Stimulus for who?

One check for $1,200 is what the Republicans in the Senate are proposing.  Except that if you're among the poorest Americans, you won't get that much.  If you had paid little or no income tax and had at least $2,500 in "qualifying" income, you'd get only $600.  However, if your earnings (still not clearly defined) are up to $75,000 as a single person, you'd get the full $1,200.

Meanwhile these same Republicans want to put aside a slush fund of $500 billion to aid businesses.

Here's a thought.  Let's apply the same concept to these bailout loans as are being applied to the one-time payments to individual taxpayers (both single and those who file jointly).

Corporations whose net profits are above, oh say, $1 billion annually can qualify for loans of no more than $50 million.  If people earning $75,000 are getting a one-time payment equal to 1.6% of their earnings, why not limit the loans to corporations to 2% of their net profits?

Oh, I'm referring to publicly traded companies.  Privately-held businesses should receive no assistance without disclosing their last three years of tax returns and audited financial statements.

If means testing is good for individuals, it is also good for corporations.  Anyone who disagrees, who believes in corporate personhood needs to explain why corporations should get special treatment.

* * *

We take it for granted

It is something we do without thinking.  We can take control of how we do it for a time if we want to, but most of time we don't give it a second thought.  I'm referring to the act of breathing.

Look at this:

The idiots who refused to skip Spring Break don't understand this.  The governor of West Virginia who told people to go ahead and keep visiting their local Bob Evans to eat doesn't understand this.  Devin Nunes, who tried to walk back his comments about how people should go to their local pub by claiming he was referring to "drive-through pubs" doesn't understand this.

I do.  All too well. I spent 10 months hooked up to a ventilator.  I know all about struggling to breathe. So did my father.  We had our last conversation by phone the day before he died.  He had to cut the call short because he simply could not breathe.

In the summer of 2009 I wound up in an emergency room, fighting so hard against being intubated that there were giant bruises on my arms where they had to restrain me before they got me sedated and tubed.  In May of 2010 when I managed to get to a different ER before falling unconscious in the triage chair.  I spent nine weeks in a coma.

I did not have SARS or MERS or a Corona Virus.  I had Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome  (ARDS) .I keep hearing idiots like Donald Trump compare Covid-19 to the flu.

The mortality rate for the "seasonal" flu is 0.1%.
The mortality rate for the influenza pandemic of 1918-1920 was around 2.0%.
Estimates put the Covid-19 mortality rate between 2.0% and 3.4%
The mortality rate for MERS was 37.1% among the 2,494 lab-confirmed cases.
The estimated mortality rate for ARDS ranges from 36% to 52%.

This isn't the flu.  People are dying.  Italy reported 627 deaths on Friday alone, with their total number of deaths rising to over 4,000.

Young, healthy people don't get it.  They hear Trump saying "you get sick, you get better" and they believe it.

I'll be carrying an oxygen tank and nasal cannula with me for the rest of my life.  So will a lot of the people who aren't treating this pandemic seriously.  Assuming they survive.