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Reality Begins to Set in on Obamacare—For Both Sides

by zB7bB4yB6a Posted on February 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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Reality is setting in:

For seven years, few issues have animated conservative voters as much as the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. But with President Barack Obama out of office, the debate over “Obamacare” is becoming less about “Obama” and more about “care” — greatly complicating the issue for Republican lawmakers.

….As liberals overwhelm congressional town hall-style meetings and deluge the Capitol phone system with pleas to protect the health law, there is no similar clamor for dismantling it, Mr. Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment. From deeply conservative districts in the South and the West to the more moderate parts of the Northeast, Republicans in Congress say there is significantly less intensity among opponents of the law than when Mr. Obama was in office.

Intensity is the key word here, since actual opinions about Obamacare don’t seem to have changed more than a eyelash over the past seven years:

But the intensity of opinion has changed. With Obama out of office, the Republican base doesn’t care as much. Hating Obamacare was mostly just a way of hating Obama. Likewise, the Democratic base cares more. They spent the past seven years griping about how weak Obamacare was—no public option, too friendly to insurance companies, subsidies too low, blah blah blah—under the apparent assumption that it didn’t matter that practically no one was passionately defending the law. With Trump in office, Democrats have finally figured out that it matters, and congressional phones are now ringing off the hook.

So reality has set in for everyone. The Republican rank-and-file has finally figured out they never really cared all that much about taxing the rich an extra three points to provide health care for everyone. The Democratic rank-and-file has finally figured out that Obamacare is a pretty good program and it’s worth fighting for.

But did we really have to elect Donald Trump to figure this out?

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Reality Begins to Set in on Obamacare—For Both Sides

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Trump Pals Have a Plan For Lifting Sanctions on Russia

by IlanaOtt24 Posted on February 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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The president’s friends have a proposal for him:

A week before Michael T. Flynn resigned as national security adviser, a sealed proposal was hand-delivered to his office, outlining a way for President Trump to lift sanctions against Russia.

Mr. Flynn is gone, having been caught lying about his own discussion of sanctions with the Russian ambassador. But the proposal, a peace plan for Ukraine and Russia, remains, along with those pushing it: Michael D. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, who delivered the document; Felix H. Sater, a business associate who helped Mr. Trump scout deals in Russia; and a Ukrainian lawmaker trying to rise in a political opposition movement shaped in part by Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

….Mr. Cohen said Mr. Sater had given him the written proposal in a sealed envelope. When Mr. Cohen met with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office in early February, he said, he left the proposal in Mr. Flynn’s office. Mr. Cohen said he was waiting for a response when Mr. Flynn was forced from his post. Now Mr. Cohen, Mr. Sater and Mr. Artemenko are hoping a new national security adviser will take up their cause. On Friday the president wrote on Twitter that he had four new candidates for the job.

The “Ukranian lawmaker” is a pro-Putin opponent of the current regime in Ukraine. Sater is, um, a guy with an interesting background: “mafia linked,” spent some time in prison, worked as an FBI informant, and spent several years as a close business associate of Donald J. Trump. Oh, and Sater was born in Russia and continues to have lots of contacts there.

And Cohen? Well, he’s the guy who could actually get inside the White House and deliver the letter. You remember Michael Cohen, don’t you?

Every time we turn around, there’s something new linking Trump to Russia. Just a few days ago, FBI Director James Comey briefed the Senate Intelligence committee about the ongoing investigation of Team Trump and its ties to Russia, and all the chatter afterward was about how the senators seemed kind of shaken by what they heard.

Who knows? Maybe it all turns out to be nothing. But there sure is a lot of smoke out there. It’s hard to believe there isn’t a fire too.

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Trump Pals Have a Plan For Lifting Sanctions on Russia

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From Tech Workers to College Kids, Trump is Also Taking on Legal Immigrants

by EmilieSchuler Posted on February 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump’s opposition to illegal immigration is well known. But since his inauguration, he has also attempted to overhaul legal immigration, most notably with his executive order barring travel and immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Speculation about other ways the president could restrict legal immigration have been fueled by his statements as well as leaked draft memos. Additionally, there are concerns surrounding potential conflicts of interest between the president’s businesses and his immigration policy, since some of the Trump’s companies rely upon visas that he now controls.

