…The TPP would lower the standard for patentability of medicines… force TPP governments to grant pharmaceutical companies additional patents for changes… [that] provide no therapeutic benefit… [thus] facilitat[ing] ‘evergreening’ and other forms of abuse of the patent system…. ‘Data exclusivity’… blocks competing firms from using previously generated clinical trial data to gain approval for generic versions of these drugs and vaccines. If pharmaceutical companies have their way, the TPP will block generic producers of biologics from entering the market for at least 12 years…. The Federal Trade Commission finds that no years of data exclusivity were necessary to promote innovation in biologic drugs. Twelve years of data exclusivity is not only unprecedented in any trade agreement, it is not the law in any of the TPP negotiating countries outside of the U.S…. The Obama Administration has actually called for data exclusivity to be reduced to seven years at home, so it is puzzling that the U.S. Trade Representative would be aggressively pushing for these terms in the TPP. These provisions and others currently included in the TPP are at direct odds with the U.S. government’s own long-standing commitments to global health…

…Austerity is unlikely to cure the British economy, but there’s not much reason to think fiscal stimulus would either…

…A union-led coalition of liberal groups launched a campaign to change Proposition 13, the iconic 1978 property tax limit, seeking billions more in revenue from commercial and industrial property owners. The coalition, Make It Fair, declared its intention to place a ‘split roll’ measure on the 2016 ballot, keeping Proposition 13’s limits in place for homes, residential rental properties and farms, but allowing upward revisions in taxable values on other properties. The ‘maybe’ qualifier is that… sponsors… indicated it would be dropped if many of the same groups decide to ask voters to extend Proposition 30, the temporary sales and income tax hike approved in 2012…

…that it may choose to switch to a state operated exchange, should that be necessary to preserve subsidies after a potential ruling adverse to these subsidies through the federally facilitated exchanges under King v. Burwell. The letter leaves open whether or not this is something Pennsylvania will do as well as the terms of a potential jointly operated exchange. Of course, all exchanges (federal or state) are jointly operated in the functional sense, since the back-of-the-house operations have to merge state-specific Medicaid enrollment standards with nationalized-standardized federally-operated exchange applications and subsidies.

On one level, I just don’t get it. Every exchange, to a certain extent, is state operated and federally operated…. Post-Burwell… other states [could] announce and then implement hybrid exchanges.  But isn’t that what they already are functionally?

…to finance development abroad, just like water should roll down a hill. Clearly that doesn’t square with the incredible amounts of cheap cash flowing into America, and the safe-asset squeeze (whether something that’s an actual market reality, or something that is an artifact of mercantilist/crisis-weary state policy) has a lot to do with it…. Foreign investors… are largely official, and have a single-minded interest in preventing the 1999 sort of debacle where a shortage of dollars resulted in… havoc…. American investors are almost exclusively private corporations that don’t have a shortage of dollar-assets, that almost never borrow in a foreign currency, and live in a world of really, really cheap basis trades. So private, social, and market valuations diverge…. The more simple description of the entire argument is that US treasuries provide a liquidity service to foreign governments and there is an inefficient shortage thereof. Or, even simpler, the US is a classical bank earning a profit on the spread between its borrowing and lending rates. Sometimes returns paint a more useful picture than valuations.

Arkansas: Medicaid expansion… cumulative savings of nearly $120 million by the end of fiscal year 2015, includ[ing] $72.9 million in savings within the Arkansas Medicaid program from moving people who previously received care under specialized Medicaid categories… into the expansion’s new eligibility group, for which the federal government pays the full cost…. The state expects to collect $34.4 million in new revenue… from taxes… producing a total gain for the state budget of over $150 million in 18 months.

Kentucky: Medicaid expansion saved Kentucky $25.8 million in fiscal year 2014, and is expected to lead to another $83.1 million in savings in fiscal year 2015… $30… on behavioral health programs, $16.4 million from spending less on inpatient hospital costs for prisoners, and $16.4 million from moving people who previously received Medicaid coverage through a medically needy spend-down program into the expansion’s new eligibility group.

