13 October, 2019

A YUGE win for Trump

Who else could have got ANY concession out of China? It was like getting blood out of a stone. It's not as extensive as many would like but it is real progress -- 100% more progress than anyone else has delivered. It also keeps faith with the US farm sector. Farmers mostly voted for Trump but have patiently borne losses from his trade war in hope of long term gains. The US agricultural sector has almost unlimited capacity so the huge new quotas will be a goldmine for them. American farmers will be saying: "I told you so".

Washington and Beijing have agreed to a ‘substantial’ interim trade deal, averting a tariff increase on Chinese goods that had been planned for October 15 and auguring an export windfall for US farmers, President Donald Trump said.

New York Post reports, the president’s announcement came during a meeting with Chinese trade negotiators in the Oval Office.

“Lots of respect for President Xi,” Trump told reporters of China’s leader, Xi Jinping. “We’ve had a tremendous negotiation, a very complex negotiation, but something that’s going to be great for both countries,” Trump said.

Ultimately, the deal is “a great thing for world peace,” he said at the end of his meeting with Beijing’s lead trade envoy, Vice Premier Liu He.

“You know there was a lot of friction between the United States and China and now it’s a love fest.”

Although the details still need to be committed to paper over the next four weeks — and then signed by both countries — the “phase one” agreement so far represents key concessions from Beijing.

It requires that over the next two years, Chinese imports from US farms will grow to an annual rate of US$40 billion (A$59 billion) to $50 billion. That’s more than double the previous high-point of $16 to $17 billion. Currently annual US farm exports to China are at $8 billion, Trump said.

“I’d suggest the farmers have to immediately go and buy more land, and get bigger tractors,” the president joked. He added, “I’m very excited for the farmer. There’s never been a deal of this magnitude for the American farmer.”

Liu also praised the accord. “We very much agreed to get to the China-US economic relationship right. It is something good for China, for the United States and for the whole world,” he told reporters at the White House. “We are making progress towards a positive direction.”

However, some observers said the deal was underwhelming. Greg Daco of Oxford Economics called it an “itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny handshake deal.”

Though it lays the foundation for a broader accord later, “behind the hype, this is nothing more than partial and ostensibly unsustainable deal lacking in real enforcement mechanisms,” he said in an analysis. “For businesses this will mean less damage, not greater certainty.”

The National Retail Federation said it was encouraged by the progress, adding, however: “Although this is a step in the right direction, the uncertainty continues.”

Trump also said the deal would make some steps toward protecting American technology, a major focus of the trade frictions.

An agreement has also been struck concerning currency and China opening its market to American financial services firms, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said.

Intellectual property protections for US companies that do business with China have also been agreed upon. “We have come to a deal on intellectual property,” Trump said.

SOURCE 

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Trump Moves to Increase Transparency in Government Regulations

Kevin Lunny and his family ran Drakes Bay Oyster Company for about 50 years on the Northern California coastline before the federal government shut down the business over regulations he wasn’t aware of.

“We produced nearly half of all the sustainable oysters in Northern California,” Lunny said Wednesday at the White House, before President Donald Trump signed two executive orders to prevent federal agencies from regulatory abuse.

“The National Park Service forced our oyster farm out of business,” Lunny said. “If that wasn’t enough for our family and our community, today the rest of agriculture, which includes another 24 ranchers and family farm businesses within the National Seashore, are facing the exact same process.”

In 2011, the Interior Department rejected a permit for the business to continue operation, despite action by Congress to grandfather protection for aquaculture companies in the Point Reyes Wilderness Act.

The agency argued in court that it had wide discretion to grant or deny permits.

Lunny’s battle to save the family’s oyster business ended in 2014, when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the government.

One of Trump’s executive orders, titled “Bringing Guidance Out of the Darkness,” prohibits federal agencies from bypassing the cost-benefit analysis and avoiding public comment—both required when agencies adopt a regulation.

Another executive order, titled “Transparency and Fairness,” protects Americans from unlawful interpretations of existing regulations, or from unexpected penalties. Agencies would be required to proactively educate the public before imposing costly fines.

As Lunny began to walk away from the lectern, Trump asked: “Is the business gone now?”

Lunny answered: “The business is gone, 20 million oysters destroyed.”

“No American should ever face such persecution from their own government, except for the president,” Trump said. “Don’t feel bad, Kevin. They treated you better than they treat me.”

The president said the White House would monitor enforcement of the new orders.

“Americans will no longer be subject to the hidden games that are played on the public,” he said.

During the Obama administration, federal agencies imposed thousands of mandates through blog posts, letters, brochures, and thousands of other publications, according to the White House.

Also speaking at the event was Andy Johnson, a Wyoming rancher whom the Environmental Protection Agency threatened with a $16 million fine for trying to build a pond on his own property.

After the story made national news, the EPA settled, agreeing not to fine the rancher and allowing him to keep the pond without obtaining a permit.

Trump had noted the case in 2017 when he ordered the EPA to reform the Obama administration’s Waters of the United States regulation.

“Today we are making a major step forward in the effort to drain the swamp and to get our arms wrapped around the administrative state,” Russ Vought, acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said at the event.

Vought added:

We can’t do that until we know all the dark, regulatory, stealth regulation that is out there. That is one of the reasons we are asking all of the agencies to put on their website, in a searchable way, all of these regulations so that we can understand what [the situation] is. Anything that is not put up there is rescinded. Secondly, we want to make sure the American people, families and small businesses, are not bullied by their government.

The Army Corps of Engineers determined in 2016 that permafrost covering about one-third of the state of Alaska met the definition of  “navigable waters,” which prevented the planned expansion of Tin Cup, LLC, a small, family-owned pipe fabrication business in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Tin Cup owner Richard Schok spoke about his situation, in which the Army Corps relied on the “Alaska Supplement” to the agency’s 1987 Wetlands Manual.

However, the supplemental material never was delivered to Congress as required by the Congressional Review Act. The pipe company argued in court that the rule was never in effect.

However, the 9th Circuit sided with the government and the Supreme Court this year declined to take the case.

“President Trump is achieving more on regulatory reform than many thought possible,” Anthony Campau, a visiting fellow in regulatory policy at The Heritage Foundation, said in a written statement.

Campau previously oversaw many Trump administration regulatory reforms as chief of staff for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a division of OMB.

“The president is demonstrating that regulatory reform in the Trump administration isn’t just about dollars and cents; it is also about securing liberty through the continued advancement of good government principles like fair notice, transparency, accountability, and decision-making grounded in analysis,” Campou added.

SOURCE 

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Bernie Sanders And Elizabeth Warren Mistake Money For Wealth

It’s often said about 1960s and 70s Wall Street that a stockbroker could leave for lunch heavily in debt, only to return an hour later rolling in cash. Such was life in the financial world of a few decades ago. So high were commissions on stock trades that a big order placed with a licensed sales assistant or colleague manning the desk could make the stockbroker’s day, and sometimes year.

No doubt stories like that were traded between Wall Street veterans and newbies this past week. With the announcement that Charles Schwab and Ameritrade would no longer charge commissions on stock trades, yet another formerly expensive act was essentially reduced to zero.

Notable about Schwab’s decision was that it in a very real sense was inevitable. In a capitalistic society, the capitalists get rich by mass producing former luxuries, and relentlessly pushing down the prices of everything. Along similar lines, airplane flying was prohibitively expensive at the same time that buying and selling shares was. This rates mention since in the same week that Schwab and Ameritrade made their announcements, so did Southwest Airlines promote $49/one way sales. The Southwest fare sale is a reminder that within ten years private flight will be increasingly enjoyed by everyday Americans. Within twenty years, it will be very much the norm thanks to enterprising individuals who will earn billions for freeing us all from the TSA frustration. Bank on it.

All of this came to mind while reading a front page New York Times story by Alan Rappeport and Thomas Kaplan about Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and their proposed wealth tax. The Times writers explained it this way:

"As they compete for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont have proposed wealth taxes that would shrink the fortunes of the richest Americans. Their plans envision an enormous transfer of money from the wealthy to ordinary people, with revenue from the wealth tax used to finance new social programs like tuition-free college, universal child care and 'Medicare for all.'"

