The Congressional Budget Office provides us with a brief description of Nancy Pelosi’s bill to reduce prescription drug pricing under Medicare:

Title I of H.R. 3 would require manufacturers of specific prescription drugs to negotiate with the Secretary for the prices of those drugs or face an excise tax on the sales of those drugs….Maximum fair prices could not exceed 120 percent of the average price—called the average international market, or AIM, price—for a given drug in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

And how much would this save us? Here are the numbers:

This adds up to $345 billion through 2029. This is something that, in theory, the Trump administration supports, so it shouldn’t be hard to get it passed. Unfortunately, that would ruin Trump’s claim that Democrats are doing nothing, so it will probably die in the Senate.

Donald Trump sure has made the rest of the world respect us:

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan rejected a U.S. offer to mediate a cease-fire between Turkish forces and Kurdish militants in northeastern Syria….“The terrorists should drop their weapons and leave the area that we have identified as the safe zone,” he said in a speech Wednesday to the Turkish parliament. He vowed to press forward with the campaign to rout Kurdish-led fighters, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, from a wide swath of territory along the border.

For better or worse, the US has no influence in Syria anymore. Turkey does. Russia does. Syria itself does. But not us.

UPDATE: It gets worse:

President Erdogan says he will refuse to meet with VP Pence, who is due to travel to Turkey to argue for a ceasefire in the ongoing Syria conflict. https://t.co/G6HAQL3EII

— NBC Politics (@NBCPolitics) October 16, 2019

This is a middle-school girl playing her glockenspiel at the Battle of Boyacá Day in Ubaté. Glockenspiels are apparently a big deal in Colombian bands. Every band I saw, from grade school to high school, had a large section of glockenspielers. I found it quite charming.

August 7, 2019 — Ubaté, Colombia

So. Last night I unloaded all my techno-gadgets and set up a blogging station in the dining room of Dr. M’s new house. Everything was fine.

This morning everything went wrong. I had to stick my phone in a window sill to get even adequate reception. Then I spilled some water on my keyboard, causing a series of increasingly bizarre glitches. T-Mobile was no help with my speed problems, and my tablet refused to pair with a Bluetooth keyboard we had laying around. Right now I’m in a Culver’s, using their WiFi to test things out. Everything is fine if I leave the keyboard unplugged. Hopefully it will dry out and come back to life, but in the meantime I guess I’ll drop into Walmart to buy a cheap replacement.

But will reception return to normal when I get back to the house? Stay tuned!

Everybody is pretty nonplussed by this revelation in the New York Times today:

The effort to pressure Ukraine for political help provoked a heated confrontation inside the White House last summer that so alarmed John R. Bolton, then the national security adviser, that he told an aide to alert White House lawyers, House investigators were told on Monday.

The aide, Fiona Hill, testified that Mr. Bolton told her to notify the chief lawyer for the National Security Council about a rogue effort by Mr. Sondland, Mr. Giuliani and Mick Mulvaney. “I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up,” Mr. Bolton, a Yale-trained lawyer, told Ms. Hill to tell White House lawyers, according to two people at the deposition.

There are two important things to take away from this. First, as much as we on the left dislike Bolton, he is, in fact, a professional diplomat of longstanding and a very competent player in interagency politics. He also plans to continue his career long beyond Trump’s presidency.

Second, he’s not a Trump man. His joke about the “drug deal” shows his disdain for the Trump inner circle, who he considers little better than dilettantes looking for a big score.

Republicans should be very concerned about this. They almost unanimously respect Bolton and consider him a hawk’s hawk. The fact that he couldn’t get along with the Trump gang for more than a few months is damning.

Is it possible to overstate how insane the Syria situation is? On Sunday President Trump talks to the Turkish president and tells him to go ahead and invade northern Syria. He is then informed that our allies the Kurds occupy this territory and will be in big trouble if the Turks roll across the border. Trump doesn’t care. He follows up this warning with a tweetstorm that basically boils down to, who cares about the Kurds anyway? Then he withdraws all US troops. Any ten-year-old could predict that this would be viewed by the Turks as a green light to do whatever they wanted, and that’s exactly what happened: the Turks began massacring Kurds and eventually the Kurds teamed up with the Russians in an act of self-preservation. Now, having made a colossal mess out of everything, Trump plans to sanction the Turks and broker a cease-fire. You betcha.

