This is really the most important part. Not one person who has criticized DeSantis has answered the question when I asked "what choice did we have?"
I'm sorry to say that I think the national picture is the same. Liberals want chaos and economic hardship thinking it will gain them power. Its the most cynical thing I've ever seen. Any disaster is promoted and fueled by them. Anything to gain power.
Flightless economy to land with a thud No national leader has been as feted as Jacinda Ardern during this pandemic. Young and progressive, New Zealand’s Prime Minister was popular before the crisis. Since she imposed the favoured pandemic solution of the left — a hard lockdown, shutting practically all business and no socialising with anyone outside your home — her star has only risen. “Laughing in the face of seismic shakes, she has calmly steered her country in the face of a massacre, an eruption and a pandemic,” The Guardian cooed on Tuesday. Steering it into an economic abyss, perhaps. Air New Zealand planes sit parked on the tarmac as sheep graze in a nearby field at Christchurch Airport. Picture: AP New Zealand’s economy is in strife. Without major change, our constitutional cousin is in decline. Its public finances are in tatters, its biggest export, tourism, has been obliterated — Air New Zealand announced 4000 job losses this week — and New Zealand police now can enter people’s homes without a warrant. “New Zealand is going backwards, falling behind the vast majority of our OECD partners in virtually every social and economic measure that matters,” said Roger Douglas, a former New Zealand Labour treasurer and the famed architect of Rogernomics. New Zealand ranks fourth last in the OECD for labour productivity growth, and last for multi-factor productivity growth, according to economist Michael Reddell, based on OECD data. Health and education are gobbling up more of the budget as the population ages, with less and less to show for it. The country’s Massey University reckons economic activity will tank 16 per cent in the second quarter, while government forecasts pencil in a 4.6 per cent decline this year ahead of an 8.2 per cent rebound in 2022. “I doubt the economy will bounce back as the government hopes; and the Treasury forecasts, as bad as they are, will prove optimistic,” former NZ Treasury secretary Graham Scott said. In one year, New Zealand has blown 30 years of hard-fought fiscal rectitude. Its public debt will explode from the equivalent of 19 per cent of gross domestic product last year to 54 per cent by 2022, on the government’s own figures. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Picture: Getty Images Scott said expanding the deficit, expected to blow out to 10 per cent this year, was the right thing to do. “But looking further out, comparisons with other countries, such as the US and UK, are no basis to justify our large debt ratios; we’re a small, open economy with vulnerable export industries,” he said, noting the share of exports in GDP had been falling steadily for nine years. That makes Labour’s ban on oil and gas exploration all the more bizarre. With 0.3 per cent of global GDP, New Zealand can only shoot itself in the foot by shunning fossil fuels. The Prime Minister and Finance Minister, who have not worked in the private sector, spruik the totems of modern left governments — renewable energy, trees, higher tax, equality — but without much to show for it. Plans for a billion trees and 100,000 houses have come close to almost naught, and a capital-gains tax was dumped. Labour made a song and dance about reducing child poverty too, but on six out of nine measures tracked by Statistics New Zealand it is unchanged or worse since 2017, including the share of children living in “material hardship”, which has risen to 13.4 per cent. It’s hard to see how shifting to a four-day working week, the Prime Minister’s latest reform idea, will fix the country’s problems. theaustralian.com.au4:40 Jacinda Ardern floats the idea of a four day working week Sky News contributor Nicholas Reece says New Zealand "has long been the social laboratory for progressive reform" as prime minister Jacinda Arder... “The real problem with the Ardern government is they have no idea whatsoever apart from how to throw money at things,” Douglas told The Australian. The targeted “investment” approach to welfare pioneered when previous prime minister Bill English was treasurer has been junked in favour of open slather. “Our $12bn wage subsidy, for instance; about a third was a donation to people who don’t need it,” he said, explaining how well-off lawyers and accountants had obtained the payments. New Zealand’s international investment position was negative $171bn at the end of last year, more than half its GDP. “To keep international investors’ trust, we must remain squeaky clean in our fundamental economic institutions,” New Zealand Initiative chief executive Oliver Hartwich said. “Even Mexico, Nigeria and Venezuela are not as indebted to the rest of the world as New Zealand.” New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks during Question Time at Parliament in Wellington yesterday. Picture: Getty Images The nation’s draconian response to the coronavirus was questionable, given it is an island with a massive moat and a small population spread over an area the size of Italy. Despite those obvious advantages, the stringency of its lockdown was higher than practically any other country, according to Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government. Deaths per million were the same as Australia’s — just four. In any case, it wasn’t outsized compassion that drove the lockdown sledgehammer but the brutal reality of an underfunded health system. With about 140 intensive care unit beds and few ventilators — far fewer than Australia per capita — it was woefully underprepared. Ardern is more popular than ever, and by all accounts is a good person and a great communicator. But if a COVID-19 vaccine remains elusive, New Zealanders may come to question her wisdom as they fall further down the global pecking order. Without economic growth, there won’t be money for more ICU beds. If we want to fete other countries for their response to the virus, how about Japan? It didn’t smash the civil liberties of its people for weeks yet it managed to keep deaths very low. Eschewing big-government solutions, Shinzo Abe would have had to “transition” to get the left’s attention.
