In Trump's Alphabet, "F" Is for Protectionism

The President wants to put another “F” in NAFTA. The morning he met with American motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson, Mr. Trump said, as the cameras rolled, "I want to change it. And maybe we do it – maybe we do a new NAFTA and we put an extra "F" in the term NAFTA. You know what the "F" is for, right? Free and fair trade – not just free trade; free and fair trade, because it's very unfair."

The President then told the tall tale about Harley-Davidson almost going out of business because foreign competitors were dumping their cycles in the US and Harley couldn’t compete. President Reagan stepped in, put a tariff on foreign cycles, and saved the domestic manufacturer, Trump said.


Even Lefty
Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC knows Harley was ready to go under due to making bad products back in the 70s and 80s as the lone domestic manufacturer. O’Donnell, himself a rider, told his audience, “You had to be a mechanic to own a Harley; to even get one started.”

Reagan did impose a tariff, Harley did turn around, and, in fact, requested the tariff be lifted a year early. However, the company’s rebound was not due to Reagan’s use of government force – foreign competitors designed around the tariff restrictions – but rather the company’s choice to make a better product more efficiently.


Barnaby J. Feder wrote in the
New York Times in 1987,
Harley introduced practices such as just-in-time manufacturing, in which parts are made only when needed, and statistical process control of operations, which catches production errors before they have become embedded in products. The company raised the percentage of motorcycles leaving its production lines without defects from about 50 percent to more than 98 percent and became a mecca for engineers from other industries.
At the same time, Harley redesigned many of the parts in its cycles without changing its basic design. The changes rid the products of such defects as bone-jarring vibration.

Today, O’Donnell owns a Harley and wouldn’t buy anything else, because the company learned how to make good bikes by studying foreign competitors.


Meanwhile, Trump wants to protect domestic manufacturers – with the inevitable result of American consumers forced to purchase inferior products for higher prices to save a few jobs in the US.

In its present form, NAFTA is anything but free trade. “In the first place, genuine free trade doesn’t require a treaty,”
wrote Murray Rothbard. “If the establishment truly wants free trade, all it has to do is to repeal our numerous tariffs, import quotas, anti-"dumping" laws, and other American-imposed restrictions on trade. No foreign policy or foreign maneuvering is needed.”


“I’m a free trader,” Trump
said back in June 2015. But since then, as hardhats have lined up behind him, he’s said the US needs “fair trade, not free trade.” America imports nearly $800 billion more in goods than it exports, and that is a “politician-made disaster,” he claims, adding, “It is the consequence of a leadership class that worships globalism over Americanism.”

However, what Trump sees as a disaster,
Rothbard views as not only not a problem but as a great thing. “Foreigners are providing cheap imports, making the dollar stronger,” Rothbard pointed out, “which is terrific.” It’s no different than a trade deficit between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Who cares?

The trade barriers Trump is proposing, in the
words of Milton Friedman, “benefit a few, at the expense of many.” True free trade “benefits many at the expense of a few.” Friedman pointed out that what’s known as a “favorable” balance of trade is actually “unfavorable”: getting more goods in and sending fewer out is a good thing, not a bad thing.

If it is Trump’s intent to do away with NAFTA in its entirety and replace it with nothing, that would be fantastic. After all, NAFTA is, in Rothbard’s words, more than a trade deal.

It is part of a very long campaign to integrate and cartelize government in order to entrench the interventionist mixed economy. In the United States, this has taken the form of transferring legislative and judicial authority away from the states and localities to the executive branch of the federal government. NAFTA negotiations have pushed the envelope by centralizing government power continent-wide, thus further diminishing the ability of taxpayers to hinder the actions of their rulers.
But Trump’s fair trade is not trade benefiting consumers and producers alike. It is protectionism, which “is out to mulct all of us for the benefit of a specially privileged, subsidized few – and an inefficient few at that: people who cannot make it in a free and unhampered market,” Rothbard wrote in Making Economic Sense.

We can only hope foreign producers dump their products in the US. If Mr. Trump is as smart as he claims to be, he surely understands that more dumping means more prosperity.

