Category: Government

Regulations Reduce Health Care Quality and Increase Health Care Cost

(p. A15) There are two million home health aides in the U.S. They spend more time with the elderly and disabled than anyone else, and their skills are essential to their clients’ quality of life. Yet these aides are poorly trained, and their national median wage is only a smidgen more than $10 an hour.
The reason? State regulations–in particular, Nurse Practice Acts–require registered nurses to perform even routine home-care tasks like administering eyedrops. That duty might not require a nursing degree, but defenders of the current system say aides lack the proper training. “What if they put in the cat’s eyedrops instead?” a health-care consultant asked me. In another conversation, the CEO of a managed-care insurance company wrote off home-care aides as “minimum wage people.”
But aides could do more. With less regulation and better training, they could become as integral to health-care teams as doctors and nurses. That could improve the quality of care while saving buckets of money for everyone involved.
. . .
. . . the potential cost savings are considerable. There are 2.3 million Medicaid patients receiving long-term care at home. Imagine if even half of them replaced one hourlong nurse’s visit a month with a stop by a trained aide. Assuming the nurse makes $35 an hour and the aide $15, that’s an immediate savings of roughly $275 million a year.

For the full commentary, see:
Paul Osterman. “Why Home Care Costs Too Much; Regulations often require that nurses do simple tasks like administer eyedrops.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Sept. 13, 2017): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Sept. 12, 2017.)

The commentary, quoted above, is related to the author’s book:
Osterman, Paul. Who Will Care for Us? Long-Term Care and the Long-Term Workforce. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2017.

Dubai Central Planners Subsidize Driverless Drones

(p. A7) Like a scene from “The Jetsons,” commuters in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, may soon climb aboard automated flying taxis, soaring over busy streets and past the desert city’s gleaming skyscrapers, all — quite literally — at the push of a button.
Passenger drones, capable of carrying a single rider and a small suitcase, will begin buzzing above the emirate as early as July [2017], according to the director of the city’s transportation authority, part of an ambitious plan to increase driverless technology.
Already, the eight-rotor drone, made by the Chinese firm Ehang, has flown test runs past the Burj Al Arab, Dubai’s iconic, sail-shaped skyscraper.
The drone “is not just a model but it has really flown in Dubai skies,” Mattar Al Tayer, the director general of Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority, said on Monday [Feb. 13, 2017], adding that the emirate would “spare no effort to launch” autonomous aerial vehicles by July.

For the full story, see:
RUSSELL GOLDMAN. “Dubai Plans Drone Taxis That Skip Drivers and Roads.” The New York Times (Weds., FEB. 15, 2017): A7.
(Note: bracketed dates added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 14, 2017, and has the title “Dubai Plans a Taxi That Skips the Driver, and the Roads.”)

DeVos Defends Due Process at Universities

(p. A17) Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has made clear her intention to correct one of the Obama administration’s worst excesses–its unjust rules governing sexual misconduct on college campuses. In a forceful speech Thursday at Virginia’s George Mason University, Mrs. DeVos said that “one rape is one too many”–but also that “one person denied due process is one too many.” Mrs. DeVos declared that “every student accused of sexual misconduct must know that guilt is not predetermined.”
. . .
As four Harvard law professors–Jeannie Suk Gersen, Janet Halley, Elizabeth Bartholet and Nancy Gertner–argued in a recent article, a fair process requires “neutral decisionmakers who are independent of the school’s [federal regulatory] compliance interest, and independent decisionmakers providing a check on arbitrary and unlawful decisions.” The four had been among more than two dozen Harvard law professors to express concerns about the Obama administration’s–and Harvard’s–handling of Title IX. So too had 16 University of Pennsylvania law professors, as well as the American Council for Trial Lawyers.

For the full commentary, see:
KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr. “DeVos Pledges to Restore Due Process; The Obama Education Department’s Title IX decree ‘failed too many students,’ she says.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Sept. 8, 2017): A17.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Sept. 7, 2017.)

The commentary, quoted above, is related to the authors’ book:
Johnson, KC, and Stuart Taylor, Jr. The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities. New York: Encounter Books, 2017.

