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November 2009
Even while you are preparing to once again feast on turkey and mashed potatoes, the European Union (EU) is preparing to once again feast on U.S. industry. And while the EU had set the table to dine this week, it has now changed the reservation to late January. What is on the menu? Two American companies, Oracle and Sun Microsystems.
Oracle is seeking to merge with Sun in order to be more competitive now and in the future. The U.S. Department of Justice approved, stating that, "Several factors led the Division to conclude that the proposed transaction is unlikely to be anticompetitive."
But earlier this month the EU issued a "Statement of Objections" to the proposed merger. With this statement the EU has made clear that it has decided to continue its push to be the global regulator, apparently thinking that regulation of the global software industry (which is vastly domiciled in the U.S.) is the way to demonstrate European-style innovation.
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Are Pets a Threat to the Environment? The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Dr. Merrill Matthews says there’s an even bigger threat.
Two professors from Victoria University in New Zealand have discovered a new threat to the planet: your pets.
They claim that a dog’s carbon “pawprint” is twice that of an SUV driven 6,000 miles a year. Cat’s are less damaging, about like owning a Volkswagen.
The primary reason, say the husband and wife professors, is it takes a lot of resources to create meat for dog and cat food.
Keeping such pets is unsustainable in the long term, so the authors called their book Time to Eat the Dog?
They recommend people switch to other pets, such as chickens and pigs, which can be eaten.
But while the book’s provocative, the premise is nonsense. We’d be better off keeping our pets and letting them eat the authors. Read More...
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There’s maybe 15 new taxes in Senator Harry Reid’s health care plan, including new taxes on:
- “Cadillac plans” (that is expensive, not necessarily rich-benefit plans);
- Medical devices and cosmetic surgery (oops, there went the Hollywood vote);
- Drug companies, health insurers and insurance executives;
- New limits on contributions to flexible spending accounts and increased penalties on non-qualified health savings account expenses;
- Individuals who don’t buy and employers who don’t provide health insurance;
- And, of course, high-income earners, and much more.
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The good news this week is that it appears that no binding treaty is going to come out of next month's Copenhagen conference on climate change.
This is good news for any number of reasons, but ironically, it’s also good news for ”green tech” – technologies that promise to produce energy from new sources or result in increased energy efficiency.
Yes, that’s right: It’s good for green tech that an international climate agreement has been stalled, at least for now.
That’s because a key demand by many of the parties at the negotiating table is that patent protection on anything labeled green tech be weakened or even eliminated in the name of facilitating technology transfer to developing countries.
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Got Your Swine Flu Vaccination Yet? Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says it’s a preview for government-run health care.
When fears of a swine flu epidemic emerged last spring, the federal government stepped in to ensure the H1N1 vaccine was available for every American—promising 120 million doses by mid-October.
But with government managing the effort the vaccine makers missed their deadlines.
So now the government is allocating the early doses to those most in need, while millions go without.
There’s a lesson here for those who think the government should take greater control over the health care system.
We’re seeing vaccine shortages, rationing, waiting lines and people dying for lack of medicine. And no one’s taking responsibility.
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It’s time to expose the lie that the Blue Dog Democrats—a coalition of 52 supposedly fiscally conservative House Democrats—are concerned about federal spending and the budget.
So far this year, the House has seen four major spending bills. Here’s how the Blue Dogs voted:
- The $787 billion stimulus package. Ten of the 52 Blue Dogs, about 20 percent, voted with every Republican against the unprecedented spending bill.
- President Obama’s 2010 federal budget. In April Congress took a vote on the president’s $3.5 trillion budget for 2010—by far the biggest spending package in history. Again, not one House Republican voted for the bill, but only 14 Blue Dogs (27 percent) joined them in opposition.
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So this man or this woman on the public payroll wants out; that’s to say, the man wants to become a woman, or the woman wants to become a man. It’s the taxpayers’ duty to pay for it?
