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Another Third Term

Their glee was evident as they promoted a third term. The conservative panel on television was positively giddy as they speculated on a fourth term. But their gaiety, I thought, should be tempered. If there can be more than two terms for Donald Trump, then there can be a third term for Barack. And Obama would present a formidable opponent.

Trump will be 82 on the next inauguration day. That is Joe Biden’s present age. Trump is an amazing physical specimen, but 82 is 82, and of course, he would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a third term. Obama, on the other hand, will be 67 on January 20, 2029.

Also consider that Obama got a majority of the votes in 2008 and won by 52.9% to 45.7%. Four years later he won by 51.1% to 47.2%. Trump in his three elections, one of which he lost, has never gotten a majority of the votes. He lost the popular vote decisively twice and won only a narrow plurality in the recent election.

We, of course, don’t know what will happen during Trump’s present term, but in considering an Obama/Trump match, let’s compare Trump’s first term with what happened under Obama.

Inflation was low under Trump for most of his term, but it was even lower with Obama even though Obama inherited the Great Recession of 2007-2009 when the GDP dropped by 4.3% and unemployment peaked at 9.5%. That recession, which was the worst since the 1930s, started under George W. Bush. It ended under President Barack Obama. Of course, under Trump we had a recession in 2020 when the unemployment rate jumped in two months from 3.5% to 14.7%. This, of course, was largely due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, the “misery index”—the sum of unemployment and inflation rates—soared under President Trump.

When Trump took office, the cost of gasoline (“Obama’s gas prices”) was lower than the averages during the next four years.

Trump seeks to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, but under Obama a system was already in place to do that. Trump scuttled that in his first term.

Trump now touts “massive” deportations of undocumented aliens, but more people were deported under Obama than have been with Trump as president.

Homelessness, which jumped under President Trump, was lower under Obama.

Deaths per capita skyrocketed when Trump was in office and had increased even before Covid. The death rate was lower under Obama, and life expectancy, which fell in this country during the Trump presidency, was longer under Obama.

Obama has spoken eloquently in favor of combating global warming. Trump has labeled climate change “a Chinese hoax.”

Murder rates increased during Trump’s first term. They declined under Obama.  

Trump said that China posed a “tremendous economic and military threat” to the United States, but on his watch, China became the EU’s largest trading partner.

Trump has voiced much anguish over our trade deficits, but those deficits were larger at the end of his first term than when he took office. 

The national debt and deficits were lower under Obama than Trump.

Opioid deaths were higher under Trump than Obama.

We could go on, but the point is to be careful what you wish for. If the conservatives gushing for another run by Trump get their desire, I will join many others by chanting, Bring Back Barack.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

You might know a lot of them, but I met my first professional thereminist the other day. Well, complete disclosure. It was the first thereminst professional or otherwise I ever met. This was at a Christmas party that I semi-crashed. I had been stopped by an unknown gatekeeper at the door of my local biergarten. She told me that a private function was underway, and the bar would be open to the general public in an hour. The establishment’s owner interceded to ask if it would be all right for me to sit at the bar, and the gatekeeper agreed. I then asked her what the group was, and she replied, “The Mark Morris Dance Group.” The gatekeeper seemed pleased that I knew about MMDG after I ingratiatingly told some of my vast array of Mark Morris anecdotes. (I have attended performances, and Mark Morris danced a long time ago in a dance company headed by the wife of a colleague and friend.) As I was sitting at the bar, nursing an Einbecker, a man squeezed in beside me, a ticket in hand, to get his own beer. He perfunctorily asked me, “What do you do with Mark Morris?” I said I was not affiliated, just a cherished neighbor of the bar’s owner. But I felt compelled to reciprocate, and he told me that he played the theremin in some of the dance company’s performance. He then also told me about some of his other theremin gigs. I could not imagine that one could make a living playing the instrument which emits those weird sounds, but he said he did. With a look that seemed to indicate that he was well rid of me (I was not going to offer him work), he wandered off among the tables. A half hour later he was next to me again with another ticket in hand. I then asked him what he thought of Sheldon Cooper playing the theremin. He hesitated as if he did not want to acknowledge the reference (you can look it up on YouTube), but he then said that it was awful. After a few seconds he amended himself: “It was good that he introduced the instrument to so many. But his playing. . . .”

Good news: Life expectancy, which fell in this country when Trump was president, has started to rebound although it is still not as long as it was before the decline started under Trump.

