Coal and Other Countries

People are up in arms about Donald Trump's latest executive order concerning pollution.  It is indeed a very depressing move.

It should be kept in mind, however, that Trump is reversing not some long-ago implemented set of standards but rather a plan that never went into effect in the first place and was introduced late in Obama's tenure, the Clean Power Plan.

Why did Barack Obama wait until June 2014 to first propose the Clean Power Plan, as opposed to, say, late January 2009, when the Democrats had narrow control of the Senate and substantial control of the House, and President Obama's approval rating stood at near 70%?  That's a question I'll leave historians and centrist Democrat apologists to answer I suppose.  The point is: Donald Trump's executive order is reprehensible, but it doesn't tear down a long-standing institution.  (His proposed budget for the EPA is a far more egregious attack than his executive order, seen in this light.)

It would have been nice to have that Clean Power Plan, I gotta say.  It would have gone part of the way to meeting the aims of the Paris agreement on global climate change, which itself would have gone part of the way to making sure we don't all die of starvation.  

Global climate change is nice for now for those folks who won't have to shovel as much snow out of their driveways in the winter. It won't be as nice for those same folks when groceries start disappearing from the shelves and meat, in particular, becomes a luxury item.

Why is Donald Trump rolling back the Clean Power Plan?  Does he actually think this will help save the hapless coal miner?  Because it won't.  Look at the historic trend:

 

(Incidentally I couldn't find this nice graphic online!  Had to take a snapshot with my phone.  Pardon the lack of a crisp image. Send one to me if you have one.)

There are more than four times as many jobs created every month as there are people total working in coal mining.  One month of job growth also eclipses all those currently employed in oil and gas extraction.  From the point of view of "saving jobs," saving the decrepit coal-mining industry means nothing.  It means diddly squat.

(If you'd like to read my proposal to eliminate the coal industry entirely while paying coal miners their current full wages to simply not mine coal at the minimal cost of around $13/year, it's contained in this post, and is not a long read.  In fact, given these new BLS numbers, there are fewer coal-industry employees than I had previously projected - so a plan to pay them their full wages for life to just not destroy our clean air or water any further will be even cheaper than I thought!)

With the GOP and Trump administration in full-on sell-out mode under the cover of "save the coal miner" (whatever happened to "drill, baby, drill"?) it falls to other countries to pull our collective fat out of the fire.

Trump voters like a strong leader.  It is clear from the first few months of his administration that Donald Trump plays a strong leader on television but isn't actually capable of leading with strength.  The Chinese, by contrast, actually have a strong leader.  And he's decided to put his heft into cutting down on pollution.  Publicly, at least, he's committed China to being the world's anti-pollution leader, which makes sense, because not too long ago China overtook the United States as the world's leading polluter.  With Donald Trump taking his toys and going home, those of us with children or hoping to have children should keep our fingers crossed that Xi Jiping means business.

This Fortune article makes clear that China has actually made some substantial progress curbing pollution and is ahead of its own goals.  Regardless, look at how dependent China is on coal:

Now look at the United States:

It would be much, much easier for the United States to kick coal to the curb than it would be for China to do so.  Not only does China rely on coal to a much larger extent for its power, it relies on coal to a much larger extent for its employment than we do.  It has a "rust belt problem," just like we do:

"The unexpected economic slowdown and the prolonged global recession has been a new challenge. It is complicating efforts to convince people to put in costly pollution equipment and to think about energy-saving technologies.  Emphases added mine:

"China is officially growing at about 7%, but that hides quite a big range of experience. In some places - in the 'rust belts' - growth has really decelerated, perhaps even to 2%. 

"The priority obviously then is to prevent layoffs and factory shutdowns. They have to worry about social stability if there is high unemployment.

"The issue really is spending a bigger part of the government's budget on pollution control equipment. Governments today are rich enough that this is no longer such a very big issue. We are not talking about building houses versus building pollution control equipment. This is no longer the stark choice facing China today." (Mun Ho, economist at the Harvard University China project, quoted by the BBC)

Who else might do the job America, like a spoiled child that won't eat its vegetables, refuses to do?  Who else but the "surrender monkeys" themselves, the French!

France is pouring billions into fusion research, specifically, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).  Skeptics might say it's wasted money, it may amount to nothing.  But if fusion power is developed, it could be a source of totally clean power for mankind FOREVER.  

The total estimated cost of ITER is around $22 billion.  Let's say that's all wasted money, that fusion power just doesn't work out.  Well, that's about the cost of the Trump administrator's proposed wall on the Mexican border that won't actually prevent any immigrants who are determined to get into the United States for doing so.  As far as wastes of money go, ITER has a lot more upside.

The United States' stake in ITER is around $4 billion, over the course of ITER's total development, i.e., an indeterminate period of time, but many years, guaranteed.  I'm going to suggest that number should be closer to $400 billion.  Because I repeat: if fusion power is successfully developed, it means limitless clean power for mankind FOREVER.

More to come on this topic soon, of course.  For now, let me just say I hope the Middle Kingdom overcomes the odds, and as always: vive la France.

