Posts tagged as “Column of the Day”

With the COVID-19 pandemic still spiraling out of control, the best economic outcome that anyone can hope for is a recession deeper than that following the 2008 financial crisis.

NEW YORK – The shock to the global economy from COVID-19 has been both faster and more severe than the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) and even the Great Depression. In those two previous episodes, stock markets collapsed by 50% or more, credit markets froze up, massive bankruptcies followed, unemployment rates soared above 10%, and GDP contracted at an annualized rate of 10% or more. But all of this took around three years to play out. In the current crisis, similarly dire macroeconomic and financial outcomes have materialized in three weeks.

Not even during the Great Depression and World War II did the bulk of economic activity literally shut down, as it has in China, the United States, and Europe today. The best-case scenario would be a downturn that is more severe than the GFC (in terms of reduced cumulative global output) but shorter-lived, allowing for a return to positive growth by the fourth quarter of this year. In that case, markets would start to recover when the light at the end of the tunnel appears.

● Read in Project Syndicate

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The most brutal stretch for global markets since the financial crisis likely isn’t over yet, say investors and analysts who believe it is too early to assess the possible scale of economic damage from the coronavirus.

In just a few weeks, U.S. stocks have lost roughly a third of their value, and investors have even fled assets like U.S. government bonds and gold that typically do well during times of turmoil.

But many analysts and portfolio managers warn that by historical standards, stocks’ declines look modest. The S&P 500 is down 32% from its February peak. In comparison, stocks tumbled 57% during the financial crisis and 49% after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.

Analysts at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said this past week they expect U.S. economic output to tumble 24% in the second quarter.

If economic output shrinks by double-digit percentages in the second quarter, it would be a devastating pullback even by historical standards: Adjusted for inflation and seasonality, GDP fell less than 5 percentage points from peak to trough during the 2007-09 recession, which was the longest downturn since World War II.

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Read in The Wall Street Journal

No society can safeguard public health for long at the cost of its economic health.

Financial markets paused their slide Thursday, but no one should think this rolling economic calamity is over. If this government-ordered shutdown continues for much more than another week or two, the human cost of job losses and bankruptcies will exceed what most Americans imagine. This won’t be popular to read in some quarters, but federal and state officials need to start adjusting their anti-virus strategy now to avoid an economic recession that will dwarf the harm from 2008-2009.

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Read in The Wall Street Journal

[Editor's note: In the 2019 legislative session, a bill (House Bill 6935) virtually identical to the one discussed in this news report (House Bill 5270) passed the Labor and Public Employees committee but was not passed by the General Assembly. See: NOT ALL WORKERS FOOLED BY UNION SCHEMES AND PROPAGANDA here on The Red Line]

HARTFORD – Public employee unions are seeking to expand recruitment opportunities while claiming membership has hardly declined since a U.S. Supreme Court ruling freed workers from having to pay for union representation.

Organized labor is backing a bill before the Labor and Public Employees Committee that proposes to increase the access state and municipal employee unions have to new hires and their personal information.

The legislation is a response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME that overturned a 41-year-old precedent that had allowed states to require that government workers who decline union membership to pay some union fees.

A coming wave of retirements is also giving state employee unions reason to want to guarantee wider access to new hires.

Some 15,000 state workers are eligible to retire before costly pension changes concerning cost-of-living adjustments and health care contributions take effect on July 1, 2022. This is one-quarter of today’s state workforce. The Lamont administration is only expecting 5,000 to 10,000 retirements, though.

Approximately 46,000 state employees had union dues deducted from their paychecks for the most recent pay period, according to the Office of the State Comptroller. This was two-thirds of all employees.

THE PROVISIONS of House Bill 5270 would entitle public employee unions to the name, job title, department, work location, work telephone number and, subject to confidentiality exemptions, the home address of any newly hired employee.

Starting in 2021, a public employer would also be required to provide unions this personal information for all members of a bargaining unit at least four times a year unless an employee opts out in writing.

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Read in Republican American

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Read and comment on The Red Line

Hartford - Hubbard-Hall President and CEO Molly Kellogg challenged Gov. Ned Lamont face-to-face Wednesday to explain why the Waterbury-based chemical company should stay put.

Kellogg bluntly told Lamont that her family’s 170-year-old manufacturing business could consolidate in South Carolina where running a business is less costly and complicated than in Connecticut.

