Meandering Monday Ahead of Data – PNW March of Socialism

Oh rats!  It’s Monday.

U.S. Hantavirus Cruise Passengers Fly to Quarantine Center After Positive Test – WSJ seems to be on everyone’s mind today.  With passengers about to be quarantined in Nebraska, we have to wonder if the “sage of Omaha” will stick around town?

I don’t know about you, but to us there’s a distinct rhyming with early 2000 when we were all assured “nothing to worry about.” And then people started to drop with COVID-19.

Son G2 – as a COVID-19 section chief back then – told me this weekend, “Dad, I don’t know if I have another pandemic in me...”  I bet him a nickel he’s not the only one worried about that.

“Look at the bright side, son.  Maybe they’ll be right this time.”

Maybe.

Wading Pool or High Board?

While we all crank that old option-picker song (“Gonna jump down, turn around, pick a bale of options, gonna jump down, turn around, short a bale a day“), the Dow and the S&P are on an early wobbly.  The Techs are still in Pretend Land.

Bitcoin was just over $81,000 after popping over $82,000 over the weekend.

Oil’s Behind All

You don’t have to look very far to see what’s happening. Iran made a (bullshit) offer for peace.  And as you’d expect Oil prices jump after Trump dismisses Iran proposal to end war.

Is this called “put the bad assumption” in the headline? Trump likely to lean on China to use its influence over Iran.  Who really is going to influence whom?

While a great deal of the doom porn purveyors are talking up food shortages, we just keep putting tomato clips on our vines and training the squash toward overhead trellising. (There’s talkers and doers in the world, in case you missed the subtext.)

Day Running the Casino

Pretty empty dance card today.  Mostly, look for news, rumors, and innuendo to rule.

Tomorrow, though, Consumer Prices will pop.  By pop, I mean we expect not much will be cheaper and if the numbers come in strong enough, maybe some of the “no rate change” mantra will fade.  As of this morning the CME FedWatch tool showed about four percent were being “rate drop die-hards.”

Our back-of-the-envelope says if CPI tomorrow comes in way hot, then rate hike talk might make the rounds and that could be hard on this house of cards.

Social Security Hikes?

Yes these same inflation concerns ripple.  And honestly, this is a pretty good summary of the ranges that are coming into view now: What the 2027 Social Security COLA Could Mean for Your Retirement Budget — Early Estimates Are In.

With food likely to “go vertical” we at least have time being retired to get into gardening which we plan to remarket as foodening.

Oh, sure, that’s right: Foodening – because food is the whole point of gardening, right?  (Yes, I bought the dot-com domain name as a lotto ticket for when people figure it out…)

At the Ranch: The PNW March of Socialism

I spent a few years in the Pacific Northwest.  In fact, since I quit swimming in amniotic fluid in 1949.  As someone who lived in what was arguably the best city anywhere, to grave-side mourner, there are lessons to be learned.  Important ones.

Washington State – while we lived there – was a dandy place.  The late Joe Davis and the Washington State Labor Council battled-back the banister class and got a 12 percent cap on interest rates put on credit cards and such.  This was the sixties.

Being a “union man” was a good thing.  Pappy was a firefighter, so he went to the Local #27 firefighter union meetings.  When I was a “boy wonder” R&E mechanic at West Coast Airlines, which became Airwest, I was a card-carrying IAM 751 member. And proud of it.

The old labor-state version of Washington was work, wages, dams, mills, airplanes, and public institutions that actually did something. The new version increasingly looks like process worship: tax the productive, regulate the essential, and then hold a meeting to decide whether a sick child’s helicopter is too noisy.  (Mind the needles on the sidewalk, while you’re at it.)

There recently, governor Bob Ferguson (“Side-show Bob”) signed a Washington State Income Tax on “rich people.”  Don’t make more than a million a year in Seattle. Will Hunts Point and Medina follow? Don’t be silly!

A nod to reader Ray for pointing out “Today’s Eastside/Bellevue Zillow looks like the biggest wave of $5 million plus luxury listings in Seattle-area history…”

The rich didn’t often attain “richness” through stupidity. Yet, in the “latest side-show,” Washington’s no-income-tax selling point took a direct hit.

The old populist union state has curdled into redistribution-by-permit-office. And that decay shows its other dimensions elsewhere in once-glorious Seattle. One of them really sticks in my craw.

The Children’s Hospital Side-show

Driving east on 45th from the (modern) I-5 freeway, you drive past the University of Washington and eventually downhill to merge into Sand Point Way.  I remember asking Pappy “What’s up there?” pointing to a left turn light to the northeast after passing the U-Village shopping center.

“That’s how you get up to Children’s Orthopedic,” he explained.

Founded in 1907 by a group of Seattle women determined that sick and injured children deserved specialized care regardless of a family’s ability to pay, Seattle Children’s Hospital began as a modest 10-bed facility known as Children’s Orthopedic Hospital.

In an era when childhood diseases, industrial accidents, and poverty often left young patients without adequate treatment, the founders combined philanthropy, civic activism, and progressive-era medicine to create one of the Pacific Northwest’s first institutions devoted exclusively to pediatric care. Over time, the hospital expanded beyond orthopedics into comprehensive children’s medicine, eventually becoming Seattle Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center, a nationally recognized pediatric research and treatment center serving families across Washington, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho.

Now the Seattle political angle.  It involves helicopters for sick kids and residents who don’t want to hear what real lives being saved sounds like.

Under a decades-old 1992 agreement involving the hospital, the city, and the Laurelhurst Community Council, many helicopter transports were routed to a pad about a mile away, then completed by ambulance, while only the most critical cases landed directly at Children’s.

The issue blew up again after medical pilots and critics argued that the rule added risky delays and transfers for sick kids. Recent reports say the Laurelhurst council now supports ending the review committee and allowing Seattle Children’s to seek city approval for more direct helicopter landings.

City approval means the Seattle City Council gets in the process.  For the moment, the happy-talk is it has a 75-80 percent chance of passing.  Politically, voting against it now means siding with helicopter-noise process over sick-kid transport time. In Seattle, even a liberal council will have trouble defending that.

But I’ve watched PNW liberalism three-quarters of a century now. I like to think there are still rational people up that way.  However, looking at California, Oregon, and past Seattle politics?

I wouldn’t live in a place where “neighborhood noise concerns” and Life Flight access for children can occupy the same moral paragraph. Which — oh my — we don’t. Thank God.

Write when you get rich,

George@Ure.net