Trucking, Tax Reform Politics, and Escalating Airstrikes

I love Hamilton Nolan, who here has a nice run-down on the changes facing trucking.  Here's the relevant excerpt.  Emphases added mine throughout:

There is no better example of an industry teetering on the precipice of destruction than truck driving. Trucks themselves will be fine; it’s just the jobs that will go away. There are about 3.5 million professional truck drivers in America. All of those jobs can and will disappear when self-driving truck technology is fully rolled out. The trucking industry itself expects that to start happening in earnest within five years. That may be optimistic. Last October, the Uber-owned startup Otto successfully demonstrated its self-driving delivery truck. We are now just in a countdown until the technology is tested and perfected and permitted and approved and widely distributed. If such technology costs $40,000 per truck, as one researcher estimates, its widespread adoption will be a no-brainer from a business standpoint. It will pay for itself within a year. Morgan Stanley has estimated that this technology could save the trucking industry $70 billion a year on driver salaries.  (The Concourse)

Nolan throws in this proposal, with which I agree:

Widespread clean energy use would save our economy hundreds of billions of dollars. Earmarking $50 billion of that for a jobs and development program in coal country would go a long way towards muting the concerns of workers who voted for Donald Trump with the vain hope of getting their coal jobs back. In essence, we need a tax on the economic benefits of globalization and technological change that is specifically earmarked for the workers in sectors being upended. Leaving this to the “free market” has simply caused all the gains to go to the investment class. It has not worked. False promises about rolling back globalization or moving technology backwards likewise will not work, and are stupid wastes of time. (The Concourse)

But of course, he also notes this:

On Friday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that the idea that American jobs could be lost to automation is “not even on my radar screen.”  (The Concourse)

In other news, the Washington Post has some reporting on what's up next for Trump and the GOP, namely, the big tax "reform" plan.  I believe the WaPo is behind a paywall so let me pull the choicest quotes for you:

Trump wants a tax cut across the board, according to the plan he published during the campaign. He has proposed relief for the wealthy especially, but also for less affluent households. The plan that Ryan (R-Wis.) and his colleagues in the House have put forward would not substantially reduce taxes for the middle class, and many households would pay more. ... In all, taxpayers with roughly average incomes could expect a tax cut of around $1,100 a year under Trump's plan, compared to just $60 under Ryan's plan once the proposals were fully implemented. (WaPo)

Look!  Here's a pretty graph.

Heavily skewed toward the rich, as is to be expected, but promising for the poor, actually!  Unless you're a single parent, in which case, screw you:

Meanwhile, both plans would increase the amount that many families can earn without paying taxes — to $30,000 for a married couple in Trump's plan and $24,000 in the proposal from Republicans in the House. These provisions would help poor and working-class families, although large families or households with one parent could be worse off under the simplified systems Republicans have proposed. (WaPo)

Then there's "border adjustment" (I'm talking about taxation, not a dumb wall), one of the only intriguing parts of this tax reform talk.  I covered border adjustment taxes (BATs) earlier here.  Political football-wise, Trump is not crazy about BATs, and Ryan is, so perhaps BATs are dead on arrival.  Still, it's much more intriguing concept in terms of Making America Great Again than just more huge tax cuts for the rich.  I don't have time today to revisit BATs, but I promise I will soon.  The ever-reliable Business Insider is on the case with a short article if you care to read it.  The fact that Wal-Mart and the Koch brothers hate the idea make it automatically intriguing to me, I can't lie. But on the other hand, let's not be simplistic.

Finally for today, I give you some fantastic data from Airwars.org, showing that the Trump admin may be pulling a Nixon to Obama's Johnson, i.e., ramping up the bombing:

Public Sector vs. Private Sector Efficiency and Jared Kushner's "SWAT team"

Among the many reasonable-sounding propositions that both the modern left and modern right subscribe to, by and large, is the premise that the private sector is more efficient (and features less "bureaucracy") than the public sector.  A friend of mine who is, generally speaking, anti-Trump nonetheless expressed positive hopes that First Son-in-law Jared Kushner's new "SWAT team" would take on needless government bureaucracy - that of course business people would do a good job streamlining government bureaucracy, which is, by its very nature, bloated.  Right?

Allow me to rain on that particular parade.

Beyond "common wisdom" and assorted anecdotes, there isn't an overwhelming body of evidence that the private sector is more "efficient" than the government in general.

First of all, it's well-known that both Medicare and Veterans Administration (VA) are much more cost-efficient than their private sector counterparts, offering comparable or at times superior care for lower cost.

The VA has already been subjected to private sector "improvements" with telling results (emphases added mine):

On top of that, Trump’s preferred option of giving veterans the choice of VA or private care has already been implemented, with interesting lessons. After the backlog scandal, Congress passed a reform bill co-authored by Bernie Sanders, and as part of it, a pilot program gave veterans a Choice Card to use at private facilities if their local VA hospital is more than 40 miles away, or if the wait time is over 30 days. This theoretically ensures that no veteran has to wait for or be inconvenienced by seeking medical care. (Fiscal Times)

Sounds good so far!

The rollout has been shaky, mainly because the 90-day deadline Congress demanded for setting up the system meant that the VA had to turn to private contractors with a history of botching health care management. This has led to a secondary waitlist for those seeking difficult-to-access private care, along with numerous billing errors and questions of eligibility. There was also no setup for integrating care between VA and non-VA providers, which meant veterans skipping between the two could get duplicative or substandard care. While some have predictably used this to label the VA as incompetent, it says more about the hurdles to delivering a public/private hybrid.

Republicans have responded by advocating for a permanent Choice Card, allowing veterans to go to anywhere they want (oddly, they haven’t offered the same kind of single-payer card for the nation’s other 300 million-odd citizens to present at any medical facility). That mirrors the Trump plan of a “public/private option.” But that would further strain a hobbled scheme private contractors couldn’t figure out for a much smaller universe of patients. It would also double the costs of the current VA. (Fiscal Times)

Oh.  

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) addressed the use of government contractors in a study released in 2013.  The findings are not good for "private sector efficiency" (emphases not mine):

• Specifically, the federal government approves service contract billing rates—deemed fair and reasonable—that pay contractors 1.83 times more than the government pays federal employees in total compensation (including benefits), and more than 2 times the total compensation paid in the private sector for comparable services.
• Federal employees were less expensive than contractors in 33 of the 35 occupational classifications POGO reviewed;
• In one instance, contractor billing rates were nearly 5 times more than the full compensation paid to federal employees performing comparable services; and 
• Private sector compensation was lower than contractor billing rates in all 35 occupational classifications we reviewed. (POGO)

Those are just some highlights.  The POGO study is not for the short of attention span and is quite dry, but it's worth your time.

