“Over the years, the terms “free market” and “limited government,” like so many conservative principles, have devolved into little more than rhetorical tics, bits of sloganeering that bear no resemblance to actual conservative governance.
What conservatives seem to have decided is that regulations, restrictions, or limitations — anything that might upset or inconvenience the corporations generating greenhouse gases — are the bad kind of big government and a bad way of picking winners and losers. Government subsidies, tax credits, and grants — anything that might benefit big corporations — is the good kind of big government and a good way of picking winners and losers.”
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“There are plenty of models that show we will need carbon capture (both industrial and natural) to supplement other efforts to reduce emissions. We probably can’t hit our mid-century targets without it.
But there is no model in the world showing emissions falling fast enough with nothing but carbon capture, with fossil fuels continuing their current headlong expansion.
The fossil fuels that remain behind after deep decarbonization, the ones that still need their emissions captured and buried, will be a small vestige of the current fossil fuel regime. That is what every credible model shows. That is the cold, hard truth at the heart of the climate dilemma: There is no avoiding the imperative to reduce fossil fuel combustion and the social and economic disruptions that come with it.
Current Republican efforts to feign climate policy conspicuously fail to grapple with that truth.”
“The House bill — H.R.3 — has a few mechanisms for reducing prescription drug prices, but most notably, it would allow the US health department to directly negotiate the prices it will pay for up to 250 drugs every year. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated the bill would save Medicare up to $450 billion over 10 years because of those new negotiating powers. CBO has also projected about eight fewer drugs (out of an expected 300 over 10 years) would come to the market in the next decade because of the decrease in revenues for drug makers.
Despite Trump’s promises on the 2016 campaign trail that he would support proposals allowing Medicare drug negotiations, the White House threatened to veto the House plan. They called it a plan to institute government “price controls,” and said it would limit access to medicine, a favored talking point of the pharmaceutical lobby.
Even without this veto threat, H.R.3 is expected to be dead-on-arrival in the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has shown no interest in taking up the bill.”
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“Instead, Trump has aligned himself more with Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, who has advanced a narrower set of reforms from his perch as the Senate Finance Committee chair. (Grassley has also accused McConnell of sabotaging his bill, which moved out of Grassley’s committee with bipartisan support.)
His committee sent a bill to the full Senate in the fall, though it has languished there in the months since. It’s unclear if Trump’s quasi-endorsement — he did not call out Grassley’s bill directly Tuesday night, instead praising the senator generally for his individual work on the issue — will provide any new momentum for the plan. Grassley’s bill, as the Brookings Institution documented, achieves pricing reform through a mix of technical changes to the rebates that drug makers pay under Medicare and Medicaid as well as provisions to cap out-of-pocket drug costs for seniors.
Right now, neither of the bills seems on a fast track to anywhere. Part of this is because Trump’s interest in drug pricing has been scattershot at best, and many Republicans are reluctant to place too many new regulations on an innovation industry.”
“To be fair, the First Step Act, Trump’s landmark criminal justice law, is commendable. More than 3,000 people have been released thanks to the law’s effort to take good behavior while incarcerated into account. And by retroactively applying the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and cocaine charges, over 2,000 people received sentencing reductions — 91 percent of them were African Americans, according to the Sentencing Project. 342 people have also been released into the elderly home confinement pilot program.
The problem, however, is that the Department of Justice has “attempted to block hundreds of eligible beneficiaries” and send those released back behind bars, according to the Sentencing Project.
It may not be too surprising considering that Attorney General William Barr had expressed his concerns about the First Step Act behind closed doors, according to the Washington Post. The publication found that Barr thought the early release could drive up crime numbers and put the administration in a bad light.
As a result, the department has tried to freeze applications or re-incarcerate former inmates by setting higher standards for their release.”
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“beyond the disruption of the Justice Department, there’s a lot to be accomplished for the First Step Act to reach its full potential. Funding falls far short of the $75 million authorized by Congress. Many prisons lack both the space and money to hold vocational, educational, mental health, and substance abuse programming. And the government has yet to expand the Second Step Act, which promised to help break barriers in employment after release. Until all these issues are addressed, Trump’s criminal justice efforts — and the speeches he makes about them — remain lackluster.”
“If you didn’t know American politics had been turned upside down by Trump’s election win, nothing in the macroeconomic data would suggest that anything at all happened in January 2017”
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“That’s not to deny Trump any credit. He made a sensible selection for Federal Reserve chair and has presided over a healthy dose of fiscal stimulus, and his trade policies haven’t been as disruptive as the most alarmist critics warn. But at the same time, his tax cuts haven’t delivered the kind of investment boom he promised, and in general, all his record-setting economic numbers are continuations of previous trends.”
