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School Daze in NYC
For most Americans, which high school their children attend is a pretty basic decision. They either go to the school designated by where they live like everyone else (Smallville students from Smallville Middle School move on to Smallville High School) or they attend one of a few private schools in their area, typically religious schools such as Our Lady of Grace of Smallville. Not so in New York City, where a combination of 2022-style fairness and woke politics leaves one wondering how much do we really hate our children.
Up until two years ago, the system in NYC worked like this for high school, with a similar system in place to choose a middle school: at the top, a very few specialty high schools, including Stuyvesant High (STEM), Bronx High School of Science, and LaGuardia High School of Music, Art, and Performing Arts (The FAME! school; grads include Nicki Minaj, Al Pacino, and Timothée Chalamet) allied with the Lincoln Center of the Performing Arts. All had individual and very specific requirements, in the case of the former two an entrance exam that produced a rank order entrance list irrespective of grades and other factors. The schools were hypercompetitive and ended up racially tilted toward white and Asian students (in a recent year only seven black students got into Stuyvesant, out of 895 spots.) There are expensive consultants and prep programs, themselves competitive, available to maybe get the odds in a student’s favor.
For everyone else, absent private schools, the city gave eighth graders the option of applying to 160 public high schools, each with their own criteria and “Applicant-to-Seat” ratio to help divine academically rigorous from easy. Typically entry meant evaluation by a combination of grades, various test scores, essays, portfolios, and other work. Schools made their choices, expressed preferences really, and students made their own preferential list on a scale of one to 12. The whole mash of grades, etc., and preferences was then run through a “deferred acceptance algorithm.” The algorithm matched applicants to schools based on their highest mutual preference, all similar to how medical students are matched with residency programs. NYC high school students received a list of 12 schools they had been accepted to, and made their choice. The thing is everyone “knew” which schools were better and which were to be avoided out of the 160 on offer, and the “good” schools were hypercompetitive and ended up racially tilted toward white and Asian students. There are expensive consultants and prep programs, themselves competitive, available to maybe get the odds in a student’s favor. It was a lot of work to stay semi-woke, but not enough for some.
While never a system without controversary, it was a system that acknowledged certain realities: some kids are smarter and work harder than others. Attendance counted; you can’t learn if you are not present. The testing at the core of the system asked math, science, and history questions, not queries somehow only a white or Asian child would know. A poor kid really good at math stood the same chance as a rich kid really good at math. But the black and Hispanic students who make up nearly 70 percent of the school system were not moving on up. You know what came next.
Under former Democratic Mayor Bill De Blasio the first attack was against the specialty high schools, particularly Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, and their do-or-die entrance exams. The predominance of white and Asian students matriculating into those schools after excelling at those tests could mean only one thing to the mayor’s woke supporters: the tests had to be unfair to black and brown students. Earlier attempts to even the admission rates by providing free after school tutoring (the Discovery Program) to black and brown students (and excluding many poor Asian students) had not succeeded. So the next obvious step was simply to eliminate the entrance exams in favor of grades as assigned by the home school teachers. That way a student from a “bad” school could have a teacher who issued A’s for effort and compete his straight-A’s against a child from a rigorous school where an A represented successful college level work in 8th grade. It was just like Smallville, where Coach Johnson gave all the football players A’s in U.S. history and Health classes!
Under New York state’s system, dropping the STEM schools’ entrance exam actually required an act of the state Congress, who under extraordinary pressure from Asian families and lawmakers shunned the change (AOC studiously avoided a public stance on the matter.) The bill in fact never even made it to a full floor vote, with one opponent accusing the mayor of creating a “nasty narrative” that pitted Asian families against black and Hispanic parents. Another likened De Blasio’s plan to the Chinese Exclusion Act, a 19th century law restricting Asian immigration to cut back on economic competition with whites. The STEM entrance exam remains in place today.
Of course there is more, those 160 other high schools in New York not subject to single entrance exams and which were part of the “algorithm” system. Using the pandemic as an excuse and not requiring state-level approval, De Blasio was able to remove attendance as a criteria for admission. Same excuse to eliminate standardized test scores. Instead, middle schoolers were placed in one of four tiers based on their highest grades over two years — that A for effort from a friendly teacher standing proudly alongside that A for calculus success from a tough one. A lottery was then held for each group, with the highest numbered lottery winners free to chose their preferred high school. This was deemed fair somehow, though an eighth-grader with an academically stellar record but a poor lottery number could easily lose out to a merely good-enough student with a great lottery assignation.