I guess you could make the argument that there's so much private contractor graft because the government which hires these contractors simply doesn't pay attention:

If the government is serious about reining in federal spending, three simple questions about federal and contractor employees must be asked: (1) Who is performing services?; (2) What are they doing?; and (3) How much do they cost?

Still, the thinking that leads to the hiring of private contractors in the first place is "the private sector is more efficient / has less bureaucracy, duh".  In fact, it appears that when private contractors are employed, the opposite is true.

The United Nations Development Programme (you know - one world government filthy commies) has a good study out that alleges that the private sector might just not be more efficient than the public sector period - or, more accurately, that no one can prove this is the case, and that we should all, hence slow our roll.

The study is a bit TL;DR for most but contains a lot of interesting conclusions.  Consider this, for instance (emphases added mine):

One study compared the efficiency of state-owned enterprises with private enterprises in Spain, before and after privatisation (Arocena & Oliveros, 2012). The study found that prior to privatisation there were no significant differences in effciency between state-owned enterprises and their private counterparts. After privatisation the effciency of newly privatised firms significantly increased, while the original (private) competitors showed no significant improvement during the same period. The study also notes that the state-owned enterprises that had higher efficiency levels before privatisation were the same enterprises showing higher increase of efficiency after privatisation. (UNDP Study)

Don't get me wrong - I'm not necessarily hostile to the premise that the private sector is "innately" more efficient than the private sector.  I've worked for both the public and private sectors in the past six years, at two different organizations.  I could give you anecdotes both ways as to which organization is more "efficient" on the whole. It is much easier to book travel here at my private sector job; I had much faster and more reliable copy machines at my public sector job.  There are motivated and lazy people in support positions found in both organizations in roughly equal numbers, percentage-wise.  The high-end folks at my private sector job have a little more zip and energy, which makes sense, because they own equity in the firm - a situation you can't really duplicate among true civil servants.

I'm just not privy to much non-anecdotal hard evidence that the private sector is, on the whole, more efficient than government "bureaucracy".  I was certainly raised to think this is the case, as I suspect most Americans were.  But could this simply be myth, dating from the time of the Cold War?  Something we've internalized so completely that we accept it as fact?  Because the Soviet system was such a disaster, it follows logically that bureaucracy is always bad and should always be cut back, right?

Let me conclude (for now): I am certainly not telling you that the government is always more efficient than the private sector.  I am simply doing my best to disabuse you of the opposite theory.  The private sector has brought us the smartphone and the driverless car and that sort of thing.  And that's grand!  It's also given us this and this and this and of course this.

So let's be cautious of Kushner's little "SWAT team", and any glib claim that of course the private sector is more efficient than the public sector, duh!  The "duh" may be on us.

The Gig Economy and the State of the American Worker

Yesterday I posted this short New Yorker article on Lyft which prompted a discussion about the American worker, his/her financial health, and her/his odds for a livable retirement (SPOILER ALERT: not good).  I wanted to expand on that discussion today.  Emphases added mine throughout.

Lyft, like many participants in the "gig economy," has tried to make egregious labor conditions sound hip and fun.  The NYer article begins with the story of a Chicago Lyft driver, Mary, who goes into labor but decides to pick up a ride en route to the hospital.  Lyft spins this as Mary being a plucky can-do kind of gal:

Mary’s story looks different to different people. Within the ghoulishly cheerful Lyft public-relations machinery, Mary is an exemplar of hard work and dedication—the latter being, perhaps, hard to come by in a company that refuses to classify its drivers as employees. Mary’s entrepreneurial spirit—taking ride requests while she was in labor!—is an “exciting” example of how seamless and flexible app-based employment can be. Look at that hustle! You can make a quick buck with Lyft anytime, even when your cervix is dilating.  (New Yorker)

The reality is likely far more grim:

Lyft does not provide its drivers paid maternity leave or health insurance. (It offers to connect drivers with an insurance broker, and helpfully notes that “the Affordable Care Act offers many choices to make sure you’re covered.”) A third-party platform called SherpaShare, which some drivers use to track their earnings, found, in 2015, that Lyft drivers in Chicago net about eleven dollars per trip. Perhaps, as Lyft suggests, Mary kept accepting riders while experiencing contractions because “she was still a week away from her due date,” or “she didn’t believe she was going into labor yet.” Or maybe Mary kept accepting riders because the gig economy has further normalized the circumstances in which earning an extra eleven dollars can feel more important than seeking out the urgent medical care that these quasi-employers do not sponsor. In the other version of Mary’s story, she’s an unprotected worker in precarious circumstances. “I can’t pretend to know Mary’s economic situation,” Bryan Menegus at Gizmodo wrote, when the story first appeared. “Maybe she’s an heiress who happens to love the freedom of chauffeuring strangers from place to place on her own schedule. But that Lyft, for some reason, thought that this would reflect kindly on them is perhaps the most horrifying part.” (New Yorker)

Lyft is not the only company to engage in this doublespeak.  Uber got this ride-sharing ball rolling in the first place.  Uber's hostility to labor is at the core of its very existence.  Uber classifies full-time workers as independent contractors, so as to avoid paying them benefits.  It's worth $100 million to Uber to keep this reality-denying arrangement in place.  Uber stands against solidarity with taxi drivers, which makes sense, because Uber's very raison d'etre is to assault taxi drivers' livelihoods.

Being a taxi driver will earn you between $30-40k per year, depending on your location.  That's double the annual salary for a minimum wage worker (which is, itself, highly inadequate to live on).  Being an UberX driver, by contrast, will earn you much, much more money, potentially, in New York City - but nowhere other than New York City.  Outside of New York City, being an Uber driver will earn you far less than being a cabbie.  This Ridester article breaks down the numbers (it's a very good and thorough article - important to note than most Uber drivers do not take home their entire fare, more like eighty cents to every dollar of their fare).  The takeaway is that outside of NYC, most Uber drivers earn less than minimum wage.

