In a recent interview with former President Donald Trump, CNBC's Joe Kernen called entitlement reform "a third rail of politics" and suggested "there's not a whole lot of difference" between Trump and President Joe Biden on the issue. The contretemps that followed confirmed the accuracy of both observations, illustrating yet again the bipartisan refusal to seriously address, or even acknowledge, the looming Social Security and Medicare crises.
"There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements," Trump said. The Biden campaign seized upon the comment as evidence that Trump wants to "slash Social Security and Medicare," and Trump denied any such plan, saying, "I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare."
Biden likewise promised to "protect" both programs. "If anyone here tries to cut Social Security or Medicare or raise the retirement age," he vowed during his State of the Union address this month, "I will stop you."
Biden averred that "many of my friends on the other side of the aisle want to put Social Security on the chopping block." But the truth is that Republican House leaders, at Trump's urging, are disinclined to back serious entitlement reforms, fearing the political electrocution to which Kernen alluded.
Contrary to what Trump and Biden imply, it is impossible to "protect" Social Security and Medicare by doing nothing. Inaction will guarantee automatic benefit cuts in less than a decade.
In 2033, according to the latest projections, Social Security's trust fund "will become depleted," and "continuing program income will be sufficient to pay 77 percent of scheduled benefits." Two years before then, Medicare's hospital insurance trust fund "will be sufficient to pay 89 percent of total scheduled benefits."
The programs' trustees note that "lawmakers have many options for changes that would reduce or eliminate the long-term financing shortfalls." But Trump and Biden have ruled out nearly all of them.
Biden did allude to one possible Social Security reform in his State of the Union address, saying he would "protect and strengthen Social Security and make the wealthy pay their fair share." But as my Reason colleague Eric Boehm notes, raising the cap on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax, currently $168,600, would violate Biden's promise "not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000 annually" and would not "come close to solving the long-term Social Security shortfall."
Tackling "fraud and waste," the solution that Trump seemed to have in mind, would be worthwhile but likewise will not do the trick. In 2023, for example, House Republicans cited an estimate of "$16 billion in improper payments" by Social Security "over the last five years," which is real money but a drop in the bucket compared to the program's projected $4.5 trillion cash deficit during the next decade.
The basic problem with both programs is a mismatch between projected revenue and projected costs, driven by the shrinking ratio of workers to retirees. The only way to eliminate that gap is by increasing revenue, reducing outlays, or (more likely) both.
Those reforms could involve raising the retirement age, increasing payroll taxes on high-income Americans, or means-testing benefits, focusing on retirees who need financial support to cover their bills. As it stands, Social Security regressively transfers money from workers to retirees who are, on average, more affluent. That makes little sense if the aim is to prevent poverty among older Americans, which is how the program originally was framed.
It is no mystery why politicians are reluctant to propose such reforms. Last week, when the Republican Study Committee suggested gradually raising the minimum age for full Social Security benefits from 67 to 69, the White House immediately condemned that modest proposal.
The fear inspired by such attacks encourages politicians to continue kicking the can down the road. But the longer they wait, the more painful the inevitable reckoning will be.
© Copyright 2024 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
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]]>A Republican budget plan released Wednesday included one of the most obvious, low-hanging ideas for shoring up Social Security: Raising the eligibility age for benefits from 67 to 69.
That idea was included within a 180-page budget plan released by the House Republican Study Committee (RSC), a policy-focused group that includes most but not all members of the House GOP. Proposals released by the RSC are in many ways similar to the president's annual budget request: an aspirational document that reflects big-picture agreement on important issues, but not necessarily an actionable plan that can be passed into law.
So the call for raising the retirement age by two years—a change that the RSC plan says wouldn't even be implemented in the short-term to spare Americans currently approaching Social Security eligibility—would barely even be accurately described as a first step. It's also not a novel or surprising development: upping the eligibility age has been a part of the discussion about Social Security since at least the George W. Bush administration.
Which is why what happened next is particularly illustrative.
The White House immediately blasted the proposal for trying to raise the retirement age and reiterated the promise Biden made at the State of the Union address to block any proposed cuts to Social Security.
Other Democrats pounced, and left‐leaning media jumped aboard the messaging train. Slate dedicated hundreds of words to analyzing the potential electoral consequences of the proposal with nary a mention of the policy substance or how Democrats plan to address Social Security's looming insolvency. Meanwhile, The New Republic described the higher retirement age as "a plan to gut Social Security" without explaining how, exactly, the program would be gutted by a reform that puts it on more stable fiscal footing.
Indeed, even some Republicans quickly threw the higher retirement age idea under the bus.
"Horrible idea. Totally opposed to this," Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) told The Hill. "Republicans are so stupid. If they want to go to working people and say, 'Congratulations, you have paid into this your whole life—your payroll taxes—and now we're going to take part of it away from you, we're going to make you work even longer than we said beforehand,' I just think that's the stupidest thing I ever heard."
Look, I get it. It's 2024, and the only thing that matters is the Electoral College scoreboard. But following the polls and looking no farther ahead than the next election is how politicians have squandered three decades that could have been used to make changes that averted Social Security's insolvency, which the program has been warning about since the mid-1990s.
It's important to keep in mind that if you're someone interested in maintaining Social Security as a functioning program, the real threat isn't from proposed changes but from doing nothing. The trustees that oversee Social Security estimate that benefits will be cut by 23 percent starting in 2033, with further cuts needed in future years, unless policymakers make changes to the program's fundamental math.
"Virtually every serious person who works on Social Security policy knows the eligibility age must eventually rise higher," Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and expert on the broken math that is pushing America's entitlement programs into a death spiral, told Reason. "That said, partisan reform blueprints only attract partisan demagoguery and poison the well for reform."
All things considered, raising the retirement age by a mere two years is a rather tepid reform—one that arguably ought to be opposed for not going far enough, and one that certainly won't fix Social Security's problems by itself.
A more ambitious proposal would phase out Social Security entirely, allow younger workers to handle their own retirement planning via private investments, and implement a federal safety net program to keep elderly Americans from falling into destitution. After facing decades of uncertainty about whether they will receive Social Security benefits, Americans should be glad to have politics removed from their retirement planning and be able to handle their own assets.
But if a modest, obvious reform is going to be greeted with a caterwaul of partisan demagoguery as Democrats seek to claim an electoral advantage and that sends populist Republicans scurrying away from their party's own plans? That says more about the current state of fiscal policy than anything you'll actually find in the GOP's proposal.
The post A GOP Plan To Raise the Retirement Age Reveals How Unserious Washington Is About Social Security appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If you think debates about tinkering with election rules are vicious, then you need to turn your attention to the endless battles between baseball's traditionalists and reformers. The former treat America's pastime as something almost sacred—a bastion of timeless and slow-moving beauty in an ever-changing world. Unlike professional football, which is forever tinkering with its rules, baseball should, in their view, cling to the past.
"I have observed a creep towards instant gratification in a game whose best quality was that it challenged us to be patient," wrote traditionalist Noah Gittell. But after seeing the results of Major League Baseball's recent changes that are designed to speed up the game (e.g., adding a pitch clock), he decided that the tweaks are OK. This isn't the first time the league has changed rules, he noted.
Columnist George Will, who wrote a book celebrating the culture of the game, rejoiced at the new rules. He believes the latest rule adjustments restore the spirit of the past, when fast-moving games were common and athleticism was more important than analytics (see Moneyball). They might also restore attendance levels. Sometimes the best way to energize an institution is to adjust the way it operates.
At the last Giants game I attended, I nearly fell asleep from boredom, so I'm not the best person to pontificate about balls and strikes, but I see parallels with our election system. For years, reformers have tried to re-energize the democratic spirit by endlessly changing and adapting the voting process. They are responding largely to low voter turnouts.
Unlike their counterparts in baseball, America's politicians haven't come up with the right formula yet—perhaps because most of the people proposing rule changes have a vested interest in the outcome of the specific contests (unlike MLB officials, whose interest centers on the game itself.) It is clear from Tuesday's primary election, however, that the latest "big" California primary rule change is a bust.
In 2010, California voters approved Proposition 14, which created a "top two" primary for every election except president, central committee, and nonpartisan elections such as boards of supervisors and superintendent of public instruction. Under the old system, Republicans would choose their candidate and Democrats theirs. They would face off in November. Under the new rules, everyone runs against each other. The top two vote-getters face off in the general election, regardless of their party.
Supporters made grandiose promises about how the new system would reduce partisanship and force candidates to moderate their positions by campaigning for all voters rather than the party faithful. It was going to increase voter participation and strengthen democracy. "It's time to end the bickering and gridlock and fix the system," according to Prop. 14's "yes" ballot argument. Supporters claimed it would force politicians to work together for the good of the state.
One needn't be a cynic to realize that "top two" didn't usher in an era of peace and goodwill. California's elections are more vicious than ever. The state Republican Party has largely faded away, but the result is nastier battles among Democratic factions. The Legislature and state constitutional offices are now filled with progressive ideologues. Tuesday's turnout was low. One can't blame Prop. 14 for everything, but it hasn't lived up to its billing.
"Top two" created a new set of rules that ambitious politicians can game. Consider the race for U.S. Senate. In the past, Democrat Adam Schiff would have debated his Democratic opponents in a primary that focused on which candidate appealed best to Democratic primary voters. Republican Steve Garvey would have debated his GOP opponents in an effort to woo GOP voters.
Instead, Schiff used reverse psychology by running ads attacking Garvey in conservative media as a means to bolster support for Garvey. It was a clever ploy to keep his main opponents, Democrats Katie Porter and Barbara Lee, out of the final runoff. The end result is the same—the leading Democrat squares off against the leading Republican in November, with Schiff almost certainly winning. But who can claim this goofy process has reduced bickering and cynicism?
Politico also reported that one union, annoyed at state Sen. Josh Newman (D–Orange County) for not supporting one of its signature bills, "launched and funded a collection of neophyte Democratic challengers" in an effort to dilute the Democratic primary vote and keep Newman from advancing to November. It failed. Similar gamesmanship took place in traditional primaries, but the "top two" made these games easier to play.
It's probably time to change the rules yet again, perhaps to a "final five" system (more on that in a future column). Just like with baseball, there's nothing wrong with adjusting rules to get a better outcome. But let's not pretend any rejiggering is a panacea for whatever ails our election system—and let's make sure the new rules actually make sense.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
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]]>President Javier Milei has set his sights on Argentina's largest state-owned news agency, vowing to shutter it for being "a covert propaganda ministry." The move unfolded as police fenced off the agency's offices in Buenos Aires and prevented workers from entering since midnight on Monday.
During a speech at the opening of the Argentinian Congress' 142 session last Friday, Milei announced the closure of Telenoticiosa Americana (Télam), alleging that the agency has served as "a Kirchnerist propaganda agency for the last decades," referring to former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. "It is immoral that in a poor country like ours," Milei said, "the government spends the people's money to buy the will of journalists."
Established in 1945, Télam rose to become Argentina's most prestigious news agency, disseminating national news and photographs to smaller news outlets across the country. According to its website, the agency "is the only one in the country with a network of correspondents in all of the country's main cities and provinces."
Shortly after Milei's announcement, Télam's website went offline. Presidential spokesperson Manuel Adorni said at a press conference that the agency's staff was exempt "from providing services for seven days with pay, while progress is made" to close the agency.
Télam workers, human rights activists, and the opposition rejected the closure announcement, claiming that the move was an attack on the free press. Many workers and union members plan to protest against Milei's decision by holding a "symbolic hug" of the building on Monday.
In response to the events, Buenos Aires Press Union (SiPreBA) issued a statement posted on X (formerly Twitter) condemning the government for "carrying out one of the worst attacks on freedom of expression in the last 40 years of democracy. Tonight, city police fenced off the two buildings of the National News and Publicity Agency Télam, to prevent the massive embrace and impede access to the building."
The Argentine Journalism Forum (Fopea) claimed the president's decisions "only exacerbate hostility and intolerance against journalism," adding that it was a "step backward" for democracy and freedom of expression in the country.
Since assuming office, Milei has pledged to end Argentina's economic crisis by deregulating the economy and slashing government spending. His efforts to privatize or eliminate inefficient and corrupt state institutions, including Télam, were outlined in an omnibus bill presented to Congress last year. However, the bill was blocked by Congress last month, stalling many of his proposals indefinitely.
But the president has been undeterred by setbacks. Since taking office in December, Milei has cut the number of government ministries from 18 to eight and fired over 50 percent of senior government workers.* On March 1, Milei told Argentina's lawmakers that he was going to keep pushing his free market reforms "with or without the support of political leaders, with all the legal resources of the executive." And last month he announced the closure of the National Institute against Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Racism (INADI)—an institution that he equated to "thought police."
"The decision was made to move forward with the dismantling of institutes that serve absolutely no purpose, such as INADI," Adorni said.
Télam might be Milei's latest target, but it certainly won't be his last.
*CORRECTION: This article previously misstated which government positions were eliminated.
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]]>Argentine President Javier Milei achieved a significant milestone on Friday after the lower house of Congress approved his sweeping free market reform package, clearing one of the biggest hurdles on his path.
After three days of heated debate and amidst opposition pressure to thwart the entire reform package, the lower chamber of deputies approved the controversial legislation with a vote of 144 in favor and 109 against. After a short recess, lawmakers are expected to vote on the legislation article by article, beginning on February 6.
When Milei assumed the presidency on December 10, he promised to shock the economy out of its economic crisis. The South American country is dealing with the world's highest inflation at 211 percent, as well as a large fiscal deficit and depleted foreign currency reserves.
After devaluing the peso by more than 50 percent, cutting state subsidies, and reducing the number of ministries by half, Milei presented a package that encompasses most of his plans to transform Argentina into a free market economy. The 351-page bill proposes to deregulate and modify laws governing fiscal matters, labor, the environment, health, and more.
Holding just 28 of the chamber's 257 seats, Milei's party, La Libertad Avanza, was able to gain enough support to pass the bill only by dropping a number of key measures. About half of the changes in the original bill survived. Several fiscal measures were dropped, including tax increases on exports—one can dispute whether those qualify as a free market reform—and modifications to the pension system.
Milei's government also agreed to reduce the number of state-run companies it promised to privatize. Originally aiming to jettison 41 state-owned companies—including the flagship airline, Aerolíneas Argentinas; the country's largest bank, Banco de la Nación; and the news agency Télam—the revised bill now targets 27 companies. Notably, the oil company YPF and the national mint will remain state-owned, while other entities will undergo partial privatization.
While the bill was being debated, protesters gathered outside Congress in opposition to Milei's reforms. The protests led to clashes with riot police, as protesters threw rocks at the neoclassical building and the police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets. More than 20 journalists were injured by projectiles, and at least eight demonstrators were arrested. Seven police officers were also injured, according to government sources.
After the vote, Milei said that the opposition leaders who supported his reforms "understood the historical context and chose to end the privileges of the caste and the corporate republic, in favor of the people, who have been impoverished and are hungry."
The approval of the bill comes after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved on Wednesday a $4.7 billion disbursement for Argentina—the fund's largest debtor. "So far, we have seen a good economic team in place, looking at ways in which the country can move out of this difficulty," the IMF's managing director, Kristalina Georgieva.
The approval of the omnibus bill and the IMF disbursement are good news for Milei's administration. But it is still too early to celebrate. The omnibus bill will now have to clear its next obstacle: its approval in the Senate, where Milei's party has only 10 percent of the seats.
The post Milei's Sweeping Reform Package Triumphs in the Legislature's Lower House appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>An Argentinian court temporarily suspended President Javier Milei's proposed labor reforms on Wednesday, marking the first major legal obstacle Milei has faced since assuming office in December.
Days after his inauguration, Milei introduced the Decree of Necessity and Urgency (DNU), an order made up of a series of deregulation measures aimed at rebuilding the country by eliminating several regulations "that have held back and prevented economic growth."
The proposed labor reforms in the DNU include changes to labor lawsuits, an extension of trial periods in employment contracts from three to eight months, the right of workers to strike, and a reduction in pregnancy leave. Also: Pension contributions and severance payments will be reduced and limited; employers may extend working hours to a maximum of 12 hours per day; and fines will be issued for incorrectly registering workers.
The changes technically went into effect last Friday, but Argentina's largest trade union (with left-leaning Peronist ideals) contested the reforms. The union claims the reforms strip away fundamental worker protections and are largely unconstitutional.
On Wednesday, the National Labor Chamber of Appeals of Argentina sided with the union and temporarily halted the implementation of the labor laws included in the reform package. Judge Alejandro Sudera, one of the three judges ruling against the reforms, said several of the measures seemed "repressive or punitive in nature" and weren't urgent enough to bypass Congress.
"The National Congress has the legislative function, the Executive Branch has the regulation and the Judicial Branch issues sentences, with the eminent attribution of exercising the control of constitutionality of legal norms. From this perspective, it cannot be argued, in any way, that the Executive Branch can freely substitute the activity of the Congress or that it is not subject to judicial control," Sudera said in his ruling.
The suspension will remain in effect until Congress reviews the measures and issues a final ruling.
Milei's government announced plans to appeal the ruling and will request another court to hear the case, according to a statement issued by the administration. The court's decision "contradicts all of the rulings issued so far" and "disregards the criterion adopted by the other courts" in the country regarding the DNU, according to the administration.
Attorney General of the Treasury Rodolfo Barra suggested the case be handled by the Federal Administrative Court, where lawsuits against the state are generally processed.
"We will take all this first to the administrative litigation courts, and if we are unsuccessful, to the [Supreme] Court. I believe that in a week this will be resolved," Barra said in an interview with Radio Con Vos, adding that the labor court is biased against the DNU's labor reforms.
Milei insists the reforms are necessary because "Argentina requires an urgent change of course to avoid disaster." However, his government may face more pushback, as over 10 other injunctions against the DNU have been filed in Argentine courts.
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]]>William D. Eggers is co-author, with Donald F. Kettl, of Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries To Solve Big Problems. He's now the executive director of Deloitte's Center for Government Insights, but 30 years ago, he was the director of government reform for Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason and this podcast. In fact, I interviewed with him when I applied for my first job here.
Eggers has since worked with dozens of governments at all levels, both in the United States and internationally, and he's written a shelf's worth of books on the proper scope and function of government. I talked with him about Bridgebuilders, what he's learned over the past three decades about making government more effective and less intrusive, and why it's long past time to move beyond what he and his co-author call "the vending machine model" of government.
The post William D. Eggers: Making Government More Effective and Less Intrusive appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In a world where economic decisions are mostly driven by short-term goals and political pressures, the need for a long-term, evidence-based approach is more pressing than at any time in memory. Enter the Copenhagen Consensus—a beacon of analytical clarity conceived by Danish intellectual Bjorn Lomborg. It aims to reshape global discourse by prioritizing initiatives based on their cost-effectiveness. Imagine harnessing this model to direct fiscal policy!
Many of today's budgetary problems could be solved if only politicians and voters recognized that not every need and problem is equally weighty. Such recognition—a staple of successful private sector projects—ought to become commonplace in the public sector.
The Copenhagen Consensus has long championed a cost-benefit approach for dealing with the world's most critical environmental problems. It does this by sorting global issues and their proposed solutions according to potential impact under the constraint of a reality-based budget, rather than ranking them by sentiment. While some critics would prefer a less compromising approach, the result is that investments are guided to where they can do the greatest good for the world when measured by lives saved per dollar. In doing so, the project wields the scalpel of economic analysis to slice through the Gordian knot of global challenges.
This pragmatic thinking should not just be used for global health or climate issues; it's also a perfect model for how Congress should be making its fiscal policy decisions, where resources are equally scarce and the need for maximum impact is equally urgent. It would also be revolutionary considering the unfortunate way Congress has behaved for decades. A fiscal project modeled on this approach would shift the focus from spending that's politically expedient to spending that promises the most substantial economic returns for society. It would also veer us off a fiscal path that only leads to crisis.