The results were as expected and intended: 90 percent of black students got into one of their top five schools, same as Hispanics. For Asians, the number was only 70 percent.
As can be imagined, there were a lot of unhappy parents, and so the school assignment process is far from over even as it increased the number of black matriculating students at the most wanted schools. Some white parents talk about private schools, others of moving to the suburbs. Manhattan has already lost 9.5 percent of its under-five population over the last two years.
Still others plans rallies and lawsuits under the banner “Merit Matters,” and, with De Blasio out of office, political pressure. The New York Times, still clinging to the idea that random choice is the woke answer, plans on blaming the system for the system, stating “It will take a long time to know whether these tweaks in the system will effect the desired change, something contingent, in part, on the kind of support students who might be new to intensely rigorous curriculums receive in order to succeed.” Nothing much will be said about the larger lessons such a system teaches, specifically that diversity only means measuring the numbers of black kids, and not understanding that “Asian” can mean Chinese, Japanese, Korea, Cambodian, Indian, Thai, etc., never mind rich, poor, immigrant, non-native speaker, etc.
New York’s current mayor, Eric Adams, couldn’t avoid adding to the woke chaos. After one admissions round, he just recently eliminated the lottery for junior high schools in favor of malleable grades. At the city’s competitive high schools, priority for seats will be given to top students whose grades are an A average, or the top 15 percent of students in each school. Criteria for admissions anywhere will not include state test scores, now basically irrelevant. The new plan seems to lessen the impact of the random lottery drawing, and crank up the value of individual grades which can be adjusted on a per-student and per-school basis to achieve the desired racial outcomes. The immediate goal will be for these changes to increase access for “communities who have been historically locked out of screened schools,” while still rewarding students who work hard academically. The broader goal seems to be how to create more racially balanced top schools while trying to prevent middle-class families fed up with the lottery from abandoning the system. NYC is bleeding students; roughly 120,000 families have left traditional public schools over the past five years.
You know what to expect: lower standards at once-rigorous schools as the only practical way of manhandling unprepared students out of the way so the others may learn at top levels, Student A struggling to add round numbers sitting next to Student B nailing advanced trig. After all, fair is fair, they both got A’s from their teachers. Sorry kids.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
New York Notes
Coming home to New York City after over a year away is like performing cunnilingus on an electrical socket. You’re shocked, and the socket doesn’t feel a thing.
I was driven by that same curiosity that makes you slow down passing a wreck on the highway. I’d read the stories of zombie homeless armies in Midtown, the subway system gone feral, the deserted office blocks, and crime stepping in for Darwin to take care of what was left. Like a last visit to a hospital Covid bedside, I didn’t want to but I needed to see it.
Inevitably someone will say this is all an exaggeration, that they live in NYC and it’s great, or the 1970s were way worse, or they just saw Lion King at Times Square with their grandma. Good for you.
The overall of feeling one gets is a place used up, a failed place that somehow is still around. It’s the ultimate irony; it was Wall Street dealers who manipulated the economy of the 1970s and 80s to create the Rust Belt out of the once prosperous Midwest and now the brokers are gone, too. Pieces of them all left on the ground, too unimportant to sell off, too heavy to move, too bulky to bury, left scattered like clues from a lost civilization. Might as well been the bones of the men who worked there. Now the same way in Weirton or Gary you drive past the empty mills and factories left to eventually be reclaimed by the earth they stand on, so to Wall Street. There are no trading houses left, just one last international bank and it will soon be leasing new space uptown.
The whole “financial district” is empty. On a weekend morning I found myself alone on the old streets off Wall, the ones that went all the way back, Marketfield, Beaver, Pine, Stone, to near-primitive times. There just were no people, nothing open. Most of the old gilded era banks and trading houses are in the process of being converted into condos, though who would want to live there is an unanswered question.
