Coyote Gulch

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Immigration
From The Cherry Creek News,
Metropolitan State College of Denver's School of Business is sponsoring an immigration debate entitled 'Immigration: Economic Boom or Bust - Separating Myth from Reality.' This will be the first in a series of debates at Metro State on the immigration issue. The series is open to the public. The debate is between economist Benjamin Powell and former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm.

11:30 a.m. - 2 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 27, Tivoli Turnhalle (Southeast corner of Tivoli Student Union at Auraria Campus). To download directions to campus and a campus map please visit http://www.mscd.edu/news/debate/map.htm"
"2008 pres"
6:23:21 PM

? for President?
Political Wire: "'The Republican Party has won two elections on the issue of fear and terrorism. It's going to try again.' -- Sen Chuck Hagel (R-NE), quoted by the Los Angeles Times, bucking his fellow Republicans on the closing of the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay."
"2008 pres"
7:02:30 AM

Healthcare
Andrew Sullivan: "What's the difference between Romney Care and Hillary Care? Diddly squat.

Matt Singer (via Left in the West):

Shane Mason and Dave Budge are getting ready to square off in a free market debate over...wait for it...pharmaceuticals. I was about to write about how absurd this is, since patents prevent a free market in most pharmaceuticals, when it occurred to me that eliminating patents for new drugs might actually be rather good for health care. Basically, the heart of the question over at MT Netroots is whether it is bad for the government to interfere with the market for drugs. The irony, I thought, was that the most important market intervention in pharmaceuticals is the granting of patents, which give exclusive monopolies to individual drugmakers for a period of time. Offsetting that power by having a countervailing monopsony isn't necessarily a bad idea. In the course of this, I was going to write a defense of monopoly-granting patents, since without patents, there would be little incentive to innovate, right?

But is that really the case? Turning the science of medicine over to the business of PhRMA itself has a distorting effect. Rather than working on drugs with major impacts for human health, pharmaceutical companies focus on a handful of big money-making areas. It's good economics - the drugs in question sell to relatively rich people in the West for a lot of money, but it's a very fair question whether or not the market is achieving its ostensible goal: improving the health of people. So why not eliminate patents for drugs? Such a move would take away monopoly power on drugs, drastically lowering the price of drugs and remove the need for monopsony power since it would create a worldwide market that actually approximates a free market about as nearly as possible.

So there's a downside, right? Sure -- drug companies lose the incentive to innovate, since they can no longer reap massive profits off of their innovations, since they have to be shared with the world. But would that really be the case? Last I checked, businesses are often very interested in brand image and tax cuts. So let's rather than having Pfizer have an in-house R+D department, they set up the Pfizer Pharmaceutical Institute, an affiliated 501c3 dedicated to researching new medicines to benefit the world. The c3 is solely financed (or likely solely financed) by donations from Pfizer. Virtually all of Pfizer's top scientists start working for PPI (some scientists remain to focus on the applied science of churning out huge quantities of drugs, quality testing, etc.). The new c3 continues to do research, guided not by Pfizer's profit motive, but by a 501c3 friendly mission -- determining priorities for new drug development based on identified needs. Whatever drugs get produced cannot be patented, so drug companies themselves end up competing on the basis of price and brand strength, which is theoretically tied to brand quality. In other words, drug companies would focus on the actual work of producing large quantities of high quality pharmaceuticals at a competitive price. And drug institutes would focus on making the world a better place. It would sure drive down the profit margins of the drug companies. That's no mistake. But wild profit margins are actually a top sign of a failing market. Over the long term, in a free market, economic profit (as opposed to accounting profit) drops to zero.
"2008 pres"
7:01:19 AM

2008 Democratic National Convention

Here's a look at the finances for the 2008 Democratic National Convention from The Rocky Mountain News. From the article:

Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper on Monday sought to assure jittery City Council members that the city has a plan to navigate the federal bureaucracy and shorten what could be long delays in getting reimbursements for Democratic National Convention security expenses. Hickenlooper said a bipartisan committee, including Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter and Republican Sen. Wayne Allard, will negotiate a payment schedule in advance with the federal government. A Homeland Security official also will be on hand to guide the city through a labyrinth of bureaucratic forms. "Part of the delay is unique paperwork that you have to fill out," the mayor said. His comments came during a briefing Monday for City Council members about the Public Safety Department's $416 million budget for 2008.
"2008 pres"
6:55:12 AM