Drug Prices in the US vs. Canada – The Big Pharma Political Connection of Corporatist Democrats

Guest Post by Jesse

This is a slide used by Bernie Sanders when he proposed making drug imports from Canada to the US legal.

The proposal was voted down in the Senate 52-46, with a few key Democrats helping overturn Bernie’s proposed legislation.

Among those voting against it was the recipient of big pharma campaign contributions Democratic rising star Cory Booker.

Booker used the Big Pharma talking point that ‘the bill did not include provisions requiring the protections of the FDA.’

Continue reading “Drug Prices in the US vs. Canada – The Big Pharma Political Connection of Corporatist Democrats”

Why millennials are supporting Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders

The ‘wasted generation’ may not bother voting, for good reason

 

Reuters

One year from now, we’ll elect a new president. It’ll be the first opportunity for what I call the wasted generation to vote—not that many will bother. What do I mean by wasted generation?

I’m talking about the 15.6 million Americans born between 1995 and 1999 — the first generation of the post-World War II era to grow up in a land of diminished economic expectations, corrosive cynicism and institutional distrust.

Think about it. Born during the petty, partisan end of the Clinton era, they were barely out of their diapers when the towers fell on 9/11 and elementary, middle school and high schoolers while their country fought, at the same time, the two longest wars in its history. They came into the world just as their parents’ incomes were probably peaking — median wages, adjusted for inflation, topped out in 1998 and 1999 — and their Moms and Dads have since been squeezed by the two most devastating stock collapses since the Great Depression and a housing collapse of historic proportions. Now they’re heading off to college or already there, and can expect to rack up nearly $29,000 in debt before even graduating.

Older Americans may remember better times. But for this group—and tens of millions born after them—it’s all they’ve known. Cynicism, war, economic stagnation—this is their “normal.” This is what we have bequeathed them. Is it any wonder polls show that young Americans don’t trust government or big corporations? They don’t trust organized religion. They don’t trust us—the media—either, and I don’t blame them.

Continue reading “Why millennials are supporting Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders”

WHERE’S OUR GAS SAVINGS?

I understand the concept of lag effect, but this seems a little extreme. Does it seem that when the price of oil goes up, gas prices go up immediately? And when oil prices fall, gas prices don’t fall as rapidly? Your feeling is confirmed by the facts. We’ve had quite a roller coaster ride of oil and gas prices this year.

The first chart shows gas prices bottoming around April 1 at $2.38 per gallon. Oil prices were at $48 per barrel. Oil reached $61 per barrel on June 24. That was a 27% increase in less than three months. Gasoline prices rose to $2.80 by June 24. That 17% rise tracked the oil price rise almost to the penny when you take the gasoline taxes out of the equation. The oil companies did not eat any of the price increase in oil. They passed it along to you immediately.

It’s been a different story on the way down. Oil has fallen from $61 per barrel on June 24 to $44.50 today. That happens to be a 27% decrease in about six weeks. Meanwhile, the price of gasoline has only drifted down to $2.63, a miniscule 6% drop. Why hasn’t it dropped 18%? It went up 18% when oil rose by 27%. It seems the oil companies aren’t quite as flexible when prices are dropping. They have executive bonuses to pay themselves. They are so busy firing thousands of employees, they haven’t had time to reduce prices at the pump. The screwing will continue until morale improves.

WHY ISN’T GASOLINE $1.75 PER GALLON?

The price of oil topped out at $107 per barrel in June of 2014. The price of gasoline topped out at $3.70 per gallon in June of 2014. The price of oil currently stands at $50 per barrel, 53% below its June price.

I read story after story about record U.S. production, a huge glut in storage, and predictions of even lower oil prices. If this is so, why are national gasoline prices still at $2.39 per gallon? That is only 35% lower than the peak in June. The last time I checked, oil is the only key ingredient in gasoline. If gasoline prices tracked the decline in oil prices, it should be 27% cheaper than the $2.39 they are selling it for today.

