Barack Obama | Reason ArchivesThe leading libertarian magazine and covering news, politics, culture, and more with reporting and analysis.(c) Reason
2024-03-28T12:50:05Z https://reason.com/feed/atom/WordPressVeronique de Rugyhttps://reason.com/people/veronique-de-rugy/https://reason.com/?p=82530332023-10-28T03:12:46Z2023-10-26T16:30:36Z
In the grand ballroom of American politics, Democrats have long waltzed to the melody of progressivism while ridiculing Republicans' preference for outdated tax cut tunes. Ironically, they don't want to pay for their style of big government with higher taxes on ordinary Americans, which their expansionary ambitions would require. Instead, they loudly proclaim that they want to tax the rich. It remains to be seen how true this is.
Indeed, while Democrats profess their devotion to social justice and fight against income inequality, they often push for policies that favor the rich. Take their nonstop battle over the last five years to ease the tax burden of their high-income constituents.
The State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap, part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), placed a $10,000 limit on the amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted from federal taxable income. This move predominantly affected high earners in high-tax states like New York, California, and many others that are Democratic strongholds.
That's a tax hike on the rich. This shouldn't bother Democrats, who are usually happy to demonstrate their egalitarian chops by clamoring for that very thing. Yet this time, by demanding repeal of the SALT cap, they are on the front lines of a battle to restore tax breaks for the rich. As it turns out, when affluent Californians and Northeasterners felt the pinch, Democrats were ready to cha-cha for tax relief.
Contrast this with the refusal by moderate New York Republicans to vote for Jim Jordan (R–Ohio) for House speaker in exchange for doubling the deduction cap to $20,000 for individuals and $40,000 for married couples. Now, this might mean these guys really didn't want Jordan as speaker, but they wouldn't roll over even in exchange for tax cuts for their own constituencies.
Would New York Democrats be so principled? Back in 2021, 17 of 19 members of this delegation threatened to block a Democrat-sponsored infrastructure bill if the SALT deduction cap wasn't entirely repealed. I would have been OK with that crony bill failing; I highlight this incident only to reveal some Democrats' commitment to tax breaks for rich blue-state voters.
Add to this the fact that big government tends to work out well for people with big bank accounts. Billions of dollars in tax credits and subsidies have gone de facto to high-income taxpayers to buy expensive electric cars, or to large, well-connected companies to build green infrastructure or semiconductors they would have produced anyway.
For all the populist huffing and puffing, many big-government policies squarely hurt middle-class and poorer Americans. A good example is Democrats' starring role in Congress' refusal to reform insolvent entitlement spending. It amounts to supporting an enormous transfer of money, through regressive payroll taxes, from the young and poor to the old and rich.
Even Democrats' support for raising the corporate income tax rate from its current 21 percent to 25 percent is inconsistent with their populist self-identification. As economists have long known, most, if not all, of the economic burden of corporate income taxes is shouldered by primarily middle-class workers in the form of lower wages. It's wrong to call this a tax on the rich.
There are other instances in which Democrats balk at the notion of raising taxes or even, in Republican-like fashion, support tax cuts. In 2010, they heralded the passage of the Affordable Care Act. However, one key funding mechanism was a 2.3 percent excise tax on medical devices.
Many Democrats eventually joined Republicans in calling for this tax's repeal, citing the potential negative impact on the medical device industry. By 2015, even liberal stalwarts like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) were advocating to suspend the tax. It was permanently repealed in 2019 as part of a year-end spending package.
In 2011, Democrats, led by then-President Barack Obama, pushed for an extension of the payroll tax cut, a policy that provided relief to millions of working families. While this move aligned with their commitment to supporting the middle class, it marked another significant departure from their traditional stance on tax cuts, showing a willingness to embrace tax relief when politically expedient.
Soon, Congress must debate the sunset of the TCJA's tax relief provisions in 2025, which are scheduled to raise taxes by roughly $3 trillion over a 10-year period. It will be entertaining to watch Democrats extend a vast majority of these policies, including some for the benefit of very well-off Americans, while continuing to blame former President Donald Trump's tax cuts for raising the deficit.
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the 2021 Met GalaVeronique de Rugyhttps://reason.com/people/veronique-de-rugy/https://reason.com/?p=82500032023-09-28T20:32:21Z2023-09-28T20:35:51Z
America needs more housing. Pressure for reform is only growing as available homes get less and less affordable. Unfortunately, rather than addressing the root cause of high housing prices—an epidemic of local overregulation that prevents enough homes from being built—some legislators continue to flirt with social experiments that can harm both landlords and renters.
For example, some states and localities have implemented well-meaning "fair chance" laws banning criminal history on background checks for prospective tenants. Progressive Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.) recently introduced the idea as federal legislation. In a statement, Pressley said, "It's time we remove the systemic obstacles that have exacerbated the prison-to-homelessness pipeline."
We do indeed have an overcriminalization and overincarceration problem in this country, so on its face, this seems like a good idea. According to the Department of Justice, more than 650,0000 ex-offenders are released from prison every year, not counting the nearly 6.9 million people on probation, on parole, or still in jail or prison at any one time. Far too many face undeserved challenges when trying to re-acclimate into society and not reoffend.
That's partly because relatively few landlords want to rent to people with criminal records. Landlords minimize the risk of delinquent or destructive tenants by selecting the best applicants on a given margin. From this perspective, avoiding people with criminal records seems like an easy choice, even though it means some potentially great tenants are rejected. The best reforms would correct the real problems of overcriminalization and overincarceration. That's politically difficult and may take a long time. Equally important would be removing all artificial barriers to building more homes.
An abundance of homes, especially rental properties, would reduce prices and encourage landlords to compete along different margins, including accepting the previously incarcerated. More housing supply would also make it easier for ex-cons with stable jobs to buy homes at much lower prices and be free from landlords altogether.
On the other hand, top-down reforms like the one proposed by Pressley and Tlaib would shift more of the risk of housing ex-cons onto landlords. The result is both unjust and counterproductive.
Remember the Obama-era initiative to "ban the box"? Reformers sought to boost the job prospects of persons with criminal records by prohibiting employers from asking about applicants' criminal histories. It was another well-meaning idea, but one that overlooked unintended consequences. Preventing employers from discriminating based on criminal history didn't remove the desire of some employers to avoid hiring criminals; it just forced them to use poor information. More employers began discriminating against black and Hispanic applicants. Evidence suggests a similar outcome if criminal background checks of tenants are restricted. A study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis found that when the use of background checks and other information was restricted in that city, racial discrimination in housing increased relative to nearby St. Paul, where no such restrictions were in place.
It's not that individuals with past convictions never see their applications accepted. It's that banning landlords from acquiring background information that they find useful won't suddenly change their thought processes about what makes for desirable tenants. These landlords will find other, noisier information to use in its place—information that may unfortunately sometimes draw from racial stereotypes.
Oh, and because noisier information means more mistakes, it will also further reduce the housing supply by discouraging people from becoming landlords.
Nevertheless, the effort is gaining steam. The Federal Trade Commission and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recently sought public comment on the use of criminal and eviction records in screening clients. Although they have proposed no specific action, it's easy to guess which direction the Biden administration is leaning.
Increased racial discrimination is not the only possible unintended consequence. As one comment from the public observed, "Rental housing providers are in the business of housing and not the eviction business." Eviction is a last resort, but making it harder for landlords to match with the right tenant is likely to mean more of it.
There are many different types of landlords, and they should be able to judge for themselves what information is necessary to operate at their desired risk tolerances. Efficiency keeps customer costs down, and it's a rare market where efficiency improves with less information.
The formerly incarcerated certainly do need more access to housing. But the best available means is simply to increase the supply of housing while reducing the number of people imprisoned for minor offenses.
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John Stosselhttps://reason.com/people/john-stossel/https://reason.com/?p=82490192023-09-20T13:16:46Z2023-09-20T13:45:33Z
Did you survive the budget cuts from the last debt ceiling fight?
President Joe Biden called them "draconian," while Republicans praised the deal's "historic reductions in spending."
But both parties conned us, as my new video explains.
What they call "cuts" were just a reduction in their planned spending increase. Instead of raising spending by 7.8 percent, they increased it by "only" 3.9 percent. Only politicians get to call an increase a cut.
Biden praised the deal, saying, "We're cutting spending and bringing the deficits down at the same time!"
"Call it an emergency—done," says Cato Institute budget specialist Romina Boccia. "Spend the money on whatever you want."
Boccia reports how the Senate is moving to increase spending beyond the agreed-upon caps simply by calling it "emergency" spending.
"They gave $296 million to NASA for 'emergency infrastructure.' What's 'emergency infrastructure?'" I ask.
"That's not really a thing," she replies. "It's just a way to plus up the NASA budget…a huge slush fund."
"How do they justify this?"
"They don't even try!" Boccia complains. "Unfortunately, Congress has complete discretion over what it calls 'emergency.'"
This trick isn't new. Under President Barack Obama, $150 million for fisheries got added by calling it "emergency funding."
"I don't think that's an emergency," says Boccia. "It's not sudden; it's not urgent."
In the current budget, even useless agencies that should be eliminated, like the Education Department, get more money. It will now spend 300 percent more than it spent 10 years ago.
"By the end of this decade, spending will be about $10 trillion," says Boccia. "Who will be willing to lend that money to the U.S. government?"
Good question.
Recently, Fitch Ratings downgraded the U.S. government debt.
"The rating agencies and investors are catching on that the federal budget is highly unsustainable," she points out.
It sure is. Politicians have voted to spend much more money than the government will ever have.
On the other hand, so far, nothing terrible has happened.
"The fact that it hasn't happened yet does not mean that it will not happen," says Boccia. "The math does not work out."
The biggest reasons are Social Security and Medicare.
But when anyone proposes cuts, my fellow old people scream, "Government deducted money for Social Security and Medicare from my paychecks for years. I'm just getting my money back!"
They don't realize that because we now live longer, most of us will get triple what we paid in.
But of course, we old people are the biggest voting bloc.
"Asking members of Congress running for office to reform old age entitlement programs is a bit like asking an astronaut in space to turn off his oxygen supply," says Boccia.
So she and the Cato Institute propose a solution: Congress should create an independent commission to do the cutting. That way politicians can say, "Don't blame me, the commission made the cuts!"
That worked once with military bases.
The military actually wanted to close some bases. But selfish members of Congress fought any closure in their states.
"In the middle of a war, you don't close a base like Groton," declared Sen. Joe Lieberman (D–Conn).
"Circumstances at our base are unique," claimed Sen. John Thune (R–S.D.).
By ignoring the self-serving politicians, the Base Realignment and Closure Commission got 350 bases closed.
"It was quite successful until Congress turned it off," says Boccia.
Since Congress won't cut, and Biden definitely won't, an independent commission may be our only hope.
We need to do something before our debt explodes, mauling our future.
"The bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it's not likely to pass constitutional muster" is not a sentence you want to hear from a president launching an economywide initiative that will directly impact millions of Americans. Yet President Joe Biden said exactly that in 2021 when he announced plans to continue a Trump-era Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initiative giving public health bureaucrats control over evictions nationwide.
The Court was not amused by Biden's brazenness, and—just as it had clearly signaled it would do when it had earlier considered the expiring eviction moratorium—it ruled that it was not, in fact, within the power of the executive to give the CDC control of the contractual arrangements between every American renter and landlord.
Biden is simply the latest to experiment with an increasingly popular governing philosophy that involves throwing laws and edicts at the wall like so much spaghetti. (As is his wont, Biden diverged from his predecessors primarily by saying the quiet part slightly louder.) This sticky spaghetti system involves knowingly attempting unconstitutional action and then waiting to see just how mad the Supreme Court gets.
The Court, it turns out, can get pretty mad.
In Biden v. Nebraska, the case that considered the president's splashy plan to forgive $430 billion in outstanding student loan debt, Chief Justice John Roberts' June majority opinion declared: "People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress." A clear, strong statement—and not Roberts' own words. Roberts was quoting then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.), who was quite correct when she explained the limits of presidential power in a 2021 press conference. Biden knew better. His whole party knew better. He did it anyway.
Roberts went on to explain, this time in his own voice, what should have been obvious: "Our precedent—old and new—requires that Congress speak clearly before a Department Secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy."
***
Unfortunately, this messy and destructive pattern repeats, with different degrees of hypocrisy and/or public acknowledgment, across administrations: Biden's vaccine mandate, Donald Trump's bump stock ban, Barack Obama's unauthorized drone strikes, Trump's funding of the border wall out of military appropriations, indeed nearly every facet of immigration policy.
Advocacy for restraint on the latter came from an unlikely quarter in 2019. "President Obama said that he did not have the right to sign DACA [the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program], that it will never hold up in court," tweeted Trump. "He signed it anyway! If the Supreme Court upholds DACA, it gives the President extraordinary powers, far greater than ever thought."
As usual, Trump's characterization wasn't precisely accurate. But Obama did say in response to calls for immigration reforms in 2010: "I am not king. I can't do these things just by myself." And in 2012, while reserving the right to do temporary law enforcement prioritization, he denied "the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order." Shortly thereafter, overly ambitious enforcement decisions by his Department of Homeland Security about those very policies were struck down by the courts.
Trump's enthusiasm for a constrained executive was far from consistent, of course. He also claimed Article II of the Constitution gave him "the right to do whatever I want as president" and it took three drafts and three trips through the judiciary before one of his own signature immigration policies—a ban on people traveling from a list of Muslim-majority countries—managed to pass muster with the Court.
***
When the president sets the tone, other politicians follow suit in their own arena. The push to implement clearly unconstitutional restrictions on social media is a striking example. Trump debuted this particular style of pasta-toss with his quickly squelched national TikTok ban, a move the Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols called "arbitrary and capricious." TikTok responded to the policy by asking to be treated fairly "if not by the administration, then by the U.S. courts."
Montana followed suit in May with its own statewide TikTok ban, which illegally targets a specific company. Meanwhile, state legislatures in Florida and elsewhere have attempted other unconstitutional intimidation, restriction, or prior restraint on what types of content social media companies choose to carry.
Congressional Republicans, including Sens. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) and Marco Rubio (R–Fla.), have gotten in on the action as well, authoring several hastily written bills that restrict TikTok to varying degrees, introducing them in a flurry, and insisting on a vote—all while fully conceding that the specifics of the bills needed work to make them First Amendment–compliant.
Protecting the Constitution should not be the sole business of the Supreme Court. Thankfully, a few politicians still know better than to make a mess and leave the judiciary to untangle a pile of noodles.
"Which is more dangerous: Videos of teenagers dancing or the precedent of the U.S. government banning speech?" asked Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) in March. "For me it's an easy answer. I will defend the Bill of Rights against all comers, even, if need be, from members of my own party."
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John Stosselhttps://reason.com/people/john-stossel/https://reason.com/?p=82426802023-07-19T19:35:59Z2023-07-19T19:45:41Z
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) just released a report claiming there are 1,225 hate and anti-government groups in America. These groups cause "fear and pain [in] Black, brown, and LGBTQ communities."
I once believed the Center. Well-meaning people still do. Apple once gave them $1 million.
But what donors don't know is that today, the SPLC smears good people, not just "haters."
Ayaan Hirsi Ali grew up Muslim in Somalia, but now she criticizes radical Islam, and sometimes (maybe this is what really bothers the SPLC) fraternizes with American conservatives. The Center put Hirsi Ali on its list.
The Center also smears the Family Research Council. I sometimes disagree with the Council. But they don't belong on a "hate map."
"When they don't agree with you politically, they're going to list you as a 'hater,'" says council Executive Vice President Jerry Boykin in my new video.
"You are a hater!" I tell him. "You hate gays."
"No, I don't hate gay people!" he responds. "I know gay people, and I've worked with gay people." The Council merely opposed gay marriage, an opinion they shared with Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
One man became so enraged by what the SPLC wrote, he went to the Council's headquarters to kill people. He shot a security guard. Fortunately, that wounded guard stopped him before he could shoot anyone else.
"He told the judge that he was there to kill as many of us as possible because we were a 'hate group,'" says Boykin.
The Center also smears the Ruth Institute, a Christian group that believes adoption agencies should first try to place children with straight couples.
I told Ruth Institute President Jennifer Morse that she must be "a hater."
"I like gay people!" she laughs. "I have no problem with gay people! That's not the issue…. There could be cases where the best person for a particular child would be their Uncle Harry and his boyfriend…. But we owe it to the children to give them the best we can, which generally is a married mother and father."
When the SPLC put the Institute on its hate map, its bank cut them off.
"You're an organization that promotes hate, violence…," wrote the bank. "Therefore we're not doing business with you."
The Ruth Institute and Family Research Council are still on the hate list.
"There's no appeal. I sure don't know how you get off," Morse complains.
I suspect the Center keeps its hate list long to bring in lots of money.
The Center pays some of its people more than $400,000 a year.
"More than my entire annual budget," Morse says. "So yeah, whatever they're doing—it pays."
It sure does. Harper's Magazine once reported that the Center was the richest civil rights group in America, one that spends most of its time and energy trying to raise more money.
They promised they'd stop fundraising once their endowment reached $55 million. But when they reached $55 million, they raised their goal to $100 million, saying $100 million would allow them to "cease costly fundraising."
But when they reached $100 million—they didn't cease. They collected $200 million. Then $400 million. Now they have $730 million.
Yet they still raise money.
"Much of which is in offshore accounts in the Caymans," says Boykin.
Today the SPLC even smears groups like Moms for Liberty and Moms for America, calling them anti-government extremists because they oppose sexually explicit content in schools, and seek school board seats to try to "stop…school districts [from] disregarding the opinions of parents."
Give me a break. The Center puts Moms for America on its "hate map," but not Antifa, the hate group that beats up people on the right.
Today the Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate group itself.
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John Stosselhttps://reason.com/people/john-stossel/https://reason.com/?p=82357862023-05-23T20:28:57Z2023-05-24T04:30:14Z
Recently, Gov. Ron DeSantis sat down with me for a one-hour interview.
I started by praising him for keeping Florida largely open during COVID-19.
"I just had to make the decision as a leader," says DeSantis. "Are you gonna worry about the daily news cycle? Worry about your personal popularity?… I did not know how it was going to work out politically. I was going to do what I thought was right."
That worked well for Floridians. "If you look at excess mortality, we were the lowest in the Sunbelt and [had] lower excess mortality than California and New York."
In addition, since the pandemic started, Florida gained more than 500,000 jobs. My state, New York, lost more than 200,000. Florida opened schools quickly. As a result, kids suffered less learning loss. Good for DeSantis.
DeSantis also banned mask mandates.
"Some local police departments were going to fine people…. We kneecap them with our clemency power…no penalties for wearing a mask or not. It's your choice."
"Your choice" is a great thing. But DeSantis' laws and executive orders often limit choice. Today no Florida business may require its customers wear masks or show proof of vaccination.
I push back. "If it's my business and I'm scared, why can't I?"
"You do have freedom to choose, but so do individuals," answers DeSantis. "In Florida, we've just consistently sided with the individual."
But people who own businesses or who want to be surrounded by masks are individuals, too.
Florida does give parents a choice when it comes to picking a school. In fact, thanks to DeSantis, Florida leads the nation in school choice, offering parents $8,000 scholarships they can take to a better school. So why can't parents choose a school with a mask mandate?
"Because it's irrational," replies DeSantis. "Hysteria took over evidence-based analysis…the policy shouldn't be based on fear."
No, it shouldn't be. But while mask mandates were often irrational, and possibly harmful to children, one-size-fits-all rules are harmful, too.
I change the topic to immigration.
Last summer, DeSantis flew 50 migrants to Martha's Vineyard—a stunt meant to expose the hypocrisy of places declaring themselves "sanctuary" jurisdictions.
"Liberal elites…don't ever face any of the consequences," complains DeSantis. "Towns in Texas are getting overrun."
Media called his stunt "cruel." A lawyer for migrants criticized DeSantis for not phoning "Martha's Vineyard so that even the most basic human needs arrangements could be made."
I read that to DeSantis. He replies, "Do you think these Texas border towns are having people call ahead?!"
"Most of those people that went to the vineyard," he adds, "were thankful to be in that area…. They were not treated well by [President Joe] Biden."
Today's favorite media "hate DeSantis" topic is his Parental Rights in Education law. Critics smear it by calling it the "Don't Say Gay" law.
The law bans "classroom instruction…on sexual orientation or gender identity."
"Transgender or probing some student's sexuality, that is not appropriate for the schools. We're going to leave that to parents to discuss."
But "it can come up," I say. How far does the ban go? "A gay teacher could say he's gay?"
"Our law doesn't affect that," DeSantis answers. Also, the decision to teach sex education is made at the district level.
Good.
I ask, "Doesn't school choice solve this? Parents who want kids taught about gender changes could have that."
Some private schools do teach that, says DeSantis. But "when you're talking about what the taxpayers are funding, you just have to make a choice."
For 44 minutes, DeSantis and I talk about: how America will go broke, whether he'd cut social security or raise retirement age, what departments he'd cut if he were president, the drug war, his opposition to former President Barack Obama's plan to send Americans to Syria, former President Donald Trump, and whether DeSantis is a "slob who eats pudding with his fingers."
I don't think his staff liked some of my questions. They cut our interview short, saying the governor had to go.
You can watch it all at JohnStossel.com
I like some things DeSantis says and does.
I also worry that he's an authoritarian.
In any case, he's definitely smarter and better than both Trump and Biden.
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Veronique de Rugyhttps://reason.com/people/veronique-de-rugy/https://reason.com/?p=82300562023-04-06T23:41:29Z2023-04-07T12:15:13Z
Republicans and Democrats have been tripping over each other to tell voters how committed they are to making zero changes to Social Security and Medicare. Meanwhile, the Social Security and Medicare Trustees just confirmed yet again that within 10 years the programs' funds will be insolvent.
It's hard to forget the scene during the most recent State of the Union address, when President Joe Biden accused Republicans of wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare and Republicans—including one who shouted from her seat—called that a lie. The mutual refusal to take responsibility for the nasty fiscal condition of entitlement programs is decades old. Indeed, the findings of the Trustees' report are not surprising to anyone who follows these programs' finances.
Social Security, readers might remember, has been relying on its trust funds' IOU since 2010 to fully pay for retirees' benefits. Assets are running low and will be gone by 2033. When that happens, it won't be authorized to make the entirety of these payments—only the amount it collects in payroll taxes. That's a 23 percent cut. You can tell a similar story about the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund for Medicare. By 2031, the program will be insolvent, and benefits will be cut by 11 percent. That's an understatement since the solvency calculations exclude Medicare's physician (Part B) and drug (Part D) programs, which face a $1 trillion shortfall over the next decade.
To pretend that Social Security and Medicare shouldn't be touched is nothing short of political malpractice. Over the next 30 years, the two programs will run a $116 trillion shortfall. This number accounts for the significant amount of interest payments on the debt the government will ring up in the process. While we might be able to stumble along indefinitely, all that borrowing will slow—perhaps even halt—our economic growth, making funding the programs that much more difficult.
Every generation has the opportunity and obligation to leave the country better than they found it. The Greatest Generation fought and won World War II; the least the boomers and Gen Xers could do is fix this enormous time bomb we call entitlements.
That will require politicians on both sides of the aisle to come together. Past reforms only worked when they were bipartisan. The 1983 Social Security rescue was negotiated between President Ronald Reagan, House Speaker Tip O'Neill (D–Mass.), the Greenspan Commission, and key Senate members from both parties. This reform held because neither party tried to undo it, since both were invested in it. Perhaps the best example on the Medicare side is the reforms in the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, negotiated between a Republican Congress and a Democratic president.
In contrast, partisan reform ideas such as lifting the payroll tax cap or taxing the rich will not work. While each of these ideas might improve solvency a little bit, they aren't nearly sufficient to get the job done.
Besides, solvency isn't the only issue with these programs. First, over 15 percent of our hard-earned wages from every paycheck for our entire lives goes to paying—half of it technically covered by your employer, but you almost definitely pay in the form of lower wages. And even that's not enough since the programs face shortfalls. That might be palatable if young workers could reasonably expect to get it all back someday, which most won't.
Then, these programs are also unfair to certain groups. Working seniors are so penalized by Social Security that they have only weak incentives to earn other money. As my colleague Chuck Blahous has calculated, for every dollar in payroll tax older workers pay, they will get 2.5 cents in benefits. Meanwhile, younger workers must transfer massive amounts of wealth to older Americans who as a group are better off than they are. Under current projections, future workers will lose net income through Social Security exceeding three percent of their lifetime earnings. And there is a good chance these entitlement programs won't be there for them when they are ready to retire.
