“While there is still some debate around the potential increase in drunk driving, there is a vast, peer-reviewed, scientific literature around the harms of secondhand smoke inhalation, and around the massive health benefits associated with the sharp decline in smoking in part due to smoke-free policies.
We know that smoking bans have been effective at reducing secondhand smoke exposure. Bans in restaurants, bars, and other hospitality establishments have the added benefit of ensuring that workers are not forced to carry the health costs against their will simply due to their place of employment. Bans have also been effective at reducing smoking and “reducing opportunities to smoke, changing smoking norms, and reducing smoking rates.”
Smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, pulmonary disease, cancer, and death. Research has shown that heart attack admissions “rapidly declined” after the implementation of 100 percent smoke-free laws.
All of this to say that if there was in fact a small increase in fatal drunk driving accidents as a result of these bans, the bans were still worth it.”
“When a Missouri-based power tool manufacturer was facing the prospect of higher costs due to new tariffs on imported saw blades, it turned to friends in high places for help—including Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.).
Hawley has been an outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump’s destructive trade policies. In fact, he’s suggested that the president should have done more to dismantle the system of global trade. But Hawley was one of four members of Missouri’s congressional delegation to sign onto a letter sent in September 2019 asking the U.S. trade representative to grant a special exemption for SM Products, which is based in Kansas City.”
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“The tariff costs facing SM Products were also hitting many other American manufacturers since much of American manufacturing is dependent on the ability to import low-cost inputs from China and elsewhere. But while some companies were able to find members of Congress willing to lobby on their behalf before the unelected board of trade officials who get to decide which tariff exemptions to grant and which requests to ignore, most other American businesses were less fortunate.”
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“Once the tariffs were in place, the Trump administration set up a murky, confusing process for companies to request exemptions. It was, and is, a system that almost seems designed to be exploited by politically connected firms and individuals. Indeed, right from the start of the Trump trade wars, some major American steel manufacturers appeared to be exercising undue influence over the exemption process. Members of Congress have warned that the process lacks “basic due process and procedural fairness” and that it could be “abused for anticompetitive purposes.” After two years, the government’s own data suggest that’s exactly what has happened.”
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“businesses that could afford to do so started hiring lobbyists to navigate the new tariff regime. The amount of money spent on lobbying work related to tariffs increased 900 percent as the trade war was getting started.”
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“Most businesses, however, can’t afford to hire lobbyists and don’t have easy access to a sitting senator. They just have to pay the tariff bill.
These are all unintended but completely expected consequences of Trump’s trade war and his poorly thought-through plan to use higher tariffs as a cudgel against China. Not only did Trump’s trade policies run directly counter to his promises to “drain the swamp” by creating opaque bureaucracies that can decide the fates of small businesses all over the country, but they actually created incentives for the swamp to get even swampier.
In the warped reality the trade war helped to create, a company in Kansas City might not succeed or fail based on the quality of the power tools it is manufacturing, but on whether its owners know the right men in Washington.”
“The Interior Department said on Monday it had completed its environmental review for a massive wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts, a key step toward final approval of the long-stalled project that will play a prominent role in President Joe Biden’s effort to expand renewable energy in the U.S.
The completion of the review is a breakthrough for the U.S. offshore wind industry, which has lagged behind its European counterparts and the U.S. onshore industry that has grown rapidly, even during the pandemic. It also marks a key acceleration for the Biden administration that has advocated renewables growth on public lands and waters.”
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“The project had suffered repeated delays under the Trump administration.”
“They’ve tucked a trio of little-noticed tax hikes on the wealthy and big corporations into their coronavirus relief package that together are worth $60 billion.
One takes away deductions for publicly traded companies that pay top employees more than $1 million. Another provision cracks down on how multinational corporations do their taxes. A third targets how owners of unincorporated businesses account for their losses.”
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“[Democrats] ran into problems complying with the stringent budget rules surrounding so-called reconciliation measures like the coronavirus legislation — especially after some wanted to add provisions like one waiving taxes on unemployment benefits.
If Democrats exceeded their $1.9 trillion budget cap for the plan, they would lose the procedural protections that were used to shield the entire measure from a Republican filibuster in the Senate.
