering (*grin*) that the Republicans were dead-set against that socialist program, called Social Security. Dead set against. And for sure I remember RoNnIe RaYgUn making those adverts against that Commie Medicare donchyano. Social Security was (again, IIRC) originally structured so that it mostly benefited white people, not Black people. And yet there was enormous contention about it.
an example: https://prospect.org/politics/how-gop-could-win-long-war-against-social-security/
Salty Sam
@bjacques: Public health via private companies no longer responsible to the public but to the (only somewhat predictable) whims of
demagoguesshareholders.Soprano2
@Baud: I don’t think the opposition to “welfare” became widespread until everyone was allowed to benefit. As long as mostly white people benefited, most white people were OK with it. Things like helping widows buy food for their children with government money weren’t controversial when it was white widows doing it.
lowtechcyclist
@zhena gogolia:
Can’t forget ‘progressive,’ which like ‘neoliberal’ is defined so many different ways by different people as to have lost all coherent meaning.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: It’s a choice between taxation and deficit spending. Deficit spending (effectively) creates new money, right? Where taxation takes money already in the economy, and spends it on different things than the original owners might have. Specifically, it’s well-understood that since the rich have enough money for their consumption needs regardless, they put their excess money into bidding up assets. When the government takes it and uses it to fund consumption, they’re redirecting the productive forces of the economy toward things that benefit everybody, instead of just the rich.
Soprano2
@suzanne: Oh yeah we made a lot of bad choices, so bad that now in some states they will be unable to close places like churches no matter how bad it is.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
I feel that way about “socialism” too.
tobie
@Chetan Murthy: I’m more Keynesian than you. There are times, like in a pandemic, when massive deficit spending, is absolutely warranted. Some deficit spending is also warranted in general. But the scale of spending that MMT recommends on a regular basis is not a good strategy and the idea that “taxing the rich” will produce the returns to cover the expenditures is not serious.
We need to modify the tax code. Absolutely. The parole “tax the rich” doesn’t begin to address how this should be done. But we also need to recognize that the biggest revenue generator for any country is GDP growth.
suzanne
@Melancholy Jaques: Mr. Suzanne is a public schoolteacher, so I’m not coming to this debate objectively, either.
I agree that schools weren’t safe….. but they weren’t safe because all this other stuff was open. We couldn’t keep low levels of infection in communities because everything reopened. I drove across the country during the worst part of the pandemic, and I was shocked to see — in Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Indiana — everything was open and people were packed in and unmasked and you would never have known there was a pandemic going on.
Reopening schools in that scenario would have been terrible and I supported keeping them closed, because of this. But again: this is why I believe we should have severely limited things like restaurants and bars and gyms and church and all the other stuff….. and put schools ahead of it.
Soprano2
We like to re-write history as if we knew then what we know now. As I said in another comment, I always point out to people that there are a lot of adults in schools, and a lot of them are older. People talk as if only children are in schools.
lowtechcyclist
@Chetan Murthy:
The problem is, that definition of ‘neoliberal’ is indistinguishable from pre-Trump conservatism.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
I don’t think that’s right. Both taxation and debt taken money out of the private sector (except where the debt buyers are foreign) and channel it back into the economy through spending.
Steve in the ATL
@Chetan Murthy: and this is exactly why the economy always performs better when democrats are running the show than when republicans are.
Soprano2
@Chetan Murthy: Well, they couldn’t keep people who weren’t white from getting SS, either. What I’m talking about are mostly welfare benefits, and for a long time they were pretty successful in keeping most non-white people from getting them through various manipulations. For example, not many black soldiers benefited from the G.I. Bill even though they should have been able to.
schrodingers_cat
@Chetan Murthy: Neoliberalism has its origin in macroeconomics and I am trying to tell you what Friedman and the Chicago school economists meant by it.
Since you are not interested and insist on giving me dictionary definitions and wikipedia references. I am going to stop.
Trump’s economic policy is straight up mercantilism practiced by colonial powers.
