Un-Brain Drain

Earlier this year, 50,000 additional H-1B visas were made available to U.S. companies for skilled workers under the proposed Immigration Innovation Act, which was introduced into the U.S. Senate in January.

The limit had been 65,000, which high-tech companies claimed was too few, thus hurting American business and innovation.

Woe is Medicaid

Medicaid’s open-ended matching grants to the states have led to huge cost growth, but not better health care. Congress should give each state a fixed amount of funding and free them to experiment with better ways of providing care for the needy. Limiting annual growth in the block grant to five percent would save $760 billion.

Secure Social Security

Social Security has huge unfunded obligations, and it causes ongoing damage by reducing personal savings and harming labor markets. Meanwhile, spending on federal disability programs has soared as the number of recipients has multiplied.

America should move to a system of personal accounts for retirement and disability, but meanwhile we would save $640 billion by indexing initial benefits to prices, modestly raising the retirement age, and trimming the disability rolls by one quarter.

Monopolies Aren't All Bad

Profs. Kevin Murphy, Edward Snyder and Robert Topel of the University of Chicago have written about some of the results of bargaining between big businesses and their customers. Big businesses often offer volume discounts, quote nonlinear prices and give loyalty incentives to customers, all mof which can encourage customers to purchase more, perhaps in a quantity similar to what they would buy in a more competitive market with lower prices.

If this bargaining view of monopolies is correct, then the standard view of big business has exaggerated the degree to which dominant sellers harm the economy.

Monopoly - Here We Come

Sprint is considering an acquisition of T-Mobile US that would reduce the U.S. mobile industry to three large carriers if approved by regulators.

The country's third-largest mobile operator, which itself was acquired by Japan's SoftBank only months ago, is studying regulatory concerns and might make a bid in the first half of next year, according to a WSJ report.

NSA Knows Who You Are

5 billion cellphone calling records have been collected by the NSA as part of a location and data tracking system, according to The Washington Post.

Details of the program were among the many documents leaked by former defense contractor Edward Snowden to news organizations earlier this year.

Adobe Breach

Last year, 152 million user records, including emails and poorly encrypted passwords, were exposed in a breach of Adobe Systems' computers. It's been called the largest publicly known leak of user information in history.

Protect yourself with safer alternatives, like the Foxit Reader and PrimoPDF creator.