A Congress that makes its decisions based on the Copenhagen model would evaluate each proposed policy's costs against its benefits—only now, they would do so in ways both substantial and consistent. Members would compare how these returns on investment stack up against other programs. They would cut the least effective programs and reform those with the potential of higher returns and the most impact for the most Americans.
In this scenario, Congress would not be the irresponsible institution it has become, mostly eager to pass legislation that serves special interests or renames post offices. Drawing from the Copenhagen playbook, it could even set out to evaluate the single biggest budgetary challenge: "How do we make Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid solvent?"
Rather than aiming at a political target that moves by the day, Congress would start with a definition of what solvent means; one that doesn't blindly accept that Uncle Sam can simply borrow some $120 trillion in the next 30 years no matter the cost in terms of lower growth and growing social tensions. Then, they would have to come up with a variety of alternative ways to meet that goal. Next, they would rank these options based on which provides the best outcome for the most people, including taxpayers and future generations. Finally, by providing clear, compelling evidence to support each recommendation and mapping out pathways to implementation, the findings would be translated into actionable policies.
Is all of this realistic? No. The lack of courage or clarity from our elected officials, and their inability or unwillingness to make the politically painful trade-offs necessary to fix fiscal problems, is why we are in this mess in the first place. The result is debt exploding, interest rates rising, inflation still chipping away at our standard of living, and Treasury auctions failing to sell all the government bonds that the government is trying to sell. Special interests and egomaniac politicians are the only ones winning under the current regime.
All that said, there's no reason to accept the situation any longer, hence this column. It's up to us to demand that Congress adopt a Copenhagen-inspired fiscal mindset and embrace it with urgency. We need to impose a new fiscal ethos upon them: drop the easy and expedient in favor of the effective.
And if, as I suspect, the irresponsible politicians we've elected refuse to change, we don't have to give up on a future where fiscal policy is designed rationally and coherently, or one where we no longer run from crisis to crisis. It simply means that American voters need to do a little prioritization of their own.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM.
The post Here's One Way To Move Toward Responsible Government and Sane Fiscal Policy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Entitlement reform has long been considered a third rail of American politics, even as the insolvency of Social Security and Medicare creeps closer.
That perception might need some reconsidering. A new poll shows that the vast majority of Americans believe policymakers should make changes as soon as possible to extend the life of America's two old-age entitlement programs and avoid possible benefit cuts that will hit in the early 2030s if nothing is done.
That poll, which was shared with members of Congress and staffers at a closed-door meeting on Wednesday morning and obtained by Reason, found that only 5 percent of voters say Congress and President Joe Biden should do nothing to address the looming benefit cuts that will hit Social Security when insolvency hits.
"Our polling shows that Americans are seriously worried about the solvency of these entitlement programs," David Williams, president of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA), a free market group that sponsored the survey (it was conducted in August and included about 1,000 likely voters). "Congress can no longer continue to ignore the facts that without action, Social Security and Medicare will face deep and automatic cuts."
Indeed, the poll suggests that many Americans have a better understanding of the crisis facing Social Security and Medicare than most elected officials seem to believe. In the survey, 87 percent of respondents agreed that action is needed to extend Social Security's solvency and avoid benefit cuts, and 89 percent said the same thing about Medicare.
According to the trustees responsible for overseeing the two programs, Medicare's main trust fund will be depleted by 2031 and Social Security's reserves will be gone by 2033. Though those trust funds are largely an accounting fiction, their insolvency will trigger mandatory across-the-board cuts that will affect retirees and anyone who expects to benefit from the programs in the future. The two programs are also the primary drivers of the federal government's future budget deficits, responsible for 95 percent of long-term unfunded obligations, according to the Treasury's recent Financial Report. Those looming problems are contributing to the federal government's declining credit rating and threaten America's future economic growth.
Despite that, leading politicians on both sides of the aisle continue to promise that inaction is possible. Biden has used fictional Republican plans to cut Social Security to demagogue against the idea that reforms to the program are necessary—most notably by sparring with GOP members of Congress during this year's State of the Union address. Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump (the leading contender to be the GOP's presidential nominee in 2024) has repeatedly promised not to touch Social Security, and other prominent figures on the so-called "New Right" have done the same.
Realistically, the only serious approach will require some changes to existing Social Security benefits. That could mean reducing benefits for wealthier retirees or implementing across-the-board benefit reductions that would be phased in over time, allowing younger workers to offset smaller Social Security benefits with private savings. Ideally, workers would be able to opt out of Social Security altogether, so they can save and invest for their own retirement without having to pay payroll taxes.
But none of those options can begin to be considered if a critical mass of elected officials continue to ignore the problem.
The TPA poll released Wednesday offers some insight into how more serious politicians might proceed. The poll found that 71 percent of Americans find means-testing for Social Security benefits—that is, limiting benefits for wealthier recipients—to be acceptable, while 60 percent would approve of cutting other government programs to fund Social Security.
When it comes to Medicare, 66 percent approve of means-testing benefits, and 84 percent are in favor of the always-popular option of reducing rampant fraud and waste within the government-run healthcare system.
Perhaps most importantly, 90 percent of voters say presidential and congressional candidates running for office in 2024 should discuss the financial challenges facing the entitlement programs. They might take note of former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley's rise in the Republican primary field, which has followed her willingness to provide some straight talk about the difficult fiscal situation that the government must face.
Finding solutions to these highly fraught issues that voters will accept is no easy task, but it can't start until politicians recognize that ignoring the government's entitlement-driven debt crisis is not a real option.
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]]>The Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along has attracted rave reviews and rewritten the musical's former status as a commercial flop. But without some recent changes to New York City licensing laws, the performance I saw could have triggered huge fines for the show's star, Daniel Radcliffe.
In the last few months of the year, casts often raise money after the final curtain call for Broadway Cares, an AIDS charity. After the show I attended in late October, this took the surprising form of an auction. Radcliffe, the former Harry Potter star and the new Merrily lead, returned to the stage and prompted audience members to place dozens of live bids for a signed prop from the musical's off-Broadway run. The winner paid $1,600.
Until last year, that simple bit of fundraising would have been illegal without a special permission slip from the city's government. Without an auctioneer's license, he would have faced fines of hundreds of dollars.
New York City no longer licenses auctioneers, thanks to Local Law 80, which took effect in June 2022. The law repealed many restrictions on small businesses, including not just the mandatory licensing for auctioneers (in place since the 1980s) but licenses for amusement arcades and laundries.
Auctioneering still requires a license in 27 states and the District of Columbia (alongside countless municipalities). According to License to Work, a nationwide report by my employer, the public interest law firm the Institute for Justice, it can cost up to $800 in fees and more than a year of unpaid apprenticeship experience and coursework to secure one of those licenses. Since 2017, nine states have doubled down by increasing the cost, time, or other burdens for aspiring auctioneers.
That's just one of many professions where licensing requirements can be both nonsensical and extreme. The Institute for Justice study reviewed 102 blue-collar and/or lower-income occupations and found that these permission slips to work require, on average, nearly a year of education and experience, at least one exam, and $295 in fees. That's a lot of time and money spent earning a license instead of earning a living, especially for lower-income workers—and that doesn't include hidden costs, such as tuition for the required schooling.
Many jobs that pose little risk require a lot of training. Indeed, 71 occupations in the study require more training than entry-level emergency medical technicians. On average, EMTs need about 36 days' worth of training, as opposed to 342 days for cosmetologists. And 88 percent of the occupations included in the report are unlicensed by at least one state—and 14 have been delicensed by at least one state—suggesting these jobs can be done safely without a license.
Proponents of licensing say it's necessary to protect consumers. But even the fiercest defenders of NYC's former auctioneering regime acknowledge that no similar regulations exist in comparable cities such as London or Hong Kong. And the end of New York's auctioneering licensing scheme did not usher in chaos. A spokesperson for Christie's, one of the industry's leaders, told The Art Newspaper last year that the auction house maintains its own ethical standards and would simply "continue to operate as we have been." If there are already adequate private sector norms and ethical standards, there's no need for a government licensing scheme.
Plenty of other laws already govern sales transactions, guarding against fraud. Licensing has little to do with protecting consumers; instead, it mostly shields existing businesses from competition by blocking new entrants to the market.
Merrily is about the obstacles people face on the long road to success. That road is even longer and bumpier when the government adds extra challenges. Thankfully, New Yorkers—and visiting Brits, like Radcliffe—are now free to conduct auctions like Merrily's fundraiser without fear of government retribution.
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]]>In November 2007, the original iPhone was barely four months old, Barack Obama was considered a long shot to win the Democratic nomination for president, and Steph Curry was a sophomore playing basketball for little-known Davidson College.
That same month, the TransWest Express Transmission Project filed its first request with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), seeking permission to build a 732-mile electric transmission line to connect a wind farm in southern Wyoming with a power grid serving the rapidly growing area around Las Vegas.
Last week, the BLM granted permission for the line to be built.
We've blown through 14 versions of iPhones, seen two terms of Obama's presidency (plus another term-and-a-half since he left office), and witnessed Curry score over 21,000 points and win four championships as a professional in the time that it took federal bureaucrats to review and approve an application for a transmission line carrying completely carbon-free, renewable energy across a mostly empty portion of the American West. That's a perfect illustration of the fact that the biggest obstacle to the government's renewable energy goals is often, in fact, the government itself.
Or governments, in this case. While the BLM took longer than anyone else to approve the project, the TransWest Express line suffered from "a 'spider web of jurisdiction' across multiple levels of government," according to Roxane Perruso, the company's COO. Perruso told EnergyWire, a trade publication, that the project required approvals from state, local, and federal entities—and getting those permits required surveys of over 40,000 acres of land for environmental impacts and 60,000 acres of land for cultural impacts.
All that to get permission to build a power line, which is less invasive than other forms of infrastructure can be. In addition to the BLM and state governments of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, the project needed approval from the U.S. Forest Service, part of the federal Department of Agriculture, and the Western Area Power Administration, which is part of the federal Department of Energy. (In fairness, EnergyWire notes that the project also got snagged by disputes with some private property owners along the planned route.)
With all the permission slips finally locked down, construction on the line will begin later this year, and the 3,000-megawatt line could be operational by 2028, EnergyWire reports. By then, it'll be 23 years since the project was first proposed in 2005.
To put it simply: It should not take nearly a quarter century to build a supply line connecting renewable electric supply with an area where there is growing demand. But this is a recurring problem in America. A recent Princeton study found that 80 percent of the potential emissions reductions from green energy projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act would be lost without an expansion of transmission lines.
The time and expense of permitting have slowed or prevented some major renewable energy projects in recent years. "Windmills off Cape Cod, a geothermal facility in Nevada, and what could have been the largest solar farm in America have all been blocked by an endless series of environmental reviews and lawsuits," Alec Stapp, a co-founder of the Institute for Progress, which advocates for policies that accelerate technological and industrial progress, wrote last year in The Atlantic. "U.S. climate spending could exceed more than half a trillion dollars by the end of this decade—but without permitting reform, those investments won't translate into much physical infrastructure."
Some of the most serious permitting obstacles are the environmental impact statements required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which take 4.5 years on average and run over 650 pages. Sure enough, the environmental impact statement associated with the TransWest Express Line took nearly six years—from January 2011 through December 2016—to be completed. In the statement issued this week by the BLM announcing its final approval of the project, the agency notes that the project will include "mitigation requirements" to offset disruptions "to lands with wilderness characteristics" and impacts to the habitat of the greater sage-grouse, a chicken-sized bird that nests on the ground in the western U.S.
But if reducing carbon emissions and developing green energy are going to be major national objectives, the sage-grouse might just have to get out of the way—or at least be less of a concern. Permitting reforms proposed last year by Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) would have capped NEPA environmental reviews at no more than two years in length, but that proposal was decried by prominent progressives as a giveaway to money-grubbing capitalists who want to turn a profit by, well, building the very green energy infrastructure that progressives say America desperately needs.
In March, the Republican-led U.S. House passed a huge energy permitting reform bill that was declared "dead on arrival" by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.), though some parts of the bill might be included in an upcoming congressional deal to lift the debt ceiling.
Until there are significant reforms, however, expect future projects like the TransWest Express line to take decades, if not longer. Building big infrastructure projects will never be as simple as turning on a light switch, but there's no reason for the government to force utility companies to operate at the speed of a first-generation iPhone in a 5G world.
The post It Took 15 Years for the Feds To Approve a 700-Mile Electric Line appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Joe Biden tweeted last week that he will be a "nightmare" for Republicans who dream of cutting Social Security and Medicare. With this statement, Biden showed that he's either shockingly ignorant about these two programs and any Republican reform efforts—or lack thereof—or just another politician who washes his hands of what happens when he's out of office and the programs hit upcoming obstacles.
I have an idea which one it is. However, before revealing my guess, it's worth revisiting the issue more fully. Each time I write about Social Security and Medicare, newspapers receive letters to the editors revealing how little the general public understands about entitlement spending and where it's headed. This misunderstanding is particularly acute and ominous when it comes to Social Security.
It's important for people to grasp reality because no single issue will affect our fiscal future more than Social Security and Medicare. Spending on these two programs alone consumes 45 percent of the federal budget. Along with Medicaid, these programs are the drivers of our current and future debt. And to drive home the seriousness of our predicament, note that Medicare and Social Security together face a shortfall of $116 trillion over the next 30 years.
How Congress decides to address this shortfall will have serious consequences on the government's ability to pay for everything else or on Americans' tax burdens, whether they be rich or poor.
This is why it's worth trying to get through to those who, for instance, believe that Congress shouldn't reform entitlements because they have paid for every dollar and are entitled to them. This assertion is incorrect. Americans have indeed been paying for some benefits, but not for their own and not for all of what they will receive.
Consider Social Security. The program is funded by a payroll tax of 12.4 percent. The revenues collected don't belong to the workers except in the sense that paying taxes makes us eligible to receive Social Security when we retire. But these revenues don't go into accounts with our names on them. Instead, they are used to fund payments made to current retirees. It's a pay-as-you-go system, not an investment account. In the former, adjustments are sometimes necessary.
Second, beneficiaries receive more than they paid in taxes. The average Social Security retiree will get $698,000 and will only have paid $625,000. That explains the program's insolvency. It's even worse for Medicare since the average beneficiary receives three times more than he or she pays in taxes for that program.
So, while no serious reformer seeks to cut a dime more than is necessary to make both programs safe and sustainable, workers and retirees upset about the changes won't have any legal rebuttal no matter how many payroll taxes they paid in. The Supreme Court said that much in a ruling in 1960.
Voters could of course throw those who want to touch Medicare and Social Security out of office. This political constraint is why every Congress stays as far as it can from seriously reforming these programs—but it doesn't mean the programs won't get cut. Failure to reform them, in fact, means benefits will automatically get cut.
Consider again Social Security. Right now, benefits paid out come from the payroll tax as well as money borrowed by the Treasury. Why does the Treasury do that? Because Social Security has a trust fund with about $2.6 trillion in IOUs that it can redeem when the payroll tax isn't covering all the benefits. That's been the case since 2010.
These IOUs come from excess payroll taxes collected from past workers. That money was exchanged for Treasury bonds—pieces of paper. Treasury then spent these funds on whatever Congress directed: defense, highways, education, you name it. This matters for two reasons. First, unless Congress changes the law, as long as the Trust Fund contains IOUs, Social Security will ask Treasury for money and get it. Second, when the Trust Fund runs out of IOUs around 2033, Social Security benefits by law will be cut by about one-fifth. Something similar happens with Medicare, only sooner.
Biden—who's spent a half-century in the Beltway and knows how this works—unwittingly used the right word to describe his intention to block Medicare and Social Security reform. By not acting, benefits will be cut without any possibility of sheltering those seniors who are poor. The nightmare looms for them.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM.
The post Social Security and Medicare Cuts Are Coming, Whether Politicians Do It or Not appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If a new governor's first act sets the administration's tone, Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro is making it clear he is not planning to help the government's regulatory and education establishments ratchet up licensing and credentialing demands on people looking for work.
Shapiro, a Democrat, was sworn into office on Tuesday. For his first executive order released Wednesday, he announced he was opening up thousands of Pennsylvania government jobs to people without college degrees.
"Effective immediately, 92% of all Commonwealth jobs do not require a four-year degree, roughly equivalent to 65,000 jobs," he writes in the order. "Consistent with this Administration's commitment to emphasizing skills and experience, job postings will begin with equivalent experience needed in lieu of a college degree whenever possible."
For the remaining 8 percent of jobs, he is ordering Pennsylvania's secretary of administration to review the positions to determine which of them, if any, could be revised to allow for practical experience to serve as a substitute for a college degree.
"Every Pennsylvanian should have the freedom to chart their own course and have a real opportunity to succeed. They should get to decide what's best for them—whether they want to go to college or straight into the workforce—not have that decided for them," Shapiro said when he announced the order Wednesday.
It's a big deal that Shapiro is going this route after absolutely trouncing Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano in the November election. The Democratic Party's strong connections with education unions and college administrations often mean politicians push for more students to attend college. The typical response to the rising demand for college degrees in the work force (and the rising costs of college) from Democrats has been fiscally irresponsible programs like loan forgiveness and more government subsidies (all the way up to and including free college), pumping more taxpayer money into the system and into the pockets of the people who control it.
It's remarkable, then, for a Democratic governor to turn around and say "You know what? We actually don't need to be sending everybody to college in order for them to be successful." Shapiro's first act drew positive attention from Nate Hochman over at the National Review, who appreciates the countermeasures to the very real issue of "diploma inflation" in the United States:
The growth in the share of U.S. jobs that require a four-year college degree is partially owing to a broader shift away from physical-labor-based industries and toward information and knowledge economies. But it's also due to a misguided, and often toxic, cultural and political trend toward viewing college degrees as a prerequisite for participation in American public life. Among technocrats on both the center-right and center-left, there's often a flawed assumption that a central goal of U.S. education policy should be to get as many young Americans as possible into four-year programs, rather than to open up other pathways and models for success.
A widely cited Harvard Business School study from 2017 explains how employers (both government and private) have been increasingly demanding college degrees from people applying for jobs, even when they're not required and even when workers already in that particular occupation don't have degrees. The report uses the position of a supervisor of production-level workers as an example. Researchers investigated current job openings for the position and found that 67 percent of the listings demanded college degrees in order to be considered for the position. But they also found that only 16 percent of people who were already working in this very position had degrees. Were all those people doing jobs they weren't qualified to do? Probably not.
Shapiro's move follows on the heels of similar reforms by former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and current Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. Both of those men are Republicans, which again highlights how significant it is that this is Shapiro's first major act. Unsurprisingly, the Pittsburgh CBS affiliate reports that Republican state Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman is pleased by Shapiro's act, saying, "Governor Shapiro's executive order to expand employment opportunities for positions throughout state government is a step in the right direction."
Hochman would love to see other governors adopt or even build on this easy political win: "Why not require that government contractors, for example, eliminate unnecessary and burdensome credentialing practices? Or give tax breaks and other incentives to private businesses that do away with them?"
It would be preferable for the government to not play a role at all in determining what level of education a private employer demands of potential hires. There are market signals that can actually help resolve the issue of "diploma inflation," which the Harvard study notes: "Seeking college graduates makes many middle-skills jobs harder to fill, and once hired, college graduates demonstrate higher turnover rates and lower engagement levels."
There are ways for businesses to recognize a misalignment in credential demands that don't require governors or lawmakers to get involved at all. When we discuss dumping oppressive government credentialing mandates, let's not replace them with other types of demands.
The post Pennsylvania's New Governor Dumps Excessive College Diploma Demands for State Jobs appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Just days before major bail reforms in Illinois were set to begin, a county judge has ruled the changes violate the state's constitution.
