Following Up: A Lippmann Gap Still Could be a Big Threat to Biden’s Foreign Policy

Tags

allies, America First, Biden, China, defense budget, Donald Trump, Following Up, Lippmann Gap, Russia, Theodore Roosevelt

Late last month, I worried here that President Biden could open up a dangerous “Lippmann Gap” in U.S. foreign and national security policy by proposing a defense budget incapable of supporting his expansive ambitions. Yesterday, the administration came out with its first official budget request, and although it lacks the detail to justify firm conclusions, I’m still worried.

The nub of the problem is this: The President has repeatedly announced his intention to reverse course from his predecessor’s America First strategy and return U.S. foreign policy to its decades-long pre-Trump sweeping global activism and engagement. And since Mr. Biden’s “America is back” declarations clearly entail at the least a determination to fill an allegedly vital gap left by Donald Trump, and probably to pursue an even more expansive agenda, logic and common sense alone dictate that he request much more defense spending than at present.

It’s true that Pentagon budget and the military forces it supports are by no means the only tools available to the nation to carry out its international aims. It’s also true that defense spending can be made more effective without boosting overall spending levels by spending existing funds more efficiently and wisely. The latter’s potential won’t start to be revealed until the more detailed budget request is made later this year.

But for now, what is known is that Mr. Biden will ask for some 1.6 percent more for the Defense Department proper for the coming budget year (fiscal 2022) than the resources allotted to the Pentagon during the Trump administration’s final year (fiscal 2021). When adding in national security funds not provided to the Department itself (mainly for maintaining the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile – which is handled by the Energy Department), the Biden increase is also about two percent over the funding appropriated during the final Trump year.  (This figure is calculated from here and here.)

Knowledgeable observers of defense spending may note that these Biden fiscal 2022 requests are considerably bigger than the Trump fiscal 2021 requests. These sought just 0.1 percent more for the Pentagon itself than was spent in 2020, and 0.34 percent more for that larger national security budget including the non-Pentagon money. (These figures are found here and calculated from here and here.) 

But Mr. Biden charged that the Trump national security agenda was sorely inadequate. So it’s natural that he’d want more military spending than his predecessor. What’s noteworthy, however, is that the Biden request isn’t that much more. In fact, if inflation takes its expected course this year, this latest military spending proposal will leave the Defense Department and the other agencies responsible for national security with less money when adjusting for rising prices than they spent last year.

Moreover, even in terms of “top-line” spending figures, this Biden request is hardly the last word. The Democratic Congress is practically certain to make further cuts.

Again, wiser spending could fill some of this gap. But what the Biden administration has said about its priorities isn’t all that encouraging, either. Just one example (but a big one): The administration stated yesterday that its military spending request “prioritizes the need to counter the threat from China as the [Defense] Department’s top challenge. The Department would also seek to deter destabilizing behavior by Russia.”

It’s still possible, as suggested above, that moving funds into U.S. China- and Russia-related accounts from lower priority accounts could accomplish these aims even though overall outlays decline in real terms. But in the very next sentence, we learn that the administration isn’t confident that these moves would be the answer (assuming they’re even being contemplated). For it claims that

“Leveraging the Pacific Deterrence Initiative and working together with allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, DOD [the Defense Department] would ensure that the United States builds the concepts, capabilities, and posture necessary to meet these challenges.”

That is, help from allied countries supposedly will be crucial to countering the Chinese and Russian threats. But not only have these countries skimped on their own defense for decades. For the time being, the President has decided not to press them overly hard to share more of the defense burden (as documented in my original “Lippmann Gap” post).

To repeat: I’m not calling for more U.S. military spending. In fact, I’d like to see Pentagon budgets shrink. But this position reflects my judgment that the nation can be adequately safe and sound by doing less in the international sphere. As long as President Biden wants to do more – not only than me, but also than Donald Trump – the only responsible policy would be to boost military spending. Anything else amounts to inverting former President Theodore Roosevelt’s approach of speaking softly and carrying a big stick – which history teaches never, ever ends well.