Douglas French
Douglas French
Douglas French is an Associated Scholar at the Johnson Center at Troy University and adjunct professor at Georgia Military College. He is the author of three books: Early Speculative Bubbles and Increases in the Supply of Money, Walk Away, and The Failure of Common Knowledge.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

When the Nation Trumps the Individual

Donald Trump has hardly taken his hand off the Bible upon which he took the presidential oath to preserve, protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, and he has already begun to radically and rapidly transform the direction of the American government. Taking up Barack Obama’s pen, he has signed a series of executive orders. Several of them demarcate the underlying premises and principles guiding much of his policy decision-making: political and economic nationalism.

One of these executive orders declared that the United States was formally withdrawing from any intention of participating in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which had the stated purpose of reducing trade barriers among 12 countries, while specifying a variety of requirements for the member nations to fulfill as part of the agreement.


Another executive order called for expediting the approval and construction of the Keystone and Dakota Access Pipelines, to enable the transportation of crude oil from Canada to refinery facilities closer to the Gulf coast.


Still another one authorized the building of his promised “Wall” along the U.S.-Mexican border, along with additional personnel to be hired for border security, and eliminating federal money to “sanctuary cities” protecting illegal immigrants.


And most recently, there has been his executive order that places a temporary hold on refugees arriving in the United States from a series of seven countries declared to be security risks to the safety of the American citizenry. This latest executive order has set off an especial firestorm of controversy and opposition.


The Meaning of Economic Nationalism


What they all have in common is a devotion to a conscious ideology of political and economic nationalism. How may we define political and economic nationalism? We might, perhaps, use a definition offered by the Swiss classical liberal and free market economist William E. Rappard, from his 1937 essay on “Economic Nationalism”
that was written at the time between the two World Wars when an aggressive nationalist creed was endemic around most of the world. Rappard said:

“Nationalism, then, is the doctrine which places the nation at the top of the scale of political values, that is above three rival values of the individual, of regional units and the international community . . . 
“If we wish to define economic nationalism by its underlying purpose, we should say that it was a doctrine destined to serve the nation by making it not richer, but freer, by promoting not its material welfare, but its independence of foreign influences. Economic nationalism is the policy of national self-sufficiency . . . 
“First, economic nationalism seeks to limit the nation’s consumption to those goods which are the fruits of its own soil and labor . . . Secondly, economic nationalism seeks to promote the domestic production of all those commodities for which the national needs are imperative . . . Thirdly, when these efforts also prove vain . . . economic nationalism is apt to raise the cry for more space, that is for annexation of neighboring or colonial territories . . .
“As no measure of restriction of imports, of stimulation of home products, and territorial expansion, can possibly make any state entirely self-sufficient under modern conditions, economic nationalism seeks, fourthly, to secure a positive balance of trade . . . It is here that the policy becomes internally self-contradictory. It is here also that rival economic nationalisms must necessarily clash.
“In order to secure for itself a favorable balance of payments, a state dominated by this doctrine must inevitably seek to inflict on its neighbors the very treatment against which it seeks to protect itself. If all countries endeavor to develop their exports while restricting their imports, to attract capital and foreign tourists, while prohibiting external loans and discouraging travel abroad, to expand their shipping, banking, and insurance services beyond their frontiers while monopolizing them at home, general failure, strife, and chaos cannot fail to be the result.”
And inescapable in such a drive for political and economic nationalism, William Rappard emphasized, was “the subordination of the individual to the state.”

Now certainly the world in which we live today is fortunately not suffering, as yet, from the dire nationalist circumstances of the 1930s, when Rappard was offering his definition of economic nationalism in the context of the hyper-collectivist epoch in which he was living at that time.


Trump’s Fallacies and Ignorance on Foreign Trade


Yet, the same dangers can be seen in Donald Trump’s worldview toward domestic and foreign affairs. The essence of this perspective is that international interactions occur in a zero-sum world.


This comes out clearly in his rhetoric about how America has been taken advantage of in its trade deals and dealings with other nations. Whether it be the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or the proposed TPP agreement, in Trump’s mind other nations are “destroying” American manufacturing, “stealing” American jobs, “weakening” American standards of living, and “taking advantage” of America’s openness to trade, investment, and migration.


It is also seen in his insistence that any balance of trade deficit suffered in its trade relationships with other countries is a demonstration of America’s loss for the benefit of other nations. Thus, the United States must enter into bilateral, politically negotiated trade deals with each and every other country to balance America’s trade ledger book with them. This is not only a throwback to the mercantilist ideas of the past, but one of the crudest versions that fails to think of even looking at the overall ledger book rather than a country’s balance of trade with each separate country. Not even the mercantilists of the seventeenth century were that economically illiterate!


