“For decades, evidence had amassed that the widespread use of antibiotics to help chickens, pigs, and cattle grow faster — and survive the crowded conditions of factory farms — was causing bacteria to mutate and develop resistance to antibiotics. By 2009, US agriculture companies were buying up two-thirds of what are termed medically important antibiotics — those used in human medicine. This in turn has made those precious, lifesaving drugs less effective for people.
Over time, once easily treatable human infections, like sepsis, urinary tract infections, and tuberculosis, became harder or sometimes impossible to treat. A foundational component of modern medicine was starting to crumble. But it wasn’t until the mid-2010s that the FDA finally took the basic steps of requiring farmers to get veterinary prescriptions for antibiotics and banning the use of antibiotics to make animals grow faster — steps that some European regulators had taken a decade or more prior.”
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“according to Matthew Wellington of the Public Interest Research Group, the FDA’s reforms went after the low-hanging fruit, and they didn’t go nearly far enough. Now, in a concerning course reversal, antibiotic sales for use in livestock ticked back up 7 percent from 2017 to 2021, per a new FDA report. The chicken industry, which had led the pack in reducing antibiotic use on farms, bought 12 percent more antibiotics in 2021 than in 2020.”
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“In 2019, antibiotic-resistant bacteria directly killed over 1.2 million people, including 35,000 Americans, and more than 3 million others died from diseases where antibiotic resistance played a role — far more than the global toll of HIV/AIDS or malaria, leading the World Health Organization to call antibiotic resistance “one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today.””
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“The FDA and the US food industry have proven that they can make progress on the issue — but to keep antibiotics working, they need to do a lot more. That will require them to tackle beef and pork, two of the more stubborn and complex sectors of America’s meat system that just can’t seem to quit antibiotics, since doing so could demand substantive changes to how animals are farmed for food.”
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“In the early 2000s, the nation’s fourth-largest chicken producer Perdue Farms began efforts to wean its birds off antibiotics, which it achieved in 2016 by changing chickens’ diets and replacing antibiotics with vaccines and probiotics. At first, chicken raised without antibiotics cost 50 percent more, but the company says it has since been able to all but close the cost differential.
In the mid-2010s, while Perdue was making progress, activists leveraged the momentum and successfully convinced McDonald’s to source chicken raised without medically important antibiotics. Tyson Foods, the nation’s largest poultry producer, then committed to reducing antibiotic use, contributing to a “domino effect” in which producers and restaurants made further pledges to reduce antibiotics in poultry, said Wellington.
By 2020, a little over half of America’s 9 billion chickens farmed for meat were raised without antibiotics, according to an industry survey.
The sea change in chicken production demonstrated it was possible to quickly scale down antibiotics in farming, but it didn’t do much to reduce overall use, as the chicken industry only used 6 percent of antibiotics in agriculture in 2016. And the momentum didn’t spread to other parts of the meat business, like beef and pork, which together account for over 80 percent of medically important antibiotics fed to farmed animals.”
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“Chickens are slaughtered at just six or seven weeks old, so the chance they’ll get sick is lower than pigs, who are slaughtered at six months old, or cattle, slaughtered at around three years of age.
The chicken industry is also vertically integrated, meaning a company like Tyson or Perdue controls virtually every link in the supply chain, so making big changes like cutting out antibiotics is easier than in the more decentralized supply chain of beef. For example, the typical steer will change hands several times before slaughter, going from a breeder to pasture grazing to a feedlot, all of which make it harder to coordinate an antibiotic-free regimen. In the last few months of their life cattle are also fed a high-grain diet that they aren’t adapted to digest, which increases the chance they’ll develop a liver abscess, a condition that’s prevented with — you guessed it — antibiotics.”
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“The pork sector, like poultry, is also vertically integrated, but the industry has largely opposed animal welfare, environmental, and antibiotic reforms. Antibiotics in pig production shot up 25 percent from 2017 to 2021.
