“More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”
“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”
The employees also warned that many of those enlisted by Musk to help him slash the size of the federal government under President Donald Trump’s administration were political ideologues who did not have the necessary skills or experience for the task ahead of them.”
“The economic uncertainty created by Trump’s tariff threats has already warped markets and harmed the economy in ways large and small.”
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“Uncertainty created by Trump’s trade policies reduced aggregate U.S. investment by as much as $47 billion in 2018, according to a 2020 study in the Journal of Monetary Economics.
The authors of that paper wrote that “all measures suggest that uncertainty about trade policy has recently shot up to levels not seen since the 1970s.” They concluded that “both higher expected tariffs and increased uncertainty about future tariffs deters investment.””
“These tariffs will protect American steelmakers and aluminum manufacturers from competition but at the expense of other American manufacturers that buy steel and aluminum to produce finished goods.
Unfortunately, there are a lot more jobs in the latter camp than in the former.”
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“The Peterson Institute for International Economics calculated that the costs of Trump’s 2018 steel tariffs totaled about $650,000 per job created. If this is an economic development scheme for American manufacturing, it’s a pretty terrible one.
Farther downstream, consumers will be hurt too. When Trump hiked tariffs on steel and aluminum imports during his first term, those import duties translated into price increases of 2.4 percent for steel and 1.6 percent for aluminum, according to a 2023 study by the U.S. International Trade Commission.
That might not sound like a lot, but there are several reasons to expect a more significant hit this time around.
For one, Trump is now raising tariffs on both metals to 25 percent. His first-term tariffs were 25 percent on steel but only 10 percent on aluminum.
The impact of the steel and aluminum tariffs imposed during Trump’s first term was also blunted by the wide variety of carve-outs and loopholes that the administration created. Companies affected by the tariffs could apply for exemptions—and the process for deciding who got those breaks was, unsurprisingly, opaque and political.”
“The U.S. is the second-largest steel importer in the world, according to the International Trade Administration. In 2023, the U.S. imported 25.6 million metric tons of steel and exported a little more than 8.2 million metric tons. About half of the aluminum used domestically is imported and by global standards, the U.S. has a very small aluminum smelting industry. Steel and aluminum imports to the U.S. were valued at nearly $50 billion in 2024, per Bloomberg.”
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“Imposing levies on steel and aluminum will increase costs for domestic energy projects (which will be passed on to consumers) while hamstringing America’s energy dominance. In recent years, high material costs (and burdensome regulations) have led to cancellations or price tag hikes for offshore wind energy, advanced nuclear power, and transmission line projects. Instead of building oil pipelines to the U.S., these trade barriers could also incentivize Canadian energy companies to invest in other markets, such as Japan, says Wayne Winegarden, an economist at the Pacific Research Institute, a free market think tank. “This really is one of the dumbest things we could be doing,” Winegarden tells Reason.
Importantly, these tariffs won’t accomplish Trump’s stated goal of “making America rich again.”
A study from the International Trade Commission found tariffs on steel (25 percent) and aluminum (10 percent) implemented during the first Trump administration decreased production and increased costs in downstream industries that use these materials by 0.6 percent and 0.2 percent, respectively. Total production in downstream industries was $3.5 billion less in 2021 because of these tariffs. The Tax Foundation estimates that repealing tariffs and their quotas would increase long-run gross domestic product by $3.5 billion and create thousands of jobs.”
““Victory” cologne and perfume. “Crypto President” watches. Limited-edition “American Eagle” guitars. T-branded golf shoes and “Fight Fight Fight” high-top sneakers.
These are just a sample of the many products licensed to bear President-elect Donald Trump’s brand, including some that he has promoted on his social media site Truth Social just weeks before his inauguration. If he continues to hawk his merchandise after returning to the White House, that could raise ethical concerns.
Consumer goods may be the least of Trump’s issues, however. He has a number of business ventures — including his social media platform, a nascent crypto firm, and the Trump Organization’s partnerships in the Middle East — that could present conflicts of interest, make the presidency vulnerable to foreign influence, and violate federal law.”
Republicans in Congress are not acting like a co-equal branch designed to be a check on power grabs from the president. They are acting like a non-person character, or a non-person Congress.
“The sort of lawsuits Trump is filing against media companies are “the latest workaround that wealthy and powerful people who want to bully the press have found to attempt to circumvent the well-established safeguards for the press under the First Amendment against
We need to maintain and grow connections between the U.S. and China. Chinese immigrants and students are not just a nice thing, they improve relations and the immigrants make America stronger diplomatically and economically.
“The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act stands as the single largest piece of legislation to address climate change in United States history.
The IRA contains nearly $370 billion for programs like tax credits for more efficient appliances, building new battery plants, and subsidies for renewable energy. And it triggered a boom in new construction and manufacturing for things like solar panels. It also created hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
But two years later, much of that money remains unspent.
The largest investment — ever — for the clean energy transition has yet to materialize into actual hardware like heat pumps or wind turbines. Despite more than $7.5 billion allocated to building electric vehicle chargers, for example, only a handful have been built. About 40 percent of big IRA projects hit delays, according to the Financial Times.”
