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The orientation to maximising shareholder value and the use of devices such as share buybacks may also have been encouraged by the fact that a significant proportion of the chief executives of the top pharmaceutical companies have formal qualifications in business, mainly MBAs or economics degrees. MBAs in particular tended in the final decades of the twentieth century to emphasise the importance of maximising shareholder value (Stout, 2012; Murray, 2013). Analysis of the qualifications of the chief executives of the 2017 top 15 companies in March 2019 shows five of the fifteen had MBAs and a further three economics degrees (Bloomberg Executive Profiles, 2019). Only seven had degree-level education in science, and this is apparently not considered a prerequisite.

What are the consequences of the focus on share prices, share dividends and share buybacks? The first, previously mentioned, is that companies can become more short-term oriented seeking to maximise immediate shareholder returns instead of making investments that look to the long-term health of the company (Palley, 1997), a short-termism arguably encouraged by, and reflected in, the practice of making quarterly financial returns to the public, mandatory in the US since the 1930s and used elsewhere. In the case of pharmaceutical companies trend data indicate that they have been keen to maintain or increase dividends over recent years, notwithstanding the 2008 financial crisis. Lazonick et al. (2017) analysed data on the eighteen US pharmaceutical companies over the period 2006–15 included in the Standard and Poor's top-500 Index in January 2016 and found that over this period they distributed 99 per cent of their profits to shareholders, 49 per cent as dividends and 50 per cent as share buybacks.

First, companies have put far more emphasis on paying shareholders. In the last twenty years or so, we have seen historically high returns to shareholders and investors. The team found that an average big business in the United States has handed 87 per cent of its income to shareholders in the ten years leading up to 2019. That is a huge amount— and it is all money that cannot be reinvested and spent on improving the business. At the extreme end, things are even worse. In a sizeable minority of cases, returns to shareholders exceeded the profits that the company in question had made.

Pharmaceutical corporations are particularly extreme in this regard. In a separate study that looked only at companies listed on the British stock market, both UK-based Big Pharma giants GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca fell into this category, returning over 100 per cent of their net income to shareholders." I repeated the exercise for the five companies examined in this chapter — AbbVie, Gilead, Pfizer, GSK and AstraZeneca — for the years 2016—20. All of them returned more to shareholders in that period than their net income, AbbVie returning a huge 165 per cent.13

