We're All In This Together

Remember that sentiment of solidarity? Early in the covid pandemic (back when it was a pandemic, and not an endemic, which is what it is today), many people uttered those words to express that we were all equally affected by the threat of disease, the potential loss of loved ones, the restrictions, the government shutdowns.

We weren't, of course. Some of us were more vulnerable to disease than others. Some were more susceptible to serious illness or death, especially since very few people actually died from covid; most died from pre-existing morbidities that covid exploited. Some of us continued to go about our lives in relative freedom. Of course, we couldn't dine out or go to the movie theater or fly on an airplane in those initial "two weeks to slow the spread" (wink, wink), but we got take-out from restaurants, went to the park or on driving vacations (even though we were told to stay home), and generally lived our lives without fear. And some of us were fortunate enough to not see our jobs or our incomes affected by government fiat that arbitrarily picked winners and losers, with ramifications that are still being felt today in labor market and supply chain dislocations.

As The Curmudgeon said at the time, "We're not all in this together. We're in the same ocean, but we're all in different boats."

Well, now we're truly all in this together. And it really seems to be bothering some people. Allow me to explain.

For many months now, government leaders and health care officials have wielded vaccination like a bludgeon, using it to drive a wedge between the populace. And those who are vaccinated have been all too willing to play along, viewing themselves as somehow morally and even intellectually (I know; it's laughable) superior to those who are unvaccinated.

Have you ever read the Dr. Suess story, "The Sneetches?" It's very appropriate to the current situation. Here's a synopsis from Wikipedia:

"The ... story ... tells of a group of yellow bird-like creatures called the Sneetches, some of whom have a green star on their bellies. At the beginning of the story, Sneetches with stars discriminate against and shun those without. An entrepreneur named Sylvester McMonkey McBean (calling himself the Fix-It-Up Chappie) appears and offers the Sneetches without stars the chance to get them with his Star-On machine, for three dollars ..." The Sneetches who originally had stars, seeing that they're no longer unique, now look to have their stars removed to once again differentiate themselves, so McBean develops a machine to remove the stars, and they pay for the privilege. But then so, of course, do the newly-starred Sneetches. And so it goes, round and round, until pretty soon none of the Sneetches know who are the original superior breed, all of them are flat-broke, and McBean has all their money.

There are several morals and key themes to this story. One, of course, is that McBean is none other than Anthony Fauci. And in the end, he's going to be the only one who gets rich off this whole thing.

But the over-arching theme is that the star-bellied Sneetches - the vaccinated - consider themselves superior to those without stars. Why? Merely because they have a star on their bellies. There is nothing else special about them, but they preened over those stars as though they actually meant something. (The bitter irony is that they come to mean less and less with each passing week.)

In their efforts to discriminate against and shun the unvaccinated, the vaccinated claimed that they were now immune from infection. From serious illness, hospitalization, and death. That they were shrouded in an invisible shield, and could not spread infection to others, and were therefore morally superior to others in the great war against covid. They accused the unvaccinated of propagating the spread of the disease, prolonging the pandemic (even after the evidence clearly showed that it had become an endemic), threatening the lives of others, and overwhelming the health care system (which never really happened).

Of course, they were wrong. On all counts. (And the irony of their presumed intellectual superiority is how easily duped they were by "McBean," just like in Suess' story.)

They were apparently math-ignorant, for even the manufacturers of their majik potions stressed that the efficacy rate of their vaccines was only about 95%. That means that, of every 100 people who get the full vaccine, five of them may still get infected, if exposed. In other words, the vaccine only works in 95% of people. And indeed, breakthrough cases happened, though they were rare. (Five percent qualifies as "rare.") But for whatever reason, the vaccinated felt justified in maintaining their smugness, and that apparently led them to ignore math and claim that 95% = 100%.

Enter delta.

