Or not.
In a Friday op-ed centered on California’s hog-raising requirements for pork sold in the State, Robert Alt, President and CEO of the Buckeye Institute had this throw-away line:
California—which boasts of recent policies that require residents to reduce electricity use to prevent rolling blackouts….
The only State—and possibly the first nation in the world—to institutionalize steady state brownouts.
What a legacy for the Progressive-Democratic Party running California.
And straightforward, too.
Nike thinks it has supply chain and marketing problems with its shoe manufacturing.
Nike Inc’s quarterly results highlight how some US brands have too much inventory at home and in markets like China, where the companies have placed big financial bets.
The sneaker giant on Thursday said revenue from China in the August quarter fell 16% to $1.65 billion, citing Covid-19 lockdowns in different cities hurting store traffic.
The People’s Republic of China represented some 13% of sales and 29% of earnings for Nike in its quarter ending last August.
Nike offered a number of excuses for its problems, including the PRC’s Wuhan Virus-related lockdowns, a heat wave in the PRC that the PRC claimed affected energy production, and inflation.
These are, though, just excuses. Nike’s problem—and it’s a political and a moral one, also—is that it does business inside the PRC.
These problems wouldn’t exist if the company moved is manufacturing facilities out of the PRC. Neither Vietnam nor Japan nor Australia have lockdown or heat wave/energy problems affecting manufactury (Australia has made significant progress since its wind storm shut down its wind-power energy production in a western state a couple years ago).
Neither would Nike have a PRC-related inflation related problem with its PRC inventory or sales if it didn’t do business in the PRC.
Nike wouldn’t have any sort of supply chain problem, or delivery problem, were it to make its products in the US.
Nike would solve its political and moral problems (did company managers have the grace to recognize that these problems are real) if it had no business dealings of any sort with the PRC so long as that nation continues its genocidal behavior vis-à-vis the Uighurs.
…details in the implementation will matter, also. Competition always drives costs to a level approaching the cost of production, and that’s to the good, not only of consumers but for competitors and others looking to enter the market, as well.
However.
On Monday, [Congresswoman and MD Mariannette (R, IA)] Miller-Meeks along with three of her colleagues introduced a bill titled the “Biologics Competition Act,” which seeks “to evaluate the process by which interchangeable biological products are approved to be used in pharmaceuticals.”
“So in essence, what we’re trying to get is biosimilar drugs that are the same chemically—that they have an equivalency to let those be prescribed as generic drugs, which would bring down the cost of medication[.]”
There’s a reason generics, in general, are delayed in getting authorization to be marketed: to allow the drug’s initial developer(s) time to recoup the costs of development and to begin realizing profit, and thereby encourage further drug development.
Such permission delays would need to apply to the biosimilar drugs, too. With a fillip: defining how much change is necessary while remaining biosimilar without leaving the required change so trivial that the new drug is an outright plagiary with only a token item grafted on.
That may well be the eye of a needle—passable, but with difficulty, especially when trying to write down a specific law. Worth going for, though, absolutely.
President Joe Biden (D) and his White House spokesmen have been bragging about what a strong economy we have.
Even CNN waved the BS flag at that. Here’s how strong our economy really is.
The Labor Department on Tuesday reported its consumer-price index rose 8.3% in August from the same month a year ago [albeit down slightly from the prior two months’ year-on-year inflation]
And
[C]ore CPI, which excludes often volatile energy and food prices, increased 6.3% in August from a year earlier, up markedly from the 5.9% rate in both June and July
And
Food prices continued to climb sharply this past month, rising 0.8% in August from July, as did those for new vehicles leapt 0.8%. Prices also rose last month for medical care, education, electricity, and natural gas
Inflation in energy cost is especially troublesome. That’s the price of heating and cooling our homes, our places of business, our schools, how we power our industrial facilities. The impact on our health and finances from that exacerbates our demand for/need for medical care.
That inflation is made the worse by the growth in wages that’s been occurring since inflation took off with Biden’s ascension to office (if not since his election). Wage growth had been at half the rate of inflation, meaning us Americans’ income actually had been shrinking relative to the prices we face. But last month, despite that 8.3%/6.3% inflation, our wages grew…not at all.
Median household income was essentially unchanged last year on an inflation-adjusted basis….
Our wage dollar buys ever less in the Biden version of a strong economy.
Biden and his Progressive-Democratic Party are either wholly unaware of the real economy us average Americans face, or they’re blatantly lying about the situation.
Meanwhile, they partied on the White House lawn the day those numbers were released, celebrating this wonderful news.
Remember their obliviousness or their dishonesty this fall.
A number of credit card companies, on the demand of the Federal government as washed through the International Standards Organization, are going to start explicitly listing gun sales by lawful gun stores to individual average Americans. Among those credit card companies are Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx.
The Federal government now is going to track us average Americans and build a database of who among us has a firearm.
For what purpose?
…gun control advocates who argue that a separate category for gun store sales will help track suspicious quantities of firearm sales that could potentially lead to a mass shooting.
Because buying a firearm is ipso facto suspicious under the ideology of the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party. But wait—suspicious quantities—what’s wrong with that? This is the camel’s nose. It won’t be long before the Feds decide that one is a suspicious number of firearms to buy. And then one is a suspicious number of firearms to own.
The concern of us average Americans is justified by this misleading claim by New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) as he demonstrates his “misunderstanding” of the tracking.
When you buy an airline ticket or pay for your groceries, your credit card company has a special code for those retailers. It’s just common sense that we have the same policies in place for gun and ammunition stores[.]
Buying “guns and ammunition” is an explicitly protected activity under our Constitution. Buying firearms—keeping and bearing Arms—is an entirely unique activity for us average Americans, quite apart from the ordinary, day to day, activity of grocery buying, or the process of buying a travel ticket. There is no reason to track Americans going about our Constitutionally protected behaviors.
Other than identifying who has firearms for further Progressive-Democrat “control.” This is another effort of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s desired surveillance state.