America's Talking - Episode 32: Study highlights high costs, limited benefits of government pandemic restrictions

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

January job growth much better than expected. Study highlights high costs, limited benefits of government pandemic restrictions. Most Americans say their finances are not better off since Biden took office. White House defends spending as federal debt tops $30 trillion. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to American Focus. I'm Cole McNeely. Coming up, we'll take a quick look at one of the top stories from the centresquare.com and later, executive editor of the Center Square, Dan McAulb, and DC reporter Casey Harper, will take a deeper dive into some of the top stories of the week. Coming up right after this on American Focus, powered by thecentersquare.com. Hi, this is Chris Kroog, publisher of the Center Square. Our team produces the nationally read and recognized news stories at thecentersquare.com. the country's fastest growing, nonprofit, nonpartisan, state-focused news and information site. We deliver essential information with a taxpayer's sensibility through reporting that's easy to understand and easy to share with your friends and family. We know that you need information that allows you to understand what the governor and your local legislators are doing.

Get the news that you need to know at thecentersquare.com. That's thecentersquare.com. Thecenter square.com. President Joe Biden's commitment to only nominate a new Supreme Court Justice, who is a black female, does not have broad support, a newly released poll suggest. The ABC poll found that 76% of surveyed Americans say Biden should consider all possible nominees to fill Justice Breyer's seat, while 23% say Biden should only consider nominees who are black women as he pledged to do. Biden promised several times during the campaign to nominate a black female justice,

saying he is, quote, looking forward to making sure there's a black woman on the Supreme Court. To read more about these stories and many others, visit thecenter square.com. Now, for a closer look, it's Dan McAulb and Casey Harper. Thank you, Cole, and welcome back to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAleb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me again today is Casey Harper, the Center Square's Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief. Casey, we're recording this on Friday, February 4th. February 2nd was Groundshog Day.

Do you believe the Groundhog can predict one story? spring will start? I think that, no, I'm not a believer. Sorry, children, listening. You know, I tried to put on a good face for the public, but I don't think I can do it. Especially because I think you have your own groundhog in your neck of the woods, don't you, Dan? And I think they conflicted this year.

Yeah, right. So Puncta Tani Phil, the one that goes back decades, he saw his shadow predicting a later spring but here i'm in the northwest suburbs of chicago um the city of woodstock where the bill murray movie groundhog day was uh filmed and they have their own groundhog and he did not see his shadow what do you do when conflicting groundhog predictions i don't know he's probably caught up in the chicago corruption network he's been bought off by some of the organized crime there maybe the energy companies wanting, you know, to get the air conditioners going sooner. I'm not sure. But that's my prediction. That's the hard-hating center square analysis. So you're saying

Punksetani Phil is accurate and Woodstock Willie is not? Woodstock Willie with the name like that, how could he not be accurate? Yeah. Well, judging by the temperatures across the country, I don't know. I don't know if we're going to get an early spring or not. All right. Let's actually get into some news. Casey, Johns Hopkins University researchers released a new study this week that essentially said that the lockdowns, while having limited effects on public health, had significant effects on people's livelihoods and mental health. What can you tell us about this analysis? Yeah, this is a really interesting study. And what it essentially says, in a nutshell, is lockdowns don't really do anything. to limit mortality of the virus, despite what, you know, you've been hearing from for the last two years, and they actually have a really profound impact on the economy and on mental health,

which is kind of something we don't talk about enough. But this is like another example of something related to the pandemic that you're not allowed to say that suddenly becomes published scientific research. And then, you know, the leaders on the who've been organizing, their response to the pandemic have to deal with it because a lot of the findings that are coming out now a couple years later really fly in the face of what lawmakers and you know even democratic governors have been telling us since the beginning of the pandemic and so we wrote about and john hopkins university is is a prestigious research uh university well known this is good no this is not the the ted cruise institute for good science okay this is john hopkins this is not not some bought off think tank is a very reputable institution. So yeah, go ahead. I wanted to make that point as well.

Well, we reported on it at the center square, the center square.com and a number of other outlets reported on it. I looked before we jumped on the podcast here. I didn't see any reporting on this analysis on like CNN or in the New York Times or in the Washington Post or in MSNBC. Why would take it for what it's worth, but I would seem to think that this is a study that's worth reporting on.

Yeah, I mean, a certain level, we can't really know the motives of some of those institutions, but it would really contradict the reporting that they've done for the last, you know, almost, you know, last couple of years on the pandemic. It goes right against everything that they've been saying, everything that Democrats and leadership have been saying, And, you know, there, I mean, there's some places where you could be censored, maybe lose your, get dinged on your social media account.

