Tag: policy
After a Crackdown on a Pain Clinic, a Tragic Double Suicide
“Danny had chronic, searing pain from an electrocution accident years earlier. For treatment, he and Gretchen, his caretaker, traveled regularly from their home in Georgia to a pain management physician in Beverly Hills, California, to receive pharmaceutical fentanyl. But on November 1, DEA agents suspended the Beverly Hills physician’s narcotics prescribing license, having decided that he was inappropriately prescribing painkillers. A week later, Danny and Gretchen killed themselves.”
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“It was the most recent of the many dreadful outcomes that follow when cops practice medicine.”
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“The DEA has not formally charged the physician, David Bockoff, who has been practicing medicine with a spotless record in California for 53 years. He was treating many “pain refugees” like Danny: patients with chronic pain, well-managed with opioids, whose previous physicians had either closed after a DEA visit or abruptly cut off their pain medication fearing the wrath of law enforcement.”
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“Today, 38 states have laws on the books that limit the dosage and amount of pain relievers doctors can prescribe to their patients. Many of these laws have cast in stone the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s now-discredited 2016 Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain. The guideline came under so much criticism from pharmacologists, clinicians, and academic physicians that the agency revised it this past November. No matter. The flawed 2016 guideline remains the basis of the prescribing laws in most states. Doctors face losing their licenses or, worse, jail time if they violate these laws.”
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“All 50 states maintain Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs to surveil all prescriptions issued and filled within the state. These primarily serve as law enforcement tools. In most states, police drug task forces use them to go on warrantless fishing expeditions, hoping to find a doctor to bust for “inappropriate prescribing” or a patient they can arrest for “doctor shopping.” These programs have not reduced the overdose rate. If anything, they have driven non-medical users who cannot obtain diverted prescription pain pills to more dangerous drugs in the black market, causing the overdose rate to increase.”
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“opioid-related overdose deaths reached a record high in 2021, exceeding 71,000, 89 percent of which involved illicit fentanyl. Despite a dramatic drop in opioid prescribing, deaths have soared.
According to government data, addiction to prescription pain relievers has been relatively stable at under one percent in this century. Chronic pain patients rarely become addicted to opioids. The overdose crisis is a prohibition-induced crisis. Neither the practice of medicine nor the act of self-medication belongs in the realm of the criminal legal system.”
How to slash carbon emissions while growing the economy, in one chart
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23447414/degrowth-decoupling-carbon-emissions-economic-growth
Biden ‘confident’ U.S. can address EU concerns about IRA subsidies
“Much of the European ire is directed at an IRA requirement that electric vehicles must have their final assembly in North America to qualify for a $7,500 tax credit. That has eliminated many European models that previously qualified, and even more could be excluded when additional domestic content provisions take effect, beginning in January.
The Treasury Department is currently developing guidance for how it will implement that tax provision, and Biden referred specifically to language that provides better treatment for countries that have a free trade agreement with the United States as one area where the law could be implemented in a flexible manner.
“That was added by a member of the United States Congress who acknowledges that he just meant allies. He didn’t mean literally free trade agreement. So there’s a lot we can work out,” Biden said.
That would solve some of the EU’s problems, since it doesn’t have a free trade pact with the United States. However, there is still the bigger problem that many of the cars that European companies sell in the United States are assembled in Europe, disqualifying them for credit because of the North American assembly requirement.
Biden did not say how that could be addressed, but U.S. lawmakers in recent days have said the administration is considering giving automakers more time to comply with the IRA provisions. That’s an issue that the France and other EU member states will continue to discuss with the United States through a recently established bilateral task force.”
Buy American Falls Short on U.S. EV Production and Risks a European Trade War
“The Buy American program created by the Inflation Reduction Act gives Americans tax credits for purchasing electric vehicles (EVs) manufactured in the United States, Canada, or Mexico. However, these tax credits will not only be paid for by taxpayer dollars, they also stand to ignite a trade war with the European Union.
The majority of EVs are manufactured in China, followed by Germany and the United States. Regarding the minerals used in lithium batteries, the U.S. is at a disadvantage. In 2020, the U.S. ranked 15th in supplying battery materials, with the top three countries being China, Australia, and Brazil. The International Energy Agency notes that “the top three producing nations control well over three-quarters of global output.” Biden’s corporate welfare policy requires batteries to derive 40 percent of their mineral components from a mine in the U.S. or a country with which the U.S. has a free trade agreement. However, only five countries among the top 25 producers of minerals used in EV batteries have a free trade agreement with the U.S.
The U.S. could conceivably increase its mineral output with regulatory reform, says Scott Lincicome, director of general economics and trade policy at the Cato Institute. “The big problem is on the regulatory side, particularly on the permitting side of state-level equivalents….this makes mining and processing rare-earth materials here very difficult.”
