I’m surprised it is so difficult to pay taxes in Japan. I had a job there. Your employer fills out your income tax return for you. The individual taxpayer doesn’t have to do anything. I certainly found it more difficult to do tax returns in New Zealand and Australia as compared to Japan.
People tell me that filling out a tax return in the USA is a nightmare. Filling out a federal tax return takes a day and tax agents must be hired by ordinary taxpayers. The USA is still ranked seventh by the World Bank in terms of ease of paying taxes.
All those American TV shows ranging from police dramas to comedies about the horrors of filling out tax returns and the dreaded IRS audit of ordinary taxpayers must have some truth in them. The pop culture about the IRS must have some accuracy to resonate with lives of the viewing audience.
Not to kick America when it’s down, I did not mention the need of many American taxpayers to fill out multiple state and city tax income tax returns. I haven’t mentioned multiple federal state and local business tax and sales tax returns either.
Medsafe denied New Zealanders access to four drugs approved in comparable regulatory jurisdictions in the last three years. Medsafe rejected two other drugs in the last three years but these drugs were not approved in comparable jurisdictions. Doxorubicin Liposomal, chemotherapy drug, is not as yet actually refused, its application is pending. Medsafe is not involved in the funding of medicines; this is the responsibility of PHARMAC.
Source: data released 29 October 2015 pursuant to an Official Information Act request to the Ministry of Health.
What’s the point of this regulatory arm of the Ministry of Health? Is it a waste of space? Should not New Zealand automatically register any drug approved in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia or Germany? What can medical trials in New Zealand find out were not already found out overseas? Medsafe targets processing applications for the approval of new drugs in New Zealand to be done within 200 days. That’s 200 days too many.
It should be lawful under the Medicines Act 1981 to market any drug in New Zealand which any of Australia, UK, USA, Canada or Germany has approved for prescription to patients.
SEEN & UNSEEN/ How much illness & death could be averted by limiting the FDA to safety, leaving efficacy to markets? http://t.co/4QkUuCCMDN— Robert Graboyes (@Robert_Graboyes) March 11, 2015
If economists have a bitter drinking song, a battle cry that unites the warring schools of economic thought all, it would be “how many people has the FDA killed today”. For example, drugs became available years after they were on the market outside the USA because of drug approval lags at the FDA. The dead are many. To quote David Friedman:
In 1981… the FDA published a press release confessing to mass murder. That was not, of course, the way in which the release was worded; it was simply an announcement that the FDA had approved the use of timolol, a ß-blocker, to prevent recurrences of heart attacks. At the time timolol was approved, ß-blockers had been widely used outside the U.S. for over ten years. It was estimated that the use of timolol would save from seven thousand to ten thousand lives a year in the U.S. So the FDA, by forbidding the use of ß-blockers before 1981, was responsible for something close to a hundred thousand unnecessary deaths.
In 1962, an amended law gave the FDA authority to judge if a new drug produced the results for which it had been developed. Formerly, the FDA monitored only drug safety. It previously had only sixty days to decide this. Drug trials can now take up to 10 years.
Sam Peltzman showed in a famous paper in 1973 that these 1962 amendments reduced the introduction of new drugs in the USA from an average of forty-three annually in the decade before the 1962 amendments to sixteen annually in the ten years afterwards. No increase in drug safety was identified.
Medsafe is a cost with no benefits to the New Zealand public. Medsafe has around 60 staff operating out of two offices, with centralised administrative functions, product approval and standard setting at the head office in Wellington.
How much of this budget of several million for Medsafe could be redirected to funding more life-saving and life changing drugs for use in New Zealand? This is rather than wasted on duplicating clinical trials already completed overseas or at the minimum duplicating regulatory approval processes, paperwork already completed overseas but not requiring a duplicate clinical trial in New Zealand.
At a minimum, the net benefits of the entire drug approval framework over the past three years in New Zealand is riding out on rejecting for approval half a dozen drugs, four of which are approved as safe in other comparable jurisdictions. That’s a pretty thin reed on which to hang a large budget that could be used by PHARMAC to fund life-saving drugs.
There should be a post box at the Ministry of Health to receive the certifications from overseas drug regulation agencies. Anything more is a deadly waste of taxpayers’ money.
