Search Results for: Clinton

My Facebook feed is alive with Hillary Clinton fans complaining about the price of an EpiPen and also about the high income of the CEO of the company that makes the EpiPen. Here are some samples:

It’s one thing for a new experimental drug to be expensive to pay for all the failed attempts. Makes perfect sense. But buying up long established technology that by all rights should have come off patent by now and price gouging consumers is just hideous and I don’t think you want to be defending that kind of behavior? The original epipen patent is from 1977. Patent lengthening is one of many games pharma companies play to extend their monopolies as long as possible. As for regulation preventing competitors, safety matters, otherwise any snake oil salesman could sell you a would be epipen (see e.g opioid epidemic). So making blanket claims against regulation doesn’t really help here. This is a specific example of this problem and it could be solved by the government treating it as an unfair monopoly and forcing them to break it up by e.g. licensing their remaining patents to competitors.

[after a commenter pointed out that competitors couldn’t get FDA approval for their devices] Maybe, but we still have anti-trust laws. Whether the market or government regulations prevent competition is irrelevant. At some point the greater good requires the destruction of the monopoly.

[after a question about why there isn’t competition] Various alternatives have been tried but none have passed regulatory muster. Free-market zealots like to depict this sequence of events as “government regulations killed the competition.” Consumer safety advocates might use a different spin on the same phenomenon: “government regulators prevented inferior and potentially unsafe alternatives from hurting consumers.” Who’s right? Who cares? If there is a monopoly, and if the current product is the only version deemed safe and effective, nothing prevents the government from forcing the monopoly to break apart. Two companies selling the identical product could still drive down prices, just as is the case with e.g. automobiles (is a Honda Accord really that different form a Toyota Camri?). The original patent expired long ago, but follow-on patents allow the monopoly to artificially continue. The drug itself is dirt cheap but a rapid and safe delivery mechanism is critical to efficacy.

Monopoly is defined by pricing power. In this case the company happens to be abusing the patent system. But that’s irrelevant. The evidence is not that they have a patent, the evidence is that they are price gouging, and that no reasonable competition exists or can come into existence quickly enough to prevent them from price gouging. The government is under no obligation to protect your monopoly just because you have a patent. The government can decide that you have recouped your investment and profit and are now just exploiting the patent system at the expense of consumers.

Friends who love to complain that women don’t get paid as much as men (i.e., that you could make near-infinite money by starting a company that hired only women) then began to complain about Heather Bresch, the CEO of Mylan, getting paid $19 million in one year. Yet their complaint was not that, like virtually all other American women, underpaid. Apparently, despite having successfully moved Mylan to the low-tax Netherlands via an inversion, Bresch was overpaid.

[Given her family connections to the rich and powerful, could she have made more money without working at all? Wikipedia says that she has four children so let’s assume she wanted four children and had each of those kids with a different father, thus maximizing child support profits. Assuming that she keeps $10 million after taxes each year, she needs to get $2.5 million from each father in order to match her Mylan income. If she could have had sex with four men, each earning $14.7 million per year, in Wisconsin, for example (child support is 17 percent of gross income, without limit), she could have matched her most recent Mylan compensation.]

Hillary Clinton says “I am calling on Mylan to immediately reduce the price of EpiPens.” (statement)

How can we explain this? The same folks who want The Great Father in Washington to regulate drugs are now objecting to a company being compensated for navigating the regulatory labyrinth? People who think The Great Father in Washington should give out monopolies via patents object to whatever particular monopoly enables the EpiPen to sell at a high price? So an official such as Hillary Clinton should decide which patents should have economic value and which should not?

Readers: Why is it that Mylan can charge a high price for these EpiPens? Why aren’t there profits sufficient to attract competitors competent to romance the FDA bureaucrats into approving a substitute?

My recent Baltic Sea cruise included passengers from more than 50 countries. I was called over to a gathering of young Arabs, mostly Saudis and Kuwaitis, for my perspective on the upcoming U.S. Presidential election. Some of these folks I had met on various shore excursions and we’d talked about their time in the U.S. (generally at least four years of college). On the question of politics I gave my standard answer that I wasn’t following the candidates because my vote, as a citizen of Massachusetts, is not relevant. The consensus of the Saudi/Kuwaiti group was that Trump was bad because he might make it tougher for them to come to the U.S. and they perceived him as “anti-Muslim”. They liked Hillary even less, however, and asserted that, like most establishment politicians, she was controlled by the Rothschild family, whom they believed to be worth $350 billion (i.e., more than Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Carlos Slim combined; Forbes, on the other hand, suggests that the family is worth in the single-digit billions; why would Rothschild family members break a sweat operating vineyards and selling wine if they are in fact worth $350 billion? You don’t see Carlos Slim-brand vino.).