Few people understand the United States’ notoriously labyrinthine immigration system. The confusion is understandable. The State Department lists 76 visa categories that fall under two umbrellas: non-immigrant visas, for those seeking to come to the country for a fixed period, and immigrant visas, for those seeking a path to citizenship.

Here are some of the visas issued by the US government and what we know about Trump’s plans for them:

EB-5: The “millionaire” or “investor” visa
EB-5 holders are required to make a minimum business investment of $1 million (or $500,000 in a “high unemployment” or rural area), creating at least 10 jobs. This visa is controversial: Some argue that it allows foreigners to buy citizenship. Others suggest that these visas are processed too quickly, potentially opening the door to money laundering and other security risks. Earlier this month, Sens. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) cosponsored a bill to end the program.

As Bloomberg reported, Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, owns an apartment complex that has taken $50 million in EB-5 funds, mostly from Chinese investors. Trump has not commented on this visa program.

H-1B: Highly Skilled worker visa
H-1Bs allow foreigners who work in a “specialty occupation,” such as technology, engineering, mathematics, or business, to work in the country for three years. (They may renew their visas an additional three years so long as they remain employed.) The worker must have an employment agreement with an American company. The number of H-1Bs is capped at 85,000.

Trump’s stance on H-1Bs has varied. He used harsh language about them on his website, but then in a campaign debate said, “I’m softening the position on his website because we have to have talented people in this country.” He then hardened his position again in a press release, stating that “I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.” In his inauguration speech, Trump said, “We will follow two simple rules; buy American and hire American.” This has raised questions about how a “hire American” requirement might impact American businesses that rely on skilled foreign employees, particularly Silicon Valley.

According to a draft executive order obtained by Bloomberg, Trump has plans to overhaul this visa program. The draft order sparked a wave of panic in India’s technology sector, whose workers are the top recipients of H-1Bs. According to executive order drafts leaked to Vox, one of the ways Trump could alter this visa would be to stop the spouses of H-1B holders from working in the United States and restricting these visas to companies that are “the best and the brightest,” which presumably means only largest and most successful American companies.

H-1B3: The “model visa”
This visa is a subset of the “highly skilled workers” visa. When the immigration system was reformed in the 1990s, the modeling industry expressed concern that while supermodels were covered by the O-1 visa (see below), non-supermodels were left out. The “model visa” was created.

First Lady Melania Trump originally worked in the United States on such a visa, and has cited it as proof that she immigrated legally and that others should follow her example. Trump’s modeling agency, Trump Model Management, has benefited from hiring foreign models using this visa. However, as Mother Jones reported last year, some of the company’s models say they came to the United States on tourist visas, which did not allow them to work legally. A Trump Organization executive did not deny the claims.

H2: Seasonal worker visa
H2s allow companies to temporarily hire agricultural workers or other workers without advanced degrees, such as waiters and housekeepers, provided that employers prove that they could not fill these position with citizens.

According to the Washington Post, Trump’s vineyard in Charlottesville, Virginia, recently applied for six H-2A visas. As BuzzFeed reported last week, the vineyard applied for nearly two dozen more earlier this month. Similarly, Trump’s Palm Beach Mar-a-Lago resort requested 78 H2B visas for foreign servers, housekeepers, and cooks. When asked about this at a debate last March, Trump said, “It’s very, very hard to get people. But other hotels do the exact same thing…There’s nothing wrong with it. We have no choice.” Perhaps that was a signal that he’ll leave this visa alone.

F-1: Student visas
These visas allow students to travel to the United States to study at high schools, universities, seminaries, and other educational institutions.

Many students with F visas have been affected by the travel ban. As Mother Jones has reported, many college students were stranded by the ban while returning from winter break. Four thousand Iranian students will be affected should the ban remain in place. Fortune estimates that US colleges could lose $700 million annually if these students’ tuition money dries up. Though Trump hasn’t spoken specifically about changes to student visas, during his campaign, he has called for ending the J-1 visa program for visiting scholars and professors.

