DANA MILBANK COLUMN

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By DANA MILBANK,Dana Milbank

Republicans are killing us.

No, really.

Until now, we've known that covid-19 death rates were higher among the unvaccinated, and also higher in counties that went for Donald Trump, whose supporters were more likely to resist vaccinations, masks and other pandemic precautions.

Now that the omicron wave is over, a couple of new analyses of state-by-state data both point to an inescapable conclusion: Living in states run by a Republican governor is dangerous to your health.

Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, consultant Doug Haddix reported Sunday that since July 1 (when the lifesaving vaccine was widely available), the 14 states with the highest death rates were all run by Republican governors. This included Florida (at about 153 deaths per 100,000 residents), Ohio (142 deaths per 100,000), Arizona (138) and Georgia (134). Contrast that with the deep-blue District of Columbia (only 27 deaths per 100,000) and California (58 per 100,000).

For verification, I checked with health-care analyst Charles Gaba, whose data on covid-19 and voting patterns has been widely cited. He ran the numbers for me using data mostly from Johns Hopkins and found similar results. The 16 states with the highest coronavirus death rates since July 1 were all run by Republicans. The worst was West Virginia (about 204 deaths per 100,000), followed closely by Oklahoma, Tennessee, Wyoming and the aforementioned Florida.

The states with the lowest death rates, by contrast, were all run by Democrats -- or, in the case of Vermont, Maryland and Massachusetts, by moderate Republican governors who had heavily Democratic legislatures and embraced vaccines and masks. The best jurisdictions were D.C., Vermont, Hawaii and California. Looking at data from the period since May 1 (by which time all U.S. adults theoretically could have been vaccinated) produced similar results.

Florida residents were, since vaccines have been widely available, nearly seven times as likely to die from covid-19 as residents of D.C., nearly three times as likely to die as residents of California and 212 times as likely to die as residents of New York. With Florida's population of about 22 million, that's a lot of unnecessary deaths.

This raises a question: How does Ron DeSantis sleep at night? Florida's Republican governor has been among the most outspoken in raising fears of the coronavirus vaccine (most recently suggesting, falsely, that it could harm women's fertility), suing to stop vaccine mandates, promoting ineffective cures, blocking rules requiring face masks, scolding mask-wearing kids for "covid theater" and touting misleading statistics.

It's likely no coincidence that Florida, under DeSantis, has had by far the highest covid-19 death rate among the most-populous states and is in the top five of all states. Other factors, including climate, health-care infrastructure, and the age and underlying health of the population, don't fully account for it. Maine, with an even older population than Florida's, had a death rate just over half as high. Also, Florida's vaccination rate appears to be overstated thanks to vaccine tourism.

In addition to the state rankings, Gaba's latest county-level data confirms earlier patterns: Since May, people in the most pro-Trump tenth of U.S. counties had a death rate more than three times as high as those in the most anti-Trump tenth. The number of overall cases, however, was only 1.3 times as high, indicating that vaccines were preventing death.

Every week, it seems, brings fresh confirmation of the basic truths about the pandemic that have long been obvious to all except those consuming the disinformation of the Trumpy right: Vaccines work. Masks work. Conspiracy theories don't.

Last week, a new CDC study confirmed that -- shocker -- masks prevent illness. A study of Arkansas school districts found that those with full mask requirements had a 23 percent lower incidence of covid-19 among students and staff compared to districts with no mask requirements. Those with partial mask requirements were in between, and those that switched from no mask to masks had reduced illness.

Before that, a pair of studies late last month added evidence to the original belief that the virus emerged in late 2019 in a wet market in Wuhan, China. Though the matter isn't settled, the findings make the scenario that the virus was spread accidentally or intentionally by a lab in Wuhan -- an incendiary accusation recklessly trumpeted by Trump, DeSantis, Fox News and the like -- considerably less likely.