In early 2021, lawmakers passed a massive bill full of criminal justice reforms called the Safety, Accountability, Fairness, and Equity-Today Act, or SAFE-T Act. Among the many changes included in the bill was the elimination of cash bail. Rather than demanding money in exchange for pretrial freedom, the courts would have to evaluate each defendant to determine whether he may be a danger to others or a flight risk, and then determine nonfinancial release guidelines. Full pretrial detention could only be ordered if the court decided the danger or flight risk was just too high to justify someone's release.
There were a host of crimes for which judges were cleared to detain defendants, including many firearm offenses, human trafficking, stalking, violent felonies, and domestic violence charges. Nevertheless, throughout 2022, opponents attacked the reforms, some falsely claiming that the changes would require people charged with crimes like second-degree murder and aggravated battery to be released without bail. Lawmakers further amended the rules earlier this month to make it clearer that judges have the authority to detain defendants they deem to be a threat to others or the community.
Prosecutors and police departments nevertheless opposed the reforms and around 60 different law enforcement agencies and prosecutors filed 64 lawsuits, arguing that the bail portion of the law violated the state's constitution. On Wednesday, Kankakee County Chief Judge Thomas W. Cunnington agreed.
Cunnington didn't say that the bail reforms are bad or wrong—he ruled that lawmakers didn't pass the law properly and that it infringes on the power of the judicial branch. The state's constitution specifically lists guidelines for bail and pretrial detention, and Cunnington determined that "had the Legislature wanted to change the provisions in the Constitution regarding eliminating monetary bail as a surety, they should have submitted the question on the ballot to the electorate at a general election." In other words, lawmakers should have gotten the public's approval via a ballot referendum and changed the constitution's text.
Cunnington also ruled that the bill runs afoul of crime victim rights protections found in the state's constitution, which require courts to consider the rights of victims and their families when setting bail amounts. Under Cunnington's logic, the new bail law would have stopped judges from setting bail amounts.
But much of the meat of Cunnington's ruling is specifically about how the state constitution separates the legislative branch from the judicial branch. While it may seem as though lawmakers should have the power to legislatively establish guidelines for how the courts operate, Cunnington noted that Illinois Supreme Court precedents have determined that there are limits. How a court is administered falls under the purview of the judiciary, and the state's Supreme Court back in 1975 determined that bail is "administrative" in nature. Over several state precedents, the top court has concluded that the judicial branch has independent authority over bail guidelines.
Cunnington ruled, then, that the bail reforms of the SAFE-T act violate the separation of powers between the legislative and judicial branches. "Because…all judges will be categorically prohibited from even considering in their discretion a monetary component to the conditions of release," he wrote, "the judiciary's inherent authority to set or deny bond will necessarily be infringed in all cases."
This would seem to doom the bail reforms if it's upheld, but Cunnington rejected the plaintiffs' request for a preliminary injunction to stop the reforms from being launched in January. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Attorney General Kwame Raoul say they're going to appeal the ruling to the Illinois Supreme Court. Raoul noted in a statement that the ruling applies only in the cases that Cunnington ruled on in the 21st Judicial Circuit. According to Kankakee County State's Attorney Jim Rowe, that means the bail reforms won't be launched in the 65 counties that participated in the lawsuits, but will be implemented in 37 others.
It appears that Illinois will follow through with implementing bail reform changes knowing that they may ultimately be struck down by the state's Supreme Court. That said, if the bail reforms work out well, judges would be able to voluntarily maintain them even if the top court throws out the legislative mandate. If the reforms stop courts from using money to determine who gets stuck in pretrial detention and it doesn't affect crime rates or court compliance, then judges should consider keeping them. Bail was never meant to be a mechanism for keeping people detained over low-level offenses just because they can't afford to pay for their release.
The post Judge Rules Illinois' Elimination of Cash Bail Unconstitutional appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last month, San Francisco recalled Chesa Boudin, its district attorney of just over two years. The son of 1960s radicals, Boudin was part of a new wave of progressive prosecutors focused on criminal justice reform, along with Larry Krasner of Philadelphia and Kim Foxx of Chicago. Boudin pledged to end cash bail, "mass incarceration," and the prosecution of "quality-of-life crimes."
But barely more than halfway into his term, San Franciscans showed Boudin the door, voting for the recall by a 10-point margin. Recall supporters cited a litany of reasons, among them rising crime rates and a perception that Boudin was not sufficiently enforcing the law. While it's not clear that San Francisco's rise in crime was incommensurate with the rest of the country, Boudin's tenure also saw internal strife, with half of the prosecutors in his office fired or quitting in under two years.
Mayor London Breed will appoint a replacement to serve out the rest of Boudin's term. But what do the results say about the broader criminal justice reform movement, and what lessons are reformers taking from Boudin's loss?
"The Boudin recall was an anomaly for a variety of reasons," but there are still "some lessons to be learned from it," Akhi Johnson, director of the Reshaping Prosecution Initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit organization that advocates for criminal justice reform, told Reason. Johnson feels that Boudin came to personify every issue that San Francisco faced—crime, homelessness, public health—whether he was responsible or not. "Crime is complex," Johnson said, and blaming a single person for all of a city's problems is akin to "blaming a pilot any time there's a plane crash."
"Ultimately, the role of a prosecutor is not conviction, it is safety and justice," Johnson said. "When there is research and evidence that we can pursue safety in alternative ways from convictions, prosecutors have an obligation to explore those alternatives."
After the recall, Johnson acknowledges, "I don't think we can just stand on research and data… People are not moved by numbers, they're moved by stories." Advocates should focus on the real-life positive impacts of reform, Johnson says, while "making sure that safety is centered" in the narrative as well.
"The reform movement is about acknowledging the complexity of crime, and trying to address it through bolder solutions. A big part of that is reducing our reliance on incarceration."
Reformers advocate a "holistic" approach. Traditionally, convicted defendants are sent to prison or jail, where they are housed with other offenders, then eventually released with a felony conviction that makes it difficult to find work. Johnson advocates a more "restorative" approach, which involves a combination of intervention and restitution that seeks to reduce incentives to reoffend. The offender may be tasked with community service, job training programs, providing financial restitution to their victim, etc.
Of course, the movement is not without its critics. Efforts to de-emphasize prosecution and incarceration "stand in direct opposition to the traditional role of a district attorney," wrote Hannah Meyers, director of policing and public safety at the conservative Manhattan Institute.
Meyers says that prosecutors like Boudin, Krasner, and Foxx should be "leading the battle against criminal offenders—not simply against social wrongs they want to right." She cites multiple mandatory diversionary programs that prosecutors utilize against drugs and prostitution in Queens County, New York.
But her examples undercut her premise: In critiquing Boudin for "undercharging drug dealing," Meyers says he "left a vulnerable population without the firm helping hand that is the choice between treatment or jailtime." Some choice. Meyers' binary suggests support for drug court programs, in which nonviolent drug offenders must undergo addiction treatment, counseling, and random drug testing, in exchange for avoiding prison time. But in practice, drug courts can lead to more arrests rather than fewer, and more punitive punishments.
Meyers also favorably cites Queens County's Human Trafficking Intervention Court, consisting of "around 400 participants, most of them prostitutes, who were avoiding incarceration by accepting a suite of mandatory services including drug rehabilitation and social work." But "since prostitution is no longer being prosecuted," the number of pending cases "now hovers in the twenties. That's a shame for those women who otherwise remain in exploitative sex work."
Of course, sex work and human trafficking are not the same thing. The most dangerous thing about consensual sex work performed by adults is its criminalization, which takes the entire enterprise underground. While the intervention program is better than imprisonment, the method is the same: Police make arrests, and prosecutors lean on offenders to make deals.
Meyers does raise valid concerns: "In his brief [concession] speech, Boudin referenced the scourge of billionaires multiple times. But his electorate aren't worried about billionaires breaking into their cars or shuttering their local pharmacies through exhaustive shoplifting." Boudin regularly characterized the recall as "Republican-led," despite considerable bipartisan support for his ouster. And amid a weeks-long string of smash-and-grab robberies, locals likely want to see their law enforcement officials making arrests and prosecuting offenders.
But this doesn't mean that criminal justice reform should be abandoned, nor that its proponents will give up. Anytime a just resolution can be achieved without subjecting someone to a prison cell, it should be on the table. But as Johnson acknowledged, it will take more than research and data points to persuade voters that something different is worth trying.
The post After Chesa Boudin's Recall, What Is the Future of Criminal Justice Reform? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>During the final presidential debate last fall, Donald Trump touted what he considered his biggest immigration accomplishment. "We got rid of catch and release," he boasted. Joe Biden could have easily let the wonky phrase slide past him, focusing on poll-tested attacks of Trump's policy of punitively separating immigrant families at the border. But in a move that undoubtedly stunned the consultants who had carefully coached him on messaging, Biden took the bait.
The former vice president launched into an extended defense of "catch and release"—a policy of allowing vetted asylum seekers to remain at liberty in the U.S. while awaiting a hearing, rather than languishing in jail at the border. He even counterattacked, explaining that Trump had made the situation worse by forcing families to wait in Mexico. "They're sitting in squalor on the other side of the river," he said passionately.
This highly unexpected exchange was Biden's final pitch to Americans on immigration, and it was the culmination of 18 months in which Biden adopted the opposite position from Trump on nearly every immigration issue. But putting out a position paper for journalists is one thing. Volunteering a defense of a controversial policy on a national debate stage with the presidency at stake is another. It was as clear a statement as you could get: Here was a candidate who was ready to reopen the country to immigrants, especially to asylum seekers and legal applicants.
Or at least, that's what Biden was saying in 2020.
Biden has been in politics long enough to have been on every side of practically every immigration debate. In the 1970s, he was reticent about paying to evacuate and resettle South Vietnamese anti-communist refugees. But by 1980, he was a leading proponent of the Refugee Act, which led to a massive increase in refugee resettlement from Vietnam and around the world.
In 1986, Biden voted to legalize 3 million unauthorized immigrants. In 1996, he voted for the harshest crackdown on unauthorized immigrants in U.S. history. In 2006, he voted to build a fence along the southern border. In 2020, he campaigned to end funding for Trump's border wall.
Biden is the Democratic Party's rusty weathervane, and in 2020 he was following the prevailing winds. Not only did a supermajority of Democrats favor legalizing immigrants in the country illegally, Gallup also found that for the first time in its 65 years of asking the question most Democrats wanted to increase legal immigration from abroad. They even wanted more refugees and more asylum seekers.
Biden campaigned accordingly. His platform was probably as pro-immigrant as any winning candidate since Lincoln. No category of immigration wouldn't see a bump on his watch, he promised, and all of Trump's "shameful" policies would immediately end. He promised to send a comprehensive immigration bill to Congress on day one. He would accomplish what all Democratic presidents before him had failed to deliver: real change.
During Trump's four years in office, America saw more families, unaccompanied children, and other immigrants travel up through Mexico to cross the U.S. border than during all eight years under Obama combined. The vast majority came to request asylum, a legal status for those fleeing violent persecution in their home countries. They arrived primarily from Central America's Northern Triangle—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—but also from Cuba, India, Africa, and dozens of other places.
Stopping this flow became the focus of Trump's immigration policy. Asylum seekers' first choice would be to apply at one of the ports of entry where hundreds of thousands of visitors cross from Mexico to the United States each day since U.S. law explicitly allows anyone arriving in the United States to apply for asylum. But in 2018, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) blockaded the legal crossings, stationing agents at the exact border line to push anyone who said they wished to apply for asylum back into Mexico. The policy (dubbed metering) allowed agents to accept only a token number to cross each day, but the goal was to deter people from coming at all.
Unable to reach family and jobs arranged north of the border, even immigrant families who arrived with a game plan suddenly faced homelessness, hunger, and crime in dangerous neighborhoods within eyeshot of U.S. inspectors. New York Times reporters described the "grim sight" of destitute families sleeping on pizza boxes in the doorways of public restrooms, surrounded by piles of donations of diapers and baby formula.
Human Rights First, a watchdog group, maintains a database on crimes committed against migrants who have been forced to wait in Mexico. As of December 2020, it contained 1,314 crimes since 2018, including assaults, rapes, and murders, against migrants blocked by U.S. agents. Jasson Ricardo Acuna Polanco and Jorge Alexander Ruiz Duban—two Honduran teenagers—were stabbed and choked to death by thieves in December 2018 while waiting to cross after port inspectors sent them away.
These dangers inevitably lead many immigrants to cross around the ports of entry. Pre-Trump, those who crossed illegally and requested asylum would be held in temporary Border Patrol facilities and transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers. Asylum officers would interview them to determine if they had a "credible" claim, evaluating whether their claims matched the legal requirements of the law, were internally consistent, and matched other known facts or evidence. If they failed to meet that threshold or had committed any serious crimes, they were placed on the next ICE plane home. If they did, they were usually released to await a final asylum hearing many months from then.
After briefly trying a policy of separating undocumented parents from their children, Trump officials settled on a more politically palatable backup for deterring comers: If immigrants fear being in Mexico so much that they'll risk crossing illegally and being arrested, why not send them back to Mexico to await their hearings? Given the dangers, they figured, people will abandon their applications and go home.
A "remain-in-Mexico" policy bearing the Orwellian name "Migrant Protection Protocols" (MPP) was born. It had an immediate effect.
Gangs murdered a Salvadoran man in Tijuana in December 2019 after DHS agents kicked him out of the United States to await his hearing in Mexico. Several dozen rapes of MPPers were reported to U.S. and Mexican authorities, including one that involved Mexican police. And as Trump hoped, many asylum seekers gave up, and nearly all of the 11,000 cases that reached a final resolution ended with orders of removal in absentia. But many continued to wait.
By March 2020, almost 70,000 asylum seekers had been dumped back into Mexico's border cities, and the number of crossings had fallen significantly. Nonetheless, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Trump's White House seized on the crisis to act. It forced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to overrule its senior medical staff and declare that it was medically justified to suspend the crossings of all undocumented migrants. The DHS then used this declaration to "expel" anyone from the United States who crossed the border from Mexico, to completely shut off even the token numbers admitted at ports under metering, and to suspend MPP hearings, so anyone already waiting in Mexico was just stuck.
These moves were a deathblow to America's asylum system. The U.S. government has now expelled hundreds of thousands of crossers. Usually it simply drops them back in Mexico. But the DHS is actually flying political dissidents back to Nicaragua, where there have been reports that the government is arresting and beating them.
In the debate, Trump understated his accomplishment. He didn't just get rid of catch and release. He got rid of asylum altogether.
Biden is intimately aware of this humanitarian disaster. Not only did he decry it in the debates, but he lamented in an October 2020 speech the nearly 10,000 Cubans "languishing in tent camps along the border." He guaranteed he would end the MPP on his first day in office. In a July 2020 piece for The Washington Post, future first lady Jill Biden issued a plea to bring the asylum seekers in Mexico back to the United States, arguing that America's identity was "on the ballot" in November.
The position was so clearly stated that migrants encamped at the border celebrated when Biden won. "This is not only a Biden victory. We migrants also won, and we are very happy," one asylum seeker in Mexico told BuzzFeed News in November. "Seeing Trump once again sit on his throne would have been fatal for us."
Trump may not be back on his "throne," but the king's policies outlived him.
In December, Biden's choice for Domestic Policy Council director, Susan Rice, told Spanish-language TV that no one should "believe those in the region peddling the idea that the border will suddenly be fully open to process everyone on day one. It will not." At the time, it seemed strange that she would call her boss's campaign promises "peddling an idea," but Biden himself soon provided clarity.
"It will get done," Biden told reporters. "But it's not going to be able to be done on day one." During the campaign, Biden enthusiastically promised to welcome more asylum seekers, but now he characterizes the arrival of more applicants at the border as a "crisis" that would "complicate what we're trying to do." Biden might as well have been quoting Trump, who had constantly used the same specter of a "crisis" to eliminate asylum and impose other restrictions throughout his term.
In January, Biden signed his first immigration executive orders. He required a review of the country's current asylum policies, but the CDC's health declaration and the expulsion policy that came with it would persist. He attempted to freeze most new deportations of noncriminals, but not for recent border crossers and asylum seekers.
While ports remained completely closed to asylum applicants, advisers quietly leaked to reporters that they planned to include Trump's metering policy as part of Biden's grand plan to fix asylum after they reopened. When Biden called for "guardrails" for the asylum system in December after the election, those same advisers explained what he really meant were "limits being set on the number of people allowed through." Never mind that Congress never approved any caps on asylum.
Biden's DHS did exempt unaccompanied children from the immediate expulsion policy, so they are now transferred to shelters, foster care, or family members who are already in the United States. Mexico has started to refuse to accept some expulsions of non-Central American immigrants in certain places, so a few families who crossed to request asylum are now being released from custody into the United States to await hearings rather than immediately expelled.
Biden has announced a plan to slowly begin to let MPP participants wait for their hearings on U.S. soil. But the tentative plan—letting in a trickle of about 600 additional asylum seekers per day only after advanced screening and negative COVID-19 tests—stands in marked contrast to the bold policies proposed by candidate Biden in 2020. In June 2019, before MPP and the CDC expulsion policies, DHS encountered and processed more than 4,600 undocumented immigrants per day at or between the ports along the border.
In 2021, Biden has so far chosen to move slowly. Overall, his border policies resemble a slightly less strict version of Trump's policies. As White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters in February, "The vast majority of people will be turned away."
What about legal immigration? During his 2019 State of the Union address, Trump told the nation that he wanted people to come here legally "in the largest numbers ever." Ironically, it would be the third straight year that legal immigration declined.
At first, Trump reduced the flow of legal immigration using a thousand little cuts. One of his first acts was "extreme vetting," which involved banning migrants from several majority-Muslim countries and massively increasing the length and complexity of the required immigration paperwork. In the name of "security," the new forms asked vague gotcha questions that often necessitated the involvement of an attorney, increasing the costs to obtain visas.
The State Department and DHS came out with new "public charge" rules that effectively created a presumption against approving immigrants with incomes below a certain threshold. In theory, the idea was to keep out immigrants who might use welfare at some point in the future, even though DHS's own statistics showed that most noncitizens near or below the poverty line received no welfare of any kind. Regardless, the rules are creating huge problems for all immigrants. These complicated data requirements force applicants to produce financial records and documentation on an almost unimaginable scale, requesting information that many immigrants don't even possess. Inability to produce the evidence results in a denial.
As soon as Trump took office, word came down that as many people as possible should be rejected, and denials spiked. DHS even started denying anyone who left anything on an application blank—including current addresses for deceased parents. Denials of U.S. citizens petitioning for family members or employees to receive immigrant visas and green cards doubled. And even if the family member's or employer's petition was approved, immigrants were twice as likely as they had been to be denied a visa by the consulates.
The number of new legal permanent residents entering from abroad was down by about a quarter by the end of 2019. Then the bottom fell out.
When the pandemic struck the United States, the State Department closed its consulates, meaning that it could issue virtually no new visas. Trump also added country-specific travel bans for almost anyone coming from China, Iran, Europe, or Brazil who wasn't a U.S. citizen. In April and June 2020, he issued proclamations suspending visas for almost all immigrants and guest workers—bans that have been extended until March 31, 2021.
These visa bans were not based on a concern about spreading COVID-19. Instead, Trump called new immigrants and guest workers a "threat" to the U.S. labor market. Never mind that the unemployment rate for the highest-skilled computer occupations, which dominate the employment-based visa system, barely budged despite the pandemic. And never mind that low-skilled jobs for guest workers have to be offered to U.S. workers before someone can be hired from abroad. That the ban applied even to little children and retirees gives insight into its real goal: fewer foreigners of all kinds.
Immigration plunged by about 90 percent—greater than any full year on record. In January, Trump extended the protectionist visa bans and left office with one of the lowest per-capita legal immigration rates in U.S. history.
