His administration remains deeply understaffed. His legislative agenda is stymied. He has been active in issuing executive orders, but many are toothless, others are only in the early stages of undoing Obama policies and some are tied up in the courts. So far, Trump’s leadership has mostly been defined by his rhetoric.
And his rhetoric, the conventional wisdom holds, could not be more different from his predecessor’s.
Barack Obama was, as president, eloquent. His language was sophisticated. He spoke in measured tones and advanced informed, reasoned dialogue.
Donald Trump is inarticulate and brusque. His language is simplistic. He dishes out invective. He shows so little regard for the facts that some say he’s the exemplar of a “bullshit artist.” And he promotes a dialogue of the deaf.
The differences between Trump’s and Obama’s rhetorical styles seem stark. Yet, when we set aside the presidents’ speaking styles and looked more carefully at the specific words Trump employed in his first months in office, we were surprised to discover that, in certain ways, these two presidents are remarkably like each other and unlike their predecessors. Here’s what we found – and why Obama and Trump have more in common than you would think.
Our analysis is based on Trump’s more substantial speeches – which we somewhat arbitrarily define as those longer than 500 words – which were directed primarily at domestic audiences. We scraped from the website of the American Presidency Project all of Trump’s campaign speeches and presidential addresses through July 1 that met these criteria. We ended up with 74 campaign speeches, representing more than 230,000 words, and 56 presidential addresses, which included more than 122,000 words. We compared these bodies of speech to each other and to a separate database of postwar presidential speech that one of us had collected, using these same criteria, for a recently published book.
We ran these speeches through a specialized computerized content analysis program called Diction. Diction contains 33 separate dictionaries tailored to political speech. It searches texts for the words contained in the designated dictionaries and then calculates the number of words from each dictionary that would be present in a typical 500-word sample.
On two key dimensions, Obama and Trump look similar – and stand in marked contrast to all other presidents.
First, their rhetoric is much more self-referential, meaning it uses more first-person pronouns. Obama’s rhetoric is 69 percent more self-referential than the presidential average, and Trump exceeds Obama by another 20 percent.
Trump employs almost 50 percent more first-person pronouns than the second most heavily self-referential president after Obama, Gerald Ford. Trump’s rhetoric is twice as self-referential as the postwar presidential average.
Second, both Trump and Obama rank very high on measures of “tenacity.” This dictionary includes a series of words such as “must” and “need” that call for action and that “connote confidence and totality.” Obama’s rhetoric is around 45 percent more tenacious than the presidential average. Trump’s rhetoric is a bit more tenacious than even Obama’s. They are the only two presidents who substantially exceed the average.
Obama and Trump’s rhetoric suggests that the prime mover of government is not separation of powers, political parties or the bureaucracy – but the will of the president. Its self-referentialism projects an image of strong leadership and of the president as the central pivot of action. Its tenacity expresses confidence that the president will triumph over the many obstacles in his way.
For all their differences, both Obama and Trump consistently presented themselves as the solution to the nation’s problems. Accepting the nomination at the Republican National Convention, Trump assured Americans, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” He regularly cited his own biography as the reason that Americans should “trust” him. The irony is that the predecessor who, on this dimension, most resembles Trump is the very one whom Trump cast as an utter failure and weak leader and as his chief foil. Obama too regularly invoked his unique personal story as the reason that Americans should place their faith in him. Minus Trump’s boastfulness, Obama too portrayed himself as the key agent of national transformation: “I’m the one who brings change. It is my vision. It is my agenda,” he told The Washington Post in January 2009. He saw other government officials as just “good mechanics.”
The computerized content analysis of presidential rhetoric sets out a pattern, it does not explain it. However, we believe it likely that Obama and Trump adopted the same rhetorical tack for the same reason: Audiences across the political spectrum have craved a strong leader who will overcome Washington’s paralysis and address the nation’s challenges.
Especially since 9/11, American politics has grown more partisan and polarized, even as Americans’ values have converged. That partisan divide has produced gridlock in the halls of power, and Congress has become a site of minority party obstruction. As a result, Americans have become frustrated with Congress, and their trust in government has plummeted. They have increasingly looked to the president to seize the initiative, conquer Washington’s dysfunction and persuade Congress to act.
In 2007, “honesty” mattered most to Americans in selecting the nation’s next president, with “leadership/strength” a distant second. In 2012, American voters said that “shares my values” was their top consideration in electing a president. By 2016, having a president who was a “strong leader” had easily taken the top spot, across voters of all parties, and was twice as important to them as it had been four years before.