Delta was more transmissible than previous variants. And it proved more resistant to the vaccines. The breakthrough cases increased, and started to get press. "Gee, I guess our efficacy rate is only about 90-95%," said the vaccine manufacturers. Effectively, that's saying the vaccines are 90% efficacious, as you can really only claim the low end of the range. In other words, if you get vaccinated, you still have a 10% chance of getting infected. Those odds are important; we'll come back to them in a bit.

Moreover, vaccinated people were getting really sick. Being hospitalized. Dying. Not in huge numbers, mind you, and the vast majority of deaths - vaccinated or not - remain among those with serious co-morbidities and/or the very elderly. But it was happening, in sufficient numbers to get reported. And, since Delta hit about six months after the first people were getting vaccinated, it had to be acknowledged that the vaccines' efficacy wanes after about that period of time. So booster doses are required to maintain efficacy, much like flu vaccines, which require an annual dose. At first the necessity for boosters was denied by the vaccine zealots; then, it was grudgingly acknowledged; now, the vaccine zealots have become eager booster zealots. Hey, if you can't beat 'em ...

(To be fair, natural immunity wanes, too. I know at least two people who had covid in 2020, and got it again in 2021. And, they were sicker in 2021 than they were in 2020, presumably because in 2021 they had the Delta variant - I'm just guessing there; I don't know what variant they had. I do know that these are very healthy people with no apparent co-morbidities and strong immune systems. To that end, covid is like other coronaviruses, including the common cold: you can catch cold multiple times over the course of your life, too, but if you catch cold today, you probably won't catch cold again in a month. All this proves is that covid is just another coronavirus.)

Still, the vaccinated kept at it. They maintained the "pandemic of the unvaccinated" theme. They ridiculed those who chose not to get vaccinated, insinuating that they're uneducated Neanderthals who don't understand science. (In truth, not only do they likely understand science as well as, if not better than, their vaccinated counterparts, they clearly, in most cases, have superior math skills. I'd argue that many of the vaccinated couldn't pass a basic statistics course, from the evidence I've seen.)

Joe Biden pushed his mandate for employers, invoking an emergency OSHA order intended to apply to situations of such dire urgent threat to workplace safety that no alternative is available other than granting broad, authoritative powers to OSHA.

Never mind that businesses have succeeded in keeping workplaces safe for nearly two years now, as the immediate threat of the pandemic has ebbed into an endemic. Never mind that this "emergency" was so dire that Biden announced the mandate in September (just after the disastrous Afghanistan surrender - "hey, look over here!"), but wouldn't put it into effect for four months. Or that it was so urgent that, the day the Sixth District lifted the stay imposed by the Fifth District, OSHA announced that it would delay enforcement by yet another month.

Some "emergency."

Yes, the star-bellied Sneetches continued to point proudly at their stars - even though the stars had to be boosted in order to keep them from fading; the boosts themselves became a new virtue signal - and looked down their beaks at their star-less brethren. So much for, "we're all in this together," right?

Enter omicron.

There is no statistical infection-rate difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated with omicron. In fact, the director of the CDC recently reported that, of omicron cases in the U.S., 80% are among the vaccinated, and a third have received a booster dose. In other words ...

The vaccines are ineffective against preventing infection from omicron.

Now, the "experts" will tell you that the vaccines will keep you from getting very sick with omicron. Well, guess what?

You're probably not going to get very sick with omicron anyway.

In South Africa, where omicron first reared its ugly head, symptoms are mild and hospitalization rates are low. And the vaccination rate in South Africa is much lower than in the U.S. In the Kansas City metro, cases are near the Delta peak (which is about 80% of the November 2020 record level); the positivity rate is a whopping 38% vs. 34% at the Delta peak and 31% last January; yet deaths are at very low levels, in line with some of the lowest levels since covid first emerged.

The most common symptoms of omicron appear to be very similar to those of the common cold, or a mild flu. Forty percent of positive cases are completely asymptomatic.

Now, that could be, in part, thanks to vaccinated people getting infected, right? Well, that leads us to the point of this post:

A recent news report focused on vaccinated people who were infected with the omicron variant. They expressed surprise at how guilty they felt. Why? Because, previously, they'd felt so judgmental toward anyone who was unvaccinated, and got infected. They felt that those people deserved to get infected.

