We get stories like this every few years. The next thing the drug warriors will do is take the licenses of any doctor who gives out "too many" (or "too long", or whatever) prescriptions, which instantly means really bad things for chronic pain sufferers.
trizzlor:
I get that you’re saying this for the sake of the argument...
True.
For all the shit the Kardashians get, they far outclass Trump both in terms of branding and earnings.
Them I know less well, but...
The Kardashians are a group and can't all be President. Nor do I see massive management skill; Their income is bigger because they're bigger celebrities (especially collectively) but they're basically a group of small businesses rather than one large.
And even if I'm totally wrong and they have tens of thousands of employees in their vast corp empire, so what? Their accomplishments do no lessen his.
Damon:
I’m more interested in what happens to the Republican and Democratic parties if Trump wins
For the GOP Best Case:
Trump "leads" by signing whatever Congress puts in front of him and claiming credit.
He does something for immigration reform in a Nixon-goes-to-China way.
He drops his economic messages and proves that he really does know management.
Worse Case:
Basically the opposite of that. He does for the national GOP what Wilson did for California on immigration, i.e. proves to an entire generation or three of hispanics that the GOP can't be trusted with power. He tries to implement economic insanity and gets the predictable results. He pulls us out of NATO and lets Russia/China become global cop(s).
what will the Dems do to gain it back?
Hopefully nominate someone who isn't openly corrupt. Maybe they decide they need a celebrity, but getting one would be easy enough.
DarkMatter: Those give him serious street cred. He knows about money, business, and management.
Stillwater: Strange comment coming from you Dark. Usually you’re the cynical one…
I see no way that he doesn't know about money, or business, or management. He's shown this over the decades multiple times and multiple ways, everything from his divorces to his management show to him being a real estate guy who lived through the crash. That's separate from his PR act which is also impressive. We can measure him by his accomplishments and they're extensive enough that making him President isn't unreasonable.
However there's this amazing disconnect between all that and what comes out of his mouth on the campaign trail. If he were running on economic sanity rather than economic insanity I'd vote for him, as it is I take him at his word... even though given who and what he is, he *must* know what he's saying is nuts.
I’d say something about how poorly it reflects upon Conservatives that they can listen to Trump and hear someone “who sounds like he knows what he’s doing,”
Trump has a mostly self made Billion dollars and this vast corporate empire. Those give him serious street cred. He knows about money, business, and management.
Of course his arguments are totally at odds with how he built his empire and what he knows(?) to be true, but to understand that you have to have some knowledge of economics and policy.
Stillwater:
You also didn’t respond to what I viewed as the most important point of that comment: that the pre-ACA healthcare delivery system had no transparent “market based” mechanism by which price is determined.
My solution, i.e. what the ACA should have done, is that it should have made pricing transparent.
That, by itself, is probably pretty hard but imho it's a lot more likely to do something than command and control. There are insurance structures which let consumers capture the results of savings, which put downward pressure on prices.
I dissent on the idea that Trump sounds like he knows what he is doing. He sounds like someone who does everything on the fly. Sometimes it works, often it does not.
For me the anti-economic arguments are another big clue. But both of us are probably a lot more informed than the typical Trump voter.
Imagine that you know literally nothing about economics, or history, or technology, and you think the elites have structured things so they win at your expense. All we need to do is break the lock that the elites have had on policy and America of the 1950's comes back.
That mindset doesn't make you "racist", but I think it's one of Trump's core demographics.
Stillwater:
DarkMatter: The pre-ACA market system was also a heavily government regulated system.
Stillwater: Dark, I gotta say I’ve lost my patience with this argument. All the conceptually based ideologically motivated idealizations in the world won’t effect how the world actually is tho it does, conventiently, effect how certain types of people judge the world and its actors.
Pot, meet Kettle. After the ACA fails to contain costs, will you want to see more market, or more government?
DarkMatter: If we’re serious about using the gov to reducing medical expenses, then we need to have a long discussion on the benefits of death panels
Stillwater: Obama actually wanted to have that discussion, which led to Palinistas to coin the term you neutrally use to refer to it: “death panels”.