"Falsehood flies," Jonathan Swift wrote, "and truth comes limping after it." The truth has taken the lead, for those who care. Alas, for some of those who accepted the lies DeSantis and other leaders told about vaccines, masks and cures, it's too late. They're already dead.

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Follow Dana Milbank on Twitter, @Milbank.

CATHERINE RAMPELL COLUMN

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By CATHERINE RAMPELL,Catherine Rampell

The outlook for the U.S. economy has darkened.

Just as it seemed as though the global economy and its tangled supply chains could be getting back to normal, three factors might supercharge inflation and/or raise the risk of recession.

The first of the three developed in just the past few days: a new covid wave in China that has already led to major lockdowns and will further stress the world's struggling supply chains. If you haven't heard much about this yet, you probably will soon.

Daily covid cases in China have reached numbers not publicly reported since 2020. Thanks partly to low vaccination rates for the elderly in China, plus the relative ineffectiveness of Chinese-made coronavirus vaccines, the Chinese government has responded to outbreaks with an iron fist. Under its so-called "zero covid" policy, several areas have been locked down in recent days, with nonessential workers mostly barred from leaving their homes in the major manufacturing hubs of Shenzhen (a city of 17.5 million people) and Changchun (9 million).

Transportation to Shanghai, the country's largest city (25 million), has been severely restricted, raising fears of a possible lockdown there, too.

These measures have forced factories, including plants affiliated with Apple, Toyota and Volkswagen, to suspend operations. The backlog of container ships waiting off Qingdao, one of the country's biggest ports, has also swelled, with nearly twice as many ships queued up Monday as at the end of February. These bottlenecks are expected to drive container freight prices (even) higher.

All of this will be bad for already elevated inflation, in both the United States and the rest of the world. The only possible economic upside is that factory shutdowns will likely reduce global demand for oil.

This might be helpful in light of Shock No. 2: the disruptions in commodity markets, including oil, resulting from Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

This issue has obviously generated more coverage. Oil and natural gas prices have climbed in recent weeks as governments and individual corporations have placed new restrictions on transactions with Russia. Oil prices have fallen back a little in the past few days but remain high.

Equally worrisome are rising prices for other commodities produced in that part of the world. Russia and Ukraine together supply nearly a third of global wheat exports, with the Ukraine planting season usually occurring in mid-March (i.e., now). Even before the war, global stocks of wheat were low, and prices high, thanks to unfavorable growing weather over the past two years. In the wake of Russia's invasion, wheat prices have skyrocketed, threatening to boost food inflation more broadly. The risk of widespread hunger and economic hardship is especially high in lower-income countries that are most reliant on Europe's breadbasket.

Finally, there's the third risk: tightening financial conditions, thanks to the Federal Reserve.

The Fed is widely expected to raise interest rates at its meeting this week. Given that U.S. inflation is already at a 40-year high, this is hardly surprising. In a different era, few would have predicted that interest rates could be at zero when inflation hit nearly 8% (as happened in February). With hindsight, even Fed officials would probably agree that they should have begun tightening months ago.

Fed officials had delayed taking these measures earlier because they feared doing so would derail the post-pandemic recovery. Most previous Fed efforts to tamp down inflation by making it harder to borrow ended with the Fed plunging the U.S. economy into recession, after all.

Central bankers have been hoping to avoid that outcome this time, particularly because there are still 2 million fewer jobs today than existed before the pandemic. And for a long time, most economic forecasters believed inflationary pressures would largely abate on their own as supply chains normalized. That clearly hasn't happened.

Engineering a "soft landing" for this hot economy was always going to be difficult. But it got more difficult in light of recent global events, because the Fed is being pulled in conflicting directions. Chinese supply chain problems and Russia/Ukraine commodity market disruptions are widely expected to push overall inflation even higher, which would normally nudge the Fed to raise interest rates faster. But those same forces are also expected to drag down economic growth, which usually suggests the Fed should raise rates more slowly.

It's not obvious what path the Fed should or even could take to get inflation under control without tipping us into recession. Frankly, even without aggressive rate hikes, recession risks are piling up.