The tax increases Democrats picked to help keep their plan’s cost in check had the political benefit of being arcane. Unlike things like raising the corporate tax rate or upping the top marginal tax rate on the rich, the ones they chose won’t produce many headlines.
They also fit Democrats’ themes of fighting inequality by forcing the well-to-do to pay more.
Since the provisions were added late in the legislative process, lobbyists didn’t have much time to rouse opposition to the plans.”
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“Democrats turned to a rule Republicans created as part of their 2017 tax cuts. It limits to $500,000 the amount of losses certain people who own unincorporated “pass-through” businesses can use to offset other income and thereby reduce their tax bills.
That issue became a lightning rod last year when lawmakers temporarily suspended that limit as part of a previous stimulus package. At the time, lawmakers were trying to get money into the hands of businesses owners in order to prevent layoffs by making it easier for them to qualify for tax refunds, and the $500,000 limit would have impeded that.
Many progressives criticized the move, calling it a giveaway to the rich.
Democrats’ coronavirus plan stops short of undoing last year’s provisions, though it does extend the $500,000 limit — which, like much of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, is currently scheduled to expire at the end of 2025 — by an additional year. The Senate Finance Committee says that will raise $31 billion.
Another provision generates $6 billion by going after executive compensation.
Businesses are normally allowed to deduct employees’ pay on their tax bills, though there are rules limiting those deductions when a CEO and a handful of a company’s other top employees earn more than $1 million. Democrats are doubling the number of officials, to 10, that would be subject to that restriction, which would hit businesses such as investment banks.
A third provision, which budget forecasters say will produce $22 billion, repeals an arcane provision giving multinational companies more flexibility in deciding how to account for their interest expenses when they do their taxes.
To be sure, the tax increases are dwarfed by the amount of tax revenue cut by the legislation — about $590 billion, according to the official Joint Committee on Taxation. Lawmakers are sending another round of stimulus checks to millions of Americans as well as temporarily expanding popular breaks like the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit.”
“Trump reshaped virtually every part of the U.S. immigration system through executive action, policy guidance and regulatory change.
In total, he made more than 400 changes to immigration policy in the last four years, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank. The Immigration Policy Tracking Project, run by former Obama Homeland Security official, Lucas Guttentag, puts that number closer to 1,000.
Biden has made fighting the coronavirus, which is still infecting tens of thousands and killing 2,000 Americans each day, his top priority. After he helps bring the pandemic under control, he plans to tackle several issues, including the economy, infrastructure, gun restrictions and immigration.
In addition to Trump’s changes, the circumstances surrounding immigration on the ground have changed, making it impossible for Biden to try to just return to pre-2016 policies.”
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” On his first day in office, Biden released a massive immigration package and signed several immigration-related executive orders to halt construction of the border wall, end a ban from some majority-Muslim nations and restart a program to protect so-called Dreamers.”
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“But Biden has yet to address a series of issues: He punted on whether high-skilled workers should be given preference if they are being hired at companies paying more money instead of through a random lottery. He hasn’t fulfilled a campaign promise to tackle the massive backlog at immigration courts that doubled under Trump. (Even with the backlog, many of those cases were denied.)
And last month, he called for a review of the so-called public charge rule that makes it harder for immigrants who rely on public benefits, such as Medicaid, to obtain permanent residency in the country.”
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“Biden will be forced to make decisions on some issues, including the closure of the southern border and granting visas to more than 100,000 foreign workers. But it’s not clear when — or if — he will act at all on others, including fighting court cases and changing the refugee caps.”
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“One of the most pressing issues Biden faces: to allow temporary migrants, such as students, easier access to visas, even though many consulates and embassies are closed. Only 43 of 233 processing centers for guests are processing routine cases, according to the State Department.”
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“Before Trump came into office, nearly 500,000 new foreign students came into the United States in a year, pumping billions of dollars into small and large schools across the country. That number slowly declined under the former president and plummeted last year.
Julie Stufft, acting deputy assistant secretary for visa services, acknowledged the problems in securing visas last week. She said her office is working to solve the problem, though those who plan to reside in the U.S. permanently take precedent. Some immigrants from select countries, including China and much of Europe, are still banned from traveling to the U.S. due to the pandemic.
Gregory Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the Biden administration deserves credit for pursuing many of the reforms he had pledged to do during the campaign. But, Chen said, “The jury is still out on whether they are going to be successful in implementing those policies.””