The Dems’ error is in presuming that money and wealth are one and the same. No, they’re not. Money is just an agreement about value that facilitates the exchange of actual wealth. Money is what governments can produce, while wealth is what we produce. If money were wealth, as opposed to a certain consequence of wealth, poverty could be stamped out with ease.

Warren, Sanders, and others vying for the favor of Democratic voters forget that a dollar in the hands of Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell is nothing like a dollar in the hands of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett; the three richest Americans the individuals who would likely pay the most if a wealth tax were instituted. And while imposing a tax and collecting on it are two entirely different things (much as money and wealth are), that’s a column for another day.

For now, it’s worth thinking about people like Bezos and Gates, along with what someone like Buffett does when allocating capital. While it used to be that only the richest of the rich had access to the world’s production, and only after incredibly expansive travel around the world, Bezos democratized access. Nowadays anyone can purchase the world’s plenty, at prices that continue to fall, all with a click of a mouse.

In Gates’s case, he attended elite Lakeside School in Seattle. This rates mention because Seattle’s fanciest school had incredibly primitive (by today’s standards) computers that students could utilize. Gates was an eager user. Readers can rest assured that computers weren’t the norm in Seattle schools back in the late ‘70s, or anywhere else for that matter. And that’s the point.

Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell and others turned nose-bleed expensive computers and the software that gives them life into common goods. Getting into specifics, all three grew incredibly rich by virtue of mass producing former luxuries that once could only be found in the vicinity of the rich and their offspring.

Buffett comes in as the investor whose capital allocations made and make all this possible. Investment is all about the production of more and more goods and services at costs that continuously shrink. Without investors willing to back dreamers like Gates, Jobs and Dell, economic advance grounds to a halt.

So with it hopefully established that individuals get rich by virtue of them democratizing access to formerly unattainable goods and services, while cheapening others (that Charles Schwab is a billionaire is a major-league redundancy), it’s useful to pivot back to the Dems’ tax plan. They want to take money from the rich in order to give it to those who aren’t.

The problem is that no one wants money, they only want what money can be exchanged for. Think about it. Crucial here is that a dollar today is exchangeable for exponentially more goods and services versus decades ago, not to mention that it commands goods and services that very few (rich or poor) could have imagined decades ago. Translated, Sanders, Warren et al want to take from the very people who got rich by powerfully improving the living standards of the poor and middle class through copious production of what was formerly out-of-reach for those same individuals. You can’t make this up!

To be clear, this is not a piece about incentives, and taxes blunting incentives. With the entrepreneurial, there’s an argument that tax rates don’t much inform what they do. But availability of capital most certainly does inform what they do.

This is important as Dems’ wax rhapsodical about the $2.6 trillion that economists Emmanual Saez and Gabriel Zucman promise a wealth tax will raise. Ok, but so what? It’s not the $2.6 trillion that matters, it’s once again what it can be exchanged for. And in shrinking the amount of capital that could be directed toward innovators (what can inheritors or producers of great wealth do but thankfully invest it?), the Dems will slow the process whereby the poor and middle class will be able to attain goods and services previously unattainable for anyone.

Translated, the Democrats in their parallel universe are bragging about plans to shrink by trillions the investment that would vastly improve the lives of the presumed "have nots." All to give them “money.” Except that money has exponentially fewer uses minus the genius of the individuals (and yes, heirs) they choose to neuter. Something to think about.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

PRIVACY ABUSE: "Some of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's electronic surveillance activities violated the constitutional privacy rights of Americans swept up in a controversial foreign intelligence program, a secretive surveillance court has ruled." (The Wall Street Journal)

MORON: "The CEO of Dick's Sporting Goods told CBS News this weekend that his decisions to stop selling certain guns and hire lobbyists to push for new gun bans have cost his company roughly $250 million. ... [Ed] Stack also said the company destroyed $5 million worth of rifle inventory because Stack believed no one should be allowed to own them." (The Washington Free Beacon)

DEBAUCHERY: The U.S. saw a record 2.4 million reported cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis in 2018, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (U.S. News & World Report)

MIGRANT ARRESTS: Most illegal crossings in 12 years: Border Patrol took 851,000 into custody during fiscal 2019 (Washington Examiner)

MASS. HEALTH COSTS:  Statewide health care spending grew to an estimated $60.9 billion in 2018, or $8,827 per person, according to the study from the state Center for Health Information and Analysis. That’s a 3.1 percent increase from the previous year and in line with the state benchmark for controlling spending. But costs for patients and consumers rose more quickly. For individuals with private insurance, out-of-pocket costs increased 6.1 percent and premiums rose 5.2 percent over the past two years, outpacing wages and inflation. In addition, more Massachusetts residents signed up for high-deductible health plans. -- Boston Globe

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here

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Study: Dem Tax Policy Driven by Hatred for Rich

Envy and retribution are poor foundations for crafting public policy 

“Hatred is like drinking poison and then waiting for it to kill your enemy.” —quote attributed to South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela

Last month, the Cato Institute released its 2019 Welfare, Work, and Wealth National Survey, and it offers a fascinating insight into the motives of those demanding ever higher taxes on the productive class in America.

The study surveyed 1,700 Americans to determine why some support socialism, tax increases on the wealthy, and wealth redistribution; is it compassion or resentment?

To determine compassion, they were asked if they agreed or disagreed with statements like “I suffer from others’ sorrows,” or “I feel sympathy for those who are worse off than myself.” To measure resentment toward successful people, they were asked if they agreed/disagreed with statements like “Very successful people sometimes need to be brought down a peg or two even if they’ve done nothing wrong,” or “It’s good to see very successful people fail occasionally.”

The study found resentment toward successful people is a far stronger motivator than compassion for the poor when it comes to support for raising taxes on high earners.

This philosophy of hatred for high achievers is rampant within the modern Democrat Party, evidenced by how the frontrunners for the 2020 presidential nomination are eagerly promising to punish the wealthy.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has called for an additional 2% tax on the wealth of all households with incomes over $50 million. To be clear, this is not a tax on new income, but on all wealth accumulated over a lifetime — investments, savings, assets, inheritance, etc., which has already been subject to income taxes, payroll taxes, capital gains taxes, property taxes, etc.

The 16th Amendment was ratified on the promise that it would only punish the ultra-rich, but today it impacts every American. Warren promises her new tax will only hurt the very wealthy, but past experience shows us it won’t be long before government agents are digging through our homes, assessing the value of the wedding ring grandma passed down so we can be taxed on it.

Not to be outdone, cranky septuagenarian socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (who owns three homes in upscale areas of Vermont and DC) is calling for even more Americans to be taxed at higher rates, with a 1% tax on net worth above $32 million, topping out at 8% for those with assets over $8 billion. He has also proposed a new tax on corporations based on the wage gap between CEO pay and that of the median worker.

This is wrong as a matter of sound tax policy, and it is morally reprehensible.

As a matter of tax policy, it has been tried and it has failed. Higher taxes lead to lower productivity, a shrinking economy, and less prosperity. Those most in need suffer the most because the wealthy have plenty of ways to shield their money from confiscatory tax rates, including simply moving, as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo discovered the hard way.

For Democrats, taxes aren’t about raising revenue for the legitimate functions of government. For them, taxes are about “leveling the playing field,” ending “income inequality,” and making the rich “pay their fair share.”

Barack Obama was a master at stoking class hatred, inciting poor and middle-income Americans to support punishing the “rich,” even if that meant hurting themselves.

In 2008, ABC’s Charlie Gibson noted that Obama was calling for a doubling of the capital-gains tax rate, but pointed out that “in each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased; the government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down… So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?”

Obama refused to back down, declaring that (even if it meant less tax revenue to fund programs for the poor and needy) he would do it “for purposes of fairness.”

Fairness for whom? The more than five million small-business owners who risked their life savings to start a business, worked 70-80 hour weeks for years to make it successful, employing tens of millions of their fellow Americans in the process, only to be hammered by taxes as a “reward” for their hard work, dedication, and sacrifice? How is it “fair” or moral to punish someone for working harder, working smarter, being more innovative, sacrificing more, and risking more than their neighbor?

The beauty of the free market is that, in order for someone to become a millionaire or billionaire, they must provide a good or service that millions of people desire. In a true free market, you simply can’t get wealthy without improving the lives of countless others.

