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September
22, 2005
Vol. 1, No.
31
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Also in
this issue:
Insurers
gamble on
new drug coverage
Adelson,
Clear Channel
expected to announce deal
Court hears
dispute between Vegas school district unions
Lessons of
the storm
'The only
lifeline
was the Wal-Mart'
For FedEx, it
was
time to deliver
Commentary:
We're all in
the same bloat
Hurricane
George is heading straight for your portfolio
Not
liberating, after all
Free-market
solution
for Medicaid |
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Recent NPRI Commentaries
The Significance
of TABOR
There's a new antidote in the constitutional medicine chest
Infantile Adult Syndrome
We subsidize pathology, then wonder why we get more of it
Dead and
Not
Knowing It, Part 2
Dead and
Not
Knowing It, Part 1
Nevada's tax-financed universities are based on a paradigm
that no longer represents reality.
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Big Government
We're all in
the same bloat
Republicans have abandoned small government. Why
shouldn't voters abandon them?
By Brendan
Miniter
Opinion Journal
"After 11 years
of Republican majority, we pared it down pretty
good. I am ready to declare ongoing victory. It
is still a process."--House Majority Leader Tom
DeLay on the federal budget
In the
presidential campaign last year, Democrats were
said to be counting on some
misfortune--terrorists attacking on American
soil, the Iraq War taking a turn for the worse,
the economy going south--to help them beat
George W. Bush. That didn't happen, of course.
But now disaster has struck, and it's becoming
increasingly clear that Democrats are better off
for it. In ripping through the Gulf Coast,
Hurricane Katrina has peeled back the lid on
Republican rule and many Americans aren't happy
with what they see. This isn't about a slow
response anymore. The Federal Emergency
Management Agency is on the ground, troops have
restored order, and the water in New Orleans has
long since begun to recede.
[continued]
The Economy
Hurricane George is heading straight for your
portfolio
By Peter Schiff
Euro Pacific Capital
As if the
damage from Hurricane Katrina was not bad
enough, Hurricane George Bush has been gathering
strength over the Potomac, and is now a category
five monster headed straight for your portfolio
(other than the part consisting of non-U.S.
dollar denominated investments that is.)
Likening his planned $200+ billion boondoggle to
the “Marshal Plan” after the Second World War,
Bush is ignoring a simple, but enormous
distinction. In 1945, we had the savings
necessary to tackle the World's problems; in
2005 we do not have adequate savings to pay for
our own.
In
my recent commentary “Nothing
Saved for a Rainy Day,” I pointed out that
Americans, who have indulged their every whim
while the sun shinned, have saved nothing for a
“rainy” day. As a result, Hurricane Katrina
struck ...
[continued]
Raunch
Not liberating, after all
How did feminists end up in bed with Hugh
Hefner?
By Wendy Shalit
Opinion Journal
Ariel Levy
attended Wesleyan University in the 1990s, and
she doesn't feel the better for it. It was a
place where "group sex, to say nothing of casual
sex, was de rigueur." It was a place where they
had "coed showers, on principle." When Ms. Levy
suggested to a department head that it would be
nice to have at least one course in the
traditional literary canon, she was dismissed
with icy contempt. Yet elsewhere on campus a
professor of the humanities taught a course on
pornography featuring, um, detailed textual
analysis.
It was all supposed to be so liberating....
[continued]
The MediMess
Free-market solution for Medicaid
By Mallory Factor
Free Enterprise Fund
While
conservatives are winning most of today’s
economic policy debates, in the long run runaway
big government is still slated to flatten us
all.
According to the Congressional Budget Office,
under current law, federal spending as a
percentage of gross domestic product will soar
to 34% by 2050, from 20% of GDP, where it has
been for the last 50 years.
[continued]
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WHY
BusinessNevada
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Politics
Fearmongering
wins a convert
The prospect of a Colorado-style Taxpayers Bill of
Rights is eliciting hysteria again
By Steven
Miller
BusinessNevada
In 2002, when Nevada doctors said an Assembly attempt at
tort-reform legislation contained too many loopholes,
Majority Leader Barbara Buckley called a press
conference and lambasted the bill’s critics as “fearmongers.”
Lately, however, Buckley has decided that
explicit fear-mongering—inciting of fear and
apprehension—is precisely what she wants to do.
In a recent interview with Alliance, the
quarterly newsletter of the Nevada Faculty Alliance, a
labor union for Nevada higher ed faculty members, Buckley told readers they should be “scared to
death” of any effort to place a Taxpayers Bill of Rights
on the 2006 election ballot.
[continued]
MediLoot
Insurers
gamble on
new drug coverage
By Michelle Swafford
InBusinessLasVegas
Managed-care companies and insurers are gearing up for big business opportunities
when seniors gain prescription drug coverage next year
through Medicare.
