On those prescription drug ads on TV

The New Neo Posted on by

Roger L. Simon writes:

We have all sorts of advertisements for medical installations big and small competing for our attention (and money), but even worse we have virtually non-stop advertising for prescription drugs on television. Indeed they seem to dominate the medium appearing on cable and network alike to the degree that sometimes you wonder if there is anything else. …

The United States and New Zealand are the only countries where prescription drug ads are legal on television. …

We live in a society where pharmaceutical corporations hypnotize us into thinking there is a pill for everything. They are doing the same to the medical community on a daily basis for mutual gain. Too many doctors have become prisoners of both the pharmaceutical companies and themselves, leaning expectantly on lobbyists for the latest cure-alls. It’s a toxic syndrome that must be stopped.

Here’s some of the history:

Such promotion [of prescription drugs on TV] was banned until 1997, when the FDA reluctantly allowed pharmaceutical ads on TV, so long as they gave an accurate accounting of a medicine’s true benefits and risks, including a list of potential side effects.

There’s also this:

Direct-to-consumer advertising is really intended for consumers. As a primary care physician, people certainly come into my office with advertisements that they’ve printed off the internet or that they remember seeing during the football game the previous Sunday and say, “What about this drug?” Studies show that when patients come in and ask their physicians about particular drugs, they’re more likely to get prescriptions for those drugs. Doctors of course also watch TV, but the pharmaceutical industry spends much more money advertising its drugs directly to physicians, through visits to their offices, sponsorship of continuing medical education, support of professional society meetings, consultancies, and the like. Actually, the amount of money that pharmaceutical companies spend on advertising to physicians is far higher than the amount spent on direct-to-consumer advertising because physicians are the ones writing the prescriptions.

Roger Simon’s article starts this way:

My father was a doctor and when I was a kid in the 1950s I recall asking him why he didn’t advertise. Medicine was his business, wasn’t it? Normally responsive to my questions, he was taken aback, wondering how I would even countenance such a thing. The honorable medical profession was above that. They weren’t a bag of potato chips or the latest Chevrolet.

Well, drug companies aren’t physicians, but back then they didn’t advertise either – except in medical journals. I’m not sure when the latter started, but my father-in-law was a doctor and I recall in the 1970s seeing his journals filled with drug ads.

My own father was an attorney and accountant, and I remember his horror at the idea of attorneys advertising, even through ads in the Yellow Pages (the Yellow Pages are another ancient reference at this point, of course). My father also was incensed when attorneys starting billing by the hour. He billed by the job and had his own system; whatever it was, he was good at what he did and never lacked for business, some of it pro bono.

NOTE:
I also read an article a little while back (which unfortunately I can’t locate at the moment) that said that drug ads are a huge part of the support for TV, and without them a great many stations would go under.

The experts: who do you trust?

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t put much trust in experts’ prognostications, and haven’t for a long time. I think it began when so many failed to predict the fall of the Soviet Union. I was a Democrat back then, and I didn’t see the problem as linked to one side or the other. But it did teach me to take forecasts by experts with a grain of salt and then some.

It’s only gotten worse – much worse – in the ensuing years. At this point, I read every article with an eye to scoping out the biases of the author[s].

I have my biases, too, and I’m upfront about them. But I really truly do try to be fair, knowing that I won’t achieve absolute objectivity but nevertheless striving for it. Wouldn’t most “journalists” and “experts” (and even hard scientists at times, but I’m talking more about economists and psychologists and people in the “soft” sciences) say the same? And yet there are unconscious and/or conscious biases all over the place.

My reluctance to trust predictions has come to the fore on the subject of Trump’s tariffs, as I’ve said in several posts about that topic. Trump is an outside-the-box thinker, and his approaches in particular are hard to analyze and make predictions about, whether the person making the prediction is a Trump hater or Trump supporter.

I have noticed in the past that most of the horror stories about what will happen as a result of some action of Trump’s have not materialized. And some things have – so far at least – worked out very well, such as the reduction in illegal aliens pouring over the border. Tariffs make me especially nervous and I don’t have a good feeling about them. But as with so many things Trumpian, I know it’s best to take a “wait and see” attitude.

How do experts become experts? Isn’t it through the opinion of other experts, and the academy? How do expects get discredited? How about that guy who had a formula that had correctly predicted the last umpteen gazillion elections and then fell flat on his face in 2024 when he said Kamala would absolutely win? He’s not an expert anymore. But there are plenty of other experts who have been wrong over and over and yet continue in their lucrative gigs.