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.  Never forget that quote. It's by 19th century railroad magnate Jay Gould and it's as good today as it was then.  The benefits-less, underpaid Uber driver has been pitted against the lower-middle class cabbie.  Lyft is part of this class war as well.  These companies are not massively profitable dominant because they've invented some groundbreaking technology - they're massively profitable dominant because they've radically reduced the costs of labor.  But they've done a fine job exploiting the basic lack of sympathy for your fellow working man and woman that most of us exhibit in this day and age. 

As the gig economy edges out the old economy - the mythic Make America Great Again economy - the women who are working until they literally must give birth, and their male counterparts, decreasingly have a dime to their name.  Nearly six in ten American workers wouldn't be able to cover a $500 emergency bill.   Think about that - a sizable majority of Americans couldn't come up with five hundred bucks.  

What direction have we been going in as a country for the past forty years?  Almost without exception, we have accepted that "the market" is almost always right and "the government" is almost always wrong.  Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton basically agreed on this point, and so have their successors.  How has that worked for us?  Most of us can't come up with five hundred bucks.  That's pathetic.

Our retirement savings are a joke as well.  In part, that is because we've come to rely so completely on the 401(k).  The inventor of the 401(k) himself, Ted Benna, now refers to his invention as "a monster":

The plans had grown so overcomplicated and so fraught with hidden fees and opportunities for bad decisions that they were better at enriching the financial industry than the actual savers — precisely the abuses that nearly drove [Benna] out of the business and to the Christian college back in 1980, he said. (Marketwatch.com)

Our private retirement plans are similar to our private health insurance plans in that much of the money we put into them is wasted on administrative overhead and other "skimming" fees and costs.  Medicaid - a government run program - is far most cost efficient than private insurance, with only about 2% of its cost going to administrative overhead, compared to 12-14% for private plans.  Think about that.  That's a lot of wasted money.  Your money.

(Naturally, Secretary of Labor nominee Alexander Acosta thinks that a rule which requires brokers offering retirement investment advice to put their clients' interest first is overly burdensome.)

Because we have poured so much of our money into 401(k)s over the years, we have not committed the financial resources would might have otherwise to Social Security.  As such, it's more or less impossible to live solely on Social Security in retirement.  Perhaps if we, collectively, had not decided to put so much of our salaries into 401(k)s but had, instead, voted for higher taxes to ensure more generous Social Security payments in old age, retirement for folks today would be a less grim proposition.

Of course, the usual candidates would like to take what few Social Security funds we can enjoy and do away with them, on the grounds that Social Security faces a funding "crisis".  The premise that Social Security is insolvent or due to become insolvent is - pardon my language - total bullshit, as Dean Baker makes clear here.  I don't think I can improve on this article which dispels key myths / fear-mongering regarding Social Security, so just read it, please.

The time has come for us to admit as a society that the market does not always have the answer to prosperity; in fact, the market is often the enemy of prosperity.  We, the People, owe it to ourselves to demand that things be made right, and that requires more government as often it is requires less.  The alternative is not some new-fangled miracle; it is cruel and fatal.

At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. The contrast between the gig economy’s rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our thinking especially clear.  (New Yorker)

UPDATE: reader Miles Kennedy corrects me on the use of the term "profit," which you can see in my stricken-out text above, and he is right to do so.  He gave me permission to quote him verbatim, and here's what he said - please read:

I agree with most of what you've said here about the pitfalls of the gig economy (especially as a former freelancer for 15+ years), it's a huge human cost and corporations are exploiting this idea in a very cynical way. But there are some major accounting errors in your statement today, which is quite unlike you. First off - neither Uber nor Lyft are profitable by any stretch of the imagination. An average Uber fare only covers 40% of the cost of the ride - meaning they are losing 60% on EVERY SINGLE RIDE. Obviously they are leveraging their billions in VC debt and "network" for a potential huge IPO (aka the modern american dream) - but once the company actually has to make money and regulators finally catch up with them, you'll likely see a 300% or more fare increase, just to break even! That is, if they still hire drivers at all, because of their heavy investments in driverless tech. On the bright side, traditional taxi companies ARE catching up with apps and on demand services (in LA at least) but still can't compete on 2/3 rds discounted price. However, they are playing the long game and betting that uber will be going away once the VC money dries up. My opinion is that these "disruptors" will not be around long enough to make a real change in labor, other than their invention of a fancy way to call a cab.

Miles' points are well made.  What I should have said is that the exploitation of labor (not fancy new technologies) have made the CEOs of Uber and Lyft tremendously rich - but it's true, the companies are not profitable in the traditional corporate sense!  This is the case with many a start-up (Venture Capital's a topic for another post). I stand by what I wrote above, but I definitely misused "profit" which was quite sloppy of me.

The only bit of Miles' quote I'm not sure I agree with is his opinion at the end - I feel like there will be a good deal of incentive to keep labor cheap and disposable, whatever happens to Uber and Lyft, and that once damage is done of this sort of tends to stay done.  However, I'll definitely revisit this topic at some point, and in the meantime, consider reading this Jalopnik article which argues that Uber is more or less doomed.

GOPcare and Women

A reader asked how GOPcare will affect women.  It's a very good question, and it's not getting a lot of play, perhaps because GOPcare is so devastating to all involved that to single out women diminishes the scope of the potential disaster.

However, if your inclination is to suspect that women will get kicked harder in the nuts than men will by GOPcare, you are not off-base!  Let's look at a few ways in which this terrible proposed legislation is even more terrible if you happen to be a woman.

For this blog I'll be drawing from this short Time article and this short Cosmopolitan article.  For you sexists reading this article, yes, a magazine that gives you really uninteresting sex tips is a better source of information on health care policy than the television you watch.  Emphases added mine throughout.

