Date: 2025-05-09 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00027608
USA
BIDEN PERSPECTIVE
PBS: Biden says global leaders are terrified of
what will happen if Trump wins the election
BIDEN PERSPECTIVE
PBS: Biden says global leaders are terrified of
what will happen if Trump wins the election
President Joe Biden speaks about prescription drug costs during an event at NHTI
Concord Community College in Concord, New Hampshire, on Oct. 22, 2024.
Photo by Elizabeth Frantz/ Reuters
Original article: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/biden-says-global-leaders-are-terrified-of-what-will-happen-if-trump-wins-the-election
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
President Joe Biden is not 'flashy' ... anything but! But the Joe Biden Administration has been very productive ... maybe as productive as any in my lifetime ... and maybe as productive as the Administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson combined! Better yet ... many of the Biden driven initiatives will have value for the USA over multiple decades!
This is very different from the Trump agenda ... almost all of which is simply about Trump!
It is also very different from President Reagan and the 'Trickle Down' agenda he espoused more than four+ decades ago. The words sounded good, but the substance left a lot to be desired!
I have become increasingly annoyed at the level of misinformation that has been allowed ... actually encouraged ... on the various (many) platforms that now populate the Internet. I have been interested in information since my college days over 60 years ago and have some history of factual reality versus what is essentially pure propaganda. The major information platforms of the present time function with two goals ... profits and views. There appears to be a negative correlation between facts and views ... so facts are more and more difficult to locate and access. The big information companies ... Google (Alphabet), Facebook (Meta), Facebook, Twitter (X) and many others with a smaller footprint have all followed more or less the same trajectory with profit the dominant driver.
I recently looked at my Twitter feed (X) and was horrified at the utter garbage that I was seeing. It is no wonder that there has been a big decline in general knowledge of the US population ... mainly young population ... in recent years. Those with power and influence should be working at maximum speed to address this ridiculous situation! This was probably the second time I had looked at my Twitter feed this year! Two times too many!
I am an older man. My foundational education predates the Internet age by several decades. In recent years there has been a lot more information accessible to almost anyone with modest computer knowledge and Internet access ... but the knowledge being used by the general public seems to have degraded in a most dangerous way.
I am not a 'luddite' ... but I have a lot of respect for knowledge and experience. I have spent my whole life working to 'connect the dots' so that desirable outcomes are achoieved. Some of this work was applied in the corporate setting where 'profit' was an important part of the performance goals. Some of my work has been to try to apply some good corporate rigor to the decision making and operations of public sector (government, UN, etc) and the social sector (NGOs).
Thoough technology has become way more powerful during my adult lifetime, the management of this technology has been problematic and the results not commensurate with the embedded power of the technology. This is no accident and what has happened has happened in plain view over several decades. Part of the problem, as I see it, is that modern education is not working very well ... and this is a problem at every level from kindergarten to PhD!
When I look back over my life and the socio-enviro-economic state of the country ... primarily the USA, but also the UK ... and the atate of the world ... it becomes apparent that there have been important changes over time that are not being taken into consideration very well by the big decision makers.
One example of this is the use of GDP as an economic measure of performance! When I studied economics at Cambridge in the early 1960s, there was a hope that GDP would be consigned to the dustbin of history ... but 60+ years later it is still one of the main 'go-to' economic statistice for the media and politicians. Why is this? It makes no sense in academic terms ... but it makes a whole lot of sense for business decision makers, politicians and the like.
In the United States there is not much 'happiness' and 'enthusiasm' for the Biden economy among the general population. Yet this economy has been supporting record New York stock market levels for the past three years. At long last a high level politician ... Kamala Harris ... is talking about addressing this anomoly. But it is an issue that has been in plain sight for multiple years and the media has studiously avoided talking (writing) about it.
I am not clear why it is that the media has avoided this subject. Is it because the reporters are simply dumb and not up to the task of decent economic analysis? Or it is that working journalists will not progress in their careers if they report on certain hot-button issues in the economy like 'price gouging' that has been 'on fire' during the last few years enabled in large part by the 'cover' of Covid disruption!
I am old ... and I am not a professional reporter ... but I talk to people and I do grocery shopping! Many of the prices are not set by the grocery store, but are directed by the suppliers directly or indirectly. By indirectly, I mean that the retail price is determined more or less directly by the wholesale price. And a lot of items being sold by grocery stores ... supermarkets ... and operating in a huge 'oligopolistic' setting! In the modern economy, a few big grocery companies dominate the market ... a classic case of 'oligopoly' enabling 'price gouging' on steroids.
