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How Much Does Dr. Fauci Really Care?
Dennis Prager spoke the hard truth Monday morning: Dr. Fauci is a lifelong government employee with a salary and benefits package perfectly insulated from the economic consequences of his words. He has absolutely no skin in the game. If Dr. Fauci truly believes it is necessary to put hourly workers, waiters, bartenders, and small businesses out of work, destroying them economically, then let him and the head of the CDC ante up.
Dr. Fauci’s easiest path is completely shutdown of our economy, doing maximum damage to people who were just starting to see real success and a brighter future. He can claim noble motives, even as he seeks to avoid blame for early failures. Words of concern and supposed sympathy tripping off a career bureaucrat’s lips ring hollow and are bitter to those he ruins.
So, President Trump needs to put this to the coronavirus crew immediately, giving them the chance to volunteer giving up their salaries until the federal guidelines no longer limit American jobs. Then, if they push back, he needs to drop it on them in front of the cameras. Let’s all see their real faces and real positions when they are made to live with the real consequences of their words.
We have already seen Dr. Fauci tripped up on his own words today. He pushed for schools to be closed, but then stumbled over himself as a real reporter asked why daycare centers would be open, since the reason for shutting schools applies to daycare. He finally acknowledged the obvious and left the microphone with “we’ll look at that again.”
President Trump can do this in the context of virtuous examples from professional sports, where team owners are promising to keep paying people who work their home venues, to protect them from the consequences of stopping games. This is the way Americans respond to hard times. Rudy Gobert has already pledged over $500,000 to his home arena workers and others. He is the NBA player who was the unlucky first to be found infected. Here in Arizona, one of the two major utility companies just announced they will not shut off anyone’s power or charge interest until this government made economic catastrophe ends. Time for Fauci to put his paycheck where his mouth is.
If Dr. Fauci and the rest of the crew face real economic pain right now, and suddenly have to worry about paying bills in the months ahead, then they will be motivated to truly act in the real public interest. This may not change their recommendations, but it will certainly go a long way towards buying them credibility with a public they lecture and chide about being serious. This is of a piece with governors ordering restaurants and bars closed, while keeping their party’s primary election on schedule for this week. Everyone can see the obvious contradictions. Those governors should lead by example.* Their salaries, along with Dr. Fauci’s should all go to direct economic relief for the smallest businesses and most economically vulnerable workers.
* President Trump was too sharp to fall for a White House press-member asking him to call on governors to postpone elections. This would immediately turn into claims of dictatorship and plans to cancel the November election, when the latest coronavirus might be back.
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And China didn’t even take any drastic steps to get where it is, just sat back and kicked up its heels. All part of their master plan to win the trade war with Trump.
Notice the very different tone in an AP piece justifying the Democratic primaries this Tuesday, which are expected to help the establishment choice, Joe Biden [emphasis added]:
I’ll ask again, how much does Dr. Fauci care?
I’m not sure what Dr. Fauci has to do with that A.P. story(?)
Where is the recommendation against holding any election requiring tens or hundreds of thousands of people to go to polling places on one day? He was quick to point out that he had put in writing a recommendation that people not meet socially in groups of more then 10, and not eat or drink in any restaurant, bar, or food court. So, where was the public health recommendation against holding primaries until the disease is under control? Not there, and he didn’t pop back up with a recommendation when the president and vice president were challenged on primaries.
I think you’re being too hard on him. I wouldn’t expect him to detail every public event in the United States, just to give general recommendations. I thought his real job is medicine.
Primaries are not “every public event” and he was very emphatic about having got restaurants on his list, going off camera to grab a copy and reading it off to the cameras to prove his point.
Like Bernie the “independent” is smarter than other pols?
But that’s the problem – we’re not carrying on.
That slogan originated in wartime England. They didn’t shut down the country and make everyone stay in bomb shelters 24×7 during the Blitz. The whole point of that slogan was to keep on with normal life as much as possible.
Apparently, Dr. Fauci has to be perfect, and get it all right, and you think this would be more likely if he had “Skin in the game”.
Trump was very clear he did not think what we had in place was enough and they were working to change it.
Sounds like every other damn crisis America has ever faced. We are never ready at first. Then the Republic springs into action and slams it. And in every case, government workers have been part of the solution.
I’ll take the under.
What is wrong with you? The man clearly cares and is trying to do his job. How does any of this show he does not care?
More to the point, why do you care if he cares? I mean, isn’t the whole idea for a cold and calm and rational a response as possible. The right choice is the least amount of suffering, right?
The man cannot win with you.
Define suffering.
We’ve purposely taken a disease that may infect a lot of people, with limited effects on many (most?), and very bad effects for some, and turned it into an event that is destroying the economy for the entire country. This will have long term extremely negative effects for years.