First of all, let us never forget that women are paid less than men, period.  The specifics differ based on the occupational field in question, the level of education involved, and so forth.  Pinning down one rock-solid number for all of society is more or less impossible.  Here's a great webpage that lays many factors out clearly, and visually.  For now, to say that women on the whole earn around 76 cents to every dollar a man earns is not a crazy ballpark figure.

With that in mind, the substantial economic burdens that GOPcare places on every individual who decide they can't do without health insurance are that much worse for women, simply by dint of the fact that women have less money, period.

Further, Obamacare / the Affordable Care Act restricted insurers from charging women more than men for their individual health care plans.  You can kiss that restriction goodbye under GOPcare:

Obamacare helped women dramatically by removing an insurer’s ability to charge women more than men for policies, offering no co-pay birth control that allowed tens of thousands of women and teens to get IUDs, and adding annual exams, mammography, and depression screenings to preventative care. (Cosmopolitan)

Sounds to me like you should maybe just not get breast cancer for now.  And hey, stay happy!  Turn that frown upside down.

Naturally, GOPcare continues the GOP's berserk war on Planned Parenthood, an organization that most Americans approve of regardless of gender - although certainly it has taken such a sustained political beating over the past few decades that it is, today, on the ropes, public approval-wise.  

Despite the fact that none of the $500 million Planned Parenthood receives from the federal government each year can be used for abortion services, the GOP plan would strip the organization of Medicaid reimbursements, which account for 40% of Planned Parenthood's annual budget overall, and 75% of the federal funds Planned Parenthood receives. (Time)

So if you're counting on Planned Parenthood for anything - not just abortion services, but cancer screenings or prenatal services, for instance - you are going to be at least somewhat inconvenienced by GOPcare, or perhaps substantially hobbled in your ability to get quality medical care.

Funny though... as you might suspect, GOPcare doesn't go far enough for the pro-life crowd:

Yet anti-abortion leaders still argue that it isn’t enough. The conservative Family Research Council, responding to the new bill, praised it for its “pro-life” components but complained there was no mechanism in place to forbid a patient from using funds from a Health Savings Account (HSA) to pay for an abortion. FRC argues that because HSAs would hold the tax credits for the new plans, paying for an abortion with those funds are actually forcing taxpayers to pay for abortion, despite the fact that the rest of the earnings placed in an HSA would come from the account holder and are their own personal, private funds.  (Cosmopolitan)

As we all know, abortions are breezy, relaxing affairs and sometimes women just have them for fun, so, naturally, we taxpayers shouldn't be asked to pay for them.

In a charming touch, GOPcare makes life harder on victims of domestic abuse.  You know, those spoiled "snowflakes" who can't take a beating or too without whining about it. 

Under Obamacare, couples have to file taxes jointly to receive a tax credit—unless they are victims of domestic abuse, domestic violence, or spousal abandonment. The AHCA doesn't account for this and requires all couples to file jointly to receive a tax credit, without exception. (

Beyond these measures I can't find anything specifically in this egregiously cruel bill that singles out women, but (1) I could be wrong about that, and please bring any further details to my attention so I can post an update, and (2) gee, I think the above is enough, right?

Before I conclude, I want to circle back to the blog I linked to above regarding television coverage of health care news.  It's a great blog post and I urge you to read the entire thing.  It pertains to the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, not GOPcare.  But the lessons to be learned stand. Here's the crux of what's said therein:

A recent study published by a team of researchers led by Sarah Gollust at the University of Minnesota may shed some light on this question. Gollust and her colleagues analyzed 1,569 local evening television news stories related to the ACA that were aired in the United States during the early months of when the health care reform was rolled out (between October 1, 2013, and April 19, 2014). They focused on analyzing local television news broadcasts because these continue to constitute the primary source of news for Americans, especially for those who are age 50 and higher. A Pew survey recently showed that 57% of all U.S. adults rely on television for their news, and among this group, local TV new (46%) is a more common source than cable news (31%) or network news (30%).

Gollust and colleagues found that 55% of the news stories either focused on the politics of the ACA such as political disagreements over its implementation (26.5%) or combined information regarding its politics with information on how it would affect healthcare insurance options (28.6%). Only 45% of the news stories focused exclusively on the healthcare insurance options provided by the law. The politics-focused news stories were also more likely to refer to the law as “Obamacare” whereas healthcare insurance focused news segments used the official name “Affordable Care Act” or “ACA”. Surprisingly, the expansion of Medicaid, which was one of the cornerstones of the ACA because it would increase the potential access to health insurance for millions of Americans, was often ignored. Only 7.4% of news stories mentioned Medicaid at all, and only 5% had a Medicaid focus.

Just a reminder: DO NOT GET YOUR NEWS FROM THE TELEVISION. 

Trumpcare Politics Update

I am expecting my first child at any point in the next 16 days, so I'm a bit on edge as I type.  Nonetheless I would be remiss if I didn't try to bring you fine folks some kind of insightful commentary.  Today's is more political football than anything else, I hate to say.

It looks as though Trump is really leaning hard on the GOP to get Trumpcare / GOPcare care passed.  He is showing the kind of Executive Branch weight-throwing that Obama rarely pulled, publicly at least.  I'm all for that, in theory, except that the President in this case is using his heft on behalf of a bill that is very, very flawed and will likely result in millions losing their health insurance.

It would be nice if the President would use his swagger to deliver on a campaign promise - bringing the cost of prescription medication down.  But it looks as though he doesn't even know how to do that, if, in fact, he is sincere about doing so.  The insightful Trumponomics Daily newsletter by Tory Newmer, which is sadly coming to a close, lays it on the line (emphases added mine):

But the president appeared to make news on that front Monday night. At a campaign-style rally in Louisville, Ky., aimed at boosting intraparty support for the Obamacare replacement plan, Trump called drug costs “outrageous” and said he wants to attack them in the bill that the House is set to take up Thursday.

...