For a long time, leaders of both parties recognized that entitlement costs were growing unsustainably fast, even if they disagreed on what to do. Former President Barack Obama talked about stopping the rising cost of health care. When he was a senator, President Joe Biden thought all spending, including Social Security and Medicare, should be on the table for reform. Yet as president, Biden now boasts of his refusal to touch these programs.
Both parties need to return to being honest about what's going on.
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John Stosselhttps://reason.com/people/john-stossel/https://reason.com/?p=82237982023-02-22T19:18:59Z2023-02-22T19:20:18Z
Classified documents are found in former President Donald Trump's home!
Democrats were outraged! Trump is guilty of "mishandling of some of our nation's most sensitive secrets" creating "a national security crisis!" said MSNBC's Chris Hayes and Nicole Wallace.
Then President Joe Biden got caught.
Suddenly conservatives were upset.
"Thanks to Joe Biden," said Sean Hannity, "America's most sensitive secrets were floating around."
But both sides were wrong.
The truth is, the word, "classified" means little. Our bloated government now classifies three things every second.
If you stacked up all the classified paper in Washington, the stacks would be taller than 26 Washington Monuments.
In my new video, Matthew Connelly, author of The Declassification Engine, explains that "as much as bureaucrats know they're only supposed to classify information that's really important, they end up classifying all kinds of nonsense….Even like telling a friend, 'Let's go have coffee.' They'll end up classifying that email as top secret."
Former CIA Director Mike Hayden once got a classified email saying "Merry Christmas."
For years, government classified how much peanut butter the Army bought. They classified a description of wedding rituals in Dagestan. They even classify newspaper articles.
They are especially eager to classify dumb things they do, like the Army's reported experiments testing whether "psychics" could kill people with their eyes.
"A lot of what the government keeps secret, they keep secret simply because it's embarrassing," says Connelly.
Occasionally, government tries to reduce the overclassification.
Presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama all pledged to reduce the excess.
"Not in one case did they actually reduce the rate at which our government was creating secrets," says Connelly. "In fact, the amount of secrecy only increased."
I'm not surprised. In government, butt-covering and status matter more than efficiency.
I say to Connelly, "I would imagine bureaucrats think, 'Ooh, if I label this classified, I'm more important.'"
"In Washington," he answers, "many officials won't even look at something unless it's classified."
And classifying something needlessly has no downside.
"In all my years of research," says Connelly, "I've never found a single instance of anybody being fired for overclassifying something."
With so much unimportant but "classified" paper around, it's no surprise that some ends up in officials' homes.
After Trump and Biden were caught, classified documents were found at the home of former Vice President Mike Pence. In 2014, Hillary Clinton was caught sending emails that included classified information. Former CIA Director David Petraeus gave classified papers to his mistress for a book she was writing.
Connelly is upset that these people act as if government documents are their personal property. Some of Biden's documents were found in a folder labeled "personal."
"I'd like to know who thought that this was his personal property?" Connelly says. "These are our property. These records are our history."
Ordinary people who take records home go to jail. A Navy veteran who took top secret documents got three years in in prison. An ex-CIA contractor who kept classified documents in his home was sentenced to three months.
I bet that won't happen to Biden or Trump.
America's first "top secret" was the D-Day landing. It succeeded partly because Hitler didn't know exactly where the troops would land.
The second was the atomic bomb.
"We have to keep secrets," says Connelly. "But when we create tens of millions of new secrets every year, it's impossible to identify and protect the things that really do have to be protected."
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Nick Gillespiehttps://reason.com/people/nick-gillespie/gillespie@reason.comJustin Zuckermanhttps://reason.com/people/justin-zuckerman/justin.zuckerman@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?post_type=video&p=82183482023-02-08T17:05:35Z2023-01-18T18:00:07Z
Newly elected New York congressman George Santos has "apologized" after getting caught lying about where he went to high school and whether he graduated from college. And where he worked after not graduating from college. And whether he is Brazilian. And Jewish. And whether his grandparents actually fled the Holocaust. And whether his mother died on 9/11.
Santos—who says he won't resign—is an extreme case, but résumé padding is nothing new in Washington. Who can forget Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren's fraudulent—and ultimatelyapologized-for—claims of Native-American heritage? She apparently even plagiarized the "Cherokee recipes" she contributed to a 1984 cookbook called Pow Wow Chow.
There are folks like Sen. Dick Blumenthal (D.–Conn.), who lied about serving in Vietnam during a tight race but then claimed he didn't really do anything wrong because he only misspoke on multiple occasions and not all the time.
And of course, there's President Joe Biden, who dropped out of his 1988 presidential bid after he was caught lying about his own distinguished academic record. Incredibly, he even plagiarized the life story of a British politician whose family were coal miners. (Biden's were not.)
When politicians invent accomplishments and lie about their pasts, it reflects poorly on their character and shows an incredibly disturbing willingness to cheat in the pursuit of power. But the most harmful falsehoods that politicians tell aren't about the scholarships they didn't win, wars they didn't fight, or discrimination they didn't overcome.
They're about the laws they pass. Consider last summer's stupendously misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which the president announced would shrink the budget deficit and reduce rising prices. Even outlets sympathetic to Biden weren'tbuyingthat.
What the bill actually does is create a vast number of complicated tax breaks and incentives aimed at "greening" the economy. It raises taxes enough to reduce the deficit by around $300 billion, which is just 2 percent of planned borrowing over the next 10 years. It does nothing to reduce our $30 trillion in debt.
Who is loaning the U.S. government those funds? The Federal Reserve mostly, which pays for all those treasury bonds by printing money out of thin air, the principal cause of inflation. Far from reducing deficits, Biden is making the government's long-term balance sheet worse: When he took office, the 10-year deficit was expected to be $12.21 trillion. By the end of his first year, it had climbed to a projected $14.5 trillion.
He has also misrepresented his record on job creation, tweeting in September, "Right now, I have the strongest record of growing manufacturing jobs in modern history." As The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler pointed out, Richard Nixon beats Biden handily on that count, with 1.3 million new manufacturing jobs back in the early 1970s compared to Biden's 630,000.
Biden also promised that he would end his predecessor's use of Title 42 rules to keep migrants from Latin America from entering the country while seeking asylum here. His flip-flop on that that has alienated even his supporters.
Of course, Joe Biden hardly invented political lying, especially among presidents. His recent predecessors in the Oval Office lied about everything everywhere all at once (Donald Trump), health care policy (Barack Obama), pretexts for war and torture, (George W. Bush), and sex (Bill Clinton).
From newly minted congressmen like George Santos to the president, we've come to expect—and maybe even accept—that our politicians are going to lie about their resumes and their personal lives. That's totally unacceptable.
But it's the lies about their policies that we end up really paying for—and that we really can't afford.
Produced by Nick Gillespie and Justin Zuckerman; Sound editing by Ian Keyser; Additional graphics by Danielle Thompson and Isaac Reese
Credits: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; CNP/AdMedia/SIPA/Newscom; KEN CEDENO/UPI/Newscom; Rod Lamkey—CNP/Newscom; PAT BENIC/UPI/Newscom; Cliff Owen—CNP/picture alliance / Consolidated News Photos/Newscom; CNP/AdMedia/Newscom; Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA/Newscom; Alex Edelman—Pool via CNP / MEGA / Newscom/RSSIL/Newscom; Chris Kleponis—CNP/Newscom
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John Stosselhttps://reason.com/people/john-stossel/https://reason.com/?p=82175372023-01-04T19:24:20Z2023-01-04T19:20:34Z
Teenage basketball star Enes Kanter was shocked when his teammate criticized President Barack Obama on Facebook.
"Dude, what are you doing?" he exclaimed. He feared his teammate would be jailed.
Kanter is from Turkey, where, as Kanter explains in my new video, people who criticize the president do go to jail.
His teammates laughed at him. "They were explaining to me about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, expression, freedom of protest."
That inspired him.
When Turkey's president shut down news outlets, Kanter decided, "I'm going to say something about it."
He tweeted, wrote op-eds, gave interviews.
Turkey's authoritarian rulers retaliated. They jailed his father. "They wanted to set an example: This is what happens if you talk against the Turkish government."
The NBA supported his protest. "[NBA commissioner] Adam Silver texted me twice and said, 'Whatever you need, we are here for you. Keep doing what you're doing.'"
But then he criticized China. Slightly. He wrote, "Free Tibet" on his basketball shoes.
"There's no rule against it," he says. Other players put "Black Lives Matter" and "I Can't Breathe" on their shoes. Criticizing America is encouraged by the NBA.
But "Free Tibet" on a shoe was too much. Celtics officials told him to take them off.
He refused. "I was like, I'm not taking them off because it's literally freedom of speech."
Actually, it's not. America's freedom of speech applies to government. The NBA can legally censor an employee who might cost them money. They did exactly that to Kanter. He didn't get to play.
It's clear what the NBA feared. Just minutes after Kanter tweeted a photo of his shoes, China TV banned coverage of Celtics games. But just temporarily.
The Celtics traded Kanter to the Houston Rockets. The Rockets waived him. He's received no offers from other teams. "I could've played another six years," he says.
He won't.
Some sports organizations defend their athletes against China's oppressive rules. When women's tennis player Peng Shuai accused a Chinese government official of sexual assault and then disappeared for a few days, the Women's Tennis Association said they would support her even if they lost money.
The NBA won't.
They could stand up for the right of one player to speak, to peacefully criticize cruelty. It's reported that the NBA gets 10 percent of its income from China. The NBA makes billions. They can't risk 10 percent?
The NBA's games are extremely popular in China. Chinese leaders probably would have resumed TV coverage. It's not in their interest to ban NBA games forever.
"More people watched NBA games in China last year than the American population," Kanter points out. "I don't really think that China's going to ban every NBA game."
But no one in the NBA supported him. No one in management. No teammate. "Ten years I talk about Turkey. I did not get one phone call. I talk about China one day, me and my manager was getting phone call every hour."
"The hypocrisy hurts me the most. When it comes to problems happening in America, [the NBA is] the first organization saying, 'This is wrong. This is what should happen, blah, blah, blah.'"
But silence for victims of torture.
Kanter has now changed his name to "Freedom." Changed it officially. His real name now is Enes Freedom. "I did it was because I believe the freedom is the most important thing that you can have—after air and water and food….What kills me is how a Chinese dictatorship can pretty much control a 100 percent made American company and fire an American citizen from that company."
Even though Enes Freedom lost a lot, he's glad he spoke out.
"If God gives you a gift, you can give back to people by standing with them," he says. "That means so much to people out there who don't have a voice. If you are not outspoken about some of the issues that are happening, you're part of the problem."
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John StosselScott Shackfordhttps://reason.com/people/scott-shackford/sshackford@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=82112492022-11-14T19:23:23Z2022-11-14T19:25:24Z
Yes, it's a real "[checks notes]" meme moment. The Bush administration launched a post-9/11 war that had almost no relationship with the terrorists responsible, based on bad intelligence and misleading the public about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Obama's signature domestic accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, was dependent on him selling Americans a lie that they would be able to keep the health insurance they had.
Bush will be interviewing Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (via live feed) as part of "The Struggle for Freedom Conference" in Texas on Wednesday. Obama will be speaking alongside former Philippines Vice President Leni Robredo on Thursday in New York City as part of an Obama Foundation panel that discusses topics like "tackling disinformation and protecting democracy; pluralism, identity and democracy; and inclusive capitalism."
It makes for an easy round of "whataboutism," and to be fair, they both deserve it. Neither of these men is speaking on the issue from a position of credibility.
The lies that spun out of these two administrations weren't just simple errors: They had a purpose. The lies they presented were intended to convince Americans to support their political goals, both of which involved broad government interventions abroad and at home. And so, when these men talk about fighting "disinformation," it's very easy to assume that they are referring to messages that may cause the public to distrust government decisions, despite whether these messages are accurate or not.
Worse, both teams here seem to be arguing that the solution to disinformation is for the government to get further entangled in what is supposed to be independent journalism in order to fight whatever they're deeming is disinformation. The George W. Bush Presidential Center's page about "combating disinformation" leans heavily on supporting "local journalism" as an antidote for disinformation in disconcertingly vague terms: "The public, along with the executive and legislative branches, should take the lead in defending and promoting freedom of the press and the role of journalism. The private sector, Congress, philanthropy, and news readers/viewers should support local journalism."
But to what end? The fact that both of these presidents used the media to peddle disinformation when they were in office should give us all pause at the idea that the government should get even further entangled in anything the press does.
We have seen now that the federal government has been quietly pushing social media companies to delete content that government officials have decided is disinformation, regardless of whether that classification is accurate. Nobody who serves as a president, as a member of Congress, or in any of these political positions should be looked to for guidance when it comes to fighting disinformation.
A government that gets more involved in the media is a government that will get more involved in controlling what the media says. This is not a recipe for fighting disinformation. This is a recipe for controlling whose disinformation gets presented.
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John Stosselhttps://reason.com/people/john-stossel/https://reason.com/?p=82075912022-10-18T22:05:34Z2022-10-19T04:30:17ZThe G Word, a new documentary, only occasionally covers serious issues. But it opts not to do honest reporting.]]>
Netflix is paying President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama millions of dollars to produce shows for them.
The latest Obama documentary series is The G Word. "G" for government.
As Netflix documentaries go, this one is remarkably stupid. It's big government propaganda.
Obama begins by claiming that he does his own income taxes, saying, "It's actually easy."
I think he's joking, but it's not clear.
"I'm amazing at them," Obama continues hours later. "You can be, too, if you use the helpful tools found at IRS.gov."
But that's just silly. It's so complex that millions of us pay to get help.
Obama's series is hosted by silly comedian Adam Conover. Conover, correctly, calls himself "an idiot."
He uses his time with the former president of the United States to make lame jokes and, at one point, to make sandwiches. He compliments Obama on how well he cuts the bread. It's not funny.
The series occasionally covers some serious issues—meat inspection, for example. But instead of honest reporting, actors do a skit suggesting that, without government, meat companies would sell us dead poisoned rats.
"Food regulation was unbelievably successful," concludes Conover.
But food is largely safe today mostly because slaughterhouses cleaned themselves up way beyond what government requires. Companies don't want bad reputations.
One company executive showed me how they voluntarily do extra things like treat beef carcasses "with rinses and a 185-degree steam vacuum." Also, "equipment is routinely taken completely apart to be swab-tested."
By contrast, for 90 years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture inspected meat with a crude process called "poke and sniff." Inspectors stuck spikes into carcasses and smelled them. They kept using the same spikes, so they sometimes spread disease. The government only stopped poke and sniff in the 1990s.
A few times, Obama's series admits that government agencies mess things up. Conover mocks the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), "not a name you normally hear after the words 'did a great job.'"
No, but he then claims FEMA fails because it's underfunded, saying, "How many lives could have been saved if FEMA had had the resources they needed?"
That's ridiculous. FEMA doesn't fail because it lacks resources. U.S. disaster relief funds have increased by billions. FEMA fails because it's a government bureaucracy, and bureaucracies do wasteful things, like bring bottles of water to hurricane victims but then leave them at an airport.
The private sector is more efficient.
The G Word sneers at what it calls "this philosophy that the free market should be trusted over the government." But Walmart donates supplies much more efficiently than FEMA. They employ sophisticated weather tracking that helps them determine what assets are needed where. They get things to people because they lose money if they don't.
Obama's series smears those of us who are skeptical of government handouts.
"In the wake of the civil rights movement," claims Conover, "some Americans began to resent the fact that the government was now providing assistance to black and brown citizens."
What? We didn't resent welfare because we're racists. We objected because it created a new permanent underclass.
Handouts, President Ronald Reagan explained correctly, "discourage work."
So Obama's documentary depicts Reagan as a vicious surgeon cutting valuable government agencies, throwing them into a bucket labeled "free market."
But government wasn't cut under Reagan. Federal spending went up during his terms. It always goes up. At one point, the excesses were so grotesque that President Bill Clinton said, "The era of big government is over."
But it wasn't. It only grows. Today it's bigger than ever.
That's fine, says Conover, because Washington rescued us during the COVID shutdowns with "stimulus checks, small business loans, and corporate tax breaks!"
They don't mention how much of that money was stolen or that their spending orgy brought 8 percent inflation.
For three hours, Obama and his sidekick say government should do more. Whatever the problem, their answer is always more government and more money.
Maybe someday a president will point out that government has no money of its own and that spending more than you have is a road to ruin.
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John Stossel discusses Netflix's new documentary, The G WordThe G Word]]>Scott Shackfordhttps://reason.com/people/scott-shackford/sshackford@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=81997342022-09-28T17:43:00Z2022-09-30T10:30:47ZThe G Word tries and fails to restore faith in big government.]]>
The G Word, a six-episode Netflix documentary, aims to convince Americans we need a large and powerful federal government to cure what ails us. But the stories it tells remind us that government is often a big part of our problems.
Hosted by Adam Conover (Adam Ruins Everything) and produced by former President Barack Obama (who appears in two episodes), The G Word tours many federal agencies the typical citizen might not think of much, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Weather Service, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
The G Word describes many harms caused by poor government decisions—agricultural subsidies that distort markets, foot-dragging during emergencies, the failure of COVID-19 relief to get to those who need it. It even notes civilians killed in foreign countries by American drones during Obama's administration.
But the miniseries is intent on attributing the federal government's mistakes to either outside influences (particularly corporations) or insufficient funding, rather than poor internal decision-making, badly structured incentives, or incompetence. When discussing FEMA's failure to adequately respond to the needs of Puerto Ricans in 2017 after the island was struck by Hurricane Maria, for example, The G Word points the finger at red tape, which it remarkably describes as the "archnemesis" of government—as if it is not a creation of government itself.
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Veronique de Rugyhttps://reason.com/people/veronique-de-rugy/https://reason.com/?p=82020512022-09-01T18:24:57Z2022-09-01T18:30:21Z
If you had any doubts that those in power have dropped the pretense of fighting for the working class, you can dispense with them after President Joe Biden administration's latest concessions to the laptop class. From student loan forgiveness to subsidies for people who drive pricey electric cars and profitable semiconductor company CEOs, this administration is working hard to shower its friends with handouts paid for by hardworking lower-wage Americans.
We learned of the most outrageous handout of them all, of course, when Biden announced that he will—unilaterally, mind you, and for no apparent reason that I can see—extend the pause on student loan payments until the end of the year and forgive up to $10,000 for those persons making less than $125,000 a year. This generosity with other people's money extends up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.
As David Stockman, a former director of the Congressional Office of Management and Budget, reported recently, "Only 37% of Americans have a 4-year college degree, only 13% have graduate degrees and just 3% have a PhD or similar professional degree. Yet a full 56% of student loan debt is held by people who went to grad school and 20% is owed by the tiny 3% sliver with PhDs."
Picture two young married lawyers who together earn just under $250,000 and are on their way to making even more money in the future. They will be able to collect from Uncle Joe a nice bonus of $40,000, taken from the pockets of the many people who didn't go to college—perhaps because they did not want to take on debt—and from those who have responsibly already paid back their debt.
It's no wonder that so many left-leaning economists and policy wonks have loudly criticized this so-called student loan forgiveness. The Washington Post, for instance, editorialized that the decision is "regressive," "expensive" and "likely inflationary," nullifying "nearly a decade's worth of deficit reduction from the Inflation Reduction Act."
Meanwhile, Jason Furman, who headed former President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, napalmed the plan in a brutal Twitter thread. He explained that, thanks to Biden's move, interest rates would have to rise by an additional 50 to 75 basis points to counteract the added inflationary effect. Furman made clear that he regards this outcome as remarkably unfair and regressive.
Then there's the Inflation Reduction Act's gusher of green subsidies, many of which disproportionately benefit wealthier Americans. Take the extension of the tax credit of up to $7,500 for the purchase of new electric vehicles. For those buying used EVs, the tax credit is now $4,000, little consolation for people who can't afford the luxury of buying electric cars, which remain much pricier than their gasoline-powered alternatives. The bill hopes to address this issue by making expensive EV cars ineligible for the credit, but it counteracts this provision with a requirement that only cars assembled in the United States are eligible.
To underscore how disconnected policymakers are from average Americans, the vehicle credits are limited to those making less than $150,000 annually (single filing) and $300,000 (joint filing), presumably to avoid criticism for subsidizing the rich. That still leaves about 93 percent of individuals or 97 percent of households able to seize the subsidy. And given that it's mainly been taxpayers with annual incomes over $100,000 using the credit in the past, this subsidy will mostly still serve a swath of fairly well-off people.
But politicians are not just showering higher-income individuals with subsidies; they do the same for companies. A quick look at the semiconductor subsidies in the CHIPS Act reveals that the well-publicized $52 billion giveaway will benefit well-connected and rich companies.
We could go on and on with more examples, such as Democrats' incessant demand to restore remarkably regressive state and local tax ("SALT") deductions to their pre-2017 heights. The only persons who will gain are high-income earners—and their big-spending elected officials—in high-tax blue states. They lost parts of these deductions when the Trump tax cuts were implemented, and they want them back.
If you're surprised by any of this, you haven't been paying attention to Democrats' recent record. Few are even pretending to be the party of anyone other than the privileged laptop class.
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John Stosselhttps://reason.com/people/john-stossel/https://reason.com/?p=81948172022-07-12T21:40:59Z2022-07-13T04:30:55Z
Some Western leaders envy dictators' powers.
President Donald Trump said, when North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un speaks, "his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same."
President Barack Obama told reporters it would be so much easier to be the president of China.
Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, said he admires China because "their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime."
These are stupid and dangerous fantasies.
Some people have a "utopian dream that if only someone at the top could just point us in a certain direction, everything would go well," says historian Johan Norberg in my new video.
"People like a strong leader," I point out.
"A strong leader of their own imagination," Norberg responds.
One example he gives: "Thomas Friedman of The New York Times famously said that he wanted to be China for a day to solve global warming."
If Friedman were dictator, he could solve global warming? I doubt it.
Yes, China has built lots of wind turbines.
"But those wind turbines don't produce more power!" Norberg points out. "Around 30 percent of them are not even connected to the grid. And why is that? Because they didn't build them to make money. They built them because they wanted to meet a political goal."
So China has useless wind turbines and, for power, builds more coal plants.
Another example: American media said we should look to China to contain COVID-19. NBC's Chuck Todd asked Dr. Anthony Fauci, "How uncomfortable is it that perhaps China's authoritarian ways did prevent this?"
Fauci replies that China "prevented a broader spread."
But China's "'Zero COVID' policy turned into a nightmare," says Norberg. China locked people into homes. One city even killed COVID patients' pets. China is still the one country that will not acknowledge that we may have to learn to live with COVID.
"That's what you get with dictators," says Norberg. "If government is big enough to give you anything, it's big enough to take everything away from you."
At the beginning of the pandemic, America imitated China's lockdowns. The mayor of Los Angeles threatened to shut off power to people who did not follow his orders.
There was lots of political bickering about what our COVID rules should be. People don't like the bickering, but Norberg calls it one of democracy's strengths.
"Because it means that we see different things and we bring different ideas to the table." By contrast, "when we have one guy at the top, they begin to fall for their own propaganda."
That's probably what led to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
"[Russian President Vladimir] Putin thought that his own military was in excellent shape," says Norberg. "Ukraine was seen as a joke of a country, a place of latte-drinking comedians."
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a comedian before becoming president.
Putin assumed Ukrainians "would just run away the moment they saw muscular Russian paratroopers," says Norberg. "But it's been a disaster for them."
In freer countries, Norberg points out, "journalists [and] people online would've seen those problems and brought them forth."
But Putin's advisers fear telling him the truth. It's fun to watch one of his flunkies groveling.
I understand why his adviser stammers. Pointing out a problem might get him jailed, if not killed. It's why dictators get bad information. They make bad decisions because there's no open dissent.
"That's what happens when you centralize," says Norberg. "You lose individual initiative…local knowledge. If you can mobilize everybody in one direction, sometimes they mobilize us all over the cliff."
I'm glad America has a government with limited powers.
"Democracy cannot guarantee the best governance, but it can prevent the worst from happening," concludes Norberg. "That is enough. That's really what freedom and democracy is about. It doesn't guarantee us heaven, but at least it makes us sure that we won't end up in hell."
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John Stossel (left) interviews historian Johan Norberg (right)Ira Stollhttps://reason.com/people/ira-stoll/https://reason.com/?p=81947942022-07-12T19:16:11Z2022-07-12T19:20:28Z
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who ran for president in 2020 on his record as the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is changing his official residence to Traverse City, Michigan, and will vote there.
