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The Speaker's Morning Digest
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Current as of June 16, 2020 at 8:00 a.m.
COVID-19
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COVID-19 Testing Sites - Florida

  • Drive-Thru Testing sites available are listed by county. Each walk up site can test up to 200 individuals per day. Access the list here

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The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity is now giving daily updates on Florida’s Reemployment Assistance program


Access the Florida Department of Health COVID Dashboard


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Data Sources


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COVID-19 Charts
COVID-19 News and Opinion


When Alex Berenson, the former New York Times reporter, said that people will look back on the coronavirus lockdown as a “colossal mistake,” many scoffed. But with each passing day, as the failures of government at every level become clearer, Berenson and other COVID skeptics look increasingly perceptive. The governmental cure was worse than the disease.

“What I think is that people took a very, very aggressive action a month ago without necessarily thinking through what the economic or societal consequences were going to be,” Berenson said to the press in April. “Now more and more evidence is coming out that we responded too harshly, that maybe we should have taken smaller steps and seen what happened before we went to the place we went. And it seems to me very, very hard, both for politicians and for the public health establishment, to acknowledge this and to walk us back in a reasonable way.”

The predictions about the virus were wildly wrong, said Berenson: “I’ve been watching this like a hawk and I’ve been watching the models, both the Imperial College and now more recently, the major U.S. model, which is the University of Washington model, fail on a daily basis, fail to predict what is happening now, what is going to happen in months or years or even in a week…. I think most scientists agree it is more dangerous than the flu, but it doesn’t seem to be 10 or 20 or 30 times as dangerous as the flu. It’s on the spectrum of the flu. That’s what the data is now suggesting.”

The sheer arbitrariness of the lockdown, during which pols, drunk on their new powers, deemed services essential or nonessential depending on their ideological preferences, has been punctuated by the riots and protests, where all the COVID rules suddenly disappeared. We see nanny-state liberals, formerly so censorious of clustered gatherings, marching arm and arm with Black Lives Matter.

The shutdown revolved around an irrational assessment of risk, one which failed to weigh the consequences of crushing an economy, distorting social life, and suppressing freedom. Other means, short of a total shutdown, could have protected the old and sick, but officious pols, determined to retain as much power as possible, dismissed those plans out of hand. These same pols, who postured about the danger of “losing even one life,” support abortion and euthanasia and kept the abortion clinics open during the shutdown while banning religious services.

The speed with which these pols turned into little dictators was astonishing, and puts one in mind of C. S. Lewis’s observation:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

It will take some time to assess the appalling damage the COVID tyrants have wrought. “In medical terms, the shutdown was a mass casualty incident,” wrote a group of 600 doctors to President Trump. “Suicide hotline phone calls have increased 600%. We are alarmed at what appears to be the lack of consideration for the future health of our patients. The downstream health effects of deteriorating a level are being massively under-estimated and under-reported. This is an order of magnitude error.” They continued, “The millions of casualties of a continued shutdown will be hiding in plain sight, but they will be called alcoholism, homelessness, suicide, heart attack, stroke, or kidney failure. In youths it will be called financial instability, unemployment, despair, drug addiction, unplanned pregnancies, poverty, and abuse.”

A group of academics — Scott W. Atlas, John R. Birge, Ralph L Keeney, and Alexander Lipton — have argued that the shutdown has ruined far more lives than the virus:

The policies have created the greatest global economic disruption in history, with trillions of dollars of lost economic output. These financial losses have been falsely portrayed as purely economic. To the contrary, using numerous National Institutes of Health Public Access publications, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and various actuarial tables, we calculate that these policies will cause devastating non-economic consequences that will total millions of accumulated years of life lost in the United States, far beyond what the virus itself has caused.