Obama and Trump’s self-referential and tenacious rhetoric – one might even call it authoritarian – seems designed to satisfy that demand for strong leadership centered in the presidency. It is not accidental that their rhetoric, as the linked charts show, also reflects a continued, long-term decline in “cooperative” and “accomplishment” language, as collaboration across party lines has been rare and as there have been few achievements. Ironically, “satisfaction” rhetoric has experienced a corresponding rise – perhaps because there has been less to celebrate and therefore more reason for presidents to proclaim that all is well.
Of course, some of this may be Donald Trump’s inimitable rhetorical style. The figures above reveal that Trump the candidate was somewhat less self-referential and less tenacious than Trump the president has been. Perhaps he was simply restraining himself during the campaign. Once ensconced in the White House, he could become more himself. Trump the president may be Trump unleashed.
But the data suggest that Trump is also a manifestation – albeit an extreme manifestation – of our political age. Obama’s self-centered, self-confident but soaring speeches gave way to his successor’s self-centered, overconfident and vain tweets. Karl Marx knew what he was talking about: History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Nevertheless, we’d better get used to authoritarian rhetoric. It appears to be here to stay.
By Ronald R. Krebs, Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in the Liberal Arts and Professor of Political Science, University of Minnesota and Robert Ralston, Ph.D. student, University of Minnesota
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The percentage of people in the U.S. dying of drug overdoses has effectively quadrupled since 1999, and drug overdoses now rank as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.
Drugs do exist to reverse opioid overdoses or treat long-term opioid addiction. But while opioids have become easier and easier to obtain through illicit markets and sellers on the dark web, a drug that could save countless lives has become increasingly out of reach.
Consider the addiction treatment drug, Suboxone. Patents and other exclusivities on the basic version of Suboxone expired some time ago, yet the price remains sky-high, and access problems persist. Oral film strips now cost over US$500 for a 30-day supply; even simple tablets cost a whopping $600 for a 30-day supply. The cost alone puts the medication out of reach for many.
I study the pharmaceutical industry, and I see how drug companies are able to play games that keep competition out and prices high. Lack of access to addiction treatment drugs like Suboxone can be traced, in part, to the soaring prices, access problems and anti-competitive conduct that has become business as usual in the pharmaceutical industry across the board.
Pharmaceutical companies have brought tremendous advances in medicine. I believe they should be adequately compensated for the enormous amount of time and resources needed to develop a new drug. Our intellectual property system is designed to do just that, rewarding companies that bring new drugs to market with a competition-free period – 20 years from the patent application date – during which they can recoup their profits.
After this defined period, generic versions of the drug are supposed to appear on pharmacy shelves, bringing down prices to levels that can be borne more easily by consumers and the health care market generally.
Brand-name companies, however, engage in myriad games to make sure theirs is the only version of the drug on pharmacy shelves, long after generics should have joined the ranks.
Martin Shkreli, the infamous pharmaceutical industry CEO responsible for hiking the cost of his company’s lifesaving drug from $13.50 to $750 overnight, once tweeted that “Every time a drug goes generic, I grieve.”
And it is not just a case of a few bad apples. Complex schemes to hold off generic competition are widespread throughout the pharmaceutical industry, as I have found in my research.
Legislators on both sides of the aisle have decried sky-high drug prices, but it can be hard to pin down the specific behavior to address. Pharmaceutical game-playing has grown over the decades into a multi-headed monster, with a new tactic popping up as soon as the old one is cut off. My colleague and I set out to clearly identify and expose these various games in our book, “Drug Wars: How Big Pharma Raises Prices and Keeps Generics Off the Market.”
One game we analyzed involved the filing of petitions at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that raise unfounded or frivolous concerns in an effort to delay generic competitors.
Some of the petitions were just stunning to us. For example, some petitions soberly ask the FDA to require, well, what it already requires, such as ensuring that the generic drug product is stable and has an appropriate shelf life. Other petitions tie the application up in knots for reasons that are hard, even for the FDA, to discuss with a straight face.
For example, the company that manufactures the blood pressure medicine Plendil filed a petition asking the FDA to delay approval of generics by citing concerns over how different types of oranges in orange juice might affect absorption of the medication and demanding additional information on the juice used in the clinical trials.
Although 80 percent of these petitions are eventually denied, it takes time and resources for the FDA to review each petition.