Alas, hours later, House Republican leaders unveiled a package of changes to the bill, and the drug industry once again is escaping untouched. Trump did leave himself some wiggle room Monday night by noting if he can’t get his tough-medicine edits in the legislation moving this week, “we’re going to do it right after” in a follow-up bill. But that one will require 60 votes to clear the Senate, a fact that’s prompted conservative hardliners like Ted Cruz of Texas to dismiss it as stillborn. The bigger point, perhaps, is that Trump just demonstrated his apparent ignorance about a basic fact of a bill that will go a long way toward determining his domestic agenda’s fate. He’ll presumably need a working knowledge of the measure — what it actually does and does not do — in order to convince Republican lawmakers facing a potentially career-ending vote to keep faith with him. He's meeting with House GOPers this morning to press his case. The next 72 hours will tell the tale.

It's possible that Donald Trump is just irritated by the whole healthcare thing, and that he wants to get to tax cuts so he can do his infrastructure bill.  Why he wouldn't just open with an "emergency" infrastructure bill (as Obama did with the stimulus bill), if he's so big on it, is beyond me.  Instead he's opening on a bill that will cost millions of people their health insurance.  It seems, in political terms, insane, but he just won a big election.

If, in fact, stocks are more overvalued than they've been since Y2K, President Trump is going to need that infrastructure bill bad, as bubbles tend to lead to big ol' recessions.

In other news, the Jets, of whom I am a fan for some reason, signed Josh McCown for $6 billion, which just makes me want to drink bleach.  Can't they do anything right?!?!  UPDATE: Ooops, I meant $6 million.  But really, would I put it past the Jets to give a QB with a 2-20 W/L a multi-billion dollar contract? I would not.

THAAD

Let's talk the Terminal High Altitude Area Device, or THAAD.

THAAD is basically a bunch of trucks with missiles on them that shoot at other missiles (which are first detected by radar).  If you hear that, think "missile defense," and then think, "but doesn't missile defense not work?", your thought process is not shoddy.

Missile defense has a pretty mixed tracked record.  Apparently Israel's "Iron Dome" works quite well, intercepting 95% of all incoming missiles.  The 1976-developed U.S. Patriot system has a dismal track record of a 25% interception rate of Iraqi scud missiles fired in the 1991 Gulf War.  The Patriot system has been upgraded since then, and apparently scored a "perfect nine for nine" missiles fired in the Operation Iraqi Freedom, although questions were raised about an additional 14 missiles, and, whaddya know, the Army declined to answer those questions.  All of this is detailed in a nice, short, and clear article here.  

All this is to say that missile defense is a bit of gamble, and furthermore, it's a very expensive gamble.  Consider the relatively-expensive Iron Dome, which fires Tamir missiles.  Those Tamir missiles cost fifty times the crude missiles which they shoot down.  Maybe any price is worth it to defend civilians, of course, but holy cow what a price tag!

With that background, let's get to current affairs in and around the Korean Peninsula.

Plans to deploy THAAD in South Korea go back to the Obama administration, and the Trump administration has so far been enthusiastic about the planned deployment.  China, however, has been less than thrilled.

The issue is that THAAD's radar will not only pick up North Korean activity; it will, of necessity, pick up Chinese activity as well, in the Manchuria region.  Naturally, China, a nuclear superpower, doesn't want the United States to have the capacity to detect an early ICBM (inter-continental ballistic missile) or other launch.  And that's not unreasonable; would we want China to be able to detect one of our own?

However, China doesn't have the capacity, for now, to deploy a similar radar system that would detect US missile activity.  In theory, that gives us "the edge" in a potential nuclear conflict with China, although it is worth taking a deep breath and remembering that in a nuclear conflict with China, civilization as we know it will likely come to an end, so let's all play nice and hope it doesn't come to that.

China, South Korea's largest trading partner, is in a good position to retaliate against South Korea -  economically - should THAAD be deployed.  Some of the methods already used by China to retaliate against South Korea are detailed here.  Suffice it to say, China can put the sting to South Korea pretty good. (South Korea has already lodged a complaint with the WTO about China's retaliatory behavior.)

For this reason, THAAD - ostensibly meant to defend South Korea, in large part - is not especially popular in South Korea.  This Vox article does a good job running down some of South Korean opposition to THAAD, including one fellow who wrote an anti-THAAD protest message in his own blood for Pete's sake.

The current, conservative government in South Korea, which agreed to THAAD, is on its way out, due to bribery scandals and/or perhaps just plain being embarrassing (you sure can't remove a President from office in this country for that! HAR HAR!).  The likely incoming President, Moon Jae-in, is not a fan of THAAD.  Can he stop its deployment, though?  He might not be able to assume office in time to stop the out-going, embarrassing Park Geun-he administration from deploying the system.

Meanwhile, the Republican administration of Donald Trump is, as you would expect, quite gung-ho about THAAD and generally not in a mood to cooperate with China to attempt to tame South Korea.  The Trump administration doesn't show a lot of concern for what Moon Jae-in might think, and Secretary of State Rex "sure doesn't look like a strong Secretary of State so far" Tillerson has said that "all options are on the table" with regard to North Korea, i.e., that perhaps the US might consider a military strike or even invasion.

If I was the dictator of North Korea, my response to that would be "oooh I'm real scared", because honestly, the military options available to the United States all totally suck.

China is clearly getting a little sick of having to shelter and protect the nutjobs in Pyongyang, and who knows, perhaps THAAD will be a "show of strength" that will convince China to part ways with North Korea.  Or, perhaps, boxed into a corner by THAAD and insulted generally by the Trump administration, China will not only not back away from pressuring North Korea but will up its game against America elsewhere, especially in the South China Sea, where it - not the United States - currently seems to hold the cards.

Why does the South China Sea matter?  Oh, you know, this:

An estimated $5 trillion worth of goods are transported through South China Sea shipping lanes each year, including more than half the world’s annual merchant fleet tonnage and a third of all maritime traffic worldwide.

