Grieving families last night said deaths had been wrongly certified as Covid-19.
Demanding an inquiry, top medical experts and MPs also insisted they were ‘certain’ that too many fatalities were being blamed on the virus.
One funeral director said it was ‘a national scandal’. The claims are part of a Daily Mail investigation that raises serious questions over the spiralling death toll.
An example. Following his grotesque ‘take-down’ of Karol Sikora, Jones turns his vitriol on Sunetra Gupta, who he introduces as having been remarkable this year for “her sheer wrongness”. In general, during this video, Jones’s language is that of the schoolyard – full of hyperbole and poor in vocabulary.
To prove Gupta’s “sheer wrongness”, Jones reveals that, contrary to her claims, early on in the first lockdown, that the Sars-CoV-2 virus was already on the wane, by the end of the year “one in every 554 Britons had been killed by the pandemic”. So, either Gupta must admit her “sheer wrongness” or she must deny that “one in every 554 Britons had been killed”.
Of course, Sunetra Gupta would wish to do neither. The number of those who died in 2020 with ‘Covid’ mentioned on their death certificate may indeed translate as one in every 554 Britons – if it does, then Gupta would surely admit this. But does this mean that she admits that “one in every 554 Britons have been killed by the pandemic”?
One of Gupta’s repeated insights throughout 2020 has been that no number is so reliable as the overall mortality number. How many Britons died in 2020? And in 2019, in 2015, in 2008? 2020’s overall mortality, when adjusted for age profile, is more or less equivalent to that of 2015, slightly lower than that of 2008, and only the ninth highest of all of the years since the turn of the millennium.
… is from page 26 of Thomas Sowell’s slim yet significant 1981 volume, Markets and Minorities (original emphasis):
Economics takes as axiomatic the proposition that more of anything is demanded at a low price than at a high price. Discrimination is no exception. A pair of twins might be equally racist, but, if one was an employer of violinists and the other an employer of basketball players they would face very different costs of excluding blacks. Their subjective prejudices might be identical, but economics would predict that the differing costs would produce different amounts of overt discrimination….
Looked at another way, there are costs to the discriminator, as well as to the victim, and the magnitude of those costs affects the extent to which subjective prejudices produce overt discrimination. Foregone opportunities to make money – as employer, landlord, seller, lender, etc. – put a price on discrimination. Economic competition means that the less discriminatory transactors acquire a competitive advantage, forcing others either to reduce their discrimination or to risk losing profits, perhaps even being forced out of business.
I first read Sowell’s Markets and Minorities in 1981, the year it was published. I just re-read it. I’d forgotten how deep, subtle, and excellent is the economic analysis that runs through this slim but profoundly important work. This book is written with Sowell’s signature clarity, yet also displays, on nearly every one of its 136 pages, both his sharp and rare talent as an economic theorist, and his remarkable ability to use that theory to make better sense of reality.
The real problem is that workers are not so much underpaid as they are under-skilled. And the real task is to help those people become skilled. Congress cannot do this simply by declaring that as of such-and-such a date, everybody’s productive output is now worth $7.25 per hour. This makes about as much sense, and does just about as much harm, as doctors “curing” patients simply by declaring that they are cured.
[Brian] Riedl, a student of ancient (or so it suddenly seems) U.S. fiscal history, remembers that the 2009 stimulus included a $25 addition to weekly unemployment checks. In 2020, Democrats wanted $600 bonuses, and Republicans were considered skinflints because they favored only $300 — 12 times the 2009 sum. During the Great Recession, the typical family of four (a family with income below the $150,000 threshold where the phaseout begins) received tax rebates of $2,600 ($1,800 in 2008 and $800 in 2009). If legislation the Biden administration wants and the House of Representatives will almost certainly pass becomes law, a typical family of four will have received $11,400 in 12 months. In previous deep recessions, state and local governments received up to $200 billion in federal aid. Today Democrats want to add $350 billion to the $360 billion approved last year.
Nearly half of states rolled in more tax revenue in calendar year 2020 than 2019, according to the Reason Foundation. On average, state revenues were a mere 0.01% lower across the board. Seventeen state treasurers recently moaned to Congress that “tax revenues have plummeted,” but collectively they’ve seen a 1.8% increase year-over-year, the Kansas Policy Institute reports.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently warned of a $15 billion budget deficit and threatened to raise New York’s top income tax rate to 14.7%—the nation’s highest—though New York’s revenues were down a mere 1.5% from 2019. He refuses to renegotiate union contracts or cut spending.
What was new this week was Democrats’ brazenness: their shocking and open targeting of news organizations. The left has long worked to shut down speech with which it disagrees, but officials in the past did it with more subterfuge. It came via legislation for “campaign finance reform,” or via their successful effort to push the IRS to target conservative nonprofits; or via Sen. Dick Durbin’s campaign to pressure companies out of funding free-market nonprofits. Liberal activists have honed intimidation campaigns, threatening boycotts and other actions against companies that advertise on disfavored platforms or donate to right-leaning groups.
The most important feature is the proposed change to the legal standard by which regulators approve business deals. It would allow the government to stop any deal that creates an “appreciable risk of materially lessening competition,” and it also defines exclusionary behavior as, “conduct that materially disadvantages one or more actual or potential competitors.”
These may sound like simple, semantic tweaks, but – much like some of the other policy ideas currently circulating – they would upend decades of settled law and create a sea change in U.S. antitrust enforcement. This change could undermine business dynamism, innovation and investment in ways that inhibit the global competitiveness of U.S. businesses.
Critics of merger and acquisition (M&A) activity by large tech firms include not only Sen. Klobuchar but also Republicans such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). Hawley recent offered an amendment to a budget bill that would preemptively prohibit mergers and acquisitions by dominant online firms. Klobuchar and Hawley believe that M&A skews the market in favor of today’s largest firms, entrenching their market power and discouraging innovation.
Economics takes as axiomatic the proposition that more of anything is demanded at a low price than at a high price. Discrimination is no exception. A pair of twins might be equally racist, but, if one was an employer of violinists and the other an employer of basketball players they would face very different costs of excluding blacks. Their subjective prejudices might be identical, but economics would predict that the differing costs would produce different amounts of overt discrimination….
The real problem is that workers are not so much underpaid as they are under-skilled. And the real task is to help those people become skilled. Congress cannot do this simply by declaring that as of such-and-such a date, everybody’s productive output is now worth $7.25 per hour. This makes about as much sense, and does just about as much harm, as doctors “curing” patients simply by declaring that they are cured.