There's never a good time for a downturn. But given all the other suffering and loss of life over the past few years, it's hard to imagine a worse time than the present.

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Catherine Rampell's email address is crampell@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @crampell.

EUGENE ROBINSON COLUMN

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By Eugene Robinson

WASHINGTON - Brave journalists have long risked their lives to document the horrors of war. But why has coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine felt so intimate, so explicit and so shockingly gory? Does this say something about the times we live in, and the ability technology has given us to broadcast -- and consume -- just about anything? Or does it reveal more about the news media's own affinities and biases?

The war in Yemen, now in its eighth year, has been every bit as brutal. The war in Syria has been far deadlier, and both sides have employed chemical weapons. Yet in those and other conflicts, we were not shown such raw and immediate images of the dead, among them the now-iconic New York Times close-up of a mother and two young children killed by Russian mortar fire in the Kyiv suburb of Irpin.

It's not that journalists didn't see and document such atrocities in other wars. Photos of children starving in Yemen, or the image of Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked down a road in Vietnam after being burned with napalm have shocked the conscience. But news organizations traditionally have been squeamish about publishing images of people who had been killed in conflict, with an especially strong taboo about showing victims' faces.

As an editor, I helped police those boundaries. Our goal was to inform readers while preserving the dignity of the dead and their families. We aimed to avoid turning our customers' stomachs to no productive end.

That was before social media, however. In 1994, when the bloodiest genocide since World War II took place in Rwanda, there was no way for observers to capture incidents of mass slaughter with the cameras on their phones and then instantly disseminate the images worldwide. The husband and father of those victims in Irpin first learned of the death of his family from pictures he saw on Twitter. In that moment, "I lost everyone and lost the meaning of life," he told The Post.

Mainstream news organizations could reasonably ask themselves whose sensibilities they imagine they're protecting, given the ubiquity of social media. They could also point to other contexts in which showing images of people as they died and after their deaths were universally considered to be in the public interest -- the nine-minute cellphone video of Derek Chauvin's knee on George Floyd's neck, for example.

Still, I have to wonder whether something more than technology is involved in the way this war, as opposed to other wars, is being presented. The unmistakable subtext of the coverage is: These are people just like us, and we could be at risk like them.

The vast majority of the victims in Ukraine are European, White and Christian. Quite a few speak at least a little English. With their puffer coats and their rolling suitcases, they look familiar as they climb onto the trains that speed them into exile. Their children play with Muppets dolls and Legos.

Whether intentionally or subconsciously, news organizations make this war more vivid and more tragic by focusing so tightly on victims and refugees. We get to see them as individuals, not as an undifferentiated mass. Viewers and readers are invited, if not forced, to imagine ourselves in similar circumstances. It is no wonder that so many members of Congress, reflecting the views of their constituents, are pressing the Biden administration to intervene more robustly, despite the obvious risks of entering an armed conflict with Russia.

Civilians killed and displaced by the 2003 invasion of Iraq suffered no less grievously. But the fact is that we rarely get intimately acquainted with the victims (who, in that case, were neither European nor White nor Christian) when U.S. forces are the ones firing the cruise missiles and lobbing the artillery shells.

I don't believe these are willfully biased decisions being made by editors. And I have nothing but awed respect for the reporters covering the Ukraine war, including Brent Renaud, the American journalist and filmmaker killed on Sunday at a checkpoint outside Kyiv.

"This was not his first war. This was not his first highly complex situation. He was not a cowboy," said Ann Marie Lipinski, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, where Renaud spent the 2018-2019 academic year as a Nieman fellow. "He was such an unusual man, with a very deep sensitivity, a shyness that made people at ease. There was a profound humanity about him. It was OK to love your subject."

Wounded in that same incident was Juan Arredondo, Renaud's collaborator and Nieman classmate, who has undergone surgery at a hospital in Ukraine.