They explain:

The lost economic output in the U.S. alone is estimated to be 5 percent of GDP, or $1.1 trillion for every month of the economic shutdown. This lost income results in lost lives as the stresses of unemployment and providing basic needs increase the incidence of suicide, alcohol or drug abuse, and stress-induced illnesses. These effects are particularly severe on the lower-income populace, as they are more likely to lose their jobs, and mortality rates are much higher for lower-income individuals.

Statistically, every $10 million to $24 million lost in U.S. incomes results in one additional death. One portion of this effect is through unemployment, which leads to an average increase in mortality of at least 60 percent. That translates into 7,200 lives lost per month among the 36 million newly unemployed Americans, over 40 percent of whom are not expected to regain their jobs. In addition, many small business owners are near financial collapse, creating lost wealth that results in mortality increases of 50 percent. With an average estimate of one additional lost life per $17 million income loss, that would translate to 65,000 lives lost in the U.S. for each month because of the economic shutdown.

In addition to lives lost because of lost income, lives also are lost due to delayed or foregone health care imposed by the shutdown and the fear it creates among patients. From personal communications with neurosurgery colleagues, about half of their patients have not appeared for treatment of disease which, left untreated, risks brain hemorrhage, paralysis or death.

Epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski has argued that the shutdown only succeeded in prolonging the virus, and that the stated reason for the lockdown proved illusory:

When the whole thing started, there was one reason given for the lockdown and that was to prevent hospitals from becoming overloaded. There is no indication that hospitals could ever have become overloaded, irrespective of what we did. So we could open up again, and forget the whole thing.

I hope the intervention did not have too much of an impact because it most likely made the situation worse. The intervention was to ‘flatten the curve’. That means that there would be the same number of cases but spread out over a longer period of time, because otherwise the hospitals would not have enough capacity.

Now, as we know, children and young adults do not end up in hospitals. It is only those who are both elderly and have comorbidities that do. Therefore you have to protect the elderly and the nursing homes. The ideal approach would be to simply shut the door of the nursing homes and keep the personnel and the elderly locked in for a certain amount of time, and pay the staff overtime to stay there for 24 hours per day.

But no one in the political class, he observes, was willing to defy the groupthink that ruled out a more targeted and balanced approach to the virus:


“It’s the science, the science, the science, not politics.” This from leaders calling for the continuation of the shutdown. It is “the science” they say they’re responding to when they tell us how to live every moment of our waking lives. It is the science that tells citizens in Michigan not to buy seeds, not to take their boats out on the lake. It is lifesaving not to go to church. It is lifesaving to wear masks even when you are walking in the park. It is lifesaving to stay six feet apart. Listen up. We, your leaders, have no choice. It’s the science. And remember, if you don’t listen to us, it’s death, and more death, everywhere death.

Apparently, our science-induced leadership has a formula to solve the virus pandemic: Science + (or x) Fear = The Virus Cure. In other words, shut down the economy. Again, there was no choice. Lives were at stake.

Here is what John Kay of the Financial Times has written about science: “The objective of science is not an agreement on a course of action but the pursuit of truth. … Science is a matter of evidence. … The route to knowledge is transparency. … The route to truth is the pluralistic expression of conflicting views. … There is no room in the process for any notion of scientific consensus.”

We are constantly told that it is science, not politics, that drives every detail of the Shut-Down-the-Economy virus cure. No hugging. It is life threatening. The six feet apart dictation does not only address the perceived health risk of hugging. It is economically devastating, especially to restaurants. But to take economics into account is to be considered immoral by the Shut-Down-the-Economy experts even though the stress from losing one’s business is also life threatening.

Germany and France, for instance, must have different scientists, different research reports, different models when it comes to no hugging. You are risking your life if you do not stay three feet apart. Maybe we should have a conference of experts with the three-footers on one side of the table and the six-footers on the other and go with the winner. Sweden would not have a representative at the table. Swedes are told to use their judgement when it comes to hugs.