The article by the Harvard law professors, mentioned above, has been posted online at:
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/33789434/Fairness%20for%20All%20Students.pdf?sequence=1

“Make School Lunches Great Again”

(p. D1) ATLANTA — On a sweltering morning in July, Sonny Perdue, the newly minted secretary of agriculture, strode across the stage of a convention hall here packed with 7,000 members of the School Nutrition Association, who had gathered for their annual conference.
After reminiscing about the cinnamon rolls baked by the lunchroom ladies of his youth, he delivered a rousing defense of school food-service workers who were unhappy with some of the sweeping changes made by the Obama administration. The amounts of fat, sugar and salt were drastically reduced. Portion sizes shrank. Lunch trays had to hold more fruits and vegetables. Snacks and food sold for fund-raising had to be healthier.
“Your dedication and creativity was being stifled,” Mr. Perdue said. “You were forced to focus your attention on strict, inflexible rules handed down from Washington. Even worse, you experienced firsthand that the rules were failing.”
Mr. Perdue then outlined how his department was loosening some of those rules. He finished with a folksy story about a child who asked whether Mr. Perdue could make school lunches great again.
Some in the audience cheered. Some walked out.

For the full story, see:

KIM SEVERSON. “Will the Trump Era Transform the School Lunch?” The New York Times (Weds., SEPT. 6, 2017): D1 & D6.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date SEPT. 5, 2017, and has the title”Will the Trump Era Transform the School Lunch?”)

Reducing Taxes and Regulations Can Boost Growth

(p. A2) The angst was on display this weekend at the annual conference of the American Economic Association, the profession’s largest gathering. The conference is a showcase for agenda-setting research, a giant job fair for the nation’s most promising young economists and, this year, the site of endless discussion about how to rebuild trust in the discipline.
Many academic economists have been champions of free trade and globalization, ideas under assault among rising populist movements in advanced economies around the world. The rise of President-elect Donald Trump, with his fierce rhetoric against elites, in particular, left many at this conference questioning their place in the world.
“The economic elite did many things to undermine their credibility while people’s economic fortunes were taking a turn for the worse,” said Steven Davis, an economist at the University of Chicago.
. . .
Stanford University’s John Taylor and Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard said Mr. Trump’s plans to simplify the tax and regulatory codes could indeed boost the economy’s growth. Both economists served in the past in the White House Council of Economic Advisers, long populated by academics who present at the AEA conference every January.
This year, academics are out in the cold. During the election The Wall Street Journal contacted every former member of the CEA, including those going back to President Richard Nixon. None had been tapped as an adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign, nor did any publicly endorse him.
The president-elect is “not particularly interested in hearing from the academic economist club,” Mr. Davis said.

For the full story, see:
Josh Zumbrun. “Economists Grapple With Public Disdain.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Jan. 9, 2017): A2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 8, 2017, and has the title “Top Economists Grapple With Public Disdain for Initiatives They Championed.”)

Courageous Grover Cleveland Belongs in “Entitlement Reform Hall of Fame”

(p. A11) Mr. Cogan has just written a riveting, massive book, “The High Cost of Good Intentions,” on the history of entitlements in the U.S., and he describes how in 1972 the Senate “attached an across-the-board, permanent increase of 20% in Social Security benefits to a must-pass bill” on the debt ceiling. President Nixon grumbled loudly but signed it into law. In October, a month before his re-election, “Nixon reversed course and availed himself of an opportunity to take credit for the increase,” Mr. Cogan says. “When checks went out to some 28 million recipients, they were accompanied by a letter that said that the increase was ‘signed into law by President Richard Nixon.’ ”
The Nixon episode shows, says Mr. Cogan, that entitlements have been the main cause of America’s rising national debt since the early 1970s. Mr. Trump’s pact with the Democrats is part of a pattern: “The debt ceiling has to be raised this year because elected representatives have again failed to take action to control entitlement spending.”
. . .
Mr. Cogan conceived the book about four years ago when, as part of his research into 19th-century spending patterns, he “saw this remarkable phenomenon of the growth in Civil War pensions. By the 1890s, 30 years after it had ended, pensions from the war accounted for 40% of all federal government spending.” About a million people were getting Civil War pensions, he found, compared with 8,000 in 1873, eight years after the war. Mr. Cogan wondered what caused that “extraordinary growth” and whether it was unique.
When he went back to the stacks to look at pensions from the Revolutionary War, he saw “exactly the same pattern.” It dawned on him, he says, that this matched “the evolutionary pattern of modern entitlements, such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps.”
. . .
Who would feature in an Entitlement Reform Hall of Fame? Mr. Cogan’s blue eyes shine contentedly at this question, as he utters the two words he seems to love most: Grover Cleveland. “He was the very first president to take on an entitlement. He objected to the large Civil War program and thought it needed to be reformed.” Cleveland was largely unsuccessful, but was a “remarkably courageous president.” In his time, Congress had started passing private relief bills, giving out individual pensions “on a grand scale. They’d take 100 or 200 of these bills on a Friday afternoon and pass them with a single vote. Incredibly, 55% of all bills introduced in the Senate in its 1885 to 1887 session were such private pension bills.”.