Manipulating the Business Climate for “National Greatness”


Many conservatives and some libertarians have hailed Trump’s decision to allow the Keystone pipeline to go forward or his promise to reduce the tax and regulatory burdens on American businesses. But the question is, why is he implementing or proposing to introduce these economic policy changes? Is it because he believes that government, as a matter of principle, should leave individuals free to make their own decisions in their personal lives as well as in the competitive marketplace?

Clearly this is not the case. Exhibit A: phone calls and meetings with corporate executives before and after assuming the presidency in which he called for them to keep their manufacturing facilities in the United States, insisting that they should focus on creating more jobs in America for American workers, and threatening heavy fiscal penalties for any private enterprise that attempts to move out of the United States and reimport goods produced outside of the country.



 Trump’s vision is not that of individual freedom and economic liberty. No, it is the collectivist ideal of restored “national greatness” for which all Americans should participate and for which all Americans will be made to conform, if necessary, through the fiscal and regulatory hand of the government.


Trump’s desire for the Keystone Pipeline to be constructed is for America to be “energy independent.” Corporate taxes are to be lowered and regulations reduced so business will have more a flexibility and financial capacity to invest in America and create “good jobs” for Americans. To the extent to which businesses keep more of their revenues and have reduced regulatory hurdles to overcome, these are means to the end of restoring that American greatness.


If tomorrow Trump decided that “making America great again” necessitated new and different regulations or new and different fiscal burdens on businesses and the American consuming public, then for their own collective national good, individuals would have to bear the regulatory and tax burdens.


Sacrificing American Consumers and Taxpayers for “the Wall”


This is clear from Trump’s executive order concerning the building of “the Wall” on the Mexican border and how it will be paid for.  In his mind, cultural and social dangers and depravities are coming over the border from Mexico, from which he must protect the American people.


For all his talk about making Mexico pay for its construction, the fact is the American taxpayers will pay for the Wall. They are the ones who will have to be taxed, either through taxes in the present or taxes in the future when borrowed dollars (plus interest) will have to be paid back for its expense. The proposal to impose a 20 percent import tax on Mexican goods entering the U.S. does not change that outcome. Import taxes add to the cost of bringing those goods to American markets and will be reflected in higher prices paid by American consumers, plus a likely reduction in the quantities and qualities of Mexican-made goods that then will be profitable to import into the United States. The interests and desires of individual American consumers and import businesses will have to be sacrificed for the higher good of restored national greatness.


Individuals Sacrificed on the Altar of “National Safety”


The latest furor over the new restrictions on refugees or immigrants from a variety of Muslim countries bears the same mark of national collectivism. If individuals from some Muslim countries already possessing permission to enter the United States are denied that entry, well, their needs must be sacrificed to the national interests of America.

If some American enterprises find it difficult to employ or retain the employment of talented and qualified foreign workers, say in the tech-industry, well then, their innovative and competitive edge must be foregone for the common good of the nation as a whole. In addition, and as a part of this, if more calmer and deliberative practices of the rule of law, as well as a sense of common decency toward those who have borne difficult hardships in their home countries abroad, must be bent or set aside based on Donald Trump’s conception of “national safety,” that, too, is part of the price of restored national greatness.


But, surely, we have not descended so far into that older aggressive form of political and economic nationalism under which America would seize the territory of other countries in the name of national interest or economic self-sufficiency, would we? It was Donald Trump who said that having invaded Iraq and overthrown Saddam Hussein, the United States should have “kept” that country’s oil fields to prevent “enemies” from using them and as a means of keeping America energy independent as payment for our liberation of that land. The logic follows from the premise.


A dark time is threatening America given the Trumpian vision of political and economic nationalism at the expense of individual liberty, private property rights, rule of law and constitutionally limited government.

Richard M. Ebeling
Richard M. Ebeling
Richard M. Ebeling is BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. He was president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) from 2003 to 2008.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Highway Robbery Gets Presidential Seal of Approval

Donald Trump is going after one of the few issues proven to be a unifier across party lines: civil asset forfeiture.

This legal tool allows law enforcement to seize money and physical property from those merely suspected of criminal behavior. Unfortunately, there is no conviction requirement, meaning confiscation can occur
before suspects have been given the opportunity to defend themselves in court. 

