iRobot Lays Off 350 Employees as Amazon Kills Merger Elizabeth Warren Opposed

“Today, Amazon terminated its planned acquisition of iRobot, manufacturer of Roomba robot vacuums, as the companies saw “no path to regulatory approval.” iRobot then announced that it would be cutting nearly one-third of its work force.
While the companies blamed regulators in the European Union for the termination, meddlesome U.S. lawmakers played their own part in souring the deal.”

“as the companies waited on regulators, iRobot was losing money: The company took out a $200 million bridge loan in July 2023 to tie it over until the deal closed (at which point Amazon lowered its offer to account for the new debt). With the deal scuttled, Amazon will now pay a $94 million termination fee, but iRobot expects to report an operating loss of as much as $285 million for 2023.

It’s worth wondering, then, if this is what lawmakers like Warren had in mind. The FTC letter worried the merger “could harm consumers and reduce competition and innovation in the home robotics market.” But without the merger, iRobot could very well face insolvency, and nearly one-third of its work force will lose their jobs—and considering the company is based in Massachusetts, a substantial number of them may very well be Warren’s constituents.”

https://reason.com/2024/01/29/irobot-lays-off-350-employees-as-amazon-kills-merger-elizabeth-warren-opposed/

Biden’s NIH pick gives Elizabeth Warren a major concession

“President Joe Biden’s pick to run the National Institutes of Health has agreed to a pair of major ethics demands made by Sen. Elizabeth Warren to help jumpstart her stalled candidacy for the top medical research job.
Monica Bertagnolli, who was nominated more than three months ago, pledged to not seek employment or compensation from any of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies for four years after she leaves government”

“Warren has made it a practice to push Biden nominees to adopt stronger ethical standards, in a bid to address the “revolving door” between government agencies and the industries that they supervise.

Last year, she secured similar commitments from Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf not to seek employment or compensation from pharmaceutical or medical device companies he interacts with at the agency for four years after leaving government.

Warren, who sits on the Senate Banking Committee and Armed Services Committee, has also sought to extract ethics concessions from nominees that come up in front of those panels — including top Federal Reserve officials and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

“Going above and beyond what federal law requires, as you are doing here, sends a powerful message that you are working on behalf of the American people and no one else,” she told Austin in 2021, after he committed not to become a defense contractor or lobbyist following his stint in the administration.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/29/biden-elizabeth-warren-concession-nih-director-00113307

Elizabeth Warren Wants To Stop Airline Mergers, Despite Evidence That They Lower Airfares

“”Data on overall traffic trends supports the notion that the average flier has not been negatively affected by consolidation,” the Eno Center for Transportation, a research nonprofit, found in 2017. “As the industry has consolidated and grown throughout the decades, the number of seats that are available for passenger use—available seat miles—has increased multiple times over. By some measures, the cost of domestic air travel has remained level since 2006, adjusting for inflation.”

However, there is some evidence that certain mergers have led to price increases. As a 2016 data analysis by travel writer JT Genter found, “On average, airfares between former Delta and Northwest hubs increased substantially—much more than the national average—demonstrating that the Delta-Northwest merger wasn’t good for hub-based flyers.” Genter continued, “However, airfares between United and Continental hubs have seen much more modest increases over the last five years, and the fares have actually decreased on average over the last four years.”

Current evidence, though not uniformly supportive of all mergers, points toward them being generally good for consumers. Larger airlines tend to mean more flights at similar or lower prices—especially when traveling through hubs. Even when evidence points to some mergers resulting in price hikes for consumers, Warren and Padilla’s assertions that airline consolidation “routinely heaps inconvenience and abuse on consumers” are exaggerated.”

Elizabeth Warren Wants Joe Biden To Deliver a Massive, Illegal Handout to the Well-Off

“First, it’s worth noting that people with college degrees are more likely to both be employed and, on average, are better paid than those who never attended college. People who attend college are also more likely to come from comparatively affluent households in the first place.

Second, it’s worth asking: Who has $50,000 worth of school loans? Not, for the most part, struggling dropouts from state schools. No, large student loan values are heavily associated with professional schools that produce graduates who, on average, go on to be fairly well-compensated.

