Such plans are a one-stop-shop. They typically offer perks excluded from traditional Medicare, such as vision and dental coverage, with low or zero premiums and caps on out-of-pocket spending. Despite more limited networks of doctors and hospitals, most seniors who’ve signed up say they’re happy with the choice.

Yet Medicare Advantage has drawbacks — notably, its exorbitant cost. Government reports show the program routinely overcharges taxpayers relative to original Medicare — to the tune of $27 billion this year alone — at a time when the system’s solvency is at risk.

With more than half of enrollees now covered by Medicare Advantage — a share expected to grow briskly — the program could well displace traditional Medicare in the coming years. A better balance between the interests of beneficiaries and taxpayers will be critical for it to thrive as it should.

Congress established what’s now called Medicare Advantage three decades ago to offer seniors more choice and (in theory) to keep Medicare’s ballooning budget in check. The government would pay commercial insurers to deliver more efficient care, the thinking went.

But Medicare Advantage has never saved the government money. Congress’ internal advisory committee estimates overpayment to Medicare Advantage plans will reach hundreds of billions of dollars in the decade through 2033. Independent researchers have found that insurers make more than double per patient in the program compared with individual or employer-sponsored plans.

How did Medicare Advantage become, as one study put it, a “money machine”? Insurers submit bids to Medicare that cover the estimated cost of providing standard services to an average beneficiary. Medicare calculates a payment “benchmark” for a given county. If a plan bids below the benchmark, it can receive a “rebate” from the government — funds that are required to pay for extra perks and lower premiums. What’s left goes toward profits and administrative costs. Plans receive bigger payments for riskier enrollees with higher expected health spending.

Without careful oversight, such a system can be easily abused.

The best way forward would be to phase out the benchmark system, which — counterintuitively — is designed to overpay. In some areas, benchmarks are set higher than average Medicare costs. This inducement was originally intended to expand coverage. With the program now ubiquitous, it no longer makes sense.

Medicare should instead enable plans to compete directly with each other on premiums as they would in the commercial market. Such a change would allow both taxpayers and beneficiaries to share in savings, which could amount to as much as $230 billion over a decade.
Medicare Advantage is popular for good reason and should remain an alternative to traditional Medicare. With the right payment reforms, the program should work in the best interests of everyone involved.

Bloomberg Opinion/Tribune News Service

Unfortunately, the president continues to play games.

The Associated Press reported that President Joe Biden was hoping to persuade Republicans to support more aid for Ukraine by tying the issue to the U.S.-Mexico border. After nearly three years of tolerating a porous southern border, Biden now proposes spending $14 billion to beef up security there as part of a $106 billion package that includes more money for Ukraine to defend itself against Russian aggression.
Logrolling — the practice of exchanging political favors — has a long history in Congress, of course. But this is no time to be cavalier about border policy. Biden needs to set aside these border funds regardless of what happens to Ukraine funding.

More than 3.8 million people have illegally crossed our southern border since the president took office in January 2021, according to the New York Post, and nearly half of them “slipped into the country illegally and were never caught.” Some reports put the number as high as 5 million. Yet the White House has treated this issue as if it’s a fiction created by right-wing xenophobes. In fact, concern about the administration’s indifference to the influx of migrants on our border with Mexico is widespread.

In a recent Fox News poll, 71% of those surveyed disapproved of the president’s handling of border security, with even a majority of Democrats and Biden voters decrying the status quo. “The issue has become a political headache for the Biden administration,” Politico reports, “which has faced criticism from Democratic state and local officials over the federal government’s seeming inaction in the face of the crisis.”

Addressing this problem becomes even more imperative given the brazen terror attacks on Israel.

A memo obtained by the Daily Caller reveals that the Customs and Border Protection Intelligence Division is warning “that individuals inspired by, or reacting to, the current Israel-Hamas conflict may try to travel to or from the areas of hostility in the Middle East via circuitous transit across the Southwest border.” This is an open acknowledgment that, absent more aggressive efforts to control illegal entries, the country faces potential risk. Have any terrorists already slipped through thanks to Biden’s indifferent approach?

It’s past time the Biden administration acknowledged its failures at the border and got serious about imposing policies that discourage illegal crossings. Unfortunately, the president’s effort to link additional border security funding to Ukraine aid — in the wake of the gruesome terror attacks in Israel — indicates he continues to fail the American people on this important issue.

Las Vegas Review-Journal./Tribune News Service

Will the Biden administration make the same mistake?

It was August 2012 when Obama, running for a second term in the Oval Office, held a news conference and fielded a question about the ongoing civil war in Syria. The president said that he had so far avoided U.S. military intervention but that his calculations would change if Syria crossed a “red line” and used chemical weapons.

A year later, a chemical weapons attack believed to have been carried out by the regime of Bashar al-Assad killed 1,400 people near Damascus. Obama did little about his “red line” but eventually cut a deal with Vladimir Putin and Russia to have Syria turn over its chemical stockpiles to international inspectors. The agreement was a failure, the victim — as The Atlantic later put it — “of Syrian deception, Russian duplicity and American dithering.”

Fast forward to this month in the wake of the horrific Hamas terror attack on Israel. As the Jewish state increases its ground operation in Gaza, militant groups threaten to escalate the conflict and have even targeted American forces. There’s little doubt that Iran is helping to fund and organize such aggression.

In recent days, Iranian-backed groups in the region, The Wall Street Journal reported this week, “launched 10 drone and rocket attacks against bases that U.S. troops use in Iraq and three on a U.S. base in southeast Syria.”

In response, the United States has ramped up the rhetoric. “My warning to the Ayatollah,” President Joe Biden said, “was that if they continue to move against” U.S. troops in the Middle East, “we will respond. And he should be prepared.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent a similar message.

“The United States does not seek conflict with Iran; we do not want this war to widen,” he said Tuesday. “But if Iran or its proxies attack U.S. personnel anywhere, make no mistake, we will defend our people, we will defend our security, swiftly and decisively.”

These warnings are entirely appropriate as an exercise in deterrence.

But this administration’s fiasco in Afghanistan and the Obama administration’s “red line” still haunt American diplomacy. It’s highly likely that the resolve of the Biden White House will be tested in coming weeks and months by Iranian-backed terrorists hoping to harm Americans in the region. Is Biden prepared to follow through? Or will he speak loudly and carry a small stick?

The administration faces serious challenges on the foreign policy front. Americans of all political persuasions should hope the president is up to it.

Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service

Hundreds were killed last Tuesday in Gaza City at a hospital crowded with people seeking safe haven. U.S. intelligence officials say the explosion came from a rocket launched by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group that went off prematurely.

“Among the evidence that’s been gathered is a blast analysis that suggests it was a ground explosion rather than an airstrike that hit the hospital,” a source told CNN. “There was no singular crater suggesting there was a bomb, but there was extensive fire damage and scattered debris that is consistent with an explosion starting from the ground level, according to the source.”

Israel also released an audio recording that it said caught Hamas operatives discussing the blast.

The loss of innocent lives is a horrific tragedy no matter its inevitability during war. Yet while Israel takes steps to curtail the civilian death toll, its enemies do the opposite. The initial attack on Israel was indiscriminate and brutal, calculated to kill innocent men, women and children. Hamas has also taken innocent Israelis — and Americans — hostage and threatened to broadcast executions. This is barbarism.

It’s also part of a strategy that promotes civilian deaths — and it has been going on for two decades.

“When used as human shields, civilians provide cover for Hamas military activities, and the resultant casualties serve the group’s propaganda interests,” Jeffrey White wrote for The Washington Institute in 2014. “In short, Hamas is acting more like a guerrilla group fighting an insurgency than a government responsible for the safety of its citizenry.”