Michigan: Medicaid expansion saved the state $180 million in fiscal year 2014 and is projected to save Michigan $190 million in the state’s current fiscal year…. In addition, the state projects two-year savings of $19.2 million in its corrections system, as the federal government now covers the costs of prisoners hospitalized outside the corrections system, as a result of the Medicaid expansion.

New Jersey: As a result of the Medicaid expansion, Governor Chris Christie’s fiscal year 2016 budget proposal spends $148 million less on charity care and $417 million less on beneficiaries previously covered at the state’s regular matching rate…. The state expects the latter category to result in nearly $3 billion in savings to the state through 2020.

New Mexico: New Mexico will save $60 million from 2014 to 2016 by transitioning low-income adults who were receiving Medicaid coverage through a waiver prior to health reform into the expansion eligibility group… an additional $15.3 million in the current fiscal year because of lower demand for state-funded behavioral health…. The state also collected $30 million in new revenue in 2014 and expects to collect another $30 million this year from its premium taxes….

Washington: Medicaid expansion saved Washington $105.5 million in fiscal year 2014, and the state expects to save an additional $286.6 million in fiscal year 2015… $64.6 million in reduced behavioral health… $147.9 million from transferring adults awaiting a disability determination for Supplemental Security Income… to Medicaid… [plus] a $33.9 million increase in premium tax revenue in fiscal year 2015….

…What I like best about Ben Carlson is that he is young and very savvy about not only investing but the tools of social and other forms of modern media like Twitter and Tumblr. Too many of the people I write about who are able to teach others about investing are, well, either old or very old. People like Ben Carlson, Patrick O’Shaughnessy, Morgan Housel, James Osborne and Josh Brown (the Magnificent Five) represent the next generation in financial writing. They are fearless in confronting financial advice poseurs of all kinds. That they all are moving swiftly into media formats like video makes me hopeful they can successfully combat more of the hucksters pushing ‘easy wealth in seven steps’ style schemes. I am rooting for them, especially when they go after people like constantly self-promoting old coots flogging their financial flim-flams that hurt ordinary investors….

The coolest thing about this is that I know the other four guys personally and have hung out with them offline. They mean what they say and are the real deal. I’m totally flattered to be associated with this crew.

…In the 40 years since… the bottom 90 percent saw their income grow by an annual rate of ¼ of 1 percent… while the top 1 percent saw theirs grow by 4.4 percent…. Okun pondered a trade-off between equality and efficiency just when those at the top of the wealth and income ladder began hauling off all the gains of economic growth…. When Okun was writing, the typical CEO earned about 25 times the typical worker. How could he know that today, they earn nearly 300 times the typical worker?… It’s hard not to see Okun’s legacy as the problem rather than the solution. His view… that the real problem was ensuring that we didn’t veer too far into ensuring equality steered us in the wrong direction…

…I suspect he would have rejected the terms of the debate slated to follow these remarks…. He would have recognized that there were likely limits on the amount of inequality reduction that could be achieved with policies that also accelerated growth. And so he would have recognized that as usual in economics there are tradeoffs…. So his balanced advice would have been to first implement policies that increase growth while increasing equality, and then consider those measures that involve trading off efficiency and equality….

For many years now, it has been the case that the income distribution has been growing much more unequal… the share of… the top 1% has risen… from about 8%… to around 20 percent…. With inequality higher and progressivity lower the case for progressive reform is strong…. Concern with issues relating to the cost of capital and the adverse effects of taxes in increasing it has been very legitimate at points in the past…. [But] at present… [with] zero interest rates… [and] corporate profits… at record levels, there needs to be much… more concern with the distributional aspects of capital taxation…. Okun recognizes the minimum wage can be dangerously high and excessively strong unions can do damage if jobs are taken away and inflation is promoted. These risks are remote…. The financial sector has shown itself to be less of a source of diversification and stability and more of a source of instability than most judged a generation ago…. The simultaneous emergence of high profits and low interest rates raises the question of whether monopoly power is on the increase. So the question of regulatory actions looms much larger…. Abraham Lincoln had it right when he said “As our case is new, so we think anew, and act anew.”