“On its face, there’s nothing wrong with providing additional psychological support for federal agents who work with trafficking survivors. But HSI—a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—has quite a questionable record when it comes to “helping” trafficking victims. At times, HSI has been known to subject suspected victims to potentially traumatizing experiences. And much of the “human trafficking” work the agency does just involves plain old prostitution stings.”
“People choose to remain in flood-prone areas for many reasons, including proximity to family, work, and school. Uprooting oneself and one’s family can be a painful thing to do, and choosing to take on risk to stay where you’ve established your home is understandable. But choosing to stay in these areas genuinely does involve considerable risk. According to FEMA, the average flood insurance claim in 2018 was $40,000, and that risk should be borne by the risk-taker.
The Biden-Harris administration approved an additional $715 million for FEMA’s Flood Mitigation Assistance Program (FMAP) in advance of Hurricane Helene on September 23. FMAP, which falls under NFIP, makes up 15.5 percent of FEMA’s budget and provides homeowners with subsidized flood insurance.
FEMA itself recognizes the folly of providing homeowners insurance at below-market rates. Established by the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968, the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012 (BW-12) was passed to reduce debt incurred by the NFIP from Hurricanes Rita, Wilma, and Katrina in 2005.
BW-12 removed discounts for some NFIP policyholders so that their insurance rates would “more accurately reflec[t] their expected flood losses,” according to FEMA’s 2018 affordability framework. These reforms were as actuarially sound as they were unpopular and were overturned two years later.
The Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act of 2014 (HFIAA) restored pre-BW-12 rates, repealed certain rate increases, and capped annual premium increases at 18 and 25 percent for primary homes and secondary residences, respectively. Congress instituted these effective price ceilings to encourage participation, but FEMA’s affordability framework recognizes the market price of insurance as “one of the best signals of risk that a consumer receives.”
The 2018 framework candidly admits that flood insurance affordability programs create perverse incentives, including “encouraging lower-income households eligible for assistance to purchase properties in very risky areas.” And that’s just what the NFIP has done: approximately 13 million homeowners live in Special Flood Hazard Areas (SFHAs), where there is at least a 1 percent annual risk of flooding.
NFIP deems 12 percent of these homeowners to have Principal, Insurance, Taxes, Insurance (PITI) to household income ratios in excess of the maximum affordable standard. Even with mandatory enrollment in SFHAs, which reduces insurance rates by forcibly expanding the base of the insurance program, the average policyholder cost for a single-family home is $1,098—more than twice the cost of policies outside the SFHAs.
Without NFIP-subsidized insurance, rates would increase, becoming unaffordable for some homeowners. Unaffordability is a feature of insurance markets, not a bug. High insurance rates discourage risky behavior that is likely to be even more painful than having to pull up roots.”
“The Iranian government ordered an operative to assassinate Donald Trump before the 2024 election, Manhattan federal prosecutors said Friday, the latest in a string of assassination plots directed at the former and future president in recent months.
Prosecutors charged Farhad Shakeri with murder-for-hire and providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization. He is believed to be in Iran and remains at large, prosecutors said.”
…
“According to a criminal complaint unsealed in Manhattan federal court, Shakeri said during an FBI interview that in September he was directed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran to surveil and kill Trump, whom the charging papers identify as “Victim-4.”
When Shakeri told an IRGC official that doing so would prove expensive, the official responded that “money’s not an issue,” which Shakeri “understood to mean that the IRGC previously had spent a significant sum of money on efforts to murder Victim-4 and was willing to continue spending a lot of money in its attempt to procure Victim-4’s assassination,” according to the charging papers.
One month later, on Oct. 7, according to prosecutors, the IRGC ordered Shakeri to put forward a plan to assassinate Trump within one week and, if that proved impossible, to pause the plan until after Election Day, because the IRGC assumed Trump would lose, making him easier to kill. According to the complaint, Shakeri claimed in the FBI interview that he didn’t “intend to propose a plan to murder” Trump within the timeframe dictated by the IRGC official.”
“his victory virtually guarantees that he will never face serious legal accountability for an avalanche of alleged wrongdoing.”
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“Even the civil cases against him will now face new obstacles. Presidents can, in some circumstances, be subject to civil penalties from private lawsuits, but Trump will surely try to use the cloak of the presidency to avoid paying the hundreds of millions of dollars he owes in judgments for sexual abuse, defamation and corporate fraud.”
“She doesn’t seek or attract attention.
She has a hand and a say in just about everything he does and every decision that’s made. I talked to more than 100 people for the profile I wrote earlier this year, and there’s some disagreement about how exactly she does that. But there’s no debate whatsoever about her constitutional allergy to the limelight.