So much for the science factor of the decision-making equation. Let us examine the fear component of the formula.
The Constitution, Law, and Order
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The Constitution - News and Opinion


America is the only Western nation that does not criminalize “hate speech.” Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most nations of Europe already do so. The United Nations relentlessly pressures the remaining holdouts to follow suit: “As a matter of principle,” says the U.N. Secretary-General, “the United Nations must confront hate speech at every turn.”

Meanwhile in America, Members of Congress issue their support for speech restrictions, and Big Tech’s digital oligarchs, enjoying a disproportionate power over society, continue to impose speech restrictions in exchange for access to their platforms. So are America’s colleges and universities more and more governed by an aggressive chorus of students, faculty, and administrators who demand and impose speech codes. These fronts promises to grow in size, strength, and confidence in the coming years.

Leading restriction advocates want not only to banish “hate speech,” but also to criminalize it. In the words of Mari Matsuda, an influential professor at the University of Hawaii Law School, “[F]ormal criminal and administrative sanction—public as opposed to private prosecution—is also an appropriate response to racist speech.”2
Mari J. Matsuda, “Public Response to Racist Speech: Considering the Victim’s Story,” Michigan Law Review, Vol. 87, No. 8 (August 1989), p. 2321. Jeremy Waldron also suggests that written “hate speech” should be criminalized and not remain only a civil tort. Jeremy Waldron, The Harm in Hate Speech (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 45-46. The influential feminist academic Judith Butler of Berkeley University similarly thinks “that there are probably occasions when” individuals should “be prosecuted for their injurious speech.” That “hateful, racist, misogynist, homophobic speech should be vehemently countered seems incontrovertibly right.” Judith Butler, “Burning Acts: Injurious Speech,” in Deconstruction Is/In America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: New York University Press, 1995), p. 139.

 Perhaps most surprising, legal precedents that would bring this revolution fully into existence in America are already embedded in two areas of our legal system: antidiscrimination and harassment laws, and Supreme Court rulings favoring sexual liberation that are based on a new view of “dignity.”

If Americans are to resist this growing movement, they must understand the arguments, the demands, and the consequences of outlawing “hate speech.” No laws of history dictate that America must submit and follow this path.

The debate over “hate speech” reveals a fundamental disagreement about the purpose of America. Either it is political liberty, in which case the freedom of speech is essential for presumptively rational citizens to rule themselves politically and to pursue the truth through science, philosophy, or religion. Or it is the equal self-respect and dignity of marginalized and self-created identities, in which case these must not only be publicly affirmed and celebrated, but also shielded from (even well-meaning) scrutiny and criticism, called “speech violence” or “hate speech.” These two views cannot coexist. Indeed, restriction advocates admit that America’s understanding of speech “comes into tension with the aspiration of equal dignity.”

They want to eliminate the former to make way for the latter.

Decent people are rightly unsettled by gratuitously vile words directed at undeserving fellow citizens. We should aspire to be courteous toward others. But today’s proposals to ban “hate speech” are not at bottom about getting rid of racial epithets or Holocaust denial. Nor are these proposals about preventing physical violence against segments of the population. The First Amendment, we should recall, does not protect speech that intentionally incites imminent violence or lawlessness.


In one of his final pieces of correspondence dated June 24, 1826, an ailing Thomas Jefferson regretfully declined Roger Weightman’s invitation to join him in Washington for the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson lamented his absence from the celebration of “the blessings & security of self-government.” These blessings, Jefferson intones, ensure that “all eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man… the general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god… these are grounds of hope for others.” But Jefferson’s confidence in the rise of equality, liberty, and self-government is now very much in doubt according to Joel Kotkin’s new book The Coming of Neo-Feudalism. To Jefferson’s republican aspirations, Kotkin counters with evidence that a new class of rulers intend to boot and spur contemporary serfs, for their own good, of course.

