We were great when George Washington bravely led us in the Revolutionary war to free ourselves from a tyrant.
We were great when Abraham Lincoln bravely led us as we fought to free the slaves during the Civil war.
We were great when Franklin Roosevelt bravely led us as we fought to free Europe and China during WWII.
We were great when Lyndon Johnson bravely led us as we passed the “Great Society programs, with the twin goals of freeing the poor and people of color from poverty and racial injustice.
But now . . .
And I promise that you poor people won’t have food!
Total Trump food-stamp cuts could hit up to 5.3 million households
The Trump administration has proposed three changes this year to the federal food stamp program, one of which was adopted last week by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and would deny food stamps to nearly 700,000 Americans.
The two other proposed rules would make it harder for people across the country to qualify for food stamps and reduce aid eligibility for Americans in cold-weather states.
A total of about 2.2 million households could lose access to government food assistance, while another 3.1 million may see reduced benefits, a recent analysis found.
“And now, you poor people won’t have health care, either!”
Trump administration announces Medicaid overhaul proposal
The Trump administration on Thursday announced a Medicaid overhaul that would let states cap their spending on health benefits for many poor adults.
The decision would give states the option of curbing coverage for millions of Americans given access to the program through the Affordable Care Act, former President Barack Obama’s health-care reform law.
“Government has a solemn responsibility to provide for the most vulnerable among us,” said Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
“Part and parcel of that responsibility is making sure the Medicaid program is sustainable.”
Democrats and consumer advocates said the move would jeopardize access to medical care for millions of people. [The New York Times, NBC News]
Aw, heck, we’ll just cut everything that benefits you, the non-rich!
Trump Budget Deeply Cuts Health, Housing, Other Assistance for Low- and Moderate-Income Families
FEBRUARY 14, 2018
BY SHARON PARROTT, AVIVA ARON-DINE, DOTTIE ROSENBAUM, DOUGLAS RICE, IFE FLOYD, KATHLEEN ROMIG
Less than two months after signing massive tax cuts that largely benefit those at the top of the economic ladder, President Trump has put forward a 2019 budget that cuts basic assistance that millions of families struggling to get by need to help pay the rent, put food on the table, and get health care.
The cuts would affect a broad range of low- and moderate-income people, including parents, children, seniors, and people with disabilities.
Taken together, the cuts are far deeper than any ever enacted and would deepen poverty and hardship and swell the ranks of the uninsured.
The budget also scales back efforts to promote opportunity and upward mobility, such as by cutting both job training and programs that make college more affordable.
These cuts fly in the face of the Administration’s rhetoric about expanding opportunity for those facing difficulties in today’s economy and helping more people work.
Today, as Donald Trump leads us, we have lost our greatness We have become a selfish, fearful, uncaring, mean-spirited, bully nation, whose primary political purpose is to enrich Donald Trump, his family, and the upper .1% income group.
We take from the poor and give to the rich. We deny the poor basic human rights. We hide behind ever-higher walls, refusing to lend aid to desperate families. We turn our backs on the needy and the powerless. We carry guns to protect ourselves from our neighbors.
In the past, we were brave; now we are cowards. We were generous; now we are mean. We were giving; now we are greedy. We were compassionate; now we are cruel.
We were great; now we are small.
We have lost our greatness. We no longer are America.
Gap Psychology describes the common desire to distance oneself from those “below” in any socio-economic ranking, and to come nearer those “above.” The socio-economic distance is referred to as “The Gap.”
Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics.
Implementation of Monetary Sovereignty and The Ten Steps To Prosperity can grow the economy and narrow the Gaps:
A Justice Department inquiry launched more than two years ago to mollify conservatives clamoring for more investigations of Hillary Clinton has effectively ended with no tangible results, and current and former law enforcement officials said they never expected the effort to produce much of anything.
John Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah, was tapped in November 2017 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to look into concerns raised by President Trump and his allies in Congress that the FBI had not fully pursued cases of possible corruption at the Clinton Foundation and during Clinton’s time as secretary of state, when the U.S. government decided not to block the sale of a company called Uranium One.
As a part of his review, Huber examined documents and conferred with federal law enforcement officials in Little Rock who were handling a meandering probe into the Clinton Foundation, people familiar with the matter said. Current and former officials said that Huber has largely finished and found nothing worth pursuing.
