Diamond_Dog
Diamond_Dog's JournalHumidity Hair
I vowed, when I went through a summer of chemo 11 years ago and was as bald as a cue ball, that I'd never complain about having a"bad hair day" again.
But gosh, I'm getting tired of my summer humidity hair. I feel like a 61-year old Little Orphan Annie.
"Cost cutting" middlemen reap millions via drug pricing, data shows
From the ongoing series about drug prices from the Columbus Dispatch.
"A middleman company hired to keep the state's prescription-drug prices in check for Ohioans on Medicaid is receiving millions in taxpayer money meant to provide medications for the poor and disabled.
Records of transactions provided to The Dispatch from 40 pharmacies across Ohio show that CVS Caremark routinely billed the state for drugs at a far higher amount than it paid pharmacies to fill the prescriptions. The state-sanctioned practice, known as "spread pricing," allows the middlemen, called pharmacy benefit managers, to keep the difference on medications used to treat health concerns ranging from mental illness to osteoporosis.
"PBMs have been fighting transparency, accountability and fiduciary obligations for years, and now I think we know why," said Antonio Ciaccia, a lobbyist for the Ohio Pharmacists Association. "PBMs criticize drug companies for inflating their prices. Here it seems they are the ones inflating prices."
http://gatehousenews.com/sideeffects/home/site/dispatch.com?utm_source=SFMC&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=GHM_Daily_Newsletter&utm_content=COLD_CD
It's so complicated!
The Parking Lot Blues
City parking garages and street lots just aren't made for Americans' bigger vehicles
From the Wall Street Journal
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/americans-love-affair-with-huge-vehicles-collides-with-tiny-parking-spaces/ar-AAyHsFC
U.S. to Put Tariffs on $50 Billion In Chinese Goods as Trade Fight Widens
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration said on Friday that it would move ahead with imposing a 25 percent tariff on $50 billion of Chinese products that are imported into the United States, threatening to escalate what had primarily been a war of words between the world’s two largest economies into a full-blown trade war.
In a statement Friday morning, President Trump said the United States would levy the tariffs on goods that contain “industrially significant technologies,” including those that relate to the country’s Made in China 2025 plan for dominating high-tech industries, and that the United States would pursue additional tariffs if China retaliates.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/politics/us-china-tariffs-trade.html?emc=edit_na_20180615&nl=breaking-news&nlid=74838209ing-news&ref=cta
***** Gee, where are we going to buy an American-made flat screen TV??? 
Most common Ohio jobs don't pay enough to cover rent
Cross posted in Ohio group
Most common Ohio jobs don't pay enough to cover rent
*************
Of the 10 most common jobs in Ohio, just two pay enough for a worker to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment.
That’s according to a report released Wednesday by the National Low Income Housing Coalition and the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio. The report said the state’s “housing wage” — the hourly wage a renter needs to earn to pay for a basic, two-bedroom unit — increased again this year to $15.25.
The coalitions said the average Ohio renter earns $13.32 an hour, nearly $2 less than needed.
"When we’re looking at job creation, we need to gauge whether these jobs are producing a living wage,” Faith said. “Instead, we celebrate the creation of call-center jobs. Housing costs have risen so much faster than wages.”
http://www.cantonrep.com/news/20180614/report-most-common-ohio-jobs-dont-pay-enough-to-cover-rent
************* So much winning! 
Most common Ohio jobs don't pay enough to cover rent
I will cross post this in General Discussion.
*************
Of the 10 most common jobs in Ohio, just two pay enough for a worker to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment.
That’s according to a report released Wednesday by the National Low Income Housing Coalition and the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio. The report said the state’s “housing wage” — the hourly wage a renter needs to earn to pay for a basic, two-bedroom unit — increased again this year to $15.25.
The coalitions said the average Ohio renter earns $13.32 an hour, nearly $2 less than needed.