Citing concerns over citizen petition games, Congress recently required the FDA to respond to such petitions within five months, but a five-month delay for a blockbuster drug can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. (The Federal Trade Commission recently filed an antitrust suit against Shire ViroPharma for attempts to hold off competition related to its gastrointestinal drug Vancocin, a campaign that included 24 filings related to a single petition.) Congress also gave the FDA the ability to summarily deny petitions when appropriate, a power that the FDA has failed to use even once.
By parsing through 12 years of FDA data, we found that out of all citizen petitions filed, the percentage of petitions with the possibility of delaying generic entry doubled since 2003, rising from 10 percent to 20 percent. Thus, in some years, one in five petitions filed at the FDA on any topic, including tobacco, food and dietary supplements, had the potential to delay generic competition.
Moreover, we found that 40 percent of such petitions were filed a year or less before the FDA approved the generic, indicating that companies are using these petitions as a last-ditch effort to hold off competition.
There are plenty of other games to play, as well. For example, generic applicants need samples of the brand-name drug to show the FDA that their version is equivalent; some brand-name companies flatly refused to sell samples to generic companies.
Another common tactic involves making tiny modifications to the dosage or formulation of a drug just as the original patents are about to expire. This strategy, known as “product hopping,” allows the drug company to obtain a brand-new set of patents on their “new and improved” version of the drug.
Even if the patents are overturned – and studies show that generics convince courts to overturn the majority of patents they challenge – the process again takes time.
Much of the attention is focused on patents, but the 13 regulatory exclusivities that the FDA doles out also play help create competition-free zones. These offer months or even years of additional protection, by taking steps such as carrying out pediatric studies or developing drugs for rare diseases termed “orphan drugs.” Drug companies have stretched these systems to the point at which the costs to society far outweigh the benefits.
One can understand the motivation – delaying entry of a generic competitor for even a few months can translate into billions of dollars in extra revenue for the brand-name company. Thus, drug companies string out games that obstruct and delay competition, one after another. As I noted when testifying before Congress about such strategies, “A billion here, a billion there; that adds up to real money.”
In 2015, 80 percent of the profit growth of the 20 largest drug companies resulted from price hikes. And drugs are vastly more expensive in the U.S. than abroad. (The liver failure drug Syprine, for example, sells for less than $400 a year in many countries; in the U.S., the average list price is US$300,000. Gilead’s hepatitis C drug, Sovaldi, reportedly sells for the equivalent of $1,000 abroad – in the U.S., it sells for $84,000.)
The industry can do this, in part, because unlike the demand for other goods, the demand for pharmaceuticals is highly inelastic. Consumers will continue to pay for the drugs that can save their lives, even if it breaks the bank.
Nowhere is the pain of these games more troubling than in the market for opioid addiction medicine.
In September, I testified before a House Judiciary Subcommittee at a hearing about the state of competition in the markets for addiction medicine, noting that, while “Open and vigorous competition is the backbone of U.S. markets…we are not seeing that in the market for addiction medicine.”
Pharmaceutical companies often argue that high profits are needed to fund development of new drugs, some of which don’t make it to market.
“The competitive market is structured to take maximum advantage of savings from brand competition,” testified Anne McDonald Pritchett, vice president, policy and research for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
However, open and vigorous competition is certainly not what the manufacturer behind the addiction treatment drug Suboxone had in mind when it combined several games to fight off generics appearing on the horizon. These games included product hopping (shifting the market to a new form of the drug just as the exclusivity expires so pharmacists cannot fill the prescription with a generic), refusing to cooperate with generic companies on safety plans, and petitioning the FDA to impose safety measures on generic versions that were never required for the brand-name version.
The opioid addiction epidemic is a complex problem, and there are no simple answers. One thing, however, is certain. The U.S. system should not reward companies for blocking generic competition. When we do that, the American public pays the price.
By Robin Feldman, Professor of Intellectual Property, University of California, Hastings
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Our study of 21 OECD countries over more than a 100 years shows income inequality actually restricts people from earning more, educating themselves and becoming entrepreneurs. That flows on to businesses who in turn invest less in things like plant and equipment.
Inequality makes it harder for economies to benefit from innovation. However, if people have access to credit or the money to move up, it can offset this effect.
We measured the impact of this by looking at the number of patents for new inventions and then also looking at the Gini coefficient and the income share of the top 10%. The Gini coefficient is a measure of the distribution of income or wealth within a nation.
