The government wants to make medicare benefits available to more people, but to achieve this goal, it needs to make cuts in the existing medicare budget. the two areas where they are considering cuts are nonessential elective surgery and 6-12 month mental health care programs. applying the concept of diminishing marginal utility, the budget cuts should be made for spending on: a. elective surgery due to its lower marginal utility per dollar of expenditure. b. neither can be compared by measuring marginal utility. c. mental health therapy due to its higher marginal utility per dollar of expenditure. d. both programs, which have the same marginal utility per dollar of expenditure.

Afirm's before-tax cost of debt, rd, is the interest rate that the firm must pay on debt. because interest is tax deductible, the relevant cost of debt used to calculate a firm's wacc is the cost of debt, rd (1 – t). the cost of debt is used in calculating the wacc because we are interested in maximizing the value of the firm's stock, and the stock price depends on cash flows. it is important to emphasize that the cost of debt is the interest rate on debt, not debt because our primary concern with the cost of capital is its use in capital budgeting decisions. the rate at which the firm has borrowed in the past is because we need to know the cost of capital. for these reasons, the on outstanding debt (which reflects current market conditions) is a better measure of the cost of debt than the . the on the company's -term debt is generally used to calculate the cost of debt because more often than not, the capital is being raised to fund -term projects. quantitative problem: 5 years ago, barton industries issued 25-year noncallable, semiannual bonds with a $1,600 face value and a 8% coupon, semiannual payment ($64 payment every 6 months). the bonds currently sell for $845.87. if the firm's marginal tax rate is 40%, what is the firm's after-tax cost of debt? round your answer to 2 decimal places. do not round intermediate calcu

Suppose a mutual fund qualifies as having moderate risk if the standard deviation of its monthly rate of return is less than 3%. a mutual-fund rating agency randomly selects 27 months and determines the rate of return for a certain fund. the standard deviation of the rate of return is computed to be 2.19%. is there sufficient evidence to conclude that the fund has moderate risk at the alpha equals 0.05 level of significance? a normal probability plot indicates that the monthly rates of return are normally distributed.

4. why do you think it is important to follow the markkula centers steps to making good decisions?