Following Up: Biden’s Cave-In on Ukraine, Russia, and Germany and Why It Matters

Tags

Adam Schiff, alliances, allies, America First, Angela Merkel, Democrats, Donald Trump, energy, Eric Swalwell, Following Up, Germany, impeachment, NATO, natural gas, Nord Stream 2, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Russia, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin

Earlier this month, I wrote about the weirdness of the Biden administration’s seemingly blasé attitude toward Ukraine’s security, given the President’s long record of support (including military aid) for its independence from an expansionist Russia, and especially given the determination of the entire Democratic party to impeach Donald Trump largely because his allegedly blasé attitude toward Ukraine security treasonously endangered America’s own security.

Today I can report that the situation has grown even weirder – and in the process, raised major questions about the administration’s view of smooth alliance relations as a top foreign policy priority, and about its adults-in-the-room reputation itself for foreign policy competence itself.

As explained in my March 17 post, the issue at hand is the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, That’s a natural gas transport project that the Trump administration opposed because it threatened to, among other problems, increase Europe’s energy dependence on Vladimir Putin’s Russia, provide this aggressive autocrat with a big new source of revenue and therefore of funds for his military, and ace Ukraine itself out of natural gas earnings, thereby weakening its economy and ultimately its ability to defend itself.

So why is Nord Stream 2 being built? Two main reasons. First, lots of big German (and other European) companies have been involved in its financing and nearly finished construction, and will profit from its operation. (See here and here for good summaries.) Further, the German government is obliged to cover the multi-billion dollar losses that would result from cancellation. Second, Chancellor Angela Merkel;s government views the project as a means of keeping Germany, and Europe in general, economically engaged, influential, and therefore at peace with Russia.

The Germans also say they need the new gas because of its plans to de-nuclearize and de-carbonize its economy. Berlin also has the option of filling the looming energy supply gap by purchasing more gas from the United States than at present.  But Germany seems more impressed by the fact that higher transport costs make the U.S. product more expensive than Moscow’s.

You’d think, therefore, that Germany would be facing heavy pressure to cancel the pipeline from the Biden administration and especially from the impeachment enthusiasts in the Democrats’ Congressional ranks – like California’s Adam Schiff, the lead House manager for the first Trump impeachment trial, who described Ukraine’s sovereignty and safety as nothing less than a vital interest of the United States.

Not a peep about Nord Stream has been heard from Schiff or from other Trump impeachment hard-liners, like California Democratic Congress Member Eric Swalwell – confirming suspicions that their main concerns all along during both the Trump-Russia collusion and impeachment dramas were somehow ousting Trump for purely partisan or possibly simply deranged reasons, not safeguarding America’s security or democracy.

But Mr. Biden’s stance is more puzzling and disturbing – the latter since Presidents matter so much more than individual legislators. As my earlier post noted, his administration has seemed more relaxed about Nord Stream even though it, too, has claimed to harbor major concerns about Ukraine’s fate.

In fact, as recently as a few days ago, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken declared that “President (Joe) Biden has been very clear, he believes the pipeline is a bad idea, bad for Europe, bad for the United States, ultimately it is in contradiction to the EU’s own security goals, It has the potential to undermine the interests of Ukraine, Poland and a number of close partners and allies.”

Yet just this morning, when asked whether Washington could (and by extension, actually would) do anything to stop Nord Stream 2, Blinken “Well, ultimately that is up to those who are trying to build the pipeline and complete it. We just wanted to make sure that our … opposition to the pipeline was well understood.”

In other words, “La de dah.”

Such quick and complete turnabouts by America’s top diplomat are disturbing in and of themselves, but the real problems with the Biden Nord Stream stance go far beyond the impotence claimed (and therefore advertised) by Blinken.

After all, avoiding a showdown with Germany on the pipeline would be understandable and even smart if Mr. Biden really didn’t view Ukraine’s security, and/or Russia’s aims and power, as terribly important in the first place, or if (as I offered as a possibility in my previous post), this decision reflected some broader administration conclusion that relations with Russia should be improved in order to outflank the stronger and more dangerous Chinese.