It's a good, descriptive, term. I am trying to use it neutrally, and I fully support the idea as long as we're going to have the gov deeply involved in paying for things.
Stillwater: Look, if you/we want to limit health care costs a part of that discussion is end of life care and rationing. And I mean that as a matter of logic, one which applies to the private insurance model just as much as any particular gummint program.
Agreed... but imho insurance is mechanically better suited towards dealing with this. Do you want to pay for that last year or not? If the answer is yes, then your insurance rate is 'this'. If the answer is no, then your insurance bill is a fraction of that.
Politicians who even try to suggest this instantly have attack ads with them throwing little old women in wheelchairs off cliffs. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2012/08/12/liberal-group-throws-granny-off-cliff-again/#31518908420f
Granted, we need to have that discussion, and badly, but I don't expect it from the politicians.
A person can win the GOP nomination for President by appealing to 35 percent of the Party that is very into openly bigoted appeals.
I think this is lumping together the anti-Islam, nativist, racist, anti-immigration, no-insiders, anti-free-trade, and enforce-the-laws sections of the party. This is also underestimating the power of being a celebrity and of raw Charisma.
Some of these groups overlap, but Trump does actually have a coalition of sorts. You don't have to be a racist to reach for the "elect a strong man who sounds like he knows what he's doing" solution.
From where I sit, the main complaint – correctly – is that our pre-ACA market system was wholly inequiped to deal with reducing medical costs. In fact, it was “designed” to inflate ’em, among other problems. Hence the ACA.
The pre-ACA market system was also a heavily government regulated system. So we have the gov deciding that because the gov messed things up, we need more government.
If we're serious about using the gov to reducing medical expenses, then we need to have a long discussion on the benefits of death panels (or whatever you want to call 'intelligent rationing'), why they're a good thing, and how they'd work in practice.
What we're doing instead is pretending that we can write a blank check to everyone for all medical expenses.
But the good news is millions of new people, most of them poor and working class, have health insurance. And their using it.
Any and every entitlement is a good thing as long as we only look at the benefits side.
Paying for it is an issue, whether we get value for our dollar is another issue, and paying for all entitlements collectively (long term, meaning 50+ years) is a huge issue.
Murali:
Dark Matter: I think “rationing” is probably a good word to describe it.
Murali: You mean we shouldn’t be cost conscious when we are spending the public dime?
"Cost conscious" would be death panels. Half your lifetime use of medicine happens in your last year of life. What we're looking at is restriction of medicine on the politically powerless or unpopular.
This is a good example of medicine-by-politics and the political system showing it's poorly equipped to deal with reducing medical costs.
The money that was taxed at the 0.05% is money that they claimed were exempt from taxes because they were set aside to be repatriated and pay taxes. Apple’s statement about waiting until a tax holiday or comprehensive tax reform likely read to the EU as “never” and therefore meant that they could go after them for it.
Apple is playing the long game, waiting 10 or 20 years for a tax holiday makes a lot of sense from their standpoint. That this is much longer than the election cycle makes it politically painful for politicians, but that seems self inflicted.
It is a matter of public record that Apple Inc. is the single largest taxpayer to the Department of the Treasury of the United States of America with an effective tax rate of approximately of 26% as of the Second Quarter of the Apple Fiscal Year 2016.[392]
In 2015, Reuters reported that Apple had earnings abroad of $54.4 billion which were untaxed by the IRS of the United States. Under U.S. tax law governed by the IRC, corporations don't pay income tax on overseas profits unless the profits are repatriated into the United States and as such Apple argues that to benefit its shareholders it will leave it overseas until a repatriation holiday or comprehensive tax reform takes place in the United States.[393][394]
On August 30, 2016, after a three-year investigation by the EU's competition commissioner that concluded that Apple received "illegal state aid" from Ireland, the EU ordered Apple to pay 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion), plus interest, in unpaid taxes.[13] Specifically, the commissioner found that Apple had benefitted from Irish Department of Revenue tax rulings that allowed it to split the profits recorded by Apple Sales International internally between its Irish branch and a stateless "head office" entity lacking employees or premises (permitted under Irish law until 2013).[395]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#Tax_practices
So basically the Commission is trying to say what the law should have been before 2013. I suspect we're looking at a "spirit of the law" vs "letter of the law" sort of thing. Multinationals who have lots of intellectual property have HUGE amounts of choice in terms of where to pay taxes on their stuff. Given that country's tax rates are more than high enough to justify these sorts of games, these games are played.
