Relying on a non-friendly country for something so crucial as energy is generally not a great position to be in, particularly if that country has rival world power ambitions. Europe and Russia have provided a great recent example of why you don't want to be reliant on potential enemies for your energy needs, and while the situation between the US and China is not the same and solar is different than fossil fuels, it's still a factor worth thinking about. The US would be a lot more secure being able to rely on a domestic solar industry as solar becomes more and more important.
The problem with deficit spending is the interest. It gets paid by the taxpayers. But they get no value from paying the interest. And it goes to the bankers, who already have more money than they need.
Occasionally short term deficits and endless bottomless deficits are not the same beast. The latter is simply a lazy political tool used to buy votes and further enrich the bankers.
Investments that have a positive ROI are worth doing. Deficit spending is never bad per se.
Arguing about the ROI of a road, education, a new shiny F35 feature, foos stamps, etc. are of course completely valid.
Neither society nor the government is one big hivemind.
There are small government advocates (who usually turn out to be cruel totalitarian dickheads), there's a new wave of young people who parrot "eat the rich" and usually turn out to be clueless idiots cosplaying as leftists, who also say things like "just pay for everything out of thin air".
It's big, it's completex, it's hard, emotions run high, there's a chance of things turning for the worse, while a lot of things are inching toward the better.
> I just want single occupancy vehicles banned from city centers
Why be so authoritarian? It's one thing to say "I think single occupancy vehicles are inefficient and bad, so I'm not going to use them", but it's another to say "I think single occupancy vehicles are inefficient and bad, so I'm going to take away everyone else's choice to use them".
From the fact that nations that fight to the end and survive in myth live on to manifest again while those that give up the fight and surrender save lives but rarely become sovereign again.
Also in the idea of elite troops who it is hopeless to fight against. Myth is incredibly powerful in war and for the long term survival of a nation or state.
The number one priority of all voters should be getting money out of politics. We've legalized bribery, so politicians represent donors, not voters. We've got it backwards. Nothing significant can be accomplished until you stop letting politicians take bribes.
I think you're misunderstanding how bad the general state of political fundraising in the US is. Just over the past week, I've gotten:
* An email titled "watch our video [not asking for money]" which links to a request for money
* _two_ people - one from each side of the aisle - trying to gaslight me into donating "again" since I've purportedly already joined their campaign
* a fake survey where every prompt is some variation on "Did you know how vile those guys are?" and the only response options are "Yes, they suck" or "No, but I know now".
* an email written to sound like a personal letter, assuring me that some state legislators will be unjustly imprisoned if I don't sign a petition, but reveals upon clicking into the petition that they also need to collect $2,084 by midnight. (I only personally need to send $16 - it's "today's most popular amount!")
And I've only ever made a single political donation from my current email! I don't think it's partisan at all to say the status quo isn't okay here.
> I've not heard a convincing explanation for Germany's relative success based only on the quality of its healthcare system and interventions. That isn't to deny that they played an important role, just that they may not have been the whole story.
Of course "its healthcare system" is not the whole story alone. "Its healthcare system and interventions" is a good enough precondition, combined with the timing: it was since long obvious that the difference in timing of introducing the interventions immensely changes the number of deaths in the first peak: first order approximation: if the doubling time is 3 days, interventions of 2 weeks earlier compared to some other country could result in 2 ^ 4 = 16 times less deaths per capita. It's very primitive approximation but good enough to make such an argument (even if it's significantly off, it is to show how little time result in big changes). For more detailed elaboration there was recently a paper calculating the difference with more exact models, I believe for the UK. (edit: found one for the US https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.15.20103655v... )
So the story for Germany is: luck, in having the early warning and the capability to act on it: Italy have had its spread earlier and it gave Germany enough of "early warning" which was effectively used. The bigger story is the failure of other countries who also practically had the same "early warning" and remained blind to it, until they recognized that they had do "do something" but with the resulting cost of more deaths.
Europe is a good enough field where a lot of effects could be clearly observed, all countries having in some important aspects significantly more sane health system than the U.S. We also know for sure that the excess deaths due to the all causes together can't be hidden in these countries (see https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ ), so we now know exactly how bad which country was hit. Comparing the rich European countries and knowing how they function all the differences among them are indeed very explainable, I don't see any surprises: it's the interventions and learning from the experience of other countries that consistently worked.
U.S. was of course much less ready to learn from anybody. In spite of that, the deaths per million in the U.S. is still 362 while it's 500 in Sweden -- so we all have a good "negative example" from Sweden. Note also that Sweden did close universities and older classes in schools, and suggested everybody who can to work from home, and still got to be that bad -- only because their interventions were by design less strong compared to other European countries.
Reported daily deaths per million in USA, Sweden, Germany and Italy, "by number of days since 0.1 average deaths (per million) first recorded" compared:
Note that "it lasted longer in Italy" for almost 20 days -- that was the early warning available to other countries. Some used it. Pity that FT doesn't display simply all the curves based only on the dates. Also, too big entities like the whole USA or China aren't a good comparison, the big less infected areas (due to them being simply less reachable) move the averages down too much -- a better base for comparison would be the entities on the order of 10 millions. E.g. in the USA, NY is definitely a phenomenon that is worth observing separately etc.
I wonder what the proportion is between pre-pandemic debt (fuelled by quantitative easing and low interest rates seemingly)and debt accrued during the pandemic?
Is it that the pandemic has uncovered a long-standing problem of high corporate debt since the 2008 Financial Crisis fuelled by quantitative easing and low interest rates? What other factors are at play here? Or am I completely wrong?
