In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman assess the Justice Department's nonsensical antitrust case against Apple before turning their attention to Donald Trump's $464 million bond payment deadline in his New York civil fraud case.
00:41—Bonkers antitrust suit against Apple
20:27—Congress passes $1.2 trillion spending package
29:54—Weekly Listener Question
42:20—Trump contests $464 million bond payment in New York civil fraud case
50:52—This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"The Absurd Apple Antitrust Lawsuit," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"European Union's AI Law Will Heavily Regulate a Technology Lawmakers Don't Understand," by Varad Raigaonkar
"Antitrust's Greatest Hits," by David B. Kopel and Joseph Bast
"Competition, Not Antitrust, Is Humbling the Tech Giants," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"Don't Let E.U. Bureaucrats Design Americans' Tech," by Jennifer Huddleston
"Joe Biden's Endless River of Debt and Regulation," by Nick Gillespie
"Marjorie Taylor Greene Introduces Measure To Oust Mike Johnson as House Speaker," by Joe Lancaster
"A GOP Plan To Raise the Retirement Age Reveals How Unserious Washington Is About Social Security," by Eric Boehm
"The National Debt Is a National Security Issue," by Eric Boehm
"'Emergency' Spending Is Out of Control," by Eric Boehm
"3 Reasons To Abolish Social Security Now!" by Nick Gillespie
"3 Reasons to Fix Social Security Now!" by Nick Gillespie and Meredith Bragg
"Brian Riedl: Who Bankrupted Us More—Trump or Biden?" by Nick Gillespie
"Science Fiction Fans Are Fighting About Politics. It's Not the End of the Universe." by Peter Suderman
Nick Gillespie's take on X on Trump's latest award:
And yet I continue to place out of the money in the annual NICK GILLESPIE AWARDS held at the Nick Gillespie Apartment and voted on by Nick Gillespie. Kudos, Donald, kudos. pic.twitter.com/nF0tB1vac6
— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) March 25, 2024
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post Biden's Antitrust Case Against Apple Is Truly Stupid appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Get ready. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear former President Donald Trump's presidential immunity claim that he is protected from prosecution for his role in plotting to overturn the 2020 election results, and has set oral arguments for April. The Court's term ends in June, so hearing arguments in April means it is very likely a decision will be released before the justices leave.
"The justices scheduled arguments for the week of April 22 and said proceedings in the trial court would remain frozen, handing at least an interim victory to Mr. Trump," reported The New York Times. "His litigation strategy in all of the criminal prosecutions against him has consisted, in large part, of trying to slow things down."
If he does not have immunity, a criminal trial will follow, probably over the summer—during the height of election season.
Earlier this month, the Court also heard a case on whether states such as Colorado are within their rights to remove Trump from ballots—the 14th Amendment argument. It is expected to issue a ruling soon.
Surely this time will be different: If Congress can't pass appropriations bills to fund the government by midnight Friday, the federal government will enter a partial shutdown. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) is going for yet another stopgap bill to attempt to keep the government open, which "would extend funding for some government agencies for a week, through March 8, and the rest for another two weeks, until March 22," per The New York Times.
The caveat is that Congress would be expected to approve six of the 12 spending bills to fund the government for the next year, while buying a little more time for legislators to negotiate and pass the rest of the spending bills. Somewhat surprisingly, news broke last night that Johnson has managed to get a fair number of colleagues on board with the plan.
Still, it's a piecemeal solution that pleases practically nobody. The far-right flank of Republicans in the House continues to pursue deep spending cuts that neither Johnson nor Kevin McCarthy before him has managed to prioritize, as well as weaning Ukraine off U.S. government aid. Continuing resolutions—a.k.a. patchwork solutions that temporarily stave off government shutdowns but do not set any sort of long-term budget—were passed in September, November, and January. And Republicans have only a two-seat majority in the House, with quite a few of them riled up about the crisis at the southern border—which they keep saying must be secured, in order for other issues to be tackled—so there are few signs that Congress will get its act together anytime soon.
Are South Koreans having enough sex? Statistics Korea recently released data showing that the fertility rate declined by 8 percent in 2023 when compared with 2022. Normally, such a drop would not be greeted as catastrophic, except that this comes at a time when many developed countries have fertility rates in free-fall and South Korea already had the lowest fertility rate in the world. If current rates hold, the country's population (51 million at present) is predicted to halve by 2100.
"The average number of babies a South Korean woman is expected to give birth to during her life fell to 0.72 from 0.78 in 2022, and previous projections estimate that this will fall even further, to 0.68 in 2024," reported Al Jazeera. The replacement rate is 2.1 children. For comparison, the U.S. fertility rate has been hovering around 1.7, with a little dip in 2020 that has since recovered.
These new data, coupled with a BBC article that featured women across South Korea and their frustrations with their predicaments, has led to a robust debate among the punditry as to whether South Korea's aggressive pro-natalist policies were all for naught. ("Pro-natalist policies have a weak track record in every country where they've been tried," wrote Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown back in June 2023. "South Korea spent more than $200 billion subsidizing child care and parental leave over the past 16 years, President Yoon Suk Yeol said last fall. Yet the fertility rate fell from 1.1 in 2006 to 0.81 in 2021.")
Demographer Lyman Stone, meanwhile, called the BBC article "a demography reporting crime" and said that "South Korea spends less in government money per child than the OECD average" and that "much of the spending Korea claims it does never gets to families, but is actually a morass of local government subsidies, grants, and other intermediated forms of spending." When it does actually get to families, the fertility rate is positively affected, Stone argued.
But there are other factors, too: South Korea's graying population, for one—and how coughing up funds for retirees affects younger taxpayers' ability to save—as well as cultural influences, like the fact that one of Korea's biggest exports, K-pop stars, are generally forced by their agencies to abstain from dating (wouldn't want to destroy the fantasy, I guess). There are massive cultural expectation issues, too, like the fact that most South Koreans—nearly 80 percent!—send their kids to expensive private schools, so the cost of having a child is perceived to be extra high.
For more on this, watch Just Asking Questions with the Washington Examiner's Tim Carney (who has a new book out soon on precisely this subject): "Why aren't people having more kids?"
Scenes from New York:
This woman used OMNY to pay for the bus. Once you hit 12 fares paid within a 7-day period, you get free rides. Cops boarded bus & forced riders to prove they'd paid didn't know how to handle this, threw her off, & hit her w a $100 ticket. Is this city a joke or what? pic.twitter.com/tD1fAvSnwL
— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) February 28, 2024
Full article here, courtesy of Hell Gate.
California politics in a nutshell ???? pic.twitter.com/XE1XRzj7eh
— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) February 28, 2024
Huge loss. If Democrats hated Mitch McConnell as GOP leader, wait til they see the ones who come next.
As for Republicans, well, this is good news only if you like how the GOP House functions & want more of that. McConnell has been GOPs most effective Congress leader in decades. https://t.co/JpqPy8brjN
— Brian Riedl ???? ???????? (@Brian_Riedl) February 28, 2024
richard lewis & larry david back in the day pic.twitter.com/lxKoB0Lzzc
— Marlow Stern (@MarlowNYC) February 28, 2024
The post SCOTUS Takes on Trump appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Congressional shutdown? A girl can dream!
Today, the federal government will start preparing for a partial shutdown, as two government funding deadlines loom—March 1 for one set of agencies, and March 8 for the rest—that will possibly not be met.
It's possible that yet another stopgap bill will be agreed to, in much the same way Congress got itself out of this pickle back in September. Oh, and also November. Oh, and also January. In short: Congress is hobbled by dysfunction right now and keeps struggling to proactively put together spending bills in advance of deadlines.
Legislators currently disagree on foreign aid, specifically whether the U.S. ought to shell out more funding for the war effort in Ukraine, as well as border control. One flank of the Republican Party also advocates massive spending cuts—1 percent across the board!—to try to get the big-picture budgetary situation under control. These are not new tensions, but rather ones that have been somewhere between boiling and simmering for the better part of the winter. (More from Reason's Eric Boehm on this.)
"I think the odds [of a shutdown] are 50-50 at this point," Rep. Patrick McHenry (R–N.C.) told CBS News. The thing is, government shutdowns are little more than an act: Though they pack a dramatic punch, and are disruptive to many, plenty of agencies continue to provide services and they don't end up saving the federal government very much money at all.
A shutdown would, for example, pause trainings for new air traffic controllers, but keep existing ones at work. It would not halt administration of benefits for veterans, but it would temporarily pause the maintenance at Veterans Affairs cemeteries. Food stamps would continue to be sent out and food safety inspection workers would stay on the job, but most National Park Service sites would close down. Loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration would probably be delayed.
But, by and large, shutdowns are not invitations to truly reconsider the role the federal government plays in our lives. They're not opportunities to reflect on which agencies and programs we actually need—to the extent that we need any of them. They're perceived as painful and semi-embarrassing for legislators, even if they don't affect very much. They generate headlines (like this one, whoops). Eventually, Congress comes together and somebody concedes something and yet another supersized ream of taxpayer dollars gets blown right through. Rinse and repeat.
This time is a little different, though, because Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) is currently traveling through Ukraine—funding for which has been a source of major disagreement, particularly in the House—and has "said he hopes to show how congressional foot-dragging on more aid has hurt Ukraine's efforts on the battlefield and to appeal to House Republicans to take action before it's too late," per The New York Times. Sooner or later, Congress will need to figure out where it stands on Ukraine funding.
Scenes from New York: The company that runs the city's ferry service, Hornblower, filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday. "This will not affect NYC Ferry service whatsoever," said Hornblower CEO Kevin Rabbitt. "In fact, this deal injects new capital into the parent company, while eliminating debt unrelated to ferry operations, which will allow the system to continue its record growth across the five boroughs."
But the NYC ferry system, wonderful as it may be, is pretty unsustainable: Each rider pays $4 per trip but is subsidized by the city to the tune of about $10 per trip. If riders were forced to bear the true costs, maybe the ferry service would be less of a money pit, and we could remain assured that it will continue to operate.
Hey folks, it's not the 1970's anymore. It's ok to say you support nuclear energy.
Just a reminder that over 50% of voters in California were in favor of keeping Diablo Canyon open.
My prediction is that in about 5-10 years being anti-nuclear energy will be as bad of a look as… https://t.co/hJmwAcmWDh
— isabelle ???? (@isabelleboemeke) February 22, 2024
In a memo to staff, Vice CEO Bruce Dixon announces hundreds of layoffs and that the company will no longer publish on Vice dot com. He also says VMG is in advanced talks to sell Refinery29. pic.twitter.com/Xc9tl8uoYE
— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) February 22, 2024
with the vice rumors sending a new batch of journalists scrambling to archive more than a decade's worth of work, i've been thinking a lot about link rot and the insidious ephemerality of digital media
the internet is forever, except when it's not, and that's kind of terrifying
— paris martineau (@parismartineau) February 22, 2024
The post Looming Deadline appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When lawmakers return to Washington next week, they will have just days to avoid a partial government shutdown that could occur on March 1—the first of a series of new fiscal deadlines created during the most recent near-shutdown in November.
It seems highly unlikely that Congress will actually pass a complete budget deal before the March 1 deadline to fund the Departments of Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, and more. It's also unlikely to happen before a slew of other short-term continuing resolutions expire on March 8.
In light of all that, some conservatives are now pushing Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) to consider a year-long continuing resolution—as opposed to a possible omnibus bill being rushed to the floor for a vote at the last minute. In a letter to Johnson on Wednesday, the House Freedom Caucus laid out a list of policies its members said should not be included in an omnibus package designed "behind closed doors" and then put up for a vote.
Congress is in session just three days before a partial government shutdown begins March 1.
We need lower spending levels and real policy wins.
If you can't get either, why proceed with higher than Pelosi spending and preserving all Biden's policies?
We need an update. pic.twitter.com/FMFbVJWfP8
— House Freedom Caucus (@freedomcaucus) February 21, 2024
"There are MANY other policies and personnel that Congress should not be funding, and a failure to eliminate them will reduce the probability that the appropriations bills will be supported by even a majority of Republicans," the group wrote in the letter to Johnson, effectively threatening to withhold votes from an omnibus deal that it does not like.
The policies included in the House Freedom Caucus' list of demands are a mix of what you'd expect from that group—some are sincere attempts at trimming government, while others are fodder for fundraising emails and social media clips.
What's more important than any of those specific proposals, however, is what this letter indicates about the ongoing fight within the Republican caucus over how the federal budget ought to be put together.
Members of the Freedom Caucus have spent years (dating back to its time as a more libertarian and less Trumpy body) advocating for a return to the so-called regular order in which Congress passes each of the 12 annual appropriations bills separately. That hasn't happened since 1996. Advocates for a return to the regular budget process argue that an over-reliance on continuing resolutions (which hold spending levels steady for an agreed-to period of time) and omnibus bills (which combine multiple appropriations bills into a single up-or-down vote) have materially weakened Congress' ability to wield its power of the purse and have concentrated power in the hands of congressional leaders at the expense of the rank and file.
So why would the Freedom Caucus now advocate for a continuing resolution? Because its members fear that an omnibus bill rushed through before the March 1 or March 8 deadlines will undo much of the progress that's been made toward the goal of actually negotiating and passing each appropriations bill in turn. The House has passed seven of the 12 since the start of last year (while the Senate has passed just three), so this gambit from the Freedom Caucus is best understood as an attempt to buy more time for this important project to continue.
There is, however, one additional wrinkle. As part of the deal to raise the debt limit last year, hardline conservatives successfully included a provision that would implement an automatic, across-the-board 1 percent spending cut for the entire government on April 30—unless all 12 appropriations bills are passed by that deadline.
That provision was meant to force all sides to the negotiating table so the appropriations bills would get finished within a reasonable amount of time. It might also give Johnson an incentive to ram through an omnibus bill now—thus defusing the April 30 cuts—rather than waiting to see what can get done in the next two months.
That leaves Johnson with a difficult choice. Democrats are unlikely to support a yearlong continuing resolution because of the potential for those automatic cuts to kick in at the end of April*, but a significant chunk of Republicans will oppose an omnibus bill that thwarts the committee-level work that's been done toward the goal of passing all 12 appropriations bills.
How Johnson proceeds from here will determine the future of his term as speaker—or very well may end it. More importantly, next week's action in the House is likely to signal whether a return to "regular order" is actually possible, or whether Congress will default back to the bad budget-making practices that have buried the government in debt.
*CORRECTION: This post has been updated to correct the timing of the automatic cuts.
The post Is Another Government Shutdown Coming? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>What if the federal government was reduced to its essential functions? What if thousands of federal workers were sent home without pay? What if citizens were forced to examine the real role that the federal government plays in their lives and Congress was confronted with hard questions about spending? What if Americans got a chance to see what life was like in the absence of the hundreds of ways, large and small, that federal spending changes incentives all around them?
Alas, government shutdowns aren't nearly as exciting as they sound. It turns out there's a lot of daylight between a government shutdown and actually shutting the government down. Yet they remain an oddly powerful threat in American politics, with an anticipated shutdown playing a starring role in exciting events taking place on Capitol Hill as this issue goes to press.
Shutdowns are largely theater. Even one of the longest ones in recent memory—a solid 35 days of partial shutdown in 2018—didn't make much of a dent in overall spending. The battle was over a federal tab that eventually clocked in at $4.4 trillion for the year. Of that, about $18 billion ended up getting delayed, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). That's less than half of a percent of the total. And $18 billion isn't even the real savings, since about half of it was pay owed to federal employees, which they received when the government reopened.
In fact, in 2019 Congress passed a law guaranteeing that back pay, further lowering the stakes of a shutdown. That law covers only federal employees, but there is a bill under consideration that would offer the same guarantee to the ever-swelling ranks of federal contractors.