Do economic downturns generate pressure for diversionary conflict? Or might downturns encourage austerity and economizing behavior in foreign policy? This paper provides new evidence that economic stress is associated with conciliatory policies between strategic rivals. For states that view each other as military threats, the biggest step possible toward bilateral cooperation is to terminate the rivalry by taking political steps to manage the competition. Drawing on data from 109 distinct rival dyads since 1950, 67 of which terminated, the evidence suggests rivalries were approximately twice as likely to terminate during economic downturns than they were during periods of economic normalcy. This is true controlling for all of the main alternative explanations for peaceful relations between foes (democratic status, nuclear weapons possession, capability imbalance, common enemies, and international systemic changes), as well as many other possible confounding variables. This research questions existing theories claiming that economic downturns are associated with diversionary war, and instead argues that in certain circumstances peace may result from economic troubles. I define a rivalry as the perception by national elites of two states that the other state possesses conflicting interests and presents a military threat of sufficient severity that future military conflict is likely. Rivalry termination is the transition from a state of rivalry to one where conflicts of interest are not viewed as being so severe as to provoke interstate conflict and/or where a mutual recognition of the imbalance in military capabilities makes conflict-causing bargaining failures unlikely. In other words, rivalries terminate when the elites assess that the risks of military conflict between rivals has been reduced dramatically. This definition draws on a growing quantitative literature most closely associated with the research programs of William Thompson, J. Joseph Hewitt, and James P. Klein, Gary Goertz, and Paul F. Diehl.1 My definition conforms to that of William Thompson. In work with Karen Rasler, they define rivalries as situations in which “[b]oth actors view each other as a significant politicalmilitary threat and, therefore, an enemy.”2 In other work, Thompson writing with Michael Colaresi, explains further: The presumption is that decisionmakers explicitly identify who they think are their foreign enemies. They orient their military preparations and foreign policies toward meeting their threats. They assure their constituents that they will not let their adversaries take advantage. Usually, these activities are done in public. Hence, we should be able to follow the explicit cues in decisionmaker utterances and writings, as well as in the descriptive political histories written about the foreign policies of specific countries.3 Drawing from available records and histories, Thompson and David Dreyer have generated a universe of strategic rivalries from 1494 to 2010 that serves as the basis for this project’s empirical analysis.4 This project measures rivalry termination as occurring on the last year that Thompson and Dreyer record the existence of a rivalry. Economic crises lead to conciliatory behavior through five primary channels. (1) Economic crises lead to austerity pressures, which in turn incent leaders to search for ways to cut defense expenditures. (2) Economic crises also encourage strategic reassessment, so that leaders can argue to their peers and their publics that defense spending can be arrested without endangering the state. This can lead to threat deflation, where elites attempt to downplay the seriousness of the threat posed by a former rival. (3) If a state faces multiple threats, economic crises provoke elites to consider threat prioritization, a process that is postponed during periods of economic normalcy. (4) Economic crises increase the political and economic benefit from international economic cooperation. Leaders seek foreign aid, enhanced trade, and increased investment from abroad during periods of economic trouble. This search is made easier if tensions are reduced with historic rivals. (5) Finally, during crises, elites are more prone to select leaders who are perceived as capable of resolving economic difficulties, permitting the emergence of leaders who hold heterodox foreign policy views. Collectively, these mechanisms make it much more likely that a leader will prefer conciliatory policies compared to during periods of economic normalcy. This section reviews this causal logic in greater detail, while also providing historical examples that these mechanisms recur in practice. Economic Crisis Leads to Austerity Economic crises generate pressure for austerity. Government revenues are a function of national economic production, so that when production diminishes through recession, revenues available for expenditure also diminish. Planning almost invariably assumes growth rather than contraction, so the deviation in available revenues compared to the planned expenditure can be sizable. When growth slowdowns are prolonged, the cumulative departure from planning targets can grow even further, even if no single quarter meets the technical definition of recession. Pressures for austerity are felt most acutely in governments that face difficulty borrowing to finance deficit expenditures. This is especially the case when this borrowing relies on international sources of credit. Even for states that can borrow, however, intellectual attachment to balanced budgets as a means to restore confidence—a belief in what is sometimes called “expansionary austerity”—generates incentives to curtail expenditure. These incentives to cut occur precisely when populations are experiencing economic hardship, making reductions especially painful that target poverty alleviation, welfare programs, or economic subsidies. As a result, mass and elite constituents strongly resist such cuts. Welfare programs and other forms of public spending may be especially susceptible to a policy “ratchet effect,” where people are very reluctant to forego benefits once they have become accustomed to their availability.6 As Paul Pierson has argued, “The politics [of welfare state] retrenchment is typically treacherous, because it imposes tangible losses on concentrated groups of voters in return for diffuse and uncertain gains.”7

First, war can occur at any stage of expansion, crisis, recession, recovery, so it is unrealistic to assume that wars occur at any particular stage of the business cycle. On the one hand, although the domestic economic problems in the crisis/recession/depression period break out and become prominent in a short time, in fact, such challenge exists at all stages of the business cycle. When countries cannot manage to solve these problems through conventional approaches, including fiscal and monetary policies, they may resort to military expansion to achieve their goals, a theory known as Lateral Pressure. [13] Under such circumstances, even countries in the period of economic expansion are facing downward pressure on the economy and may try to solve the problem through expansion. On the other hand, although the resources required for foreign wars are huge for countries in economic depression, the decision to wage wars depends largely on the consideration of the gain and loss of wars. Even during depression, governments can raise funding for war by issuing bonds. Argentina, for example, was mired in economic stagflation before the war on the Malvinas islands (also known as the Falkland islands in the UK). In fact, many governments would dramatically increase their expenditure to stimulate the economy during the recession, and economically war is the same as these policies, so the claim that a depressed economy cannot support a war is unfounded. In addition, during the crisis period of the business cycle, which is the early stage of the economic downturn, despite the economic crisis and potential depression, the country still retains the ability to start wars based on its economic and military power. Based on the above understanding, war has the conditions and reasons for its outbreak in all stages of the business cycle.

