Category Archives: Economics

Tom Coburn

RIP.

I’m glad that someone cared about government waste, but I always found his annual book a little frustrating, because he would go after some tiny pointless study, as though that was where the problem was. He often seemed to have an instinct for the capillary.

[Monday-morning update]

John Fund remembers the indefatigable fighter against government spending.

[Bumped]

Europe Was Not Ready

…and it may never fully recover.

And get ready for more exits; Italians are burning the EU flag.

I think that this is probably the most significant European event since the end of the war. The project, and the conceit of globalism in general, is coming apart at the seams.

[Update a few minutes later]

But wait! There’s more: Calls in France to “buy French.”

The Virus

…has exposed Americans’ disconnect from reality.

[Update a while later]

Nancy Pelosi and the politics pandemic.

[Update a while later]

Goodbye, Green New Deal.

Set aside, for the moment, any reservations you might have about the coronavirus-emergency regime, and set aside your views on climate change, too, whatever they may be. Instead, ask yourself this: If Americans are this resistant to paying a large economic price to enable measures meant to prevent a public-health catastrophe in the here and now — one that threatens the lives of people they know and love — then how much less likely are they to bear not weeks or months but decades of disruption and economic dislocation and a permanently diminished standard of living in order to prevent possibly severe consequences to people in Bangladesh or Indonesia 80 or 100 years from now?

Not a prayer.

[Update later morning]

Yes, the president is not wrong: Pelosi is a sick puppy.

Remaining U.S. Hospital Capacity

A hard look.

I’m unlikely to be killed by this thing, but I don’t want to even get it, let alone be hospitalized.

[Wednesday-morning update]

Why that doomsday scenario is likely way off.

[Bumped]

[Wednesday-afternoon update]

Bob Zimmerman doesn’t think that this will overwhelm our national hospital capacity. Though it does seem to be doing so in New York city.