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JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-host: Larry Kudlow, CNBC senior advisor; & Cumulus Media radio
 
Hour One
Tuesday  12 July 2016   / Hour 1, Block A:  John H Cochrane, Hoover, in re:  LK: There’s a moral dimension to our current national tragedy of racism and shootings. “Content of his character.”  Need leadership, Golden Rule. One problem is family break-up, bad decisions; how are people teaching their children?  Can you actually think of a better way to live so we have stronger characters ad resolve disputes peacefully.  I don't hear church leaders or politicians or others speaking up on this.  JC:  This is a meeting of the Free Republicans . . .  Will imi9grants take American jobs? Is there economic value to keeping immigrants out?  No. We can stop illegal immigration overnight: make it legal [joke].  Yes, there will be limits; but the US is esp self-destructive in the kinds we let in and those we keep out – family-based immigration is not good; skills-base immigration is excellent.  Immigrants come here. Work, earn money - and spend money: buy a car, aha house, food.  US policy is to let doctors come study and then we kick them out. Business schools: they come here to get a degree and them we kick them out.  Europe’s problem, e.g., is assimilation, not immigration. Germany lets single young me in and won’t let them work for two years!
Tuesday  12 July 2016   / Hour 1, Block B:  John H Cochrane, Hoover, in re:   . . .  Trump family immigrated at the turn fo the Twentieth Century.  . . .  Need skill-based immigration. We have 1 million people here who can't leave because they can’t return; and have no basic protections of law.
In the US we have an unworkable pretense of an immigration system: it's illegal, we pretend we’ll stop them, then wink and let them in, and then horribly mistreat them.  A lot of border states say they‘ve lost jobs.  Data say they’re wrong.
Tuesday  12 July 2016   / Hour 1, Block C: Brian Blase, Mercatus Center Senior Research Fellow, and Forbes; in re: Adam Smith’s genius of 1777.   Americans make a market of [almost everything]. People who use the ACA plans are older, sicker and cagier than the Obama Adm imagined, allowed for, or expected. United Health Care, the largest in the country, is exiting all the exchanges.  People respond rationally: those who receive large subsidies enter; people who are healthy do not buy the coverage.  Flawed plan from the beginning: risk pricing not taken into account. Initially distributed $16 billion to insurers to cover their extra cost. Adm released an estimate today: a median deductible of $850. But the average is 2.5 times that – the median shows how the law has failed: half the enrollees qualify for cost-sharing. Bimodal distribution: those with low deductibles, and those with $6,000 deductible for Bronze coverage! Insurance companies  have to be solvent; higher premiums lead to the adverse-selection spiral. Obamacare is a high-risk pool. However, the small-group plans are working out well:  people are healthy in order to work, and it's harder to game the system if you have a job. This whole ACA has been held up by $7 billion of illegal payments by the Obama Adm – supposed to have gone to Treasury but was illegally rerouted.   Health care mustn’t be designed for income redistribution.
Administration’s report on Obamacare deductibles: http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2016/07/12/obama-administration-issues-misleading-report-on-obamacare-plan-deductibles/#5771f4d37ce5
By taxing insurers that enroll younger and healthier people, the risk adjustment program discourages insurers from attracting the people desperately needed for the law’s complicated structure to work. To the degree that the risk adjustment formula is flawed, however, arbitrary transfers among insurers occur. This produces benefits for insurers that don’t deserve them and costs for insurers that shouldn’t bear them, features not conducive to a well-functioning market.
Ultimately, while the ACA’s regulations and price controls made risk adjustment necessary, risk adjustment creates its own set of complicated problems with deleterious effects. Risk adjustment may be the ultimate “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” part of the law.
Tuesday  12 July 2016   / Hour 1, Block D: Larry Kudlow:  Eleven thousand jobs one month and 285,000 the next – have to smooth it out.  Earnings are falling; a new batch coming in the weeks ahead; need a snap-back and I don’t see it.  If you’re not making money you won’t buy shares. Capital goods spending and industrial production are down or negative.  London FTsie is doing better than we are; New York is a sanctuary for outside Europe.  Latin Am mkts are OK, although not Japan or China; Taiwan is up bit.
 