The CBO also noted that while there was some reduction in gross domestic product during the quarter that the shutdown took place, it was largely (though not quite entirely) made up in subsequent quarters.
So shutdowns don't really save money and most of the uncertainty that they cause is already priced in to the broader economy. The huge machine of the federal government mostly grinds on, expensive and intrusive. Aside from delayed pay, a few showy closures of museums and national parks, and even longer delays in the processing of paperwork, it's business as usual.
Shutdowns don't seem to be occasions for self-scrutiny either. Congress has habitually procrastinated on its budgetary duties for decades. For the last 27 years, it has never managed to deliver a budget under "regular order," the process codified by the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974.
In theory, the president proposes a budget, Congress passes a budget resolution, and then various committees put together a dozen separate spending bills. They're debated and voted on, and then the president signs them into law by October 1. What happens instead is that the members of the House careen into each fall full tilt, screaming at each other until they throw together some kind of stopgap measure to fund the federal government for a little while longer until they can get their act together to generate a big, messy omnibus bill that no one will have time to read.
When they can't manage even that, we get a shutdown. When Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) was elected speaker of the House, he reportedly promised a handful of House Republicans that there would be no more messy continuing resolutions but instead something like regular order. These Republicans, vaguely clustered around the vestigially libertarian but now mostly MAGA Freedom Caucus, had McCarthy over a barrel. In addition to their quite sensible demands about the budget process, they also demanded procedural concessions involving tax increases, new spending, and amendments to fire or reduce the pay of federal officials. They also extracted the traditional venal earmarks and some troubling concessions on oversight of ongoing investigations.
Reason's Peter Suderman diplomatically wrote at the time: "It remains to be seen whether McCarthy will deliver on his promises."
He did not.
At press time, McCarthy had narrowly averted a shutdown and managed to pass a continuing resolution, only to be shocked to discover that there are consequences to broken promises. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.), a leader of the GOP dissenters, introduced a rare "motion to vacate"—that is, to remove McCarthy as speaker. After about an hour of debate, McCarthy was gone.
"It's a sad day," Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma said, arguing that removing McCarthy would plunge the House "into chaos."
Gaetz offered a different view: "Chaos is Speaker McCarthy."
In fact, the chaos of the congressional budget process is bigger than just one man or even one caucus. Chaos has been the default, the natural order of things for at least a generation.
McCarthy's continuing resolution, his final act as speaker, funds the government only through November 17. So by the time you read this magazine, chaos may once again be overtaking Washington. The country will likely be staring down another shutdown. Just don't believe them when they tell you the government will really shut down.
The post Is Chaos the Natural State of Congress? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>You've undoubtedly noticed how up in arms everyone becomes when the government is on the verge of shutting down. I've also noticed that the people who most loudly express their horror at the notion of a partial government closure seem totally comfortable with the fiscal wall we are barreling into. That wall is being built, brick by brick, by two political parties that are unwilling to end Washington's spending debauchery.
This isn't to deny that some people would have been hurt by the recently averted shutdown (which, by the way, would not have made our debt smaller). It's a call for consistency from anyone putting their good-government sensibilities on display.
Those sounding the loudest alarms last week are largely silent on the countless occasions when Congress ignores its own budgetary rules. They are rarely outraged when the government is financed with legislation that only expands the balance sheet regardless of whether the money is well spent. All that seems to matter is that government is metaphorically funded, since it usually means growing deficits and explosive debt.
Democrats and Republicans alike engage in fiscal recklessness by passing spending bills they don't have the first cent to pay for. Politicians who won't be around to pay the costs shower today's voters with money that must be repaid by tomorrow's taxpayers, many of whom aren't yet born.
They rashly dispense tax credits, loan guarantees, and subsidies to big companies to do what they were going to do without these government-granted favors. The most recent example of this folly is the Inflation Reduction Act, which doled out billions in subsidies to green energy companies for projects most of the recipients had announced months before the bill was passed.
Republicans and Democrats also share in the habit of re-upping subsidies to large agricultural interests, which often raise the price of food. They sneakily bundled those subsidies into a bill that hands out Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits—popularly known as food stamps—to the tune of $145 billion in 2023 (an increase from $63 billion in 2019).
Beyond the hidden subsidies, the SNAP program is ineffective at lifting families out of poverty. SNAP is designed in ways that likely create disincentives to work. American Enterprise Institute scholars have shown that as many as 71 percent of households receiving food stamps contain no workers and only about 6 percent have a full-time worker. If earning extra money means losing even more in government benefits, many people will understandably choose not to. Ultimately, such a system is bad for recipients and their children, who remain impoverished. Yet it persists because Congress won't do much about it.
But the worst is of course the bipartisan refusal to reform Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Most of this spending is on autopilot, allowing Congress to repeatedly ignore the problem and others to argue that we should further increase benefits. It's also the driver of our current and future debt. Where's the outrage about this fiscal madness? Where are the demands that politicians show us their plans for reform?
One thing's for sure: These calls aren't coming from the shutdown alarmists. How many of them write similarly panicky commentaries about how, in about 10 years, Congress' blatant inaction will lead to across-the-board cuts to entitlement benefits for both the rich and the poor? After all, if legislators decide to borrow more to avoid cuts rather than reforming the programs, it will add another $116 trillion over 30 years to our debt just for Medicare and Medicaid.
Newspapers should be full of reports about how Congress repeatedly fails to perform its core function and avoid this level of fiscal drama altogether. Elected officials should be too embarrassed to show their faces in public. Instead, they can just promise more spending because the real "crisis" is apparently that someone is trying to slam on the brakes—not that there's a fiscal wall looming ahead.
The federal budget is on a treacherous path and Congress is to blame. Politicians are continuously delinquent on their obligation to be good stewards of our fiscal health, but the "irresponsibility" that most reporters and commentators raise their voices against is the risk of shutdown. These people are upset about the symptoms, not the fatal disease.
The ultimate blame rests on the shoulders of the American people. We routinely elect politicians without care for our fiscal situation. Politicians respond to incentives, and voters mostly signal that we won't punish them for poor performance. The alarm is ringing. It's time to wake up, America.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM.
The post The Real Scandal in Washington Is the Government's Reckless Spending appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman sprint through a buffet of topics including government shutdowns, Mexican fentanyl, the second GOP presidential debate, and the death of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.).
1:04: The government didn't shut down.
10:03: Fentanyl and the border with Mexico
25:05: Reactions to the second GOP debate
38:18: Weekly Listener Question
42:52: Death of Sen. Dianne Feinstein
Mentioned in this podcast:
"Congressional Clown Show," by Liz Wolfe
"The Government Won't Shut Down," by Eric Boehm
"The GOP Can Always Get Worse—And It Will (Midterm Election Copout Edition)," by Nick Gillespie
"Josh Barro: A Republican Presidential Debate Detached From Reality," by Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe
"Despite Debunking, Rainbow Fentanyl Myths Continue," by Emma Camp
"The Truth About Ron DeSantis' Fentanyl Horror Story," by Joe Lancaster
"Ban Teenagers From Social Media, Vivek Ramaswamy Says, Because Fentanyl," by Jacob Sullum
Ronald Reagan vs. 2024 Republicans on immigration, by Bess Byers
"The 5 Best Arguments Against Immigration—and Why They're WRONG" by Nick Gillespie and Todd Krainin
"Vivek Ramaswamy Is Wrong About the National Debt," by Nick Gillespie
"Vivek Ramaswamy: Why He's Running for President—and Against 'Woke Capitalism,'" by Zach Weissmueller and Nick Gillespie
"Vivek Ramaswamy Proposes a (Probably) Illegal Plan To End Birthright Citizenship," by Fiona Harrigan
"Ron DeSantis and Chris Christie Call Out Trump for Adding to Federal Debt," by Eric Boehm
"DeSantis Says He Would Use Justice Department To Bring Civil Rights Cases Against 'Soros-Funded Prosecutors,'" by C.J. Ciaramella
"On Guns, Drugs, and National Security, Dianne Feinstein Was Consistently Authoritarian," by Jacob Sullum
"Social Security, Snoopy Snoopy Poop Pants, & Alan Simpson: Ultimate Enema Man Remix," by Austin Bragg and Nick Gillespie
"The Noid," Domino's pizza 1986 ad
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post The 'Whack Jobs' Were Right appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Government can't even do a shutdown right: Over the weekend, Congress passed a continuing resolution that will allow the government to stay open until mid-November, buying legislators more time to settle on a spending package to fund the government for the upcoming fiscal year. In the House, the bill passed 335–91; in the Senate, the vote was 88–9.
"The continuing resolution keeps overall spending levels at 2023 levels, though it does not resolve the impasse over whether Congress will continue supplying military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine," reports Reason's Eric Boehm. "That funding was left out of the final bill, but House Democrats released a statement Saturday saying they expected [House Speaker Kevin] McCarthy to hold an up-or-down vote soon on a separate bill to fund the Ukrainian efforts."
"We're tired of fucking around with these whack jobs," Rep. Don Bacon (R–Neb.) told Politico, referring to the right-wing flank in the House that had consistently opposed both spending bills and stopgap measures like this one.
A shutdown probably wouldn't have accomplished much, politically or otherwise. "We know from history that shutdowns don't really save money," wrote Boehm over the weekend. "After the record 35-day shutdown that ended in January 2019, the Congressional Budget Office found that about $18 billion in federal spending was delayed—less than half of one percent of the $4.4 trillion spent that year. The actual savings were even less, since half of that total was the result of not paying federal employees for five weeks, which means they were immediately wiped out when the government reopened and those workers got their back pay."
Of course, it's highly unlikely that members of Congress, still tasked with approving the budget for fiscal year 2024, will do anything to touch giant entitlement programs such as Social Security—one of the real culprits responsible for our nation's financial woes—over the next month and a half.
Fire alarms, how do they work? Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D–N.Y.) pulled the fire alarm in a House office building on Saturday, in what was widely perceived as an effort to delay the vote on Republicans' stopgap spending bill. "I was rushing to make a vote; I was trying to get through a door. I thought the alarm would open the door," Bowman said to reporters, oddly acting as if he didn't know how a fire alarm works.
Then he kept going: "I want to be very clear, this was not me, in any way, trying to delay the vote. It was the exact opposite—I was trying urgently to get to a vote, which I ultimately did."
Unfortunately for Bowman, the whole incident was caught on camera. "This should not go without punishment. This is an embarrassment," said House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.), who knows a thing or two about being embarrassed in public these days.
Dianne Feinstein's replacement: California Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected to appoint Laphonza Butler, the president of the abortion rights group EMILY's List, to the Senate seat made vacant by the death of Dianne Feinstein. Back in March, the Democratic governor had vowed to replace Feinstein with a black woman. Appointing Butler, who is black, makes good on that promise.
But there's a problem: She literally doesn't live in California.
"Butler is registered to vote in Maryland but will switch her registration to California," reports Politico.
Congrats to the state of Maryland on finally obtaining three Senators.https://t.co/FuEm8IWa8u
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) October 2, 2023
Politically, there's very little about Butler that libertarians will like. She was a senior strategist on Kamala Harris' 2020 presidential campaign before it crashed and burned. She served as president of the Service Employees International Union of California, where she lobbied for higher taxes and a higher minimum wage.
Forgive me if I seem retro by today's political standards, but I think senators should actively live in the places they're representing and possibly even be picked on merit. Crazy, I know.
Scenes from New York:
A healthy, functional city with infrastructure that definitely works:
Huge storm and flooding in NYC today. This is 4th Ave and Carroll St in Brooklyn, which is near Gowanus Canal, a superfund site.
Reminder: Do not go in the flood waters, it contains pathogens and is a threat to human health.pic.twitter.com/uzPQLfSL3G
— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran) September 29, 2023
On Friday, much of New York was brought to a halt by biblical flooding. Nearly every subway line was either closed down or substantially delayed, cars were unable to drive on highways, and lots of apartments sustained damage.
More video of the flooding in NYC pic.twitter.com/utPgYtalY1
— Harrison Krank (@HarrisonKrank) September 29, 2023
Gavin Newsom has appointed the California Attorney General, Sec of State, and now has the chance to appoint both US Senators. All the most powerful positions in the state were selected by hand by Newsom, not the voters.
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) September 29, 2023
The post Congressional Clown Show appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Asked last week about the possibility that the federal government could shut down, Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh described it as "the worst thing that could happen."
Coming from a flack for the part of the government that is supposed to plan for what to do in the event of a nuclear war, that description seems just a little hyperbolic.
Well, there's some good news for Singh: The federal government won't shut down after all.
At least not until November 15.
With the scheduled shutdown just hours away, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) pushed a 45-day continuing resolution through the House of Representatives on Saturday afternoon despite the opposition of 90 fellow Republicans (and one Democrat). The Senate passed the same bill in an 88-9 vote on Saturday night, and President Joe Biden has indicated he will sign it.
The continuing resolution keeps overall spending levels at 2023 levels, though it does not resolve the impasse over whether Congress will continue supplying military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. That funding was left out of the final bill, but House Democrats released a statement Saturday saying they expected McCarthy to hold an up-or-down vote soon on a separate bill to fund the Ukrainian efforts.
In remarks to the media after the House vote, McCarthy criticized the group of Republicans who had blocked various attempts to pass spending bills.
"If you have members in your conference who won't let you vote for appropriations bills…and will not vote for a stop-gap measure so the only option is to shut down and not pay our troops—I don't want to be a part of that team," McCarthy said.
Others were less diplomatic. "We're tired of fucking around with these whack jobs," Rep. Don Bacon (R–Neb.) told Politico.
While governing 45 days at a time is pretty silly, the last-minute passage of the short-term continuing resolution was probably the least stupid way for this drama to end—for now.
It prevents the theatrics of a shutdown from distracting from the actual issue: the cost of the federal budget and the unsustainability of the government's borrowing. But it's also a short enough time period that it can keep those issues front and center in Washington.
For various reasons, a shutdown was not a particularly attractive option for meaningfully reducing the size or cost of government. As Reason's Liz Wolfe explained earlier this week, most of the government would actually have continued operating even without a budget bill or continuing resolution.
And we know from history that shutdowns don't really save money. After the record 35-day shutdown that ended in January 2019, the Congressional Budget Office found that about $18 billion in federal spending was delayed—less than half of one percent of the $4.4 trillion spent that year. The actual savings were even less, since half of that total was the result of not paying federal employees for five weeks, which means they were immediately wiped out when the government reopened and those workers got their back pay.
The Republican holdouts were hoping to use the threat of a shutdown to force some reductions in discretionary spending. But there was little indication from any side that the threat of a shutdown was going to address the entitlement costs that are driving the growing federal budget deficit.
"This crisis was the fault of House Republican leadership, who stalled on bringing up a passable package until today, forcing a last-minute scramble just hours before a potential shutdown. Such recklessness is no way to govern," Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayer for Common Sense, a fiscal conservative nonprofit, said in a statement. "The question now is whether legislators can put aside their differences to pass comprehensive spending bills in a timely manner."
If the government had shut down on Sunday morning, it wouldn't have been the dramatically disruptive event that so many in the media and bureaucracy wanted to portray it as. But it wouldn't have been a step toward solving America's fiscal problems either. What happens between now and November will be crucial.
The post The Government Won't Shut Down appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Was it really only last week that the biggest story blowing out of Washington, D.C., like smoke from a Canadian wildfire was the announcement that the Senate, the self-described "world's greatest deliberative body" (fact check: FALSE), would no longer enforce its "voluntary" dress code, thereby letting 100 of the luckiest bastards on the face of the Earth have even less to fret over?