Here's an idea worthy of the smart, innovative, bipartisan approach that got Buttigieg so much favorable attention during that presidential campaign: How about Buttigieg moves the Department of Transportation from Washington to Michigan with him? It would signal that the transportation future involves decentralization and rapid change rather than Washington-style command-and-control.
As of April 2022, of the department's 53,250 permanent and temporary employees, 7,599 of them were assigned to its headquarters. The Department of Transportation's main building is a 2 million square foot Washington, D.C., palace designed by celebrity architect Michael Graves and completed in 2009.
A bipartisan, if contrarian, consensus is emerging around the idea that not all these jobs, and others like them, need to be in high-cost Washington. Especially with the rise of remote work, it's increasingly feasible to put government jobs, and offices, in the heartland, where bureaucrats can be more in touch with middle America, and where taxpayers can save money by taking advantage of lower labor costs and real estate prices.
President Donald Trump's administration proposed moving about 20 percent of the FBI's Washington-based positions—2,306 of the bureau's roughly 10,606 Washington-based staff—to sites in Idaho, Alabama, and West Virginia.
A 2016 article by the center-left writer Matthew Yglesias for the left-leaning site Vox was headlined "Let's relocate a bunch of government agencies to the Midwest."
"Moving agencies out of the DC area to the Midwest would obviously cause some short-term disruptions," Yglesias wrote. "But in the long run, relocated agencies' employees would enjoy cheaper houses, shorter commutes, and a higher standard of living, while Midwestern communities would see their population and tax base stabilized and gain new opportunities for complementary industries to grow."
For an agency like the Department of Transportation, moving from Washington, D.C., to Michigan might be even more significant.
Think of four great revolutions in transportation in the past century and where they came from.
Malcolm McLean was a North Carolina truck driver who invented containerized shipping. The railroads accused him of violating the Interstate Commerce Act. Port administrators resisted the change. But the cost savings made goods cheaper for consumers and spurred international trade.
Herb Kelleher, co-founder of Southwest, started a new airline in Texas. He helped push the civil air deregulation championed by President Jimmy Carter, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D–Mass.) and his aide Stephen Breyer, and Cornell professor Alfred Kahn. Again, consumers benefited from the lower prices resulting from competition and choice.
Travis Kalanick, a Californian, began a ride-sharing service in San Francisco that became Uber. Taxi medallion owners and city governments fought it, but the service took advantage of smartphones, dynamic pricing, and the gig economy. Uber is now being attacked in a big investigation published by The Washington Post. The Post's owner, Jeff Bezos, is the founder of Amazon, which itself uses an Uber-like approach to deliveries, right down to boldly taking over New York City public street corners, like 72nd St. and Park Avenue, as package-sorting warehouse substations.
Elon Musk popularized the electric car with Tesla. Tesla, founded in California, relocated its corporate headquarters to Texas in 2021. One can criticize Tesla by saying it has benefited from taxpayer subsidies and government-caused high gasoline prices, and that it does a lot of business with communist China. The fact is, though, that the company has far outsold companies such as GM and what used to be Chrysler that were "rescued" by taxpayers during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.
What all four of these revolutions have in common is that not a single one of them started in Washington.
So if Mayor Pete—Secretary Pete—wants to play a constructive role in the transportation future, moving himself and the federal transportation bureaucracy out of the capital might be just the right move.
As for that existing headquarters building? It would make lovely condominiums, or private-sector office space. Maybe some future Uber, Tesla, or Southwest will want it to use as a kind of museum. It could help Congress understand that the solutions to America's transportation problems won't come from Washington bureaucrats but from unleashing the creativity of entrepreneurs in places like Texas and maybe even Traverse City.
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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg testifies before the Senate Committee on AppropriationsScott Shackfordhttps://reason.com/people/scott-shackford/sshackford@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=81932472022-07-01T18:00:51Z2022-07-04T11:30:46Z
The confused and muddled messaging of The G Word, a six-part Netflix documentary miniseries about federal government bureaucracies hosted by Adam Conover and produced by former President Barack Obama, is well illustrated toward the end of the very first episode.
Conover has spent much of the episode explaining how the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) works and its role in monitoring our food supply. He takes viewers to a meat processing plant for an explanation of the relationship between USDA inspectors and domestic meat suppliers, heavily weighted toward the importance of having the federal government overseeing the process.
When Conover visits a supermarket, though, the episode shifts and explains the less savory side of the USDA. Conover notes how federal crop subsidies distort the natural food marketplace, line the pockets of wealthy agricultural corporations, and contribute to a flood of cheap but unhealthy junk food.
"It sure feels like the government's mission to help farmers is getting in the way of its mission to help eaters," he says. "Especially since the same USDA that keeps agriculture afloat is also responsible for crafting the dietary guidelines that advise us what to eat. I wonder if that's a little bit of a conflict of interest." It is, of course.
Conover knows that junk food is junk, even if it's delicious, regardless of whatever food pyramids the government may shove in front of us. And he says so, but as he's opining in the checkout line, he complains, "Every article and ad tells us that the key to healthy eating is to make better choices. But why is it all on us? Maybe instead of worrying so much about what we choose off the shelves, we should pay more attention to what the government chooses to put on them. Because only it has the power to determine if our food is safe and fit to eat."
Wait, what? Only the U.S. government has the power to determine if our food is safe and fit to eat? He just noted that he has the ability to independently evaluate the quality of the food he's consuming and yet consumes food that he knows is unhealthy because he likes the taste. He knows full well that we have experts completely outside the realm of government who can adequately advise us on healthy eating. And he even just noted that part of the corruption of the USDA's dietary guidance was the result of the government ignoring these experts for the benefit of agriculture interests.
This is the weirdness of The G Word in a nutshell. Across the six 30-minute episodes, released in late May, Conover details what various federal agencies do and notes how they frequently fail to do what we need them to do. Nevertheless, the purpose of The G Word is to sell to viewers that a large and powerful federal government is good and that citizens need it for protection. Essentially, Conover's flipped his typical script and is trying to unruin the government.
Obama appears in just the first and last episode, but his fingerprints are all over the show's sense of technocratic optimism, a consistent belief that government is supposed to be big and broad and deployed to serve our best interests, whatever those might be. There's an emphasis on what I call the imaginary "we," a familiar refrain of Obama's presidency: the insistent and utterly mistaken belief that "we" all largely want similar things from our government. We do not.
To the extent that the federal government fails or struggles, the show largely lays the blame on two factors—outside corporate manipulation and reductions in funding and staffing. In the second episode, the show calls out AccuWeather's attempts to restrict public access to National Weather Service data so that it can profit off providing them, a very specific claim of meddling. But when talking about the many, many failures of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), it's somewhat vaguely attributed to differing goals and agendas of the various organizations under the agency's umbrella and funding being unfairly distributed based on the political power of differing states (also known as democracy in action).
The funniest moment in the series comes not from the various attempts at humorous sketches. The segment that presents the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a parody of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is cringe-inducing to the very edge of unwatchability. The only time I laughed out loud was purely unintentional. At one point, when explaining FEMA's failures to adequately respond to the needs of Puerto Ricans in the wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017, Conover blames "red tape," which he then describes as "the archnemesis" of government. If I had been drinking, I would have done a spit-take here.
While the show is happy to get specific about corporate malfeasance in attempts to capture and control government, it treats the excesses of government bureaucracy as things that just come up out of nowhere and uninvited, like mold growing on bread. The G Word does not in any way approach bureaucracy as itself a form of internal corruption designed to make government more expensive and more powerful in the service of various interested parties that fiscally benefit with contracts and jobs when government is bigger and more intrusive. At no point when the show mentions FEMA's failures in Puerto Rico does anybody mention anything like the federal Jones Act, a deliberately protectionist law that benefits the maritime industry (and its unionized employees) and at the same time makes it extremely expensive to ship anything to the island. It's an example of bureaucracy that is not just some magical evil force showing up out of nowhere. It's there deliberately, and it made it exorbitantly expensive for Puerto Ricans to recover from the disaster caused by the hurricane. Yet, President Joe Biden's administration continues to support it because the maritime unions support it.
Later in the series, Conover expresses confusion that his mother—a public school teacher—was one of those types of people who believed that government is big and wasteful. Rather than tackling any of the many, many, many examples of government being wasteful, The G Word essentially insults the intelligence of the audience by suggesting that the push to shrink the size of government is a modern movement pushed by certain types of people (including think tanks, so presumably Reason falls into this category) as a reaction to the civil rights movement. The G Word says the call for smaller government only really began to build under President Ronald Reagan, shown as an actor performing comically inept surgery on a hunky Uncle Sam.
And while it's true that Reagan did run on the promise of reducing the scope and size of government, federal employment numbers actually increased during his eight years of office, from 2.9 million to 3.1 million. Today's numbers are back down to 2.8 million. Most of the job cuts actually took place under President Bill Clinton (and the show does note that both he and Obama agreed to cutting the size of government), but the data just simply doesn't support the claim that the federal government has actually been reduced in size and scope. If Conover wanted to make the claim that the money going to government isn't being used how it's needed, the problem then lies in the show's unwillingness to explore the reality of the "red tape" or the waste. When the show vaguely references the lack of affordable housing in our cities, it doesn't properly blame it on NIMBYs abusing environmental protection procedures to halt construction or labor unions suing to block projects unless they get a cut of the money but on "anti-housing capitalists," because capitalism apparently somehow hates providing goods in exchange for money?
To its credit, the show is, in a limited sense, willing to explore how federal and local government power is used to cause harm. The DARPA segment discusses the positive private use of drones (to film a wedding) contrasted with our government's deadly deployment of them to assassinate targets in countries we aren't even officially at war with. The G Word even rejects the Obama administration's lackluster undercounting of civilian victims and instead uses independent observer numbers to show how our drone strikes have killed hundreds of unintended targets. (The show, however, stops short of pointing out that the federal government has imprisoned Daniel Hale, the whistleblower who helped reveal how poorly the drone program operated.)
Toward the end, the final 15 minutes of the final episode, The G Word turns its sights toward local government in an attempt to optimistically encourage local election engagement. Here the show notes that this is where, in particular, criminal justice reform needs to take place because most who are serving prison time are in state custody, not in federal prisons. But even here the show is strangely vague, turning to some activists in Philadelphia who were involved in getting District Attorney Larry Krasner elected. But the show apparently no longer has any time to elaborate on why Krasner's election was important or even really explain much of his platform other than a vague reference to reducing cash bail. Krasner doesn't even appear on the show. It doesn't engage with the backlash against progressive district attorneys and their proposed reforms. It doesn't discuss the awkward public safety balancing act that comes from trying to make sure citizens feel safe while also not unnecessarily imprisoning people who would be better served by other systems.
After attributing attempts to reduce the size of government to people with bad intentions, it completely ignores the "Defund the Police" part of the criminal justice reform movement. It doesn't engage with it or attempt to even push the conversation in the direction of getting more mental health and social service experts to respond to certain emergency needs. It just completely ignores it.
On this Independence Day weekend, it's worth noting this series because of the tendency of some people to worship at the altar of big and powerful government as a solution to all our ills even when they absolutely know how frequently it fails, how frequently it hurts people, and how frequently it serves only itself and its friends. There's nothing unusual about Conover (and Obama) thinking that government is failing because it's just somehow not powerful enough or effective enough. It's very American, in fact. But The G Word shows that holding onto this belief that our government isn't funded enough requires completely ignoring huge chunks of what the government does with its money and authority.
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Adam Conover in "The G Word"John Stosselhttps://reason.com/people/john-stossel/https://reason.com/?p=81886982022-06-08T22:34:58Z2022-06-08T19:08:50Z
The president now brags that he cut the deficit!
"We're on track," he says, to have "the biggest decline in a single year ever in American history."
It's actually true.
But utterly deceitful.
President Joe Biden's deficit will be down from last year, but that's only because he spent such gargantuan amounts then.
For once, the media did not take his remarks at face value. Even CNN ran a "fact check" that quoted a Moody's Analytics director saying, "The actions of the administration and Congress have undoubtedly resulted in higher deficits, not smaller ones."
Much higher. Despite record tax revenues from last year's booming stock markets, our national debt will increase by about $1 trillion.
Sadly, most people don't care. These big numbers are too abstract. This will not end well.
During former President Barack Obama's administration, I complained about his irresponsible spending. Obama practically doubled our debt.
What a relief it was when former President Donald Trump was elected! He looked at the budget and said, "There's a lot of fat in there!" He promised he'd "cut spending, big-league!"
Foolishly, I believed him. But Trump cut almost nothing. He bragged that his military spending set "an all-time record."
Congress was partly to blame, but under Trump, our debt rose by another third.
Never trust politicians.
Last year, Biden made things much worse. He signed a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief law, saying he was "giving people in this nation, working people, middle class folks, people who built the country, a fighting chance." It included $1,400 stimulus checks, increased unemployment benefits, and increased child tax credits.
Then he added the $1.2 trillion "infrastructure" bill, which included billions in state and local aid, billions for schools, billions for small businesses, $110 billion for infrastructure, and $66 billion for Biden's favorite subsidy for the rich, money-losing Amtrak.
Biden wanted to spend even more, but his Build Back Better Act failed to pass. Thanks, Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.). You saved us $2.2 trillion and made our government a little less irresponsible.
Biden recent deficit-reduction brag didn't mention that he wants to increase the deficit even more. Last week, he put taxpayers on the hook for $5.8 billion in debt from people who attended Corinthian Colleges. Now he wants taxpayers to pay hundreds of billions more so other students don't have to pay.
Biden also bragged about a "record 6.7 million jobs created last year—the most in the first year of any president in American history."
But the president didn't create those jobs.
In panic over COVID, governments shut down so many businesses that they raised the unemployment rate to 14.7 percent. Biden then slowed hiring further by giving nonworkers extended unemployment benefits and fat stimulus checks. For many people, that meant they could make as much, or more, collecting unemployment. No wonder they didn't go back to work.
Finally, most benefits have run out, so of course, we have job growth now. It's not because of anything good that Biden did.
Under Biden, Trump, and Obama, government federal spending almost doubled.
Hope for future spending responsibility is bleak. "Biden's 10-year outlook still would rack up $14.4 trillion in deficits," reports Bloomberg.
More money gets printed, inflation gets worse, and the national debt grows.
Politicians need to make actual cuts to make a difference in our debt.
Budget cuts are needed to give our children hope for a prosperous future.
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Charles Oliverhttps://reason.com/people/charles-oliver/https://reason.com/?p=81843212022-05-09T15:18:32Z2022-05-16T08:00:48Z
In Roswell, Georgia, Centennial High School said in a statement that a substitute teacher caught on video in an expletive-filled classroom rant has been fired. The teacher, who wasn't named, told students that "When I was in high school, I was learning about Obama increasing drone strikes in my [expletive] country." One student said the teacher also compared Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler.
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John Stosselhttps://reason.com/people/john-stossel/https://reason.com/?p=81743062022-03-09T22:26:23Z2022-03-10T12:00:48Z
Russia's invasion revealed big differences in how politicians deal with threats.
The president of Ukraine, when offered evacuation, said, "I need ammunition, not a ride." He's a leader.
By contrast, in Canada a few weeks before, when truckers staged a protest against COVID-19 rules, the cowardly Prime Minister Justin Trudeau felt so threatened by the peaceful protesters that he went to "a secret location." Then he invoked Canada's Emergencies Act.
That empowered authorities to forcibly break up the protest. In one instance, police rode into a crowd on horseback. People were trampled.
Nasty as that was, the part of the act that turned out most effective at stopping protest was freezing protesters' bank accounts.
That's similar to what the West is doing to Russian President Vladimir Putin now.
But Trudeau did it to his own people!
"You do have to have a bank account, really, to be able to live," says George Mason University law professor Todd Zywicki in my new video.
"Imagine if, during the Civil Rights era, Martin Luther King could have lost his bank account because he trespassed at a Woolworth's counter."
Of course, more people used cash then. Now we rely on banks and credit cards.
The easily frightened Trudeau justified his use of the Emergencies Act by saying the truckers received "disturbing amounts of foreign funding to destabilize Canada's democracy."
Really? The truckers were going to "destabilize Canada's democracy"?
"I don't know why you would say it's 'destabilizing democracy,'" says Zywicki. "This is democracy. Canadians trying to stand up for their rights."
Fortunately, such abuse of power doesn't happen in the United States.
Except it does.
In 2013, Zywicki reminds us, "Companies engaged in completely legal services found themselves losing access to bank accounts…being forced to shut down."
It happened because the Obama administration launched Operation Choke Point, which encouraged banks to choke off accounts of pornographers, gambling businesses, payday loan operators, gun dealers, and other businesses that they didn't like.
Gun dealer Kat O'Connor did everything the government demanded—filled out the paperwork, got federal and state licenses, paid hefty fees. But suddenly, online payment processors wouldn't deal with her. She then tried companies like Stripe, PayPal, and Square. "It always ended up with an email saying they were closing my accounts," she told me. She assumes the blacklisting was "a backdoor attempt at gun control."
It probably was.
Choke Point continued until Donald Trump was elected.
But O'Connor is still blacklisted. Once government labels you a problem, the bureaucrats may choke off your finances forever.
That's infuriating.
But part of my job is taking the other side. So, I said to Zywicki, banks are private businesses, lending their own money. Why should they lend to people they don't like? Private businesses can make whatever choices they choose.
Zywicki had a good answer: Banks are not really private businesses. "There are barriers to entry. You have to get permission to start a new bank.…The financial services industry is so intertwined with government."
That government connection means bureaucrats who regulate banks can silence government's critics by cutting off access to their money. In Canada, protesting truckers resisted pressure from police and politicians for weeks. But once Trudeau froze their money, that was the beginning of the end of their protest.
When governments can de-bank you, you are not really free.
"We need to tolerate people saying things we don't like and separate that from their ability to make a living," says Zywicki. "We've merged those two things. That's a very big threat to the free society."
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Daniel Raisbeckhttps://reason.com/people/daniel-raisbeck/https://reason.com/?p=81412912021-12-03T03:16:47Z2021-12-02T16:15:46Z
Puerto Rico's Financial Oversight and Management Board, created under the administration of former President Barack Obama, recently reached an agreement with the Commonwealth's government to restructure the island's debt, which has been in default since 2017. Media outlets have speculated about a possible "end to the largest bankruptcy proceeding in U.S. history." The only remaining obstacle is the approval of Chief United States District Judge Laura Taylor Swain of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, who is in charge of the proceedings according to the 2016 PROMESA law (the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act).
The deal only reached Swain's desk, however, after the federal oversight board agreed to Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi's demands "of zero cuts to pensions of current retirees and current accrued benefits of active public employees," plus funding of $500 million per year for the University of Puerto Rico until 2027.
As John Dizzard of the Financial Timeswrote, the holders of Puerto Rico's defaulted bonds "are being handed deep haircuts on their face value whilst pensions for retired public sector employees are left intact." As bondholders lose out to pensioners, politicians are turning the logic of secured credit investing on its head.
One of the hearings for Puerto Rico's defaulted debt concerned $3 billion "in bonds backed by Puerto Rico highway tolls and excise taxes," and $800 million "in debt secured by taxes on rum paid to Puerto Rico by the federal government," notes Courthouse News Service's Thomas F. Harrison. After the default, Harrison adds, "the insurers for the bondholders tried to collect from the trust funds" to which the revenues were supposed to be paid, only to find "that the (Puerto Rican) government had been diverting the money away."
One reason why the federal oversight board is legitimizing such conduct is the precedent from the 2008-2009 bailouts and bankruptcy proceedings of Detroit carmakers. Some of the same decision-makers of the financial crash era have also been involved in the Puerto Rican debt dealings.
In 2016, Obama named former judge Arthur J. Gonzalez to the federal oversight board for Puerto Rico. In 2009, Gonzalez was in charge of the Chrysler bankruptcy proceeding. As George Mason University law professor Todd Zywicki wrote of that "egregious" process: "Creditors who held the company's secured bonds were steamrolled into accepting 29 cents on the dollar for their loans. Meanwhile, the underfunded pension plans of the United Auto Workers—unsecured creditors, but possessed of better political connections—received more than 40 cents on the dollar."
Gonzalez resigned from the Puerto Rico oversight board in October 2020, a year after his original three-year term had expired. But the spirit of the Chrysler bankruptcy still permeates the recent debt deal. This could have effects beyond Puerto Rico.
As Marc Joffe, a senior policy analyst at the Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this website), comments: "What does it say to retail buyers of municipal bonds on the U.S. mainland about who is to be rescued after a default?" Political pressure groups in Puerto Rico have tried to put the spotlight on the speculators who have bought the island's defaulted bonds in expectation of a bailout, the hedge funds which they call "vulture funds," but the fact remains that over two thirds of municipal securities are "held by individual investors either directly or through mutual funds," according to the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board.
Atara Miller, an attorney at the Milbank law firm in New York, told Courthouse News that Puerto Rico's debt proceeding leaves bondholders "with an umbrella that we can only use on sunny days." This risks the spread of contagion to states with high debt burdens and unfunded pension schemes such as New Jersey, Illinois, and Kentucky.
Besides its potential effects on the entire municipal bond market, which encompasses nearly $4 trillion in general obligation and revenue bonds, the Puerto Rican debt saga has also made a mockery of the rule of law. According to municipal finance expert Cate Long, who predicted that Puerto Rico would default on its debt as early as 2012, the island's government is three years behind on releasing audited financial statements, although "Congress explicitly required in the PROMESA law that Puerto Rico's financials had to be up to date."
While Puerto Rico has failed to make debt service payments since 2017, government spending is up over 12 percent since then despite a drastic population decrease. Long says Puerto Rican officials are realizing "how easy it is to hide financial data, pretend austerity, and fool their creditors." For its part, she adds, the U.S. government is creating all the incentives for Puerto Rico "to become a serial defaulter, like Argentina," a country on the brink of its tenth default since 1816.
The comparison is ominous; Argentina's longstanding practice of acquiring heaps of debt on the global markets before failing to repay it reflects the workings of its internal politics. As scholars Pablo Spiller (of the University of California, Berkeley) and Mariano Tomassi (of the Universidad San Andrés in Argentina) wrote in 2007, Argentina's brand of federalism combines decentralized spending for the provinces with largely centralized tax collection and funding schemes. The system, which began to arise in the late 19th century, still motivates "subnational governments [to] adopt a lax fiscal stance in the expectation that they will be bailed out in the event of a fiscal crisis."
In turn, they write, the top regional politicians tend to be the crony machine operators "who are best at the game of extracting rents from the common central pool." Similarly, negotiating rescue packages with the International Monetary Fund has become a part of an Argentine president's unofficial job description. Will governors of Puerto Rico assume the same role vis-à-vis the White House and Congress?
Certainly, U.S. taxpayers should consider the long-term consequences of their bailout of Puerto Rico, where children of politicians tend to be overrepresented as recipients of six-figure government salaries and seven-figure government contracts. The habitual debt busts of Buenos Aires is one Latin American export that is better left on the dock.
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Daniel Raisbeckhttps://reason.com/people/daniel-raisbeck/https://reason.com/?p=81382952021-11-10T18:57:19Z2021-11-10T19:00:58Z
In Cuba this past July, thousands of openly defiant citizens took to the streets, chanting they were "no longer afraid" of the communist regime. In response, a routine, inevitable wave of repression ensued, but this time was different since the world saw much of it live on social media channels, which Cubans increasingly use. The myth of an egalitarian, socialist paradise with a superior healthcare system was clearly exposed with viral images of miserable hospital conditions and chronic food shortages.
More noteworthy still was the willingness of ordinary Cubans to persevere with the protests. Unlike the last massive protest in Havana, in 1994, which fizzled out as a one-time affair, this year's demonstrations will have a sequel. When dissidents announced they would march peacefully through Cuban cities on November 20, the regime refused to grant them permission to do so. Current dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel, heir to the Castro brothers at the helm of the Communist Party, has scheduledmilitary exercises on the same date and declared a "day of national defense" against supposed foreign interference. The dissidents, led by playwright Yunior García, responded by changing the protest date to November 15.
This game of chicken is also being played outside Cuba. Last week, Florida Democrats in the House of Representatives, led by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D–Fla.), passed a House resolution that expresses solidarity with Cubans "demonstrating peacefully for fundamental freedoms." The 40 votes against largely came from Democrats in the party's progressive wing. In July, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), who generally opposes free trade, blamed the protests in Cuba on the American embargo; that is, on a lack of free trade. Now, the question is what President Joe Biden will do about Cuba, an issue which divides his own party.