That it served them right.

Nice, huh? Yet we've seen it all across social media. An outspoken vaccine critic gets covid and dies, and the comments on their social media page are shockingly hateful. Laughing at them. Making fun of them. Referencing karma and the like.

Well, funny thing about karma - be really careful with it, because, as John Lennon sang, it's gonna get you - gonna knock you right on the head.

In this news report, the vaccinated people who got infected were saying that they realized that anyone can get covid, and that they shouldn't have been so judgmental.

In other words, they were coming to realize that we're all in this together. That the stars on their bellies don't mean a whole lot, in the grand scheme of things. Those stars are no more a differentiator than whether one is vaccinated against the flu, and you don't see people virtue-signaling over the flu vaccine, or attempting to brow-beat or ostracize others over their flu vaccination status.

And, now that omicron is the dominant covid variant, we can truly say that the flu is more severe than covid. (It probably always has been, for the vast, vast majority of us, who are under the age of 65 and don't have significant co-morbidities.)

Okay, now for those odds I promised we'd talk about. Anyone who's ever read The Curmudgeon knows he loves math. So here's some math, and it's pretty easy stuff.

If you run the numbers in terms of how many people have had covid in the U.S., and divide it by the population, then adjust it for the number of months that covid has been present in the U.S. and annualize that, your odds in any given year of getting covid are a bit less than 10%. That's with no vaccine. It's simple math, and the data is readily available: ((Total Cases / Population) / Months Since First Case ) x 12 = Annual Rate. (It actually works out to 8.4%, currently.)

Now, I would argue that there have been a lot of completely asymptomatic people running around who were never tested who had covid, which would influence the numbers higher. At the same time, in 2020, for political reasons, the testing protocols were manipulated to overstate cases, as The Curmudgeon has previously addressed, so those things may cancel each other out. (There are other complicating data, such as people getting it twice, but the incidence of that data would be statistically insignificant.)

In addition, as we've also previously discussed, other factors influence one's odds of getting covid. Population density is a biggie. Age, race, and gender all play a role. So, using The Curmudgeon as an example, a white male under 65 living in suburban Johnson County, Kansas probably has somewhat lower odds than the national average - maybe, I don't know, around 7-8%?

But, for arguments' sake, let's peg it at 10%, a nice, round, conservative number. Now, remember that post-Delta efficacy rate of 90-95%? For all practical purposes, with the vaccine, I have maybe a 10% chance of getting infected.

Same odds as if I'm unvaccinated.

And that's with delta. With omicron, by all appearances, my odds are higher. Even if I'm boosted. So ...

We truly are all in this together. Vaccinated or unvaccinated, boosted or unboosted. Stars on our bellies or no stars. We're all in this together. So there's no shame in getting sick. Just like it was before the vaccines - before covid, really. There was no shame in catching a cold, or getting the flu, or a sinus infection. It was just part of life. If someone got the flu, nobody said, "Stupid bastard should have gotten the flu shot." If your neighbor caught cold, you didn't say, "Serves her right for not wearing a mask to the store."

So if you're vaccinated, maybe it's time to get off your high horse - because maybe you've come to realize that your "high horse" was never that high. Maybe you've come to see that, at best, it's one of those mechanical horses outside the supermarket that you insert a quarter into to make it go. And at worst, it's a stick horse that you straddle, and gallop around the yard on while you scream, "Yee-haw!" If not - well, take a closer look at that horse.

Because if you insist on continuing to hang your virtue on the fact that you made the choice to get a vaccine - which, by the way, is your choice, and good for you if you made it; that's your business - you may soon find yourself having tested positive for covid, and realizing that, if the vaccine was the source of all your virtue, you have no virtue at all.

And if that happens, for the unvaccinated, let me admonish you not to succumb to the temptation to point to your star-less belly and say, "I told you so." Don't be guilty of the same sin you've complained about for lo these many months. Yeah, I get it; "they" were wrong to act the way "they" did. But two wrongs don't make a right. So be better than that.