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“Now President-elect Donald Trump has said he wants to claw back the unspent money and congressional Democrats are getting antsy. In a recent letter, dozens of senators and representatives wrote to the White House asking Biden to get more money out the door, from the IRA as well as other legislation like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.”
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“One of the big challenges with spending most federal funds in programs like the IRA is that the money doesn’t go straight to suppliers for construction materials, EV chargers, batteries, or home insulation. Rather, the funds are sent to state and local authorities who then distribute the money.
That added step creates a lot of complications. First, a lot of local officials simply are not set up to receive a lot of cash all at once. It requires rigorous accounting and record-keeping, so before they can use the money, recipients have to invest in the personnel and tools to track it. Then when money hits bank accounts, local officials have to decide where to spend it. That means seeking out proposals, soliciting competitive bids, and giving enough time for communities to weigh in. Even for “shovel-ready” projects, they often have to contend with last-minute hurdles like rising financing costs from inflation, supply chain snarls, and litigation that can halt ground-breaking.
Local governments also have their own incentives. While Biden’s White House wanted to juice the clean energy economy as fast as possible, often state and local governments want to stretch out the funds. “There’s always a sense that if money is spent too quickly, people might get used to the money, maybe even addicted to it, and then officials would have to raise taxes to make up the difference” when it runs out, said Donald Kettl, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy who studies government spending.
Delays also result from how the funding is leveraged, whether it’s a grant, a loan, a loan guarantee, or a tax credit. Tax credits add an inherent lag because you don’t receive the cash benefit until you file your taxes.”
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“There are also factors beyond Biden’s direct control at play. Changes in global demand and uncertainty about the outcome of the presidential election led some companies to hold off on executing IRA-funded projects. And those that do want to get rolling often have to go through a tedious, sometimes years-long permitting process before they can break ground.”
“Physicians elsewhere do not bear the same financial burden. I traveled in 2019 to the Netherlands, Australia, and Taiwan, which have three distinct health care systems that still manage to cover all of their citizens: universal private insurance, a public-private hybrid, and single payer, respectively.
In the Netherlands, physicians take three years of undergraduate studies, three years of master’s studies, and complete a one- to two-year internship before being licensed; certain specialties then require further training. Dutch university students typically graduate with much less debt (less than 25,000 euros on average, or about $26,200) than their American counterparts. In Australia, the training requirements would look familiar to US doctors — a decade or so of education and then on-the-job training — but the tuition would not, with annual medical school costs capped at less than $10,000 per year. Taiwanese doctors likewise spend significantly less money on their education, even relative to differences in cost of living, than US doctors.
What all of those countries have in common is more robust public support for higher education and generous loan repayment programs. The high cost of college is a longstanding issue in the US, and that contributes to the prohibitive cost of a medical education for reasons that have little to do with health care itself.”
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“There is another way in which the US health system places an unusual burden on doctors: the headaches of health insurance paperwork. As left-leaning policy analyst Matt Bruenig wrote on the recent brouhaha over insurers and doctors after the killing of Brian Thompson, at least some of the excess pricing of US medical services can be attributed to the administrative costs that providers incur while dealing with private insurers.
The demands of insurance claims on doctors’ time and attention not only make for a less pleasant working experience, they also take them away from patients, which can contribute to worse health outcomes.
Here is perhaps the most telling statistic, from the Commonwealth Fund’s 2024 international survey of doctors: 20 percent of US doctors said they spend “a lot” of time on paperwork or disputes over medical bills. That was nearly double the rate in the country with the next highest share; 12 percent of Swiss doctors said the same working in their country’s system, which also relies on private insurers to oversee benefits.
Only 5 percent of Dutch doctors and 9 percent of Australian doctors said paperwork and billing took up a large chunk of their time.
This wasteful activity affects both the cost and quality of our health system. Among wealthy countries, US patients have the fewest number of consultations with a doctor in a given year, with the exception of Sweden, and spend the least time with their physicians. Time and money spent on administrative work, for both insurers and providers, account for about 30 percent of the excess medical spending in the United States.”
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“The average physician salary in the US ranges from about $260,000 (for endocrinologists and pediatricians) to $550,000 (for certain surgeons). The most elite providers earn more than $1 million annually.
Dutch general practitioners, by contrast, make about 120,000 euros ($126,000). Even senior hospital surgeons typically earn about 250,000 euros. Australia, with a more robust private market, can be more generous: While primary care doctors earn between AUD$100,000 and $150,000 ($60,000 to $93,000) on average, senior practitioners make more and specialized surgeons can rake in as much as AUD$750,000 ($460,000) — much closer to the American norms.
Doctors in Taiwan — where, it should be noted, nationwide average incomes are about half of what you find in the United States — can make between $60,000 and $100,000 per year. The policy experts I spoke to there agreed that doctors are underpaid relative to the high number of patients they see, substantially more than a typical American physician will see in a day.
Whatever complaints American physicians may have, doctors in those countries feel undercompensated.”
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“The blame game between insurers and doctors is ultimately a distraction. Other countries have private health plans and private providers and yet don’t experience nearly the same waste and out-of-control price increases as the US has. The whole system — the prices and how they’re paid — will need to be addressed in the long run. As one landmark health economics paper put it 20 years ago: “It’s the prices, stupid.””