Bernie Sanders declares his view that “There should be no billionaires.” But would Americans truly be better off if Sam Walton had not revolutionized commerce with his high-volume, low-margin model that allows tens of millions of Americans to afford goods previously out of reach? Would Americans today be happier without iPhones? Would we be better off without the millions of jobs created thanks to Bill Gates and his Windows software?

Would we be better off without these millionaires and billionaires?

No. So why punish them, and ourselves in the process?

SOURCE 

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Trump Declines Dems' Invitation to Impeachment Hoax

President Donald Trump is done playing the Democrats' impeachment game. On Tuesday, the White House sent an eight-page letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Reps. Adam Schiff, Eliot Engel, and Elijah Cummings essentially telling them to put up or shut up. The letter highlighted the fact that Pelosi and Democrats have violated the Constitution, "the rule of law, and every past precedent" in their politically partisan quest to see Trump impeached. The letter, written by Trump attorney Pat Cipollone, bluntly exposes the Democrats' true political motivation:

Put simply, you seek to overturn the results of the 2016 election and deprive the American people of the President they have freely chosen. Many Democrats now apparently view impeachment not only as a means to undo the democratic results of the last election, but as a strategy to influence the next election, which is barely more than a year away. As one member of Congress explained, he is "concerned that if we don't impeach the President, he will get reelected." Your highly partisan and unconstitutional effort threatens grave and lasting damage to our democratic institutions, to our system of free elections, and to the American people.

Cipollone asserts that Pelosi and company's impeachment inquiry is invalid because no vote was held in the House or even in a House committee to initiate the current inquiry. Instead, Pelosi unilaterally "announced an 'official impeachment inquiry.'" Cipollone writes, "Your contrived process is unprecedented in the history of the Nation, and lacks the necessary authorization for a valid impeachment proceeding."

As a result of Pelosi's invalid initiation of an impeachment inquiry, Cipollone points out that Trump's due-process rights have been violated. While Democrat-led committees subpoena White House officials demanding compliance under threats of obstruction charges, Trump on the other hand is denied the right to confront witnesses against him, to call his own witnesses, and "to have the assistance of counsel." All of those things would be afforded him if Pelosi were to actually hold a House vote to officially launch an impeachment inquiry.

The letter concludes, "The President cannot allow your constitutionally illegitimate proceedings to distract him and those in the Executive Branch from their work on behalf of the American people."

Predictably, Pelosi responded with her own letter alleging that Trump is the one guilty of trying "to normalize lawlessness," ridiculously adding that "he is trying to make lawlessness a virtue." And once again Pelosi vacuously asserts that Trump's "actions threaten our national security, violate our Constitution and undermine the integrity of our elections." She further asserts that the White House is engaged in a "cover-up" of Trump's "betrayal of our democracy." It will be interesting to see if Pelosi moves forward with an impeachment vote, or if she continues to drag out her lawless charade.

SOURCE 

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McConnell Turning Tables on Democrat Impeachers

"The way that impeachment stops is with a Senate majority with me as majority leader."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sees it for what it is, and the upper chamber of Congress, which will try President Donald Trump if and when the House ever gets around to impeaching him, will prove to be the sane chamber. In a campaign video, McConnell says that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is “in the clutches of a left-wing mob that finally convinced her to impeach the president.” However, he adds. “The way that impeachment stops is with a Senate majority with me as majority leader.”

McConnell must firmly believe that there is not enough evidence to oust Trump or he wouldn’t assert this far in advance that the Senate will kill the effort. He’s also clearly hanging this political charade around Democrat necks.

On a final note, Democrats have, for effect, compared the proposed Trump impeachment with that of Richard Nixon — but there is a BIG difference and it betrays a remarkable double standard.

Nixon was rightly impeached and resigned because he attempted to conceal the fact that operatives within his administration used FBI and CIA personnel to uncover what they believed were communist influencers in the Democrat Party. That was exposed with the botched attempt to steal DNC files from its office in the Watergate building — though, notably, Nixon was not orchestrating these tactics.

However, in the case of both the 2016 Russia-collusion hoax and the current Ukraine quid-pro-quo hoax, Democrats are the ones using deep-state operatives within the FBI and CIA to frame a sitting president to obstruct his agenda across the board. Don’t wait on The Washington Post to devote six months of headlines to the Democrat deep-state conspiracy.

SOURCE 

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Ten Hours of Testimony for nothing
 
Kurt Volker, the former U.S. envoy to Ukraine, testified on Capitol Hill Thursday for nearly 10 hours. He was one of the first witnesses deposed in the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.

I’m pretty sure that if our brave men and women at Gitmo interrogated a jihadist for ten hours, the left would be yelling that it was torture. But that didn’t stop Democrats from interrogating Volker for ten hours.

And, of course, they did it behind closed doors, presumably because they were touching on classified subjects. Or maybe they just didn’t want the American people to hear what Volker had to say. I suspect it was the latter because Republicans came out of the hearing unfazed.

Rep. Jim Jordan, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told reporters that “not one thing [Volker] said comports with any of the Democrats’ impeachment narrative. Not one thing.”

Rep. Adam Schiff left the hearing and told reporters that he had no comment. Schiff’s silence speaks volumes. If Volker’s testimony had been damaging to Trump, Schiff would have had plenty to say.

SOURCE 

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Surprise Medical Billing Must Be Stopped

Have you ever had this happen to you? You or a loved one gets sick, you check and double-check your insurance and find a provider in your insurance network, make an appointment and see that provider. You pay the co-pays and pick up the drugs the doctor prescribed. All seems fine until weeks later, you get an unexpected, and very expensive, bill for services you thought your insurance provider covered. This is called surprise medical billing, and if it has happened to you, you’re far from alone.

Here’s how it works: People go into facilities that are in their insurance network. In fact, if you’re like me you’ll call your insurance provider or at least check its website to make sure the facility is in-network so you won’t get slapped with charges above and beyond the premiums, co-pays, deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums, which already add up to a lot of money.

Even when patients are told that yes, this facility is in-network, they often get a surprise bill after the fact. The bill says that while the facility was covered, one of the medical providers was not, and patients are expected to make up the difference. How was the patient even supposed to know that? Medical insurance companies want to pretend they’re entirely innocent in the shady practice known as surprise medical billing. They’re not.

This happens far more often than you might imagine. According to a study by Stanford University, almost 40 percent of American patients have been hit by surprise medical billing.

This may technically be legal, but it is unfair and unjust and in extreme cases can turn even fairly routine illness into a financial crisis. It’s not an overstatement to say that the existence of widespread practices like this one call the entire American medical system’s legitimacy into question.

America’s health insurance companies say that this is not their fault. They point out that equity firms have bought up a lot of medical practices and have driven billing costs up. The message is: blame the other guy.

They’re not wrong and this is a problem, but it’s not the whole story. American insurance companies are Goliaths who want to pretend to be Davids. The five largest insurance companies will generate more revenue in 2019 than the five biggest tech companies according to Axios.

In forging their agreements with medical facilities, American insurance companies have created a problem for us, known as “skinny networks.” These are networks that are not broad enough to meet the needs of all of their clients.

To a certain extent, this is understandable. People come to doctors and other medical specialists with a wide variety of problems. Even a diligent insurance company can only foresee so many problems and thus only strike a deal with so many problem-solvers.

But really, when, let’s say, most anesthesiologists or many emergency room doctors are not covered by a network agreement, whose fault is that? It’s clear that while equity firms are not making the problem any better, health insurance companies share a portion of the blame for surprise billing as well. Patients really have no way of anticipating the after-doctor sticker shock.

The best solution would be to make sure, first of all, that this is not the patients’ problem and, second, that no party – not insurance companies, not private practitioners, not medical facilities, not equity firms – has the power to lord it over the others.

A bill in Congress called the STOP Surprise Medical Bills Act would stop surprise medical billing. Rather than arguing about blame for what has gone wrong, it would simply force all the parties to fix the problem and not trouble patients about it.

When bills come to the insurance company that are out of network, rather than pass that bill on to you, the insurance company would be required to enter into binding arbitration with that provider, and hammer out a deal.

