Tag Archives: markets

On Governor Newsom’s Plan to Produce Insulin

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Regarding that idea, a letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Tuesday Letters section offered this after suggesting that Newsom’s effort would have the salutary outcome of demonstrating the foolishness of such a move:

Targeted subsidies for at-risk populations cost a fraction of the investment needed to bring “affordable” medications to the people….

That’s true enough, could Government actually do that and, further, keep it limited to the truly at-risk. However, actual competition in the market is free, and that brings down costs for everyone. Additionally, that competition allows far better and more accurate identification of those remaining few at-risk who still can’t afford their meds and would be legitimate targets of largesse. That also would facilitate more effective use of sources of largesse, beginning in order with family and friends first, followed by church and local charity, local community, county, then state governments, with the Feds last on the list, rather than the default source.

Sue, Settle, and Biden’s Demand for Producers to Produce

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There was a time when a million acres of land were available in California for oil and gas leasing and hydraulic fracturing (fracking).

Then California’s Attorney General, Governor, and “other state agencies” sued, claiming that the Bureau of Land Management’s environmental impact analysis was inadequate. BLM then settled. Under the terms of BLM’s sue-and-settle agreement,

until the Bureau conducts a supplemental environmental review of the project, new oil and gas leases will not be granted in central California….

Three guesses when that review will be begun, and you get a pass on the first two.

This is the duplicity with which President Joe Biden (D) inveighs against oil and natural gas producers for not producing more.

To Repeat

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In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the problems volatile energy prices cause for central banks, there’s this allegation:

The pass-through of higher energy prices to other goods and services, along with their volatility, could make it harder for the Federal Reserve to tell what price shocks are temporary and thus set interest rates appropriately.

Wrong answer.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. Instead of trying to play the market, or even to time it, the Fed needs to set its benchmark interest rates at levels historically consistent with the 2% inflation rate that it’s historically used for its target inflation rate, and then sit down and shut up.

Full stop.

Part of the Agreement

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…on Reduced-Build Back that Senators Joe Manchin (D, WV) and Chuck Schumer (D, NY) settled on last week is this Progressive-Democratic Party gem, and which illustrates in no small part the depth of the betrayal that is Manchin’s agreement.

The Senate drug agreement would require the Health and Human Services Secretary to “negotiate” prices for 10 of the top-spending drugs in Medicare starting next year and 20 by the end of the decade. If drug makers don’t accept the government’s offered price, they would get slapped with a 95% excise tax on their sales. Take his offer or else.

If that’s not the opening shot in the destruction of the American pharmaceutical industry, it’s certainly the beginning of the end of the industry’s interest in innovating and in leading the world in innovation.

That’s to the severe detriment of every American citizen who gets sick.

Some Lipstick for the Pig

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Here’s some of what’s in the Build Back Reduced bill—formally styled Inflation Reduction Act—that Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) agreed, which Manchin euphemizes as an all-in energy policy:

[T]he Interior Department would be required to offer up at least two million acres of federal land and 60 million acres of offshore acreage to oil and gas producers every year for the next decade. If Interior officials fall short, they wouldn’t be able to advance some permitting aspects of the wind and solar projects on federal land.

Offer up. But at what price? And for what duration before the leases expire? Look for the Biden administration to use lease pricing to actively discourage producers from buying leases, to slow walk the subsequent permit applications that would enable the leases to be acted on, and to use the failure to get the permits on time as excuses to terminate the leases/allow them to expire.