As White notes, there are steps Hamas terrorists could take — wearing uniforms, moving weapons from populated areas, staying out of civilian buildings — if they chose to lower the civilian death count. Instead, they emphasize such tactics.

A decade ago, Hamas provoked Israel by firing rockets into the country without regard for innocents. Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic came to the obvious conclusion. “Hamas is trying to get Israel to kill as many Palestinians as possible,” he wrote. “Dead Palestinians represent a crucial propaganda victory for the nihilists of Hamas. It is perverse, but true. It is also the best possible explanation for Hamas’ behavior, because Hamas has no other plausible strategic goal here.”

The words ring true today. Israel has a right to defend itself and its people. Hamas wants to kill innocents and push Israel into the sea. The latter is the problem.

Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service

But one thing we do know: Washington showered so much money on states and local governments that most haven’t come close to spending it all. Recently, the Government Accountability Office released a quarterly report that tracks coronavirus spending through March 31, about three years from the onset of the pandemic.

“States reported obligating 60% ($118.3 billion) and spending 45% ($88.2 billion)” of State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds, the office reported. “Localities reported obligating 54% ($67/5 billion) and spending 38% ($47.9 billion) of their awards during the same period.”

How was the money distributed?

“The states and localities reported spending the largest amount of their awards to replace revenue lost due to the pandemic,” the GAO found. “Specifically … 45% ($39.5 billion) of states’ reported spending and 68% ($32.4 billion) of localities’ reported spending was used for this purpose.”

In other words, state and local governments are still sitting on billions in unspent virus cash — and the money they have spent went primarily to pad their coffers rather than to aid businesses or individuals who were harmed by shutdowns and business closures.

Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute told Reason that the analysis highlights Washington’s lack of fiscal discretion. “By the fall of 2020, it was clear that the states were in good fiscal shape and not facing Armageddon as many policymakers were claiming,” he said. “They did not need federal handouts.”

Yet congressional Democrats insisted on using virus relief as a slush fund that blue states could tap to disguise fiscal mismanagement.
The GAO also revealed that “14% of localities did not report to Treasury their uses” of these federal funds, as required by law, so it’s impossible to know where those billions went.

No doubt, pandemic relief was warranted during those unprecedented times, particularly in early and mid-2020. But the GAO report reveals an exercise in excess that federal taxpayers are still paying for today. Not only should Congress take action against local governments that fail to report how they used pandemic funds, it should also consider clawing back billions in unspent funds from states and localities.

As the national debt roars past $33 trillion, it’s time to shut down the party.

Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service

Iran has become increasingly belligerent in recent days, warning of a “huge earthquake” if Israel doesn’t cease its military response to the vicious Hamas terror attacks. But if a de-escalation is the goal, perhaps Iran could start by cutting off its financial support to radical militants while calling off Hezbollah and recognizing Israeli’s right to exist and defend itself.

Instead, continued Iranian provocations have led to concerns that the nation could use Israel’s Gaza response as a precursor to open another front in the war against the Jewish state.

“We can’t rule out that Iran would choose to get directly engaged some way,” Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” last Sunday. “We have to prepare for every possible contingency.”

That must include making it abundantly clear to the mullahs that the United States will extract a price for Iranian efforts to intensify the conflict. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did precisely that on Monday, warning “Don’t test us” during a speech at an Israeli parliamentary session that was interrupted by rocket fire in Jerusalem.
Given the region’s history, Iran and others in the Middle East know Netanyahu should be taken seriously. But what about the United States and the Biden White House?

Sullivan said Sunday that the administration has used diplomatic back channels to communicate a stern message to Iran. The president has also sent two aircraft carriers to the region as a sign of solidarity with Israel.

“Moving the two carriers into the region sends a very strong signal,” Gen. Frank McKenzie, the retired commander of the U.S. Central Command, said. “There is ample historical evidence that Iran respects the flow of combat forces into the theater. It does affect their decision calculus. And as Iran’s decision calculus is affected, so is Lebanese Hezbollah’s calculus affected.”

Whether that’s true in this case remains to be seen. Either way, as The Wall Street Journal noted Monday, “The Ayatollahs in Tehran need to understand that more than their terrorist proxies are at risk. They need to know that their nuclear sites and oil fields are also on the target list.”

American policy toward Iran over the past decade has been a hallmark of mixed signals and even appeasement. But there must be no doubt that the United States will do what it takes to subdue any Iranian efforts to provoke a wider conflict.

Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service

Hamas is a terrorist organization, and the acts of its agents on Oct. 7, when they crossed the border into Israel with the express intent of killing and kidnapping civilians, were terrorism.

That makes them terrorists.

While some have suggested Hamas’ political role in Gaza means it is not a terrorist organization, it is clearly targeting civilians for political ends, which is the very definition of terrorism..

The danger in using euphemisms such as “militants” to describe terrorists is that it normalizes heinous acts of terrorism and implies that the deliberate targeting of civilians is a military act and that Hamas at large has some other, less despicable objective.

But let’s be clear: Hamas’ stated goal in its founding charter calls for the obliteration of the state of Israel. The United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada have all formally designated Hamas a terrorist organization. It should not be confused with Palestine or the innocent Palestinians now suffering in Gaza.

Hamas’ terror attack on Israel is clear and indisputable proof that Hamas continues to be committed to its original goal, despite its 2017 charter revisions.

The grisly details that have emerged in the days since the attack leave no doubt.

Terrorists stormed Israeli towns, killing and kidnapping anyone they encountered. They recorded the atrocities on body cameras and posted the video to social media sites.

Footage compiled by the Israeli government shows civilians shot in bedrooms, bathrooms and yards.

At a music festival celebrating “friends, love and infinite freedom,” terrorists gunned down 260 revelers and took an unknown number of hostages.

Authorities also released photographs of slain babies, their bodies shot and burnt.

In Be’eri, over 100 are known to have been killed and others were taken hostage. News reports describe homes riddled with bullet holes and cars reduced to burnt husks. In kibbutz Nir Oz, at least 20 people were murdered and upwards of 80 were kidnapped.

In response to all of this, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin described the atrocities committed by Hamas as “worse than what I saw with ISIS.”

Hamas currently holds more than 200 hostages from their Oct. 7 attack on Israel and has promised to begin executing them if Israel retaliates.

There is a word to describe the intentional targeting of civilians to political ends, and that word is “terrorism.” Those who commit acts of terrorism are terrorists.

To call these acts or their perpetrators anything other than terrorism and terrorists is not only intellectually disingenuous, it also risks normalizing such acts by obfuscating the essential truth of their nature.

This editorial is being published in all MediaNews Group/Tribune Publishing newspapers.

Late last month, the Department of Energy issued new regulations on residential furnaces. By 2028, non-weatherized gas furnaces and those used in mobile homes must have an “annual fuel utilization efficiency of 95%.” The move would effectively ban new non-condensing gas furnaces. The American Gas Association estimates that this rule would eliminate 60% of the residential furnaces currently on the market.
To justify this regulatory intrusion, the department claims this will “cumulatively save consumers $24.8 billion on their energy bills over 30 years.”

That sounds like a big number. It’s not. That’s an annual savings of around $825 million. In a country of 335 million people, that’s a per-capita savings of less than $2.50 a year. Keep in mind that government estimates such as this represent the best-case scenario. In reality, bureaucratic projections rarely come true. Remember when officials promised Obamacare would save families money and lower the deficit?