This approach has been tried in New York and it has already saved thousands and thousands of people from the national plague of surprise medical billing. Congress should replicate this success story for all American patients.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

UKRAINE PROBE: "A newly unearthed document shows that Ukrainian officials had opened a new probe into the firm linked to Hunter Biden months before President Trump's phone call with that country's leader." (Fox News)

COSTLY INSURANCE UNDER OBAMACARE: "Health insurance now costs the average American family over $20,000 annually, according to a recent survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The foundation’s chief executive, Drew Altman, noted, “It’s as much as buying a basic economy car, but buying it every year.” Bloomberg reports, “While employers pay most of the cost of coverage, according to the survey, workers’ average contribution is now $6,000 for a family plan. That’s just their share of upfront premiums, and doesn’t include co-payments, deductibles and other forms of cost-sharing once they need care.” -- Patriot Post

NOKO STATUS QUO: "Working-level nuclear talks in Sweden between officials from Pyongyang and Washington have broken off, North Korea's top negotiator said late on Saturday, dashing prospects for an end to months of stalemate." (Reuters)

NARRATIVE BUSTER: Women and minorities are fueling an increase in concealed-handgun permits (John Lott)

TOO LITTLE TOO LATE: Bloomberg Law finally retracts its false and misleading "anti-Semitic" story involving Department of Labor official Leif Olson (The Volokh Conspiracy)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here

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Democrats Issue Ominous Warning to Supreme Court

For all the claims about President Donald Trump’s dangerous erosion of institutional norms, it is prominent Democrats who are ramping up their threats to pack the Supreme Court unless it starts producing different outcomes on pet issues.

Rule differently on gun control or face restructuring, several Democratic senators warned in a brief filed August 12. Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Richard Durbin (D-IL), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), issued the threat in response to the court’s consideration of the constitutionality of a New York City law strictly limiting the transport of guns by their law-abiding owners.

“The Supreme Court is not well. And the people know it. Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics,’” the liberal senators wrote, quoting a Quinnipiac University poll showing that 69 percent of Democrats support court packing. The message from the Democratic senators was not subtle: That’s a nice court you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it.

Contrary to what the senators are implying, the issue isn’t that the public at large is frustrated with the court. The issue is Democrats. Another recent poll shows that, while 62 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Supreme Court, that percentage drops to 49 percent for Democrats, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey—the lowest percentage in decades.

Democratic politicians appear to be letting these polls dictate their policy proposals. South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg proposed limiting justices’ lifetime terms on the bench, while several other Democratic candidates for the 2020 presidential nomination have already spoken in favor of adding justices to the court.
As the progressive magazine Mother Jones put it: “Court-Packing Went from a Fringe Idea to a Serious Democratic Proposal.”

It’s not the first time Democratic politicians have tried to regain control of the Court by court packing. The Constitution doesn’t fix the number of justices on the court. It ranged from five to ten in the early years of the republic before being codified at nine in the Judiciary Act of 1869.

President Franklin Roosevelt, frustrated that the court had declared key provisions of his New Deal unconstitutional, proposed the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill in 1937. It would have allowed him to appoint as many as six additional justices. Even the Democrats who controlled Congress and his own Vice President opposed the plan.

But while Roosevelt’s plan to increase the number of justices failed, ultimately the pressure Roosevelt brought to bear achieved the desired result. Congress passed a bill that allowed justices who retired to receive full, rather than one-half, pensions. Four justices stepped down within the next four years and another two died, giving him six of the eight justices he eventually appointed. Another justice, Owen Robert, began voting to uphold Roosevelt’s agenda in what has been dubbed the famous “switch in time that saved nine,” on the assumption that his conversion was an attempt to stave off the president’s attempt to reconfigure the court.

Democrat threats to pack the court may be another attempt to threaten justices into changing their votes. Unfortunately, the tactic occasionally works. In 2012, the initial vote of the court regarding President Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, was to strike down the law for violating the Commerce Clause. The media, senators and even President Obama began previewing arguments they would use if the court so ruled, calling the court partisan, activist, and illegitimate.

Chief Justice Roberts, worried about the blowback on the court, negotiated a deal with Justices Kagan and Breyer. They voted to overturn the law’s expansion of Medicaid in exchange for him voting to uphold the individual mandate as a tax. Both inside and outside the court, the view was that the chief justice had changed his legal position not on principle but due to public pressure.

However, the Court’s true legitimacy derives from its freedom to make decisions in accordance with law, not in its reaching decisions that will win favor with powerful politicians or media elite. A justice who allows the president or other politicians to change his or her vote does not show independence.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg surprised some recently when she strongly decried court packing for political gain in an interview with NPR’s Nina Totenberg. Noting that the Constitution doesn’t require nine justices, she said it was a bad idea when FDR proposed it, and it’s a bad idea now.

“You mentioned before the court appearing partisan. Well if anything would make the court appear partisan, it would be that. One side saying when we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges so we will have more people who will vote the way we want them to. So, I’m not at all in favor of that solution to what I see as a temporary situation,” she said.

The best solution for depoliticizing the Supreme Court is for it to have a smaller role in America’s social, economic, and political life. The high court should determine whether legislation is Constitutional. It should not correct, rewrite, update, or amend statutes, much less tinker with the Constitution itself.

A less political Supreme Court is more probable when Congress legislates clearly and utilizes the Constitution’s amendment process. Much of the temptation for courts to overreach into the political arena arises from the perception that change through the proper channels is not feasible. Democratic senators demanding the Supreme Court take on an activist role is really a declaration of their own incompetence as legislators.

Over the last 30 years, and at several critical junctures, nominations and advise and consent responsibilities have become increasingly politicized. As always, the Constitution’s independent and limited judiciary remains preferable to a hyper political court that is legislating from the bench and subject to the same base political pressures as members of Congress pandering for votes. Similarly, as voters we need to take our responsibility as guardians of the Constitution seriously and elect presidents and senators who demonstrate integrity in dealing with the court.

SOURCE 

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How Rent Control Threatens the American Dream

It’s no secret that many parts of the country are experiencing a housing affordability crisis. Homelessness is on the rise in high-cost urban areas and skyrocketing rental prices mean that families have an increasingly tough time making ends meet. This dismal state of affairs is concerning for those who live in these areas already, but a potentially much larger problem, and one that could have effects for generations to come, is the disappearing ability for families across the country to move into these dynamic areas in the first place.

To address these problems, policymakers in California and Oregon (among the worst states for housing affordability) have decided on the one policy choice that is almost universally despised among economists: rent control. The idea has also received support from Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who has made national rent control a key part of his presidential campaign. The quintessential “sounds-good-but-doesn’t-work” policy, rent control is a government-imposed limit on how much landlords can increase rents for property they own. Once signed by Governor Newsom, the California legislation will limit increases in rent to five percent, plus the rate of inflation. Oregon lawmakers passed a statewide rent control law in February that limits rent increases to seven percent, plus the rate of inflation.

Even economists who typically favor government intervention in the economy generally don’t like rent controls because they simply fail to achieve their intended goal of controlling rental costs. Instead of being forced to rent units at below-market rates, landlords facing rent controls often respond by converting their units into condos that can be sold or business properties that are not subject to rent control laws. This ultimately shrinks the supply of units available to rent, driving up the cost of renting for everyone. According to recent research from Stanford University, this is exactly what happened when San Francisco implemented rent control laws in the 1990s—stabilizing rent for a few while reducing the supply of units available for rent by 15 percent and increasing rental costs across the city by 5.1 percent.

Even more concerning is the effect that such policies will have on the ability for families to move into the places where they have a better chance at finding work, moving up the income ladder, and providing their children with the best opportunities to succeed. Although it has been more than a decade since the great recession, America’s economic recovery has been decidedly geographically unequal. Research from the Economic Innovation Group (EIG) has documented a growing divide, since the great recession, between prosperous (typically urban) and distressed (typically rural) communities. For example, employment in prosperous zip codes fully recovered from the recession by 2013 and by 2016 these areas had 3.6 million more jobs than in 2007. Distressed zip codes, meanwhile, by 2016 had 1.4 million fewer jobs than in 2007 and are not expected to ever fully recover. The researchers also note that, “highly populous counties—those with more than 500,000 residents—were far more likely to add businesses above and beyond 2007 levels than their smaller peers.” Between 2007 and 2016, nearly 60 percent of large counties added businesses on net, while only about 20 percent of small counties did so.

