[ExI] Some virus statistics

[spike at rainier66.com]

> On Behalf Of John Clark via extropy-chat



> Oh there is something we can learn from them: if you accept dictatorship, your covid death rate will be whatever the dictator says it is. 

 

>…Do you really believe every epidemiologist in the world is lying and every country except the USA is a dictatorship just like North Korea?

 

 

We don’t know what the covid rate is in any communist country.  The governments there control information.  In the US, we incentivize hospitals to over-report covid cases.

 

Over time, we have more and more people who caught covid and recovered, or were exposed and their immune systems responded.  Those people have covid antibodies which can be measured.  If they end up in the hands of the coroner, the corpses are tested for covid antibodies.  If positive, the coroner might report that as a cause of death, even if there were plenty of other factors.  Covid deaths get the hospital paid.  Otherwise probably not.  Fill in the blanks.

 

>… Spike, you say you love the constitution…

 

Right on!

 

>… drastically cut government spending during 2 simultaneous disasters… John K Clark

 

I get that.  But the government cannot manufacture wealth.  It can manufacture money.  Two different things.

 

Government overspending causes cuts eventually.  They are not voluntary cuts.  In our current catastrophe, government revenues are going to be way down, waaaaay down, while costs go up.  This will cause governments at all levels to come up short.  States can raise income taxes (and likely will) they can raise sales taxes (they will) and to some extent they can raise property taxes (California will not (because it requires a constitutional amendment (which would require 2/3 of the legislature to agree (which they will not (particularly when record numbers are begging the state government for relief on current tax bills.))))

 

States can borrow, if investors are willing to take a risk, but their reach is limited.

 

We can argue the government can spin out a pile of phony money.  But if they do, we now have runaway prices on any imported goods, and a whole new world of hurt.  States can do the things I listed above, and probably will.  Counties and cities, well, good luck to them.

 

spike

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