The Opioid Epidemic and the Face of Long-Term Unemployment →

...a must-read story at Bloomberg, This Is the New Face of American Unemployment. It seeks to give a better picture of long-term un and underemployment through five profiles, each chosen to illustrate a widely-reported impediment: low mobility, criminal records, disability, labor shortage, and “mature workers”.
However, when you read the stories carefully, they actually depict two overarching problems: discrimination and the far-ranging impact of the opioid epidemic.
And separately, the story has buried in it a factoid that indicts the performance of our ruling classes: “Nearly half of U.S. children now have at least one parent with a criminal record.”
The most gripping story is the first, that of Tyler Moore of Mingo, West Virginia, who is meant to stand as the poster child of “low mobility”. But the reason it would be better if he could get out of Mingo is that the town and area are collapsing due to the closure of coal mines, which had been the anchors of the economy.
And it isn’t that Moore is not willing to go, even though he would prefer to remain near his aging father. It’s that the only thing that has kept him alive is family and community safety nets.
Even though the story doesn’t dwell on it, it is not hard to discern that Mingo is awash in drugs and despair...
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The bigger point is that neoliberalism treats individuals as able to make their own way, when people are products of their families and communities. And we have entire sections of the country being laid waste by the combination of economic distress, poor education, weak social safety nets, and despair. And regulatory neglect made a bad situation vastly worse. This damage greatly compounded by Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, targeting less well educated doctors in areas with a lot of manual workers who would suffer from accidents and long-term orthopedic pain. On top of that, Purdue sold what was an alleged longer-term formulation, and when patients would report pain when the dose ran out after 8 hours, the MDs would be told to increase the dosage...
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The key is that the ravaging of swathes of rural America wasn’t simply the result of economic misfortune. Sustained looting in the form of being targeted by a predatory opioid producer made a bad situation vastly worse. And the coastal elites call the victims deplorables when that label fits much more properly on the Sacklers and the experts that helped them perfect their lucrative strip-mining of working class communities.

Republicans Want Retirement Plans That Keep Wall Street Rich →

Several states, most notably Illinois and California, are in the process of opening up their public retirement plans to workers in the private sector to allow people to save without giving so much money to the financial industry. Under this plan, workers in private firms would have the option to contribute to a state-managed system. 
This would have the advantage of keeping the same plan even as someone changed jobs and the fees would be far lower. Instead of fees of 1.0-1.5 percent, workers would likely be seeing fees in the range of 0.2-0.3 percent. Did I mention this was voluntary? 
Okay, so we’re talking about giving workers the option to save for their own retirement in individual accounts. If the Republican Party stood for anything other than giving money to rich people, this would be it. 
But the Republicans are up in arms against making it easier for workers to save. Paul Ryan and his gang are planning to deny states the right to offer such plans...
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They argue, incredibly, that workers need safeguards with their savings and that the government must have oversight over employers sending checks to the state system.
This one is too stupid even for Washington politics. Everyone knows that there is nothing the Republicans in Congress hate more than government regulations that protect workers. This is why they were so anxious to repeal the fiduciary rule requiring financial advisers to act in the interest of their clients. This is why they want to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The story here is about as simple as it gets. Republicans’ buddies in the financial industry will lose a lot of money if workers can put their money in these state-sponsored retirement systems instead of having to rely on their rip-off outfits. The Republicans are rigging the system to transfer tens of billions of dollars a year from ordinary workers to their rich friends.  The only principle here is giving more money to the rich.

Politics Stressing You Out? You Aren’t Alone →

Something I've been worried about. I wish there was historical data, to see if/how different this post-election period is. Still:

More than half of Americans — 57 percent — say that the current political climate is a "very" or "somewhat" significant source of stress in their lives, according to a new survey released by the American Psychological Association (APA).
What's more, fully two-thirds (66 percent) say that the future of the nation is a significant source of stress.
The new survey, conducted by the Harris Poll on behalf of APA, is part of a larger poll about stress conducted by the organization since 2006. But 2016 was the first year that APA asked about the impact of politics, an addition prompted when psychologists who are part of the organization reported a spike in patient anxiety about the 2016 election. In January of this year, the APA followed up with additional questions, yielding the data released Wednesday.
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But concern about the future of America runs across party and educational lines. Majorities of both Republicans (59 percent) and Democrats (76 percent) say they are significantly worried about the nation in the long run. That's also true for more than 60 percent of respondents across all levels of education. 
Anxiety about politics may have contributed to an overall increase in Americans' stress levels in just the past few months, too. Between August 2016 and January 2017, Americans' overall average reported stress level rose from 4.8 to 5.1 on a 10-point scale, the survey found.