Bless the journalists with that kind of courage and compassion. And may the same empathy be extended to war victims everywhere who are every bit as human as the people of Ukraine.

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Follow Eugene Robinson on Twitter: @Eugene_Robinson

MEGAN MCARDLE COLUMN

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By Megan McArdle

WASHINGTON -- In policy, as in life, almost every problem you're not having seems easier to handle than the ones you're suffering through.

In recent years, people worried about inflation were regarded as falling somewhere between fogies and cranks. Serious inflation was a thing that had happened in the past, to people who wore funny-looking pants. Or it was something that happened abroad. But it hadn't happened to the United States since the early 1980s, and after a while people started to worry that we had too little inflation -- that the Federal Reserve was choking off the economy before it could get to full employment and should set a higher target such as 4% annual inflation, rather than its timid 2%.

Now, suddenly, we have all the inflation the doves ever wanted, and then some. The rate was 7.9% in February, a 40-year high, and that alarming figure doesn't yet reflect what the Russian invasion of Ukraine is doing to the price of oil, natural gas and other critical commodities. We are now rediscovering why central banks were so obsessed with keeping inflation low.

But first, let's give the inflation doves their due. Despite the worries of extreme inflation hawks, the doves are right about one thing: Some inflation is better than none. Inflation eases problems such as "sticky wages" -- workers are reluctant to take pay cuts, and employers are therefore reluctant to offer them, so when firms run into cash-flow problems, they lay off some people instead of giving everyone a small pay cut. By providing that pay cut in real terms -- if the cost of living goes up while your salary remains flat, my friend, you've taken a pay cut -- inflation avoids some unemployment.

Virtually all economists agree on this much; we're just arguing about how much inflation is too much. But our situation is highlighting the high personal and political costs of inflation -- costs that doves might have underestimated after so many years of steady prices.

As the example above suggests, one way inflation boosts employment is by lowering real wages -- the opposite of what most advocates of "running the economy hot" seem to expect. And if that lower unemployment rate represents people lured into the job market by nominally higher paychecks, some of them will probably march right back out again when they realize how little purchasing power that check represents.

Meanwhile, there are the other costs. Retirement savers, for example, have long been cautioned to shift more money into bonds as they approach 60, because bonds are safer. But bonds become unsafe when inflation rises, because their fixed payouts get steadily less valuable. Nor is that the only way retirees get whacked by inflation: Some will pay taxes on capital "gains" that just reflect the general increase in prices; some have pensions without cost-of-living adjustments.

Workers get hit in a different way: Since salaries rarely adjust to inflation in real time, they will typically see price increases before their paychecks rise to meet them. And while there will be offsetting gains for some people -- this is a great time to be sitting on a mountain of fresh debt -- the joy of homeowners luxuriating in 2% fixed-rate mortgages as the cost of everything else goes up probably doesn't outweigh the cumulative anxieties of renters worried about buying gas and food.

The doves might retort that this all has nothing to do with what they were suggesting. They wanted a modestly higher inflation target, not a convulsive leap to nearly 8%. The fact that unpredictable inflation is bad doesn't mean that the planned kind would also be terrible.

Yet one could ask just how much good it does to double a completely predictable target: If it really all comes out in the wash, how effective could 4% possibly be? One could also ask whether it was ever reasonable to demand that everything stay the same except the inflation rate.

That predictability was hard-won by central bankers who did roughly the same thing, decade after decade, giving the markets confidence that there would never be another inflationary spiral. Had they shifted those targets to a higher level, they would have sacrificed some of that credibility. And the transition costs were bound to be large, because plans made for a low-inflation environment fall apart when inflation rises, as happened in the 1970s and early '80s, and as is happening now.

For 40 years, central bankers have shielded us from those costs. That came at a price. But that's the point: We were never choosing whether to impose costs on people, just which costs to impose, and who would pay them. It's always tempting to assume that some other collection of trade-offs would sting less. But before we advocate for any major policy switch, we should always seriously consider the unfortunate possibility that whatever unsatisfactory thing we're doing now might, in fact, be better than any realistic alternative.

