• Tag Archives Trump

  • Trump backs price controls – free enterprise in peril

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Donald Trump has once again demonstrated how his ill-conceived populist appeals will quickly commit him to public policies that conservatives have been working to defeat — for a generation or more. His latest example is a casual embrace government-set price controls – this time for pharmaceutical drugs. Government price controls and dictated similar mandates are policies Republicans have opposed for decades, led by fact-based conservative economists and purposeful conservative principles.

    Price controls, mandated by government agencies, do not adapt to market conditions at anything other than glacial speed. The real price of consumer products – whether life saving medicine or the latest hair-growth cream – regularly shift at both the wholesale and retail levels. Economists – both conservative and liberal – have repeatedly demonstrated how government mandated price controls decimate expenditures like the research and development process. The incredible freedom scientists have to experiment within the United States over the previous decades has already produced multiple miracle drugs. These same freedoms and liberties are on the cusp of giving us even more ground breaking and innovative medicines. If candidate Trump’s plans were enacted, not only would research and development be severely reduced, but it would also force a severe limitation of the drugs Medicare patients can use today.

    Yet here is Trump, naively backing this idea at a New Hampshire rally with rhetoric that is literally indistinguishable from liberal lines used by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) or Hillary Clinton.
    This raises the question: if Trump were the standard-bearer for the Republicans – typically the more free-market party, though certainly not perfect on that score – what would stop the United States from becoming a European-style welfare state with its high taxes and low growth rates?

    Certainly not Congressional Republicans are not the answer, who have been shying away from the issue. They have repeatedly allowed progressives to frame the debate as a supposed common-sense “negotiation” – as if government-set price controls were just another routine business transaction.

    Trump has used the same cynical progressive rhetoric elsewhere. He has claimed the only reason the government doesn’t seize on hundreds of billions in savings is somehow “because of the drug companies.”

    Total nonsense and typical Trump bluster. The way Medicare currently purchases drugs is to take the average price of that drug on the private sector. The price of the drug on the private sector is subject to the same laws of supply and demand like any other good or service. However, there is a notable influencing factor which lowers the cost of prescriptions for millions of Americans. Most self-insured companies and the larger health insurance companies employ pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). PBMs negotiate pharmacy expenditures on behalf of those companies – companies which serve tens of millions more patients than Medicare’s 41 million. Negotiating on behalf of this vast number of U.S. citizens gives the PBMs the “clout” necessary to drive hard bargains – and obtain prices lower than those received by Medicare beneficiaries.

    What Sanders, Clinton and others are proposing is to let Medicare demand a given price from the drug companies – regardless of the costs needed to produce that medicine or fund further research. If the company simply couldn’t produce the medicine at the demanded price, the drug would then not even be available to a very large pool of Medicare patients.

    The key distinction between the private plans negotiating with the drug companies and Medicare is that people on private plans have some degree of choice about which plan they pay for. Medicare patients have only Medicare as an option so long as the government is paying for their health care.

    Many other countries have tried out “magical” economic thinking with price controls. In places like Germany, France and Japan, the best-performing drugs simply become unavailable, forcing doctors to prescribe a higher quantity of less-effective drugs. Thus the average price for each prescribed drug goes down but overall per person spending on drugs goes up. Germany and France, for example, both spend a higher portion of their health care spending on drugs than the U.S. does. Meanwhile, price controls further damage research and development because the government is artificially rewarding low prices rather than efficacy. Companies have a reduced financial reason to invest in better drugs. This is one of the reasons new drug development in the U.S. is dramatically better than the rest of the world.

    Trump absurdly claimed price controls would save $300 billion a year. That’s more than 80 percent of the entire amount of money everyone in our country annually spends on drugs. Not just Medicare – everyone in the United States. That’s just fantasy – even Bernie Sanders doesn’t pretend that fantasy could happen. Sanders own website only claims that government mandated price controls would save approximately $40 billion a year.

    Source: Trump backs price controls – free enterprise in peril | TheHill


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  • The rise of American authoritarianism

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    The American media, over the past year, has been trying to work out something of a mystery: Why is the Republican electorate supporting a far-right, orange-toned populist with no real political experience, who espouses extreme and often bizarre views? How has Donald Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, suddenly become so popular?

    What’s made Trump’s rise even more puzzling is that his support seems to cross demographic lines — education, income, age, even religiosity — that usually demarcate candidates. And whereas most Republican candidates might draw strong support from just one segment of the party base, such as Southern evangelicals or coastal moderates, Trump currently does surprisingly well from the Gulf Coast of Florida to the towns of upstate New York, and he won a resounding victory in the Nevada caucuses.

