In The News (21)

In The News (20)

More than two thirds of India may have Covid antibodies, new survey shows evidence the virus may have spread far more widely than official figures suggest. ........ Our immune systems develop antibodies either induced by vaccination, or in response to infection. The majority of survey participants, 62%, had not received a vaccine ......... "More than half of the children (6 to 17 years old) were sero-positive, and sero-prevalence was similar in rural and urban areas," he said -- but "states, districts and areas without antibodies run the risk of infection waves," meaning about 400 million people will still be vulnerable if a third wave hits. .......... Active immunity, meaning protection against a disease, is often measured by the presence of antibodies -- proteins in the blood, made by the immune system to help fight infections, acquired either through prior infection or vaccination. ........ only 6.35% of India's 1.38 billion population has been fully vaccinated ........ "I would like to emphasize today that at hill stations and in markets, the large crowds who are not wearing masks or following protocols is an issue of great concern," said Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week, after photos emerged of tourists flouting Covid protocols in vacation destination towns. "This is not right." ............... the real toll of cases and deaths are likely much higher than reported, pointing to the discrepancy between official figures and the sero-surveys. .......... So far, India has reported about 31.2 million confirmed cases, according to Johns Hopkins University -- less than 3% of its total population, and drastically lower than the proportion of survey respondents showing antibodies. ..........

the number of excess deaths reported during India's pandemic could be up to ten times the official death toll

........... Between 3.4 and 4.9 million estimated excess deaths were reported in India between January 2020 and June 2021 ..... compared to the Indian health ministry's reported death toll of approximately 400,000. ............. the first wave of the pandemic was "more lethal than is popularly believed," and that their estimates show a higher number of excess deaths reported during the first wave than the second. ........

"True deaths are likely to be in the several millions not hundreds of thousands, making this arguably India's worst human tragedy since partition and independence."

Amateur Astronomer Discovers New Moon Orbiting Jupiter “I’m proud to say that this is the first planetary moon discovered by an amateur astronomer!”

The Expanded Child Tax Credit Is Here. Here's What You Need To Know The expanded child tax credit is only for 2021. A budget deal announced by the Senate Budget Committee on Tuesday would extend it. President Biden has also proposed an extension under his American Families Plan but faces opposition in Congress. Not a single Republican voted for the American Rescue Plan, and some have criticized the expanded child tax credit........ "What I am hopeful for is that the power and the magnitude of what these checks mean for so many Americans is going to force the hand of politicians to make this permanent"

Will ‘the Great Wealth Transfer’ Trigger a Millennial Civil War? As this younger generation ages into its prime voting years — and boomers steadily age out of the electorate — the intergenerational “balance of power” will shift. ........ “such a shift in the balance of power could include a harsher inheritance tax regime, less income protection for pensioners, more property taxes, along with greater income and corporates taxes … and all-round more redistributive policies.” ......... over the next quarter century, roughly 45 million U.S. households will collectively bequeath $68.4 trillion to their heirs. This transfer will constitute the largest redistribution of wealth in human history. Generation X stands to inherit 57 percent of that $68.4 trillion; millennials will collect the bulk of the rest. ......... millennials are “questioning” individuals who value “experience,” while zoomers are “communaholics” who prize “uniqueness” ......... A person born in the late 1980s was raised on distinct media, cultural products, and economic assumptions from someone born in the early 1950s. ..........

Millennials gave Joe Biden about 60 percent of their ballots in 2020, while voters over 45 gave him only 48 percent.

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Poor, proto-socialist, tenuously housed — this is the generation that Deutsche Bank fears. It is also the one whose ascent the left eagerly awaits.

............ Our country’s exceptionally cruel brand of capitalism lived on bought-off boomers. It would not survive the rise of a debt-ridden generation with little taste for Fox News. ......... the boomers can’t take their appreciated assets with them, and capital is already trickling down family trees.

By the time AOC turns 50, millennials will be “the richest generation in human history.”

............. more than half of the estates bequeathed over the next three decades will go to low or middle-income households ......... it raises the possibility that intergenerational warfare will give way to intragenerational class conflict. ............ About half of millennials are invested in the stock market. Those with significant savings have seen their wealth multiply over the past three years: the S&P 500 advanced 31.5 percent in 2019, 18.4 percent in 2020, and about 17.8 percent through the first five and a half months of 2021. ............ the racial divide in millennial wealth is singularly gaping. White millennials lag white boomers in wealth accumulation by just 5 percent. Black millennials, meanwhile, own 52 percent less wealth than previous generations of Black Americans had accrued by their age......... Wealthy, white millennials will claim a massively disproportionate share of the impending inheritances and intergenerational gifts. And as familial wealth is transferred, and millennials’ “earned” assets appreciate, the generation’s internal class divisions are liable to become more invidious than those of its predecessors. ............ Advances in automation are expected to increase returns to capital and lower labor’s share of income. ................. Climate change also threatens to bring routine water shortages to many parts of the country, thereby periodically condemning ordinary millennials to a nigh-preindustrial living standard ......... Of course, it is possible that policy changes will avert our descent into a neo-feudal dystopia. ........ a manufactured housing shortage: There are 3.8 million more willing buyers than available homes in the U.S. today. .........

