From our "Office Pool 2018" column, published December 25, 2017:
The big health care story is a) national alliance of nonprofit or academic hospitals in effort to counter negotiating power of insurance companies b) Distributors AmerisourceBergen and McKesson are each bought by drug companies anxious about Amazon and CVS/Aetna c) surprise bipartisan alliance between Ryan-Trump Republicans and Sanders-Warren Democrats aiming to help balance the federal budget by squeezing drug company profits and physician pay d) unexpected breakdown or hack of electronic medical records system.
The latest development in the ongoing war between the White House and the FBI is that the Trump administration is now proposing to demolish the Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C., that serves as FBI headquarters, and to replace it with a new building.
It is a prime piece of real estate. Perhaps Trump can figure out a way to save the taxpayers some money by putting a hotel, condo, or office building on the property, and moving the FBI to somewhere less expensive, like the Virginia or Maryland exurbs, or to some job-thirsty rustbelt location.
My column this week is in the form of a letter to the incoming president of Harvard, Lawrence Bacow:
One of your biggest challenges will be to figure out what to do about the fact that, to overstate it just a bit, the half of the country that voted for Trump basically hates Harvard. And it's not because they went to Yale.
Please check out the full column at the New York Sun here and at Newsmax here.
For a flavor of the wisdom of Harvard's newly announced next president, Lawrence Bacow, check out this video of him speaking at the University of California in April 2017 on the topic of presidential searches. There is so much wisdom here on the topic of academic leadership and leadership in general, and several of the lines are newly relevant, and perhaps even ironic, among them Bacow's observation that "you're never more popular than on the day of your inauguration."
From a New York Times Magazine article about the destruction of Chicago's Cabrini-Green public housing projects:
Even today, the federal government devotes three times as much each year to mortgage-interest deductions and other subsidies to the speculative real estate market — essentially public housing for homeowners — than to the entire annual budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The president's Council of Economic Advisers has released a new paper with some ideas about how to reduce the cost of prescription drugs without destroying incentives for innovation. I expect to have more to say about this later, but for now, the paper is worth a look for anyone interested in that issue.
An inner-circle aide to President Trump, Rob Porter, resigned earlier this week, and his two failed earlier marriages are now front-page news in the New York Times.
The story is sad for many reasons, starting with the reported treatment of the ex-wives and including the downfall of Porter, who had an impressive background as a Rhodes Scholar, former chief of staff to Senator Hatch, and son of Roger Porter, a big deal Harvard professor and former White House official who was Master of Dunster House.
Barry Bluestone, a professor at Northeastern University who was the founding dean of its public policy school, was caught on video saying about President Trump, "Sometimes I want to just see him impeached...Other times, quite honestly, I hope there are no FBI agents here, I wouldn't mind seeing him dead."
When contacted by the Boston Globe, the professor said he doesn't condone violence and opposes assassinating the president, Boston 25 News reports.
And the universities wonder why their endowments are getting hit with new taxes and their admissions practices are getting investigated.
Many documents and electronic media collected in Afghanistan land on the shelves of a unit in the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism division. The materials, which are stored in federal facilities in Northern Virginia and at F.B.I. Headquarters in Washington, have been a vexing problem for the agency. American officials have long wanted to exploit the materials but lacked the resources as the F.B.I. has focused on other pressing terrorism investigations over the years.
Maybe if the FBI spent less time and money dining with journalists to leak grand jury information about insider trading investigations, wiretapping phone calls between money managers and their spouses, wiretapping Trump campaign volunteers, or pursuing bogus insider trading cases, it would have more "resources" to devote to counterterrorism.
The New York Times website was leading with charts of the Standard & Poor's 500 Stock Index "over the last year" and "the last week." If your investment time horizon is longer-term than that, you might want to take a look at this chart from J.P. Morgan Chase's quarterly guide to the markets:
That chart, covering the stock market since 1900, includes two long booms, from roughly 1950 to 1970 and from roughly 1980 to 2000. You might even look at it as one long 1950 to 2000 boom, with a decade-long exception known as the 1970s. By comparison, the post-financial-crisis rally that some people say is getting old may be really just getting started. The long term trend has been up. That trend could always change, of course — "past performance is not indicative of future returns," it says at the bottom of the chart. But sometimes stepping back and looking at the longer term story helps provide some useful perspective.
The Mulvaney and Nunes memos and the rule of law are the topic of my column this week. Please check the full column out at the New York Sun (here) and Newsmax (here).
The aftermath of the 2016 election is prompting something of a long overdue housecleaning at the FBI.
Director James Comey was fired. Deputy director Andrew McCabe retired. FBI agent Pete Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page were reassigned after their text messages were exposed. The House Intelligence Committee has released, over the bureau's objections, the Nunes memo faulting the bureau for "abuses" in its application to wiretap a Trump campaign aide.
So long as Congress and the Trump White House are taking a look at FBI shenanigans, let them not forget the case of Supervisory Special Agent David Chaves.
Damon Linker has a smart piece in the New York Times book review that ends, in part:
For many liberals, politics involves bureaucratic administration, the management of government benefits and the jostling of interest groups. One party or coalition tweaks the numbers in one direction, another nudges them a different way. Such fiddling with policy is a good part of modern politics. But it's not the whole of politics. At a more elemental level, the one to which Aristotle directed much of his attention, politics is about more existential issues: this bounded community in this place with this history and heritage, determining its own character for itself, deciding who is and who is not a citizen, who will rule and in the name of which vision of the good life.
Elisabeth Rosenthal writes in the New York Times: "Medicare, by law, is not allowed to negotiate discounts on drug prices. But you can bet Amazon-JPMorgan-Berkshire will."
For what it's worth, the pharmaceutical industry calls the claim that Medicare can't negotiate drug discounts a "myth." It points out that the Medicare prescription drug benefit is administered through pharmacy benefit managers that "already negotiate discounts and rebates with the manufacturers."
I did check the text of the law, the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003. It does include this language:
It's been our occasional practice, verging on habit, around here to publish an annotated version of the State of the Union Address. Here is one from 2015, and one from 2013. Why should President Trump be spared the same treatment we gave President Obama? So here goes, with my comments interspersed in brackets throughout and at the end:
THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, the First Lady of the United States, and my fellow Americans:
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