“Everybody is asking why the Justice Department (and FBI) isn’t looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary and the Dems,”the president tweeted at the time.
Donald J. Trump has agreed to pay $25 million to settle a series of lawsuits stemming from his defunct for-profit education venture, Trump University.
It was a remarkable concession from a real estate mogul who derides legal settlements and has mocked fellow businessmen who agree to them.
Students paid up to $35,000 in tuition for a programs that, according to the testimony of former Trump University employees, used high-pressure sales tactics and employed unqualified instructors.
The complaints alleged that students were cheated out of thousands of dollars in tuition through deceptive claims about what they would learn and high-pressure sales tactics.
The settlement is a significant reversal from Mr. Trump, who had steadfastly rejected the allegations and vowed to fight the lawsuits, asserting that students filled out evaluations showing they were mostly happy with what they had learned in seminars.
When political opponents pressed him on the claims during the campaign, Mr. Trump doubled down, saying he would eventually reopen Trump University.
The judge overseeing the two California cases, Gonzalo Curiel, was thrust into the limelight of the campaign in May when Mr. Trump spent several minutes at a rally denouncing the judge’s decisions in the case, calling him a “hater” and questioning his impartiality because of his Mexican heritage.
Trump University, which operated from 2004 to 2010, focusing largely on real estate investing and learning Mr. Trump’s secrets. Students could then purchase more expensive packages costing up to $35,000.
Some former Trump University managers had given testimony about its unscrupulous and exploitative business practices. One sales executive testified that the operation was “a facade, a total lie.” Another manager called it a “fraudulent scheme.”
Despite claims that Mr. Trump had handpicked instructors, he acknowledged in testimony that he had not.
And then there was:
Judge orders Trump to pay $2 million for misusing his foundation Trump ordered to pay $2 Million after misusing his charity in ‘shocking pattern of illegality’
NOV. 7, 201903:16 By Dareh Gregorian
President Donald Trump must pay a $2 million judgment for improperly using his Trump Foundation charity to further his 2016 presidential campaign, a New York state judge ruled Thursday.
“Our petition detailed a shocking pattern of illegality involving the Trump Foundation — including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more,” then-Attorney General Barbara Underwood alleged in a statement late last year.
“Mr. Trump’s fiduciary duty breaches included allowing his campaign to orchestrate the Fundraiser, allowing his campaign, instead of the Foundation, to direct distribution of the Funds, and using the Fundraiser and distribution of the Funds to further Mr. Trump’s political campaign.”
The judge was referring to a Jan. 28, 2016, event Trump held in Des Moines, Iowa, that he’d billed as a fundraiser for veterans.
The settlement also included an admission from Trump that he personally misused foundation funds and called for mandatory training requirements for the now-defunct foundation’s directors — Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump
There is an odd circumstance that surrounds all things “Trump.” Whenever he accuses anyone of anything, shortly thereafter, facts will show that it was Trump himself who did what he accused the other person of doing.
Perhaps, because each time Trump commits some malfeasance, that act pressures his mind, and to relieve the pressure, he feels the need to accuse someone of that very thing, usually in a childish, schoolyard, name-calling manner.
When he calls someone “crooked,” you can be sure it’s because Trump himself just did something crooked. When he talks about a judge being bigoted, it’s because he himself has made some bigoted remarks.
And who could forget the time Hillary Clinton said Trump was a puppet for Putin, and Trump said, “No, you’re the puppet,” a childish response which, in context made no sense.
There probably is a name for that kind of psychosis. Perhaps a psychologist could tell us.
Someone I care deeply about has two relatively rare disease conditions: Thymoma (cancer of the thymus) and myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS — disorders that reduce the bone marrow’s ability to create normal blood cells.)
The treatment for the uncommon thymoma and MDS, together with her age, sex, other conditions, and her unique genetic profile, requires more than using an approved drug or drugs.
It requires finding a unique, specialized treatment, perhaps appropriate only to one person on earth.
Though today doctors generally prescribe a standard approved treatment for a common ailment — i.e. aspirin for a headache, chemotherapy for a cancer — each of us responds differently to every chemical and to every treatment, much to the frustration of doctors and their patients, who expect everyone to react the same.
Each of us is a unique human specimen as DNA searches reveal. At some time in the future, possibly every disease will be custom-treated for each individual.
