Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• A Couple Won the Powerball. Investing It Turned Into Tragedy. How high fees and low returns hurt a nonprofit that trusted a local financial adviser (Wall Street Journal)
• Three Algorithms in a Room: A growing number of industries are using software to fix prices. Law enforcers are beginning to fight back. (American Prospect)
• Insurers Pocketed $50 Billion From Medicare for Diseases No Doctor Treated: Questionable diagnoses of HIV and other maladies triggered extra Medicare Advantage payments; ‘It’s anatomically impossible’. (Wall Street Journal) see also The Hidden Fee Costing Doctors Millions Every Year: A powerful lobbyist convinced a federal agency that doctors can be forced to pay fees on money that health insurers owe them. Big companies rake in profits while doctors are saddled with yet another cost in a burdensome health care system. (ProPublica)
• IRS collected $1 billion in back taxes from millionaires in less than a year: The IRS has launched a series of initiatives over the past two years to crack down on wealthy tax cheats. (CNN)
• Metal Thieves Are Stripping America’s Cities: Across the country, copper and other valuable materials have been stolen from streetlights, statues and even gravesites, costing millions to repair. (New York Times)
• What Trump doesn’t want you to know about Project 2025: Project 2025 is a radical blueprint for a potential second Trump administration, spearheaded by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. Twenty-five of Project 2025’s 34 authors served as members of the Trump administration. (Popular Information)
• It’s Impossible to Overstate the Damage Done by the Supreme Court in This Term: The effects of the high court’s rulings will be enduring and almost impossible to overturn without a serious reckoning by Democratic lawmakers. (The Nation) see also The Supreme Court Took A Sledgehammer To American Democracy: The immunity decision by the Supreme Court took a sledgehammer to the constitutional foundation of American democracy and eviscerated the rule of law. It will, in my view, go down in the annals of wretched Supreme Court decisions alongside Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Korematsu. It makes Bush v. Gore look like a piker. (Talking Points Memo)
• Inside a Violent Gang’s Ruthless Crypto-Stealing Home Invasion Spree: More than a dozen men threatened, assaulted, tortured, or kidnapped 11 victims in likely the worst-ever crypto-focused serial extortion case of its kind in the US. (Wired)
• The new Roe v. Wade: On its face, the judicial method employed by Trump v. United States resembles Roe v. Wade in the ways that matter. Like Roe, the Trump majority explicitly relies on its views of wise policy. For example, the Trump majority invents immunities “to enable the President to carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution.” The Roe test eventually became “undue burden.” Both decisions support their policy pronouncements with one-sided snippets from prior cases that are readily distinguishable both factually and contextually. (Society for the Rule of Law)
• Data: Temperatures 1.5C above pre-industrial era average for 12 months. Copernicus Climate Change Service says results a ‘large and continuing shift’ in the climate. (The Guardian)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Matt Eagan of Loomis Sayles. He is the head of the full discretion team, and a member of Loomis’ Board of Directors. Loomis Sayles & Co. was founded in 1926, acquired by Natixis in 2000, and manages over $335 billion in client assets.
Americans are split over the state of the American dream
Source: Pew Research Center
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