The single largest source of student loan debt is MBA programs, as Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Adam Looney has noted, and MBA grads average more than $73,000 in earnings their first year out of school. “The five degrees responsible for the most student debt are: MBA, JD, BA in business, BS in nursing, and MD,” Looney wrote in 2020. “That’s one reason why the top 20 percent of earners owe 35 percent of the debt, and why most debt is owed by well-educated individuals.”

Technically, it’s true that well-paid professional school graduates fall into the category of “working people.” But they are not the sort of working people Warren wants you to think of when she uses those words.

What Warren wants, and what Biden appears to be considering, is a massive program of government aid that would disproportionately benefit doctors, lawyers, well-paid medical specialists, and comfortably salaried individuals with advanced business degrees.

But for some reason, you don’t hear Warren and Biden talking about their plan to give huge amounts of money to corporate lawyers and junior associates at hedge funds.”

“a program to forgive $50,000 per borrower would come in at around $950 billion, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. This would be in addition to the cost of the current pause on student loan repayment, which has already cost more than $100 billion.

Warren’s pitch for a presidential program to help “working people” is a trillion-dollar bailout for the upper-middle class.”

Why a Wealth Tax Is a Bad Idea

“Biden isn’t calling his proposal a wealth tax, of course. It’s the “Billionaire Minimum Income Tax,” and it imposes a minimum 20 percent tax on the income of households with more than—oddly—$100 million in wealth. Biden’s proposal is smaller and more pragmatic than the earlier variants from Sens. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.)—par for the course with Biden. Most notable is that even with implausibly optimistic estimates of the federal government’s ability to collect, the whole mess is supposed to raise an average of a mere $36 billion per year over the next 10 years.

The University of California, Berkeley, economist and Warren adviser Gabriel Zucman estimated what several billionaires would pay under the plan’s 20 percent tax on unrealized gains in illiquid assets, pinning Jeff Bezos’ bill at $35 billion, Warren Buffett’s at $26 billion, and Jim Walton’s at $7 billion.

Anyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention to federal spending over the last several years knows that figures that begin with b instead of t are now considered rounding errors. The point of this wealth tax is not to raise revenue. It has two rather different aims.

The first is pure political calculus. A floundering, unpopular president seeks to demonstrate a willingness to punish a small, unpopular class of people. A Reuters/Ipsos poll last year found that nearly two-thirds of respondents agree that the very rich should pay more taxes: 64 percent either strongly or somewhat agreed that “the very rich should contribute an extra share of their total wealth each year to support public programs.””

“The second aim, which has more far-reaching consequences, is to establish the principle that the U.S. government can tax based on wealth at all. If such a tax were to be put into law—and found constitutional by the Supreme Court, which would be no mean feat—it would be the thin end of a very large wedge. Biden’s proposal will spin up the huge bureaucratic, legal, and accounting support systems, public and private, necessary to support the formal tracking of wealth alongside income.

The utility of permitting individuals to accumulate large amounts of money varies from person to person, of course. There are many billionaires whose fortunes are extractive or confiscatory—that is, they have seized a larger slice of an unchanged pie. But in the U.S. in particular, we specialize in billionaires whose fortunes are clearly related to value creation—that is, they have taken a healthy slice of a pie that they also made much larger.

Sanders and others seem determined to conflate these two groups, applying the term oligarchs to, among others, people whose houses have an excessive number of bathrooms, people who build rockets, and people who own Major League Baseball teams.

People do not need to have been wholly self-made to somehow deserve to keep their money. No billionaire is an island, even if many of them own one. In fact, vanishingly few of us have fates that are wholly self-determined.

As a moral matter, if not a legal one, we might ask what the very rich do with their money as a way of evaluating whether they should keep it. As famously rich person Elon Musk recently tweeted: “Working hard to make useful products & services for your fellow humans is deeply morally good.” Many who support wealth taxes seem to hold the belief that the government would use the resources that the very wealthy command toward more valuable ends. Of course, most of the fortunes of billionaires such as the Waltons, or Musk, or Bezos are tied up in the large and extremely productive firms that made them rich in the first place.”

Elizabeth Warren’s plan to break up Big Everything

“mergers don’t just affect consumers: “The world has changed for those workers,” Warren said.”

“Studies have shown that as markets become more concentrated, wages stagnate.”

“Under Warren’s new bill, mergers over a certain size or that consolidate the market too much are forbidden. And consummated mergers that have harmed competition, workers, consumers, or competitors can be broken up.”