I call that suffering.
Yes I agree that is suffering.
So is 1.5 million people dead.
So was thousands of people stranded in Atlanta in 2014 due to snow.
What we are doing here is blaming leaders for making the wrong decisions before we know all the facts. Maybe they are doing it wrong. In fact, with 20/20 hindsight, I know for a fact we will look back and be able to second guess anything they do.
Unless you have had to sit in that seat (as I have as a CEO), you cannot understand the pressure to “get it right” when you done have enough information. It is so easy to rant and rave about what they are doing. It is not fair, but people are not fair.
Like Y2K, if we have a good landing, people will say the reaction was all overboard. If the landing is horrible, then people will say it was not enough.
I wonder, if millions were to die, if anyone in this thread would come back and say “whoops, I was wrong”. I doubt it.
For my part, I have no idea what the right moves are. What I do know, is that I am going to have some grace for the men and women in these impossible spots.
And of course we all believe the numbers put out by the Chinese Communist Party. They would never lie about something like this.
Wait… what?
You don’t consider the mandatory, enforced quarantine of hundreds of millions of people to be “drastic?”
They peaked at over 400 million under at least partial quarantine. Some cities were in full lockdown for at least six weeks.
Fauci’s job is to give his best medical perspective to the elected officials whose job it is to make the hard decisions, the cost-beneft/medical-economic balancing game. He would be derelict in his duty if he let economic or any other non-medical considerations color his judgments.
The least amount of suffering in the short term, or in the long term? Should we minimize suffering now at the cost of selling our grandchildren’s generation into slavery? (That is not a hypothetical question.)
It’s not a platitude. It’s an expectation.
I expect Trump to make choices in the best interests of the public. Regardless of what he may think are the consequences to his political future.
I don’t know what those choices might be. He’s the one with access to information, expertise and the powers of the Presidency.
Valiuth was being sarcastic, but can speak for himself …
While it doesn’t appear there are any good solutions, I do trust that the President has better people around him than the previous president who was surrounded by people who dreamed of purposefully crashing the economy to bring about a glorious socialist future.
I’m still personally screwed.
Gosh no.
But it is a hyberbolic question, seeing as that no one is being sold into slavery.
How, exactly, are statements like that different from panic statements being hyperbolic on the future of the virus itself?
I can’t like you being personally screwed. I wish no one was getting screwed. I wish not to live in times such as these.
You expect too much.
If I were him, looking at the Democrats and the media war, I would consider it a no-brainer that my political survival is inexorably linked to the welfare of the country, and I would be quite right.
But it’s beyond even that, because going against this grain is well-nigh impossible, and would result in other negative results for the country.
If he doesn’t begin to relax the conditions in two or three weeks, it won’t much matter. Our country will become Venezuela Norte in one decade. They will have won.
You are right about China and I am always skeptical of their data. However, the data coming from South Korea is considered to be highly accurate and voluminous. If I use them for an example, then that 3 to 4 million dead American estimate would be, if I calculated this right, approximately 75,000 times higher than South Korea’s Corona death rate! Someone please check my math.
I’d love for someone saying hyperbole like this to explain how this happens in steps. It sounds like a great sound bite. Sell me on it, so I too can be panicked by it.
Sorry, honey, but it’s about 3 times the S.Korea death rate. Rate in % = (deaths/cases) x 100 Using 60% (splitting the difference between the 50-70% attack rate–which is an insane estimate, BTW) of the 327M population, and the SK death rate of 0.7%, there would be 1.37M deaths. Four million dead assumes a death rate of about 2%, which is more like what China has seen.
I can’t give you a step by step, but the forced closures of small businesses and the mass unemployment will destroy the middle class. Large corporations will survive. Small businesses probably won’t. Medium-sized businesses may not either.
We are looking at mass unemployment that will not suddenly reverse when this is over.
OK, if we keep from giving the government too much power and don’t crash the economy too badly, maybe the grandkids can be slaves only 9 months of the year and free the rest. That’s a little less hyperbolic. Does that help?
1) Economic chaos
2) A special candidate is inserted by Democrats as a savior
3) Trump is vilified for the carnage
4) ‘competent’ Democrat wins promising to fix everything
5) uses the chaos and crisis to use unprecedented powers
Ten years might be too far out, could be sooner.
Hello Querida, I think you are misinterpreting what I am measuring, or else I worded it incorrectly. I am not talking about the mortality rate of the virus. I was measuring the rate of actual dead citizens compared to the total population of the country.
South Korea has 50 million people and 81 deaths so far. Death rate = .00000162
America has 320 million people with the hypothetical 3 to 4 million deaths. Death rate = roughly .01