There’s also no pork or beef giant that’s taken the antibiotic-free leap like Perdue did for chicken.”
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“Aside from outright banning the routine use of medically important antibiotics to prevent disease, Wellington said he’d like to see the FDA take three actions: set a target of reducing antibiotic use by 50 percent by the end of 2025 (based on 2010 levels); publish data on antibiotic use, not just sales; and limit the duration of antibiotic courses for farmed animals.
An FDA spokesperson said specific reduction targets weren’t possible because the agency doesn’t know how many antibiotics farmers are using: “We cannot effectively monitor antimicrobial use without first putting a system in place for determining [a] baseline and assessing trends over time.” The agency right now only collects sales data, and it’s been exploring a voluntary public-private approach to collect and report real-world use data.”
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“here’s a lot to learn from the Europeans: Denmark, the continent’s second-largest pork producer, has become the de facto case study in how to wean Big Meat off antibiotics. In the early 1990s, it started phasing out antibiotics in pigs with little impact on the industry. From 1992 to 2008, antibiotic use per pig fell by over 50 percent, and while pig mortality went up in the short term, by 2008 it had dropped back to near-1992 levels.”
“The Teamsters, the union in this case, allegedly timed a 2017 strike so that it would begin after some of Glacier Northwest’s mixing trucks were already filled with concrete, forcing the company’s non-union employees to race to dispose of this material before it hardened in the trucks. But the company was able to remove this wet concrete from the trucks before they were damaged, and there are a wealth of cases establishing that workers may strike even if doing so will cause some of their employer’s product to spoil.
In one case, for example, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — a kind of quasi-court that hears disputes between unions and employers — sided with milk truck drivers who struck, even though their strike risked spoiling the milk before it was delivered to customers. Another case, handed down by a federal appeals court, reached a similar conclusion regarding striking cheese workers.
That said, there are also some cases establishing that workers may not walk off the job at a time that could result in truly egregious damage to their employer’s business. In one such case, for example, a federal appeals court ruled that foundry workers who work with molten lead could not abruptly walk off the job and leave the lead in a state where it could melt the employer’s facilities or injure other workers.
In any event, the Supreme Court’s decision in San Diego Trades Council v. Garmon (1959) lays out the process that employers must use if they believe their workers timed a strike so recklessly that the union should be held liable. In nearly all cases, the employer must first obtain a ruling from the NLRB establishing that their workers’ strike was not protected by federal law. Only then may they file a lawsuit against the union.
The employer in Glacier Northwest, however, wants the Supreme Court to water down Garmon considerably, potentially enough to render that decision toothless.
If that happens, it would be a tremendous blow to workers. One important reason the Garmon process exists is that it shields unions from lawsuits that could drain their finances and discourage workers from exercising their right to strike — after all, that right means very little if well-moneyed employers can bombard unions with lawsuits the union cannot afford to litigate.”
“While it is true that the president’s party almost always has a poor midterm, there have been exceptions. And the 2022 midterms turned out to be one of these “asterisk elections,” thanks in no small part to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn the constitutional right to abortion. This year I should have been more prepared for the possibility that the ruling could throw a wrench into the election, especially after a draft of the decision was leaked in May. And even after the decision, it took me a while to become convinced that voter anger over Dobbs would prove durable enough to last until Election Day. It wasn’t until the fall that I revised my expectations from a “red wave” to a “red ripple.”
My biggest mistake here was not realizing just how common an “asterisk election” actually is. I often quoted one key stat: that the president’s party had gained House seats in only two of the previous 19 midterm elections. But there were four other midterms where the president’s party lost fewer than 10 House seats — so what happened in 2022 isn’t that rare. I also neglected to remember that the president’s party had lost Senate seats in only 13 of the last 19 midterms. In other words, midterms like 2022 happen about a third of the time — way too frequently to count them out.”