These are the, you know, a similar example would be there was a time where if you said that cloth masks don't work, you know, you could be censored, you'd be ridiculed. You know, if you're a leader, you definitely have some special on MSNBC mocking you as a fool. And then it came out recently that cloth masks actually don't really do much. They really don't do anything. And that's another example of something that you could be censored for saying last year is now published scientific research. And the origins of COVID-19, early on the first year, you'd be mocked if you even suggested that it could have come from the Wuhan lab in China that does. research and testing on coronaviruses. Now it's there's been no definitive study that I've seen one way or the other. But now there's a pretty good chance, maybe a 50-50 chance that it did originate at the Wuhan lab.

So just like the masks early on, the research has changed. Right. And, you know, the federally funded Wuhan lab, by the way. But, you know, this You know, we, Dan, you and I, we try not to really take sides or anything and give the facts. But I think one of the issue of censorship, journalists, I think we do have a right and a responsibility to stand up to it. And, you know, I think this is a great example of why the censoring of social media companies, you know, we see the White House right now pushing for the censoring of, you know, public figures on the pandemic. This is why censoring doesn't work. And you have to let ideas have their space to let them fight it out. because, you know, if something's a bad idea and it's not true, then it'll be proven as such over time.

But, you know, in this example, social media companies and the government has been trying to censor ideas that turned out to actually be true. And sometimes you can't know right off the bad as something is true or not. So to give people the power to just censor things, when they don't really know and the facts haven't all come out, you were seeing the danger of that now. You imagine how it might be different if some of the arguments, around pandemics and masks or on lockdowns and masks were allowed to breathe a little bit and, you know, undergo scrutiny and not be censored, how a response to the pandemic might have been different. All right.

I agree with everything you just said there. I do want to just get back to the study briefly. It concluded that lockdowns in Europe and the U.S. So this was a study of both America's response but also European response to COVID-19. Lockdowns in both continents or Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average. And the study concludes, and this is going to be a direct quote from the report, while this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted.

In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be raised. rejected as a pandemic policy instrument. So that's pretty definitive and that's pretty direct. It's not suggesting that the lockdown policies didn't work. It's outright saying that they didn't work. Yeah. I think the, you know, a critic would point out a little bit of nuance. There has been, I think, evidence showing that if people voluntarily shut themselves in their home,

they actually, they are reduced risk. But with that, and they'll say see lockdowns work because those people who locked themselves down were safer. But what this isn't examining that. This is examining a government policy of lockdowns. And does mandate that everyone, yeah, does a mandate saying everyone has to stay inside, you know, it doesn't work. You know, people, it may shut down the local coffee shop, but those people are still going to hang out in their homes. And they're still going to get COVID by seeing each other. And, you know, meanwhile, the coffee shop goes out of business, right?

So if they're still going to get COVID, you might as well have let the economy run, let people feed their families, you know, let them take the risk that they felt was appropriate. And I think that's really what the study is getting it. All right. Well, and one thing U.S. policy did in the early part of the pandemic with these lockdowns, of course, is millions and millions of Americans lost their jobs, which led to congressional action. that everyone remembers the Paycheck Protection Program and other COVID relief bills approved by Congress and both Presidents Trump and now President Biden spending billions upon billions of dollars to boost up these economies. And now just this week, we found out that the federal debt has topped $30 trillion. dollars. What can you tell us about that? Yeah, that's right. There's no problem that Congress doesn't think another trillion dollars can solve. I think that's what we learned that lesson yet again. But

you're right. I mean, there was several multi-trillion dollar spending bills last year that were either passed or pushed, you know, advocated very hard for. And the federal government hit a kind of troubling landmark of $30 trillion in debt. Now, to put that a little bit of perspective, in the year 2001, the debt was $5 trillion, right? And even more perspective, just five years ago, the debt was $20 trillion. So the debt is rising fast. You know, the debt rose double. In the last five years, the debt rose twice as much as what it was in 2001.

Right. So that is a really significant rise. You know, Republicans definitely talk more about the debt and fiscal responsibility. But I think we have to be honest that a lot of Republicans have contributed to this and the debt has risen steadily across both Republican and Democratic administrations over the last two decades. And so it's a big problem. You know, it has a lot of implications. You know, it's helped contribute to our inflation, obviously, printing money. there's a lot of talk also about how if we were in some kind of armed conflict you could imagine based on the way Joe Biden is handling Ukraine that it could escalate gone forbid into something more full scale with Russia and do we have the financial capacity and the borrowing capacity to go into a lot more debt to fight a war which is what almost always happens when countries go to war they take on a lot of debt but if you're already in a lot of debt can you how much more can you take on. So it is a national security risk. So we can talk about the cause. We can talk about the implications and risks, but that's kind of the general overview of what we're dealing with.