Kotkin argues that the economic, social, and political aspects of our period compare well with feudalism. And that means, according to Kotkin, that we are stagnant and increasingly ruled by a disconnected elite on behalf of their notions of justice and virtue, regardless of what majorities might actually desire. He describes the feudal period in Europe that existed roughly between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of independent city-states in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a static society, governed by Catholic orthodoxy, accompanied by economic and demographic paralysis. I would argue, however, that this period, particularly its legal systems as documented by Harold Berman in Law and Revolution, was illusorily stagnant. It is hard to argue that political and economic modernity built itself anew and on top of nothing, however self-congratulating this thesis has been to many across the centuries. Lest we forget, much of political modernity in the West, from its onset in the sixteenth century, has been absolutist and uncompromising, unlike medieval England, to take one example, which had limits on monarchy, a practice of representation, and the rule of law.

I can still take Kotkin’s point here. Economic growth in England and in the Netherlands really does explode in the late eighteenth century, producing the much-remarked L-shaped hockey-stick expansion that revolutionized living conditions and commerce in the West. Moreover, this manner of existence builds on the notion that commerce is itself a good thing, which requires the extension of a certain liberality by political institutions to individuals and corporations who become free to trade. As Kotkin repeatedly underscores, it presupposes that economic growth, the creation of a middle class, property ownership, capital accumulation, technological development, and the rule of law are positive goods.

Kotkin’s provocative definition of neo-feudalism as “a new form of aristocracy developing in the United States and beyond, as wealth in our postindustrial economy tends to be ever more concentrated in fewer hands” is part of an overarching argument about a malignant inequality that grips us, he claims, along with a new nobility ruling us from its position at the apex of this pyramid. His claims about economic inequality pick up where most do in the 1970s, where he states that the majority of income growth was taken by the top 1 percent “and especially the top .l percent” for the next two decades. In the twenty-first century gains for the top 1 percent have only magnified. Everyone else lost ground. I’ll come back to this observation later because I think it is incomplete and is a striking weakness in his argument. But it is a happy fault, precisely because growing incomes should help counteract Kotkin’s largely accurate observations about the ruling class that does want to herd us in their preferred pins.


Accounting professor Gordon Klein is at risk of losing his job. 

The University of California, Los Angeles teaching veteran and Detroit native informed a student via email that he wouldn’t alter his final exam schedule or grading policies for black students in light of the protests following George Floyd’s death.

Klein's response was in line with the university’s faculty policies. But that didn’t stop the backlash. 

The professor, who has taught at UCLA for nearly 40 years and hasn’t received a prior complaint for discrimination, is now on mandatory leave after a university dean labeled his response as an “abuse of power” and criticized Klein’s tone. 

A Change.org petition is also circulating, demanding UCLA fire Klein and has attracted more than 20,000 signatures. 

Klein is a victim of the political correctness mob, which is growing more powerful by the day. 

And if you value the free expression and debate of ideas, you should be concerned. 

While this kind of intolerance and over-sensitivity on college campuses has become an alarming trend in recent years — with implications to free speech and basic constitutional rights — it’s spilled into workplaces. 
History
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San Juan Island National Historical Park celebrates how individuals and nations can resolve disputes without resorting to violence. For it was here in the mid-1800s that Great Britain and the United States settled ownership of the island through peaceful arbitration. Watch former park historian, Mike Vouri, give a brief overview of the Pig War.

The dispute is perhaps the best-known period in island history. But the park also encompasses a rich and diverse environment that cannot be separated from the island’s 3,000-year human history. Long before the arrival of Europeans, the island sheltered a thriving culture attracted by its temperate climate, rich soil, abundant timber and marine resources. These same attributes lured Spain, Great Britain and the United States. Each explored, charted and named the islands while staking overlapping claims to the Oregon County-- the present states of Washington Oregon, Idaho, portions of Wyoming and Montana and the province of British Columbia.

Spain had abandoned its claims by the time an Anglo-American agreement in 1818 provided for joint occupation of the region. Although lucrative trade agreements and capital investments existed between the two nations, primarily on the Eastern seaboard, tensions mounted among those living in the Oregon Country. Americans considered the British presence an affront to their "manifest destiny." The British believed they had a legal right to lands guaranteed by earlier treaties, explorations and commercial activities of the Hudson's Bay Company.

