April 29, 2020
It is a pleasure to welcome former Congressman Erik Paulsen to Total Spectrum and to This Week in Washington. Those of you who met Erik when he represented Minnesota in Congress and served on the House Ways and Means Committee know of both his intellect and uncommon common sense.
There has been a great amount of discussion about the significant amount of our health care needs that are manufactured overseas. A bipartisan group of Senators passed a bill – which ultimately became part of the CARES Act – that asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to assess the vulnerability and dependence that overseas production of our health care products puts on our country. Steve Gordon and Erik Paulsen interviewed Joe Carson, a supply side expert, to get his thoughts and ideas on this in our cover story.
In Heard on the Hill, Steve Gordon writes about our health crisis, our economic crisis, and our fiscal crisis and how Congress and the Administration are reacting to them. Dana Marston looks at COVID-19 in other ways: the USDA’s plans to assist commodity markets, trends in retail sales due to the virus, and concentrations in COVID-19 diagnoses across the country.