Well that didn't take long: Pfizer brought down the cases in Israel, see, but then along came big bad Delta and cases went back up, see, meanwhile effectiveness fades after 5 months, see, so you need a booster of the same stuff that doesn't work, see

 AP Obama talks up the John Maynard C19 Booster Shot:

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-science-middle-east-public-health-coronavirus-vaccine-9ee6e5d46d29c08bf7610b39713b025e

Most adults had received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine by March, causing infection levels to plummet and allowing the government to lift nearly all coronavirus restrictions.

But in June, the highly infectious delta variant began to spread. After studying the matter, experts concluded that the vaccine remained effective against the virus, but that its efficacy waned roughly five months after the second shot.

In late July, Israel began distributing booster shoots to at-risk citizens, including those over 60. Within weeks, it expanded the campaign to the general population.

More than 3 million of Israel’s 9 million citizens have gotten a third dose of the Pfizer vaccine, according to the Health Ministry. ...
 

The Israeli Health Ministry said the FDA decision “gave validity to the third vaccine operation” underway in Israel, which “decided to act responsibly and quickly in order to treat growing infections.” It said statistics show the booster dose has “restored protection.”

Israel tonight ranks 8th worst in the world for C19 cases per million, and about 50th for deaths per million (in the top 25%). There were just over 50 in hospital in mid-June, but tonight there remain well over 1000 hospitalized for C19 after peaking at 1444 at the end of August.

 

Obviously John Maynard C19 vaccination hasn't really been tried in Oregon

 

LOL Mike "Mish" Shedlock goes full Keynes on C19 vaccines

Israel's high vaccination rate isn't high enough. The country jumped out ahead of all other countries on vaccines, and 78% of eligible Israelis over 12 years old are vaccinated.

More.

Mish is a long time popularizer of the Austrian School of Economics.

Israel approves John Maynard 3rd Vaccine Dose on July 29th as 60% full vaccination with two doses fails to prevent soaring cases, hospitalizations and deaths

Health Ministry gives green light for 3rd vaccine dose to seniors

 

Vaccinated Israelis account for 53% of new daily COVID cases

 

 

 

Coronavirus vaccines are just like Keynesianism

54% vaccination isn't enough just like spending 54% more to stimulate the economy isn't enough.

75% won't be enough. 100% won't be enough.

IT'S NEVER ENOUGH.

Both are religions. You can't disprove them because they've never really been tried.

Increase to deficit in fiscal 2018 under Keynesian Trump expected to add 0.6 points to GDP

Discussed here.

James Pethokoukis on China trade reminds me of my doctor pushing statin drugs

As everyone knows, statin drugs for cholesterol inhibit CoQ10 synthesis. So now the doctors push a CoQ10 supplement on you at the same time they push the cholesterol drug.

As George W. Bush famously said, "That doesn't make any sense."

So along comes James Pethokoukis confronted with the study showing how the opening to China trade destroyed many American jobs and lives.

His solution?

An expanded earned income credit, wage subsidies, and other government safety net initiatives to encourage work over retirement.

And relocation assistance to where the jobs are.

Never mind we don't want to move to China, India, Pakistan, Thailand or Indonesia.

Like Keynesians and MDs pushing drugs libertarians can never be proven wrong.

If Obama had wanted to "rescue" the economy in 2009, he should have ramped-up the wars as he's doing now

If Obama had really wanted to rescue the economy in 2009, he would have ramped up dramatically the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of putting them on the path to euthanasia. In this sense he was a very bad Keynesian who made FDR spin in his grave.

Of course, that assumes he is smart enough to understand Keynesianism, being raised as a doctrinaire Marxist who was content to bask lazily in the glow of his presidential victory while a bunch of Clinton re-treads did their mediocre best for him . . . recreating HillaryCare. A more sinister interpretation believes that the inattention to the economy was all on purpose, since suppressing the middle class is the main objective of revolutionary leftism faced with successful capitalism almost everywhere. Still others simply chalk it up to Obama's incompetence, just another example of the Affirmative Action Presidency at work.

But I digress.

The simple reason for the need to have ramped up the wars back in 2009 is that the radical stimulus spending called for by the likes of Paul Krugman (3x what Obama ended up spending), who ridiculed the smallness of Obama's stimulus spending plan in The New York Times here, cannot be accomplished quickly through any other department of the federal government except through what we used to call more accurately The War Department. 'There are only a limited number of “shovel-ready” public investment projects — that is, projects that can be started quickly enough to help the economy in the near term,' Krugman wrote at the time.

