[AMV] Amerikaanse politiek #469 maga

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Op dinsdag 6 maart 2018 19:02 schreef OMG het volgende:

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Godsamme, ik weet gewoon echt niet meer wat echt is en verzonnen. .

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White House counselor Kellyanne Conway violated the Hatch Act on two occasions, the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) informed the Trump administration Tuesday.

Appearing in her official capacity, Conway endorsed and advocated against political candidates, the watchdog said, referring its findings to President Trump "for appropriate disciplinary action."

The violations occurred during two television appearances in 2017, one on Fox News's "Fox & Friends," and one on CNN's "New Day."

“While the Hatch Act allows federal employees to express their views about candidates and political issues as private citizens, it restricts employees from using their official government positions for partisan political purposes, including by trying to influence partisan elections,” OSC says in its report.

“Ms. Conway’s statements during the 'Fox & Friends' and 'New Day' interviews impermissibly mixed official government business with political views about candidates in the Alabama special election for U.S. Senate."

The report goes on to state that Conway received "significant training" on the Hatch Act and possible violations. OSC says it gave Conway, a former GOP pollster who served as Trump's campaign manager, the opportunity to respond as part of its report, but she did not.

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Op dinsdag 6 maart 2018 19:02 schreef OMG het volgende:

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Godsamme, ik weet gewoon echt niet meer wat echt is en verzonnen. .

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Op dinsdag 6 maart 2018 19:14 schreef Monolith het volgende:

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Die obsessie met beroemdheden en populariteit is toch niets nieuws?

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Op dinsdag 6 maart 2018 19:14 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:
Kellyanne Conway found to have violated Hatch Act

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President Donald Trump’s administration has been on a deregulatory bender, particularly when it comes to environmental regulations. As of January, the New York Times counted 67 environmental rules on the chopping block under Trump.

This is not one of Trump’s idiosyncrasies, though. His administration is more ham-handed and flagrant about it, but the antipathy it expresses toward federal regulation falls firmly within the GOP mainstream. Republicans have been complaining about “burdensome” and “job-killing” regulations for so long that their opposition to any particular health, safety, or environmental regulation is now just taken for granted.

For instance, why would the Environmental Protection Agency close a program investigating the effects of toxins on children’s health? Is there some evidence that the money is wasted or poorly spent? Why would the EPA allow more unregulated disposal of toxic coal ash? Don’t people in coal regions deserve clean air and water? Is there any reason to think coal ash is currently well-regulated?

These questions barely come up anymore. Republicans oppose regulations because they are regulations; it’s become reflexive, both for the party and for the media the covers them.

As it happens, though, we know something about the costs and benefits of federal regulations. In fact, Trump’s own administration, specifically the (nonpartisan, at least for now) White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), just released its annual report on that very subject. (Hat tip to E&E.)

The report was released late on a Friday, with Congress out of session and multiple Trump scandals dominating the headlines. A cynical observer might conclude that the administration wanted the report to go unnoticed.

Why might that be? Well, in a nutshell, it shows that the GOP is wrong about regulations as a general matter and wrong about Obama’s regulations specifically. Those regulations had benefits far in excess of their costs, and they had no discernible effect on jobs or economic growth.

SPOILER

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The “job-killing” thing is also nonsense

Okay, environmental regulations produce enormous health and social benefits, but don’t they kill jobs?

Not really. This is another myth that conservatives have simply repeated with such tenacity that no one bothers to scrutinize it anymore.

The OMB report has a long section looking into the employment effects of environmental regulations, assessing several studies and literature reviews. Mostly it is devoted to explaining how complex and vexed such analysis is. Jobs may be eliminated in one place/industry and created in another. Jobs may be eliminated in the short term but a larger number created in the long term. Effects on employment must be disentangled from contemporaneous social and economic trends, many of which have much larger effects. And so on.

The conclusion — which is in keeping with the broader literature, as I described in this post — is that there may be local and temporary employment effects from environmental regulations, either positive or negative, but at the aggregate national level, such regulations simply aren’t a significant factor in employment. Their effects are lost amid the noise of demographic shifts and macroeconomic drivers.

They don’t “kill jobs.” From the perspective of the overall economy, they don’t do much of anything to jobs, other than shift them from certain regions/industries to others. As it happens, those shifts are often unfavorable to GOP constituencies, but that’s not a license to, you know, lie about them.

There is no coherent policy justification for Trump’s deregulatory frenzy

If the GOP wants to explicitly align itself behind the interests of particular polluting businesses and against the broader public interest, well, it can. If it doesn’t think the costs to industry of reducing pollution are worth much larger benefits to public health, it can say so. If it wants to transfer wealth back from the public to industrialists by reversing all of Obama’s rules, that is its right as the party in power.

But GOP lawmakers shouldn’t be allowed to simply burp up the words “burdensome” and “job-killing” and move on. The OMB finds no evidence that federal regulations have any noticeable impact on aggregate national employment or economic growth. There is evidence that they produce public benefits well in excess of their costs.

If EPA head Scott Pruitt wants to say that defending children from toxics or rural communities from coal ash pollution is burdensome, he ought to offer some numbers, or evidence, or ... something. Goofy homilies are not enough. (His latest claim is that the Bible recommends the deregulatory agenda.)

twitter:

emorwee twitterde op dinsdag 27-02-2018 om 19:12:11 Pope Francis, on Scott Pruitt's faith-based brand of environmentalism: “This is not the correct interpretation of the Bible as intended by the Church.” https://t.co/NGAHzys3Kl reageer retweet

Believing in the inherent costliness and ineffectiveness of federal regulation is not a religious matter. It’s not an article of faith. It’s an empirical assertion, an argument, and the available evidence indicates that it is incorrect.

It is certainly not a belief to which journalists owe any particular deference.

Until Trump’s administration makes a case that its own OMB and agencies are wrong — not just by a little, but by tens of billions of dollars — the presumption of every journalist and politico in Washington should be that there is no coherent policy rationale for Trump’s deregulatory agenda.

It is, like his health, tax, and infrastructure initiatives, simply the polar opposite of populism: the targeted transfer of wealth to the already wealthy, at the public’s expense.