For the full interview, see:
Tunku Varadarajan. “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW with John F. Cogan; Why Entitlements Keep Growing, and Growing, and . . ..” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Sept. 9, 2017): A11.
(Note: ellipsis in title, in original; other ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Sept. 8, 2017, and has the title “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; Why Entitlements Keep Growing, and Growing, and . . ..”.)

The Cogan book, mentioned above, is:
Cogan, John F. The High Cost of Good Intentions: A History of U.S. Federal Entitlement Programs. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017.

Cashless Toll Technology Enables Congestion Pricing in Manhattan

(p. A15) As debate about creating a toll system to limit traffic in the most congested parts of Manhattan heats up, a transformation in technology could make congestion pricing a far more realistic notion than when it was last proposed a decade ago.
By the end of the year, nine crossings around the city will employ an open-road, cashless collection system that does away with tollbooths, toll lanes and toll collectors. Instead, sensors and cameras installed both above the road and in the pavement itself will capture cars and trucks as they zip by at full speed – automatically charging the 90 percent of drivers with E-ZPass transponders, and billing the other 10 percent by mail.
A decade ago, when the Bloomberg administration first proposed congestion pricing, such tolling technology was in its infancy and not widely used. Now, it is in place in some 35 jurisdictions, and its deployment in New York is the most ambitious use of the technology in a complicated urban setting.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who had not shown any enthusiasm for congestion pricing, has embraced the idea of late as a way to raise billions of dollars for the city’s ailing subway system. But Mayor Bill de Blasio has been steadfast in his opposition, and has instead pushed a plan to raise transportation funds by increasing taxes on wealthy New Yorkers.
Mr. Cuomo has yet to release a detailed congestion-pricing plan, but most schemes being discussed call for tolling vehicles to enter crowded parts of Manhattan, and doing so in a way that that does not slow the flow of traffic. By making toll-collecting all but invisible, Mr. Cuomo hopes congestion pricing will be more politically viable this time around.

For the full story, see:
MARC SANTORA. “Cashless Toll System Could Pave the Way for Manhattan Congestion Pricing.” The New York Times (Sat., AUG. 26, 2017): A15.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date AUG. 25, 2017, and has the title “Open-Road Tolls Could Pave the Way for Manhattan Congestion Pricing.”)

Inventor of Submarine “Was Shunted Aside”

(p. C6) There are very few wars in history that begin, dramatically, with a brand-new weapon displaying its transformative power, but one such case occurred in the southern North Sea in September 1914, when three large cruisers of the Royal Navy were torpedoed and swiftly sunk by a diminutive German U-boat, the U-9. At that moment, the age of the attack submarine was born, and the struggle for naval supremacy for a great part of both World War I and World War II was defined. The U-boat–shorthand for “Unterseeboot”–had come of age.
It is appropriate, then, that the historian Lawrence Goldstone begins “Going Deep” with a dramatic re-telling of the U-9’s exploit. It should be said immediately that his chronicle doesn’t present the whole history of submarine warfare but rather the story of the efforts of various American inventors and entrepreneurs–above all, an Irish-born engineer named John Philip Holland–to create a power-driven, human-directed and sub-marine vessel that could stalk and then, with its torpedoes, obliterate even the most powerful of surface warships.
. . .
“Going Deep” ends in 1914. By that time, the U.S. Navy was on its way to possessing some submarines–vessels equipped with torpedoes that were therefore capable, in theory, of sinking an enemy’s warships or his merchant marine, although in fact these boats were aimed at only coastal defense. And by 1914 American industry could boast of a nascent submarine-building capacity, especially in the form of the Electric Boat Co., which was to survive the capriciousness of the Navy Department’s “on-off” love affair with the submarine until World War II finally proved its undoubted power.
But these successes, limited though they were, were not John Philip Holland’s. He had played a major role–really, the greatest role–in developing the early submarine, grasping that it could transform naval warfare. He had grappled with and overcome most of the daunting technological obstacles in the way of making his vision a reality. Mr. Goldstone is surely right to give him such prominence. But eventually Holland was shunted aside by more ruthless entrepreneurs, diddled by business partners and denied Navy contracts. He passed away on Aug. 12, 1914, just as World War I was beginning. By then, feeling beaten and having retired, he was a quiet churchman and amateur historian. This part of Mr. Goldstone’s story is not a happy one.

For the full review, see:

Kennedy, Paul. “A Man Down Below; How an Irish-American engineer developed a Jules Verne-like wonder-weapon of the deep.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., June 17, 2017): C6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 16, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Goldstone, Lawrence. Going Deep: John Philip Holland and the Invention of the Attack Submarine. New York: Pegasus Books Ltd., 2017.

