Republican Medicaid cuts could mean ‘Armageddon’ in D.C., official says: House Republican proposals to slash government spending on Medicaid could devastate the insurance program that covers 40 percent of District residents. - "Federal Medicaid payments for states are based on a formula that considers average per capita income, but in D.C., the rate was fixed in 1997 when the District teetered on the edge of financial collapse. Then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Thomas M. Davis III, a GOP congressman from Northern Virginia, brokered a deal that said the federal government would pay 70 percent of Medicaid costs and the District 30 percent.
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"The arrangement recognized that the District’s tax revenue is limited by the amount of tax-exempt federal property within its borders and the inability to levy a commuter tax on people who work in the District but live elsewhere, said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s nonvoting representative."
Is brown rice actually healthier than white rice?: Recent concerns over the health risks of eating brown rice are mostly overblown. - "Christian Scott, the lead author of the Michigan State study and a postdoctoral research associate at the university, said the average American adult would need to eat more than three servings of brown rice — one-and-a-half cups — 'every day for years' to be at an increased risk of developing health problems from the arsenic in rice."
Read The Atlantic’s Interview With Donald Trump: A conversation with the president about executive power, Signalgate, and 24-karat gold [ed. note: I mean, the guy thinks he sent Javelins to Ukraine. It's nuts.]
American Panopticon: The Trump administration is pooling data on Americans. Experts fear what comes next. - "A worst-case scenario is easy to imagine. Some of this information could be useful simply for blackmail - medical diagnoses and notes, federal taxes paid, cancellation of debt. In a kleptocracy, such data could be used against members of Congress and governors, or anyone disfavored by the state. Think of it as a domesticated, systemetized version of kompromat - like opposition research on steroids: Hey, Wisconsin is considering legislation that would be harmful to us. There are four legislators on the fence. Query the database; tell me what we've got on them."
Trump Is Paving the Way for Another ‘China Shock’: The MIT economist David Autor helped fracture the old free-trade consensus. But he thinks that what’s replacing it is even worse. - "Autor: Absolutely not. I think the Trump folks are asking the right question. But they've come up with just about the worst answer. It's a classic case of fighting the last war. They're looking over their shoulder, wishing we hadn't made the mistakes we made 20 years ago. But what they are doing now is just compounding the errors.
"The jobs that we lost to China 20 years ago: We're not getting those back. China doesn't even want those jobs anymore. They are losing them to Vietnam, and they aren't upset about it. They don't want to be making commodity furniture and tube socks. They want to make semiconductors and electric vehicles and airplanes and robots and drones. They want those frontier sectors.
"As it happens, those are the sectors we've actually held on to. But we could lose those too. We could lose Boeing. We could lose GM and Ford. We could lose Apple. We could lose the AI sector. These are the parts of manufacturing that generate good jobs but also so much more than that. They are where innovation occurs, where the big profits are, where technology and military leadership come from. And those are the sectors that we stand to lose next."
Why China Won’t Give In to Trump Xi Jinping, like his American counterpart, needs to be the top dog.
Republicans Are Right About Soda: Public-health groups are tying themselves in knots over a GOP crackdown on the sugary drink. - "Nowhere is the Republican Party's about-face on soda more stark than in West Virginia. In July, the state removed its soda tax. And now, less than a year later, it is pushing forward with a SNAP soda ban as part of an effort to decrease consumption of 'ultra-processed crap that barely qualifies as food,' Republican Governor Patrick Morrisey said late last month. Banning the use of SNAP funds to purchase soda has become so popular because it combines the 'Make America healthy again' focus on America's diet problems with the conservative desire to reform the welfare state."
What Jonathan Haidt Thought When He Watched Adolescence: “The internet is just not a good place to let your child roam free 24/7.” - "Direct one-to-one communication is great. It's very important to separate the internet from social media. One-to-one synchronous interaction is great. What's not healthy is any sort of one-to-many performance, especially when it's asynchronous, because that's where the girls in particular get sucked into perfectionism and careful editing and carefully thinking through every word. It's posting that seems to especially have a bad effect on teen girls."
The Roman Way to Trash a Republic: When you’re the emperor Augustus, they let you do it. - "He took control of the government gradually but completely, with the support of those wealthy aristocrats who valued fortune above principle and with the complaisance of a population exhausted by conflict and disillusioned by a system that favored the rich and connected. Perhaps most salient for us today, Augustus consolidated his power with the institutional blessing of the Senate."
Grover Norquist Can’t Believe What He’s Hearing: Is the GOP about to raise taxes?
The Force That Holds Trump’s Coalition Together: Traditional Republican elites tolerate the authoritarianism because they want the tax cuts. - "Randy Barnett, a right-leaning libertarian law professor at Georgetown, posted on X a few days ago a list of 'bullets we dodged' by avoiding a Democratic-run government that, he believes, would abolish the filibuster, establish single-payer health care, and fulfill other liberal goals. The president might be claiming the power to whisk any person he chooses to a Central American Gulag without due process, but at least he isn't doing something as horrific as Medicare for All."