Not so as anyone ever thought before. On the other hand, it’s a crazy time, and there’s this big health care debate going on in Washington, D. C. So, yes, Fort Worth is considering adding sex change operations to health coverage for city employees. Which would make Fort Worth a little bit more like San Francisco, where public insurance plans have covered sex change procedures since 2001.
Our bet is, Fort Worth people aren’t going to let Fort Worth city government model local behavior on what passes for normal in California. Read More...
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The delegate from India requested that language be inserted into a particular project explaining that "IP has inherent anticompetitive elements" and that the project needs to "address anticompetitive behaviors such as refusal to license."
The member of the WIPO Secretariat, in response, explained to India that "if you make it illegal for rightsholders to refuse to license, you destroy the IP system."
Which is undoubtedly the India delegate's point. Read More...
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I'm in Geneva this week for a meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), so this week I'm kinda in an IP frame of mind.
Today's good news is that no binding treaty is going to come out of next month's Copenhagen conference on climate change.
It's good news for any number of reasons one of which is that the global IP skeptic community will not be able to use climate issues to undermine international patent rights on "green" technologies, at least not now, and at least not through this mechanism.
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Is the President’s Stimulus a Success? The Institute for Policy Innovation’s Dr. Merrill Matthews says it depends on what one mean’s by success.
President Obama says his $787 billion stimulus package is a huge success.
Even though the economy’s lost more than 2 million jobs, the administration boasts that federal contractors who received $16 billion in stimulus money have created or saved 30,000 jobs.
As the ProPublica website points out, that’s spending more than $500,000 per job.
Hey, where do I sign up?
The administration also claims that for every direct job, an indirect job has been created or saved. So maybe 60,000 jobs.
Democrats now say the first stimulus was such a success they may want to do another. But if the first one had really created jobs, we wouldn’t need a second. Read More...
Stimulus |
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Why Is No One Running the Medicare Program? Dr. Merrill Matthews of the Institute for Policy Innovation says the president may be avoiding some difficult questions.
Health care is important to President Obama, so you’d think after nine months in office he would have appointed someone to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
That’s the federal agency that manages the Medicare program for seniors and Medicaid for the poor. Together they cover about 85 million Americans.
But maybe it isn’t so strange. The appointment needs Senate approval, allowing senators to discuss Medicare’s $90 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Or why Medicare fraud is an estimated $60 billion or more a year.
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Most politicians would wince at being accused of trying to push the biggest tax increase in U.S. history.
But under President Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress, the question isn’t whether but which tax increase—the “cap and tax” bill or the health care reform legislation—is the biggest in U.S. history.
At IPI we’ve been trying to decide ourselves, but there are so many variables, moving parts and unknowns it’s hard to know.
The Wall Street Journal said last June: “Americans should know that those Members who vote for this climate bill are voting for what is likely to be the biggest tax in American history.”
To support the claim, the Journal cited the Heritage Foundation’s analysis, which found Waxman-Markey, the House version of the cap and trade bill, “would cost the economy $161 billion in 2020, which is $1,870 for a family of four. Read More...
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Money, money, money—all we need right now is a whole lot more of it. To finance, say, congressional Democratic lust for spending more on health care.
The supposedly “moderate” Senate Finance Committee plan for health insurance overhaul figures on Texas picking up an additional $20 billion in Medicaid spending over the next decade. That’s to pay for another 2.5 million program enrollees, on top of the 2.9 million we have right now.
There are places in the U.S. where Medicaid pays for about half of the births. Yet one of Congress’s top solutions to solving the problem of the uninsured is expanding Medicaid to even more people.
Here’s another fun statistic. Texas taxpayers right now pay about 42 percent—$19 billion—of state Medicaid costs, with the feds picking up the rest. In the 2006-07 fiscal biennium it was $13.1 billion.
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Author: Bartlett Cleland || Location: Lewisville, Texas, USA