Category: Government

Blocking their own web sites.

Earlier this week, the President said this about auto bailouts:

I refused to turn my back on a great industry and American workers. I bet on American workers. I bet on American manufacturing. Three years later, the American auto industry has come roaring back. And what happens in the auto industry can happen in other industries.

Please, please don’t do to other industries what has happened to GM. I don’t just mean the fuzzy math attached to the bailout repayments.

Despite President Barack Obama’s stories about a resurgent GM ready to repay its bailout tab, the automaker and its former bank still owe taxpayers nearly $42 billion, according to an inspector general’s report.

GM owes $27 billion on the nearly $50 billion it received from the auto bailout and Ally Bank, the company’s lending arm, owes $14.7 billion of the $17.2 billion taxpayer-funded bailout it received.

I mean that I hope other American industries don’t start making products as terrible as General Motors. To say they are roaring back has a slightly different meaning after my recent experience renting a Chevy for four days.

My first car was a 1999 Chevy Cavalier. It was a former rental, but it served me exceptionally well. That thing took me up and down the East Coast constantly for years. I sold it to my aunt when I needed to upgrade to something larger, and I believe she only recently replaced it. My mother had a matching Chevy Cavalier, and she had a similar experience. Her car was only taken off the road after she sold it to my cousin who wrecked it. Needless to say, I was a big fan of Chevy even after I bought my Honda. I figured that if I ever went with an American car again, it would be a Chevy.

After renting a Chevy Aveo for the quick trip to Nashville and back, neither my mom or I will ever buy another General Motors product again. In fact, I told Hertz that if this is their new standard of smaller rental cars, then I won’t rent from them ever again, either. Roaring was a good term for what the inside of the car sounded like as we drove. The tiny gas tank had us pulling off just as often as if were driving one of our own SUVs. The seats were uncomfortable, and the car started shaking any time you took it above 75. It wasn’t any kind of maintenance issue with the car, it was just the car.

I beg you, Mr. President, please don’t ask other industries to model themselves after GM. I’d hate to see all American-made products go downhill so that customers actively seek out foreign brands. It’d hate it if that’s his idea of making the economy “work.”

Clayton Cramer takes a look at the capacity of our mental health system, and notes that even recently, there’s been a precipitous decline. I’m guessing this is because states are running out of other people’s money and turning mental patients out onto the street is an easy way to save money. One interesting thing to know would be to understand how mental health services compare in Europe. I don’t think you can use cross country comparisons to draw absolute and firm conclusions, but I do think they can be useful.

Dave Hardy notes that the new boss ain’t much different from the old. In other news, it seems if I don’t post, someone else won’t come along and do it for me. Who knew?

It’s rare that I call for government intervention, but because government already raises the cost of drug development to such stratospheric heights, if they don’t do something to encourage new antimicrobial drugs to be developed, we’re going to be very very screwed. By the time this rises to the level of a real crisis (e.g. when there are enough sick people dying of diseases that haven’t been lethal for years) it’ll already be too late, and you’ll be waiting a decade or more before any effort started at the point of a crisis come to fruition.

The problem is this: new antibiotics are difficult to find, and any new antibiotic that would hit the market is practically guaranteed to be held in reserve for infections that can’t be treated by current antibiotics. The market will tend to be small. Because of these market realities, there have only been two novel classes of antibiotics produced in the past 40 years.

I would suggest a prize of sufficient size to guarantee a hefty return on investment to any research team or company that can successfully bring a new class of antibiotic to market, and that has a reasonable safety and pharmacological profile. For libertarians that are uncomfortable with government involvement with the market, you can justify it with the fact that antimicrobials are a critical component of our war fighting capacity as a nation. There’s definitely a military justification to spawn new development. The fact is that without some kind of incentive, new antibiotics just are not going to be developed, and I don’t think you’ll have any luck convincing the American people to drop the FDA requirements that raise the barriers for new drugs entering the market. A prize is the most efficient way to deal with this kind of problem.

From Jim Geraghty:

But we shouldn’t imagine Harkin is some financial genius or wheeler-dealer… “Harkin credits his wealth largely to his wife, telling The Des Moines Register this month that “I don’t know squat about investing money.” … says the man on the Senate Appropriations Committee, directing billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars.

God help us.

Why are Republicans so bad at picking Supreme Court Justices?