O-1: The “artist” or “genius” visa
This visa allows “individuals with extraordinary ability or achievement” to come to the United States to work in their field of expertise. This visa covers everyone from athletes and musicians to famous authors and Nobel Prize-winning scientists. (Athletes who are entering for a specific competition may enter on a P-1 “athlete’s visa.”)

If Trump’s travel ban is upheld, celebrities from the seven specified countries could be affected. International disapproval of the ban could affect major events, such as Los Angeles’ bid for the 2024 Olympics, which will be decided in September. According to ESPN, international soccer officials’ disapproval of the president’s travel ban could affect the United States’s chances of hosting the World Cup in 2026.

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From Tech Workers to College Kids, Trump is Also Taking on Legal Immigrants

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Gutting Obamacare Would Leave 3 Million Americans Without Drug Treatment

by AnneDeLittle Posted on February 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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There’s no denying that America is experiencing the largest drug epidemic in its history: Around 2.5 million Americans are addicted to opioids like heroin and prescription painkillers. Last week, Alaska became the latest state to declare the opioid epidemic a public health disaster.

President Donald Trump has particularly strong support in areas that have been hit hard by the crisis. Yet if Obamacare is repealed, as Trump has repeatedly promised, thousands of Americans would lose access to their daily or weekly treatment for opioid addiction.

Here’s what gutting Obamacare would mean for the people who depend on it to fight America’s opioid epidemic:

What’s the connection between the opioid epidemic and Trump?

Shannon Monnat, Penn State

Kathleen Frydl, a historian and the author of The Drug Wars in America, recently found that in nearly every Ohio and Pennsylvania county with high drug overdose rates, Trump’s share of the 2016 vote was 10 points higher than Romney’s in 2012, Clinton’s share was 10 points lower than Obama’s in 2012, or both. While the link between the drug epidemic and Trump’s popularity is circumstantial, “When you’re dealing with counties that have overflowing hospital parking lots, the message that America is already great doesn’t resonate with people,” Frydl says.

It’s not just overdoses: Trump overperformed in counties with high rates of “deaths of despair,” or deaths from alcohol, drugs, and suicide, according to research by Penn State sociologist Shannon Monnat. Counties with high despair death rates and high Trump turnout weren’t necessarily the poorest, but they were, generally speaking, financially worse off than they were a generation ago. “They’re places that have been experiencing economic downturn for at least the last three decades,” Monnat says. “There’s been a heavy loss in manufacturing jobs, natural resource extraction jobs—there’s a sense in these places that there’s been a dismantling of the American dream.”

Where are people most reliant on Obamacare for addiction treatment?

What has health advocates particularly worried is that the states with the highest overdose rates also rely the most on Obamacare. West Virginia, New Hampshire, Kentucky, and Massachusetts, have the first, second, third, and seventh highest overdose rates in the country, respectively, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate of uninsured residents in those four states would roughly triple if the ACA were repealed.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

These maps from the Department of Health and Human Services show this overlap. In the first map, red states have the highest overdose rates; in the second, red states have the most residents per capita who would lose their insurance if Obamacare is repealed.

What would repealing Obamacare mean for addiction treatment?

If Obamacare disappears, nearly 3 million Americans with addiction disorders would lose some or all of their health insurance coverage, according to recent research by Richard Frank and Sherry Glied, professors of health economics at Harvard and public service at New York University, respectively. Of those, about 222,000 would lose opioid addiction treatment.

Last December, in a rare moment of bipartisanship, Congress enacted the 21st Century Cures Act, which will allocate $1 billion over the next two years to expand access to opioid addiction treatment. But Frank and Glied estimate that repealing the ACA provisions that address substance abuse and mental disorders would take away at least $5.5 billion annually from the treatment of low-income Americans with mental health and addiction disorders. A one-time $1-billion increase in spending would “not even serve as much of a bandage,” they write.

Why is Obamacare a big deal for opioid treatment?

The ACA has been particularly important for those seeking addiction treatment, says Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University psychiatry professor who advised the Obama administration on drug policy. “It was designed to be very broad, but at the same time we knew that if there was anything that this would help a lot for, it’s addiction,” he says.

Before the ACA went into effect, a third of individual market insurance policies didn’t cover substance abuse treatment, including medications like buprenorphine that have proven critical to keeping former opioid users off of drugs. The ACA deemed substance abuse and mental health treatment to be essential health benefits, and now insurance plans are required to cover them. In states that expanded Medicaid, 20 percent of hospital admissions for substance abuse and mental health disorders were uninsured in 2013, before the bulk of the expansion provisions kicked in. By the middle of 2015, the uninsured rate had fallen to five percent.

In addition, Obamacare covers Americans who are are most at risk of becoming addicted to opioids: People with incomes below 200 percent of the poverty line have a 50 percent higher risk of having an opioid problem than people with higher incomes. Humphreys adds that most users start using heroin or pain-killers when they’re young. Since the ACA lets children stay on their parents’ health insurance until they’re 26, it’s easier for young users to access treatment.

Without the ACA, says Humphreys, “We’re back where we were before: bad access, low quality of care, and a lot of patients being turned away.”

What could Obamacare do better?

The ACA hasn’t fixed everything. While it’s increased the number of people with coverage, there’s still not nearly enough treatment capacity, leading to big gap between the number of people who have treatment and those who need it. About 420,000 people who suffer from opioid addiction don’t have access treatment. Frank and Glied estimate that repealing the ACA would widen this treatment gap by 50 percent, bringing the number Americans who can’t get opioid treatment to 640,000.

Apart from the ACA, there’s the more general issue that federal funding for addiction treatment and services has flatlined over the past decade, says Andrew Kessler, founder of health policy consulting firm Slingshot Solutions. Overall, states get about two thirds of their funding for addiction prevention from Department of Health and Human Services block grants—and given the rate of inflation, those grants have lost about a quarter of their purchasing power. Under Mick Mulvaney, the former representative from South Carolina who was confirmed as Trump’s budget director last week, “we’re bracing for a very austere budget,” says Kessler.

What will come after Obamacare?

Congressional Republicans have long promised to repeal Obamacare. Many proposals that Republicans have put forward, including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s “A Better Way,” would eliminate the requirement for insurance policies to cover essential benefits, including substance abuse and mental health treatment.

This has some GOP leaders worried. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, whose state has been hit particularly hard by the opioid epidemic, warned fellow Republicans in January about the implications of Obamacare repeal. “What happens to drug treatment, what happens to mental health counseling?” he asked. As Humphreys puts it, Republicans “ought to realize that they will really harm their own constituents pretty substantially if they took this away.”

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Gutting Obamacare Would Leave 3 Million Americans Without Drug Treatment

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“Jane Roe” Has Died. Abortion Rights Might Not Be Far Behind.

by StormyMoseley Posted on February 19, 2017

Mother Jones

Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” plaintiff in the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case that legalized abortion in the United States, died Saturday at at an assisted-living facility in Katy, Texas. She was 69.

McCorvey was a complicated symbol for the political fight over abortion rights. Following the high court’s 1973 decision, she became the face of the pro-choice movement. At the time, she represented the struggles faced by ordinary women confronted with unwanted pregnancies. Abortion was illegal in Texas in almost all cases when she learned she was pregnant in 1969. Poor and with a ninth grade education, she didn’t have the means to seek abortion across state lines. The legal battle dragged on for three years; by the time she won, she had long since carried the pregnancy to term. She gave the baby up for adoption.

But in 1995, McCorvey reversed her stance on abortion after discussing the Bible with Pastor Flip Benham, the director of Operation Rescue, an aggressive pro-life group that had moved in next door to the women’s health clinic where McCorvey worked. She soon quit her job at the clinic and was baptized by Benham. She became a spokeswoman for the anti-abortion movement, penning a book about her ideological transformation and traveling the country giving speeches to religious groups.