And was it only late yesterday that the same legislators who couldn't be bothered to do any substantive work on the $6 trillion–something budget for the fiscal year that starts on October 1 rallied to pass a binding dress code (more on that in a moment)?
These things simultaneously seem like they happened sometime during the second Grover Cleveland administration and maybe 15 minutes ago. Such odd and intense minidramas about insignificant issues are the rule, not the exception, in contemporary politics, and leaders will do anything to avoid confronting serious issues, especially related to ballooning budgets (in nominal dollars, federal spending has more than tripled over the past 20 years).
Now more than ever, we live in a 24/7 doom-loop of the "Roth Effect," which holds that the world is getting ever weirder and less believable on an hourly basis. Certainly, no serious novelist would have scripted last night's GOP presidential debate, which sounded more like a Samuel Beckett play put on by middle schoolers than a meaningful discussion about the country's future.
"Senators are able to choose what they wear on the Senate floor," Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) told the Associated Press last week, which pointed out that lowly aides and support staff don't get the same freedom. The rule change was reportedly made for the benefit of Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman, who suffered a stroke during his 2022 campaign against crudité-apocalypticist Mehmet Oz and is widely known for dressing in cutoffs and hoodies or, as he puts it, "like a slob." Fetterman is the Rubeus Hagrid of the Senate, an oversized, sometimes genial, sometimes irascible character who uses "assistive technology" due to his ongoing medical issues and who once threatened to beat me up on Bill Maher's Real Time (it's all good between us, really). It wasn't exactly clear—even to Fetterman—why the change was necessary. "It's nice to have the option," he said, "but I'm going to plan to be using it sparingly." And yet, there he was, almost immediately presiding over the Senate in something less than a jacket and tie.
Despite stakes so small you need a microscope to spot them, the commentariat couldn't let this pass. "Dress codes are a marker of social, national, professional or philosophical commonality," pronounced Southern Methodist University's Rhonda Garelick in The New York Times, in a lamentation titled "What We Lose When We Loosen Dress Codes." "A sea of 100 adults all dressed in some kind of instantly recognizable, respectful manner — a suit and tie, a skirt and jacket — creates a unified visual entity. A group in which individuals have agreed to subsume their differences into an overarching, sartorial whole." Yet even she had to admit that the Senate "has never been more divided" despite its longstanding informal dress code. Precisely how adding sweatpants into the mix was going to make things worse is unclear.
New York Post political reporter Jon Levine, who helpfully exposed the designer of Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's notorious "Tax the Rich" Met Gala gown as a tax cheat, tossed on Fetterman garb and tried to get seated at the Big Apple's finest eateries. He mostly got turned away, but the three-Michelin-star Eleven Madison Park, where a nine-course, vegetarian tasting menu costs $365, told him he'd be welcome. What this proves is unclear, even if it provides raw material for Twitter feuds and Halloween costumes.
The momentary suspension of the dress code roused to life the frustrated standups of the Senate, such as chucklemaster Susan Collins (R–Maine), who joked, "I plan to wear a bikini tomorrow to the Senate floor." On a more somber note, Sen. Roger Marshall (R–Kan.) told the A.P.: "I represent the people of Kansas, and much like when I get dressed up to go to a wedding, it's to honor the bride and groom, you go to a funeral you get dressed up to honor the family of the deceased." Marshall is hardly alone in invoking funerals when discussing the Senate, where the median age of members is 65.3 years, by some accounts the second-oldest cohort in history. The only question: Who exactly is the corpse in his scenario?
Maybe it's democracy itself. In 1974, Congress revised and updated its budget process into its current form, with the House and the Senate mandated to pass appropriations bills governing outlays for the coming fiscal year before it begins each October 1. You would think that authorizing federal outlays—however misguided they may be—would be the minimum accomplishment of any given Congress, the equivalent of just showing up for class. Yet since 1977, the first year that the new rules were in effect, Congress has managed to actually get its budget work completely done on time just four times—in fiscal 1977, 1989, 1995, and 1997. Instead, it half-asses everything for as long as it can and then relies on various types of resolutions to keep on spending until our elected leaders get around to letting us know how much we're on the hook for.
As the Pew Research Center notes, since fiscal 1997, "Congress has never passed more than five of its 12 regular appropriations bills on time. Usually, it's done considerably less than that: In 11 of the past 13 fiscal years, for instance, lawmakers have not passed a single spending bill by Oct. 1″ (emphasis in original). That will almost certainly hold true for this fiscal 2024, alas.
The inability to get anything done helps to explain the history of government shutdowns, including the most recent—and longest—one, which started in December 2018 and carried over into the next year. Absent some probable last-minute deal making, the next one is due to start on Sunday.
Of course, shutdowns are far from the worst thing that can happen, especially given the massive and rampant waste in spending (most of which is on autopilot, coded as "mandatory spending" that doesn't need to be reauthorized each year). The hysteria that surrounds any minor hiccup in federal outlays is inevitably overwrought and ridiculous, but it is revealing nonetheless. It's good to know, for instance, that the Pentagon has unilaterally declared Ukraine aid sacrosanct. Sadly, the shutdowns don't actually prevent any spending from happening. They just push back its timing by a few days, weeks, or months.
More important, shutdowns borne out of congressional laziness are a sign that our leaders are fundamentally unserious, regardless of whether they dress flamboyantly like Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I–Ariz.) or rock Carhartt hoodies like Fetterman. The "new, enforceable" dress code that was pushed through last night by Sens. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) and Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) calls for business attire for men—"a coat, tie and slacks or other long pants." It's not exactly clear what it means for female senators, who caused a fuss by daring to wear pantsuits back in the 1990s. That passing a dress code will likely be among the greatest legislative achievements of Manchin and Romney (who is stepping down at the end of his current term) is a sad commentary on their Senate runs.
Judging by their record when it comes to the budget process, it's too much to expect that members of the "world's greatest deliberative body" will do their jobs, much less actually cut spending, reduce the size and scope of government, or even forego alleged bribes. But at least there is one less distraction when it comes to holding them accountable for record-high levels of debt.
The post Shut Up Already About John Fetterman's Slob Chic appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Lina Khan is why we can't have nice things: Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued Amazon, accusing it of suppressing competition and "illegally forcing sellers on its platform to use its logistics and delivery services in exchange for prominent placement and of punishing merchants who offer lower prices on competing sites," per Bloomberg.
"Amazon is a monopolist and it is exploiting its monopolies in ways that leave shoppers and sellers paying more for worse service," said FTC Chair Lina Khan to reporters.
The lawsuit attempts to substantiate this claim by noting that Amazon makes other sellers' products harder to find if they find their price has been undercut, so "sellers hike prices… due to fear of Amazon's penalties." (More on this by Reason's Joe Lancaster.)
"If the FTC gets its way, the result would be fewer products to choose from, higher prices, slower deliveries for consumers, and reduced options for small businesses—the opposite of what antitrust law is designed to do," said Amazon's general counsel David Zapolsky.
incredible. the biden admin has to prove "consumer harm," rather than "the concept of successful companies simply offends us," so after decades of complaints to the contrary they've decided to argue amazon charges *more* than its competitors. dangerous, unhinged ideologues. pic.twitter.com/s89xOSz02v
— Mike Solana (@micsolana) September 26, 2023
Here's another.
"Online superstore"?
Huh?
If Amazon is a clear monopoly, why such a tight market definition? Why not "online retail" or "online marketplace"?
Ah, right… because they compete with countless offline superstores and online and offline small stores/sellers. pic.twitter.com/5SUXtr12lM
— Patrick Hedger (@pat_hedger) September 26, 2023
Ah yes, we must put an end to the famously high prices on Amazon https://t.co/T2LuX2QLEE
— Eli Dourado (@elidourado) September 26, 2023
Check out Elizabeth Nolan Brown's excellent November 2023 cover story for more.
Fraudster-in-chief Judge Arthur Engoron ruled yesterday in a civil suit brought forth by New York's attorney general that former President Donald Trump committed fraud by overvaluing his assets and lying to banks and insurers to secure loans to build out his real estate empire.
"My Civil Rights have been violated," he wrote on Truth Social, "and some Appellate Court, whether Federal or State, must reverse this horrible, un-American decision. If they can do this to me, they can do this to YOU!"
"Under the ruling, limited liability companies that control some of Trump's key properties, such as 40 Wall Street, will be dissolved and authority over how to run them handed over to a receiver," reports the Associated Press. "Trump would lose his authority over whom to hire or fire, whom to rent office space to, and other key decisions."
Are Republicans really waging war on… poor people? Facing a possible government shutdown at midnight Saturday if they can't agree to spending bills, House Republicans are reportedly working on a proposal to "cut spending on 'discretionary' programs, a category that excludes programs such as Social Security and Medicare, by roughly 27 percent, except for the military budget and spending on veterans affairs," reports The Washington Post. Federal Pell Grants for low-income college students, Head Start programs that serve poor children and families, and affordable housing grants would all be affected by these cuts.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (D–Calif.) is hoping to fund the federal government for all of fiscal year 2024 with these concessions to the far-right contingent concerned about government spending running amok, but even with the roughly $150 billion in proposed cuts, the bill may still not be a winner. "House Republican officials have discussed another $60 billion in spending cuts," reports the Post, "but it is unclear if such a measure would prove sufficient to appease the remaining conservative holdouts."
It's not exactly a winning PR move to slash the programs that serve needy toddlers and first-generation college kids, but there's an important fundamental truth at the heart of the fiscal hawks' concerns: government spending simply cannot continue at current levels with no consequences. Higher-than-usual inflation resulted, in part, from the COVID stimulus checks doled out by the federal government. The bill always comes due in the end.
Meanwhile, in the Senate, Republicans and Democrats have agreed to a stopgap bill that would allow the federal government to remain funded until mid-November while devoting $6 billion to the war effort in Ukraine. If brought to a vote, the bill is likely to face massive resistance in the House.
Reports of impending doom are majorly exaggerated: Will the government shutdown actually result in "hunger for millions" as Reuters and several Biden administration officials claim? "Nearly half of U.S. newborns rely on WIC, the USDA says," according to Reuters. But that's not true; WIC is a means-tested program and nowhere near half of U.S. infants are eligible for it, or living in poverty. I debunked such claims yesterday.
Even if this claim were true, many poor people in the U.S. receive multiple types of welfare. If WIC benefits were temporarily suspended due to the government shutdown, SNAP would still be issued for the entire month of October, for example.
Perhaps the best possible way forward would be for Congress to consider cutting non-means-tested entitlements like Social Security that comprise such a hefty portion of the federal budget. Oh, wait. That would mean possibly jeopardizing their chances of getting reelected, and we couldn't have that.
Scenes from New York:
Denizens of a hacker house pulled off an elaborate New York City dining scene prank on Saturday night.
"The menu purported to follow the life cycle of a cow. As diners at the pop-up's 35 tables tucked into courses like Meadows Bring Life (a mixed green salad), Youth: Ever Precious, Ever Fleeting (veal meatballs) and Agrarian Synergies (bruschetta with mozzarella), some diners became suspicious," reported The New York Times.
Last Saturday, 65 of us made a five-star steak dinner for 100+ guests at New York's highest-rated steakhouse: Mehran's Steak House
The full story: pic.twitter.com/iNlPKOxWtn
— Mehran Jalali (@mehran__jalali) September 26, 2023
It's frankly impressive that this group was able to study restaurant economics, conscript their friends into "working" for them for one night only, and successfully dupe bougie diners. Mad props.
What do you think about RFK Jr running on the Libertarian Party ticket? pic.twitter.com/PiSzxko4rH
— Being Libertarian (@beinlibertarian) September 25, 2023
Apocalyptic rhetoric around migration is absurd. A smaller % of the population is an immigrant today than 150 years ago, when basically annnyone could just show up. That's also how the southern border worked for generations—there were half a dozen amnesties in the 20th century! https://t.co/KjbrNdvTK3 pic.twitter.com/O8RpGo8Ngv
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) September 26, 2023
The post Amazon Gets Sued Bigly appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Biden, US officials warn of hunger for millions in a government shutdown," reads a Reuters headline from yesterday. The article details how Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters this week that the "vast majority" of the 7 million who receive benefits from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program will see their benefits disappear after the government shuts down, which is likely to happen this Saturday at midnight due to congressional inability to approve spending bills.
"Nearly half of U.S. newborns rely on WIC, the USDA says," according to Reuters.
Just one problem: That's not true.
If you scroll down to Figure 6 on the Department of Agriculture's helpful site, you can input your state and see the current numbers as well as how those trends have changed over time. The "coverage rate"—the number who participate in the program, out of the total number who are eligible—hovers around roughly 50 percent. But half of U.S. newborns are not eligible for WIC in the first place, as it is a means-tested program designed to serve the poor, and half of newborns in the United States are not in poverty or close to it.
In my state of New York, for example, there were 1,449,500 children aged 0-4 and pregnant or postpartum women (all of whom would be theoretically eligible for WIC, if meeting the need requirement); of that total population, 48.7 percent would be eligible for the program (so about 706,000), and about half of that number ends up actually taking advantage of benefits (roughly 353,000).
For the record, other parts of the USDA's site partially contradict that panel of information. During fiscal year 2022 (which may have seen an uptick due to pandemic-related disruptions), WIC administered benefits to "an estimated 39 percent of all infants in the United States." This seems high to me given what we know about poverty statistics. It's hard to get a straight answer, even using the agency's own data and infographics. But one thing becomes clear: it is not true that half of U.S. newborns rely on this means-tested government program, which is what Reuters claimed (albeit with the handy hedge word nearly).
The official national poverty rate as of 2022 hovered at around 11.5 percent, per Census Bureau data. There are plenty of issues with how poverty gets measured in the U.S. As I wrote recently in Roundup:
Poverty in America is measured in two ways: via the Official Poverty Measure (OPM), which uses cash and cash-like government benefits (welfare and unemployment checks), and the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which factors in food stamps and tax credits. Depending on which measure you look at, you'll get a different sense of how dire (or not) the situation is. For example, stimulus checks, expanded food stamp benefits, and expanded child tax credits were counted only under the SPM (not the OPM). When they expired last year, the poverty rate (as counted by the SPM) rose.
But the buried lede in all of this trouble with counting is that there are actually a lot of programs designed to take care of the needs of the American poor. WIC, for example, tends to be available to those with "a family income of at or below 185 percent of the U.S. poverty level"; 37 percent of WIC recipients are also enrolled in Medicaid but not Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or SNAP; 31 percent of WIC recipients used both Medicaid and SNAP but not TANF; 4 percent use all mentioned programs.
None of this is to downplay the hardships or indignities of poverty. Rather, it is important for news outlets to accurately report what is really happening on the ground so that we don't have a warped sense of the scale of the country's problems. If fully half of American infants are starving or in danger of it—and if that money will soon be pulled because Congress can't agree on appropriations bills—that would be a dire situation. Thankfully, that's not really what's happening, and there are generally multiple welfare programs that serve these groups at once.
Even if the government shuts down and WIC payments get temporarily suspended, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will still continue to cut checks for the needy, at least for the entire month of October, for example. The longest government shutdown in history lasted for 34 days, so it's likely that SNAP would have enough runway to continue to administer benefits for the duration of the shutdown. Meanwhile, the Department of Housing and Urban Development says that it will continue to administer housing vouchers but that "the processing or closing of FHA-insured loans may be delayed."
In other words: some of the programs that poor people rely on to scrape by may be temporarily halted or skeletal in staffing, but basic necessities will, in some form, remain available. Media outlets and politicians looking to score points should not claim otherwise.