Nevertheless, in June 1846 the Treaty of Oregon was signed in London, setting the boundary on the 49th parallel, from the Rocky Mountains "to the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver's Island” then south through the channel to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and west to the Pacific Ocean.

Difficulty arose over language. The "channel" described in the treaty was actually two channels: the Haro Strait, nearest Vancouver Island, and the Rosario Strait, nearer the mainland. The San Juan Islands lay between, and both sides claimed the entire island group.

As early as 1845 the Hudson's Bay Company, based at Fort Victoria, claimed San Juan Island, only seven miles across the Haro Strait. By 1851 the company established salmon-curing stations along the island's western shoreline. By 1853, the islands were claimed as U.S. possessions in the newly created Washington Territory. In response, the HBC in December 1853 established Belle Vu Sheep Farm on San Juan Island's southern shore. While this move was politically motivated, the island's natural attributes made the farm a lucrative concern. The flock in a mere six years expanded from 1,369 to more than 4,500 scattered in sheep stations throughout the island.

Reports of the island's good soil and bountiful resources by Northwest Boundary Survey naturalists quickly circulated among American settlers on the mainland. By spring 1859, 18 Americans had settled on claims staked on BC prime sheep grazing lands. These they expected the U.S. Government to recognize as valid. But the British considered the claims illegal and the claimants little more than "squatters" or trespassers. Tempers were growing shorter by the day.

The crisis came on June 15, 1859, when Lyman Cutlar, an American, shot and killed a company pig rooting in his garden. When British authorities threatened to arrest Cutlar and evict all his countrymen from the island as trespassers, a delegation sought military protection from Brig. Gen. William S. Harney, the anti-British commander of the Department of Oregon. Harney responded by ordering Company D, 9th U.S. Infantry under Capt. George E. Pickett (of later Civil War fame) to San Juan. Pickett's 64-man unit landed on July 27 and encamped near the HBC wharf on Griffin Bay, just north of Belle Vue Sheep Farm.


The First and Second Amendments get a lot of attention, but the Third rarely comes up in court. It reads, in full: “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.”

The U.S. ratified it in response to a very specific set of circumstances in the late 18th century involving the British military. Even so, there are a few 20th and 21st century legal cases in which courts have mentioned or considered the amendment.

The Third Amendment Was in Response to British Quartering Acts

Between 1754 and 1763, the British Empire sent tens of thousands of soldiers to its American colonies to fight the French and Indian War for control of the Ohio River valley. Afterward, many of these soldiers continued to live as a standing army in the 13 colonies. In 1765, the British Parliament passed a Quartering Act requiring the colonies to feed and house these soldiers.

“The colonists were to provide barracks for the soldiers, and if they were not available, the troops were to be billeted in inns, stables, and alehouses,” writes Gordon S. Wood, a professor of history emeritus at Brown University, for the National Constitution Center. “[I]f these were insufficient, the governors and councils of the provinces were authorized to use uninhabited houses, barns, and other buildings to lodge the soldiers.”

This act was unpopular in the colonies, especially after the 1770 Boston Massacre in which British troops fired on a crowd and killed five people. In response to growing unrest in the colonies, Parliament introduced an even more invasive Quartering Act in 1774 as part of the so-called “Intolerable” or “Coercive Acts.” The law required colonists to house and feed British soldiers in their private homes if there was no other place for the soldiers to stay.

This quartering was among the grievances Thomas Jefferson listed in the Declaration of Independence. Specifically, he accused King George III of keeping “among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the Consent or our Legislatures,” and “quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us.”