From 1870 to 1977, inequality measured by the Gini coefficient fell by about 40%. During this time people actually got more innovative and productivity increased, incomes also increased.
But inequality has increased in recent decades and it’s having the opposite effect.
Inequality is preventing people with less income and wealth from reaching their potential in terms of education and invention. There’s also less entrepreneurship.
Inequality also means the market for new goods shrinks. One study shows that if incomes are more equal among people, people who are less well off, buy more. Having this larger market for new products, incentivises companies to create new things to sell.
If wealth is concentrated among only a small group of people, it actually increases demand for imported luxuries and handmade products. In contrast to this, distributed incomes means more mass produced goods are manufactured.
What’s been driving inequality since the 1980s is changes to economies - countries trading more with each other and advances in technology. As this happens old products and industries fade while new ones take their place.
These changes have delivered significant net benefits to society. Reducing trade and innovation will only make everyone poorer.
The declining number of people in unions has also contributed to inequality, as workers lose collective bargaining power and some rights. At the same time, unions can adversely affect innovation within firms.
Unions discourage innovation when they resist the adoption of new technology in the workplace. Also if innovation creates profits for firms but some of these are taken up by higher wages (lobbied for by unions), these reduced profits provide less incentive for firms to innovate.
Where workers’ jobs are protected, for example with union membership, there’s often less resistance to innovation and technological change.
Most countries have much higher levels of inequality than the OECD average. This combination of high inequality and low financial development is a major obstacle to economic prosperity.
When financial markets work well, everyone gets access to the amount of credit they can afford and can invest as much as they need. We found that for a nation with a credit-to-GDP ratio of more than 108%, low income earners are less discouraged by not having a share of the wealth. There’s less of a dampening affect on innovation.
Unfortunately, most countries (including many in the OECD) are far from this threshold. In 2016, the credit-to-GDP ratio averaged 56% across all countries, and only 28% for the least developed. Until 2005, Australia was also below this threshold.
This means governments should look at providing more people with more access to credit, especially to the poor, to stimulate growth.
For financially developed nations like Australia, increased inequality actually has less of an effect on innovation and growth. So tackling inequality might not be as easy as increasing access to credit.
Spending and taxing are already historically high and growing inequality makes it harder to further raise taxes. Countries like Australia are not unequal societies in the sense of having significant barriers to people improving their income.
Australia is a relatively egalitarian nation. In 2016, the top 1% owned 22% of the wealth in Australia, compared to 42% in the USA, and 74% in Russia.
Governments in more developed nations can instead try to maintain a stable financial sector to improve growth or by training and education.
By Chris Doucouliagos, Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, Deakin Business School and Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Though the low-income housing tax credit could land on the chopping block, it’s probably safe due to its history of bipartisan support. Along with politicians from both sides of the aisle, developers and many banks and nonprofits embrace it because the tax credit makes creating new affordable housing units financially feasible and less risky. Yet the program, which is the only significant federal subsidy for building affordable housing, could be in jeopardy as lawmakers seek to close tax loopholes and lower tax rates.
As a tax law researcher who has studied where properties built with this tax credit are located, I see good reasons to preserve it. Above all, this program has the untapped potential to help solve the intractable problems of residential segregation by race, ethnicity and class.
Each year, the federal government delivers approximately US$8 billion in low-income housing tax credits to housing developers that agree to set aside a certain number of units as rent-controlled affordable housing for qualified tenants. Since it began in 1986, the program has helped create at least 45,905 affordable housing projects with nearly three million units.
Some recent research suggests that the affordable housing properties built with the tax credits help to integrate and revitalize otherwise poverty-stricken neighborhoods.
Notwithstanding these encouraging findings, I still worry that the program may reinforce racial and economic segregation in some cities. For example, affordable housing advocates have voiced concern about the program’s harmful effects on neighborhood choice in Dallas and New York City. In my own research about low-income tenants in Philadelphia, I have noted that they have few options to live in low-income housing tax credit projects outside of high-poverty neighborhoods where most residents are people of color.
Here’s one possible explanation for the disagreement. Because there are no geographic restrictions on where affordable housing may go for builders to qualify for the tax credit, and there is no mandate that eligible projects help break up pockets of poverty, its impact inevitably varies.
Instead of leaving outcomes to chance, some affordable housing advocates and I are suggesting a solution: Housing authorities – which determine which affordable housing projects will be awarded the tax credits – should approve only properties consistent with new, broader anti-poverty and anti-segregation objectives.