The Buy American program also risks trade conflicts. E.U. French President Emmanuel Macron went so far as to say, “We need a Buy European Act like the Americans. We need to reserve [our subsidies] for our European manufacturers.” With the U.S. and Europe trending towards protectionism, Lincicome says restrictions will inherently “reduce adoption and consumption of whatever is targeted.”
Another fear that comes with protectionism is the retaliatory environment it creates. “Protectionism gets nasty, it gets political, and it spirals, and it’s very difficult to stop the cycle,” says Lincicome. Should a trade war begin over EVs, it could expand to other products, driving up prices.”
Pay Attention to Policy, not ‘Narratives’
“opinion leaders create narratives about how the world works—and then voters essentially buy into one that suits their biases. They pick a team. Social media reinforces each side’s thinking habits. As the election arrives, most voters aren’t doing a cost-benefit analysis—but embracing the candidate who touts the story their team tells (whether it’s true or not).
“Narratives … provide a rich source of information about how people make sense of their lives, about how they construct disparate facts and weave them together cognitively to make sense of reality,” explains a 1998 UC Irvine study. They can be helpful for understanding the world, but they can also send people down a rabbit hole.”
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“fewer people can be persuaded by evidence. If you subscribe to the narrative that your opponents want to destroy everything that you find holy and dear, then you’ll put up with anything from a candidate from your tribe. During the 2016 election, Republicans embraced the “Flight 93″ theory—it’s time to rush the cockpit because a Hillary Clinton presidency would crash democracy.
Democrats believe something similar about a Donald Trump re-election, although they’re on more solid ground given that he did indeed try to steal an election and his election-denying acolytes filled the GOP ticket this year. Polls show most GOP voters have bought into that denialism narrative—and no evidence likely will sway them from their vote-stealing fantasies.”
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“Jumping on the narrative bandwagon can take you to some morally dubious places. I don’t expect voters to adopt my balls-and-strikes voting strategy. But unless there’s a movement back in that direction, the story of our democracy might not have a happy ending.”
Biden has ambitious infrastructure goals. Made-in-America rules could slow them.
“The $1 trillion infrastructure law passed last year expanded Buy America rules, which require state and local agencies to buy certain materials made in the United States for federally funded infrastructure projects. Rules that iron, steel, and manufactured products be made in America have been in place for decades, but they’ve traditionally applied to transportation and water-related projects, such as highways, rail, and public transit.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act’s new rules broadened the scope of goods that have to be produced in the United States by creating a new category for “construction materials.” It also expanded the types of infrastructure projects subject to the requirements to permanently include housing, broadband, and new programs for electric vehicle charging projects for the first time.”
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“many state and local officials across the country say the new rules could delay much-needed infrastructure projects and significantly drive up costs amid the fastest inflation in 40 years. Some say they’re already struggling to deal with supply-chain disruptions that have emerged during the pandemic and worry that material shortages could worsen if they’re limited to domestic manufacturers. Higher costs could also lead to fewer projects and soften the impact of the package”
The messy true story of the last time we beat inflation
“The monetary tightening inaugurated by Volcker was one part of an entire deflationary policy repertoire that also included union-busting and the creation of a global supply chain to hold down the costs of labor, components, and commodities.”
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“The Fed might be able to choke off credit to slow investment and job creation, but it can’t create the real-world political, legal, and logistical systems that in the past have kept prices down even amid economic growth.
To truly tame prices, we can’t just turn off the money hose. We have to plan for more concrete long-term solutions to a lack of labor, commodities, and goods.”
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“Volcker’s shock and central bank independence happened at the same time as Ronald Reagan’s anti-union effort; the emergence of New Democrats like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, who were less sympathetic to organized labor than their New Deal and Great Society forebears; and the collapse of union membership across almost every sector of the economy except government. Volcker and his central banker colleagues were keenly aware of the importance of union power to increasing wages: The minutes of Fed meetings show that these policymakers fixated on the ability of unions to set wages even after many academic economists had moved on from the subject.”
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” Just as Volcker’s rate hikes coincided with a bipartisan anti-union push, so the rise of central banks paralleled the acceleration of globalization and the creation of a world-spanning super-efficient “just in time” supply chain. New logistics infrastructure, trade deals, and methods of inventory management allowed firms to get cheap commodities and components from the other side of the world astonishingly quickly. Globalization also reinforced the attack on unions, since it allowed businesses to move factories to countries with weaker labor laws, humbling labor leaders of industrialized economies. After the 1980s, and especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, markets began to integrate many formerly communist countries with large, well-educated — but poorly paid — workforces and ample natural resources. The creation of global supply chains depended in large part on a relatively calm geopolitical scene, with no serious confrontations between “great powers,” who generally seemed to be on the same page regarding globalization.”