The immigration plan that Biden released before the pandemic was designed to weave its way through America's complex legal immigration system, concluding at each juncture that more was better. More family reunification. More high-skilled visas. More seasonal workers. More refugees. More visas for participants in the diversity visa lottery program, which permits some immigration for nationalities that normally receive few visas under the family- and employer-sponsored system. He even wanted to create a new community-sponsored visa program to deal with "shrinking populations, an erosion of economic opportunity, and local businesses that face unique challenges."
Biden rarely hedged. His proposal outlined the most ambitious and expansive legal immigration strategy of any winning presidential candidate in at least 150 years. When the pandemic hit, and then when he won the nomination, commentators predicted a move to the middle that never came. Biden stuck by his plan. He called Trump's protectionist visa bans a distraction from dealing with COVID-19. "Immigrants help grow our economy and create jobs," he tweeted. "The President can't scapegoat his way out of this crisis."
Biden had even criticized Trump's decision to enact country bans supposedly to stop the spread of the virus. "Banning all travel from Europe—or any other part of the world—will not stop it," Biden tweeted in March 2020. Biden's view reflected the reasoned judgment of the academic literature on travel restrictions, and Trump's bans ultimately did not keep the pandemic away.
Yet five days into office, Biden underwent an unexplained 180. He extended travel bans on most noncitizens coming from Brazil and Europe, even though Trump had set them to expire the very next day, and expanded the ban to include South Africa. For the hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants awaiting visas abroad, it was a foreboding signal.
When Biden signed an executive order on February 2 that included in the title "Restoring Faith in Our Legal Immigration Systems," hope surged that the new president would at least rescind Trump's visa bans on families and workers, reopen the consulates, and restart the legal immigration process in other countries. In the end, however, the order did little more than require agencies to review their current policies.
In February, America's largest trade and business associations wrote a public letter urging an end to the visa ban, detailing how it was separating families and harming their operations. Still, Biden remained silent. Meanwhile, his Justice Department has gone to court to defend his authority to keep the ban in place, even arguing that family separation doesn't necessarily constitute "irreparable harm" to U.S. citizens and their immigrant family members.
The visa bans are set to expire on March 31, but even if they do, administration officials have shown little willingness to reopen consulates and begin issuing visas again. Each day that passes, the backlog of hundreds of thousands of immigrants grows. Because the law limits the number of visas issued in a fiscal year, many of the visas they would have received will be lost if they aren't issued by September.
The only positive development on legal immigration is that Biden increased the refugee cap, albeit to a lower number than he initially promised. But his unwillingness to streamline Trump- and Bush-era "extreme vetting" means that the cap will likely not be filled this year anyway.
Democrats have unified control of Congress, the body that ultimately decides what the laws will be. Well, that's the grade-school theory anyway, and to his credit, Biden has attempted to follow it. On day one, he sent his requirements for a bill to Congress.
While it was not as sweeping as his campaign plan, it was still broad and included a path to citizenship for almost all 11 million unauthorized immigrants and more green cards for workers and families. Congressional Democrats threw together a bill in a month that met its requirements, but even they acknowledged the bill has little hope in the Senate, where Republicans and perhaps even some moderate Democrats oppose it. No effort was made to obtain bipartisan support for it.
Instead, Biden's party is focusing on a few narrow bills that it believes have crossover appeal: legalizations for Dreamers, farmworkers, and participants in the Temporary Protected Status program for those undocumented immigrants who have been granted temporary safety from instability at home.
What Biden will give up to get these discrete bills to his desk remains unclear. His immigration bill includes no new enforcement measures that would appease the GOP, and he hasn't so far been willing to mix immigration into negotiations over his other top priorities: the COVID-19 response and economic relief.
That's not new. Presidents Obama and Trump both campaigned promising immigration changes. Both had the advantage of a friendly Congress. But neither wanted immigration reforms to upset prospects for their other major priorities.
The stalemate leaves the executive branch as the most likely place for change. The Biden administration does have some ability to change policy without congressional involvement. But hopeful immigrants and employers would be wise to remember how conservative Biden has shown himself to be.
Biden personally understands immigration policy better than almost any president in history. For decades he has played a crucial role in making it, both during his time as a senator and during his time as vice president. This understanding is certainly an asset for good governance. Unfortunately, it also probably also makes him too committed to the current system to take the drastic actions that would be needed to make that system work better. He's also beholden to a complex interwoven system of partisan priorities that could cause him to turn his back on immigration—or enthusiastically embrace it—later in his presidency, depending on what else is going on.
Many advocates were hopeful that the wave of outrage against Trump's abuses would translate into more than just a reversal of those policies. He could streamline or remove onerous regulations and interpret ambiguous laws in the favor of approving applicants, rather than denying them. Maybe these things will happen eventually. The end of the pandemic will undoubtedly help. But so far, the Biden administration seems to have little appetite to wield the powers of the executive on behalf of immigrants as aggressively as Trump did against them.
Immigration law is a complicated, inhumane mess. But Congress has given the president vast authority to interpret and implement the law in simple and humane ways. Biden currently seems reluctant to use it, whether out of shortsighted political calculation or a lack of genuine belief in the goal.
But that's 2021 Biden. Who can predict what 2022 Biden will do, or any of the Bidens who will come after him.
The post Joe Biden Offers Bold Talk, Timid Action on Immigration appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Thousands of National Guard troops patrol the nation's capital as I write, hoping to ensure that the scheduled transition of power from one president to the next comes off without renewed violence. That sight—unusual for the United States—underlines the fact that millions of Americans no longer support the political system or believe it derives its powers "from the consent of the governed" (as the Declaration of Independence puts it). It also strongly suggests that it's time to try something new if the government under which we live is to be anything better than a resented force at war with much of the population it rules.
The militarization of Washington, D.C., comes after the January 6 storming of the Capitol —a shocking event with as-yet to be determined repercussions that was actually supported by a fifth of voters and 45 percent of Republicans, according to post-riot polling. Perhaps that's not as surprising as it should be; well before the ginned-up controversy over the presidential election results, only 24 percent of voters believed the government had the consent of the governed (53 percent disagreed), as reported by a 2018 survey. Maybe the real marvel is that we avoided a January 6-style event for so long.
We've built toward this point for years. While the Trumpists' storming of the Capitol was an unprecedented rejection of the established procedures for transferring power, it built on trends. From the contested, but peaceful, 2000 election, to the boycotting of Trump's 2016 victory by dozens of Democratic members of Congress as other opponents rioted blocks away, Americans have moved toward belief in the legitimacy of elections only if their side wins. At some point, we were going to see an outright refusal to accept a loss, which is what occurred on January 6.
And there's no reason to expect that people will lose their distaste for political defeat in future political contests.
How could Americans be accepting of electoral losses when many view their opponents as immoral and unpatriotic and see them as enemies of the country—to the point that the major factions are defined by their hatreds? "Democrats and Republicans … have grown more contemptuous of opposing partisans for decades, and at similar rates," notes a November 2020 paper on political sectarianism. "Only recently, however, has this aversion exceeded their affection for copartisans."
To a large extent this is because politics has become combat, with election victors using their control of government agencies to torment losers.
"It is more and more dangerous to lose an election," economist John Cochrane, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, wrote in September. "The vanishing ability to lose an election and not be crushed is the core reason for increased partisan vitriol and astounding violation of basic norms on both sides of our political divide."
No sane people would consent to a political system that works as a weapon against them; they would try to escape its power. One of the virtues of the original decentralized American republic and its federalism was that if you didn't like the laws and rulers where you lived, you could go elsewhere.
"Foot voting is still underrated as a tool for enhancing political freedom: the ability of the people to choose the political regime under which they wish to live," George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin wrote in a 2012 paper since expanded into a book. "When people are able to choose their governments, political leaders have stronger incentives to adopt policies that benefit the people, or at least avoid harming them. And the people themselves are able to select the policies they prefer."
The "people" Somin references aren't the amorphous masses discussed in Social Studies classes as marching to the polls to jam the alleged will of the winners down the throats of the losers. He means individuals turning their backs on governing systems they dislike and picking those that better suit them.
But, as Chapman University law professor Tom Bell—another advocate of political choice—points out in his 2018 book Your Next Government?, "the United States has in recent decades failed to take states' rights seriously, making federal law supreme even in minutely local matters."
Moving does little good when the laws and "vanishing ability to lose an election and not be crushed" (as Cochrane put it) follow you.
Even reviving federalism would accomplish little when many states have larger populations than the whole country did at its founding and the major political divides run not between states or regions, but between urban and rural areas. Within localities are many people who feel trapped by circumstances in "enemy territory," subject to hostile rulers and laws they despise.
How do we make more palatable a political system that functions as a death match between mutually loathing factions who believe themselves—with reason—to be in peril when their enemies win control?
"If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state—to relinquish its protection and to refuse paying toward its support," Herbert Spencer famously argued in 1851. Fundamentally, Spencer wanted the right to exit that Somin favors, but without the physical migration of foot voting, as a means of making political arrangements more widely acceptable and considerate of liberty.
But Somin not only favors radical decentralization to minimize the costs of migration, he also discusses arrangements whereby "individual citizens can change government service-providers without a physical move." Bell, too, believes that "for the same reason that nation states should and generally do allow the unhappy residents to emigrate, more consent-rich governing services would doubtless guarantee the freedom of citizen-customers to exit to other legal systems" without moving their locations.
In 2001, Swiss economist Bruno Frey proposed what he called functional, overlapping, competing jurisdictions—basically, governments that people choose among as if picking club memberships.
Frey echoed Belgian economist Paul Emile de Puydt who, in the 1860 article "Panarchy," advocated a system of non-territorial federalism under which people could freely register their support for, or withdrawal from, any political associations that gain sufficient support. "I hope we can all go on living together wherever we are, or elsewhere, if one likes, but without discord, like brothers, each freely holding his opinions and submitting only to a power personally chosen and accepted," de Puydt wrote.
These proposals expand on Spencer's "right to ignore the state" in empowering people to join with the like-minded not just to reject officials and laws that don't suit them, but to construct systems that do.
Their advocates emphasize existing precedents for choice in government. "People choose between governments every time they choose to live in a new city, state, or country," writes Bell. "Businesses and others are often able to choose for themselves which state's law will govern their dealings with each other, even if they do not actually reside in the state in question," points out Somin.
What if Americans could choose governing systems rather than having them jammed down their throats? They could embrace rules as limited or restrictive as they please, programs and policies that suit their tastes, and officials who resist treating election to office as opportunities to punish enemies. If dissatisfied, they could exit one system and choose another—just as they can now, but without having to shoulder the hassle and expense of loading a rental truck and driving across a border. Tensions might ease and violence become less likely if people who hold each other's values and lifestyles in contempt didn't have to fear government as a bludgeon in the hands of their enemies.
True, American politics has been moving away from allowing exit in recent years, centralizing power so that people can't escape and even attempting to continue taxing those who flee, as California lawmakers propose. But the result has been battles between rebellious localities and higher authorities. And now troops patrol the streets of the nation's capital because nobody is willing to lose elections.
We can have a future of increasing conflict between Americans who hate each other. Or we can make it easier for people to peacefully escape each other's control.
The post To Avoid More Political Violence, Allow Americans To Escape Each Other's Control appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When cops invaded Ginnifer Hency's home in Smiths Creek, Michigan, they seized TV sets, ladders, her children's cellphones and iPads, even her vibrator. "They took everything," she told state legislators a year later. The July 2014 raid turned up six ounces of marijuana.
Hency, a mother of four with multiple sclerosis, was using marijuana for pain relief based on her neurologist's recommendation, as allowed by Michigan law at the time. She also served as a state-registered caregiver for five other medical marijuana patients. So after the cops arrested her for possessing marijuana with the intent to sell it, a St. Clair County judge dismissed the charges. But when Hency asked about getting her property back, she recalled, "The prosecutor came out to me and said, 'Well, I can still beat you in civil court. I can still take your stuff.'" When she heard that, Hency said, "I was at a loss. I literally just sat there dumbfounded."
Annette Shattuck, another medical marijuana patient who was raided by the St. Clair County Drug Task Force around the same time, told a similar story. "After they breached the door at gunpoint with masks, they proceeded to take every belonging in my house," she testified at the same hearing. The cops' haul included bicycles, her husband's tools, a lawn mower, a weed trimmer, her children's Christmas presents, $85 in cash from her daughter's birthday cards, the kids' car seats and soccer equipment, and vital documents such as driver's licenses, insurance cards, and birth certificates.
"How do you explain to your kids when they come home and everything is gone?" Shattuck asked. She added that her 9-year-old daughter was now afraid of the police and "cried for weeks" because the cops threatened to shoot the family dog during the raid. Although "my husband and I have not been convicted of any crime," Shattuck said, they could not get their property back, and their bank accounts remained frozen.
Stories like these, which highlighted the petty, cruel, money-grubbing behavior encouraged by a system that allows police to take property allegedly tainted by crime, helped inspire Michigan legislators to change the civil asset forfeiture laws that created this license to steal. In 2015, they raised the standard of proof in civil forfeiture cases involving drugs or "nuisances" such as gambling and prostitution, requiring "clear and convincing evidence" rather than "a preponderance of the evidence," the more-likely-than-not rule that had previously applied. They also required law enforcement agencies to report "all seizure and forfeiture activities" every year and indicate whether the property owners had been charged with crimes, which is not necessary for the government to take your stuff.
More reforms followed in 2017, when the state legislature eliminated a requirement that property owners post a cash bond of up to $5,000 before challenging a forfeiture, and in 2019, when it required a criminal conviction to complete forfeitures in drug cases involving property worth $50,000 or less. And Michigan legislators were not alone in imposing new restrictions on civil forfeiture, which police and prosecutors throughout the country use to supplement their budgets. Since 2014, according to a tally by the Institute for Justice (I.J.), 35 states and the District of Columbia have enacted civil forfeiture reforms, including two—New Mexico and Nebraska—that have abolished the practice.
On the face of it, this surge in forfeiture reform is puzzling. The practice of taking property by accusing it of complicity in crime, regardless of whether the owner has done anything wrong, has been a subject of national discussion since the late 1980s. The manifest injustice of that system led to modest federal reforms in 2000, then not much else. But judging from press coverage, interest in the issue has exploded in recent years: References to "civil asset forfeiture" in the Nexis news database rose to more than 11,000 during the last decade from fewer than 400 in the previous decade.
The story behind the recent wave of state reforms is the story of how politicians became newly aware of a problem that never went away and why they decided to do something about it, despite the dogged resistance of police and prosecutors keen to keep the money train rolling. The story varies from one state to another, but it generally involves a combination of outrageous injustices, corruption scandals, and rising disgust at the unseemly greed that leads cops to steal TV sets and snatch money from children's birthday cards.
The first Nexis reference to "civil asset forfeiture" appears in an Associated Press story from 1988, four years after a federal law expanded the use of this weapon, supposedly to cripple organized crime and deprive drug "kingpins" of their ill-gotten gains. The A.P. article described the Coast Guard's seizure of two multimillion-dollar yachts on which it found tiny amounts of marijuana. "Interdiction or Overkill?" the headline asked.
Overkill, Congress eventually decided. In 2000, after more than a decade of similar outrages, it approved the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act (CAFRA). CAFRA imposed notification rules, required the government to prove a criminal nexus by a preponderance of the evidence (instead of forcing the owner to prove that his property was not subject to forfeiture), allowed owners to challenge the proportionality of forfeitures, and required the government to pay the legal costs of owners who managed to prevail in forfeiture cases. The law also expanded the "innocent owner" defense, allowing people to recover their property by proving they did not know about the criminal activity that allegedly made it subject to forfeiture or, if they knew, "did all that reasonably could be expected" to stop it.
CAFRA hardly put a stop to forfeiture abuses. In fact, it expanded the reach of federal civil forfeiture beyond drug cases to include the proceeds of any "specified unlawful activity," allowing the government's money grabbers to allege many other underlying offenses. And the law's safeguards were not as helpful as they seemed.
The innocent owner defense forced owners to prove their innocence, a complicated, time-consuming process that often costs more in legal fees than the property is worth. Unlike criminal defendants, the owners of seized assets generally do not have a right to court-appointed counsel. CAFRA did not change the profit motive created by letting law enforcement agencies keep the proceeds from the forfeitures they initiate. It did not address the fundamental problem of punishing people by taking their assets without charging them, let alone proving their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And it did nothing to help the victims of proliferating state forfeiture laws.
Brad Cates, who directed the Justice Department's Asset Forfeiture Office from 1985 to 1989, watched with growing horror as the monster he had helped create wreaked havoc across the country. Initially, he viewed civil forfeiture as a useful tool to confiscate the assets of big-time drug traffickers and make crime less profitable. But as the crimes that could be used to justify federal forfeitures expanded from half a dozen to hundreds; as one state after another emulated Uncle Sam; and as examples of innocent victims accumulated, Cates had a change of heart.
"We tried to fix it, and it didn't fix," he says. "They made a stab at it, and it didn't significantly change anything."
To illustrate that point, Cates cites a 2015 case in which federal drug agents boarded a train in Albuquerque and seized $16,000 in cash from Joseph Rivers, a 22-year-old aspiring video producer who was traveling from his hometown in Michigan to Los Angeles. Rivers explained that he planned to use the money—which represented years of savings combined with contributions from relatives—to produce a music video. "It just didn't seem like he ought to have it, so they took it," Cates says. "And it doesn't seem right. It doesn't seem fair to many of us."
In 2014, Cates and John Yoder, who preceded him as director of the Asset Forfeiture Office, wrote a remarkable Washington Post op-ed piece in which they declared civil forfeiture "unreformable." While it "began with good intentions," they said, it had "failed in both purpose and execution," turning the presumption of innocence "upside down," perverting law enforcement priorities, and fostering corruption. "It should be abolished," they concluded.
The following year, New Mexico took their advice. Cates, who had served eight years in the state's legislature before his stint at the Justice Department, played a key role as a lawyer for the House Judiciary Committee, where he wrote a bill that prohibited forfeiture without a criminal conviction. "It just made sense to everybody we explained it to," he says, including "liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans and everybody in between."
One reason legislators were so receptive may have been an embarrassing video of a civil forfeiture seminar for New Mexico police officers that had recently leaked. During the seminar, which was conducted in September 2014, Las Cruces City Attorney Harry S. Connelly Jr. called seized assets "little goodies" and described "a stakeout at a bar" that went awry because cops were so eager to seize and sell a fancy car that they made a crucial mistake.
"A guy drives up in a 2008 Mercedes, brand new," Connelly says in the video, which was featured in a New York Times story after the Institute for Justice shared it with the newspaper. "Just so beautiful. I mean, the cops were undercover, and they were just like, 'Ahhhh.' And he gets out, and he's just reeking of alcohol. And it's like, 'Oh, my goodness, we can hardly wait.'"
The officers watched the guy enter the bar and arrested him when he came out, but before he got back into his car. Because "he didn't have control of the vehicle," Connelly explained, the car could not be forfeited. The lesson: Cops can miss out on "little goodies" if they're not careful.
The Times story surely did not hurt Cates' bill, which the New Mexico House of Representatives unanimously approved in March 2015. It was about to get a vote in the state Senate when a police lobbyist caught wind of it. "We deliberately kept it low-key," Cates says. "We didn't make a big deal about it." On the last night of the legislative session, he says, "all the alarm bells were going off, but it was too late." The Senate also approved the bill unanimously, and then all it needed was the signature of Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican and a former district attorney.
"She just hated it," Cates says. "She really, really, really wanted to veto it. But everybody in the state—the major newspapers and all the legislators—was saying, 'No, you got to sign it. This is a great bill.' And she didn't see the value of it, but she signed it."
When Nebraska abolished civil forfeiture a year later, the process was less stealthy. But police and prosecutors had a strong motive to support some sort of reform because of a 1999 ruling by the state Supreme Court and a 2015 decision by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.