And this happened in the span of a week!

It’s easy to pretend that a president doesn’t really need to know much. After all, that’s what aides are for. But it’s really not true. Everyone makes mistakes, as Obama did when he talked about a “red line” in Syria. But Trump’s unfathomable ignorance and bloated ego is light years beyond that. A lot of us figured from the start that Trump probably wouldn’t deliberately start a war, but that he might start one by accident. As it turns out, that was exactly right.

I really haven’t taken many pictures on this trip so far, but I feel like I should offer something that’s a little I80-ish today. So here you go: a wind farm stretching across the highway a few miles east of Evanston, Wyoming.

Gabriel Zucman has analyzed the tax implications of the plans set forth by three of the Democratic candidates and has come up with this:

No surprises here: Warren and Sanders want to soak the rich but Biden doesn’t. Still, it’s interesting to see the details.

This reminds me that I’m still sort of surprised that no one has proposed a universal health care plan that’s heavily funded by a head tax on corporations. This would get rid of all the questions about where the funding would come from and would end up costing everyone about the same as they pay now. There would obviously be some additional details to work out, and you can imagine them being whatever you prefer.

This would obviously not be the best funding mechanism from a pure policy perspective, but it sure seems like it might be the best from a pragmatic political perspective.

Pema Levy reports that our fearless attorney general is unhappy with the state of America:

In his address Friday, Barr thundered against what he described as a “moral upheaval.” “Virtually every measure of social pathology continues to gain ground,” he said. “Along with the wreckage of the family we are seeing record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence and the deadly drug epidemic.”

Let’s check this out for young people. There’s no question that single-parent families are on the rise, but three-quarters of all kids still live in two-parent families. What’s more, it’s worth pointing out that the US is not a huge outlier on this front:

Teen suicides are up in recent years, but nowhere near a record:

Illicit drug use is way down in virtually every category:

And of course violent crime is way down too:

Self-reported rates of depression among teens is up in recent years, but it’s unclear if these numbers are accurate.

I’d add to this that teen pregnancy is down, graduation rates are up, school bullying is down, and test scores are up in both reading and math.

Now, this is just teens, and Barr was presumably talking about the population in general. However, if teens are doing pretty well, that speaks well both for how we’re raising our kids and how society is affecting bad behaviors.

Obviously not everything is peaches and cream. The opioid epidemic may be receding, but it’s a serious problem. And although the Case/Deaton “deaths of despair” thesis may be overstated, it’s still a problem too.

That said, it seems likely that the real problems we have are mostly centered not on the loss of religion, as Barr suggests, or on bad morals in general. The real problems are mostly centered on sluggish or nonexistent wage growth among the working and middle classes. That’s a problem that Barr’s party doesn’t like to admit because it might get in the way of their project to direct as much money to the rich as possible.

Bottom line: Barr needs to look at himself in a mirror.

Our ambassador to Ukraine has testified that she was fired because Rudy Giuliani was upset about her anti-corruption efforts. Why did this upset him? Because there was no corruption involved in Hunter Biden’s activities, and this meant that an anti-corruption effort wouldn’t do anything to help him smear the Biden family. He therefore recommended that President Trump get rid of her, and Trump happily agreed.

Elsewhere, Trump decided not merely to pull a small number of American troops out of northern Syria, but to do it in precisely the way that would cause the most chaos to both the United States and its allies. And that’s what he’s gotten. The Turks are shelling positions near the American troops that still remain, so Trump has now decided to pull them all out. As a result, our erstwhile allies, the Kurds, are now teaming up with the Russian-backed Assad government.

And in yet other news, after blowing up negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan because he didn’t understand what was going on, Trump is now trying to start them up again. Good luck with that.

Oh, and Trump’s buddy who served as roving ambassador to Ukraine is apparently prepared to testify that the only reason he said there was no quid pro quo required for Ukraine to receive its military aid is because Trump told him to say that. He himself, it seems, has no idea if it was true or not.

And that was just over the weekend. We now have a whole new week ahead of us. I hope you enjoy it.