But not only is the President a strong believer in deterring Russian designs on Europe. He recently seemed to go out of his way to antagonize Putin by calling him a “killer.”

So the most reasonable conclusion to draw is that, at least for now, Mr. Biden is so determined to keep America’s wealthiest European ally happy that he’s given it a veto on a matter he himself has deemed a major U.S. interest. Worse, he seems indifferent to Trump’s (correct) complaint that Germany evidently has no problem with enriching Moscow while continuing to rely on the U.S. military to defend it from Russia. This doesn’t necessarily leave the President guilty of carrying out an “America Last” foreign policy. But it makes you wonder how far he’ll drift from from putting America First.

Following Up: Two Hopeful Signs from Trump’s CPAC Speech

Tags

Capitol riots, Conservative Political Action Conference, Conservative Populism, CPAC, Donald Trump, election 2020, election integrity, Following Up, Jeff Sessions, Kevin McCarthy, Populism, voter ID

He came, he spoke, and he left the audience happy. Not that I view Donald Trump as a Caesar-esque figure, but a paraphrase of that Caesar-esque remark seems to describe well the former President’s speech and its reception yesterday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Two aspects of the speech – the former President’s longest public utterance since his pre-Capitol riot rally speech – made yours truly especially happy. First, he spent a fair amount of time defining what he (and many others, including me) called “Trumpism.” And second, his inevitable treatment of the election 2020 integrity issue was nearly as forward looking, and therefore constructively focused on how last fall’s unmistakable voting and vote-counting irregularities can be minimized from now on, as it was backward looking, and therefore divisively focused on claims of an outright political steal (which, as I’ve previously said, haven’t struck me as results-altering).

Trump’s attention to a Trumpist perspective counts mainly because at least in principle it conveys the idea that he’s interested in consolidating and strengthening his legacy by promoting a set of programs and policies, and not simply by mounting a comeback of his own and emphasizing personal loyalty. In other words, possibly along with not explicitly declaring even an interest in running for reelection in 2024, the former President has opened the door to the possibility of Trumpism without Trump – that is, the party’s nomination of a presidential candidate who’s with him on the issues but lacks his troubling personality traits.

Of course, talking this talk doesn’t mean that Trump will walk this walk. In this respect, I can’t help but recall the way he excommunicated from Trumpworld his first Attorney General and the former Senator from Alabama Jeff Sessions, who was a Trumpy (and in my view admirably serious) conservative populist way before Trumpy was cool, and in fact became the first sitting Senator to endorse his 2016 White House bid.

It’s true that Sessions was villified – and essentially denied a return to the Senate last year when Trump endorsed his much less ideologically Trumpian opponent in the state’s Republican primary – because he recused himself from overseeing the Justice Department’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia.

But it’s also possible that the so-called “Russia-Gate” drama was (understandably, given its disgracefully partisan roots and its damage to his early presidency) a one-off event in Trump’s mind. In this vein, perhaps Trump’s continued cordial relations with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy of California, who blamed him in part for the Capitol Riot, points to a more tolerant Trump going forward.

As for election integrity, don’t overlook the fact that Trump led off by demanding voter identification requirements. First, polls show it’s incredibly popular among the public, enjoying, for example, 76 percent approval in this 2018 Pew Research Center survey. In addition, however, there’s reason to think that Democrats might find it in their interests, too.

How come? Because of evidence that stronger ID requirements have actually spurred Democratic and non-white voter turnout – two paramount and related objectives of the party. Apparently, these rules so incense Democrats that they react both by voting in greater numbers, and by doubling down on efforts to register non-whites.

But regardless of motives, the outcomes should be applauded across the political spectrum. For they mean not simply that more votes are cast, and that voting becomes easier. After all, those shouldn’t goals for democracies that want to remain or become healthy. Instead, the combination of voter ID requirements and more registered voters would mean that voting by those who are eligible is maximized. Who could legitimately object?