Like McCorvey’s own views on abortion, popular opinion about a woman’s right to choose has been the subject of much conflict and debate since the landmark 1973 case. And while a strong majority of Americans still agrees with the Roe decision, dismantling the right to an abortion is now an explicit objective for both the new administration and the Republican-led congress.

In the month since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, GOP lawmakers have put forward measures aimed at pulling federal family planning funds from Planned Parenthood and repealing the Affordable Care Act, including its requirement that insurance plans cover contraceptives. They have also introduced bills that would make abortion illegal after 20 weeks of pregnancy and would ban the standard abortion method used by doctors in the second trimester.

A Supreme Court majority that would be open to overturning Roe is becoming increasingly likely, as well. This is something Trump promised repeatedly during the campaign as part of his largely successful effort to win over skeptical evangelical voters. As a candidate, he made four promises to the anti-abortion community: He pledged to nominate anti-abortion justices; defund Planned Parenthood; sign the 20-week abortion ban; and permanently enshrine into law the Hyde Amendment—a 40-year old budget rider that Congress has repeatedly used to bar federal tax dollars from funding most abortions. Assuming that Judge Neil Gorsuch is confirmed this spring, it may only take the departure of one pro-abortion-rights justice to tip the balance on the court against Roe.

During the campaign, the formerly pro-choice Trump brought on Mike Pence to shore up his anti-abortion bonafides. As governor of Indiana, Pence signed some of the country’s strictest abortion restrictions into law, including a measure requiring burial or cremation of aborted fetus remains and a ban on abortions due to fetal anomaly. In a September 2016 speech, Pence told an evangelical conference in Washington, DC, “I want to live to see the day that we put the sanctity of life back at the center of American law, and we send Roe v. Wade to the ash heap of history, where it belongs.”

Last month, Pence became the highest-ranking government official to ever address the annual March for Life in person. “Life is winning again in America,” Pence said at the anti-abortion gathering, pointing to the “historic election of a president who stands for a stronger America, a more prosperous America, and a president who, I proudly say, stands for the right to life.”

Roe has been seen by many as an imperfect decision. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the foremost legal warriors for gender equality, has criticized the decision for changing too much, too quickly. After founding the ACLU’s women’s rights project in the 1970s, Ginsburg focused on fighting sex discrimination with an incremental strategy. She brought several cases to the Supreme Court, building up a body of court victories that together established a sweeping legal and moral understanding of sex discrimination as something that is both illegal and wrong. Roe, she said at a conference in 2014, “established a target” for abortion opponents because it ditched this incremental approach, instead imposing a drastic change on states across the country. She suggested that if the high court had moved a little more slowly, today the idea of reproductive choice wouldn’t be so controversial. “A movement against access to abortion for women grew up, flourished, around a single target,” Ginsburg said.

After her victory as Roe’s main plaintiff, McCorvey joined the movement that sprung up to oppose Roe. Her death comes at a time when that movement, with help from the Trump White House, could achieve many of its long-held goals.

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“Jane Roe” Has Died. Abortion Rights Might Not Be Far Behind.

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Trump Just Held His First Campaign Rally for the 2020 Race

by SusanneWPA Posted on February 19, 2017

Mother Jones

On Saturday, just one month into his presidency, President Donald Trump held the first rally of his 2020 presidential campaign.

Trump was introduced by several Florida congressmen before making a dramatic entrance. To the soundtrack of the movie Air Force One, the presidential aircraft pulled into the airplane hangar where the rally was being held. Earlier this week, the White House said in a statement that they would not use the plane in the background as a prop, something Trump did often during the campaign with his own airplane.

After Melania Trump recited the “Our Father” and said a few words, Donald Trump opened his rally with an attack on the media. “I also want to speak to you without the filter of the fake news,” he said, accusing news outlets of writing false stories about him using made-up sources. “When the media lies to people, I will never, ever let them get away with it.” For the next 45 minutes he returned to his familiar themes of the wall on the US-Mexico border, keeping out unvetted immigrants, the unreliable judiciary, and America’s return to greatness.