    Perhaps strangest of all, it wasn’t just Trump but his supporters who seemed to have come out of nowhere, suddenly expressing, in large numbers, ideas far more extreme than anything that has risen to such popularity in recent memory. In South Carolina, a CBS News exit poll found that 75 percent of Republican voters supported banning Muslims from the United States. A PPP poll found that a third of Trump voters support banning gays and lesbians from the country. Twenty percent said Lincoln shouldn’t have freed the slaves.

    Last September, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst named Matthew MacWilliams realized that his dissertation research might hold the answer to not just one but all three of these mysteries.

    MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear.

    So MacWilliams naturally wondered if authoritarianism might correlate with support for Trump.

    He polled a large sample of likely voters, looking for correlations between support for Trump and views that align with authoritarianism. What he found was astonishing: Not only did authoritarianism correlate, but it seemed to predict support for Trump more reliably than virtually any other indicator. He later repeated the same poll in South Carolina, shortly before the primary there, and found the same results, which he published in Vox.

    As it turns out, MacWilliams wasn’t the only one to have this realization. Miles away, in an office at Vanderbilt University, a professor named Marc Hetherington was having his own aha moment. He realized that he and a fellow political scientist, the University of North Carolina’s Jonathan Weiler, had essentially predicted Trump’s rise back in 2009, when they discovered something that would turn out to be far more significant than they then realized.

    That year, Hetherington and Weiler published a book about the effects of authoritarianism on American politics. Through a series of experiments and careful data analysis, they had come to a surprising conclusion: Much of the polarization dividing American politics was fueled not just by gerrymandering or money in politics or the other oft-cited variables, but by an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group — authoritarians.

    Their book concluded that the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies.

    This trend had been accelerated in recent years by demographic and economic changes such as immigration, which “activated” authoritarian tendencies, leading many Americans to seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly alien.

    These Americans with authoritarian views, they found, were sorting into the GOP, driving polarization. But they were also creating a divide within the party, at first latent, between traditional Republican voters and this group whose views were simultaneously less orthodox and, often, more extreme.

    Over time, Hetherington and Weiler had predicted, that sorting would become more and more pronounced. And so it was all but inevitable that, eventually, authoritarians would gain enough power within the GOP to make themselves heard.

    At the time, even Hetherington and Weiler did not realize the explosive implications: that their theory, when followed to its natural conclusion, predicted a looming and dramatic transformation of American politics. But looking back now, the ramifications of their research seem disturbingly clear.

    Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force. They would thus seek a candidate who promised these things. And the extreme nature of authoritarians’ fears, and of their desire to challenge threats with force, would lead them toward a candidate whose temperament was totally unlike anything we usually see in American politics — and whose policies went far beyond the acceptable norms.

    A candidate like Donald Trump.

    Even Hetherington was shocked to discover quite how right their theory had been. In the early fall of 2015, as Trump’s rise baffled most American journalists and political scientists, he called Weiler. He asked, over and over, “Can you believe this? Can you believe this?”

    This winter, I got in touch with Hetherington, MacWilliams, and several other political scientists who study authoritarianism. I wanted to better understand the theory that seemed to have predicted, with such eerie accuracy, Trump’s rise. And, like them, I wanted to find out what the rise of authoritarian politics meant for American politics. Was Trump just the start of something bigger?

    These political scientists were, at that moment, beginning to grapple with the same question. We agreed there was something important happening here — that was just beginning to be understood.

    Shortly after the Iowa Republican caucus, in which Trump came in a close second, Vox partnered with the Washington-based media and polling company Morning Consult to test American authoritarians along a range of political and social views — and to test some hypotheses we had developed after speaking with the leading political scientists of the field.

    What we found is a phenomenon that explains, with remarkable clarity, the rise of Donald Trump — but that is also much larger than him, shedding new light on some of the biggest political stories of the past decade. Trump, it turns out, is just the symptom. The rise of American authoritarianism is transforming the Republican Party and the dynamics of national politics, with profound consequences likely to extend well beyond this election.

    Full article: The rise of American authoritarianism – Vox


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  • How Mitt Romney Is Totally Wrong About Donald Trump

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    The easy rejoinder to Romney is to say he’s accurate but his timing is too late to matter. Indeed, as Trump’s march to the Republican nomination proceeds, this is fast becoming the conventional wisdom among GOP activists, whether they are part of the #NeverTrump crew or are coming to terms with having the guy at the top of their ticket. As longtime Republican consultant, no in-the-tank Trump loyalist Alex Castellanos recently wrote

    Donald Trump whipped the establishment and it is too late for the limp GOP establishment to ask their mommy to step in and rewrite the rules because they were humiliated for their impotence.

    If Trump is going to be our nominee, as I believe he is, it is our mission to support Trump and make him the best nominee and president possible.