How come the average American gets screwed no matter what happens in the markets? The price of oil is the same as it was in November, but gas prices have surged by 18%. Who benefits? Who is winning?

Goldman Sachs and the rest of the Wall Street shysters, along with Big Oil, have it rigged in their favor. You are just a pawn in their game.


SCREWED GENERATION

Does the entitlement/welfare/ warfare state benefit the Boomers or the Millenials? Has the massive consumer and government debt accumulated over the last 30 years benefitted the Boomers or the Millenials? Who will vote in massive numbers to keep the status quo? Who didn’t save enough for their retirement so they are not leaving the workforce, keeping young people out of the workforce? Who gets sent to die in wars started and managed by Boomers? During Fourth Turnings the Prophet Generation is supposed to lead and the Hero generation is supposed to follow and do the heavy lifting. Not too much leadership coming from the Prophet generation, just finger pointing, greed and blaming the youth for their own sins. Yes, Boomers have earned their reputation as the Shallowest Generation.

Older generations to the young: Drop dead

The acronym NEET first gained wide exposure last August, when riots blamed on young people “Not in Employment, Education or Training” broke out in London’s Tottenham district. It’s a useful term, particularly with youth unemployment fueling the angst over the European debt crisis.

The NEET rate among those 15 to 24 years of age is 19 percent in Italy, 18 percent in Greece and 17 percent in Spain and Ireland. In the United States, it’s almost 15 percent, according to figures compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Urban development expert Joel Kotkin has another term for this group of young people: “The Screwed Generation.” Writing at his website NewGeography.com, Mr. Kotkin calls these young people “the victims of expansive welfare states and the massive structural debt charged by their parents.”

Mr. Kotkin has a knack for a blunt phrase. In 2004, when he was at Pepperdine University in California, he was hired by the Greater St. Louis Economic Development Council to study how St. Louis could attract young professionals and entrepreneurs. Mr. Kotkin had some useful recommendations, few of which were remembered after he told a Post-Dispatch editorial board meeting, “Your downtown sucks.”

His view of the dim prospects facing today’s young people is rooted not just in NEET numbers, but in studies that show many college graduates are struggling to find full-time employment at a living wage. One study of 444 recent graduates by the Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University showed that only 51 percent of graduates of four-year colleges between 2006 and 2011 had found full-time employment. Twenty percent had gone back to graduate or professional school, but the rest were working part-time or not at all.

Data from the 2010 census show the number of unemployed young people, age 16 to 29, declined 18 percent between 2000 and 2010 to its lowest point since World War II. Nearly 6 million Americans aged 25 to 34 are living with their parents, up 25 percent since 2007. Among families with heads of household younger than 30, the the poverty rate was 37 percent.

Ninety-four percent of them came out of college carrying at least some debt; the median debt load for graduates of public universities was $18,690. It was $24,460 for private university graduates.

It’s not just that companies have been slow to expand, it’s that older workers are staying on the job longer, working at least until full Social Security and Medicaid benefits become available. These are benefits that young people will be taxed for (assuming they get work) but, given long-term budget outlooks, may not be available in 40 years.

And not only are older Americans hogging the jobs and the benefits, they’re voting in large numbers against changing the calculus. Having enjoyed the benefits of post-war prosperity, many older Americans don’t want to pay the debts they’ve incurred, much less preserve benefits, repair the infrastructure or fix global warming.

Screwed is right.

In the 2008 presidential election, record numbers of 18- to 24-year-old voters turned out at the polls. They may not match that 49 percent turnout this year. Their elders vote at rates of up to 70 percent.

It’s easy to understand why America’s NEETs and debt-burdened college graduates would be disenchanted with politics. But they really can’t afford to take the year off.

Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/the-platform/editorial-older-generations-to-the-young-drop-dead/article_68af2bc2-55be-5273-802c-972fc54cde72.html#ixzz1xIkNqnPa

GENERATION SCREWED

Neil Howe with another thought provoking post. He posted this on the same day that a Millenial named James Holmes committed one of the most horrific mass murders in history. Howe’s description of Millenial beliefs and hopes fits perfectly with my thesis about why Holmes snapped. Millenials have very traditional views on success and the American Dream. They believe education will lead to a good job, which will lead to a good income and a nice house in the burbs. Well reality sucks. Howe doesn’t address the current state of affairs, but shifts the discussion to the 2020s when Millenials may get the chance to succeed. That doesn’t cut it in my book. How do the Millenials get through the next ten or fifteen years with staggering student loan debt, lack of good jobs, miniscule income and no chance to buy a house? What does this do to their beliefs and minds? We’ve seen what it did to James Holmes. How many more Millenials will snap?

I was happy to find out that my Generation is actually the most screwed. But that’s alright, we expected it. Gen X relishes being crapped on. We don’t expect much and our expectations keep getting met.

Howe seems to have his own cognitive dissonance. His own books reveal clearly that Fourth Turnings are always violent and bloody, but he doesn’t seem to want to go there. Even when I met him, he didn’t want to talk about that aspect of the current Fourth Turning. I believe the levels of getting screwed that are happening in our society will lead to violence, social unrest and civil war in this country. But I’m Gen X and always expect the worst.

 

Generation Screwed and Unscrewed

Are Millennials the Screwed Generation?” asks Joel Kotkin in Newsweek.  A professor of urban studies and an astute observer of social trends, Kotkin answers his own question in the affirmative.

He describes a gauntlet of economic challenges facing today’s under-30 Americans that are, I think, pretty well known to readers of this blog.  Some of the adverse trends he cites are mostly of recent (post-2008) origin: High unemployment, falling real median personal and household income, falling median household net worth, a sharply rising share who are living with their parents, a falling share who own their own homes, and (symptomatically) a sharp decline in birthrates by younger moms.

Yet other trends prejudicial to youth, most of which he mentions, have been underway for much longer: a declining national saving rate; rising fiscal deficits; college tuitions rising faster than family incomes; a widening spread between the relative wealth and income of older versus young households; and the steady rise in the share of public spending that goes to the entitled old (pensions, health care)—versus a declining share that goes to future-oriented investment (infrastructure, research, education).

Sounds depressing, I know.  But the reason I emphasize how long many of these trends have been at work is to cast a bit of doubt on whether Millennials are really as screwed as all that.  Keep in mind that back in the early 1980s, many economists and policymakers commented on the “declining fortunes” of late-wave Boomers who came of age during the energy crises and stagflation.  At the time, experts thought that demographic size was the problem: Numbers-driven competition among young workers was depressing Boomer incomes.

Then came the early 1990s, when economists discovered that Gen-Xers–often, at that time, called “Busters”–were even more screwed than Boomers.  (Since there were relatively few of these Busters, the demographic explanation was quietly dropped.)  From the very beginning, a “reality bites” fatalism about diminished economic possibilities emerged as a cornerstone this generation’s very self-image.  Over the next twenty years, as first-wave Gen-Xers moved into their 30s and then their 40s, evidence of “living-standard decline” in their age brackets (despite two-income households and working around the clock) has steadily mounted.

So is there still a good case for calling Millennials yet more “screwed” than these two older generations?  I suppose one could argue that Millennials are uniquely penalized because the adverse trends cited above—savings decline, young-old divide, fiscal bias, etc.—are more advanced and pronounced today than when Xers or Boomers were young.  One could also point to the extreme severity of the recent recession’s impact on youth—for example, the highest unemployment rate over the most months for young adults than during any downturn since the Great Depression.  We know from abundant economic research, starting with Glen Elder’s great book (Children of the Great Depression) that extended unemployment early in life has an impact on future income that lasts long into a person’s career.

On the other hand, of course, one would have to note the even harsher impact of the Great Recession on Gen-Xers and late-wave Boomers (households today age 30 to 60), as I pointed out in my earlier blog post.  And who hurts most during a great famine—the guy who thinks he might someday have a home and kids, or they guy who actually has a home and kids?