In one particularly odd moment, Trump forced the Secret Service to let a man who had complimented his presidency during a pre-rally interview join him on stage. Trump instructed the man to climb over a fence to get to the stage and then briefly gave him the microphone to address the crowd. Trump acknowledged that the Secret Service was probably not pleased with this, but “we know our people,” he said.

Trump also lashed out at the Ninth Circuit appeals court that overturned his executive order banning immigrants from seven Muslim nations, saying that thousands of immigrants have been allowed into the country with no vetting. “There was no way to vet those people. There was no documentation. Nothing,” he said. In fact, the immigration process for refugees and other immigrants requires extensive vetting and documentation. Trump also said he’s ordered the Department of Justice to protect police and sheriffs “from crimes of violence,” and reiterated his plans to cut taxes, while also promising to implement a trillion dollar infrastructure program around the country.

You can watch the full speech here:

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Trump Just Held His First Campaign Rally for the 2020 Race

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Who Really Benefits From Repealing the Stream Protection Rule?

by LucieLHAEafk Posted on February 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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Behold the politics of Donald Trump in a nutshell:

Weigel is in Florida, so the workers in question are mostly Appalachian miners. Here’s a quick look at Appalachian coal mining employment:1

This chart shows two things. First, coal mining in Appalachia has been plummeting for a long time. Decades, actually. So it’s pretty easy to see why Appalachian coal miners are in dire straits and eager to listen to someone, anyone, who sounds sympathetic to their plight.

Second, Trump is getting a lot of of attention for rolling back the Stream Protection Rule, but it’s not going to put anyone back to work. I had to cheat to even get it to show up on the chart. It’s responsible for maybe a hundred mining jobs out of a total decline of 30,000 between 2009 and 2020.

So who does benefit from rolling back this rule? Well, OSM figures that Appalachian mine owners will save about $24 million per year in compliance costs.3 So they’re pretty happy. This is a dynamic that we’re going to see over and over from Trump:

He puts on a big show about something or other. Workers cheer.
Offstage, it turns out the benefit to workers is minuscule.
Instead, the bulk of the benefits end up going to corporations and the rich.
Liberals will find out about this because the New York Times will probably write about it. Working-class Trump fans won’t, because none of it will be reported by Fox News or Drudge or Limbaugh or Breitbart.

Executive summary: workers get a pittance, the rich get rewarded, and streams and rivers will continue to be fouled by mine tailings. But Trump’s supporters will be happy because they’ll be kept in the dark by all the people supposedly looking out for them.

1This is approximate. I counted coal mine employment from Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Alabama. The projection is based on a 50 percent loss of coal production and coal jobs between 2012 and 2020. The Office of Surface Mining figures that the Stream Protection Rule will cost about 260 mining jobs, and that Appalachia will bear 46 percent of compliance cost. (See this CRS report, p. 17.) So we can roughly figure that it will cost Appalachia a little over a hundred mining jobs.2

2The net job loss will be about zero, thanks to additional hires of engineers and biologists. However, that does nothing for miners.

3See here, p. 15. Total estimated compliance costs are $52 million per year, with Appalachia bearing 46 percent of the total.

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Who Really Benefits From Repealing the Stream Protection Rule?

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It’s Pretty Sad That the President of the United States Needs to Watch Briefing Videos Like This

by WillyNiles9 Posted on February 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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On Thursday morning, Mother Jones fellow Ashley Dejean reported on a classified memo which revealed that Donald Trump’s “daily briefing book typically contains reports on only three topics, typically no more than one page each.”

On Thursday afternoon, American Urban Radio White House correspondent April Ryan asked the president a question about the Congressional Black Caucus that provoked a response suggesting Donald Trump thinks all black people know each other.

On Friday night, occasional Mother Jones contributor (and my brother) Harry Dreyfuss published a video neatly tying those two stories together.