Let the lesson for all of us be that we truly are in this together. Covid is now a common, seasonal coronavirus, like the common cold, and it's going to be with us forever. (Yet another gift from China that we're stuck with forever, like shrimp toast.) It'll continue to come and go. Some years will be worse than others. Nearly all of us will eventually have to deal with it. It'll be worse for some of us than others.

Fortunately, we now have treatments, which are even better than vaccines. Why? Because if I'm vaccinated, I can still get covid. But if I get it, vaccinated or not, I need to be able to overcome it with a treatment. Just like I can get the flu vaccine, but I can still get the flu, and if I do, I want to be able to take Tamiflu so I can get over it faster. (In fact, insert the word "flu" in the place of "covid" throughout this paragraph, and you'll see just how common covid is now.)

Only once we adopt this mindset will we truly put covid behind us - at least the fear part of it. To hell with Anthony Fauci, the CDC, the news media, the politicians, and everybody else who's trying to capitalize on that fear. Let's put Fauci back where he belongs - in the dustbin of bureaucratic obscurity. It's a false premise to say that we'll be past covid when we reach X% vaccination, because the vaccinated can very easily get covid. We'll be past covid when we figure out that covid is here, it's seasonal, it's treatable, and if we're really worried about it because we're in a particularly vulnerable population, or we're just worried about it for our own reasons, we have vaccines for it, that may help. But the bottom line?

We'll be past covid when we've figured out that it doesn't matter what X is, and when we've accepted that we're all the same, irrespective of which side of X we're on.

An Open Letter to AOC

Dear AOC,

We’ll give you a pass for your ridiculous claim that you represent “as many people, if not more, than Joe Manchin.” After all, ridiculous claims are your stock-in-trade, and you’ve demonstrated time and again that you suck at math.

(But for the record, Sen. Manchin represents more than twice as many people as you do.)

However, we would ask that you return to middle school and take a Civics class (as in government, not Honda cars), and don’t leave the classroom until you pass this time, because you clearly don’t understand how this whole thing works.

See, it matters not how many people one represents; it’s what those people want. Your constituents are probably all on welfare, and so the prospect of all the false promises of the Build Broke Better legislation sound good to them.

Sen. Manchin’s constituents, being hard-working folks, know better. They’ve been polled, and 75% of them oppose Build Broke Better. (Here’s some remedial math for you, sweetie: if he represents more than twice as many people as you do, and 75% of his constituents oppose Build Broke Better, that means that he represents more people who oppose Build Broke Better than the total number of people you represent.)

So you see, Sen. Manchin is doing what the people of West Virginia elected him to do: representing their interests. You claimed that he was guilty of “an egregious breach of the President’s trust.” Well, see, the President didn’t appoint him. He was elected by the people of his state. So it’s their trust that matters, not the President’s. This is one of the things you need to make sure you learn in that Civics class before you head back to D.C.

Another thing you need to learn is that, in a democratic Republic, you’re not always going to get your way. (Once you learn that, go back to Washington and explain it to your Squad Sisters – and Bernie, while you’re at it.) You say that the system needs to change, because one man shouldn’t be able to block a bill.

Well, that’s not what happened here.

Fifty Republican Senators firmly oppose Build Broke Better. And so does Joe Manchin, the lone voice of reason in the Democrat party (unless Kyrsten Sinema still opposes it; she’s kinda been lost in the shuffle since Sunday’s bombshell announcement by Manchin).

Here’s a little more remedial math – and I’ll go slow, because I know that I need to with you: there are 100 Senators. Fifty Republicans, plus one Joe Manchin, equals 51. Fifty-one is more than half of 100, so that’s a majority. And if a majority of the Senate opposes a piece of legislation, that piece of legislation fails, and “the system” is working exactly as the framers intended for it to work. One man didn’t block it; 51 people did.