In State v. Franco, the Nebraska Supreme Court had noted that the state's unusually demanding standard for civil forfeiture—proof beyond a reasonable doubt—was the same as the standard for a criminal conviction, which suggested that the legislature "intended that [forfeiture] should be criminal in nature." Given that, the court concluded, pursuing both forfeiture and a criminal prosecution in the same case would violate the constitutional ban on double jeopardy. Franco forced law enforcement agencies to choose between using state law to take someone's crime-tainted property and prosecuting him for that crime.
The Justice Department's Equitable Sharing Program, which gives police and prosecutors a cut of the money when they initiate or participate in federal forfeitures, offered a way out of that dilemma. By seeking federal "adoption" of seizures, Nebraska law enforcement agencies could avoid the double jeopardy problem by outsourcing forfeiture litigation to federal prosecutors. They could also keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds, which was even better than the 50 percent share they got from forfeitures under state law. Nebraska cops used that workaround for years, until Holder turned off the spigot in 2015 by prohibiting most kinds of forfeiture adoption.
So when the Nebraska legislature took up forfeiture reform in 2016, police and prosecutors had an incentive to make a deal. Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson, a Republican, was in favor of new legislation.
Working with Sen. Tommy Garrett, a self-described "conservative Republican," and Sen. Ernie Chambers, a long-serving progressive Democrat, the Institute for Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska seized the opportunity. Peterson "opened the door to reform, and we ran through that door," says Lee McGrath, senior legislative counsel at I.J. "We got the second-best bill [in the country] enacted."
Like New Mexico, Nebraska now requires the government to obtain a criminal conviction before it can confiscate property. The 2016 law also limits federal adoption, which was restored under the Trump administration, to cases involving assets worth $25,000 or more. But unlike New Mexico, which assigned all forfeiture proceeds to the general fund, Nebraska still gives law enforcement agencies their 50 percent cut of state forfeitures, which is mandated by the state constitution.
Peterson was not exactly thrilled with the final bill, which passed the unicameral legislature by a vote of 38–8 and was signed into law by Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts in April 2016. The attorney general's office complained that it "contains more than minor errors" and expressed skepticism that forfeiture abuse was ever really a problem in Nebraska. Peterson's chief of staff nevertheless told the Lincoln Journal Star that "over-all, it's a positive step forward."
Compared to the reforms in New Mexico and Nebraska, the conditions and restrictions that other states have imposed on forfeiture in recent years are pretty mild, even when they look impressive on the surface. After three rounds of reform in Michigan, for instance, law enforcement agencies still receive 100 percent of forfeiture proceeds, and the criminal conviction requirement in drug cases is not as rigorous as it seems.
First, the requirement does not apply to assets worth more than $50,000. Such caps are a common feature of state forfeiture reforms, on the theory that abuses are more likely when property is not valuable enough to make a legal challenge worth the cost to the owner.
Second, a property owner in Michigan can trigger the conviction requirement only by responding to the government's forfeiture complaint in civil court, which typically requires hiring a lawyer. Answering the complaint puts the forfeiture on hold pending the outcome of the related criminal case. But the owner must act promptly. After receiving the government's complaint, he has only 20 days to file a response, and he still has no right to publicly funded legal assistance in that civil process.
Other states have similar two-track systems, which preserve the financial disadvantage that deters forfeiture challenges. "It's not that you can wait and see if you are convicted," McGrath explains. "You must expend the money to either file the civil complaint or answer the government's civil complaint."
As McGrath sees it, such halfway reforms create an impression of progress that is largely illusory. "In many states, the prosecutors come running up the steps of the capitol saying, 'Let's reform,'" he says. "They are willing to stay the civil process until after the criminal process but insist on keeping the complex and expensive two-track system. Changing the timing is a simple reform that has superficial appeal. But legislators don't ask how many seizures won't be challenged because of the complexity and the cost, which exceeds the dollar value of most seizures."
Still, the fact that so many legislators want to be seen as doing something about forfeiture abuse is striking. The timing suggests that the interest has a lot to do with the publicity campaign that the Institute for Justice launched in 2010, when it published the first edition of Policing for Profit, a report that graded state forfeiture laws and explained the abuses they encourage. At the same time, the organization was calling attention to the predicament of the innocent property owners it represented in one case after another and working with news organizations like The New York Times to highlight the avariciousness of cops obsessed with finding cash and "little goodies" to seize.
In the decade after Policing for Profit first appeared, references to "civil asset forfeiture" in the Nexis database rose 30-fold from the previous decade. Nick Sibilla, who writes about the subject regularly as a legislative analyst at I.J., says stories from influential outlets such as the Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and The New Yorker had a big impact. Between 2014 and last March, he counted "over 350 editorials from nearly 140 separate outlets" that advocated reform or abolition of civil forfeiture, while just one defended the practice. Public opinion is not as lopsided, but it's still overwhelmingly critical of civil forfeiture, which 84 percent of respondents opposed in a 2016 Cato Institute poll.
The stories that helped turn people against civil forfeiture featured sympathetic victims like Mandrel Stuart, a Virginia restaurateur whose case was highlighted by the Post. After Stuart was pulled over because a cop thought the windows of his SUV were too dark, a drug-sniffing dog supposedly "alerted" to his front bumper. That was enough for the cops to seize $18,000 in cash that Stuart had planned to spend on restaurant equipment and supplies.
The forfeiture stories also featured villains whose greed sometimes straddled or crossed the line between legal budget padding and outright corruption. In 2013, for instance, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed that Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard's office had spent nearly $30,000 in forfeiture proceeds on booze, fancy parties, NBA and CeeLo Green tickets, and a security system for Howard's home. State officials already were investigating the D.A.'s office based on prior allegations of loose spending habits. As a participant in the Equitable Sharing Program, Howard was supposed to "avoid any appearance of extravagance, waste, or impropriety."
In 2011, former Romulus, Michigan, Police Chief Michael St. Andre and five of his former detectives were charged with "using asset forfeiture funds acquired during narcotics and prostitution investigations to buy…narcotics and prostitutes," as my Reason colleague Mike Riggs noted at the time. In one year, prosecutors said, the cops spent $40,000 in forfeiture proceeds on prostitutes, marijuana, and alcohol. St. Andre, who ultimately took a plea deal and received a prison sentence of five to 20 years, was also accused of spending $75,000 from his department's forfeiture fund to buy a tanning salon for his wife.
Another, more recent Michigan case illustrates the pitfalls of reforming forfeiture laws while leaving the profit motive untouched. In 2020, state Attorney General Dana Nessel charged Macomb County Prosecutor Eric Smith and three other defendants with a litany of felonies for misusing about $600,000 in forfeiture money. They had allegedly spent the funds on "flowers and make-up for select secretaries, a security system for Smith's residence, garden benches for staffers' homes, country club catering for parties, and campaign expenditures," among other things.
You might think such blatant abuses would discredit civil forfeiture. But they may simultaneously make the use of forfeiture funds to cover legitimate law enforcement expenses look good by comparison. Such budgetary supplementation also tends to pervert law enforcement, since it encourages police and prosecutors to prioritize financial reward over public safety. Yet many legislators welcome this found money because it relieves them of the need to appropriate additional taxpayer dollars. Arizona's recent experience with forfeiture reform illustrates that tendency.
In 2017, the Arizona legislature overwhelmingly approved a bill that increased oversight and transparency, prohibited federal adoption of forfeitures worth less than $75,000, and raised the standard of proof from a preponderance of the evidence to clear and convincing evidence. Lawmakers had heard the usual troubling stories about people who lost their property through no fault of their own. One example was Rhonda Cox, a San Tan Valley woman whose pickup truck was seized in 2013 because she lent it to her son, who was accused of equipping it with stolen accessories.
Three years later, a bill that would have gone even further to protect such innocent victims by requiring a criminal conviction prior to forfeiture passed the state Senate unanimously but foundered in the House, where Democrats unanimously opposed it. The bill's critics offered several objections, including a pandemic-shortened legislative session that ruled out amendments. But as the Tucson Sentinel reported, "some were wary of depriving prosecutorial agencies and possibly public defenders of the funding that forfeiture provides."
As far as Brad Cates is concerned, that rationale for preserving civil forfeiture is completely wrongheaded. "Need the money, need the money, need the money," he says. "That's just not a proper motive for the government to be bounty hunters. If we need more, then you appropriate more."
Cates favors a long list of forfeiture reforms. But he thinks assigning forfeiture revenue to a state's general fund rather than police and prosecutors, which eliminates their profit motive and neutralizes their budgetary argument, is the single most important way to curtail abuses.
Matt Miller, an attorney who worked on forfeiture issues at I.J. and the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute, says the monolithic Democratic opposition to the 2020 Arizona bill was "amazing" because "it's a police reform measure." He declines to speculate about the motives of Democrats who claim to favor reform in principle. During the next legislative session, he says, "they will have every opportunity to show their support for this police reform."
In Texas, where Miller ran the Institute for Justice's state office for nine years, budgetary concerns were conspicuous when legislators considered forfeiture reform. Police and prosecutors initially said civil forfeiture was an important crime-fighting tool that nevertheless was not used very often and had not led to serious abuse in the state. But when "I.J. and others convincingly showed that it is a problem," Miller says, the argument became: "We need the money. Don't take this away from us. This is going to impact police budgets."
Texas rated a D+ in the 2020 edition of Policing for Profit, quite a distance from New Mexico's A–. But Massachusetts, where you might think progressive Democrats would be sympathetic to reform, did even worse, joining North Dakota as one of just two states to earn an F. According to the report, "Massachusetts has the worst civil forfeiture laws in the country."
Police in Massachusetts can confiscate property based on nothing more than probable cause, an even lower standard than the one that Arizona and Michigan rejected as inadequate. They also get to keep up to 100 percent of the proceeds. Innocent owners can get their property back only by proving they did not know about the criminal activity that allegedly justified the forfeiture. Yet efforts to reform the system so far have gone nowhere.
Because people sympathetic to law enforcement tend to serve on legislative committees with jurisdiction over forfeiture, McGrath says, "you don't have the progressives that one thinks of in Massachusetts serving on the relevant committee where these bills are introduced." Alex Marthews, who runs the pro-reform group Restore the Fourth, says much of the blame lies with Massachusetts House Speaker Robert DeLeo, "a law-and-order Democrat" who "has generally enjoyed the support of law enforcement." Marthews notes that forfeiture reform "affects the budgets of the police, and the costs of going against the police in the legislative context are high."
Meanwhile, state legislators who might be more receptive to reform say they have not seen enough solid evidence that forfeiture abuse is a serious problem in Massachusetts. But that sort of evidence is hard to collect. "The evidentiary record for forfeiture cases is generally very slim, because the majority of cases are uncontested," Marthews says. "I can find plenty of information relating to the small number of unrepresentative cases that do get appealed, but not regarding the sort of bread-and-butter forfeitures that happen daily."
Massachusetts, like many states, does not keep careful track of what cops take from whom and in what circumstances. I.J. says reporting requirements in Massachusetts are "very poor": The data are vague, limited to drug cases, and difficult to obtain.
To get a clearer picture of what was going on just in Belmont, the small Boston suburb where Marthews lives, he had to file a public records request with the police department, which yielded a spreadsheet indicating how much income local cops had generated by participating in multi-city drug task forces. He found that forfeitures in Belmont "tend to be very small," which is consistent with research elsewhere. That helps explain why so many forfeitures go uncontested, which in turn helps explain why it is hard to say how many involve innocent owners.
Opponents of civil forfeiture—a practice that frequently targets people of modest means, drives police encounters that otherwise might not occur, and disproportionately affects African Americans—hoped those problems would be addressed by the reforms that followed George Floyd's death in Minneapolis last May. But the package that Massachusetts legislators approved in July did not touch the issue.
While "there is some appetite for change," Marthews says, "police advocates are enormously powerful in the state legislature and have been for many years." He draws some hope from the fact that ordinary people tend to oppose civil forfeiture once they understand how it works. "I explained the issue to my parents not long ago, and my parents are conservative," he says. "They were horrified that such a thing could even be legal."
The post States Are Finally Revoking Cops' License To Steal appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last night, I appeared on Fox Business's Kennedy to discuss the Trump administration's plans to consolidate the Department of Education and Department of Labor into a single operation, move food stamps (SNAP) out of the Department of Agriculture and into Health & Human Services, and related ideas.
Overall, these are generally good ideas and definitely worth thinking through. We often think of cabinet-level agencies as part of the natural landscape, but they change all the time. Education didn't become its own department until 1979 (Ronald Reagan promised to kill it but instead increased its funding), Veterans Affairs was added in 1989, and Homeland Security only in 2002.
Here's the segment:
.@nickgillespie on the Trump administration announcing plans to reorganize Cabinet departments: "This is a great idea… It makes sense to condense these programs." https://t.co/uvuZy3jqKY pic.twitter.com/CvrM5pG2BT
— FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) June 22, 2018
The post "This Is a Great Idea": Consolidate Cabinet-Level Departments appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Darrell Issa, widely considered the most vulnerable Republican in this November's House elections, announced today that he is retiring from Congress.
Issa, who has represented his corner of California since 2001, chaired the House Government Oversight Committee from 2010 to 2015. There he led probes into whether the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) targeted Tea Party groups; how the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) lost track of illegally purchased U.S. guns it allowed to be taken to Mexico; troubles with Transportation Security Administration body scanners; and, of course, Benghazi. He also ended the preposterous congressional hearings into steroid use in baseball.
Unfortunately, little of this led to substantive action. Forget abolishing the IRS—Issa's investigations didn't even let us review or reduce the ATF's budget. As of 2016, nearly 800 body scanners were deployed at 157 airports.
Nevertheless, the investigations were still by and large far more useful than anything the committee, now obsessed with Russia, has produced in the last year.
Also on the plus side: In 2012, Issa prevented an amendment from gutting Texas Rep. Ron Paul's Audit the Fed bill. (Paul's legislation passed the House unanimously but died in the Senate.) Issa also introduced a sensible bill last year aimed at preventing state licensing boards from self-dealing. A vocal critic of asset forfeiture, Issa recently tried to defund the Department of Justice's asset forfeiture fund.
In other ways, alas, Issa was an orthodox Republican. He voted for the Iraq war and the PATRIOT Act, and his zest for government oversight faded after President Trump took office.
He faced an uphill battle for re-election: Hillary Clinton won his district by nine points over Trump in 2016, when Issa won over his Democratic opponent by about half a percentage point. With today's announcement, someone else will have to carry the GOP's banner in the race.
The post Darrell Issa Retiring from Seat He Barely Won Last Time appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Bill Kristol of the conservative Weekly Standard and William Galston of the more liberal Brookings Institution have teamed up to explore what "the center" of politics looks like in an era of President Donald Trump. They've just released the results in a report called "Ideas to Re-Center America."
The concept should be familiar by now—some guys on both sides think that what will fix our polarized America is a path right down the "middle" of American politics. Kristol told The Washington Post that the process of writing the report made him discover "there was more being missed by Republican politicians and think tanks than [he] realized."
So what does this new middle look like? Well, apparently Joe Average is really, really angry about Chinese theft of intellectual property.
Wait, what?
"The New Center" cares so much about intellectual property theft and patent reform that it's one of the seven major planks of its platform. Read this policy proposal and ask yourself if it sounds like Main Street populism or if it sounds like the work of some think tanks and lobbyists with a vested interest in certain outcomes:
Tariffs are the nuclear option of international trade and can spur a counterproductive trade war. But China and other countries must understand there are real consequences for violating U.S. intellectual property protections. Two measures passed by Congress in the 1970s—Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—provide the president broad latitude to investigate trade practices that are harmful to the U.S. and to impose sanctions.
I'm sure there's absolutely no self-interested parties in Washington, D.C., who recommended to Kristol and Galston that they include this bit:
In 2011, Congress passed the Budget Control Act—commonly known as the "sequester"— which slashed discretionary spending across the federal government, with little consideration for the effectiveness of affected programs. Economic returns from basic government research are so significant—with a $1 investment in basic government research spurring over $8 in additional industry investment—that Congress should restore and increase basic research funding.
Setting sarcasm aside (briefly), the entire report reads like it was written by Beltway professionals, and Kristol acknowledges to the Washington Post that it's where many of these ideas came from.
Let's not necessarily talk smack about think tanks. The libertarian Cato Institute was consulted for this report (and of course, Reason Foundation is a think tank that publishes this very blog and pays me).
But this is the "No Labels" shtick. It sells technocratic management of citizens' lives as some "moderate" alternative to the left and the right, but it's still big government controlling what people can do and ignoring side effects that lead to corruption. Consider the abuse potential on this recommendation on skills training:
In early 2017, there were 6 million job openings even as 6.8 million Americans were looking for work. This is a stark reminder that too many Americans don't currently have the skills employers need. One way to fix this imbalance would be for the federal government to make more of its educational funding (e.g. Perkins loans) conditioned upon students pursuing majors in areas where there are projected future job shortages.
Who would be projecting these future job shortages and who will be lobbying for certain recommendations? An instructive warning: The economic stimulus plans pushed by President George W. Bush and supported by President Barack Obama created a land rush in the Southern California desert to develop dozens and dozens of solar energy projects. A small number of solar plants did get built. Many more did not.
Meanwhile, colleges were flogging solar energy job training programs for all the many openings these solar plants were going to provide. Then they didn't happen (and even when they did, solar plants do not require significant numbers of employees compared to other types of power pants).
We're not even getting into the whole Solyndra affair. The government thumb on the scale distorts the market, and that should make people wary about the government projecting where jobs are going. It's not a neutral arbiter. It has enormous power—far too much power—over how jobs get created. And with colleges so dependent on government funding, we end up in what's pretty damned close to central planning of the work force as the "centrist" alternative to the left and the right.
Not all of the report's contents came from lobbyists or think tanks. Here is the report's "solution" to young adults not being in the work force:
In 2015, more than one of every five American men without a college degree was both without work and not looking for a job. What are they doing instead? One study found that roughly three-fourths of their time is spent staring at a screen, including an average of nearly nine hours per week playing video games.
Even if these individuals are not "mooching" off anyone else, social science suggests that the failure to contribute correlates with a whole variety of pathologies, including drug use, divorce and depression. The New Center should not be bashful about criticizing individuals who are not carrying their weight.
Hey guys, that's not a "solution." This is what's known as "bitching." Peter Suderman had a different, less cranky-old-man take on this phenomenon in a recent issue of Reason magazine.
I would add that we also should not assume that these gamers are not contributing to the economy. Many of these young men stream their gameplay online and have developed an audience that earns them advertising income. Also of note, YouTube (owned by Google) and Twitch.tv (owned by Amazon) are the major platforms by which these guys make money off gaming through ads. But this report ponders bringing antitrust actions against those companies, leaving an observant person to wonder what might happen to those gamers' revenue streams.
Also fascinating: Pretty much every solution in the report's section on tech monopolies is based on bringing the hammer of government down on these companies. There is very little analysis of whether the government itself makes it harder for competitors to challenge major tech firms.
In the growth section, the report worries that manufacturing jobs are being replaced by low-wage service jobs. Yet one of its solutions is to increase the minimum wage, which will kill jobs in many non-urban economies that don't have diverse workforces. And then there's this utterly inexplicable component in the middle of the "solutions" intended to create more growth for citizens:
Each year, the federal government spends billions of dollars on basic research funded across a whole range of agencies. The products and services that emerge from those initial investments are frequently commercialized by private profit-making companies. But while the private sector benefits when a technology like GPS becomes a commercial success, the taxpayers who financed the original research rarely see any return. Government-funded research should not be predicated on the possibility of income. But when there is a commercial success, the original investor (the taxpayer) should get some portion of the upside.
Here's the return for the taxpayers: They get cheap or even free GPS. Don't take this as an endorsement of federally funded research. But think about the outcomes of this "solution." First, Joe Average would have to pay more for products and services that incorporate these innovations. Second, if this solution involves some sort of tax or payment back to the government, it is most certainly not going back to the taxpayer. It's going to go back to the various agencies and colleges responsible for the government-funded research. So in this "growth" section, one of the solutions would result in citizens paying more for stuff with they money going back to the government.
