Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“Out of the $105 billion paid out in 2021 and 2022 as part of the temporary expansion of the child tax credit here in the US, only 5 percent went to families without any income at all.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23959612/child-tax-credit-compromise-bipartisan
“The State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap, part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), placed a $10,000 limit on the amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted from federal taxable income. This move predominantly affected high earners in high-tax states like New York, California, and many others that are Democratic strongholds.
That’s a tax hike on the rich. This shouldn’t bother Democrats, who are usually happy to demonstrate their egalitarian chops by clamoring for that very thing. Yet this time, by demanding repeal of the SALT cap, they are on the front lines of a battle to restore tax breaks for the rich. As it turns out, when affluent Californians and Northeasterners felt the pinch, Democrats were ready to cha-cha for tax relief.”
https://reason.com/2023/10/26/democrats-say-theyre-fighting-inequality-but-many-of-their-policies-favor-the-rich/
“In the six months since states began double-checking the eligibility of people enrolled in their Medicaid programs for the first time in three years, more than 8.5 million Americans have lost their Medicaid benefits.
Based on enrollment numbers at the start of the year, that means roughly 1 in 10 people covered by Medicaid have lost their health insurance in a matter of months. After the US saw its uninsured rate hit historic lows during the pandemic, millions of the most vulnerable Americans are now falling off the rolls — with no assurance they will be able to find another form of coverage.
Worse, many of those losing coverage are losing it because of administrative hiccups and would otherwise be eligible — a problem that is disproportionately impacting children.
We won’t know until next year’s national insurance surveys how many people simply ended up uninsured and how many people successfully enrolled in another form of health coverage even as they lost their Medicaid benefits. But it is safe to expect that millions more Americans are now uninsured than were at the beginning of the year.
The health effects of this massive loss in health insurance will take years to be realized. But we know that having Medicaid means people are more likely to see a doctor and keep up with managing chronic conditions. The program helps people live longer. So losing coverage will make it even more difficult for a population that already struggles with its health to stay well.
Here’s why this is happening: During the pandemic, Congress approved an emergency provision that prevented almost anyone from losing their Medicaid coverage. Even if you had a change in income or life circumstances that in normal times would have led to you leaving the program, you were allowed to stay as long as that emergency policy was in place. But that provision expired earlier this year, part of the government standing down from its pandemic footing, and states were tasked with double-checking the eligibility of every person who was on their Medicaid rolls — a process referred to as unwinding. Starting in April, they could remove people who they found were no longer eligible.”
https://www.vox.com/policy/2023/10/13/23914264/medicaid-health-insurance-enrollment-data-unwinding-october
“unless you pin down the details, basic income is too vague to mean anything politically concrete. Like the Rorschach inkblot, you can interpret and design UBI in an endless variety of ways. A program that provides $250 per month is a different ballgame than one providing $1,200 per month. The same goes for one that replaces all other welfare, like food aid (sometimes referred to as a “pure UBI,” which would actually leave the most disadvantaged worse off, and is a bad idea), compared with one that complements existing programs.
Ultimately, the effects of any income guarantee hinge on the details. How much does it pay? Who gets it? How’s it financed? How does it relate to the rest of the welfare state? But most of the real proposals that have made their way through the policy world share a noteworthy trait: When the dust settles, they just wouldn’t be that radical, in either direction.
Generally, most people at the bottom of the income ladder would be better off, those in the middle would break even as they pay about as much in higher taxes as they’d receive from the basic income, and those at the top would be a little worse off. Society would neither ascend into utopian communism nor collapse into bleak idleness. There would just be less poverty and higher taxes.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/10/13/23914745/basic-income-radical-economy-poverty-capitalism-taxes
“Biden’s administration sold off more than 40 percent of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve last year to help limit rising fuel prices after Russia invaded Ukraine, leaving the stockpile at its lowest levels since the early 1980s. That’s fueling Republican accusations that Biden has left the U.S. vulnerable to a disruption of global oil supplies — at a time when Hamas’ terrorist attacks in Israel are stoking fears of a wider regional war disrupting fuel shipments from the Middle East.”
…
the reserve still holds 351 million barrels — equivalent to nearly 56 days of total U.S. oil imports last year — though well below the peak of 727 million barrels it held during the Obama administration. That’s on top of 424 million barrels that private companies were storing in the U.S. as of early October.
The administration has defended its handling of the reserve, saying it still holds ample crude to protect the nation’s strategic needs and offer a cushion against price shocks. “I am not worried about the reserve levels at all,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told a House committee in September, adding: “It is the largest strategic reserve in the world.”