“Only a tiny portion of the spending in the bill goes toward vaccinations and other priories directly related to the pandemic.
Much of the rest of the spending is not well-suited, or even designed, to respond to current economic conditions, which are increasingly favorable.”
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“Take public education, where Democratic-allied teacher unions dominate. It’s not clear why any additional spending is necessary, given that tens of billions of education funding from prior Covid relief bills are still unspent, even as many districts have already begun to reopen for in-person instruction.
Nonetheless, the bill spends roughly another $130 billion on K-12 education. According to a CBO estimate, by the time most of the money is spent we will have long exited the pandemic that supposedly justifies it.”
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” The $350 billion in aid to states and localities comes despite state and local tax revenue being down only a tick through much of 2020 compared with the year before. According to widely cited Moody’s economist Mark Zandi, the state and local funding gap will be roughly $60 billion through fiscal 2022. Still, states and localities will be showered with money, after more than $500 billion in aid to states and localities last year.”
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“The bill spends $86 billion bailing out union-negotiated multi-employer pension plans.
Transportation gets tens of billions of new spending, which by its nature doesn’t happen quickly, and more than $30 billion goes to expanding Obamacare, a long-term Democratic policy goal.”
“The $1.9 trillion Covid stimulus that the House is expected to pass Wednesday includes roughly $100 billion in aid to families with dependent children.
If that phrase rings a bell, it’s because “Aid to Families with Dependent Children” was the name of the New Deal-era welfare program eliminated by President Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform bill. Back then, Democrats worried (with some reason) that AFDC enabled, for some families, long-term dependency on welfare. To limit time spent collecting welfare and to move low-income mothers off the dole, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act.
Now, a quarter-century later, in the midst of a Covid recession, the Democrats are reviving no-strings financial assistance to families with children. The bill nearly doubles the Treasury’s expenditure on the child tax credit, and extends eligibility to nearly everyone. The Covid bill would increase the maximum child tax credit from $2,000 per child to $3,600 per child. It would also, for the first time, extend the benefit to nonworking Americans—a significant departure from the program’s origins in 1997 as a tax break for middle- and upper-income families.”
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“the pendulum hasn’t just swung back for Democrats. While the Covid bill was under consideration in the Senate, Republican Sen. Mitt Romney proposed his own expansion of the child tax credit, one that would raise the maximum benefit even higher, to $4,200 per child (though Romney would offset that with cuts to other income-support programs). Romney’s plan was attacked immediately as “welfare assistance” by Republican Sens. Marco Rubio and Mike Lee, and in the end, Republicans voted as a bloc against the Covid bill that contained President Joe Biden’s version. But Rubio and Lee favor raising the maximum child tax credit, too; indeed, they want to raise it even higher than Romney, to $4,500. (Their difference with both Romney and Biden is that they would not extend the child tax credit to nonworking families.)”
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“Does increasing the value of the child tax credit risk building the work disincentive back up? It does, but to a much smaller extent. The expansions that Biden and Romney put forth largely mooted these worries by making eligibility virtually universal. If there’s no income level at which you lose your child tax credit, then the marginal tax a jobless person pays on jumping back into the workforce is zero. And if the eligibility cutoff is very high—under the Covid bill, many families earning in the six figures still get the full $3,600—then reducing or eliminating the credit isn’t going to pinch very hard.
The catch is that the closer you get to making a government benefit universally available, the more expensive it gets.”
“The starting point of any conversation about U.S. policy toward Cuba needs to be a piece of unfinished business from the previous administration: the still-unfolding mystery of how 26 American diplomats were injured in Havana in 2016 and 2017.
The exact origins of the injuries remain uncertain, but the known and emerging evidence suggests the Cuban regime is guilty, if not by commission then at least by omission, of injuring U.S. personnel. This episode represents a likely direct attack on one country’s citizens by another, and there has yet to be a full accounting of who is responsible and how it all happened, or a resolution. If the Biden administration is tempted to engage anew with Havana, it must first hold the Cuban government to account for what these American diplomats endured.”
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“Cuba consistently denied involvement. Instead, the regime has peddled the theory that the cause was mass psychogenic illness—aka. mass hysteria—among America’s diplomatic personnel. Conveniently, this theory absolves Cuba of blame, shifting it instead to the victims. Yet the theory doesn’t hold up to scrutiny now, and never did.”