The American colonists’ breakup with the British Empire in 1776 wasn’t a sudden, impetuous act. Instead, the banding together of the 13 colonies to fight and win a war of independence against the Crown was the culmination of a series of events, which had begun more than a decade earlier. Escalations began shortly after the end of the French and Indian War—known elsewhere as the Seven Years War in 1763. Here are a few of the pivotal moments that led to the American Revolution.

1. The Stamp Act (March 1765)

To recoup some of the massive debt left over from the war with France, Parliament passed laws such as the Stamp Act, which for the first time taxed a wide range of transactions in the colonies.

“Up until then, each colony had its own government which decided which taxes they would have, and collected them,” explains Willard Sterne Randall, a professor emeritus of history at Champlain College and author of numerous works on early American history, including Unshackling America: How the War of 1812 Truly Ended the American Revolution. “They felt that they’d spent a lot of blood and treasure to protect the colonists from the Indians, and so they should pay their share.”

The colonists didn’t see it that way. They resented not only having to buy goods from the British but pay tax on them as well. “The tax never got collected, because there were riots all over the pace,” Randall says. Ultimately, Benjamin Franklin convinced the British to rescind it, but that only made things worse. “That made the Americans think they could push back against anything the British wanted,” Randall says.

2. The Townshend Acts (June-July 1767)

An American colonist reads with concern the royal proclamation of a tax on tea in the colonies as a British soldier stands nearby with rifle and bayonet, Boston, 1767. The tax on tea was one of the clauses of the Townshend Acts.

Parliament again tried to assert its authority by passing legislation to tax goods that the Americans imported from Great Britain. The Crown established a board of customs commissioners to stop smuggling and corruption among local officials in the colonies, who were often in on the illicit trade.

Americans struck back by organizing a boycott of the British goods that were subject to taxation, and began harassing the British customs commissioners. In an effort to quell the resistance, the British sent troops to occupy Boston, which only deepened the ill feeling.

3. The Boston Massacre (March 1770)

Simmering tensions between the British occupiers and Boston residents boiled over one late afternoon, when a disagreement between an apprentice wigmaker and a British soldier led to a crowd of 200 colonists surrounding seven British troops. When the Americans began taunting the British and throwing things at them, the soldiers apparently lost their cool and began firing into the crowd.

As the smoke cleared, three men—including an African-American sailor named Crispus Attucks—were dead, and two others were mortally wounded. The massacre became a useful propaganda tool for the colonists, especially after Paul Revere distributed an engraving that misleadingly depicted the British as the aggressors.
Free Markets & The Economy
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Free Markets and the Economy - News and Opinion


These indicators are mostly for travel and entertainment - some of the sectors that will probably recover very slowly.

The TSA is providing daily travel numbers.
This data shows the daily total traveler throughput from the TSA for 2019 (Blue) and 2020 (Red).

On June 14th there were 544,046 travelers compared to 2,642,083 a year ago.That is a decline of 79.4%. There has been a steady increase from the bottom, but air travel is still down significantly.

The second graph shows the year-over-year change in diners as tabulated by OpenTable for the US and several selected cities.

The next graph shows the seasonal pattern for the hotel occupancy rate using the four week average.

Hotel Occupancy RateThe red line is for 2020, dash light blue is 2019, blue is the median, and black is for 2009 (the worst year probably since the Great Depression for hotels).

2020 was off to a solid start, however, COVID-19 has crushed hotel occupancy.

The next graph, based on weekly data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), shows the year-over-year change in gasoline consumption. At one point, gasoline consumption was off almost 50% YoY.

As of June 5th, gasoline consumption was off about 20% YoY (about 80% of normal). This was the same decline as the previous week.

The final graph is from Apple mobility.

According to the Apple data public transit in the US is still only about 45% of the January level. It is at 31% in New York, and 63% in Houston.

