Ever since Reagan, conservatives have been telling us about welfare queens.
The way they put it, there are thousands of undeserving poor people in this country right now bilking taxpayers for all they’re worth all while you and me are sweating out a hard day’s work.
And here’s the thing: conservatives are right.
There ARE a lot of undeserving people getting rich off the commons and the working class.
But they’re not the poor (and probably black) welfare queens of popular conservative mythology -- far from it.
America’s REAL welfare queens are the corporations and corporate executives who, with the help of sellout Republicans, have turned our economy and tax system into their very own get-rich-quick-scheme.
Case in point: Big Pharma.
While big drug companies like to talk about how cutting edge they are, they really don’t do very much innovation at all.
They leave that to taxpayer-funded government scientists.
As a
recent piece in the Los Angeles Times pointed out, “75% of so-called new molecular entities with priority rating (the most innovative drugs) trace their existence to NIH funding [the National Institutes of Health], while companies spend more on ‘me too’ drugs (slight variations of existing ones.)”
And, while there is a strong argument to be made against private corporations getting a free ride off taxpayer-funded research, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this situation.
This is what governments do and have been doing for much of the last century -- they fill in the holes in the marketplace and create incentive structures that wouldn’t otherwise exist.
But what makes Big Pharma’s dependence on public research so offensive is the fact it uses that public research to manufacture drugs that it then sells at absurdly high and often unaffordable prices.
And that’s not even the worst part.