That's for sure.

Proof of this can now be seen in the GDP numbers in just the last year when ISIS all of a sudden became a threat on the administration's radar screen even though ISIS had been building in the open for years and the administration actually had been warned about it and knew about it.

Federal government consumption had been a net negative subtraction from GDP for each of the last three years, 2011-2013, totaling -0.28 points of GDP for each year on average, and 75% of that came on average from cutting spending on National Defense.

All of that changed on a dime in 3Q2014 when ISIS surged into Iraq. Consumption on national defense suddenly vaulted to +0.69 points of GDP from +0.12 points in 1Q and -0.07 points in 2Q, to the point where defense spending now represents fully 97% of the federal contribution to GDP in the third quarter of 2014, and over 13% of GDP overall. All the current big contributors to GDP come in lower than this except for exports, with which defense spending is tied. 

Only the military can spend large sums of government money quickly in this slow-moving, inertia-plagued bureaucratic state. Future presidents, take note: War is still the father of everything.

Crazy WaPo article portrays middle class as complete creature of government spending

Here, focusing on the anecdotal history of the middle class in Downey, California, where the removal of spending on the space program has hit particularly hard.

Just the sort of deliberate Keynesian propaganda you would expect from The Washington Post, where you will also find narry a word mentioned about how America's turnabout to free-trade fanaticism during the 1960s started the wholesale export abroad of good-paying middle class jobs, the dearth of which now is our present predicament.

The sickness of Republicanism in the present liberal era has been how ready it has been to participate in profiting from the export of these jobs, and by masking how the middle class was being gutted by providing transfer payments to them, for example, in the form of tax credits.

If there's every been a time for a middle class rebellion in America, this is it. Unfortunately, so many of the middle class are now in the lower class that, if a revolt comes, it will be studiously lied about by the profiteering elites of both parties as a dangerous, left-wing proletarian revolution.

There is a way to take the country back which is not violent, however, but it requires Americans to demand the representation which they do not enjoy. It requires a transformation of their vision in conformity with a constitution which never imagined there was anything sacrosanct about the number "435". 

Here come the Chinese industrial bankruptcies: Officials to respond with a mixture of capitalism and Keynes

The Chinese premier's comments are discussed here in The UK Guardian:

Premier Li Keqiang told lenders to China's private sector factories they should expect debt defaults as the world's second largest economy encounters "serious challenges" in the year ahead. ... Li's warning followed the failure of Shanghai Chaori Solar Energy to make a payment on a 1bn yuan (£118m) bond last week. The default was the first of its kind for China and widely seen as pointing to the end of 11th-hour government bailouts for troubled enterprises. Some analysts said the decision to let some indebted firms collapse was a sign the authorities had learned from the Japanese boom and bust experience of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Tokyo was plunged into two "lost" decades of stagnation after it prevented zombie companies from declaring bankruptcy – even blocking petitions from bondholders in the courts - when a property collapse exposed debts many times the value of their businesses.

------------------------------------------

If only we could get Americans to practice some similar capitalism by letting companies and banks fail instead of bailing them out.

China can afford the Keynesian stimulus, however, unlike the US. They've got the savings Keynes prescribed, in the form of massive foreign reserves.

Too bad America has no such savings.

Rush Limbaugh: The Big Boob On The Right

It's Monday and you know what that means. If Rush Limbaugh is talking about numbers on a Monday he's going to slaughter them.

I counted two major instances today of getting it totally backwards.

The first, on Janet Yellen, is totally missing from the transcripts. He had said she will completely reverse the Bernanke policy and tighten when everyone knows she'll do no such thing. Someone must have called him to correct him, and then he reversed what he had said previously, and corrected it (here) to avoid looking like the total boob that he is:

I was misinformed by a self-professed market expert.  Anyway, my bad.  I got 'em reversed.  That's why the market's doing well today. It is because the priming of the stock market pump is scheduled to continue unabated if this Yellen woman ends up being the chairman of the Fed.  Now, I'll give you the stats on all this quantitative easing. It's basically $85 billion a month.  What it is, is they're not really printing the money.

In other words, the man with the golden EIB microphone doesn't have the brains to discern the one position from the other, nor is any real knowledge about the subject he may possess anything but completely derivative. He relies on what other people whom he trusts tell him, and can't reason it out for himself, not even by checking the stock market before he goes on the air. And for that reason what he says is no good to his audience. He's just quoting an authority figure. But what is really shameful is that he simply blamed his error on someone else when the privilege of holding a microphone going straight into the ears of millions should be viewed by him as a great responsibility which rests on him, not on his sources. Instead he treats his public position, and his hearers, with contempt by blaming someone else.

