The Washington Post reports: No one knows exactly how much money hotels extract from resort guests in fees. A recent study by New York University found that hotels and resorts collected $2.25 billion in surcharges last year, but the number includes other add-ons. We do know that virtually no hotels disclose the fees in their […]
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One of the many New Deal reforms enacted to help prevent another Great Depression was a requirement that the financial industry keep its commercial investment activities separate from its basic depository and lending activities so as to prevent the risks of the former from jeopardizing the latter. Congress, unfortunately, repealed that law (known as "Glass-Steagall," […]
…is the title of this eye-opening piece in 538.com, about a Gallup survey of community college presidents about the likelihood of free community college passing in their states. President Obama has proposed to fund two years of free community college “for responsible students across America” but even under a formula providing that the feds would […]
A provocative paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research this spring argues that, although most political arguments about the implications of income inequality "crucially assume that ordinary people know how high inequality is, how it has been changing, and where they fit in the income distribution," in fact "ordinary people have had little idea […]
Many of our readers likely have seen media reports that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is strengthening its label warning about the relationship between use of certain pain medications and heart attacks and strokes. The drugs are all in a drug class known as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs. Common over-the-counter NSAIDs that will have […]
That's the thrust of this article by Peter Whoriskey.
Law professor Nora Engstrom has written A Dose of Reality for Specialized Courts: Lessons from the VICP. Here is the abstract: The latest in a long line of reform proposals, health courts have been called “the best option for fixing our broken system of medical justice.” And, if health courts’ supporters are to be believed, […]
A federal district judge in Virginia on Wednesday rejected the Washington Redskins’ challenge to the cancellation of the football team’s trademarks as disparaging to Native Americans. Judge Gerald Bruce Lee upheld a previous finding by a patent and trademark administrative board that the trademarks violated federal law under the Lanham Act. The judge denied the team’s constitutional […]
The Federal Trade Commission has had a busy week. Yesterday, the FTC announced that it had stopped a "massive payday loan fraud scheme." The operators of a payday lending scheme that allegedly bilked millions of dollars from consumers by trapping them into loans they never authorized will be banned from the consumer lending business under […]
The Federal Trade Commission has announced: The marketers of a dietary supplement called Procera AVH will relinquish $1.4 million under settlements resolving Federal Trade Commission charges that they deceived consumers with claims that the supplement was clinically proven to significantly improve memory, mood, and other cognitive functions. Under the terms of the settlements, the defendants […]