So in theory, the election integrity portion of the Trump CPAC speech could help inspire at least a first needed election reform step that even the most extreme partisans would favor. For in states that tighten ID requirements, these new standards would logically set off a heated voter registration competition that would both increase turnout and greatly boost the odds of all ballots cast being valid ballots. That sounds like a win both for election integrity and for a more inclusive political system. And the faster the progress made by this reform campaign in state legislators, the likelier that America’s next presidential election will help bring the nation together rather than drive it further apart.

Following Up: A New Warning on U.S. Allies’ Reliability

Tags

alliances, allies, Asia, Asia-Pacific, Biden, China, deterrence, Following Up, Indo-Pacific, infotech, multilateralism, national security, Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, semiconductors, Sheena Greitens, Taiwan, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, tech, TSMC, Xi JInPing, Zack Cooper

Well isn’t this a kick in the pants for the Biden administration – and by extension for all Americans?. No sooner did the President give a major speech to U.S. allies on his plans to return them to the center of American foreign policy-making because they’ll be such crucial assets in vital efforts to achieve essential goals like coping with China’s rise, than a new study comes out reporting that these hopes could be in vain. 

Specifically, the United States’ allies in Asia could well stay on the sidelines in what’s arguably become the most important potential showdown with China of all: ensuring Taiwan’s independence.

As known by RealityChek regulars, keeping Taiwan free of Beijing’s control has become so pressing for two reasons. First, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping is sounding and acting more determined than ever to “reunify” what he and his predecessors have regarded as a breakaway province by whatever means necessary – including using force. And second, a Taiwanese firm, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC), has recently grabbed the global lead in actually producing (as opposed to designing) the world’s most advanced semiconductors. If China manages to control TSMC’s capabilities, it could use them to build the electronic devices and defense systems that would secure substantial technological and military superiority over the United States.

President Biden is of course correct in arguing that the more allies the United States can mobilize, the easier it will be to handle China’s increased aggression and economic predation. But that claim inevitably assumes that these allies will actually join with America to push back against China, and especially that Washington can count on their assistance if heaven forbid the missiles and bullets start flying.

And this assumption is exactly what’s questioned in a paper recently published by the Washington, D.C.-based Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. According to authors Zack Cooper and Sheena Greitens, there’s not a single country in the Asia-Pacific (or, as it’s now officially called by the U.S. government, the Indo-Pacific) region that’s sure to stand shoulder to shoulder with American forces as they seek to actually repel either a Chinese attack on Taiwan, or an effort by Beijing to turn the island into a satellite through coercive means short of full invasion, like limited military strikes, cyber-attacks, or an embargo.

In fact, write Cooper and Greitens, these allies not only would likely balk at sending their own ships, plans, and troops to buttress American forces. To varying degrees, they’d be reluctant to allow the United States the kind of access to their military bases needed to prevail over China in any of the above contingencies.

The authors believe that sufficient allied cooperation can be generated if the United States begins (ASAP!) “a series of detailed discussions with key allies about their roles in different contingency scenarios involving China and Taiwan (and for some, the South China Sea).” That advice sounds fine as far as it goes.

But the need in the first place for “detailed discussions” on such dangerous and perhaps rapidly growing threats – which would leave all countries in the region far less prosperous and prosperous if not deterred or beaten back – makes appallingly clear just how dysfunctional these alliance relationships have become. Moreover, you can be sure that the longer and more detailed these discussions become, the more allied doubts they’ll reflect, and the less likely they’ll be to produce the kind of certainty when push comes to shove that the United States or Taiwan will need.

I don’t view Cooper and Greitens analysis as gospel. But in my experience, the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center has done serious work on Asian security issues in the past, and the larger project of which this essay is a part has had support from sponsors across the political spectrum. So its warning is worth taking seriously, and if its arguments are on target, the problem they describe will resist easy solution – and not just because truly worthwhile agreements with the allies could take years to negotiate, but because the U.S.-based semiconductor production capacity needed to reduce Taiwan’s importance will take just as long to create.