Second, the economic origin for the outbreak of war is downward pressure on the economy rather than optimism or competition for monopoly capital, which may exist during economic recession or economic prosperity. This is due to a fact that during economic prosperity, people are also worried about a potential economic recession. Blainey pointed out that wars often occur in the economic upturn, which is caused by the optimism in people's mind [14], that is, the confidence to prevail. This interpretation linking optimism and war ignores the strength contrast between the warring parties. Not all wars are equally comprehensive, and there have always been wars of unequal strength. In such a war, one of the parties tends to have an absolute advantage, so the expectation of the outcome of the war is not directly related to the economic situation of the country. Optimism is not a major factor leading to war, but may somewhat serve as stimulation. In addition, Lenin attributed the war to competition between monopoly capital. This theory may seem plausible, but its scope of application is obviously too narrow. Lenin's theory of imperialism is only applicable to developed capitalist countries in the late stage of the development capitalism, but in reality, many wars take place among developing countries whose economies are still at their beginning stages. Therefore, the theory centered on competition among monopoly capital cannot explain most foreign wars. Moreover, even wars that occur during periods of economic expansion are likely to result from the potential expectation of economic recession, the "limits of growth" [15] faced during prosperity — a potential deficiency of market demand. So the downward pressure on the economy is the cause of war.

On balance, however, I do not think that even the extraordinary economic conditions we are witnessing today are going to have much impact on the likelihood of war. Why? First of all, if depressions were a powerful cause of war, there would be a lot more of the latter. To take one example, the United States has suffered 40 or more recessions since the country was founded, yet it has fought perhaps 20 interstate wars, most of them unrelated to the state of the economy. To paraphrase the economist Paul Samuelson’s famous quip about the stock market, if recessions were a powerful cause of war, they would have predicted “nine out of the last five (or fewer).”

Second, states do not start wars unless they believe they will win a quick and relatively cheap victory. As John Mearsheimer showed in his classic book Conventional Deterrence, national leaders avoid war when they are convinced it will be long, bloody, costly, and uncertain. To choose war, political leaders have to convince themselves they can either win a quick, cheap, and decisive victory or achieve some limited objective at low cost. Europe went to war in 1914 with each side believing it would win a rapid and easy victory, and Nazi Germany developed the strategy of blitzkrieg in order to subdue its foes as quickly and cheaply as possible. Iraq attacked Iran in 1980 because Saddam believed the Islamic Republic was in disarray and would be easy to defeat, and George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 convinced the war would be short, successful, and pay for itself.

The end of humanity is far more likely to be brought about by multiple factors, Kemp says—a pileup of disasters. Although apocalyptic movies often turn to viruses, bacteria and fungi to wipe out huge swathes of the population, a pandemic alone probably won't drive humanity to extinction simply because the immune system is a broad and effective defense, says Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. A pandemic could be devastating and lead to severe upheaval—the Black Death killed 30 to 50 percent of Europe's population—but it's unlikely that a pathogen would kill all of humanity, Adalja says. "Yes, an infectious disease could kill a lot of people," he says, "but then you're going to have a group [of people] that are resilient to it and survive."

Humans also have tools to fight back against a pathogen, from medical treatments to vaccines to the social-distancing measures that became familiar worldwide during the COVID pandemic, Adalja says. There is one example of a mammalian species that may have been entirely eliminated by an infectious disease, he says: the Christmas Island rat (Rattus macleari), also called Maclear's rat, an endemic island species that may have gone extinct because of the introduction of a parasite.

In Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, the canonical book in the disease-outbreak genre, an alien microbe threatens the human race with extinction, and humanity’s best minds are marshaled to combat the enemy organism. Fortunately, outside of fiction, there’s no reason to expect alien pathogens to wage war on the human race any time soon, and my analysis suggests that any real-life domestic microbe reaching an extinction level of threat probably is just as unlikely.

Any apocalyptic pathogen would need to possess a very special combination of two attributes. First, it would have to be so unfamiliar that no existing therapy or vaccine could be applied to it. Second, it would need to have a high and surreptitious transmissibility before symptoms occur. The first is essential because any microbe from a known class of pathogens would, by definition, have family members that could serve as models for containment and countermeasures. The second would allow the hypothetical disease to spread without being detected by even the most astute clinicians.

Given the urgency of the issues and those bipartisan majorities — and given that little else was clogging the legislative agenda during the final months of the year — you might wonder why nothing was done. Certainly in decades past, the relevant committees would have held substantive hearings to look into the separate issues and reported bills to the full House and Senate. And the House and Senate might have taken a week to debate and vote on each bill and dozens of amendments. In this instance, almost none of that happened.