 

As Obesity Rises, Remote Pacific Islands Plan to Abandon Junk Food →

An important experiment:

While many governments struggle to ban soda to curb obesity, the tiny Torba Tourism Council in the remote Pacific island nation of Vanuatu is planning to outlaw all imported food at government functions and tourist establishments across the province’s 13 inhabited islands.
Provincial leaders hope to turn them instead into havens of local organic food. The ban, scheduled to take effect in March, comes as many Pacific island nations struggle with an obesity crisis brought on in part by the overconsumption of imported junk food.

Why Polls Differ On Trump’s Popularity: It’s cherry-picking season already →

What’s the real story? The differences between the polls aren’t random, or at least they don’t appear to be based on the relatively limited amount of data we have so far. Instead, Trump’s approval ratings are systematically higher in polls of voters — either registered voters or likely voters — than they are in polls of all adults. And they’re systematically higher in polls conducted online or by automated script than they are in polls conducted by live-telephone interviewers. Here’s every approval rating poll that we can find for Trump so far this month:2...

Many excellent details of the intricacies and science behind popularity polls in the article. The kicker, however:

In some ways, the pattern reflected the one before November’s election, when reporters and pundits selectively interpreted the evidence and assumed that Hillary Clinton was a much heavier favorite than she really was based on the polls. Trump is not very popular, but he’s also no more unpopular than Barack Obama was for much of his presidency. If his numbers hold where they they are right now — especially among registered voters — Republicans would probably hold their own in 2018, and 2020 would be another highly competitive election.
What’s different, as I mentioned, is Trump’s approval ratings are much worse than what a president typically enjoys at this stage of his term. So the question is whether his ratings will continue to decline or if he steadies the ship, or eventually pivots and sees his approval ratings improve. It’s possible — I’d wager more likely than not if forced to bet — that Trump’s ratings will continue to decline over the next six to 18 months, at which point he’d be in trouble since he’s starting from a low baseline. But while he faces a lot of challenges — mostly of his own making — he sometimes benefits from news coverage that overextends itself and predicts his immediate demise only to have to pull back later, perhaps making him seem more formidable in the process. We learned that lesson the hard way in the primaries, and then we often watched the same feeding-frenzy mentality take hold in the general election. While the news is unfolding at an exceptionally brisk pace, changes to Trump’s popularity ratings are likely to be slower.

Upward Distribution of Wage Income Behind Social Security's Shortfall →

The "shortfall" in Social Security is political sleight-of-hand, a tax dodge for the wealthy. 

From the video transcript. Dean Baker:

...They love to talk about the issue of aging and it's kind of, you know, strange however you want to put it. The point about aging is it is true, we are getting older, that's actually a good thing in the sense that people are living longer. Most of us think that's a good thing because as medical care and our wellbeing improve people do live longer lives. But what's weird is that this isn't new. This has always been true. It's not unexpected. People knew that we were going to live longer. You can go back our projections that were made back in the '30's, they are almost exactly on line in terms of how much longer people would live and the increase in the size of the retired population relative to the working population. So, none of that is new. We knew about it, it's not a new story. There's nothing qualitatively different from what's projected to happen in the next 10, 20, 30 years than what's happened in the last 30, 40 years. So, that's not new. What is new, and Speaker Ryan is less anxious to talk about this is that we've had a large upwardly distribution in wage income. And the reason why that matters you referred to the cap on wage income - $127,000. Income above the cap is not subject to taxation. The last time there was a major overhaul of the program in 1983, they set the cap at a level where only 10% of wage income went over the top, avoided taxation. Today, because there's been so much upwardly distribution of income, close to 20%, almost twice as large a share of wage income goes over the top and avoids taxation. That's a big part of the projected shortfall in social security. I'm not saying it's the whole story, but it's a very big part of the story. And it's a part of the story that Speaker Ryan and other Republicans aren't anxious to talk about...

