on drug labels

Court Ruling Exposes Drug Makers; Debate On Impact Begins:

Wyeth argued that the FDA's approval of the drug's label prevented such a suit because federal laws and regulation pre-empt lawsuits filed under state law.

The court rejected that argument, saying Wyeth's interpretation was "based on the fundamental misunderstanding that the FDA, rather than the manufacturer, bears primary responsibility for drug labeling."

To which I say, GOOD. Until this society feels like actually paying the FDA's real tab for what it really costs to certify a drug, costs the FDA doesn't totally make up by the registration fees paid for by the company, the FDA just becomes a rubber stamp to what the drug-maker claims.

You have your choice:

• deregulate, have government agencies be a rubber stamp, and hope the threat of a lawsuit prevents people dying (hint: it doesn't, as you can ask any of the peanut butter victims of the last 6 months and the hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on this never-ending wave of recalls).
• have REAL regulation, with real teeth behind it, in spite of the costs and the time spent, because that will greatly increase the safety of what we consume.

but you can't have the former and then act like you have protections of the latter.

better still for now that we make it clear we're increasingly in the former, and will be for some time so long as one particular political party has anything to say about it.

every industry that has been "deregulated" (whether by direct act of congress or indirectly through the loss of funds needed for enforcement) has undergone a massive public financial or safety fiasco.  banks, S&Ls, telecom, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, environment effect of industry, industrial-scale food inspections; the list goes on and on...

...while other things get regulated to be illegal that are nothing of anybody's business (hint hint, the OTHER political party).  i don't care how much you hate transfats - as long as the menu items are clearly labeled (as "undercooked meat" always is), get the hell outta my kitchen except to look for unclean dishes and rats.  and btw, french slow-heat cooking styles are perfectly safe and healthy and have been for a thousand years.

meanwhile...

Court Ruling Exposes Drug Makers; Debate On Impact Begins:

Though the claim - that a manufactured failed to inform a consumer of risks - is key to many pharmaceutical-related cases, other pre-emption claims are still possible and remain protected, for example those claiming damage from a design defect.

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled, in a case involving Medtronic Inc. (MDT), that federal law bars lawsuits "challenging the safety or effectiveness of a medical device," as long as the device is marketed in a form that received FDA approval.

Weisburd said the Wyeth decision leaves companies with uncertainty and exposes them to different state-based standards that may second-guess the warnings on a label. For example, he said, drug makers could face lawsuits for providing too little information on a label or for giving too much because it will obscure the most important warnings.

"What is a company supposed to do?" he said.

This has, recently, become a problem with the Court under Roberts, who has expressed this idea that decisions should be weighed to be as low-impact as possible on constitutional interpretations (mind you, just like Scalia's "originalism", it's an ideology perfectly thrown away by Roberts when it gets in the way of a political decision he wants to make).  The Court has in the last 3 years set up a number of conflicting rulings that instead of making lower-court cases open-and-shut, increase the indecision and the potential for appeals, as if the Court was practically in the job of giving itself "job security for life"...which is, of course, ridiculous since they already have that...

couldn't have put it better myself...

you know...

...you're getting to be a serious Marillion geek ("getting to be?"  how 'bout "utterly gone"?) when, as you re-import the front row club releases for better sound than your first 128k cuts were, you specifically join together songs that never get separated, like...

• the This Town medley
  
• Hotel Hobbies/Warm Wet Circles/That Time of the Night (I *hate* how they sometimes can't make up their mind which track the "wedding ring" section belongs to)
  
• any cuts from Misplaced Childhood side 2
• Misplaced Childhood side 1, but only if Bitter Suite is included (if just Kayleigh/Lavender +- Heart of Lothian or Afraid of Sunlight, keep 'em separate)
• Goodbye to All That and The Great Escape from Brave, when some live albums separate the subsections.

Of course, I'd ripped a few before setting these standards so now I have 2 cds to go back and redo again...

on "I'm going to earn 249,999.99 to avoid paying more in taxes" story

Good Math, Bad Math : Tax Thresholds: Why the horror stories about the Obama tax plan are lies:

The idea behind this, and similar stories, is that raising the income tax rate on people earning over $250,000 per year creates a threshold, where earning more than that threshold will result in your taking home less after-taxes pay than if you earned less.

How could that happen? (I'm making up nice round numbers here to illustrate; these have no relation to real tax rates.) Suppose that the tax code was set up so that if you earned less than $250,000, you paid 20%; and if you earned more than $250,000 per year, you paid 30%. Under that system, if you earned $249,000 per year, you'd pay $49,800 in taxes, for an after-taxes take-home of $199,200. If you earned $251,000, then you'd pay $75,300 in takes, for an after-taxes take-home of $175,700.

So if taxes actually worked this way, then there would be a range of incomes where there would be a strong motivation to keep your income smaller, in order to avoid crossing the threshold - because earning more would translate to earning less after taxes.

The ABC story, and all of the others I've been seeing/hearing have either implied or directly stated that that's how our tax system works - and that therefore people earning close to $250,000 are frantically searching for ways to keep their income below the horrible $250,000 threshold.

The problem is, that's not how our tax system in the US works. Anyone who pushes this story is either too dumb/uninformed about how US income taxes work to be commenting on it, or they're liars.

The way that the US system works is that there's a base rate of taxes. You pay the base rate on all of your income up to a threshold. When you cross that threshold, the tax rate on the part of your income above that threshold is increased. The Obama proposal is to add a new threshold: the tax rate on the part of your income above $250,000 would be increased - not the tax rate on the entire thing.

To go back to our example, imagine that $250,000 was the only threshold, and that the base tax rate was 20%, but that the rate on income above $250,000 was 30%.

If your income was $249,000, then your tax bill would be the same - $49,800, for a take-home of $199,200. If your income was $251,000, then you'd pay 20% on the first $250,000, and 30% on the $1,000 above $250,000. So your tax bill would be $50,000 + $300 = $50,300 - for a take-home of $200,700. Of your extra $2,000 in income, you'd take home $1,500 - or 75%.

This story is a lie, plain and simple.

And these exact same people complained using exactly the same bullshit story when Clinton first proposed the upper-bracket tax hikes that got us where we are today.