The View from Right Field

Waiving IP for Vaccines – Or Actually Doing Good

The Biden administration has, perhaps not surprisingly, agreed to support a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines.  It sounds good on the surface, but I can’t help but wonder if the better solution might be to just pay Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to make as many doses as they can as quickly as they can.  They know how to make these vaccines.  They have the best idea on how to ramp up production.  Instead of giving away IP to people and companies who may or may not know how to make these vaccines, why not just buy more doses from the people who do know how to make them. 

The United States could volunteer to pay the costs.¹  The total cost would probably disappear in the rounding with all of the programs the Biden administration is already proposing.  And giving away vaccines would be a great foreign policy move.  Russia can’t afford to do it, and China doesn’t have vaccines that work as well as these.  But we do can it.  We can help the world.  And that’s something you do when you can.

Spending Lots; Doing a Little Good

Nancy Pelosi famously¹ said of Obamacare that you had to pass it to see what was in it.  It appears that was true of Joe Biden’s first big Covid relief bill, too.  In January, I said this about President Biden’s proposed plan in a post entitled “Covid-19 Relief Ought to Be More Than Just Throwing Money Around Randomly”:

“A properly-targeted pandemic relief program wouldn’t waste money by giving it to people who don’t need help.  If we target the help where it is needed, there will be more money for the people who actually need help.  It’s not a matter of cutting costs; it’s a matter of having enough money to help those who really need it.”

Writing Constitutions – And Judging Those Who Write Them

This week’s Economist has a review of Linda Colley’s new book on the history of written constitutions, The Gun, the Ship and the Pen.  The book covers the writing of constitutions from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present.  According to the review:

“Above all, Ms Colley argues, the need for innovative, written constitutionalism was driven by the evolving nature of war. … Governments’ need for ever-more manpower to fight these wars – and ever-growing tax revenues to pay for them – led to crises at home that could only be tackled by the concession of new rights and promises of wider political participation. … 

House Values in Illinois

One of the problems with living in Illinois is that house prices values aren’t going up like they are in some other parts of the country.  But then, with so many people leaving Illinois (Illinois is one of the few states losing people each year), it’s logical.¹  With fewer people in Illinois, there are fewer people looking to buy houses; i.e., demand is lower.  With demand lower and supply staying the same (the houses aren’t leaving, just the people), it’s logical that prices aren’t going up as much as places where population is growing and people want to move.

One of the reasons people are leaving Illinois (and why others aren’t coming or returning) is our lousy state government.  As I have said elsewhere, Illinois has the worst credit rating of any state and has hundreds of billions of dollars of unfunded pension liability, not to mention billions of dollars of unpaid bills.  Why wouldn’t people want to leave – or not come?  Why not get away from that debt?  Why move to that debt?

The Return of Earmarks. Sigh.

It was sad last week to see Republicans in the House of Representatives giving up one of the real accomplishments on the last Republican House: the ban on earmarks.  In 2011, House Republicans passed a ban on earmarks, and since they wouldn’t approve earmarks, Congress couldn’t pass them and the President couldn’t sign them.  The entire Congress ultimately went along with the House Republicans, and in 2014, President Obama even said he would veto any bill containing earmarks.

The problems with earmarks were obvious.  Representatives and Senators were putting in specific appropriations for things they wanted done, not necessarily what needed to be done.  The more powerful a representative or senator was, the more money a district or state would get.  One of the most infamous earmarks was the $233 million “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska.¹

Can Washington Ignore the Coming Medicare Funding Crisis? Springfield Says Yes.

The Chicago Tribune last Friday had an Op-Ed by Robert Moffit on the coming insolvency in the Medicare trust fund.  The Congressional Budget Office has confirmed the Medicare trustees’ report that the fund, which covers hospitalization costs and related services, will run out of money in 2026.  Unlike Covid-19, this crisis has been obvious for years.  Paul Ryan was talking about it, and proposing plans to deal with it, more than a decade ago.  But Democrats ignored him and most Republicans did, too.  Especially once Donald Trump got nominated and elected.

But with date for insolvency of 2026, the headline on Mr. Moffit’s Op-Ed reads, “Washington can no longer ignore the coming Medicare crisis.”  Unfortunately, I think this underestimates our politicians in Washington.  The only choices in this situation are hard ones, and Washington has been ignoring this problem for years (as I said above), even though the solutions a decade ago would have been far easier.  I am sure the people in Washington can continue to ignore it.

If Government Wants Our Trust, It Needs to Follow Proper Process

Illinois recently adopted a law ending cash bail.  I’m not going to discuss the merits of the new law; that’s not the purpose of this post.  I want to talk about how the bill was passed because that says something important about Illinois and the way we are governed.

A law abolishing cash bail is a big deal.  You would think that there would be a lot of discussion about it.  And that those passing it would want the process to be proper and to be seen to be proper.

Vaccinated. What Now? A Follow-Up

On February 11, I asked, in a post entitled “What’s Next for the Virus? Shots, Restrictions, and Masks”:

“Once we get to that point, i.e., when there is enough vaccine for everybody, what does that mean about all the restrictions we have been living under?  What about social distancing?  Limits on restaurants?  Plays and concerts and sports?  Ultimately, what about masks?”

The Chicago Tribune had an article in Sunday’s paper: “After the second dose of vaccine, what’s next?”  People want to start doing things.  That’s one the reasons they are getting the vaccine, but the experts in the article seemed to say things won’t change that much:

Texas - and Illinois

Texas has been getting a lot of bad press lately.  I commented here last Thursday.  But Texas isn’t the only state that is messed up.  Here is a letter to the editor that was published in the Chicago Tribune yesterday:

“Comparing Texas, Illinois

The more I read of the problems in Texas, the more it sounds like Illinois.  Texas could have built a utility system that would have handled the recent cold weather.  We have windmills in Illinois that work in winter, and Manitoba in Canada has water systems that work.

Why Wasn’t Texas Ready for the Cold? Why Weren’t We Ready for Covid-19?

In talking about getting ready for the next coronavirus, etc., last April, I said this in my conclusion:

“Robustness.  Resiliency.  Nimbleness.  These are what we need if we are to be ready for the emergencies and disasters that will happen, though we don’t know which ones or when.” 

The problem is, however, as I said in December:

“Building robustness, resiliency, and nimbleness into our systems and our countries, and maintaining them over time, will cost money, a lot of it.”