Sorry, I was not trying to snub the humanities or imply that we should not support them. I was kind of focused on STEM because that closely relates to pharma/healthcare policy. That being said, I 100% agree that we need to support the arts and humanities because right-wing misinformation is a cancer on the public consciousness.
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It’s really a pet peeve of mine that people don’t see the real problem for what it is. If there is an attack on science, it comes less from defunding efforts and more from the side with attacks on our ability to understand the world and the context around science in general and from privatization of STEM fields.
Most people seem to be under the impression that STEM fields are underfunded at the federal level (or all levels), but they are not. We’ve just shifted much of our R&D (and the funding for it) that used to be housed in public institutions to private, for-profit corporations, which is also not healthy. Meanwhile, the humanities are literally surviving on table scraps and in some cases, literally not at all.
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I’ve been a Katie Porter fan right out of the gate, but I still want to be cautious. Please, please, please may AOC and Omar never have any justifiable cause to be criticized.
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Katie Porter is a genius communicator and I respect and love her so much. I am so thankful to have her working for us.
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Really? Curious why you say that. I find them highly effective. Using visuals and voice makes them more likely to be remembered as well. But then, I’m an art teacher, so I am definitely biased.
Edited to add: as usual I commented before I read the whole thread, and voila, you answered elsewhere. I think the homespun nature of Katie Porter’s visuals actually adds to there effectiveness. I’m actually thinking about that in terms of my increasingly slick power points, and the way they become easy to ignore… but it’s okay to disagree.
I think in her case, at least for me, the homespun nature of them make it feel more of the moment, even though she clearly has made them in advance. I have only really encountered them from her, the association with Republicans isn’t there for me, but I could see where that would sour you on them.
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I completely agree with your overall point, but I’m often surprised how terrible Congress is at public questioning. The highlights are usually those, like Porter, who don’t have that background.
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It’s impossible to get anything accomplished in politics without some level of compromise. Viewing compromise as failure is not a reasonable response. Also, expecting anyone to never do anything you disagree with is a recipie for disappointment.
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If you’ve been hiding the magic wand that will let her “DO THAT,” please return it at your earliest convenience.
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no magic required to have a vote on Medicare for All. The bill has been advanced. Speaker can put it to a vote if she wants.
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Is there a bigger problem with the House than its lack of fair proportional representation of the electorate?
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Go directly to data visualization jail until Ed Tufte signs your release
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I know you’re not that naive.
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So about R+D costs/profits-I though you were supposed to include those costs in your financial statement before you calculated profits. If it costs over a billion dollars to get a drug to the market, shouldn’t that cost be reflected in the posted profits of the company? So then the posted brazillions of profit take into account the costs of R+D?
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Definitely. It should be captured in your COGS as part of the baseline cost of the product. But Pharma likes to keep it separate because they miss on a fair number of drugs prior to launch and thus want to pool those development losses rather than allocate them to specific product lines. It also lets them inflate profitability of successful drugs by keeping the R&D costs separate.
Their accounting is a mess.
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I know I’m being a pedant, but Katie Porter’s presentation would have been even more effective if she had represented the dollar amounts as equal-width bars instead of bubbles. You get a better sense of the numbers when you represent a one-dimensional quantity (like dollars) in one dimension (length) than two (area). The stock-buyback bar would have gone off the edge of her whiteboard while many of the other bars would have been nearly invisible slivers of paper, but that’s kind of my point.
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If you live in California or New York the SALT limit of $10k surly fucked you. My wife’s a nurse, I work in logistics and we own a home in the Bay Area. The property tax on our house alone is almost $10k meaning none of our income tax is deductible. We make right around the medium income for the Bay and are by no means “wealthy”.
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Once again promised universal medication coverage was conspicuously yet quietly missing from the Canadian federal budget, issued a few weeks ago. We continue being the world’s sole nation that has universal healthcare but no similar coverage of prescribed medication, however necessary.
Recouping research and development costs is typically cited by the powerful industry to justify its exorbitant prices and stiff resistance to universal medication coverage public plans, the latter which it’s doing in Canada. However, according to a Huffington Post story (“Pharmaceutical Companies Spent 19 Times More On Self-Promotion Than Basic Research: Report,” updated May 8, 2013), a study conducted by the British Medical Journal found that for every $19 dollars the pharmaceutical industry spent on promoting and marketing new drugs, it put only $1 into its R&D.
A late-2019 Angus Reid study found that about 90 percent of Canadians — including three quarters of Conservative Party supporters specifically — champion universal medication coverage. Another 77 percent believed this should be a high-priority matter for the federal government. The study also found that, over the previous year, due to medication unaffordability, almost a quarter of Canadians decided against filling a prescription or having one renewed.
Not only is medication less affordable, but other research has revealed that many low-income outpatients who cannot afford to fill their prescriptions end up back in the hospital system as a result, therefore costing far more for provincial and federal government health ministries than if the medication had been covered. So, in order for the industry to continue raking in huge profits, Canadians, as both individual consumers and a taxpaying collective, must lose out huge. And our elected representatives, be they federal Liberals or Conservatives, seem to shrug their figurative shoulders in favor of the pharmaceutical industry — time and again.
Considering it is such a serious health affair for so many people, impressed upon me is the industry lobbyists’ potent influence on our top-level elected officials — manipulation that our mainstream news-media apparently fail to even try to fully expose, let alone condemn — for the sake of large profit-margin interests.
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Being from Canada, I don’t get this. You get to deduct state and local taxes from federal income taxes why? They have nothing to do with each other. I mean, you can deduct property taxes and even your mortgage if you’re using your property to generate income (like you do business from there or you rent it out), but if you’re just living in a house with high property taxes, you don’t get to write it off. And deducting provincial income tax from federal income tax?? Makes no sense.
Does it help to look at it this way: most of the tax code was written by rich guys who don’t want to pay taxes?
There. That about sums it up.
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Virginia gets back about $10k in federal government aid per resident. California gets back $12. Both states have roughly the same median income.
Childen get you a federal tax deduction.
None of it makes any sense.
Edit: also, I was trying to respond to the other guy. b
I do agree with your statement though.
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