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July 2007
Read IPI Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy Peter Ferrara's latest op/ed published today in National Review Online. In it, Ferrara discusses Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama's proposed plan to combat urban poverty, entitled "Impoverished Poverty Program."
Although Obama's received accolade for this $6 billion proposal, Ferrara says these intiatives are not only outdated, but deficient and a waste of taxpayer dollars.
The solution to fighting poverty is not escalating the size of government programs and spending billions more for micro-initiatives, but rather empowering the poor by promoting private accounts, adopting school choice and providing vouchers for private health insurance instead of Medicaid. Read More...
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Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson claims that the problem of what to do about the looming entitlement crisis has been ignored because, “Washington’s vaunted think tanks—citadels for public intellectuals both liberal and conservative—have tiptoed around the problem”...failing to…“expand the public conversation by saying things too controversial for politicians to say on their own. Here, they've abdicated that role.”
To the contrary, IPI has been on the cutting edge of saying things about entitlement reform that not only politicians but also most Washington think tanks are afraid to say. Mr. Samuelson seems to have missed IPI’s web site (www.ipi.org) where he would find a burgeoning library of reports on what to do about Social Security and Medicare that refute the conventional wisdom that has policy makers wringing their hands, trapped in a false dilemma of their own making. Read More...
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On Friday, the House passed a massive $286 billion farm bill that is the poster child for congressional irresponsibility when it comes to spending. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) certainly got it right after passage of the bill when she quipped, “Future farm bills will never look the same.”
The bill is a cornucopia of special-interest handouts, not only to large corporate farmers but also to every politically-correct interest imaginable. While the heart of the farm pig-out is a $7.5 billion payoff to Midwest and Southern farmers growing corn, wheat, cotton, rice and soybeans, the bill is strewn with a barnyard of other legislative hogwash ranging from new money for preservation of grasslands and wildlife habitats, the Chesapeake Bay watershed, youth obesity programs, more subsidies for agriculture-based fuels, even increased foreign aid. Read More...
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Read Larry Hunter's new op/ed in the Boston Herald.
Hunter’s led a discussion on the numerous attempts politicians from both sides of the aisle are making to "fix" America's health care system by encroaching upon the market.
“In pursuit of a health care utopia through bogus economic policy prescriptions,” Hunter says reforms such as Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts universal health insurance coverage plan and Hillary Clinton’s proposal to put price controls on prescription drugs could sicken the system, and “politicians… would be wise to find a little humility.”
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In June Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) said "The [software] industry has failed in self-regulating. It's time to step in and enact serious consequences against those who use this invasive and deceptive practice." He then introduced legislation that would make it illegal for companies to install spyware on PCs without consent. He apparently believes that one more law would cause bad guys to change their ways.
This would be a bit like saying that the banking industry is not regulated because robberies still exist or that retail outlets are not regulated enough because shoplifting occurs.
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Sometimes you just have to groan at the hypocrisy in the battle over access to prescription drugs.
Medicines Sans Frontieres (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders) has just published a new study in AIDS, the Official Journal of the International AIDS Society.
The new study looks at Thailand’s and Brazil’s recent efforts at compulsory licensing two anti-HIV drugs, liponavir and ritonavir. The article claims that Brazil paid too much—perhaps four times too much—when it negotiated a settlement with a drug manufacturer. Thailand got a much better price by compulsory licensing the drugs.
MSF’s point? Thailand has the model for other middle-income countries.
At lease that what I think the article says.
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In the New York Post on Friday, July 27, 2007, John Podhoretz writes in a commentary entitled “The Liberal Edge”:
“What if, in fact, we’re seeing a restoration of a secular national trend towards liberalism -- a preference among voters and the American populace more generally toward liberal solutions to national problems and to the Democratic Party as the repository for those solutions?
“This would be the trend that was in evidence on Election Night 2000. If you add up the votes of the two left liberal presidential candidates that year – Al Gore and Ralph Nader – you come up with 54 million. That’s three million more than George W. Bush and Pat Buchanan combined.