The DOE makes a second claim that sheds more light on the new rule. It says the changes will “cut harmful carbon and methane emissions that fuel the climate crisis.” There it is. You must sacrifice your gas furnace in the name of climate purity. The supposed payoff for this is never quite explained, especially because countries such as China and India continue to build coal power plants.

But the costs will be much more apparent. Non-condensing gas furnaces are cheaper, though they may have higher energy costs in the long-run. Individual consumers should be allowed to weigh these options. It gets worse. Millions of homes already have a non-condensing gas furnace. When they go to replace it in the future, they can’t just swap out it out for a condensing gas furnace.

“They’re going to have to, in many cases, install new equipment to exhaust gas out of their home,” Richard Meyer, the vice president of energy markets, analysis and standards at the American Gas Association said in an interview with Fox News Digital. He continued, “This rule would require additional retrofits for a lot of consumers. And those retrofits can be extremely cost prohibitive.”

It’s safe to assume it will cost a homeowner much more than the $2.50 the government expects in annual per capita savings.

This is just one of many gas appliances that leftist climate extremists seek to ban. The Biden administration is also targeting gas stoves and gas-powered generators.

The American public isn’t supportive of these regulations. So the left tries to gaslight you into pretending they aren’t happening. They are.

Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service

Nobody knows better than we who cover the news that it’s difficult to be confronted with the worst of humanity day in and day out. There are awful people doing awful things on a daily basis, and it can take a tremendous toll to absorb that ugliness and violence and harm.

That’s why we’d urge everyone to take a break, even if only for 15 minutes. Turn off your phone. Sit in the sunshine. Be quiet and calm. Recharge. Try to find a moment of peace.

The events in Israel are the latest reminder that the forces of evil are determined and unrelenting, but also that the scenes of horror are never far from reach in our interconnected world.

Reports of indiscriminate rocket attacks and the deliberate targeting of civilians by Hamas forces, followed by the swift and violent Israeli response, were available instantaneously via social media platforms — terror beamed directly into the palm of your hand.

There’s a term for endlessly reading bad news on social media — doom scrolling — and medical experts believe it’s having a deleterious effect on the nation’s mental health. The American Psychiatric Society reported in December that “nearly two out of five (37%) Americans rated their mental health as only fair or poor. The United States has recorded a 16% increase in suicides from 2011 to 2022 and a drop in average life expectancy from 79 in 2019 to 76 in 2021.

The United States recorded about 50,000 suicides in 2022, a 2.6% increase over the previous year.

At a conference last month at Dartmouth College, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy and six of his predecessors gathered to discuss the nation’s mental health crisis. They highlighted barriers to access and the disconnected network of mental health services that can make it challenging to get help to people who need it.

But they also zeroed in on social media creating feelings of sadness, hopelessness and depression, especially among young people. In addition to improving health care access and services, they stressed the need to build stronger, more supportive communities.

Murthy worries that people see the worst of others in the events around them, and come to believe that’s an accurate reflection of society.

“I think we’re actually more grounded in the core values of kindness and generosity, of service and friendship. I think that’s what we want,” Murthy said.

To be there for others — to provide the sort of support and compassion that helps those in turmoil and models positive behavior for kids — we have to first care for ourselves. And at a time of international conflict, domestic unrest and unspeakable horrors done by one group against another, that can begin simply — by turning off your phone, setting aside the news for a few minutes and taking time to be at peace.

The challenges before us are immense and they require our attention and concern. We should be engaged, informed and working to build more just and supportive communities.

But everyone also has to make an investment in their well-being, time that can make a lasting difference in your life and the lives of others.

The Virginian-Pilot/Tribune News Service

This murderous Palestinian assault deserves only one response from the world: outrage, and unwavering support for Israel’s right to defend itself. U.S. President Joe Biden has rightly pledged to stand with Israel “full stop,” as has the European Union. Even as Israel takes the necessary military actions to protect its citizens, all parties in the region need to work to restore some semblance of stability and avoid a broader conflict.

An Israeli invasion of Gaza to rescue Israeli captives and reassert control over the territory could last months, if not years. For that reason alone, Israel’s old, new and prospective partners in the Arab world do themselves no favors by not condemning the Hamas attack more forcefully. They understandably fear public opinion, which has never embraced the normalization of ties with Israel. Still, there can be no excusing the slaughter of civilians.

Pretending otherwise will only bolster the extremists and their backers in Iran. Countries with influence over Hamas, including Turkey, Qatar and Egypt, must pressure the terrorists to pull back and release their hostages before the violence escalates dangerously.

Palestinian Authority leaders are being equally shortsighted by blaming Israel for inviting the attack. While dramatic, the cross-border incursion will not lead to the defeat of Israel nor change its policies in the occupied territories. Ordinary Palestinians will pay a heavy price for Hamas’ wanton and unprovoked massacres of innocent Israelis.

Meanwhile, the chances of substantive territorial concessions in the West Bank as part of a prospective peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel have shrunk further.

Eventually, Israeli leaders will need to confront their own mistakes: The fact that Hamas could have planned such an assault — involving dozens of fighters, boats, paragliders and drones — over months without Israel’s vaunted intelligence services catching wind represents a massive failure. There is plenty of blame to go around.

But all that’s for another time. For now, Israel’s priority must be to destroy the ability of Hamas and its ilk to further threaten the country’s security. Pursuing peace with Israel’s Arab neighbors will be much harder in the near term, which no doubt was one of the terrorists’ aims.

Yet all parties should recognize that, once the fighting is over, such efforts will also be more important than ever — and something all sides in this conflict should still aspire to and pursue. The alternative is only more bloodshed, death and terror.

Bloomberg Opinion/Tribune News Service

The Department of Education announced that it would publish a new regulation on Oct. 10 intended to punish colleges whose graduates have either large debt loads in relation to their salaries or earn less than the average high school graduate in their state of residence. The Barack Obama White House pushed a similar effort in 2014, which the Trump administration later reversed.

The new rule is supposed to hold schools accountable for their performance.

There’s nothing wrong with providing taxpayers, students and potential enrollees with pertinent data on graduation rates, costs, job placements, etc. This can help students make decisions and schools better meet the demands of the marketplace.

Yet the bulk of the regulations apply only to for-profit schools, not traditional four-year public institutions that offer bachelor’s degrees and graduate programs. Why ignore such a vast part of the higher education landscape, particularly when state-funded institutions have come under increasing fire for soaring tuition and devalued diplomas?

The answer is that Obama and now Biden want to use the power of the state to put many for-profit colleges out of business.

“Once again,” Jason Altmire, president and CEO of Career Education Colleges and Universities, told The Associated Press, “the department has rushed the process, overlooking critical issues, to hastily implement and weaponize a final Gainful Employment rule against for-profit institutions.”

The regulations impose a two-part test on schools. The first part determines whether graduates make enough money to attack their student debt burden. The second test reviews whether at least half of a program’s graduates earn more than workers in their state with only a high school diploma.

“Programs that fail either test will need to warn students that they’re at risk of losing federal money,” the AP reported. “Those that fail the same test twice in any three-year period will be cut off from federal aid. That amounts to a death sentence for many programs.”

The wire service noted that cosmetology schools could be the hardest hit.

If progressives were truly serious about holding educational institutions accountable for results, they would start with the nation’s struggling K-12 public schools before moving on to the system of higher education. But they have no interest in either. The fact that they seem inordinately focused on “for-profit” colleges instead exposes this for the ideological puffery that it is.

Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service

But there is a remedy for this injustice.

Since the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan more than two years ago, the United States has welcomed more than 80,000 refugees from the country.

