Media/News Company
‘Striking’ Crisis Gap Exposed as Swedish Economy Stands Out
There’s one country whose economy looks set to fare better than others when it comes to the fallout of Covid-19: Sweden. In a report on Monday, Capital Economics presented data that give Sweden an irrefutable edge. From peak to trough, Swedish GDP will shrink 8%; in the U.K. and Italy, the contraction is somewhere between 25% and 30%, according to estimates covering the fourth quarter of 2019 through to the second quarter of 2020. The U.S. is somewhere in the middle, it said. Sweden has kept shops, gyms, schools and restaurants open throughout the pandemic. But the strategy, which the government says wasn’t shaped with the economy in mind, has resulted in one of the world’s highest mortality rates. Sweden’s state epidemiologist recently acknowledged he would have opted for a tighter lockdown with the benefit of hindsight. Sweden says its approach was based on an assumption that Covid-19 will be around for a while yet, meaning severe temporary lockdowns will do little to prevent its spread in the long run. But Swedes themselves have started to lose faith in their government’s strategy as the death toll continues to rise.
from Columbia Basin Herald
Newspaper in Moses Lake, WA
Main runway reopens after $21.5 million project to level surface
The 13,500-foot-long main runway was closed in December to allow workers to remove a roughly six-foot high hump that blocked the view from one end of the runway to the other. While this wasn’t a problem for the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s, the hump violated Federal Aviation Administration’s rules. In the end, workers removed and repaved roughly 4,000 feet of runway at a cost of $21.5 million — most of it paid for by FAA and well under the original engineering estimate of $26 million, according to Airport Director Rich Mueller.
from FEE (Foundation for Economic Education)
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from First Things
A STRIKING DISPLAY OF SOPHISTRY
The Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County offers a striking display of sophistry in service of the spirit of the age. The Court had to rule on whether Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act bars employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The 6-3 decision held that the Act does indeed forbid such discrimination. The effect will be dramatic. This decision hands LGBT activists the coercive machinery of civil rights law.
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from Hoover Institution
Nonprofit Organization in Stanford, California
Covid-19 And Middle Eastern Tyranny
In the democratic West, many expect there to be a post–Covid-19 reckoning. That politicians who did poorly in handling the pandemic will fall from office. There isn’t a clear understanding of what virological competence in a leader ought to look like (Angela Merkel appears, for now, to be the exemplar), but many executives in the more severely infected nations ... aren’t role models and should be punished. And beyond leadership, many seem to believe that the virus will produce a social and cultural judgment day for national priorities. Much more welfare, more state capitalism, and less defense spending seem to be the themes. Covid-19 will, we are assured, shake and shape us long into the future. ,,, Certainly in the West, the coronavirus might seriously reorder priorities if economies can’t recover rapidly from the first wave—and can’t withstand subsequent waves—of this malady. It’s reasonable to assume that Covid-19, and deficit spending that many Western nations, especially the United States, are utilizing in an effort to stave off depression, will accelerate the decades-old shift in funds from defense to domestic spending and bring us more quickly to the day when bond markets rebel against debt. A disarming, retrenching America will, of course, have enormous impact abroad. In the Middle East, American power has often checked Russian and Iranian ambitions and made worst-case scenarios, say, Iranian domination of Persian Gulf oil, unthinkable. Neither Russia nor China nor the Islamic Republic—the big three revisionist powers—are likely to respond to the coronavirus and a retreating United States with timidity and isolationism. Beyond continuing American retrenchment, does Covid-19 in any way rewrite the politico–economic map in the Muslim Middle East, making dictatorships and democracies weaker or stronger? In particular might this be the nail in the coffin—a viral Chernobyl moment—for the Islamic Republic, which is perhaps the most politically explosive country in the region?
The Pandemic In The Middle East: Unexpected Results And Pending Shifts
As bad as the cumulative impact of COVID-19 in terms of loss of life has been, it has been less devastating than initially predicted. At least such are the results to date, in mid-May 2020. The trajectory of the pandemic may of course still change, and a second wave may yet follow, but the estimation in the Imperial College study of 2,200,000 deaths in the US alone turns out, fortunately, to have been far over the mark; as of today (May 17,2020), the Johns Hopkins Resource Center reports 87,530 US COVID-19 related deaths.
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from KUOW Public Radio
CDC Now Recommends Driving Alone. But What If You Don't Have A Car?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently took an unusual step of encouraging people to drive alone — the exact opposite of what cities have urged people to do for years. That's because while cars create deadly accidents and unhealthy pollution, not to mention carbon emissions and stressful traffic, they provide protection from the coronavirus, at least compared to carpooling and public transit.