Surprise, surprise ... the stock market loves this ... and it therefore comes as no surprise that stock market prices have been at record levels for a long time and investors are happy! Ordinary folk ... customres, on the other hand are furious and stuck with the situation. It is good that Kamala Harris is promising political action ... but so far it is only a promise. Top politicians have ignored this for far too long ... but better late than never.
And when it comes to economics ... let me be clear ... Trump was a disaster for the economy during his first term except for himself and a few rich oligarchs at the top together with a relatively few corporate executive enablers!
Peter Burgess
Oct 23, 2024 3:53 PM EDT
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — President Joe Biden tore into his predecessor on Tuesday, suggesting that global leaders are terrified of what Donald Trump’s return to the White House could do to democratic rule around the world.
“Every international meeting I attend,” Biden said, specifically referencing his whirlwind trip to Germany last week, “They pull me aside — one leader after the other, quietly — and say, ‘Joe, he can’t win.’ My democracy is at stake.”
His voice rising, Biden then asked if “America walks away, who leads the world? Who? Name me a country.”
The comments came during what was supposed to be a rather staid speech on health care in New Hampshire. They were a dose of unfiltered politics at an event otherwise focused on Biden’s policy legacy with the race to replace him just two weeks from concluding. And they made clear that the president also sees not having Trump succeed him as an important piece of how he might go down in history.
After the speech, Biden went to a campaign office to support New Hampshire Democratic candidates and continued his broadsides against Trump, even saying at one point, “We’ve got to lock him up.” Some supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris — who replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket in July — have yelled that during her rallies, though such chants actually have their origin with Trump supporters demanding jail time for his 2016 opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Biden evoking it drew applause from those assembled at the campaign office, but Biden quickly added: “Politically lock him up. Lock him out, that’s what we have to do.”
Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said Biden “just admitted the truth: he and Kamala’s plan all along has been to politically persecute their opponent President Trump because they can’t beat him fair and square.”
Biden didn’t mention Harris much during his comments, though he noted that she’d been endorsed by some high-profile Republicans. That includes former Rep. Liz Cheney, the GOP’s onetime No. 3 in the House and daughter of ex-Vice President Dick Cheney. Instead, Biden continued to focus on Trump, slamming him for being proud about being friends with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and joking that Trump “believes in the free press like I believe I can climb Mt. Everest.”
He said Trump and supporters of his “Make America Great Again” movement have “anti-democratic” attitudes toward the way the Constitution functions and “virtually no regard” for it.
“Think about what happens if Donald Trump were to win this election,” Biden said, adding, “He’s not joking about it, he’s deadly earnest” and “It’s a serious, serious problem.”
“We must win,” Biden said.
Biden was in New Hampshire’s capital of Concord with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the last candidate he beat to win the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. They both appeared at Concord Community College to trumpet the Department of Health and Human Services finding that almost 1.5 million Medicare enrollees saved nearly $1 billion on prescription drugs during the first half of the year.
Much of those savings came as a result of a cap on out-of-pocket drug costs created by the sweeping climate and health care law that the Biden administration helped carry through Congress in 2022. It put an annual maximum of $3,500 that recipients of Medicare, the government’s health insurance coverage plans for seniors, pay for their prescriptions while making recommended vaccines for older Americans, like immunization for shingles, free.
Biden said that seniors aren’t the only ones benefitting from the savings: “It’s also saving taxpayers billions of dollars.”
Next year, the drug cost cap for Medicare recipients falls to $2,000 per year, which will save some of the sickest Americans more. But the change has come at a price for others – it’s contributed to rising drug plan premiums that the government has tried to keep down by paying insurers billions of dollars from the Medicare trust fund. Still, some insurers have raised plan prices significantly – or pulled plans from markets.
The legislation is expected to deliver major savings in other ways, though, for taxpayers and Medicare enrollees in the long term.
For the first time ever, the federal government will negotiate the price of 10 of Medicare’s costliest drugs. The negotiated list prices, announced in August, will take effect in 2026. Taxpayers spend more than $50 billion yearly on the 10 drugs, which include popular blood thinners Xarelto and Eliquis and diabetes drugs Jardiance and Januvia.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that Medicare drug pricing negotiations will save taxpayers $3.7 billion in the first year.
But his championing of lower drug prices was overshadowed by the warnings Biden offered about Trump.
“No president has ever been like this guy. He’s a genuine threat to our democracy.”
Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Amanda Seitz and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.
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