But the humanitarian program that allowed them to come here provides only temporary protection and no road to permanent residency. In addition, thousands of Afghans who aided the American war effort remain at risk in their home country, unable to cut through the red tape and flee to the United States. They and their families are targets for retribution from the brutal Taliban.

“Helping these Afghans would signify to other allies that the U.S. doesn’t abandon its friends,” Sierra Dawn McClain wrote in the Wall Street Journal recently. “More important, it would help settle the moral debt America incurred with its botched withdrawal.”

In July, a bipartisan group of senators reintroduced the Afghan Adjustment Act, which had previously stalled in Congress. It would, The New York Times reports, “allow Afghans who have short-term humanitarian parole status — which typically lasts for two years — to apply for permanent legal status if they submit to additional vetting, including an interview.”

The original bill ran into roadblocks, primarily from Republicans, over security concerns involving immigrants who hadn’t been adequately screened and the Department of Homeland Security’s lack of transparency about the process.

The updated version of the bill addresses those concerns and has earned significant GOP support. Yet Congress remains distracted by various issues, most recently the government shutdown. Meanwhile, the lack of certainty for many refugees currently in the United States makes it impossible for them to set down roots and discourages employers from hiring them.

It’s true that, in the aftermath of our withdrawal from Afghanistan, there were problems with the vetting process and some undesirables took advantage of this. But as Times columnist Farah Stockman noted, the legislation in question is “one of the most promising ways to ensure that evacuees are rigorously vetted. The legislation requires additional screening for those who apply for permanent residency.”

The Afghan Adjustment Act offers members of Congress the opportunity to show voters they can come together for an important cause. They should pass the bill this year. We must not turn our backs on those who selflessly and courageously helped this country.

Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service

When Congress created Medicare’s prescription-drug benefit in 2003, it prevented the government from haggling with drugmakers — a coup for the industry. Medicare’s new powers are forecast to reduce out-of-pocket costs for seniors and save nearly $100 billion over a decade. For consumers accustomed to paying the highest drug prices in the world, that’s unequivocally good news.

Yet the government needs to strike a careful balance. The goal should be to push prices down while preserving incentives to develop new and better treatments. With this in mind, the law directs Medicare to find the “lowest maximum fair price” while “appropriately rewarding innovation.”
Officials have spent months laying out in painstaking detail how the negotiations will proceed. Nowhere do they explain how Medicare will come up with a “fair price.”

Many other countries have solved this dilemma using what’s called cost-effectiveness analysis, a quantitative method applied regularly within in the pharmaceutical industry and by government negotiators to determine how much a drug should cost. Cost-effectiveness seeks to weigh the health benefits of a treatment against its price. It can help health officials with limited resources answer difficult questions such as how much a vaccine should cost during a pandemic, or whether a new Alzheimer’s treatment is worth its $26,500 price tag.

For the coming negotiations, it would determine if a drug delivers sufficient health benefits for seniors while offering taxpayers good value for their money.

One might think such an objective would be central to the IRA. In fact, the law explicitly bans the most common cost-effectiveness metric — so-called quality-adjusted life years, or QALYs — from negotiations. Certain interest groups had complained that QALYs discriminate against people with long-term illnesses or disabilities (on the dubious rationale that “sick” years are assigned lower scores than “healthy” ones). The pharmaceutical industry, for its part, doesn’t like the government using QALYs to meddle in the business of pricing drugs. Most other markets don’t need regulators armed with formulas to determine how much products should cost, the argument goes.

Yet the prescription-drug market is different. Patients and providers don’t make decisions about whether a treatment offers good value — middlemen do. These intermediaries, which design prescription-drug coverage and negotiate discounts for health plans, get bigger fees for more expensive medications.

Even so, effective alternatives exist, including some that have been developed to minimize the disparities that disability advocates cite. Medicare should embrace these metrics and be transparent with the public about its pricing methods. A quantitative framework is the clearest, most predictable way to achieve the IRA’s goals, not least because it rewards innovation by giving high marks to expensive yet very effective drugs.

Bloomberg Opinion/Tribune News Service

The justices have thus far agreed to hear 21 cases, the most prominent of which is Lopez Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which offers the court the opportunity to rein in the nation’s ubiquitous regulatory state. The case involves a rule that the National Marine Fisheries Service imposed on herring fisheries, but the issue touches on the broader question regarding the authority of federal agencies.

In 1984, the high court created the “Chevron doctrine,” which holds that the courts should generally defer to regulatory agency interpretations of “ambiguous” congressional statutes. This rule greatly empowered Washington bureaucrats to create and interpret law even if the statute upon which they acted didn’t clearly convey such authority. Critics argue that investing such dominion in unelected executive branch officials represents an unconstitutional transfer of power from the judiciary and legislative branches.

In the Lopez case, the justices have the chance to rule that statutory silence does not give federal agencies carte blanche, essentially overturning the Chevron principle. This would send the message that Congress must be more specific in its statutory language if it seeks to delegate significant authority to executive branch bureaucrats.

The justices will also hear a pair of free speech cases involving government officials who blocked critics from their social media profiles. At issue is whether the public officials were acting in their government capacity or as private citizens. In both cases, however, the officials “cloaked their social media profiles in the authority of public office,” the ACLU alleges.

In this age of ubiquitous electronic communication and devices, the high court will face a challenge drawing a line between the private and public actions of elected officials. But any such distinction must not make it easier for politicians and government actors to evade the First Amendment requirements that undergird our democratic republic.

The Supreme Court has recently faced a barrage of criticism from left-wing activists unhappy that the conservative majority has looked askance at progressive efforts to expand government beyond its constitutional boundaries. Efforts to undermine the court’s credibility are partisan and without merit.

The current court has, by and large, been a bulwark against those who would erode protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Liberty will be best served if that trend continues when the justices convene next week for their new term.

 Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service

At this month’s convention for Ace Hardware, exhibitor Laura Freeman of Watcher Total Protection had talked herself hoarse by the end of the opening day. Aggrieved store owners crowded her booth to quiz her about her company’s security systems, which are augmented with artificial intelligence.

AI is coming to the rescue of merchants, for better or worse. “We will see a lot more AI for shoplifter protection,” said Freeman. “You’ll see more and more where the system does the work.”

The old days of dumb cameras recording thieves in action for review after the fact have given way to smart systems that can detect illegal activity as it happens and send instant text alerts. The surveillance cameras constantly scan for a shopper taking something off a shelf and shoving it into a bag, for instance, which immediately triggers a warning so merchants can decide whether to question the suspect, call for help or otherwise intervene.

In the meantime, tags attached to high-value items not only trigger sensors on the way out of a store but also can be coded to the exact item and linked to video of the exact moment that item was removed from its spot in the store. As a result, merchants can spend much less time reviewing footage to zero in on the part they need.

AI is also being used to spot employees who ring up one-penny sales to open their cash drawers, or customers at those now-ubiquitous self-checkouts who try the old “banana trick,” scanning cheap items like the fruit while putting expensive items in their bags.

Some retailers with stores in high-crime locations have tried equipping their clerks with the same body cameras worn by police, mostly to deter violent confrontations that, sadly, also have become more common since the pandemic. And facial recognition makes it possible for camera systems to flag likely suspects as they enter a store so they can be tracked, based on their prior criminal records, or previous incidents of theft.

We realize that retailers need new tools to combat the epidemic of lawlessness costing them huge losses. And, similarly, we know police and prosecutors have a backlog of violent crimes to pursue. While we support stronger laws and enforcement to protect businesses under siege, we recognize that no one is going to rush over with lights and sirens if a shopper takes a steak while ringing up a banana at checkout.

