Isaac Laquedem

A timeline of Texas's stand against Covid as managed by Governor Abbott and Costello

Sometimes the facts imply their own editorial commentary:

March 19, 2020:    Governor Abbott limits gatherings of large groups to help prevent the spread of Covid-19.

June 30, 2020:    Texas reports 6,975 new Covid-19 cases, a single-day high for the state.

December 17, 2020:     Texas reports 16,864 new Covid-19 cases, the highest daily number of new cases since the start of the pandemic.

March 2, 2021:    Governor Abbott lifts Texas's mask mandate and allows all businesses to reopen at full capacity.

April 5, 2021:    Governor Abbott prohibits Texas governments from requiring visitors to show proof of vaccination.

May 18, 2021:  Governor Abbott bans almost all Texas governments from requiring visitors to wear masks. "Texans, not government, should decide their best health practices," he said.

July 21, 2021:    New Covid cases in Texas begin to jump, moving from 1,000/day in the prior week to 10,000/day on July 27.

July 29, 2021:  Governor Abbott allows all state agencies and local governments "to proceed without COVID-19-related limitations imposed by local governmental entities or officials."  Any local official or  government that violates the order may be fined $1,000.  The governor reiterates his April 5, 2021 order that prohibits all governments from requiring visitors to provide proof of vaccination.  "Texans have mastered the safe practices that help to prevent and avoid the spread of COVID-19," he wrote.

August 17, 2021:    Governor Abbott tests positive for Covid-19.

October 11, 2021:    Governor Abbott prohibits all vaccine mandates in Texas, writing that "in yet another instance of federal overreach, the Biden Administration is now bullying many private entities into imposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates, causing workforce disruptions that threaten Texas's continued recovery from the COVID-19 disaster."

December 28, 2021:    Texas reports 57,000 new Covid-19 cases over the Christmas weekend.

December 31, 2021:    Governor Abbott begs President Biden for federal help for Texas to fight Covid.

UW Medicine tells the courts to go away until COVID-19 is under control

Lawyers occasionally send the courts and one another notices of unavailability, in which a lawyer says that he or she will be on vacation, or in another trial, or recovering from surgery for a certain period.  By rule or professional courtesy, the courts and opposing counsel won't schedule hearings or depositions during the periods when the lawyer is not available.

The federal and state courts in Washington must have been surprised to receive a notice of unavailability this week, not from lawyers in a case but from UW Medicine, the hospital system affiliated with the University of Washington.  The notice states that because of the COVID-19 pandemic, until at least April 27 all medical professionals employed by UW Medicine will be unavailable to participate in any regularly-scheduled legal proceeding.  In a polite way, UW Medicine has told the legal system that it's going to put treating patients and keeping its staff healthy above going through old files, sitting in depositions, and showing up for hearings.

Most of the judges and lawyers of our sister state will agree that UW Medicine is in line with our national priorities.  I predict, however, that at least one tone-deaf attorney will file a motion to compel someone from UW Medicine to attend some legal proceeding, and I hope the court that hears the blithe lawyer's motion orders him or her into quarantine.

You can read the full text of UW Medicine's letter to the courts below the break.  UW was thorough and also sent its notice to the state and local bar associations, the attorney general, the King County prosecuting attorney, and the public defender.

Jane Ace tells off a hospital that asked for a gift

On March 9 the Wall Street Journal published this article by Alexandra Samuel about feedback fatigue, describing how "in their eagerness to deliver a better customer experience" by incessantly asking for reviews and evaluations, "companies have created a new kind of bad customer experience: feedback fatigue."  Ms. Samuel cites two studies that discovered that customers don't like the surveys.  "Repeated surveys," she wrote, "may make customers reluctant to return."  She described a 2014 study as showing that "over-surveying by different organizations leads to exhaustion with all the requests for feedback."  

The article brought to mind one fine example of a business being less than careful with its customer outreach, way back in 1974.  The particular business was a New York City hospital, and it sent this letter to a former patient, Jane Ace.  I've shortened it a bit:

December 6, 1974

Dear Mrs. Ace:

As a recent patient you have seen how our hospital serves its community by providing a full range of medical services, offering a high level of nursing service together with physical amenities, enabling the hospital to treat the patient as a person, rather than a number.  We are appealing to former patients like yourself to contribute to the hospital's Capital Improvement Fund . . .