A hit piece that is so slanted that you refuse to provide the url. It spends most of the time whining about the Labour government's policy on oil & gas drilling. It provides no numbers on the overall economic impact of coronoavirus to GDP of New Zealand while attempting to make poor nonsensical political points about the government's very successful COVID response.
Since the state has scrubbed detailed COVID data off of its state portal to please DeSantis as he drove his re-open agenda -- newspapers had to go dig up the information on their own. The picture being presented in Florida is not pretty -- in fact it is pretty much a disaster. How many are sick and how sick are they? Here’s the South Florida COVID-19 hospitalization data the state won’t show you. https://www.sun-sentinel.com/corona...0200625-fxaqlfnlrbgm3ouzrcm55yhaxe-story.html As new Covid-19 cases in the state hit record highs daily, hospitalizations climb and intensive care beds fill, leaders are becoming increasingly anxious about whether the infection will overtax the local hospital system. But Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration isn’t showing Floridians all they know about how the virus is playing out in its hospitals. The Sun Sentinel has obtained Covid-19 hospitalization information for South Florida from Florida International University where researchers from the university’s Robert Stempel College of Public Health & Social Work have launched the Miami-Dade COVID-19 Trend Tracker, a website dedicated to monitoring the long and short term trends of COVID-19 and its impact on Miami-Dade hospitals. The data is significant because, unlike publicly available state data, it focuses solely on Covid-19 patients and it does so in far more detail. The FIU data shows clear and concerning hospitalization trends are emerging in South Florida: South Florida hospitalizations for Covid-19 are now eclipsing the peaks reached in mid-April. Miami-Dade on Wednesday had 981 people hospitalized with the virus, surpassing an April 17 peak of 787. Broward County had 391 Covid patients in hospitals, nearing its peak of 413 on April 7. Palm Beach County, with 394 people hospitalized with the virus, has far exceeded a peak of 245 cases on April 20. In Broward County, more Covid-19 patients fill hospital beds each day for the last week, but overall people are sicker in Palm Beach County, where hospitalizations, intensive care and ventilator use for those in critical need have been on the increase since mid-May. Palm Beach County has consistently had the highest percentage of Covid-19 patients in intensive care, accounting for about 33 percent of the county’s hospital patients. In Broward and Miami-Dade those numbers are 28 percent and 23 percent, respectively. All three South Florida counties have reported consistently higher daily hospitalizations from the virus since June 12. Miami-Dade has seen a sharp rise in infected patients on ventilators this week as more patients are in ICU beds. Broward County hospitals have been admitting more patients with the virus than discharging them since June 4. (Much more at above url with charts)
Are you truly trying to claim that Florida had under COVID 10 deaths yesterday? DeSantis needs to fix his fake data portal 5,004 new COVID-19 cases in Florida and 46 more deaths Thursday https://www.heraldtribune.com/news/...-cases-in-florida-and-46-more-deaths-thursday The Florida Department of Health announced 5,004 new cases of COVID-19 in the state on Thursday. Florida now has 114,018 coronavirus cases across the state. The number of reported deaths increased by 46 to 3,327 since Wednesday.