One expert I generally respect is Thomas Sowell, but he generally describes the past and present rather than predicting the future. He’s written about the failures of experts, especially in universities – “intellectuals” – in a number of books in which he states that a lot of knowledge in a narrow field, and success in a chosen profession, often give intellectuals the idea that they know a lot about a great many things of which they are ignorant (see this book of Sowell’s about the phenomenon).

I also happened upon a YouTube video that featured Sowell opining on Trump’s tariffs. Before I watched it, I assumed it was either from Trump’s first term (or even earlier about tariffs in general). But no; it featured the 94-year-old Sowell in what looks like a recent interview. He seems sharp as ever, although he finally has started to look somewhat old and his words don’t come quite as quickly and crisply as when he was younger. Here’s the video:

It’s easy to find those who say this will undoubtedly be a terrible disaster, and a little less easy but still possible to find those who say the opposite. I find Sowell’s statements convincing compared to most of them. He doesn’t try to read Trump’s mind, but offers various scenarios for what Trump is thinking and considers that the outcome will be based on how Trump uses the tariffs and decisions he makes around them.

And here’s Commerce Secretary Lutnick’s explanation for the policy, plus his prediction:

I want to get a gig updating websites for the government

The New Neo Posted on by

I can do that. I’ve designed websites. I do it very very slowly but hey, I do it. And the pay would be very very helpful (hat tip Ace):


The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the agency created by executive order on President Donald Trump’s first day in office, has uncovered yet another striking example of wasteful federal spending. This time, the target is the Department of Veterans Affairs, which until recently had been paying nearly $380,000 a month for relatively simple website modifications—work that a single staffer now handles internally with just 10 hours of effort each week.

DOGE broke the story via a post on X, formerly Twitter, praising the VA for not renewing the contract. “VA was previously paying ~$380,000/month for minor website modifications,” the agency wrote. “That contract has not been renewed, and the same work is now being executed by 1 internal VA software engineer spending ~10 hours/week.”

This revelation adds to DOGE’s growing list of accomplishments, which already include the cancellation of 113 wasteful federal contracts valued at over $4.7 billion.

I’m not sure whether my level of cynicism has gotten high enough to say that none of this surprises me.

Trump’s tariffs anger Europe

The New Neo Posted on by

Europe is angry at Trump.

You might ask: what else is new? Europe has been angry at Trump for a long time – that is, when it’s not busy ridiculing him for things like warning them (pre Ukraine War) about their dependence on Russian fossil fuels.

But now they’re really angry. Really really angry:

European leaders reacted with shock and anger over President Donald Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, with the French prime minister calling them a global “catastrophe” and the German economic minister comparing them to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

On Wednesday, President Trump announced reciprocal tariffs on countries that have been levying disproportionately higher import duties on U.S.-made goods. The president called April 2, the day of his announcement, the “Liberation Day” that would “forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn.”

President Trump promised “a little tough love” for the “foreign cheaters” who, for decades, have been hurting the interests of U.S. workers and manufacturers. “Foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once-beautiful American Dream,” he warned, speaking from the White House Rose Garden. “But it is not going to happen anymore.”

… The France-based Euronews TV channel reports:

“The EU is ‘preparing for further countermeasures’ to protect its interest,’ Ursula von der Leyen said after after Donald Trump announced a 20% levies on European goods, urging the US to ‘move from confrontation to negotiation’.

“’We are already finalising a first package of countermeasures in response to tariffs on steel. And we are now preparing for further countermeasures, to protect our interests and our businesses if negotiations fail,’ the Commission president said on Thursday from Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where she will attend the first-ever EU-Central Asia summit.

“Outgoing German Economy Minister Robert Habeck compared the impact of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on the world economy with that of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.”

What I get out of all of this is that Europe is understandably angry that the US is no longer accepting the fact that Europe protects itself and the US doesn’t. But – as I’ve said before – the subject area of tariffs is most definitely not my strong suit, and I admit that they worry me.

Also, there’s this about how the Trump administration arrived at its high figure for the tariffs Europe imposes on the US:

In a statement released Wednesday night, the US Trade Representative explained that Trump’s sweeping “reciprocal tariffs” were calculated using a complex formula that aims to “balance bilateral trade deficits” between the US and its trading partners.

It adds that the calculation factors in “a combination of tariff and non-tariff factors that prevent trade from balancing.”

In other words, the 39% figure has been inflated by factoring in a range of measures that the Trump administration considers to place barriers to trade – not just tariffs.

