Welcome back!
Even the most rabid opponents of Obamacare recognize that something is wrong with the current health care financing system we have in the U.S., and even its most ardent supporters are willing to admit that, projections of deficit neutrality notwithstanding, the new health care system will do nothing to contain costs and will almost certainly drive them up.
What if there were a partial solution (at this point it would take divine intervention to devise a complete solution) that most people could agree on? [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
health care finance,
health costs,
HMO,
market force,
Obamacare
I present here a few paragraphs on wages and benefits, an excerpt from Human Action, a work by the famed Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, who is the intellectual godfather of F.A. von Hayek, among other notables. I find it especially relevant because I have been working in Haiti for the past couple of weeks, my firm having won a contract to conduct a pre-feasibility study for an industrial park in the northern part of the country, which will accommodate garment manufacturers. [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
benefits,
garment,
Haiti,
Hayek,
informal sector,
remuneration,
sweatshop,
textile,
von Mises,
wages
I’ve just returned from a few days in Sydney, Australia, where it is more or less the dead of winter, which means sunshine, highs in the upper 60s, and lows in the 50s. Not a snowplow in sight. Leaving aside the World Cup and Aussie Rules football and the odd murder and sex scandal, the main news story is the precipitous loss of confidence in Kevin Rudd, the Labor Party leader who became Prime Minister in 2007, soundly defeating John Howard and his center-right Liberal Party, who had been in power for the previous eleven years. Rudd, a former civil servant in the Foreign Office known mainly for his fluency in Mandarin Chinese and his geekish, technocratic look, was meant to be the antidote to Howard’s proud pro-Americanism and belligerent attitude towards darker-skinned folks seeking political asylum in the Land of Oz. Rudd was the new internationalist, prepared to identify Australia as an Asian country and to place Australia in the vanguard on such cutting global issues as climate change. Barely three years later, and with the next election no more than 10 months away, Rudd appears to be hanging on by his fingernails, facing his lowest poll ratings ever as well as grumblings within his own party that he might have to be replaced by another politician – Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard, for example – if Labor is to have any chance of staying in power. What went wrong? [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Australia,
Bolivia,
Brazil,
China,
Iran,
Kevin Rudd,
Labor Party,
mining tax,
Rio Tinto,
sovereign risk,
Venezuela,
Wayne Swan,
Xstrata
Obamacare has passed, for better or for worse. Which it is, we probably won’t find out for several years. But it’s worth noting that one key to passage of the bill was the pharmaceuticals industry’s decision to support it. What do they get in return? Potential access to 30 million new customers, certainly. But also, as today’s Financial Times reports, “The industry won 12 years of ‘data exclusivity’ for biological medicines, protecting its most profitable drugs from lower-cost generic rivals; and rejection of a planned ban on ‘authorised generic’ or ‘pay for delay’ deals, by which companies can pay other manufacturers to defer the launch of cheaper versions of their medicines once the patents expire.” Somewhere in the 2,000 pages of legislation is almost certainly buried a raft of other special favors granted to other special interest groups, each one with a cost to both the government and the public. Can someone explain to me how this is supposed to shrink the deficit, as the Congressional Budget Office says it will?
Tagged as:
deficit,
healhcare industry,
Obamacare,
pharmaceutical industry
The business elite and the political classes are overjoyed by President Obama’s program to double U.S. exports over the next five years. John Castellani, President of the Business Roundtable, says, “”Our member CEOs have long believed that to enhance economic growth and create more and better-paying U.S. jobs, business and government must work together to put domestic and international policies in place for workers and companies to compete in the global marketplace. The President is doing just that by mobilizing the government’s resources through the creation of his Export Promotion Cabinet and by promoting closer cooperation with the private sector through the new President’s Export Council, which will be led by two of our member CEOs, Jim McNerney, President and CEO of The Boeing Company, and Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox.” [click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Boeing,
Business Roundtable,
China,
currency manipulation,
EU Trade Commissioner,
Evan Bayh,
export initiative,
Obama,
President's Export Council