TONYG
@Professor Bigfoot: Well, thanks to RFK Junior, Trump and Musk, the FDA and the CDC are now empty shells, with much of their staff having been fired. So, the privatized medical infrastructure is now essentially what it was in the 19th century — anyone can sell any poisonous elixir and call it a cure. Good for profits, and good for reducing the population of Useless Eaters.
stinger
@Ohio Mom:
@Baud:
Those countries are experiencing an influx of darker-skinned immigrants and — this will surprise you — are starting to see social problems such as resentment of undeserving furriners taking our benefits as a result.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: In the short-term, yes. In the longer-term, debt puts money in the pockets of the rich, where taxation takes it out.
prostratedragon
@Chetan Murthy: “Neoliberal” wasn’t around much when I was close to the subject, but monetarism would go along with laissez-faire (lazy fairy, indeed in most cases) since that’s all that’s left without expenditure policies(*). The various banking facilities that were run through the Fed in both GWB and Obama administrations were more or less monetarist.
(*) Assuming the government responds at all.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
I understand that. What I don’t understand is how they affect inflation.
Salty Sam
We were in Puerto Rico when “lockdown” was ordered, and although it is an American territory, the PR government took it very seriously. Grocery stores were open, but only 3 people allowed inside at a time, masked of course, and after a monitored visit to a hand washing station outside. No new vessels allowed into or out of the harbor (which is why we were stuck there)- USCG patrolled the waters and refused entry, even to boats that had been enroute when the lockdown was ordered and needed to resupply. Don’t know whatever happened to them, it was a dire situation for them.
There was also a curfew after dark- I was walking back from a grocery run just before twilight and had a cop pull over and warn me to be off the street within 5 minutes.
stinger
@Chetan Murthy: The Venn circles of “parents who resented having to supervise their kids’ education during the pandemic” and “parents who are all-in on home schooling” have a pretty fair overlap.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@schrodingers_cat:
And I don’t think anybody here, least of all me, is accusing him of neoliberalism economic policy by any stretch.
Nor were people like me who do use the term along with the more recognized Reaganomics/trickle-down ever accusing Biden of that–we acknowledged the basic underlying Keynesian nature of the two spending bills.
And plenty of people like me had Biden’s back far more than others in the Totebagger Radio listener/Ezra Klein podcast listener/Atlantic Reader crowd who tossed him under a bus in a nanosecond.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: IANAE(conomist) but from what I understand one of the things that bids up prices for land (housing), education, and other things, is money in the pockets of the rich. As I once heard it put, “life is lived on the margin”. That is to say, prices are determined by what the marginal buyer is willing to pay. If you take money out of the pockets out wealthier people, you effectively reduce what the seller can charge. And I think we can see this at work in the housing market as large private landlords buy up large tracts of housing and rent it out: they’re bidding up prices and locking out regular homebuyers.
lowtechcyclist
@Melancholy Jaques:
Me too. There was so much we didn’t know in 2020. Remember when we were wearing disposable gloves to the grocery because we didn’t know yet that Covid didn’t pass from me to you if you touched the same objects or surfaces that I’d touched? Remember when we were keeping our distance from people outside as well as indoors because we hadn’t figured out yet that even slight air movements effectively dispersed the microdroplets carrying Covid to too low a density to infect us? Remember when we had no idea whether kids, who were mostly quite resistant to catching Covid themselves, could be bringing it home with them and infecting their parents?
It took us a while, with this novel coronavirus, to build up an understanding of where and to whom the true risks were. Just, it could kill you and there’d be nothing anyone could for sure do to save you. The only smart reaction was overreaction until the vaccine was widely available. And it pisses me off that people forget that.
Chetan Murthy
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Over at LG&M some front pager remarked that the one demographic that really suffered under Biden was upper-middle-income professionals. The poor got more money, and of course the rich did. But those in the middle didn’t and haha, guess where all the pundits and journos are ?
Professor Bigfoot
@Soprano2: To me this is the core of the “conservative movement,” that ONLY straight white Christian people should gain any benefit from American citizenship and America herself.
They don’t genuinely believe anyone else is a true citizen… or is fully human, for that matter.
Chetan Murthy
Hell, I remember when we thought the only mode of transmission that mattered was droplet (gravity-driven) and aerosol (suspension, driven by air currents) didn’t matter. B/c the studies on that had been done back in the 1930s when photographic tech was primitive. And then along came that mechanical engineer from MIT who said “no, we have much better tech today, let me show you how a cough travels” and all of a sudden it was a live subject again. And then it took another TWO YEARS (with petitions to the WHO signed by hundreds of infectious disease researchers all over the world) to get them to admit that COVID was spread by aerosols.