As retailers adopt these potentially game-changing but also intrusive systems, there must be checks and balances.

Indeed, the rise in retail theft has led to much faster adoption of emerging technologies than might otherwise have occurred, according to Matt Harper, loss prevention manager at Ace.

It’s no exaggeration to say an AI-enhanced arms race is underway in the retail biz.

Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy recently opened an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. He wants House committees to examine the “culture of corruption” that swirls around the Biden family. That includes the business affairs of Hunter Biden, the president’s son, and potential connections to President Biden himself. That could include bribery charges.

Republicans are also likely to scrutinize whether the Biden administration gave Hunter Biden special treatment. Officials offered and then retracted a plea agreement for Hunter Biden that would have sent him to a diversion program for a gun charge and given him broad immunity in other matters. After the public learned the details, a judge pressed prosecutors and the deal fell apart.

The first response from Democrats and many in the media was to assert that there’s no evidence of corruption.

House Republicans have “turned up no evidence of wrongdoing,” Ian Sams, a White House spokesman, wrote on X. The Associated Press reported, “House Republicans have aggressively investigated Biden and his son, claiming without evidence that they engaged in an influence-peddling scheme.”

But Republicans have uncovered plenty of concerning evidence. That includes bank records showing $20 million flowed to the Biden family and its associates through a number of shell companies. Republicans exposed an FBI form from a confidential source implicating President Biden in a scheme involving the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Witnesses have confirmed that President Biden spoke to his son during Hunter Biden’s business meetings. Republicans have also uncovered that the Treasury Department flagged as suspicious more than 150 transactions involving the Biden family and its business associates.

Evidence of President Biden’s unseemly behavior is plentiful. Little wonder a recent CNN poll found that a majority of the public, 61%, already believes President Biden had some involvement with Hunter Biden’s business affairs. Forty-two percent believe the president acted illegally. Another 18% said President Biden’s behavior was unethical, but not illegal.

That doesn’t mean an impeachment inquiry will be smooth sailing for the House GOP. It’s not even clear if McCarthy has support from all his members. His slim majority will present challenges going forward.

McCarthy has put himself in a double bind. Opening this official inquiry without eventually impeaching President Biden would be the political equivalent of acquitting him. But impeaching President Biden — knowing a Democrat Senate is all but certain to acquit — reeks of futility and political payback for the Democratic treatment of Donald Trump.

Playing politics may excite the Republican base, but it does little for the swing voters who decide elections. They’re interested in lower gasoline prices and closing America’s porous southern border. They’re interested in fiscal sanity and a strong defense. Republicans would be better served keeping their focus on drawing contrasts with Biden’s failed policies.

Las Vegas Journal-Review/Tribune News Service

What a perfect time to announce that members of the world’s greatest deliberative body are welcome to start coming to the U.S. Capitol looking like slobs.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has officially ditched the Senate dress code for members while on the chamber floor.

It’s true that post-pandemic fashion norms are, to put it mildly, relaxed.

But they shouldn’t be when representing American democracy to the nation and the world from the televised floor of the United States Senate.

“There has been an informal dress code that was enforced,” Schumer said in a statement, but going forward, “Senators are able to choose what they wear on the Senate floor. I will continue to wear a suit.”

Notably, the relaxed new standards don’t apply to the staff who attend the senators. They still have to dress in business attire. Thus has Schumer achieved a curious outcome: He has cheapened the stately decorum of his chamber, while simultaneously confirming the public’s view of Congress as being intolerably elitist — the unmistakable message when the elected class exempts itself from the rules it imposes upon others.

The announcement didn’t explain Schumer’s rationale, but it seems to have been in response to some members pushing the boundaries of the dress code lately with gym shoes and other provocations.

None has been more provocative than Sen. John Fetterman. The Pennsylvania Democrat reportedly has taken to standing in the cloakroom doorway to cast his votes, lest his trademark hoodie-and-gym-shorts getup cause a ruckus on the Senate floor.

All due respect to Fetterman’s performative populism, but there are reasons why shorts and T-shirts are appropriate at softball games and barbecues but not at weddings or funerals. Or in the Senate.

Formal dress conveys respect for important occasions and settings. It puts that imperative — respect — above the imperatives of comfort and practicality that are perfectly acceptable in more casual endeavors.

Formal dress telegraphs dignity, which America’s battered politics needs more than ever these days. Dignity is already in short enough supply in Washington.

While it’s unlikely that Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, will carry out her joking threat of showing up in the Senate chamber in a bikini, the potential for political fashion faux pas here is immense. Ponder the issue of T-shirts alone. “I’m with Stupid” is among the milder possibilities of partisan mischief that, once you start thinking about it, feel almost inevitable.

It’s not just about how the dresser is perceived; it’s about how the dresser perceives him- or herself. Studies have long shown that one’s mode of dress affects decorum and professionalism.

Not that a jacket and tie necessarily guarantee those qualities (heaven knows), but elected leaders should at least try and look the part.

Especially in an era where too few of them act it.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch/Tribune News Service 

Across the nation, all but a few public school districts jumped at the “free” cash that federal lawmakers allocated to reverse the vast harm done by the failure of remote instruction. Students, particularly those most in need, suffered significantly.

In 2022, The New York Times reported, “the National Assessment of Educational Progress released its latest assessment of 9-year-olds, showing the largest decline in reading in 32 years and the first decline in math scores since it started testing students in 1969.” ACT scores hit new lows, as did civics test results.

The massive amount of new funding was unprecedented. “This is the biggest one-time infusion of federal dollars ever to come to schools,” Phyllis Jordan, the associate director of FutureEd, an education policy think tank, told the Times. “It’s just an astounding amount of money.”

Yet efforts to add more instruction time for struggling students were often met with resistance from the usual suspects. As the Times so delicately put it, “In their advocacy on behalf of exhausted, burned-out teachers, unions often protest proposals that require more work from educators, whether a shorter summer, longer school days or mandatory tutoring.” Of course, hidebound education unions didn’t protest attempts to shift the money into teacher pay or bonuses, which is how many districts spent their windfalls.

In the meantime, there has been no sudden improvement in national test scores — nor do education advocates promise any such thing in the near future. Instead, the federal “investment” will dry up next year, which will prompt many districts that used the money to pad baseline budgets to cry poverty, demanding still more.

“In fact,” the Times discovered, “most states aren’t doing much to provide meaningful support to districts on how to spend the money or track whether initiatives are actually helping students.” Marguerite Roza, director of Edunomics Lab and a research professor at Georgetown, told the paper, “Big industries would never make multimillion-dollar investments without checking in quarterly on what kind of effects they were getting.”

“More money can help schools succeed, but not if they fritter those extra resources in unproductive ways,” Jay Greene, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told Reason magazine in February.

“Wasteful schools tend to hire more non-instructional staff while raising the pay and benefit costs for all staff regardless of their contribution to student outcomes.”

Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service

Modern communication tools are especially able to exploit this finding, providing users with what they want to hear rather than challenging assumptions. “Decades of social science research show that our need for collective belonging is forceful enough to reshape how we view facts and affect our voting decisions,” the essay asserts. “When our group is threatened, we rise to its defense.”

The Journal cites Donald Trump as a reliable practitioner of exploiting group identity, although it allows that Democrats also use the tactic, but “not as forcefully.”

It’s true that the former president’s ardent supporters see themselves in similar terms as outsiders scorned by the elites. But the idea that Democrats only reluctantly appeal to this base instinct is laughable. The Democratic Party virtually invented the toxic notion of identity politics and has built entire coalitions on the idea that individuals are defined, not by their words or deeds, but by their skin color, sexual preference or any number of other characteristics.

