Group items tagged

As President Donald Trump makes a hurried final push for reelection, he is relying not only on his campaign staff but on government officials to transmit his message to voters

his White House press secretary has appeared on television from campaign headquarters, identified as a campaign adviser. His top White House immigration adviser convened a campaign-organized briefing to assail Joe Biden

Seldom does a day go by in a battleground state where a Cabinet member from the Trump administration is not paying a visit -- often with a government announcement in tow.

When it comes to health policy, President Donald Trump made it his mission to undo many measures his predecessor put in place.

In their four years in office, the Trump administration made sweeping changes that affected the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, abortion and transgender rights, in many cases reversing the efforts of the Obama administration.

Biden's health officials will likely be active, as well, but it will take time for all their actions to take effect.

New Zealand has advance purchased two new coronavirus vaccines from pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and Novavax, giving the small island country the ability to vaccinate its 5 million residents.

they will go a step further and provide free doses to its population as well as neighboring nations Tokelau, Cook Islands, Niue, Samoa, Tonga, and Tuvalu, should they want them.

"Never before has the entire globe sought to vaccinate the entire population at the same time," Ardern said. "This will be a sustained rollout over months not weeks but our pre-purchase agreements means New Zealand is well positioned to get on with it as soon as it is proven safe to do so."

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

The world needs to address the root causes of vaccine hesitancy. We can’t go on believing that the issue can be solved simply by flooding skeptical communities with public service announcements or hectoring people to “believe in science.”

For the past five years, we’ve conducted surveys and focus groups abroad and interviewed residents of the Bronx to better understand vaccine avoidance.

We’ve found that people who reject vaccines are not necessarily less scientifically literate or less well-informed than those who don’t. Instead, hesitancy reflects a transformation of our core beliefs about what we owe one another.

the British economist Simon Wren-Lewis argues persuasively that financial markets were responding in large part to increased uncertainty, which was in turn largely a reflection of political uncertainty. The Truss economic plan was obviously unsustainable politically, but it wasn’t clear what would come next.

the political point is clear. Truss staked out a political position that, to a first approximation, has no public support either in Britain or in the United States. So failure was inevitable.

A 2017 paper by the political scientist Lee Drutman mapped out the distribution of U.S. voters on these axes; it’s unlikely to have changed much since. (And the distribution of British voters seems similar.) His picture looked like this:

The nation’s largest companies and lobbying groups spent a combined $2.3 billion in 2022 to shape or scuttle key components of the emerging law, according to a review of federal ethics disclosures and data compiled by the money-in-politics watchdog OpenSecrets.

Among the fiercest critics was the pharmaceutical industry, which spent more than $375 million to lobby over that period, the records show. Many tried and failed to block Congress from granting the government new powers to negotiate the price of selected prescription drugs under Medicare.

The work to implement that program is underway: The Biden administration is supposed to identify the first 10 drugs it is targeting for negotiation by September, continue the formal process into 2024 and see the prices implemented in 2026, with more drugs to follow in future years. Drug manufacturers that refuse to comply would face steep financial penalties.

Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute

Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.

in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”

Lindsey is one of almost 3 million children in the U.S. who have been diagnosed with a serious emotional or behavioral health condition. When the pandemic forced schools and doctors' offices closed last spring, it also cut children off from the trained teachers and therapists who understand their needs.

In the first few months of the pandemic, between March and May 2020, children on Medicaid received 44% fewer outpatient mental health services — including therapy and in-home support — compared to the same time period in 2019, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. That's even after accounting for increased telehealth appointments.

Roughly 6% of U.S. children, ages 6 through 17, are living with serious emotional or behavioral difficulties, including children with autism, severe anxiety, depression and trauma-related mental health conditions.

The more I covered Biden, the more I came to feel affection and respect for him. Then, as now, he could be a tough boss, occasionally angry and hard on his staff. But throughout his life, Biden has usually been on the side of the underdog. I’ve rarely met a politician so rooted in the unpretentious middle-class ethos of the neighborhood he grew up in. He has a seemingly instinctive ability to bond with those who are hurting.

He has his faults — the tendency to talk too much, the chip on his shoulder about those who think they are smarter than he is, the gaffes, that episode of plagiarism and the moments of confusion — but I’ve always thought: Give me a leader who identifies with those who feel looked down upon. Give me a leader whose moral compass generally sends him in the right direction.

But I’ve also come to fear and loathe Donald Trump. I cannot fathom what damage that increasingly deranged man might do to this country if given a second term. And the fact is that as the polls and the mood of the electorate stand today, Trump has a decent chance of beating Biden in November of next year and regaining power in 2025.

This is the driving theory of most of the progressive policy agenda, most of the time: give people money or a moneylike voucher they can use to buy something they need or even just want.

The problem is that if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing. You can see the poisoned fruit of those mistakes in higher education and housing. But it also misses the opportunity to pull the technologies of the future progressives want into the present they inhabit.

The first problem is explored in “Cost Disease Socialism,” a new paper by the center-right Niskanen Center. “We are in an era of spiraling costs for core social goods — health care, housing, education, child care — which has made proposals to socialize those costs enormously compelling for many on the progressive left,”

We are living in, as George F. Will recently put it, “the most dangerous U.S. moment since World War II, more menacing than the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis”—because then the country was dealing with just one reckless nuclear power, and today it is dealing with three (China, Iran, Russia). Our national debt is dangerously high. Any serious discussion of the viability of Medicare and Social Security is sidelined indefinitely, even as the tidal wave of Baby Boomers reaches retirement age. The Southern border is indeed in crisis. Emerging technologies such as AI threaten to, at a minimum, have a significant economic impact.

Such a time requires clarity, forward thinking, and moral leadership. But it is abundantly clear that Republicans are not up these challenges—which was not lost on Buck. “It is impossible for the Republican party to confront our problems and offer a course correction for the future while being fixated on retribution and vengeance for contrived injustices of the past.” Indeed, those issues decided the speakership election. They are the raison d’être of the party’s prohibitive nominee for president.

In 1989, a policy analyst at a leading conservative Washington, D.C. think tank described a workable planopens in a new tab or window in which private insurers, just as in Germany, provide universal coverage. This plan would:Change the current tax treatment of health insurance (which largely benefits people with employer-based coverage at the expense of lower income Americans)Declare that families face the responsibility of having adequate insuranceOffer government assistance to families unable to afford health coverage on their ownReform the Medicare program

The middle planks of this conservative plan ultimately became the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) Marketplacesopens in a new tab or window, where families could purchase health insurance in a new, nationally regulated market with financial subsidies to cover costs for those with incomes below 400% of the federal poverty level (about $92,120opens in a new tab or window for a family of three).

President Barack Obama signed the ACA into law 13 years ago today, transforming a patchwork system of individual health insurance markets into one that today could form a national framework for universal healthcare

Business types and some economists may talk glowingly about the virtues of “creative destruction,” but the process can be devastating, economically and socially, for those who find themselves on the destruction side of the equation. This is especially true when technological change undermines not just individual workers but also whole communities.

It’s a big part of what has happened to rural America.

This process and its effects are laid out in devastating, terrifying and baffling detail in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” a new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman