Price gouging in the US pharmaceutical drug industry goes back more than three decades. In 1985 US Representative Henry Waxman, chair of the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, accused the pharmaceutical industry of "gouging the American public" with "outrageous" price increases, driven by "greed on a massive scale." Even in the wake of the many Congressional inquiries that have taken place since the 1980s, including one inspired by the extortionate prices that Gilead Sciences has placed on its Hepatitis-C drugs Sovaldi since 2013 and Harvoni since 2014, the US government has not seen fit to regulate drug prices.
There is widespread and growing concern about the availability of good jobs in the U.S. economy. Inequality has been growing for thirty years and is now at levels not seen since the 1920s. Stable and remunerative employment has become harder for U.S. workers to find. With the widespread plant closings of the 1980s, the loss of these "middle-class" employment opportunities was confined largely to blue-collar workers with high-school educations. As a group, members of the U.S. labor force with college educations always do better than those with high-school educations, but over the course of the 1980s the wage premium to having a college education expanded significantly. During the 1990s and 2000s, however, older and experienced college-educated white-collar workers began to find their earnings under pressure as the career
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