Former President Barack Obama renewed diplomatic ties with the Castro regime, removed the island from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, and eased some of the embargo's economic sanctions. This last measure aimed to "foster robust commercial ties," create stakeholders in the American business community, and produce "conditions in Cuba favoring greater economic freedom," as American University professor William Leogrande wrote. The real changes Obama wrought were the political concessions, though, which legitimized the dictatorship, and the greatly increased flow to the island of U.S. tourists, who were allowed to travel to Cuba regularly on commercial airlines, cruise ships, and ferries. Remittances also increased considerably as limits were lifted.
In terms of trade, however, the impact was small. Leogrande writes that Obama left "the core of the economic embargo…intact," since only pharmaceutical and telecom companies could enter joint ventures with the Cuban state, while U.S. exports "were still limited to agricultural, medical, and some consumer goods."
The embargo, initially strict, has become a leaky structure. In 2000, the Trade Sanctions Reform and Enhancement Act permitted the sale of food and agricultural goods to Cuba. By 2020, the U.S. was the island's main provider of food and agricultural products and its ninth-largest trading partner, according to economist Daniel Lacalle. The 27 percent of Cuban GDP that consists of international trade—mainly with Canada, China, Venezuela, Spain, and the Netherlands—makes a mockery of the regime's continuous claims of a U.S. "blockade" against the island.
The limited scope of Obama's normalization policy toward Cuba was due to legal constraints. He was willing to lift the remaining parts of the embargo entirely, but according to the terms of the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, this requires the approval of Congress, which Obama called for.
Things changed once Donald Trump won the 2016 election, but it was mostly a matter of tone. Although once a supporter of "opening with Cuba," Trump the candidate used tough rhetoric against the Castro regime and its Venezuelan satellite, reaping strong electoral results in south Florida. As president, Trump restricted travel and the flow of remittances to the island, placing a limit of $1,000 per person each quarter. Nevertheless, he "left the basic architecture of Obama's opening to Cuba in place," Leogrande concludes, due primarily to sustained pressure from the farm, tourism, and telecommunications industries.
But during the final days of his presidency, Trump returned Cuba to the list of international sponsors of terrorism (alongside Syria, North Korea, and Iran.) At the time, an Associated Press article suggested that Trump's intent was to "hamstring" president-elect Biden. According to Emilio Morales, an exiled Cuban economist, Biden was unlikely to incur the political risk of throwing "a lifeline to Cuba's leadership without anything in return," as Obama had done.
In fact, Obama not only decided to forego any serious attempt to blunt the Cuban regime's apparatus of repression; he also made it considerably more difficult for ordinary Cubans to escape from communism. He ended the "wet foot, dry foot policy," which allowed Cuban refugees who reached U.S. soil to remain in the country and obtain green cards. He also got rid of the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, a George W. Bush-era policy that allowed the Cuban healthcare professionals who are sent abroad on forced labor assignments to defect to U.S. embassies and consulates. Between 2006 and 2016, the program allowed over 7,000 medical workers to escape Cuba's brutal "missions," which have become the regime's main cash cow, providing over $6 billion in foreign currency in 2018. The abrupt change in policy left 180 Cuban doctors strandedin Colombia, where they sought refuge after fleeing the medical missions in neighboring Venezuela.
Obama's policy had regional repercussions. When Obama held a press conference in Havana alongside Raúl Castro in 2016, he emphasized that "Cuba is sovereign, and the future of Cuba will be decided by Cubans, not by anybody else." The problem was that the Castros—apart from forbidding Cubans to determine their own future—never practiced noninterventionism in Latin America; they exported guerrilla warfare and Soviet repression tactics, meddled in elections, and leached other countries' natural resources. Obama's Cuba deal, in fact, involved turning a blind eye to the regime's takeover of Venezuela. As Obama admitted in Havana, his conversations with Castro did not include "an extensive discussion of Venezuela," although they did "touch on the subject." This was like speaking to an ivory trader without mentioning elephants.
To his credit, Obama's easing of travel and commercial restrictions against Cuba were steps in the right direction. Why should the government determine where you can travel or with whom you can trade? But his obstruction of the few available escape routes for Cuban dissidents was a serious mistake, as was his symbolic whitewashing of the Cuban dictatorship, which he astoundingly praised for its "enormous achievement in education and healthcare." For Cuban political prisoners and those risking their lives for liberty in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and other subdued Latin American nations, few images were as discouraging as those of the leader of the free world frolicking with Castro at a baseball game.
And Trump's restrictions on trade, travel, and remittances to Cuba were mistaken; such curbs on liberty likely harm ordinary Cubans as much as the regime itself. Nevertheless, Trump was right to denounce the Cuban and Venezuelan dictatorships on the global stage, even if this was inconsistent with his support for dictators elsewhere. And Trump struck a balance by exerting diplomatic pressure on Havana and Caracas, while refraining from military adventures and attempts at regime change.
Whether or not a "state sponsors of terrorism" list serves a useful purpose, Cuba is a state sponsor of terrorism. To give just one example, the regime harbors the top brass of Colombia's National Liberation Army (ELN according to the Spanish acronym), a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group created in 1964 with Fidel Castro's support. In 2019, the ELN bombed a police academy in Bogota, Colombia, leaving 20 dead. Díaz-Canel then denied Colombia's extradition request for four of the ELN leaders who now enjoy the remaining charms of Havana. This is part of a long history of the Cuban regime's attempts to do to Colombia what it already did to Venezuela, which is why it's important for U.S. leaders to distinguish between friend and foe in an increasingly dangerous neighborhood.
Biden's Cuba policy, which is under review, can build on what his two most recent predecessors got right while avoiding the mistakes of each. The administration should undo Trump's commercial and travel restrictions and allow as much free trade as possible. The political reality, which the Democratic Party's top brass seems to recognize, is that congressional approval for the end of the embargo is even less feasible now than under Obama, whose Cuban adventures arguably contributed to Republican victories in Florida in 2016 and 2020. Biden also should avoid Obama's public embrace of the Cuban dictatorship, which shouldn't mean engaging in hostilities. As the Cato Institute's Ian Vásquez tells Reason, "America's role in the world is to denounce tyranny while recognizing the limits of its own power."
The Biden administration should go beyond "wet foot, dry foot" and, as Vásquez suggested in 2017, "grant political asylum to all Cubans who escape the island." And though pushing for greater internet access in Cuba is helpful, wifi alone won't bring down the tyranny. After all, in Venezuela, the Castro-Maduro cadre erected a totalitarian state while the use of the web was still "partly free" (and with the lowest broadband speed in Latin America).
Wise politics, wrote philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila, consist of strengthening society and weakening the state. In that vein, Biden's approach should be simple: oppose, pressure, and denounce the Cuban dictatorship—but allow American commerce, tourism, and money transfers to benefit ordinary Cubans. The tailwinds are strong. For the first time in six decades, the Cuban regime is afraid of its people.
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Veronique de Rugyhttps://reason.com/people/veronique-de-rugy/https://reason.com/?p=81331712021-09-30T18:38:05Z2021-09-30T18:38:05Z
How to best ensure substantial long-run economic growth should be a question on everyone's mind. Its benefits can't be overstated, and it's undeniable that the lack of growth is a root contributor to many seemingly disconnected economic and social problems. That's the central theme of a recent podcast discussion between The New York Times' Ezra Klein and George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen.
They both expressed support for reforms to make government less bureaucratic and more agile. For example, Cowen cited the Food and Drug Administration's recent failure to approve COVID-19 treatments quickly enough, while also getting in the way of COVID-19 tests' development and distribution. In an ideal world, Cowen's sensible observation should lead to serious reform of the FDA along with other alphabet agencies that fail the American people through slow and counterproductive processes. During ordinary times these bureaucratic problems loom large enough; during a pandemic they're devastating.
My issue, however, is with Klein's suggestion that changing the status quo requires conservatives and libertarians to stop denouncing Uncle Sam for big fiascoes like Solyndra, the solar company that infamously went under shortly after receiving a $538 million loan guarantee from a green-energy program under the Obama administration. Denouncing such waste, Klein insists, only serves to embarrass the government for its failures, thus prompting it to be more cautious. As such, Klein would like "to somehow quiet these players looking to point out every failure."
That's wrong. Klein misunderstands why I and other free-market proponents fight against private companies receiving government-granted privileges—which is called "cronyism." It's not the wasteful spending that I mostly focus on; it's the unfairness.
Before I explain, I want to state for the record that it's not the role of government to prop up private companies, even green ones. Nor is it the case that the FDA screws up because conservatives and libertarians don't miss a chance to criticize government failures. Bad government, political incentives, and repeated lack of accountability are all alone to blame for this mess. Besides, if pointing out that the government fails and wastes taxpayers' money were such a powerful way to embarrass government into exercising undue caution, we wouldn't continue to see this administration double down on interventions where others have failed before.
Now, consider the Department of Energy's Section 1705 green energy loan program, which gave us failures like Solyndra, Abound Solar, and others. The program started under former President George W. Bush but hit its stride during Obama's presidency. It was allegedly designed to incentivize banks to lend to riskier green companies that wouldn't get access to capital otherwise, bolstering innovation in the process and boosting growth.
While it did lend to risky Solyndra, a vast majority of the loans primarily went to large, well-financed, and established companies that already produce green energy. Take NRG Energy Inc., for instance, one of the program's biggest recipients. As its then-chief executive, David W. Crane, explained to the Times after securing $5.2 billion in federal loan guarantees, plus hundreds of millions in other subsidies for four large solar projects, "I have never seen anything that I have had to do in my 20 years in the power industry that involved less risk than these projects," and "It is just filling the desert with panels."
That story repeats itself throughout the program. Contrary to the program's goal, the 1705 loans didn't incentivize new market entrants. They instead subsidized big and powerful market incumbents. Under these conditions, it's not surprising that on paper and to untrained eyes the overall program seemed to be fairly low-risk, even successful, and led observers like Klein to dismiss Solyndra's failure as a cost worth paying for an otherwise good program.
That's the wrong conclusion, of course, if one understands how incredibly unfair such handouts are. They give an artificial competitive edge to big companies that have no problems accessing capital, and this comes at the expense of smaller and truly innovative competitors, of consumers and ultimately of the integrity of our markets and political system. Adding insult to injury, the companies' executives are often well-connected with politicians or with White House officials—as were Solyndra executives. This recipe is hardly one that produces innovation and growth.
The incentives within government decision making processes are such that this same pattern exists in most programs where government extends handouts to private businesses, which explains why I oppose all subsidies and loan guarantee programs. It's a barrier to the growth that Cowen and Klein want to boost, and it's profoundly unfair.
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Nick Gillespiehttps://reason.com/people/nick-gillespie/gillespie@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?post_type=video&p=81302342021-09-09T17:41:48Z2021-09-09T17:41:17Z
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded and occupied two countries, bombed four others, helped create 21 million refugees and cause over 800,000 deaths, and spent over $6 trillion on combat and anti-terrorism measures. Republican and Democratic presidents and congressional leaders authorized sweeping new initiatives that effectively put all American citizens under surveillance.
Even as the United States has left Afghanistan, ending our longest war, many of the programs and mindsets born out of events 20 years ago are still firmly in place. In Reign of Terror, national security reporter Spencer Ackerman argues that the war on terror also profoundly destabilized American politics and helped to produce the Donald Trump presidency by stoking fears of a racialized Other. "The longer America viewed itself as under siege," he writes, "the easier it became to see enemies everywhere."
He talks with Reason's Nick Gillespie about how a coalition of libertarians and progressives can work to stop ongoing government surveillance and military interventionism underwritten by overwrought fears of Islamic terrorism.
Edited by Ian Keyser. Intro by Paul Detrick. Interview by Nick Gillespie.
Photos: Randy Taylor/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom, GORAN TOMASEVIC/REUTERS/Newscom
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Nick Gillespiehttps://reason.com/people/nick-gillespie/gillespie@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?post_type=podcast&p=81293072021-09-01T20:38:38Z2021-09-01T20:45:28ZTomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy.]]>
"You don't get to lose a war and expect the result to look like you won it," says historian Stephen Wertheim of the violent and chaotic withdrawal of United States forces and personnel from Afghanistan. "Yet some in Washington are denying reality, calling for still more war and blaming Biden for their failure."
He talks with Nick Gillespie about how the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were doomed to failure from their earliest days, what policy makers should be focused on as we approach the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and why a fundamental rethink of U.S. military and foreign policy is not only urgent but, after a radical shift in public opinion, eminently possible.
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Nick Gillespiehttps://reason.com/people/nick-gillespie/gillespie@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?post_type=video&p=81275042021-08-19T18:38:06Z2021-08-19T18:40:52Z
"After 20 years, I've learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw U.S. forces," said President Joe Biden in defending his decision to take U.S. personnel out of Afghanistan. "How many more generations of America's daughters and sons would you have me send to fight…Afghanistan's civil war when Afghan troops will not?"
Biden's decision to pull the United States military out of Afghanistan after two decades has been roundly condemned by interventionists, who say that the retreat was "humiliating" and disastrously planned, leaving thousands of Afghans prey to vengeance and violence at the hands of the Taliban.
Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with the Austin, Texas-based Horton about why he believes American intervention in Afghanistan was doomed from the start, U.S. foreign policy has been a disaster for all of the 21st century, and a libertarian approach to both domestic and foreign affairs would make people better off all over the globe.
Photo Credits: Scott Horton; Mohammad Rahmani on Unsplash; Antiwar.com; Joshua Sukoff on Unsplash; Pool ABACA, Newscom; Saifuraham Safi Xinhua News Agency, Newscom; ScottHorton.com; Voice of America News, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.jpg; Tayfun Salci ZUMAPRESS Newscom; SSG LEOPOLD MEDINA JR, USA, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons; AP POOL ABACA picture alliance Consolidated News Photos, Newscom
Music Credit: When The Sunrise, Instrumental Version, by Sivan Talmor from Artlist
Written by Nick Gillespie; produced by Regan Taylor; audio post-production by Ian Keyser
President Joe Biden hit the right points in his speech on the Afghanistan debacle. He acknowledged the failure of the country's western-backed government, the limited options after 20 years of occupation, and the need for Americans to withdraw and let events take their course. It was a realistic speech, almost enough to make us forget the years he spent promoting military intervention in Afghanistan and his role as vice president when the Obama administration concealed evidence that the war was unwinnable—evidence that should have prepared him for the Afghan government's inevitable implosion. Yes, he learned hard lessons about the costs of intervention, but others pay the price.
"American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves," Biden told the world on Monday. "We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong — incredibly well equipped — a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies."
"We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future," he added.
This is all entirely true, and it is long past time that a U.S. president acknowledged these unpleasant facts. The previous three administrations knew this moment was coming and did their level best to hide hard reality from the American people.
"A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable," the newspaper reported in 2019. Implicated in the report were the administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. Biden, of course, was vice president under Obama.
"We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn't know what we were doing," Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who headed up White House efforts in Afghanistan during both the Bush and Obama administrations, admits in the documents.
But American officials should have known better. In 2015, the U.S. Army War College Press published The Strategic Lessons Unlearned from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan: Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold, and the Implications for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan arguing that the U.S. was as doomed to fail in Afghanistan as in Iraq and South Vietnam because "all three countries were artificial colonial relics with no pervasive sense of national identity." Author M. Chris Mason, professor of national security affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute, cautioned that the Afghan National Army had "virtually no logistics capability," was incapable of maintaining its equipment, and was hobbled by corruption. But experts who gave the bad tidings to American officials were ignored, he added.
"U.S. officials tried to create — from scratch — a democratic government in Kabul modeled after their own in Washington," the Washington Post noted of similar conclusions in the documents it obtained. "It was a foreign concept to the Afghans, who were accustomed to tribalism, monarchism, communism and Islamic law."
Among the politicians who spurned warnings was Joe Biden. While he claims now that he "opposed the surge when it was proposed in 2009 when I was Vice President," that came relatively late in the game. He was better known for years as an advocate of military intervention in Afghanistan.
"And like it or not, our leadership role must include soldiers on the ground," Biden argued as a U.S. senator in 2002. "If others step forward, fine, but whatever it takes, we should do it. History will judge us harshly if we allow the hope of a liberated Afghanistan to evaporate because we failed to stay the course."
Biden remained hawkish on the campaign trail as he sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 against Barack Obama. But he seemingly changed his mind when he realized the extent of corruption under then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
"Whereas he had once felt that, with sufficient U.S. support, Afghanistan could be stabilized, now he wasn't so sure," New Republic's Michael Crowley noted of the disillusioned Biden.
Biden's long-gone "hope of a liberated Afghanistan" also highlights the revisionism of his insistence that "our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified, centralized democracy."
Bush was especially unrealistic on this point, emphasizing his intent "to build a flourishing democracy as an alternative to a hateful ideology" in 2008. Later, Obama not only doubled down on troop commitments, he boasted in 2014 that the U.S. and its allies "have helped the Afghan people reclaim their communities, take the lead for their own security, hold historic elections and complete the first democratic transfer of power in their country's history."
That Biden seemed to grasp the hopelessness of the U.S. position in Afghanistan is apparent from his adoption, with a few months delay, of the withdrawal from Afghanistan negotiated by his predecessor. It's a welcome shift in policy after years of heavy cost.
As of November 2019, Brown University's Costs of War project estimated deaths in Afghanistan at 2,298 for the U.S. military, and 3,814 for contractors. Deaths among Afghan military and police were estimated at 64,124. Other allied troop deaths are estimated at 1,145. The civilian death toll is put at 43,074. Then there is the "over a trillion dollars" spent on the lost cause cited by Biden. If government leaders learned anything from the debacle, it has been learned at great expense, and after enormous delay.
That the price has yet to be fully paid can be seen in the faces of those flooding the Kabul airport in a desperate bid to flee the Taliban after the western-backed government collapsed. It was an implosion predicted not just by experts over the years, but by recent intelligence assessments, yet the U.S. government was unprepared.
"The collapse has been sudden, our exit too ill planned to evacuate the vulnerable Afghans who worked with us," points out former Marine captain Timothy Kudo this week in a New York Times essay. He wonders of those who fought "how we could have given the best parts of their lives to such a lie."
So, it's good that a U.S. president is capable of learning hard lessons about failed policy, and of making the tough and thankless decision to end a war that dragged on for decades. But he's not the one who shouldered the burden through these long years, nor will he pay the price that will continue to be extracted from those who aided the U.S. and now remain behind to discover their fate.
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Ronald Baileyhttps://reason.com/people/ronald-bailey/rbailey@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=81195212021-06-11T15:44:30Z2021-06-11T15:45:25Z
The rule of law can be serviceably defined as restricting the arbitrary exercise of power by subordinating it to well-defined and established laws. Unfortunately, politicians have learned how to subvert the rule of law by laundering their decisions through supine federal bureaucracies that interpret badly-defined laws and regulations to suit the desires of the president and his minions.
The decade-long saga of the Keystone XL oil pipeline is a near-perfect example of how this works. (Don't get me started on arbitrary presidential power to impose tariffs and exercise secret emergency powers.)
Earlier this week, bowing to President Biden's January declaration that its pipeline was not in the U.S.'s national interest, the builder of the pipeline, TC Energy, announced that it was permanently canceling construction of its Keystone pipeline. That project would have transported more than 800,000 barrels of Canadian oil daily to refineries on the Gulf Coast.
Let's jump into the federal policy WABAC Machine to see how this capricious melodrama unfolded. Back in September 2008, TransCanada Keystone Pipeline (TC Energy now) filed an application for a Presidential Permit with the Department of State to build and operate the Keystone XL Project. That began a three-year-long process in which the Department of State oversaw the compilation and issuance of a Final Environmental Impact Statement in 2011 that concluded that the Keystone XL would have "no significant impact" on land and water resources along its route and a negligible effect on man-made climate change.
All that these sorts of assessments are supposed to do is supply the information to federal agency appointees who then make national interest determinations. Reasonable people would agree that a finding of "no significant impact" would suggest that the project is in the national interest and should be approved, right? Wrong.
The findings were evidently not the right answers for then-Secretary of State John Kerry, so he sent the report back for further deliberation. The requirement for further deliberation meant that certain deadlines were missed and the company was obliged to reapply for a presidential permit in 2012. Because President Obama did not want to alienate either the blue-collar unionists who favored the pipeline or the environmental activists who were protesting frequently in front of the White House, he strategically dithered for years.
In 2013, a Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement again concluded, "Approval or denial of the proposed project is unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oil sands, or on the amount of heavy crude oil refined in the Gulf Coast area" and would be unlikely to alter the future trajectory of global greenhouse gas emissions. Again, the wrong findings. So the bureaucrats were sent back to their desks again for further consideration.
The result was a January 2014 Final Environmental Impact Statement that more comprehensively analyzed the project's greenhouse gas emissions and their likely impact on global climate. Among other things, the new report outlined a scenario in which blocking the pipeline would shift Canadian crude oil transport to railways. That switch would actually increase greenhouse gas emissions by 27 percent over those emitted by the proposed pipeline.
Despite yet another finding that building the pipeline would have only minor impacts on land, water, and climate, on November 6, 2015, Secretary Kerry issued a determination that "the proposed project would not serve the national interest." Kerry stated, "The critical factor in my determination was this: moving forward with this project would significantly undermine our ability to continue leading the world in combatting climate change."
Then came the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president. During the presidential campaign, Trump promised to allow the Keystone pipeline to be built in return for "a big piece of the profits" for the American people. Four days after he took office, Trump issued the Presidential Memorandum Regarding Construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, in which he basically ordered the same bureaucracies to redo the Final Environmental Impact Statement on the pipeline. When various court fights delayed that process, President Trump acted unilaterally and simply issued a Presidential Permit on March 29, 2019, authorizing construction, connection, maintenance, and operation of the project at the U.S.-Canada border.
Still, the wheels of bureaucracy ground on. In December 2019, the Trump administration's Department of State issued an updated Final Environmental Impact Assessment that concluded that the effects on land use, water, biological and cultural resources, and climate change of the building and maintaining the pipeline would range all the way from negligible to minor.
During the 2020 campaign, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden promised to reverse the decision allowing the construction of the pipeline. Biden didn't even bother with ordering another Environmental Impact Statement. Citing Kerry's 2015 determination, Biden on his first day in office revoked the permit, declaring that "approving the proposed Keystone XL pipeline would not serve the U.S. national interest." Why not? Because "the Keystone XL pipeline disserves the U.S. national interest" due to the cumulating effects of man-made climate change.
Thirteen years after the pipeline was first proposed, the $8 billion project is kaput.
During his tenure, Trump arbitrarily reversed Obama administration decisions, including those on vehicle fuel economy standards, methane emissions, appliance energy efficiency standards, the establishment of national monuments, oil drilling in Alaska and offshore, calculating the social cost of carbon emissions, and clean water regulations. Now Biden's first executive order has arbitrarily reversed Trump's reversals.
This is not to say that either Trump or Biden is right or wrong with respect to the policies they seek to impose on the rest of us. The machinations around the Keystone Pipeline project highlight how modern American politicians have become adept at bending ostensibly fair and transparent bureaucratic procedures to justify decisions that they have already made. The result is that citizens and companies increasingly cannot count on the stability and certainty of the law when making decisions about their lives and businesses. Ever-expanding administrative autocracy is the opposite of the rule of law.
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Matt Welchhttps://reason.com/people/matt-welch/matt.welch@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=81192802021-06-14T13:38:15Z2021-06-09T16:20:14Z
When the Group of Seven (G-7) wealthy democracies agreed in principle June 5 to establish a global minimum corporate tax of 15 percent and an "excess profit" surcharge on large corporations with annual margins above 10 percent, you could almost hear the sound of the world's political elites rubbing their hands together at visions of pillowy new billions.
"Huge sums of money are at stake," gushed The New York Times. "A report this month from the E.U. Tax Observatory estimated that a 15 percent minimum tax would yield an additional 48 billion euros, or $58 billion, a year. The Biden administration projected in its budget last month that the new global minimum tax system could help bring in $500 billion in tax revenue over a decade to the United States."
Those numbers, however plausible (or not), are all in the future, contingent on tricky G-20 negotiations, pesky tax competition abroad, and congressional skepticism back home. Surely there's some other massive pot of free money hiding just out of view?