You do see a fair number of homeless in the shadows; the city commandeered empty hotels in the area for them during the worst of the three Covid winters. Left out of the place it created is the famous Stock Exchange. The building is still there and there are people inside, but near-zero trades are done there anymore, nearly everything is remote/online, a trend started after 9/11 and completed by Covid’s arrival. On my next visit it wouldn’t surprise me to see the space has been converted into a Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Across the street there’s already a TJ Maxx.
Like some elaborate joke about canaries in the coal mine, the condition of New York’s subway system often points the way the rest of the place is headed. With parts of the system still in use that were built 118 years ago, the thing is a testament to just how far the least amount of maintenance will go. Meh, NY grit. You expect it to be too cold in winter, too hot in summer, with no public toilets, and layers of filth which may be what is actually holding it all together.
But the purpose of the subway has changed. With fewer people working out of offices, and more and more of those that do now driving private cars in the city (parking is a new thing to complain about, car theft is up double-digit percent from pre-Covid times) it is no longer common ground for New Yorkers. Most of the real passengers are blue collar t-shirted, and most everyone else is homeless. Vast numbers of visibly mentally ill people inhabit the subway system. It is their home, their kitchen, and their toilet. The person in Union Square Station pushing a shopping cart and yelling racial slurs may not physically hurt anybody but is a symbol of a city that just gave up caring while lying to itself about being compassionate. There is no compassion to allowing thousands of sick people to live like rats inside public infrastructure.
Not surprisingly, the subway is an angry place. Last year there were more assaults in the subway system than anytime for the last 25 years, including a Covid-era trend of randomly pushing people into the path of an incoming train just to watch them die. I didn’t see that, but I saw the secondary effects: passengers bunched up like herbivores on the African savanna, most with their backs against a wall or post for protection. Fewer people looking down at their phones so as to stay more alert.
If you need to use the subway, you need to acknowledge that you must share it with the predators, under their rules. Like everywhere in this city, navigating around the mentally ill, the homeless, and the criminal is just another part of life. People treat each other as threats, and just accept that, but to an outsider it seems a helluva way to live. The new mayor says he’s gonna clean it all up. so far, four months in office, not so much.
My old Upper East Side neighborhood hadn’t changed as much as mid- and downtown. The doorman at my old building said there were many more renters than owners resident now, and the masking and fear of catching Covid had done away with the lobby chatter that served as a palliative when heading in from the street.
Across the street at the projects the drug dealers were in their usual places; seller, runner, overseer. I knew generally where to look for them so it was an easy spot, but they may have been just a little more obvious than last year. I don’t know where they were during the old “stop and frisk” days but I didn’t see them then. Nearby a good number of the mom and pop restaurants are closed, along with about every other chain drug store outlet (ask a New York friend how many Duane and Reade’s there used to be.)
A couple of those “only in New York places” are holding on, but the effect is grim not scrappy given the gray around them. Passing the United Nations compound, you’re left with the memory that in the 1950s this was once the most powerful city on the globe. My favorite pizzeria, the original Patsy’s at First and 117th in Harlem, is still open and somehow still staffed by old Italian men in an otherwise all-black neighborhood. Nearby Rao’s, an old-school red sauce joint and still one of the hardest-to-get reservations in Manhattan for those of a certain age, is in much the same state, both places in some sort of time-vortex, the old DNA someone will someday use to genetically re-engineer New York for a museum.
The good news is that the NYPD seems to have reoccupied Times Square, as the city is betting big tourism will someday save it. The problem is Times Square shares a border with the rest of New York, and a block or two away places like the Port Authority bus terminal are decaying back into their primordial state. No obvious hookers like in the 1970s, but their space in the ecosystem is taken by the homeless and those who provide them services, usually quick, sharp, young black kids selling what the cops told me was fentanyl, NY’s current favorite synthetic opioid.
Some of the least changed areas were on the Lower East Side. These have always been mean streets, and post-Covidland is far from the first challenge they have faced. It’s not nice but it’s stable, it is what it is and it doesn’t ask for much more. Go tread lightly on the area’s terms and you stay safe.
Covid did its share to the City but every measure of Covid was made worse by bad decision-making on the part of the city. Lockdowns decimated whole industries while leaving New York still one of the red zones of America. Defunding and defanging the police, coupled with no-bail policies drove crime deeper into the fabric of neighborhoods and decent people out to the suburbs. The tax base crumbled. Pre-Covid the top one percent of NYC taxpayers paid nearly 50 percent of all personal income taxes collected in New York, accounting for 59 percent of all revenues. Property taxes add in more than a billion dollars a year in revenue, about half of that generated by office space. Those folks are bailing out and the tourists are largely staying home.
