The legal scholar who shaped Trump’s coronavirus response defends his theory
“Has anybody decided to shut down the economy for six months every year for flu season?”Prof Epstein was initially ridiculed for his March 16 prediction that only 500 Americans would die from Covid-19. When that was wildly wrong he switched to saying that he made a simple calculation mistake and meant to say 50K.
If I’m correct in what I said, the dominant model has about a one percent chance of being true, and my model, forget about the differences, is essentially you’re talking about normal flu season, 30,000 to 50,000 deaths, is 99 percent true. Has anybody decided to shut down the economy for six months every year for flu season?
He still maintains this incredibly wrong idea that Covid-19 is just another flu. Well, it's not, in that it's more infectious, more lethal and nobody has any immunity to it.
It's a pandemic on the order of 1919, or could be without adequate measures.
But despite his 99% certitude that he's right on March 31, one month later he's already wrong with the number of deaths already hitting 60K and counting. But this death toll was certainly mitigated a good deal by the lockdown and economic shutdowns which occurred, albeit belated and haphazard.
Epstein advocated against any lockdown and predicted 30K- 50K deaths while doing nothing special and pretending this was just another flu. Meaning he's not just wrong about 50K, but we would have almost certainly had 100's of thousands of deaths following his prescriptions, if not millions.In other words, his whole premise, model, prescription of doing nothing and everything else he thought about the disease was hugely wrong and would have been terribly disastrous.
Epstein was basically the Heritage Foundation point guy for Covid-19 and advocated doing next to nothing to combat it, which likely influenced much of the Right and quite probably Trump's early and continued downplaying.
Epstein was my constitutional law professor (if I started 2 or years later it would have been Obama!) and his primarily skill is making arguments, and then using bluster and certitude to support that. Ironically, he was well-known for his spittle and spraying when talking in an agitated fashion, his usual means of communicating. Basically everyone avoided sitting in the first three rows in his lecture halls. Sure hope he's been masked despite his belief it isn't necessary. Though likely he's like that WI election official telling everyone it's safe to vote while covered head to toe in full protection gear.
He's a libertarian who advocates a form of maximum utility which favors above all else plutocratic use of wealth. He's a hardcore ideological cretin, certain of his own brilliance.
But now you’ve got $2 billion of extra money. Where’s it coming from? You could print it. Well, if you always make money by printing it, we’d have hyperinflation. You can borrow it, but then somebody has to pay the interest. You could raise taxes, but that’s not going to happen.
I'm sure he means $2T. Interest is super-low, even negative. And why can't you raise taxes, except the the President and Senate are GOP controlled for now. W e cut taxes for no reason to give wealthy people $1T. In an emergency, why not take that back and more?
They’re trying to give you $2 trillion in stimulus. That’s not real production, that’s a wealth transfer. Wealth transfers always make you, in aggregate, poorer and not richer, in wealth. You just hope the short-term utility gains from the transfer will offset the long-term wealth effects, which is the basic theory you have to go on for these things to work, but you can only do it once.
More bluster and BS. I never understand why anyone thinks it's not good for poor people to have money. They tend to spend it quickly, out of need, which helps the economy qucikly. Wealthy people otoh can decide not to spend for quite some time during a crisis, or tend to spend on lavish stuff like gold-plated garbage cans and yachts. I'd much rather have millions spending money on food and clothing and electronics. Which of course makes their lives better.
Who knows or cares why he thinks you can only do it once.
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