As COVID-19 was causing the nation’s economy to suddenly shut down in March, Congress moved swiftly to provide financial assistance to millions who were abruptly thrown out of work. These entitlement payments temporarily played an important role in helping Americans get through a public health emergency, but if extended in their current form would threaten the ability of businesses to hire and get back on their feet. A more nuanced approach – allowing individuals to immediately receive benefits from Social Security in return for deferring retirement – would ensure that people who genuinely need substantial assistance can opt to receive it, without causing others to drop out of the workforce unnecessarily.

Among the many provisions included in the March 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act was the establishment of Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation – a new $600 per week benefit for individuals who had lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic. This provision is set to expire at the end of July, and Congress has begun deliberating about what form assistance take in the future.

A University of Chicago study recently estimated that, as a result of this provision being combined with pre-existing unemployment insurance benefits, the median newly unemployed person was entitled to an average of 134% of his or her regular income. In the throes of the first wave of the pandemic, this helped encourage Americans to stay home. But, as a return to normal business becomes increasingly possible, Congress should ensure that any future assistance goes to those who truly need it, rather than needlessly pulling people out of jobs who are able to work. 

As 21 million Americans remain unemployed and entire industries are still entirely shut down, Congress will surely seek to extend some form of assistance beyond July. But businesses seeking to resume operation have reported finding it hard to get staff to return to work. This is in large part because the CARES Act entitles more than two-thirds of eligible workers to unemployment benefits that exceed their prior earnings, while a fifth can receive benefits that are more than twice what they previously earned. This calculus is further skewed by the fact that individuals also stand to save substantial amounts on daycare and commuting costs, as well as time, if they choose not to return to work. 

Such an arrangement sets up a conflict between businesses and their staffs, who stand to lose eligibility for benefits if their employers call them back to work as they are permitted to reopen. As a result, a return to work would cause them to incur increased expenses and greater health risks in return for lower incomes. 

The Congressional Budget Office has noted that while the work disincentive could be reduced by cutting assistance to a limited percentage of individuals’ prior income, as jobs will still be hard to come by following reopening, this would hurt those with the lowest incomes and may hamper their contribution to macroeconomic demand. A better approach would be to target assistance at those who genuinely can’t work.

Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute and Joshua Rauh of Stanford University have proposed that the federal government make direct payments to individuals in return for them agreeing to delay the age at which they are eligible for Social Security. They estimate that in order to receive several thousand dollars, most Americans would only need to delay retirement by a few months. Not only would this help individuals make up for lost income and serve to boost economic demand in the short run, it would also have the advantage of not adding to national debt liabilities over the long run. 
Science, Health, & Technology
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Science, Health, & Technology - News and Opinion


When people think about Apple and health, the first thing that comes to mind is the Watch.

But the real lynchpin of Apple’s health strategy is this humble app:

Apple is building it into the OS for Health.

Specifically, they’re building a system to aggregate data from modern connected devices (like watches, scales, fitness equipment, mattresses, etc) and integrate it with traditional health records (lab results, conditions, medications, procedures) in order to unlock a new, comprehensive view of your body’s health.

Traditionally, these data sets have lived in silos. But what could happen if it all was aggregated safely in one place?

The impact on your health, and on the healthcare system more broadly, would be enormous.

For example:

Imagine when you sign up for a new gym, you can connect Apple Health. Data can now flow in both directions. So your trainer could know you had a herniated disk, and your doctor will have access to your workout history.

Imagine a smart toilet that can sample your stool and send the data to Apple Health. Imagine this triggers an automatic analysis by an algorithm developed by your healthcare provider, which takes into account the context of all your other health data (e.g. weight, heart rate, sleep, DNA), in order to proactively suggest you schedule an appointment if any anomalous patterns are detected.

Imagine the healthcare system was able to operate 10x more efficiently, because continuous background data collection and analysis eliminated unnecessary visits, reduced misdiagnoses, and caught most issues early enough to be solved with simple procedures.

Of course, these stories are still just imaginary. The technology has a long way to go, healthcare is a notoriously distorted market, and Apple isn’t the only tech giant interested in becoming an aggregator of health data. 