Left is the largest homeless population of any American metropolis, to include 114,000 children. The number of New Yorkers living below the poverty line is larger than the population of Philadelphia, and would be the country’s 7th largest city. More than 400,000 New Yorkers reside in public housing. Another 235,000 receive rent assistance. They live in the Third World, like a theme park torn out of the Florida swamps unlike its surroundings. You look at it and you cannot believe this is the same country as where you live. New York does that, puts it all right in your face.
New York, at least in the guise of its elected leaders, chose this, participated in its own end game decision by decision. Former mayor and once Democratic presidential candidate Bill De Blasio, who presided over the NY apocalypse, still had the moxie to claim not diversifying the city’s elite public schools was one of his only real mistakes. No one seems to know what to do, how to unwind what was created.
Don’t let anyone tell you New York died. It was murdered. The last time I was this happy to get on a plane and leave somewhere I was in Baghdad.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Tale of Three Travel Destinations (Florida, NYC, Hawaii)
As a fairly new resident of Hawaii, I bring an outsider’s perspective, and maybe a bit of uninvited advice. If Hawaii wants to regain its place as a popular tourist destination, it needs to think more like someone from Ohio than Oahu.Asian travel is at a standstill, and will be for some time. Should someone from Japan decide to visit our beautiful islands, in addition to our COVID requirements, upon returning home he would face a 14 day quarantine, a two-week ban on using public transportation, and location tracking via cell phone from his own government. If he breaks quarantine, among other penalties his name would be made public as someone “contributing to the spread of infection.” You would have to really, really love poi to build all that into a vacation.
That brings us back to our potential Ohio traveler as he weighs his vacation options. He did the right thing and got double-vaccinated right away, and has been happily living and working without a mask for months. The pandemic as we still practice it here ended for most Americans months ago.
Florida looks good to our traveler. Florida dropped all of its COVID restrictions about a year ago, and appears to have survived two Spring Breaks and beyond. Visitors can enter the state without testing, vaccination checks, or threats of quarantine. Disney, et al, are welcoming guests. Cruises look like they are about to restart. Instead of fretting, the governor is hosting a conference in September to bring together tourism professionals, advertising agencies, and state leaders to build on opportunities. They’re looking at $95 billion in revenues from tourism, the good stuff: people drive or fly in, use few governmental resources, and leave behind money. It is a sweet investment, as every $1 put into their tourism promotion agency, Visit Florida, yields a $3.27 return to taxpayers. Visitors save every Florida household more than $1,500 a year on state and local taxes. Florida gets it.
New York City was ground zero once again, the hardest hit COVID site. The city faced some of the nation’s worst COVID management, slamming the door shut on what was a tourism industry that created 400,000 jobs and $70 billion in economic activity pre-pandemic. But slowly the place awoke to discover it was not Judgment Day 2020, but summer 2021. Visitors can enter without testing, vaccination checks, or threats of quarantine. As of mid-June, almost all COVID restrictions were dropped, and the Governor announced the state of emergency was over. Broadway is reopening with Bruce Springsteen, the Garden with the Foo Fighters, and the city is running a $30 million “NYC Reawakens” tourism campaign funded by stimulus money. After a year of some very bad decision making, the pols seem now to get it. Even the neo-socialist mayor says “building a recovery for all of us means welcoming tourists back.”
Hawaii stands alone among the 50 states simply refusing to admit the pandemic is over. Hawaii alone requires not only COVID testing for unvaccinated visitors, but a complex regime of “trusted partners” who in the end administer the same tests through the same national labs as the untrusted partners. Let’s hope some of them are within a day’s drive of would-be tourists. Until a snap decision changed the rules as of July 8, Hawaii stood alone in treating those vaccinated in Hawaii differently from those vaccinated outside of Hawaii. It was always easier for dogs; as of today you can import a dog into Hawaii with an out-of-state rabies vaccine but not a tourist with an out-of-state COVID vaccine.