[Signed by the president of the hospital]

Mrs. Ace and her husband Goodman Ace were well-known radio personalities, and he was a veteran humorist.  He felt that the letter wasn't appropriate, and wrote the following response, which has stuck with me since I first read it in 1975:

December 8, 1974

Dear Sir:

As a former patient I did notice your high-level nursing service together with its other amenities, and I would dearly like to contribute to your hospital fund.  But, you see, on November 11 I died in your hospital.  Maybe we can get together later.

Sincerely, Jane Ace

 

The Laquedem coronavirus relief plan, Part 1: Student loans

This post is the first in a series to describe policy initiatives to help the United States economy recover from the depression that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused.  Based on the slow national response to the pandemic and the growing wave of stay-home and shelter-in-place orders, I sadly expect it to be a long series.

The Republican leadership in Congress (there is none in the executive branch at the moment) is supporting some relief for consumers and a lot of relief for large businesses.  "The devil is in the details," as the saying goes, and Congress is going to be occupied for some time in negotiating the details of any business bailout.  

Any relief program should start by providing some help to many people, instead of a lot of help to very few people.  I propose that Congress start with a simple step that requires little administration and provides debt and expense relief to 45 million Americans.  The step is to pay off the $1.6 trillion of student loans that those 45 million Americans owe to public and private lenders.  Some of those 45 million borrowers are in deferment; many of them are making monthly payments, often from the earnings of jobs that don't now exist.  Paying off the student loans has two immediate effects: first, the borrowers who are making payments will have more disposable income when conditions return to normal; second, the lenders that are now holding the loans will have $1.6 trillion of liquidity that they can redirect to more productive uses.  They might, for example, use the cash to make masks and toilet paper.

The Laquedem Student Loan Payment Plan will come with three conditions, each of which Congress can mandate.  The first condition is that the borrowers will not report the repayment as income from cancellation of debt.  Lenders will not issue 1099-C forms to the students.  The repayment will be treated as if Grandma had paid tuition directly to the schools, which under current tax law is neither a taxable gift from Grandma nor taxable income to the student.  The second condition is that the government will neither make nor guarantee student loans for tuition at any proprietary (for-profit) school.  The third condition is to again make student loans cancellable in bankruptcy.  

The reasons for the three conditions are simple.  The first condition ensures that students whose loans are paid off don't incur a tax liability for which they aren't receiving cash with which to pay it.  The second condition recognizes that the default rate on loans to students to attend for-profit schools is far higher than on loans to students who attend public and private non-profit colleges.  In 2016, the latest year for which I can find statistics, the default rate on loans for private college tuition was 6.6%, the default rate on loans for public college tuition was 9.6%, and the default rate on loans for tuition at for-profit schools was 15.2%.  The default rates for public and private non-profit schools were heavily skewed upward by defaults on loans for students who attended for less than four years.

The third condition corrects one of the missteps of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, which made student loans mostly nondischargeable in bankruptcy.  We should not expect 18-year-old borrowers to be smarter than the large and sophisticated banks that make the loans.

Instead of giving the lenders money and trusting them to do the right thing by their borrowers, let's remove the debt from the borrowers.

My next post on the topic will synthesize ideas for rescuing the domestic airline industry.

Trickle-up economics, farm subsidies for corporate America, and Obamacare

Senators that support the United States government giving multi-million dollars subsidies -- welfare money, really -- to Archer Daniels Midland to grow food crops and turn corn into car fuel should be in favor of Obamacare, which is a subsidy to maintain the health of the Americans who buy the food and use the car fuel.  In fact, higher subsidies to the consumers would lead to higher consumer spending, much of which would pass into the hands of large corporate America, thus enriching business.  We might call it trickle-up economics.

Keep the team names simple: let's call them "pro-measles" and "anti-measles"

Years ago the opponents of abortion renamed their cause from "anti-abortion" to "pro-life," followed by their adveraries renaming themselves from "pro-abortion" to "pro-choice."  This follows a long tradition of factions renaming themselves (q.v. "Bolsheviks" and "mahayana") to claim the moral high ground, and renaming their opponents (q.v. "Mensheviks" and "hinayana") for propaganda reasons.