Oil transported through the Malacca Strait from the Indian Ocean, en route to East Asia via the South China Sea, is triple the amount that passes through the Suez Canal and fifteen times the volume that transits the Panama Canal.

Yeowch.

 

In short, this author's opinion: if THAAD was truly a lock to be a working anti-missile defense system, any amount of diplomatic turmoil with China and South Korea would surely be worth it.  But because it's not a lock, deploying THAAD seems like a very heavy-handed approach to take that alienates China and South Korea while providing no guarantee of security at all.  Global diplomacy guideline: if the move you're making is real macho, mull it over careful ahead of time, because the odds are it's stupid and counterproductive.

Lest you think I am being excessively harsh on the Trump administration - let's bear in mind that THAAD originated during the Obama years!

I will be sure to follow up on THAAD in the future.

Trump Democrats in Macomb County, MI

For the last two days, I've discussed Trump's scandals and how they do or do not impact him.  My feeling is that the scandals - tax evasion, corruption in Azerbaijan, you name it - essentially will not impact him all that much.  The scandals get his opponents riled up, but his opponents were already riled up.  Meanwhile, the scandals do not deter his supporters in the slightest.

This study by Democracy Corps and the Roosevelt Institute on white Democrats in Macomb County, MI - the famed home of the "Reagan Democrat" - who voted for Trump teaches us much about what is going on in the mind of the average Trump supporter.  I regard it as a study that should be taken very seriously, so I'm going to try to break it down for you now.  I apologize in advance, as my thoughts below ramble a bit.  Emphases added mine throughout.

All participants in  this study were white, non-college educated, none younger than 30 years old, and all from Macomb County, MI. 

Barack Obama carried Macomb County in both 2008 and 2012, but this time many of those same Obama voters voted for Trump.  They are not suffering from Trumpgrets.  They are standing by their man, they see the protestors as engaging in unfair behavior, and they think President Trump deserves a shot.  Like many on the left, they hold shaky, extreme views of reality.

Some fear growing unrest and some even worry "we're going to end up in a civil war".

I'd heard about coups, but not civil wars!

 

It's worth noting now that we have several months of President Trump under our belts, and these Trump voters do not regret their vote.  Despite the flap over the "Muslim Ban," the whole "Obama wiretap" thing, the desecration of Jewish graves, tweet after tweet after tweet of this or that inflammatory statement - none of all that matters to these voters.  They do not care.  They have expectations of President Trump that make all these concerns irrelevant.  As such, I personally doubt any tax scandal that might afflict Donald Trump is unlikely to dissuade these voters substantially.

Now, this might seem odd, but many of these folks do not care for congressional Republicans!  They are supportive of Republicans totally controlling government because they want President Trump to have a free hand to pursue his agenda, not because they especially value the GOP agenda or hold the GOP in high regard.

These voters see Donald Trump as a "strong leader".  To many of us, he appears to be a petulant, incompetent crybaby, but strength is in the eye of the beholder, and to these Macomb County Trump Democrats, he is a strong leader.  Therefore I suggest that standing on soapbox and ridiculing Donald Trump's statements as ridiculous, whiny, desperate, out-of-touch, demented and so forth will not sway his supporters - they see the very same statements, tweets and so forth as strength.  This is a key point to grok.  They also view Trump's (often crazy) statements as "not being afraid to be unpopular," which I think most of us would argue is a good trait, all other concerns aside. 

These voters really do not like immigrants.  No issue came up more in the study.  The mad-on towards immigrants is so intense that a few of the folks in the study blamed immigrants for problems in modern healthcare.  In this view, somehow, immigrants are getting good health care and that is what is driving up premiums for hard working Americans.  It's a totally insane belief, but it's a deeply held belief.

One of the women was really “hoping that [Trump will] fix our healthcare situation, but that comes back to the immigrants.” 

It's interesting to note that "Reagan Democrats" from Macomb County used to regard African-Americans as the bogeyman, but those views have shifted.  To the extent blacks came up in this study, the study participants expressed vague pity, not anger or fear.  They were proud, ostensibly at least, of the process made in race relations and multiculturalism over the past few decades (although they argued that Obama had made race relations worse in this country, which is a head-scratcher to me).

Their problems with the first African American president are rooted in a fairly complicated, but not particularly racial or racist framework. Very many of them were “proud that we finally had a minority president” and they were quite proud of their vote for him. They were hopeful that this meant “we can break that tension, the prejudice and everything, because it wasn’t just the black people that voted for him.”

It seems, then, that perhaps this group - as with most human groups - perpetually needs an enemy, an external foe, an other, and that once upon a time Blacks had been this foe, and now it's Immigrants.

That is why one-in-four participants said that Trump’s commitment on the border, immigration and refugees was one of the best things about him and fulfilling that commitment is one of their greatest hopes for his presidency. Some say “I don’t really care about the wall, as long as we can get a grip on the illegal immigrant problem.”

It goes without saying that the old canard of "legal immigration is good, but illegal immigration is bad" came up.  There's not a lot of reflection on this topic that perhaps immigration laws in earlier periods of American history were much better, and more welcoming, than they are today.  You have to wonder if the Polish-, Iraqi- and Albanian-American families surveyed would even be here today had walls been erected against them.  But it is likely they might take offense if you pointed this out to them.

Their views of Barack Obama I found quite interesting.  They thought well of him, generally, as a man, and did not regret their votes for him; in fact, they said they faced a lot of pushback from friends and family for their Obama support, that they felt more judged for voting for Obama than Trump.  They also said that they felt Obama did not put black people before white people, but at the same time, that he was more of a divider than a uniter!  If this seems incongruous, it's because it is.

These voters felt that Donald Trump will fix health care and that the Affordable Care Act d/b/a Obamacare was responsible for driving up medical costs in recent years.  This is a very serious disconnect from reality.  There's some dispute about whether or not Obamacare bent the "cost curve" of medical cost inflation.  So-called conservatives generally argue it did not, and so-called liberals generally argue that it did.  There's evidence both ways, but there's certainly no evidence that it made medical cost inflation worse.  Medical coverage was the problem addressed - more or less successfully - by Obamacare.  Medical inflation remains to be addressed as an issue.  (I'll let you google "obamacare cost curve" on your own).