The post Will the Government Shutdown Result in 'Hunger for Millions' as Reuters Claims? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Congressional impasse With a government shutdown looking ever more likely, the Senate is now debating whether Ukraine aid ought to be included in whatever stopgap bill they pass to fund the government.
At midnight on Saturday, the fiscal year ends. Congress has not passed the bills it needs to in order to fund the government for another year, which means a group of Democratic senators are eyeing a temporary measure—called a continuing resolution—to keep the government up and running while negotiations continue. But a significant sticking point in the existing spending feud is $25 billion in new funding for the Ukraine defense effort, which several vocal House Republicans oppose.
Excluding "contentious provisions" like that line item would allow it to "be a 'clean' measure that might enjoy broader support among Republicans in the House, which also have to pass it to keep the government open," reports The New York Times. Some senators reportedly personally assured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week during his visit that American aid to Ukraine would not cease, but others fear that will sink the bill when there's no time to waste.
Besides, "even if the Senate is able to assemble and pass a temporary spending measure in the next few days, it is uncertain whether [House Speaker Kevin] McCarthy would even bring the legislation to a vote," adds The New York Times. "Doing so would be likely to provoke a formal challenge to his hold on the speakership, presenting him with a choice between keeping the government open or igniting a fight for his job."
So what? What's wrong with a government shutdown? This whole fight is about more than just McCarthy keeping his job; people ostensibly depend on the federal government to provide services that matter to them, or so the argument goes.
Of course, a shutdown doesn't actually mean the federal government fully grinds to a halt (be still, my heart); instead, services deemed nonessential are suspended (like Food and Drug Administration inspections; administration of Medicare and Social Security programs but not actually cutting the checks) while services considered essential (air traffic control, border protection, law enforcement, maintaining the power grid, that dreaded IRS with its new infusion of cash from that time Congress singlehandedly stopped inflation with a well-named bill, and a long list of other things) carry on. Federal employees get temporarily furloughed, with backpay paid later.
In short: Not all that much actually happens, and an astonishing number of government programs are considered essential. In some cases, the calls as to what's "essential" vs. "nonessential" are bizarre: WIC gets shut down but SNAP continues issuing benefits, for example.
There are some knock-on effects to such disruptions. During the 2013 shutdown, for example, people were turned away en masse from national parks which resulted in lost revenue and a funding crunch later on. During the 2018–2019 shutdown, a lot of TSA agents and a few air traffic controllers refused to show up for work, which created major travel issues and shut down all of New York's LaGuardia airport for a time. Generally speaking, though, government shutdowns don't affect people's day-to-day lives as much as some in the media claim and, since so much of the government stays running and so many government employees end up still getting their paychecks, they're a bit of a misnomer.
In fact, I have some candidates for agencies we could shutter (forever): the TSA, with its 80-95 percent failure rate at detecting explosives and weapons, would be a great candidate. (Just saved the government $10 billion annually.) Maybe the Environmental Protection Agency, which keeps trying to regulate carbon emissions and power plants to little effect, and which stands in the way of controlled burns. (Just saved another $10 billion, you're welcome).
Scenes from New York:
More housing above stores. More apartments near transit. No more mandatory parking spots. No more red tape and regulation holding back homes for New Yorkers.
This is the plan for a little more housing in every neighborhood: https://t.co/sNgQN4C35I pic.twitter.com/DFhbY2L9xY
— Mayor Eric Adams (@NYCMayor) September 26, 2023
Mayor Eric Adams proposes more accessory dwelling units, scrapping parking minimums, and loosening certain zoning restrictions. A bunch of lefties still aren't satisfied, despite the fact that these incremental changes are certainly a step in the right direction for those who care about housing affordability, because… of city rules surrounding what constitutes a bedroom. (We will return to our regularly scheduled programming of dunking on Adams shortly.)
Fetterman's slob wear is an uncharacteristically elitist gesture. He comes from an affluent family, so he's never had to prove that he belongs in an exalted space.
A working class person would never dress that way to an important job. https://t.co/xKfs6TRGYE.
— Caitlin Flanagan (@CaitlinPacific) September 23, 2023
Gen X today is signficantly wealthier than Boomers were at about the same age: $600,000 for Gen X vs $500,000 for Boomers
Millennials today are about equal in wealth to Boomers at the same age, just over $100K
All inflation adjusted! pic.twitter.com/exx7urqRFk
— Jeremy Horpedahl ???? (@jmhorp) September 25, 2023
The post Shut It All Down appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman break down the politics of a potential government shutdown on the horizon and assess the United Auto Workers strike ahead of the next Republican presidential primary debate.
0:29: Another looming government shutdown
20:02: United Auto Workers strike
27:46: Weekly Listener Question
34:24: The next GOP debate is this week.
42:05: Bob Menendez, senator of sleaze
Mentioned in this podcast:
"It's Government Shutdown Theater, Again," by J.D. Tuccille
"5 Dissenters in the House," by Liz Wolfe
"Congress Is Still Using 'Emergency Spending' on Non-Emergencies," by John Stossel
"Don't Let the Government-Shutdown Charade Distract You From the Debt Crisis," by Romina Boccia
"Shutdown Highlights Basic Fact: Most of Government is 'Non-Essential,'" by Nick Gillespie
"Final Countdown to Government Shutdown," by Meredith Bragg and Nick Gillespie
"Government Shutdown: Planet of the Apes Remix," by Meredith Bragg and Nick Gillespie
"The Government Is Going to Shut Down Again (and That's Bad)," by Andrew Heaton and Sarah Rose Siskind
"5 Sequester Facts To Know Before Committing Suicide," by Meredith Bragg and Nick Gillespie
"Tim Scott Invokes Ronald Reagan and Says UAW Strikers Should Be Fired," by C.J. Ciaramella
"Biden, the 'Most Pro-Union President,' Reaps What He Sows," by J.D. Tuccille
"Strikers Demand 4-Day Workweek," by Liz Wolfe
"Baby Boomers Screwing Younger Workers, Private Sector Edition," by Nick Gillespie
"How to Make Unions More Powerful, the Libertarian Way," by Brian Doherty
"Are We Really Doing a Trump vs. Biden Rematch?" by Steven Greenhut
"Zelenskyy Goes To Washington," by Liz Wolfe
"Gen Xers are most worried with 86% saying they are worried about the future of Medicare and Social Security," according to Allianz Life insurance.
"The Real Class Warfare Is Baby Boomers vs. Younger Americans," by Nick Gillespie
"Generational Swindle: How D.C. Is Screwing Over Millennials," by Nick Gillespie
The Trump campaign's "Whoop a man's ass" commercial
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsor:
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post Are Government Shutdowns Good for Limited Government? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Asked if we should expect a shutdown of the federal government, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) says "no" and points out "we still have a number of days" until funding runs out on October 1. The White House, though, insists debate over spending is "marching our country toward a government shutdown." The battling takes are political theater as are so-called "government shutdowns" which, unfortunately, are nothing of the sort. No matter how D.C. disputes end, the federal government will certainly continue spending entirely too much and, no matter what the headlines say, will never have really shut down.
Arguments over how much to spend are a normal part of government, with natural tensions between those who want to spend somewhat less (or just increase spending by not quite so much as their opponents) and those (usually in the majority) who embrace spending ever more.
"As Covid tyranny ramps up again, reckless spending is sabotaging economic stability while fantasy energy policies destroy the American dream," Rep. Chip Roy (R–Texas) wrote in a September 14 op-ed favoring defunding Democratic green and social-justice-y policies in favor of the GOP's preference for border restrictions. "The 'power of the purse' is the most effective tool we possess to force an out-of-control executive branch to end its abuses and focus only on its core functions."
"Extreme House Republicans continue to demand a reckless laundry list of partisan proposals as a condition of keeping the government open—from an evidence-free impeachment that even some of their own members don't agree with, to reckless cuts to programs millions of hardworking families and seniors count on, to a litany of other extraneous ideological demands," the Biden administration sniped back.
Whatever you think of any given policies, debates over spending are normal and healthy. When politicians stop debating and come together on how money squeezed from us ought to be used, then it's time to be afraid. It's also not unusual for politicians to miss deadlines for deciding how much money to (over)spend. Since the current budgeting process was adopted in 1976, spending gaps have occurred almost two dozen times. The idea that this heralds the collapse of the government is relatively recent.
"Until 1980, there was no such thing as a 'government shutdown,'" Denver Nicks noted for Time in 2013. "When presidents didn't have cash, they spent on credit. If Congress failed to pass a budget on time, federal agencies just carried on with work until their appropriated funding was authorized retroactively."
In 1980, then-Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti interpreted the Antideficiency Act of 1870 to mean that federal agencies can't spend without authorization. No budget meant no authorization, so government had to "shut down." But does anybody really think that government officials will voluntarily stop doing to us what they've been empowered to do, just because direct deposits are briefly interrupted? Of course not! This is political theater.
"Once in a while, to really get the crowd on their feet, the President will offer up a showstopper in which he 'shuts down' the government," James R. Harrigan and Antony Davies of the American Institute for Economic Research wrote in January of this year. "But the shutdown only ever applies to non-essential government services (don't ask why we're spending on anything that's non-essential, anyway). And as soon as the shutdown ends, all the money that would have been spent during the shutdown is then spent retroactively."
That means lots of headlines about national parks closing their gates and federal workers waiting for paychecks that they'll inevitably receive. Basically, the brief hiatus is reserved for anything that inconveniences the public and plucks at heart strings. The stuff that government officials actually care about continues, of course.
"Services that the government deems 'essential,' such as those related to law enforcement and public safety, continue," Bloomberg's Erik Wasson assures us. "Defining 'essential' is more art than science, however, and individual government departments — and the political appointees who run them — have a say over who comes to work and who stays home."
You can safely assume that ATF agents will still be out there keeping the world safe from paperwork violations, the DEA will continue to dutifully hunt down disfavored intoxicants, and the FBI will be on the alert for whoever constitutes this week's enemies of the state. And no, they're not laboring out of the goodness of their hearts.
"Thanks to a 2019 law signed as part of the measure to fund the government at the end of the 35-day shutdown, they all will automatically be granted back pay to cover the shutdown once funding is restored," reports Government Executive's Erich Wagner. "In previous appropriations lapses, Congress had to approve back pay for furloughed federal workers following each shutdown, but that process has since been automated."
Finger-pointing over the shutdown all comes from a well-worn script, too. None of this is particularly new or interesting. "Political theater is at an all-time high as both parties seek to outdo each other with more elaborate and showy news events, even as there is little legislating or even backroom negotiating underway to end the stalemate," Michael A. Memoli observed for The Spokesman-Review in 2013.
None of this means that government officials are good at debating and passing budgets. Actually, they continuously fail to exercise adult judgment regarding their financial responsibilities.
"Congress has not completed all of the steps in the appropriations process on time since 1996," Reason's Peter Suderman pointed out in the April issue. "Many years, Congress has passed no budget resolution at all. Instead, the process has become increasingly centralized, with party leadership drawing up 'omnibus' spending packages that combine all the appropriations bills into a single piece of megalegislation, which lawmakers are given essentially no time to read or debate."
Worse, the federal government has consistently spent far more than it takes in for decades.
"Since 2001, the federal government's budget has run a deficit each year," admits the U.S. Department of the Treasury. "Starting in 2016, increases in spending on Social Security, health care, and interest on federal debt have outpaced the growth of federal revenue."
In all of the various scenarios the Congressional Budget Office projects for federal spending, it no longer even contemplates balanced budgets as a possibility. It's all just different ratios of spending, deficits, and debt, leading to fiscal disaster sooner or later.
When that day of reckoning finally arrives, then you might see a real government shutdown.
The post It's Government Shutdown Theater, Again appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Is this Bidenomics? "We're taking advantage of the fact that we have moved quickly to move a little more carefully now," Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told a gaggle of reporters yesterday in reference to the Fed's decision not to hike interest rates further. Rates are currently hovering at 5.25–5.5 percent, and the Federal Reserve has, for the past 18 months, been aggressive with raising them in an attempt to cool runaway inflation.
But yesterday, the Associated Press reported that "the 19 members of the Fed's rate-setting committee conveyed growing optimism that they will manage to slow inflation to their 2% target without causing the deep recession that many economists had feared" (also called a "soft landing"). Powell and the rest of the rate-setting committee did note that rate hikes are still absolutely possible as the year progresses, but that the current state of inflation coupled with low unemployment and strong economic growth means there's reason for optimism that inflation will cool back down to their target by 2026. "Fed officials now expect their benchmark rate to be at 5.1% by the end of next year, according to their median estimate, up from 4.6% in the last projection round in June," according to Bloomberg. Basically, it's shaping up to look like interest rates won't be hiked higher, but that inflation will likely be around longer than many had previously predicted.
Though this is decent news, remember that President Joe Biden spent much of July trying to convince American voters that he was God's gift to (working) man via his "Bidenomics" speeches, in which he touted his role in raising pay for low-wage workers while decrying trickle-down economics and taking responsibility for having personally restored the "American dream." Pretty rich given that my grocery store now charges $8 for a gallon of milk (New York City, baby), that the prices of eggs and meat have gone sky-high, and that plenty of people have deferred home-buying decisions, unable to hack it given the high mortgage rates and large monthly payments that result. If I were him, I would simply not try to act like the economy has flourished under my watch, and demonstrate a bit more humility with regard to how multiple years of high inflation harms both Americans' budgets and long-term plans and is connected to reckless government spending.
Like a jellyfish: Tuesday and Wednesday's Republican infighting was at least partially calmed by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.), who started making concessions to the fiscal hawks. The only problem? This doesn't necessarily mean that pared-down spending bills will be passed by the Democrat-controlled Senate (quite the opposite, in fact). So it's possible that by conceding, a government shutdown is more likely.
"Standing in the way of legislation is a shifting group of lawmakers focused on cutting government spending but wielding other demands as well, some of which aren't shared by other Republicans—such as ending aid to Ukraine," wrote The Wall Street Journal. "Moderate Rep. Don Bacon (R., Neb.) has dubbed his hard-line colleagues 'the dysfunction caucus.' He put their numbers at around five to 10 members, saying the group's exact makeup changes from vote to vote. 'Amorphous, like a jellyfish,' he said."
The House and Senate will need to pass 12 appropriations bills to fund next year's government, and their deadline is September 30. Fearing that this won't happen, McCarthy has also floated a stopgap bill that could buy time for lawmakers to come to an agreement.
I specifically requested the opposite of this: Varshini Prakash, co-founder of the Sunrise Movement (a "youth movement to stop climate change"), endorses Biden's new plan to employ 20,000 youngsters "to do the essential work of averting a climate catastrophe." But AmeriCorps-style grassroots activism is almost certainly not the essential work that will avert "climate catastrophe." That "essential work" is more likely to involve developing nuclear technology or carbon capture and sequestration methods or geothermal drilling. "Republicans have criticized the idea of a climate corps as government boondoggle that would fund pipeline protests with taxpayer dollars," according to The New York Times, which is conspicuously light on details as to how much this seemingly useless program might cost taxpayers.
Life support for Ron: A CNN/University of New Hampshire poll released Wednesday shows Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis slipping in a crowded field of Republican presidential hopefuls, dropping to fifth place behind Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, and Vivek Ramaswamy (Donald Trump remains top dog). "The campaign for Ron DeSantis is on life support," veteran New Hampshire Republican strategist Mike Dennehy told Politico. "He has one shot at resuscitation and that is the debate next week." This month, Vanity Fair went inside the DeSantis campaign turmoil. In July, Reason's Eric Boehm explored how cozying up to the "new right" edgelords was a bad call. Takeaway? "He needs to get his ass up to New Hampshire," one DeSantis supporter told Politico.