My next round of Official Information Act requests will ask whether the minister and associate ministers of health were briefed on refusals of new medicines approved in other jurisdictions. Next I will ask:
for any evidence that a separate regulatory authority for drug approvals in New Zealand has any benefits, and
whether the Medsafe regime has ever been subject to a cost benefit analysis.
I have previously asked for information on drug approval lags. That was refused on the grounds I can look it up for myself on a rather complicated public database that requires knowledge of the names of medicines submitted for approval. Still mulling over what to do about that.
The only clear advantage Greece has on Russia as a place to do business is trading across borders because of European Union membership. Russia is a dog of a place to get things across borders. Greece has dropped two places overall ranking as a place to do business while Russia climbed 3 places in the World Bank 2016 Doing Business rankings as compared to their 2015 Doing Business rankings.
In 2016, Russia has considerable strengths as compared to Greece in a number of other areas of doing business such as enforcing contracts, registering property and starting a business. Russia is even a slightly better place to pay taxes than Greece! Russia’s World Bank Doing Business ranking for trading across borders has not changed between 2015 and 2016.
Australia is certainly a dog of a place when it comes to trading across borders and the same pretty much goes for New Zealand. Continental European Union members who are next to each other have a good run when it comes to trading across borders. Germans seem to manage to stuff that up nonetheless.
Australia and New Zealand get a poor rating because of border charges for a processing of customs documents. In Continental Europe, where there are no border controls for land crossings between EU members, these border compliance costs obviously do not apply nor is there any waiting at border checkpoints.
If you doing anything as badly as Greece, which Italy and certainly Germany have some explaining, it’s really difficult to start a business in your country. The British and French don’t have anything to crow about either.
Associate Health Minister Peter Dunne was onto something when he pointed out that a number of those supporting the legalisation of medicinal cannabis oils are using it as a stalking horse to legalise the marijuana leaf.
After reading the wonderful investigation in Saturday’s Dominion Post, it’s quite clear that cannabis oil has nothing to do with marijuana liberalisation.
The Associate Health Minister pointed out on television yesterday that there is already one cannabis oil derivative product approved by Medisafe and available on prescription. It is open to any pharmaceutical company to submit any other cannabis oil and marijuana derivative medicine for approval. There will be a fair hearing.
Medical marijuana is already legal in New Zealand. Few cannabis oil and marijuana leaf derivatives have been approved under the Medicines Act because few have shown to be an effective medication.
Those campaigned for a marijuana law reform would do a lot of sick people a service by saying that the campaign from better access and government funding of cannabis oil and other marijuana derivatives is a separate issue from which they stand apart. They should be not trying to follow in medicinal cannabis deregulation to liberalise recreational use of marijuana.
The issues have nothing to do with each other. Those who want marijuana liberalisation should stand on their own political feet.
By infiltrating the medical marijuana lobby, their entryism slows any deregulation of the medicinal uses of cannabis oil and marijuana leaf because of slippery slope arguments.
The marijuana decriminalisation lobby should be honest and say that it happens to be a coincidence that marijuana has other constituents that have medicinal uses. They want to decriminalise marijuana because they just want to get high.
1. My JPAM 2000 paper documents that suburbanites drive more and consume more electricity than urban residents.
2. My 2011 JUE paper documents that center city liberal resident NIMBY zoning regulation has deflected more development to the suburbs where people live a high carbon life (see paper #1 above) and then oppose carbon pricing.
3. My co-authored 2013 JPUBE paper documents that energy intensive manufacturing industries seek out cheap electricity price areas. Whether U.S carbon pricing and the resulting higher electricity prices would nudge them to move oversees remains an open question.
4. My co-authored 2012 EER paper documents that more educated people are more likely to have installed solar panels and to go off the grid and thus not pay higher electricity prices.
5. My 2013 EI paper documents that Congress Representatives oppose carbon mitigation regulation when they are conservative, their district is poorer and their district is high carbon. Nancy Pelosi and Tom Steyer are in liberal, rich, low carbon San Francisco. There, it is easy to comply with carbon regulation. They will pay few new costs for such low carbon regulation.
6. My co-authored 2015 JAERE paper documents that even in California and within counties that suburbanites vote against low carbon regulation relative to center city residents. Since we control for the fact that liberals live in center cities, this 3rd variable does not explain the urban form/voting correlation.
7. In my co-authored 2015 JUE paper we document that U.S protectionism through the Buy America Act has hindered the improvement of our bus fleet as a green technology.
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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