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tenderfoot

tenderfoot's Journal
tenderfoot's Journal
September 26, 2015

New, disastrous Kansas job loss exposes pure folly of Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax cuts

Eat this you libertarian trolls.

Gov. Sam Brownback’s income tax-cut plan to spur job growth in Kansas has become a full-time disaster.

On Friday, the state announced it had lost 3,000 total jobs in August. That’s on top of the 5,100 jobs lost in July.

Here’s even more dire news: The Sunflower State in the past 12 months gained a total of a puny 1,000 new jobs.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback's promise to create new private sector jobs is going very, very badly.

Only West Virginia, North Dakota and Alaska are worse, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Other states, meanwhile, that didn’t slash taxes and give up hundreds of millions of dollars in public revenues are enjoying robust job additions.

Just look at Missouri: It has gained 30,800 jobs in the last 12 months — almost 31 times more than Kansas has.

more: http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/yael-t-abouhalkah/article35684450.html


September 21, 2015

Ex-hedge funder buys rights to AIDS drug and raises price from $13.50 to $750 per pill

I just thought I'd post this here because surely there's some conservative douche troll that supports this asshole 110%



A former hedge fund manager turned pharmaceutical businessman has purchased the rights to a 62-year-old drug used for treating life-threatening parasitic infections and raised the price overnight from $13.50 per tablet to $750.

WATCH: Ex-hedge funder who hiked AIDS pill cost by 5,500 percent says drug ‘still underpriced’

According to the New York Times, Martin Shkreli, 32, the founder and chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, purchased the rights to Daraprim for $55 million on the same day that Turing announced it had raised $90 million from Shkreli and other investors in its first round of financing.

Daraprim is used for treating toxoplasmosis — an opportunistic parasitic infection that can cause serious or even life-threatening problems in babies and for people with compromised immune systems like AIDS patients and certain cancer patients — that sold for slightly over $1 a tablet several years ago. Prices have increased as the rights to the drug have been passed from one pharmaceutical company to the next, but nothing like the almost 5,500 percent increase since Shkreli acquired it.

Worrying that the cost of treatment could devastate some patients, Dr. Judith Aberg, the chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai asked, “What is it that they are doing differently that has led to this dramatic increase?”

According to Shkreli, Turing will use the money it earns to develop better treatments for toxoplasmosis, with fewer side effects.

“This isn’t the greedy drug company trying to gouge patients, it is us trying to stay in business,” Shkreli explained, saying that many patients use the drug for far less than a year and that the new price is similar to other drugs used for rare diseases.

Shrkeli also defended his small pharmaceutical company saying, “It really doesn’t make sense to get any criticism for this.”

This is not the first time the fledgling pharmaceutical executive has come under scrutiny.

He started the hedge fund MSMB Capital while in his 20’s and was accused of urging the FDA to not approve certain drugs made by companies whose stock he was shorting.

more: http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/ex-hedge-funder-buys-rights-aids-drug-and-raises-price-from-13-50-to-750-per-pill/

September 4, 2015

What's the point of having a block feature when the person you block can still...

see and respond to your posts?

I thought the point of "blocking" was to have a stress free experience here. Yet it doesn't.

So why have it to begin with?

Profile Information

Gender: Female
Hometown: East Coast
Home country: USA
Current location: West Coast
Member since: Tue Sep 3, 2013, 01:59 PM
Number of posts: 8,426
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