In a memoir published shortly before his death in 2011, Christopher Hitchens tore into the concept, which he dated to the late 1960s. “It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves,” he wrote. “There are many ways of dating the moment when the left lost or — I would prefer to say — discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.”

Yet this is the modus operandi of the modern Democratic Party, which has become openly hostile to concepts such as personal responsibility and individual liberty while promoting group identity and grievance. If Trump has become especially adept at practicing the politics of tribalism, he has had years to watch how its done.

This obsession with identity politics has indeed led to more division and becomes self-perpetuating. “Americans in the past were more likely to meet people different than themselves,” the Journal reported, “which created opportunities for reducing group bias and creating conditions for compromise.”

But how do we turn back from this poisonous path? A Stanford study found that the “strategies that worked best at reducing partisan animosity essentially modeled good behavior, highlighting what Democrats and Republicans have in common as Americans or presenting people making a good-faith effort to understand someone with differing views.”

But that will require elected officials on both sides of the aisle to set an example of leadership — something too many modern politicians have proven utterly incapable of doing in recent decades. That leaves it up to American voters who are sick of extremists driving the agenda.

 Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service

In 2022, the U.S. federal government ran a $1 trillion annual deficit. Yes, you read that correctly. In just one year, the federal government spent $1 trillion more than it took in.

That will soon be considered the good ole days. This year, the annual budget deficit is expected to double to around $2 trillion. It’s one thing for deficits to spike during a major national crisis — like the initial days of the COVID-19 pandemic or a world war — or an economic downturn. The country hasn’t experienced those during the past year.

That’s left some supposed experts mystified.

“To see this in an economy with low unemployment is truly stunning. There’s never been anything like it,” Jason Furman, once a top economist in the Obama administration and now a Harvard economics professor, told The Washington Post. “A good and strong economy, with no new emergency spending — and yet a deficit like this. The fact that it is so big in one year makes you think it must be some weird, freakish thing going on.”

Furman may teach at what was once one of America’s elite institutions, but apparently he skipped Economics 101. If you spend more than you take in, you’ll run a deficit. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about a Fortune 500 company, personal finances or the government. If the interest rate on your significant past debt increases, your payments will skyrocket too.

Both of those things are applicable here. From August 2022 to July 2023, the federal government collected around $4.5 trillion in revenue. But it spent roughly $6.7 trillion. Compared to the past year, that was a 16% spending increase and a 7% decrease in tax collections. Even the federal government can’t tax its way out of a spending problem.

Higher interest rates are one cause of the spending spike. The Federal Reserve has been raising them in a belated effort to bring down inflation. Along with home and auto loans, that has also increased the cost of servicing the national debt, which is approaching $33 trillion. The Heritage Foundation notes, interest costs on the debt went from “$350 billion in 2021 to nearly $800 billion today on an annualized basis.” The federal government will soon spend more on interest than defense.

Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service

Late last month, the Biden administration announced it had selected 10 drugs for Medicare price “negotiation.” The list included drugs for diabetes, heart failure and blood cancer, among others. The White House said these are some of the most costly to the Medicare Program. In future years, Medicare will negotiate the prices on dozens of other drugs. The administration claims this will save money for both Medicare recipients and taxpayers

This sounds innocuous, even necessary. Of course, the federal government should use its purchasing power to obtain lower prices. But that’s not what’s happening here.

Consider Bristol Myers Squibb. Its blood thinner, Eliquis, is one of the 10 drugs on Biden’s list. In a real negotiation, the company and Medicare would meet together. If they couldn’t come to a mutually beneficial agreement, both would go on their separate ways. But that’s not what will happen under the Inflation Reduction Act, which created this arrangement.

That bill sets the price ceiling of a selected drug from 25% to 60% of its list price. If a drug company wants to walk away, the law hits it with a daily excise tax that begins at 186% of the daily revenue generated by the drug. The tax eventually climbs to a staggering 1,900%.

That’s not a negotiation. It’s a stickup. What the Biden administration is looking to do is institute price caps on drug prices, disguised with rhetorical flourishes.

It’s easy to predict what will happens next, especially if you’re familiar with the long-term damage done by rent control. Drug companies will invest less in making new drugs. A University of Chicago study from November 2021 projected that 135 fewer drugs through 2039 would be brought to market because of this law. The study found that would cause a loss of 331.5 million life years in the U.S. For context, at the time of the study, COVID-19 had resulted in 10.7 million life years lost in this country.

This isn’t mere conjecture. Economist Tomas Philipson, one of the study’s co-authors, reported that at least two dozen drug companies have already pulled back on drug development because of this bill.

In response, pharmaceutical companies have sued. They argue that this scheme violates the “takings” clause of the Fifth Amendment. That prohibits the government from taking private property for “public use, without just compensation.” Although how courts will rule is uncertain, that’s obviously what’s happening here.

Those who look forward to lifesaving medical breakthroughs should hope these lawsuits are successful.

Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service

State Farm is the largest homeowners insurance company in California. In May, it announced that it won’t be accepting applications for new policies. That’s odd. Companies with a dominant market position don’t usually walk away. But now, State Farm looks like a trendsetter.

Farmer’s Insurance, the second-biggest player, is limiting how many new homeowners policies it issues. Allstate, ranked No. 4, has stopped selling. It’s hard to keep up with the exodus. AmGUARD Insurance, connected to Berkshire Hathaway, is out. Berkshire Hathaway had the third most market share in 2022.

Liberty Mutual, No. 5 on that list, will not renew business owner policies at the end of this year.

It shouldn’t be hard to understand why this is happening. Something is preventing these companies from making money. Things are so dire that they believe it will be more profitable to walk away from the market share they’ve spent years and oodles of money developing.

That “something” isn’t hard to find. In 1988, California voters passed Proposition 103. If insurance companies request rate rates of 7 percent or more, “public interest” groups can delay or even stop the approval process.

In most circumstances, that’s an annoyance, not a deal breaker. But Bidenomics pushed inflation to 7% in 2021 and 6.5% in 2022, driving up costs. Claims have gone up, too. Progressives point to global warming, but there’s much more to it, including government inaction and interventions in the marketplace by meddling Sacramento politicians.

In the past few years, California has experienced a number of massive wildfires. In terms of property loss, the seven largest wildfires in California history have all occurred since 2020. The other occurred in 2018. The 2021 Dixie Fire destroyed more than 1,300 structures. The 2020 North Complex Fire ruined more than 2,000.

Flooding is a problem, too. Much of the small town of Pajaro was destroyed in March after a levee failed. Officials knew a nearby levee was weak. But California has spent decades neglecting aging infrastructure.

Fighting global warming generates headlines, but it often distracts from the more mundane, yet essential, tasks. Those include maintaining levees and building dams and reservoirs.

This has left insurers in an untenable position. Costs are soaring, but they can’t raise rates by enough to cover them. It shouldn’t take a degree in economics to realize that many have decided their best choice is to exit the market.

California’s insurance crisis should serve as a warning to other states. Price controls — hello, rent control — produce shortages and should be avoided.

 Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service

Earlier last month, nearly 40 Democrats in the lower chamber formally requested that the Judicial Conference, which serves as a policymaker for the federal judiciary, relax rules that currently forbid cameras in federal courtrooms and “explicitly authorize the broadcasting of court proceedings in the cases of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump.”

The effort, led by Trumpaphobe Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is couched in language emphasizing the importance of transparency and accessibility.