All this, after many incidents of spread that could not be traced to droplets. Like in cruise ships.
Ohio Mom
@DougL: That’s a great observation. I’ve seen both movies and never made the connection. That the EPA was the villain in Ghost Busters went right by me. Didn’t set off alarms, was an acceptable plot device to me.
Glidwrith
@bjacques: It’s something of a joke that a biotech company is initially founded because the venture capitalists want to cure cancer, but then they get old (and being men) shift the focus to baldness cures and penile dysfunction research.
Professor Bigfoot
@TONYG: Remember, this is America.
Where, if it is profitable, it is by definition moral.
artem1s
look – the US government and public trusts were not prepared to deal with the necessary build up of manufacturing and distribution that was needed to get ready for WWII and the invasion of France. The New Deal WPA started a public/private partnership that meant the US already had a process in place to out source and coordinate large infrastructure projects and utilize public universities to supply an educated workforce needed to carry out project like building damns. This kind of out sourcing to private companies and using government money to build the infrastructure is what made the US the strongest economy in the world after the war was over. Pre war much of the US was still rural, uneducated, and had no economy outside agriculture. The economies of most states became far more mixed and recession proof because of this process of private/public cooperation. The Marshall plan rebuilding Europe and the New Deal WWC meant jobs in the US after the war and keeping a work force active and educated.
This partnership flourished until the Civil Rights act meant the US couldn’t reserve those contracts solely for white owners. And then the wheels fell off the wagon. The Obama pandemic playbook worked because there were still remnants of that old cooperative process to lean on and the WHO and CDC and global health care systems and universities were used to working with one another.
But since Raygun the GOP started dismantling that process and cutting off the red states from taking advantage of the potential of those partnerships. Money stopped flowing to the states and they had privatize their public utilities and contract out services to private companies. Because we had the one true Orange ‘business man’ in charge when COVID hit, of course the response was to turn to private companies and allow grifting and nepotism hold sway. Soutpiel is the end result of killing the idea of cooperative, public projects, public works and government funding for infrastructure that benefits everyone not just the .0001%.
People often wonder if Hillary had been elected if Dems would have responded better and been better able to help states manage the lockdown and keep the supply chain up and running.
My response is always – remember August 8, 2021 memo. W, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice were warned by the outgoing Clinton administration and the IC that bin Laden was going to attack the US. W’s administration had a month to prepare and put the DOJ, IC, FBI, FAA, and the states’ law enforce on high alert. And yet they spent that time waging a war on the ATF and Roe, propping up the stock market bubble, giving away trillions in tax breaks to the rich, killing the death tax, and trying to privatize social security. And after 9/11 instead of declaring a moon shot to make the US independent of fossil fuels W told us all to go shop at the malls.
Of course the biggest failure of COVID was the government response and inability to gear up a cooperative response by appealing to the nature of our Better Angels. Instead they called forth their Worsest Spirits and celebrated and enabled the most venal and greedy and craven among us.
Professor Bigfoot
@Chetan Murthy: Old Man Potter and Pottersville.
lowtechcyclist
@Chetan Murthy: Yeah, that was the basis for the 6-foot social distancing that is even still somewhat practiced in grocery and pharmacy lines around here: that gravity pulled the Covid-carrying droplets to the ground within that distance. It persisted long after it became “another great theory ruined by the facts,” as my grandfather used to say.
Ohio Mom
@sentient ai from the future: I don’t doubt that some children’s development was set back, and I hope someone is researching that before that part of higher ed goes out of business (I’m sure Trump/Musk/Vought see no reason for child development departments).
But what was the choice, really? We had a pandemic and we were making up our response on the fly.
glory b
@tobie:
Speaking of taxes and taxing the rich, it would be nice to have an update of this poll…
Most Bernie Sanders supporters aren’t willing to pay for his revolution | Vox
schrodingers_cat
@glory b: That man is a grifting fraud and has caused major damage to the Democratic brand with his pie in the sky promises and incessant fingerwagging against Dems.
Ohio Mom
@Chetan Murthy: Thefwvt that European countries had social safety nets before we did and managed to keep their democracies and economies going, was studiously ignored.
