“There are some serious costs associated with means testing. Though they’re usually framed as ways of curbing government spending, means-tested benefits are often more expensive to provide, on average, than universal benefits, simply because of the administrative support needed to vet and process applicants.
And then there’s the burden means testing puts on those in need. Take the applications for SNAP, or food aid, for example. The most complicated state programs require individuals to meet a specific income threshold and complete certain asset tests. Individuals need to show that they don’t currently make more than 130 percent of the poverty line, or $16,744 for an individual, and have assets worth more than $2,500 (a requirement that varies based on age). According to mRelief, a nonprofit that assists SNAP recipients, the average applicant needs to either fill out a 17-page form or participate in a 90-minute interview, in addition to providing as many as 10 documents about their assets. Even the prospect of this can push people away.”
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“According to Georgetown University political scientists Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan, the administrative costs for programs like SNAP, the family assistance program known as TANF, and the Supplemental Nutritional Program for Women, Infants, and Children can range from 15 to 40 cents of each dollar of benefits distributed in the programs. That includes money used to interview people, check the documentation they provide, and ensure that their claims of need are valid.
In other words, even though the intention of means testing is to help people most in need, imposing strict qualification requirements can actually make it tougher for individuals who are eligible to get past the application process.
As Matt Bruenig writes for the People’s Policy Project, a progressive think tank, these administrative barriers have hurt uptake rates of programs like SNAP and Medicaid, none of which fully serve all the people who qualify for them”
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“Additionally, researchers have found that means testing stigmatizes people who are eligible for these programs, further reducing participation in them and fomenting biases toward low-income people.”
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“A pitfall that universal programs are able to avoid, too, is choosing a cutoff that fails to adequately estimate need. For instance, the income threshold for SNAP is $28,550 for a family of three. Because of this cap, people who make slightly more money than the cutoff are left out of the program — even if they could also use this support.”
“these shortages and delays are the product of many cross-cutting problems that have existed for years, including the Covid-19 pandemic, rising consumer demand, and a global and highly optimized manufacturing network that doesn’t adapt to change quickly.”
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“What the pandemic did do was cause factories to shut down, usually because there weren’t enough workers, and that created shortages of products and components. Those shortages led to bottlenecks and delays in product manufacturing (if factories don’t have the parts to build something, it doesn’t get made and doesn’t get shipped).
As more shortages lead to more bottlenecks, the disruption causes problems in other parts of the supply chain, creating even more shortages, new delays, and higher prices. For example, automotive manufacturers haven’t been able to make cars and trucks, because they can’t get their hands on enough computer chips. Ikea can’t ship furniture parts from its warehouses to its stores thanks to the trucker shortage. A supply crunch for petrochemicals has driven up the cost of making anything that includes plastic, including children’s toys.”
“US companies have been moving more and more manufacturing abroad for decades, which means a growing amount of the stuff American consumers want to buy needs to be imported. Meanwhile, worsening conditions for truck drivers in the US have made the job incredibly unpopular in recent years, even though the demand for drivers has gone up as e-commerce has become more popular. That means that as Americans relied more on online shopping during the pandemic, getting goods from ports to doorsteps has been challenging.”
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“Covid-19 has also affected consumer demand — namely, which products they want to buy and how much — creating constant changes that the supply chain just hasn’t been able to keep up with, especially lately.”
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“This record number of imports is slowing down product deliveries. Cargo ships carrying holiday merchandise are waiting to unload their stock along the California coast, but there aren’t enough port workers to do the job. Those delays mean there are fewer containers available for manufacturers trying to send more products to the US, which only sets the supply chain back even more.”
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“Pushing the Port of Los Angeles to operate 24/7 is Biden’s most direct action to date, and it’s supposed to ensure that an additional 3,500 cargo ships are unloaded each week. The Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach, which expanded its operations last month, are responsible for 40 percent of the containers brought into the US, so expanding their operations is supposed to speed up shipping nationwide, the White House says.”
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“it’s not clear what Biden can do to fix the bottlenecks occurring higher up in the supply chain, like manufacturers running low on components and factories getting shut down abroad. While the White House has convened task forces to address these underlying problems, those efforts probably won’t bear fruit in time for the holidays.”
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“In the long run, it’s possible that the US government can change policies that contributed to this situation in the first place. Politicians could shift their approach to trade, which has historically encouraged US companies to manufacture products abroad. Improving labor standards might boost working conditions for truckers and factory workers to make those jobs more appealing — boost global vaccine manufacturing and ensure that workers in other countries are safer from Covid-19 outbreaks. Admitting more people into the US could address a shortage of delivery and port workers.”