Furthermore, recent research from the Equality of Opportunity Project is clear that place matters for the ability of Americans to move up the income distribution across generations as well. For children in poor families, growing up in a county with less concentrated poverty, lower crime rates, a larger share of two-parent families, less income inequality, and better schools has a significant positive effect on future adult income. But despite these disparities in opportunity, Americans are less geographically mobile than ever. In the 1950s, about 20 percent of the population moved every year, but by 2017 only about 10 percent did. Long-distance moves are often job related and the percentage of job seekers relocating for a new position was 41.8 percent in 1986, but just 10.1 percent in 2018. Certainly, there are multiple causes for the decline in geographic mobility, from state-specific occupational licensing requirements to a decline in job switching, but the towering “cost-of-living” barrier is certainly a piece of the puzzle.

Geographic mobility is a crucial part of the economic dynamism that enables the American Dream. There is a very real shortage of affordable housing across America’s most dynamic areas, but rent control is an ineffective solution to this problem. Instead, policymakers should address the root of this problem, the lack of housing supply, by reforming zoning rules, eliminating onerous mandates on new construction, and allowing housing supply to meet demand. Rent control is a band-aid style solution imposed from the top down, it will not address the housing affordability crisis and is almost certain to make housing even less affordable for Americans seeking opportunity.

SOURCE 

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Walmart Reforms Healthcare

Most of the current debate over healthcare focuses on which third party will pay for healthcare, instead of focusing on increasing access, improving quality, or decreasing costs for patients. Surprisingly, Walmart has stepped up to help change the conversation by opening a new type of health clinic in one of their stores.

The delivery of high-quality care requires the combination of several components, among them, access to healthcare providers. For those living in impoverished urban or rural areas, access to healthcare providers can be limited. With the closure of 64 rural hospitals between 2013 and 2017, only 82 percent of Americans now live within 10 miles of the nearest hospital.

On the other hand, over 90 percent of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart. Walmart has begun the process of rolling out healthcare clinics in stores that would offer patients low cost medical, dental, vision, and mental healthcare.

Walmart’s innovation is to clearly list and compete on prices, something currently missing from the healthcare industry in America. This transparency helps uninsured and low-income patients that are concerned about out of pocket healthcare costs. They currently have prices listed on their website offering $20 flu tests, $30 annual adult checkups, and $45 vision exams. They will be staffed by licensed medical professionals trained to handle a wide array of treatments.

It can feel weird to treat healthcare like just another transaction. For many in the healthcare industry, treating diseases is a form of service for others. Many professionals treat it as a calling rather than just another job—and with people’s health and lives in their hands, that perception is tough to argue. However, consumers shopping around for which services best meets their needs, with both a price and quality comparison, is healthy for competition. Competitive pressure helps incentivize firms to reduce costs, employ new technologies or management techniques, and pass those lower prices on to consumers even as quality improves. This graph from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) demonstrates how in industries that face stronger competitive pressure, products like automobiles, clothing, TVs, and toys have fallen in price compared to wages, unlike hospital services and medical care which face little price competition.

As the costs of healthcare continue to rise, this transparent pricing will help put downward pressure on prices, now that patients can see them before scheduling an appointment. By removing individuals from the decision-making process through opaque pricing, third-party payers face no pressure to reduce prices for consumers. The bureaucracy of third-party payers adds more people to the payment process, which naturally increases costs as more people are involved in handling the money. While insurance is important for unexpected and expensive procedures, for predicable, routine procedures it simply adds costs. Walmart’s transparent pricing can help fix this.

In healthcare, innovation can take many forms and even new practices that seem impractical to us before implementation can be a valuable test of new management techniques and industrial organization. Countless inventors or business leaders were told their ideas were crazy before they revolutionized their field. Ford laughed at Lee Iacocca’s Minivan idea, and James Dyson was told his idea for a new type of vacuum was ludicrous, but both became incredibly successful.

This experiment by Walmart is a new way to focus on convenient healthcare delivery in a cost-conscious way. Obviously, experimentation in healthcare treatments themselves pose risks for the patient. But rather than experimenting on people, this innovation is an attempt to develop a better method of delivering care. This type of low risk innovation should be encouraged as a means to develop more efficient methods of delivering healthcare.

In addition to helping lower prices, offering healthcare services in a Walmart location could help improve healthcare utilization. How many times have you or your friend gone into a Walmart or Target “just to get one thing” and ended up spending an hour buying things you didn’t come in for? Offering healthcare services in this location could help encourage people who feel a little sick, but wouldn’t make the trip just to the doctor’s office, to stop in for a quick appointment.

Another way that Walmart could encourage healthcare utilization is if their clinics reduced wait times. Long wait times deter patients from scheduling a visit until their symptoms worsen, which can result in serious complications. The expansion of telehealth services provides a poignant example of how more convenient care helps encourage patients to use healthcare services. For instance, when veterans were offered telepsychiatry as an option to treat PTSD, their usage of the services were much greater than when they were forced to schedule a face to face appointment with a psychiatrist during the day.

Walmart’s innovation is not the first of its kind; outside of the U.S., the Narayana hospital system has experienced success with a similar model. Narayana has succeeded by employing different management techniques than those used in the U.S. healthcare system, which has helped them reduce the cost of healthcare services significantly. For instance, a heart bypass surgery that costs $100,000 in the U.S. costs between $1,000-2,000 for Narayana. Like Walmart, they also view medicine as a business, making the prices clear for patients and focusing on reducing costs so that more patients are able to receive medical care.

The thought of low-cost or budget healthcare carries a stigma of low quality to match the reduced price tag. However, when gains in productivity due to innovation are passed on to consumers, lower costs do not translate to lower quality.

By focusing on low, transparent prices, Walmart’s new health clinics have the potential to help slow runaway healthcare costs, which continue to increase. Providing a convenient, low-cost alternative can only help patients. Patients have varying needs, budgets, and locations, and healthcare should reflect that. Walmart’s innovation is a potential welcome disruption that could help bring competition to healthcare, and increase access to the care patients need.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

TAX-RETURN FISHING EXPEDITION: "President Donald Trump lost his bid Monday to shield his tax returns from the Manhattan District Attorney's office, which subpoenaed them as part of an investigation into 'hush payments' to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal." (ABC News)

SCOTUS RECONVENES: "The justices are returning to the Supreme Court bench for the start of an election year term that includes high-profile cases about abortions, protections for young immigrants and LGBT rights," the Associated Press reports. Be sure to check out The Heritage Foundation's comprehensive overview.

NEW WHISTLEBLOWER: The Associated Press reports, "A second whistleblower has come forward with information about President Donald Trump's dealings with Ukraine." The report further reveals, "Crucially, the new whistleblower works in the intelligence field and has 'firsthand knowledge' of key events." According to Sen. Lindsey Graham, "This is Kavanaugh all over again."

IMMIGRATION PROCLAMATION: Trump signs order to prevent taxpayers from subsidizing healthcare for legal immigrants (The Daily Wire)

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here 

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Donald Trump threatens to 'obliterate' Turkish economy if it goes too far with Syria invasion

Turks are attacking the heroic Kurds.  Trump thought he had a deal with Turkey to protect the Kurds which would allow US troops to withdraw safely

US President Donald Trump warned Turkey against going too far in Syria, after giving Ankara a green light to invade its southern neighbour.

Mr Trump said on Monday he was done with "ridiculous endless war" as he stood aside to allow a long-threatened Turkish assault on Kurdish-held Syria, effectively abandoning its allies who fought Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

The US had for months been working with Turkey to try to create a buffer zone along its border with northern Syria between the Turkish military and Kurdish forces which Ankara sees as terrorists.

But amid an outcry from the region and strong opposition at home from both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, the US leader appeared to reverse himself, though without drawing any specific red lines that might protect Kurdish allies.

"If Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I've done before!)," Mr Trump tweeted.

Other US officials, apparently surprised by Trump's Sunday announcement, stressed that Washington will not actively support the long-threated Turkish action, warning of destabilizing blowback to the region.

"The Department of Defense made clear to Turkey - as did the president - that we do not endorse a Turkish operation in Northern Syria," said Pentagon spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman.

Turkey has repeatedly criticised the slow implementation of the buffer zone and threatened a unilateral assault, but until Monday the US had refused to stand aside.

"The Kurds fought with us, but were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so. They have been fighting Turkey for decades," Mr Trump said in an earlier series of tweets.

"Turkey, Europe, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia and the Kurds will now have to figure the situation out."