These people do not like paying for health insurance.  Understandably so.  I don't like paying for it either.  Private health insurance is fucking rubbish, pardon my language. 

“There are people that can’t work for a living that collects welfare, gets the insurance paid for them 100 percent including prescriptions, dental and everything and you got me that works for 25, 30 years straight, I get hurt on the job and then I have to pay for my healthcare insurance, I have to pay for my prescriptions and everything else while we got all these other people that can work that's sitting back and collecting it all for free.”

...it was clear to them that the law was not benefitting them and their families, and Democrats should take that seriously.

The voters in the study want medical costs brought down.  They believe, wrongly, that a repeal of Obamacare will accomplish that, but they could live with Obamacare continuing as long as the cost of health care comes down.

Therefore, as GOPcare / Trumpcare rolls onward, and it becomes clear that the result will be millions losing their insurance and rising premiums for the rest of us, the result could be the first major bit of political trouble for President Trump among these voters.

These voters, for all they like Donald Trump, do not like or trust Congressional Republicans.  They view them as slimy, dishonest, lackeys of the ultra-rich, all the bad traits we associate with run-of-the-mill politicians.  They also warn that they better move swiftly to get health care and the immigrant situation sorted out:

“I want them to pass all of Trump’s ideas in the next hundred days,” said one man. “I want all these things, and they have the power. …They should have their replacement for Obamacare right now, they've had eight years to do it.” Several warn: “they better get together or they're going to end up getting beat out again too if they don't do something and work with Trump. And we have the Congress and we have the Senate. Let’s get something done.”
 

This is another possible area of trouble for Trump and his GOP allies in Congress, who have been unable to accomplish much to date.  Another potential third rail would be any attempt to privatize Social Security or turn Medicaid into block grants to the states, which GOP though leaders have long dreamed of:

When voters learned about the position of Trump’s cabinet secretaries on Medicare and Social Security, alarm bells went off. Many are upset by the prospect of working later in life. Others are skeptical about vouchers: “The voucher to buy private insurance is kind of a joke, because if you can’t buy insurance on your own, then the voucher is not going to do you any good whatsoever.”

At the same time, however, these voters have no problem with the Trump cabinet being filled top to bottom with millionaires and billionaires.  They think that Trump himself will overrule them as needs be.

Of course he wants rich and successful people in his cabinet and of course he has the last word, not his cabinet secretaries. 

Still, it's all a matter of phrasing:

When his cabinet is described as full of campaign donors, Goldman Sachs bankers (bailed out by the taxpayers) and people who use undocumented workers in their homes, they question whether this is the Donald Trump they voted for. “That right there seems to be two-faced,” and Trump is now “just the puppet” doing what Goldman Sachs want. Most important, this means they won’t get the changes they wanted and it’s possible “we’re in for another four or possibly eight years of the same old same old.”

Donald Trump's proposed tax plan, which these voters do not seem to understand, did not sit well with them.  Finding out that his proposed tax cuts heavily favor the rich, a few of the voters began to characterize Donald Trump as just another standard politician after all; a return to the same old "bullshit" (their word, not mine).

So - what have we learned so far?  These voters don't care about scandals, Trumps' taxes, or Twitter dust-ups; they do care very much about their health care and whether or not rich people are going to come out on top of the little guy yet again.

The trope about many Trump supporters having positive feelings for Bernie Sanders was more or less confirmed by the study.  Several said that Sanders "would've won" and that he "sounded like Trump."  

A majority of these voters were very open to Democrats like Senators Brown, Sanders and Warren who oppose trade deals, want to protect consumers from Wall Street, oppose corporate tax breaks, and will bar secret campaign money so government works for the middle class. That’s the kind of change they were hungry for.

I'd go out on a limb and wager a guess that many of these folks would be big fans of single payer, if it was framed as a solution to the overarching greed of the fat cats running the health insurance industry. 

I've gone on quite long enough and I need to get back to work.  I'll just leave you with this closing thought for now:

It's been the presumption among most Trump opponents that one of two things will happen over the next eight years: either (1) Donald Trump and the GOP will both suffer colossal defeats, first in 2018 midterms and then in 2020, with Donald Trump falling at the ballot box, as America wises up to the pro-corporate, working-class-be-damned agenda that Trump and the GOP are jointly pursuing; or alternately (2) Donald Trump and the GOP will just absolutely dominate for eight entire years, with Democrats cosigned to obscurity the entire time.

I'm going to propose a third alternative, which I can't say I'm a fan of but which seems eminently possible to me.

Voters, beginning in 2018, hold the GOP's feet to the fire for whatever we get out of GOPcare / Trumpcare, their regressive tax policies, their attempts (successful or not) to kick millions off their insurance, their cuts to valued rural programs, and more.  By the time 2020 rolls around, Democrats retake Congress and make huge advances at the state level.  

At the same time, Donald Trump wins re-election because voters do not link him to the GOP agenda. The Democrats spend their time attacking Trump over various scandals and character issues and nominate yet another pro-corporate candidate in the mold of John Kerry or Hillary Clinton (I hate to always pick on Cory Booker, but he seems to be the current poster boy for this sort of approach), who fails once more to sufficiently fire up the progressive base.  Meanwhile, Trump's supporters - the people who see him as his own man and a strong leader - show back up to show their support for their hero, while at the same time voting for Democrats on the local level.

And as such, we end up with a reversal of the Obama years - a hamstrung Republican President with a Democrat congress.  Of course, in this scenario, the President will have the Supreme Court on his side.  It often seems we doomed to a perpetually hyper-conservative Supreme Court.

Have a great weekend everyone!  Soon I will get to budget discussion and finally a look at THAAD.