Yes, claims President Joe Biden's Treasury Department, in a bluntly titled May 20 document called The American Families Plan Tax Compliance Agenda. A staggering $700 billion in currently undetected taxpayer IOUs is grabbable over the next decade, and $1.6 trillion the decade after, if only we give the IRS an extra $80 billion worth of rope with which to close the "tax gap."
"Even partly closing that gulf," noted The Washington Post, "could go a long way toward paying for President Biden's spending proposals, which include trillions of dollars for infrastructure, child care, manufacturing and other domestic spending priorities."
If such promises look naggingly familiar, that's because we were hearing similar vows, and reading equally credulous headlines, the last time a Democratic administration was enjoying its media honeymoon. "Obama cracks down on overseas tax loopholes," asserted NBC News in May 2009. Echoed NPR, "Obama: Tax Haven Curbs To Generate $210 Billion."
Back then, there was a common, vaguely sourced claim that, in the words of then–Sen. Carl Levin (D–Mich.), "Offshore tax evasion produces an estimated $100 billion in unpaid taxes each year." President Barack Obama name-checked the influential Levin while announcing his 2009 plan to end "indefensible tax breaks and loopholes" and "crack down on the abuse of tax havens by individuals," promising a resulting bounty of "savings we can use to reduce the deficit, cut taxes…and provide meaningful relief for hard-working families."
So before we assess Biden's new enforcement proposals, it's worth asking: What happened to that $210 billion?
The vast majority of Obama's projected haul, the multinational corporations portion, was scuttled before it got started, after successful pressure on centrist Democrats by Silicon Valley companies and Chamber of Commerce types. What remained, getting passed into law in 2010, was the individual taxpayer component, known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or—because Washington is filled with grown-ups—FATCA.
FATCA, which unilaterally foisted upon foreign financial institutions (FFIs) the customer-unfriendly duty to rat out their U.S.-citizen clients to the IRS or face 30 percent account-garnishes, while also imposing proctology-level annual reporting requirements on Americans (I am one of them) who have at least five figures parked overseas, was projected by supporters to bring in a more modest but still measurable $8.7 billion in total new tax collections by 2020, or $870 million per year.
So how'd that work out?
"The actual amount of tax collected by FATCA is statistically insignificant," concluded Texas A&M University School of Law's William Byrnes and Robert Munro in an extensive March 2017 paper. "FATCA has probably generated $300 million extra tax revenue a year that otherwise would go unreported [though] this figure will continue to decrease."
An Inspector General report from July 2018 was titled, "Despite Spending Nearly $380 Million, the Internal Revenue Service Is Still Not Prepared to Enforce Compliance With the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act." An April 2019 Government Accountability Office (GAO) assessment found that, "Data quality and management issues have limited the effectiveness" of FATCA, and that "overlapping requirements increase the compliance burden on U.S. persons," leading to expatriates increasingly being denied financial services and seeking to revoke their citizenship.
Yet this is the template that Biden, despite his late-campaign promise to the estimated nine million Americans living outside the country to "work in partnership with you on all the issues that impact your lives and well-being as Americans resident abroad, including reviewing the barriers to accessing banking and financial services," is seeking not just to maintain but expand into the lives and ledgers of every U.S. citizen.
Biden's American Families Plan Tax Compliance Agenda seeks to build on the model of FATCA's intrusive third-party reporting requirements, constructing a "comprehensive financial account reporting regime" that would force a wider grouping of financial institutions and platforms (PayPal, settlement companies, "crypto asset exchanges," etc.) to "report gross inflows and outflows on all business and personal accounts…including bank, loan, and investment accounts."
But there's no need to worry if you've got nothing to hide.
"For already compliant taxpayers, the only effect of this regime is to provide easy access to summary information on financial accounts and to decrease the likelihood of costly 'no fault' examinations once the IRS is able to better target its enforcement efforts," Treasury reassures us. "For noncompliant taxpayers, this regime would encourage voluntary compliance as evaders realize that the risk of evasion being detected has risen noticeably."
For successive Democratic administrations (Donald Trump was rhetorically against FATCA, though neither he nor the GOP-led Congress did much of anything about it), increased financial surveillance is critical to ratcheting up "voluntary" tax compliance. Indeed, the bulk of revenue generated from FATCA has come not from the IRS discovering new taxable income, but from spooked expatriates voluntarily paying fines as part of various limited amnesties on filing post-dated IRS reports, many of which contain zero new tax liability in and of themselves. Turns out when you threaten law-abiding middle-class U.S. citizens with massive fines and even prison time while conscripting their banks into tax collectors, they will hastily throw smaller amounts of money at making Leviathan go away.
That is if they don't turn in their passports. As was repeatedly predicted in this space in 2011, 2012, and beyond, the burdens placed on non–fat cat expatriates are so life-rattlingly onerous that record numbers continue to de-Americanize themselves. This could change, if the United States joined literally every other country on earth besides Eritrea in taxing people based on residence and not citizenship, but it has long since become clear that Washington enjoys the ability not just to bully its own diaspora, but to impose financial reporting rules on the rest of the world while brazenly refusing to reciprocate when it comes to the international tax havens of Florida, Delaware, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Now that Biden is turning his attention inward to the financial nethers of non-expatriate Americans, it's worth pondering the possible consequences on those of us not rich enough to afford the finest in creative, penalty-free tax compliance. For that, check out this June 2 letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen from some canaries in the bank-surveillance coal mine, the group Democrats Abroad.
"We are deeply concerned that the need for additional investment in FATCA compliance frameworks will motivate even more [FFIs] to close the accounts of, or deny new accounts to, of customers deemed U.S. Persons," Democrats Abroad International Chair Candice Kerestan wrote. "[Since FATCA], the number of Americans locked out of banking services in the country where they live has grown from one in approximately fourteen to one in three." More:
Ordinary law-abiding Americans living abroad – the unintended objects of FATCA – have suffered an extraordinary amount of personal and financial disruption, anxiety, and distress, and yet, after ten years, the IRS has not been able to use FATCA reports to identify and apprehend genuine lawbreakers….There have been at least three Congressional hearings this year discussing the need to capture the tax that is lost due to "offshoring," and at no time have lawmakers noted the predicament of Americans abroad caught in the unintended adverse consequences of well-intentioned tax-enforcement measures.
At some point, the reality of Washington governance, and the coverage thereof, requires a reassessment of the idea that invasive new financial-snooping schemes sold with facially unattainable revenue promises are in fact "well-intentioned." The Biden administration, like the Obama administration under which he served, wants to scare Americans into "voluntary" compliance and penalty payments using a massive surveillance apparatus that turns all third-party financial players into narcs. To adapt a popular phrase about the previous administration, the obedience is the point.
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John Stosselhttps://reason.com/people/john-stossel/https://reason.com/?p=81168082021-05-19T13:53:50Z2021-05-19T14:00:39Z
America has a record 8.1 million job openings.
The media call it a "labor shortage."
But it's not a labor shortage; it's an incentive shortage.
"No one wants to work," says a sign on a restaurant drive-thru speaker in Albuquerque, New Mexico. "Please be patient with the staff that did show up."
I never wanted to work. I got a job because I had to support myself. That was good for me. It forced me out of my comfort zone. It made me a better person.
Had government offered me almost equal money not to work, I never would have applied.
Today, government takes away that incentive.
The American Rescue Plan, passed in March, increased unemployment payments by hundreds of dollars and extended them for up to 73 weeks. Given the cost of commuting, etc., many people find they are better off financially not working.
Denmark once offered workers five years of unemployment. Then they noticed that workers found work after exactly five years. So, Denmark cut the benefit to four years. Then most workers found jobs after four years. Now Denmark, wisely, has cut benefits in half.
Incentives matter.
America's unemployment handouts began during the Great Depression when desperate people really needed help. Still, you could collect for only 16 weeks.
Former President Barack Obama extended unemployment benefits to up to 99 weeks.
"There are no jobs!" people I interviewed waiting in line for benefits in New York City once told me.
But that wasn't true. There were lots of entry-level jobs within walking distance.
My staff visited 79 nearby stores. Forty said they wanted to hire. Twenty-four said they'd hire people with no experience.
People in the unemployment line also said that the government should do more to train them for jobs. But New York already offered "job training" centers, so I sent an intern out to see what they did. The first offered to help her get welfare. A second told her to apply for unemployment. Neither place suggested looking for a job.
When she insisted that she wanted work, not handouts, they directed her to yet another building. There she was told she could not receive help because she didn't have a college degree.
Finally, a fourth office offered her an interview at the sandwich chain Pret a Manger. The boss there told her she'd wasted her time going to the government Jobs Center because she could have gotten that same interview using Craigslist.
Some politicians understand that handouts encourage dependence. Sixteen states are now ending extra unemployment benefits early. Montana and Arizona replaced extra unemployment benefits with a bonus for people who find work.
Even President Joe Biden has noticed the unintended consequences of his party's benefits. "If you're…offered a suitable job, you can't refuse that job and just keep getting unemployment," he said.
Seems more than reasonable. Yet a New York Times headline says, "Some say it presents an undue hardship."
The reporter interviewed a "Mx. San Martin, 27, who uses the pronouns they and them."
Mx. Martin wants to work with pets. They complained that "there simply weren't enough jobs that I would actually want." Restaurant work "is not in my field of interest."
Too bad.
Bad for all of us when people think they're entitled to our tax money if bureaucrats don't get them the exact job they want.
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Matt Welchhttps://reason.com/people/matt-welch/matt.welch@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=81139612021-04-28T15:41:55Z2021-04-28T15:44:14Z
'Tis the season for pompous presidential speeches to Congress. Most years we call these prime-time pitches the State of the Union address, though beginning in earnest with Ronald Reagan in 1981, first-term presidents have stepped in where lame-duck executives once stood and delivered something of a less official yet still aspirational pep talk to a Joint Session of Congress. Such we will experience tonight.
In most years this annual exercise in presidential self-importance—which in less imperious times (1801–1912) was delivered in letter form—is an occasion to study bad speech writing, insincere promise making, and palpable crisis-envy, as the man in the Oval Office wishes out loud that the nation was panicked enough to confuse his domestic agenda with yet another "moonshot."
But sometimes, as in 2021, the national trauma is real. First-term presidents in the wake of widespread calamity tend to go very big in their early-season congressional asks, and they tend to get much of what they want, changing the trajectory of American history.
Lyndon Johnson, in his celebrated 1964 SOTU after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, declared a "war on poverty," and helped push through the Civil Rights Act. Gerald Ford, post-Watergate and amid the oil shocks of 1975, laid the groundwork for Washington's star-crossed 1970s interventions into the energy sector. Reagan in 1981 outlined an entire course correction on economic policy, much of which would be enacted during his first term despite a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives. And Barack Obama in 2009, with now–President Joe Biden looking on behind him, bragged about his just-passed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and rhetorically paved the way for what would eventually be known as Obamacare.
So more than usual, Americans should take seriously the words passing the president's lips tonight, as they have a much higher chance of being translated into policy. Biden in his first 99 days has already sent a staggering amount of money out the door, withhopes of doubling and tripling down. The sheer size of spending, deficits, and debts are placing the country in unchartered territory, but the president also has terraforming ambitions on everything from infrastructure to labor relations to racial "equity."
We can learn a lot, or at least laugh a little, when looking back through history at comparable presidential speeches, and the policies they helped unleash. So in chronological order, here are bite-sized analyses of the four addresses delivered under circumstances that most resemble Biden's.
Recent national trauma: The November 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, plus the continuous civil rights protests, clashes, and murders during the previous calendar year.
Elegy: "In these last seven sorrowful weeks, we have learned anew that nothing is so enduring as faith, and nothing is so degrading as hate. John Kennedy was a victim of hate, but he was also a great builder of faith."
Moonshot: There were two. 1) "This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America….Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it." 2) "As far as the writ of federal law will run, we must abolish not some, but all racial discrimination."
Congressional control: Democrats 66-34 in the Senate, 253-177 in the House.
Scorecard: Governmental discrimination at the federal, state, and local level was indeed curtailed by the Civil Rights Act, though its Title VII became the backdoor through which positive discrimination was driven through. Poverty, on the other hand, was not at all cured.
Them old mountains sure look like molehills!: The budget, LBJ promised, "will cut our deficit in half—from $10 billion to $4,900 million." Granted, $10 billion in 1964 was worth around $85 billion in 2020 dollars. But $85 billion in the first six months of Fiscal 2021 amounted to…just around nine days' worth of deficit.
Libertarian policy porn: "[My agenda] can be done without any increase in spending. In fact, under the budget that I shall shortly submit, it can be done with an actual reduction in federal expenditures and federal employment…. It will be, in proportion to our national output, the smallest budget since 1951." Federal spending during Johnson's presidency, needless to say, was not reduced.
Bitter irony: "For our ultimate goal is a world without war." Seven months later came the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
Did NOT see that coming: "This administration must and will preserve the present gold value of the dollar."
Recent national trauma: Watergate (which did not get mentioned), plus ongoing oil shocks.
Elegy: "I must say to you that the state of the union is not good."
Moonshot: "I am proposing a program which will begin to restore our country's surplus capacity in total energy. In this way, we will be able to assure ourselves reliable and adequate energy and help foster a new world energy stability for other major consuming nations….We must end vulnerability to economic disruption by foreign suppliers by 1985."
Congressional control: Democrats 60-37 in the Senate, 291-144 in the House.
Them old mountains sure look like molehills!: "This year's federal deficit will be about $30 billion; next year's probably $45 billion. The national debt will rise to over $500 billion." With inflation, those number translate to $145 billion, $220 billion, and $2.45 trillion, respectively. Meanwhile, the federal deficit alone in 2021 will likely be higher, adjusted for inflation, than the entire accumulated national debt as of 1975.
Libertarian policy porn: "Only a reduction in the growth of spending can keep federal borrowing down and reduce the damage to the private sector from high interest rates. Only a reduction in spending can make it possible for the Federal Reserve System to avoid an inflationary growth in the money supply and thus restore balance to our economy. A major reduction in the growth of federal spending can help dispel the uncertainty that so many feel about our economy and put us on the way to curing our economic ills."
Bitter irony: "If our foreign policy is to be successful, we cannot rigidly restrict in legislation the ability of the president to act. The conduct of negotiations is ill-suited to such limitations. Legislative restrictions, intended for the best motives and purposes, can have the opposite result." The deliberative 21st century rollback of presidential foreign policy restrictions by Ford administration veteran Dick Cheney helped midwife one of the single most disastrous decisions in the history of American foreign policy.
Did NOT see that coming: "Now, I want to speak very bluntly. I've got bad news, and I don't expect much, if any, applause….My message today is not intended to address all of the complex needs of America." Can we make this the opening paragraph of all SOTUs going forward?
Recent national trauma: The recently resolved Iranian hostage crisis, but mostly: "All of us are aware of the punishing inflation which has for the first time in 60 years held to double-digit figures for 2 years in a row. Interest rates have reached absurd levels of more than 20 percent and over 15 percent for those who would borrow to buy a home. All across this land one can see newly built homes standing vacant, unsold because of mortgage interest rates. Almost 8 million Americans are out of work."
Elegy: "Can we, who man the ship of state, deny it is somewhat out of control?"
Moonshot: "I am proposing a comprehensive four-point program…This plan is aimed at reducing the growth in government spending and taxing, reforming and eliminating regulations which are unnecessary and unproductive or counterproductive, and encouraging a consistent monetary policy aimed at maintaining the value of the currency."
Congressional control: Republicans 53-46 in the Senate, Democrats 243-191 in the House.
Scorecard: Well, Reagan's first-term economic reforms are the subject of debate to this day. Taxes were cut, spending was not, the deregulation that was launched under Jimmy Carter continued for a while then petered out. But also, inflation was tamed, the economy boomed, and the mood of the nation was noticeably changed.
Them old mountains sure look like molehills!: "Our national debt is approaching $1 trillion. A few weeks ago I called such a figure—a trillion dollars—incomprehensible, and I've been trying ever since to think of a way to illustrate how big a trillion really is. And the best I could come up with is that if you had a stack of thousand-dollar bills in your hand only 4 inches high, you'd be a millionaire. A trillion dollars would be a stack of thousand-dollar bills 67 miles high." Since the national debt now stands at upwards of $22 trillion, that means the subsequent stack of Grover Clevelands, placed on its side, would stretch from Boston to Miami.
Libertarian policy porn: Like many political speeches of the time (including by Democrats), there was a lot to choose from: "The taxing power of government must be used to provide revenues for legitimate government purposes. It must not be used to regulate the economy or bring about social change. We've tried that, and surely we must be able to see it doesn't work. Spending by government must be limited to those functions which are the proper province of government. We can no longer afford things simply because we think of them."
Bitter irony: "We're asking that another major industry—business subsidy I should say, the Export-Import Bank loan authority, be reduced by one-third in 1982. We're doing this because the primary beneficiaries of taxpayer funds in this case are the exporting companies themselves—most of them profitable corporations." This is ironic mostly because we've always known this agency is corporatist garbage, yet never kill it.
Did NOT see that coming: The word communism—Reagan's longtime bête noire, was not uttered once. The Soviet Union merited two meager paragraphs.
Recent national trauma: The financial crisis of 2008
Elegy: "Now, if we're honest with ourselves, we'll admit that for too long, we have not always met these responsibilities as a government or as a people….The fact is, our economy did not fall into decline overnight, nor did all of our problems begin when the housing market collapsed or the stock market sank."
Moonshot: "We must have quality, affordable health care for every American. It's a commitment that's paid for in part by efficiencies in our system that are long overdue. And it's a step we must take if we hope to bring down our deficit in the years to come….Nearly a century after Teddy Roosevelt first called for reform, the cost of our health care has weighed down our economy and our conscience long enough. So let there be no doubt: Health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait another year."
Congressional control: Democrats 56-41 in the Senate, 254-178 in the House.
Scorecard: The gap between the Affordable Care Act's promises and results was wide enough that every Democrat running for president in 2020 ran on drastically overhauling it.
Them old mountains sure look like molehills!: "Yesterday I held a fiscal summit where I pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office. My administration has also begun to go line by line through the federal budget in order to eliminate wasteful and ineffective programs. As you can imagine, this is a process that will take some time. But we have already identified $2 trillion in savings over the next decade." Even adjusted for inflation, those annualized savings of $250 billion (which may have been identified, but were never realized), would at this point cut the 2021 deficit by less than one-tenth.
Libertarian policy porn: "We will end education programs that don't work and end direct payments to large agribusiness that don't need them. We'll eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq and reform our defense budget so that we're not paying for Cold War–era weapons systems we don't use. We will root out the waste and fraud and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn't make our seniors any healthier." I'm sure it was pretty to think so!
Bitter irony: "To overcome extremism, we must also be vigilant in upholding the values our troops defend, because there is no force in the world more powerful than the example of America. And that is why I have ordered the closing of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay."
Did NOT see that coming: "And to respond to an economic crisis that is global in scope, we are working with the nations of the G-20 to restore confidence in our financial system, avoid the possibility of escalating protectionism, and spur demand for American goods in markets across the globe." Remember when U.S. presidents warned against trade protectionism?
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Biden's speech tonight is almost certainly not to register much of a blip in the history of political rhetoric. But it could mark a further milestone in the history of ever-expanding federal government. Buyer beware.
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Matthew Pettihttps://reason.com/people/matthew-petti/https://reason.com/?p=81063332021-02-26T18:44:59Z2021-02-26T18:15:33Z
Former Obama administration official Anne-Marie Slaughter defended the "responsibility to protect" doctrine—and the military intervention in Libya it led to—at a congressional hearing on Wednesday.
She also claimed to have spoken out against the intervention in Libya when it went too far, although she was a vocal supporter of the U.S.-led war effort at its beginning and end.
Slaughter, a longtime proponent of the idea that states have a duty to stop crimes against humanity in other states by force, served as director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department from 2009 to 2011. Soon after leaving office, she publicly pushed the Obama administration to intervene to protect Libyan civilians amid an ongoing uprising.
President Barack Obama cited Slaughter's doctrine as a reason to launch military strikes against Libyan ruler Moammar Gadhafi in March 2011. After Gadhafi was ousted, Libya fell under the rule of armed militias, eventually resulting in the Second Libyan Civil War, which killed thousands of Libyans and was ongoing until last October.
Slaughter doubled down on her support for humanitarian intervention on Wednesday while addressing the House Foreign Affairs Committee alongside several other veteran diplomats.
"It's a doctrine that's going to evolve a great deal over this century. I think it is the right doctrine, but it can easily be used in the wrong ways," she said.
Slaughter added that "one of the lessons" of the past few years has been "that we need intervention much further upstream" to prevent armed conflict.
She was responding to a question by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) about the effects of humanitarian intervention.
"For a long time, you have been one of the most vocal champions of the 'responsibility to protect' doctrine and so-called humanitarian intervention," Omar said. "I am under no illusion about the Taliban or Gadhafi or [Iraqi dictator] Saddam Hussein. But I am also under no illusion about how those countries look today."
"Maybe there was a sense of moral righteousness about our interventions there, but there should be more clarity about what the consequences have been," the Minnesota* congresswoman added.
Slaughter responded that the Iraq War had little to do with responsibility to protect—and did not mention the Taliban or the war in Afghanistan—but defended her stance on Libya.
"I strongly supported intervention on the grounds of responsibility to protect because it looked like the Libyan people in Benghazi were facing genocide—crimes against humanity," Slaughter said.
In March 2011, the Libyan government had lost control of Benghazi to armed rebels, and pro-Gadhafi forces were gearing up for a counteroffensive to retake the city. Gadhafi himself had promised to fight "house by house" and show "no mercy or compassion" to the rebels.
The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution on March 17, 2011, authorizing foreign militaries to use any means short of an occupation to protect Libyan civilians. The United States and its allies began an air campaign against pro-Gadhafi forces two days later. Several countries eventually sent military advisers to assist the opposition.
Gadhafi was captured and tortured to death by rebels in October 2011 near the end of the First Libyan Civil War. Years of unrest and a second civil war followed.
The U.N.-recognized government in Tripoli and the forces of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar signed a ceasefire in October 2020 and finally agreed to a unity government earlier this month.
Slaughter acknowledged that U.S. intervention had the potential to cause chaos. "We cannot engage in armed interventions for the responsibility to protect if we do not have both a plan and a commitment…to support whatever government emerges over the long haul," she said.
And she claimed to have spoken out when the U.S.-led war effort in Libya went too far.
"I actually wrote during the intervention in Libya when it became clear that arms were pouring into the country—and it became clear that this was not just responsibility to protect, this was going to overthrow Gadhafi—we were setting the country up, and particularly the women and children in the country, for decades of violence," Slaughter told Congress.
She had indeed warned in a July 2011 article for TheFinancial Times that "stopping the fighting now is more important than an opposition victory on the current terms advocated by the National Transitional Council in Benghazi" because Libya was risking "a cycle of radicalisation and entrenchment that makes it progressively harder rather than easier to reach a settlement."
But Slaughter wrote a month later that critics were proven wrong.
"The sceptics must now admit that the real choice in Libya was between temporary stability and the illusion of control, or fluidity and the ability to influence events driven by much larger forces," she wrote for the same publication in August 2011. "Libya proves the west can make those choices wisely after all."
CORRECTION: This piece previously described Rep. Ilhan Omar as a Michigan congresswoman. She is actually from Minnesota.
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Jacob Sullumhttps://reason.com/people/jacob-sullum/jsullum@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=81020832021-01-26T17:46:33Z2021-01-27T05:01:42Z
When Donald Trump pardoned Steve Bannon last week, the outgoing president blocked the former White House strategist's prosecution for bilking donors to an organization that claimed to be raising money for a wall along the border with Mexico. When Trump granted a commutation to Craig Cesal, by contrast, he freed a man who had already served 17 years of what was originally a life sentence for repairing trucks that were used to transport marijuana.
As those examples reflect, Trump's acts of clemency mixed favors to cronies with relief for genuinely deserving federal prisoners hit with grossly disproportionate penalties. The controversy over his choices highlights longstanding problems with a clemency system that is a woefully inadequate remedy for the injustices routinely inflicted by rigid and draconian federal sentences.
Trump's final batch of 70 commutations brought his total to 94, which included dozens of nonviolent drug offenders, 18 of whom had received life sentences. He shortened more sentences than all but one of his eight most recent predecessors.
The one exception is Barack Obama, who granted a record 1,715 commutations, nearly all in his second term and the vast majority during his last year in office. Even Obama, however, approved just 5 percent of petitions for commutations, five times Trump's rate (which was in turn 10 times George W. Bush's rate) but still pretty slim odds for people languishing behind bars, often because of conduct that violated no one's rights.
