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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ild who wrote (29514)	5/6/2005 2:49:07 PM
From: mishedlo	Respond to of 116555

Wow. Krugman in the Times is amassing an impressive body of work concerning the lack of ethics in Washington. This one is a doozy about the new drug benefits bill. Check out the last two paragraphs about Social Security. There is an investment here somewhere for the truly cynical. I think I may try to invest in a congressman or two. Billy Tauzin, who shepherded the drug bill through when he was a member of Congress, now heads the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the all-powerful industry lobby group, for an estimated $2 million a year. In his new job, he's making novel arguments against allowing Americans to buy cheaper drugs from Canada: Al Qaeda, he suggests, might use fake Viagra tablets to get anthrax into this country. Meanwhile, Thomas Scully, the former Medicare administrator - who threatened to fire Medicare's chief actuary if he gave Congress the real numbers on the drug bill's cost - was granted a special waiver from the ethics rules. This allowed him to negotiate for a future health industry lobbying job at the very same time he was pushing the drug bill. If all this sounds like a story of a corrupt deal created by a corrupt system, it is. And it was a very expensive deal indeed. According to the Medicare trustees, the fiscal gap over the next 75 years created by the 2003 law - not the financing gap for Medicare as a whole, just the additional gap created by legislation passed 18 months ago - will be $8.7 trillion. That's about three times the amount President Bush proposes to save by cutting middle-class Social Security benefits. nytimes.com