US Republican and Democrats had warned such an offensive on the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which lost 11,000 troops in the battle against Isil, could lead to a massacre of Kurds and send a worrying message to American allies across the world.

The US began pulling back some of its 1,000 troops from border towns  Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ayn on Monday, and has said it will potentially depart the country should widespread fighting break out.

The announcement, first made by the White House overnight on Sunday, appeared to take both the Kurds and US coalition forces, which had been carrying out joint patrols with Turkey on the ground, completely by surprise.

Kurdish sources say they were acting in good faith trying to establish a security mechanism with the US to placate Turkey, but now felt that Ankara had been using it as a cover for reconnaisance.

Mustafa Bali, spokesman for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), tweeted: "We are not expecting the US to protect NE #Syria. But people here are owed an explanation regarding security mechanism deal, destruction of fortifications and failure of US to fulfill their commitments."

The White House statement was released after a phonecall between US President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday night.

Mr Erdogan had reportedly assured the US president that Ankara would take over the detention of Isil militants captured by the SDF, on the battlefield.

The Kurds have been holding thousands of Syrian and thousands more foreign Isil suspects in prisons and camps across the north of the country.

Mr Trump has repeatedly asked countries under the US-led coalition against Isil to repatriate their citizens. However, the UK, France, Germany, and other allies have so far refused.

“The United States will not hold them for what could be many years and great cost to the United States taxpayer,” the White House statement said. “Turkey will now be responsible for all ISIS fighters in the area captured over the past two years in the wake of the defeat of the territorial “Caliphate” by the United States.”

The decision is a massive blow to the Kurds, who not only helped hold back Isil but have for years been building an autonomous statelet in the northeast of Syria.

Turkey claims its planned “safe zone” is to purge the border of YPG forces, which it sees as a terrorist offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has fought an insurgency inside its territory for the past 35 years.

The proposed corridor would have an initial depth of 18 miles and a length of 300 miles and includes the Kurds’ biggest urban centres, including the city of Qamishli which has an estimated 250,000 population.

Turkey on Monday night carried out air strikes on the Iraqi side of the Iraq-Syria border crossing, in what was thought to be an attack on the YPG's supply line.

Western diplomats told the Telegraph they are working on the theory that Mr Erdogan will begin by attempting to take a smaller sliver between the towns of Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ain on the border, but the Turkish president himself has previously hinted at much wider ambitions.

Mr Erdogan has said he wants to return two million of the mostly Sunni Arab Syrian refugees Turkey is hosting to the buffer zone, which some have said would amount to an ethnic repopulation.

The Kurds fear many of the Syrians that might be placed in the zone are not native to north-east Syria, and might displace the Kurdish culture and rights.

The UN said that it was "preparing for the worst", fearing an assault would send large numbers of civilians fleeing.

“This Turkish military operation in northern and eastern Syria will have a significant negative impact on our war on ISIS and will destroy everything that has been achieved from the state of stability over the past years,” the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces said in a statement.

They said they would defend themselves against “Turkish aggression” and called on all sects, including Kurds, Arabs, Syriacs and Assyrians to join them.

Defending its Kurdish allies would have seen the US come against its Nato partner Turkey, which Washington was keen to avoid.

President Donald Trump has since taking office attempted to disentangle the US from drawn-out wars in the Middle East.

His goal of swift withdrawals in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan have been stymied by concerns from US officials and American allies about the dangerous voids that would remain.

SOURCE 

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America’s top CEOs say they are no longer putting shareholders before everyone else

This a joke.  CEOs have NEVER put shareholders first. Their own prestige, power and income have always been their first priority and that will not change.  Shareholders just get the scraps

For the past two decades, the official stance of America’s top corporate executives has been that the interests of shareholders came before the interests of all others—workers, consumers, the cities and towns in which their companies operated, and society as a whole.

Today, that changes.

The Business Roundtable, a lobbying group composed of the nation’s leading CEOs, just announced that its members “share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders”—each of whom “is essential”—while pledging “to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities, and our country.”

With its “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation,” the Roundtable has affirmed the need for “meeting or exceeding customer expectations”; “investing in our employees,” including by “compensating them fairly and providing important benefits,” as well as offering training and education so that they can “develop new skills for a rapidly changing world”; “dealing fairly and ethically with our suppliers”; “supporting the communities in which we work”; and “generating long-term value for shareholders.”

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase and the Roundtable’s chairman, says he hopes that this declaration “will help to set a new standard for corporate leadership.”

It is, without question, a huge deal.

As I’ve detailed before, through the 1980s and most of the ’90s, the Roundtable held that companies had a responsibility to “carefully weigh the interests of all stakeholders,” as the organization described it, and that “the thrust of history and law” buttressed this kind of broad assessment.

In 1997, the Roundtable switched course. Suddenly, it proclaimed that “the paramount duty of management and of boards of directors is to the corporation’s stockholders” and that “the interests of other stakeholders are relevant as a derivative of the duty to stockholders.” (The Roundtable echoed that message in 2016.)

The Roundtable’s shift to a shareholder-first posture has been widely cited as a significant marker in the evolution of corporate America—both a reflection and reinforcement of an ideology that has thrilled investors, gripped executives, and knocked out a more enlightened form of capitalism that had emerged in the era after World War II.

Yet since then—and especially over the past 5 to 10 years—serving shareholders first and foremost has come under increasing attack. An expanding chorus of critics has made the case that this predilection has contributed to a short-term mindset among far too many executives, fostering a culture of indiscriminate cost-cutting and financial engineering, and has been a central reason for the explosion in income inequality.

“I read the Roundtable’s statement as a return to common-sense principles of management and the recognition that employees need a bigger share of the pie to assure a healthy economy,” says Judy Samuelson, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program.

The pressure for business to put an end to shareholder primacy has been building from a variety of quarters. Younger workers, in particular, are looking for employers that have a loftier purpose than merely maximizing their profits. More and more, customers are paying attention to which companies seem to be doing right by their people and the environment—and punishing brands that fall short. Socially conscious investors have started putting vast sums of money into financial products that use a “sustainable, responsible, and impact” lens.

Politicians have also taken up the cause. The Accountable Capitalism Act, proposed by Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential candidate, would require very large companies to obtain a new federal charter under which directors would have to “consider the interests of all corporate stakeholders.”

Meanwhile, the basic tenets of shareholder capitalism have been questioned by scholars such as the late Lynn Stout, a Cornell law professor and author of The Shareholder Value Myth, who cogently argued that executives and directors have wide latitude in deciding what is best for a company and don’t have any obligation—legal or otherwise—to elevate shareholders above everyone else. Journalists and think-tank types have weighed in along these lines, too.

MY DINNER WITH DIMON

Among them has been me. As Fortune’s Alan Murray recounts, the Roundtable began to reevaluate its views on the relationship between shareholders and other stakeholders after a “testy, off-the-record dinner” last fall that I participated in. Dimon had invited four of us—including the Washington Post‘s Steve Pearlstein, Bloomberg’s Joe Nocera, and Samuelson of the Aspen Institute—to JPMorgan headquarters to better understand why we kept insisting that corporate America had become overly obsessed with shareholder value and, as a result, was damaging society.

Dimon’s perspective—then and now—is that most big companies already take good care of their various stakeholders. “We relentlessly invest in employees, communities, and innovation,” he told me.

If that were true, of course, the new Roundtable statement would simply be codifying the current state of affairs. But with all due respect to Dimon, who deserves great credit for engaging with us and then guiding the Roundtable to recast its position, the numbers don’t back him up.

Sure, no company completely ignores all of its constituents save for its shareholders. If it did, it would soon be out of business. But as a study published last week by the Center for American Progress makes clear, things are terribly out of balance.

Wages for the majority of the American workforce have been stagnant for 40 years, while their health coverage and retirement security have eroded. At the same time, corporate profits—high by historical standards—are mainly being used to reward shareholders, including CEOs themselves. Their compensation has gone up 940% since 1978; typical worker compensation has risen 12% during that time, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

For the Roundtable’s statement to mean something—and not stand as empty rhetoric—this picture can’t be allowed to continue.

With that in mind, I asked a half-dozen colleagues who’ve been at the fore of fighting shareholder primacy what would it take for them to be convinced that CEOs across the business landscape had genuinely embraced stakeholder capitalism.