Trump's Immigration Clampdown Hurts the Heartland →

...That could choke off the flows of overseas tuition dollars and research funding that now power many local economies in the Midwest and South.
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Unlike local students, the international kids usually pay full sticker price -- about $13,000 in 2014, compared with an in-state price of about $4,500. That means foreign students aren’t taking away spots from the locals; they’re actually subsidizing their education, by tens of millions of dollars a year. Rich parents in places such as China and India, anxious for their kids to get an American degree, pay big bucks to send them to places like Fort Hays State. That money helps local Kansas kids get a good education for much less than they otherwise would. Most of those overseas students eventually go home, and the Kansas kids get a lifetime earnings boost.
And even more importantly, the local economy gains. It benefits from the dollars that those international students spend on meals, clothes and movies. It benefits from all the services the university buys from electricians, plumbers and construction companies. That’s why places where the U.S. government established land grant universities long ago have a big economic advantage today.
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As economist Adam Ozimek points out, educating international students is an export industry that brings in tens of billions of dollars a year. Want to decrease the U.S. trade deficit? Recruit more international students for U.S. colleges. Want to save the economies of places in the Rust Belt, and boost the growth of small cities and towns outside the thriving coasts? Attract international students. Want to help Trump’s small-town working-class voter base? Get more international students.

Iran Hawks Take the White House →

The United States is adding new sanctions on Iran over that country’s alleged misdeeds, and nearly all of those allegations are either out-and-out lies or half-truths. It has a familiar ring to it, as demonizing Tehran has been rather more the norm than not since 1979, a phenomenon that has included fabricated claims that the Iranians killed American soldiers after the U.S.’s armed interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. This time around, the administration focused on the perfectly legal Iranian test of a non-nuclear-capable, medium-range ballistic missile and the reported attack on what was initially claimed to be a U.S. warship by allegedly Iranian-backed Yemeni Houthi fighters. The ship was later revealed to be a Saudi frigate.
Donald Trump’s national-security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, “officially” put Iran “on notice” while declaring that “The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate Iran’s provocations that threaten our interests. The days of turning a blind eye to Iran’s hostile and belligerent actions toward the United States and the world community are over.”
Ignoring the fact that Iran cannot actually threaten the United States or any genuine vital national interests, the warning and follow-up action from the White House also contradict Donald Trump’s campaign pledge to avoid yet another war in the Middle East, which appears to have escaped Flynn’s notice. The increase in tension and the lack of any diplomatic dialogue mean that an actual shooting war might now be a “false flag,” false intelligence report, or accidental naval encounter away.
If it all sounds like a reprise of the baseless allegations and intentionally unproductive negotiations that led to the catastrophic Iraq War, it should. What “belligerent actions against the United States” Flynn was referring to, generally speaking, were not completely clear, but that lack of precision may have been intentional, to permit instant vilification of anything Tehran attempts to do to counter the hostility coming out of Washington.
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Iran certainly exhibits assertive behavior regionally. But much of its maneuvering is defensive in nature; it is surrounded by a sea of enemies, most of whom are better armed and funded than it is. The nuclear agreement with Iran has considerably delayed any possible development of a nuclear weapon and is in everyone’s interest. It is not plausibly a delaying tactic to acquire a weapon somewhere down the road, as Flynn and Ledeen would have us believe.
Iran will be a very tough nut to crack if Flynn has his way and the Trump White House employs military force. Iran is roughly the same size as Alaska and has three times the population of Iraq, and the Iranian people have a strong national identity. They would fight hard, and using their sophisticated Russian-provided air defenses and Chinese missiles they could inflict major damage on U.S. air and naval units in the Persian Gulf region. They would also be able to unleash limited but nevertheless lethal terrorist resources. It would not be a “cakewalk,” and even if there were a military victory of some sorts, the world would be left with yet another power vacuum in the heart of Asia.
I believe that Flynn is a dangerous man, possibly even mentally unhinged on some issues. He thinks that the United States has the preemptive right to tell countries in the Middle East what is acceptable and what is not and is willing to exercise various repressive measures to compel good behavior. Iran, as a designated “problem state,” is consequently not allowed to act in support of its own national-security interests. Flynn justifies his hostility by claiming that Iran is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism and instability, which is a self-serving lie. Absent diplomacy to resolve differences, the only interaction with Tehran from Washington has become the threat of economic sanctions backed up by military force. As Iran responds in kind this will become an escalatory cycle with no easy way out.