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Follow Megan McArdle on Twitter, @asymmetricinfo.

E.J. DIONNE JR. COLUMN

Advance for release Monday, March 13, 2022, and thereafter

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By E.J. DIONNE JR.,E.J. Dionne Jr.

WASHINGTON - It's time for hopeful realism about what government can achieve in 2022 and beyond.

Putting this disposition to work is essential to dialing down the political divisions that have torn the country apart, beginning with the rise of the tea party in the Obama years and even more toxically by the Trump movement. It also happens to be the only approach that gives Democrats a fighting chance to hold their majorities in the House and Senate this fall.

Hopeful realism is both "centrist" and "progressive," yet also neither. It would push aside abstract debates about whether programs were too radical or insufficiently bold, too big or not big enough. The focus instead should be on what can be done, now, to deal with problems that moderates and liberals alike see as urgent.

Three developments undergird the case for this approach.

By making the stakes so high, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has reminded us how puny and recklessly trivial our nation's debate has become. With democracy, world order and freedom under threat, we can begin to see more clearly how our politics are insufficient to the moment.

Second, the scuttling of President Biden's Build Back Better program requires a return to the drawing board. The plan was always more practical in its aspirations than it got credit for. But Democrats allowed (and Republicans encouraged) a debate that focused relentlessly on how big the program should be rather than what it would do.

Now, the question for all wings of the Democratic Party is what useful measures from Build Back Better can be salvaged -- on battling climate change, cutting prescription-drug costs, caring for and educating children, making taxes fairer. It is, by the way, more moderate Democrats from swing districts who have the biggest need to get something done. They want to go home to their constituents with achievements to talk about.

The third factor is the one most easily overlooked: passage last week of a $1.5 trillion bill to fund the government for the rest of the year that included a $46 billion increase in nondefense spending and a $42 billion increase in military spending.

True, Congress passing a budget should not be a big deal. This is what normal government looks like. But we have not had normal government for a long time.

With all the big numbers that were thrown around in the Build Back Better debate (as well as the enormous expenditures that kept the economy from collapsing during the height of the covid-19 pandemic), you might also say that these sums don't seem, well, transformational.

But as Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro, D -Conn., chair of the House Appropriations Committee, noted in an interview, the year-to-year work of Congress involves major public investments in many issues addressed by Build Back Better and the new budget reflects a "paradigm shift" in domestic spending.

A lot of work got done in this bill. For starters: a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act; $1 billion for Biden's priority of financing research into cures for diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's; substantial new money for maternal and child health programs; a major increase in Pell grants to help lower-income students pay for higher education; and a down payment on spending to fight climate change.

In his State of the Union message, Biden also highlighted the urgency of efforts to grapple with the opioid crisis, and on Thursday, Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, hailed the nearly $1 billion in grants in the budget under the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA).

This underscores that "bipartisan" does not automatically mean "lacking substance." Portman has long championed the CARA program, along with Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I.; Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va.; Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., while Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska; and Edward J. Markey, D-Mass.; and Rep. Ann Kuster, D-N.H., have pushed for expanded access to opioid treatment in correctional facilities.

We need to take bipartisan wins where we can find them. On drug addiction, it's urgent to act in inner cities and rural areas alike.

Skeptics might see hopeful realism as a form of retrenchment, and in some ways it is. It means accepting that narrow majorities, particularly in the Senate, could not sustain the level of change that many of us thought they could.

But it's still possible to make this a year of step-by-step progress and to show that government has the capacity to function effectively -- and, maybe, with a little less rancor.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., summed up the imperative this way: "We have to get done what we can get done with the votes we have," he told me, "and that would be a big step forward."

That's hopeful realism talking.

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E.J. Dionne is on Twitter: @EJDionne.