The contenders in the vaccination debate have the same opportunity but haven't used it much except that one side sometimes calls the other "anti-vaxxers," which sounds vaguely derogatory.  It's time for the side that understands science to come up with better and more resonant names for itself and its opposition.

I'd like to suggest referring to the opponents and proponents by simpler names:  "pro-measles" and "anti-measles."  That gets the message across.  One side may end up being nicknamed the "measlies," but I don't know which.

Other states don't teach evolution; we don't teach basic biology

Two stories, at first glance unrelated, were published recently.  One story (here) identifies Oregon as the state with the lowest rate of high school graduation, which is a polite way of saying that the least educated among us have, on average, less education than the least educated in 48 other states.  (Idaho didn't report its results.)  The other story, often repeated (here's an Oregonian story from October about the topic), identifies Oregon as the state with the highest rate of parents who prefer not to immunize their children against what used to be the common diseases of childhood -- measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox, for example.  In the early 1960s the United States saw more than 400,000 cases of measles a year; in 2012 there were only a few hundred reported cases.   The 99.5% drop is the result of the vaccine.

Maybe there's a connection between these two stories, and the reason that Oregonians don't believe in the science behind vaccination and the immune system is that Oregonians simply aren't, as a group, all that well educated.  As we make fun of the Southern states' continued efforts to teach creationism in biology class we might ask ourselves whether their citizens mock our simple-minded disbelief in bacteriology.

Isaac to Jesuit High School: Protect your students, keep out the Texans

Jesuit High School is coming in for some criticism today after it cancelled the scheduled visit of nine student leaders from the African nations of Congo, Niger, and Ivory Coast.  The principal of the school, Paul Hogan, wrote that even though the students came from nations that have reported no cases of Ebola, "the situation with Ebola is fluid and uncertain at this time, including in the U.S."

As Texas has reported more Ebola infections than Congo, Niger, and Ivory Coast put together (it's not very hard to surpass zero), under the same principle Mr. Hogan should ban Texans, and recent visitors to Texas, from visiting the Jesuit campus while the situation remains "fluid and uncertain."  We can't be too careful about protecting the children!

Oregon's Monsanto Protection Act, Part II: Monsanto protects the humble pot grower

I'd written a few months ago about Oregon's Monsanto Protection Act, which prohibited local governments from regulating the production, sale, and use of certain kinds of agricultural products.  The Monsanto Protection Act, Senate Bill 863 in the 2013 special session, was rushed through the legislature without any particular sponsor, and was intended to prohibit cities and counties from regulating or prohibiting the use of genetically modified seeds and their products.

The act doesn't, however, refer to genetically modified seed, but states in broad terms that local governments may not enact or enforce any regulation that restricts (among other things) the sale, propagation, or use of agricultural seeds, nursery seeds, and their products.  You can read the text of the act here.

The 2013 legislature also passed a law to allow medical marijuana use, and retail dispensaries ("pot stores") of medical marijuana.  Several Oregon cities are working to ban retail marijuana stores from opening up shop within their limits.

If you didn't click on the link to the Monsanto Act, go back and do that now.  Then consider whether the Monsanto Act prohibits cities and counties from regulating marijuana stores, at least if the marijuana is grown from seeds that could qualify as "agricultural seed," "nursery seed," or "vegetable seed" as defined in the law.  "Vegetable seed" includes "the seed of those crops usually grown in Oregon in gardens or on truck farms or for canning and freezing purposes and generally known and sold under the name of vegetable seed."  "Agricultural seed" means "fiber, forage and grass crop seed and any other kind of seed or bulblet commonly recognized in this state as agricultural seed or as lawn or turf seed, and mixtures of any of such seeds, as may be determined by the Director of Agriculture."

Is marijuana seed "grass crop seed," and will the Director of Agriculture determine it to be "grass crop seed"?  If so, then the Monsanto Act prevents cities from banning the sale of marijuana seeds, and also from banning the growing, harvesting, marketing, possession, and use of marijuana seeds and their products.   This happy result almost reconciles me to the Monsanto Protection Act itself.

Aren't our fire departments basically Obamacare for houses?

It's something of a political marvel that the faction opposed to a national health care system has persuaded so many of us that providing fire protection to American houses is an essential government service, but providing health care to the Americans who inhabit them isn't.