Will Brazil Finally Awaken?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_hyoF2ZMhQ
Author: Lone Candle
China’s “Balance Sheet Recession” Has Already Started | Richard Koo
The U.S. trade deficit is a problem, and the best way to solve it is by a weaker dollar. Free trade is good, broad tariffs are bad, and the trade deficit is best dealt with by a weaker dollar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRSpfG6hRTQ
The moral case for paying kidney donors
The moral case for paying kidney donors
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/372412/end-kidney-deaths-act-kidney-donor-tax-credit
Trump’s health care plan exposes the truth about his “populism”
“Vance’s sunny rhetoric here disguises his plan’s inegalitarian moral priorities.
It is true that the young and healthy have different medical needs than the old and sick. And before the Affordable Care Act’s regulations, the former could sometimes procure cheaper insurance tailored to their (currently) limited needs.
But this came at a social cost. Insurers were able to offer cheap health coverage to those who barely needed it by screening out those with preexisting conditions. In Vance’s terminology, they constructed low-risk pools: By only including people who were unlikely to require expensive treatments in their plans, they could profitably provide low-premium insurance to the young and well.
Meanwhile, sick and/or older Americans on the individual insurance market either went without coverage or were forced to pay dramatically higher premiums in order to cover the high cost of their care. Some state governments tried to defray this cost somewhat by subsidizing high-risk pools. But enrollees still paid much higher premiums than the typical market rate, and their coverage often excluded the treatments they needed most.
The Affordable Care Act effectively forced the healthy to subsidize the sick. It required insurers to include those with preexisting conditions in their plans and cover all medically necessary procedures. To guarantee that insurers could still turn a profit and that coverage remained (at least somewhat) affordable for all, the government provided consumers with insurance subsidies.
The upshot of all this was that coverage became a little more expensive for some healthy people, while growing much cheaper for the old and seriously ill.”
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“Vance’s vision for health care policy helps clarify the character of the right’s burgeoning “populism.” On trade and immigration, Vance’s ideology may prize a nationalistic conception of the common good above free markets. But on most economic questions, its iconoclastic rhetoric belies its fealty to conservative orthodoxy — and thus, to “the ruling class” whom Vance loves to deride.
As Trump’s running mate, Vance is campaigning on tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy and deregulation for health insurers. The rest of Trump’s economic agenda is rather hazy. But if his first term is any guide, it would also involve curtailing workers’ collective bargaining rights, reducing workplace safety standards, and attempting to throw millions off of Medicaid. Vance has not seen fit to criticize any aspect of this record.”
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“For Vance, deregulating insurance markets at the expense of the vulnerable is not neoliberal or anti-populist. But arguing that politicians should not spread incendiary lies about immigrants is.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/372635/trump-health-care-plan-vance-preexisting-conditions
No, 13,000 Migrant Murderers Are Not Running Loose
“There is a “small number of non-detained migrants” who have been convicted of homicide but can’t be sent back to their home countries after serving their time, mostly because the U.S. doesn’t have repatriation agreements with those countries, Nowrasteh says. A 2001 Supreme Court decision bars ICE from indefinitely keeping someone in immigration detention, but “non-detained” people are often still subject to ICE check-ins or electronic monitoring.
Trump is also wrong to claim that these individuals all came to the U.S. under the Biden administration. The list “includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more,” explained the Department of Homeland Security in a Saturday statement, “the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration.””
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“The number of convicted criminals on ICE’s nondetained docket hasn’t grown significantly under President Joe Biden, reported The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler. In August 2016, five months before Trump took office, there were 368,574 on the docket; in June 2021, five months into Biden’s presidency, there were 405,786; and in December 2022, nearly two years into Biden’s presidency, there were 407,983.
As he campaigns ahead of the presidential election next month, Trump has routinely said outrageous, misleading, and false things about immigrants and crime. He often talks about a “migrant crime” wave and claims that it “is taking over America.” Much like his migrant murderers claim, the true picture looks very different. Crime decreased in the cities that received the most migrants through Texas’ Operation Lone Star busing activities, per NBC News. “The most recent significant crime spike in recent years occurred in 2020,” Cato Institute Associate Director of Immigration Studies David J. Bier told Reason in March, “when illegal immigration was historically low until the end of the year.”
Trump paints a terrifying picture of migrants and migration, but the reality is far more nuanced and far less dangerous than he would suggest.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/04/no-13000-migrant-murderers-are-not-running-loose/
Trump’s Deportation Plan Would Cost Nearly $1 Trillion
“Former President Donald Trump’s promise to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” would not only be a moral calamity requiring an enormous expansion of government—it would also be hugely expensive and ruinous to the American economy.
The governmental infrastructure required to arrest, process, and remove 13 million undocumented immigrants would cost nearly $1 trillion over 10 years and would deal a “devastating” hit to economic growth, according to a report published last week by the American Immigration Council (AIC). The think tank estimates that a mass deportation plan would shrink America’s gross domestic product by at least 4.2 percent, due to the loss of workers in industries already struggling to find enough labor.”
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“The costs of mass deportation would rebound into the economy in several ways. The economy would shrink and federal tax revenues would decline. The construction industry, where an estimated 14 percent of workers are undocumented migrants, would be particularly hard hit, but the effects would be felt throughout the economy.”
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“Immigration restrictionists often assume that deporting millions of undocumented workers would allow more Americans to fill those jobs, but the economy is not a zero-sum game. A shrinking economy would be bad news for many workers who aren’t directly impacted by Trump’s deportation plan.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/07/trumps-deportation-plan-would-cost-nearly-1-trillion/
I Did Business With China, and America Won
“The Chinese factory charged me $10 for a cart that cost them $9 to manufacture. U.S. retailers bought it from me for $15, then sold it to consumers for $30.