But if they do manage to pull it off, it’ll be a major strategic coup, and a huge departure from Apple’s usual way of doing things. 

In other words, it could be Tim Cook’s iPhone.


Sweden’s less rigid response to COVID-19 came under sharper attack in the past week after having enjoyed popular support. It’s still difficult, however, to judge the success or failure of the policy.  

Sweden has had a lower number of new cases of the coronavirus, with fewer deaths than some European countries but still more than its closest neighbors. And it has had more deaths per capita than the United States. 

“There has been some movement in public opinion. Previously the Swedish public, based on opinion polls, had been highly supportive of the government’s approach and demonstrated national pride in that they had taken a different approach, unique to Sweden,” Joshua Michaud, associate director of global health policy at Kaiser Family Foundation, told The Daily Signal. 


Market forces are the best way to set prices when it comes to toilet paper, hand sanitizer, prescription drugs, and health care services. When government gets involved in fixing prices, it ends up distorting prices in a way that hurts both consumers and the companies that provide the service or product.

The fact is that markets work, and government is terrible at managing consumer access to products and services. Just look at the U.S. Postal Service for a classic example of government price fixing and management leading to billions in taxpayer losses.

The Coalition Against Rate-Setting (CARS) is an alliance of organizations opposed to price controls (rate setting) in the health care system. This advocacy coalition – of which Institute for Liberty is a member – sent a letter to the White House signed by a wide array of taxpayer and consumer protection groups as a warning that “some members of Congress and some individuals in the Trump administration have repeatedly floated the idea of ‘fixing’ the pressing problem of surprise medical billing (SMB) through a ‘rate-setting’ system.” The idea of rate setting is “fatally flawed,” because it would put bureaucrats in the place of patients and doctors in setting prices.

The CARS coalition has come together because some politicians are advocating for a flawed short-term fix to SMB that will fundamentally – and over the long-term – damage the American health care system. The coalition letter cited a May 27, 2020 story in Politico that reported, “Trump administration officials are floating a plan that would outlaw health care providers from putting patients on the hook for thousands of dollars in expenses — but without mandating how doctors and hospitals would recover their costs from insurers, according to administration officials, Capitol Hill aides and industry lobbyists familiar with discussions.” The goal of ending surprise medical billing is a laudable one, but the solution presented will make the problem worse.

Price fixing will stifle innovation, damage the doctor-patient relationship, and undermine market competition and transparency. The CARS coalition highlights in our letter that “any mandates or price controls would make surprise billing problems worse and disrupt care for millions of patients across the country.” The impact of price fixing will devastate a health care system already ravaged by the COVID-19 crisis.  


Birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish may see kinds of colours we cannot even imagine, say researchers whose experiments with wild hummingbirds show they perceive five so-called non-spectral colours.

Almost all of the colours we perceive correspond to a single wavelength. Such colours are called spectral colours as they are part of the visible spectrum, ranging from red and yellow to blue and violet.

The exception is purple, which can be evoked only by a combination of red and blue light, not by any single wavelength. For this reason, it is known as a non-spectral colour. “For us, purple is kind of special,” says Mary Caswell Stoddard of Princeton University.

Our eyes have three kinds of cells, called cone cells, that detect red, green and blue light. We see purple when only the red and blue cones, but not the green cones, in our eyes are stimulated.

Birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish also have an ultraviolet cone in their eyes. This means they might see five non-spectral colours, because there are five ways that two or three cones can be stimulated without any others. They might see ‘ultraviolet plus yellow’, for instance, when the ultraviolet, green and red cones, but not the blue cone, are stimulated.

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Images of Winston Churchill failed to appear Sunday during Google searches for the former British prime minister—but the tech giant says it was not on purpose.

Users noticed something was wrong when Churchill’s Google Search Knowledge Graph card appeared without an accompanying image.

Then a Google search for British Prime Ministers showed a gray generic avatar instead of his picture alongside other former U.K. prime ministers.