Instead, the Democratic majority in the Senate refused to take up aid to Israel unless it was packaged with aid to Ukraine, which by itself might not have enough Republican votes to overcome a filibuster. In response, House Republicans announced they would refuse to fund aid to Ukraine unless Democrats agree to stronger border enforcement and tougher criteria for refugees. In response, progressives warned fellow Democrats never to agree to tougher immigration laws unless Republicans agree to a pathway to citizenship for millions who are already here illegally.

Why has gridlock been so bad recently? Many blame polarization. Certainly polarization has an effect. Bipartisan agreements have become less common as ideological moderates have disappeared from the chambers. That, coupled with a Senate increasingly requiring 60-votes to pass legislation, is a big reason why stalemate has become more common in recent decades.

Polarization is important but I would argue that it should take a back seat to another explanation: inter-chamber disagreement. Research has shown that House and Senate ideological differences are probably the most important indicators of gridlock. Even in instances of unified congressional control policy differences between the chambers can significant increase gridlock. In Binder’s book, Stalemate, she illustrates that bipartisan context is the largest substantive indicator of gridlock and productivity – outperforming both polarization and traditional divided government. The further the chambers are from one another, the more difficult it is for Congress to pass bills.

The U.S. Congress is navigating yet another government funding deadline — the eighth in less than six months — and are at an impasse over sending aid to key allies in Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel. Divisions among Republicans in the House and Senate killed a major bipartisan border policy bill. Reforms to bedrock programs like Medicare and Social Security are desperately needed but no closer to getting passed. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives spent close to a month without a speaker last year due to infighting between moderate and hard right factions of the Republican party.

When U.S. Representative Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, begged his colleagues in November to “give me one thing I can campaign on and say we did,” he was articulating what many lawmakers and observers were feeling: Congress isn’t working.

Those days are over, of course. Now, congressional majorities typically seek to pass even minor bills without any support from the other party.

At crucial junctures such as the current debate about tax and spending priorities, top leaders are left without negotiating partners they know they can deal with.

But, even if Republicans gain majorities in the House and Senate in today’s midterms, the Inflation Reduction Act won’t be repealed any time soon. In fact, it’s unlikely the Act will ever be fully reversed. Most of the drug pricing provisions, in particular, will likely remain on the books permanently.

While a GOP-led House and Senate could formally repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, for the next 26 months they would face a President who wields veto power. Therefore, no matter what happens in the midterms, 2025 would be the earliest Republicans could take action to successfully rescind the law.

In the year since the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) became law, I’ve heard versions of the same question keep coming up on the road from people interested in taking advantage of the law’s programs: will the incentives last if Republicans take over?

It’s a good question. The law received zero Republican support in Congress, and, in the past, Republicans have made overturning influential Democratic policies a centerpiece of their agenda, a trend underscored at last week’s Republican presidential debate where leading GOP presidential candidates trashed the Biden Administration’s climate agenda. Entrepreneur-turned-politician Vivek Ramaswamy called the climate agenda the “wet blanket on our economy” and promised a “war” on “toxic regulations.” Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley said clean technology subsidies just help China. Trump, who wasn’t on stage, made undoing climate rules a priority his first four years in office—and there’s no reason to think his perspective on this issue has changed.

A trio of Republicans led by Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy is introducing legislation Thursday that would impose a fee on products imported from high greenhouse gas-emitting countries, a move aimed at protecting U.S. manufacturers from competition from China and other countries with lax environmental standards.

The bill, shared exclusively with POLITICO, represents the first GOP-led proposal to inject climate change policy into U.S. trade rules through so-called carbon adjustment fees. It’s a strategy that’s gained in popularity as industrialized nations that are imposing ever-stricter climate regulations at home seek to ensure they don’t drive domestic manufacturing to countries that have weaker rules over emissions of the pollution that’s warming the planet.