The funny things is the only thing Hawaii worries about in human travelers is COVID. It neither tests for nor asks for proof of vaccination for yellow fever, malaria, ebola, AIDS, polio, Hepatitis A, B or C, leprosy, dengue fever, or hundreds of other diseases more problematic to the general population than COVID. And of course there is no science saying something magical happens at 70% local vaccination levels that does not happen at 69% or 59%. They’re just arbitrary numbers to create the illusion of control to provincial voters.
Hawaii also seems unaware tourists need to plan vacations well ahead of time. The ever-changing guidance out of the Governor’s office drove people away. Imagine our Ohio tourist approaching his boss a month ago for time off: “Hey boss, can I have my two weeks when Hawaii hits 70%? It might be August, might be December, or they may alter the rules again, so we can stay chill on the dates, right?” That’s one traveler; if you are booking group tours, forget about it and go to Disney. The Governor’s waiting until late June to acknowledge vaccinated people don’t get COVID just wrote off a second summer season.
If our Ohio visitor dips into the local news he sees the Governor and the Lieutenant Governor arguing publically over what the new rules should be. He sees Hawaii is looking to defund its own tourism promotion authority and still can’t get its light rail running.
He reads unwelcoming, almost contemptuous Op-Eds wondering if too many tourists are spoiling things for the locals. He is unlikely to feel welcome with the Third World-like two-tiered pricing regime at popular sites. He sees articles about people sent home from the airport over an innocent Safe Travels mistake, stories suggesting he’ll need to rent a U-Haul as no cars are available, $120 Uber rides in from the airport, taxes going up on accomodations alongside already usurious “resort fees,” and bars and restaurants capped at limited capacity so it could be Zippy’s again for dinner. Hope word reached Ohio reservations are required for Hanauma Bay, and good luck scoring them.
All this accompanied by the Jugend mask patrols, scolding anyone from ABC to CVS who is not wearing a mask, vaccinated or not. Sound like a vacation to you? The July 8 changes are welcome, but are in the end too little too late.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Economic Disparity and COVID in New York City
The separateness in this city, New York, and by extension much of the nation curled around it from America’s eastern edge, stands out. There are the hyper-wealthy and there are the multi-generational permanent poor. New York has more of each than any other city in America. In writing about them it has been easy to stress how far apart they live, even though the mansions of the Upper West Side are less than a mile from the crack dealers uptown. The rich don’t ride public transportation, they don’t send their kids to public schools, they shop and dine in very different places with private security to ensure everything stays just far enough apart to keep it all together.
But that misses the dependencies that until now have simply been a given in the ecosystem. The traditional view of this applied to New York has been the rich need the poor to exploit as cheap labor, textbook economic inequality. But with COVID as the spark, the bomb of economic inequality may soon Beruit America’s greatest city. Things are changing and New York needs to ask itself what it wants to be when it grows up.
It’s simple. New York is populated by the incredibly wealthy and the incredibly poor. The wealthy and the companies they work for pay most of the taxes. The poor do not work, or are underemployed, and consume most of the taxes through social programs. COVID is driving the wealthy and their offices out of the city. No one will be left to pay for the poor, who are stuck here, and the city will collapse in the transition. A classic failed state scenario. The new social contract.
New York City is home to 118 billionaires, more than any other American city. New York City is also home to nearly one million millionaires, more than any other city in the world. Among those millionaires some 8,865 are classified as “high net worth,” with more than $30 million each.
They pay the taxes. The top one percent of NYC taxpayers pay nearly 50 percent of all personal income taxes collected in New York. Personal income tax in the New York Metro-Region accounts for 59 percent of all revenues. Property taxes property taxes amount to more than billion dollars a year in revenue, about half of that from office space.
Now for how the other half lives. Below those wealthy people in every sense of the word city has the largest homeless population of any American metropolis, to include 114,000 children. The number of New Yorkers living below the poverty line is larger than the population of Philadelphia, and would be the country’s 7th largest city. More than 400,000 New Yorkers reside in public housing. Another 235,000 receive rent assistance. The Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City is North America’s largest housing project with 3,142 apartments.
That all costs a lot of money. The New York City Housing Authority says it needs $24 billion over the next decade just for vital repairs. That’s on top of a standing cost approaching $4 billion a year just to keep current housing operating. A lot of the money used to come from the Federal government before a multibillion-dollar decline in federal Section 9 funds. Today there is a shortfall and repairs, including lead removal, are being put off.