The spouse is so immature. I’d be at home in the bath, and she’d come in and sink my boats.

After the last Republican presidential debate, which I hope you have forgotten, commentators on a conservative “news” channel bemoaned that the candidates only attacked each other and did not discuss issues. One said, “Not one of them talked about high taxes.” Apparently, she had forgotten that the tax cuts skewed towards the rich by the Republicans only six years ago are still in effect. She must have been of the political camp of the observer who asked, “Are we ever going to realize our political ideal of making the other fellow pay the taxes?”

I would like to see those candidates talk about this issue: healthcare. The United States spends much more on healthcare per capita than any other country. However, life expectancy in this country lags far behind that in other

developed nations. (It is slightly shorter than it is even in Cuba.) Our healthcare is confusing and filled with bureaucracies. Does anyone want to hear another commercial for a medicare advantage plan? They don’t exist in countries with better healthcare systems. But our candidates don’t address the situation. Oh, yes, except for Trump, who recently again said that if elected he would get rid of Obamacare and replace it with something better. Are old promises the best ones? I have been waiting since 2016 for the details or even the broadest outline of Trump’s “better” healthcare plan, and I don’t hold my breath for one now.

“No problem is too big to run away from.” Charles M. Schultz.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

The CDC National Center for Health Statistics has just released state-by-state data on life expectancies at birth. Hawaii leads the country at 80.9 years. Mississippi is last at 74.4 years. Eight states have life expectancies at birth of over eighty years. None of those states is red. Fox News and other conservative outlets spend much time telling us how awful it is to live in these blue states, California and New York especially. On the other hand, eight states have life expectancies below seventy-six years. All of them voted for Trump. Fox and other right-wing media often report increased urban homicide numbers telling us the cities have Democratic mayors. (I have never heard them say that the homicide rates started accelerating under President Trump or that Republicans control the states that consistently have the highest homicide rates.) Let me know if you hear Fox reporting that life expectancy is higher in Democratic states than elsewhere.

While crossing the street at a busy intersection, I heard a young man say to a young woman, “Would you rather have your best friend murdered, or . . . .” And it faded away.

I just learned that an Olympic gold medal is really silver. The prize must be at least 92.5 percent silver and is then plated with a bit of gold. The news story said that the gold and silver are worth $758. The article did not say how much a medal was worth on Ebay.

“Many priceless things can be bought.” Maria von Ebner-Eschenbach.

Many people poked fun at Marjorie Taylor Greene for “gazpacho police” and assumed that she did know that she meant “gestapo police.”  “Gazpacho police,” however, at least has the virtue of not being redundant. Now, whether Greene knows the meaning of “redundant” is another question.

 Old joke: “She seems lost in thought.” “I wouldn’t be surprised. She’s a total stranger there.”

The emails beseech me for a donation so that the organization can vigorously defend Navy SEALS who have not been granted a religious exemption from a vaccination requirement. And I wonder about the religious belief system that says a person may kill but may not get vaccinated. I also wonder if the organization would defend someone who wants to be a SEAL but has religious scruples against killing.

 He asked, “Are you religious.” “No,” I replied. “I’m rational.”

I used to have a torso, but apparently now I have a core.

The spouse looked at my wispy, uncut-for-quite-a-while hair haphazardly brushed back and said that I was beginning to look like Benjamin Franklin. I wanted this to be a compliment noting that my high forehead denotes intelligence and that I, too, am a lusty old fellow still sharp as a tack. But I don’t think that’s what she meant.

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Covid-19. No Big Deal?

Most weeknights I watch the man with the smirk and rolling eyes but only for a few minutes. I can’t stand Tucker Carlson for longer than that.

The other night he was trying to convince us that the Covid-19 concerns have been overblown. His aha information was that the median age of a Covid death in this country is eighty. “That is higher than the average life expectancy in the United States.” A few moments later I turned off the TV and resumed reading Celestial Bodies, the selection for next week’s book group, but Carlson’s information stuck in my head.

So I did some checking the next day. A chart on the CDC website breaks down deaths involving Covid-19 by sex and age groups in 2020 and 2021. It does not provide the median age of the more than 600,000 deaths, but eighty, if not the official median age, is close to it.