a house bought in 2021 won’t be a sound store of wealth unless U.S. home prices remain exorbitant in perpetuity

........... zoning restrictions that have kept housing artificially scarce ....... some other “angry millennial” renters have organized campaigns to eliminate exclusionary zoning and promote housing abundance. ............... it is also plausible that the twilight of the boomers will bring a new dawn for class politics, as the hegemony of social liberalism among the millennial generation lowers the salience of cultural issues, while the ever-compounding wealth gap forces questions of capital ownership back onto the American political agenda, for the first time in more than a century.

In Nearly All Other Democracies, This Is Not Normal the Constitution’s requirement that House members serve for only two-year terms. ....... The two-year House term has profound consequences for how effectively American government can perform — and too many of them are negative. A longer, four-year term would facilitate Congress’s ability to once again effectively address major issues that Americans care most about. ......... In nearly all other democracies, parliaments are in power for four to five years. ......... in most democracies, candidates do not have to fund-raise all the time to run; governments typically provide public financing to the political parties.

The two-year term, combined with primary elections and the constant need to raise funds individually, generates exceptional turbulence and short-term focus in our politics.

.......... The Federalist Papers then had to devote a good deal of energy fending off the demand for annual elections. .......... If you think American politics is not chaotic enough, imagine if the Constitution had adopted annual House elections.

America Needs to Break Up Its Biggest States From its beginning, the United States was built to expand. Article IV, Section 3 of the Constitution grants Congress the power to create states. Starting with the Vermont Republic in 1791, as America grew, the country’s roster of states expanded as well. ........ But since the addition of Alaska and Hawaii in 1959, America hasn’t increased the number of states, and unless some future president winds up buying Greenland, the United States is unlikely to expand territorially. ........... Since 1960, the country has added over 150 million people through a combination of immigration and natural population increase. Yet we haven’t upped our state count. .......... America needs new states to improve the internal governance of the states and the country. We need new states — and the place to start is to carve them out of the largest states that already exist........... on its own, Los Angeles County would be the 10th-largest state in the union. The four largest states by population now make up roughly one-third of the population of the entire United States — more than the smallest 34 put together. ...........

Those four largest states have only eight senators, while the 34 smallest states have a supermajority of 68.

.............. On issues like environmental regulation and education policy, these behemoths can shape or frustrate national policy by their unilateral actions in ways that smaller states cannot easily dissent from. Their key industries and interest groups, meanwhile, wield disproportionate influence in the national and state capitals. ..............

Kentucky was created out of territory that originally belonged to Virginia, as was Tennessee from North Carolina territory and Maine from the territory of Massachusetts.

.......... creating states from a state that already exists would merely require the state legislature to vote to split up and for Congress to assent. ...........

carving the four megastates into three or more states each

............ If, as part of a larger national reorganization, New York City were to become a city-state — as Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen are in Germany ......... Inasmuch as New York City needs partners to coordinate with, the most important ones are in New Jersey and Connecticut, not in Buffalo and Rochester — so splitting up New York State could give new momentum to proposals for regional governance across state lines. ......... California could even plausibly be broken into as many as five states, if the Bay Area and Los Angeles were hived off to become city-states, which they are certainly populous enough to be. ............. Maine and Missouri were admitted in 1820 and 1821 to preserve the national balance between free and slave states. .......... it could be powerfully symbolic if, for example, members of the Seneca, Oneida, Mohawk and other nations of the old Iroquois Confederacy played a central public role in defining a state covering their old territory. ....... The genius of our federal system is that it provides a framework for a multiplicity of communities, with different interests and values, to live together as part of a single country. .......... Breaking up can be hard to do, but sometimes, it’s the best way to ultimately come together.

Snap Out of It, America! The country expanded its borders, abolished slavery, broadened the franchise; waves of immigrants reshaped and revised America’s character; the government added and dropped functions, amending the Constitution to fit the times. It was a restless experiment. ........... For more than 150 years, the United States had no official national anthem. “The Star-Spangled Banner” shuffled among “Hail, Columbia” and “America (My Country, ’Tis of Thee)”; the design of the flag shifted with the states and with fashion. ........... The country that passed Prohibition and created Social Security now spends decades dithering over how large a role the government should play in health care.

The country that went to the moon shrinks at the challenges presented by climate change.

.......... hard partisanship makes it difficult to create coalitions for sweeping changes. Wars, which once smashed through gridlock, no longer lead to collective action.