The cleaning company is a third party.
The uniform company is a third party.
The airline is a third party.
The government inspector is a third party.
None of these groups reach into my wallet. Nor do they insist that they have the ability to represent me and make life decisions such as how much I earn nor whether or not I'm allowed to work at all. Nor do they threaten me with violence if I don't follow their religion.
You’re required, by the terms of your employment, to deal with *all sorts* of third parties.
"Deal with" isn't the same as "hand over my personal money and follow their ideology".
I don't personally have an economic relationship with most of the groups you mentioned. I do have an economic relationship with the company's customers, but that's serving as the company's agent and even there I'm not expected to spend my own money.
I’m sorry, but you sound like a complete moron.
Personal attacks don't strengthen weak arguments.
So, tell me, should companies be *forbidden by law* from signing a *voluntary contact* with unions that has them agreeing to only hire union members?
"Voluntary contract"? If the union is striking are we supposed to believe the company wants all of it's workers to strike with the union? Further, companies have very little control over the personal lives and wallets of their employees.
And comparing it to rape is just completely absurd.
Words which describe involuntary relationships where one party is benefiting at the expense of another are usually pretty ugly.
This is not as strong an argument as you want it to be, because, well, this is how democracy works.
This is close to treating unions as governments. There's something to this as a paradigm (especially for explaining pro-union attitudes), governments are allowed to tax people, use force, and do things to their 49% without consent.
If I had to change one bit of current union regs, I would make it so that ‘religious’ objectors are anonymous to the union, and not just hidden, but like HIPAA anonymous...
If we use the religious paradigm, then those objectors are heretics. If we use a union-is-a-government paradigm, then those objectors are traitors.
As long as we allow a union to force unwilling people to join, imho it's going to be impossible to prevent the abuse of it's heretics & traitors.
Mylan's CEO's father is Joe Manchin, i.e. the senior US Senator from West Virginia.
He's on the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. One of that Committee's subs is Consumer Protection & Product Safety. Among other things they get to haul in the FDA for questioning.
This would be the same FDA which has systematically prevented any of her competitors from introducing a competing drug.
The usefulness of a product is determined, in the market, by whether or not people buy it.
Agreed, but this is an odd thing to say in the context of forcing people to join a union.
And you do realize that all unions that exist exist because 50%+1 of the workforce supports them, right? All unions are ‘bought by the market’ of workers at that company.
And the other 49% are going to be forced, at legal gun point, to buy the product?
That 49% can include entire groups who correctly believe the union doesn't serve their interests and they can even be abused by the union as long as the 50%+1 is fine with that. These groups can include, the young, the talented, the educated, blacks/asians, and/or entire professional classes.
And after having been outvoted and forced unwillingly to join a union, they can continue to be grouped with numbers of people whose interests don't align with their own and have no recourse.
For example, the Michigan Home Health Care workers were forced to join a union by missing the vote (50%+1 being of just the people who voted), and then forced to stay in the union until they got an individual right to leave, whereupon 80% of them did at the first opportunity.
Since they worked from home, the union did nothing for their working safety condition, their pay didn't go up (the union and gov needed to bend over backwards just to give them an employer at all), etc. The union just collected dues and collaborated with pro-union gov officials to keep the captive workers captive.
Unions can just, poof, exist, no vote at all, containing exactly however many people want to be in them.
Sure could. And stage slowdowns, hold completed work hostage, and (as I observed in RL) get fired for that. My expectation is a union would need to pass a minimum 'power' threshold to work with management.
And you *also* have to demand that the union *no longer has to negotiate for people not in it*, unlike how it works now under current law.
Agreed. But my strong impression is it's the unions which would object to this. 'Negotiating' for the freeloaders gives them more power than not doing so. Having a non-union group of workers around making more than the union would be a problem. Which implies the high value people leave the union and do their own thing.
