In The Wall Street Journal‘s Allysia Finley piece about Progressive-Democrats’ targeting California Republicans, this bit jumped out at me:
The Los Angeles Unified School District is making emergency budget cuts and layoffs to avoid bankruptcy, yet the teachers union is threatening to strike if its members don’t receive a 6% raise.
Hmm….
h/t Ralph
Chao Deng’s piece in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal chronicled the failure of People’s Republic of China rampant infrastructure spending to stimulate economic activity.
China bolstered economic growth for decades by pouring trillions of dollars into roads, factories, railroads and more, and doubled down to protect the economy from the global financial crisis of the last decade.
Deng went to lengths to point out that, for all those trillions, businesses did not appear, factories remain unused, roads and railroads are only lightly traveled, and even the high rise apartment buildings remain largely empty.
He—and the PRC government—missed the root cause of the fruitlessness of that spending.
Build it and they will come only works in a free market economy where no one needs government permission to engage in economic (or any other) activity.
The Trump administration has proposed a rule that would require companies advertising drugs to provide the list prices of those drugs in their advertising—including their television advertising. Big Pharma is opposed, and wants instead to be left to voluntarily provide pricing information by having links in their advertising that would guide folks to a separate Web site.
I sympathize with Big Pharma on this. Government regulation already is out of hand; the Trump administration is reducing that, and this is an unnecessary addition.
There is an alternative.
The FDA could compile a list of drug list prices; region-by-region retail prices at places like Walgreens, CVS, Walmart, amazon (note that this is not an exhaustive list of retailers); and the tier within which each drug sits. This list then could be made available on the FDA’s Web site home page above the fold.
This more central source, in addition to encouraging competition among drug companies, would encourage more competition among retailers.
Professor Benjamin Harris (Kellogg School of Management) made a case for redoing our 401(k) retirement savings system. He had several good points, too: the tax break today compared to the taxes due on withdrawal during retirement’s usually lower tax rate is irrelevant to those whose current income is low enough to go untaxed or not taxed much. Contributions are tax deductions vs tax credits equal to a portion of contributions. The whole system is complex from a tax-figuring perspective (what are the tax brackets in play for a particular saver, what taxes will be in play when the saver retires, how will investments perform in the interim).
Overlooked, though, is a larger alternative, even if it is a more difficult alternative to achieve. It’s far from impossible to achieve; this year’s tax reform and cuts represent a major step in this direction.
The whole complexity of the tax question, along with most of the tax question itself, would disappear with a low, flat income tax rate.
Exxon Mobil Corp is throwing $1 million at the move to produce a national carbon tax.
Exxon’s move is an attempt to manage what it sees as the risk of a similar movement in the US, in ways that it hopes will simplify requirements on its industry….
Exxon sees a carbon tax as an alternative to patchwork regulations, putting one cost on all carbon emitters nationwide, eliminating regulatory uncertainty….
On the contrary, Exxon is looking for short-term competitive political advantage at the expense of long-term economic—real—advantage. That’s unfortunate.
It’s also unfortunate because, leaving aside the question of whether a carbon tax even would work as claimed, the scheme is based on the false premise that increasing atmospheric CO2 somehow is bad. Atmospheric CO2 is, in fact, critical—as in can’t live without it—plant food. In addition to that small fact, ice core samples from both ends of the earth—Greenland and Antarctica—reaching back 400,000 years indicate that rising atmospheric CO2, far from being a harbinger of bad warming to come, lags planetary warming by several hundred years. The rise confirms that a cold planet is warming out of its Ice Age, and life is recovering and exhaling increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.