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Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily Podcast today is Thursday, April 16, 2020.

I'm John Budhward, the editor of commentary. I just wanted to alert everybody to the fact that we are changing a lot about our pricing structure and how the magazine will come to you.

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By becoming a paying customer and it's not just the podcast that is worth your time. We just put up our May 2020 issue on the website, which we will be delving into over the course we started yesterday with Jim Megs talking about his article Elite Panic versus the Brazilian populace.

And we will be going into other pieces over the course of the next week. Today we have both our regular daily voice senior writer Christine Rosen here to talk about her article on the media and its handling of China's role in the coronavirus.

And contributor Jonathan Chanzer from the foundation of defensive democracies who will talk about China's role not in the media, but China's role in trying to dominate international institutions that has been exposed to the public for the first time in some ways due to its misbehavior with the coronavirus.

So Jonathan Chanzer welcome. How are you? Thank you very much going to be with you.

Okay, also with us of course as ever senior editor Abe Greenwald hi Abe. Hey John and associate editor Noah Rothman. Hi Noah. Hi, John.

So China we haven't done like an update on what's what's happened over the last 24 hours. I don't think I mean the only really continually continuing horrendous news is that is that there's another nearly six million people filing front employment benefits.

And the the the factoid that everybody seems to be shook by is that 22 million jobs were created since the great recession of 2008 and we have lost 22 million jobs in the last four weeks.

Now these are not comparable circumstances you should say obviously the jobs that were lost in the wake of poison was the result of a of a colossal market failure and global meltdown collapse.

This of course is a somewhat engineered job loss in order to cause the public and the and people themselves deciding to stay home and stop working in order to burn the virus out and not have it have a catastrophic death toll across the United States.

So they're not they're not the same one as a failure or the other is a choice.

And theoretically assuming we ever can get back to normal that those job losses are unusual a natural and will be will be ended by the return of demand.

Right so still the news is dreadful and so as usual is the behavior of Congress which is allowing its which due to efforts by Democrats that appears to hold up new monies for the paycheck protection act in order to get wish list items of its own through Congress.

That money is apparently going to run out as of today leaving you know tens of millions of small businesses exposed without sufficient resources with the extension of that paycheck protection act so that that's one assumes that they will come to terms on this but yet again we have we have this notion that you can't let a crisis go to waste.

By having money by having Democrats trying to get money for their for their desired programs yeah we should tease out the impasse here it is as I understand it Democrats seeking more funding for as they say hospitals and frontline professionals and quite a few can favor constituencies and Republicans have repeatedly attempted to get some consensus around just injecting more money into the small business loans accounts.

And they have failed and so the Democratic strategy here seems predicated on the assumption that they're going to get a lot of good press because when the tap runs dry and more joblessness is the result of that because the payrolls that we're trying to float can't be floated anymore.

The assumption is that I think on their parts that the media is going to come to the rescue it's an assumption that they've made on more than one occasion and usually they're right but not always and when it fails them the failure is rather spectacular and fast so I'm thinking of the 2018 shutdown for example over chip funding and legal immigrants status and so and something else recently which I'm blocking on but it has happened.

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