Sierra Health Services and PacifiCare Health Systems are the main
players in Nevada's Medicare business right now, but
that is likely to change when Part D prescription drug
plans are offered later this year. Major insurers and
managed-care companies want a piece of the Medicare pie
because of its profit potential in covering 42 million
Americans.
The federal government has pledged to subsidize companies that offer
drug plans so they cannot lose too much money. On the
flipside, Medicare will take its cut if the company
earns too much Medicare profit.
[continued]
Gaming
Adelson, Clear Channel expected to announce deal
By David McKee
LV Business Press
On Friday,
according to a well-placed source, Las Vegas Sands,
owner of the The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, will
announce an alliance with the Clear Channel
entertainment empire.
It will be an augmentation of Sands' campaign for one of
two casino licenses currently being put up for bid in
Singapore. The Singapore government has said it will
submit requests for proposals from Sands and its
competitors at the end of September.
Sands spokesman Ron Reese was traveling and unavailable
for comment and Clear Channel representative Ray Young
said his company would be making no announcement of its
own.
[continued]
Labor
Court hears dispute
between Vegas school
district unions
ESEA tries to block choice by employees it
shorted in $6 million-plus unpaid medical bill scandal
Associated Press
CARSON CITY, Nev. -- A lawyer for the union that
represents non-teaching workers in Las Vegas-area
schools asked the Nevada Supreme Court on Wednesday to
block an election to determine if the Teamsters Union
should represent the workers.
Michael Dyer, representing the Educational Support
Employees Association, argued that state law blocks a
union trying to replace an existing union from having an
election unless it can produce membership cards from
more than half the potential members.
[continued]
American Enterprise
Lessons of
the storm
Hurricane Katrina brought out
the worst
in Washington and the best in business
By Justin Fox
Fortune
As the
residents of shattered Gulf Coast towns like
Biloxi, Miss., and Gretna, La., began returning home or
crawling from the wreckage in the days after Hurricane
Katrina hit, many found their way to the big concrete
box with the battered orange sign. Home Depot stores
were among the first to reopen in the storm’s wake,
offering rebuilding supplies plus the even more precious
commodities of electricity and normalcy.
That was no accident. Home Depot had started
mobilizing four days before Katrina slammed into the
coast. Two days before landfall, maintenance teams
battened down stores in the hurricane’s projected path,
while electrical generators and hundreds of extra
workers were moved into place along both sides of it. At
the company’s hurricane center in Atlanta, staff from
different divisions—maintenance, HR, logistics—worked 18
hours a day to cut through logjams and get things where
they needed to be.
[continued]
American Enterprise
'The only
lifeline
was the Wal-Mart'
The world's biggest company
flexed its massive distribution muscle to deliver vital
supplies to victims of Katrina. Inside an operation that
could teach FEMA a thing or two
By Devin Leonard
Fortune
Jessica Lewis couldn't believe her eyes. Her entire
community—Waveland, Miss., a Gulf Coast resort town of
7,000—had been laid waste by the storm, and Lewis,
co-manager of the local Wal-Mart, was assessing the
damage to her store. The fortresslike big box on Highway
90 still stood. But Katrina's floodwaters had surged
through the entrance, knocking over refrigerators full
of frozen pizza, shelves of back-to-school items, racks
of lingerie. Trudging through nearly two feet of water
in the fading light, Lewis thought, How are we ever
going to clean up this mess?
That quickly became the least of Lewis's
worries. As the sun set on Waveland, a nightmarish scene
unfolded on Highway 90. She saw neighbors wandering
around with bloody feet because they had fled their
homes with no shoes. Some wore only underwear. "It broke
my heart to see them like this," Lewis recalls. "These
were my kid's teachers. Some of them were my teachers.
They were the parents of the kids on my kids' sports
teams. They were my neighbors. They were my customers.""
[continued]
American
Enterprise
For FedEx, it was time to deliver
Years of coping with calamity
have taught the huge shipper to improvise. That came in
handy when the big storm hit.
By Ellen Florian Kratz
Fortune
Watching TV in Memphis, Mike Mitchell didn't get it. Day after day,
the FedEx Express senior technical advisor heard
reporters describe how desperately New Orleans rescuers
needed communications. Nobody seemed able to fix the
problem.
Finally, on the Thursday after Katrina hit,
Mitchell spied a way to help: an aerial shot of a
54-story building near the convention center showed the
intact base for a FedEx radio antenna, part of a system
he had visited in 2004 on a maintenance check. That led
him to hope that part of the installation had survived.
We have spare parts here in Memphis, he thought. If we
could just get a generator to the roof and radios to the
rescuers, they'd have a way of talking to one another.
Mitchell shot an e-mail to his boss the next day. It
made its way up the ranks. FedEx called FEMA. FEMA
called the 82nd Air-borne Division. They all liked the
idea.
[continued]
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