Saturday Links

Posted on by John C. Goodman

How parents decide when and how to punish their children. It’s similar to the principles of criminal law.

Reducing carbon emissions through subsidies (the Biden/IRA approach) costs 6 times as much as a carbon tax.

Why the Medicare Trustees report is too optimistic: It assumes the birth rate in the long-run will increase to a nearly full native replacement of 2.0 children per woman, despite a steady and now long-standing fall to around 1.65.

80% of new treatments in the pharmaceutical pipeline originate in the U.S. That’s been a Godsend for the more than 55 million people living with dementia across the globe, the tens of millions worldwide who will receive a cancer diagnosis, and the more than 38 million people living with HIV.

David Henderson’s proposal to cut Medicare spending: offer beneficiaries cash instead of a benefit in kind. I would offer everyone approved for elective surgery half the DRG rate in cash as an alternative. This is actually how some European countries handle long term care.

2 thoughts on “Saturday Links”

  1. I am certainly not a doctor, but I would offer the following caution on the proposal about “cashing out” elective surgeries…..

    namely, that some of these surgeries address conditions that could worsen if they are not addressed. The patient who takes cash may come to deeply regret their decision….and they may have no recourse at that point.

    However: I was an actuarial student, and in that capacity I would contend that the Henderson proposal could be destructive. Insurance of any kind, public or private, involves the creation of a pool of money, to deal with events and conditions that no single individual can bear.

    If healthy people can just take their Medicare money and waive coverage, all it will take is one event like Covid to collapse the insurance pool altogether.

    Reply

  2. Federal tax expenditures for residential real estate are around $200 billion annually, or at least they will be when the TTJA expires in 2026. The main purpose of these seems to be to incentivize the purchase of ever-larger McMansions in the exurbs, with increasingly longer commutes.

    Using either carbon taxes or targeted subsidies to offset the environmental costs of existing tax policy seems a bit like driving with one foot on the brake and the other on the accelerator. Although in the case of the Inflation Reduction Act subsidies, a better analogy might be a dual-motor Tesla with the two motors being actively powered in opposite directions.

    Reply

Join the conversation.