NYC also has a $34 billion budget for public schools, many of which function as distribution points for child food aid, medical care, day care, and a range of social services. Costs for unemployment payouts are up dramatically because of COVID. The budget for a city as complex as New York is huge, a mess of federal, state, and local funding sources, multi-year grants. It can be sliced and diced many ways, but the one that matters is the simplest: the people and companies who pay for New York’s poor are leaving. The city is already facing a $7.4 billion tax revenue hit from the initial effects of the coronavirus. The money is there; New York’s wealthiest individuals have increased their net worth by $44.9 billion during the pandemic. It’s just not here.
New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo has seen a bit of the iceberg in the distance. He recently took to MSNBC to beg the city’s wealthy, who fled the coronavirus outbreak, to return. Cuomo said he was extremely worried about New York City weathering COVID if too many of the well-heeled taxpayers who fled decide there is no need to move back. “They are in their Hamptons homes, or Hudson Valley or Connecticut. I talk to them literally every day. I say. ‘When are you coming back? I’ll buy you a drink. I’ll cook. But they’re not coming back right now. And you know what else they’re thinking, if I stay there, they pay a lower income tax because they don’t pay the New York City surcharge. So, that would be a bad place if we had to go there.”
Included in the surcharge are not only NYC’s notoriously high taxes. The recent repeal of the federal allowance for state and local tax deductions (SALT) costs New York’s high earner tax filers some $15 billion in additional federal taxes annually.
“They don’t want to come back to the city,” Partnership for NYC President Kathryn Wylde warned. “It’s hard to move a company… but it’s much easier for individuals to move,” she said, noting that most offices plan to allow remote work indefinitely. “It’s a big concern that we’re going to lose more of our tax base then we’ve already lost.”
While overall only 5 percent of residents left the city as of May, in the city’s very wealthiest blocks residential population decreased by 40 percent or more. Across the city the higher-earning a neighborhood is, the more likely it is to have emptied out. Even the amount of trash collected in wealthy neighborhoods has dropped, a tell-tale sign no one is home. A real estate agent told me she estimates about a third of the apartments in my mid-range 300 unit building are empty. The ones for sale or rent attract few customers. She says it’s worse than post-9/11 because at least then the mood was “How do we get NYC back?” instead of now, when we just stand over the body and tsk tsk through our masks.
Enough New Yorkers are running toward the exits that it has shaken up the area’s housing market. Another real estate agent describes the frantic, hypercompetitive bidding in the nearby New Jersey suburbs as a “blood sport.” “We are seeing 20 offers on houses. We are seeing things going 30 percent over the asking price. It’s kind of insane.”
Fewer than one-tenth of Manhattan office workers have returned to the workplace a month after New York gave businesses the green light to return to the buildings they ran from in March. Having had several months to notice what not paying Manhattan office rents might do for their bottom line, large companies are virtually leaving. Despite the folky image of New York as a paradise of Mom and Pop restaurants and quaint shops, about 50 percent of those who pay most of the taxes work for large firms. More Fortune 500 companies, 71, have their headquarters in NYC, than any other city in America. They are keeping their employees working from home. Conde Nast, the publishing company and majority client in the signature new World Trade Center, is moving out. Since the coronavirus hit the office has largely been vacant anyway and the publisher has given no indication when workers will return.
It is no better in other sectors. A third of NYC’s small businesses are closing. On Madison Avenue in the ultra-rich 60s and 70s blocks most lux stores are closed. Retail foot traffic is down 85 percent from a year ago. The former customers are in Connecticut and the Hamptons, and so major art galleries have shuttered their city locations to open branches where the rich have relocated. Neiman Marcus is closing its flagship store in Hudson Yards. Tourism, once worth $70 billion a year, has fallen to near zero.
Meanwhile, progressive Mayor De Blasio has lost touch with his city. After years of failing to address economic inequality by simply throwing free money to the poor and limiting the ability of the police to protect them, and us, from rising crime, his COVID focus has been on shutting down schools and converting 139 luxury hotels to filthy homeless shelters. Alongside AOC, he has called for higher taxes and more federal funds, neither of which is coming. As for the wealthy who have paid for his social justice experiments to date, he says “We don’t make decisions based on a wealthy few. Some may be fair-weathered friends, but they will be replaced by others.”