To recap: The factory made $1, I made $5, and retailers made $15, minus freight and U.S. tariffs.
The freight costs went to shipping lines, U.S. railroads, truckers, warehouses, and America’s highest-paid union workers—longshoremen at the Port of Los Angeles. As for those tariffs: Do the Chinese actually pay them, as former President Donald Trump claims? That would be illegal, as U.S. Customs charges tariffs only to the “importer of record,” which must be a U.S. entity. The monies collected go directly to Uncle Sam and retailers add them to their cost of goods, as with any other expense.
So each Magna Cart created $21 in profits, of which 95 percent went into American pockets. Selling 5 million carts meant a $100 million gain to the U.S. economy. Yet the official trade statistics framed that as a $75 million addition to the trade deficit.”
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“Wouldn’t American profits be even higher if these things were made in the U.S.A? That’s a big no, because many products simply wouldn’t exist. My original plan had been to manufacture in the United States. Then I saw the factory quotes, and I realized my babies would have to retail for more than $100. Thanks to China, tens of millions of Americans can now carry their chairs and gear to the beach with ease, and move heavy loads without tweaking their backs for under $40. (It used to be $30. Sigh.)
So why can’t we move all that manufacturing to other low-wage countries? Because only China has the massive workforce (800 million strong), the infrastructure, and the natural resources to supply 380 million Americans (plus 7.6 billion others globally) with every gizmo and gadget imaginable.
The nearly $500 billion that America imports annually from China enriches our economy by trillions. The math is so simple, you’d think even politicians could understand it.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/08/i-did-business-with-china-and-america-won/
Trump’s Destructive Tariff Proposals Will Make Us All Poorer
“”Former President Donald Trump’s proposals to impose a universal tariff of 20 percent and an additional tariff on Chinese imports of at least 60 percent would spike the average tariff rate on all imports to highs not seen since the Great Depression,” warns Erica York of the Tax Foundation.
Trump has actually been a little vague on the size of his universal tariff, first floating it at 10 percent while allowing “it may be more than that,” and then upping the ante to 20 percent. Either way, it’s a cost that ends up being largely paid by Americans in terms of higher retail prices and more expensive imported parts and materials for domestic manufacturing.
The Trump administration’s 2018 “tariffs resulted in higher prices for a wide variety of goods that U.S. consumers and businesses purchase,” the Tax Foundation’s Alex Durante and Alex Muresianu concluded.
Even when tariffs don’t directly affect the cost of imported goods purchased by consumers, they still drive up the prices of many things made in the U.S. The Cato Institute’s Pierre Lemieux points out that “a tariff on an input (say, steel) is paid by the American importer who will typically pass it down the supply chain to his customers and eventually to the consumers of the final good (say, a car).” Instead of boosting domestic production, that can do harm, instead.
“For manufacturing employment, a small boost from the import protection effect of tariffs is more than offset by larger drags from the effects of rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs,” Federal Reserve Board economists found when they researched the 2018 tariffs.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/09/trumps-destructive-tariff-proposals-will-make-us-all-poorer/
Could Trump Impose More Tariffs Without Congressional Approval?
“Check the U.S. Constitution, and you’ll see that Article 1, Section 8 clearly gives Congress sole authority over “Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises.” Unfortunately, Congress traded away much of that power during the 20th century, beginning in the aftermath of the Great Depression—which was considerably worsened by a series of tariffs passed by Congress—and continuing with various laws passed in the 1960s and 1970s, as the Cato report details.
In theory, handing over those powers made sense. Lawmakers were more likely to be influenced by parochial interests and would favor protectionism that benefited some local industry, even if it came at the expense of the nation’s economy as a whole. Presidents, it was assumed, would take a more expansive view of the benefits of trade and would use those powers to reduce barriers like tariffs.
For a long time, that was true. It no longer is. Both Trump and President Joe Biden have favored protectionism, and have faced scant opposition from Congress or the courts.
If Trump returns to the White House in 2025, he would assume huge power over the flow of goods into the United States “without substantial procedural or institutional safeguards” due to the “broad and ambiguous language” included in many of those trade laws passed decades ago, Packard and Lincicome write.
The tariffs that Trump imposed during his term in office took advantage of many of those same powers.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/10/could-trump-impose-more-tariffs-without-congressional-approval/
The scary truth about how far behind American kids have fallen
“the average American student is “less than halfway to a full academic recovery” from the effects of the pandemic.”
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“Many factors probably contribute to students’ slow recovery, experts say. Some may have missed “foundational pieces” of reading and math in 2020 and 2021, Lewis said. Learning loss can be like a “compounding debt,” she explained, with skills missed in early grades causing bigger and bigger problems as kids get older. Chronic absenteeism also remains a big obstacle to learning. Twenty-six percent of students were considered chronically absent in 2022-23, up from 13 percent in 2019-2020.
Children who are in kindergarten and first grade today were too young to experience the shift to remote learning in 2020 and 2021. But they were more likely to be isolated from other children and adults, Lake said. And like their older counterparts, many also experienced the trauma of deaths in the family, poverty, and parents out of work, all of which could have affected their social and emotional development.
Some have argued that pandemic learning loss shouldn’t be a concern because all students were affected — maybe, the argument goes, learning is just different now.
But that’s not the case, experts say.
Students from wealthier school districts are already well on their way to recovery, while students in lower-income areas continue to struggle. “Not everybody is in the same boat,” Kane said.”
https://www.vox.com/education/372475/math-reading-school-covid-education-learning-loss-kids