One bonus of spending two weeks on a cruise ship is that one meets a wide array of people. The roughly 2,400 guests on our Serenade of the Seas Baltic Sea cruise came from 52 different countries. Among these were Americans from every region of the U.S. and with a much wider range of political views than are typically aired in Massachusetts.

Due to the upcoming election and perhaps the media’s frenzied portrayal of the Clinton v. Trump decision as a momentous one that will affect all Americans’ daily lives, there was a lot of political discussion. On the immigration issue, one pattern that I noticed was that at least some people tend to vote their checkbook. Some older Americans expressed positive attitudes toward immigration. They were done working and therefore wouldn’t be competing with anyone for a job. They typically own property that will increase in value if the U.S. population is expanded to 600 million via immigration. Asked what the advantages of immigration were to an average existing American citizen they talked about how immigrants would do jobs that “Americans didn’t want to do,” such as prepare and serve food in senior citizens’ housing. In other words, prices for consumers of unskilled labor would be lower. On the other hand, some young people, including college students, were negative about immigration and therefore positive about Donald Trump. They cited traffic jams, competition for jobs, higher taxes to pay for welfare benefits and other handouts to immigrants, and costs and security hassles related to Islamic violence at public events or gatherings.

The ship itself is a good example of why working-age Americans might rationally vote to obstruct a free worldwide labor market (one method of obstruction being blocking immigration to the U.S.). There were workers from 64 different countries on the ship (flag parade video that I captured). The ship itself, a magnificent machine that has been kept in near-perfect condition, was built in Germany in 2001-2003. It is a floating town of about 3,500 passengers and crew and includes most of the businesses and municipal functions of a town: retail, restaurants, hotel, electricity generation, water desalinization, sewage treatment, legal and regulatory compliance, health care (doctor and two nurses), repairs and maintenance, cable TV, Internet, live entertainment, etc. All of this is accomplished to a higher-than-typical-American standard at a lower-than-typical-American cost by a crew that includes very few Americans. Americans would find work in a free labor market, of course, but we wouldn’t be sought-after. (Economists would say that in a truly free labor market the unemployment rate is always close to 0% because eventually the market will clear with workers accepting jobs at low wages, but this isn’t relevant in the modern welfare state because living on government handouts may yield a better material lifestyle than working at a market-clearing wage (and working at a market-clearing wage may be illegal due to minimum wage laws; see Puerto Rico)).

Top executives in Silicon Valley often have a huge cushion due to a monopoly position and high costs to customers to switch. John Chambers, who built modern-day Cisco, is an exception. While Cisco has a great brand name it has to fight for every sale given that, by definition, its boxes must be able to communicate with all of the rest of the world’s routers and switches.

What does someone like this think of our upcoming presidential election? The MIT alumni magazine, Technology Review, asked him:

Between Trump and Clinton, who has the better technology policies?

If you’re asking, “How do you give middle-class America a pay raise? How do you create opportunities? How do you make the country more competitive on a global basis in a way that allows everybody to benefit? How do you change health care and education?”—well, those questions are all about a digital agenda, and yet I’ve not heard a single candidate articulate a vision on that.

One of Hillary Clinton’s main campaign points is that women don’t get paid, on average, as much as men. She’s about to make the “gender gap” stat worse, though, by quitting a $20 million/year job giving talks to Goldman Sachs et al. and taking a $400,000/year government job (President of the United States). So Hillary will be taking dramatic action, once in office, to address a problem that she herself exacerbated!

At a business/social gathering following Super Tuesday I heard from a variety of Massachusetts residents regarding Hillary Clinton and other politicians:

• (from a Bernie supporter) it would be nice to have a president who didn’t actually have an office at Goldman Sachs
• (from a Trump Supporter) I’m sick of working to support people who don’t work. (Her after-tax income was definitely less than value of housing, food stamps, and health insurance received by a successful Boston-area welfare family. Sadly she was past her child-bearing years and would not have been able to go down the most reliable Massachusetts road for getting cash without working.)
• Hillary and Congress will be making laws that benefit their friends in ways that I won’t even be able to understand. But I know that I’ll be paying for this.
• Ronald Reagan ruined American politics by introducing religion. I can never forgive him for not mentioning the word “AIDS” until after more than 22,000 Americans had died, including a lot of my friends. (This statement regarding Reagan may not be accurate. This article says Reagan talked AIDS in 1985  (same year that a blood test was approved for HIV) and so does this organization, which also notes that about 13,000 Americans had died to that point.)
• (from a Bernie supporter) At least Trump probably won’t try to do that much once he is in office except enjoy being President.
• If Hillary gets elected we should buy stock in Goldman Sachs and Berkshire Hathaway and other companies to which she is connected. We know that they’re going to do great for the next eight years. [See “Warren Buffett’s Nifty Tax Loophole” (Barron’s) for the complexity of Berkshire Hathaway’s relationship with the tax code.]

