Tag: National Review

Does the Fed’s Monetary Policy Threaten Inflation? (Contains Spoilers)

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/does-the-feds-monetary-policy-threaten-inflation-contains-spoilers/

Excerpt:

Indeed, Brainard writes, “If, in the future, inflation rises immoderately or persistently above target, and there is evidence that longer-term inflation expectations are moving above our longer-run goal, I would not hesitate to act and believe we have the tools to carefully guide inflation down to target.” It matters that people believe this, even if the actions cause immense short-term pain. Do people still believe the Fed has that will? Do people believe that the Treasury Department and Congress have the parallel will to take fiscal steps to contain inflation if it should come?

Does the Fed really have the tools to do it? I am doubtful. For ten years, interest rates were zero. (Interest rates were either too high or too low, depending on your view of things, but stuck at zero in any case.) For ten years, the Fed ran massive quantitative easing after quantitative easing. Inflation just sailed along slightly below 2 percent. This episode suggests the Fed has a lot less power than it thinks. But that is also a cheery view, as if the Fed’s interest-rate and bond-purchase tools are relatively powerless, then not much of what the Fed is doing will cause inflation either. In the current economy, fiscal policy and fiscal anchoring seem the greater danger to inflation than even the monetary mistakes of the 1970s.

Author(s): John H. Cochrane

Publication Date: 9 March 2021

Publication Site: National Review

The Politics of Pensions

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.nationalreview.com/the-tuesday/the-politics-of-pensions/

Excerpt:

One of the difficulties faced by some of these pensions is that most of the large employers that were expected to pay into them no longer do so, many of them having ceased to exist. As Elliot Blair Smith put it in a 2016 MarketWatch write-up of the sorry history of the Central States pension fund: “Only three of the plan’s 50 largest employers from 1980 still pay into the plan. And for each active employee, it has 5.2 retired or inactive participants.”

If corporations did nothing but grow and stack up profits, then this would be a pretty good system. But that isn’t how things actually work.

In spite of the sci-fi trope of immortal, galaxy-spanning corporations, the modern business firm is in fact a relatively vulnerable and short-lived thing. In the middle of the 20th century, a big corporation might be expected to stay in business for the better part of a century; today, the average big corporation will not live long enough to legally order a beer. McKinsey has estimated that three-fourths of the companies listed in the S&P 500 in 2017 will disappear within ten years. This is an inconvenient thing for people who expect to be taken care of for all of their adult lifetimes by a single employer, but it is the result of improved business practices rather than defective ones. As businesses become more focused on their core competencies and learn to adapt more quickly to changes in the market, they become ever more temporary partnerships among different kinds of capital: physical, financial, and human.

Author(s): Kevin Williamson

Publication Date: 9 March 2021

Publication Site: National Review

Why Cuomo Cooked the Books on Nursing-Home Deaths

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/why-cuomo-cooked-the-books-on-nursing-home-deaths/

Excerpt:

What DeRosa told lawmakers had them aghast. Not only had Cuomo misled them; he had, in DeRosa’s telling, done it in order to keep relevant information hidden from U.S. investigators. If the latter were true, Cuomo administration officials could well be guilty of federal-obstruction and false-statements crimes. In other words, so shameful was their actual reason for covering up nursing-home deaths — namely, to make a wayward governor look like a fantasy hero — that Cuomo administration officials figured it was better to be seen as potentially felonious than to admit their crude political motivation.

As the New York Times reported on Thursday night, in the spring of 2020, DeRosa and other members of Cuomo’s inner circle, who have no public-health background, studiously purged the nursing-home death data from a report compiled by state health officials. The Justice Department was not eyeing them at the time. That happened months later, in August, when the feds began seeking information about the treatment of, and record-keeping about, COVID-stricken nursing-home residents by New York and three other states.

So what was going on at the time of the purge? Well — whaddya know! — it turns out that was just when Cuomo was quietly securing the state ethics approvals that would permit him to earn outside income from a book he’d decided to write. The book would inform the world about his unparalleled mastery of the COVID crisis — which, oddly enough, he contemplated as a work of nonfiction.

Author(s): Andrew McCarthy

Publication Date: 6 March 2021

Publication Site: National Review

Senate Narrowly Passes $1.9 Trillion COVID Stimulus Bill

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/senate-narrowly-passes-1-9-trillion-covid-stimulus-bill/

Excerpt:

The Senate voted 50-49 to pass Democrats’ $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package on Saturday, after a marathon session of voting on various amendments.

The bill was passed via budget reconciliation rules, which allow a simple majority to approve legislation in place of a filibuster-proof 60-vote threshold. The Biden administration had been pushing to pass the legislation before the week of March 14, when pandemic-related federal unemployment assistance is scheduled to expire.

The vote occurred entirely on partisan lines. Senator Dan Sullivan (R., Alaska) returned to his home state on Friday to attend the funeral of his father-in-law, meaning Vice President Kamala Harris did not need to cast a tie-breaking vote.

Author(s): ZACHARY EVANS

Publication Date: 6 March 2021

Publication Site: National Review

Cuomo Aides Altered Nursing Home Report to Conceal Death Toll

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/cuomo-aides-altered-nursing-home-report-to-conceal-death-toll/

Excerpt:

Aides to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo rewrote a July report by state health officials to conceal the number of nursing home residents who died from coronavirus in the state, according to reports.

Cuomo’s top aides worked to hide the fact that more than 9,000 nursing home residents had died from the virus in the state at the time, according to reports from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. 

….

Cuomo’s aides clashed with the state’s health officials over the July report, which the Health Department worked on with the consulting firm McKinsey. The report included a chart comparing nursing home deaths in New York with other states, according to the New York Times, which showed that New York’s total of 9,250 deaths was far greater than that of the next highest state, New Jersey, which had 6,150 at that time.

The chart put the death toll at about 50 percent higher than the number the Cuomo administration had touted at the time.

Author(s): BRITTANY BERNSTEIN

Publication Date: 5 March 2021

Publication Site: National Review

Cuomo Accuses NY Lawmakers of ‘Extortion’ Over Calls to Investigate Nursing Home Deaths

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/cuomo-accuses-ny-lawmakers-of-extortion-over-calls-to-investigate-nursing-home-deaths/

Excerpt:

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Monday blasted state lawmakers who have threatened to rescind his emergency powers and open investigations into his administration’s coverup of its mishandling of nursing home coronavirus deaths.

“You can’t use a subpoena or the threat of investigation to leverage a person,” Cuomo said in a briefing on Monday. “That’s a crime, it’s called abuse of process, it’s called extortion.”

He also defended his earlier policy that forced nursing homes to accept coronavirus-positive patients after they were discharged from hospitals, saying that it was not sick residents who spread the virus within the nursing homes amid New York’s first wave in the spring, but visitors and staff.

Of 613 nursing homes in the state, 365 received a COVID-positive patient from the hospital, Cuomo said. Ninety-eight percent of nursing homes that admitted a patient from the hospital already had COVID in their facility before the patient was admitted, he said.

Author(s): Brittany Bernstein

Publication Date: 15 February 2021

Publication Site: National Review