Opinion

A Medicaid work requirement isn’t cruel and other comments

Policy expert: The Truth Behind Trump Immigrant Storm

As is “so often the case,” says Kay Hymowitz at City Journal, President Trump’s “noxious wording is distracting from a serious public-policy debate” on immigration. Fact is, “today’s immigrants face a different economic reality from their predecessors.” During the mass European migration of 1850-1930, millions of uneducated and unskilled people were able to find work here “because there was plenty of it” on piers and in factories. But today’s immigrants “are not so lucky” — blue-collar and manufacturing jobs are disappearing. And “post-industrial economies create a far more challenging path to upward mobility,” which is largely dependent on education, where immigrants struggle. The “prospect of a multi-generational proletariat class, hovering near the poverty line and dependent on government help, is probably not what most Americans had in mind.”

Strategist: The Lessons of Hawaii’s Missile-Alert Fiasco

Hawaii’s bizarre false missile-attack alert over the weekend gives US civil-defense agencies and military planners a lot of important points to ponder — three of which “deserve immediate attention,” contends Austin Bay at Town Hall. First, the state’s warning system procedures “are abysmally bad.” This alert was triggered by “two mistakes on two separate pages, by one employee.” Second, such alerts lead to mass panic, especially in a state whose “current missile defenses are so thin.” Finally, it proves “computer and digital device vulnerability to cyber warfare attacks, especially [from] computers linked to alert networks.” Not to mention “how much chaos an enemy hacker” could “create by generating a false attack alert” — and then following it “with a genuine ICBM attack.”

From the right: Oprah-Mania Just More Media Hype

Remember last week, when Oprah-for-President mania made it seem like her inauguration was practically imminent? Well, says Jim Geraghty at National Review, the first poll numbers suggest “only a small percentage of folks” think an Oprah candidacy is a good idea. The same poll also suggests she wouldn’t even “be a slam-dunk to win the Democratic nomination.” Frankly, he says, “this kind of a wild disconnect between the media’s perspective and that of the larger public doesn’t happen in a vacuum.” He suggests “a chunk of the American people are not automatically enraptured by every famous celebrity who flirts with a political campaign . . . unlike, say, bored political reporters who want to write about someone glamorous and exciting.”

Economist: Medicaid Work Requirement Isn’t ‘Cruel’

Democratic lawmakers have been piling on the Trump administration’s “cruel” and “painful” decision to allow states to impose work requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries, notes Michael Strain at Bloomberg. In fact, the decision “is completely reasonable,” targeting only “able-bodied adults of working age.” It doesn’t apply to “the elderly, to pregnant women or to the disabled.” Moreover, work “is construed broadly to include community service, education, job training, volunteer service and treatment for substance abuse,” among other things. Nor is it being imposed on states, which can “be flexible on how far to go.” Time was when requiring work seemed unreasonable. But ObamaCare changed “the very nature of the Medicaid program by expanding it to a large group of people who can reasonably be expected to work.” And doing so would send “a message that if you can contribute to society, you should.”

Foreign desk: Venezuela Targets the Catholic Church

Vatican diplomacy “moves slowly and cautiously,” notes Commentary’s Sohrab Ahmari, but occasionally “it becomes necessary for the Holy See and the Pope himself to throw down the gauntlet to worldly authorities that threaten the Church and her flock.” Now “such a time is at hand in Venezuela,” where strongman Nicolas Maduro has called for two bishops to be prosecuted. Their crime: “speaking out against the graft and socialist mismanagement that have transformed the country from one of the breadbaskets of Latin America into a basket case.” Yet Pope Francis has only “offered bland, conciliatory words that seem to suggest a moral equivalence between the socialist regime and the opposition.” Sadly, “one gets the sense [his] heart isn’t in the struggle.”

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann