Costs of Covid Mitigation Efforts Vastly Outweigh Benefits for 89% of Population, Health Researchers Conclude
These results are all the more reason to leave decision-making to the individual judgment level.
Excerpt:
...“The list of [pandemic policy] mistakes is long, but the most glaring was the failure to understand and act on the virus’s propensity to attack the old and vulnerable,” pharmaceutical consultant Charles L. Hooper and Hoover Institution health economist David R. Henderson write in the Wall Street Journal. “Policy makers failed, in other words, to understand the enemy.”
Hooper and Henderson conclude that—only looking at economic, not social costs—mitigation efforts cost young people $102,000 but only preserved an average of 7.5 hours of life per individual.
“Would you pay $102,000 to live an extra 7.5 hours?” the researchers ask. “What 18-year-old values his time at $13,600 an hour?” However, they find that for the elderly the benefits of mitigation efforts do exceed the costs: “The benefits of protection, measured in life expectancy, are 210 times as high for the older person.”
“Had policy makers understood the enemy, they would have adopted different protocols for young and old,” Hooper and Henderson conclude. “Politicians would have practiced focused protection, narrowing their efforts to the most vulnerable 11% of the population and freeing the remaining 89% of Americans from wasteful burdens.”
I’d take it one step further.
The fact that costs and benefits associated with pandemic mitigation measures vary so enormously across different people is all the more reason to leave decision-making to the individual judgment level.
Basecamp FOLDS on Non-Woke Workplace Policy, Suspends Exec After Employee Cries
https://www.dailywire.com/news/basecamp-folds-on-non-woke-workplace-policy-after-employee-cries
Federal Reserve turns the dollar into toilet paper
https://asiatimes.com/2021/05/federal-reserve-turns-the-dollar-into-toilet-paper/
Excerpt:
...Inflation is here, and bigly. The sclerotic sensors of the Bureau of Labor Statistics haven’t yet translated it into sticker shock on the Consumer Price Index, but that’s coming soon.
Perhaps the worst of it all is that the entire leadership of the Federal Reserve system has taken to the airwaves to deny that there’s a problem. Chicago Federal Reserve President and CEO Charles Evans said Wednesday, “I think the risk of this scenario [out-of-control inflation] is remote.”
Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester said that more inflation would be a good thing. She added, “I wouldn’t consider the increase in inflation I expect this year to be the type of sustainable increase needed to meet the forward guidance on our policy rate” – that is, to compel the Fed to talk of future tightening.
Jimmy Carter was president the last time the Fed let inflation run out of control. In 1979, Carter installed the late Paul Volcker as Fed Chairman. Volcker raised interest rates drastically and crushed inflation, at the expense of an excruciating three-year recession.
There’s one enormous difference between 1979 and 2021, however: In 1979 the US budget deficit was just 1% of GDP. Today it is 15% to 20% of GDP, a hole in US finances not seen since World War II.
The Federal Reserve is financing most of the budget deficit by purchasing bonds. If it stops doing so, interest rates will have to rise drastically to persuade investors to lend money to the US government. The Fed, in short, is up the creek without a paddle.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.