Lone Candle – Page 926 – Champion of Truth

Trump’s Tariffs Are Still Slowing America’s Coronavirus Response

Posted on May 2, 2020 by Lone Candle

“President Donald Trump’s tariffs probably reduced the ability of hospitals and other medical providers to stock up on crucial gear before the coronavirus pandemic. When those trade barriers were imposed in 2018, medical professionals warned the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative that the levies were counterproductive and would harm America’s preparedness for a public health crisis.

The administration waited until mid-March to lift those tariffs. As GM’s (and other companies’) exemption requests demonstrate, cutting tariffs for medical gear doesn’t go nearly far enough to help American companies respond effectively to the pandemic.”

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“The administration’s China tariffs, Glidden wrote, could “impede the ability of GM and other U.S. manufacturers to source parts for critical care ventilators quickly, reliably, and at as reasonable a cost as possible.”

In mid-March, the administration quietly took action to lift tariffs on medical devices and equipment imported from China. As part of that process, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative opened a special docket on March 20 to let American companies seek relief from other tariffs in light of the COVID-19 outbreak. The public comment period runs through June 25.

General Motors is one of dozens of companies to have submitted requests. The Wall Street Journal reports that the list of requests comes from a wide range of businesses who say “tariffs are hitting chemicals, equipment, parts for devices and other items needed in the fight against coronavirus, but which may not be readily identifiable as medically related.” GoPro, for example, says its camera equipment can be used to teach doctors how to use ventilators. Energizer Holdings Inc. says its batteries are needed to power medical devices.”

Physicians Should Be Allowed To Practice Across State Lines—and Not Just During a Pandemic

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Lone Candle

“Medical professionals are typically licensed on a state-by-state basis, so a doctor licensed in one state can’t practice in another without receiving an additional license. The patchwork of licensing requirements across states is a major obstacle to the use of telemedicine because physicians are generally only permitted to provide telemedicine services to patients in states where they are licensed.

States are recognizing the cost of these onerous regulations in light of the current crisis. Over the past few weeks, governors and medical boards in every state except for Alaska, Arkansas, and Minnesota have temporarily suspended their licensing rules to allow out-of-state physicians to work in their state. Most of them have also waived restrictions on the use of telemedicine across state lines.”

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“Some states are in greater need of physicians than others. On average, there are roughly 263 physicians per 100,000 people in the United States. But in Massachusetts, there are 449 physicians compared to just 191 in Mississippi. Moreover, the number of COVID-19 cases is expected to peak at different times in each state, so the peak demand for health care providers will vary. Allowing physicians to practice across state lines grants them flexibility to help where they are needed most.”

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“Beyond the current crisis, telemedicine has the potential to connect patients with specialists across the country. Telemedicine may also reduce inefficiencies that result from schedule gaps, unexpected appointment cancellations, and the uneven geographic distribution of physicians.

A growing, aging population is expected to generate a national shortage of nearly 220,000 physicians by 2032. As with the current distribution of physicians, shortages will not be evenly distributed across states. Regional projections from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) indicate that the Southeast will have a shortage of approximately 13,860 primary care physicians as early as 2025, while the Northeast will have a surplus of around 810 physicians. Telemedicine offers a solution, but states will need to reform their licensing laws for the technology to reach its full potential.”

Trump’s Immigration Pause Is Pure Virtue Signaling to His Base

Posted on April 30, 2020 by Lone Candle

“Trump launched his first presidential bid by denouncing Mexicans as “rapists” and “criminals” and pledged to build a “big, beautiful” wall on the southern border. But what began as a slam on unauthorized immigration morphed into an all-out assault on legal immigration as soon as he walked into the White House.
One of his first acts was to ban travel from several predominantly Muslim countries. He also slashed America’s refugee program in less than half and is failing to admit even the number he allowed. But these and other moves were just baby steps toward a much more ambitious agenda to slash and radically revamp America’s legal immigration program.

