Tag: WSJ

Australia and Facebook

As reported in Bloomberg: “Australia’s parliament passed a world-first law to force digital giants such as Facebook Inc. and Google pay local publishers for news content…. The legislation was passed Thursday and will ensure “news media businesses are fairly remunerated for the content they generate,…  ‘We look forward to agreeing to new deals with publishers and enabling Australians to share news links once again,’ [Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs] wrote in a blog post dated Feb. 24.”  Got that???  Does this apply to content that Facebook generates or collects and shares or does it apply to news links Australians share? Perhaps both. Actually, I think that newspapers and other news sources pay Facebook to post their links. It’s called advertising.

But what about the links I post on Facebook and Twitter to articles in the Washington Post, WSJ, and Bloomberg (all of which I subscribe to)?  Facebook is the platform on which I post them. Is Facebook being asked to pay the Post and WSJ for my posts? What I do with what I buy from these news services should be between me and these services and should have nothing to do with Facebook. Should Word Press have to pay the sources I link in my blogs? Should AOL have to pay sources I send or link in my email? OK, OK, I am an older gentlemen and got my AOL email address over thirty years ago and I don’t want to change. !!!  Should the U.S. Postal service have to peak into my regular mail and pay for any source content that I might be sending someone? This is ridiculous and it should be opposed.   

A mistitled tax proposal

The Wall Street Journal used the following headline to an article exploring a healthcare reform issue: “GOP Senators Weigh Taxing Employer-Health Plans”. The article itself is a well-balanced presentation of the issue but the article headline gives a very different impression.  WSJ article

The issue is that employment benefits that are part of a worker’s remuneration, such as health insurance, are excluded from a worker’s taxable income while a self-employed worker who buys their own health insurance (the private market) cannot deduct it’s cost from their taxable income. Both Democrats and Republicans recognize that this is unfair to those who do not receive employer provided health insurance. They differ over how to eliminate this unfair treatment—whether to include the value of health insurance in taxable income for both or to exclude it, as is done with employer provided coverage, for both. No one is proposing taxing health insurance as the article’s title suggests. The following headlines would give a rather different impression for the same proposal: “GOP Senators weigh equal treatment of health plans between employer and self-employed provided plans” or even, “GOP Senators weigh including value of health insurance in taxable income for everyone.”

As I have noted before we must find ways to reduce the cost of health care in America (it costs twice as much as care in Europe with poorer results) while insuring that everyone has reasonable access to it. But how we allocate its cost and structure the payments of those costs determine the incentives faced by the medical care industry that have played a major role in inflating those costs. https://wcoats.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/health-care-in-america/