Higher-Paid Finance Jobs Moving from NYC and San Francisco to Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Dallas

FinanceJobsMigrateFromNYCandSF2017-08-15.pngSource of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) Traditional finance hubs have yet to recover all the jobs lost during the recession, but the industry is booming in places like Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Dallas. The migration has accelerated as investment firms face declining profitability and soaring real estate costs.
. . .
“San Francisco is a wonderful place, but unfortunately it’s an expensive place from a real estate standpoint,” said Brian McDonald, a senior vice president for Schwab. “So we had to identify other places where we could make things work.”
While the finance industry has been relocating entry-level jobs since the late 1980s, today’s moves are claiming higher-paid jobs in human resources, compliance and asset management, chipping away at New York City’s middle class, said (p. B2) Kathryn Wylde, president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit that represents the city’s business leadership.
“This industry isn’t just a bunch of rich Wall Street guys,” Ms. Wylde said. “It’s a big source of employment that’s disappearing from New York.”

For the full story, see:
Asjylyn Loder. “Wall Street’s New Frontier.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., JULY 27, 2017): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JULY 26, 2017, and has the title “Passive Migration: Denver Wins Big as Financial Firms Relocate to Cut Costs.”)

Russian Regulators Jail Entrepreneur for Innovating “Too Fast and Too Freely”

(p. A1) AKADEMGORODOK, Russia — Dmitri Trubitsyn is a young physicist-entrepreneur with a patriotic reputation, seen in this part of Siberia as an exemplar of the talents, dedication and enterprise that President Vladimir V. Putin has hailed as vital for Russia’s future economic health.
Yet Mr. Trubitsyn faces up to eight years in jail after a recent raid on his home and office here in Akademgorodok, a Soviet-era sanctuary of scientific research that was supposed to showcase how Mr. Putin’s Russia can harness its abundance of talent to create a modern economy.
A court last Thursday [August 3, 2017] extended Mr. Trubitsyn’s house arrest until at least October, which bars him from leaving his apartment or communicating with anyone other than his immediate family. Mr. Trubitsyn, 36, whose company, Tion, manufactures high-tech air-purification systems for homes and hospitals, is accused of risking the lives of hospital patients, and trying to lift profits, by upgrading the purifiers so they would consume less electricity.
Most important, he is accused of doing this without state regulators certifying the changes.
It is a case that highlights the tensions between Mr. Putin’s aspirations for a dynamic private sector and his determination to enhance the powers of Russia’s security apparatus. Using a 2014 law meant to protect Russians from counterfeit medicine, investigators from the Federal Security Service, the post-Soviet KGB, and other agencies have accused Mr. Trubitsyn of leading a criminal conspiracy to, essentially, innovate too fast and too freely.
. . .
(p. A9) Irina Travina, the founder of a software start-up and head of the local technology-business association, said Akademgorodok was “the best place in Russia,” with “outstanding schools, low crime and a high concentration of very smart people.”
But she said Mr. Trubitsyn’s arrest had delivered a grave blow to the community’s sense of security.
“In principle, anyone can fall into this situation,” Ms. Travina said, praising Mr. Trubitsyn as a patriot because he had not moved abroad and had invested time and money in science education for local children. “It can happen to anybody,” she added. “Everyone has some sort of skeleton in their closet. Maybe nothing big, but they can always find something to throw you in jail for.”

For the full story, see:
ANDREW HIGGINS. “Russia Wants Innovation, but Jails Innovators.” The New York Times (Thurs., AUG. 10, 2017): A1 & A9.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date AUG. 9, 2017, and has the title “Russia Wants Innovation, but It’s Arresting Its Innovators.”)

Fanjul Sugar Family Donated to Inauguration and Now Seeks Sugar Price Protection

(p. B1) MEXICO CITY — The sugar barons of Florida, Alfonso and José Fanjul, have been equal-opportunity political donors for decades, showering largess on the campaigns of Democrats and Republicans alike to ensure that lawmakers will protect the American sugar industry.
When Donald J. Trump was preparing to take office as president, the Fanjul brothers wrote another check. Among the contributors to Mr. Trump’s inaugural festivities in January was Florida Crystals, a Fanjul-owned company that contributed half a million dollars.
The brothers most likely had more on their mind than a sumptuous ball. Led by the Fanjuls, large American sugar producers and refiners were eager for the new administration to tackle some business left unfinished by the Obama administration: an agreement to control imports of Mexican sugar.

For the full story, see:
ELISABETH MALKIN. “Sugar Talks May Hint at Trump’s Approach to U.S.-Mexico Trade.” The New York Times (Mon., June 5, 2017): B1-B2.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 4, 2017, and has the title “Sugar Talks May Hint at Trump Approach to U.S.-Mexico Trade.”)