For starters, several say, companies must curtail stock buybacks, if not stop them altogether. These repurchases have become a financial narcotic, with a record volume of shares being snapped up, largely in an attempt to pump up their price.

Some, including Roundtable President Joshua Bolten, defend the practice as an efficient way to deploy capital and help the economy grow. But buybacks plainly favor shareholders (including, again, CEOs), and every dollar of profit spent on them means one less dollar that can go directly to bolster worker pay, training, R&D, and other areas.

“I would make it the primary obligation of all business corporations to ‘retain-and-reinvest’: retain profits and reinvest in the productive capabilities of employees,” says economist Bill Lazonick, who is perhaps the country’s most outspoken detractor of buybacks. “I would place constraints on ‘downsize-and-distribute’: downsizing the company’s labor force and distributing corporate cash to shareholders.”

Environmental stewardship is another proving ground. Some big companies score high marks in this arena right now. But with climate change posing an existential crisis, it’s crucial that corporations do far more.

“Why I’m passionate about ending shareholder primacy is that I truly think the future of the entire human race depends on it, and I’m not trying to exaggerate,” says Lenore Palladino, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “For corporate leaders to show they are committed to stakeholder capitalism, we need to see a commitment to the health of the environment as a business priority . . . a dramatic strategic reorientation towards reversing the current damage and reengineering businesses to be productive for the long term.”

For sustainability pioneer John Elkington, another sign that a stakeholder model hadreally taken root would be for companies to no longer speak with two voices: one from the C-suite and another via the Washington influencers representing them.

“They would resign from all trade and industry groups which lobby to slow or stall necessary systemic changes” that would enhance the simultaneous creation of economic, social, and environmental value, says Elkington, who coined the term “triple bottom line.” Then they would turn around, he adds, and “forcefully and publicly lobby for a meaningful price on carbon and for the breakup of monopolies and oligopolies.”

To give the Roundtable statement some teeth, they’d also take a fresh approach to organized labor. “Welcoming, rather than fighting, a union would be a big one,” says Andy Green, managing director of economic policy at the Center for American Progress. Research shows that nearly half of all workers not in a union want to join one. Yet many companies do all they can to keep this from happening.

Samuelson, for her part, would be impressed by companies “dampening down the intense focus on stock price in CEO pay.” More than half of CEO compensation is share-based these days, much of it tied to short-term financial measures. Instead, executives should be paid—and to a meaningful degree—on a mix of environmental, social, and governance metrics.

The University of Toronto’s Roger Martin, who has been recognized as the world’s number-one management thinker, wants to see a reversal of something that, for many of the most senior executives, is even more deep-seated.

Rather than concentrate on stock price, he says, they should expressly concentrate on serving customers or developing employees or tackling some social need through innovation. Ultimately, Martin has maintained, that’s the best means of taking care of shareholders anyway.

“For me, the key would be to view shareholder value creation as the logical consequence of other things, not something that you can directly pursue,” he says. “It is like Aristotle who pointed out that if a person sets out to be happy, the person is unlikely to end up happy. However, if the person sets out to lead a virtuous life, the person will probably end up happy. If I could only have one thing, it would be that.”

Others made additional suggestions: Companies should guarantee a living wage for all workers, including contractors. Stakeholders of different stripes (employees, sustainability experts, even everyday taxpayers) should be given seats on corporate boards. Executives should lean on business schools to stop teaching that shareholder value is the be-all and end-all of capitalism.

Much of this agenda may be dismissed as unrealistic. Certainly, none of it will be easy to achieve. And none of it is meant to imply that the Roundtable’s statement isn’t, in and of itself, a monumental step.

Words matter. The words of the Roundtable—a Who’s Who of those at the helm of the largest U.S. corporations, from Abbott to Zebra Technologies—matter a lot. In the end, though, it is the actions of Roundtable members that will matter the most.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here 

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Do medical X-rays give you cancer?

It would be very surprising if they did. They have been in use for about a century so one would think that any adverse effects would have been noticed long ago. Yet the article below says they do cause cancer -- in South Korea.

But the article is inconclusive. WHO were the people who had many X-rays?  Probably the poor as the poor are always shown to have worse health.  So the greater incidence of cancer among X-ray recipients was entirely as expected -- as a normal correlate of poverty.

There is so much crap in epidemiological research.  Inconclusive articles like this are a big pain to me as I repeatedly feel obliged to point out the obvious flaws in them


Association of Exposure to Diagnostic Low-Dose Ionizing Radiation With Risk of Cancer Among Youths in South Korea

Jae-Young Hong et al.

Abstract

Importance:  Diagnostic low-dose ionizing radiation has great medical benefits; however, its increasing use has raised concerns about possible cancer risks.

Objective:  To examine the risk of cancer after diagnostic low-dose radiation exposure.

Design, Setting, and Participants  This population-based cohort study included youths aged 0 to 19 years at baseline from South Korean National Health Insurance System claim records from January 1, 2006, to December 31, 2015. Exposure to diagnostic low-dose ionizing radiation was classified as any that occurred on or after the entry date, when the participant was aged 0 to 19 years, on or before the exit date, and at least 2 years before any cancer diagnosis. Cancer diagnoses were based on International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision codes. Data were analyzed from March 2018 to September 2018.

Main Outcomes and Measures:  The primary analysis assessed the incidence rate ratios (IRRs) for exposed vs nonexposed individuals using the number of person-years as an offset.

Results:  The cohort included a total of 12 068 821 individuals (6 339 782 [52.5%] boys). There were 2 309 841 individuals (19.1%) aged 0 to 4 years, 2 951 679 individuals (24.5%) aged 5 to 9 years, 3 489 709 individuals (28.9%) aged 10 to 14 years, and 3 317 593 individuals (27.5%) aged 15 to 19 years. Of these, 1 275 829 individuals (10.6%) were exposed to diagnostic low-dose ionizing radiation between 2006 and 2015, and 10 792 992 individuals (89.4%) were not exposed. By December 31, 2015, 21 912 cancers were recorded. Among individuals who had been exposed, 1444 individuals (0.1%) received a cancer diagnosis. The overall cancer incidence was greater among exposed individuals than among nonexposed individuals after adjusting for age and sex (IRR, 1.64 [95% CI, 1.56-1.73]; P < .001). Among individuals who had undergone computed tomography scans in particular, the overall cancer incidence was greater among exposed individuals than among nonexposed individuals after adjusting for age and sex (IRR, 1.54 [95% CI, 1.45-1.63]; P < .001). The incidence of cancer increased significantly for many types of lymphoid, hematopoietic, and solid cancers after exposure to diagnostic low-dose ionizing radiation. Among lymphoid and hematopoietic cancers, incidence of cancer increased the most for other myeloid leukemias (IRR, 2.14 [95% CI, 1.86-2.46]) and myelodysplasia (IRR, 2.48 [95% CI, 1.77-3.47]). Among solid cancers, incidence of cancer increased the most for breast (IRR, 2.32 [95% CI, 1.35-3.99]) and thyroid (IRR, 2.19 [95% CI, 1.97-2.20]) cancers.

Conclusions and Relevance:  This study found an association of increased incidence of cancer with exposure to diagnostic low-dose ionizing radiation in a large cohort. Given this risk, diagnostic low-dose ionizing radiation should be limited to situations in which there is a definite clinical indication.

JAMA Netw Open. 2019;2(9):e1910584. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.10584

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A new map by a Houston-based nonprofit shows clear disparities in life expectancy on either side of a line along Interstate 35 in Travis County, with those in the west living often more than a decade longer than in areas in the east.

In case anybody accuses me of unsubstantiated generalizations, I am reproducing here one of the thousands of articles that show the poor to have worse health.  The discussion below is about Austin, Texas and some of the disparities reported are extreme


The map, released Monday by the Episcopal Health Foundation, relied on six years of mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics and drills down to the neighborhood-level by looking at census tracts. It found huge differences in life expectancy in neighborhoods sometimes only a few miles apart.

In the Rosewood area in East Austin, near East 12th Street and Pleasant Valley Road, for example, a person can expect to live to about 72, the map shows. About 5 miles away near Enfield Road in West Austin — on the other side of I-35 — life expectancy is 83, or 11 years longer.

Poverty levels and demographics also vary widely in the two areas.