Until them, it is the enormous differences in people multiplied by their infinite reactions to treatments, multiplied again by the immeasurable number of diseases and other afflictions, that makes the following excerpts germane.
18 DECEMBER 2019 How Artificial Intelligence Will Change Medicine
Claudia Wallis, Contributing Editor (This report was produced independently by the editors of Scientific American, who take sole responsibility for the editorial content.)
The biomedical world is awash in data. We have terabytes of genomic information from mouse to human, troves of health metrics from clinical trials, and reams of so-called real-world data from insurance companies and pharmacies.
Using powerful computers, scientists have scrutinized this bounty with some fine results, but it has become clear that we can learn much more with an assist from artificial intelligence.
Over the next decade, deep-learning neural networks will likely transform how we look for patterns in data and how research is conducted and applied to human health.
Innovations In AI and Digital Health
Right now the biggest bets are being placed in the realm of drug discovery. And for good reason.
The average cost of bringing a new drug to market nearly doubled between 2003 and 2013 to $2.6 billion, and because nine out of 10 fail in the final two phases of clinical trials, most of the money goes to waste.
Every large pharma company is working with at least one AI-focused start-up to see if it can raise the return on investment.
Machine-learning algorithms can sift through millions of compounds, narrowing the options for a particular drug target.
Perhaps more exciting, AI systems—unconstrained by prevailing theories and biases—can identify entirely new targets by spotting subtle differences at the level of tissues, cells, genes or proteins between, say, a healthy brain and one marked by Parkinson’s—differences that might elude or even mystify a human scientist.
The pharmaceutical companies “waste” many billions of dollars searching for the one drug that works on enough similar people,who have a certain condition common enough that sales of the cure will be profitable.
If a company somehow discovered a drug that could cure the thymoma for just one woman, that drug would not be produced. Even if a drug could cure the MDS of a thousand people, it never would be brought to market.
The profit motive would prevent it.
And that takes us to the single biggest problem in health care. It is the biggest problem facing hospitals; the biggest problem facing doctors and nurses, etc. It is the biggest problem facing pharmaceutical companies. It is the biggest problem facing patients.
The single biggest problem in the entire realm of healthcare involves money.
And fortunately, we Americans own a solution to that problem. Our federal government has the unlimited ability to create money, specifically our sovereign currency, the U.S. dollar.
Our federal government, being Monetarily Sovereign, is not constrained by a profit motive. It wants no profits; it needs no income; it never can run short of dollars. Never.
Contrary to the disinformation by those who say America’s deficit spending is “unsustainable,” or harmful, federal deficits and debt are neither. They not only are beneficial, but absolutely necessary.
The search for medical preventions and cures is constrained by money. For pharmaceutical companies, it is constrained by the need for profits. For universities, it is constrained by the need to pay for researchers, their research, and their equipment.
And all of it could be funded by the press of a federal computer, money-creation key.
Ben Bernanke: “The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.”
Will the inefficiencies of today’s electronic health records (EHRs) be addressed by smart systems that prevent prescribing errors and provide early warnings of disease?
Some of the world’s biggest tech giants are working on it.
More accurately, some of the world’s biggest tech giants are working on systems they can sell for a profit — which does not always correlate with the needs of patients.
By contrast, all phases of medical research could be federally funded, allowing for the goals to be preventions and cures rather than only profits.
The bigger concern is a shortage of people with both biomedical knowledge and algorithm-building proficiency.
This brings us to a related article that appeared in the December 18, 2019 issue of Nature Magazine. Excerpts:
Hunting for New Drugs with AI
The $1-trillion global pharmaceutical industry has been in a drug development and productivity slide for at least two decades.
Pharmaceutical companies are spending more and more—the 10 largest ones now pay nearly $80 billion a year—to come up with fewer and fewer successful drugs.
Ten years ago every dollar invested in research and development saw a return of 10 cents; today it yields less than two cents.
In part, that is because the drugs that are easiest to find and that safely and effectively treat common disorders have all been found; what is left is hunting for drugs that address problems with complex and elusive solutions and that would treat disorders affecting only tiny portions of the population—and thus could return far less in revenue.
These same challenges have increased the lab-to-market time line to 12 years, with 90 percent of drugs washing out in one of the phases of human trials.