Trump himself said during his announcement:

In the coming days, there will be complaints from the globalists, and the outsourcers, and special interests, and the Fake News, always the Fake News will always complain. But, never forget, every prediction our opponents made about trade for the last 30 years has been proven totally wrong. They were wrong about NAFTA, they were wrong about China, they were wrong about the Trans Pacific Partnership, which would have been a disaster if I didn’t terminate it. If I didn’t terminate that, United Autoworkers, you would have had no jobs in this country. You would have had no jobs. It was all going to other countries. In my first term, they said tariffs would crash the economy. Instead, we built the greatest economy in the history of the world.

I don’t know about “in the history of the world.” Typical Trump talk. But I do know that for many many decades I’ve been upset that so much of our industry has departed this country. I’ve read the arguments about how that’s not a bad thing, but I continue to see it as a bad thing when during COVID we were dependent on China for our pharmaceuticals, for example.

And then there’s this from Batya Ungar-Sargon, former leftist and now semi-changer:

Here’s the truth about tariffs: For 60 years they destroyed the American working class to funnel money upwards into the pockets of the rich. Donald Trump is the first president in generations to tell Wall Street to screw itself—he’s for the working men and women of this country.

I don’t think anyone knows where this is going.

More on sliding scales for traffic fines: good or bad idea?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Gorgasal” makes a point about differential speeding fines that I’ve seen made many times by proponents. In fact, it’s the main argument for them, and it goes like this:

Speeding tickets that scale with income are the norm in Switzerland.

The argument is NOT that a rich guy who does 20 over the limit is more dangerous than a poor guy at the same speed.

The argument is that a 50 CHF is utter peanuts to a derivatives trader with UBS and will not dissuade him from speeding – but a fine in the multiple thousands just might. (And yes, this is the monetary range we are talking about.)

Much as I usually agree with Neo and the commentariat here, in this specific case I agree with this proposal.

I understand the argument, but I don’t think it holds up under scrutiny, and I’ll explain why.

Whether you think of fines as deterrents or punishments or both, it does make intuitive sense that of course for a poor person a fine takes more of a bite out of his or her income and therefore one would think it’s a greater punishment and therefore a greater deterrent, and likewise such a fine is hardly any deterrent at all for a rich person. If that is true, one would think that, per capita, poor people would already be speeding less than rich people; after all, the punishment fine is much greater for them in terms of percentage of income.

But do they? I’ve never seen a demonstration that this is the case, except for self-reports about speeding which show poorer people report less speeding than rich people report. But self-reports are meaningless in that regard, because they merely measure what people are willing to own up to when asked in a survey, rather than their actual behavior objectively measured. And if someone is very poor, that person also may not be driving as much for the simple reason that he or she may have a problem affording gasoline, or might be more likely to live in an urban area where public transportation is the norm and is more convenient.

The most objective measure I could find of how much poor people speed versus wealthier people was a study of the violations found in New York by speed cameras. Such cameras don’t discriminate. And guess what? There was no difference in speeding rates between rich and poor communities, or between races:

New York City’s speed safety camera program saves lives. The program led to a 72 percent reduction in speeding and a 55 percent drop in all traffic fatalities at camera sites during hours of operation after its introduction. There is no correlation between the number of tickets per resident and race or poverty level.

Such cameras also come at a cost: constant surveillance (which we already have to a great extent anyway). And the differential fines proposed in California (that I wrote about yesterday) have an additional cost: a record must be kept or accessed of every driver’s income in order to set the scale for that particular person’s speeding fine. Another cost is the normalization of differential “justice” penalties based on income. And – at least as far as I can tell from the quick research I’ve done – all without any indication that these revised fines would act as a deterrence to speeding. In fact, logic tells me that reducing the present fines for poor people will be likely to lead to an increase in speeding among the poor and a rise in accidents and fatalities among the poor, because the deterrent for them would be weaker than it is now.

I think you see where this is going. Why limit this to speeding tickets? There’s really no reason. Let’s have differential fines for everything, differential tolls, and differential prices for goods. Why should a poor person pay as much for eggs as a rich person? After all, the poor person has to eat. That’s far more important than the right to speed. And rich people can afford to eat more meat; perhaps we should have a rationing system to make the consumption of meat more equal.

Also, do we care why a person is poor? For example, some people are poor because they abuse substances, and low income people are more likely to have substance problems (although which is cause and which is effect I don’t think we know). Is that of any important at all? How far does our futile quest for cosmic justice go?