What others? The concentration of major corporations once pulled talent to the city from across the globe; if you wanted to work for JP Morgan on Wall Street, you had to live here. That’s why NYC has skyscrapers; a lot of people once needed to live and especially work in the same place. Not any more. Technology and work-at-home changes have eliminated geography.
For the super wealthy, New York once topped the global list of desirable places to live based on four factors: wealth, investment, lifestyle and future. The first meant a desire to live among other wealthy people (we know where that’s headed), investment returns on real estate (not looking great, if you can even find a buyer), lifestyle (now destroyed with bars, restaurants, shopping, museums, and theatres closed indefinitely, coupled with rising crime) and…
The future. New York pre-COVID had the highest projected GDP growth of any city. Now we’re left with the question if COVID continues to hollow out the city, who will be left to pay for New York? As one commentator said, NYC risks leading America into becoming “Brazil with Nukes,” a future of constant political and social chaos, with a ruling class content to wall itself off from the greater society’s problems.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Time to Get Back to Work
If America has a fast forward button on it someone should push it ahead to November. We won’t be done with the virus until we’ve done with the election. Between prudence and overreaction lies politics.We bleat about wanting decisions based on science. Then we do the same dumb red-blue thing, even counting the corona dead differently (nothing left certain but taxes now) to make the numbers seem better or worse depending on the shifty politics of better or worse. Something that should not be about Trump at all is All About Trump.
There is no other country in the world so driven by politics so devoid of science. It’s killing us. Other countries have good leaders, some not so good. But look at us. Our nation is held hostage to protests and counter-protests, lockdowns and open bowling alleys. There is no other nation where so many are convinced their leader is actively trying to kill them with his virus response, even imagining he wants them to drink bleach.
The MSM portrays protesters against government restrictions as dangerous, Trump death cultists who’d rather end up in an ICU that skip a haircut. It is an echo of the things that lost 2016 for the Democrats. The people don’t want haircuts. Such flippancy insults the righteous anger over lost livelihoods. They want to feed their families. They want thought-out targeted restrictions instead of politically driven over-reaction and fear mongering. It’s about deep emotional waters, sense of self, a whole lot more than just how the economy will help Trump win or lose. Many also are concerned that their lives, including the right to assemble, to worship, and to protest, are being controlled by leaders they don’t trust while a media they abandoned years ago mocks them. Beaches open in a red state are #FloridaMorons; in a blue state it’s #SurfsUp.
But they see this time the Brooklyn elites are going a step further, beyond the deplorable label, to wishing them to catch the virus, figuring the infection will teach them a lesson before they vote wrong again. Wishing death on people you disagree with. It’s almost like cheering for a guy who drives his car into a crowd of BLM protesters.
Elsewhere, medical professionals say the protestors have no right to put others’ lives at risk, and think it is just more than OK to physically stop the rallies. That’s called “the heckler’s veto” by the Supreme Court and is not allowed under the 1A, even if you’re a hero ER nurse or just an abortion protester blocking the door to a clinic. Stopping someone from protesting by shouting them down, driving a car into their crowd, or otherwise trying to stop them from exercising their rights (including the right to hold a dumb opinion or one you disagree with) is disdainfully unconstitutional.
The medical professionals and their Muppet chorus of journalists sound like some soldiers who felt their sacrifice was made cheap by people who protested the war. Thank you for your service. It does not however allow you to choose which people can exercise their rights. When you choose to serve you serve those you define as worthy and those you don’t. It’s bigger than you, doc.
Government is not supposed to be able to take away freedoms, even if it’s for “our own good.” Governments always invoke safety and security when they are taking away rights (see the Patriot Act.) The invoke the majority over the minority. It’s an old playbook, joined in this century by our 1A nannies on social media, who electronically block efforts to organize. If you’re screeching about how rights don’t matter when lives are at stake, the same old safety vs. liberty argument people always use, you’ve got company. The KKK used that argument to block blacks from marching, claiming it was a safety issue.
Protesting against the government taking away your right to assemble is about as fundamental a civil right as you can get. The argument restrictions are needed to keep us safe (“we’ll get the virus!”) are about as fundamentally wrong as you can get. Yet authorities in California will no longer issue permits for anti-lockdown protests at any state properties, including the Capitol.