And you’re probably going to be in the poorly ventilated part of the mine.
:Amusement: If you're going to describe a situation where the union is actually adding value, then getting people to join won't be an issue.
...then wonder what the *hell* happened to their salary after the union negotiated a good portion of it to union workers, and, incidentally, away from them.
This assumes salary isn't set by the market. Offering people less than they're worth is a problem both short and long term.
Do concede, then, that union violence a century ago shouldn’t be used to justify a rejection of unions now?
Yes, absolutely.
It’s interesting to me how a claim that one party uses violence to achieve its ends is, when countered with a claim that the competing party uses violence too, viewed as a justification of union violence.
How the hell does that happen?
Don't know. What really gets me is how pretty recent threats/violence somehow gets related to century old problems.
Personally I think the whole violence thing is because they've got nothing else to bring to the table. If management isn't evil they've got no dragon to slay, no reason to exist.
The “violence” argument cuts in more than one direction.
Ludlow and Homestead were both more than a century ago, they might as well have been on different planets. If we limit the whole "violence" thing to the last 50 or so years we keep it within the current culture and legal framework.
IMHO management violence or threats thereof from last century should not be used to justify union violence now.
There is the small matter where unions don’t have even the small power they do in the US, those same corporations to pretty much the same things they used to do in foreign countries and continually lobby for relaxation of various regulations that were passed due to union pressure years ago.
What "regulations" are you talking about?
Somehow I doubt we're going to being "The Jungle" any time soon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Quartz: Chronic pain patients are suffering because of the US government’s ongoing War on Drugs”
test
"
We get stories like this every few years. The next thing the drug warriors will do is take the licenses of any doctor who gives out "too many" (or "too long", or whatever) prescriptions, which instantly means really bad things for chronic pain sufferers.
On “The Republican Party and the Right After Trump”
True.
Them I know less well, but...
The Kardashians are a group and can't all be President. Nor do I see massive management skill; Their income is bigger because they're bigger celebrities (especially collectively) but they're basically a group of small businesses rather than one large.
And even if I'm totally wrong and they have tens of thousands of employees in their vast corp empire, so what? Their accomplishments do no lessen his.
"
For the GOP Best Case:
Trump "leads" by signing whatever Congress puts in front of him and claiming credit.
He does something for immigration reform in a Nixon-goes-to-China way.
He drops his economic messages and proves that he really does know management.
Worse Case:
Basically the opposite of that. He does for the national GOP what Wilson did for California on immigration, i.e. proves to an entire generation or three of hispanics that the GOP can't be trusted with power. He tries to implement economic insanity and gets the predictable results. He pulls us out of NATO and lets Russia/China become global cop(s).
Hopefully nominate someone who isn't openly corrupt. Maybe they decide they need a celebrity, but getting one would be easy enough.
"
@Stillwater
I see no way that he doesn't know about money, or business, or management. He's shown this over the decades multiple times and multiple ways, everything from his divorces to his management show to him being a real estate guy who lived through the crash. That's separate from his PR act which is also impressive. We can measure him by his accomplishments and they're extensive enough that making him President isn't unreasonable.
However there's this amazing disconnect between all that and what comes out of his mouth on the campaign trail. If he were running on economic sanity rather than economic insanity I'd vote for him, as it is I take him at his word... even though given who and what he is, he *must* know what he's saying is nuts.
"
@don-zeko
Trump has a mostly self made Billion dollars and this vast corporate empire. Those give him serious street cred. He knows about money, business, and management.
Of course his arguments are totally at odds with how he built his empire and what he knows(?) to be true, but to understand that you have to have some knowledge of economics and policy.
On “ITV: Plans to deny surgery to obese and smokers ‘put on hold’”
@Stillwater
My solution, i.e. what the ACA should have done, is that it should have made pricing transparent.
That, by itself, is probably pretty hard but imho it's a lot more likely to do something than command and control. There are insurance structures which let consumers capture the results of savings, which put downward pressure on prices.
On “The Republican Party and the Right After Trump”
@saul-degraw
For me the anti-economic arguments are another big clue. But both of us are probably a lot more informed than the typical Trump voter.
Imagine that you know literally nothing about economics, or history, or technology, and you think the elites have structured things so they win at your expense. All we need to do is break the lock that the elites have had on policy and America of the 1950's comes back.
That mindset doesn't make you "racist", but I think it's one of Trump's core demographics.
On “ITV: Plans to deny surgery to obese and smokers ‘put on hold’”
@stillwater
On “The Republican Party and the Right After Trump”
@saul-degraw
I think this is lumping together the anti-Islam, nativist, racist, anti-immigration, no-insiders, anti-free-trade, and enforce-the-laws sections of the party. This is also underestimating the power of being a celebrity and of raw Charisma.
Some of these groups overlap, but Trump does actually have a coalition of sorts. You don't have to be a racist to reach for the "elect a strong man who sounds like he knows what he's doing" solution.
On “ITV: Plans to deny surgery to obese and smokers ‘put on hold’”
@stillwater
The pre-ACA market system was also a heavily government regulated system. So we have the gov deciding that because the gov messed things up, we need more government.
If we're serious about using the gov to reducing medical expenses, then we need to have a long discussion on the benefits of death panels (or whatever you want to call 'intelligent rationing'), why they're a good thing, and how they'd work in practice.
What we're doing instead is pretending that we can write a blank check to everyone for all medical expenses.
"
Any and every entitlement is a good thing as long as we only look at the benefits side.
Paying for it is an issue, whether we get value for our dollar is another issue, and paying for all entitlements collectively (long term, meaning 50+ years) is a huge issue.
"
@murali
"Cost conscious" would be death panels. Half your lifetime use of medicine happens in your last year of life. What we're looking at is restriction of medicine on the politically powerless or unpopular.
This is a good example of medicine-by-politics and the political system showing it's poorly equipped to deal with reducing medical costs.
"
@will-truman
I think "rationing" is probably a good word to describe it.
"
Wow. Is it more expensive to operate on the heavy? ...Ignoring that extreme athletes can have high BMIs.
On “Tim Cook: A Message to the Apple Community in Europe”
@mo
Apple is playing the long game, waiting 10 or 20 years for a tax holiday makes a lot of sense from their standpoint. That this is much longer than the election cycle makes it politically painful for politicians, but that seems self inflicted.
"
It is a matter of public record that Apple Inc. is the single largest taxpayer to the Department of the Treasury of the United States of America with an effective tax rate of approximately of 26% as of the Second Quarter of the Apple Fiscal Year 2016.[392]
In 2015, Reuters reported that Apple had earnings abroad of $54.4 billion which were untaxed by the IRS of the United States. Under U.S. tax law governed by the IRC, corporations don't pay income tax on overseas profits unless the profits are repatriated into the United States and as such Apple argues that to benefit its shareholders it will leave it overseas until a repatriation holiday or comprehensive tax reform takes place in the United States.[393][394]
On August 30, 2016, after a three-year investigation by the EU's competition commissioner that concluded that Apple received "illegal state aid" from Ireland, the EU ordered Apple to pay 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion), plus interest, in unpaid taxes.[13] Specifically, the commissioner found that Apple had benefitted from Irish Department of Revenue tax rulings that allowed it to split the profits recorded by Apple Sales International internally between its Irish branch and a stateless "head office" entity lacking employees or premises (permitted under Irish law until 2013).[395]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#Tax_practices
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc.#Tax_practices
--------------------------
So basically the Commission is trying to say what the law should have been before 2013. I suspect we're looking at a "spirit of the law" vs "letter of the law" sort of thing. Multinationals who have lots of intellectual property have HUGE amounts of choice in terms of where to pay taxes on their stuff. Given that country's tax rates are more than high enough to justify these sorts of games, these games are played.
On “Globalism vs Populism vs Empricism”
@davidtc
None of these groups reach into my wallet. Nor do they insist that they have the ability to represent me and make life decisions such as how much I earn nor whether or not I'm allowed to work at all. Nor do they threaten me with violence if I don't follow their religion.
"Deal with" isn't the same as "hand over my personal money and follow their ideology".
