December 6, 2019

December 6, 2019 (Jobs Byte)

For the moment, the US trade war with China has shifted focus from stealing US intellectual property back to the value of its currency, with the Trump administration renewing its old charge of manipulation.

Economists are continually developing new statistical techniques, at least some of which are useful for analyzing data in ways that allow us to learn new things about the world.

In terms of credit for the favorable labor market, Trump managed to come into office at the right time, just as unemployment was getting low enough to produce real wage gains. The best that can be said is that at least Trump didn’t screw things up.

(This post first appeared on my Patreon page.)

Earlier this month, Senator Warren put out a set of steps that she would put forward as president as part of a transition to Medicare for All. The items that got the most attention were including everyone over age 50 and under age 18 in Medicare, and providing people of all ages with the option to buy into the program. This buy-in would include large subsidies, and people with incomes of less than 200 percent of the poverty level would be able to enter the Medicare program at no cost.

These measures would be enormous steps toward Medicare for All, bringing tens of millions of people into the program, including most of those (people over age 50) with serious medical issues. It would certainly be more than halfway to a universal Medicare program.

While these measures captured most of the attention given to Warren’s transition plan, another part of the plan is probably at least as important. Warren proposed to use the government’s authority to compel the licensing of drug patents so that multiple companies can produce a patented drug, in effect allowing them to be sold at generic prices.

The government can do this both because it has general authority to compel licensing of patents (with reasonable compensation) and because it has explicit authority under the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act to require licensing of any drug developed in part with government-funded research. The overwhelming majority of drugs required some amount of government-supported research in their development, so there would be few drugs that would be exempted if Warren decided to use this mechanism.

These measures are noteworthy because they can be done on the president’s own authority. While the pharmaceutical industry will surely contest in court a president’s use of the government’s authority to weaken their patent rights, these actions would not require Congressional approval.

The solution to the current conflicts on trade policy is not a false nationalism that nonetheless expands corporate control, nor a defense of the current failed corporate system. We need a wholly different system than that embodied in the WTO.

Guillaume LongOpenDemocracy, 25 de noviembre, 2019

Mark Weisbrot
Contexto y Acción, 20 de noviembre, 2019

How a global narrative of fraud should have emerged from the OAS’s bizarre attack on a quick vote count that is not legally binding and on late-reporting votes naturally favoring a candidate over another, is quite incredible.