And this bill is going to come due, right, at some point. Taxpayers are on the hook. National taxpayers across the country are on the hook for this $30 trillion dollars. And the question is, at what point does the national debt get too expensive, get too costly? that it's going to have dramatic impacts on the entire economy. Yeah, I mean, I don't think anyone really knows the answer to that. We passed significant size of the GDP numbers that recently. It's kind of like how much, you know, arsenic does it take to kill you. It's just little by little every day and then suddenly you cross some kind of tipping point.

I think that, you know, there's a lot of reasons that people are, you know, confident that will be okay. United States, our currency is the standard for the world. But it may be, it's probably going to be okay this year and next year, but it's our kids and grandkids that are going to be competing with a China that has really been really aggressive economically. That that's really where, you know, the worry is going to come. And it just makes you unable to be resilient in crisis. And so that's really a question.

is like, well, how long before this is the problem? It's like, well, when's the next crisis going to be that we're going to need to take on a lot of debt and can't? When's the next full-scale war that borrowers aren't going to lend us anymore? Or lenders aren't going to give us any more money because, you know, we're not good for it anymore. So when's the next crisis might be the better question. So you wrote about the story at the center square.com this week. Just one more item on this note. You also quoted Sheila Weinberg from Truth in Accounting, 30 trillion,

NARS is a massive figure. How many zeros are in there? I can't calculate in my head right now. Right. But she actually says federal debt is much higher. That's right. That's right. She doesn't, you know,

she actually puts the number at $141 trillion. Which is, yeah, which is obviously scary for a lot of people. You say, well, how does she get that? What does that mean?

But basically what it comes down to is that the Treasury Department when they report and they count up all the debt and the different things, they do not include Social Security and Medicare liabilities. So, you know, the government has, if you can just project out what the government is going to have to pay over the next 10 years in Social Security and Medicare. So, you know, you may not technically call that a debt, which the Treasury Department doesn't, but it is, it's on the books. You're going to have to pay it.

It's owed to people. And if you did count that, you know, every year, then it adds up to $141 trillion. So that's kind of the money that the federal government owes to its own people, really. The reason they don't count it, and this might be talk about scary, this would be scary to some people. The reason they don't count it is because technically Congress could change the law at any point and revoke Medicare and Social Security benefits. Which would be devastating to America. Oh, yeah. Oh, totally, right. So it's like, don't worry. We don't actually owe $141 trillion because we could take your money. Social Security away to pay for it.

It's like, wait a minute, that is not a good picture if you want to hear. Particularly folks like you were getting up there in age, Casey, and might be looking at retiring at some point. That's right. I think I've already, everyone at my age assumes we won't have Social Security. So. All right. Why don't we move on?

It's tax season, Casey. workers have been getting their W-2 statements and whatnot from their employers and face an April deadline to file their federal income taxes. But we're now hearing that there's such a significant backlog at the IRS, which processes these, that one, if you're expecting a return, you might not get it as soon as you want, but two, there's calls from many in Congress. for penalty relief. Well, tell us about this story. It's a little complex.

Sure. So the IRS is a big, you know, well-staffed. Well, some people may not say well-staffed enough, but there's a lot of moving parts of the IRS, a lot of different departments and offices, and they don't always talk to each other very well. So what's happening is the IRS is getting very backed up and processing income tax returns,

which means people aren't getting their refunds, but it also means that it's not going in... We're talking about returns from last year, right? We're not talking about this year's tax season. We're talking about last year's tax season. Absolutely, absolutely. And that means that people aren't getting their refunds, but it also means that it's not going in the system

that you paid your taxes for some people. And so what's happening is you're going to imagine if the left arm of the IRS is the one that collects all the tax returns And the right arm is the one that smacks you if you don't pay, right? The left arm is the tax, you know, collecting side is getting so backed up that they're not even processing. Some people filed their taxes last year paid like they were supposed to, but the IRS hasn't processed it yet. And so when the right side, the right arm of the IRS looks, looks up, you know, Dan McAulb's name in the system. It says, well, it says here, we don't have anything in the book saying you paid your taxes.

And so they start sending penalties to Dan, to you, Dan. And then then you're like, well, I paid my, I paid my taxes. What are you talking about? Where is this penalty coming from? Well, it's sitting in some bureaucrats, you know, top shelf of their desk somewhere. And it hasn't been put in the system yet. And so people are getting, you know, penalties. They're getting letters and warnings and notices, even though they pay their taxes.

