Healthcare expenditures are about 8% of average expenditures by Americans. Food is 12%, transportation is 16%. Housing is 34%. Maybe you can argue that healthcare prices have the most scope for reduction, but it's literally incorrect to say that healthcare is "the big expense in our lives".
cyd
joined 2 years ago
Ad hominem aside, TheSanSabaSongbird's basic point, that price controls are an economically illiterate idea, is right. Prices are an economy's way of signalling scarcity, so messing with that signal prevents the underlying problem from being solved. Inflation has to be tackled through monetary and fiscal policy; the alternative approach, micromanaging prices, is how you get to the economy of Argentina.
Picking out one price rise, and calling it out because it's higher than the average inflation rate, is silly. Since inflation is the rise in the price level, averaged over all goods, almost by definition there will be some prices rising by more than average (and others less than average).
In fact, it's well known that inflation hits very unevenly across different prices in an economy. The 1970s inflationary episode, for example, started with gas prices going up due to the oil embargo, before bleeding through into other prices. There are entire fields of economics dedicated to looking at inflation through different segments of the economy, precisely because price rises can be so uneven.
The bigger issue is that inflation is a problem of monetary and fiscal policy, which means pointing to greed is totally beside the point. Inflation was quiescent during the 2010s, and it's not like people and companies were magically non-greedy during that period.
The US government has given itself far reaching powers over such matters. International investments of strategic importance must go through a government committee (CFIUS), which decides for itself what "strategic importance" means. The government can also compel individuals, e.g. it has banned US citizens outside the US from working for Chinese semiconductor firms. A lot of this is done at the executive level, with no legislative oversight and no avenue for recourse by affected parties.
The idea of the US government staying in its lane, away from private sector affairs, is pretty much dead and buried at this point.
He's gonna be campaigning in Nebraska?
“China can draw on a talent pool of 1.3 billion people, but the United States can draw on a talent pool of 7 billion and recombine them in a diverse culture that enhances creativity in a way that ethnic Han nationalism cannot.”
-- Lee Kuan Yew
If anything, the repressed and defensive China of Xi Jinping is falling ever further behind.
After all the angst and drama over whether Turkey will allow Sweden into NATO, it'd be hilarious if the accession gets sunk by Hungary.
Like, during the many months other NATO members were pressuring Turkey, no one thought they should worry about Hungary too?
I didn't know it was already settled law. But in that case, why are models like llama still released under licenses? If they are non-copyrightable, licenses should be unenforceable and therefore irrelevant.
Fun fact: Chevron deference emerged from the Reagan era conservative movement, and was originally used to justify giving federal agencies leeway to waive regulations as part of the Reaganite push for freer markets.
Neil Gorsuch's mom ran the EPA during this time and was part of this Chevron deference-enablef deregulatory push.
Do they have permission from the Iraqi government, which is after all supposed to be a friendly government? Or is this another case of sovereignty not mattering when it's inconvenient for the US? (Won't even bother asking about Syria.)