"When we’re looking at job creation, we need to gauge whether these jobs are producing a living wage,” Faith said. “Instead, we celebrate the creation of call-center jobs. Housing costs have risen so much faster than wages.”
http://www.cantonrep.com/news/20180614/report-most-common-ohio-jobs-dont-pay-enough-to-cover-rent
************* So much winning!
Failing Pension Fund Threatens Thousands of Retired Truckers
"Jim Onley logged more than a million miles behind the wheel during his more than three-decade career as a truck driver, but a letter delivered to his New Milford, Ill., home in April stopped him in his tracks.
The letter said his $2,100-a-month pension will be gone by 2025 and maybe sooner.
Onley retired in 2002 when his employer, Consolidated Freightways, went bankrupt and closed its doors. The company was a member of the Central States Pension Fund, the nation’s fourth largest multiemployer pension fund, which told its nearly 400,000 pensioners in April that it will run out of cash by 2025, and possibly sooner.
There are more than 1,000 multiemployer pension funds in the U.S., and about 100 of them — of which Central States is the largest — are projected to run out of money within 20 years. The magnitude of these failing private sector pensions is far smaller than the looming catastrophes facing thousands of underfunded local and state government pensions across the country. Nevertheless, if all endangered multiemployer pension funds were to go under, some 1.2 million active and retired workers in the U.S. would be left with a fraction of the pension benefits they were promised."
http://www.ttnews.com/articles/failing-pension-fund-threatens-thousands-retired-truckers
Another village is missing its idiot
"An Arizona lawmaker reportedly doubled down on controversial comments he made earlier this week about the “existential threat” immigration poses to the country, and how “there aren't enough white kids to go around" in the state’s public school system.
State Rep. David Stringer made the comments Monday at a Republican men’s forum event near Prescott, Ariz., which gained traction after David Schapira, a Democratic candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction posted a video of the speech to social media, according to the Phoenix New Times.
“Sixty percent of public school children in the state of Arizona today are minorities. That complicates racial integration because there aren't enough white kids to go around," Stringer said, according to the paper. “Immigration is politically destabilizing. President Trump has talked about this. Immigration today represents an existential threat to the United States.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/arizona-lawmaker-says-there-arent-enough-white-kids-to-go-around-in-states-public-schools/ar-AAyCZ5S?li=BBnbfcL&ocid=mailsignout
Why do they keep messing with Oreos?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/foodanddrink/foodnews/oreo-is-unleashing-5-new-flavors-and-we-cant-wait/ar-AAylWBP?li=BBnbfcL&ocid=mailsignoutI say keep the Original, Golden, and Lemon.
All others meh.
HUD Proposal hits children the hardest
"After 10 years as a home-health aide, Karon Taylor earns just $11 an hour. She has a teenage daughter, and she’s also raising two grandchildren.
So she has a hard time seeing how the federal government could improve her economic prospects by raising her rent.
“I’m a working mom, and I still sometimes have to go to the food pantry,” said Taylor, who lives in a federally subsidized townhouse on the East Side.
Her family is among more than 4 million low-income households across the United States who could see their rents rise significantly under a proposal by U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, who says that increasing rents and work requirements is a way to boost self-sufficiency.
“It would make people who are very vulnerable, and who are struggling on the edges in our society, that much more precarious,” said Bill Faith, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio. “To make their lives less stable is an outrage.”
The center estimates that rents for more than 400,000 people in Ohio — one of 10 states facing the biggest percentage increases in rents — would jump by an average of 23 percent, or $730 per year, to $3,910. In the Columbus area, the projected annual increase is about $740, or 22.3 percent.
http://www.dispatch.com/news/20180607/working-poor-would-pay-more-rent-under-hud-proposal
*********** Can someone please explain to Carson and the Republicans that raising poor people's rents doesn't magically create better paying jobs for them to take advantage of? Hopefully Congress laughs this one out of reality.
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Member since: Tue Dec 26, 2017, 08:31 AMNumber of posts: 31,989
