Thursday, November 21

Tag: commentaries

Biden’s $3.1 Billion Train Ticket to Nowhere
2Jan By adminNo Comments
Health

Biden’s $3.1 Billion Train Ticket to Nowhere

It didn’t get a lot of attention, but last month the White House awarded $3.1 billion to the California High-Speed Rail project. This was supposed to be a bullet train connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles in less than three hours. Instead, its costs keep rising even as the state scales back the plan. Since 2008, when California voters authorized a $10 billion bond issue for the train, they’ve been sold a bill of goods.The original total estimated construction cost to taxpayers was $33 billion. That’s risen to at least $100 billion. The authority decided to offer service between San Francisco and Los Angeles in Phase I, then eventually extend the train service north to Sacramento and south to San Diego. Phase I was to have been completed by 2020. Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company...
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Xi Jinping Says Happy New Year
2Jan By adminNo Comments
Business

Xi Jinping Says Happy New Year

China’s Supreme Leader Xi Jinping offered his traditional New Year’s greeting Monday with a warning. “The reunification of the motherland is a historical inevitability,” Mr. Xi said, according to the Chinese-language version documented by various news sources.“Compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose and share in the glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” he added. The official English translation wrote “all Chinese” rather than “compatriots,” according to a Reuters dispatch.Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
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Double Dipping in Opioid Lawsuits
2Jan By adminNo Comments
Health

Double Dipping in Opioid Lawsuits

The plaintiffs bar never met a business it wouldn’t sue, and now the lawyers are using government authority to pursue private interests. In their latest business model, trial lawyers are hired by state attorneys general to help prosecute public lawsuits then use it to the advantage of their private lawsuits. Kudos to one company for pushing back. In December pharmacy benefit manager OptumRx filed a motion in federal court in Ohio to disqualify Motley Rice, a South Carolina plaintiffs firm suing the company in multidistrict opioid litigation. Motley has been retained by state attorneys general and city prosecutors in Washington, D.C., Hawaii and Chicago to handle the government’s litigation, but it continues to represent private clients in related litigation.Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones &...
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Tariffs and the Common Man
2Jan By adminNo Comments
Business

Tariffs and the Common Man

With Donald Trump leading the 2024 polls while calling for a 10% universal tariff, the new GOP protectionists are trying to sell this idea as a boon for the working class. The evidence exposes this folly: Trade wars invite painful retaliation, prop up politically favored industries at the expense of others, and raise prices on consumers like an invisible tax. They hurt the average worker.The economic literature on this point is voluminous. To pick one place to start, here was the conclusion of a study of Mr. Trump’s last trade wars, written in 2019 by two Federal Reserve economists: “We find that U.S. manufacturing industries more exposed to tariff increases experience relative reductions in employment as a positive effect from import protection is offset by larger negative effects from r...
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Xenophobia Drives Foes of Nippon Steel’s Deal
1Jan By adminNo Comments
Health

Xenophobia Drives Foes of Nippon Steel’s Deal

Election-year jitters have the Biden administration and a few swing-state members of Congress from both parties parroting union concerns about Nippon Steel’s takeover of U.S. Steel. The United Steelworkers union favored Cleveland-Cliffs’s offer, which was almost 50% lower than Nippon’s $14.1 billion bid. There is no real cause for concern other than xenophobia and the damage it could do to Cleveland-Cliffs’s position as the sole U.S. producer of electrical steel for transformers and electric vehicles. The rest is imported.Nippon’s steelmaking is at least as advanced as U.S. Steel’s, so technology export control isn’t an issue. National security could be a concern if American mills were shutting down due to unfairly subsidized Japanese exports to the U.S. But Nippon never used gimmicks to ...
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John Fetterman Plays Against Type
1Jan By adminNo Comments
Business

John Fetterman Plays Against Type

West Mifflin, Pa.It’s a warm December morning, and Sen. John Fetterman is walking along the Great Allegheny Passage across the Monongahela River from his home in Braddock. “I spend as much time as I can out here,” he says of the trail, which runs 150 miles from downtown Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Md.Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
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Biden’s ‘Proportionate’ Defense of U.S. Troops Has Failed
1Jan By adminNo Comments
World

Biden’s ‘Proportionate’ Defense of U.S. Troops Has Failed

On Christmas Day, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that U.S. military forces conducted “proportionate” strikes against Iraqi militias that attacked and wounded American service members (“Biden Endangers U.S. Troops,” Review & Outlook, Dec. 27). The statement defines the equivocating, timid and wholly unsuccessful strategy of the Biden administration, but also of successive administrations for years.After nearly daily attacks on U.S. forces over months, resulting in dozens of wounded Americans, “proportionate” ought to have been revealed as having no deterrent value. It is past time for the U.S. to signal to those who attack our forces that they will pay disproportionately and severely. Continued attacks will see increasingly robust spankings. In this case, if the Iraqi governm...
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