The Rest Of The Story: Monday, July 2nd, 2018

We all live in this fire-hose of crisis news stories. There is so much news that seems life-or-death, so many distracting Presidential tweets and social media outrage that it's very easy to miss the smaller stories that we really should also be paying attention to each day.

This Monday-Friday feature is a way to cut through all the conventional wisdom, political strategists and random Facebook posts and provide a daily rundown of political and cultural news that you should know. While we post the story about 6:00 a.m. ET each day, the post will be updated throughout the day as needed.

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Trump's Accidental War On Electronic Music:

Pitchfork is reporting the North Carolina-based synth music company Moog says it will likely have to make layoffs and possibly move overseas, thanks to the Trump Administration's new tariff policy:

"These tariffs will immediately and drastically increase the cost of building our instruments, and have the very real potential of forcing us to lay off workers and could (in a worst case scenario) require us to move some, if not all, of our manufacturing overseas," the letter reads. "We ask that you will support us by imploring our elected officials to recognize that these tariffs are seriously harmful to American businesses like Moog."



Perhaps It's Fitting That The Price Of Viagra Is Going Up:

Pfizer has raised the prices of 100 products just weeks after Donald Trump claimed the pharma industry was about to implement "massive" voluntary reductions, according to the Financial Times:

In a move that threatens to fuel the backlash over the soaring cost of medicines in the US, Pfizer increased the price of some of its best-known drugs, including Viagra, the erectile dysfunction treatment, according to figures seen by the Financial Times. 

The increases were effective as of July 1 and in most cases were just over 9 per cent — well above the rate of inflation in the US, which is running at about 2 per cent. 

In remarks on May 30, Mr Trump said that "some of the big drug chains in two weeks [are] going to announce...voluntary massive drops in prices". No such announcements have since transpired. 

Pfizer, the largest standalone drugmaker in the US, did decrease the prices of five products by between 16 and 44 per cent, according to the figures. 

"The latest increases signal that it is ‘business as usual’ rather than the voluntary concessions that Trump indicated were coming," said Michael Rea, chief executive of Rx Savings Solutions, which makes software that helps employers and health insurers lower the amount they spend on prescription drugs. 



Everything You Think You Know About Immigration Is Probably Wrong

The National Bureau Of Economic Research just released a new study that shows that in most countries, people tend to think there are more immigrants in the country than is the case and that they are poorer and using more government assistance than official figures show:

While all respondents have misperceptions, those with the largest ones are systematically the right-wing, the non-college educated, and the low-skilled working in immigration-intensive sectors. Support for redistribution is strongly correlated with the perceived composition of immigrants – their origin and economic contribution – rather than with the perceived share of immigrants per se.