Scenes from New York:
I took this picture in my neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn. It's a dilapidated home sorely in need of restoration. This is the type of thing the gentrification debate so frequently misses: Poor neighborhoods are dotted with homes that have fallen into disrepair, and a lot of capital is needed to restore them—capital provided by either developers seeking to profit or by relative newcomers who have the budget to buy a suboptimal property and restore it (often over time), but would not be able to afford a fancier brownstone elsewhere. My own building, for example, had squatters living in it up until 2019. A nearby homeowner I interviewed for a piece on New York City's terrible new short-term rental regulation said much the same: He lovingly restored his home, at great cost, before renting a portion of it out. Nobody was coming to save these abandoned properties—least of all the city.
"Throughout the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, brownstones and tree-lined streets are being destroyed to make way for anonymous glass new luxury buildings, whose skyrocketing rents displace neighbors and further contribute to the neighborhood's gentrification," say my neighbors who are engaged in historic preservation efforts for nearby blocks of brownstones. This is a caricature far detached from the reality on the ground, since very few glass luxury buildings have sprung up in our neighborhood and since this activist group also frequently opposes transplants coming into the neighborhood, regardless of which housing stock they choose to take up. There are still lots of people interested in owning a piece of New York City history; in fact, property rights give people the best incentive of all to take good care of these beautiful brownstones (not that the brownstone-restoring transplants are welcomed by opponents of gentrification). Neighborhoods should be dynamic and ever-changing, not preserved in amber, nimbly adapting to the changing needs of the city's residents, wherever they may have come from. In the future, hopefully lots of tall, multi-unit buildings will spring up and lots of shabby brownstones will be restored to their former glory.
The post Inflation Here To Stay? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>National debt exceeds $33 trillion, but no one seems to care. With a government shutdown possibly happening sometime over the next two weeks if there's no spending deal in Congress, the U.S. national debt has quietly slipped past the $33 trillion mark for the first time. It is on track to exceed $50 trillion by the decade's end. "The increase in debt over the last 20 years was overwhelmingly driven by the trillions spent on Republican tax cuts skewed to the wealthy and big corporations," a White House spokesperson told The New York Times.
But this wholly ignores Democrats' massive spending, which they say will have no dire consequences (ever!). The Inflation Reduction Act, for example, was estimated to cost $400 million but will cost something more like $1 trillion. It also does lots of things that are not inflation-reducing at all, not even if you squint. As Reason's Eric Boehm has argued, it's basically "a pared-down version of what Biden originally pitched as the 'Build Back Better' plan—it leaves aside much of the original bill's spending, but it maintains a huge corporate tax increase, huge spending on green energy initiatives, and a plan to swell the ranks of IRS agents." Some pandemic relief programs promoted by Democrats have either been wasteful or plagued by fraud, like the Employee Retention Credit ("The I.R.S. is freezing the program because of fears about fraud and abuse," reports the Times) and the Paycheck Protection Program, which Reason has covered extensively.
Setting the blame game aside, there are massive implications that could stem from this addiction to spending. In the future, rising debt levels could make it harder for businesses to borrow money, kneecapping growth; rising debt could also mean massive inflation—even worse than what we've been contending with.
"This town is addicted to spending other people's money," commented Rep. Eli Crane (R–Ariz.) on X. "Enough is enough."
Zelenskyy cleans house. Six of Ukraine's top defense ministers were fired by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy yesterday ahead of his visit to Washington, D.C., and to New York, where he will address the United Nations. Roiled by reports of corruption, some have speculated that Zelenskyy needs to get his house in order before he makes big asks for U.S. aid, but no official reasoning for the defense ministry shakeup has been given. Defense Chief Oleksii Reznikov was axed by Zelenskyy earlier this month.
In other news, Ukraine has recaptured the village of Klishchiivka, near Bakhmut, which is Zelenskyy's "second significant gain in three days in [Ukraine's] grueling counteroffensive against the Russian army," per Reuters.
What's going on with the child poverty rate? "The poverty rate rose to 12.4 percent in 2022 from 7.8 percent in 2021, the largest one-year jump on record," reported The New York Times last week after the release of new Census Bureau data. "Poverty among children more than doubled, to 12.4 percent, from a record low of 5.2 percent the year before."
But it's a bit thornier than that. Poverty in America is measured in two ways: via the Official Poverty Measure (OPM), which uses cash and cash-like government benefits (welfare and unemployment checks), and the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which factors in food stamps and tax credits. Depending on which measure you look at, you'll get a different sense of how dire (or not) the situation is. For example, stimulus checks, expanded food stamp benefits, and expanded child tax credits were counted only under the SPM (not the OPM). When they expired last year, the poverty rate (as counted by the SPM) rose. "The decline in the child poverty rate between 2021 and 2022 under the OPM was statistically insignificant," according to Matt Weidinger and Scott Winship at the American Enterprise Institute. "Because the undercounting of UI [unemployment insurance] benefits made the 2021 official rate too high, it's likely that a better-measured version would have shown an increase this year."
Besides, "there have been only three years with a lower child poverty rate in US history—2019, 1973, and 1969." And, "had inflation—partly caused by massive spending in 2021—been lower, the OPM might have reached an all-time low." Things are, by and large, getting better all the time.
Scenes from New York:
VIDEO THREAD: This morning in New York City, climate activists blockaded the entrances to the NY Federal Reserve.
NYPD quickly issued a warning over an LRAD and began arresting activists one by one.
"We need clean air, not another billionaire!" they chanted while refusing to… pic.twitter.com/wCUv16f6af
— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) September 18, 2023
The post Spending Other People's Money appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>With the Senate and now the House reopening for business, Congress is resuming its negotiations over annual spending on so-called discretionary programs. As Washington tinkers around the edges of the behemoth federal budget, members are steering clear of the biggest budget items—the ones sending U.S. debt to unprecedented heights.
Discretionary means that Congress hasn't put these programs on autopilot, unlike so-called mandatory programs. Instead, Congress must vote each year (and sometimes more often) to either continue, or alter the spending. Otherwise, discretionary program funding expires on September 30, or whichever date Congress picks as the end date for a continuing resolution (a bill to continue spending at current levels).
While controlling discretionary spending is important for fiscal responsibility, for reducing government waste, and for negotiating the proper size and scope of federal activities, the current shutdown debate is largely symbolic. America's biggest fiscal challenge lies in the unchecked growth of federal health care and old-age entitlement programs. Repeated shutdown fights and a slew of temporary continuing resolutions have gotten us no closer to reforming Social Security and Medicare.
Those paying attention to the debt limit debate that ended in early June may be wondering what all the shutdown fuss is about, given that Congress and the White House agreed to new spending limits just a few months ago. Those limits, specified in the Fiscal Responsibility Act, were a sham from the beginning. Secretive side deals undermined the stated goals of the bipartisan agreement before the ink was dry. Now President Joe Biden has requested $40 billion in additional emergency supplemental spending, with the Senate adding several more billion to its appropriations bills, a glaring attempt to evade even modest fiscal restraints.
The debt limit deal did succeed in allowing both Democrats and Republicans to claim political victory while suspending the debt limit for more than 18 months. The losers are the American people, as excessive federal spending and unchecked entitlement growth drive up inflation and interest rates and undermine stronger economic growth. A more responsible way to raise the U.S. debt limit would have paired such an increase with a credible fiscal plan to stabilize the growth in the debt. Alas: With federal elections looming next year and the White House dug in against entitlement reform, Congress chose to punt instead.
The longer Washington waits to fix autopilot spending, the more damage they'll do. The Congressional Budget Office's latest long-term budget outlook projects that U.S government spending will consume nearly 30 percent of the economy by 2053—almost 40 percent higher than the historical average. Congress is expected to rack up more than $100 trillion in additional deficits over those 30 years—more than four times what the U.S. government has borrowed over its entire history. Who will lend the U.S. government such vast sums?
The main drivers of this increase are heightened interest costs and the growth in health care and Social Security spending. With Medicare and Social Security responsible for 95 percent of long-term unfunded obligations, according to the Treasury Financial Report, there's simply no way any serious fiscal reform effort can leave these programs untouched. Every other part of the budget will either stay steady or decline slightly. Other so-called mandatory programs, including various welfare programs, retirement benefits for federal employees, and some veterans' benefits, are projected to decline as a share of the economy. Discretionary spending depends on what Congress decides to spend each year; if historical trends hold, this part of the budget will decline by one-sixth. And yet this is the part of the budget that all this shutdown fuss is about.
The most likely outcome from the current standoff is a continuing resolution into December, followed by a spending-laden Christmas tree bill before year's end. This shutdown debate matters only so much, considering the huge fiscal challenge confronting the United States.
The post Don't Let the Government-Shutdown Charade Distract You From the Debt Crisis appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The monthslong debate over raising the debt limit is barely in the rearview mirror, and already it's time for another round of brinksmanship over the federal government's fiscal future.
This time the stakes are a possible government shutdown at the end of the current fiscal year on September 30. That will happen unless Congress and President Joe Biden agree on a budget before then—which is highly unlikely—or agree to pass a short-term continuing resolution, which is how these fights are usually resolved.
The complicating factor is that some Republican members of the House are threatening to use a possible shutdown as leverage to push a variety of their preferred policies.
Some of those demands reflect important concerns about the fiscal state of the government and the growing budget deficit. The House Freedom Caucus wants to revisit the debt limit deal made by Biden and Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) earlier this year, in the hopes of lowering spending levels for future years. Members are also demanding an end to what they call a "blank check" of military aid and funding for Ukraine.
But the group's demands also include more funding for a wall on the border with Mexico, new limits on which immigrants can be granted asylum, and a crackdown on the FBI. Some members of the group are attaching even-less-related issues to the budget negotiations: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), for example, told constituents last week that she would not vote to fund the federal government unless the House opens impeachment proceedings against Biden, CNBC reported.
Whether or not Biden deserves to be the subject of an impeachment inquiry, making these sorts of but-wait-there's-more demands only serve to distract from the essential debate here: the one over the federal government's unsustainable fiscal trajectory.
And unsustainable it is. The national debt is now larger than the American economy, something that's never happened outside of a few brief years during World War II. The budget deficit for the first 10 months of this fiscal year added another $1.6 trillion to the debt, and the short-term nature of most government borrowing means higher interest rates are adding fuel to this fiscal fire. By the end of the decade, interest costs on the national debt will exceed the size of the military budget and will only keep growing. And then there's the Social Security crisis looming in the early 2030s.
It's unfortunate that the only group of lawmakers trying to slam the brakes on federal spending is constantly being distracted by other, less important issues. Because, when it comes to the country's fiscal status, the Freedom Caucus is pretty much right.
"[People] say, 'The Freedom Caucus is a danger,'" Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told Axios earlier this week. "No, the danger is the status quo." As Axios also notes, Paul is not the only senator who seems sympathetic to the Freedom Caucus' maneuvers, though the majority in the upper chamber seems unwilling to consider a government shutdown. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) has indicated that the Freedom Caucus is essentially McCarthy's problem to solve.
While we wait to see what happens next, it's worth considering how this new fight over a possible government shutdown reveals the foolishness of governing from crisis to crisis. Biden and McCarthy had an opportunity to head off some of the federal government's major fiscal problems earlier this year but instead settled for a debt ceiling deal that largely maintained the status quo—the new limits on discretionary spending do virtually nothing to solve the deficit, spending, or entitlement issues facing the country.
This year's federal budget deadline presents an even better opportunity for beginning the difficult process of solving those problems. At the very least, lawmakers should ask why federal spending has ballooned from $4.8 trillion to more than $6.2 trillion between 2018 and 2022, and how that increase in spending is driving deficits higher.
Punting on those tough questions doesn't make any of them go away. Instead, it will only create another crisis in a few months, and another opportunity for groups like the House Freedom Caucus to leverage the debate.
This is no way for a serious country to govern itself. It's fine to worry about the consequences of a government shutdown, but at some point Congress has to start worrying about the consequences of keeping the government open if doing so requires ongoing borrowing at unsustainable rates.
The post Is a Government Shutdown Better Than More Reckless Borrowing? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Fitch Ratings just downgraded the U.S. government's credit rating due in part to Congress' erosion in governance. Indeed, year after year, we see the same political theater unfold: last-minute deals, deficits, and, all too often, the passage of gigantic omnibus spending bills without proper scrutiny, along with repeated debt ceiling fights and threats of shutdown.
But these are just symptoms of a budget-making process that remains in desperate need of reform. With legislators chronically delinquent about following their own rules, the change may need to be as much cultural as procedural. No matter how good the rules are, they're useless if politicians ignore them. And in a world where politicians are rarely told no when it comes to creating or expanding programs, most simply refuse to have their hands tied or behave as responsible stewards of your dollars.
Adding insult to injury, the budget process has become a winner-takes-all competition, leaving the minority party with little to no voice in budgetary outcomes. Under these conditions, battles over the debt ceiling, continuing resolution votes, and threats of shutdowns are the only ways for the voiceless to state their demands.
Bad processes lead to bad outcomes. The lack of oversight and the general absence of a long-term vision is creating inefficiency, waste, and red ink as far as the eye can see. Without real reform, no one can stop it. So, let's have some real reform.
What we need is a comprehensive budget process under which programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are no longer permitted to grow without meaningful oversight. Combined with other mandatory, more-or-less automatic spending items, they make up more than 70 percent of the budget. Thus, they must be included in the regular budget process and subjected to regular review. Only then will our elected representatives be forced to stop ignoring the side of the budget that requires their attention the most.
This would also help deal with the fact that entitlement spending is, as every serious observer knows, unsustainable. Unless reformed, these programs will drain wealth not only from the government but from the economy. Ensuring their sustainability must be part of any serious budget process reform.
Enter a "Base Closure and Realignment Commission (BRAC)"-style fiscal commission, an idea promoted by the Cato Institute's Romina Boccia. This commission would be staffed with independent experts appointed by the president. It would be "tasked with a clear and attainable objective, such as stabilizing the growth in the debt at no more than the GDP of the country, and empowered with fast-track authority, such that its recommendations become self-executing upon presidential approval, without Congress having to affirmatively vote on their enactment," Boccia explains.
I'm uneasy about delegating the president power to appoint "experts." Unfortunately, Congress has proven they will never seriously address the problem unless forced to. The idea is not unprecedented. Congress has already delegated a lot of its legislative power to administrative agencies and the executive branch. It's also how the political class dealt with the closures of military facilities after the Cold War—another set of hard choices they refused to make on their own.
What's more, Congress would retain some veto power. If they disapprove of the proposal, the House and Senate can reject it through a joint resolution within a specified period. Whether it's the best solution to address our fiscal problems remains to be seen, but it's worth considering.
There are many more budget reform ideas out there. I'll leave you with one more. For years now, Congress has failed to pass a budget, and in turn brought the country to the brink of a government shutdown by fighting over the need for a continuing resolution—a temporary measure that extends previous funding levels for a few months.
Making continuing appropriations automatic in case of a lapse could remove the threat of shutdowns. As explained in one senator's proposal, if appropriations work isn't done, "implement an automatic continuing resolution (CR), on rolling 14-day periods, based on the most current spending levels enacted in the previous fiscal year." Further, to avoid overrelying on CRs, "all Members of Congress must stay in Washington, D.C., and work until the spending bills are completed."
The road to reform is never easy. Entrenched interests and complexity, combined with congressional spinelessness, are a daunting challenge. But the stakes are too high to shy away. It's time to completely rethink the way we approach the federal budget, grounding our efforts in the principles of transparency, accountability, and fiscal responsibility.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM.
