Tag Archives: politics

Bad Idea

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Socialist Senators Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and Angus King (I, ME) are proposing a new law that would

ban pharmaceutical manufacturers from using direct-to-consumer advertising, including social media, to promote their products.

This is a bad idea. Not just singly bad; it’s bad on three grounds.

One is the ground of free speech. We don’t get to ban speech based on who’s doing the speaking any more than we get to censor speech based on what’s being said. That includes pharmaceutical companies that want to advertise their wares, so long as they don’t misrepresent them. Truth in Advertising laws, though, are agnostic regarding both advertisers and products.

Our nation went over who is allowed to advertise when lawyers wanted to engage in direct advertising, including via television ads, lots of years ago. Our courts, and we as a nation, came down on the side of free speech when we all decided lawyers advertising was entirely jake. The worst that got us is ads like The Texas Hammer‘s.

It’s a bad idea because it’s insulting to us average Americans. We are not as droolingly imbecilic as these two Wonders of the Left insist that we are. We are fully capable of deciding for ourselves whether we want to take pharmaceutical company’s word at face value or our doctor’s advice. Certainly the advertisements can lead us to peppering our doctors with questions, but we should be doing that, anyway, regarding his diagnoses and proposed treatments. That some of us are foolish enough to remain willfully ignorant about our own health and blithely (and blindly) accept our doctor’s word unquestioningly is between us and our doctors. It’s no excuse for government censoring other parties.

That brings me to the third reason this is a bad idea. It’s not government’s role to protect us from ourselves, or even from each other except on criminal matters. Government’s role is to protect us from external criminal elements and threats to our nation as a whole. It’s not even the Federal government’s sole role to protect us from domestic criminal elements—that is primarily the role of each of our several State governments, with help from the Feds only when invited in by the States.

This is a move that only Socialists and their monarchist Progressive-Democratic Party ally could love.

Tariffs and the Fed

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The Federal Reserve Bank is facing a conundrum:

First, they [tariffs] raise prices, which weakens the case for cutting interest rates. Second, they sap confidence and demand, which strengthens the case.

There’s this, too:

In May, the Treasury Department collected roughly $15 billion more in customs duties than in February. That is equal to about 3% of total consumer spending on goods. Some goods prices have risen, but not by that much. And in May, prices fell on some obvious tariff targets such as apparel and new cars.
This is a head scratcher. If consumers aren’t paying the tariffs, who is? Not foreign producers, at least through April, when import prices excluding fuel rose. Not, apparently, retailers and wholesalers, whose margins took a hit in April but bounced back in May, according to the producer price report released Thursday [12 June].

For me, though, the head scratcher is straightforward: it’s been so long since we had significant tariffs, and economies have evolved so much in that interim, that we don’t yet understand the lags that are involved between the onset of tariffs and allegedly associated price increases. This is further contaminated by the confusion by folks who should know better of highly variable tariff rhetoric with actual tariffs in place.

And a second contaminant: how much do tariffs raise prices, really, in a global economy that has supply chains that are much more mobile (or at least much less fixed in place) than in those prior economic environments?

And a third: a measure of flexibility in cost transfer techniques: keeping prices stable while doing away with free shipping or raising existing shipping charges, for instance.

Oh, and energy costs are down; lowering prices here counterbalances, in the larger scheme, price increases there.

Clean Sweep of an Advisory Board

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HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr, announced his plan to remove all 17 current members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the CDC advisory panel that advises on vaccine schedules. The nice editors at The Wall Street Journal have termed this a “not-so-clean sweep.” They rationalize their characterization in large part with this:

Mr Kennedy’s beef seems to be that the committee’s members know something about vaccines and may have been involved in their research and development. “Most of ACIP’s members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines,” he writes.
Some members have been paid by vaccine makers—typically sums less than their salaries—to assist with clinical trials in which they help evaluate the vaccines for safety and efficacy.

I’ll ignore the opening bit of disingenuous snark. I’ll leave aside the naïve belief that folks, including government bureaucrats, are immune to chump change bribes. These editors should know better than that. Instead, look at the facts included in the snippet: some committee members being involved in the R&D of the vaccines on which they now advise in the name of the government, and some members having been paid by vaccine makers. That many of the studies in which those then-paid members were involved were double-blind is irrelevant: those members were paid by vaccine makers, and now those members advise on those vaccines.

These are clear conflicts of interest, and even the august editors of the WSJ should be able to understand that.

The editors did point out that current members have recused themselves from considerations in which they (think they) have a conflict of interest. Such recusals, though, always are judgment calls on the part of the bureaucrat considering his own recusal. There’s no need for such judgment calls when there are no conflicts of interest.

In an ideal world, such conflicts—large or small—would have no influence on government-advising bureaucrats. In that ideal world, we would have no need for conflict of interest rules. We live in the real world, however, and Kennedy is entirely correct to seek to reduce as far as may be the existence of such conflicts. It’s much too early in the process to begin criticizing his move, even a knee-jerk beef triggered by it being an RFK, Jr, move.

In the end, Kennedy has appointed eight members to the revamped ACIP:

  • Joseph R. Hibbeln, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who worked in nutritional neurosciences at the National Institutes of Health.
  • Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist who used to work at Harvard Medical School.
  • Retsef Levi, a professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management.
  • Robert Malone, a biochemist who helped with early research of mRNA vaccine technology.
  • Cody Meissner, a professor of pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and former ACIP member.
  • James Pagano, an emergency medicine physician with 40 years of clinical experience.
  • Vicky Pebsworth, the Pacific region director of the National Association of Catholic Nurses, who previously sat on the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.
  • Michael Ross, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University.

 

Some Editors are Worried

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Some editors, here The Wall Street Journal‘s, worry that a criminal investigation into Biden White House staffers’ apparent coverup could get those staffers to clam up and not talk. They’re happy with House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer’s (R, KY) civil-oriented investigation into the coverup and worry further that a criminal investigation could interfere with the civil one.

Maybe, maybe not. The only way the staffers could clam up in a criminal investigation would be to plead the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination. They could otherwise slow-walk their testimony, be evasive in their answers, fail to remember things, and on and on. But they can do those things in Comer’s investigation, too—especially, plead the 5th.

The editors closed their piece with this:

Learning more about how the White House covered up Mr Biden’s decline matters, but raising American incomes matters more.

The two are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, increasing American incomes depends critically on a mentally competent President. Learning how the last President’s mental decline occurred, and especially how it was covered up and by whom—the positions as well as the incumbents—is critical to maximizing our chances of having mentally competent Presidents in future.

And that requires a criminal investigation, also, to determine if any criminal laws were broken, if so by whom, and locking those persons up. They’ve done their damage, criminally or civilly, but locking up those who broke criminal laws would discourage future staffers from doing the same thing.

Resist

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That’s what the tech industry honchoes are doing vis-à-vis Republican moves to cut or eliminate altogether clean energy tax credits. They want to maintain their handouts.

The Data Center Coalition, a group that includes Microsoft, Alphabet’s Google, Amazon.com and Meta Platforms, recently made its pitch in a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R, SD), according to a copy viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The group asked him to preserve tax credits and loan funding that would be aggressively phased out in the version of the bill passed by the House of Representatives last month.
The bill is fueling industry concerns about rising prices and power shortages if planned investments don’t materialize.

There’s this, too:

The House bill would require solar, wind, and other projects to begin construction within 60 days of the measure’s enactment to receive tax credits. It would also require the projects to come online by 2028, setting a hard cutoff for any projects placed in service after that year. Under current law, the tax credits phase out over four years, starting in either 2032 or when the US power sector’s greenhouse-gas emissions fall to a quarter of their 2022 levels—whichever comes later.

Here’s the thing, though. This isn’t so much a rescission of the tax credits or removal of “loan funding” as it is a requirement that recipients not dilly-dally about their performance. To get/keep the credits and funding, they actually have to start doing the things—begin construction, for instance—required to “earn” the handouts. Then they have to stop slow-walking their performance, pocketing the money money without anything to show, and instead complete their promised project and bring their “clean-energy” facility on line by a date certain.

Their worry about rising prices and power shortages is a valid concern, but that’s not effectively addressed with tax credits or government loans for their projects. That’s effectively addressed by getting government regulations out of the way of fossil fuel-sourced energy. Natural gas is about as clean as it gets, even counting the fiction that atmospheric CO2—plant food—is a pollutant. Oil-based energy production is nearly as clean, as is modern coal-based energy. The actual pollutants from burning coal have long been cleaned up be well-established technologies.

Fossil fuel-sourced energy is lower priced in no small part because it’s utterly reliable, producing energy whether or not the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and those fossil fuel facilities need no expensive, themselves polluting from mining through disposal, battery storage that lasts only a very few hours into a long-term weather or night-time outage.

Clean energy facilities don’t need the tax credits or artificial government loans any more than do fossil fuel facilities. When they’re ready for market, the market will call for them without taxpayer money being donated to them. The proper resistance is a pushback and retention of the tax credit cuts and rescissions.