Libertarian: Yesterday’s Heroes Get the Can
At the pandemic’s height, Gothamites gathered at their windows nightly to bang pots and pans and cheer for health and other essential workers — now “those same New Yorkers, through their representative government, are telling those same essential workers to go look for a new job, unless they have been vaccinated for COVID-19,” sighs Reason’s Matt Welch. “The requirements are exacerbating existing staff shortages in the health-care sector 19 months into the pandemic,” even as they seem to be causing some uptick in jabs. “Vaccine mandates may well be the last illiberal push that results in the US reaching some mythical pandemic off-ramp. But they may also create health-care shortages in the Northeast right as the virus once again rears its seasonal and regional head.”
From the right: Behind Biden’s $3.5 Trillion Lie
President Biden is “completely crackers” to insist “his overstuffed, $3.5 trillion slop-pail of a spending package ‘costs zero dollars,’ ” National Review’s editors snark. “The cost of a $3.5 trillion outlay is $3.5 trillion, ‘paid for’ or not.” Individuals and businesses would pay “through higher taxes” — “don’t tell them it’s free while you’ve got your hand in their pockets.” And Biden’s assertion that the plan won’t add to the national debt is “preposterous,” and Democrats know it, which is why they won’t “submit the program for a Congressional Budget Office score before voting on it.” Fact is, if the package were “fiscally sensible,” Biden “would not be obliged to lie about it.”
Prof: The Perils of Trigger Warnings
“Is warning students that they are about to be traumatized or re-traumatized likely to decrease or increase the stress they feel?” asks Harvard Law’s Jeannie Suk Gersen in The New Yorker. In fact, the explicit “trigger warnings” now common in academia may . . . backfire. One study found that “those who received trigger warnings reported greater anxiety in response to disturbing literary passages than those who did not.” Another “suggested that trigger warnings may prolong the distress of negative memories.” A third found that they “reinforced the belief on the part of trauma survivors that trauma was central (rather than incidental or peripheral) to their identity,” a belief associated with “more severe PTSD.” Thus, “the perverse consequence” of such warnings “may be to harm the people they are intended to protect.”
COVID watch: Harry & Meghan’s Vax Fallacy
At Spectator World, Ross Clark zings the Sussex royals’ claim “that ‘ultra-wealthy’ pharmaceutical companies are holding up the vaccination of the developing world by refusing to surrender their intellectual property.” After all, AstraZeneca “has made its vaccine available at cost price” and “has licensed production to the Serum Institute of India, so that low- and middle-income countries can access vaccines produced at a lower cost base.” Plus, wealthy nations have given “300 million doses of COVID vaccines to 142 countries, with a total of 1.3 billion . . . to be delivered” by year’s end. And “44.5 percent of the world’s population” has gotten “at least one dose of a vaccine,” while several countries have declined the donations. “The idea that a few rich countries are hoarding vaccines while the rest of the world goes without doesn’t reflect reality.”
Conservative: Minorities Reject Identity Politics
“Reliably Democratic voting blocs” can change, notes The Wall Street Journal’s Jason L. Riley: The trends are not “unshakable.” For example, “Republicans who can be bothered to court” the black vote (“former mayors like Richard Riordan of Los Angeles and Stephen Goldsmith of Indianapolis, or former governors like Chris Christie of New Jersey”) have learned “that campaigning in black communities can pay dividends.” Gov. Larry Hogan (R-Md.) doubled his black vote to 28 percent in 2018 because many blacks “like safe neighborhoods and low tax rates just like a lot of other Americans.” Nor are Hispanics “forever lost” to the GOP, as former President Donald Trump’s Hispanic support jumped eight points in the last election. Both parties “had forgotten that Hispanics are swing voters.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board