The post The U.S. Credit Rating Just Dropped. It's Time for Radical Budget Reform. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It's common knowledge among budget experts that the budget process is "broken." Anyone who regularly reads this column knows about debt limits, government shutdowns, and out-of-control spending and borrowing. The list goes on. Well, part of the problem is that almost 50 years since the last budget process reform, it needs a serious update. However, when we do that, let's not miss the elephant in the room: Things would work much better if Congress agreed to follow its own rules.
This has serious implications for those of us pressing for budget process reform. Indeed, the success of any new budgeting approach will depend on Congress' willingness to stick to it. If legislators choose to sidestep or ignore it, even the most well-crafted new set of budgetary rules will fail.
Ponder our current situation. The 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act put in place a process where each year Congress must appropriate discretionary spending—a category that includes education, defense, and more—but does not appropriate mandatory spending on programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
At that time, most of the budget was discretionary. Today, only 27 percent of the budget is discretionary and 73 percent of the spending is mandatory and debt service. One result is that only a small share is under annual congressional control and in most years, the largest share of the budget grows without much supervision. This situation should change for sure.
But that brings us back to the deeper problem of members of Congress refusing to do their job and follow existing budgeting rules. It's best illustrated by a stat provided in 2019 by Brookings Institution scholar William Gale: Since Congress designed and implemented the last budget process in 1974, only on four occasions have all of the appropriations bills for discretionary spending been passed on time. In other words, legislators on the right, left, and center have, from the moment the new process was in place, violated their own budgeting rules without suffering any negative consequences.
Indeed, for years we have witnessed numerous instances of this. Congress has, among other indiscretions, waived budget points of order, circumvented spending caps, and used budget reconciliation to bypass the traditional legislative process. This has caused the budgeting process to be more reactive, ad hoc, and in many cases chaotically last-minute in preventing government shutdowns.
So, it's fair to ask: Is the real problem a budgeting process that's actually broken, or a Congress that doesn't want to do its core job? Sure, let's update the budget rules. But let's also be honest. If Congress were embarrassed about its behavior, or even inclined to follow the rules, we wouldn't be in our current fiscal mess.
The difficulty, of course, is that legislators are both the referees and the players in the budget game. Convincing them to tie their own hands and follow the budget rules is hard. It's one thing for congressional leaders to convince their colleagues that a disciplined budget process is not merely a bureaucratic exercise but an essential tool for fiscal stewardship. It's another thing to convince legislators to begin acting as such in the heat of a high-profile battle with their partisan opponents.
It requires a change in mindset or culture. Members of Congress must see budgeting rules as constraints rather than suggestions. This attitude shift will not happen overnight, but it can be encouraged by cultivating a culture of fiscal discipline and prudence.
Transparency can be a powerful tool. By making the budget process and its outcomes more visible to the public, legislators might feel more pressure to abide by the rules. After all, elected officials are ultimately accountable to their constituents and a well-informed electorate can be a forceful motivator.
Because politics is downstream of culture, public engagement is also an effective way to ensure that Congress adheres to budgeting rules. The more the public understands the budget process, the better able voters are to hold their representatives accountable. Therefore, efforts should be made to demystify the budget process, making it accessible and understandable to the average citizen.
These changes would only scratch the surface of the complex challenge of ensuring Congress adheres to budgeting rules. Ultimately, it will require a combination of political will, public pressure, and institutional reform.
With the mounting fiscal challenges facing our nation, the importance of addressing this issue cannot be overstated. It's time for Congress to take budgeting rules seriously by following them in the interest of fiscal health and economic stability.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM.
The post Is the Budget Process Broken, or Is Congress Just Refusing To Do Its Job? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A group of Republican senators is increasingly ready to shut down the federal government in order to stop President Joe Biden's vaccine mandates. On Wednesday, the House failed to vote as planned on a short-term budget resolution to keep the government open past Friday, when the current spending authorization expires.
Holding things up is a demand from some Republicans that the next budget agreement not contain funds for enforcing the various vaccine mandates issued by the Biden administration, including one that requires members of the military to get the jab, and another that would require employers with 100 or more workers to get vaccinated or take periodic COVID-19 tests.
The House Freedom Caucus sent a letter to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) that asks him to use "all procedural tools" at his disposal to pass a continuing resolution that prohibits funding for "unAmerican" and "unlawful" vaccine mandates.
It's a sentiment that's being echoed in the Senate as well.
Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) is reportedly leading the effort, and urged his fellow GOP senators to support a shutdown at a lunch on Wednesday, reports Politico.
"I think we should use the leverage we have to fight against what are illegal, unconstitutional and abusive mandates from a president and an administration that knows they are violating the law," Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) told reporters on Wednesday, reports The Washington Post.
Cruz, you'll recall, led a successful effort in 2013 to hold up another spending bill because it contained funding for Obamacare. That resulted in a 16-day shutdown of the federal government.
Many Republican senators were critical of Cruz's maneuvering at the time, arguing—correctly, as it turns out—that the GOP would be blamed for a government shutdown that had no hope of actually ending Obamacare.
The backlash from that episode perhaps explains why a number of anti–vaccine mandate Republicans are nevertheless trying to throw cold water on their colleagues' demand for a shutdown over funding said mandates.
"Shutdowns almost never work out," said Sen. Roy Blunt (R–Mo.) to Politico.
McConnell has been pretty tight-lipped about the whole affair. He reportedly said nothing at the lunch where Lee urged senators to back a continuing resolution with no funding for vaccine mandates, opting instead to silently eat two pieces of chicken.
He told reporters on Tuesday that there would be no shutdown, reports the Post.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.), for his part, has said that the two parties are making progress in their budget talks, and cautioned GOP senators against causing what he branded as a "needless Republican government shutdown."
Unfolding in the background of these budgetary machinations are a host of legal challenges to the White House's vaccine mandates.
In late November, the Biden administration asked an appeals court to lift a stay on its vaccine mandate for private employers. That stay had been issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit earlier that month. Several members of the military, represented by former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, have also sued over a requirement that service members get the jab or face dishonorable discharge.
The U.S. Supreme Court may be inching closer to overturning longstanding precedent on abortion. On Tuesday, oral arguments were heard in a case challenging Mississippi's ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The state's law violates past Supreme Court rulings that prohibit states from restricting abortion prior to "fetal viability"—meaning the fetus can survive outside the womb. Viability is generally considered to begin around 23 or 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Most of the action, as Reason's Jacob Sullum covered yesterday, involved the court's six conservative justices pondering whether they could uphold Mississippi's law without wholly overturning decisions in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey that together established that viability standard.
Their comments and questions, wrote Sullum, "do not bode well for anyone who hoped that the Court would retain the essence of its abortion precedents even if it let Mississippi's law stand. Given the unsatisfying justification for the viability rule and the lack of promising alternatives, a majority of the justices may well conclude that 'half-measures' won't suffice."
Sullum has also written about why both the current viability standard and the potential replacements for it are all arbitrary.
Supply chain issues and labor shortages are handicapping current economic growth, according to a new Federal Reserve report. That's the takeaway from the Fed's Beige Book—a collection of interviews with business leaders, economists, and market experts on the state of the economy—that was published on Wednesday. The Wall Street Journal summarizes:
Despite robust hiring during the period covered by the report—early October through mid-November—businesses contacted by the Fed "reported robust demand for labor but persistent difficulty in hiring and retaining employees." Child care issues, Covid-19 safety concerns and retirements were the top issues cited for the labor crunch….
Businesses throughout the country reported rising input costs and said they were passing them on to customers. In the Cleveland Fed district, 80% of firms surveyed said they had higher costs over the past two months. "Gas, electric, food, raw materials, products, everything is going [up]," a logistics business said.
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• Judge Glock argues over at the Breakthrough Institute that suburbia is actually good for the environment, and states should stop trying to prevent "sprawl."
• A new poll of Los Angeles County voters finds that a majority support a new state law that will allow duplexes to be built on almost all residential land in the state, including in once single-family neighborhoods.
• San Francisco officials are going to keep their indoor mask mandate in place "indefinitely" in response to the new omicron variant. Did we expect anything else?
• The White House has a new plan for fighting the virus that includes easier access to at-home testing, more booster shots, and more travel restrictions.
• The Michigan student who killed four people at Oxford High School earlier this week had apparently provoked concerns from school administrators prior to the Tuesday shooting.
• Over at National Review, Philip Klein argues that the omicron variant is actually a great example of why we need to ditch COVID-19 restrictions and get on with our lives.
The post Republicans Mull Shutting Down the Government Over Vaccine Mandate Funding appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>During a policy retreat in September, Donald Trump attributed his signature orange hue, which seems to be caused by the amateurish application of bronzer, to energy-efficient lightbulbs. "The light's no good," he told House Republicans. "I always look orange. And so do you. The light is the worst."
It was hardly the most consequential instance of Trump's blame shifting in 2019, but it was part of a pattern for a president who seems constitutionally incapable of accepting responsibility. Here are some of the more memorable examples from the last year.
Border Song. "The federal government remains shut down for one reason and one reason only: because Democrats will not fund border security," Trump said in January. Yet it was Trump who caused the shutdown by insisting on money for his "big, beautiful wall" along the southern border—money that Congress still has not approved.
Hanoi Shuffle. After his February meeting in Hanoi with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ended abruptly, Trump initially blamed Kim's insistence on a complete lifting of economic sanctions in exchange for only partial progress on denuclearization, saying, "Sometimes you have to walk." A few days later, he argued that Democrats had helped spoil the summit by inviting his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to testify while Trump was in Hanoi, which he said "may have contributed to the 'walk'"—i.e., Trump's own decision to end the meeting.
It's Not the Crime. While it turned out that Trump was telling the truth when he denied that his campaign had illegally conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election, his public and private efforts to impede, curtail, or stop investigations of that question needlessly prolonged the "witch hunt" he blamed on Democrats and the "Fake News Media." Those efforts filled an entire volume of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's March report, which detailed obstructive behavior that made it look like Trump had something to hide.
18th Century Airports. During an Independence Day speech, Trump claimed the Continental Army "manned the air" and "took over the airports" during the Revolutionary War. He attributed the flub to a teleprompter failure that had forced him to extemporize.
Love Him or Leave. After Trump supporters at a July 17 rally chanted "send her back" when he mentioned Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.), who was born in Somalia, he claimed "I felt a little bit badly about it" and "started speaking very quickly," which was not true. Trump's attempt to distance himself from the spirit of the chant was especially implausible because just a few days before he had suggested that "'Progressive' Democrat Congresswomen"—a reference to Omar and three other minority representatives, all of whom were born in the United States—should "go back" to the countries they "originally came from."
Do Us a Favor. To this day, Trump insists that his July 25 telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy—Exhibit A in the case for impeachment—was "perfect" and "totally appropriate," even though his request for an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading contender to oppose him in this year's election, alarmed several administration officials. Instead of conceding that it was even a little bit unseemly to mix foreign policy with his own political interests, Trump has blamed all the fuss on hostile underlings, treasonous Democrats, "corrupt journalists," and even Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
First Resort. In October, Trump suddenly reversed plans to hold next June's Group of 7 summit at his golf club in Doral, Florida, after his advisers and congressional allies warned him that the appearance of self-dealing and self-promotion would provoke an easily avoided controversy. Trump blamed Democrats who "went crazy" and reporters who cited "this phony Emoluments Clause."
There was more, including Trump's claims that the impeachment inquiry and the Fed were responsible for economic developments more plausibly linked to his trade war. But I have run out of space, which is what happens when you try to catalog this president's inartful dodges.
© Copyright 2020 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
The post Trump's Inartful Dodges appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>At the same time that Democrats are holding impeachment inquiries to determine if President Donald Trump abused his executive power, they apparently have no qualms about letting him continue to spy on Americans.
While impeachment hearings are getting most of the attention on Capitol Hill today, House Democrats will also hold a vote on a continuing resolution that will postpone a government shutdown—slated for this Thursday, if Congress can't agree on a budget deal—until December 20. Included in the short-term budget deal is a provision to fully re-authorize the Patriot Act for an additional three months beyond its current sunset at the end of the year, extending it through March 2020. That will postpone any effort to reform or abolish the 9/11-era law that grants the federal government broad surveillance powers including the ability to collect phone records and online data.
"Very cool way to resist Trump by ensuring he continues to have terrifying authoritarian surveillance powers," wrote Evan Greer, deputy director for Fight For The Future, a digital rights advocacy group, on Twitter.
Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.) introduced an amendment on Monday night that would have removed the Patriot Act reauthorization from the continuing resolution, but the amendment was blocked by Democratic leaders.
I introduced an amendment to strip the Patriot Act extension from the spending bill. It has no business being in there. Just like GOP leaders, Dem leaders ruled my amendment out of order. Neither party protects your rights, even though securing rights is why government exists! https://t.co/6kCKt5zisP
— Justin Amash (@justinamash) November 18, 2019
The continuing resolution will also boost pay for the military, fund next year's census, and hike overall spending by about $322 billion—a figure that was agreed to earlier this year, but still seems irresponsible given the rapidly rising deficit and $23 trillion national debt.
The four-week stopgap funding bill also punts on the question of paying for Trump's border wall. That shortcoming might be the best way to stop the reauthorization of the surveillance provisions, since Trump has demanded funding for the border wall in exchange for his signature on a continuing resolution. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) has suggested that Trump might veto the bill in an effort to hamstring the ongoing impeachment investigation.
The continuing resolution's passage in the House seems assured, but some Democrats are signaling their unwillingness to support the bill because of the surveillance issues. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) tweeted that they opposed the Patriot Act's reauthorization.
Yeah that's gonna be a no from me dog https://t.co/O6t8h6zkgs
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 18, 2019
Yeah…no. Count me out. https://t.co/3MsfgzdVsc
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) November 19, 2019
Progressive groups including Demand Progress have also highlighted the Patriot Act reauthorization in tweets and emails encouraging opposition to the continuing resolution. But while Democrats may face a small revolt from their left flank, there is little reason to think the passage of the continuing resolution will be in doubt when it is brought to the floor later on Tuesday.
Asked about the possible progressive opposition to the spending bill Tuesday, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D–Md.) told CNN's Haley Byrd that the three-month extension will allow time for lawmakers to "deal with the issue legislatively," rather than simply letting the Patriot Act lapse.
If there is a silver lining in today's likely reauthorization of mass surveillance of Americans, it could be that Democratic leaders commit to at least considering the possibility of maybe reforming an 18-year-old law that's eroded civil liberties without making Americans much safer.
"Every representative in Congress should oppose this legislation," Amash tweeted on Monday. It would be a huge surprise if more than a handful of lawmakers do.
The post Congress Will Vote Today on Continuing Resolution That Hikes Spending, Extends Patriot Act Surveillance appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On the 34th day of the recent government shutdown at 4 p.m., a huge cloud billowed out from Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. It had been produced by a successful static test fire of the Falcon 9, which will ferry American astronauts to the International Space Station sometime in the next few months. It will be the first such flight since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011, essentially marking an American return to manned spaceflight.
On the day of the test fire, about 95 percent of NASA's workforce was on furlough, having been deemed non-essential to government functioning. How did NASA manage such a milestone with a skeleton crew?
It didn't. The Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon capsule that sits atop it were built by SpaceX, a privately held company founded by entrepreneur Elon Musk. The vehicle's tests and flights are being conducted on contract with NASA as part of the Commercial Crew Program, which represents a tiny fraction of the overall cost of the U.S. space effort. The program is a classic study in the power and pitfalls of privatization, and it may be our best chance to get off this godforsaken rock.
Before it can stage a manned flight, SpaceX must execute one final dress rehearsal, duplicating the planned mission but without actual human beings in the capsule. It looked, for a while, like the government might still be shut down when that time came. SpaceX and NASA both indicated that the launch would nonetheless happen on schedule.