On Trump's last day in office, The New York Timescomplained that he had "largely bypassed a rigorous Justice Department process for vetting and approving" pardons and commutations. Yet that process, as the Timesnoted two days later, "has left thousands of petitions waiting for review with a small team of lawyers unable to keep up."
Margaret Colgate Love, who served as the Justice Department's pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997, says she was "continually frustrated by the hostility of the prosecutors to whom I reported, who evidently feared that pardon would undo their hard work." Those prosecutors "were unreceptive to suggestions that pardon could tell good news about their work by showcasing rehabilitation and redemption."
As a result, Love says, "the Justice Department sent few favorable pardon recommendations to the White House." While some of the system's critics think the White House should cut the Justice Department out of the process (as Trump effectively did) to avoid this conflict of interest, Love argues that a better approach would be for Congress to let judges or executive agencies perform some of the clemency system's functions.
People often seek pardons, for example, to recover their Second Amendment rights, something that Love suggests could be accomplished "by application to an administrative agency or a court." She notes that the FIRST STEP Act, a 2018 law that Trump supported, authorized judges to reduce prisoners' sentences for "extraordinary and compelling reasons," a reform that could be expanded to cover many of the people who are now desperately hoping for commutations.
President Joe Biden has promised that he will "broadly use his clemency power for certain non-violent and drug crimes." He should do that throughout his administration, instead of waiting until he is nearly out of office.
Biden also favors abolishing the mandatory minimum sentences that he championed for decades as a senator. Such reforms, especially if they are retroactive, would have a much bigger impact than liberal use of clemency: During the first year after the FIRST STEP Act took effect, its relatively modest changes resulted in shorter sentences for more than 7,000 people.
That amounts to less than 5 percent of federal prisoners, nearly half of whom are serving time for drug offenses. But the law still helped four times as many prisoners in one year than even Obama managed through commutations in eight.
If Biden truly wants to atone for his long history as a hardline drug warrior, he cannot let sentencing reform sink to the bottom of his priorities.
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Billy Binionhttps://reason.com/people/billy-binion/billy.binion@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=81015072021-01-21T23:17:09Z2021-01-21T22:43:45Z
President Barack Obama deported more immigrants than any U.S. executive leader in modern history. Then came Donald Trump, who went on to beat his predecessor in showing less mercy toward immigrants—no small feat, and one he undertook openly and honestly.
President Joe Biden, who was sworn in yesterday and served as veep to the "deporter in chief" for eight years, can best be described as a consensus politician. And if the last few years are any indication, the two-party consensus on immigration is deeply flawed. Still, if Biden is willing to buck the status quo in this area, that's a welcome sign.
On his first day in the Oval Office, the new president directed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to issue a 100-day moratorium on deportations for various non-citizens. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) may still remove immigrants who engaged in or are suspected of engaging in terrorism, those who are a danger to national security, those who were not yet in the country on November 1, 2020, and those who have waived rights to be in America. ICE's acting director may also move to deport someone as "required by law" after conferring with the agency's general counsel, DHS noted in a memo.
Both Obama and Trump cast a wide net when it came to deportation policy. The former's list included national security threats and individuals convicted of grave crimes, both of which generally make sense. But he also zeroed in on scores of immigrants who committed minor, nonviolent crimes—including traffic violations—or had no record at all. This after promising that his administration would focus on people who were a menace to society, as opposed to "folks who are here just because they're trying to figure out how to feed their families."
The majority of Obama's deportations, however, fell under that very group. And, as promised on the 2016 campaign trail, Trump shoved aside essentially any limitations on deportations and instituted a "zero-tolerance" policy at the southern border.
According to the DHS memo, the 100-day pause will allow the government to "ensure that our removal resources are directed to the Department's highest enforcement priorities." How the Biden administration plans to proceed in the long-term is still unclear.
On the campaign trail, the candidate initially resisted the moratorium and said in November of 2019 that he would prioritize deportations solely for those who were convicted of "a felony or serious crime." Such an outline may theoretically make sense, though it depends on how Biden, a former drug warrior, defines a "serious crime."
One offense that was big enough to merit deportation by both Obama and Trump: the mere act of crossing the border without papers. That's a Band-Aid at best and glosses over the root of the problem, which is that a high school graduate from Mexico will wait more than 100 years on average before the U.S. permits them to come here legally. When you make it impossible to do it the "right" way, is it any wonder some opt for a different route?
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Scott Shackfordhttps://reason.com/people/scott-shackford/sshackford@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80950862020-12-02T19:54:00Z2020-12-02T19:55:22Z
President Barack Obama is the latest establishment Democrat warning that screaming "Defund the Police" is not necessarily a viable path to bring about actual police reforms, let alone win elections.
In an interview on the Snapchat show Good Luck America, Obama compared the slogan to a marketing tool, not a realistic effort to bring about change. Quotes via Politico:
"If you believe, as I do, that we should be able to reform the criminal justice system so that it's not biased and treats everybody fairly, I guess you can use a snappy slogan, like 'defund the police.' But, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you're actually going to get the changes you want done," Obama said.
"The key is deciding, do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?" he added. "And if you want to get something done in a democracy, in a country as big and diverse as ours, then you've got to be able to meet people where they are. And play a game of addition and not subtraction."
There were some modest successes in police reform over the summer, but they almost feel like they've happened despite the "defund the police" movement, and because they had the support of civil libertarians of all political persuasions. We've seen laws passed to ban "no-knock raids" in the wake of Breonna Taylor's shooting death by police in Louisville, Kentucky; we've seen new laws banning types of chokeholds, partly in response to anger over the death of George Floyd under the knee of former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin; we've seen, after years of resistance, New York state pass a bill that subjects police misconduct and disciplinary files to public records laws.
However, hundreds of proposed police reform bills also went nowhere this year. Street protests can draw attention to outrageous police behavior, but state legislatures are where those outrages are addressed (or not). Countless Californians protested over the summer, but law enforcement unions still managed to kill a bill that would have created a system to decertify problem cops and prevent them from finding new police jobs in other cities.
So much of potential policing reform is transpartisan: Successes have come not from one single party having power but when individuals across the political spectrum agree. Many reforms of state civil asset forfeiture laws—which empower police to seize and keep money and property suspected of being tied to criminal activities, even when the owners haven't been charged or convicted—came from a combination of those who object to Fourth Amendment violations as well as those who noted that poor minorities and immigrants were often the targets of this tactic. That's reform people across the ideological spectrum can support.
The "defund the police" movement instead invited polarization and vagueness, and as we clearly saw this fall, got dragged not just into the culture war but into election campaigning, as President Donald Trump used the slogan to argue that police reforms were entirely a Democratic "anti-cop" crusade. Democrats ended up losing down the ballot in many states and races (even in California). Does this now taint as partisan future criminal justice reform efforts?
Those who have actually paid attention to years and years of police reform efforts know that this is not true. Not only have numerous Republicans supported efforts to reduce harsh police enforcement, but Democrats have also carried water for police unions. Don't believe me? Check out Arizona, where Democrats killed a bill in May to restrain civil asset forfeiture because they didn't want the police to lose the revenue.
Tying police reform to a particular party or ideological movement is ultimately bad for criminal justice, and Obama recognizes that. Unfortunately, the damage may have already been done. We'll see what, if anything, comes out of President-elect Joe Biden's administration and state legislatures next year.
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Billy Binionhttps://reason.com/people/billy-binion/billy.binion@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80931682020-11-14T06:45:40Z2020-11-14T13:00:17Z
In September 2015, Stephen Miller, then an aide to Sen. Jeff Sessions (R–Ala.), emailed a Breitbart staffer about what he saw as Pope Francis's overly liberal views on immigration. "Someone should point out [to the Pope] the parallels to The Camp of the Saints," he said, referring to the 1975 French novel about the supposedly dire effects of migration.
Penned by Jean Raspail, the book follows hundreds of thousands of Indians as they set sail for France to lay claim on "the white man's comfort." In Raspail's telling, the migrants are feces-eating, "swarthy-skinned," "kinky-haired," and sexually depraved: "Everywhere, rivers of sperm. Streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers….Men with women, men with men, women with women, men with children, children with each other, their slender fingers playing the eternal games of carnal pleasure."
Miller went on to become a special adviser to President Donald Trump and one of the primary tailors of the administration's immigration policies. A farewell to Miller's approach, apparently guided by his disdain for migrants as human beings, is arguably the biggest upside to the end of the Trump administration.
Miller's record is full of freedom-impinging stains that, in theory, should unite just about everyone—conservatives, progressives, libertarians, and those in-between—in opposition. He is perhaps best known for his role in implementing a "zero tolerance" policy at the Mexican border, in which migrant parents were systematically separated from their children as part of a deterrence strategy. (Hundreds are yet to be reunited.) But while that may be the administration's most infamous immigration controversy, Miller also worked to orchestrate Trump's broader restrictionist policy. Some of those attempts came to fruition; others they didn't. Some attempts were legal; others, perhaps not.
For example: Miller sought to embed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the government group charged with safely assimilating migrant refugees into the United States. Miller reportedly hoped to ramp up deportations of the adults who came forward to sponsor migrant children. Unfortunately for Miller, it is against the law for the Department of Homeland Security to use federal funds in service of holding or deporting potential sponsors for unaccompanied alien minors, so they rejected the proposal. But the department did allow ICE to collect biometric data on those adults, potentially giving them the opportunity to track and deport them over minor offenses.
Similarly, Miller attempted to transfer an employee from the Treasury Department to an advisory role at the Social Security Administration in order to more easily track down personally identifiable information for deportations.
As special adviser, Miller pushed for the government shutdown at the end of 2018, which bled into 2019, lasting 35 days and becoming the longest shutdown in U.S. history—all to try to get $5.7 billion for a border wall. (The Republican-controlled Senate and Republican-controlled House did not deliver, and Trump eventually declared a national emergency.)
Unsurprisingly, Miller opposed Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the Obama-era program giving immigrants who came to this country as children temporary protection from deportation. Seventy-four percent of Americans—and 68 percent of Republicans—support the program. In leaked emails between Miller and Breitbart, he railed against DACA and birthright citizenship, and likened immigrants to terrorists. After all, Miller is the man who reportedly said he "would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched American soil." Though Trump promised during his campaign to protect DACA recipients, he weaponized their precarious status for political capital; when the courts declined to strike down the program, Trump moved to limit who can apply for such protections.
There are many potential downsides to Joe Biden's incoming administration, but the bar for immigration policy has been set low. At the very least, the new president is unlikely to bring in an adviser with an approach as inhumane as Miller's.
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Billy Binionhttps://reason.com/people/billy-binion/billy.binion@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80875652020-10-07T18:56:53Z2020-10-07T17:46:14Z
The news, as it tends to be, has been dominated by President Donald Trump over the last several days, perhaps even more so with his recent COVID-19 diagnosis, which means one recent Trump tidbit largely flew under the radar: his requirement that billions of dollars in food aid packages for the needy arrive in tandem with a letter signed by him.
"As President, safeguarding the health and well-being of our citizens is one of my highest priorities," the letter reads, referencing the U.S. Department of Agriculture's $4 billion Farmers to Families Food Box Program. The initiative has purchased food typically bought by restaurants and rerouted it toward poor families, with over 100 million boxes sent since May. "As part of our response to the coronavirus, I prioritized sending nutritious food from our farmers to families in need throughout America."
Reactions have not been uniformly positive, with some characterizing the letter as an overtly politicized election stunt. "In my 30 years of doing this work, I've never seen something this egregious," Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Food Banks, toldPolitico. "These are federally purchased boxes."
Some food banks have begun removing the letters. Meanwhile, several people appear to be receiving the aid and corresponding letter even though they aren't underserved. "Why would someone receiving this really need to know this?" said Matthew Killen of Miami Beach, who is not in need but received a package of food on his doorstep, according to The Miami Herald. He lives in a majority Hispanic neighborhood, which he feels the administration "targeted" so Trump could "win [the] area."
Readers might remember a string of similar criticisms leveled at former President Barack Obama during the 2012 election after the "Obamaphone" video went viral. "Everybody in Cleveland—low, minority—got Obamaphones," says a woman who had shown up to protest at a Mitt Romney rally. "Keep Obama in president [sic]. He gave us a phone. He's gonna do more."
In reality, that controversy was a farce. Under the spotlight was the Lifeline program, which provides subsidies for communications to eligible low-income recipients. The catch: It was implemented in 1985 during the Reagan administration, and the Obama administration had sought to reform what was seen as a program plagued by massive fraud. The changes reportedly saved $213 million in 2012.
That didn't get in the way of a semi-popular claim, however, that Obama was passing out phones for votes. "She may not know who George Washington is or Abraham Lincoln," opined radio host Rush Limbaugh, "but she knows how to get an Obamaphone." Former Rep. Adam Putnam (R–Fla.) had more pointed words: "Early vote now so that you can wave signs on election day next Tuesday," he said. "We've got to drag people to the polls. That's what they're doing. You don't have to offer them cell phones like they're doing."
The Trump administration denies that his food aid work was at all politically-motivated. "Politics has played zero role in the Farmers to Families food box program," the Department of Agriculture said in a statement. "It is purely about helping farmers and distributors get food to Americans in need during this unprecedented time."
Trump similarly attached a letter to the stimulus checks doled out as part of the government's coronavirus relief program, though that was a bipartisan measure negotiated through Congress. The two programs have something else in common, though: They are the very types of "socialist" policies that many right-wingers usually condemn, a la "Obamaphones."
This morning, USA Today published my op ed making the case for abolishing the constitutional requirement that the president must be a "natural born" citizen. This step would enable immigrants to become president, and also put an end to the sorts of ridiculous controversies over eligibility under the Clause that have arisen in every presidential election since 2008. The op ed is coauthored with Harvard Law School Prof. Randall Kennedy, one of the leading academic experts on racial and ethnic discrimination. I have been a big fan of Prof. Kennedy's work since I was a young law student in the 1990s, and it is a great honor to coauthor this piece with him. We differ on many issues, but we completely agree on this one.
Here is an excerpt:
This presidential election season joins the last several in being attended by accusations that certain candidates are ineligible because of the requirement in Article II of the Constitution that the president be not only a citizen, but a "natural born" citizen. This time around, some have claimed that Sen. Kamala Harris is ineligible for the presidency because, though born in the United States, her parents were immigrants who had not become citizens by the time of her birth.
We believe this claim is untenable. But the need to address the matter at all highlights why eligibility distinctions that turn on place of birth or status of parent ought to be abolished….
In 2016, the targets were Republican candidates Ted Cruz (born in Canada to U.S.-citizen parents who had immigrated from Cuba) and Marco Rubio (also the son of Cuban immigrants). In 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama, was assailed by "birthers" who falsely claimed he was born outside the United States. Obama's 2008 GOP opponent, John McCain, came under attack because he was born in what was then the Panama Canal Zone. Such episodes are all too likely to recur. In an increasingly diverse society, it will often be possible to claim tendentiously that some candidate or other is ineligible….
Barring naturalized citizens from eligibility for the presidency is little different from discrimination based on race, ethnicity or gender. Such unchosen circumstances of birth say nothing about a person's competence or moral fitness for office. Our legal system rejects the natural born requirement elsewhere. It does not apply to governors, members of Congress, justices of the Supreme Court, cabinet officers, or the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It should be removed as a condition for eligibility for the presidency.
In the remainder of the op ed, we address some standard justifications for keeping the Clause, and also explain why prospects for enacting a constitutional amendment to repeal it are likely to improve over time (though it will still be an uphill struggle due to the large supermajority needed to enact any amendment).
I discuss GOP Senator Orrin Hatch's 2003 proposal to repeal the Natural Born Citizen Clause (mentioned in the op ed) in greater detail here. The similarity between racial and ethnic discrimination and discrimination on the basis of parentage and place of birth is analyzed in greater depth in Chapter 5 of my recently published book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom (Introduction available for free download here).
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Sen. Kamala Harris - focus of the most recent controversy over eligibility under the Natural Born Citizen Clause.Jacob Sullumhttps://reason.com/people/jacob-sullum/jsullum@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80829792020-09-03T21:07:27Z2020-09-03T20:40:27Z
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit yesterday ruled that the National Security Agency's bulk collection of Americans' telephone records was illegal and probably unconstitutional. For Democrats who see Donald Trump as an unprecedented threat because of his disregard for the Constitution, the decision is a useful reminder that sacrificing civil liberties on the altar of national security is a bipartisan rite.
The NSA program, which was revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, indiscriminately collected telephone "metadata"—indicating who was calling whom and how long they talked—about millions of Americans for years. The program, which the USA FREEDOM Act ended in 2015, began under George W. Bush but continued during Barack Obama's administration, which concealed its existence, then speciously defended its legality and usefulness.
"The administration has now lost all credibility," The New York Timeseditorialized after Snowden's revelations. "Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it."
James Clapper, the Air Force general whom Obama appointed as director of national intelligence, epitomized the administration's dishonesty by blatantly lying to a Senate committee about the NSA's data collection practices three months before the phone record database was revealed, then repeatedly lying about lying. In his latest incarnation, Clapper is a vociferous Trump critic who blames Russia for the election of a president he despises as a man "whose first instincts are to twist and distort truth to his advantage."
Further scrambling the conventional understanding of which major party is more concerned about civil liberties, Obama tried to prosecute Snowden, while Trump, who in 2013 called Snowden "a traitor" who "should be executed," last month suggested he might pardon the NSA whistleblower. Another interesting point Democrats might prefer to overlook: While questioning the constitutionality of the NSA's metadata dragnet, the 9th Circuit cites Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump nominee who is a more reliable defender of the Fourth Amendment than the judge Obama wanted to appoint.
I am not for a moment suggesting that Trump's new respect for Snowden, which is probably driven by his pique at "deep state" foes like Clapper, or his choice of Gorsuch, which was based on what he thought conservatives wanted, reflects civil libertarian principles (or any principles at all). But as this case shows, Trump's polarizing personality tends to obscure the deeper problem of powers that tempt presidents to violate our rights, regardless of their personal traits, avowed principles, or party affiliation.
The prosecution that led to the 2nd Circuit's decision involved four Somali immigrants who were convicted in 2013 of sending money to the terrorist group al-Shabab. While the ruling does not affect those convictions, it addresses the legality of the NSA's phone record database, which supposedly played a crucial role in the case.
I say "supposedly" because that is what federal officials claimed while defending the NSA's program. Then-FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce, for example, told a congressional committee the database generated a tip that allowed the bureau to reopen its investigation of the suspected al-Shabab supporters. The 2nd Circuit rightly discounts such statements, which were part of a fact-deficient attempt to portray the program as an essential weapon against terrorism.
"The metadata collection, even if unconstitutional, did not taint the evidence introduced by the government at trial," the appeals court says. "To the extent the public statements of government officials created a contrary impression, that impression is inconsistent with the contents of the classified record." That's a polite way of saying that Obama administration officials misled the public about the program's value.
What about its legality? As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit did in 2015, the 9th Circuit makes short work of the government's argument that the program was authorized by Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which allowed secret court orders "requiring the production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation…to protect against international terrorism." Such orders were supposed to be based on "a statement of facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation."
Using the same needle-in-a-haystack argument that was deployed by the Obama administration, the government's lawyers maintained that everyone's phone records are "relevant to an authorized investigation" because searching them might reveal useful clues. "Although admittedly a substantial portion of the telephony metadata that is collected would not relate to [terrorism suspects]," they said, "the intelligence tool that the Government hopes to use to find [investigation-related] communications—metadata analysis—requires collecting and storing large volumes of the metadata to enable later analysis." According to the government, "all of the metadata collected is thus relevant, because the success of this investigative tool depends on bulk collection."
The 2nd Circuit said "such an expansive concept of 'relevance' is unprecedented and unwarranted," and the 9th Circuit concurs. The government's interpretation "essentially reads the 'authorized investigation' language out of the statute," it says. "We hold that the telephony metadata collection program exceeded the scope of Congress's authorization."
As for the program's constitutionality, the government argued that it was covered by the third-party doctrine, which says people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding information they voluntarily divulge to others (in this case, the phone companies from which the NSA collected its metadata). The Supreme Court invented that doctrine in United States v. Miller, a 1976 case involving bank records. Three years later, the Court invoked the doctrine in Smith v. Maryland, which involved a warrantless "pen register" that police used to record the numbers dialed by a robbery suspect over the course of a few days. Although that situation is rather different from the collection of personal information about millions of people for years, the government argued that Smith shows the NSA's program was consistent with the Fourth Amendment.
"There are strong reasons to doubt that Smith applies here," the 9th Circuit says. "The distinctions between Smith and this case are legion and most probably constitutionally significant….Society may not have recognized as reasonable Smith's expectation of privacy in a few days' worth of dialed numbers but is much more likely to perceive as private several years' worth of telephony metadata collected on an ongoing, daily basis—as demonstrated by the public outcry following the revelation of the metadata collection program."
The Supreme Court in Smith drew a distinction between the "contents" of a phone call and information about numbers dialed, deeming the latter much less sensitive. But "in recent years the distinction between content and metadata 'has become increasingly untenable,'" the appeals court notes. "The amount of metadata created and collected has increased exponentially, along with the government's ability to analyze it."
The 9th Circuit emphasizes how revealing this information can be, quoting former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker. "Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody's life," Baker said. "If you have enough metadata you don't really need content."
The appeals court illustrates that point with a couple of examples: "A woman calls her sister at 2:00 a.m. and talks for an hour. The record of that call reveals some of the woman's personal information, but more is revealed by access to the sister's call records, which show that the sister called the woman's husband immediately afterward. Or, a police officer calls his college roommate for the first time in years. Afterward, the roommate calls a suicide hotline."
And that's just for a start. "Metadata can be combined and analyzed to reveal far more sophisticated information than one or two individuals' phone records convey," the 9th Circuit notes before quoting a brief filed by the Brennan Center for Justice: "It is relatively simple to superimpose our metadata trails onto the trails of everyone within our social group and those of everyone within our contacts' social groups and quickly paint a picture that can be startlingly detailed."
The 9th Circuit notes that the Supreme Court expressed similar concerns in Carpenter v. United States, the 2018 case in which the justices said the third-party doctrine does not apply to cellphone location data. Furthermore, the appeals court says, "numerous commentators and two Supreme Court Justices have questioned the continuing viability of the third-party doctrine under current societal realities."
Here is where Gorsuch comes in. He dissented in Carpenter, not because he thought cops should be allowed to collect cellphone location data without a warrant but because he thought the third-party doctrine should be scrapped entirely, along with the malleable "reasonable expectation" test. Nowadays, Gorsuch noted, people routinely store sensitive information—including "private documents" that, "in other eras, we would have locked safely in a desk drawer or destroyed"—on third-party servers. According to the reasoning of Miller and Smith, he said, "police can review all of this material, on the theory that no one reasonably expects any of it will be kept private. But no one believes that, if they ever did."
The 9th Circuit did not reach a firm conclusion about the constitutionality of the NSA's program, because it was not necessary to decide whether the convictions should stand. But its observations show how readily the government invades our privacy on the flimsiest pretext, blithely dismissing constitutional concerns when they prove inconvenient. That alarming tendency cannot be corrected by switching out one politician for another.
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James ClapperJacob Sullumhttps://reason.com/people/jacob-sullum/jsullum@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80778762020-07-31T21:09:27Z2020-07-31T20:45:35Z
During his eulogy yesterday for Rep. John Lewis (D–Ga.), a leading figure in the civil rights movement, former President Barack Obama expressed support for eliminating the Senate filibuster, which he called a "Jim Crow relic." That position contradicted the one Obama took as senator in a chamber controlled by Republicans, and his historical framing was more than a little misleading. The filibuster, which in its current form prevents a vote on legislation without 60 votes to cut off debate, was first used in 1837 during the controversy over the Second Bank of the United States, and it has been deployed many times since for reasons having nothing to do with government-enforced white supremacy.
It is true that segregationists used the filibuster to oppose civil rights legislation in the 1950s and '60s. Most famously, Sen. Strom Thurmond, then a Democrat representing South Carolina, spoke for more than 24 hours to impede passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which aimed to protect the voting rights of African Americans in the South. Southern legislators—including Sen. Robert Byrd (D–W.Va.), an ardent defender of Senate traditions—also used the filibuster in an unsuccessful attempt to block the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned segregation in public schools and racial discrimination in voting requirements, employment, and places of public accommodation.
