Sugar, Health Care, and the Internet
Florida’s purchase of a large section of U.S. Sugar property will benefit US Sugar far more than it benefits Florida taxpayers.
As Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and others show, the cost of health care reform will far exceed Obama’s estimates.
Ben Kuntz writes in Business Week about the walling off of the internet by individual tech companies.
1. POLITICS
Florida’s purchase of a large section of U.S. Sugar property will benefit US Sugar far more than it benefits Florida taxpayers.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Adjunct Scholar Fran Smith on why the deal is rotten.
“[T]he company will stay in business and sell some land, not necessarily contiguous, to the state. But the land was valued at the height of the real estate boom and has significantly dropped in value, which would mean a boon for the sugar company, but a bane for Florida taxpayers.”
2. HEALTH
As Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and others show, the cost of health care reform will far exceed Obama’s estimates.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Counsel Hans Bader on the true economic and social costs of proposed health care legislation.
“The Obama administration managed to hide $1.4 trillion in costs generated by the health care reform bill though a series of budgetary ‘gimmicks’ that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is required to treat as valid in scoring the bill’s enormous cost. Although the CBO is low-balling the costs of ObamaCare, even it concedes that as a whole, ‘President Obama’s policies would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.’”
3. TECHNOLOGY
Ben Kuntz writes in BusinessWeek about the walling off of the internet by individual tech companies.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Director of Technology Studies Wayne Crews on why the splintering of the internet is a good thing.
“Many claim to worry about the rise of proprietary services (I, as you can probably tell, often doubt their sincerity) but I’ve always regarded a ‘Splinternet’ as a good thing that means more not less communications wealth. I first wrote about this in Forbes in 2000 when everyone was fighting over spam, privacy, content regulation, porn and marketing to kids. Increasing wealth means a copy-and-paste world for content across networks, and it means businesses will benefit from presence across many of tomorrow’s networks, generating more value for future generations of consumers and investors.”