Medical institutions have increasingly focused on translational research. The purpose of such research is to accelerate the application of basic scientific discoveries to practical therapies; in other words, to transport discoveries from the researcher’s bench to the patient’s bedside.
Category Archives: Blog
Obama Hints at Foreign Source Tax Reform
In last night’s State of the Union address, President Obama proposed a minimum tax for foreign profits of U.S. corporations:
First, if you’re a business that wants to outsource jobs, you shouldn’t get a tax deduction for doing it…. No American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas. From now on, every multinational company should have to pay a basic minimum tax.
Sadara Ventures: Developing the tech industry in Palestine
Last week, I visited Israel last week as part of a Harvard Business School trip on the subject of innovation. One of the groups we met was a new venture capital fund called Sadara Ventures (which is a name that connotes “pioneering” in Arabic). Sadara focuses on Palestinian investments—mainly in the city of Ramallah in the West Bank.
Challenges for private pension plans
2011 was a tough year for private defined benefit pension plans (DB plans). According to a report from Credit Suisse, the funding gap for the DB plans of S&P 500 companies rose from $250 billion at the end of 2010 to $450 billion at the end of 2011. Note that this is much higher than the shortfall during the peak of the financial crisis, which was estimated at $274 billion.
Rick Santorum, taxes, and the role of government
Now that Rick Santorum has emerged as the latest candidate to challenge Mitt Romney, we should take a closer look at what he believes about tax policy. To his credit, Santorum’s policy proposals are less radical than those of the previous anti-Romney’s—Perry, Cain, and Gingrich. For the most part, his plan resembles mainstream conservatism. But two policies suggest a role for the government that may prove unacceptably large to conservative voters.
The payroll tax showdown
This past week we have been seeing the fallout from the failure of the Supercommittee to reach any sort of agreement.
Senate Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on a one year extension of the 2% decrease in payroll taxes but could not agree on the financing. Democrats want to charge a 1.9% surcharge on income above $1,000,000 for ten years, while Republicans want to freeze the pay of federal workers for two years.
More challenges for the Brussels pact
Since I last posted on Monday, the status of the December 9 agreement in Brussels has deteriorated further. I have major doubts that this agreement will significantly ease the crisis either in the short-term or the long-term.
The euro summit: Less than it seems
On Friday, the seventeen Eurozone countries—and the ten other nations that comprise the EU—came together to discuss the next steps in responding to the sovereign debt crisis. The pact was agreed to by 26 of the 27 present nations—the U.K. was the only holdout.