[(Clare and Ted, Congressional reporters and producers for CNN Politics.) “Senate fails to override Trump veto of Iran War Powers resolution.”, CNN, 5-7-20, https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/07/politics/senate-iran-war-powers-resolution/index.html]//LR

The Senate on Thursday failed to override a presidential veto of a War Powers resolution intended to rein in presidential authority to use military action against Iran without congressional approval. The vote was 49-44. A two-thirds majority would have been required for a successful override, which was not expected to happen after President Donald Trump vetoed the resolution on Wednesday. But the fact that the measure made it to the President’s desk with bipartisan support in the first place nevertheless represented a rare rebuke by his own party and stood as a show of support for congressional efforts to check the executive branch’s war-making powers. When the resolution passed the Senate in February, eight Republicans voted in favor of it even as the President voiced opposition. In March, the resolution passed the House, where a handful of Republicans joined Democrats in supporting the resolution. The resolution was introduced by Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia and was co-sposnored by several Republican senators, including Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, however, spoke out against the War Powers Resolution saying this is no time to take pressure off the Iranian regime, which, he argued, is using its “scant resources to export violence” around the region and the world. In issuing a veto on Wednesday, Trump called it a “very insulting resolution” and argued the measure was “based on misunderstandings of facts and law” in a statement. “This indefinite prohibition is unnecessary and dangerous,” the White House said in a separate message to the Senate on Wednesday. Kaine said in a speech on Thursday that the bill was “not part of a strategy to hurt President Trump.” “I’ve advocated these same positions as have other members of this body under presidents who were both Democratic and Republican,” Kaine said, adding that “in no way was this partisan.” The resolution called for “the President to terminate the use of United States Armed Forces for hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran or any part of its government or military, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force against Iran.”

[(Zach, senior writer for CNN Politics.) “Congress acted to protect NATO. But it might not be enough to stop Trump.”, CNN, 2-13-24, https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/13/politics/congress-trump-nato-what-matters/index.html]//LR

Trump’s desire to pull out of NATO The post-World War II alliance of Western democracies was built around NATO, but Trump has long complained that the US is getting a raw deal with the organization, paying too much and getting too little. Trump’s ultimate goal, writes CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen, has long been to pull the US out of NATO, which was formed in 1949 to contain the threat of the Soviet Union and the spread of communism and is now organized around deterring Russian President Vladimir Putin. CNN’s Jim Sciutto, in a forthcoming book, quotes a former official in both the Trump and Biden administrations who predicts a Trump election win in November would mean “the US will be out of NATO.” Sciutto also writes about how Trump nearly pulled the US from the alliance during a 2018 NATO meeting. At the same time, Trump tried to claim credit, arguing it is his tough talk and not the threat of Russian invasion that has caused NATO member countries to increase their defense budgets in recent years. What’s to stop him? If Trump wins the 2024 election and does turn on NATO, he would run into that new language from Congress, which says the president “shall not suspend, terminate, denounce, or withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty” without either a supermajority vote in the Senate or an act passed by the full Congress. When I asked the former US Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker about what Trump could do to undermine NATO as president, he first pointed out that Trump was boasting about his interaction with an unnamed world leader rather than promising future action. The Constitution, Volker noted, says the Senate must be involved with ratifying treaties but it is silent on the subject of withdrawing from a treaty. Any court battle could take years. Alternatives to withdrawal Rather than attempting to withdraw from NATO, a second Trump presidency could allow his allies to pursue a policy of making NATO “dormant,” an idea pushed by at least one Trump-allied think tank. Nobody knows exactly what that would look like, Volker said, but the president has immense power over how the US interacts with its allies. “There’s lots of things that you can do administratively as the commander in chief that would still be very disruptive for NATO,” Volker said. A president could reduce the number of exercises Americans take part in with NATO allies, further reduce troop presence in Europe, withhold payments to the NATO infrastructure or cut down on the US military budget. The US would still be bound, under this type of scenario, by the pledge to defend other NATO nations, but it would not be prepared. “It’s not just enough to say, yes, we will fight together,” said Volker. “You actually have to have the capabilities.” Americans lead NATO by design If Trump wins the election this year and then seeks as president to reduce American military participation, he could, in theory, recall the NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower first held the job after NATO’s founding, and ever since, the top NATO commander has always been an American admiral or general. NATO’s power to deter attacks on other countries rests in large part on American nuclear weapons, and so it is appropriate that an American service member sits atop the NATO structure, according to Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Pulling American generals out of NATO might force other NATO countries to seek their own nuclear deterrents. Part of the reason Europeans have not pursued a collective European military is by American design and a result of security provided by NATO, Bergmann said. Countries are eager to be protected by Article 5 of NATO’s charter, which is the principle that an attack on one member is an attack on all of the members. Sweden and Finland have both worked hard to join after Russia invaded non-member Ukraine. Finland joined in 2023, and Sweden is inching closer to accession. That provision that Trump dislikes has only been invoked one time, after 9/11, when the US and NATO allies invaded Afghanistan after terror attacks brought down the World Trade Center and struck the Pentagon. More members hit 2% benchmark Trump frequently complains that NATO members other than the US don’t pay dues, which is a misstatement of facts. Members are supposed to spend a minimum of 2% of their GDP on defense, but it is just a guideline that doesn’t require payments to NATO or the US. Multiple NATO countries do not hit that benchmark, although spending has risen since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “That argument is weaker and weaker, because allies are indeed spending more and doing more,” Volker said. NATO’s charter is a relatively short and simple document. Its section on how a country withdraws from the alliance is further evidence of how central the US is to the organization: A country wishing to withdraw must notify the US a year before it plans to withdraw. No country, by the way, has ever withdrawn from NATO, although France did not take part in NATO’s military operations from the mid-1960s until 2009. A difficult relationship to unbreak If Trump is reelected and chooses to hollow out NATO or make US participation dormant, it would sever ties that future presidents might have trouble repairing. “It’s just like any relationship,” said Bergmann of the likelihood of permanent damage if Trump were to materially alter the NATO alliance. “This would be seen as the US basically having a massive affair and like cheating on Europe. Could the marriage be restored? Well, potentially. But it would require, I think, a lot of effort on the part of future administrations.”