One would also have to weigh in the balance certain collective advantages Millennials have enjoyed early in life that their elders did not.  These include arriving as newborns in an era when mothers were more likely to say their newborn was “wanted” and growing up in an era when parents and families (if not always government) spent more time with them, more money on them, spurred them to achieve, and protected them more from harm.  Today, as a result, Millennials have become a generation of youth who commit less crime, cooperate more with each other, take fewer personal risks, and get along much better with their parents.  They are also on track to have the highest educational attainment ever (following college completion rates that actually backtracked for late-wave Boomers and early-wave Gen-Xers).

What’s more, most Millennials already know that history favors them.  Interesting factoid: When asked if being a young person is harder today than it was when your parents were kids, a growing majority of young people since the late 1990s say no, it’s actually easier being a kid today—after decades of polls (in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and early ‘90s) that leaned the other way, with Boomers and Xers bemoaning, year after year, how much harder being a kid is for them.

Kotkin asserts that this generation still believes in a very conventional definition of life success—most aspiring to a stable career and to owning a home in the suburbs.  I agree.  The data I’ve seen point in the same direction.  My favorite recent survey on this topic is the 2011 MetLife Study of the American Dream, which shows that Millennials are significantly more likely than Xers or Boomers to say that a college degree, acquiring wealth, owning a home, and (yes!) even marriage is “essential” to realizing the American Dream.  Most Millennials have a fairly concrete idea of what they want in life, together with benchmarks for getting there, and thus far most surveys (admittedly, not the depressing Rutgers survey cited by Kotkin) indicate that they remain confident that they will someday get there.

But to me, the most persuasive argument for not regarding Millennials as America’s most “screwed” generation is simply this: They are still young.  Even if the economy continues to deteriorate, a steady recovery that gets underway by the early 2020s will still save the future for most of them.  At roughly age 20 to 40, in this case, most Millennials will still be able to launch successful careers in an expanding economy.  Moreover, they will be able to buy homes at record-low prices and buy stock portfolios at record-low P/E ratios.  Which means, by the time they fully occupy midlife in the late 2040s (at roughly age 45 to 65), they may be doing far better at that time, relative to other generations, than people that age are doing today.

So who really is the most screwed generation?  When it comes to aggregate economic security and upward mobility, I think the most screwed generation already know who they are: Generation X.  Consider the scenario described above.  More chaos followed by a steady recovery starting a decade from now would come too late for most Xers—who by then (their first-wavers hitting their early 60s and thinking about retirement) may be looking at senior benefits programs whose generosity has just been cut way back in the name of fiscal austerity and renewed economic growth.  Any Xer protest is likely to be weak and ineffectual.  Most Boomers will be grandfathered, and most of the public’s attention will be focused on saving America’s future for the Millennials.

As Bill and I forecast twenty years ago back in 13th-Gen (I’ve changed the “13ers” here to “Gen-Xers”):

Reaching midlife, the Gen-Xers’ economic fears will be confirmed: They will become the only generation born this century (the first since the Gilded) to suffer a one-generation backstep in living standards.  Compared to their own parents at the same age, the Xers’ poverty rate will be higher, their rate of homeownership lower, their pension and healthcare benefits skimpier.  They will not match the Boomers’ inflation-adjusted levels of disposable income or wealth, at the same age.  Gen-Xers will also experience a much wider distribution of income and wealth than today’s older generations, with startling proportions either falling into destitution or shooting from rags to riches…  Finding their youthful dreams broken on the shoals of market-place reality, Xers will internalize their disappointment.  Around the year 2020, accumulated “hard knocks” will give midlife Xers much of the same gritty determination about life that they gave the midlife Lost during the Great Depression or the Gilded during Reconstruction.