I looked for articles about the effect of these laws on countries in Europe that already have them. Do the laws reduce speeding, and by whom? I couldn’t find any such articles, although they may indeed exist. What I did find is this sort of thing, which contains some interesting data:

In Finland, speeding fines are linked to salary. The Finns run a “day fine” system that is calculated on the basis of an offender’s daily disposable income – generally their daily salary divided by two.

The more a driver is over the speed limit, the greater the number of day fines they will receive.

This has led to headline-grabbing fines when wealthy drivers have been caught driving very fast.

In 2002, Anssi Vanjoki, a former Nokia director, was ordered to pay a fine of 116,000 euros ($103,600) after being caught driving 75km/h in a 50km/h zone on his motorbike.

And in 2015, Finnish businessman Reima Kuisla was fined 54,000 euro ($62,000) for driving 22km/h over the 50km/h speed limit.

Switzerland uses a similar system, and currently holds the world record for a speeding ticket. It was handed to a Swedish motorist in 2010 who was caught driving at 290km/h. He was fined 3,600 Swiss francs per day for 300 days – around 1,080,000 Swiss francs ($1,091,340) in total.

The UK introduced tougher speeding penalties in 2017. Drivers can be fined up to 175% of their weekly income, on a sliding scale depending on the severity of the offence. However, the amount is capped at £2,500 ($3,310).

Such fun! Stick it to the rich!

In my search for evidence on the effect of “progressive” speeding fines, I did find research on the effect of raising fines for speeding in general. The upshot:

During the years 1995-2004, the rates for fixed penalties for traffic offences in Norway increased substantially. This paper evaluates the effects on compliance of these increases. Regression analysis was performed to determine the effects of increases in fixed penalties. For speeding in general, no effect of increasing fixed penalties can be found. For speeding close to speed camera sites, there is a weak tendency for the violation rate to go down. This tendency is not statistically significant at conventional levels.

In other words: no deterrent effect for increased fines (this paper found similar results). My conclusion is that people either speed or don’t speed for a number of poorly-understood reasons, but fear of substantial fines is probably not a big factor.

A sliding scale for speeding tickets: is this even legal?

The New Neo Posted on by

California is looking to be a trailblazer:

San Francisco is launching a new program backed by Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom that will issue speeding tickets based on income. …

Violations for speeding range from $50 to $500, but individuals with a household income at or below 200% of the federal poverty level are eligible for a 50% discount, according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Indigent persons, or individuals who are homeless, are eligible for an 80% discount on the speeding ticket. …

A fact sheet for the pilot program states that speeding cameras were placed across the city “in an equitable fashion.” …

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation will roll out a similar program in 2026 that targets speeding drivers, but has an option for low-income individuals to perform community service instead of paying fines.

Speeding tickets aren’t a graduated income tax.

Here’s a law review article defending this type of practice as a wonderful idea.

Personally, I think it’s a terrible idea, one of so many of the left’s attempts to institute what Thomas Sowell called “cosmic justice.” Cosmic justice is impossible for mere humans to issue, and efforts to achieve it almost invariably end up perverting actual justice.

Is Musk leaving DOGE?

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s become more and more difficult to get the truth of a story in the MSM, although it’s long been quite difficult. So now there’s a “Musk is leaving DOGE!” story that’s getting hyped.

However, the plan was always for Musk to leave DOGE, and the timeframe involved was never especially long. Here’s the story now:

A senior government official told NBC that Musk — whose DOGE team is engaged in a controversial effort to slash federal spending — would leave at the end of a 130-day stint as a special government employee.

That specific designation, SGE, caps a person’s workdays per year at 130 days. Having started on Jan. 20, Musk’s SGE cap will be reached at the end of May.

Politico reported earlier Wednesday that the Tesla CEO will soon be leaving the Trump administration. Tesla shares rose after that story was published.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, in a tweet, called that report “garbage.”

Also see this from Fox:

Elon Musk will exit his role with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on schedule later this spring, once “his incredible work at DOGE is complete,” the White House confirmed Wednesday.

“This ‘scoop’ is garbage,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted to X Wednesday. “Elon Musk and President Trump have both *publicly* stated that Elon will depart from public service as a special government employee when his incredible work at DOGE is complete.”

Leavitt was referring to a Wednesday Politico article reporting that “Trump has told his inner circle & members of his Cabinet that” Musk “will be stepping back in the coming weeks from his current role.” Musk, however, has long been anticipated to step back from DOGE when his 130 days as a “special government employee” run out in May.

So that’s it. Not much of a story. But the MSM can make an anti-Trump anti-Musk story out of almost anything or even nothing. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and there’s most definitely a will.