“Given the historic nature of the charges brought forth in these cases, it is hard to imagine a more powerful circumstance for televised proceedings,” the letter stated. “If the public is to fully accept the outcome, it will be vitally important for it to witness, as directly as possible, how the trials are conducted, the strength of the evidence adduced and the credibility of witnesses.”

No doubt Rep. Schiff and his crew are also confident that the bombastic Trump will say or do something that could damage him politically. But that’s a risky dice roll.

Trump is a reality TV star at ease and fully confident in front of a camera. His unexpected ascent to the White House in 2016 can be attributed in part to his ability to sustain media attention and to use modern communication channels to his advantage. It’s at least as likely that televised trials would help him with voters rather than hurt him.

Opponents of airing the trials argue that it will create an incentive for disruption and potentially devolve into an unmanageable circus that overwhelms the quest for justice. They also raise the potential of political fanatics threatening and endangering witnesses and jurors.

But there is a long track record of televised trials in state courts being conducted with integrity. For the most part, such events have proved useful in educating taxpayers on the intricacies of the justice system while boosting confidence in the outcome of the proceedings. As for putting participants in danger, absent specific threats, speculation shouldn’t be justification for limiting openness.

Trump’s trials will be unprecedented and a point of great division among Americans. That’s all the more reason, as the House members note, to maximize transparency. Trump’s attorneys have hinted they would have no objection. The Judicial Conference should make an exception to the federal TV ban when it comes to the former president.

Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service

Most consumers still don’t want an electric vehicle. Despite heavy subsidies and mandates, just 6% of new vehicles sold last year were electric. Sales are increasing but remain behind many government and automaker goals.

Rather than let the market operate, the green movement wants the government to force people out of gasoline-powered vehicles. They argue this will reduce emissions and lower global temperatures.

But these efforts have yet to have any noticeable effect on the climate, although EV mandates have had more success. California is set to ban the sale of new cars with an internal combustion engine by 2035. Massachusetts has already done so, as part of a 2022 climate bill.  Earlier, President Joe Biden’s EPA proposed a rule that will essentially require two-thirds of new vehicles to be electric by 2032.

Trading gas-powered cars for electric ones is supposed to eliminate carbon emissions. But most electric vehicle owners prefer to charge their vehicles at home. They plug in after returning for the evening and charge overnight. Energy isn’t produced by magic. Nor is it produced by solar once the sun goes down.

States such as California and Nevada are largely relying on natural gas to produce needed power in the evenings and overnight.

In other words, natural gas power plants are often supplying the electricity fueling electric vehicles.

“It is clear by any objective measure that California is relying more on hope than a workable plan to transition to a green power grid,” a report by the Pacific Research Institute concluded in June. “California policymakers made an enormous mistake in their haste to push technologies that aren’t ready. … It is past time for the state to reassess its approach for addressing global climate change.”

This sleight of hand is typical of the debate over green energy. Politicians, including Biden, describe global warming in the most apocalyptic terms imaginable to create support for an overhaul of the entire U.S. economy. But they never mention all of the problems inherent in pushing these mandates well before green technology is capable of picking up the load.

Green activists promote electric vehicles, but they don’t mention that creating a lithium-ion battery for a “zero-emissions” car produces more initial emissions than a gasoline-powered vehicle. They don’t mention that fossil fuel plants provide the electricity used to mine the minerals that make those batteries. They don’t mention how often U.S. environmental groups block projects that would produce the minerals necessary to wean the nation off fossil fuels.

And in many cases, electric vehicle crusaders have succeeded only in substituting one form of fossil fuel use for another.

Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service

We see a good chance of the high court coming together for a 9-0 vote in the months ahead to shoot down a terrible injustice that festered in bankruptcy courts for years — until the notorious Sackler family inadvertently put a spotlight on it.

The Sacklers made billions engineering an opioid epidemic that ruined countless lives and killed off Americans by the hundreds of thousands.

Their company, Purdue Pharma, admitted that it used false marketing to con doctors into prescribing its deadly pills by lying about how addictive they were. As regulators dithered, the Sacklers conducted what one family member called a “milking” operation, stripping the company of more than $10 billion and stashing the dirty money offshore.

Purdue’s bankruptcy made the scandal even more outrageous.

The Sacklers agreed to put up $6 billion — a fraction of what they had creamed off the opioid epidemic — in exchange for blanket protection from all related legal claims. Though no one in the family had filed for personal bankruptcy, the settlement in bankruptcy court would have enabled the whole gang to walk off with billions and no worries about being held accountable in other courts.

It’s a shame that many bankruptcy judges have given up trying to do justice, choosing expediency instead, and inventing rules for these releases that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Earlier this month, the high court temporarily blocked the nationwide settlement with OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma, agreeing to a White House request to put the brakes on the agreement. The court also agreed to hear arguments in December focused on whether the bankruptcy code authorizes a court to extinguish “claims held by non-debtors against non-debtor third parties, without the claimants’ consent.”

So far, the high court hasn’t tipped its hand about how it will resolve the matter. What if the court rules 9-0 that the bankruptcy code doesn’t authorize those releases?

Congress will need to start doing the job it should have been doing all along, updating the law so that bankrupt companies can find a temporary shelter to liquidate or reorganize, while resolving relevant litigation without the corrupting influence of the releases.

At the same time, Congress also needs to ensure that bad actors can’t get away with stashing a fortune overseas while using every legal trick in the book to write another sickening chapter in the opioid epidemic.

Justice for the victims demands it.

Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service

Still, it’s not the moment to call it a day. TPS is, as the suggests, structured to be temporary, though in practice it often isn’t. There are current TPS holders from countries including Somalia and El Salvador that have been living here in a sort of status limbo for decades, getting renewals but no fundamental security.

That’s because Congress failed to build in a path to residency and eventual citizenship, apparently having not considered that it would never quite be safe for nationals of certain countries to return.

So we don’t have to speculate about the fate that will befall hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian TPS recipients, because it’s happened to many others before them. Without further congressional action, they’ll be stuck in a kind of semi-permanent status, building lives in the United States without any clear way to guarantee their place past the next re-designation cycle, and never able to naturalize.

That could be addressed by the passage of the Ukrainian Adjustment Act, a bill to provide a path to residency for Ukrainians paroled into the U.S. — which would cover most TPS holders along with those that have come in through parole programs and not received TPS — since the outbreak of hostilities with Russia in 2014.

This is an even bigger no-brainer for Congress.

Congress should also pass the Afghan and Venezuelan Adjustment Acts, bills that would provide paths to citizenship for hundreds of thousands more people who are busying themselves building lives here after fleeing the collapse of the Afghan government in the aftermath of the chaotic U.S. withdrawal, or the regime Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, one of the U.S.’s most vehement regional opponents.

Congress is already passing laws, why limit them to these patches without addressing the underlying issues? It should go back to the drawing board and totally reformulate our humanitarian immigration systems to prevent people from ending up in these limbos in the first place. That will entail a recommitment to an expansive global refugee system that can more quickly process people abroad and allow them to arrive in the U.S. with status in hand, as well as a return to policies to let people who’ve been in the country for years without incident apply for permanent residency regardless of their status, a consensus position in a bygone era of bipartisan understanding on immigration.

 New York Daily News/Tribune News Service

This month, the government announced that inflation bumped up 3.2% in July, with core prices rising 4.7%. It’s the first upturn in the economic gauge since last year, and it was driven by higher prices for food and services, including automobile repair and housing costs.

To be sure, this is not the 9.1% inflation from a year ago. But it’s also well above the rate when Biden took office. Any credit the president takes for tamping down rising prices must also recognize that it was “Bidenomics” which created the problem in the first place.