Remember that call elsewhere in the report for an increase in federal spending on basic research? Interesting how this all comes together.
It should be abundantly clear that this report's claims to present "bold new ideas" are total nonsense. The report is just a new effort to sell old ideas that often originate from people with a vested interest in seeing the size and scope of government expand. To see for yourself, read the report here.
The post 'The New Center' Is Full of the Same Old Worship of a Powerful Federal Government appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>There are two rules of thumb to keep in mind when following the California legislature.
First, lawmakers love to prattle about pie-in-the-sky issues, such as halting global warming, but steadfastly avoid tackling nuts-and-bolts issues (pension liabilities, infrastructure repairs) that cry out for attention but run up against powerful special-interest groups.
Second, you always know it's a cop-out when legislators promise to "study" something.
The gutting of a police-reform bill last week combined both of those realities. Assembly Bill 284 had little chance of passage because it dealt with an actual problem and was getting pushback from some muscular lobbies. Instead of killing the measure and getting a bad rap among their minority constituents, legislators turned it into a meaningless study bill.
The bill was introduced by Assemblyman Kevin McCarty (D-Sacramento) following an incident captured on a disturbing video. Last July, Sacramento police tried to run over a knife-wielding, mentally ill man with their police cruiser, then fired 18 shots and killed him. The city in February settled a lawsuit with the man's family for $719,000, but the district attorney cleared the officers of wrongdoing. Police said the man was a danger to the neighborhood.
Obviously, several "use of force" incidents have been in the news, so the Sacramento situation wasn't unusual. What was unusual is that a legislator proposed something substantive in response. The legislation would have created statewide teams to investigate officer-involved shootings. This would provide outside involvement in the currently incestuous oversight system. The revised bill now merely requires the state Department of Justice to produce a report of times officers shoot people or when people shoot them.
Let's deal with a few little-discussed realities. No matter how egregious any killing appears, officers are cleared by their own departments and district attorneys, who work closely with the same police departments they oversee. In the rare instance they do prosecute an officer, a jury will side with the cop. Police unions shield even the worst officers, who always claim their lives were in danger. I've covered a number of these cases, and the result is usually the same.
Here are some more realities. Liberals see these police killings through an entirely racial lens. There is, of course, a strong racial element to many of them, but most of the ones I've covered have had white people as the victims. It's more a policing problem that centers on an insular paramilitary culture that downplays the value of "civilian" lives.
Conservatives—you know, the folks who prattle about government overreach—instinctively side with the government's agents. Would they be OK with letting the IRS or the Environmental Protection Agency or the California Air Resources Board investigate themselves when there are accusations of abusive behavior? Should we always side with government because, well, it's responsible for protecting us and its employees often have tough jobs?
The gutting of AB284 also reminds us of this reality: Union-allied Democrats are as hostile to police reforms as Republicans. Democratic state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, for instance, opposed the bill in its original state but backed it after it was watered down into meaninglessness. I'm glad that civil-rights groups spoke out at the Capitol against the amended version. Perhaps they will realize that there's virtually no chance any substantive police reform will move forward, even with Democratic legislative dominance.
Whenever there's a troubling incident, we're faced with a false choice. We can trust the process or get upset that the officers don't face criminal sentences. But there is a third option. We can analyze current policies, training, job protections and strategies—and institute reforms to improve the way those agencies operate. After the Sacramento shooting, the city instituted some reforms. Why is that a verboten idea in the legislature?
Government officials are supposed to work for us. There's nothing anti-police about questioning the way the current system operates. Police policy has been dominated for decades by law-enforcement unions, which exist solely to protect officers. Lawmakers from both parties are deathly afraid of their power—and of being portrayed in the next election as "soft on crime."
As a result, public concerns are given short shrift. Meanwhile, the drug war (and all that surplus military equipment) has led to increased militarization of local police forces, even though crime rates have fallen to levels not seen since the days of "The Andy Griffith Show." Instead of a community policing model, we often get one that seems more like something from an occupying army.
Liberals, in particular, forget that all the new rules and regulations they promote ultimately will be enforced by police officers. Some of the most disturbing police incidents involve cops enforcing picayune regulations.
It's unclear whether McCarty's original idea would have made any difference, but it is clear the current bill punts on a serious problem—and that the new studies will be meaningless. We can do better than this.
This column first appeared in the Orange County Register.
The post Gutting of Oversight Bill Puts Kibosh on Police Reform in California appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Years ago, I was riding an Amtrak train from Virginia to New Jersey and was chatting with a couple from California, who were stunned at how rapidly the train went from one state to another. One can drive from southern Maine to North Carolina and pass through a dozen states, plus the District of Columbia, in roughly the same distance as going from San Diego to Crescent City, California.
Consider also that California's approximately 39 million population equals the total combined population of the nation's 22 smallest states. I can regale you with geographic trivia, but the closer you look, the harder it is to fathom why talks of breaking up California are not taken more seriously. California is too large in size and population to be governed fairly.
Note the word "fairly." There's plenty of debate about whether California is governed properly. I think not, but I cover the state Capitol and listen closely to the zaniness. I own a historic home that would have been flushed down the Feather River like detritus circling a toilet bowl, had the Oroville emergency spillway collapsed. California's leaders lavish public employees with benefits and build silly bullet trains, yet can't maintain basic infrastructure. And then they strong-arm us into raising taxes, yet again.
But, ultimately, the "properly" question is a matter of political philosophy. Most liberal Democrats I know are happy with the way California is managed, and with the priorities that emanate from Sacramento. And why not? They control every state constitutional office and have supermajorities in the legislature. That's where fairness comes in. People who live outside the metropolitan areas are always overruled in the Capitol. They have no effective representation, no way to govern according to local values.
In late March, two leaders of the Brexit movement—the successful, underdog referendum to extricate the United Kingdom from the European Union—were in Huntington Beach to receive an award from the American Association of Political Consultants. While there, they touted the latest plan to chop up California into two or more independent states. This is Version 2.0 of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Tim Draper's previous plan to create "Six Californias."
I've read dismissive and even mocking media coverage of Draper's idea. It's ridiculous, some say, even though there have been dozens of efforts to break up California since the beginning of the state. The eastern borders were largely arbitrary—and designed basically by committee at a constitutional convention.
But the imprimatur of two Brexit ringleaders, party leader Nigel Farage and financier Arron Banks, has put the issue back in the news, given that their British effort was once deemed too silly to contemplate. They beat the odds, so why can't we? While in Orange County, they met with former Orange County Republican Party Chairman Scott Baugh, who has said the breakup idea would improve democratic representation. He's right. They were well-received when they spoke to local groups about Brexit and the possibility of partitioning California.
There have been myriad ideas to address our representation problem. I've written occasionally about San Diego-area businessman John Cox and his efforts to qualify a statewide initiative that would vastly expand the size of the Legislature. It sounds unwieldy to elect 8,000 Assembly members, which is why his Citizen Legislature plan still needs revamping. But the general idea makes sense.
In California, we have one Assembly member for every 483,000 residents. That's the worst ratio in the country. In New Hampshire, which has the best ratio, there are approximately 3,200 residents for every member of the statehouse. What are your chances of influencing or even reaching your legislator—or even his or her staffers—in California?
In a state as big as ours, only the big guys—the political parties, labor unions and other special interests—matter. Breaking up one mega-state into multiple reasonably sized states, where people with like-minded interests can better govern themselves, is a great idea that gives voters more power. If that won't happen, then we at least need more representative districts.
I carefully analyzed the Six Californias proposal, and found it would have created a competitive situation in the three more conservative states. The liberal states around Los Angeles, San Jose and Sacramento would have remained liberal bastions, but at least officials would be closer to home and more accountable.
I dismiss the "Calexit" idea, however, because it would make California its own nation. I can't imagine living without the protections of the U.S. Constitution (or what's left of it). It won't happen. Plus, it's reportedly advocated by a man with Russian ties.
But there's no reason we can't give new boundaries to old states. If Rhode Island—not much larger than Orange County—can have two senators and a Capitol, why can't there be several states formerly known as California? Thanks to Farage, Banks, Draper and Baugh for helping us revisit a vital question.
The post Breaking Up California an Idea That Won't Go Away, For Good Reason appeared first on Reason.com.
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]]>If you want to watch a heated political feud, forget about the race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. That presidential bad blood is toxic, but seems tame compared with what's going on in Orange County, Calif., between county Supervisor Todd Spitzer and District Attorney Tony Rackauckas. The two Republicans have been mixing it up for years, with Spitzer hoping one day to replace Rackauckas as the county's top cop.
This nasty local spat is of broader significance because it shows the pointlessness of creating commissions and new regulations to "fix" whatever's wrong with the political system. A couple weeks ago, I wrote for Reason about Orange County's Measure A, an effort by good-government activists to start an ethics panel to police campaign finance rules. "Often, these commissions are the worst of all worlds. They give the impression of oversight without actually overseeing much of anything," I concluded. It's not too independent either, given that politicians who will be monitored by the new panel get to choose its members.
Since then an intensifying spat between Spitzer and Rackauckas illustrates another crucial lesson: These commissions will almost certainly be gamed by political actors. Instead of clamping down on bad behavior, they offer tools for political actors to embarrass their opponents. The commission hadn't even been approved yet, and these two foes are using it to score points on each other.
Spitzer is a key supporter of the measure, which was overwhelmingly approved by voters on Tuesday. After he recorded a "robocall" backing it, Rackauckas called a press conference to accuse Spitzer of falsely impersonating an assistant district attorney. Rackauckas pointed to part of the script Spitzer read: "I have always played by the rules. As an assistant district attorney, I know that many politicians do not." Spitzer used to be an assistant district attorney until he was shown the door by Rackauckas in 2010.
Said Rackauckas at the presser: "Stunning isn't it? Not only does he falsely impersonate an assistant district attorney, he does not appear to follow campaign laws requiring 'paid telephone calls must identify the candidate who paid for or authorized the call.'" Spitzer, as quoted by the Register, responded: "The only person who could misinterpret what I'm saying in this robocall is a paranoid district attorney who has failed to do his job as the district attorney of Orange County." He said he clearly identified himself as a county supervisor at the beginning the call.
The D.A.'s office sent me Spitzer's latest campaign statement, in which he identifies himself as "a business owner, father and assistant district attorney," and a video in which he previously has identified himself as a former Los Angeles police officer—even though he was only a reserve officer. Rackauckas isn't going to press charges or do anything else about it. That's a good thing given these seem like fairly minor infractions.
At one level, this is great political theater. I've always been startled by Spitzer's tendency to play the first-responder card for maximum political impact. An amusing example: As a state assemblyman, he attended a press conference (regarding wildfires) dressed in yellow firefighter boots and a vest. In a less-amusing episode, last year he made a "citizen's arrest" of an unarmed man at a restaurant. After a youth counselor approached him to talk about the Bible, Spitzer went back to his car, grabbed a loaded gun and handcuffs and detained him until cops arrived.
Spitzer said he was concerned for his safety because the man was acting in a bizarre way. He told the Register his law enforcement background gives him "some kind of weird sixth sense when something's not right." My journalistic background gives me a similar sense about politicians. Neither the supervisor nor the D.A. is behaving in a manner that seems right—and I doubt yet another commission will do much about it.
After I contacted Spitzer, his office sent me a press release slamming the DA: "From the informant scandal committee to the grand jury, every independent and neutral observer who reviews the district attorney's management style is in complete agreement that the district attorney has allowed his office to become a rudderless ship with a culture of favoritism that endangers the public." Spitzer later issued another statement accusing Rackauckas of vindictiveness and retaliation.
This brings us back to Measure A, which was the measure that sparked all the fuss. Spitzer is for it. Rackauckas is neutral. But does anyone think creating a new panel will take the toxicity out of the political process? Or will it just give politicians another weapon with which to embarrass each other? We know the answer. Sorry, but there's no taking politics out of the political system, even if 70 percent of OC voters think otherwise.
The post Local California Political Duel Shows Limits of Ethics Reform appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A year ago yesterday, the killing of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson, a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, catapulted the issue of police violence onto the national stage. After Brown's death, subsequent cases of killings by police received more attention than they likely otherwise would've.
Even killings that happened before Brown's, like that of Eric Garner, who was killed by police on Staten Island last July after being accused of selling loose, untaxed cigarettes, garnered more attention afterward. Garner's death saw protests in New York CIty and around the country on a scale not seen when police shot and killed 18-year-old Ramarley Graham after chasing him into his grandmother's house over a small amount of marijuana. Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, and even Sandra Bland subsequently became household names. If their deaths had occurred a few years earlier they would join the thousands of names of people killed by police unknown to Americans, like Graham, or David Lee Turner or Erik Scott or Ernesto Duenez or Bobby Bennett or Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams or even Seth Adams.
This year, victims of fatal police violence are counted by the media in a way they never have before. Over the weekend, the Washington Post ran a long piece under the headline "Black and Unarmed" about the 24 unarmed black men fatally shot by police this year, based on their ongoing analysis of their database on fatal police shootings. The Post does not offer a link to its database itself, but at least one other outlet has its own publicly available database. The Guardian has been collecting news reports of police killings this year and making the database available to the public online as a feature called "The Counted." The Guardian counts 26 unarmed black men fatally shot by police.
It includes six cases not in the Washington Post's report, those of Denzel Brown, Sam Holmes, Kevin Judson, Glenn Lewis, Demeris Turner, and Andrew Williams, while categorizing four cases in the Post's report as something other than an unarmed black man fatally shot by cops. The Guardian lists Albert Davis' race as unknown and Victor Larosa's armed status as unknown. Lavall Hall and Bobby Gross are listed as "armed (other)" because they were alleged to have been armed, respectively, with a broom stick and a tree branch. The Post says it considers victims of police shootings holding "an object unlikely to inflict serious injury" as unarmed.
Nevertheless the Post omits 23 other black men shot by police that The Guardian reports were armed with something other than a gun or a knife. The most recent, Darius Graves, barricaded himself in a motel room after being chased for allegedly committing a robbery. Police threw tear gas into his motel room and then shot him when he ran out with a steel pole.
By focusing on fatal police shootings, the Post missed about 28 other unarmed black men killed by police in some other manner. By focusing only on unarmed black men, the Post can say that the number represents "a surprisingly small fraction of the 585 people shot and killed by police through Friday evening." The Guardian counts 704 people killed by police in the U.S. in 2015—about 83 percent of whom were shot. But less than half of the unarmed black men who were killed by police were shot. Ten died in police custody, including Jonathan Sanders and Freddie Gray. Four were struck by police vehicles—in each case police say it was an accident but in at least two cases, that of Bernard Moore and Bryan Overstreet, the families are questioning the police narrative. Fourteen unarmed black men died after being Tased.
Of the two black women killed by police this year, one was among four people fatally struck by police vehicles in New Jersey alone, and another, Natasha McKenna, died after being Tased while shackled in a Virginia county jail. While authorities insisted her death was accidental, and that psychoactive medications and her state of "excited delirium" contributed to it, the jail temporarily stopped using Tasers after the incident.
The Washington Post points out that its 24 fatal police shootings of unarmed black men make up 40 percent of all shootings while black men make up only 6 percent of the U.S. population. But there have been no reports of police shooting and killing an unarmed black woman this year. They make up 6 or 7 percent of the population too, but no one would suggest there's not a problem with policing when it comes to black women. More than 90 percent of the victims of fatal police shootings are men,
The Post says it found unarmed black men are seven times more likely to be shot and killed by police, an incredible statistic that points to a big racial problem in policing, and the hiring and firing thereof. But were unarmed black men killed by police at the same rate as unarmed white men, there would still be more than 40 fatal police shootings of unarmed people in the U.S. this year. There have actually been 65—while 85 other unarmed people died in police custody some other way, more from Tasers than any other method.
What most of these cases have in common, across race, gender, and age, is that the officers involved get away with it. Cases like Freddie Gray's and Walter Scott's, where police officers were charged criminally, are the exception. Police officers across the country enjoy a wide array of privileges "civilians" involved in homicides don't. Even in the case of Freddie Gray, where the police officers had 10 days to speak to investigators about what happened, the six cops facing charges related to Gray's death all remain on the payroll of the Baltimore Police Department.
Police officials and police unions complain that the new national mood is turning police officers into targets, on the streets and in the courts. The Washington Post points out 18 cops have been shot and killed in the line of duty—but not that this is a 25 percent decrease from last year, or that police work is getting safer. And where police unions and officials argue there's a problem of overprosecuting cops—setting aside for a moment the absolute absurdity of this argument when most cops don't face charges after killing someone—the employment protections they've carved out for law enforcement have contributed to the problem. In many jurisdictions it's almost impossible to fire a cop absent a criminal conviction. All six Freddie Gray officers, again, are still employed. A lack of meaningful accountability for homicidal misconduct helps create an environment where such misconduct will of course continue.
The fetishization of the racial aspect of police violence at the expense of any other factors by much of the mainstream media means those systemic problems, and others, that contribute to police violence are ignored. The case of Zachary Hammond, an unarmed white teenager shot during a sting over 10 grams of marijuana, for example, illustrates the drug war's role in police violence. Many police shootings, of people of all races, armed and unarmed, are drug-related. Drug-related violence, state or otherwise, is almost entirely fueled by the government's classification of drugs as illegal substances. Hammond was white, so he's not on the Post's list. But The Root covered Hammond's case last week, pointing out that the "All Lives Matter" crowd had not drawn attention to Hammond, while police reform activists operating under the banner of "Black Lives Matter" had. Hammond's attorney complains the case has not received as much attention as its controversial nature deserves because the dead unarmed teenager is white.
As Jacob Sullum notes, the main lesson in Hammond's case is the depravity of the drug war, and the support that war continues to enjoy. Sullum highlighted one quote from a resident responding to the fatal shooting: "We're so thankful here in Oconee County that our police departments and sheriffs and things like that, that they're on top of the drug problems and trying to eliminate all drugs and everything." There is a statement that is pretty typical of the white community. The All Lives Matter crowd The Root refers to isn't one that's interested in police violence as it applies to all races, but one that tries to downplay state violence because of the lives the state saves by, say, throwing people in jail for the things they put in their bodies. Eliminating "all drugs and everything."
The mainstream media's narrow interest in police violence as a racial problem misses a police violence epidemic that crosses racial and class lines. Hammond's cases is pretty close to what Toni Morrison said would be an indicator of the end of racism—an unarmed white teenager shot in the back. And Hammond isn't the first unarmed white teenager killed by cops who got away with it. It doesn't mean racism is over. Just as if police killed unarmed people of all races at the same rate—even if that rate were the one they currently kill unarmed white people at—there would still be a police violence problem.
Until cops can be fired for displaying malicious tendencies—even before they kill—until cops are no longer ordered to go into largely poor communities to zealously enforce petty laws meant at raising revenue, until the community-police relationship is really treated as one of master-servant, in that order, there will continue to be plenty of names to count and talk about.
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]]>Approximately 220 million Americans are eligible to vote, but only 130 million or so are likely to cast a ballot next November. While the 90 million who fail to make a trip to the polls will inspire hot takes and handwringing about the public's apathy and its deleterious impact on democracy, what about the apathy on the other side of the transaction?
The United States is a network of 330 million people, all with different interests, aptitudes, skills, and experience. Yet the primary way the government attempts to tap their collective brainpower on a regular basis is by asking them all the same simple questions at election time. Candidate A or Candidate B? Yes or No on Proposition X?
Over the last two decades, great efforts have been made to use technology to democratize campaign fundraising and help people become more engaged and informed voters. In contrast, little attention has been paid to a far more ambitious and potentially transformative quest: using technology to help people become more engaged and productive citizens, in ways that truly harness the full range of their skills and expertise.
