Hillary Clinton's campaign-trail statement, "I'm the only Democratic candidate in this race who will pledge to raise your incomes, not your taxes," is the topic of my column this week. Republicans may want to get the clip ready now for the 2018 congressional races. Or maybe a Republican Congress in 2017 would hold President Hillary Clinton to it.Please check the column out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

The New York Times Science section carries a review by Abigail Zuger M.D. of a book, The Death of Cancer, by Vincent T. DeVita Jr., an oncologist who is a former director of the National Cancer Institute, a former director of the Yale Cancer Center, and a former physician in chief at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. From the review:

The regulatory caution of the Food and Drug Administration has been a thorn in his side for decades: "I'd like to be able to say that as cancer drugs have become increasingly more complex and sophisticated, the F.D.A. has as well. But it has not." In fact, he writes, "the rate-limiting step in eradicating cancer today is not the science but the regulatory environment we work in."

From today's column by Paul Krugman in the New York Times:

Rising demand for urban living by the elite could be met largely by increasing supply. There's still room to build, even in New York, especially upward. Yet while there is something of a building boom in the city, it's far smaller than the soaring prices warrant, mainly because land use restrictions are in the way.

And this is part of a broader national story. As Jason Furman, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, recently pointed out, national housing prices have risen much faster than construction costs since the 1990s, and land-use restrictions are the most likely culprit. Yes, this is an issue on which you don't have to be a conservative to believe that we have too much regulation.

I agree with Professor Krugman, which is something that doesn't happen very often.

Thanksgiving is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at Newsmax here.

A peanut glut "threatening to hand American taxpayers a near $2-billion bailout bill over the next three years" is the subject of a dispatch by Reuters:

U.S. farmers look set to keep producing more peanuts than Americans can consume, leaving taxpayers on the hook.

First, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is paying farmers most of the difference between the "reference price" of $535 per ton (26.75 cents per lb) and market prices, now below $400 per ton. A Nov. 18 report to Congress estimates such payments this year for peanuts exceed those for corn and soybeans by more than $100 per acre.

Secondly, government loan guarantees mean once prices fall below levels used to value their crops as collateral, farmers have an incentive to default on the loans and hand over the peanuts to the USDA rather than sell them to make the payments.

Micah Rosenbloom writes at TechCrunch:

Theranos' largest competitors, Quest Laboratories and LabCorp have combined revenues of over $13B per year. If all Theranos ever did was make that industry more convenient, faster, and prettier using standard tools, isn't that impressive enough on its own?

Asked another way, how is offering accurate, more convenient tests, at a lower cost, using industry-leading technology—while simultaneously spending tens of millions on R&D that could further reduce the cost, complexity, and pain of blood testing—a bad thing? That's a vision I'd invest in if given the chance (at the right valuation of course!)...

Theranos has been accused of a bait and switch because they use a competitor's lab equipment to run most of their tests. Is it a moral failing that Netflix is powered by Amazon Web Services? Netflix has figured out how to add value on the back of a direct competitor's infrastructure. Does this invalidate Netflix's business model?

At the Wall Street Journal's law blog, my former New York Sun colleague Jacob Gershman has coverage of Judge Alex Kozinski's highly newsworthy talk earlier this week at the Cato Institute.

United Health Care may stop offering insurance on the ObamaCare exchanges, USA Today reports:

The insurer's withdrawal from the Obamacare exchanges would force some 540,000 Americans to find coverage from another provider.
UnitedHealth downgraded its earnings forecast, bemoaning low growth projections for Obamacare enrollment and blaming the federal health care law for giving individuals too much flexibility to change plans....The average premium for medium-benefit plans offered to 40-year-old non-smokers is set to rise 10.1% in 2016, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Here's a rare presidential campaign issue that Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton all are on the same side of: they claim to prefer cute little "community banks" instead of Wall Street behemoths.

And, as can sometimes be the case in those unusual instances when there's a bipartisan consensus on an issue, the politicians are wrong.

Please read more in my column this week at Time.com/Money (here), the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

Scott Sumner has an interesting post about the "Scandinavian" economic model touted by Bernie Sanders. "The only Scandinavian country with an estate or inheritance tax is Denmark." Also, "the Nordic countries are really big on privatization and deregulation. How often do you hear progressives calling for those things? When was the last time you heard a progressive advocating Sweden's 100% nationwide school voucher program?" And "the Scandinavian countries have far lower corporate tax rates than America."

As usual, the American left wants to import the left-wing policies of Europe but not the more free-market-oriented policies.

From a New York Times dispatch about the appointment of Neel Kashkari as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis:

Mr. Kashkari is the third person this year appointed to lead a regional reserve bank, and all three of the new presidents previously worked at Goldman Sachs. The Philadelphia Fed in March appointed Patrick Harker, a former Goldman trustee, as its new president. The Dallas Fed in August selected Robert S. Kaplan, a former Goldman vice chairman.

Questions for the Republican presidential candidates are the topic of my column this week in advance of tonight's debate. Please check the column out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

The Washington Post has a good example of government inefficiency:

Heaving under mountains of paperwork, the government has spent more than $1 billion trying to replace its antiquated approach to managing immigration with a system of digitized records, online applications and a full suite of nearly 100 electronic forms.

A decade in, all that officials have to show for the effort is a single form that's now available for online applications and a single type of fee that immigrants pay electronically. The 94 other forms can be filed only with paper.

This project, run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was originally supposed to cost a half-billion dollars and be finished in 2013. Instead, it's now projected to reach up to $3.1 billion and be done nearly four years from now

The Pentagon is paying professional sports teams for those displays thanking the troops, NPR reports:

taxpayers paid $49,000 to the Milwaukee Brewers to allow the Wisconsin Army National Guard to sponsor the Sunday singing of "God Bless America." In another contract, the New York Jets were paid $20,000 to "recognize one to two New Jersey Army National Guard soldiers as hometown heroes."

Maybe this is a better use of recruiting money than spending on television ads. But you'd think the teams might be willing to do it for free, at least after September 11, 2001.

Ahmad Chalabi, who played an important role in liberating Iraq from the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, died this week. I wrote an article for the Daily News memorializing him that you can read here.