Later, she said she did not find the governor’s generic responses to her reassuring, but she also expressed a desire to remain in Connecticut where Hubbard-Hall has its roots.

Kellogg got to ask Lamont the second-to-last question when he addressed a business lobbying day that the Connecticut Business & Industry Association organizes every legislative session.

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Read in Republican American

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The leading Senate Democrat draws a rebuke from Chief Justice Roberts.

Democrats like to accuse President Trump of violating institutional democratic norms, and often he does with his rhetorical broadsides. But at least he’s never directly threatened the U.S. Supreme Court the way Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer did on Wednesday.

Speaking to a crowd on the Supreme Court steps, the leading Senate Democrat declared: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.” He meant Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, the newest Justices who were appointed by President Trump.

Mr. Schumer was speaking before abortion-rights activists as the Supreme Court considers whether to curtail the ability of abortion providers to sue on behalf of women seeking abortions—a doctrine known as third-party standing. Mr. Schumer, still addressing Messrs. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, added: “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

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Read in The Wall Street Journal

Early Voting; Last-Minute & Online Registration; Absentee and Provisional Ballots; Ballot Verification and Counting After Election Day

[Editor's Note: If you liked the tallying of votes in Iowa (41 delegates), California (495 delegates) may offer you true love.]

Fourteen states hold primaries next Tuesday, but millions of votes will already have been cast for those contests.

Rules on returning absentee ballots vary. Many states such as Colorado and Minnesota require that absentee ballots be received no later than Election Day.

But in Washington, California and some other states, ballots merely must be postmarked by the election date or day before. So ballots may roll in days later, which could delay election results.

Three-quarters of California voters are expected to receive absentee ballots this year, and political experts project that 40% will be cast before South Carolina’s primary on Saturday. But young people especially tend to procrastinate, so all ballots may not arrive until days after Super Tuesday. Many will also have to be verified.

That’s because Democrats have recently overhauled so many election procedures that mischief and mistakes are almost certain. Californians may now both register and vote at any place in their county on Election Day. Only two weeks ago California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law letting voters change their party identification and address through Election Day. Independents must ask for a Democratic ballot if they want to vote for a Democrat.

Democrats are still griping about the chaotic Iowa caucuses, but the results from California—which awards 495 delegates—may not be known for weeks.

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Read in The Wall Street Journal

What appeared to be a ritual demolishing of the billionaire candidate may humanize him to voters.

Michael Bloomberg must have expected the ambush. He should have prepared himself. For some reason, he didn’t. In his first presidential debate, in Las Vegas last night, his rivals pelted him with rotten fruit. Standing there at the end of the row of candidates, taking it, he seemed inert and discomfited. He made me think of a marble bust. He looked vaguely like William McKinley.

Welcome, the others jeered, to the presidential race. It was a ritual hazing—cruel and a little too easy. The 2020 Democrats, especially the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren supporters on the left, enjoy the theater of Cultural Revolution now and then, and Donald Trump’s “Mini-Mike” was the perfect specimen-bourgeois billionaire, led out to be tormented in the public square and condemned for his deviations—for his off-color (and weirdly off-center) remarks, for stop-and-frisk, and above all, for his plutocrat’s money. There was a frisson of Robespierre in the spectacle, an aspect of pent-up fury, of revenge.

Next morning, the commentators shoveled on further obloquy. They agreed that in this debut, the billionaire had “lost,” and that his novel, Wizard of Oz candidacy was badly damaged. He’d been forced out from behind his campaign of slick and expensive television advertising and required to show himself, in real time, for what he is.

The consensus on the left declared the evening a triumph for Warren. She was “on fire.” She was “aflame.” MSNBC and the New York Times editorial board assumed that her fiery passion was a good thing. They used the word “eloquent.” Warren insulted Bloomberg as mercilessly as she knew how, her relentless voice hammering and quavering, her hair bouncing as usual, her blue eyes flashing behind the oval panes of her eyeglasses. The performance seemed to pay off in all directions; the Warren campaign raised $3 million in contributions in the hours after the debate. These things are a matter of taste. Senator Warren’s indignation struck me, anyway, as narcissistic (a common affliction on the left). People out in the un-woke reaches of the country find that quality to be not just unlikeable but unbearable.

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Read in City Journal

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Read and comment here on The Red Line