I hope you do well in your Civics class. Try not to get too discouraged if it’s graded on the curve. Just do your best, and remember: those other kids may be smarter than you, but you’re a whole lot more entertaining.

Sincerely yours,

The Economic Curmudgeon

The Madness of Mad Money

You may have tuned in to the CNBC show, "Mad Money," starring Jim Cramer. Cramer has always been a highly entertaining guy - loud, bombastic, talks a mile a minute, and very opinionated. Sometimes to his own detriment.

Now, I used to kind of like Cramer. He's actually made me some money over the years with his stock picks. Based on his research, I bought Ulta and Ambarella, and did quite well in the former and pretty good in the latter. But he's also made some real dud calls - like urging people to buy Bear Stearns in early 2008. (Bear Stearns failed in March of that year.)

Cramer is a very smart guy, and generally a great stock-picker. His record, and his portfolio, speak for themselves (although he's undoubtedly made more money as a TV celebrity and off his personal brand than he ever did, or could have, in the markets; otherwise he'd still be working in the markets am I right?).

However, I have long been aware that Cramer either doesn't know jack about macroeconomics, or he simply doesn't care about the greater good where macroeconomic policy is concerned. We can now extend that to public health policy, and public policy in general, and in a frankly alarming way. But first, let's focus on the macroeconomic piece.

In 2007, Cramer went on an epic, on-air rant on CNBC, screaming that then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke should open the Fed's discount window - the borrowing till for banks - and cut the borrowing rate for banks to zero in order to save firms like Bear Stearns from failing. He predicted that, if the Fed didn't do that, those firms would indeed fail.

Well, Bear Stearns did. So, six months later, did Lehman Brothers. The rest of Wall Street, and much of the rest of the banking system, eventually had to be bailed out. So Cramer was right, yes? Yes, but ... so what? The Fed knew all that would happen, too. So Cramer wasn't omniscient; he didn't know anything that Bernanke didn't know. (Don't get me wrong; Bernanke didn't see the housing bubble forming, or the bust coming. Neither did Cramer, for that matter. I did. So I'm not defending Bernanke. I think he's an idiot. I'm just saying he knew what Cramer knew. So did anyone who was paying attention back then, because we were in the middle of a shyte-storm.)

So why didn't the Fed open the discount window, like Cramer wanted them to do, and cut the borrowing rate for banks to zero? Because ...

Saving those banks from failing isn't the Fed's job.

There's this thing called moral hazard. And it comes from letting huge companies take huge risks, then bailing them out instead of letting them fail when the risks go against them. It creates an incentive for them to keep taking huge risks, and it puts the taxpayer on the hook for it. (That's a gross over-simplification, but I don't want to take the time to expound on it.)

Why, then, did Cramer want the Fed to save those firms, if it isn't the Fed's job? Two reasons: one, he had a lot of buddies that worked there, from the corner offices to the trading floors. And they were all calling him, crying that they were going to lose their seven-figure-a-year jobs - never mind that it was because they made a bunch of risky trades that they probably didn't really understand when they made them. But they were afraid they'd lose their houses in the Hamptons, so they called their buddy Jim, who's on TV all the time, hoping he could persuade somebody, anybody, to listen, and help them out.

And the second reason?

Cramer makes money when the stock market goes up. So he wants it to always go up.

That's key. Cramer will say anything, advocate for anything, to try to prop up the stock market. Even if it's bad policy. Bad economic policy, bad fiscal policy, and now bad public health policy. Or just bad public policy.

(The Curmudgeon, on the other hand, has figured out that you can make money when the market goes up OR down. Seeing the market crash coming in 2008, he shorted the market, and made money while it was tanking.)

After the Great Recession was over, the Fed kept rates too low, too long, which is how the housing bubble got inflated to begin with; they did the same thing after the dot-com recession in 2000. So when Bernanke and Co. decided to start raising rates, Cramer went on another rant, screaming that they shouldn't do it, they should keep rates low - even though the economy was ready to stand on its own two feet, and continuing to keep rates that low would probably fuel another bubble.