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The recent controversy over how to tax general partners in private equity firms presents not only a thorny technical tax-policy issue but it also raises a more fundamental philosophical question: What is the appropriate standard to apply when devising tax policy within a totally corrupt and dysfunctional tax system such as the federal income tax?
Carried interest is the reward a general partner in a private equity firm receives in the form of a percentage of the profits generated by the equity fund managed by the general partner, usually on the order of 20 percent.
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Number 4.28
July 26, 2007
Online businesses (and these days, whose business isn’t online?) have to deal with a multitude of overlapping and competing e-marketing regulations, including CAN-SPAM, COPPA, the Lanham Act, state child e-mail privacy laws, adware regulations, FTC and FCC enforcements and advisories, and all of the relevant international laws. But for some this is not enough as across the country several jurisdictions are considering adding even more to the regulatory burden.
Last month Rhode Island held hearings asking whether the legislature should add a new law that makes it a felony to intentionally access a computer without authorization and for fraudulent or other illegal purposes. Read More...
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First the good news: The Government of Ethiopia and Starbucks have recently announced a successful resolution of the long-running dispute over Ethiopia’s right to control marketing of its specialty coffee beans which are indigenous to the African State. Starbucks provides good coffee, consistent service and wifi access along with a large mug of highly public Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). That is what made the dispute between Starbucks and the Government of Ethiopia hard to understand.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) long has stressed the role of IP as a power-tool for sustainable economic growth in the developing world through innovation and trade. In this context, trademarks may be seen as the “gate-way” intellectual property protection, Read More...
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From the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI)
Number 4.28
July 24, 2007
The Right Way to Increase Oil Tax Revenue
You know the old saying that no good deed goes unpunished.
In Washington, it’s more like no good deed goes untaxed.
The rising price of oil is a decidedly mixed blessing. On the one hand, we are all paying higher prices at the gas pump. Ouch!
On the other hand, the increased price has energized, so to speak, the oil and gas industry. They are ramping up drilling in places that might not have been profitable under the much lower prices up until a few years ago.
Those industries were already big investors. Read More...
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Today’s IP-Watch provides coverage of what is characterized as Rwanda’s “pioneering” use of TRIPS flexibilities to import generic copies of patented HIV/AIDS therapies from Canada.
The Rwandan Government filed with the WTO on July 19th (yesterday) this request forwarded from the Rwanda's Government Centre for the Treatment & Research on AIDS (TRAC) containing a blanket waiver of intent to enforce WTO TRIPS patent obligations relating to a generic fixed-dose combination product of Zidovudine, Lamivudine and Nevirapine produced by Canada’s Apotex under the name Triavir.
I have to admit that my first reaction is to wonder whether entire exercise is a good use of resources for a least developed country that has no TRIPS obligations (as noted by IP-Watch) until 2013. Read More...
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I've been troubled by the International Trade Commission (ITC)'s intrusion into a patent dispute between Qualcomm and Broadcom.
A jury found in Broadcom's favor and awarded Broadcom damages. But then the ITC issued an exclusion order banning the import of handsets containing the disputed chips.
My view has been that it is illegitimate for the ITC to essentially do an end-run around the legal process and issue an injunction. That is not a commentary on the merits of either Qualcomm's or Broadcom's cases; it's simply a commentary on process.
ITC does have within its mission handling certain patent disputes which involve imported goods. But this dispute was already working its way through the U.S. court system, and Broadcom took it to the ITC as well, as an end-around the legal process.
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The Wall Street Journal's most compelling columnist, Holman W. Jenkins, has done it again.
Today, Jenkins has almost completely nailed Google's machinations to use the power of the federal government to preserve its business share and market power by re-regulating wireline telecom and by, for the first time, regulating wireless.
This is all being done for the financial interests of the Google corporation.
Jenkins details Google's attempt, and apparently Kevin Martin's acquiescence, to having the FCC set new rules for the 700Mhz auction that reduce the value of the spectrum and force whoever owns the spectrum to give Google defacto free access to the spectrum.
