President Trump’s plan to scare companies away from moving jobs to Mexico is working great:
Ford Motor Co. will begin importing Focus compact cars from China in the second half of 2019, scrapping earlier plans to build the small-car model in Mexico amid a push by President Donald Trump to drastically alter the North American Free Trade Agreement. The company said Tuesday the Focus, which is now built at an assembly plant in Michigan, will also be imported from Europe, but most new models sold in North American will initially come from China.
Nice work, Donald. Scrapping TPP was also great news for China. The big autocracies of the world thank you for your support.
Just this morning I was wondering how it is that there have been so few leaks from the Senate’s health care team. They’ve really got things buttoned up tight over there. But today The Hill revealed this little tidbit:
The proposal would start out the growth rate for a new cap on Medicaid spending at the same levels as the House bill, but then drop to a lower growth rate that would cut spending more, known as CPI-U, starting in 2025, the sources said. That proposal has been sent to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for analysis, a Senate GOP aide said.
Let’s translate this into English. Between 2000 and 2016, the ordinary inflation rate, CPI-U, has averaged 2.1 percent. However, medical inflation has risen more rapidly, at a rate of 3.7 percent. Using these rates as estimates for the future, it means the House bill stays even with inflation by increasing its spending cap 3.7 percent per year. The Senate does the same until 2025 but then switches to 2.1 percent. In other words, after 2025, when you adjust for medical inflation, spending declines about 1.6 percent per year. Here’s how that adds up over the years:
Look: Those tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to pay for themselves. Somebody has to pay for them. Why not the elderly, disabled, and poor who are on Medicaid?
It’s Technology Week at the White House! Jared Kushner is in charge:
Kushner is not a very impressive speaker. He’s reciting his speech like a sixth-grader, not like a White House aide who actually knows what he’s talking about.
But put that aside. It’s the content that’s appalling. Kushner burbles about heading up the Office of American Innovation, which has “empowered interagency teams” that are “analyzing and auditing current infrastructure.” They have discovered that the government operates 6,100 data centers, the “vast majority” of which can be migrated to the cloud.
That sounds like quite the audit! Of course, I was able to come up with the same information in about five minutes by hopping over to the GAO website:
The 24 agencies participating in the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) have made progress on their data center closure efforts. As of August 2016, the agencies collectively had identified a total of 9,995 data centers, of which they reported having closed 4,388 and having plans to close a total of 5,597 through fiscal year 2019.
Wait. They’ve already closed 4,388 data centers? Well yes. You see, the Obama administration began an initiative to do this several years ago. You can read GAO’s latest 144-page report here if you really want to. If Kushner himself has read it, he sure doesn’t act like it.
Later he mentions the 1980 Paperwork Reduction Act, “established before the government used computers.” I suppose I should give him a break since I know what he probably meant to say, but these were prepared remarks. He sounds like an idiot when he says stuff like this. And that’s not even counting the fact that the PRA was updated and amended in 1995.
Nor does Kushner seem to understand the purpose of the PRA or why it gives OMB centralized authority over government forms. It did this to reduce the number of forms from different agencies. OMB’s review of changes to forms does take time—and I don’t doubt that it could be streamlined—but it’s not because of fiddly clerks who want to make sure everyone is using approved fonts. It’s to make sure that agencies aren’t duplicating the work of other agencies and demanding too much information from the public.
This is kindergarten stuff, and Kushner doesn’t give the impression of knowing the first thing about any of it. I have a feeling that Technology Week is going to be about as boffo as Infrastructure Week was. Remember that? It was only two weeks ago.
Strawberry fields are, alas, not forever. However, the harvest isn’t quite finished yet, and our local grower still has a few lovely, ripe strawberries waiting to be picked. They lease their fields from Southern California Edison, and plant corn, tomatoes, strawberries, and other delicacies on the right-of-way beneath the power pylons. They sell them in a nearby roadside stand, one of the few still left around here.
Old fashioned? I dunno Jim. Did the founding fathers have cameras? Did they have audio recorders? I think not. You are lucky Trump allows you to use the pen of your choice, rather than a quill pen.
Of course, Rasmussen is famously pro-Republican, so this doesn’t mean much. Here is Pollster’s latest aggregate of Trump’s job approval rating from everyone other than Rasmussen:
Is President Trump under investigation for obstruction of justice? His attorney appeared on TV yesterday to say it ain’t so:
SEKULOW: I want to be very clear about this, the president is not and has not been under investigation.
DICKERSON: How do you know?
SEKULOW: Because we’ve received no notice of investigation….
DICKERSON: Is it your view, and just to educate viewers, that — that if you were under investigation, there would be an obligation for the special counsel to let you know? Couldn’t you be under investigation and they’ve just not let you know yet?
SEKULOW: Well, look, I — I can’t imagine the scenario where the president would — would not be aware of it.
This is the whole story in a nutshell: Trump has not been notified that he’s the target of an investigation. That’s it. That’s all that Jay Sekulow knows. He has no idea whether Trump is or isn’t under investigation by special prosecutor Robert Mueller.
Neither do I, for that matter. The Washington Post says he is, and their evidence seems pretty strong. At the same time, it could be that Mueller is merely interviewing some folks as a way of deciding whether he should widen his investigation to include Trump.
In any case, that’s it. Mueller is interviewing some people about Trump’s firing of James Comey, but Trump has not been notified that he’s under investigation. That’s all we know.
The case started when Republicans gained complete control of Wisconsin’s government in 2010 for the first time in more than 40 years. It was a redistricting year, and lawmakers promptly drew a map for the State Assembly that helped Republicans convert very close statewide vote totals into lopsided legislative majorities.
In 2012, Republicans won 48.6 percent of the statewide vote for Assembly candidates but captured 60 of the Assembly’s 99 seats. In 2014, 52 percent of the vote yielded 63 seats.
The Supreme Court has never tossed out a redistricting map based on concerns about partisan (as opposed to racial) gerrymandering. With gerrymandering now far more widespread thanks to the use of mapping software, will they finally take the opportunity to rein it in? Rick Hasen provides reason to keep our expectations modest:
About an hour after the Court issued its order agreeing to hear this case, it issued a second order, on a 5-4 vote, granting a stay of the lower court order in this case. The four liberal Justices dissented….So this stay order raises a big question mark for those who think Court will use the case to rein in partisan gerrymandering.
Last year a district court ordered Wisconsin to produce a new, less partisan map in time for the 2018 election. The vote to stay this order suggests that five members of the Supreme Court are leaning in the direction of doing nothing about Wisconsin’s gerrymander.
Well, who knows? But I will say one thing: the primary purpose of Obamacare repeal is to get rid of Obamacare’s taxes on the rich. However, a reconciliation bill is not allowed to increase the deficit, so if you get rid of the taxes you also have to get rid of at least the same amount of spending.
This means that Senate Republicans have limited options. They can either (a) make the House bill more generous, which means not cutting taxes as much, or (b) keep all the tax cuts, which means cutting spending as much as the House bill.
I think we can all agree that option B is far more likely, can’t we? And cutting spending means cutting health care. They can blather all they want about “improving efficiency” or “letting states innovate” or whatever, but it’s just posturing. Under reconciliation rules, if you want to cut taxes, you have to cut spending. And if you cut spending, you cut health care. End of story.
My sister is in London and sends along the following from outside Buckingham Palace. Apparently it earned her a sunburn. I guess it’s sort of warmish in London right now?
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