Healthcare reform, NAFTA renegotiations, tax reform,and the review of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which offers individuals and small businesses numerous protections at the expense of banks, have primed the debate on economic development, job creation, and poverty. Healthcare reform, in particular, tends to provoke heated responses, because the inability to pay for healthcare is a matter of live and death. As a form of financial compensation for employment, insufficient and increasingly expensive health benefits simply reflect the struggle to earn a sufficient income. As a form of public welfare, government health insurance and subsidies only mirror the growing need for social welfare spending.
Poverty around the world has a surefire cure. It is income from employment and business ownership. More specifically, it is a source of income capable of supporting a modern lifestyle and the opportunity to grow one’s income based on merit and hard work. Absent an economy that delivers opportunities to the majority of people, social welfare spending is needed to ensure the basic needs of people are met and people can access the means needed to eventually uplift themselves from poverty. Unfortunately, productivity-enhancing technology, outsourcing accelerated by disruptive trade, and the redistribution of wealth into concentrated pockets are factors fueling a growing need for public welfare.
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The US House of Representation under Republican Congress finally managed to pass the infamous American Health Care Act, which seeks to replace key aspects of the Affordable Care Act, i.e. Obamacare. To convince reluctant House members to vote for a bill they did not actually support, House leadership used a combination of pressure tactics, concessions to key holdouts, and irrelevant promises of major changes in the Senate version. They essentially tweaked the previously rejected AHCA version with politically-motivated alternations without addressing the actual criticism of the original analysis and solving the cost issue of healthcare.
Republicans did add provisions for a grossly underfunded state-sponsored “high-risk pools” that would allegedly help cover the added expenses of individuals with preconditions, but this will simply force government to subsidize the insurance of those with preconditions, which is basically what Medicare does for costly old people, thereby allowing insurance companies to pocket the extra profits that should be used to cover the care of sick people, i.e. the market solution. In other words, Republican lawmakers made a bad piece of legislation even worse by negating the very purpose of health insurance. It is a perfect example of how government should not operate and how legislation should not be crafted. US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently raised concerns when he tried to explain the Trump Administration's "America First" foreign policy. He appeared to divorce American policies from American values, which is how publications like 'The Guardian' interpreted his argument.
The statement "...And in some circumstances, if you condition our national security efforts on someone adopting our values, we probably can’t achieve our national security goals or our national security interests. If we condition too heavily that others must adopt this value that we’ve come to over a long history of our own, it really creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests, our economic interest...." probably alarmed people, especially non-Americans, the most. Just as the world reacted to America's unilateral, seemingly arbitrary, and terribly justified use of American might to crush the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, statements and sentiments like this frighten people, because they frame the United States as a scary, self-serving emperor of the world that expects all to obey its will or face armed invasion. The Tillerson's speech does reflect "the balance" theme that the Washington Outsider has argued "America First" should and must embody in articles, such as "International Governance In An Age of America First and Nationalist Movements," "US Foreign Policy Politics Decrypted: International Governance Versus Nationalist Politics," and "Trump On Foreign Affairs: Criticism Explains Failures of US Foreign Policy." Tillerson also asserts the need to preserve US values while his jumbled argument does rightfully highlight the need for the US to stop imposing American views and policy approaches onto the Peoples of the world. It does, however, appear that Tillerson has convoluted these ideas in such a way that he is justifying the support of abusive, oppressive governments for the sake of alleged US economic and military objective, which are often motivated by politics and special interests . It appears he has not learned the lessons discussed in Washington Outsider articles like "Trump, World Leaders Neglect Lessons from Arab Spring Revolutions: Empower the Peoples of the World." American global power, economic and military, is rooted in America's alliances. It is precisely, because American policies are rooted in American values, that the world chooses to support the United States over other global powers. When the United States does act to pursue US national interests, without developing policy objectives honor US values, it has resulted in a betrayal of American values and countless disasters. As part of the anti-Obama theme of the Trump Administration, Tillerson's assertions are a rejection of Obama's foreign policy stances. Obama's foreign policy was, of course, a response to the failures of the George. W Bush Administration's foreign and the Arab Spring Revolutions, which revealed what happens when the US spends decades supporting oppressive dictators in order to achieve US military and economic interests without America' principles. The Obama Foreign Policy had many issues, but the foreign policy Tillerson appears to embrace has decades of failure attached to it. Actions speak louder than words. In the world of politics, public policy priorities offer far more insights into the thinking, values, and allegiances of political figures than their rhetoric. Unfortunately, politicians are fairly apt at using spin to muddy the water when their policy preferences appear to contradict their expressed views. Republicans, for example, will always cite the need to safeguard the viability of the free market when it comes to stripping away regulations that provide consumer protections. They argue they are helping consumers by ensuring a competitive marketplace exists, even if they are blatantly catering to some special interest group. Democrats will claim they are protecting the rights of everyone when they are catering to the special interests of their base.
With that in mind, the Trump Administration has pressed forward with a policy agenda that takes the US toward the Right. On certain issues, such as free trade, the President’s views also align with the more traditional priorities of those in the middle as well as those on the Left. There are also areas where the Trump Administration, like all Presidencies, blatantly favors special interests groups over the broader interests of the nation. The rollback of environmental and other regulations definitely favors the industries targeted by the regulations, but there is room for debate as to whether or not their repeal favors US national interests. When it comes to Trump’s tax priorities, however, he clearly reveals how both special interests and his professional bias influence his policy preferences. NAFTA sits in judgment under the Trump Administration, which scuttled the TPP agreement negotiated by the Obama Administration. In advance of a May Day filled with protests pushing for stronger Labor Rights and Immigration Rights around the world, where free trade continues to spread with initiatives like TPP and CEPA, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order that seeks to determine whether free trade agreements have benefited the US. The simple answer will be “yes,” because the national, aggravate benefits of free trade policies are easier to calculate than the localized and long-term costs of failing to embrace alternative policies.
The more relevant question is, therefore, who has benefited from free trade agreements in what ways and who has been harmed. In reshaping US trade policy, the next question is how can the benefits of free trade policies be achieved without the costs of tariff-free trade. Although the Trump Administration faces steep opposition from immigration advocates due to his aggressive policies and rhetoric against immigrants, particularly illegal immigrants and migrants from Muslim countries, his anti-free trade views align with both the views of Labor Rights advocates and Immigration advocates who believe tariff-free trade disempowers the world’s population. |
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April 2020
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