Luckily, as indicated in the piece linked just above, both Congress and the new administration claim to recognize the need – at least rhetorically – to restore cutting-edge U.S. competitiveness in this and other information technology manufacturing. In the meantime, the Biden administration should of course try maintaining enough of a semblance of allied unity vis-a-vis China to give Beijing pause over Taiwan. Hopefully, Washington  can even inspire some genuine support for preserving the island’s independence.

But as I’ve written previously (in the afore-linked National Interest piece), the greater the emphasis placed on resolving the semiconductor challenge via the homegrown solution of reviving the domestic industry, instead of relying mainly on protecting Taiwan’s security militarily, the better the odds of maintaining American security and prosperity. And in any necessary negotiations with the allies, the sooner President Biden abandons his globalist faith in apologetics and gauzy preaching, and acknowledges the need for at least some of the hard-bargaining Trump-ian “transactionalism” he’s decried, the better.  

Following Up: Still No Biden Learning Curve in Sight on the Middle East or China

Tags

America First, China, energy revolution, Following Up, fossil fuels, globalism, Iran, Iran nuclear deal, Israel, Joe Biden, Middle East, oil, Phase One, Saudi Arabia, Sunnis, tariffs, The New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman, Trade, trade war, Trump

Talk about great timing! Just two days ago, I analyzed New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman’s new offering warning Joe Biden not to rush back into the Iran nuclear deal because this step could undo lots of the progress made by President Trump’s America First foreign policy approach in greatly improving the prospects for advancing and protecting U.S. interests in the region.

And just this morning, Friedman has published a piece based on lengthy interview with the apparent President-elect making clear that he has no interest in learning these valuable lessons of the recent past. In addition, Biden confirmed that his China policy plans are just as dominated by cynical doubletalk these days as during the 2020 election campaign.

As Friedman argued on November 29, Mr. Trump’s message that Israel and the Arab world’s Sunni Muslim monarchies (mainly Saudi Arabia) should no longer count on the United States to fight their battles accomplished this critical objective: It

“forced Israel and the key Sunni Arab states to become less reliant on the United States and to think about how they must cooperate among themselves over new threats — like Iran — rather than fighting over old causes — like Palestine. This may enable America to secure its interests in the region with much less blood and treasure of its own. It could be Trump’s most significant foreign policy achievement.”

But as Biden made clear in his conversation with Friedman, he either can’t or refuses to understand the key development that validates the Trump approach – the U.S. fossil fuel production revolution that has eliminated America’s overriding reason for treating the Middle East as a vital national security interest, and enabled Washington to adopt a Trump-ian take-it-or-leave-it approach safely.

Not that domestic energy independence means that completely ignoring Middle East affairs is always the best response. But it certainly does mean much greater scope for Washington to advance objectives with varying degrees of importance (notably, preventing a nuclear-armed Iran from dominating the region) in ways far less risky and costly than the lengthy wars and immense military commitments that have dominated globalist strategy.

And as Friedman has indicated, the President has started lifting the United States off its dangerous hook by leaving its Middle East allies no choice but to stop quarreling over trifles (like the fate of the Palestinians) and work together to take responsibility for their own genuinely critical and shared interests.

Biden, however, still believes that America remains so dependent on “getting some stability” in this long-unstable region that deep entanglement in Middle East affairs is unavoidable. Just as worrisome: He’s laid out a genuinely Rube Goldberg-esque rationale for treating the Iran nuclear deal as his strategy’s linchpin. As Friedman describes his blueprint (based on this interview and other conversations with top Biden aides):

“[O]nce the [nuclear] deal is restored by both sides, there will have to be, in very short order, a round of negotiations to seek to lengthen the duration of the restrictions on Iran’s production of fissile material that could be used to make a bomb — originally 15 years — as well as to address Iran’s malign regional activities, through its proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

“Ideally, the Biden team would like to see that follow-on negotiation include not only the original signatories to the deal — Iran, the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany and the European Union — but also Iran’s Arab neighbors, particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.”