Make no mistake: Google understands that restricting a wireless operator's ability to design its own business model can, by definition, only reduce its incentive to invest. But Google has bigger fish to fry. It wants to make sure it can continue to free-ride on your broadband subscription bills, even in the mobile world. It wants to make sure it won't have to share the proceeds of its massive search and advertising dominance with suppliers of network capacity. Read More...
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From the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI)
Number 4.27
July 17, 2007
Senators Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, announced on Friday that they had reached a bipartisan solution for funding a massive new expansion of the 10-year-old State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP): increase the tobacco tax by 61 cents per pack, for a total of one dollar a pack.
What their proposal amounts to is a huge new tax—a 156 percent increase—on mostly low-income people (because they are more likely to smoke) in order to provide subsidized health insurance to middle and upper-middle income families.
Tax increases just don't get much more regressive than that!
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Political rhythms would suggest that 2008 will be a banner year for Democrats. Republicans have held the White House for 8 years with a now unpopular incumbent. They held the Congress for longer until recently. At some point, voters just want to try a change.
The Democrats, however, are quite vulnerable because they are not offering voters a change. Completely captive to their far left, they are offering a nostalgic rollback to the 1960s, or even the 1930s.
If Republicans are going to take advantage of this, however, they are going to have to offer a positive, even populist message that speaks to voters’ basic concerns. To rally the nation to their side, the Republicans need a deeply appealing economic growth message. Indeed, such a credible message is the key to appealing to all the important voter base groups that are currently weak for Republicans – younger voters, Hispanics, African Americans, labor.
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Well, so much for the idea that those who commit acts of terrorism are the poor, underprivileged Muslims whose actions are at least partially understandable because they have been so deprived by the West and are understandably lashing out at the West.
OR that the reason they fall sway under the message of jihad is that they are poor and uneducated and not exposed to a variety of viewpoints and different cultures.
This latest bunch were DOCTORS. Well-educated, informed, with scientific training and exposed to lots of different cultures.
Fact the facts. The same struggle that dominated Europe and Asia for more than a thousand years until it was interrupted by the Cold War has resumed. It's an ideological struggle, and it has little or nothing to do with what we DO. It has to do with what we ARE, or more precisely, with what we AREN'T. Read More...
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On May 29, 2007, Hillary Clinton gave a major economic policy speech at the Manchester School for Technology in New Hampshire. Free market advocates ignore that speech at their peril.
What was shocking about it to me is that it started off with Jack Kemp themes about prosperity, particularly for working people. Indeed, the title of the speech was Modern Progressive Vision: Shared Prosperity”. Clinton goes on to say,
“I believe that one of the most crucial jobs of the next President is to define a new vision of economic fairness and prosperity for the 21st century, a vision for how we ensure greater opportunity for our next generation, and then to outline a strategy and then to implement it.”
She goes on to promise to “provide more opportunities for more Americans to succeed” and to “promote the great American tradition of opportunity for all and special privileges for none.” She says Read More...
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I was delighted to see Ron Cass' op/ed in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) on the Democrats' short-sighted attacks on IP protection in trade agreements.
Essentially, Democrats on the Hill have fallen victim to a PR campaign by a cabal of anti-IP activists who persuaded them to start pressuring the office of the U.S. Trade Representative to stop pressing countries, in this case Thailand, to respect and enforce intellectual property laws.
In the 1980s, Congress, with a Democratic majority, instituted the Special 301 process for the U.S. Trade Representative to identify countries whose failure to protect intellectual property harms the U.S., making potential trade sanctions leverage for better protection. In the 1990s, the U.S. and Europe secured world-wide assent to greater IP protection through the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property) agreement that brought these issues within the world trade framework.
Ever since, however, a reactionary coalition -- composed of unions in declining U.S. industries, companies threatened by changes in the global economy, health activists seeking free or heavily subsidized access to innovative drugs, and Ralph Nader acolytes (financed by George Soros and left-leaning foundations) who reflexively prefer government control to markets and private property rights -- have endeavored to reverse protections for trade and IP rights. Read More...
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Author: Erin Fitch || Location: Lewisville, Texas, USA