And the U.S. is no longer the energy beggar it was in 1973, when the Yom Kippur War prompted an Arab oil embargo against the United States that sent prices spiraling and left Americans waiting in hours-long lines at gas pumps. Back then, U.S. oil production was dropping while its thirst for the fuel was rising — prompting Congress to pass a law in 1975 to create the reserve.”
…
” the United States is the world’s biggest oil producer, which exports more crude and petroleum products than it imports. Its output is at record highs and is climbing, even as demand has flattened.
Over the years, some conservatives have even called for abolishing the reserve, complaining — as the Heritage Foundation did eight years ago — that “Presidents have used the SPR as a political tool.”
Still, the reserves’ diminished volumes limit Biden’s options to respond to a future shock to the oil markets, including those that could result from a widening of the war in the Middle East.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/biden-half-empty-oil-fuels-090000833.html
“Ashtabula’s problems stand out compared with two nearby counties – Erie, Pa., and Chautauqua, N.Y. All three communities, which ring picturesque Lake Erie and are a short drive from each other, have struggled economically in recent decades as industrial jobs withered – conditions that contribute toward rising midlife mortality, research shows. None is a success story when it comes to health. But Ashtabula residents are much more likely to die young, especially from smoking, diabetes-related complications or motor vehicle accidents, than people living in its sister counties in Pennsylvania and New York, states that have adopted more stringent public health measures.
That pattern held true during the coronavirus pandemic, when Ashtabula residents died of covid at far higher rates than people in Chautauqua and Erie.
The differences around Lake Erie reflect a steady national shift in how public health decisions are being made and who’s making them.
State lawmakers gained autonomy over how to spend federal safety net dollars following Republican President Ronald Reagan’s push to empower the states in the 1980s. Those investments began to diverge sharply along red and blue lines, with conservative lawmakers often balking at public health initiatives they said cost too much or overstepped. Today, people in the South and Midwest, regions largely controlled by Republican state legislators, have increasingly higher chances of dying prematurely compared with those in the more Democratic Northeast and West, according to The Post’s analysis of death rates.
The differences in state policies directly correlate to those years lost, said Jennifer Karas Montez, director of the Center for Aging and Policy Studies at Syracuse University and author of several papers that describe the connection between politics and life expectancy.
Ohio sticks out – for all the wrong reasons. Roughly 1 in 5 Ohioans will die before they turn 65, according to Montez’s analysis using the state’s 2019 death rates. The state, whose legislature has been increasingly dominated by Republicans, has plummeted nationally when it comes to life expectancy rates, moving from middle of the pack to the bottom fifth of states during the last 50 years, The Post found. Ohioans have a similar life expectancy to residents of Slovakia and Ecuador, relatively poor countries.
Like other hard-hit Midwestern counties, Ashtabula has seen a rise in what are known as “deaths of despair” – drug overdoses, alcoholism and suicides – prompting federal and state attention in recent years. But here, as well as in most counties across the United States, those types of deaths are far outnumbered by deaths caused by cardiovascular disease, diabetes, smoking-related cancers and other health issues for residents between 35 and 64 years old, The Post found. Between 2015 and 2019, nearly five times as many Ashtabula residents in their prime died of chronic medical conditions as died of overdoses, suicide and all other external causes combined, according to The Post analysis of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s death records.
Public health officials say Ohio could save lives by adopting measures such as a higher tobacco tax or stricter seat-belt rules, initiatives supported by Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican generally friendly to their cause.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/red-state-politics-shaving-years-172234346.html
“Government favoritism in the form of subsidies, tariffs, and other interventions allocates resources (labor and capital) differently than the way resources are allocated by consumers spending their own money. Ordinarily, businesses—spending their investors’ money—compete for these consumer dollars. Industrial policy rests on the assumption that such market outcomes don’t adequately support higher causes such as national security. If that’s true, it’s all the justification industrial policy needs. Nothing needs to be said about jobs.”
…
“As Noah Smith reminded his readers in a recent blog post, “Most of the actual production work will be done by robots, because we are a rich country with very high labor costs and lots of abundant capital and technology. Automated manufacturing is what we specialize in, not labor-intensive manufacturing.””
…
“Be wary of those who push industrial policy as a means of job creation. It’s a short-sighted approach that distracts us from the more important question, which is whether hindering the market allocation of resources is truly justified for national security or other valid reasons.”