To which the only reasonable response is “Good luck with that” – especially given the lack of consensus on Middle East goals among this highly diverse group of countries, and, equally important, the wildly varying stakes in success between governments inside and outside of the Middle East,

On China, the big and encouraging news is that Biden has decided not to remove the steep, sweeping Trump tariffs “immediately.” That position of course makes at best little sense given how disastrous he called these levies’ impact.

Otherwise, the former Vice President showed that his China policy statements could be even more thoroughly dominated by doubletalk and cluelessness than they were during the campaign.

Most troubling was how Biden contended (correctly) that “leverage” is the make-or-break factor in negotiating with China, and then quickly added “in my view, we don’t have it yet.” Even leaving aside Beijing’s at-least-suggestive decision to sign a Phase One trade deal whoppingly one-sided in favor of a country whose markets it needs desperately to secure adequate levels of prosperity, why did the apparent President-elect go out of his way to advertise supposed American weakness? Indeed, this perverse practice looks like an emerging habit of the Biden foreign policy camp.

As Biden told Friedman, he continues insisting that this leverage can be created in large measure by creating a “coherent strategy” behind which the United States and its European and Asian allies can unite. But as I’ve pointed out repeatedly, many of these countries (notably, Germany, Japan, and South Korea) have made too much money trading with China at the U.S.’ expense to support any position but a complete return to the pre-Trump era of actively coddling and enabling the People’s Republic.  (See, e.g., this analysis.)

At the same time, the apparent President-elect deserves credit for recognizing that gaining sufficient leverage to deal with China successfully requires (in Friedman’s words) “developing a bipartisan consensus at home for some good old American industrial policy — massive, government-led investments in American research and development, infrastructure and education to better compete with China.”

Finally, however, Biden still accepts the completely unjustified pre-Trump view that, without the kind of one-sided, pro-U.S. enforcement mechanism at the heart of the Phase One agreement, Washington can negotiate away most of China’s wide-ranging trade predation with precisely enough worded paper agreements. As I’ve explained, the only genuine hope for progress along these lines is the kind of dispute-resolution system set up in Phase One – in which Washington serves as judge, jury, and court of appeals. 

A few days before he spoke with Friedman, Biden told another journalist that he knows the nation and world are “totally different” from his Vice Presidential days and that therefore his administration would not be “a third Obama term.”  His conversation with Friedman, though, strongly indicated that he meant “except for the Middle East and China.”  

Following Up: Podcasts On-Line of Yesterday’s National Radio Appearances on Biden and China/Asia Trade

Tags

allies, Asia-Pacific, China, globalization, Making News, Market Wrap with Moe Ansari, RCEP, Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, The John Batchelor Show, Trade

I’m pleased to announce that the podcasts are now on-line of my two national radio interviews yesterday on U.S. trade policy under a Biden administration.  The special focus:  whether the United States should be worried that 14 Asia-Pacific countries – including all of America’s main regional allies – have just signed a Chinese-organized agreement to set up a free trade zone called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

My appearance on Moe Ansari’s “Market Wrap with Moe” can be found at this site, and clicking on the play button of the “Current Market Wrap” (“Cold War with China”) episode.  The interview begins just before the 23-minute mark.

Meanwhile, the “John Batchelor Show” segment episode covering these subjects is located here.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Following Up: Podcast to NYC Talk Radio Interview on Trump-ism without Trump Now On-Line

Tags

conservatism, Conservative Populism, Following Up, Frank Morano, New York Mets, politics, Populism, Trump, WABC-FM

I’m pleased to announce that the podcast is on-line of my interview yesterday morning on WABC-FM radio with Frank Morano on…just about everything under the sun! Subjects ranged from the prospects of conservative populism staying nationally competitive in the United States with Donald Trump out of the White House to the emerging new era for Major League Baseball’s New York Mets.