Twenty years later, I think this prediction still stands.  As I read back over it, the only adjustment I would make is to say “early-wave Boomers” where we wrote “Boomers.”  But now let me move on to something else about Xers—the fact that the economy will recover, in part, precisely because Generation X chooses not to insist on its rightful public entitlement in old age.  We wrote about that in 13th-Gen, as well:

Nor will Gen-Xers ever effectively organize or vote in their own self-interest.  Instead, they will take pride in what they don’t receive, in their lifelong talent for getting by on their own, and in their ability to divert government resources to help the young.  Policy experts who today worry about the cost of Social Security and Medicare past the year 2025 seldom reflect on the political self-image of those who will then be entering their late sixties.  Entitled “senior citizens”?  Hardly.  Like Lost Generation elders in 1964–who voted more for Goldwater than any younger generation even after he promised to slash their retirement benefits—old Xers will feel less deserving of public attention than richer and smarter young people who lack their fatalism about life.

Even back in 1993 we had the concepts of generational archetypes firmly in mind.  As readers of The Fourth Turning know, Gen-Xers belong to same (Nomad) archetype as the Lost Generation.  The location in history of both generations, which manifests so many obvious parallels early in life, will continue (I think) to track each other moving forward.  Who is getting hurt worst in the current age of stagnation and deleveraging?  Late-wave Boomers (born after 1950) to some extent, mostly by have their home and retirement assets values hit hard; Generation X most of all; and early-wave Millennials to some extent, mostly by delayed career starts.  Who got hit worst in the Great Depression?  Late-wave Missionaries (born after 1870) to some extent, mainly by losing their savings in failed banks in the early 1930s; the Lost Generation most of all; and early-wave G.I.s to some extent, mostly by having their careers put on hold until VE- and VJ-Day.  Same archetypes, same patterns.

Koktin points out that today’s hard times are pushing most Millennials in the developed world politically toward the left—that is, toward a greater commitment to national collective action by government.  We’ve witnessed this trend in every election globally since 2008—including of course the massive 2-to-1 margin by U.S. Millennials for Obama in 2008.  (In the fall of 2012, U.S. Millennials will almost certainly give another large margin for Obama, but it will be smaller than in 2008 and whether it will be enough to win the election is uncertain; this is an issue I will handle in a future post.)

These political trends also have interesting parallels in the last saeculum.  The Lost Generation, as we document in Generations and The Fourth Turning, leaned Republican and libertarian all its life.  The Lost hated President Wilson for the fiasco of World War I; voted heavily for Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover (though it turned against Hoover with the Bonus Army); comprised the most visible and colorful opponents of FDR; and voted GOP after WWII all the way to Goldwater.  The party valence turned sharply the other way, however, for cohorts born after 1900—those who missed WWI, who belonged (like John Steinbeck) to entirely different artistic circles than the likes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and who were disposed to mobilize around a new trust in community after the Crash of ‘29.

Although no one collected age-graded polling back in the 1930s, some historians estimate that a very large majority—perhaps 85 percent—of voters under age 35 voted for FDR and the Democratic Party in 1936.  It is widely agreed that this is the first election in which a clear majority of young African-Americans voted for the Democratic Party rather than the party of Abraham Lincoln.  Consulting our own American Leadership Database, we are able to confirm that 28 out of 32 (88 percent) of G.I. senators, representatives, and governors sent to Congress in 1936 were Democrats.  By 1940, 75 percent of incoming G.I.s were still Democrats.

Read the numbers, Republicans, and weep.  That is, unless your new Mormon, whiz-kid, C-suite candidate is able to project a stronger, more hands-on image of strong national leadership than Barack Obama—which may not be setting the bar too high.  Anything is possible.

One last point.  To most Millennials, the whole whiney victimization card (look at me, I’m screwed!) seems like such a stale trope of Boomers and Gen-Xers, that they instinctively recoil from it.  And right on cue, a bona fide Millennial offers a cocky and defiant reply to Kotkin in the Washington Post (“Generation Unscrewed”)—though in a sardonic (“It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)”) tone that may leave all generations mystified.