4 ms·
Why not publicly funded R&D?
by earthtolazlo 8y ago
Why not publicly funded R&D?
- airstrike 8y agoDo you trust the government to spend money wisely (read efficiently) more than you trust investors?
- HarryHirsch 8y agoGoldman Sachs published a paper not too long ago about the unsuitability of pharma to deliver returns on investment. Do you trust Goldman Sachs? Public R&D is the only way forward.
- airstrike 8y agoI trust capitalism. I'm not saying we shouldn't have any Public R&D -- by all means, feel free to invest. Just don't make me pay more taxes than I already do, please.
- astrodust 8y agoThe government can afford to invest in things with no immediate commercial benefit, but which over time can pay off in huge ways. Nuclear power. Highways. Satellite communication. The internet itself. These are all products of long-term thinking, not short term profit. If you want lower taxes there's one thing you can do to cut them by half: Dramatically shrink the US military and stop building new nuclear weapons. The amount of money put into programs like pharma is a drop in the bucket.
- opportune 8y agoWe can also just increase capital gains tax (introduce higher brackets), reform tax loss harvesting, and add some sort of annual CPI discount to capital gains so that people stop using that as an excuse to not raise capital gains
- fzeroracer 8y agoWhat an absurd complaint. I would be more than happy to pay more in taxes if it meant the byzantine and life-destroying system that is healthcare in America was completely overturned. It's silly how much we pay for basic services, but it's OK because the government isn't attached. It's taxes in all but name only, with worse services and less guarantees. Where we pay much more than the wealthy.
- airstrike 8y agoThe cost of healthcare in the US is not only driven by pharma prices.
- acct1771 8y agoThen let's invest in obsoleting the other problems, too.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago>I would be more than happy to pay more in taxes if it meant the byzantine and life-destroying system that is healthcare in America was completely overturned. Plus it would rid of the monthly premium 'tax', the out of pocket costs, and the giant deductibles. You get all of that money back in your pocket, but have to pay an automatically deducted tax instead. I'm all for it.
- moosey 8y agoYes. Very much so. Profit, while useful in the market, has an upper limit before it can be considered a lack of efficiency, IMO. In some sense, it is the stripping of productive economic value, which is then given to shareholders. It is basically a tax that produces wealth rather than wellbeing. When shareholders have this money, do they use it wisely in the economy? I don't think that this is an absolute truth. Can the government do better? Yes, if we abandon the conceptual thought that government is always the problem, or by default inefficient, when in fact it can be demonstrated that governments around the world, and here, do many things very well.
- lukasb 8y agoStandard economic theory predicts that the market will underfund public goods - goods where one person's consumption doesn't diminish another person's capacity to consume. R&D is a public good: https://www.asm.org/index.php/ceo-blog/item/5727-the-public-good-and-the-public-funding-of-science-2 https://www.asm.org/index.php/ceo-blog/item/5727-the-public-...
- MBCook 8y agoThey’re the largest insurer aren’t they? Medicare + Medicaid + the VA. So if a hospital doing it is good, why isn’t having the largest insurer plus a huge hospital/care center/doctor group doing it better?