After 2016 saw several state victories reining in the practice, the Obama Administration reinstated the program on the federal level. The federal Equitable Sharing Program, which had briefly been paused due to budget constraints, provided local law enforcement with a loophole, which allowed them to continue the practice so long as they shared their spoils with the feds.


President Trump made some egregious comments on the matter while addressing a room full of Texas police officers on Tuesday, effectively destroying any hope that his administration will be better on this issue than President Obama. In fact, the situation may very well become worse.


The nomination of Jeff Sessions to the office of Attorney General has made many criminal justice advocates nervous, as he has a long history of justifying the practice of policing for profit. On Tuesday, Trump confirmed these fears when he threw his support behind the controversial practice, saying that he saw  "no reason" to restrict law enforcement's use of civil asset forfeiture.


Ignoring the substantive concerns over the practices' disregard for due process, Trump even threatened to "destroy the career" of libertarian-leaning Texas legislator Konni Burton for her outspoken opposition to the practice, a comment met with approving laughter from the law enforcement officials in attendance.


Unfortunately, the issue is not as clear-cut as Trump would like to believe. Civil asset forfeiture has arguably done more to destroy the lives of innocent people than it has to help catch those actually guilty of criminal acts.


A Systematic Problem


Since there are few restrictions to the practice, it has frequently been used against those who were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time and were not, in fact, engaging in criminal behavior.

In 2013, for example, a Peruvian pastor had $14,000 seized during a routine traffic stop. Traveling to a church event, Pastor Marco Silva, a citizen of Peru but legally present in the United States, was pulled over for “failure to signal a lane change.” The money, which was supposed to be donated to a Peruvian orphanage, was seized by law enforcement.


While Trump claims that any politician opposed to this practice would "get beat up really badly by the voters," he clearly doesn't understand the impact civil asset forfeiture has had on everyday people.

Without first having to prove guilt, asset forfeiture is ripe for abuse. Worse still, law enforcement is incentivized to continue this practice since they are allowed to keep a portion of the confiscated cash or property.

One family, who had their entire house ransacked after falsely being accused of breaking drug laws, not only had their belongings destroyed, but important legal documents, including adoption papers, were also confiscated and subsequently lost in the process.


This is because with civil asset forfeiture, it is technically the property, and not the individual that is being prosecuted. This makes it extremely difficult for individuals to regain control over their belongings. Those who are able to afford the extravagant legal fees are often forced to settle for only a portion of their property returned, while some are forced to forfeit their property forever.


The Road Ahead


The abuse of civil asset forfeiture has become so widespread, it has created unlikely alliances in Congress between Republicans and Democrats.

In an era when the country finds itself more divided than ever, Trump would be wise to cease his support of an issue that has negatively impacted so many Americans.


Instead, Trump has fallen victim to the same fear mongering used to convince people that a repeal of asset forfeiture would result in terrorist attacks or a cartel takeover.


While Trump was discussing the issue with Texas law enforcement earlier this week, Rockwall County Sheriff, Harold Eavenson, called out another Texas lawmaker who, like Burton, is committed to passing legislation restricting the process. "I told him the cartel would build a monument to him in Mexico if he could get that legislation passed,” Eavenson told Trump. President Trump distastefully responded, by saying, "you want to give us his name? We'll destroy his career."


As the room once again erupted in laughter, it became painstakingly clear that under the Trump Administration, the road to criminal justice reform will be an uphill battle.

Brittany Hunter
Brittany Hunter
Brittany Hunter is an associate editor at FEE.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The Crazy, Convoluted, Wacky, Unworkable System of Obamacare

Consider this news item:
MIAMI, FL - NOVEMBER 02: Martha Lucia (L) sits with Rudy Figueroa, an insurance agent from Sunshine Life and Health Advisors, as she picks an insurance plan available in the third year of the Affordable Care Act at a store setup in the Mall of the Americas on November 2, 2015 in Miami, Florida. Open Enrollment began yesterday for people to sign up for a 2016 insurance plan through the Affordable Care Act. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
In opeds at Time and National Review Online, I discuss how ObamaCare’s health-insurance Exchange has collapsed in Pinal County, Arizona, throwing some 10,000 residents out of their ObamaCare plans. Charles Gaba of ACASignUps.net and Cynthia Cox of the Kaiser Family Foundation asked me to explain a claim I make in the NRO piece:

Obamacare will still penalize those residents if they don’t buy coverage — even if the amount they must pay increases tenfold or more.