Economists sympathetic to the White House insist the July increase is an outlier. We’ll see. Other economists “are predicting that rising oil and gas costs could lead to another rise in inflation in August, though they expect prices to settle back down this fall,” according to The Washington Post.

But despite the varying opinions on inflation trends, there can be little doubt that Bidenomics has led to an unprecedented blowout of red ink. Remember Biden laughably taking credit for falling deficits as COVID spending came off the books? There’s a reason he has finally clammed up on the subject. The Congressional Budget Office last week revealed that the deficit had hit $1.62 trillion for the first 10 months of the fiscal year, up 55% from the year previous.

This comes after the Fitch agency downgraded the nation’s credit rating this month in response to the rising $32 trillion national debt and the unwillingness of Congress and the president to do anything about it.

“The deficit this year and next year are on track to be 50% larger than before the pandemic,” noted Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “despite the fact that the pandemic is over and the economy seems to be growing at a steady clip.”

And as the Fed has ramped up interest rates to fight Biden’s inflation, interest payments on the debt have “climbed to 15.5% of all federal revenue,” The Wall Street Journal notes, and will keep soaring. “Much more debt will be needed to finance the Biden spending binge that has only begun for the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips Act and the infrastructure bill,” the paper observed.

Job growth has remained a bright spot under this administration. But balance that against a $32 trillion national debt, annual deficits exceeding $1.5 trillion, rising prices, soaring interest rates and record federal spending.

This is the “progress” of Bidenomics.

Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service

Inflation has stabilized over the past 12 months after skyrocketing to more than 9% — a number not seen in four decades. But the White House seems intent on exacerbating the problem.

Recently, Vice President Kamala Harris was in Philadelphia to announce that the Labor Department had revamped a rule governing worker pay on federal construction projects. The reform will relax the standard by which so-called “prevailing wages” are set under the Davis-Bacon Act, which dates to the Great Depression.

The new regulation will raise wages for workers on federal projects and, Harris said, “That’s thousands of dollars more every year, to help put a down payment on a home, for example, or to save for retirement, or to simply take their family on vacation once a year.”

Not surprisingly, the vice president omitted the fact that this will also drive up the cost of such projects, further burdening taxpayers and putting more inflationary pressures on the economy.

Under current rules imposed during the Reagan administration, prevailing wages are determined by looking at the pay of half the workers in a given trade in a given area. The new Biden rule would reduce that to 30%.

In other words, as Eric Boehm of Reason magazine points out, the Biden White House is barring the federal government from “even considering bids that might pay average wages, thereby obligating taxpayers to pay more than they might have had to in an open market.”

This is blatant sop to organized labor, which embraces Davis-Bacon as a means of limiting competition.

Never mind that the data used to calculate the “prevailing wage” is often scattershot and incomplete or that there’s no evidence union labor delivers taxpayers more bang for their buck — quite the contrary. Some of the biggest public sector infrastructure boondoggles — Boston’s Big Dig, for instance — were union projects.

Sean Higgins of the Competitive Enterprise Institute told Reason, “The Biden administration’s decision to turn back the clock on Davis-Bacon Act regulations to a Carter administration-era version will benefit a few well-connected unions while raising costs on taxpayers.” And you can bet that those “well-connected” labor organizations will launder some of their newfound lucre through Biden and his fellow Democrats.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Davis-Bacon will cost taxpayers more than $24 billion between 2023 and 2032. The law is a relic and should be abolished. But given the past few years, it’s not surprising that the Biden economic team once again follows in the footsteps of the one-term Carter.

Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service

Nevertheless, the White House is taking no chances given Biden’s obvious and many vulnerabilities. Rather than ignore Kennedy, the administration has from time to time harshly criticized his public statements, some of which have been controversial. And now Kennedy complains that the president is taking more subtle swipes in an effort to minimize his candidacy.

Last month, Kennedy tweeted that he had sought Secret Service protection, but that the agency ignored his request and then turned him down. “Since the assassination of my father in 1968, candidates for president are provided Secret Service protection. But not me,” he wrote.

His campaign manager, the quixotic Dennis Kucinich, who also ran a long-odds presidential campaign in 2008, went further. “The American people, no matter their politics, will find this decision shocking and repugnant,” Kucinich said in a statement. “This is obviously a political decision, not a legal one. As such, this is directly on President Biden.”

The Secret Service notes on its website that it offers protection to “major presidential and vice presidential candidates and their spouses within 120 days of a presidential election.” We’re about 11 months away from that threshold. But since 1980, a number of candidates — including Barack Obama — have been granted protection well before the 120-day standard applied, although rarely this far out.

Another issue is the definition of a “major” candidate. Federal law leaves that up to the Department of Homeland Security and a bipartisan panel of House and Senate leaders. While the Biden camp will be loath to admit it, surely a candidate with double-digit support qualifies under this standard even if he is well behind the front-runner.

Then there’s Kennedy’s family history. His uncle, President John F. Kennedy, was felled by an assassin’s bullet in 1963, and his father, Robert F. Kennedy, was shot and killed while seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968. As CNN reports, President Jimmy Carter granted Secret Service protection to Ted Kennedy, another RFK Jr. uncle, shortly after he announced his 1980 presidential run.
Kennedy’s request is neither unprecedented nor unreasonable. It is also understandable given the historical circumstances. Political considerations are a distraction in this case. The Secret Service and the Biden administration should re-examine the decision to deny him protection.

Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service

The high court decision invalidated provisions in 23 states in which voters had approved limitations on how long their senators and representatives could serve in Congress. Term limits had become popular in the early 1990s and were included in the GOP’s 1994 Contract with America, which helped Republicans gain control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years.

Currently, 16 states limit how long their state lawmakers may serve. Such restrictions were approved in those states with an average of 66% voter support.

Despite the popularity of the concept, proposals to limit congressional terms have languished — largely because such an amendment would require the consent of the very politicians who would suffer the consequences. Yet the nation’s growing polarization and its aging political class could provide impetus to again jump-start a federal term limits movement.

President Joe Biden will be in his late 80s if he is re-elected — and his physical and cognitive decline are obvious. He has been entrenched in Washington for 50 years. Late last month, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a 90-year-old California Democrat who has served in the upper chamber for three decades, appeared confused at a Senate committee hearing and had to be told how to vote. That same week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, 81, froze up while talking to reporters, leading to speculation that he may have had a mini-stroke.

At the same time, too many members of Congress prioritize re-election ahead of addressing the nation’s business. The national debt has skyrocketed past $32 trillion largely because elected officials on both sides of the aisle are terrified of angering special-interest groups by taking the steps necessary to reverse that dangerous trend.

“Elected office should represent a short-term privilege of public service, not a career choice,” said Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., who, with Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, introduced an amendment this year to limit terms for federal offices. “Those of us in Congress ought to serve for a reasonable period of time and then return home to live under the laws we enacted.”

The Cruz-Norman plan would limit senators to two six-year terms and confine House members to three two-year stints.

Opponents of term limits argue they restrict voter choice and rob the system of valuable institutional knowledge. There is some truth to this. Yet it’s worth noting that the most vociferous opponents of term limits include self-interested politicians themselves and the lobbyists who have spent years cultivating access to long-term incumbents. As for voter choice, many of those espousing this argument also support laws that make it more difficult for third-party candidates to appear on the ballot.

Term limits aren’t a magic bullet. But they will ensure a healthy turnover in the nation’s political class while potentially encouraging new ideas and spurring elected officials to focus more on the nation’s business than on fundraising for the next election.

 Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service