But that is just a snapshot of the filibuster's potential uses, which can be either malign or beneficial, depending on the target and one's view of the legislation's merits. Just as the principle of federalism does not qualify as a "Jim Crow relic" simply because segregationists invoked it, the filibuster cannot be deemed irredeemable simply because they found it useful. Like other restraints on the majority's will—including those mandated by the Constitution, such as requiring bicameral approval of legislation and the president's assent in the absence of a congressional supermajority—the filibuster is an ideologically neutral obstacle that makes it harder to pass laws. Whether you think its net impact is good or bad is apt to depend not only on which party happens to be in power but also on your general view of the work that Congress does.
The filibuster was not part of the original constitutional design. It arose from a rule change that Vice President Aaron Burr urged in 1805. As George Washington University political scientist Sarah Binder explained during a 2010 Senate hearing, Burr thought the chamber's rule book was cluttered with unnecessary provisions, including what was known as the "previous question" motion, which it turned out could be used to close debate with a simple majority. Unlike the Senate, the House of Representatives retained that rule.
"Today, we know that a simple majority in the House can use the rule to cut off debate," Binder said. "But in 1805, neither chamber used the rule that way. Majorities were still experimenting with it. And so when Aaron Burr said, 'Get rid of the previous question motion,' the Senate didn't think twice. When they met in 1806, they dropped the motion from the Senate rule book." In other words, "the filibuster was created by mistake."
However inadvertent its inception, the filibuster has proven useful to legislators of various parties during the last two centuries, as its persistence demonstrates. And while the very term filibuster—derived from the French flibustier, referring to pirates in the West Indies—suggests a lawless hijacking, there is nothing illegitimate about the tactic, since it is authorized by the Senate's rules.
When they are in the majority, senators may complain that the filibuster is undemocratic. But the same could be said of many constitutional provisions that prevent a legislative majority from doing whatever it wants, including the restrictions imposed by the Bill of Rights, not to mention the basic principle that Congress may exercise only those powers it has been explicitly granted.
Three decades elapsed between the Senate's rule change and the first recorded use of the filibuster. In 1837, Whig senators used the tactic in an attempt to keep Democrats from expunging an 1834 resolution that censured President Andrew Jackson for removing federal funds from the Second Bank of the United States. The Democrat-controlled Senate nevertheless nullified the resolution by a five-vote margin.
While "there were very few filibusters before the Civil War," Binder noted, they were common by the 1880s, deployed against civil rights legislation but also against election law changes, nominations, and the appointment of Senate officers. In 1917, Woodrow Wilson, outraged by Republican senators' filibustering of his proposal to arm merchant ships as a deterrent to German U-boats, demanded reform to disempower this "little group of willful men." The Senate responded by adopting Rule 22, which empowered a two-thirds majority to cut off debate—a compromise between Democrats who favored a simple-majority rule and Republicans who resisted any change. In 1975, the Senate reduced the majority required for cloture from two-thirds to three-fifths, or from from 67 to 60 votes in a chamber with 100 members.
"Adoption of Rule 22 occurred because Wilson and the Democrats framed the rule as a matter of national security," Binder noted. "They fused procedure with policy, and used the bully pulpit to shame senators into reform." While that description suggests senators who opposed American involvement in World War I were engaged in shameful obstruction, a more skeptical view of that senseless and disastrous conflict suggests otherwise, and the defeat of the Wilson-backed bill inspired a chapter of Profiles in Courage.
Whatever your view of Wilson or World War I, it is indisputable that senators have used the filibuster for what they sincerely believed were sound, public-spirited reasons going beyond petty partisan interests. To take an example that appeals to libertarians, Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) protested the Obama administration's policy of "targeted killing" via drone with an old-fashioned 13-hour talking filibuster against the nomination of CIA Director John Brennan in 2013. Those of a different political persuasion may admire the eight-and-a-half-hour filibuster that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) pulled off in 2010 to protest the extension of federal tax cuts.
Both Democrats and Republicans have used filibusters or the threat of them to block the nomination of judges and justices whose records they found alarming. That option was largely foreclosed in 2013, when a Democrat-controlled Senate, frustrated by Republican opposition to Obama's judicial picks, approved a rule that allowed a simple majority to end debate on almost all presidential nominations except for the Supreme Court—an exception that was eliminated four years later, after Republicans regained control of the Senate in 2014 and Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. Both changes were accomplished via the "nuclear option," a parliamentary maneuver that allows a simple majority to approve rule changes.
Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–Nev.), who had opposed the nuclear option as a threat to venerable Senate norms when George W. Bush was president and Republicans ran the Senate, switched positions in 2013. So did Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.), who as the majority whip during the Bush administration had threatened to make the rule change that Reid resisted.
McConnell warned Democrats that they would regret their shortsighted move. And presumably they did once McConnell, converting again, greased the skids for Trump's Supreme Court nominees and the president began reshaping the federal judiciary. As the Cato Institute's Gene Healy noted in 2013, "Serious political movements shouldn't try to knock down all the barriers to power whenever they temporarily enjoy it, because nothing is permanent in politics save the drive for more federal power, and the weapons you forge may someday be detonated by the other side."
When politicians are in the mood to defend filibusters (i.e., when their party is not in charge of the Senate), they often say that preserving the tactic helps ensure that the minority's views receive adequate consideration as legislation is crafted. Bipartisanship for its own sake is a dubious goal. Joe Biden, who is trying to replace Donald Trump as the guy who gets to make nominations without worrying about filibusters, has famously cited his collaboration with Strom Thurmond—yes, the same senator who tried to block a civil rights bill with the longest filibuster in U.S. history—as an inspiring example of bipartisanship. That collaboration produced the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, a godawful piece of legislation that set the pattern for a decade of indiscriminately punitive criminal justice policies.
Still, there is something to be said for mechanisms that require the majority to slow down, reflect a bit, and maybe even read legislation before passing it. Biden used to think so. Last February, while he was competing for the Democratic nomination, he said he was against eliminating filibusters. But this week, contemplating a victory that looks increasingly likely, he is having second thoughts.
Despite his adulation of compromise and consensus, Biden now thinks it may be time to remove this impediment to presidential agendas. "It's going to depend on how obstreperous [Republicans] become," Biden told reporters on Monday. "But I think you're going to just have to take a look at it."
The situational ethics of filibusters could be seen as evidence that the time-honored tradition is nothing more than a tricky maneuver that members of both major parties praise when it's convenient and condemn when it's not. But the relevant question is whether that tricky maneuver, on balance, gives us better or worse government. When you think about the gratuitous, pernicious, and blatantly unconstitutional legislation that Congress manages to pass even when the filibuster option is available, it is hard to imagine that eliminating this obstacle would improve the situation.
Donald Trump's pitch to "Make America Great Again" included a commitment to rethinking America's interventionist foreign policy.
"After the Cold War, our foreign policy veered badly off course," then-candidate Trump told an audience at the Center for the National Interest in April 2016. "Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance, and this led to one foreign policy disaster after another."
Trump's promise to unwind America's foreign commitments won the vote of some anti-war libertarians, who argued that, while many of his political views were odious, foreign policy mattered most.
"Donald [Trump] is a peacenik, practically, certainly compared to the war-mongering Hillary [Clinton]," libertarian economist Walter Block told the audience at a November 2016 debate over whether libertarians should support Trump, which was hosted by the Soho Forum.
On the campaign trail, Trump also attacked Clinton for voting to authorize the invasion of Iraq as a senator, for pushing for U.S. intervention in Libya as secretary of state, and for her hawkish approach to foreign policy in general.
"Almost everything [Hillary Clinton] has done in foreign policy has been a mistake, and it's been a disaster," Trump said in an October 2016 debate.
In a November 2016 Reason podcast, historian Thaddeus Russell made the case that Trump would prove to be the less interventionist alternative to Clinton.
"Whenever there's a dictator or tyrant [America doesn't] like in any part of the world, we are obligated to remove him," Russell said. "Trump is the first president to call bullshit on that very claim…And in doing so, I think he may do great service for actual peace."
But now that we're ending his presidential term, do noninterventionists believe Trump actually has moved the world closer to peace?
"I think Trump has moved America considerably closer to peace," says Russell. "At the very same time, he's moved us into more wars. So it's a terribly mixed bag."
But Russell says that Trump's rhetoric alone still was an important victory for the noninterventionist cause.
"He called into question the need for America to invade countries, to change their regimes and to stay there…Specifically, he called into question the Iraq war."
Trump isn't the first modern president to promise an end to foreign entanglements on the campaign trail only to double down on those commitments once in office. Candidate Barack Obama called the Iraq War "dumb" and promised to end it.
Obama temporarily withdrew troops from Iraq on Bush's pre-negotiated timetable, but then re-intervened a few years later after ISIS filled the power vacuum. He also expanded the war on terror into several new countries and began personally ordering covert drone strikes, one of which killed a 16-year-old American, and another that killed at least 13 people headed to a wedding.
Even George W. Bush, who as president started the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ran against nation-building on the campaign trail.
"I just don't think it's the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, 'We do it this way. So should you,'" Bush said in a 2000 debate.
Scott Horton, a popular anti-war podcast host and author of a book on the history of the war in Afghanistan, says modern presidents often campaign against war because it's a popular position in the abstract.
"The American people want peace," says Horton.
He agrees with Russell that Trump's rhetorical attack on the foreign policy establishment, and specifically on Jeb Bush and the Iraq war, helped the anti-war cause.
"He really got the…Tea Party, Republican voters of America to finally admit that they were wrong to have supported George Bush," says Horton.
But he says Trump is too impulsive to be reliably anti-war.
"The problem with Donald Trump, of course, is that he's a millimeter deep," says Horton. "He has some instincts, but he doesn't have…thinking really on these things."
Trump's wars with the media, Democrats, and protesters have meant that Americans are paying less attention than ever to our actual wars, which nevertheless are still being waged.
Trump hasn't invaded any new countries, but he has ramped up the nearly 19-year-long, $2 trillion Afghanistan war that's cost the lives of tens of thousands of Afghans and more than 3,500 U.S. and NATO troops.
Trump deployed thousands more troops to Afghanistan in 2017 and dropped more bombs and missiles in 2019 than in any previously recorded year.
"Once they get in there, all the incentives are to keep the [wars] going," says Horton. "Afghanistan is the greatest example of this."
Instead of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria once he took office, Trump vowed to stop publicly reporting troop numbers.
The Trump administration did strike a deal with Taliban leaders in late February to wind down the war within 14 months if they pledged to prevent terrorist groups like al Qaeda from operating in the country, and the Pentagon announced a reduction in forces and withdrawal from five Afghanistan bases on July 14.
"The fact that Trump was willing to break with Bush and Obama's policy to go ahead and negotiate directly with the Taliban was a clue that he was really serious," says Horton.
But he worries that deal could be scuttled by uncorroborated reports that Russia paid bounties to Afghans who killed U.S. troops, which prompted Republican Liz Cheney to partner with several House Democrats to place conditions on the withdrawal.
Horton also points out that Trump has increased U.S. involvement in Yemen and Somalia. In Yemen alone, the United Nations estimates that the Saudi-led and U.S.-supported bombing campaign has resulted in almost a quarter of a million deaths.
"These are two of America's most horrible wars and no one pays any attention to them whatsoever," says Horton.
Trump has continued and escalated the war on terror, which could make the U.S. susceptible to getting involved in even more conflicts around the globe. He also undid Obama's nuclear deal with Iran and ordered a targeted assassination of Iranian Gen. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, whom he accused of plotting an attack on an American base.
But after Iran fired back, Trump backed off. He pulled back a strike in 2019 after Iran downed a U.S. drone, and political allies and media commentators portrayed it as a weakness. He faced widespread criticism for moving troops out of northern Syria and praise when he fired missiles into a Syrian airfield after allegations of a chemical attack by Bashar al-Assad.
"Look at the narrative and the agenda in the media," says Horton. "How dare Donald Trump try to end any of America's wars ever."
Russell worries about the increasingly belligerent rhetoric on both sides of the aisle towards China. Trump has escalated tensions with China through his trade war and the reported placement of low-yield nuclear weapons in the region. But Russell still believes Trump's rhetoric was useful.
"The best aspect of the foreign policy of Trump is that…he has revealed the mind of not just the foreign policy establishment…[but] really government workings and the workings of the state," says Russell. "The worst aspect of the Trump foreign policy is that he's a mass murderer, just like the rest of them."
In the end, Trump, as commander in chief, has had ample opportunity to begin making good on his promise to begin extricating the American military from its endless wars. Time and again, he has failed to formulate a coherent strategy for doing so.
"It never should have been this way. We screwed up, got the whole 21st century off on the wrong foot," says Horton. "But we didn't need to. We could call the whole damn thing off…and just forge that new [foreign policy] consensus and stick with it. It should be easy because we're right."
Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Graphics by Lex Villena and Isaac Reese.
Photo credits: "Liz Cheney," Stefani Reynolds/CNP/MEGA/ Newscom; "Mother at military funeral," Kevin Dietsch/UPI/Newscom; "Carrying flag-draped casket," Kevin Dietsch/Newscom; "Woman at veteran's gravesite," Michael A. McCoy/ZUMA Press/Newscom; "Trump and Jeb Bush at debate," Max Wittaker/UPI/Newscom; "Trump holding up fists," Yin Bogu Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; "Chinese ballistic missile," Kyodo/Newscom; "Donald Trump campaigning at podium," by Gage Skidmore; "Trump and Clinton debate," Christian Gooden/TNS/Newscom; "Afghanistan war footage," by Combat Views under Creative Commons license; "Trump with crowd behind him," by Image of Sport/Newscom; "Yemeni children in village," CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/Newscom; "Yemeni children getting water," CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/Newscom; "Yemeni child in hospital," Abdulnasser Alseddik/ZUMA Press/Newscom; "Bombed Yemeni village," Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; "Nurse wearing face shield," CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/Newscom.
Music credits: "Truth or Reality," "Temerity," "Unforeseen," "To Begin Again," by Sean Williams licensed by Artlist.
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Christian Britschgihttps://reason.com/people/christian-britschgi/christian.britschgi@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80731782020-07-02T19:25:28Z2020-07-02T17:20:29Z
The White House appears to be at war with itself on housing policy, following a late-night tweet from President Donald Trump that echoes right-wing criticisms of his own administration's pending, free-market-themed revamp of federal fair housing regulations.
Late Tuesday, Trump tweeted out an unprompted attack on the Obama-era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, a 2015 regulation that required jurisdictions receiving federal housing funding to complete lengthy "assessments" on existing obstacles to fair housing, and then prepare plans for eliminating those obstacles.
"At the request of many great Americans who live in the Suburbs, and others, I am studying the AFFH housing regulation that is having a devastating impact on these once thriving Suburban areas," said Trump on Twitter. "Corrupt Joe Biden wants to make them MUCH WORSE. Not fair to homeowners, I may END!"
At the request of many great Americans who live in the Suburbs, and others, I am studying the AFFH housing regulation that is having a devastating impact on these once thriving Suburban areas. Corrupt Joe Biden wants to make them MUCH WORSE. Not fair to homeowners, I may END!
That tweet set off a storm of criticism from Democrats and progressives, who denounced the president's threat to end the AFFH rule as tantamount to bringing back segregation.
The same man who was sued by the DOJ for housing discrimination now wants to legalize housing discrimination. https://t.co/0pmswZEQu0
The Democratic response to Trump's tweet doesn't capture the full debate happening among conservatives, who have long criticized the 2015 AFFH, or the fact that the policy is overly burdensome and needs retooling. The assessments mandated by Obama-era rule saw jurisdictions producing 800-page reports that dived into everything from access to public transportation to labor market outcomes. Some grant recipients struggled to complete these assessments at all.
Since 2018, the Trump administration has been in the process of replacing it with something that incentivizes local governments to repeal regulations on housing construction.
"I want to encourage the development of mixed-income multifamily dwellings all over the place," U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Carson toldThe Wall Street Journal in 2018 when announcing the administration's plan to replace the AFFH rule. "I would incentivize people who really would like to get a nice juicy government grant" to reform their zoning codes.
In January 2020, HUD released the text of a proposed replacement rule that would require recipients of HUD funds to report on more narrow measures of housing affordability and quality, and then propose three concrete steps for improving those measures. Jurisdictions that showed improvement over time could be rewarded with additional grant money.
Progressives and housing activists have criticized the Trump administration's approach as insufficient for truly guaranteeing fair housing. Without the original AFFH's voluminous reporting requirements, they argue, both HUD and HUD grant recipients will lack the information they need to address long-standing patterns of segregation and concentrated poverty.
The Trump administration's approach has also been criticized from the right by those who've argued that trying to incentivize local jurisdictions to repeal regulations on new housing threatens suburban communities' local control.
"All the administration's proposed HUD rule does is change the AFFH requirement from a left-wing social engineering experiment to a right-wing attack on local control," wrote Jordan Bloom in TheDaily Caller in February.
On Tuesday, National Review published an article by Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center which warned ominously that Joe Biden and Democrats wanted to use the AFFH to "abolish the suburbs."
"Once Biden starts to enforce AFFH the way Obama's administration originally meant it to work, it will be as if America's suburbs had been swallowed up by the cities they surround," wrote Kurtz. Suburban communities, he continues, "will even be forced to start building high-density low-income housing. The latter, of course, will require the elimination of single-family zoning. With that, the basic character of the suburbs will disappear."
Far from fighting against this dystopia, Kurtz argues Carson's HUD is embracing it.
"What Carson has developed so far is something you might call 'AFFH lite,'" writes Kurtz. "[Carson] still wants to use HUD money to gut suburban single-family zoning."
The fact that Trump's tweet attacking the AFFH closely mirrors Kurtz's rhetoric, and the fact that it came the same day as Kurtz's article, suggests something beyond coincidence, says Michael Hendrix of the Manhattan Institute.
"Someone got [the Kurtz article] into Trump's hands. Trump reads it and tweets. It's as simple as that," Hendrix tells Reason. And while Trump's tweet was explicitly going after Biden, by echoing the Kurtz article it was implicitly attacking the reforms being proposed by his own administration.
"There's a fight between different factions and different visions of housing reform," within the administration, Hendrix says, with a more free-market-inclined HUD on one side and suburban partisans on the other. This fight is now spilling out into the open.
Hendrix says that there are good policy reasons to support the reformed AFFH rule as proposed by Carson's HUD. Having localities report on a few straightforward measures of housing affordability would highlight cities where local policymakers are getting things right while sending a message to expensive, over-regulated jurisdictions.
Just getting rid of the AFFH rule—as Kurtz proposes and Trump has now threatened to do—also isn't really an option, says Hendrix. The rule is an attempt to implement the 1968 Fair Housing Act (FHA) requirement that federal housing programs be administered in a way "that affirmatively furthers fair housing."
Getting rid of the Obama-era AFFH doesn't repeal the FHA's underlying requirement that the federal government has some kind of regulation on the books ensuring their grant programs are furthering fair housing. Any effort to simply gut the law would likely see the courts impose their own solution or simply reinstate the old AFFH rule unchanged, says Hendrix. Indeed, Carson's suspension of the AFFH rule without a ready replacement sparked a lawsuit from the National Fair Housing Alliance demanding the rule be reinstated.
The comment period for the new AFFH rule the Trump administration proposed in January closed back in March. Everyone is now waiting for the publication of a finalized rule.
Obviously the most libertarian solution would be to eliminate all federal housing grant programs, giving Washington regulators little to bicker about.
But given that those grant programs exist, and that federal law attaches some strings to their administration, some form of regulation is required. Carson's proposal to rewrite these rules to incentivize sensible free market reforms on the part of jurisdictions receiving federal grants is probably the best implementation limited government advocates can hope for presently.
Should Trump decide to scrap his own pending fair housing reform, as his tweet suggested he might, it would be a loss for free markets, and likely just result in the return of the old Obama-era AFFH that no one in his administration likes.
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Matt Welchhttps://reason.com/people/matt-welch/matt.welch@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80538582020-03-27T18:45:07Z2020-03-27T18:47:24Z
In 2009, the last time Washington aimed a trillion-dollar firehose at the distressed U.S. economy, the president, a Democrat, repeatedly coupled that act of temporary profligacy with the rhetorical aim of long-term budgetary sobriety.
"One of the central goals of this administration is restoring fiscal responsibility," Barack Obama asserted back then. "Even as we have had to spend our way out of this recession in the near term, we've begun to make the hard choices necessary to get our country on a more stable fiscal footing in the long run."
There were plenty of reasons for contemporaneous skepticism about Obama's claims, but even insincere nods toward a presumed virtue can contribute to a mild braking on vice. Policy battles over deficits, debt ceilings, and old-age entitlements dominated national politics through the end of 2013, and not merely because of then-ornery, now-quiescent Tea Party Republicans. Erskine Bowles, after all, was a Democrat.
But the twin rise of President Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), along with the strains of populism they channeled, chased deficit hawks to the despised corners of polite society by 2015. After that, the main questions left were how many zeroes would end up on the federal check when the next crisis inevitably hit.
By comparison, the bipartisan stimulus that was very temporarily held up by the near-universally despised Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), totals around $2.3 trillion, according to the bean-counters at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Even accounting for population increase (the U.S. had 307 million residents in 2009, around 331 million today), that's an inflation-adjusted per capita increase from around $6,000 11 years ago to $6,950 today.
How much is $2.3 trillion? In nominal terms, it's the same as the entire federal budget for Fiscal Year 2004. Adjusting for inflation gets you back to the federal government's $1 trillion outlay for 1987. Inflation and population together take you back to 1974. In short, Congress just approved a bailout/stimulus of $6,950 per person, which is more than the $6,600 per person in constant dollars that the entire federal government spent in Richard Nixon's final year in office.
The accumulated national debt in 1974 was $475 billion, or around $2.5 trillion in today's money ($11,700 per U.S. resident). George W. Bush inherited we-owe-yous of $5.67 trillion (which adjusts to $8.52 trillion and $30,200 per capita), and left for Obama a present of $10 trillion ($12 trillion/$39,600). As Trump readies his black sharpie for the rescue package, the debt clock stands at $23.6 trillion ($71,300 per person)—and it was being goosed by trillion-dollar annual deficits even before COVID-19 hit the fan.
And unlike Obama in 2009, Trump doesn't currently feel the need to even rhetorically hint at future tradeoffs. The president reportedly said in late 2018 about any future fiscal crisis: "Yeah, but I won't be here." Add in the likelihood of future bailouts and stimuli, and basically we're all Modern Monetary Theorists now.
The annual budget deficit, which snapped an entire generation of conservatives into attention when it crossed the $1 trillion threshold a decade ago, is likely to top $2 trillion before the fiscal year is out. The Government Accountability Office and Congressional Budget Office were calling the country's long-term fiscal outlook "unsustainable" back when the good times were still rolling. Now revenues are taking a massive hit, demand for government service is going through the roof, and the U.S. Mint's going brrrrr.
Libertarians back in 2008-09 tended to make four types of predictions about the bailout/stimulus. One—that the unpredented swooshing of cash and Federal Reserve intrusion into the economy would trigger long-dormant inflation—did not come to pass, and so many policy enthusiasts have taken that as a cue to ignore libertarians.
But there were three other forward-looking objections to socializing the failures of deep-pocketed losers during the financial crisis: that the ensuing debt load would unduly dampen the eventual recovery, that failing to fix the underlying government distortions that caused malinvestments in the first place would make bailouts an eternally recurring phenomenon, and that papering over problems with money would create new, even more dangerous bubbles.
With today's Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, Congress has cemented what we already suspected: that the federal government does not care about learning from directly relevant mistakes it made in the recent past.
There is no more politics of fiscal prudence in America, just a competition to see who can wag the biggest firehose. While the bodies begin to pile up in New York City and elsewhere, Washington has responded with a massive course of experimental economics. May we respond better than rats in a cage.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is using an iron fist to smash protests over his latest effort to erode the citizenship rights of Indian Muslims. He, and many of the state governments that his party controls, have suspended the internet in many cities, dispatched paramilitary forces to storm Muslim colleges and beat up students, and imposed a ban on protests, including in Bangalore, where police roughed up and arrested one of India's most renowned historians, Ramachandra Guha. The death toll of the protesters has now reached 25.
Modi is out of control. Even China's authoritarian rulers have shown more restraint in dealing with the Hong Kong protesters.
It is high time that Modi's admirers in the West—politicians, business leaders, and Hollywood celebrities who fawned over him—admit that they made a profound mistake. They embraced him despite clear warnings that his high-minded talk about turning India into an economic and technological powerhouse masked a sinister Hindu nationalist agenda.