Go to this website to listen and click on the play button on the “Future of Trumpism” episode. My segment begins just after the 24-minute mark.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Following Up: Podcast On-Line of Last Night’s National Radio Interview on Biden China Policy

Tags

China, Following Up, Gordon G. Chang, health security, healthcare goods, Joe Biden, manufacturing, national security, supply chains, tariffs, tech, The John Batchelor Show, Trade, trade war, Trump

I’m pleased to announce that the podcast is now on-line of last night’s interview on John Batchelor’s nationally radio show on the future of U.S.-China relations. Click here for a timely conversation among John, co-host Gordon G. Chang, and me on whether a possible Biden administration will continue or end President Trump’s trade and tech wars with China, and keep his promises to bring back home key manufacturing supply chains.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Following Up: Nursing Home Deaths Still Dominating U.S. CCP Virus Fatalities

Tags

assisted living facilities, CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, Following Up, Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, Kaiser Family Foundation, lockdowns, nursing homes, shutdowns, The New York Times, Worldometer.com, Wuhan virus

Given the recent U.S. surge in reported CCP Virus infections (but not yet U.S. deaths, according to sources such as the Worldometers.com website), I thought it was time to take another look at the nursing homes dimension of the pandemic. Depressingly, most of the evidence signals that it’s still at least as central to America’s virus fatality story.

RealityChek‘s last update, from mid-August, found that, since the pandemic’s early stages, the share of CCP Virus deaths linked with these facilities had more than doubled – to at least 41 percent. The phrase “at least” matters a lot because U.S. states’ reporting of these losses is far from uniform.

The New York Times, which had been doing an admirable job of tracking the scattered statistics that are available, hasn’t focused on the issue since then, but several others have stepped into the breach and some suggest that the problem has worsened.

In early September, the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation reported that “People in long-term care facilities make up 8 percent of coronavirus cases, but 45 percent of all COVID-19 deaths.” And worrisomely, Kaiser found signs, as of August, of an uptick.

Moreover, in a second September report, Kaiser examined another set of institutions in which senior citizens are heavily concentrated – assisted living facilities. It concluded that, despite data even less complete than for nursing homes, CCP Virus deaths were strongly increasing among residents and staff alike between June and August.

Similar figures were published in late August by the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a think tank that bills itself as non-partisan but that looks like of right-of-center-ish to me. (“Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”). Actually, the organization published three sets of figures, each using a different methodology and each covering both nursing homes and assisted living facilities. The low end number pegged virus deaths associated with both at 42.1 percent, the middle at 42.7 percent, and the high end estimate was 46.9 percent.

What says the U.S. government, you might ask? Nothing terribly helpful. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) does try to monitor the situation, and its data are more recent than those of the other two outfits – bringing the story up to October 18. But it only includes information from the relatively small number of states that voluntarily send in their numbers. That is, there’s no reporting requirement. The two private sector organizations discussed above use other sources, like press accounts – which are admittedly not definitive.

If you do look up these numbers, however, you’ll find that the agency pegs the nursing home death toll at 61,765 as of October 18. But you’ll also find that no overall U.S. death total is provided for that date.

The Worldometers site’s number for the day is 224,792. Do the math, and nursing home deaths as a share of total deaths comes to 27.47 percent. Yet not only is the result missing many states’ fatalities. It doesn’t include assisted living facilities, either.

I’ve argued in my previous posts that the high share of total U.S. virus-connected deaths is argues strongly for concentrating prevention and mitigation efforts on such unusually vulnerable populations, rather than the economy or the society as a whole. As new infections climb once more, and talk of major lockdown increase just as quickly, this still sounds like the strategy to choose.

Following Up: Podcast Regrets

Tags

baseball, Following Up, Frank Morano, national security, New York Mets, Populism, semiconductors, Steve Cohen, Trump, WABC AM

I was hoping to post a podcast of my interview last night on Frank Morano’s WABC-AM New York City radio show, but “technical difficulties” unfortunately kept on interrupting the segment. What a shame, because when our connection was working, we not only got in some good exchanges about my recent articles on America’s lost lead in semiconductor manufacturing and on (offbase) charges that President Trump is a phony populist. We also provided blinding insights about the state of play of billionaire Steve Cohen’s purchase of the New York Mets!

So I’ll hope to return to Frank’s show soon. And in the meantime, keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.