“The easiest way to win a trade war? Don’t be one of the countries involved.
When the United States slapped tariffs on steel, aluminum, and billions of dollars of Chinese imports in the summer of 2018, China and other U.S. trading partners retaliated by targeting American agricultural exports. By the time a series of tit for tat increases in tariffs by the U.S. and China came to a halt with a December 2019 partial trade agreement—one that left most of the higher tariffs in place on both sides—the average foreign tariff for American farm goods had jumped from 8.3 to 26.8 percent
As a result, U.S. farm exports suffered. Carter and Steinbach calculate that U.S. farmers lost more than $15.6 billion in trade with countries that hiked tariffs in response to the Trump administration’s trade war. Soybeans, pork products, and grains were the products most affected.
Some of those losses were offset by trade with other nations—for example, when China stopped purchasing U.S.-grown soybeans, growers had to find other buyers for their products. That was the goal of a July 2018 deal struck by President Donald Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker that the White House touted as a vehicle for sending more American soybeans to Europe.
As Reason noted at the time, Europe’s annual consumption of soybeans was less than 25 percent of China’s (and it already had access to tariff-free imports of U.S. soybeans), so “unless Juncker and Trump plan to start jamming soybeans down European throats, foie gras-style, there’s simply no way that Europe can consume enough soybeans to make up for the loss of China as an American export market.”
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“Nearly two years later, Carter and Steinbach calculate that so-called “deflected trade” in agricultural goods boosted U.S. exports by about $1.2 billion during the trade war—leaving American farms only $14 billion in the red.”
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“countries that the two researchers identify as “non-retaliatory countries”—that is, places that did not hike tariffs in response to U.S. tariffs on steel, aluminum, and other goods—gained more than $13.5 billion by increasing trade to places, like China, that took steps to reduce imports of U.S. farm goods.”
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“soybean farmers are worried about how the trade war might permanently reshape the global soybean trade, to the detriment of American growers.”
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“In March 2018, after Trump announced his intention to hike tariffs on steel and aluminum, Peter Navarro, the director of the White House’s National Trade Council, was asked about the potential consequences of retaliation aimed at American farm exports.
“I don’t believe any country in the world is going to retaliate,” he said. “They know they’re cheating us, and we’re just trying to stand up for ourselves.”
Navarro and Trump were wrong. American farmers have lost $14 billion because of their mistake.”
“The decision to toss out Flynn’s case is, to put it mildly, controversial. The DOJ is saying, implicitly, that they can’t prove that Flynn committed the crime he already confessed to, or that it’s simply not worth prosecuting even though he already pled guilty. Either scenario is, well, odd.
On the surface, there’s only one reason to drop this case: politics. Trump, and his Attorney General Bill Barr, think the Russia investigation was bogus to begin with. Flynn’s lawyers, for their part, have insisted that the FBI mishandled the investigation and entrapped him.”
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“I reached out to eleven legal experts. While there wasn’t a perfect consensus, every expert agreed that the DOJ’s decision was highly unusual at best and an attack on the rule of law at worst.”
“All of this leaves me where no reporter wants to be: mired in the miasma of uncertainty. I wanted to believe Reade when she first came to me, and I worked hard to find the evidence to make certain others would believe her, too. I couldn’t find it. None of that means Reade is lying, but it leaves us in the limbo of Me Too: a story that may be true but that we can’t prove.”
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/5/21247837/coronavirus-vietnam-slovenia-jordan-iceland-greece
“The scientists who do this kind of research argue that we can better anticipate deadly diseases by making diseases deadlier in the lab. But many people at the time and since have become increasingly convinced that the potential research benefits — which look limited — just don’t outweigh the risks of kicking off the next deadly pandemic ourselves.”
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/11/21249203/venezuela-coup-jordan-goudreau-maduro-guaido-explain
“the attention and resources dedicated to repurposing old drugs detracts from the pursuit of new therapies that would be true breakthroughs, exponential advancements in science. Feldman describes such innovation as “value beyond pearls.”
“It’s rare, it’s beautiful, it’s startling, it’s a thing of beauty,” she said.
But that kind of innovation takes time and money with no certain payoff. It’s simpler and cheaper to modify existing products to somewhat improve their efficacy or to tweak them to treat a different condition.
“I worry that our system is not well primed for it,” she said. “It’s all about the incentives. Our incentives aren’t directed properly.”
She pointed to the shift away from antibacterial resistance research and drug development, even though researchers anticipate millions of global deaths annually within the next few decades because bacteria have become resistant to the drugs that we already have to fight them.
Drug makers currently devote a lot of their attention to end-stage cancers, because they can benefit from “orphan drug” designation and other competitively advantageous policies, while Feldman argued that chronic conditions have been underserved. Looking at it from a societal perspective, the latter obviously has more value than the former — and yet that is not necessarily what our innovation system has been designed to reward.