Soprano2
@Professor Bigfoot: I saw a story on Twitter yesterday about a black woman whose vial of blood for a blood test was labeled “King Kong”, and there was a photo of the vial. This is the kind of thing that people don’t believe can happen but does, it’s casual racism where the people involved think it’s a big joke, and will say “don’t you have a sense of humor?” when challenged. It’s gross.
Ohio Mom
@stinger: I’m not surprised, just proves my point that racism is among the forces which rule us, even when we don’t recognize that it exists or disguise it by using other terms (“too many immigrants”).
Steve in the ATL
@Ohio Mom:
I assume that’s a typo and you were trying to say “covfefe”
DougL
@catclub: Dems have been fighting rearguard actions since Reagan. They’ve not been able to truly govern the whole country since LBJ. Too many (white) spaces they don’t dare enter or challenge. They let the Bundy’s get away with an insurrection out west because they couldn’t count on their control of the military or the police, but most importantly, the vast majority of the local population. I don’t think we Dems appreciate just how precarious is our position when the majority white demographic is voting 60%+ for GOP. The black man in the White House just solidified their opposition. The US is a big empty country. The GOP controls most of the empty spaces. Aided and abetted by the billionaires who control all our media.
New Deal democrat
On the subject of what “neoliberalism” means, I’m just going to drop this here and then tap out.
The confusion is that there are at least two very different types of “neoliberalisms.” There’s a version that while conservative economically is consistent with progressive policies, and then there is a very reactionary one.
The more “progressive” neoliberalism was typified by Brad DeLong and Bill Clinton, plus several of Obama’s economic advisers. This version agrees that the government is properly involved with fostering better social and economic outcomes for the masses, but it should do it in a manner least intrusive to the “free market” by things like nudges and financial incentives. Obamacare is a good example; remember it was based on a conservative think tank’s proposals, and relies on individuals selecting an insurer based on market competition. This type of neoliberalism frowns on overt interventions into the market typified by things like environmental and OSHA regulations forbidding certain behaviors.
Reactionary neoliberalism is a throwback to the 17th through 19th centuries, and opposes *any* government involvement in fostering more equitable social or economic policies. It doesn’t just oppose the FDR’s New Deal, it opposes Teddy’s “Fair Deal.” It also opposes interfering with individuals’ desire to discriminate based on race, sex, ethnicity, etc. Basically it stands for taking the government back to 1860, minus Dred Scot and slavery.
Hope that is helpful.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@New Deal democrat:
Neoliberalism and the exhaustion of liberal democracy:
Gretchen
@lowtechcyclist: Yes, it pisses me off too. People act like we always knew everything about how this virus worked and we just did these dumb things anyway. We did those things because we didn’t know how it worked. And it still pisses me off that these people pretend that it would have been fine to let all the kids get infected on the assumption that there would never be any long-term effects, even though that’s not how most known viruses work. They just affirmed that this virus was different, there would be no long-term effects for kids, because that got to the result they wanted.
Gretchen
@Professor Bigfoot: We’re all Non Player Characters to them, therefore deserving of no consideration.
bluefoot
@Professor Bigfoot: I think that’s what’s going to happen. Social safety net will be for white people who conform only, and as you’ve said before, white people of all stripes will shake hands over the ashes of the “others.”
Gloria DryGarden
@Baud: i wonder if my city’s lead pipe replacement program is from a federal fund. Now I feel lucky, cuz my turn for that happened. Phew!
Gloria DryGarden
@Glidwrith: fun joke from the movie The Lost King. Wife is getting passed over at work for cute young persons. Husband asks her what she needs. She says, a penis. He says, drily, you can have mine. Not to very busy lately….
@bluefoot: how am I going to conform? Pretty sure I’m a non player character. Conforming is hard for some of us. And normal, as the joke says, is just a sitting on the dryer.
Gloria DryGarden
I have long term effects, since Covid #1, Jan 2022. “Mild”, but the cascade of corollary changes is getting v noticeable.
davek319
@Baud: Absofuckinglutely. We’re all 3/5ers now.
davek319
@schrodingers_cat: Huh? What’s his grift, you think? Is it his unbending rectitude? Or maybe that people across the ideological spectrum respond to his message, backhanding the purity Rose Twitter types? Judging by the spitting vitriol, sure sounds like that last twanged a nerve with someone…
caphilldcne
@Suzanne: doing this would have consigned thousands more teachers along with elderly grandparents to death. The closures of schools were about more than the youngest people.