The second major blunder was that Rush stated that the US created $18 trillion out of thin air during the financial crisis, when that figure is the estimate for global borrowing, and certainly is not money printing:

The overall amount of priming that the federal government and the Federal Reserve along with several other central banks all over the world have done, the amount of money that they put in to the global economy... What was it I heard? It's $18 trillion, and that's just the US number. That's what it is. It's $18 trillion all told for $1 trillion worth of growth.  So in order to get $1 trillion of economic expansion in the past five years, the Fed has spent $18 trillion.  It's been classic Keynesian economics. ...

The bottom line was, folks, that $18 trillion was created out of thin air -- $18 trillion.  I mean, this doesn't even get lopped on to the national debt because this is not money authorized by the federal budget by US Congress.  This is just the Federal Reserve just decided to print money wherever they wanted and send it wherever they wanted, all ostensibly to save the world economy.  All it did was bail out the best and the brightest from the mistakes that they had made. 

Then during a break another panicked phone call comes in from the trusted source and Rush again quickly corrects himself, putting the $18 trillion figure on the global effort, not on the US alone, and designating it as "borrowed" not "printed":

It's $18 trillion. The G7 nations borrowed $18 trillion since the financial crisis and have only $1 trillion in economic growth to show for it.  That's it.  That's what it's bought us. There was $18 trillion borrowed, and a lot of it's gonna be forgiven and not have to be paid back.  By the way, if you want to know what happens to that money, say hello to tax increases down the line.

I'm sure by this time the rubes are completely confused by their hero. There's no point in explaining any of this to Rush because he gets this stuff wrong no matter how many times it is explained to him, which just shows he has no desire to learn it or simply lacks the mental equipment.

In which case he ought to just shut up about it. Spreading falsehoods is bad for the country and bad for the cause. 

Kudlow Is Right That Obama's Glorious Immediate Post-War Never Existed, But Completely Misses The Spending Cut Angle

Larry Kudlow, here:

[S]peaking in Galesburg, Ill., this summer, Obama served up a convenient historical fairy tale: "In the period after world War II," he said, "a growing middle class was the engine of our prosperity." Presumably he was thinking of a time when high taxes on the rich and industrial-union rule had the middle class soaring. The trouble is, Obama's history is wrong.

--------------------------------

Arguably, government spending cuts were the engine of post-war prosperity.

While Truman's record is second only to JFK/LBJ for real GDP growth in the post-war period, it occurred under special circumstances of extraordinarily deep government spending CUTS, which is little appreciated today when politicians and Keynesian and monetarist economists stress the importance of government spending for GDP. The truly remarkable thing under Truman is how the economy soared as spending decreased by TWO THIRDS from 1945 to 1947, as Arnold Kling reminded us here last year. Funny how Kudlow doesn't mention this. I guess they don't teach that at Princeton.

Under Truman's successor Eisenhower, real GDP growth slowed dramatically because of onerous levels of taxation maintained primarily to retire the war debts, but Eisenhower spent almost as frugally as Truman at the same time, making them the two best presidents we've had when it comes to small increases in the US public debt. That said, only the two Bush presidents and Obama have turned in poorer GDP performances than IKE. Funny also how Kudlow mentions only the one Bush. He leaves out the other one. You know, the "read my lips . . . no new taxes" Bush who ended up raising taxes.

Interestingly enough for US public debt growth, JFK/LBJ come in right behind Truman and Eisenhower while introducing the tax cuts which might have made Eisenhower's GDP record better than it was. Despite the guns and butter era under LBJ, the presidents occupying The White House between 1945 and 1968 were the most fiscally responsible we've had in the post-war, and it was a dramatic resetting of the baseline for spending LOWER under Truman which was the foundation of that period's economic growth.

The Immorality Of Keynesianism Explained In A Thought Experiment

From the conclusion of Jeffrey Dorfman for Forbes, here:

"Actions by private individuals that are not beneficial to society do not suddenly become so when the government does them. Ask yourself if government policies [of printing money and income redistribution from the rich to the poor through the tax code] would be legal and have a positive effect if a private citizen did the same thing [by counterfeiting money and robbing banks]. If the answer is no, using government to accomplish the same aims will not change the policy into a good one."