The private sector cannot afford endlessly to lose money, but the federal government can. Remember that since 1940 the federal government has lost more than $20 trillion, with no ill effects.
Alan Greenspan: “Central banks can issue currency, a non-interest-bearing claim on the government, effectively without limit. A government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency.”
In fact, the federal government easily could afford to lose double or triple that amount and the only effect would be for the economy to be strengthened and the populace to be enriched by the addition of dollars to their pockets.
And did we mention that finding new and better cures faster, would benefit everyone?
Step #10 of the Ten Steps to Prosperity reads: “Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99.9%”
I suggest that vastly increased federal funding for medical research and development be one of those “myriad initiatives.”
The federal government has the unlimited ability to fund personnel and equipment in the pharmaceutical industry and universities, and to provide financial incentives that encourage and enable faster and more complete searches for new preventions and cures.
It can be done. It should be done. It must be done, or development will continue to decline and we all will suffer.
The people who prevent this, by making false claims about “unsustainable” federal deficits and debt, are complicit in the suffering and too-early deaths of billions.
Disregard their deceptions. Demand more federal spending on projects vital to America.
Gap Psychology describes the common desire to distance oneself from those “below” in any socio-economic ranking, and to come nearer those “above.” The socio-economic distance is referred to as “The Gap.”
Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics.
Implementation of Monetary Sovereignty and The Ten Steps To Prosperity can grow the economy and narrow the Gaps:
Student debt is a barrier to American economic and scientific success.
An article in THE WEEK Magazine serves as the basis for this post. It decries the rising cost of college education, tries to assign blame, and offers solutions.
Today’s American economy relies on people who have attended college.
Nearly all, large companies are managed by college-educated people.
They are the ones creating jobs for Americans.
Today’s scientific advances come from those who have attended college. Our political leaders attended college.
Our information leaders have been college-educated. Our military leaders are college-educated.
College education is beneficial to all Americans, even to those who never attend college or even attend any school at all.
America without college would be a backwater, 3rd world country.
Yet today, millions of young Americans, potentially great leaders, either cannot afford college or have been punished financially for attending.
Prepare yourself for a $400,000 price tag for college, said Alia Wong in TheAtlantic.com.
A new analysis found that the sticker price to attend the University of Chicago will pass the $100,000-per-year mark by 2025, and “at least a handful of other U.S. colleges”—Harvey Mudd College, Columbia University, and Southern Methodist University—“will follow suit soon after.”
While only 42 percent of Chicago’s undergraduates paid the full tuition cost in the 2016-17 school year, those sticker prices keep growing.
Colleges have turned to “complex financial math” to balance high tuition with discounts and financial aid, said Pete D’Amato in The Hechinger Report.
College costs have rocketed up. Millions of people are unable to afford advanced education. Colleges are forced to give some people free or discounted education. The others languish.
And these discounts are financed by the people who don’t receive discounts, which sends regular tuition costs even higher.
If this cost of education story sounds eerily familiar, it’s because exactly the same story exists for the cost of medical care.
Hospital costs rocketed up. Millions of people are unable to afford proper health care. Hospitals are forced to give some people free or discounted care.
And these discounts are paid for by the people who don’t receive discounts, which makes regular hospitalization costs even higher.
Two situations — education and healthcare — both vital for all of America, and both becoming less and less affordable.
Out-of-control college costs have become a central issue in the Democratic campaign, said Danielle Kurtzleben in NPR.org. Last week, a rift opened up over how to fix them—and especially over “who should get to go to college for free?”
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren “have pitched plans making free public college available to all.”
By contrast, Pete Buttigieg launched an ad ripping plans that make college “free even for the kids of millionaires.” Buttigieg’s own proposal would offer tuition-free college to most students at public four-year colleges, but it would taper off those benefits for people from higher-earning families.
The weaknesses of Sanders’s, Warren’s and Buttigieg’s education proposals is the same as the weaknesses of their healthcare proposals:
All three candidates make the false assumption that any federal expenditures somehow must be “paid for” by taxes or by spending reductions.
Yet, a Monetarily Sovereign government neither needs nor uses tax dollars or any other form of income. The U.S. government creates brand new dollars, ad hoc, every time it pays a bill.
In fact, paying bills is the method by which the federal government creates dollars.
One proposal, from Warren, would wipe out up to $50,000 of college debt.
