DL Open Thread Tuesday The Ides of March 2022
Oh Crap
BEIJING, March 15 (Reuters) – China posted a steep jump in daily COVID-19 infections on Tuesday, with new cases more than doubling from a day earlier to hit a two-year high, raising concerns about the rising economic costs of its tough measures to contain the disease.
A total of 3,507 domestically transmitted cases with confirmed symptoms were reported on Monday across more than a dozen provinces and municipalities, up from 1,337 a day earlier, the National Health Commission said.
Most of the new cases were in the northeastern province of Jilin.
Though China’s caseload is still tiny by global standards, health experts said the increase in daily infections over the next few weeks would be key to determine whether its “dynamic zero-COVID” approach, of containing each outbreak quickly as it arises, remains effective against the rapidly spreading Omicron variant.
Makers of everything from flash drives to glass for Apple’s iPhone screens are warning of shipment delays as they comply with China’s curbs against the disease, putting further strain on global supply chains.
More like this please. Get them on record. Make Republicans (and Joe Manchin and Chris Coons) vote against it.
Dems push plan to tax oil companies’ profits, send checks to Americans during Russia-Ukraine price spike
Rep. Ro Khanna and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse are pushing a bill they say will help bring relief from high gas prices to Americans.
The proposal, which comes as Russia’s war on Ukraine delivers a shock to global energy prices, is called the “Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax.” According to Khanna, D-Calif., and Whitehouse, D-R.I., the bill would levy a tax on oil barrels sold by large producers “equal to 50 percent of the difference between the current price of a barrel of oil and the pre-pandemic average price per barrel between 2015 and 2019.”
The money from that tax would be sent to consumers as a quarterly rebate, according to a description of the bill, with a cutoff for single people making $75,000 or more and families making $150,000 or more.
“We’ve seen this script before, and we cannot allow the fossil fuel industry to once again collect a massive windfall by taking advantage of an international crisis,” Whitehouse said. A press release from Whitehouse and Khanna said the increase in gas prices, “is not justified by increases in the cost of domestic production, but is driven by international markets controlled by fossil fuel cartels.”
Speaking of Machin…
Raskin made the mistake of saying that Climate Change is real and something we need to factor into our plans.
Interesting report on Starbucks’ flailing anti-union efforts.
https://truthout.org/articles/starbuckss-multimillion-dollar-anti-union-effort-may-have-backfired/
Idaho just jumped on the forced-pregnancy bandwagon. I think these magats know the fix is in and RvW is done.
When the gop is in full control again in 2025, expect a nationwide total ban on birth control.
There’s Tennessee with the total ban … and letting citizens enforce it? There has GOT to be a way to troll and abuse this… until it becomes national law.
The argument against windfall oil/gas tax used to be that they would reinvest the profits to drill, baby, drill to increase supply and lower price.
But that was then. Now we don’t want to increase supply of fossil fuels.
So tax, baby, tax and use the money to support Ukraine, or invest in renewables. Anything but dividends to oil investors and burning more oil.
China was going for a zero-COVID policy which is nonsensical in an age of widely-available vaccines. The small surge of cases in Europe is also appearing in countries with worse vaccination efforts. Hong Kong is also learning the hard way that we have to live with COVID, after vaccinating all the vulnerable and everyone else who can possibly get it, instead of just hoping no infections ever happen.