For more than a decade, researchers have noted that affordable housing properties boosted by this tax credit are disproportionately located in low-income neighborhoods. Perhaps for this reason, an important line of research has sought to understand the tax credit’s impact on the communities surrounding new affordable housing projects. Though findings have varied, several researchers have found positive spillover effects.
In a recent report, Rebecca Diamond and Tim McQuade from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business offered new empirical evidence to support the view that the tax-subsidized properties benefit surrounding areas. They found that the projects increased property values, lowered the crime rate and spurred economic and racial integration – as long as the buildings were located in low-income neighborhoods where more than half the population was black or Latino.
The study didn’t detect these benefits, however, for affordable housing located in more affluent, predominantly white areas. Does that mean builders should go out of their way to site projects in low-income neighborhoods? Not necessarily.
Establishing affordable housing in low-income neighborhoods may give surrounding areas a small boost. But doing so exclusively may severely restrict housing options available to low-income tenants, leaving many without opportunities to live in other kinds of places.
My own research on siting patterns has focused on Philadelphia, a city with a history of residential housing segregation that still persists. I found that the number of low-income housing tax credit properties in a Philadelphia ZIP code is strongly correlated with the ZIP code’s poverty rate, or the percentage of residents below the poverty line, which varies according to family size. (Families of four earning less than $24,755, for example, fall into this category.)
My findings suggest that the projects have been – intentionally or not – clustered in low-income neighborhoods. In fact, 40 percent of Philadelphia’s 465 low-income housing tax credit properties built or rehabilitated since 1987 were located in just five low-income ZIP codes.
Since my study didn’t look at neighborhood change, I can’t say with certainty whether siting 184 low-income housing tax credit projects in those five ZIP codes has increased the racial and economic diversity of those neighborhoods over the past few decades. I don’t know whether the neighborhood homeowners benefited from having 30 or more low-income housing tax credit properties down the street.
What I can say is that the average poverty rate in those five ZIP codes was still 43 percent in 2015 (the city average is 26 percent), and 83 percent of the residents were nonwhite, compared with 58.3 percent of all Philadelphia residents. Meanwhile, most of these low-income housing tax credit properties are zoned for highly segregated public schools.
These are troubling statistics, given recent findings by New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey that children who live in high-poverty, racially segregated neighborhoods are more likely to be even poorer than their parents when they grow up. This effect takes a toll on the generation of children living there and the next generation.
Given the risks tied to living in overwhelmingly segregated neighborhoods, housing policies should encourage builders to construct affordable housing in more affluent areas.
Though the tax code calls for a larger tax credit for projects located in certain high-poverty census tracts, it lacks geographic restrictions or guidance on where they should go. In other words, the federal tax law is designed to increase the supply of affordable housing without saying where to put it.
Without siting mandates, the tax credit is relatively flexible and could, at least theoretically, help make poverty less concentrated. One possibility is to draw higher-income tenants to low-income neighborhoods through low-income housing tax credit-financed mixed-income housing.
The tax law allows for mixed-income projects, but Yale Law professor Robert Ellickson has noted that more than 80 percent of low-income housing tax credit properties are exclusively low-income. For the tax program to support a mixed-income strategy, developers would have to reserve fewer units for poor tenants. And that change that might undermine the program’s primary goal.
For this reason and others, policymakers should instead look to the program’s potential to aid other housing programs. For instance the $18 billion-per-year Housing Choice Voucher program is designed to give low-income renters choices about where they will live – including places where poverty is less concentrated than where they currently reside.
This program gives low-income tenants vouchers to help pay their rent. They agree to spend up to 30 percent of their income on rent, state housing authorities pick up the rest of the tab, and the federal government reimburses the states for that expense.
Many landlords won’t accept vouchers, sometimes because they worry that low-income tenants won’t pay their rent. Even the landlords who take vouchers can get skittish over compliance and inspection requirements.
But landlords renting out affordable housing units built through the low-income housing tax credit program aren’t allowed to refuse to lease to tenants merely because they plan to use vouchers. Disproportionately siting projects in poor neighborhoods may limit the tax law’s capacity to make the most out of this federal program.
In contrast, encouraging builders to place affordable housing in more affluent neighborhoods with this tax credit may give low-income renters more housing location options. For parents facing economic hardship, the ability to move to an affluent neighborhood may make it more likely that their kids will grow up to be better off.
By Michelle D. Layser, Research Fellow, Adjunct Professor of Law, Georgetown University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
