Matt Ulman

I’m really late to the synthetic cannabinoid debate, but now that I’ve caught on a bit I’m fascinated.

If I was a paranoid guy, the headline would be something like:

Chinese exporters in race with FDA to mask and vary the ingredients in synthetic copies of illegal drugs.

Of course the reality is a less scary, but no less interesting.  I admit that from time to time I’ve read up on the latest ‘fake’ drugs, and they’ve always seemed to be just that.  I didn’t expect anything different when I started hearing about K2, but the reality’s quite different.

Imagine a world where they took this opportunity to regulate and tax this stuff instead.  Rather than playing whack-a-mole with each new product, or watching a bunch of kids snarf down acetone laced and unevenly dosed infusions, the FDA instead removes the uncertainty and solves the deficit problem instead.

Last night on the O’Reilly Factor, Bill turned to the audience letters. From Peter in Canada: “Has anyone noted that life expectancy in Canada under our health system is higher than the USA?” Bill wasn’t phased, but he did use some creative math to answer. “Well Peter, that’s to be expected,” he said, “we have ten times as many people as you do!”

My immediate take on this contrast was, Bush is really gone.

It’s not supposed to be about politics in a crisis like this, but getting us out of this means that we frame the debate a certain way, and that is politics. His turning attention to people doing the right thing, and asking that we do the right thing, rather than distracting us with some sort of feel good circus (not to take anything away from Sullenberger et al) makes me think we might have a chance.

Yes, these are ok and I had fun on the train this morning playing “how would I answer”.  Maybe that’s what you’re always supposed to do, but today was the first time I caught myself doing it.

They’re all pretty straightforward;  answer according to party lines, etc.  Probably a grasp of economics helps, hopefully.  I might not have that, or maybe, but a lot of them are political questions from political people.  Mitt’s questions were particularly dumb and we really dodged a bullet there.  I hope I get around to writing down my ideas about ‘our ability to compete globally’, or I might be too busy trying to put my portfolio back in order.

But moving on:

President Obama supports the estate tax. Why should a person who leaves his money to his children pay more in taxes than another person with the same lifetime income who spends all his money on himself? — N. GREGORY MANKIW, a professor of economics at Harvard

The attribution  fails to mention that “From 2003 to 2005, Mankiw was the chairman of Ex-President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors“, according to Wikipedia and my own recollection.  (as an aside, typing that ‘Ex’ made me smile)

As I got off the train and walked the couple of blocks to work I was thinking about that (the question, not the fact that we’ve been waiting for 1/21/09 for 7+ years).  I liked the way he phrased it, and for a second I agreed.  But then I realized there’s nothing wrong with fighting against an accumulation of wealth.  We’re not fighting the American Dream, we’re not saying that you can’t acquire wealth.  We’re just  trying to stop some people from getting too far ahead, so we can all compete on a level surface.  Do they hate competition?

So that’s not particularly profound, but I started thinking about it again with the Kennedy thing.  I wish that the fact that she’s, you know, unqualified meant that we’d get some scrappy fighter from the Bronx.  We won’t, but unless they appoint Bush we’re ahead.