GOP Healthcare Troubles

Why is the GOP having such trouble with health care? Simple. They talked themselves into opposing their own best plan for health care. You see, back when Bill and Hillary Clinton had a congressional majority and wanted to fix the whole health care thing, Republicans were worried that Democrats might socialize the entire medical industry. So the conservative Heritage Foundation released the very best plan for a market-based...

The problem with share buybacks

Recently many publicly traded companies have spent huge amounts of money buying back their own shares. Why is this happening, and why is it a problem? Economics 101: be careful what you incentivize. CEO’s are incentivized primarily on share price performance. In theory that means incentives are structured to grow the business. But markets respond primarily to growth in profits, which is not necessarily the same thing...

Privatizing Air Traffic Control

Privatizing air traffic control would simply be another handout to the rich, where the investors get the upside, and the public covers the downside. Here’s how it works. If you privatize air traffic control no insurance company is going to touch the entity. So the next time an air traffic controller causes (even just as a minor contributing factor) a crash, the lawyers will be all over it, and the entity will be out of...

Twitter diplomacy

Think about this for a moment. Yesterday on Twitter the President of the US attacked the mayor of the largest city of our closest ally in the wake of a terror attack. Seriously. Not to be outdone by his tweet yesterday, this morning Trump attacks the government of the country that is host to the largest US military base in the Middle East – on Twitter. Quoting Jesse Berney, “The decision by Saudi Arabia and other...

Whatever happened to Trumps pharmaceutical re-impo...

In 2015 the top 20 pharmaceutical companies made $125 billion in profit between them (not sales, profit, as in what is left over for investors after all the marketing cost, executive salaries, R&D, and production costs were paid – in that order). Both Trump and Clinton campaigned against high drug prices. Both Trump and Clinton promised to allow the re-importation of drugs from Canada – essentially allowing...

Hillary Clinton and responsibility

“I take responsibility.” said Hillary in her new book. And proceeded to provide a long list of things other people did to her, and not one thing she failed at. Sorry, but that’s not taking responsibility. However it is a pretty good display of the root cause of failure. There are a whole lot of overlapping reasons why she lost. Most of them are due to her management decisions. A few were due to unusual...