Greg Mankiw (former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors):
I just came back from city hall, where I switched my voter registration from Republican to unenrolled (aka independent). Two reasons:
First, the Republican Party has largely become the Party of Trump. Too many Republicans in Congress are willing, in the interest of protecting their jobs, to overlook Trump's misdeeds (just as too many Democrats did for Clinton during his impeachment). I have no interest in associating myself with that behavior. Maybe someday, the party will return to having honorable leaders like Bush, McCain, and Romney. Until then, count me out.
Second, in Massachusetts, unenrolled voters can vote in either primary. The Democratic Party is at a crossroads, where it has to choose either a center-left candidate (Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Yang) or a far-left populist (Warren, Sanders) as their nominee for president. I intend to help them choose the former. The latter propose to move the country too far in the direction of heavy-handed state control. And in doing so, they tempt those in the center and center-right to hold their noses and vote for Trump's reelection.
He must've seen the CEA's twitter post today:
Under @POTUS, monthly opioid-involved overdose deaths stopped their steep upward growth. Compared to the previous trend, CEA estimates that almost 30,000 lives and $326 billion have been saved pic.twitter.com/0BJMnLG6Dj
— CEA (@WhiteHouseCEA) October 28, 2019
I replied with three tweets (and feel really silly saying that):
- So, if it leveled off in January 2017 what did @potus do before the inauguration to cause the change in opioid deaths?
- Given that something positive happened in 2016, it seems like the @WhiteHouseCEA is inferring causality from a Trump administration policy when the cause might be something else.
- Is there a background document with some analysis that we could look at?
Here is what the CEA says in their report that can be found at the bottom of a blog post (that was referred to in a subsequent CEA tweet) :
The Trump Administration has taken swift action to address the opioid crisis. It has limited high-dose opioid prescriptions, promoted better information about the risks of opioid misuse, undertaken measures to cut the supply of illicit drugs including fentanyl, and invested in treatment and life-saving drugs for those currently suffering from substance use disorder. There are signs that these measures may be paying off. After an increasing trend in the number of opioid overdose deaths, preliminary estimates show the growth in deaths involving opioids stopped rising in 2017.
According to the White House the Trump Administration starting doing something after October 2017 (in October 2018).
In October 2017, President Trump declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency. Ever since, the Trump Administration has applied an all-of-Government approach to the epidemic, taking an extraordinary range of actions that reflect the President’s commitment to stopping the crisis in its tracks. ...
Among the historic actions taken:
As of October 2018, the Trump Administration had secured $6 billion in new funding over a two-year window to fight opioid abuse. To curb over-prescription, the President implemented a Safer Prescribing Plan that will cut opioid prescription fills by one-third within three years. President Trump is fighting to keep dangerous drugs out of the United States by securing land borders, ports of entry, and waterways against smuggling. In 2018, President Trump worked with Congress to pass the SUPPORT Act, the single largest legislative package addressing a single drug crisis in history.
These are all good things, I think. I'm not criticizing these policies. I am criticizing the Council of Economic Advisors which is shilling for the President, assigning credit for the decline in opioid deaths that began early in 2017 to a set of policies that were announced in October 2018. The CEA is suggesting that opioid deaths magically declined after the inauguration.
What am I missing?