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“Under Trump, we have seen a sharp slowdown in net immigration that has helped reduce US population growth to a trickle. The foreign-born share of the population, however, is not falling despite the immigration crackdown because American women are also having fewer babies.”
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“The number of babies women say they’d ideally like to have isn’t declining; we are just seeing the gap between ideal fertility and actual fertility get bigger and bigger each year. According to surveys, the main reason is the high (and growing) cost of child care — a problem that a “good economy” alone doesn’t fix, since child care is so labor-intensive.”
“President Donald Trump has spent three years molding America’s immigration system to primarily be concerned with keeping people out.
He built, layer by layer, impediments in Central America, at the border, in detention centers, and in the immigration courts that have made obtaining asylum nearly impossible.
He swept aside former President Barack Obama’s immigration enforcement priorities in favor of vastly expanding immigration detention and prosecuting every immigrant who crosses the border without authorization. The result is a punitive system that treats immigrants as criminals and places them in prolonged detention even if they don’t pose any danger to the public.
And he waged a quiet and effective campaign to reduce legal immigration — including expanding his travel ban to block immigration from Nigeria, the largest country in Africa. Under Trump, the legal immigration system increasingly rewards skills and wealth over family ties to the US, while shutting out a growing number of people from low-income countries.
When Trump lays out the start of his reelection-year argument in the State of the Union address on Tuesday night, his guests will include a senior Border Patrol official and the brother of a man who was killed by an unauthorized immigrant. His immigration record is likely to be one of his top talking points.
It’s true that Trump has run into some roadblocks: He’s behind schedule on construction of the southern border wall, a key messaging tool for his base. He hasn’t been able to appoint his preferred candidates to lead the immigration agencies. His attempts to pass immigration-related legislation in Congress have failed. And his policies have faced so much opposition in the courts that his administration has appeared to pursue a strategy of rapidly churning out new policies and hoping that at least some of them survive judicial review.
But while he might not have succeeded at building an actual wall to keep immigrants out, his policies have achieved the same end.”
“The United States dropped 7,423 bombs on Afghanistan last year—that’s an average of more than 20 per day—narrowly surpassing the previous record set in 2018.
It’s a statistic that belies the notion that President Donald Trump is an anti-war commander-in-chief, and one that suggests America is still no closer to winning its longest military conflict.
Trump has overseen a massive escalation in the amount of ordnance fired at Afghanistan in the past two years, according to a new report from the U.S Air Force. But other than blasting thousands of new craters in the war-torn country and terrorizing the people unfortunate enough to live there, there is little evidence that bombing the hell out of what’s left of the country is accomplishing any vital U.S. interest. Amid the record-breaking year of attacks, the Trump administration was holding on-and-off peace talks with the Taliban—you know, the same group we went to war nearly two decades ago to remove—aimed at handing over control of the country.”
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“now the Trump administration does not even appear willing to explain its Afghanistan strategy to Congress. Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo refused to appear at a congressional hearing this week in which lawmakers grappled with the “Afghanistan Papers” published in December by The Washington Post. The Post’s document dump showed that the Pentagon has been lying for years about the status of the war in Afghanistan, while top military brass have privately concluded that the U.S. has no clear strategy or path to victory.”
“about 130 feet of newly constructed border wall “fell on the Mexico side of the border, landing on several trees.” Evidently, the sections had not yet been set in a concrete foundation.”
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“other sections of the border wall have huge holes, by design, to prevent flash floods from damaging it. Sources familiar with the wall designs tell the Post that the structure will act like a giant sewer gate during those periodic downpours, allowing water to pass through but causing rocks, trees, and other debris carried by the water to slam into it. To avoid potential damage, there 30-foot floodgates will be built into the wall, and the floodgates will be left open for months at a time during the rainy season.
John Ladd, a cattle rancher who has one such floodgate on his property—built into an older section of border wall constructed in 2008—tells the Post that he’s seen smugglers drive pick-up trucks through the openings.”
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“Smugglers have already been spotted cutting holes in new sections of the wall, and there’s a long history of people gaining access to the United States by tunneling or catapulting their way in. More than 200 such tunnels discovered since 1990, and another one was found just this week near San Diego, California.”
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“Most illegal immigrants to the United States don’t hop the border; they land at airports and then overstay their visas.”
“the 2018 maternal mortality rate was 17.4 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births — meaning 658 women died in 2018. The figure includes deaths during pregnancy, at birth, or within 42 days of birth.
The rate once again put the US last among similarly wealthy countries”
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“If you compare the CDC figure to other countries in the World Health Organization’s latest maternal mortality ranking, the US would rank 55th, just behind Russia (17 per 100,000) and just ahead of Ukraine”