“I document a large and mounting body of empirical research that shows that key market-based policies in health care have failed. Even if well intended, these policies have often not helped people make meaningful choices of medical care or insurance plans. And neither have they controlled spending, as experts promised.
In fact, they are doing exactly the opposite. They are setting people up to make poor choices and are scaffolding a massive, ineffective market bureaucracy.
One-third of people said they would rather file their taxes than read the terms of a health plan. And reams of studies summarized in my article affirm that people do not choose well among health insurance plan options, and these errors are hard to remedy with anything short of a strong default plan—in which case, one must ask whether “choice” even matters.
Likewise, even when people have to pay a large share of their own medical care and have easy access to price information, they still do not compare prices or choose the lowest-price options, even for services with little variation in quality. One partial explanation is that health care patients look to doctors—not price lists—to steer their care. Patients lack the desire, time, knowledge, and skills to navigate medical decisions as “consumers.”
The focus of the last several decades of health regulation has been to try to fix broken markets and flawed consumers through constant regulatory, technocratic tinkering—either to spur competition or to nudge consumers toward better choices. This tinkering has fallen short, and it has produced a massive market-based bureaucracy.
Thick layers of government regulations and regulators attempt to scaffold failing market-based policies. Plus, this scaffolding has deeply embedded private health care enterprises—with high profits and salaries—into the bureaucracy. As one example, the 2018 salary for the CEO of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan was recently reported to be $19 million, which is not an unusual sum among health care executives.
Because markets do not meaningfully enhance choice, do not avoid bureaucracy, and have certainly not solved cost problems, it is time to stop tinkering and to seek a better foundation for the next era of health policy and regulation.”
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“It is time to give up the false hope that health care markets and individual purchase decisions will produce a health care system that Americans want and, in the process, drive down spending. Policymakers have spent a half-century avoiding the hard questions about what values, objectives, and tradeoffs should guide health policy, by hoping that markets would magically answer these questions.
The reality is that the only way to build effective health policy—and, in turn, health regulation—is by engaging deeply in these hard questions and the challenging political battles they necessarily provoke.”
“The use of artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and other sophisticated tools have made it easier for foreign governments to track US intelligence officers operating in their country, according to the report. The monitoring of the intelligence officers could easily lead them to the agents working for the CIA.”
““Aaron Rodgers is a smart guy,” said David O’Connor, a virus expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Packers fan. But, he added, “He’s still vulnerable to the blind side blitz of misinformation.”
In the interview, Rodgers suggested that the fact that people were still getting, and dying from, COVID-19, meant that the vaccines were not highly effective.
Although imperfect, the vaccines provide extremely strong protection against the worst outcomes of infection, including hospitalization and death. Unvaccinated Americans, for instance, are roughly 10 times more likely to be hospitalized and 11 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than vaccinated Americans, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“As far as the people who are in the hospital with COVID, overwhelmingly, those are unvaccinated people,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virus expert at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan. “And transmission is being driven overwhelmingly by unvaccinated people to other unvaccinated people.”
Rodgers also expressed concern that the vaccines might cause fertility issues, a common talking point in the anti-vaccine movement. There is no evidence that the vaccines affect fertility in men or women.
“Those allegations have been made since the vaccines first came on the scene, and they clearly have been addressed many, many times over,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a vaccine expert at Vanderbilt University. He added, “The vaccines are safe and stunningly effective.”
There are a few potentially serious adverse events that have been linked to the vaccines, including a clotting disorder and an inflammation of the heart muscle, but they are very rare. Experts agree that the health risks associated with COVID-19 overwhelmingly outweigh those of vaccination.
Rodgers said he ruled out the mRNA vaccines, manufactured by Pfizer and Moderna, because he had an allergy to an unspecified ingredient they contained.
Such allergies are possible — a small number of people are allergic to polyethylene glycol, which is in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines — but extremely rare. For instance, there were roughly 11 cases of anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction, for every 1 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine administered, according to one CDC study.
The public health agency recommends that people with a known allergy to an ingredient in one of the mRNA vaccines not get those vaccines, but some scientists expressed skepticism that Rodgers truly had a known, documented allergy. Even if he did, he may have been eligible for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which relies on a different technology.”
“Beijing is heading for global dominance because of its advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning and cyber capabilities, he said. Compared to China’s advancement, US cyber defences in some government departments were at the kindergarten level.
Chaillan blamed the reluctance of Goggle to work with the US defence department on AI. Chinese companies, on the other hand, are obliged to work with Beijing, and were making “massive investment” into AI without regard to ethics, he said to Financial Times.”