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“Accountability for the injuries of these 26 Americans must begin where the attacks started, in Havana.”
“Although less than half of 1 percent of the U.S. population resides in nursing homes, they account for nearly 40 percent of all Covid deaths. Nursing homes are supposed to help residents remain safe and healthy, but the opposite turned out to be the case: When it came to the coronavirus, residents in nursing homes were more vulnerable, not less.”
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“rebuilding nursing home facilities is an expensive and long-term solution to an immediate crisis. I’ve been studying long-term care settings for many years, and I think there’s a quicker and possibly even more effective approach we can take in the short term to ensure better care for our seniors in the post-Covid era: improve staffing.
It’s no secret that nursing home staff are paid relatively poorly for incredibly demanding work. Certified nurse aides who provide over 90 percent of direct resident care are often paid at or near minimum wage — the same wages as entry-level workers in retail establishments or fast-food chains. Nursing staff are also underpaid; registered nurses and licensed practical nurses who work in nursing homes are often paid below their counterparts who work in hospitals and other health care settings.
What’s more, nursing home staff often lack essential benefits, like health insurance and paid sick leave. That means nursing home workers are incentivized to come to work even when sick — how does that make sense when they are caring for medically vulnerable residents during a pandemic?
Nursing homes are also very hierarchical workplaces with lower-level staff having little autonomy and control in their jobs. Not surprisingly, being undervalued and unempowered makes it hard to recruit and retain individuals to work in nursing homes.
The result is that many facilities around the country often have dangerously low levels of staffing. Additionally, the average U.S. nursing home was recently found to have an annual staff turnover rate of 128 percent. This suggests an average facility’s staff completely changes over the course of a year, and many nursing homes have even higher turnover rates — as much as 300 percent — suggesting the staff changes every four months. If some part of good nursing home quality depends on the relationship between staff and residents, it’s hard to see how those relationships can develop when staff keep changing.”
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“There are a number of things we can do to improve this situation. Here are a few ideas”
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“One solution would be to increase the number of direct care workers by raising the federal minimum staffing standards in nursing homes. The federal standards are relatively low and have not been updated in over 30 years. Many states set staffing levels above the federal standards and these state policies have generally been found to increase staff.”
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“Another idea is to raise minimum wages to increase nursing home staff pay. Many certified nurse aides would see their hourly wages increase under the $15 minimum wage proposed by the Biden administration. In the absence of a broader minimum wage hike, policymakers could also increase wages specifically for nursing home and other long-term care workers.”
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“The elephant in the room is what additional Medicaid or other public funding would be necessary to pay for greater staffing and higher wages. The nursing home industry will inevitably push back against any “unfunded mandates.” The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has found overall nursing home operating margins are currently thin based on the Medicare cost reports. However, there is quite a bit of variability in profitability across facilities. It is also unclear whether some facilities are accurately reporting their costs. Resident advocates have questioned whether a sufficient amount of existing public nursing home funds are spent on staffing. Thus, higher Medicaid funding will be necessary to improve staffing levels and wages, but it needs to be paired with the next suggestion.”
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“We currently lack transparency in how nursing homes spend public dollars on staffing and other areas. Nursing homes are required to submit Medicare cost reports each year to detail their revenues and spending, but these data are known to be incomplete, especially in the context of increasingly complicated corporate ownership arrangements. A series of financial reporting and oversight steps need to be taken to tighten the requirements for facilities. The bottom line is that regulators need to be able to follow the public’s money and ensure it is being spent on staffing as policymakers intended.”
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“Beyond putting more money into wages, policymakers might also consider ways in which they could provide financial support to allow additional education and training to certified nursing assistants and licensed practical nurses seeking upward mobility within a facility. For example, some nursing homes currently have ladder programs that provide nursing assistants with financial support in seeking nursing degrees. These programs could be expanded through direct reimbursement via Medicare and Medicaid.”
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“Improving wages and benefits is a necessary but insufficient step towards valuing nursing home caregivers; we also need to begin to value the work these individuals do and the individuals that do it. If you can believe it, this might be harder than increasing staffing standards and wages. Finding additional money is one thing — changing the culture around nursing home staffing is another.”