One effort to do exactly that is Challenge.gov. Created in 2010 and run by the General Services Administration (GSA), it offers a common platform where federal agencies list prize competitions open to the public. In April, for example, the Department of Defense (DOD) announced that it's seeking a turbine engine with two or more times the fuel efficiency of current small turbines and three or more times the power-to-weight ratio of a standard aviation piston engine. And it will pay $2 million to the first person or team who successfully fulfills these requirements.
In its first five years of existence, Challenge.gov hasn't generated a huge amount of attention or activity. To date, approximately 70 federal agencies have posted around 400 competitions, eliciting responses from 50,000 or so "solvers" and awarding $90 million in prizes.
But even with this small data set, the versatility and potential usefulness of Challenge.gov is clear. Some agencies are simply using it as a kind of outreach or publicity tool. In one recent contest, for example, the Department of Consumer Safety challenged schoolkids to create posters that convey the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Others, however, are essentially using the website as a new form of procurement. In some instances, the goods or services they seek are fairly general. The National Institute on Drug Abuse is now offering $100,000 for "bold new ideas" on how to manage and improve the clinical quality of addiction treatment. Others are far more specific. NASA recently solicited designs for a 3D printable handrail clamp assembly for the International Space Station.
Traditionally, federal agencies engaged in procurement write very detailed specifications about what they're looking for, circulate requests for proposals in established channels like FBO.gov, then evaluate the proposals that come in.
This approach essentially encourages the agencies themselves to frame and shape potential solutions, and to determine which of these proposed solutions will provide the best result. Shifting the frameworks of procurement to a prize format, however, alters the process. Instead of trying to define and thus solve problems in advance, agencies define a more general outcome they're seeking to achieve without telling potential vendors exactly how to pursue it.
Jim Adams, NASA's acting chief technologist, addressed this dynamic in a May 2014 report on prizes published by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. "NASA is one of many organizations that follow a strict procedural approach to solutions," Adams exclaimed. "This is valuable, but has the potential to blind problem solvers to alternative solutions."
Like most crowdsourcing platforms, Challenge.gov shifts much of the risk and resource investment to potential creators. Federal agencies can describe what they're looking for in more general terms, then evaluate actual solutions, not just proposals. And ultimately, they only have to pay for outcomes, not development efforts. While various parties will attempt to deliver the more efficient turbine engine the DOD is hoping to find, the government will only pay the $2 million prize if someone does in fact build an engine that meets its specifications.
And it's not just that these kinds of platforms only reward positive outcomes. Typically, they also end up leveraging the incentive money they offer several times over. In the case of the NASA handrail clamp assembly challenge, the total prize money offered was just $2,000. But it attracted 474 entries. Had NASA been paying market rates to even just the top 10 percent of these entrants for the time they spent designing their submissions, its costs would have been far higher.
In general, crowdsourcing platforms inspire innovation by putting problems in front of more eyes. And Challenge.gov is already working in this fashion. Aaron Foss, who won a 2012 Federal Trade Commission challenge that sought new methods of helping consumers block telemarketing robocalls, told Forbes that he "never would have worked on the robocall problem if not for the challenge." Similarly, a NASA survey of approximately 3,000 challenge participants found that 81 percent had never previously responded to government requests for proposals.
In addition to more eyes, crowdsourcing platforms like Challenge.gov tend to attract fresh eyes—i.e., people with skills and knowledge that may be useful in a given domain, but who aren't specialists in that area. Because they aren't familiar with which types of approaches should yield potential solutions, they often pursue unconventional methods that turn out to also be effective.
In essence, then, crowdsourcing is a supremely democratic mechanism: It starts with the assumption that everyone has something potentially valuable to contribute. Voting, jury service, and other forms of civic engagement, like commenting on proposed government rules, make this assumption as well, but they're all far more proscriptive in the ways they permit individuals to perform those actions. When you vote, you must follow the same basic set of processes as everyone else.
What makes participating in a Challenge.gov contest so unique in terms of civic engagement is how much latitude it gives to participants. Like voting and jury service, it's an explicitly collective activity that can help instill a sense of being a part of something greater than oneself. But it's also explicitly geared to individuals. It asks people to identify areas of interest to them where they think their unique skills and attributes may help them provide a solution that will ultimately be of value to all. In this regard, it both plays to our growing preference for highly autonomous and narrowly tailored experiences and promotes comity as well. We're all in this together, America, trying to invent the wearable alcohol biosensor!
And of course there's the lure of cash prizes. On the one hand, market-based civic engagement may not seem like civic engagement at all. But the federal government already spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year on procurement. Shifting some of that activity to a platform that is more open, transparent, and competitive than traditional channels will likely cost less, not more. And a greater number of participants will have a shot at the money that does get spent.
In the end, the democratic promise of Challenge.gov is so great it almost seems like a mistake to leave it in the hands of the government. What it needs is a Jeff Bezos or a Pierre Omidyar at the helm, someone with the expertise and the capital to take it from 100 challenges a year to 100 challenges a day. Or perhaps we should make it a self-directed contest: The first person who figures out how to triple Challenge.gov's traffic wins a million dollars.
Related: Should the Government Regulate Paid Dinner Parties?
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]]>The latest Reason-Rupe poll found that 72 percent of Americans are concerned about their state and local government's ability to fund public employee pensions as currently promised. However, only 39 percent say they are "very" concerned while another 33 percent are only "somewhat concerned."
This is reflected in how Americans prioritize dealing with public employee pension reform. Thirty-five percent say public pension reform ought to be a "top priority" for government while another 41 percent say it should be "an important but lower priority" reform. In other words, Americans are moderately concerned about public employee pensions, but have not yet been persuaded it's a crisis.
Part of the reason is that few Americans are aware public employee pensions are estimated to be underfunded up to $4 trillion dollars. (See here and here). To put this in perspective, this estimate exceeds the total amount of money the United States federal government spent in 2014—$3.5 trillion dollars.
Not surprisingly, older Americans, and are thus thinking more about retirement, and fiscal conservatives are more likely to say pension reform should be a priority.
For instance, 32 percent of private sector employees think pension reform ought to be a top priority, compared to 44 percent of retirees. Prioritization steadily increases with age, for instance, 27 percent of college-aged Americans want government to prioritize pension reform, compared to 34 percent among those 30 to 44 years old, up to 44 percent among those over 65.
Tea partiers are also 10 points more likely to prioritize pension reform—and this cannot be explained by age. Indeed, even younger tea partiers prioritize pension reform. Forty-three percent of tea party supporters want pension reform to be a top priority compared to 33 percent of non-supporters. Find more discussion of what the public thinks about public pension reform here.
The Reason-Rupe national telephone poll, executed by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, conducted live interviews with 1003 adults on cell phones (501) and landlines (502) January 29-February 2, 2015. The poll's margin of error is +/-3.8%. Full poll results and methodology can be found here, including poll toplines (pdf) and crosstabs (xls).
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]]>The latest Reason-Rupe poll finds that nearly 8 in 10 Americans think that the public should be allowed to vote on increases to public employees pensions and benefits. Support is largely non-partisan with 73 percent of Democrats, 81 percent of independents, and 80 percent of Republicans favoring such votes.
Solid majorities of both public (61%) and private (82%) sector workers also favor allowing the public to vote on such increases. Nevertheless, as one might expect, public employees themselves are more opposed to such a proposal. Indeed government workers are more than twice as likely as private sector workers to oppose allowing the public vote on public pension increases (37 to 16 percent). Find more discussion of what the public thinks about public pension reform here.
The Reason-Rupe national telephone poll, executed by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, conducted live interviews with 1003 adults on cell phones (501) and landlines (502) January 29-February 2, 2015. The poll's margin of error is +/-3.8%. Full poll results and methodology can be found here, including poll toplines (pdf) and crosstabs (xls).
The post 78 Percent of Americans Say Voters Should Get to Vote on Government Employee Benefit Increases appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Remember that number-cruncher extraordinnaire Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight blog for The New York Times became the go-to spot for electoral prediction and numerical analysis in 2012? Well, Silver has since moved on to his own broader venture (still called FiveThirtyEight), leaving the Old Gray Lady lagging in the fashionable (if scarequote-worthy) "data-driven journalism" space. The paper plugged that gap this spring with a new mini-pod called "The Upshot," edited by economics columnist David Leonhardt.
Some of us have been skeptical about the rise in fact-checking, "explanatory" journalism, arguing that it too often attempts to bathe a solidly statist bias in the holy waters of above-it-all empiricism. As if to live out that theory, here are the first two paragraphs of a David Leonhardt Upshot piece today:
If you wanted to bestow the grandiose title of "most successful organization in modern history," you would struggle to find a more obviously worthy nominee than the federal government of the United States.
In its earliest stirrings, it established a lasting and influential democracy. Since then, it has helped defeat totalitarianism (more than once), established the world's currency of choice, sent men to the moon, built the Internet, nurtured the world's largest economy, financed medical research that saved millions of lives and welcomed eager immigrants from around the world.
This is a telltale exercise in scoreboard-pointing, responsibility-assumption, and blurry timelines. For example, if a measurable chunk of the success of the United States is due to the revolutionary, limited-government architecture of the Constitution, which provided a framework protecting the non-governmental pursuit of happiness (including commerce), then that design victory technically belongs not to the current U.S. government, but to its immediate precursor, no? If the majority of America's globe-topping GDP–which created the conditions for the dollar becoming a reserve currency–emanates from the private sector, is it numerically sensical to assign primary responsibility to the much less productive sector that taxes and regulates the Apple Computers of the world? And though the raw numbers may be higher today, the continent was more legally welcoming to immigrants under British, French, and Spanish rule than it has been over the past century under the Yanks.
Then there are the U.S. government's many egregious failures, ranging from slavery to colonialism to internment to pointless war to mass incarceration. In fairness, Leonhardt's column is actually about government screw-uppery and the need to correct it; the we're-number-one stuff is more of a sweetener to make the medicine go down easier:
[P]rogressives in particular will need to grapple with these failures if they want to persuade Americans to support an active government.
The fact that such a sentence still needs to be written 45 years after Charles Peters founded an entire public-policy journalism genre around the notion of intellectually rigorous, sacred cow-slaying policy analysis from the left, speaks volumes about how far the Democratic/media center of gravity has drifted. As I wrote in a May 2013 critique of the new New Republic,
An entire valuable if flawed era in American journalism and liberalism has indeed come to a close. The reformist urge to cross-examine Democratic policy ideas has fizzled out precisely at the time when those ideas are both ascendant and as questionable as ever. Progressivism has reverted to a form that would have been recognizable to Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann when they founded The New Republic a century ago: an intellectual collaborator in the "responsible" exercise of state power.
If your starting point is that the U.S. government is the most successful organization in modern history, there are many possible adjectives to describe your journalism. "Data-driven" isn't one of them.
Hat tip: Rowland Stebbins.
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]]>Philip K. Howard, the author of 1995's influential treatise against bureaucracy and stultifying regulations, The Death of Common Sense, has a new book out. It's called The Rule of Nobody and it's an important discussion of "automatic government" that combines the worst elements of technocracy and mindless do-gooderism; it's a demented version of "the rule of law." I talk about it in my latest Daily Beast column. Snippets:
"Under current orthodoxy," writes Howard, "the ideal government runs like a software program: Input the facts and out comes a decision." While stressing that such a "technocratic model…has many plausible virtues" and evolved as a way to combat favoritism and partisan whimsy, he convincingly argues that contemporary government has removed virtually all scope for human intervention and responsibility. The result isn't a fairer, more predictable form of government, but "a form of tyranny," says Howard. "The fact that the tyrant is a bureaucratic blob instead of Birmingham police chief Bull Connor means that our freedom is smothered instead of subjugated at the point of a weapon."
Putting more and more decisions—especially spending decisions—on a sort of autopilot is good for pols, of course, and for favored constituencies.
It's clear why politicians like "mandatory" spending: It absolves them of any real responsibility while also shoveling heaping servings of cash to high-turnout voters. For all the rancor in D.C., neither Democrats nor Republicans show the least bit of interest in seriously tackling entitlement reform or shifting "mandatory" spending into "discretionary" funding, where it would come up for an annual and on-the-record vote.
Of course, the problem is that putting increasing amounts of spending, including increasing amounts of automatic increases in spending, on autopilot means that governments can't deal with changed circumstances. Does anyone seriously think that the need for and structure of Social Security—created during the Great Depression, for god's sake, and at a time when there were 160 workers per beneficiary—is relevant to 21st-century America, in which households headed by seniors have 47 times the wealth of households headed by people under 35 years old?
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]]>"This is the most transparent administration in history," President Obama has said. The new Reason-Rupe poll, however, finds 57 percent of Americans disagree with the president's statement. Only 37 percent of Americans think the Obama administration is the most transparent in history.
Eighty-one percent of Republicans, 61 percent of independents, and 34 percent of Democrats say the Obama administration is not the most transparent administration in history.
As income rises, Americans become more skeptical of President Obama's transparency assertion. About half of Americans making less than $50,000 a year disagree with the president's promise compared to 68% of Americans making more than $90,000 a year disagree.
A majority (54 percent) of Hispanics disagree that the current administration is the most transparent while 41 percent agree. Nearly two-thirds of white Americans disagree while more than two-thirds of African-Americans agree that Obama's administration is most transparent.
A plurality of young Americans 18-24 agree with President Obama on his administration's transparency, but 60 percent of older millennials (35-34) disagree. Roughly 6 in 10 Americans over 35 also disagree the Obama administration is the most transparent in history.
Nationwide telephone poll conducted Dec 4-8 2013 interviewed 1011 adults on both mobile (506) and landline (505) phones, with a margin of error +/- 3.7%. Princeton Survey Research Associates International executed the nationwide Reason-Rupe survey. Columns may not add up to 100% due to rounding. Full poll results, detailed tables, and methodology found here. Sign up for notifications of new releases of the Reason-Rupe poll here.
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]]>"This is the most transparent administration in history," President Obama has said. The new Reason-Rupe poll, however, finds 57 percent of Americans disagree with the president's statement. Only 37 percent of Americans think the Obama administration is the most transparent in history.
Eighty-one percent of Republicans, 61 percent of independents, and 34 percent of Democrats say the Obama administration is not the most transparent administration in history.
As income rises, Americans become more skeptical of President Obama's transparency assertion. About half of Americans making less than $50,000 a year disagree with the president's promise compared to 68% of Americans making more than $90,000 a year disagree.
A majority (54 percent) of Hispanics disagree that the current administration is the most transparent while 41 percent agree. Nearly two-thirds of white Americans disagree while more than two-thirds of African-Americans agree that Obama's administration is most transparent.
A plurality of young Americans 18-24 agree with President Obama on his administration's transparency, but 60 percent of older millennials (35-34) disagree. Roughly 6 in 10 Americans over 35 also disagree the Obama administration is the most transparent in history.
Nationwide telephone poll conducted Dec 4-8 2013 interviewed 1011 adults on both mobile (506) and landline (505) phones, with a margin of error +/- 3.7%. Princeton Survey Research Associates International executed the nationwide Reason-Rupe survey. Columns may not add up to 100% due to rounding. Full poll results, detailed tables, and methodology found here. Sign up for notifications of new releases of the Reason-Rupe poll here.
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]]>In schools, the interests of unionized teachers trump the needs of students. In local government, the compensation given to unionized workers often reflects their political clout, not the pay and benefits necessary to keep them on the job. In the Legislature, public employees are so powerful that union lobbyists have been known to openly browbeat lawmakers who don't do their bidding.
So how can Californians loosen this union chokehold? By adopting a reform that's both better for governance and fairer to union workers than the status quo.
The reform, known by the shorthand of "paycheck protection," typically requires unions to have the permission of individual members before their dues are used for anything but collective bargaining.
Six states have adopted such a reform. Easily the most liberal of the six is Washington, where voters adopted this requirement as part of a popular campaign-reform push in 1992 that was opposed by unions but supported by many union members.
What followed was a relentless 15-year campaign of subterfuge and sabotage by unions and their Democratic allies in Washington's legislature and court system. But in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for implementation of the law following its original intent.
Since then, the politics of the state have evolved in interesting ways. While voters embraced gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana in 2012 initiatives, they are increasingly represented by more pragmatic and less ideological Democrats. In spring 2012, such Democrats teamed with minority Republican senators to pass a fiscally conservative state budget. Later in the year, two Democrats decided to caucus with minority Republicans in a coalition running the state Senate in an attempt to force a more centrist course for Washington, which has had Democratic governors continuously since 1985.
Perhaps these moderating developments would have happened without paycheck protection. But they would have been less likely. In Washington state politics, the same as everywhere, money talks.
There is a good chance that California would have a similar evolution with paycheck protection in place. The social liberalism of most residents would still influence policy. But on fiscal, budget and compensation questions, if the California Teachers Association, the California Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees International Union could only throw their weight around using the dues of members who wanted such activism, government policy would reflect less union-first dogmatism.
Unfortunately, the last time reformers brought paycheck protection before California voters — via Proposition 32 on the November 2012 ballot — they didn't trust voters enough to just give them a straightforward up-or-down vote on whether union members should have a say on the use of their dues. Instead, the initiative included legally dubious provisions restricting corporate campaign spending that gave critics ample ammunition to depict it as a deceptive power play.
The measure lost in a landslide. But state voters came fairly close to passing cleaner, simpler versions of paycheck protection in 1998 and 2005.
The appalling story of former Los Angeles Unified elementary schoolteacher Mark Berndt would make a simple version of paycheck protection much easier to pass in 2014 or 2016. After evidence turned up indicating Berndt had been feeding sperm to his students, district officials had no choice but to pay Berndt $35,000 to get him to quit because of job protections demanded and won by United Teachers Los Angeles.
When the Berndt case triggered a public backlash, the state Legislature earlier this year passed a teacher-discipline measure that was billed as a smart way to keep perverts away from students. Instead, it actually gave teachers even more job protections.
Nothing better illustrates the unions' chokehold on Sacramento than this. If the CTA and the CFT had less money for political fights, maybe, just maybe, the public would have gotten its way — and parents wouldn't have cause to think that state lawmakers worry more about protecting predatory teachers than the students of such teachers.
This article originally appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune.
The post Fixing California: How to Loosen the Union Chokehold appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>We all know how intrusive, bloated and expensive the federal government is—the not-really-a-shutdown provided us a glimpse of just how far the beast on the Potomac has extended its tentacles into everyday life. But local government often flies under the radar, spreading its reach, hassling its subjects and outliving its usefulness while we remain largely unaware of the growing problem. It's the attack of the zombie government agencies, and victories against them are rare and hard-fought.
At Bloomberg, Tim Jones and John McCormick write:
Across the country, there are 38,266 special purpose districts, or government units distinct from cities, counties and schools, each with its own ability to raise money. Since President Ronald Reagan declared in his 1981 inaugural address that government "is not the solution to our problem—government is the problem," their numbers have jumped 32 percent.
Among such bodies is "a mosquito abatement district in suburban Chicago that spends three-quarters of its budget on pay and benefits—and more on pensions than insecticide. The districts have been around since the 1920s, when they were created to fight malaria." Illinois, overall, is tits-deep in these pointless but expensive local agencies, with "almost 7,000 units that tax, spend and drive up debt in a state struggling to pay off vendors and cover almost $100 billion of unfunded pension liabilities." The agencies often duplicate each other's efforts, sharing overlapping responsibilities and jursdictions—and still not accomplishing their assigned (and often archaic) tasks, while failing to do so with full staffing and spectacular costs.
Spectacular costs? The South Cook County Mosquito Abatement District spent $2.3 million last year, most on salaries, pensions and the like, with only $100,000 going to pesticide. The Wheaton Sanitary District pays its head $146,000 per year—more than Illinois' lieutenant governor, treasurer, or comptroller take home.
The special districts are almost impossible to kill, since they have entrenched defendes in the form of patronage hires and their own lobbyists, while most taxpayers don't know they exist.
These seemingly unkillable government bodies do take an occasional head shot.