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“It’s this model of globalization that is currently breaking down, leading to volatile rising prices. As anyone who has ordered a piece of furniture in the last two years can tell you, “just in time” has become a thing of the past. Instead of speedy manufacturing getting imported from any nation on earth, now we import their supply chain bottlenecks, as, say, plumbing component manufacturers in China hamstrung by that country’s “zero-Covid” policy hold up house completions in the United States.
While supply chain bottlenecks were widely predicted to ease in 2022, geopolitics got in the way. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent economic retaliation rocked global energy supplies, a particularly troubling economic disruption since energy is a vital component of nearly every product, and further poisoned relations between wealthy Western countries and Russia’s key ally, China, where so much of the stuff Americans buy is made. Instead of getting more cheap electronics from China, the world’s second-largest economy, the US is sanctioning the chip industry there.
If the Federal Reserve is largely removed from the internal dynamics of the labor market, it has even less to do with foreign policy and geo-strategic maneuvering.”
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“We don’t want policymakers to make the mistake of fighting the last war. If we leave inflation up to the central bankers rather than continuing the push for coordinated investments in cost-saving renewable energy and dense housing, or policies that reverse the shrinkage of the labor supply since the pandemic, we won’t so much beat inflation as resign ourselves to a poorer, less-resilient future.”
Biden’s New Industrial Policy Will Fail, Just Like Industrial Policy Always Fails
“When it was passed, the law provided subsidies for the construction of a domestic shipping industry, while imposing various employment rules and other shipping regulations. It has been amended in the century since, but it continues to prohibit foreign-flagged ships from traveling between U.S. ports, and many of its wage and labor regulations are still in effect, making it beloved, almost obsessively, by unions.
In at least one way, the Jones Act has served at least part of its intended purpose: It has benefited the domestic shipping industry by shielding it from foreign competition. But it has done so at considerable expense to everyone else.
By restricting and regulating shipping at America’s ports, the Jones Act considerably raises the costs of transporting goods, which in turn raises prices on everything from food to electronics to textiles. In good economic times, the Jones Act is a cost borne by the majority to bolster the fortunes of a few. In periods of global economic instability and high inflation, the Jones Act makes supply chain problems worse and drives prices even higher. On a daily basis, it is a force for impoverishment. ”
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“Just about any time one finds a politician taking credit for specific business decisions by specific companies, one ought to be skeptical, worried, or both. In this case, the proximate cause of much of Biden’s factory-jobs campaigning is the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act, a $52 billion package of industry subsidies Biden signed into law in August. Manufacturers who stand to benefit from these subsidies have played along, with Micron’s leadership saying that its facility is “the first of Micron’s multiple planned U.S. investments following the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act.” Micron, however, was publicly teasing the possibility of new manufacturing facilities as early as October 2021, long before the CHIPS Act became law.”
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“Just as the Jones Act ends up distorting the shipping industry, shaping it in ways that make it less flexible and less responsive to genuine consumer demand, we should expect the CHIPS Act to push the semiconductor industry into labor and production decisions intended to satisfy politically determined subsidy requirements rather than genuine market needs. Subsidies are more likely to incentivize inefficiency and dysfunction than genuinely useful production, inflating prices in the process. When subsidies are driving decisions, that means subsidy programs, not end users, are the true customer. “
Biden Forgets That Workers Are Consumers Too
“Consider that supposedly worker-centric trade policy. Biden has left in place many of the tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump, including the levies on aluminum and steel. By artificially hiking the price of imported steel, those tariffs are supposed to boost domestic production, creating more and better-paying steelworker jobs. But the cost of the tariffs rebounds onto every industry that uses steel to make other products. While about 57,000 Americans work in steelmaking jobs, more than 12 million are employed in manufacturing jobs that use steel. The tariffs hurt those workers.
Even steelworkers suffer from the tariffs, which raise prices for cars, appliances, and a host of other products. The Peterson Institute for International Economics, a trade policy think tank, estimates that repealing those tariffs would put about $800 back in the average family’s pockets this year.
Biden also has decided to extend tariffs on solar panels and their component parts, which were due to expire this year. In theory, those tariffs promote domestic manufacturing. In reality, they have cost more than 62,000 jobs in the four-plus years since Trump first implemented them by sharply cutting the number of solar panels available for installation and service, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.”
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“Trade and labor policies should not be worker-centric or consumer-centric. They should be market-centric, because trade and labor are both parts of a market system that benefits Americans as workers and consumers.”