The Omicron variant knocked 905 points off the Dow yesterday. Today, there are over 105,000 people at a football game in Ann Arbor, MI. In other words, people aren’t fearful of Omicron, they are fearful of the government’s response to Omicron.
Brian Wesbury
40.7K posts
Brian Wesbury
@wesbury
Chief Economist, First Trust LP. The Antidote to Conventional Wisdom. Eagle Scout. Former Chief Economist, Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress.
- I have lived in Chicago or suburbs for 35 years. I have seen bad leadership, but the incompetence of the Chicago Mayor, Lori Lightfoot, is inexcusable. People are dying. Businesses are destroyed. One of the great cities in the world, and the mayor seems to want it destroyed.
- American Airlines cancels 600 flights and says they are dealing with weather problems.
- Arizona shows a directionally nice decline in new cases per 100,000 people and a drop in ICU space used by COVID. This site always extrapolates to the worst case. A little alarmist, but the new case count has been going down for TWO WEEKS. Better news, better markets.
- When California starts to complain about a lack of water this summer, and blames climate change, let’s never forget that they probably received enough precipitation this year to take care of the next 3 years. It’s not the Colorado River…it’s that they didn’t plan or build. If
- Texas has a decline in new cases as well, and it’s hospital ICUs are at 87% of capacity. Like Florida, things look better. Obviously there are still a few hospitals at capacity, but even there things are looking better.
- Janet Yellen is saying that Congress needs to raise the US Treasury’s debt ceiling to avoid “catastrophe.” Try calling your credit card company up and using the same argument. How about Congress stops spending to avoid “catastrophe.”
- I’ve talked about this before. It’s astounding when you look at the numbers. Medicaid paying people to stay at home to take care of relatives accounts for 12% of all jobs in NYC!
- Deaths per 1 million population (8/5/20), Worldometers. NJ - 1,793 NY - 1,686 MA - 1,256 CT - 1,245 United Kingdom - 677 Spain - 608 Sweden - 564 USA - 461 FL - 345 TX - 264 Forgive me for asking this question, but who failed the American people?
- Here is a chart of mask wearing versus daily positive cases of COVID. Mask wearing is a survey, but shows little change in mask wearing since July 2020. Yet cases surged, fell back, surged big, and fell back again. I get the “virtue” of wearing a mask, but where are “results”?
- Let’s stop paying all salaries for politicians and bureaucrats right now...for as long as the shutdown lasts...then let’s see how long it lasts. Why should they get paid, when many American’s are losing their jobs due to government required shutdowns?
- In 1930, the federal government cost about 2.5% of our GDP. Today, it is 23% of our GDP. Over the past 90 years, the cost of government has gone up 9 times faster than overall economic output. That’s price gouging.
- Table 3 of the CDC’s data on deaths between 2/1 and 8/22 2020 says directly that only 6% of the 161,392 reported COVID deaths were listed as COVID-19 alone, just 9,684. All other US deaths had, on average, 2.6 additional conditions. cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr…
- Replying to @RBReichAre you really comparing the Washington Post to Twitter? The owner of the Washington Post decides what to publish. The owner of Twitter doesn’t publish anything.