In Lee County, Florida, the Lee Soil and Water Conservation District, established in 1947 as a New Deal-era effort to keep the Oklahoma dust bowl from replicating itself in…Florida? Anyway, decades later, it had been reduced to expending its budget on sprinkler inspections at a cost of $500 each. As a result, reports WINK News, "An agency in local government has abolished itself, because its directors realized: it had nothing to do. So, the Lee Soil and Water Conservation District has gone out of existence after more than 60 years."
But…There was more to it than that. More in the form of years of hard work as local libertarians worked to win a majority on the District board and to rein it in. Writing in the News-Press, one of those activists, Kim Hawk, describes the process:
It was springtime in 2004 when the federal, state and local budgets were spiraling out of control and Jack Tanner, at the tender age of 70, was looking for a way that even one person could make a difference.
He set his sights on the Lee County Soil and Water Conservation District board, got himself appointed to fill a vacancy. Come election time, he got elected and realized that after several 4-1 votes against the idea he needed help.
In the spring of 2006 Jack asked fellow libertarians Tom Clark and myself to join him and create a 3-2 majority. I was lucky to run unopposed and Tom won by a solid margin, setting the stage for the first big showdown. …
As layers of government over the years rendered the districts obsolete, they became bureaucracies in search of a mission. Many districts, including Lee's, decided their new mission was to offer "free" inspections of lawn sprinklers. No adjustments or repairs were allowed. Jack Tanner was furious when he realized the cost of each visit was $500, consuming $200,000 in taxpayer money in Lee County every year.
Jan. 11, 2007 dawned clear and cold. I was nervous and excited as I entered my first meeting and found the room full of important looking bureaucrats. The board moved quickly to the discussion of the termination of two employees and the sprinkler check-up service. Amid vehement protests and declarations of retribution we voted 3-2 to end the program.
You'll notice that victory was in 2007 and final dissolution came last month, in 2013. The years in between were spent returning money to taxpayers, successfully battling to end other sprinkler-inspection programs and fighting to have the District dissolved so nobody else could win control and restart the patronage machine. The whole process took nine years.
One down, 38,265 special purpose districts to go.
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]]>Dean Barrow was leaving Madeo last night, flanked by personal security, when he was asked if he had any advice for the U.S. government to avoid another shutdown.
His response—"You have to switch to the parliamentary system."
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]]>But that moment of possible progress has turned out to be more complicated than many had hoped. The first round of audits will be chiefly conducted by the American Correctional Association (ACA), the very organization that has been criticized over the years for failing to identify and address safety problems at prisons across the country.
The ACA, based in Virginia, performs an array of services for the corrections industry: it provides training for guards and other officials, hosts conferences, and lobbies in Washington. But it is perhaps best known for its accreditation service. Prison officials pay the organization to evaluate facilities on issues such as inmate healthcare, sanitation, food service, and personnel training. ACA's blessing is sought, in part, to help prisons defend against inmate lawsuits.
The post National Prison Rape Audit to Be Led by Prison Workers' Group appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Calling policy wonks, Golden State taxpayers, and all the ships at sea!
Reason is happy to bring you a livestreamed conversation about California's fiscal woes and how to move forward into a sustainable future.
Reason Foundation's Vice President of Policy, Adrian Moore, will talk with former San Diego City Councilman Carl DeMaio, who pushed through S.D.'s historic pension reform plan last year, lost a close election to become mayor, and is now heading up Reason Foundation's California Reform Agenda.
The action starts right here at Hit & Run at 7.15pm ET/4.15pm PT.
See you then.
The post Can California Survive?: Livestream w Carl DeMaio and Adrian Moore, Tonight at 7.15pm ET/4.15pm PT appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sunday, November 25, 2012 marks the 10th anniversary of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which pulled together nearly two dozen federal agencies and departments under the control of new, single entity. Its responsibilities include running the US Border Patrol, the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, and FEMA.
DHS is the third biggest cabinet agency, but are we better off because of its existence?
Here are three reasons to get rid of DHS.
1. It's unnecessary. In the months immediately following September 11 attacks in 2001, President George W. Bush initially resisted calls to create a new high-level bureaucracy that would be laid on top of current activities. He was right to recognize that coordinating existing agencies would have been smarter and better. Unfortunately, he caved in to pressure to create a massive new department.
2. It's ineffective. To read the titles of Government Accountability Office (GAO) analyses of Homeland Security is to be reminded constantly that DHS is never quite on top of its game. Recent reports include "DHS Requires More Disciplined Investment Management to Help Meet Mission Needs," "DHS Needs Better Project Information and Coordination Among Four Overlapping Grant Programs," and "Agriculture Inspection Program Has Made Some Improvements, But Management Challenges Persist."
3. It's expensive. Last year, Homeland Security spent a whopping $60 billion, a figure that will doubtlessly increase in coming years. The construction of its new headquarters – the single-largest projectever undertaken by The General Services Administration – will cost at least $4 billion and is already years behind on schedule since breaking ground in 2009.
Since it's the holiday season, here's a bonus reason to get rid of the Department of Homeland Security: It also runs the Transportation Security Administration, whose nasty reputation for manhandling innocent travelers is only slightly more annoying than its massive and undeserved growth in personnel and cost over the past decade.
About 2.30 minutes.
Produced by Meredith Bragg and Nick Gillespie, who also narrates.
Bonus link: Glenn Instapundit Reynolds foresaw all this a decade ago.
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The post 3 Reasons to Kill the Dept. of Homeland Security appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Only a few groups reach the majority threshold supporting the elimination of the state income tax, including Republicans (61 percent), households making between $75,000-$90,000 (54 percent), and small business owners (52 percent).
Instead, Californians are considering further state tax increases with Prop 30, currently too close to call, but slightly in the lead, and Prop 38, currently trailing. However, if those tax increases fail to close the deficit, three quarters of Californians say spending cuts must be next.
Sixty-two percent of Californians favor cutting down the size of the state government workforce to help balance the budget. They also favor (77 percent) asking public employees to contribute more toward their pensions and health care benefits. Moreover, 56 percent favor rolling state spending per capita back to their 2000 levels, adjusted for inflation.
Californians are also open to privatizing some state government functions to help deal with the budget deficit. For instance, 59 percent favor allowing private companies to operate state parks. At the local level, 63 percent favor selling government assets like golf courses, convention centers, and parking lots to private companies, and 60 percent favor outsourcing services like trash collection and road maintenance to private companies.
Californians don't want to lower taxes but are hesitant to raise them as well. Although Californians are concerned about spending cuts that could harm education, they are open to reforming the public sector work force, and outsourcing some government services to private companies to balance the budget.
California telephone poll conducted October 11th-15th on both landline and cell phones, 696 adults, margin of error +/- 3.8%. The sample also includes 508 likely voters, with a margin of error of +/- 5.1%. Columns may not add up to 100% due to rounding. Full methodology can be found here. Full poll results found here.
The post 58 Percent of Californians Oppose Eliminating the State Income Tax, 36 Percent Favor appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Only a few groups reach the majority threshold supporting the elimination of the state income tax, including Republicans (61 percent), households making between $75,000-$90,000 (54 percent), and small business owners (52 percent).
Instead, Californians are considering further state tax increases with Prop 30, currently too close to call, but slightly in the lead, and Prop 38, currently trailing. However, if those tax increases fail to close the deficit, three quarters of Californians say spending cuts must be next.
Sixty-two percent of Californians favor cutting down the size of the state government workforce to help balance the budget. They also favor (77 percent) asking public employees to contribute more toward their pensions and health care benefits. Moreover, 56 percent favor rolling state spending per capita back to their 2000 levels, adjusted for inflation.
Californians are also open to privatizing some state government functions to help deal with the budget deficit. For instance, 59 percent favor allowing private companies to operate state parks. At the local level, 63 percent favor selling government assets like golf courses, convention centers, and parking lots to private companies, and 60 percent favor outsourcing services like trash collection and road maintenance to private companies.
Californians don't want to lower taxes but are hesitant to raise them as well. Although Californians are concerned about spending cuts that could harm education, they are open to reforming the public sector work force, and outsourcing some government services to private companies to balance the budget.
California telephone poll conducted October 11th-15th on both landline and cell phones, 696 adults, margin of error +/- 3.8%. The sample also includes 508 likely voters, with a margin of error of +/- 5.1%. Columns may not add up to 100% due to rounding. Full methodology can be found here. Full poll results found here.
The post 58 Percent of Californians Oppose Eliminating the State Income Tax, 36 Percent Favor appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Like Wisconsin, Californians are largely Democratic and are favorable toward President Obama. At the same time, both Californians and Wisconsinites have strikingly similar attitudes regarding reforming public sector unions. These results suggest that Californians may also be open to Wisconsin-like government reforms.
Two-thirds of Californians and Wisconsinites think government employees receive better retirement benefits than workers with similar jobs in the private sector. Even as a plurality of Wisconsin voters thought public employee unions have too much power when negotiating their pay and benefits with elected officials, a majority of Californians agree.
Pluralities in both states think public sector unions have done more to hurt the state and local economy than help (42 percent in California, 36 percent in Wisconsin).
These shared perceptions of public sector unions may explain why three-fourths of voters in both states favor requiring public employees to contribute more toward their own pensions and health care benefits. Moreover, equal percentages of both states' voters approve of transitioning new government employees from guaranteed pension payments during retirement to 401(k)-style accounts based on the amount the worker saves for retirement plus investment returns. Half of Wisconsinites and 51 percent of Californians also think the government should not begin disbursing lifetime retirement benefits until government workers turn 65.
One potential difference between the two states is over voter approval of government worker pay increases. Seventy-four percent of Californians think "taxpayers should get to vote on increases to government employee pensions and benefits". Rasmussen asked a similar question, but worded differently, in March 2011, finding 48 percent thought government union contracts increasing pension benefits should require voter approval, 39 percent were opposed.
When we released the Wisconsin poll results in June, some were surprised by the strong support for government union reform despite the +10 Obama vote margin over Republican candidate Mitt Romney, and a +3 favorability advantage for Obama. Yet in California, Democrats enjoy an even stronger advantage; Obama leads Romney 53 percent to 38 percent and has a +15 favorability advantage.
Reason-Rupe California and Wisconsin polls demonstrate that reforming how we compensate government workers has moved beyond partisanship and voters are eager for elected officials to rein in public sector worker costs.
The California Reason-Rupe poll was conducted October 11-15th 2012 on landline and cell phones of 696 respondents, including 508 likely voters with a +/-5% margin of error. The Wisconsin Reason-Rupe poll was conducted May 14-18th 2012 on landline and cell phones of 708 respondents, including 609 likely voters with a +/- 4% margin of error. Full results and methodology can be found here.
The post Like Wisconsin, California May Be Ready to Reform Government Unions appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Like Wisconsin, Californians are largely Democratic and are favorable toward President Obama. At the same time, both Californians and Wisconsinites have strikingly similar attitudes regarding reforming public sector unions. These results suggest that Californians may also be open to Wisconsin-like government reforms.
Two-thirds of Californians and Wisconsinites think government employees receive better retirement benefits than workers with similar jobs in the private sector. Even as a plurality of Wisconsin voters thought public employee unions have too much power when negotiating their pay and benefits with elected officials, a majority of Californians agree.
Pluralities in both states think public sector unions have done more to hurt the state and local economy than help (42 percent in California, 36 percent in Wisconsin).
These shared perceptions of public sector unions may explain why three-fourths of voters in both states favor requiring public employees to contribute more toward their own pensions and health care benefits. Moreover, equal percentages of both states' voters approve of transitioning new government employees from guaranteed pension payments during retirement to 401(k)-style accounts based on the amount the worker saves for retirement plus investment returns. Half of Wisconsinites and 51 percent of Californians also think the government should not begin disbursing lifetime retirement benefits until government workers turn 65.
One potential difference between the two states is over voter approval of government worker pay increases. Seventy-four percent of Californians think "taxpayers should get to vote on increases to government employee pensions and benefits". Rasmussen asked a similar question, but worded differently, in March 2011, finding 48 percent thought government union contracts increasing pension benefits should require voter approval, 39 percent were opposed.
When we released the Wisconsin poll results in June, some were surprised by the strong support for government union reform despite the +10 Obama vote margin over Republican candidate Mitt Romney, and a +3 favorability advantage for Obama. Yet in California, Democrats enjoy an even stronger advantage; Obama leads Romney 53 percent to 38 percent and has a +15 favorability advantage.
Reason-Rupe California and Wisconsin polls demonstrate that reforming how we compensate government workers has moved beyond partisanship and voters are eager for elected officials to rein in public sector worker costs.
The California Reason-Rupe poll was conducted October 11-15th 2012 on landline and cell phones of 696 respondents, including 508 likely voters with a +/-5% margin of error. The Wisconsin Reason-Rupe poll was conducted May 14-18th 2012 on landline and cell phones of 708 respondents, including 609 likely voters with a +/- 4% margin of error. Full results and methodology can be found here.
The post Like Wisconsin, California May Be Ready to Reform Government Unions appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>So my family and I just came back from a business trip to Brooklyn's Department of Motor Vehicles. Each of the three employees we dealt with were as pleasant and helpful as can be; there were no surprise setbacks along the way, we walked out of there with both of our goals accomplished (converting my D.C. license and registration into legitimate New Yorkese, for the low low price of $265), and the whole process took…five goddamned hours.
This, it turns out, is totally normal, based on the scientific evidence of my two colleagues who have also enjoyed the Brooklyn DMV. "I was there for 5 hours Friday just to change my license from Virginia one to New York," one wrote, prophetically, before I departed. "I once spent 7 hours at that same DMV getting my license switched over," another wrote at the halfway mark of my experience. "Godspeed."
The DMV-horror story is such a libertarian staple by now that it almost feels unfair. Here, let's take a walk through some past Reason headlines:
* "D.C.'s Deadly DMV"
* "Smiles Outlawed: DMV Makes Life Even More Miserable"
* "Hell Can't Be Worse Than the DMV"
And don't forget this Reason.tv classic:
You don't have to be a libertarian to shudder at DMV horror stories, because you have likely experienced them yourself (unless you are one of these apparently lucky people who also happen to like commenting at Bloggingheads.tv). The more salient question is, why do we put up with this? And why do politicians bore us with any of their other crap while a monopoly city service sputters on with all the efficiency (but 200 times the price!) of a Soviet Bloc post office? (A similar argument could be made about the grotesquely inefficient system for allocating jury duty, as Greg Beato wrote for us last year.)
You used to see (or is it that I used to see?) a lot more concern on the liberal side of the aisle for reforming taxpayer-funded institutions that failed to deliver on their basic promises, and even some exploration of options (such as privatization) for getting government out of businesses it always seems to do poorly. I have on my desk the third edition (circa 1976) of Inside the System, a collection of Washington Monthly articles devoted mostly to figuring out why government doesn't work well. As Charles Peters (who founded the mag in 1969) and James Fallows wrote in the introduction,
The government's struggle to reform itself has been the continuing political story of the 1970's, but often the story has a familiar ending. No sooner has an agency been set up to save the environment, deliver the mails, cure the sick, or discover new sources of energy than it begins to behave like the many other government agencies, which were created years ago in similar bursts of enthusiasm but quickly crossed the threshhold into bureaucratic ossification.
Can you imagine sentiments like that emanating from the modern left? Instead, even when celebrated "wonks" like Peter Orszag suggest privatizing the Post Office once they're safely out of power, it comes with such comparative throat-clearing as "Those who believe in the usefulness of government must be vigilant about making sure all its activities are vital ones, since the unnecessary ones undermine public confidence."
Screw public confidence; let's start with not wasting everyone's time and money, just because you can't let go of services that AAA would perform 10 times better.
The post Five Wasted Hours in Michael Bloomberg's DMV appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>MILWAUKEE — Democratic Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett is campaigning against outside money flowing into Wisconsin's recall election, but in his home city Friday morning, he turned to a high-profile outsider to energize his troops.
Former Democratic President Bill Clinton, in from New York City for the day, stumped on Barrett's behalf and touted the Milwaukee mayor as someone who can unite the state to move it forward.
Clinton's speech began immediately after an embrace by the two men, and continued as the former president embraced Barrett's governing style.
"Cooperation works," Clinton said. "Constant conflict is a dead-dang loser."
Barrett's campaign is seeking to invoke class warfare in the election, saying Republican Gov. Scott Walker, the man the mayor is hoping to replace in the June 5 gubernatorial recall election, favors the interests of the rich and powerful over regular workers.
Clinton lashed out at Walker, saying common sense calls for "shared prosperity" in good times and "shared sacrifice" in tough times.
The mayor complained that Walker "has done a wonderful job of making the wealthiest people the happiest people."
While boasting of Barrett's ability to involve all groups in Wisconsin's electorate, Clinton had sharp words for some more conservative folks.
The former president said that if tea party-types like those backing Walker had their way, "there never would've been a U.S. Constitution." He went on to talk about the horse trading in which the Founding Fathers engaged to write the Constitution.
"We would not even be here today if they (tea party-types) had had their way," Clinton said.
The mayor cast the election as critical for the Badger State's future.
"It's for you. It's for your kids. It's for your grandkids," the mayor said. "It's for our state."
The former president also touched on his 2003 stump speech against the recall of California Gov. Gray Davis, saying if the process came to fruition, it would "create a circumstance where nobody ever makes a hard decision again."
For Barrett, Clinton makes an exception.
"Normally, I'm against recall elections," Clinton said, adding this is a special occasion. "It's the only way to avoid a disastrous course."
The Republican Party of Wisconsin issued a statement during the rally claiming Clinton's visit is a distraction.
"Clinton's arrival is clearly meant to provide cover for President (Barack) Obama's refusal to campaign in Wisconsin, given that today the president will be attending three campaign events a stone's throw away from Minneapolis, and then three more in Chicago," said state GOP spokesman Ben Sparks.
This article originally appeared at WisconsinReporer.com.
The post Impeached Prez: Recall Gov! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Approximately 4 minutes.
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]]>"Some guy came up to me said, 'Are you John Stossel?…I hope you die soon,'" recounts Fox Business Network host and Reason contributor John Stossel. Thankfully Stossel found a more civil audience when he stopped by Reason's Washington, DC office to promote his new book No, They Can't: Why Government Fails But Individuals Succeed.
During a lively Q&A session, Stossel took questions from the audience about his book, his time as a consumer reporter, and the power of the internet to communicate libertarian ideas.
About 6.30 minutes.'¨
Camera by Joshua Swain, Meredith Bragg and Jim Epstein. Edited by Swain.
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The post John Stossel on Journalism, How he became Libertarian & his book "No They Can't" appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>April 21, 2012 marks the fifth annual Record Store Day, a nation-wide project to promote struggling brick-and-mortar music shops. Across the country, independent stores offer exclusive, one-of-a-kind recordings as a way to bring customers through the door.
"It is the busiest day of the year," says Matt Moffatt, co-owner of Washington, D.C.'s Smash Records, a shop that sells new and used CDs and vinyl LPs, along with clothing, posters, t-shirts, vintage clothing, and more.
But now the powers that be in the nation's capital have decided that record stores must get second-hand dealer business licenses, which cost a lot of money and have onerous reporting requirements. Store owners such as Moffatt would have to report every new piece they put up for sale to the police, allow the cops to verify it's not stolen, and get information about all customers who buy used goods. Failure to comply would mean incurring massive fines of thousands of dollars a days. (Read more here and here).
"Basically," says Moffatt, "they want us to get a pawn shop license."
Local business groups such as the Adams Morgan Partnership are pushing back but the future of stores such as Smash Records is far from clear. "It just seems so heavy-handed, it could easily destroy businesses like mine," says Moffatt.
About 3.45 minutes. Produced by Meredith Bragg and hosted by Kennedy; co-written by Nick Gillespie.
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The post How City Hall is F*cking "Record Store Day"! appeared first on Reason.com.
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