Why would Cramer do that? Why would he advocate for bad - actually, dangerous - monetary policy?

Because he was afraid that, if the Fed began to raise rates, the stock market rally would end, and stock prices would stop going up.

In other words, Jim Cramer is nothing more than a prostitute, and his pimp is a rising stock market.

Now, recently, Cramer went even further off the deep end. He actually said that the government needed to just mandate covid vaccines for every man, woman and child - not just workers at companies with more than 100,000 employees. Not just government employees and contractors. EVERYBODY. And, get this - how would Cramer make sure that everyone complied?

He would have the military enforce this new mandate.

That's right, boys and girls. Jim Cramer would have armed American soldiers stand guard over you while someone sticks a needle in your arm. And I guess, if you tried to cut and run, he'd have the soldier shoot you.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Now, why would Cramer make that quantum leap into the realm of totalitarianism?

Simple: he made that statement the day the news of the omicron variant dropped, which sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 900 points on the day.

Never mind that we've since learned that omicron is much milder than delta (4700 cases in the UK; 10 hospitalizations; 1 death). Never mind that the Dow since recovered (in just ten trading days) to more than the level where it was prior to the omicron news.

Never mind that, of the 43 US cases as of a couple of days ago, 79% of them were among vaccinated people, and 41% of those vaccinated people had gotten a booster. So much for your vaccine mandate, Cramer, you stupid sack of ...

But I digress. See, Cramer is tired of seeing covid news cause big market drops. So he thinks if we just vaccinate everybody, covid will go away, and the market will go up forever. Well, I've got a few hard life lessons for ya, Jimmy-boy:

1. Covid ain't going away. Don't like it? Blame Fauci and his Chinese buddies; they created it. The vaccines aren't working - witness the data points listed above, and there's plenty more where that came from. Plus, they wear off. Your plan would keep the army pretty busy, I guess, because we'd be vaccinating every couple of months. And people would still get infected. And there would still be new variants.
2. As long as we have a media in this country, we'll have those market reactions, because the media is selling fear, and the market is buying. Maybe if your buddies on the trading floor were a mite bit smarter, they wouldn't freak out every time the media hypes something like omicron. The rest of us seem to have figured out that all of this fearmongering from the media (and hacks like Fauci) is much ado about nothing. Why does the market have to poop its collective diaper every time CNN projectile-vomits up some new covid crisis?
3. If you were a little smarter with your (and your viewers') money, you could profit from those dips. I bought stocks after the omicron dip, and I'm looking pretty good today. I jump in and out of the market on covid news, buying when these freak-out headlines send the market reeling, and taking my profits when it recovers, so that I have some cash on hand to jump back in.

Now, Cramer has taken it even one step further, if you can believe it: he just tweeted that "the government has a right to force you to obey."

Think about that for a minute. If you've read the same Constitution and Bill of Rights that I read, do you recall seeing anything about the government having rights? Doesn't the government exist to protect and defend our rights? Are governments endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights?

No. Because you know who their Creator is?

WE ARE, Cramer, you blathering, mindless, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, hopeless, heartless, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed sack of monkey poop!!!

(Yeah, I borrowed heavily there from Chevy Chase's rant in "Christmas Vacation," edited for decency. 'Tis the season, ho ho ho, and all that.)

So yeah, I can only assume that Cramer has gone finally and fully MAD; so hell-bent on arguing for any policy that will put a jack under stock prices that he'd advocate for his children to be sent to the gulag, if he thought it would result in a 10% pop in the FANGs.

Hey Jim, if you haven't figured out by now that markets go down as well as up; and if you can't figure out how to advise your audience what to do when that happens; maybe it's time to admit that you're over your head. It was a good ride, you milked it for all you could, but you've exposed yourself. You're clearly out of your depth. Hand the reins over to somebody who gets the big picture, the whole picture, and retire.

Before it's too late, and the grey matter goes so soft, you have trouble remembering what you were talking about. We've seen that happen quite a bit lately, and it's rather sad.