Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Undeserved profit?

While giving a speech just now, Barack Obama said that drug companies "make billions of dollars of profits they don't deserve."

How does one distinguish between deserved profit and undeserved profit? Somebody needs to ask Obama, because he just promised to get rid of those "undeserved profits."

Meanwhile, he was offering an ironclad promise of a middle-class tax cut. I think his exact words were "cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye middle class tax cuts." Maybe I remembered that part wrong. But anyway, he said he really really really wants to cut taxes on the middle class.

So, once he's separated the deserved and undeserved profits for drug companies, then Obama is going to distinguish those who are "middle class" from those who are "slightly low-class" and "moderately high-class." He'll also divide the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff, the saved from the sinners.

Here's something somebody needs to ask Obama: What's going to happen to drug companies after you take away their "billions in profits they don't deserve"? Obviously, their stock will be worth a lot less, and that will hurt pension funds that include stock from Pfizer, Bristol-Myers, etc. Less profit also means less investment in research and development, less advertising and marketing, less of everything that the company does with its profits.

Remember a few months ago, when banks and financial companies were making huge profits? Now they're not. And this is such a "crisis" that the president is demanding that taxpayers fork over $700 billion to fix it.

So why -- and someone should ask Obama this -- won't it be a "crisis" when the government takes away billions of dollars of profits from drug companies? Once Obama has made drug companies less profitable, will he then propose a drug company bailout? Wouldn't it just be easier to leave the drug companies alone? If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?

Now that it looks like Maverick has abandoned any pretense that he's actually trying to win the election, we all need to start studying Obamanomics. Mere months from now, this crazy crap is going to be federal law.

UPDATE: Apparently, no one in the press corps thought this "profits they don't deserve" statement was worth reporting.

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