If you project the first three quarters of GDP growth, the US should end the year with $27.6 Trillion of GDP. The annualized rate is 8.5% without adjusting for inflation. Inflation adjusted, the annual rate of growth is 3.75% in the first three quarters.
In that case, the $1.7 Trillion deficit is 6.1% of GDP, so actually a half-percent lower than your calculations.
There's a saying in my country. "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."
There aren't any beggars or any people sleeping under bridges in my country who don't want to do that themselves. We have social security for everyone, and homeless shelters for those who cannot behave well enough to not be evicted from apartments.
Or even a small private army for their protection. The poor have to rely on the mercy of the law, the police, and the courts. They don't like having their things stolen, they don't like being accosted in the street, they don't like disorderly conduct around them -- but they don't have nice villas or townhouses to retire to.
I don't think Anatole France really had thought things through when he wrote that quote...
As a renter and voter, my preferred policy solution is to suspend rental evictions, let the foreclosures go forward as mortgages are a risky asset, then let the market sort it out at auction. That sounds like a more market-oriented solution to me.
Not sure if you'd feel the same if the building you're renting in ended up in the foreclosure bucket, then bought by someone who wants to kick everyone out of the building and raze it.
> That sounds like a more market-oriented solution to me.
Market-oriented solutions in times like these tend to (continue to) optimize for profit and fail to consider the humans involved. No thank you.
Over 62.5 percent of American homeowners have a mortgage, worth collectively over $10 trillion dollars (total equity is ~$18 trillion). You are entitled to your opinion, but are in the minority.
How many homeowners also rent? I have a mortgage on a cabin in Idaho, but rent in California. I would vote to support the renters, because although I'm practically neutral, homeowners have at least 1 asset and are generally better off in wealth and savings.
Also, majority rule is probably not the relevant metric here (even if renters + owners were mutually exclusive sets). We have a long history of not going strictly with the majority.
I'd noted it was higher so that would follow, yes. I left out the precise number because I saw some variation in the across sources and couldn't be bothered to dig into the details as it didn't make a difference anyway.
I do not know the New Zealand system, but I suspect the base level of care is still covered by public funding and the insurance is only covering optional extras (like private rooms).
I don't know the answer to the best time to give antivirals, but the lung inflammation happens for some, but not all patients. A non-trivial amount have relatively normal lungs, low oxygen saturation, and an extremely high heartrate.
The reasons for this are unknown, but it is an active area of research. Some doctors are beginning to call for treating covid patients like they altitude sickness.[1]
Doctors that don't know how to properly operate a vent are currently a problem in the US. Not blaming them, as there doesn't seem to be any real alternative.
I don't think you can pick a single /r/medicine thread as evidence of a widespread problem. My wife and every other doctor to ever practice medicine can give you anecdotal examples of other doctors mismanaging patients.
Another thing to consider is this is a rapidly changing/progressing disease and there are no standards. The opinion of a recently graduated fellow has different biases than an experienced attending. They can both be correct while disagreeing on the specifics.
Good systems would obviously be desirable, but this is basic executive competence. A US response to a potential pandemic brewing in China should have been a top White House priority since early January. When there are coordination problems, it's the responsibility of the person at the top to sort it out. They didn't even try and fail to fix the problem, they identified an entirely different concern: the threat to the stock market, which is where the response concentrated.
The Trump administration has responded quite slowly compared to the Obama administration's response to H1N1. The CDC commenced emergency operations a week after the first H1N1 case was detected, and advised school closings less than a week after that [0]. It seems likely that Trump's unfavorable comparison of the Obama H1N1 response to his COVID-19 response will come back to haunt him [1]. We'd be extremely lucky to get away with only 12,000 US deaths, this time.
You're comparing the Trump and Obama administrations handling of different diseases and it looks like you are making a partisan point.
This is the early phase of a crisis. Now is the time to call on leaders to do things; not to politic about whether something could have happened a bit earlier or not. Trump is still going to be held responsible for the administration's performance; but now isn't the time.
Nobody is going to bother going back to compare this to the Obama Administration's H1N1 response. The H1N1 response is not a useful guide for how to deal with the piles of dead bodies that are about to start appearing outside hospitals.