Good idea. There is absolutely not one reason why the federal government needs or should receive a payback from students.
The Department of Education may soon offer income-sharing agreements that would let students delay repayment until they get a job following graduation, with the borrower “on the hook for a certain percentage of income” after that.
Bad idea. There is no purpose for a “delay” in payment rather than simply eliminating the repayment. There is no reason to keep borrowers “on the hook.”
House members also want to reduce the number of federal repayment plans from 14 to two. Currently, it is “a complicated system critics say leads to needless defaults.”
It’s not the system that leads to defaults. It’s the entire repayment concept. Why fiddle with a bad concept, when it easily could be, and should be, eliminated?
Not every proposal has been well received, said Aarthi Swaminathan in Yahoo.com. Sen. Rand Paul last week unveiled “a plan to fix the student debt crisis” by letting borrowers withdraw up to $5,250 from their 401(k) or IRA account tax- and penalty-free for tuition or student loans.
Critics, however, say Rand just kicks the can down the road with a plan that’s “detrimental to Americans’ future security.”
The critics are right. Sadly, Rand Paul never has demonstrated any understanding of federal financial reality.
At Indiana University, which awarded more than 21,000 degrees last year, nearly half of all bachelor’s degree graduates leave the institution with zero student loan debt, and 82% have less than $30,000.
Many public Midwestern institutions are hard at work implementing a variety of aggressive but sensible policy measures that are proving successful.
These include minimizing tuition increases; reducing operating costs; increasing student financial assistance; promoting on-time graduation; expanding online education; greatly reducing the costs of digital textbooks for students; and introducing comprehensive financial literacy and wellness programs.
Three of the “measures” — minimizing tuition increases, increasing student financial assistance, and greatly reducing the costs of digital textbooks — merely mean that some students will have to pay more, in order for other students to pay less.
Two of the “measures” — reducing operation costs, and promoting on-time graduation — leave one to wonder: Haven’t you been doing that all the time, and if not, why not.
One “measure” — introducing comprehensive financial literacy and wellness programs — seems to be something a distraction from the problem of school costs.
Regarding the latter, we are just one of a number of Midwestern institutions, including Ohio State University, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, that have recently launched innovative financial advising, money management and peer-coaching practices to help students make wise borrowing decisions.
Would a “wise borrowing decision be: Don’t borrow to attend college, or don’t attend college.”
Furthermore, bipartisan legislation in Congress would require colleges and universities that accept federal aid to send an annual “debt letter” to every student — a practice that we pioneered in 2012 — estimating their total loan debt and future monthly payments.
Issuing that letter to each loan recipient is now the law in Indiana and required of all colleges.
And upon receiving that letter, what is a student supposed to do? Leave college. Stop buying lunch?
On the policy front, a number of Midwestern and other institutions are deeply engaged at the national level in serious and thoughtful conversations among key stakeholders regarding the future of federal student financial aid.
These institutions are talking about ensuring greater accessibility to the high-quality education they provide, increasing the transparency of financial aid information and designing effective strategies to improve student success and help build the knowledgeable and well-trained workforce that our nation needs.
“Deeply engaged,” “thoughtful conversations, “effective strategies” — it sounds like a bunch of academic blah, blah, blah to me.
Obviously, there is still a lot of work to be done to prevent the specter of major debt from looming over our best and brightest graduates.
What we need to address the student debt issue — less posturing and more practical solutions.
Michael McRobbie is president of Indiana University and chair of the Association of American Universities Board of Directors.
There is one practical solution, and it is the same practical solution for healthcare: Single-payer.
The federal government is the one entity that, being Monetarily Sovereign, has the ability and the mandate to fund anything that benefits America and its people:
—Federally funded Medicare — parts A, B & D, plus long-term care for everyone;
—Free education (including post-grad) for everyone;
—Salary for attending school.
In short, Steps #2, 4, and 5 of the “Ten Steps to Prosperity,” not only would accomplish the mission but stimulate the overall economy.
Gap Psychology describes the common desire to distance oneself from those “below” in any socio-economic ranking, and to come nearer those “above.” The socio-economic distance is referred to as “The Gap.”
Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics.
Implementation of Monetary Sovereignty and The Ten Steps To Prosperity can grow the economy and narrow the Gaps:
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 