Too soon to tell. Pooky Amsterdam mercilessly fisks a typical clueless story from the MSM.
Category Archives: Economics
The Avastin Decision
Did the FDA do the right thing?
The Wall Street Journal, and others, have denounced the FDA’s move as “a chillingly blunt assertion of regulatory power.” But my Manhattan Institute colleague Paul Howard is the guy who gets it right, in a blog post for Medical Progress Today:
If you think (as I do) that the FDA should be expanding the accelerated approval pathway and allow more drugs to get to market based on promising early studies. rather than waiting for large Phase III clinical trials that can take years to complete, you can argue that this outcome actually strengthens AA. Critics have charged that AA is sop to industry, and that companies never do the follow up studies to support AA. Avastin proves them wrong.
This is exactly the point. If you want the FDA to approve more innovative, new drugs based on promising but early clinical results, you have to give the FDA a way to revoke those approvals later on, should larger trials prove that those drugs aren’t as safe or effective as they first seemed. This is why the FDA should be congratulated for the way it has handled the Avastin breast cancer saga, and why I hope we will see the FDA handle more cases like this one, not less.
Yes, this is better than the way they’ve done it in the past, but this argument presumes that the FDA should have such regulatory power in the first place. It’s one thing to provide data on efficacy. It’s another to prevent people from making their own decisions about what drugs to use for which ailments.
Obama’s Coming Nightmare Decision
Whether or not to bail out the Eurozone.
There’s never a good time to get in to a job that’s way over your head, but he picked a particularly bad one.
Good News For Space Startups
And not just space startups: the House passed a bill to allow non-accredited investors to invest up to ten grand in startups. This would undo some of the damage caused by Sarbanes-Oxley, though that still needs to be repealed as well (one of the many disasters of the Bush administration). It would also be a huge improvement over decades-long SEC rules that have prevented space entrepreneurs from easily raising funds. And yes, of course, there will be some bad deals. Caveat emptor.
And of course, it isn’t law yet. It still has to get through the Senate and signed by the president. I won’t hold my breath.
What The Occupiers Believe And Why They Believe It
It’s indoctrination:
During the 2008 campaign, Obama’s critics often called him a “radical,” a “socialist” or even a “Marxist” and were either dismissed as hysterics or condemned for “McCarthyism.” It was not widely noted that, for those too young to remember America’s Cold War struggle against Soviet tyranny, the accusation of “Marxism” doesn’t carry much weight, while “McCarthyism” is at most something they’ve read about in books. (Stan Evans’s Blacklisted by History probably isn’t on the collegiate reading list.) Voters who were 25 in 2008 were in first grade when the Berlin Wall came down. If they have some idea that the Soviet empire was a bad thing, they have little idea of why it was bad. And this ignorance is no accident.
To explain why the Bolshevik experiment failed so spectacularly would require that students be taught the errors of socialism, which would necessarily require an explanation of the superiority of the market economy to the socialist planned economy. And the left-wing orientation of today’s academic establishment — “Down With Capitalist Education!” to quote a sign in a protest today by Cal State university faculty — pretty much prohibits any such explanation.
Seventeen-year-olds taught that they are “the 99 percent” and that advocates of economic freedom are “f–king up our future” have not been merely miseducated, but have been quite literally indoctrinated. But as Buckley said, they would be “outraged by the suggestion” that they have not arrived at their beliefs “by independent intellectual exertion.”
These young people have not been taught Marx and Lenin. Rather, they have had their heads stuffed with nebulous ideas about “equality,” “rights” and “social justice” by teachers (and journalists and movie producers) who cherish romantic mythology about the righteous glories of Sixties radical movements.
The other problem is that Marxism is an emotionally appealing argument, to those who have never been taught how to actually think.
[Update a while later]
“The putrid stench of a century of folk Marxism.”
Rick Perry Is An Idiot
At least based on his interview with O’Reilly.
No, the Occupy Wall Streeters are not looking for jobs, Rick. They’re looking for a big paycheck to cash in on their worthless college degrees, if they even have them.
But even worse, knowing that you were going into that interview that you would be asked about the president’s comments about “Americans being lazy” and knowing that your commercial had taken him out of context, in that he was talking about us bringing in foreign investment, did you point out that in fact that the president was wrong, and that there has been abundant foreign investment in the US because much of the money has nowhere else to go?
No, you just double down on the stupid.
Here’s some advice Rick Perry. Either listen to your political advisers, or fire them. Because this was a huge blown opportunity.
The Regressive Green Movement
Is Our Infrastructure Crumbling?
Obama Delays Shale Drilling
…and delays 200,000 jobs. It’s almost like he has an electoral death wish.
[Update a few minutes later]
“We can’t wait!” Unless we have to pander to our base.
[Update a few minutes later]
Why no jobs, explained in one sickening chart (it’s the housing, stupid).
[Update a few minutes later]
Our country has a jobs-creation problem. You don’t say.
The GM Bailout
The losses are going to be massive:
The $23.6 billion represents a 25 percent loss on the feds $60 billion direct “investment” in GM. But that’s not all that taxpayers are on the hook for. As I explained previously, Uncle Sam’s special GM bankruptcy package allowed the company to write off $45 billion in previous losses going forward. This could work out to as much as $15 billion in tax savings that GM wouldn’t have had had it gone through a normal bankruptcy. Why? Because after bankruptcy, the tax liabilities of companies increase since they have no more losses to write off.
This means that the total hit to taxpayers, who still own about a quarter of the company, could add up to $38.6 billion. That’s even more that the $34 billion on the outside I had predicted in May.
But it’s OK, ‘cuz the president’s campaign supporters got paid off.