He is not a hero of progress and development but a blood-and-soil nativist arguably more dangerous than any in the West.
Let us remember what we once knew but seem to have forgotten: Modi cut his political teeth in the RSS, the militant wing of a party obsessed with avenging historic slights—real and imagined—that Hindus endured under Muslim rule centuries ago. One of the RSS's members assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, whom some Hindu nationalists regard as a Muslim "appeaser." Modi himself has a long history of anti-Muslim animus. In 1992, he rode a chariot in the Hindu procession that marched to the iconic Babri mosque and razed it. His feelings morphed into actual bloodletting in 2002, when he was the chief minister of the state of Gujarat. Hindu thugs, some connected with his party, went on a rampage and slaughtered 1,000 Muslim men, women, and children as the state police stood by.
Modi expressed not an iota of remorse for the events in Gujarat when he ran for the prime minister's office in 2012, even comparing the murdered Muslims to "puppies" run over by a careless driver.
Yet after he became prime minister, the world gave him the benefit of the doubt. The man who had been banned from many Western countries, including America, because of his role in the Gujarat pogrom became an international sensation.
A campaign-style extravaganza that Modi held in Madison Square Garden to celebrate his victory was attended not only by 18,000 gushing Indian Americans but also 40 U.S congressmen. Hugh Jackman introduced him, and he applauded heartily when Modi recited Sanskrit shlokas or verses calling for world peace.
President Barack Obama went beyond ordinary diplomatic protocol in welcoming Modi during that visit. He hosted a White House dinner for Modi and invited him to stroll to the Martin Luther King memorial with him. A year later, when Obama went with first lady Michelle to India for a state visit, he commended Modi's "legendary work ethic" and his fashion sense, even joking about wearing a kurta shirt to imitate Modi's sartorial style.
The silencing effect that Obama's chumminess had on Modi's critics cannot be overstated. If the first black American president who fully understood the struggle for minority rights could endorse Modi, they reasoned, then Modi naysayers were just paranoid hysterics whose hatred was blinding them to his manifold virtues.
President Donald Trump, who isn't shy about hobnobbing with odious leaders, has unsurprisingly taken things to a whole new level in a naked bid for the Indian American vote. At the #HowdyModi rally held in Houston this summer to celebrate Modi's re-election, Trump warmed up the crowd for Modi, calling him "his friend" and "a great man and a great leader." A whole throng of Texas leaders from both parties, including Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson, stood behind Modi on stage like a hallelujah chorus.
Even more disheartening has been the reaction of U.S. industry leaders. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg got the ball rolling five years ago when he enthusiastically served up Modi agitprop, holding a townhall event for him at his company's headquarters. Zuckerberg asked Modi such pointed questions as how much he loved his mother and how he planned to use his mastery of social media to transform India. Two weeks after this lovefest, India experienced the first in what was to become an epidemic of beef lynchings under Modi. Hindu cow vigilantes stormed a Muslim family's home in Dadri, a village not far from Modi's home in New Delhi, and pulled the old patriarch from his bed and bludgeoned him to death. Modi the transformative leader's response? Days of silence.
Zuckerberg was unfazed. He reiterated during Modi's #HowdyModi visit that he "deeply appreciates PM Modi's commitment to Digital India." This was one month after Modi shut down the internet in Kashmir and imposed central rule on this Muslim-dominated state, arresting its leaders and scrapping its constitutionally guaranteed autonomy. That shutdown is now in its fourth month, earning Modi, the vaunted digital leader, the great distinction of engineering the longest internet shutdown in a democracy.
That still hasn't deterred Zuckerberg's fellow tech luminaries from piling encomiums on Modi.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates bestowed his foundation's prestigious "Global Goalkeeper Award" on Modi this September for his "Swaatch (Clean) India" campaign and for expanding access to toilets in the country. This elicited howls of protest from human rights groups. Muslim artists Riz Ahmed and Jameela Jamil pulled out of the awards ceremony. But Gates defended the award, calling Modi "brave" for tackling the issue of toilets.
Then there is Bridgewater Associates co-founder Ray Dalio, who opined last month, after India's economic growth hit a 10-year low and unemployment a 45-year high, that "Prime Minister Modi is one of the best, if not the best, leaders in the world." And Qualcomm Chairman Paul Jacobs proclaimed that Modi's leadership is "really moving in the right direction." And Unilever CEO Paul Polman declared that he was "very confident about the Modi government."
The effect that such endorsements have in emboldening Modi and undermining the internal points of resistance to him is incalculable. Try criticizing Modi to his supporters, and they'll instantly throw all his international awards and accolades in your face. But whatever the excuse of these leaders for issuing such deluded statements in the past, there can't be any now that Modi is taking the gloves off. Just because a fanatic has changed his tune doesn't mean he has changes his mind.
The least these leaders can do now is condemn Modi's campaign of persecution. It has been painful for many of us who believe in India's pluralism and democracy to watch Modi transform himself from an international pariah to an international star with the help of Western elites. He may be unstoppable at this stage. But he is also a profoundly vain man, a publicity hound who craves international attention and respectability. So their condemnation now may well make a difference. Who knows how far he is prepared to go to advance his Hindu nationalist project?
The protesters in India are putting their lives on the line to stick up for their constitution and the nation's minorities. It is their fight and they are fighting it. But it is not too much to ask that Modi's useful idiots in the West acknowledge their mistake.
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Keith E. Whittingtonhttps://reason.com/people/keith-e-whittington/https://reason.com/?p=80363192019-12-05T21:33:02Z2019-12-05T21:33:02Z
Representative Matt Gaetz was widely mocked yesterday for suggesting during the impeachment hearing that "maybe it's a different president we should be impeaching," by which he meant the one who left office in January 2017. He soon clarified via Twitter that he did indeed mean to say the House can impeach former presidents.
This is not an easy case, and there is not a scholarly consensus on this point, but it is plausible that it is within the authority of the House to impeach former federal officers.
Rather awkwardly, the framers separated the impeachment power into several different clauses sprinkled across the Constitution. Notably, the Constitution grants to the House of Representatives the "sole power of impeachment." It separately specifies that the president, vice president and other civil officers shall be removed if convicted upon an impeachment, and limits the Senate to doing no more than removing from office and disqualifying from future office when rendering a judgment in an impeachment trial.
In practice, disqualification from future office has rarely been an issue in federal impeachments. The House has rarely requested it. Only three officers, all judges, have been disqualified from future office by the Senate. Removing a problematic officer has often been treated as the sole purpose of the impeachment power, but I think that is a mistake. The impeachment power can and has served other purposes than just removing a sitting officer. If removal is the only purpose an impeachment can serve, then there would never be any point in the House voting to impeach when it knew the Senate would not convict. But sometimes it makes sense to impeach even when removal is not an available option.
When the framers entrusted the House with the power of impeachment, what did they think that power encompassed? They did not say very much about that. But the English parliamentary practice from which they were borrowing did not restrict impeachments to current officeholders. When the impeachment power was transplanted to American shores, it was explicitly shorn of some British features. Americans did not impeach private citizens. American legislatures were prohibited from imposing punishments other than removal and disqualification on those who had been convicted in impeachment trials. American legislatures were restricted to impeaching only for a limited type of offense.
But some state constitutions explicitly authorized their legislatures to impeach former officers, sometimes while imposing a time limit on how long the former officer was at risk of impeachment, and none prohibited it. The federal constitutional framers did not clearly rule it out, though they were aware that such applications were understood to be within the scope of a legislative power of impeachment.
If impeachments are a "grand inquest" into the conduct of public officials, then there is no necessary reason why that inquest should be cut off by an officer's departure from office. If impeachments are to deter public officers from gross misconduct, then leaving the door open to a legislature scrutinizing the conduct of former officers is potentially useful. If impeachments are to protect the republic from dangerous officeholders, then the ability to disqualify a former officer who has been demonstrated to have committed grave abuses of office in the past might be valuable.
One can imagine situations in which such a use of the impeachment power would be justifiable. In 1862, the Senate for the first time disqualified someone from future federal office when it convicted Judge West Humphreys on articles of impeachment that included the charge that he "did unlawfully act as judge of an illegally constituted tribunal within said State, called the district court of the Confederate States of America." If Humphreys had bothered to send in his resignation rather than simply neglecting his duties as a federal judge under the U.S. Constitution, the House might not have taken the time to impeach him. But it would have been understandable if Congress had determined that even if he had resigned that the secessionist Humphreys still needed to be barred from any future federal office of honor, trust, or profit.
In 1876, Secretary of War William Belknap resigned as the House was considering impeaching him for a newly revealed corruption scandal. The House impeached him anyway, and the Senate rejected a motion to dismiss the case for want of jurisdiction over a former federal officer. Belknap was not convicted, in part because some senators doubted their authority to do so. Condemning Belknap's actions and disqualifying him from future office seemed a sufficient reason to proceed for many in the House and Senate.
If Congress in 1974 had imagined the possibility of President Richard Nixon rehabilitating his reputation sufficiently to have a chance at holding a future office, it is not hard to imagine a bipartisan House and Senate steaming ahead with an impeachment and trial in order to bar that possibility through a judgment of disqualification. Worried that an infamous former officeholder might eventually live down his infamy, Congress might seek to make that recovery more difficult through the impeachment process.
The House practice manual accepts that the impeachment power extends to former officers, though it admits that since removal is generally the "primary objective" of an impeachment the proceedings have usually been brought to an end if the officer resigns. Brian Kalt has provided the most comprehensive analysis of "late impeachments," and I find him persuasive.
But this is also a good opportunity to reemphasize the importance of distinguishing what a government official or institution can do from what it should do. It is possible to abuse your discretionary authority. An act can be wrong and contrary to the health of the constitutional regime even if it is within a government official's lawful authority. An officer can be impeached for such an act. Members of Congress cannot be impeached, but they can certainly be condemned for such actions.
The House may have the constitutional authority to impeach a former president, but such acts are highly disfavored within our constitutional practice and the House would have an extraordinary argumentative burden to bear to justify such an action. It might be the case that the House should impeach a former officer so as to fortify constitutional norms and send a clear message to other officers that the behavior in question is unacceptable. But we should not want to go down the road of simply using the impeachment power to settle scores with the leaders of the other political party. It would quickly squander the solemnity and weight of the impeachment power while heightening partisan tensions and fostering greater animosity and distrust.
Representative Gaetz is probably right that the House could impeach a former president, but that does not mean the House should.
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Elizabeth Nolan Brownhttps://reason.com/people/elizabeth-nolan-brown/elizabeth.brown@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?p=80340232019-11-19T14:22:21Z2019-11-19T14:30:38Z
The Trump administration still falls short of the Obama administration when it comes to deportation numbers. But under President Donald Trump, more people are being held in immigration detention centers than ever before in U.S. history. And the majority of these detainees (70 percent) are people with no criminal records, according to the latest numbers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
"More than 14,000 are people the U.S. government has determined have a reasonable fear of persecution or torture if deported," points outThe Washington Post.
Both Trump and former President Barack Obama have presided over a huge number of deportations, although keeping so many people unauthorized immigrants detained has slowed the Trump administration's march toward Obama-like deportation numbers.
While Obama "removed 409,849 people in 2012 alone," Trump "has yet to surpass 260,000 deportations in a single year," notes the Post. "And while Obama deported 1.18 million people during his first three years in office, Trump has deported fewer than 800,000."
An ICE spokesperson said the high detention numbers were due to an increasing number of Central American migrants being caught trying to cross the border illegally, while immigrant advocates and civil libertarians blame the Trump administration's harsh and haphazard policies and the fact that ICE is simply detaining people for longer and longer time periods. Many people previously eligible for bond and release are being ordered held in ICE custody while winding through an increasingly backlogged immigration hearing process.
FREE MINDS
A Columbus to Chicago Hyperloop by 2029? "Realizing the fantasy of jet-speed surface transportation will depend more on bureaucracy and political will than on engineering wizardry," writes Justin Davidson at Intelligencer. That being said, "if Hyperloop is to grow from gee-whiz infancy into a mature—even boring—form of intercity mass transit, it could launch a slow-motion transformation of the heartland."
Lima, Ohio, Mayor David Berger "believes the new system will turn his struggling small city [population 37,000] into a magnet," writes Davidson:
"The quality of life here is good," he says, "and Hyperloop would make us attractive to people who work in downtown Chicago"—now a four-hour drive.
"Living in our community could be practical for a much larger universe of folks." That's a good thing for Lima, but is it good for America? There's something paradoxical about the notion of controlling sprawl by encouraging people to live hundreds of miles from their jobs.
William Murdock of the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission told Intelligencer that when it comes to Hyperloop over traditional high-speed rail, for instance, "the environmental footprint is smaller, the right of way is narrower, and the noise impact is lower."
FREE MARKETS
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is launching a crowdfunded social media platform. WT:Social will display user feeds in chronological order and will not display ads or sell user data, Wales said.
"About 160,000 people have signed up for WT:Social since it launched in October," notes Stephen Johnson at Big Think. "The platform is free to join, but new users are put on a wait-list, which can be instantly bypassed if you donate money. WT:Social hopes to survive only on donations."
ELECTION 2020
Abolish billionaires…except when they're big Democratic donors?
Almost 20% of American billionaires have donated—either directly or through their spouse—to the campaign committees of Democrats running for president.https://t.co/9ktZ2ZHye3
In remarks for The Federalist Society last week, Attorney General William Barr claimed "the real 'miracle'" of our country's founding was the "creation of a strong executive, independent of, and coequal with, the other two branches of government" and that far from being the "rebellion against monarchical tyranny" of which we were told, the real target was an overbearing legislature. Writes Damon Linker: "This is, to put it mildly, an unorthodox reading of the American Revolution."
Snippets from Monday's impeachment inquiry proceedings: "Now what led you to believe the president didn't give a shit about Ukraine?"
"Now what led you to believe the President didn't give a shit about Ukraine?" (p.55) pic.twitter.com/jf6i31ZXMi
South Dakota's latest anti-drug campaign is… interesting.
Mina Chang, a senior State Department official, is resigning amidst revelations of multiple false claims she made about her resume and charity work, including a photo of herself in which she claimed to be on a "humanitarian mission" in Afghanistan and pictured with women "in hiding" somewhere outside Kabul. "They were wives of local employees of the defense contractor that paid for her trip," notes NBC News.
Tiana Lowe at Washington Examiner suggests that far from some sort of meltdown or misunderstanding, pundit Michelle Malkin's recent embrace of Holocaust deniers and white nationalists "is a calculated choice in her mission to navigate what comes after President Trump's tenure comes to an end"—albeit a bad one.
Protecting and serving:
17-year-old gets roofied and raped by two men, immediately tells police, gets interviewed and has a rape kit taken, the men are interviewed, then literally nothing happens for 23 years because police never tested the kit https://t.co/CSArBTit0x
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Matt Welchhttps://reason.com/people/matt-welch/matt.welch@reason.comKatherine Mangu-Wardhttps://reason.com/people/katherine-mangu-ward/kmw@reason.comPeter Sudermanhttps://reason.com/people/peter-suderman/peter.suderman@reason.comNick Gillespiehttps://reason.com/people/nick-gillespie/gillespie@reason.comhttps://reason.com/?post_type=podcast&p=80339132019-11-18T21:56:48Z2019-11-18T20:00:56ZReason Roundtable podcast]]>
Who's ready for Week Two of the impeachment show (not to be confused with The Impeachment Show)? Well, ready might be a strong word, but the Reason Roundtable quartet of Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward have many thoughts about comparative presidential corruption, the Sixth Amendment, how politics keeps getting stuck in our government, and whether "bribery" is the right word for the job. The important thing is that it's all going to get worse.
Speaking of which, so are the Democrats' semi-phony yet heartfelt Centrism Wars, which get a thorough examination on the podcast as well. Is Pete Buttigieg a blank slate for the politically gullible? Does Michael Bloomberg's understanding of capitalism outweigh his enthusiasm for regulation? Is it time to blow the whole thing off and spend the weekend tripping balls on ayahuasca? All, and much more, are discussed.
SPEAKING OF DISCUSSION: Ever feel like harassing the Reason Roundtableists with individual or group questions? With our annual Webathon around the corner, the time to do so is right the hell now. Email your queries to podcasts@reason.com, and we shall do our best to answer them in a forthcoming video release during the Webathon.
Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear three consolidated cases challenging the Trump administration's decision to rescind DACA, an Obama administration policy suspending deportation of some 800,000 undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. DACA allows such migrants (often referred to as "dreamers," after the Dream Act, which failed to pass Congress) to stay in the U.S. as long as they arrived in the country when they were 15 years old or younger, were 30 or younger when the program began in 2012, have not been convicted of any crimes as of the time they apply for the program, and have either graduated from a U.S. high school, are currently enrolled in school, or have served in the armed forces.
As co-blogger Josh Blackman (a longtime critic of the legality of DACA) points out, the Trump administration's position in these cases relies heavily on the notion that DACA had to be rescinded because it is itself illegal. For political reasons, the president did not want to give the impression that he actually favors deporting the Dreamers (which would be an extremely unpopular position). Thus, he decided to hide behind the theory that his hands are tied by legal considerations. As Josh recognizes with admirable candor, this framing of the issue makes the administration's policy "nearly impossible to defend." I agree, with one slight modification: If this really is the only justification, I would strike out the "nearly" in that sentence.
While the president's motives for relying on this argument were probably political, I don't doubt that many conservatives, including some administration officials, sincerely believe that DACA is illegal. But, regardless of the reasons for putting it forward, the claim that DACA is illegal is badly wrong. I summarized the reasons why in a 2017 post from which much of what follows is adapted:
Quite simply, DACA is within the scope of presidential authority because it does not change the law, and does not legalize anything that would otherwise be illegal, without specific authorization from Congress.
Critics attack DACA on the grounds that Obama lacked legal authority to choose not to enforce the law in this case. This critique runs afoul of the reality that the federal government already chooses not to enforce its laws against the vast majority of those who violate them. Current federal criminal law is so expansive that the majority of Americans are probably federal criminals.
That includes whole categories of people who get away with violating federal law because the president and the Justice Department believe that going after them isn't worth the effort, and possibly morally dubious. For example, the feds almost never go after the hundreds of thousands of college students who are guilty of using illegal drugs in their dorms.
John Yoo contends that there is a difference between using "prosecutorial discretion" to "choose priorities and prosecute cases that are the most important" and "refusing to enforce laws because of disagreements over policy." But that distinction makes little sense. Policy considerations are inevitably among the criteria by which presidents and prosecutors "choose priorities" and decide which cases are "the most important."
One reason the federal government has not launched a crackdown on illegal drug use in college dorms is precisely because they think it would be bad policy, and probably unjust to boot. It did not even do that during the reign of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the hard-core drug warrior who also initiated the rescission of DACA on the grounds that the program exceeds the bounds of executive discretion.
Yoo and others also argue that prosecutorial discretion does not allow the president to refuse to enforce an "entire law," as opposed to merely doing so in specific cases. But Obama has not in fact refused to enforce the entire relevant law requiring deportation of illegal immigrants. He has simply chosen to do so with respect to people who fit certain specified criteria that the vast majority of undocumented migrants do not meet.
Most of the points I made in this 2016 article defending the legality of Obama's later DAPA policy (which was rescinded by Trump in June 2017) also apply with even greater force to DACA, since the latter is a much more limited program. Wide-ranging presidential enforcement discretion is unavoidable in a system where there is so much federal law and so many violators that the executive can only target a small fraction of them. In the 2016 article, I explain why presidents have the power to exercise their discretion systematically as well as on a "case-by-case" basis.
Systematic exercise of discretion by the president should be particularly attractive to conservative believers in "unitary executive" theory, which holds that the president should have nearly unlimited authority to set policy priorities for his subordinates in the executive branch. Often, issuing systematic instructions may be the only way for the president to exercise effective control over the sprawling executive law-enforcement apparatus and ensure that it is following his policy priorities.
I myself have growing doubts about the validity of unitary-executive theory. In my view, Congress should, at least in many instances, be able to constrain presidential control over executive officials. But even if that is true, Congress has not in fact adopted any laws requiring the president to prioritize deportation of the "Dreamers" over other law-enforcement goals, or forbidding him from issuing categorical instructions giving absolute priority to other objectives.
The Trump administration and other DACA critics claim that the policy goes beyond enforcement discretion, because it offers "affirmative benefits" to recipients, such as the right to work legally in the United States, and accrue "lawful presence" time in the US. But the policy of giving DACA recipients work permits actually does have congressional authorization, based on a 1986 law that specifically permits employment of aliens who are "authorized … to be employed … by the attorney general."
The grant of "lawful presence" to the immigrants covered by DACA is perhaps the most questionable part of the policy. But while this may seem like a big deal, in reality "lawful presence" does not actually legalize the presence of any otherwise illegal migrants. For the most part, it merely reiterates the executive's discretionary decision not to deport the migrants covered by the order.
It does, however, also allow them to accrue time for the receipt of Social Security and Medicare benefits that, however, they are unlikely to ever actually collect unless their status is genuinely legalized at some point in the future, and they remain in the US until after retirement age.
Moreover, the "lawful presence" element of DACA could easily have been excised separately, without affecting the other, far more important aspects of the policy. If "affirmative benefits" were the true target of Trump and Jeff Sessions' ire, they could easily have taken this approach. But they instead chose to rescind the entire program.
The fact that DACA is an exercise of executive enforcement discretion also undermines Josh Blackman and Ilya Shapiro's creative arguments that it is illegal under "non-delegation" principles, or because it attempts to resolve a "major question" that Congress would not have left to executive determination.
Like Josh and the "other" Ilya (see my handy guide to distinguishing the two of us), I believe the Supreme Court should do more to enforce the "non-delegation" doctrine, which prevents Congress from engaging in excessive delegation of legislative authority to the president. But enforcement discretion is not a legislative power. It's an inherent power of the executive itself. Thus, there is no delegation involved, and therefore no reason to worry that too much power has been delegated.
The same point applies to the "major question" canon, which holds that courts should not interpret federal laws to leave to the executive important decisions about the scope of what is or is not banned by the statute in questoin. The "major questions" at issue are questions about what sort of conduct is legal under the statute, not which lawbreakers will be prosecuted and which let off the hook by enforcement discretion.
Under the doctrine, the executive is denied the power to decide "major questions" about the meaning of a law. But DACA does not do that. It concerns enforcement priorities as between different violators of a specific federal law. It does not offer any new theory about the meaning of that law, much less resolve any "major question" about that meaning.
The extent of presidential discretion over law enforcement revealed by DACA does raise troubling issues. In a world where federal law is so extensive that not only undocumented immigrants, but most native-born Americans, have violated federal law at one time or another, the executive's ability to pick and choose which of the many lawbreakers to go after is a menace to the rule of law.
But that menace won't be ended by getting rid of DACA. Doing so will merely shift the discretion in question to lower-level officials, not eliminate it. The only effective way to truly deal with the problem of excessive executive law-enforcement discretion is to cut back on the immense extent of federal law itself.
The Trump administration could prevail in the DACA cases even if the program is not illegal. The Supreme Court might conclude that Trump still has the authority to repeal the program purely on policy grounds. But that option is, at the very least, made more difficult by the administration's failure to present a policy rationale, except at the eleventh hour. Even now, the administration still hasn't put forward a theory of why it's actually a good idea to subject DACA recipients to deportation, as opposed to claiming that rescinding DACA is desirable for such ancillary reasons as "sending a message" that laws will be enforced. That rationale that could justify pretty much any decision, since virtually any policy could be interpreted as "sending a message" to some group or other.
The Court could also rule that decisions to rescind a enforcement policy are inherently unreviewable, and that therefore the administration can essentially do whatever it wants in this area. But doing so could set a dangerous precedent for future abuses of executive power.
The justices could even conclude that the argument that DACA is illegal is "good enough for government work," even if it is badly wrong. It could perhaps still be enough to pass muster under the Administrative Procedure Act, the law under which the DACA cases are being litigated. I will leave this and other APA-related issues to commentators with greater relevant administrative law expertise.
It is, therefore, entirely possible that the Court will find a way to rule in favor of Trump without ruling that DACA is illegal. Nonetheless, the administration has put a lot of its eggs in the "DACA is illegal" basket, even if not quite all of them. Those eggs richly deserve to be crushed.
NOTE: This post addresses only a key legal issue at stake in the DACA cases. I considered the moral and policy questions raised by DACA here. It is telling that those issues are sufficiently one-sided that even an administration as deeply hostile to most immigration (including legal immigration) as this one wants to avoid looking like it actually wants to deport the "dreamers."