Excerpt from – 

It’s Pretty Sad That the President of the United States Needs to Watch Briefing Videos Like This

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Trump Decrees That the Economy Must Grow Twice as Fast

by JesseGeorge Posted on February 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Congressional Budget Office forecasts that the labor force will grow 0.5 percent annually over the next ten years and productivity will grow 1.4 percent. That’s total economic growth of 1.9 percent per year. But the Trumpists are forecasting 3.5 percent growth over the next decade. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they supercharge the economy, pulling everyone back into work and achieving labor force growth of 0.8 percent. They still need productivity growth of 2.7 percent. That’s astronomically higher than anyone thinks possible. So how are Trump’s economists justifying this?

The answer is simplicity itself. The Wall Street Journal explains:

What’s unusual about the administration’s forecasts isn’t just their relative optimism but also the process by which they were derived. Normally, the executive branch starts with a baseline forecast prepared by career staff of the CEA….Discussions for the Trump administration unfolded differently, with transition officials telling the CEA staff the growth targets that their budget would produce and asking them to backfill other estimates off those figures.

So…they’re doing it by just telling their economists what growth will be. That’s an interesting approach. But what’s the point of this? Here’s a pair of growth forecasts—one for 2 percent and one for 4 percent—that should illustrate things:

If you assume higher growth, you can cut taxes and still get more revenue. Alternatively, you can spend more on the military or a border wall without increasing the deficit. Or a combination of both.

In other words, it’s magic fairy dust. Sprinkle it around and you can do anything you want. Problems only arise if a bunch of snooty Ivy League economists insist that you’re delusional, which explains why Trump hasn’t bothered to hire anyone for his Council of Economic Advisors. They would just tell him stuff he doesn’t want to hear. It also explains why Paul Ryan isn’t playing this game too: his budget is vetted by the CBO, which has no intention of aiding and abetting fantasyland figures like these.

It’s hard to know what the point of this is. Most likely, Trump said on the campaign trail that he’d grow the economy at 4 percent, and by God he’s going to stick with that. (Remember: 3.5 rounds up to 4, so his campaign promise is safe.) Besides, Trump probably really believes that he can get the economy growing that fast through the sheer force of his personality.

The real shock here isn’t Trump—we already know he’s divorced from reality—but the rest of his staff. Is there really not a single person in the White House who has both the gumption and the standing to tell Trump that the president can’t peddle this kind of drivel in an official document? Is there no one who can tell him that Twitter is one thing, but the Budget of the United States of America is another?

I guess not.

UPDATE: The original illustration of 2 percent vs. 4 percent growth used figures for nine years of growth instead of ten. It’s been corrected.

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Trump Decrees That the Economy Must Grow Twice as Fast

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Trump’s environmental assault continues, and now he’ll have Pruitt as a henchman

by Elena50Fdd Posted on February 17, 2017

Even as national security scandals and general chaos engulf the White House, President Trump continues to wreak environmental havoc. Your Trump Tracker columnist already told you what POTUS got up to in his first and second weeks; now here’s a roundup of the mayhem from weeks three and four.

Not-so-great Scott:
Oil industry ally taking helm at EPA

What happened? Scott Pruitt is expected to be confirmed by the Senate as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday. [UPDATE: Yep, he was confirmed.] He doesn’t lack for detractors. EPA employees are making unprecedented calls for senators to oppose his nomination. Maine Republican Susan Collins says she won’t vote for him. Democrats have been kicking up a fuss over Pruitt’s refusal to release emails from his time as Oklahoma attorney general, when he did the oil and gas industry’s bidding. On Thursday, an Oklahoma judge ordered Pruitt to release those emails by next Tuesday. But none of that will be enough to stop him from being confirmed.

So the EPA will be led by a man who appears to hate the EPA. Pruitt has sued the agency 14 times to challenge environmental rules, and couldn’t or wouldn’t name a single EPA rule he likes. His ties to oil and gas producers and the Koch brothers are notorious, and the donations he’s received from them have been bounteous. He sides with different kinds of polluters too, like the poultry industry.