“the CBO published its report on budget options. The two-volume document highlights options for deficit reduction. One volume details large possible spending reductions while the other lays out small ones—so the options are plenty. They include important reforms of some of the major drivers of future debt: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
All told, it’s possible to achieve deficit reduction of $7.7 trillion over 10 years. That’s enough to accomplish what some people mistakenly believe to be out of reach: balancing the budget without raising taxes. There are also a few options to simplify the tax code by removing or reducing unfair individual tax deductions and by cutting corporate welfare.
For instance, it’s high time for Congress to end tax deductions for employer-paid health insurance. This tax deduction is one of the biggest of what we wrongly call “tax expenditures.” It’s responsible for many of the gargantuan distortions in the health care market and the resulting enormous rise in health care costs. The CBO report doesn’t eliminate this deduction; instead, it limits the income and payroll tax exclusion to the 50th percentile of premiums (i.e. annual contributions exceeding $8,900 for individual coverage and $21,600 a year for family coverage). The savings from this reform alone would reduce the deficit by roughly $900 billion.
A second good option is to cap the federal contribution to state-administered Medicaid programs. That federal block grant encourages states to expand the program’s benefits and eligibility standards—unreasonably in some cases—since they don’t have to shoulder the full bill. CBO estimates that this reform would save $871 billion.
CBO also projects that Uncle Sam could reduce the budget deficit by $121 billion by raising the federal retirement age. CBO’s option would up this age “from 67 by two months per birth year for workers born between 1962 and 1978. As a result, for all workers born in 1978 or later, the FRA would be 70.” Considering that seniors today live much longer than in the past and can work for many more years, this reform is a low-hanging fruit.
Congress could save another $184 billion by reducing Social Security benefits for high-income earners. I support a move away from an age-based program altogether since seniors are overrepresented in the top income quintile. Social Security should be transformed into a need-based program (akin to welfare). Nevertheless, the CBO’s option would be a step in the right direction.”
“While college campuses are chock full of particularly mind-numbing misunderstandings of the First Amendment—from students and administration alike—the example that takes the cake this year comes from Yale Law School, where student activists disrupted a Federalist Society event discussing civil liberties.
As Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) attorney Zach Greenberg wrote, “Protesters banged on walls, stomped on the ground, chanted ‘Fuck you FedSoc,’ and screamed at the panelists…. The cacophony persisted for the majority of the event, and though panelists struggled to project their voices over the noise, the audience remained largely unable to hear them.”
The activists’ actions comprised a “heckler’s veto”—a form of unprotected speech where the heckler prevents someone from exercising their free speech rights by physically preventing them from being heard. However, the activists didn’t seem to care. When students were told their actions violated Yale’s free expression policies, a chorus of students insisted that “This is free speech.””
“Most Americans who enter independent work arrangements do so because they prefer them to the more structured and controlled world of traditional employment, not because they have no other choice. A 2021 Upwork survey found that more than 70 percent of both full‐time and part‐time independent workers see increased flexibility as the major reason for engaging in independent work. A separate 2021 survey from MBO Partners showed that nearly 90 percent of respondents were happier in independent work than in traditional jobs. It also found that roughly three‐quarters of independent workers are satisfied with their work, intend to remain in independent work, and are optimistic about their career future. Just 11 percent wanted to find full‐time traditional employment.
This preference extends to oft‐maligned gig work. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, for example, almost 80 percent of gig platform workers rated their experiences positively, with almost half citing schedule flexibility as a major reason for doing the work. Only 28 percent of respondents said they performed gig work because there were few other job opportunities available where they live. And in 2019, when economist M. Keith Chen and his colleagues did a study of more than a million U.S. Uber drivers over an eight‐month period, they found that drivers valued the flexibility the arrangement provided—in both the timing and amount of work—at $150 per week (or 40 percent of expected earnings). Chen’s team also learned that drivers would need a 50 percent raise to work for a less flexible taxi company.”