[Funniest statement of the evening, from a travel industry executive: “We’ve been advertising on PBS…”]

There was no affection expressed for Hillary, even among those who said that they voted for her. The kindest thing that was said that she would be more likely to get legislation passed with Congress than would Bernie Sanders be (hardly anyone was willing to admit to supporting Trump).

With support for Hillary this weak in a passionately Democrat state just one night after Super Tuesday I wonder if she will have a tough time in November. But on the other hand other recent U.S. presidents have been elected without charming everyone. Nixon, for example. George H.W.? George W?

Readers: What do you hear in your neighborhoods? Are voters excited about Hillary or just voting for her because they like other candidates even less?

If we model voting as a social phenomenon, this image shows why Hillary Clinton wins the Massachusetts primary:

There was not a single other candidate that anyone in our town was willing to be seen supporting. (Maybe I will go down there at 5 pm with a “Jesus Loves Trump” sign and a blood pressure meter to see what happens!)

(As per usual, most of the ballot was taken up by candidates running unopposed. One interesting item is that the Democrats in Massachusetts have positions titled “State Committee Man” and “State Committee Woman” for which there is a gender ID requirement. There was not an interesting electoral contest for these positions, as each one had a single unopposed candidate. But the existence of these positions raises the question: what if a successful “State Committee Man” decides to identify as a “woman” at some point subsequent to his/her election? How are these positions meaningful in a transgender age?)

Given that Bernie Sanders only recently joined the Democratic Party (previously identifying as “socialist,” not a popular brand name for most Americans) and that only about half as much money has been spent to promote Mr. Sanders compared to Ms. Clinton, does the more or less equal vote tally actually represent a defeat for Hillary Clinton?

Let’s also consider momentum. Bernie Sanders was not considered a serious candidate a year ago but now he collects roughly the same number of votes as Hillary Clinton. More voters will now take the time to learn about Sanders and some of those will become his supporters? If he adds those to the roughly 50 percent share he has already… he could actually win?

“’90s Scandals Threaten to Erode Hillary Clinton’s Strength With Women” is a nytimes article about how Hillary Clinton participated in attacking and discrediting the women with whom her husband was having sex (or trying to have sex with), rather than supporting her sisters, which presumably would have eventually required divorcing the unfaithful husband.

The litigators we interviewed for Real World Divorce wouldn’t be surprised by Hillary’s decision. Had she sued Bill Clinton under D.C. family law, she would have been entitled to child support and alimony of perhaps $200,000 per year based on his salary as President. Bill Clinton’s historical earnings hadn’t been that large due to his holding down government jobs. She might have been able to share in Bill Clinton’s spectacular post-Presidential payday via an alimony and child support modification lawsuit, but a new award based on the discarded spouse’s post-divorce higher income is subject to judicial discretion (see “Peter Orszag beats the child support rap” for how a similar case played out in the D.C. courts; also see “the lottery winner in Massachusetts alimony court”).

It was economically rational for Hillary to stay married to Bill and therefore she did. If this required denouncing other women, that wouldn’t surprise anyone in the world of divorce litigation.

Readers: Where would Hillary be today if she had sued Bill Clinton in, say, 1998?

Related:

• “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” (2012 Atlantic magazine article) from one of Hillary Clinton’s subordinates at the State Department: “My workweek started at 4:20 on Monday morning, when I got up to get the 5:30 train from Trenton to Washington. It ended late on Friday, with the train home. In between, the days were crammed with meetings, and when the meetings stopped, the writing work began—a never-ending stream of memos, reports, and comments on other people’s drafts. For two years, I never left the office early enough to go to any stores other than those open 24 hours…”

As Hillary Clinton finalizes her stroll back to the White House it is worth remembering that her election in 2016 would prove Richard Nixon correct: “.. certainly in the next 50 years we shall see a woman President–maybe sooner than you think.” (speech from 1969 to the League of Women Voters)

[How else have things changed? Peggy Noonan, one of the idea-generators in Ronald Reagan’s White House, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “[Democrats during her childhood] did not spend their time endlessly accusing people of being sexist-racist-homophobic-gender-biased persons of unchecked privilege. They would have thought that impolite.”]