I don't personally have an economic relationship with most of the groups you mentioned. I do have an economic relationship with the company's customers, but that's serving as the company's agent and even there I'm not expected to spend my own money.
Personal attacks don't strengthen weak arguments.
"Voluntary contract"? If the union is striking are we supposed to believe the company wants all of it's workers to strike with the union? Further, companies have very little control over the personal lives and wallets of their employees.
Words which describe involuntary relationships where one party is benefiting at the expense of another are usually pretty ugly.
"
@oscar-gordon
This is close to treating unions as governments. There's something to this as a paradigm (especially for explaining pro-union attitudes), governments are allowed to tax people, use force, and do things to their 49% without consent.
If we use the religious paradigm, then those objectors are heretics. If we use a union-is-a-government paradigm, then those objectors are traitors.
As long as we allow a union to force unwilling people to join, imho it's going to be impossible to prevent the abuse of it's heretics & traitors.
On “Scott Alexander: Reverse Voxsplaining – Drugs vs. Chairs”
Dont' know if anyone else pointed this out but...
Mylan's CEO's father is Joe Manchin, i.e. the senior US Senator from West Virginia.
He's on the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. One of that Committee's subs is Consumer Protection & Product Safety. Among other things they get to haul in the FDA for questioning.
This would be the same FDA which has systematically prevented any of her competitors from introducing a competing drug.
And yes, this is not "proof".
On “Globalism vs Populism vs Empricism”
@davidtc
Agreed, but this is an odd thing to say in the context of forcing people to join a union.
And the other 49% are going to be forced, at legal gun point, to buy the product?
That 49% can include entire groups who correctly believe the union doesn't serve their interests and they can even be abused by the union as long as the 50%+1 is fine with that. These groups can include, the young, the talented, the educated, blacks/asians, and/or entire professional classes.
And after having been outvoted and forced unwillingly to join a union, they can continue to be grouped with numbers of people whose interests don't align with their own and have no recourse.
For example, the Michigan Home Health Care workers were forced to join a union by missing the vote (50%+1 being of just the people who voted), and then forced to stay in the union until they got an individual right to leave, whereupon 80% of them did at the first opportunity.
Since they worked from home, the union did nothing for their working safety condition, their pay didn't go up (the union and gov needed to bend over backwards just to give them an employer at all), etc. The union just collected dues and collaborated with pro-union gov officials to keep the captive workers captive.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/09/26/michigan-seiu-branch-allowed-to-keep-millions-in-dues-skimmed-from-stealth.html
http://dailycaller.com/2014/04/30/after-right-to-work-80-of-mi-healthcare-workers-desert-union/
http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/16241
http://www.btlaborrelations.com/fight-over-unionization-of-michigan-home-health-care-workers-continues-in-federal-court-and-at-the-ballot-box-in-november/
Sure could. And stage slowdowns, hold completed work hostage, and (as I observed in RL) get fired for that. My expectation is a union would need to pass a minimum 'power' threshold to work with management.
Agreed. But my strong impression is it's the unions which would object to this. 'Negotiating' for the freeloaders gives them more power than not doing so. Having a non-union group of workers around making more than the union would be a problem. Which implies the high value people leave the union and do their own thing.
:Amusement: If you're going to describe a situation where the union is actually adding value, then getting people to join won't be an issue.
This assumes salary isn't set by the market. Offering people less than they're worth is a problem both short and long term.
"
I agree with all of that.
"
@stillwater
Yes, absolutely.
Don't know. What really gets me is how pretty recent threats/violence somehow gets related to century old problems.
Personally I think the whole violence thing is because they've got nothing else to bring to the table. If management isn't evil they've got no dragon to slay, no reason to exist.
"
@stillwater
Ludlow and Homestead were both more than a century ago, they might as well have been on different planets. If we limit the whole "violence" thing to the last 50 or so years we keep it within the current culture and legal framework.
IMHO management violence or threats thereof from last century should not be used to justify union violence now.
"
@jesse-ewiak
What "regulations" are you talking about?
Somehow I doubt we're going to being "The Jungle" any time soon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.