Wednesday, May 06, 2026
Most Think Trump Is Not Mentally Or Physically Fit To Be President
The charts above reflect the results of the ABC News / Washington Post Poll -- done between April 24th and 28th of a nationwide sample of 2,560 adults, with a 2 point margin of error.
Most Americans Prefer Their Passport To NOT Have Trump's Picture On It
The chart above is from the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between May 1st and 4th of a nationwide sample of 1,573 adults, with a 3.4 point margin of error.
The Trump Tariffs Turn Out To Be A Reverse Robin Hood Corporate Scam
The following is part of a post by Tim Dickinson at The Contrarian:
On “Liberation Day” in April 2025, Donald Trump imposed a massive set of tariffs on imported goods from around the world. The federal government then collected those funds — raking in ten upon tens of billions of dollars — for nearly a year, until the Supreme Court ruled that the president had unconstitutionally usurped Congress’s taxation powers.
As a result, the federal government has now begun the process of refunding about $166 billion in illegal tax revenue — payable to the corporations that originally handed over the money to the U.S. Treasury.
But did these corporations actually pay the tax? Or, after all, was it you and me?
In truth, the fat tax-rebate checks from the IRS will be going to corporations that already passed those costs on to shoppers in the form of tariff-bloated prices. American consumers paid the premium, but Treasury’s refunds will be going to huge companies. Ford announced it expects a $1.5 billion payback; General Motors anticipates a $500 million return. Both companies will reportedly be using the cash to boost their earnings.
Whether by incompetence or dark design, Trump’s illegal tariffs have worked like a reverse-Robin Hood scheme, on steroids. The pockets of the poor and middle classes were picked — during an affordability crisis, no less. And, following a detour through the IRS, that cash is now topping off the coffers of multinational corporations for whom the economy is already delivering record profits.
The economic ins and outs of tariffs, or import taxes, can be confusing at the best of times. And Donald Trump has added to that confusion with a constant stream of lies. To hear the addled president tell it, foreign countries pay the bulk of tariffs. But that is not true: A study by the New York Fed shows that foreign exporters absorbed only a small fraction of the costs of Trump’s tariffs. Instead, roughly 90 percent of the costs were paid by Americans.
An independent study by the Kiel Institute, a leading European economic think tank, pegs the cost paid by Americans even higher, at 96 percent. The report, titled “America’s Own Goal,” also illuminates how the costs of Trump’s tariffs, though initially paid by importers, are “ultimately” passed through to consumers via higher prices. The net effect of Trump’s tariffs, the study described, was to “transfer wealthfrom American consumers to the U.S. Treasury.”
In other words, American consumers bore the costs of Trump’s tariffs. The corporate importers were just the middleman. And yet, those same corporations are now in line to pocket the massive rebates from the Treasury, leaving consumers all the poorer.
To be plain: This isn’t a little bit of money around the edges. According to Congress’s Joint Economic Committee, the Trump tariff burden per household over the last year was about $1,700 — or more than the cost of one month’s groceries for a family of four.
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Tuesday, May 05, 2026
ABC News / Wapo Poll Shows Trump's Approval Numbers Are Getting Worse
The charts above reflect the results of the ABC News / Washington Post Poll -- done between April 24th and 28th of a nationwide sample of 2,560 adults, with a 2.2 point margin of error.
It's Not Just The Insurers - Hospital Costs Are Rising Too Fast
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The following is from an article by Assistant Professor Zack Cooper (Yale School of Public Health) in The New York Times:
There is boiling rage at health insurers among the public — for instance, over the fact that premiums for a family health plan can exceed $27,000 a year, even as patients routinely get their care denied. Such is the rage that when an insurance executive was murdered in 2024, one poll found that 41 percent of American voters under 30 perversely thought the killing was acceptable.
Republicans and Democrats have been eager to haul insurance executives to hearings and grill them. President Trump tried to justify removing subsidies for Americans to buy health insurance — a policy that will lead to 4 million people losing coverage and thousands of deaths — by arguing it would mean less money going to insurers.
