The Political Center

Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) and his daughter are looking to form a project that would promote centrist policies and candidates in future endeavors and elections. Their project is Americans Together, and it’s intended to be a politically active nonprofit entity.

In a memo that was shared with potential donors and viewed by The Wall Street Journal, the project proposes a coalition that would “mobilize the middle” and support a shift toward the political center.

The Manchins’ move, though, misses an important underlying assumption: what is the middle, the political center?

The Progressive-Democratic Party, with its extremist ideology—

  • no effective southern border
  • voting “rights” and welfare support for illegal aliens
  • sanctuary for illegal aliens
  • identity politics
  • ideology indoctrination of our children from kindergarten through graduate school
  • ever expansive and intrusive government

—has been dragging what used to be our nation’s center steadily Leftward at least since 2008.

Drug Price…Foolishness

President Joe Biden (D) and his associates over in Medicare have identified the drugs of which he’s willing to pretend to negotiate the price. The particular drugs aren’t important; what matters is the precedent being set regarding the Progressive-Democrat-run administration’s view of what constitutes negotiation in Party’s lexicon. Readers interested in which drugs are targeted for now can find the list at the end of the linked-to article.

What’s important here is this.

The naming of the 10 drugs subject to price negotiations kicks off a lengthy process. Drugmakers have until October 1 to say whether they will join in the negotiations.
If they don’t negotiate or accept the price resulting from it, companies face a tax of up to 95% on a medicine’s US sales, or they can pull all of their drugs from Medicare and Medicaid coverage.

And this:

Drug makers that don’t participate or reject the government’s price will incur a crippling daily excise tax that starts at 186% and eventually climbs to 1,900% of the drug’s daily revenues. This is extortion, not a negotiation.

That’s not negotiation, that’s “Take our price, or pay even more through our usurious, if not confiscatory, taxes.” The outcome will be a stifling of medical (not just for medicinal) innovation in the US. Instead, innovation, such as might remain, will be pushed overseas, in large part to nations that don’t themselves innovate very much, having come to rely on American developments which they then heavily subsidize for their own citizens.

Some of those drugs, too, will be pulled from Medicare/Medicaid coverage, along with all of the other drugs a company makes available through those programs, which will price them out of reach of those most in need—those with the ailments being treated by those medicines and who lack the money to pay the full price.

That is, until Party takes the next obvious step and taxes those medicines’ sales revenues earned outside of Medicare/Medicaid, to be followed by Party’s diktat that those medicines must be offered through Medicare/Medicaid.

Which will result in those medicines no longer being manufactured in the US at all and no longer being sold at all in the US, regardless of their manufacture.