[(Gavin, reporter covering the administration and Congress’ approach to industrial policy and other trade issues.) “DC slammed Trump’s tariffs. Biden’s decision to keep them draws a very different reaction.”, Politico, May 15th 2024 https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/15/biden-tariff-reaction-trump-00158043]//LR

Back in 2018, lawmakers of both parties greeted President Donald Trump’s decision to slap tariffs on Chinese imports with widespread derision. Six years later, most members of Congress are applauding President Joe Biden’s extension — and in some cases, expansion — of those tariffs, if not calling for him to go even further. The contrasting reactions to similar policy moves just a few years apart is yet another reminder of just how much the U.S. political consensus has shifted against free trade. And it bodes ill for those hoping Washington will be more open to negotiating new trade deals and cutting tariffs after the 2024 election. “It’s a terrible, unfortunate movement towards protectionism,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), one of the few lawmakers to critique Biden’s move, told POLITICO when asked why Washington’s reaction has been so different this time around. Besides Grassley, free trade advocates have remained largely silent. Far more typical was the response from Michigan Republican Rep. John Moolenaar, the new chair of the House Select Committee on China, who called Biden’s move “overdue.” “Congress and the Administration must be ready to work in a bipartisan manner to strengthen our economy while supporting American farmers and workers who face retaliation from the [Chinese Communist Party],” Moolenaar said in a statement. Biden’s administration spent much of his first term debating what to do with the duties Trump put on more than $300 billion worth of Chinese imports, before finally announcing Tuesday that he will increase Trump-era duties on steel, aluminum and clean energy products from China, including quadrupling tariffs on electric vehicles, while keeping the rest in place. The move, which Biden and his aides had telegraphed in remarks earlier this spring, was promptly condemned by leading trade groups, including those representing the U.S. tech industry and large importing corporations. But they barely elicited a peep from free traders in Congress, a dwindling population in recent years. Grassley, a 90-year-old with few reelection concerns, was one of the only lawmakers to slam Biden on tariffs, saying he was making an “election year-decision that risks serious retaliation against American producers — especially agriculture, as we’ve seen before.” That used to be a mainstream position in the GOP, which for much of the past 40 years defined itself as pro-business and pro-free trade. But Grassley, the most senior member of the Senate, is increasingly an outlier in his party, which has grown far more populist and protectionist in the wake of Trump’s 2016 presidential victory. In that sense, they’ve converged with the American left, which has long criticized free trade as boosting big corporations at the expense of workers. The Democratic party’s center of gravity has increasingly moved in that direction, as well, with Biden taking a number of trade cues from lawmakers like Sens. Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Bob Casey (Pa.) and Tammy Baldwin (Wis.) who are up for reelection this year and pushed Biden this month to increase the tariffs on China. All three of those lawmakers welcomed Biden’s move on Tuesday, while Brown pushed him to go further and enact an outright ban on Chinese vehicles entering the U.S. The administration should issue rules, he said, that include “prohibitions on finished vehicles and technology that is designed, developed, manufactured, or supplied from the People’s Republic of China.” Democrats who had opposed tariffs on clean energy products in the past were, by contrast, more taciturn on Tuesday. Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), who had lobbied Biden to pause solar tariffs two years ago, stopped short of criticizing the president’s decision to slap 50 percent tariffs on solar products from China. “I think we just have to be cautious that we don’t impact what’s happening now,” in terms of solar power growth in the U.S., Rosen said on Capitol Hill. “We’re going to keep our eye on [the issue] and see what else we have to do.” There were some exceptions to the protectionist narrative among Democrats on Tuesday. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis — seen as a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2028 — was one of the few Democrats Tuesday who decried Biden’s tariff move, calling it “horrible news for American consumers and a major setback for clean energy.” “Tariffs are a direct, regressive tax on Americans and this tax increase will hit every family,” he wrote in a social media post. Comments like those used to be commonplace in Washington in response to tariffs — even from Biden himself. Back in 2019, he slammed Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on China — the same tariffs he preserved this week — as “shortsighted.” “All that [Trump’s] delivered as a consequence of [his tariffs] is American farmers, manufacturers and consumers losing and paying more,” Biden said during a campaign speech at the City University of New York. But now, those arguments are scarce in Washington, even from Republicans who have pushed Biden to embrace more free trade policies. Rep. Adrian Smith (R-Neb.), the head of the Ways and Means trade subcommittee, has routinely said he is “no fan of tariffs” and introduced a bill on Tuesday that would renew a long-expired tariff exemption program. Even so, he decided not to criticize Biden for raising tariffs in a Tuesday statement, instead arguing that the administration should be “rolling back policies harmful to American consumers like electric vehicle mandates” and “engaging with willing partners around the world to reduce trade barriers through enforceable trade agreements.” Those Republican arguments are taking a cue from their party’s protectionist-in-chief: former President Trump, who slammed his 2024 rival for pursuing electric vehicle mandates. He’s also said he’s prepared to go much further than Biden to protect domestic EVs, by imposing steep tariffs on auto imports from Mexico, where Chinese companies are building electric vehicle plants. Trump-aligned lawmakers on Capitol Hill parroted that argument on Tuesday, with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) calling Biden’s tariff decision “half-baked.” “It is imperative that any updated tariff regime adequately address the extinction-level threat that Chinese vehicles — both internal combustion engine and electric — pose to American automakers and the workers they employ,” he said in a statement. Both Trump and Biden are touting their tariff policies as they try to woo working class voters in the industrial Midwest — which has been hit particularly hard by the rise of free trade and the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs — and other swing states. Support for foreign trade dropped, nationwide, after the Covid-19 pandemic exposed key chokepoints for supplies like medical equipment, baby formula and even toilet paper. The shift toward protectionism “comes from the grassroots,” Grassley said — “America First stuff for Republicans, and for Democrats, union outrage.” Other lawmakers say that lessons learned since Trump first imposed tariffs on Chinese goods have convinced them Biden’s decision is the right move. Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, who attended Biden’s tariff announcement on Tuesday, said that she was concerned about Chinese retaliation against American agriculture when the tariffs were first imposed, but now sees the threat of Chinese subsidies as too big to ignore. Back in 2018, “The concern was that backlash [from China] on agriculture and food,” said Stabneow. But since then, “I’ve seen the impact of what the Chinese are doing. They are consistently undercutting manufacturing in all parts of [our] economy by either owning or heavily subsidizing what is done in their country.” Other Democrats argued that Biden is being more selective with his tariffs than Trump. “Biden’s tariff approach is not out of personal anger, it’s about a thoughtful way to support the development of domestic industry,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). “There’s a coherence to what President Biden is trying to do that just wasn’t there in the Trump years.” Even members of Biden’s own administration who have advocated for lower tariffs — like Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen — have backed down on those arguments as the election approaches, cognizant of how popular tariffs are in swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

[(Colin, Associated Director at the Cato Institute’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies and columnist for the Hill.) “Congress won’t stop Trump’s trade assault”, The Hill, July 18th 2018, https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-budget/397444-congress-wont-stop-trumps-trade-assault/]//LR