Since Donald Trump became the dominant figure in American politics, nobody has been this important and this close to him in this role for this long. Nobody. That she’s going to be his chief of staff is news in only the most technical sense — because in reality it’s simply a continuation of what she’s been to him for the last four years. And in 2016 and 2020, too, she helmed his Florida operation.”
…
“She’s in the past described herself as “a moderate on the political spectrum” but she talks as much about disposition as ideology. “I come from a very traditional background. In my early career things like manners mattered and there was an expected level of decorum,” she told me earlier this year. “And so I get it that the GOP of today is different. There are changes we must live with in order to get done the things we’re trying to do.” There’s certainly a way to see and study the evolution of the Republican Party over the last half-century through the lens of her long career. So what does she believe? She believes in working and working hard for the person she’s working for. She believes in being valuable to the principal.”
…
“There’s a legitimate mutual respect. He listens to her. She brings to the rooms she’s in with him a certain equanimity. They’re in many ways very, very different, but they also recognize something in each other. She’s smart, she’s competitive, and she can be, in her own out-of-the-way, soft-spoken, “who, me?” manner, pretty cutthroat. There’s a yin-and-yang component to the two of them: Trump reads the stage directions — he’s all text and no subtext — and she’s essentially the utter opposite. I’m tempted to say he needs her and he knows it. Maybe more to the point, though, they need each other.
She’s clear-eyed about the terms of engagement. She doesn’t control him — nobody controls him — and she doesn’t try. But strategically, temperamentally, even psychologically, she can try to help him, advise him, guide him. And it doesn’t work all the time — she very clearly hasn’t made Trump someone or something he’s not — but it can and does work some of the time.
I’m thinking here about something she once told me about her mother: “She woke up an optimist every day, and she started every day like that, and it would fall apart or it wouldn’t …”
There are multiple definitions of the word I’m about to use and I think in her case they all apply.
Susie manages.”
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“She’s not just a calming presence. She’s an experienced operator. And she’s no stranger to the dark arts. She’s a savvy source-builder in the intersecting worlds of politics and media and has been for years quite effective at shaping perceptions that help clients and hurt opponents.”
“The annual U.S. death toll from illegal drugs, which has risen nearly every year since the turn of the century, is expected to fall substantially this year. The timing of that turnaround poses a problem for politicians who aim to prevent substance abuse by disrupting the drug supply.
Those politicians include Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who promises to deploy the military against drug traffickers, and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, whose platform is also heavy on supply-side tactics. Neither candidate seems to have absorbed the lessons of the “opioid epidemic,” which showed that drug law enforcement is not just ineffective but counterproductive, magnifying the harms it is supposed to alleviate.”
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“While replacing street drugs with methadone or buprenorphine reduces overdose risk, Dasgupta et al. say, it does not look like expanded access to such “medication-assisted treatment” can account for the recent drop in deaths. But they think it is “plausible” that broader distribution of the opioid antagonist naloxone, which quickly reverses fentanyl and heroin overdoses, has played a role.
By contrast, Dasgupta et al. say it is “unlikely” that anti-drug operations along the U.S.-Mexico border have helped reduce overdoses. They note that recent border seizures have mainly involved marijuana and methamphetamine rather than fentanyl, the primary culprit in overdoses, and that retail drug prices have been falling in recent years—the opposite of what you would expect if interdiction were effective.
Supply-side measures, which are doomed by the economics of prohibition, not only have failed to reduce drug-related deaths. They have had the opposite effect.
Prohibition makes drug use much more dangerous by creating a black market in which quality and purity are highly variable and unpredictable, and efforts to enforce prohibition increase those hazards. The crackdown on pain pills, for example, drove nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes, replacing legally produced, reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with iffy street drugs, which became even iffier thanks to the prohibition-driven proliferation of illicit fentanyl.
That crackdown succeeded in reducing opioid prescriptions, which fell by more than half from 2010 to 2022. Meanwhile, the opioid-related death rate more than tripled, while the annual number of opioid-related deaths nearly quadrupled.
Trump and Harris seem unfazed by that debacle. Trump imagines “a full naval embargo on the drug cartels,” while Harris aspires to “disrupt the flow of illicit drugs.” They promise to achieve the impossible while glossing over the costs of persisting in a strategy that has failed for more than a century.”
His plans increase the deficit, which is inflationary.
Large and broad tariffs are inflationary.
A massive crackdown on illegal immigration will also be inflationary as without cheap labor, making products will be more expensive or won’t happen here at all–particularly agricultural goods and housing.
Trump wants to end the independence of the Federal Reserve. Trump has been in favor of lower interest rates, which will increase inflation.