Or look at the antiviral space, which is the most relevant to the coronavirus response.
Antiviral research investment historically has not been a priority for the major drugmakers. The Wall Street Journal reported Pfizer had to reestablish its antiviral research department for its Covid-19 work because the unit was disbanded in 2009. Novartis ended its antiviral and antibacterial research in 2018. One systemic review of the past 30 years of antiviral research found “only a few drugs were approved to treat acute viral infections” in that time.
“Antibiotics and antivirals are both areas that haven’t seen a tremendous amount of new drug development because the economic incentives haven’t justified significant R&D in this area,” Caroline Pearson, senior fellow with NORC-University of Chicago, told me recently.
So long as these incentive structures remain in place, Feldman warned, we will never be ahead of the curve in fighting off the next pandemic. She said that the US should be asking: “What’s of value and what should we incentivize people to do?””
“The recent spike in Covid-19 cases in some of the countries thought to have best contained the virus — first Singapore, now South Korea and, potentially, Germany — is a glimpse into America’s possible future as states start reopening businesses and public activities after several months of lockdown.
All it can take to reverse the positive trends is a single undetected case. As Vox’s Alex Ward reported this week, one South Korean man who went out for a night on the town at several Seoul dance clubs has been linked to nearly 80 new cases there. Suddenly the country’s curve is rising again and the local government ordered bars and restaurants to be closed, an abrupt reversal of its reopening plans.”
“The coronavirus crisis..has revealed many uncomfortable truths about America, including the country’s unemployment system: It is broken, and in many cases, it is broken by design. After years of disinvestment and underfunding, benefits systems across the country have been left starved and in disrepair. In many states, benefits are intentionally difficult to collect and application processes complex to navigate.”
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” The program is funded through unemployment insurance taxes that employers pay to the state and federal government, and the amount collected by states varies, as do the benefits they provide, the way they set up their systems, and the way they deal with applicants. ”
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“so, what the country has wound up with is a patchwork of unemployment systems.”
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” Unemployment insurance is supposed to act as a stabilizer in an economic downturn, but ungenerous benefits mean that’s not the case. “In some of these states, the benefits are so hollowed out that it couldn’t be countercyclical,” said Rebecca Dixon, executive director of the National Employment Law Program, meaning benefits are unable to help boost the economy when it’s needed most.”
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“The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, the $2.2 trillion stimulus package signed into law in March, makes some temporary adjustments to unemployment insurance. It adds on $600 a week in federal benefits through the end of July, extends eligibility by 14 weeks, and expands the pool of workers who can apply to include freelancers, gig workers, and those who are self-employed. Still, poor infrastructure and funding in different states make accessing those benefits hard.”
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““Many states have refused to raise taxes to fund unemployment insurance. They’re always betting that the feds will bail them out if things get really bad, and no one expected it to get this bad, just a crush,” said Holzer.”
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“in many parts of the country is unemployment systems have gradually been whittled down. Part of the problem is that many people on the left have been more focused on getting aid to workers, and many people on the right have focused on cutting funding altogether, so infrastructure has been neglected. People pay attention when there’s a crisis, and then it’s too late to act.”
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“multiple states are still using COBOL, a coding language dating back to the 1950s, in their systems. In April, New Jersey put out a call for COBOL programmers to help reinforce its program. The problem with the language isn’t necessarily that it’s a bad one, it’s that there aren’t a lot of people who know how to use it anymore. That means there aren’t enough people to fix bugs in the system or update it to take on an influx of applications.”
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“States employ a number of tactics to keep people from collecting and to discourage them from accessing the system. They put a hard-nosed administrative face to clients by way of work search verification, fraud prevention, identity verification, and adding in bureaucratic layers that are difficult to maneuver around. And by cutting back benefits, they also make it so workers feel like it’s less worth the hassle to apply. (Part of the problem now is that the $600 in weekly federal money is pretty motivating.)”
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“unemployment insurance is not designed for the modern-day workforce and leaves people out. When the program was created in the 1930s and intervening years, it was designed for a largely white male workforce who were breadwinners and who were laid off for short periods of time and called back, Dixon explained, like a factory that would temporarily put workers on leave during a slow period. Employers wanted unemployment because they wanted their workers to be available to come back. But today, more layoffs are permanent, and there’s no relationship with employees.”
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“If the US were to start over, it may very well try to deal with unemployment insurance at a federal level, Vroman said: “Internationally, almost every country that has unemployment insurance has a national system.””
““Obamagate” is a convoluted mess of conspiracy theories untethered to reality. It is a deflection from the utter catastrophe unfolding daily because of the Trump administration’s disastrous coronavirus response.
That may not matter. Trump has used the “witch hunt” strategy since the start of his presidency, and, when it comes to his base and his allies in Congress and the administration, it works.”