Hour Two
Tuesday  12 July 2016   / Hour 2, Block A:  Stephen F. Cohen, Prof. Emeritus of Russian Studies/History/Politics at NYU and Princeton; also Board of American Committee for East-West Accord (eastwestaccord.com); in re:
Next up after NATO's Baltic/Poland build-up: lowering tension with ...  Despite the new NATO troops for Eastern Europe, experts said the bloc and Russia must quickly dial back tensions – through constant ...
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Tuesday  12 July 2016   / Hour 2, Block B: Stephen F. Cohen, eastwestaccord.com); in re:
Tuesday  12 July 2016   / Hour 2, Block C: Stephen F. Cohen, eastwestaccord.com); in re:
Tuesday  12 July 2016   / Hour 2, Block D: Stephen F. Cohen, eastwestaccord.com); in re:
 
Hour Three
Tuesday  12 July 2016   / Hour 3, Block A:   Lara M Brown, George Washington University; in re:  Amid Trump veep buzz, Newt Gingrich and Fox News cut ties  CLEVELAND — Speculation about Donald Trump's running mate hit fever pitch Tuesday, ...  ;  Fox News suspending ties with Trump veep possibility Gingrich  ;  Newt Gingrich Is No Longer a Fox News Contributor
Tuesday  12 July 2016   / Hour 3, Block B:   Phillip Terzian, Weekly Standard, in re:  http://www.weeklystandard.com/contested-conventions-are-perfectly-conventional/article/2003248  (1 of 2)
Tuesday  12 July 2016   / Hour 3, Block C:   Mary Anastasia O'Grady, WSJ Editorial, THE AMERICAS, in re:  The Unraveling of a Narco-Terror Non-Deal   http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-unraveling-of-a-narco-terror-non-deal-14...
Tuesday  12 July 2016   / Hour 3, Block D: Mary Anastasia O'Grady, WSJ Editorial,  THE AMERICAS, in re:  The Unraveling of a Narco-Terror Non-Deal   http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-unraveling-of-a-narco-terror-non-deal-1468186815?tesla=y  (2 of 2)
 
Hour Four
Tuesday  12 July 2016   / Hour 4, Block A:  Adam Thierer, senior research Fellow,  Mercatus Center,  George Mason University in re:  for both practical and ethical reasons, right to try may become the norm, rather than the exception. Should this happen, the FDA will need to reorient to focus on risk education.
Two opposing viewpoints undergird the policy debate around the right to try: “precautionary principle” thinking and “permissionless innovation.” The “precautionary principle” seeks to minimize any and all potential risks through regulation, whereas the “permissionless innovation” mindset argues for trial-and-error experimentation with minimal restraint.
  • The information revolution has dramatically increased the costs of a precautionary system, as illustrated by the hypothetical case of limiting 3-D–printed prosthetics. These prosthetics, which often provide life-changing benefits to their users, are medical devices in a traditional regulatory sense, but few people are going to the FDA and asking for permission or a “right to try” new 3-D–printed limbs. Banning the printers, the materials, the blueprints, or the sale of these prosthetics would be highly impractical and costly to enforce.
The rise of personalized medicine evidenced by the increasing use of genetic testing, wearable devices, and biohacking suggests that precautionary regulation will become increasingly impractical and undesirable as individuals seek to take advantage of these rapid technological developments.   http://mercatus.org/publication/right-to-try-and-fda-future-personalized-medicine   (1 of 2)
Tuesday  12 July 2016   / Hour 4, Block B:  Adam Thierer, senior research Fellow,  Mercatus Center,  George Mason University in re:  for both practical and ethical reasons, right to try may become the norm, rather than the exception. Should this happen, the FDA will need to reorient to focus on risk education.  (2 of 2)
Tuesday  12 July 2016   / Hour 4, Block C: Robert Zimmerman, behind the black, in re: Vision problems from weightlessness   This article provides an excellent review of the vision problems caused by long term exposure to weightlessness, including the efforts to study the problem on Earth.
Before a human trip to Mars — a journey of six to nine months that NASA says it wants to achieve by the 2030s — researchers agree that VIIP [the name given to this problem] must be understood much better. VIIP could be the first sign of greater dangers to the human body from microgravity. “We’re seeing the visual and neural, ophthalmic manifestations of it,” Barratt said. “I’m fairly certain this is a bit more global than that.”
Richard Williams, the chief health and medical officer at NASA, agrees that what we do not know about VIIP still poses the biggest threat. Ironically, one of the only ways to get more knowledge is spend more time in microgravity. “The longer we stay in space, the more we’re going to learn,” Williams said.  (1 of 2)
http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/vision-...
Tuesday  12 July 2016   / Hour 4, Block D:   Robert Zimmerman, behind the black, in re: Vision problems from weightlessness  (2 of 2)