And so you can understand why this would be very worrisome for people. And lawmakers are saying, hey, we need to hold off on these penalties until the IRS can get its act together. because people shouldn't be, you know, penalized when they, when they did the right thing, paying their taxes last year. So that's a little bit scary. And hopefully, if Congress has to act on that, hopefully they do, this is not a partisan issue or certainly should not be a partisan issue. If an individual or a business paid their taxes on time, but the IRS just couldn't process it,

they certainly, I think, I don't see anyone arguing that they should pay the penalty. if they paid their taxes on time. Right. And I just, you got to follow these examples away because these are the kind of things I remember when certain lawmakers advocate for taking whole parts of the economy

under the arm of the federal government. I mean, anyone who's been to the DMV, anyone who has still not gotten their tax refund yet, these are the kind of things you have to remember where the federal government really struggles to keep up administratively with complex problems, even as they advocate.

for taking over, you know, huge parts of the economy. It's just, you know, raises questions about what if your application for a new surgery under public health care was backlogged for nine months, Dan? You know, I mean, you can imagine some, you know, people talk about the public option or even banning private health care, all health care going through federal government. These are the kind of problems that some countries have seen that have, you know, totally, you know, only public health care. you apply for a surgery that you need and it could take months and months to even be processed the way these returns are.

So just kind of an interesting thing to think about as we hear more and more of these proposals for government expansion. All right. Moving on then, Casey, you wrote about another poll that came out this week about Americans and their finances. What is the poll show? Yeah, that's right. So Gallup, which is another very reputable pollster, every year they ask Americans, do you feel like you're better off financially than you were last year? And so, let's see, there was 59% of Americans in January of 2020, right before the pandemic, that said they were better off than they were the year before.

But some combination of a new administration and the pandemic have really destroyed. drop those numbers. So this new polling data showed that only 41% of Americans this year said they're better off financially than a year ago when President Biden took office. So the year before, that is a slight increase. It was 35% in more of the heart of the pandemic. Only 35% of Americans said they're better off. But it's interesting Gallup went on to say that a major reason Americans are worried about their financial situation is because of something that we've written about a lot at the sooner square.com and that's inflation. Right.

You know, the inflation has steadily increased at actually a very high rate over the last, you know, 12 months. So we've even seen record, record numbers, like the highest in 40 years. Inflation, there's different, you know, different data sets, find, you know, different price, you know, that look at different prices, kind of gauge different ways. But they all agree on the same thing, that it's the highest inflation in decades. And this poll shows that Americans are actually very, very concerned about it. And the causes, you mentioned, the pandemic. You mentioned inflation. But there was a new jobs report that came out today that conflicts with a jobs report that came out earlier in the week.

The Department of Labor today released January's jobs report. And economists across the country were expecting not so good news, but it turns out, according to the federal government, the U.S. created more jobs in January than expected. Yeah, that's right. So the first job report you mentioned is an ADP report. It's kind of, it looks at only private sector jobs. ADP is a major payroll company that has tens of millions of, you know, employees that are on its payroll. So they have a really good way of kind of judging the private sector and how many people have been at it or taken away. And what they saw, saw was a decrease in jobs, which actually be very serious. If the economy, the economy has to

not just add jobs, but add jobs at a certain rate just to keep kind of break even because new people, you know, there's, there's immigrants coming every day. There's new people turning 18 every day who need jobs. So you have to add jobs to the economy just to keep pace with all the people who need new jobs. So if you actually shrink in the number of jobs, it'd be very serious, which is what this initial report said of the private sector. But as you pointed out, the the Department of Labor report, which I'll be kind of digging into today, found that just for our listeners' benefit, just came out like half an hour, 45 minutes ago, so we're still digesting it.

Totally. Absolutely. Yeah. And it showed that the economy actually added 467,000 jobs and put unemployment at 4%. So that's better than experts predicted. One difference is that includes public sector jobs. you know the initial report didn't cover that so it'd be interesting to see if most of those jobs or all of those jobs are government jobs that would be very unusual it may just be that the ADP was off

we'll have to dig into it today but it's definitely an interesting thing to look into is something you should be watching on the website right and that would be you know again speculating because the report just came out not so long ago we haven't had a chance to dig into it that much but if it is government sector jobs, that's a concern. If most of it is government sector jobs, that's another concern because that's more taxpayer expense. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, you can't, if you lose private sector jobs and gain government jobs, it's not going to be very long before you kind of turn it upside down. Because one, it's a weight on the economy and one is a, you know, feeds the federal government. It allows it to do what it does. So, yeah, you're right. That would not be a good trend if that continued. All right, Casey, that is all the time we have for the America and Focus podcast. Thank you again for your insight, and we'll talk to you next week.