He demanded that Congress cut family-based immigration in half in exchange for reinstating the legal status of “Dreamers,” which he himself had scrapped. (Dreamers are folks who were brought to this country without authorization as minors, who have grown up as Americans and often have little connection with their birthlands.) But when Congress demurred, he went to town to achieve through administrative means what he couldn’t through legislative ones—the kind of thing that Republicans used to vociferously condemn when Trump’s predecessor attempted it.

Trump scrapped the Obama-era program handing work authorization to the spouses of foreign techies enduring a decades long wait for their already approved green cards. His “Buy American and Hire American” executive order smothered the high-tech H-1B visa program in red tape, vastly increasing the processing time and doubling the rejection rate. As if that’s not enough, he recently implemented something called the public charge rule, which makes it exceedingly difficult for immigrants to upgrade their immigration status—for example, guest worker visas to green cards and green cards to naturalization—if they or their American family members collect or are likely to collect even the smallest amount of some means-tested cash or non-cash public benefits. This, along with other measures, will result in a 30 percent reduction in legal immigration next year, according to a National Foundation for American Policy study.

The coronavirus crisis has been manna from heaven for Trump’s restrictionist agenda.

The only visas that were still being entertained at all—albeit at an extremely scaled-back level—were long-term visas for jobs, visas for studying in the United States, and green cards sponsored either by American employers or American family. This long-term program is what Trump’s unprecedented executive order is now purportedly going after.

Trump claims that the ban will last 60 days after which he may review and renew it for another 60 or so. But his travel ban was supposed to last 90 days. It is now on day 1,181 and covers even more countries.”

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“the vast exemptions that Trump is planning to carve in the virtual wall he’s constructing to seal off America from the world are a tacit admission that immigrants are indispensable for vital sectors of the American economy, not a threat to American jobs.

The purpose of Trump’s executive order, then, must be to rally his restrictionist base and ensure that it makes the schlep to the polls this November. It’s pure political posturing that’ll do not an iota of good for America.”

GOP Debt Hypocrisy

Posted on April 29, 2020 by Lone Candle

“Republicans in Congress, on the whole, no longer care about debt or deficits—at least not in any substantive sense. That’s a problem for a number of reasons, not least that it increases the risk of a debt crisis in the future.

Those same Republicans spent the better part of Barack Obama’s presidency complaining bitterly about the trillion-dollar budget gaps the country ran during his first term, and President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail to eliminate all federal debt. But since Trump’s election, deficits have increased even faster than expected, and the total federal debt has risen accordingly. That, in turn, is likely to have long-term consequences for both the economy and for the broader politics of debt and deficits.”

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“By 2030, CBO projects the deficit—the annual gap between spending and revenues—will reach $1.7 trillion, which was roughly the size of the entire federal budget in 1999. Rising debt and deficits, the budget office predicts, will coincide with slowing economic growth, dropping from 2.2 percent this year to 1.5 percent a decade from now. The federal government will be borrowing more, and the economy will be expanding at a slower pace. It may not lead to an immediate economic crisis, but the nation is spending and borrowing into stagnancy and decline.”

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“The biggest drivers of long-term debt are Medicare and Social Security, which benefit seniors, many of whom are reliable Republican voters. Trump ran against cutting those entitlements, and although his rhetoric has wavered slightly in recent months, he has not pressed the issue. Republicans in Congress don’t exactly seem eager to tackle it either. (Trump’s 2020 budget proposed reducing some Medicare payments, similar to proposals made by the Obama administration, but would leave the program’s essential benefit structure intact.)

Trump also does not appear to worry much about what happens down the road. When his advisers in 2018 raised the possibility of a future deficit crisis, the president reportedly shrugged it off, saying, “Yeah, but I won’t be here.” Absent some event to force his hand, it’s unlikely that attitude will change.”

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“One possible forcing event would be the election of a Democratic president in 2020, which would almost certainly see the GOP return to its Obama-era complaints about sky-high debt and deficits.

Yet if that were to happen, Democrats would most likely dismiss these complaints as hypocritical—not as honest efforts to enforce needed fiscal restraint but as self-interested attempts to check the opposite party’s agenda. The Democratic primary race, which has prominently featured calls for tens of trillions in new spending, has already provided evidence for this view.”