Before I explain, let me first apologize on behalf of the Affordable Care Act’s authors for the complicated mess that follows.


A Complete Mess


ObamaCare’s individual mandate penalizes taxpayers who fail to purchase health insurance. But there are so many exemptions that of the 33 million or so people who lacked insurance in 2014, the IRS levied the penalty against only 6.6 million tax filers (which actually represents a larger number, maybe 17 million people).


For example, the Affordable Care Act exempts “individuals who cannot afford coverage” from the penalty. You qualify for this exemption if your “required contribution” exceeds roughly 8.13 percent of your household income. For individuals who don’t have access to a suitable employer plan, the “required contribution” is equal to “the annual premium for the lowest cost bronze plan available in the individual market through the Exchange in the State in the rating area in which the individual resides,” minus “the amount of the credit allowable under section 36B for the taxable year (determined as if the individual was covered by a qualified health plan offered through the Exchange for the entire taxable year).”


In other words, if you would have to pay more than 8.13 percent of your income for an ObamaCare plan, even after accounting for premium subsidies, then coverage is unaffordable for you and ObamaCare doesn’t penalize you for not buying coverage.


You would think this exemption would somehow apply to the 10,000 residents of Pinal County, for whom coverage will become dramatically more expensive when the Exchange collapses. If those folks are like Exchange enrollees in the rest of the country, the vast majority of them (85 percent or so) receive premium subsidies. When their Exchange coverage disappears next year, so will those subsidies.


If they wish to purchase coverage off the Exchange, they will face, for the first time, the actual cost of ObamaCare coverage. Given that the amount Pinal County residents will have to pay for ObamaCare coverage could rise by several multiples, from a fraction of the premium to the full premium, given that the lowest-income enrollees will see the largest increases, given that the large year-to-year rate increases occurring nationwide will only add to the suffering, you would think the ACA’s unaffordability exemption would somehow cover those 10,000 Pinal County residents. But you would be wrong.


The Unaffordability Exemption


Remember, the ACA penalizes people if they fail to purchase insurance, unless they qualify for an exemption. The unaffordability exemption applies only if “the annual premium for the lowest cost bronze plan available in the individual market through the Exchange” in Pinal County, minus “the amount of the credit allowable under section 36B,” whether the individual enrolls in Exchange coverage or not, exceeds 8.13 percent of the individual’s household income.


You can’t do that calculation in Pinal County. The premium for the lowest-cost bronze plan in Pinal County is not $0.00. It’s not even a number. It’s the empty set. The “credit allowable under section 36B” is likewise the empty set. Section 36B “allow[s] as a credit…an amount equal to the premium assistance credit amount for the taxpayer.”


To calculate the premium-assistance credit amount, you need to know either the premium for the health plan the taxpayer “enrolled in through an Exchange established by the State under [section] 1311,” or the premium for the “the second lowest cost silver plan” available to the taxpayer “through the same Exchange.” It would be awesome if all those premiums were $0.00. (Free health care!) But it’s not. Instead, no such premiums exist. Since there are no such premiums, there is no “required contribution.” Since there is no “required contribution,” there is no unaffordability exemption in Pinal County. Without an Exchange, there is no unaffordability exemption from the individual mandate.


A Penalty for Not Buying What You Can't Afford


Following the collapse of the Exchange, the ACA strips 10,000 Pinal County residents of their health coverage, strips them of any subsidies they had been receiving, and penalizes them if they fail to purchase coverage that everybody knows ObamaCare has made unaffordable for them. The ACA also denies the unaffordability exemption to any uninsured residents who had qualified or would have qualified for it. The ACA exempted them from penalties when coverage was somewhat unaffordable, yet penalizes them when coverage becomes very unaffordable.


But let’s suppose we had a government that didn’t care what the law says, and was determined to make the unaffordability exemption work for residents of Pinal County and any other county or state where the Exchange collapses. The government could pretend the lowest-cost-bronze-Exchange-plan premium actually is $0.00. But then the required contribution would be zero or negative, which is less than 8.13 percent of household income. So no exemption.


Ooh, I know! The government could pretend the ACA allows them to use non-Exchange-bronze-plan premiums for the first part of the “required contribution” calculation. But then they would have to argue simultaneously that the ACA does not allow them to use non-Exchange-silver-plan premiums for the second part of the calculation.