Rosewood is largely black and Hispanic, with nearly 50% of residents living below the federal poverty line. The West Austin neighborhood is 88% white, with only 10% considered in poverty.

The area with the shortest life expectancy in Travis County is in Oak Hill near Sunset Valley, where people can expect to live to age 68. Just about a mile to the west is the area with the longest life expectancy, near Barton Creek Boulevard and Southwest Parkway, where a person can expect to live to age 88, or 20 years longer.

The median life expectancy in Texas is 77.8 years.

Austin Public Health has found similar disparities in health outcomes between eastern and western Travis County. The department said it regularly uses its own data to decide where to target its efforts, often on the east side. Cassandra DeLeon, assistant director for disease prevention, said this includes providing job training, education campaigns and access to healthy food.

SOURCE 

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Another lie from Pocohontas

This is typical psychopathic behavior.  She tells lies to suit the moment with no thought of it coming back to bite her later on

U.S. presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is coming under scrutiny after resurfaced video from 2008 appears to contradict a claim she is now making on her campaign trail.

The Democratic hopeful, 70, told a town hall audience in Nevada on Wednesday that she lost her job teaching special needs students in the early 1970s because she was 'visibly pregnant'.

'By the end of the first year, I was visibly pregnant, and the principal did what principals did in those days - wish me luck and hire someone else for the job,' she told the crowd in Carson City.

However, a YouTube clip posted in January 2008 shows Warren giving a different explanation as to why she left that school.

In the video, she tells interviewer Harry Kreisler that her undergraduate degree was in speech pathology and audiology, and, as such, she didn't have the necessary educational requirements to continue on at the school.

According to her Wikipedia page, Warren was teaching at the school on an 'emergency certificate' and was required to return to graduate school to take extra courses in education.

Several viewers of the 2008 clip have left comments beneath the video wondering why there are now apparent discrepancies between her two stories.

'She needs to explain why she is now saying "principal did what principals do" and they fired her. Beyond her other fabrications, is this really someone we want for president?' one asked.

SOURCE 

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Trump shows what government is

Since the Democratic Party leadership and the mainstream mass media went into apoplectic disbelief that Trump won the presidential election in November 2016, they have been in a deep state of denial and determination.

Their denial is because they still cannot believe that someone like Trump could have been elected president of the United States. And they have been determined to reverse the outcome of the election, since “really” he was not the winner; after all, Hillary Clinton had more of the popular vote, while Trump “only” had won the electoral college majority. Besides, if not for those hacking Russian meddlers, the minds of American voters would not have been twisted in the wrong direction. History has to be undone in the name of “social justice” and democracy.

Mueller’s Failure Overcome by a Whistleblower’s Claim
The Mueller Report failed to provide the legal leverage to move forward with impeachment. There had not been demonstrable collusion between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s government to influence the 2016 presidential election; and the Russian hacking and attempted social media manipulation could not be shown to have affected the outcome of the election. The Democrats had pinned so much hope on Robert Mueller, and, damn it, he let them down.

But, now, a whistleblower’s accusations seemed to give them the smoking gun the Democrats had been hoping for in their political dreams. Oh no! An American president attempted to influence a foreign government to investigate possible political corruption connecting the son of Trump’s leading potential Democratic Party rival for the presidency in the 2020 election. Hunter Biden may have been earning $50,000 a month as a board member of a Ukrainian energy company due to the influence of his father, Joe, while his father was vice president of the United States.

Plus, Trump seemed to use congressionally funded military aid to Ukraine as a “carrot” to get the Ukrainian government to dig up and provide the dirt to bolster “The Donald’s” chances for re-election in November 2020. Oh, the horror! Donald Trump may have used the office of the presidency to influence a foreign government with taxpayers’ money to gain a political advantage for himself.

The Nature of Politics: Power, Plunder, and Privilege for Some
Let us remember the nature of politics: it is the use of government power for plunder and privilege so some may gain at the expense of others in society through regulation or redistribution. It does not matter whether an absolute monarch, a totalitarian state, or a functioning democracy does this. It is the reason why those who are concerned with liberty and prosperity have insisted that governments always must be restrained and restricted to a limited and narrow set of functions and responsibilities for the protection of individual freedom, without becoming its destroyer.

If Donald Trump has one redeeming quality, it is his refreshing honesty. He rarely hides behind the rarified rhetoric of altruist promise-making typically heard in political discourse. He tells you who he is and what he wants. He knows where American businesses should invest to make what he considers “America great again,” and they better or there will be consequences. He knows which are the “bad” nations and trading partners, and he is going to teach them a lesson through either trade sanctions or import tariffs to get them to give Trump what he wants. And he will punish other countries that don’t go along with his executive ordering dictates and demands, because America comes first and he knows what America both needs and wants.

Like many other successful demagogues of the past, Donald Trump knows how to play to an audience. The words, the phrases, the short and repeated slogans and name callings that stick in the minds of those enticed by his assurances that all their problems will go away, if only he is in charge to set it all right. Anyone who does not agree with and fawn over his every word and deed is an enemy — an enemy of him and therefore to America. (See my article “The U.S. Revives the Personal State.”)

Modern Democratic Politics Is Trading Votes for Favors
But what has Donald Trump done — even if it is found to be technically against the law — that has not been done by politicians of both major political parties over the decades in both domestic policy and foreign affairs? Which politician does not offer a quid pro quo to voters that if they will only cast their ballot for him come Election Day, he will use taxpayers’ money to give them an unending stream of government-funded programs, subsidies, protections, and privileges?

That is the nature of the political arena of exchange in modern democratic society. Government is not primarily a protector of people’s individual rights; it is a huge and intricate tax-funded pumping machine that transfers wealth and income from certain groups and sectors of the society to others through a complex and interconnected network of federal, state, and municipal bureaucracies. Any freedoms preserved or any freedoms extended are the secondary effects of a political system operating with purposes in mind having little or nothing to do, per se, with human liberty anymore.

In foreign affairs, every U.S. administration in modern times, from Franklin Roosevelt’s to Donald Trump’s, has used political, military, and financial promises and pressures to get foreign governments to do what the president of that time wanted and considered “good for America” and the world. Whether or not some previous occupant of the Oval Office was as transparent as President Trump in making plain how self-serving it is, it was always considered good for the political future of that earlier chief executive, either for winning reelection into the Oval Office or influencing what would be his hoped-for legacy and “place in history.” (See my article “A Call for ‘Do-Nothing’ Presidents Without Legacies.”)

U.S. tax dollars have been used to support or overthrow foreign governments; tax-funded dollars have been used to arm dictators considered “friendly” to America, who often used that military aid to brutalize their own people; those tax dollars have been applied to influence elections and public opinion in other lands considered to be part of America’s “national interest.”

Mafia Bosses and Politicians Both Try to Eliminate Opposition
It often seems as if politicians think and act like a mafia boss. The godfather rarely says directly, “Get rid of ‘Vito the Knife’ tonight.” He says things more indirectly, like, “You know, life would be so much easier if only Vito stopped bothering me.” And his mafia lieutenants know exactly what he wants, just in case the FBI is bugging his office. Trump basically just says to the Ukrainian president, “Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, seem to have been part of Ukraine’s corruption problems. Why don’t you look into it and share any information you get with some representatives of mine? By the way, the U.S. has been a really good diplomatic and financial friend of the Ukraine compared to those misguided and financially stingy Europeans.”

Trump has simply personalized it more than most other former presidents before him, who tended to couch it in the rhetoric of the “common good,” the “general welfare,” and the “safety of the free world.” It is an inevitable part of any American foreign interventionist policy, just as its counterpart in domestic interventionist policies. Interventionism is the politics of regulation and redistribution. Virtually nothing that government touches in a world of interventionism fails to benefit some at others’ expense, given that all interventions inescapably divert the course of social and economic events from the patterns they would have followed if left free from government interference.

You want to eliminate Trump-like actions and policies? There is, ultimately, only one means and method to do so: End the interventionist-welfare state. Restore and relegate government to the limited and narrow protection of each individual’s right to his life, liberty, and honestly acquired property. Then there is nothing for government to sell and supply to Peter at Paul’s expense. But that is not the politics that either Democrats or Republicans want, as reflected in their campaign promises and policy deeds. Thus, the political circus will continue, regardless of who wins the White House or the congressional elections in 2020.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here

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