    What both sides—conservatives who say they will NEVER vote for Trump under any circumstances and conservatives who will grudgingly fall in line—misunderstand is that Trump isn’t a fraud perpetrated on the Republican Party, nor on the throngs of Republican primary voters who have propelled him to victory all over the place.

    Put simply, Trump is the distillation of conservative Republican politics for all of the 21st century. He’s not the cause of a GOP implosion, but the final effect of an intellectual and political hollowing-out of any semblance of commitment to limited government, individual rights, and free markets. He is what happens when you fail to live up to your rhetoric and aspirations again and again.

    Yes, as Romney stated, The Donald has shifted positions on all sorts of issues over the years (immigration, outsourcing, abortion, whatever). As if that isn’t a clearer indictment of the Republican Party when it ran both houses of Congress and the White House in the early part of this century. Winning the most-contested election in the history of the United States, George W. Bush campaigned on reducing the size, scope, and spending of government—and then proceeded to kick out the jams on constraints on government outlays.

    Leave aside massive increases in defense spending and the scope of foreign policy ambitions for the moment (we’ll get to them). With help of “conservative” and “establishment” legislators (it’s far from clear what either of these terms really means, except to the GOP Mensheviks and Bolsheviks tossing them at each other like Molotov Cocktails), the Republicans pushed No Child Left Behind, the single-biggest expansion of the federal government into education in decades, and the creation of a budget-busting prescription-drug entitlement for seniors. They signed off on Sarbanes-Oxley, a dumb regulatory response to the Enron scandal and bursting of the tech bubble, which helped push IPOs to London and foreign capitals. Bush and the GOP signed off on protectionist measures against foreign steel and timber when it suited them while completely bungling federal responses to natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.

    Then there was the Republican response to the 9/11 attacks. The Republican Congress signed off on The Patriot Act, which vies with Hillary Clinton’s latest memoir for the title of least-read (even by the authors) doorstop of this century. They created not just the demonstrably useless Transportation Security Administration but an entirely new and sclerotic cabinet agency, The Department of Homeland Security (DHS). And now as conservatives and Republicans whine about Donald Trump’s authoritarian desire to “open up the libel laws,” recall what Republican Attorney General John Ashcroft said to anyone who dast dissent from Total Information Awareness:

    “Those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty,” he inveighed before Congress, “your tactics only aid terrorists.”

    When it came to actually prosecuting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the GOP was anything but fiscally responsible or part of what used to be called the “reality-based community.” Rather, Republicans deliberately funded (still) ongoing activites via “emergency supplemental” spending procedures, so they didn’t really have to fully explain to the public how much loot they were spending. That underhanded process only stopped once Barack Obama took office, in the brief moment when he and the Democrats deigned to actually produce and write budgets. Having succeeded with passing tax cuts, the Republicans—despite constantly bashing the Democrats as big spenders and deficit whores—never bothered to discuss how to pay for massive increases in military spending. Or Medicare spending. Or any other sort of outlay that ballooned under Bush and the Republican Congress. But don’t you see? It’s Obama and the Democrats who are to blame for everything—even when the GOP controls Congress?

    Who created TARP and which party’s 2008 candidate suspended his campaign so that he could race back to Washington to bail out the big banks and, eventually Chrysler and GM? On his way out the door (and after a last-ditch $100 million stimulus plan that is largely forgotten to all but the nation’s debtors), George W. Bush actually said, “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.” Like much of what Donald Trump says today, of course, this is a lie, or at least an exaggeration, to the extent it pretends that George W. Bush, whose greatest business deal involved family connections and eminent domain, ever embodied free-market principles.

    But what’s past is past, right? And today’s conservatives all hated Bush and the GOP Congress, right, even if they did endorse them George W. and company (except when he tried to privatize Social Security or, even worse, pass immigration reform).

    In 2008 and 2012, the Republican Party ran such paragons of principle and consistency as John McCain and Mitt Romney for president. What was notable about McCain, besides his reflexive war-mongering, was that he ultimately flipped from being actually kind of open-bordersy to cutting TV commercials demanding that we “complete the danged fence.” As for Romney, who now sits in smug judgement of Donald Trump, he was that GOP guy who “evolved” on abortion and gay rights (even though Republicans don’t believe in evolution) and, oh yeah, created the program that became the model for Obamacare.

    But let’s not just look at the top of Republican tickets to see the ideological rot and hypocrisy that hollowed out the conservative Republican “brand” like a wet log teeming with termites. At least since Barry Goldwater and certainly since Ronald Reagan’s success, the GOP has always billed itself as the party not just of “limited” government but of small government—or at least smaller government than whatever the Democrats were yapping about. What was it that St. Reagan used to say? “Government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.”

    Source: How Mitt Romney Is Totally Wrong About Donald Trump


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