The federal government wound up reopening the day after the test fire, well before the planned launch. But it could certainly be shuttered again, given that the underlying political battle is far from resolved. And legislation emerging from this shutdown will make future shutdowns less politically painful by guaranteeing back pay to government workers. What's more, since the goal of the commercial launch industry is to greatly increase launch frequency, there's a good chance the government will at some point be shut down at a crucial moment in space travel.
The Commercial Crew Program was deemed essential this time and therefore escaped the wrath of politics. But that won't always be the case. And in this instance, key elements of other relevant agencies—notably the Department of Defense and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)—were up and functioning, thanks to some lucky budgetary timing that might not always align so neatly. This is the danger of intermingling private and public: There are efficiency gains and cost savings from the private side, but the dysfunction of the public sector leaks into the efforts of the firms.
Privatization should push further, aiming to remove as much of human enterprise as possible from the blast zone of politics. It's pure madness to make the success of manned space missions contingent on President Donald Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreeing about how many steel slats Congress is willing to fund at the Mexican border.
Even if they don't have direct NASA funding or contracts, commercial space companies are not safe from the vagaries of government. The CEO of the space startup Vector recently tweeted that a test flight to orbit was being held up by a lack of FAA approval. "Shutdown stops FAA's ability to finish our launch license," wrote Jim Cantrell. "Hoping DC gets its act together soon." This is why privatization isn't enough—deregulation is also crucial.
Trump put it best, actually, when he said at a March cabinet meeting: "Rich guys, they love rocket ships. That's good. That's better than us paying for them. And I noticed the prices of the last one, that they said it cost $80 million. If the government did it, the same thing would have cost probably 40, 50 times that amount of money. I mean, literally, when I heard $80 million—you know, I'm so used to hearing different numbers with NASA."
Rich entrepreneurs aren't the only ones who love rocket ships. That's another good reason to protect space from politics by moving as much of it as possible into the private sector: Rich officeholders love space too—but they don't understand it.
Shortly after his inauguration, for example, The Atlantic reported that Donald Trump asked NASA to consider sending up the first test of the Space Launch System (SLS) as a manned flight. That is, the White House asked whether Boeing—which is building a vehicle in direct competition with SpaceX under more conventional contracting terms—could skip the step where you send an empty capsule up before putting actual humans in the tin can. Trump's interest, of course, was driven by a desire to see the return to crewed American space flights during his presidential term.
That may or may not be a good idea. As Reason has argued, NASA is probably overcautious about risk. But this is a decision between aerospace engineers and astronauts. It shouldn't be subject to the demands of political showmanship or executed on timelines determined by elections instead of the movement of planetary bodies.
Meanwhile, SLS, the project over which the government has the most control, is also the furthest behind schedule. "At its current rate, we project that Boeing will expend at least $8.9 billion through 2021—double the amount initially planned—while delivery of the first Core Stage has slipped 2.5 years from June 2017 to December 2019 and may slip further," an October Office of the Inspector General report found.
Not only that, but SLS is single-use. Each launch requires a new vehicle to be constructed, with a price tag of about $1 billion each. And its parts, unlike those of the SpaceX system, are not recoverable or reusable.
According to a plan NASA submitted to the Office of Management and Budget shortly before the shutdown, the agency has the equivalent of 17,856 full-time employees. Of those, about 800 are needed to "protect life and property," which more or less amounted to keeping the folks in the International Space Station alive, keeping NASA property secure, and keeping the Commercial Crew Program moving forward.
The government was essentially stalled for one-tenth of its working year. That would be hard for any firm to recover from. Yet about 17,000 NASA staff will get compensated, in the end, for work they didn't do.
For some people, even the promise of a (belatedly) paid vacation isn't enough to make the struggle with a federal bureaucracy worth it. Shutdowns make it harder for the government to attract and keep the best and brightest. For a long time, NASA was able to take a captive workforce for granted. Wanna be an astronaut? NASA is the only game in town. Rocket scientist? NASA. That guy in the white vest from that movie? NASA. That lady in the cool glasses from that other movie? NASA.
But now? "We didn't have a mass exodus," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine in his remarks welcoming back furloughed workers. "I think had this gone on longer, we would have. But we did lose people—onesies and twosies—across the agency and even here at headquarters."
When conditions change for private companies, they adapt in different, more efficient ways. SpaceX just did a round of layoffs, announcing the departure of about 10 percent of the company's 6,000 employees. Another player, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, laid off about 40 employees as it transitioned to a new home for its commercial flights at the (mostly publicly funded) New Mexico Spaceport.
A space launch industry that is more private than public would also be more fun. You may recall when Musk launched a car into space just because in early 2018. After he got in trouble with just about everyone—including his own boards and the Securities and Exchange Commission—for a podcast interview he did while smoking weed in September, NASA's Bridenstine jumped on him for it, saying to a group of reporters in November: "I will tell you that was not helpful, and that did not inspire confidence, and the leaders of these organizations need to take that as an example of what to do when you lead an organization that's going to launch American astronauts." NASA's solution was to conduct "a cultural assessment study in coordination with our commercial partners to ensure the companies are meeting NASA's requirements for workplace safety, including the adherence to a drug-free environment."
This is obviously a CYA activity, though it's hard to imagine that if a bunch of astronauts die in a fireball over a populated area anyone will say, "Oh, well, NASA did conduct those cultural fit assessments in 2019. What more could it have done?" But it's also hard to imagine that a visionary CEO smoking pot on a podcast has much to do with workplace safety.
When one rocket-building rich guy cracks up, it's handy to have a couple more waiting in the wings. (See what I did there?) Musk is making people nervous, even as he currently leads the pack. But look over here: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is racking up victories as well. His firm, Blue Origin, is building on a reusable model similar to SpaceX's and has had considerable success on the launchpad. The company has secured some modest contracts from NASA, but it's less entangled with the federal government than SpaceX is. Of course, for that very reason, Blue Origin may find it trickier to get approvals and licenses for launches than its more state-symbiotic counterparts. And then there's the open question of whether Trump would stoop so low as to instruct his agencies to deny permissions to Bezos' space company just because he happens to have a beef with Bezos' newspaper company.
There's a deeper truth in those high furlough figures: A space program isn't essential to the functioning of government. Indeed, the vast majority of nation-states operate quite cheerfully without a space program at all. Just because something is vitally important—essential even—doesn't mean we should rely on government to get it done. Quite the opposite.
The post You Can't Shut Down Space appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Donald Trump will likely sign a compromise border deal that would avoid another partial government shutdown, several outlets reported Wednesday morning.
Two unnamed sources told CNN that the president intends to sign the deal, which would keep the government open beyond Friday. The Wall Street Journal reported the news as well, also citing anonymous sources.
What comes next remains unclear. The deal in question has the support of Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress, who are eager to avoid another shutdown. It provides Trump with $1.375 billion for physical barriers on the border, according to Politico, not the $5.7 billion he's been demanding for months.
As I pointed out yesterday, it's still possible the president could sign the border deal and still get his way. While the bill funds just 55 of the 215 miles of border wall that the administration wants, Trump could conceivably take executive action to divert Defense or Treasury Department funds to build the wall, according to CNN. He could do this even without declaring a state of emergency.
Speaking to reporters prior to a cabinet meeting yesterday, Trump expressed his misgivings over the deal, but suggested he's "using other methods" to get his wall money.
"Am I happy at first glance?" he said. "I just got to see it. The answer is no, I'm not. I'm not happy."
"It's not going to do the trick, but I'm adding things to it and when you add whatever I have to add, it's all going to happen where we're going to build a beautiful big strong wall," Trump said. He also said he doesn't expect there to be another shutdown.
Ultimately, signing this border deal is probably the right thing to do. While government shutdowns might sound good in theory to those who love liberty and hate government overreach, the reality is much more complicated. As Reason's Eric Boehm noted last month, the last shutdown did nothing to actually reduce the federal government's power or cost. (Though it did highlight the intrusive and inappropriate role government plays in industries such as air traffic control and beer-labeling.)
Signing the border deal and then immediately taking executive action to obtain money for the wall would also be a bad idea. That's because building the wall would actually cost tens of billions of dollars and involve seizing private property to provide an ineffective solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.
The post It Looks Like Trump Will Sign Border Deal and Dodge Another Government Shutdown appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Donald Trump today said he's "not happy" with a compromise reached by Democratic and Republican negotiators that would prevent another government shutdown. As was the case in the lead-up to and during the last government shutdown, it all comes down to Trump, and it remains unclear exactly what he plans to do.
News broke last night that negotiators from both chambers of Congress had reached a deal to keep the government fully funded after Friday. Republicans and Democrats have been at an impasse over border security funding since late last year. Trump and his allies in Congress want $5.7 billion to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border; Democrats don't want to give it to them. When the president refused days before Christmas to sign seven remaining spending bills—including one that would fund the Department of Homeland Security, where the wall funds would come from—roughly one-quarter of the government shut down. More than a month later, Trump finally gave in, signing a continuing resolution that would reopen the government for three weeks.
Which brings us to the present day. The deal lawmakers reached last night does not give Trump anything close to the $5.7 billion he had demanded. While the bill's text has yet to be released, the agreement reportedly includes $1.375 billion for physical barriers on the border, according to Politico. It also caps the number of beds (i.e. detention slots) for immigrants held by Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) at roughly 40,500. That's about a 17 percent decrease from the current limit of 49,000, but it's still a win for Republicans. That's because Democrats originally wanted to lower the cap to 34,000, The New York Times reported, citing Democratic aides. However, as USA Today notes, it wouldn't be all that difficult for ICE to exceed the cap imposed by Congress, which it regularly does.
At a rally last night in El Paso, Texas, Trump wouldn't weigh in on the deal until he had been briefed on the details. But speaking to reporters prior to a cabinet meeting today, he expressed his displeasure with the compromise.
"Am I happy at first glance?" he said. "I just got to see it. The answer is no, I'm not. I'm not happy."
"It's not going to do the trick, but I'm adding things to it and when you add whatever I have to add, it's all going to happen where we're going to build a beautiful big strong wall," the president added. Trump also said he's "using other methods" to get his wall money.
What about the possibility of another partial government shutdown? "I don't think you're going to see a shutdown," Trump said.
A White House official told CNN's Jim Acosta, meanwhile, that despite his misgivings, Trump will likely sign the compromise.
This is Trump we're talking about, though, and as always, it's almost impossible to predict his next move. The current situation draws some parallels to December, when Trump, after saying he'd be "proud" to shut down the government over border wall funding, appeared to temporarily shift course. Then, after the Senate approved a bill with $1.3 billion in border security funding (though none for an actual wall) that would keep the government open through February, Trump revealed he wouldn't support it.
As was just as true then as it is now, it all comes down to Trump. If the president decides to reject any proposal that doesn't include $5.7 billion, then the government will probably shutter again, as the chances are slim that two-thirds of both the House and the Senate could come together to override a presidential veto. Ultimately, Trump will have the final say.
However, it's within the realm of possibility that Trump could sign the compromise legislation and still get his way. While the bill funds just 55 of the 215 miles of border wall that the administration wants, Trump could conceivably take executive action to divert Defense and/or Treasury Department funds to build the wall, according to CNN. Some of these options would require him to declare a state of emergency; others wouldn't.
Of course, it's important to note that building the wall would actually cost tens of billions of dollars and would involve seizing private property to provide an ineffective solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.
The post Is Another Government Shutdown Imminent? Only Trump Knows! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Congressional Republicans and Democrats have apparently cut a deal on funding border enforcement. So unless President Trump—who says
he's "unhappy" with the terms—walks away and snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, a government shutdown come Friday is not in the cards. However, the question is whether after all of the drama of the last few months, did Democrats even remotely advance the cause of a sane and humane immigration enforcement policy?
Liberal commentators would have you believe that they did because Trump didn't get the $5 billion-plus he was demanding for his border "barrier." That may be right, but the fact of the matter is that he got something and the Democrats got nothing at all, as I note in my latest column at The Week.
The sticking point that nearly derailed the talks over the weekend concerned funding for detention beds to house unauthorized immigrants picked up at the border and rounded up from the interior. Given that Trump has illegally diverted funds for this end, one would have thought the Democrats would use the funding fight to hold the line and insist on starving the ICE beast.
Think again.
So terrified were the Democrats about being blamed for the next shutdown, that they approved pretty much the same levels of detention bed funding as the Republican-controlled Congress did last year.
Nor was it their only capitulation.
Go here to read about the Democrats' other surrenders, including the fact that they didn't even bring up the issue of legalizing Dreamers. They played on Trump's turf and came away empty.
The post The Great Democratic Cave on Border Enforcement appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The main thing we learned from the partial government shutdown that ended last week was something that was apparent before it started: Shutdowns don't work.
President Donald Trump's decision—and it was almost exclusively his decision—to shut down the government to pressure congressional Democrats into supporting a border wall was an abject failure on its own terms. It was also a clear defeat for anyone who favors a smaller, more limited government. If anything, it left us with a federal government that is slightly larger and more powerful than it was before.
Judged strictly as a tactic for extracting policy concessions, the ploy came up short. Although Trump spent most of the shutdown insisting that he would not accept any deal to reopen the government that did not include $5.7 billion for the construction of a barrier along the southern border, he caved in the end; the deal he accepted to reopen the government for three weeks included no significant concessions from Democrats
That's a huge defeat for a president who campaigned on an anti-immigration platform while touting his ability as a tough-minded dealmaker. Trump was simply outplayed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who understood how the shutdown would play out. Trump didn't, and by handing her an early win he has has empowered his primary political antagonist.
Pelosi is an effective political strategist, but the outcome in this case is less a result of some sort of unique genius on her part and more a product of Trump's incompetence and impetuousness. It was obvious from the beginning that Trump would lose, because Trump, who declared in December that he would be "proud to shut down the government for border security," was the one attempting to extract policy concessions by forcing a shutdown.
The clear lesson of past shutdowns is that this tactic not only fails, it backfires. When Republicans, led by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, shut down the government over Obamacare in 2013, the health law briefly became more popular and Republicans folded in a matter of weeks. At the beginning of last year, Democrats briefly shut down the government over immigration demands; they folded when it became clear the public was against them. Attaching unrelated demands to a budget negotiation is a losing strategy.
This shutdown gave us the same essential dynamic, with the general public blaming Trump by a large margin (which seems fair, given that he said he was responsible) and even the president's core supporters trickling away as time went on. In the end, Trump gave in and got nothing in return. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of recent political history could have predicted that this was how it would play out. But apparently, that category does not include Donald Trump.
To be clear, I'm glad we won't end up with a wall. It's a bad idea based on bad premises, and it simply doesn't reflect the reality of immigration in the United States. But that doesn't mean the shutdown had no consequences.
For starters, it probably cost taxpayers money. Federal workers who went without paychecks will receive back pay. Federal contractors will be paid with interest. The economy probably suffered as a result of the shutdown, with an estimate from the Committee For a Responsible Federal Budget putting the toll at around $26 billion. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the cost to the economy at around $11 billion, though much of that will be recouped over time. At a press conference today, Larry Kudlow, Trump's top economic adviser, disputed the figure while offering no evidence to the contrary.
If there is a legislative outcome from this, meanwhile, it's likely to be a bill to pay federal workers during shutdowns. A number of Senate Republicans have come out in favor of such legislation, with Sen. Rob Portman (R–Ohio) touting a bill that would continue to fund federal agencies at existing levels should lawmakers fail to reach a budget deal, allowing for small reductions over time in order to encourage legislators to act. This would effectively put the budgets of federal agencies and the paychecks of federal workers on autopilot, like so much other federal spending.