QE Is For The Banks, Nothing Else

Quantitative easing is for the banks and nothing else, despite the long-standing professorial deflections to the contrary by Ben Bernanke.

Oh, he can say it's to help housing recover, or employment, or whatever else happens to be languishing depending on the exigencies of the moment. But God forbid Ben should say what everyone ought to have understood from the beginning, that there's a huge pile of non-performing loans on the banks' books. Ben's various iterations of QE have kept him busy systematically transfering to the books of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States significant tranches of those bad loans, and it won't be until those transfers end decisively that you can be sure that the banks are finally in the clear.

Meanwhile, have you considered that when Keynes said markets can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent that Keynes never imagined how un-free markets were to become in the Western world? Five years out from the troubles of 2008, that the purchases of MBS continue apace should at once frighten everyone and galvanize support to reform the banking system and prioritize the commitment of its central bank to the integrity of the US dollar.

The voices warning us are out there. You just won't hear them on your television, which you should turn off at a minimum, and preferably execute loudly in your backyard with a shotgun, or drop on your driveway from a second story window. Please send film.

Consider this from Manuel Hinds, former finance minister of El Salvador and 2010 winner of the Hayek Prize, here:

"[H]igher interest rates would burst the bubbles in asset prices that monetary printing has created, bringing to the surface the losses that banks have accumulated by years of lending to unsustainable activities. Thus, the Fed is between a rock and a hard place. If it does not increase the rates of interest, excess demand will explode leading to high inflation, large current account deficits or both. If it increases interest rates, the activities that are profitable only with very low interest rates will collapse, including the equity and commodity markets. This would expose the banks to very large losses, which would trigger a serious crisis because the banks have accumulated bad assets for over a decade now and have cleansed them only partially because they trust that the government will save them without having to take painful write-offs. As a snowball going down a slope, the problem gets worse with time. ... The coming breakdown is likely to be much worse than that of 2008."

Or this from Joseph Calhoun of Alhambra Investment Partners, here, who doesn't consider that QE is so negative for present GDP growth because it is "financing" past growth now ensconced as bad debt:

"There are any number of reasons why QE might be negatively impacting growth, from high oil prices to the diversion of capital to speculative purposes to its effects through exchange rates on other countries with which we trade. I do not claim to know the full extent of the effects of QE but most importantly, neither does Ben Bernanke. That being the case and considering the evidence to date, why does Bernanke persist in pursuing the policy? Is there some other reason for the policy other than the stated one of spurring economic growth? If so, Bernanke sure isn't telling anyone what it is."

Or this from the ever-wise John Hussman, here:

"Meanwhile, with a monetary base of $3.27 trillion and an estimated duration of at least 7 years on present Fed holdings, the recent 100 basis point move in bond yields has created a loss of over $200 billion for the Fed. The Fed reports capital of only $55 billion on its consolidated balance sheet. but then, just like major banks, the Fed does not mark its assets to market. Most likely, the Fed is now technically insolvent. Moreover, the Fed is levered more than 59-to-1 even against its stated capital. The benefits of QE seem vastly overpriced and excessively trusted, particularly in an environment where the internal debate even within the Fed is becoming more pointed. Two members already want the Fed to taper in order “to prevent the potential negative consequences of the program from exceeding its anticipated benefits.” ... We don’t observe any material economic impact from quantitative easing, and continue to believe that the key event in the recent credit crisis was the FASB move to abandon the requirement for mark-to-market accounting among financial institutions (the Fed’s zero interest policy has merely allowed banks to recapitalize themselves on the backs of savers and the elderly on fixed incomes)."

QE is financial repression of the American taxpayer for the benefit of institutions which should be wound down and broken up. How long are you going to put up with it? Can you last another five years?

Forbes Magazine Calls Keynes A Dead White European Male

Some of us would beg to differ.

All kidding aside, Jerry Bowyer makes some great points about John Maynard Keynes, pederast, misogynist, anti-Puritan immoralist and devotee of the cult of the higher sodomy:

"Keynes was a man who exhibited what most of us would see as an almost pathological preference for exclusively male intellectual and sexual companionship specifically because of the great admiration for the male mind and disdain for the female one, who disapproved of the presence of women in his economics classes, who found women’s thinking patterns repugnant and who associated savings with feminine reticence. Is it really such an unforgiveable sin to take these facts and to surmise that his odd sexual views might be related to his odd economic views? Is it really right that anyone who suggests that they are connected should be drummed out of polite society?"

