There isn’t much on which President Joe Biden has taken an active interest in during his presidency. Border security? Nope, he’s mostly ignored that. Inflation? He ignored that for as long as he could, then simply declared it over. In fact, on most issues that have popped up during his administration, there is more video of him eating ice cream than speaking coherently about it. But that doesn’t mean he’s not doing anything. The President is, in fact, doing quite a bit, and one issue in particular, quite a bit of damage to the health of the American people.
Politicians love a good enemy, real or imagined. It gives them something at which to direct the animosity of the public that is not them. Short of an enemy, a good scapegoat will always do.
If the economy stumbles, blame “big business.”
If oil prices spike, no matter the reason, “big oil” is always a favorite target.
And the perennial favorite target for politicians is “big PHARMA.”
None of these are remotely “villains,” they’re just easy targets for deflection. Slap “BIG” in front of an industry and instant boogeyman.
The problem is none of these industries are ever the problem.
Without businesses taking risks and recovering, often times in spite of the actions of government, there’d be no economy to speak of. The generic “Wall Street” is a great strawman, but it’s also meaningless. There is no face to it, there is no logo for it, just some ether-based idea the imaginations of the public can they fill in for themselves. It’s perfect.
The Biden administration seeks to regulate and tax this boogeyman, as most Democratic administrations have, but they haven’t necessarily used them as scapegoats, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average is one of the few things, they have to try to claim credit for.
It’s the same thing with “big oil,” only people have a more personal relationship with the gas pump. It’s an easy target, though governments (local, state and federal) make more money per gallon via taxes than stations do.
The Biden administration insisted no president can influence gas prices when they were going up, then demanded credit when they went down. The strategic petroleum reserve is still dangerously low, but now that prices at the pump are roughly $2 per gallon lower than their high, and people have largely forgotten they are more than $1 per gallon higher than when Biden took office, this boogeyman isn’t really needed right now.
That brings us to the perennial favorite: prescription drugs. The people who need them to stay alive or improve the quality of their lives have an uncanny ability to put side that reality and resent the cost. And the costs are substantial sometimes, because it’s wildly expensive to develop new ones and manufacturers have a limited number of years to recoup the more than $1-$2 billion it takes to bring one to market, not to mention the extra needed to research and develop more. They might be the only industry that actively saves lives and is routinely demonized at the same time. Tellingly, no one foregoes their products while attacking.
But attack them, because it’s easy.
None of the attacks mention the flaming hoops the government puts up in the creation of these drugs, hoops that add little to safety but a lot to the cost. But how someone runs mile fourteen of a marathon is just as important as how they run the last two.
Since the first two boogeymen are out for this administration, the third is catching extra flack. That flack is coming to the form of threats.
First is a new tax the administration, thanks to the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act, empowers them to impose a 95 percent excise tax on any drug manufacturers that refuses to agree to government-imposed prices for specific drugs in Medicare, the federal health insurance program for the elderly. More than that, the President also says his administration can simply seize patents for medicines if manufacturers refuse to comply, cutting them completely out of the equation by having other companies make and distribute their product against their will.
If that sounds third world, that’s because it’s what happens in the third world.
That may play well with some voters, but it will damage, if not kill, a lot of innovation. Why would any company invest in something if there’s little chance of ever recouping the costs of, or a decent chance the government will simply take?
Joe Biden may publicly seem like a disengaged President, but his administration is doing a lot behind the scenes. A lot of it, like what he’s doing on prescription drugs, is very damaging to the public. Which might be why you probably haven’t heard about it.