To put it differently, the government would have to argue the ACA allows them to pretend that non-existent Exchange plans exist but does not allow them to pretend that non-existent tax credits exist. I’m guessing that would be awkward.


It may be a blessing that we won’t have to watch ACA ObamaCare supporters put themselves through such contortions (again). The ACA gives the Secretary of Health and Human Services carte blanche to exempt anyone she pleases from the mandate penalty. All she has to do is claim they have “suffered a hardship [trying] to obtain coverage under a qualified health plan.”


The people of Pinal County would certainly seem to qualify. To date, the Secretary has issued a raft of these “hardship” exemptions, none of which seem to apply to enrollees for whom coverage became unaffordable because their Exchange just plain collapsed. Since the Secretary hasn’t created such a hardship exemption yet, what I’m describing is here the law.


The Most Awkward Exemption


And even though it seems inevitable that the Obama administration will create such an exemption, the fact that they will have to take that affirmative step to protect ObamaCare’s intended beneficiaries from the law is significant. It will certainly be the most awkward the Obama administration has had to issue.


It will be an admission that ObamaCare threw thousands of Pinal residents out of their pre-ObamaCare plans, stripped them of their guaranteed-renewability protections, turned their covered illnesses into pre-existing conditions, threw them out of their health plans again, left them with no affordable health-insurance options, and left many of them far worse off than they would have been if the president had never signed the ACA or had heeded Congress’ calls for repeal.


Issuing hardship exemptions for Pinal County will be an admission that ObamaCare is inherently unstable, and that a similar fate could soon befall other Exchange enrollees. It will be an admission that the ACA’s architects suffered from a certain lack of foresight.


And it can’t come soon enough.

This piece ran at Cato@liberty.
Michael F. Cannon
Michael F. Cannon
Michael F. Cannon is the Cato Institute’s director of health policy studies.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Obamacare Repeal Stalls as Americans Suffer

When President Donald Trump took office, repeal of Obamacare seemed like a guarantee—and then the timeline started slipping.

All the elements are in place: A Republican-controlled Congress and a Republican president, all elected after promising to repeal Obamacare. But once the celebration and ceremonies died away, Congress started to do what it does best. Nothing.

“Nothing” may be a bit strong given the historic levels of obstruction from Democrats in the Senate, but House Republicans have no such excuse. In fact, they even have a blueprint.

Last year, the House and Senate passed an Obamacare repeal using the budget reconciliation process. That measure was ultimately vetoed by then-President Barack Obama, but that same legislation can be reintroduced and sent to Trump desk to be signed into law.

There is no reason to delay. The slipping of the Obamacare repeal timeline is creating cascading problems for the American people.

Delaying Repeal Prolongs the Current Health Care Crisis


No one needs reminding that Obamacare takes away choice, erodes the value of health care and puts additional burden on the pockets of the American taxpayer. The unsustainable nature of Obamacare is creating massive uncertainty and causing insurers to leave the marketplace, causing individual premiums to increase.

Additionally, once repeal is signed into law and real health care reforms begin moving forward, private insurers will need time to adjust to the new market. Continuing to delay repeal shortens the time insurers will be able to adjust and provide the best solution for the insured.

Most importantly, we don’t want Americans living under the current failing health care system any longer.

Obamacare is bad, and only getting worse. Average premiums are going up by 25 percent this year, deductibles are blowing past $10,000 for a family, and 70 percent of U.S. counties have no insurer choice, or a choice between only two insurers.

What good is a health care plan that you can’t choose and can’t afford to use? Congress must repeal it as soon as possible to put better health care choices back in the hands of the American people.

Delaying Repeal Hurts Public Support for Congress


Nearly every single congressional Republican campaigned on the promise to repeal Obamacare. The unfortunate consequence of the delay is that the American people are losing faith in the people whose job it is to represent them.

Recent Heritage Foundation research shows 72 percent of Americans will take the promises of Congress less seriously if they wait to fulfill their promise to repeal Obamacare. And 70 percent of Americans believe the longer Congress waits to fulfill their promises to repeal Obamacare, the less likely they will be successful.

There is no doubt that lawmakers will be held accountable to their promises.

Reprinted from The Daily Signal.
Sondra Clark
Sondra Clark
Sondra Clark is the digital director of Heritage Action for America.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.