In other cabinet news, Trump’s nominees for two more environment-related jobs — Rep. Ryan Zinke for interior secretary and Rick Perry for energy secretary — are expected to sail through confirmation once they get squeezed onto the Senate calendar. They will join a host of other climate deniers in the Trump cabinet, including recently confirmed Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.

How much does it matter? Pruitt’s confirmation is a huge deal. The EPA is responsible for implementing federal laws that protect air and water, and determining what the latest science tells us about protecting human health. If Pruitt refuses to implement those laws or consider that science, the environment will get dirtier and Americans’ health will suffer. Which leads us to …

Something wicked this way comes:
Trump poised to bludgeon the EPA

What happened? The Trump team told EPA officials this week that the president is planning to sign executive orders to revamp the agency and curb its work on climate change. He’s just been waiting for Pruitt to be confirmed. As soon as next week, Trump is expected to hold a swearing-in ceremony for Pruitt at EPA headquarters and sign the orders, which may include one related to the State Department and the Paris climate deal. The orders could “suck the air out of the room,” a source told Inside EPA. And the agency is already gasping for breath. EPA Acting Administrator Catherine McCabe said on Tuesday that Trump’s federal hiring freeze is “creating some challenges to our ability to get the agency’s work done.”

How much does it matter? A ton. Reversing progress on climate change in particular will have massive, global impacts. If, as expected, Trump kills Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the U.S. will be unlikely to meet its emission-reduction pledge under the Paris deal, and if the U.S. flakes, other countries are more likely to flake on their pledges, too. If Trump tries to pull out of or undermine the Paris agreement, the repercussions will be even bigger.

If you build it …
Full speed ahead on Dakota Access

What happened? Construction started up on the controversial segment of the Dakota Access Pipeline last week, after the Trump administration officially granted an easement for the pipeline to be built on federal land. The disputed segment will run underneath Lake Oahe, a reservoir in North Dakota near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. The Sioux and environmental allies have been trying various legal challenges to stop the construction, but none have worked so far and they’re increasingly looking like long shots. The pipeline could be completed and pumping oil by June 1.

Meanwhile, the company that wants to build the Keystone XL Pipeline is also moving forward. Obama rejected the proposed pipeline in fall 2015, but Trump encouraged pipeline builder TransCanada to revive the project. On Thursday, the company made a step in that direction, applying to a Nebraska commission for approval of its proposed route through the state.

Trump said last week that his pipeline moves must not have been controversial because he hadn’t gotten a single phone call in opposition. Perhaps that’s because the White House wasn’t picking up the phones.

How much does it matter? A lot. Both pipelines pose local environmental risks and global climate threats, but more notably, stopping them had become a cause for the climate and environmental justice movements to rally around. Activists aren’t giving up, though: They’re continuing to fight both projects and ramping up battles against other pipelines around the U.S.

Breaking the rules:
Repealing regs to help pollutocrats

What happened? The House has been swiftly and giddily voting to repeal Obama-era environmental regulations, and the Senate has been following suit at a slightly slower pace. This week, Trump signed two of those rule revocations into law. The first one was a gift to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and his oil industry buddies; Trump did away with a rule that had required oil, gas, and mining companies to disclose any payments they made to foreign governments, with the aim of curbing corruption. The second was a gift to the coal industry; now mountaintop-removal mining companies will again be free to dump their waste into streams. And thanks to a provision in the law Congress used to make these repeals, the government is banned from issuing substantially similar regulations in the future.

The Trump administration has also delayed some regulations that the Obama team had put in place, including one to add the rusty patched bumble bee to the endangered species list.

How much does it matter? Some. We’ll now see more corruption in developing countries and more pollution in coal-mining communities. Trump may next sign repeals of regulations on methane leaks and public participation in land management. But the real danger is still to come. As Juliet Eilperin recently reported in the Washington Post, “Trump has embarked on the most aggressive campaign against government regulation in a generation.” We ain’t seen nothing yet.

On that note, have a happy long weekend!

Continued here:  

Trump’s environmental assault continues, and now he’ll have Pruitt as a henchman

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