With U.S. trade policy teetering, some in Congress are belatedly realizing the need for oversight over this key determinant of the country’s economic health. In particular, there is an effort to restrain the president’s ability to impose tariffs on national security grounds. To head off abuse of such measures, bipartisan bills have been introduced in both the House and Senate that would require such tariffs to obtain congressional approval within a 60-day window. Enactment of such limits of presidential authority would certainly come at an opportune time. That both Republicans and Democrats are lining up behind them illustrates the growing perception that Trump is overstepping his bounds. A favored part of his protectionist toolbox, Trump has already risibly cited alleged national security concerns to justify tariffs on imports of foreign steel and aluminum including from U.S. allies. The ludicrous launch of an investigation into the national security implications of auto imports, meanwhile, portends additional such measures—as well as the foreign retaliation that will inevitably follow. While it’s laudable that Congress is now stepping up to the plate, the effort will sadly almost certainly prove to be a futile one. Trump’s possession of a veto pen as well as the considerable deference still afforded him by Republicans in Congress assure that the prospects of such language becoming law in the near-term are virtually nil. Indeed, 11 GOP senators refused to even vote in favor of a toothless censure of his trade policy. The horse may have escaped the barn, but most federal legislators appear content to let it roam free, much less bring it back in and bolt the gate. In fairness to Congress, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. The laws governing U.S. trade policy were written with the implicit assumption that the primary protectionist threat would come not from the White House but Capitol Hill. The logic is hard to fault. Filled with members more attuned to the parochial concerns of their individual districts or states rather than the national welfare, Congress has traditionally been more prone to bouts of protectionism designed to benefit favored constituencies. The president, meanwhile, has typically taken a more expansive and positive view of trade, placing more emphasis on its large but dispersed benefits than its comparatively smaller and more concentrated costs. Then along came Trump. Withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade deal only days after taking office, Trump spent the remainder of his inaugural year bellowing to aides about his desire for tariffs and casually musing about withdrawal from NAFTA. These rhetorical blasts, however, just proved to be the calm before the storm. This year the president has been unleashed, with 2018 witnessing a succession of protectionist moves. Whether on metals imports, China, or the alleged threat posed by foreign-built washing machines, the president has opted to impose new tariffs on American consumers whenever the opportunity has presented itself. With Trump readying retaliatory measures on China, labeling the European Union a commercial foe, and the auto investigation yet to be completed, additional protectionist misadventures almost certainly await. When one trade dispute is smoothed over, such as Trump’s complaints over an allegedly unfair free trade agreement with South Korea, another always seems to be around the corner. But how will a course correction be brought about? Salvation seems unlikely even should a Democratic wave sweep through Congress this November. Although certainly eager to stymie Trump in any number of respects, it’s difficult to imagine that the likes of Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) or Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) view his runaway protectionism done under the guise of national security as a pressing concern. If a sliver of hope is to be found it is that the steady drip of stories detailing the havoc Trump’s tariffs are playing with businesses across the country may stir Congress to stronger action. Even here, however, no one should be holding their breath. With stories replete of Trump supporters standing by their man even after suffering direct impact from the tariffs, this appears to be a long shot. Things will have to get worse, it seems, before they get better. This, then, is the summer of discontent for supporters of free trade. As Trump runs amok in search of new windmills to tilt his national security tariffs at, Republicans appear largely spineless in their opposition. Given the influence of protectionist organized labor interests, it also seems unlikely that Democrats will prioritize restrictions on Trump’s trade recklessness should they take the reins of Congress next year. The current effort to pare back the president’s authority to impose tariffs on national security grounds, while certainly welcome, is likely years too late.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (January 17, 2024) — The Biden administration may soon endorse a proposal before the World Trade Organization (WTO) that would suspend patent protections on Covid-19 treatments and tests and, in doing so, thwart existing WTO standards. This move would be enormously unpopular with American voters, according to a new poll released today by the Bayh-Dole Coalition.

Seven in ten voters believe that it is important for the Biden administration to preserve WTO standards for protecting IP. And 77% are at least slightly concerned that the pending proposal would stifle medical research and kill American manufacturing jobs.

A new poll finds that 60% of US voters want President Joe Biden to endorse the motion by more than 100 lower- and middle-income countries to temporarily waive patent protections on Covid-19 vaccines at the World Trade Organization. Only 28% disagreed.

The survey, carried out by Data for Progress and the Progressive International, shows a super majority of 72% registered Democrats want Biden to temporarily waive patent barriers to speed vaccine roll out and reduce costs for developing nations. Even registered Republicans support the action by margin of 50% in favor to 36% opposed.