RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/national-debt-washington-postponing-frightening-choices/

What cannot go on much longer soon probably won’t.

The current U.S. budget deficit could soon exceed a record $4 trillion. The massive borrowing is being driven both by prior budget profligacy and by a hurried effort by the Donald Trump administration to pump liquidity into a quarantined America.

The shutdown has left the country on the cusp of a self-inflicted economic collapse not seen since the Great Depression.

Americans may soon have to service a staggering national debt of about $30 trillion — nearly $100,000 of debt for every American.

Democrats and Republicans can blame each other, either for spending too much or for too little taxation or both. But both sides will agree that managing such an astronomical debt requires several frightening choices.

One, Americans would be forced to live with permanent near-zero interest rates, or perhaps even negative interest rates.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/28/cuomos-coronavirus-personae-all-fail-the-statesmanship-test/

However much past policy decisions were taken in good faith, they must now be reversed for the sake of human life. To dodge political accountability by invoking science is not leadership, it is cowardice.

Anyone who has dipped into Andrew Cuomo’s daily coronavirus press briefings knows that the New York governor relishes his variegated personae.

There is the ethnic Cuomo, who, we have learned repeatedly, enjoyed spaghetti and meatball Sunday dinners in his Queens childhood home.

Then we have Cuomo the family man, now belatedly bonding with his daughters as they shelter together in place, as we have also repeatedly learned.

Cuomo, the dutiful son, broadcasting to millions of viewers an intimate Zoom chat with his mother on Mother’s Day.

Then there is Cuomo, the righteous champion of human life, berating the Trump Administration for not immediately sending New York State 30,000 ventilators. “You pick the 26,000 people who are going to die!” he exclaimed heatedly on April 23. (As it turned out, New York never used the thousands of ventilators it had already stockpiled and it sent its many surplus machines to other states, where the ventilators also sat unused.)

Don’t forget Cuomo, the regal recipient of tribute, whether from one Samir Bhatt, a senior lecturer at Imperial College London. “Governor, it’s a professional honor to work with you,” Bhatt told Cuomo via Zoom on May 18. “Your state has already shown what can be achieved when policies are driven by science”), or from the governors of neighboring states who on May 3 offered a similarly effusive assessment for Cuomo’s performance. Imperial College was the source of the disastrous coronavirus model that sent the world economy hurtling into depression.)

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/progressive-brights-are-pretty-dim-bruce-thornton/

“Brights” is a term that became popular nearly 20 years ago to describe self-proclaimed rationalists who reject religion, practical wisdom, and tradition, and instead rely solely on “science” for understanding and solving social and political problems. Evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins defined “brights” as “Those of us who subscribe to no religion; those of us whose view of the universe is natural rather than supernatural; those of us who rejoice in the real and scorn the false comfort of the unreal.”

The current virus crisis has exposed the dangers of such hubris. Federal and state governments have put in place exorbitantly costly polices such as the extreme lockdown, guided by provisional knowledge about the coronavirus based on incomplete data. In fact, the lockdown policy has cost lives; New York mayor Andrew Cuomo, a proponent of the lockdown, back in early March was “shocked” and “surprised” that people “sheltering at home” had contracted the virus anyway and comprised the majority of those who died. The deep recession that has followed the lockdown has also cost lives, and will cost many thousands more as the effects of lost jobs and isolation take their toll over the coming years.

Once again, the “bright” progressives’ “science-based” policies have collided with the complexity of the human condition.

The “brights’” claim that only the material world is real started to spread over 200 years ago with the Enlightenment. A hundred years later it became the controlling idea behind technocratic progressivism, which holds that the “human sciences” can understand the human world accurately enough to manipulate and improve it as much as the hard sciences’ and the technologies they create did the material world. So we hear from progressives about “science-based policies,” calls to be guided by “science” and to defer to its authority, and dismissal of skeptics and critics of their policies as “deniers,” “flat-earthers” and “young-earthers” who believe cavemen rode dinosaurs.