The left retains control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court

The New Neo Posted on by

In Wisconsin, a referendum to put the already-existent requirement for voter ID into the state constitution won but the Republican judicial candidate lost, in a state that Trump carried in 2024 – although he carried it narrowly. But the Democrat judge won by a large margin: 10%. The turnout was about 70% of what it had been in the 2024 general election.

I used the phrase “Democrat judge,” but the race is billed as “non-partisan.” However, it’s hard to imagine a more partisan race, although that fact is hidden by a law in Wisconsin requiring that Supreme Court candidates be listed on the ballot without party affiliation. That is an attempt to maintain the fiction that judges are above the partisan fray. Ha!

So I’m not sure how many Wisconsin voters even followed this closely enough to understand that Crawford, the winner, is a highly partisan Democrat, or what significance the race has on a national level in terms of redistricting to favor Democrats. And besides, I believe that by Wisconsin law ads also cannot designate political affiliation for Supreme Court candidates, as far as I know. Political junkies are aware of all of this, and endorsements and rallies also tell the tale. But most people are not political junkies.

The MSM is framing the result as a terrible defeat for Trump, and a warning to him. It’s certainly a defeat, but I don’t know whether it’s a warning or not, and neither do they. After all, there was a similar special election in Wisconsin in 2023, and the Democrat won although in 2024 Trump carried the state.

I believe that there is probably a significant percentage of Trump voters who are no-shows if he’s not on the ballot. Plus, special elections generally have low turnout and favor the most politically fanatic, who will always turn out. Plus, tons of money were poured into Wisconsin for the Democrat. Plus, apparently the GOP candidate was a lackluster campaigner. Plus, it probably was hard to convey to potential GOP voters that this state election for a judge could help lose the US House for the GOP and affect the course of the last two years of the Trump presidency.

That said, the loss is depressing and certainly not an encouraging sign.

How much did the Democrats spend in the race? This article mentions the topic but only gives a total amount and not a party breakdown:

Susan Crawford, who was endorsed by the Democratic Party, won the closely-watched Wisconsin Supreme Court race Tuesday night in what was the most expensive judicial election in American history.

What would have normally been a sleepy nonpartisan judicial race turned into an expensive battle between Crawford, a Dane County judge, and Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel, who was endorsed by the Republican Party. The campaigns and their supporters have spent more than $81 million, attracting endorsements and campaign appearances from Elon Musk, Vermont Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders and other national political figures.

Here’s the BBC on the subject. The article says the total was 91 million, including 20 million by Musk “and groups affiliated with him.” What are these groups? And are we to conclude that the Democrats – and “groups affiliated with them” – spent the other 70 million? Who knows? The BBC isn’t telling, athough they list some of the names of the donors – the usual suspects:

Democrats, too, have rallied deep-pocketed donors in support of Crawford. Along with Soros, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman have reportedly contributed large sums. But their names haven’t inspired the same vitriol as Musk’s.

I’ve looked but so far I can’t find an article that says what the Democrats spent on the race.

This one mentions an interesting angle that may have been a factor:

Scott interviewed a Glendale voter who has voted for Trump three times, including in the most recent election. He said he’s backing liberal county judge Crawford in this race.

“He believes that President Trump, by supporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade, sent this issue back down to the states,” reported Scott. “He believes [Crawford] most aligns with his views on abortion rights.”

I see some speculation in the comments on other blogs that the Democrats won because of fraud. My opinion is that, although it’s possible that some fraud occurred, not only will we never know but the margin of victory was rather high for that and I think Crawford won.

One more thing that it’s important to keep in mind is that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz came within a hair of winning Wisconsin in 2024. They were incredibly poor candidates, and yet they came close to winning that election. Trump’s margins were broad but shallow, and I think it’s an enormous error to count the Democrats out.

Both Florida races were won by the GOP with very comfortable margins, although with the enormous margins of Trump wins in those districts last November. This makes sense, though, because the special elections were in red areas and it was pretty clear that the Republicans would win. So, many Trump voters probably figured: why bother? I think that’s a risky calculation, but I understand it.

RIP Richard Chamberlain

The New Neo Posted on by

Chamberlain has died at the age of ninety. I remember him almost entirely from his early TV show Dr. Kildare. I was never much of a fan, but the show was wildly popular in its day, and Chamberlain went on to star in several miniseries’ such as Shogun, which I also watched but barely remember.

My most striking recollection of Chamberlain was passing him on a street in the theater district, perhaps fifty years ago. He was a tall and handsome presence.

RIP.