DANA MILBANK COLUMN

Advance for release Sunnday, March 13, 2022, and thereafter

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By DANA MILBANK,MILBANK,Dana Milbank

WASHINGTON - Suppose, for a moment, that the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the group overseeing the 2022 campaigns of all Democratic senators and Senate candidates, announced that Democrats, if they keep congressional majorities after November's elections, would enact a plan that would raise taxes on working families more than $1 trillion over 10 years.

Further suppose that this top Democratic official also pledged that the Democratic majority would "sunset" laws that provide Americans with Social Security and Medicare, military retirement benefits, veterans programs, unemployment compensation, student loans, deposit insurance and more. Additionally, the Democrats would require U.S. businesses to shut down $600 billion a year in foreign trade and abandon countless billions in overseas investments.

The cry from Republican officials and the Fox News echo chamber would be deafening. Socialism! Defund! Tyranny! They might not even have time left to blame President Biden for Russia's Ukraine invasion or high gas prices.

Now, back to reality: An outline of exactly such a legislative agenda was introduced two weeks ago -- by the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.). The sweeping plan caused a kerfuffle for a couple of days, but Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) stepped in to disavow it, the coverage died down and the issue faded.

That the Republican's plan is not kitchen-table conversation across America is a testament to the asymmetry of our current politics, in which Democrats are at a decided disadvantage.

Scott's proposal is easily the most radical document to be put forward by a member of the leadership of a major political party in modern times. "Americans deserve to know what we will do," Scott, who is in charge of the GOP bid to retake the Senate, wrote in the introduction to his "An 11-Point Plan to Rescue America."

The NRSC chairman is proposing a 10-year tax increase of more than $1 trillion on, in his own words, "more than half of Americans," to make sure every household pays taxes. The bean counters at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy ran the numbers on what ITEP called the "only possible interpretation of Sen. Scott's proposal" (making sure every household pays at least $1 in federal income tax) and found that the Republican plan would raise taxes by $100 billion a year, or more than $1 trillion over the standard 10-year budgeting time frame. Almost all of it would be shouldered by households with income of $100,000 or less.

Scott's plan would also sunset -- eliminate -- all federal legislation over five years, under the (risky) assumption that worthy laws would be reenacted. That could mean an end to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, everything else mentioned above -- and potentially more.

Don't just take my word for it. Here's how McConnell recently described the Scott plan: "We will not have as part of our agenda a bill that raises taxes on half the American people and sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years."

Of course, even if passed by a Republican-majority Congress, none of these plans would become law with Biden holding a veto pen, but it's significant that the NRSC chief -- Donald Trump's preferred candidate to oust "Old Crow" McConnell as Senate GOP leader -- is still standing behind it, and Republican candidates have generally not disowned it.

The GOP-Fox News echo chamber has successfully branded Democrats as proponents of the "green new deal," "defunding the police," "socialism" and "woke" indoctrination in "critical race theory" -- even though such ideas are not embraced by the vast majority of Democrats in office, and certainly not by anyone in a leadership position such as Scott's.

The difference, of course, is Democrats don't have an equivalent of Fox News, which repeats the propaganda du jour in multiple "reports" throughout the day. Democrats are also congenitally unable to stick to a message.

Could this time be different? The White House, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democrats have been hammering away at the Scott plan. The DSCC has done radio ads, news conferences, statements and a mobile billboard that circled this week's Senate Republican retreat. Senate Democrats are talking about holding show votes on elements of Scott's plan.

All Democrats need do is repeat Scott's own words. "Gradually end all imports from Communist China." That's $600 billion a year in trade. "Build supply chains that rely solely on American workers and allies." That would wipe out vast amounts of U.S. foreign investment. "Cut the IRS funding and workforce by 50 percent." Good luck getting your tax refund. Sell off all "non-essential" government property. Goodbye, national parks? Cut off funds to states "other than disaster relief." No money for health care, education, housing or roads. "Prohibit debt ceiling increases." Get ready to default.

As Scott himself says, "Americans deserve to know what we will do."

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Follow Dana Milbank on Twitter, @Milbank.