Agree? Just remember what you’re saying now about these redneck inbreeding gun nuts the next time someone claims a march permit can’t be issued in the interest of public safety to a group you support. Hint: It’s the same thing. Rights are rights. Because you know what else can spread rapidly if “left unchecked?” Tyranny. Justice Louis Brandeis held free speech is not an abstract virtue but a key element of a democratic society. He ruled even speech likely to result in “violence or in destruction of property is not enough to justify its suppression.” In braver times when Americans challenged the safety vs. liberty argument, the Supreme Court consistently ruled in favor of free speech, reminding us democracy comes with risk. But that was another world ago, before we measured human worth in RTs.
There is science which should be informing decisions. The irony is that while claiming a small rally in Denver will cost lives, or Florida will kill people by opening its beaches, the same voices remain silent as NYC keeps its subway running 24/7. The timing of the public beach versus public transportation debate came as a new study detailed NYC’s “multitentacled subway system was a major disseminator — if not the principal transmission vehicle — of coronavirus infection,” “seeding” the virus throughout the city. Without a superspreader like the subway it can be contained locally. It is tragic when the virus rips through a nursing home or meatpacking plant (it is a virus after all, it will go viral), but all of those together barely touch a week’s body count in New York. Shut down mass transport.
We can put most people back to work with limited risk; the protesters are right. The virus kills a very specific patient. About half the dead are over age 65. Less than one percent of deaths were under age 44. Almost 94 percent of the dead in any age group had serious underlying medical issues (about half had hypertension and/or were obese, a third had lung problems.) The death toll in NYC under total lockdown: 22,000. Death toll in much more densely populated Tokyo with “smart” lockdown: 93.
About 22 percent of New Yorkers already have the virus antibody and thus expected immunity. A logical conclusion — large numbers already have or had the virus, and that it is harmless to them — is simply ignored. Quarantine/social distancing is for those most vulnerable so we can stop wrecking all of society with cruder measures. Hospitals should separate patients by age. No need to keep kids from school, especially if that means isolating them inside a multigenerational household. Let them wear soggy paper masks to class, even tin foil on their heads, if it makes things easier. Online classes are lame and America doesn’t need a new generation dumber than the current one.
The New York-New Jersey area, with roughly half the dead for the entire nation, practices full-on social distancing while Georgia was one of the last states to implement a weaker stay-at-home policy. Yet as Georgia re-opens, the NY/NJ death count is over 27,000. Georgia is 892. NY continues adding around 500 bodies to the pile every day, even with its bowling alleys closed.
We judge risk versus gain for every other cause of death. We wear condoms. We watch our diets. Time to do the same for the virus. As for lockdowns, we may not even be judging them accurately. Some 22 states have had fewer than 100 deaths. Only 15 states had total deaths for the entire duration of the crisis higher than NYC’s current 500 a day. The original goal of lockdowns, to buy time for the health care system (and most resources were never needed due to over-estimates of the viral impact), has passed. If the new goal is Virus Zero it will never come. If the real goal is harm Trump we’ll have to put up with this without serious discussion until November.
A Stanford doctor nails it: “Strictly protect the known vulnerable, self-isolate the mildly sick and open most workplaces with some prudent large-group precautions. This would allow the essential socializing to generate immunity among those with minimal risk of serious consequence, while saving lives, preventing overcrowding of hospitals, and limiting the enormous harms compounded by continued total isolation.”
We are fretting and frittering away our national muscle watching TV about a bigamous tiger keeper. There are too many who want this isolation to continue indefinitely, a pathetic nation whose primary industries for its young people are camming and GoFundMe. We focus on the virus deaths, but the Reaper keeps a more accurate tally: deaths from despair, from hunger (two million new people became food insecure in NYC since the virus), financial losses (26 million Americans have filed for unemployment), mental health issues, and abuse (domestic murders during the viral months in NYC outstripped the total from 2019.) In some ultimate irony, parents are postponing vaccinations for fear of bringing their kids to medical facilities.
It is the reaction to the pandemic that exhausts us, not the pandemic itself. So when someone claims it is Money vs. Life they miss the answer: It’s both. It should not be taboo to discuss this. The debate needs to be about human life in full.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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