Carlson was also right that eighty is more than the average life expectancy in this country. That number at birth is about seventy-eight years. (Carlson did not point out that life expectancy has recently declined for several reasons including the number of Covid deaths.*)

Finding out that his figures were right, however, did not stop me from thinking that the comparison between life expectancy at birth and the median Covid death age is bizarre. Perhaps Carlson thinks that if you get to be eighty, you are living on borrowed time and death is no big deal, or perhaps he thinks you must already be dead. However, life expectancy increases each year a person survives. At age 75, for example, the average life expectancy is not 78, but about 84. At age 80, it’s about 88. He wanted us to conclude from his statistics that the concern over Covid has been overblown, but is it no big deal that hundreds of thousands who died of Covid were deprived of seven or eight more years of life? If you are older than 78 and dying of Covid, Carlson would suggest that you shouldn’t be upset because you have already exceeded the average life expectancy. Perhaps Carlson thinks we also overreact to cancer and heart attacks because they disproportionately affect older people.

Carlson’s data, of course, also mean that half of the over 600,000 Covid deaths occurred to people younger than eighty. It is also the case that more than 120,000 deaths were of people under sixty-five. Starting at age forty, more than ten percent of deaths from all causes during the pandemic involved Covid, and overall, Covid was involved in about one in every eight deaths in 2020 and 2021. Remember how some people tried to tell us that this coronavirus was no worse than the flu? Influenza killed fewer than 10,000 people in 2020 and 2021; Covid-19 killed sixty times that number.

But even if they aren’t much concerned with the pandemic, the conservative news outlets do seem exercised about the recent rise in murders, and it is true that the sharp increase of gun homicides–about 25%–that occurred under President Trump has continued into this year. In 66 major cities, homicides were 33% higher in 2020 than in 2019 and have increased further by 29% in major cities in the first three months of 2021 over 2020.

The conservative news reports those homicides, but seldom, if ever, do they explore possible causes for the increase. These might include the rise in gun sales during the pandemic–a 64% increase in 2020 over the previous year. And alcohol sales, surveys indicate, were more than 50% higher during the pandemic. More guns; more alcohol. Is anyone surprised that there was a surge in gun violence? But guns, alcohol, and the pandemic–which put strains on the police, courts, probation offices, and social services agencies–are seldom considered on the conservative outlets; instead, they point to protests against the police and calls to defund the police as the only possible causes for the increase in homicides. If these were the only causes, there should be a concomitant rise in all street crimes, but this is not the case. While murders have increased, the rate of other crimes has not. Moreover, they fail to present any historical perspective. As it turns out the present rate is much less than recent highs. For example, the homicide rate in a group of cities was 19.4 per 100,000 residents in 1995; it was 11.4 in 2020 in those same locations.

The conservative fixation on city gun violence also leaves out a salient fact: more people die from gunshot suicides than from firearm homicides. The conservative commentators don’t mention suicides perhaps because they have nothing to do with police protests and reforms and are not a big-city problem. Gun suicides, in fact, are disproportionately rural—two-and-a-half times higher in rural than urban areas–and overwhelmingly white—about 85%. The states with the five highest suicide rates in 2020 were New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, and Idaho. They were lowest in New York and New Jersey. While the conservative media likes to emphasize the murder rates in a handful of cities with Democratic mayors, it is interesting to consider which states have the highest homicide rates. So far this year, the states with the five highest rates are Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, Maryland, and Arkansas.

Conservatives may avoid discussion of suicides because these people cannot be subliminally transformed into an image of dangerous minorities and because it might lead to a serious consideration of guns in the hands of those whom we don’t think of as criminals. While the success of attempted suicides by all methods is low—about 4%–attempted suicides by gun result in death over 90% of the time. And a study concluded that the chances of a suicide in a household with a gun is about three times higher than in a home without a firearm. Shouldn’t we be talking about this?

The Tucker Carlsons of the world (I write that fervently hoping it is in error and that there is only one of him) want to downplay the importance of Covid-19 and disregard the suicides. But they continue to harp on the homicide rate without mentioning a stable overall crime rate. Yes, we should be concerned about the increase in murders, which has now risen to fifty murders a day in the country. Meanwhile, there are about sixty daily gunshot suicides, and about 250 people each day are still dying from Covid. But, apparently, since half of the pandemic victims have lived longer than the average life expectancy at birth, it is no big deal.

*Part of the reason that the median age of Covid deaths is higher than life expectancy at birth is because America does not have an exceptionally long life expectancy. The United States places forty-sixth is the world. It is always surprising to me when I learn that that life expectancy in Cuba, where medicine is socialized and poverty widespread, is longer than it is here.