Much more here.

Aren't Keynesianism and Homosexuality Equally Forms Of Psychological Rebellion?

"Despite his Cambridge education, aristocratic manner and wealth, Keynes was also an outsider in his own way. He was an aesthete who enjoyed describing himself as an 'immoralist,' a leading member of that sparkling circle of British intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury group that defied Victorian mores in both art and love. Keynes was married but was also homosexual, a fact that automatically put him in defiance of social convention.

"Keynes's rebellion against economic orthodoxy, as he explained himself, was not derived from the political discontents of socialism and class conflict. It was based on a psychological insight: capitalism was ripe for unprecedented abundance, universally distributed, if only human society could get beyond the stern dogma of the Protestant ethic, the Calvinist ethos that insisted self-denial and suffering were good and necessary for the human spirit. Save for the future, the Calvinist creed taught, and you will be rewarded in the long run and certainly in heaven. 'In the long run,' Keynes observed, 'we are all dead.' Enjoy the here and now, he insisted. Pleasure is good. Suffering is mostly unnecessary."

-- William Greider, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (New York: Touchstone, 1989), p. 318.

David Stockman Hates Everything About America, Except Cash

Just like, you guessed it, The New York Times!

He hates:

Crony capitalism, Keynesianism, imperialism, stimulus, social insurance, incumbency, the constitution, free elections, lobbying, deficit spending, the Fed's discount window, the FDIC, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, quantitative easing, interest rate repression, and currencies in a race to the bottom.

But honestly, all he really hates are the new stock market highs.

"When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is."

Wah. Wah. Wah.

Read it all here.

Truman Cut Spending Big Time In 1945. The Economy Boomed.

Speaker John Boehner, wake up.

Arnold Kling, here:

When World War II ended in 1945, President Harry Truman faced a problem. Public opinion called for a rapid demobilization that would bring the boys home as soon as possible. But the Keynesians who were gaining prominence in the economics profession warned that a rapid decline in government spending and the size of the public work force would produce, in the late economist Paul Samuelson’s words, “the greatest period of unemployment and dislocation which any economy has ever faced.”

Thankfully, Truman ignored the Keynesians. Government spending plummeted by nearly two-thirds between 1945 and 1947, from $93 billion to $36.3 billion in nominal terms. If we used the “multiplier” of 1.5 for government spending that is favored by Obama administration economists, that $63.7 billion plunge should have caused GDP to fall by $95 billion, a 40 percent economic decline. In reality, GDP increased almost 10 percent during that period, from $223 billion in 1945 to $244.1 billion in 1947. This is a rare precedent of a large drop in government spending, so its economic consequences are important to understand.

Hey John Tamny! Did The Electorate Get It Right Last Night?

The invisible hand of the electorate and the invisible hand of capitalism cannot be falsified by anything, because they are, well, invisible, here:

Put plainly, Wanniski argued that the electorate always gets things right, or in his words:

“…the electorate as a whole is wiser than any individual member in understanding its interests, it is wiser than any economist or group of economists.”

No doubt many readers are scratching their heads in response to the above, but as Wanniski put it to the late William F. Buckley (paraphrase), “You’re likely smarter than every individual inside a packed football stadium, but collectively those individuals are smarter than you are.” The wisdom of crowds….

We may not have always liked the end result, but the electorate has always been right. ...

The electorate unhappily gave [George W. Bush] another shot; one it presumably came to regret. ...

Obama ... [i]s as a result presiding over a sick economy that should be strong, and as the electorate dislikes failures, Obama’s days in the White House are numbered. ...

The electorate is dying to fire Obama, history says it will given its aversion to failures, yet Romney’s timidity with regard to policies actually meant to grow the economy point to a close win for Romney when it should be a rout. Wanniski’s electoral model says so.

The libertarians are as bat-shit crazy as the Keynesians.

Monetarist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Eats Keynes For Dinner, Austrians For Dessert

Frustratingly inconclusive and full of explanatory power at the same time, here:

Monetarists blame the ECB and the Fed for keeping money too tight in early to mid 2008, pushing a fragile credit system over the edge. They blame “pro-cyclical” regulators for aborting recovery ever since by forcing banks to raise asset ratios too fast. They are right on both counts.

Yet the `Austrian School’ is surely right as well to argue that a rise in debt ratios across the rich world from 167pc of GDP to 314pc in just thirty years was bound to end badly. There comes a point when extra debt draws down prosperity from the future. The future arrived in 2008.