'Star Wars' Digital Downloads: Aren't You a Little Expensive for a 40-Year-Old Movie?
The Star Wars movies are available today for digital purchase on services like iTunes, Google Play and Amazon Instant Video for the first time. For $89.99 you can own two and a half good movies, and then hours of other stuff George Lucas also made, now featuring nine additional hours of bonus features.
That purchase price might be palatable to some fans, but seems a lot to charge as a promotional tool ahead of this December's new J.J. Abrams-directed installment in the franchise, now owned by The Walt Disney Company. Especially considering the franchise has already earned something on the order of $27 billion across its various outlets.
But most of that went directly to Lucasfilm, before Disney completed its purchase. Along with its Marvel revenues, Disney should see quite the revenue bump from the sci-fi/fantasy world this year, with The Avengers: Age of Ultron, the sequel to the third-highest grossing movie ever, opening next month, followed by Star Wars: Episode VII in November.
While there are probably some people out there who have no idea what it means to ask "who shot first?", those people are not likely to pay $90 to find out. And for those fans who do know, it seems the new digital versions still have the wrong answer.
Stat of the Day: 0.2%
The New York Times’ Jim Tankersley tweets: “In order to raise enough revenue to start paying down the debt, Trump would need tariffs to be ~4% of GDP. They're currently 0.2%.”
Read Tankersley’s full breakdown of why tariffs won’t come close to eliminating the deficit or paying down the national debt here.
Number of the Day: 44%
The “short-term” health plans the Trump administration is promoting as low-cost alternatives to Obamacare aren’t bound by the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to spend a substantial majority of their premium revenues on medical care. UnitedHealth is the largest seller of short-term plans, according to Axios, which provided this interesting detail on just how profitable this type of insurance can be: “United’s short-term plans paid out 44% of their premium revenues last year for medical care. ACA plans have to pay out at least 80%.”
Number of the Day: 4,229
The Washington Post’s Fact Checkers on Wednesday updated their database of false and misleading claims made by President Trump: “As of day 558, he’s made 4,229 Trumpian claims — an increase of 978 in just two months.”
The tally, which works out to an average of almost 7.6 false or misleading claims a day, includes 432 problematics statements on trade and 336 claims on taxes. “Eighty-eight times, he has made the false assertion that he passed the biggest tax cut in U.S. history,” the Post says.
Number of the Day: $3 Billion
A new analysis by the Department of Health and Human Services finds that Medicare’s prescription drug program could have saved almost $3 billion in 2016 if pharmacies dispensed generic drugs instead of their brand-name counterparts, Axios reports. “But the savings total is inflated a bit, which HHS admits, because it doesn’t include rebates that brand-name drug makers give to [pharmacy benefit managers] and health plans — and PBMs are known to play games with generic drugs to juice their profits.”
Chart of the Day: Public Spending on Job Programs
President Trump announced on Thursday the creation of a National Council for the American Worker, charged with developing “a national strategy for training and retraining workers for high-demand industries,” his daughter Ivanka wrote in The Wall Street Journal. A report from the president’s National Council on Economic Advisers earlier this week made it clear that the U.S. currently spends less public money on job programs than many other developed countries.