Responding to the wrongdoing of insurers is imperative, but it won’t do much to address the unsustainable cost of health care. We are directing our anger at the part of the system that is most visible and frustrating (insurers’ restrictions on care) while ignoring the part of the health system that is most responsible for high costs and economic pain: hospital prices. At a time when two-thirds of the public are worried about the price of health care — a greater share than are worried about affording groceries, gas or housing — we need to have an honest conversation about what is driving high premiums and how to lower them.
Americans receive a similar amount of care as people in other countries, but we pay much higher prices for the care we receive. Take hip replacements. Hospitals in the United States earn $29,000on average for a replacement covered by private insurance and $16,000 for one covered by Medicare. In Germany, the public system of nonprofit insurers, which covers 90 percent of the population, pays hospitals $9,400.
Hospital prices are the leading driver of the 320 percent increase in insurance premiums that Americans have experienced over the past 25 years. Since 2000, prices at hospitals have grown faster than prices in virtually any other sector of the economy. They have grown three times as fast as inflation and twice as fast as prescription drugs and doctor visits.
The reason hospital prices are so high: hospitals’ accumulation of market power, which brings them more bargaining heft when they negotiate prices with insurers. Since 2000, there have been more than 1,300 hospital mergers among the nation’s approximately 5,000 hospitals. When hospitals that were once competitors merge, prices go up, often by double-digit percentages, with no measurable improvement in patient outcomes. Even though we rely on competition to determine hospital prices, 21 percent of hospitals are effectively monopolies — they have no competitor within a 30-minute drive — and an additional 24 percent face only one competitor. . . .
Politicians from both parties have called for reining in insurance denials. They’re right to. Such denials, and the bureaucratic processes that accompany them, are stressful for patients, and, in the worst cases, lead to patients missing out on lifesaving care. Likewise, research shows the high out-of-pocket costs included in many insurance plans can drive up death rates. We need to lower out-of-pocket costs and make insurance less bureaucratic. However, unless we pair such reforms with a focus on addressing hospitals’ rising prices, rolling back insurer restrictions on care risks driving growth in health spending that, in turn, will slow economic growth and drive job losses among low-wage workers.
If hospital prices are such a key driver of rising costs, why aren’t elected officials doing more about them? Partly the answer is politics. Hospitals are the largest or second-largest employer in many counties in America, and a formidable lobbying force — spending more than $100 million annually in Washington, often more than health insurers spend, to protect their interests. Politicians who represent places with dominant hospital systems are not eager to pick a fight with these institutions. Moreover, when an insurer denies your claim, you know it immediately. When a hospital merges and its prices go up, the harms — slower overall economic growth and job losses outside the hospital sector — are real but diffuse.
Another reason so little has been done about hospital prices is the chronic underfunding of the Federal Trade Commission. Each year, there are approximately 20 potentially harmful hospital mergers, but the cost of pushing back on all of them would potentially exceed the agency’s entire budget for antitrust enforcement across all sectors of the economy.
Addressing this issue would require regulating the prices for at least some hospitals. Economists generally prefer to rely on competition to determine what companies get paid. But in hospital markets that are effective monopolies, regulation isn’t a departure from sound economics — it’s the only tool left. Congress should cap the prices monopoly hospitals can negotiate with private insurers, using Medicare rates or prices in other competitive markets as benchmarks.
Perhaps more than anything else, what makes hospital prices so hard to confront is that the relationship we have with our health care providers is very different from the transactional relationship we have with our insurers.
The physician and scholar Jay Katz spent his career writing abouthow vulnerability, fear and gratitude make it difficult to hold doctors and hospitals to the kind of scrutiny that we apply to other powerful institutions. We lean on hospitals when our children are born, when our parents get sick and when we approach life’s end. That kind of reliance requires trust.
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