Posts Made By: James Brown

Originally Posted by Richard Davis

My postings aren't rambling. 

Fair point, I should have said incoherent. 

Originally Posted by Richard Davis

Jim Brown:  " You have to understand Rich, the numbers would be FAR worse IF we hadn't imposed all the shutdowns to mitigate the damage”

Other than the misuse of quotes, I have to say; ‘Bingo’. 

And and that my friends, is four replies to one post.  Certainly a PR, if not a forum record!

Jim

Originally Posted by Richard Davis

Can you say the same?  I don't think so, not when your assertions change on a daily basis.  

Rich, it is the data that has changed, thankfully in a positive direction.  See the first post in this thread.  The projections change with the data, that is what disease models do.  Good on us.  Jim

Originally Posted by Richard Davis

And when you say now that you believe that the numbers would have been much worse without mitigation, you were talking Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths up to 240,000 dead in the USA.

Of course.  More than that if we had done no mitigation.  Jim

Originally Posted by Rod Kaufman

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/492419-biden-unveils-plan-to-safely-reopen-us-we-cannot-repeat-trump-admin

Hi Rod:

I didn't actually see a plan in the Hill article or the NYT op-ed.  Just some political platitudes.  We have been talking about contact tracing and a staged reopening of business here on the A-Mart for at least two weeks.

Jim

The new case data for the last seven day period was quite linear.  This is great news,  I think it is pretty clear from the new cases that the US did plateau a week or so ago.  

There will be growing grass-roots pressure to re-open the closed portions of the economy.  I personally think the vast majority of Americans desire the reopening be cautious and slow.  The month of May might be a good time to start, if the infection and death trends decrease significantly between now and then.  There is risk involved with re-opening, whenever it occurs.  The numbers of infections and deaths will likely tick back up.  Expect much tension between the risk-averse governments and experts at all levels, and people who need the economy to re-open to stave off economic ruin.   

Jim

Originally Posted by Rod Kaufman

Jim,
I wouldn't consider contact tracing or staged reopenings and other recommendations to be political platitudes; they're constructs of a plan. 

Fair enough, but they are constructs of everyone's plan, at best Biden is parroting what others, even Trump I suppose, said before.

Jim

Originally Posted by James Lacey

"The federal government has absolute power. As to whether or not I'll use that power, we will see." -- Donald J. Trump

Hi James:

That quote is probably good insight into DJT's mind.  Don't worry too much about Trump going full dictator though, though, the federal/state network of checks and balances is still intact.

Jim

Originally Posted by Richard Davis

I think it is his rhetoric, not what he's actually going to do.

I agree with this, but it bothers me a lot that Trump spouts off nonsense like this so often.  I do believe that if the checks and balances built into the US system of government were not so robust and if the president's powers were not therefore constitutionally limited, then Trump would do exactly as he says.   

I get it that other presidents have and would have abused their powers too, but for the system.  No need to rehash that. 

Jim

Originally Posted by Richard Davis

Do you find it a bit incredibly hypocritical that all these leftists in the press and on the Democrat side of the aisle, like Rod, are blaming him for killing people by not acting fast enough in shutting the country down, and then in the next breath they are saying he's a dictator if he says he wants to open up the nation to business and commerce.

Any thoughts on that?  

I don't know about these nameless leftists in the press, but I did not hear Rod calling for the President to unilaterally shut down the country.  I might have missed it, but I doubt it.  There was a lot of stuff posted about the Fed's failure of leadership early on in the crisis of course, some was probably spot on, some was over the top.  When I read those posts though, it read them as endorsing a coordinated effort between Fed and State, not as any call for the Federal Government to peremptorily shut down any states over the objection of that state's governor.

Assuming Trump said that he now has the unilateral power to reopen the economy, over the objection of any governor in any given state, Trump is wrong.  He can and should coordinate the testing efforts and federal funding and so on, but he is not the sole decider in this case.

Final thought:  For years I have noticed both the left and the right being selectively the passionate champions of state's rights or demanding federal authority and national consistency depending on the issue at hand.  The traditional left and right (R's and D's) seem to have no real appreciation or consistent support for federalism - the R's and D's are issue oriented, and flexible to the point of hypocrisy on the role of the federal government with respect to the states.

Strict libertarians and socialists are way more consistent in their viewpoint, but obviously this consistency across all issues puts them at odds with popular opinion on a regular basis.

Jim