Health beat: Dems’ Plan To Boost Joblessness

At The Wall Street Journal, Brian Blase reports that a Democratic bill to funnel cash to states through Medicaid includes “a built-in incentive” to keep unemployment rates high: The higher a state’s rate, the more it gets from the feds. The change would be permanent — and leave Uncle Sam covering “almost all Medicaid costs” this year. And states could collect as much as 95 percent of their costs — $19 for every dollar they spend — ­inviting “enormous and wasteful spending” and creating “a perverse ­incentive for states to keep their economies frozen.” If Congress wants to aid states, it should adhere to principles such as capping funds and steering clear of rewriting the Medicaid law. Above all, it should “be wary of the new problems it might seed” in the process.

Pandemic journal: The Quarantine Border

Virginia restauranteur Joe Deel can “see people going to lunch” in another restaurant across the street — but, syndicated columnist Salena Zito recounts, isn’t allowed to open his diner. The Tennessee-Virginia border runs through Bristol, dividing the town between states with “very different approaches to reopening.” Deel thinks his governor, Ralph Northam (D-Va.), might “feel a little bit different” about keeping the whole state closed through June 10, applying rules focused on “densely populated northern Virginia,” if he visited. But for now, the city, famous in country-music history, exemplifies the “chasm between open and closed states.”

2020 watch: Why Joe Won’t Release His Papers

Joe Biden has so far resisted “opening his Senate papers from 1973 to 2009 (and his vice-presidential papers from 2009 to 2016)” in response to Tara Reade’s sexual-assault allegations, arguing that material would ­become campaign “fodder” for the opposition. Yes, snarks National ­Review’s David Harsanyi: If the papers are released, Biden would have to explain “why he’s made a 180 on virtually all notable policy stances” over the years, having cozied up to segregationists, supported “virtually every expansion of the drug war and mass incarceration” and “proposed a law allowing states to overturn Roe v. Wade,” among other things. Releasing his papers, in short, would prove that Biden’s only case for the presidency is that he isn’t Trump.

Legal desk: How the FBI Railroaded Flynn

Documents released last week show how the Federal Bureau of Investigation “conceived and orchestrated” a “corrupt” plan to railroad ex-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Solomon Wisenberg thunders at Fox News. They reveal the FBI had “completely cleared” Flynn of any conspiracy with Russia, yet then-agent Peter Strzok kept the probe open, supposedly to investigate Flynn for violating a law that “the American political and legal establishment” consider “a constitutionally dubious dead letter.” Strzok’s ­decision had “no law-enforcement purpose” — but gave the FBI the chance to interview Flynn and then claim he lied. What the FBI “cabal” did to Flynn was “worse than entrapment”: It was on par with the worst abuses of power “this country has ever seen.”

Libertarian: No, Masks Aren’t Tyranny

“Some libertarians and conservatives” are displaying “constitutional ­amnesia come to things like people’s voluntary decisions to wear personal protective equipment or retail businesses requiring shoppers to wear masks inside,” sighs Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason. But it isn’t remotely “tantamount to tyranny” or “social control,” as these grumps suggest. Businesses set rules “all the time — think ‘no shirt, no shoes, no service.’ ” Heck, “even if you have it in your head somehow that masks can’t help stop the spread of disease: Who cares? Permit people to protect themselves and those around them as they see fit.” Indeed, “if we want authorities to actually allow commerce and freedom of movement again, and to avoid top-down impositions of protective-gear rules, we should be encouraging people to voluntarily adopt mask-wearing.” In reality, pushing “hysterical or pointlessly contrarian objections to wearing a mask” isn’t “anti-authoritarian praxis, it’s just ­being a jerk.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board