And while we won't be getting a border wall, we may well end up with Trump declaring a state of emergency and trying to build a wall without legislative approval. Trump toyed with that idea during the shutdown, and in his remarks last Friday he all but announced his intention to use it when the current three-week deal is up if Democrats don't approve wall funding. At this point, it's fairly obvious they won't.
Any declaration of emergency by the president would almost certainly end up in court, and the challenge would probably last years, rendering it practically useless, at least in the short term. Yet declaring an emergency in this circumstance would still represent an executive power grab—a formal indication that Trump has no problems thwarting the will of Congress if doing so suits his political goals.
The final result of this shutdown, then, will probably be a government that costs taxpayers more, in which the paychecks of federal workers become permanently sacrosanct, with the stage set for the president to make a symbolic play to further expand executive power.
This result is all the worse because it was so predictable. No good was ever likely to come from this shutdown, and now that it is over (at least temporarily), it's clear that no good came of it.
The post The Shutdown Was a Failure on Its Own Terms appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Leading 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) proposes an "annual wealth tax on the tippy-top 0.1%." Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) maintains that "a system that allows billionaires to coexist with poverty is immoral." Billionaire Starbucks magnate Howard Schultz declares that he's "seriously considering running for president" as an independent. President and purported billionaire Donald Trump announces the end of the partial federal government shutdown. In the wake of widespread media layoffs, journalists fantasize about "benevolent billionaire backers not fixated on maximum growth." And one such billionaire, Jeff Bezos, saves The Expanse from cancellation.
What do these seemingly disparate stories have in common? BILLIONAIRES, THAT'S WHAT. And also, theyall get discussed on this week's Editors' Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, starring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and me. The conversation also covers U.S. policy toward turbulent Venezuela, the hero's journey of Rep. Walter Jones (R–S.C.), and a certain generational culture-chasm between the podcast's participants.
Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'The 3rd' by Anitek is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Relevant links from the show:
"Trump Announces Deal to End Government Shutdown," by Joe Setyon
"The Government Will Always Be Shut Down," by Matt Welch
"If You Still Think the Shutdown Proves Government Is Important, You're Seeing What You Want to See," by J.D. Tuccille
"Air Safety Is Important. We Shouldn't Let Politics Put It at Risk," by Robert W. Poole, Jr.
"Venezuelan Crisis Boils Over as Opposition Leader Declares Himself President," by Eric Boehm
"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Calls Climate Change 'Our World War II,'" by Nick Gillespie
"Rep. Walter Jones, Who Supported and Then Denounced Iraq War, Is Dying," by Nick Gillespie
Don't miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)
The post Are Billionaires a Policy Failure?: Podcast appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The theatrical federal government semi-shutdown is now over, or at least on hiatus, while the dominant political tribes in D.C. take a break from posturing to pay a few bills. And, I admit, I'm honestly sad to see the end of an inconvenience to government workers. Even as media pundits lamented the plight of federal employees waiting on delayed paychecks, it became increasingly obvious that many of their tasks are unnecessary, better performed by the private sector, or downright dangerous.
Illustrating the theatrical and unnecessary nature of much of the shutdown was a story in my local paper about National Park Service rangers fining "trespassers" at sites including the Montezuma Well Indian ruins. The sites were closed because 22 employees were furloughed and "volunteers also can't return to work" (because reasons, I suppose). But Montezuma Well is free to enter and the small ranger station there is often unstaffed. The four officers still patrolling may well be the most official activity the place has seen.
Unlike patrolling locations that are frequently unguarded, air traffic control is a job that needs to be done. So it was troubling when the Federal Aviation Administration announced that unpaid federally employed controllers were calling in sick, creating delays at airports. But why are we dependent on the government for air traffic control?
After all, an important recent report from the U.S. Department of Transportation's own Inspector General pointed out that Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France "commercialized their air traffic operations via independent air navigation service providers" that "are financially self-supporting." The report added that the United States could learn from their experience.
The various foreign approaches studied in the report range from government-owned corporations to for-profit partnerships. All the operations are funded independent of government taxes and appropriations, meaning that they can continue functioning through the overseas equivalents of the Trump-Pelosi show.
Unsurprisingly, the airline trade association, Airlines for America, supports privatization. Industry analysts say their cause got a big boost from the shutdown.
Of less concern, air travel-wise, was the growing absentee rate among TSA workers as their paychecks failed to materialize. Sure, it sucks to work for delayed compensation. But nobody conscripted them into government service—they took those jobs of their own accord. And they're very, very bad at what they do.
"Undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials," ABC News reported in 2015.
Of travel safety, security expert Bruce Schneier says "the two things that have made flying safer since 9/11 are reinforcing the cockpit doors and persuading passengers that they need to fight back. Everything beyond that isn't worth it."
"The relationship between the public and the TSA has become too poisonous to be sustained," admits the agency's former administrator, Kip Hawley.
TSA workers do excel, though, at abusing opportunities to rob, grope, and harass travelers.
Harassment, of course, is a core responsibility for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). Like too many law enforcement agencies, they largely exist to stop people from doing what they have every right to do—in their cases, to interfere with people's right to self-medicate and to possess the means for self-defense.
Also like too many law enforcement agencies, these two federal bureaucracies have an unpleasant record of misbehavior. The ATF is frequently guilty of "rogue tactics," as the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel put it, and has lost many of its own firearms while trying to regulate those belonging to the public. The DEA has a history of brutality, partying with criminals, and occasionally trafficking in contraband itself.
I find it equally difficult to feel sorrow over the FBI's complaints about shutdown-induced difficulty in paying snitches and buying drugs in stings (no word yet on how the cash crunch affected the bureau's domestic surveillance operations or its campaign against private encryption). Given the bureau's checkered and politicized record, anything that slows it down should provide plenty of Americans with a feeling of relief.
Speaking of a cash crunch, is anybody really sorry that IRS employees suffered some financial discomfort from the sort-of government shutdown? That is, I'll point out, the type of experience they specialize in inflicting on others. Besides, it may not be such a bad thing if the nation's tax collectors fell a bit behind in their role as political weapons wielded by the powerful against their enemies.
Commenting on soldiers who enlist to fight in imperialist wars, the philosopher Herbert Spencer once remarked, "When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves."
By comparison, it doesn't seem excessive to me to refuse to shed tears over temporary financial inconveniences for government workers whose jobs, in all too many cases, pose threats to life, liberty, and property.
No, the experience of working while waiting on a delayed paycheck isn't pleasant for anybody. But the private sector is also hiring, and it's perfectly capable of taking over many of the actually necessary jobs that government does. Given the nasty, intrusive, and abusive nature of so much of the rest of what occupies the government's time, we should be happy to see it go unfunded.
Many of the tasks done by government, it turns out, are better done by somebody else. And many of the rest are best not done at all.
The post If You Still Think the Shutdown Proves Government Is Important, You're Seeing What You Want to See appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Donald Trump's announcement today that the federal government shutdown is ending for a three-week period of negotiations over border security may have put an end to the 35-day standoff. But there is no escaping the conclusion that the underlying dysfunctions and pathologies that got us to this shambolic point will continue long after this month is in the rearview mirror.
As long as Congress refuses to do its job, and as long as the Republican Party refuses to acknowledge that its monomania about security along the U.S.–Mexico border is based on ignorance, unmeetable expectations, and outright lies, we will be reenacting variations on this unpleasant experience for at least the next two years.
"I think part of the problem with politics is people aren't honest enough about what's going on. And there's a lot of bad going on," Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) told Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward last Friday at LibertyCon. Like his friend and fellow-traveler Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), Amash has long been a leading critic of the myriad ways the legislative branch has serially abdicated its most basic of responsibilities in order to preserve electoral viability.
"What we have today is a speakership that is run very much top down," he told Mangu-Ward. "So the speaker dictates everything to everyone, and then all the legislation is take-it-or-leave-it. 'Here's a bill, take it or leave it.'…
"Under Speaker [Paul] Ryan we weren't allowed in the last term to even one time—not even one time!—vote on the House floor to amend legislation. It's the first time in our country's history. And people don't know that. First time in our country's history that members of Congress could not go to the House floor to offer amendments on any legislation. Never happened before….We had a record number of…take-it-or-leave-it bill[s]….So we never really got to legislate."
Congress hasn't passed a proper budget in more than two decades, it has let presidents wage undeclared wars all over the globe, and it has shown little interest in rolling back the executive branch's administrative state. Legislators from the same party as the president openly run interference for the commander in chief, rather than apply the kind of co-equal scrutiny they came into office vowing to exert. Things have gotten so irresponsible that the outgoing House Republican leadership last month tucked into a typically awful Farm Bill reauthorization a provision preventing the 115th Congress from applying the War Powers Act to Yemen.
All of these pathologies have been present in Washington for the entire 21st century; all are objectively getting worse. There is zero reason to expect this sorry trajectory to change.
The same can be said for conservative obsession with "securing the southern border." Both sides in that debate tend to argue as if the federal government hasn't been dumping money, personnel, and construction materials into that issue over the past two decades, and on a bipartisan basis. The number of border guards has doubled, the annual Customs and Border Protection budget has more than tripled, physical barriers have expanded from nearly non-existing to more 650 miles, and yet Republicans act as if nothing has ever been done and Democrats act as if such policies are unconscionable only when the other party does them.
But even though Democrats have not yet landed in a coherent space after the great two-party divergence on immigration beginning in around 2013, it's the restrictionists on the right—and in the White House—who have crossed over into a fantasyland that they show no sign of exiting.
It should tell us something profound that the administration can't seem to open its mouth about immigration-related issues without lying—about criminality, terrorist infiltration, the drug "pipeline," sanctuary cities, the diversity lottery visa, chain migration, illegal-immigrant voter fraud, its own reasons for asking about citizenship in the decennial Census, and so on. This is not just about a president uniquely perpendicular to the truth, though Trump did repeat some of his greatest whoppers this afternoon in the Rose Garden. The same broad sense of factually untethered dystopia has been a feature on the right since the end of the Cold War. Just ask Mitt Romney.
Hyperbole is a tool for those frustrated that facts alone haven't been persuasive enough. Fuse it with the emotions that the immigration issue generates, and the sense of powerlessness that many restrictionists have long felt vis-à-vis the Washington political class, and there's a potentially lavish reward structure for those who peddle dark fantasies about northbound migrants. Just ask Donald Trump. Or Ann Coulter.
The reality is far less exciting. As Nick Gillespie has pointed out in this space, "the number of illegal immigrants in the country is at a 10-year low and the number of people caught trying to enter the country illegally between checkpoints on the Southern border is one-fourth of what it was in 2000 (see chart). Compared to decades past, the majority of illegals enter the country legally and then overstay tourist, student, or work visas. In 2016, the Department of Homeland Security said 170,000 people entered the country illegally outside of border checkpoints while 628,000 people who entered the country legally overstayed visas."
So enjoy these next three weeks, as a do-nothing Congress matches wits with a hysterical president to see just how both sides can continue putting off their respective reckonings. As in today's temporary denouement, the safest bet will always be the option that requires exerting the least responsibility. The government will always be shut down, long after the government shutdown.
The post The Government Will Always Be Shut Down appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Donald Trump today endorsed a continuing resolution that would end the partial government shutdown. The legislation does not provide any of the $5.7 billion the president had demanded for a wall on the U.S.–Mexico border. Instead it will reopen the government for three weeks, giving Trump and lawmakers time to negotiate a more permanent deal.
"We have reached a deal to end the shutdown and reopen the federal government," Trump said from the White House Rose Garden. He alluded to his ability to secure border wall funds by declaring a national emergency, but said he would prefer not to do so. Still, he suggested he might declare one if Congress does not allocate border wall money by February 15.
Trump's announcement comes on the 35th day of the partial shutdown. Roughly 800,000 federal workers have been either furloughed or working without pay. Capitol Hill sources tell The Daily Beast that reports of closed terminals at LaGuardia Airport—a result of an air traffic controller shortage—spurred lawmakers to start talking in earnest. The air traffic control issue was also a contributing factor in Trump deciding to end the shutdown, a White House official tells CNN's Jeff Zeleny.
Republicans and Democrats in Congress have been trying to reach a deal for weeks. Yesterday, the Senate voted on two proposals to end the shutdown, both of which failed. A Republican-backed plan would have funded the government and provided Trump with his border wall money. A Democrat-supported proposal would have funded the government for two weeks without allocating any money for the wall.
In the end, it was almost certainly going to come down to Trump. Before today, the president rejected any proposal that didn't include wall funding. Considering the slim chances that two-thirds of both the House and the Senate could come together to override a presidential veto, Trump was going to have the final say.
It's hard to see Trump's move as anything other than a fold. Trump had insisted on border wall funding, but for now at least he's not going to get it.
But that's a good thing. Trump's border wall is a bad idea for many reasons. (You can read about some of them here.) And as Reason's Eric Boehm noted yesterday, the shutdown has done nothing to actually reduce the federal government's power or cost. If anything, it's had devastating effects in areas the government shouldn't be involved in, such as air traffic control and beer-labeling.
Despite the deal, this saga is far from over. Lawmakers and Trump have yet to strike a permanent deal. It will be interesting to see how negotiations play out over the next three weeks, and whether Trump actually gets any money for the wall.
The post Trump Announces Deal to End Government Shutdown appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The partial shutdown of the federal government is entering its second month, with few signs that it will end anytime soon. Continuing right along with it is the national outpouring of sympathy and material support for the some 800,000 federal workers who've either been furloughed or forced to work without pay.
That's been most evident in the one-company town of Washington, D.C., where businesses have been giving away everything from free pizza and beet burgers to heavily discounted microbrews that get cheaper the longer the government shutdown goes on.
Outside the Beltway, state governments are starting to pitch in. In Connecticut, furloughed feds can now apply for zero-interest loans during the shutdown. The Oregon legislature is drafting a bill that would extend eligibility for unemployment benefits to these same folks, while the coastal town of Astoria, Oregon, is waiving their water and sewage bills.
Average citizens are donating free food to TSA agents around the country, while A-list celebrities like Jon Bon Jovi and Gene Simmons have said agents could eat for free at their respective restaurant chains.
This outpouring of sympathy is perfectly understandable on a human level: People are losing out on pay through no real fault of their own, forcing many families to ask how they're going to pay for rent or needed medical care. The unfairness is particularly rankling for the 10,000 air traffic controllers who're being forced to work a demanding, crucial job without being paid.
And yet none of that very real pain erases the fact that we are seeing an incredible outpouring of grief over something private sector workers have to contend with everyday, and who are not guaranteed backpay once the federal government gets itself together. Worse still, this charity is being directed at people whose current jobs—pay or no—are often unnecessary, ineffectual, or even actively harmful.
That's true of the FBI agents, who're fretting that they're less able to entrap people during the shutdown thanks to their snitches having been furloughed.
It's even more true for TSA agents, who are both incredibly ineffectual even when they're being paid in full (the agency's fail rate at catching contraband hovers somewhere between 80 and 95 percent) and whose job requires the violation of the flying public's privacy and dignity on a daily basis.
To be sure, forcing people to work without pay is a pretty messed up thing to do, even if the underlying job is bogus.
Nevertheless, the solution we should be embracing isn't restoring these professional molesters' compensation to 100 percent, but rather to fire all of them, and turn over security to more capable, less handsy private contractors—or, in the case of bureaucrats at the Department of Education, abandoning the work they do altogether.
Instead, the hyper-partisan attitudes the government shutdown has evoked have seen an increasing number of people lionize them, while ignoring a more fundamental question of whether some of these workers should be on the federal payroll in the first place.
Public sector unions are trying to recast the shutdown as an attack on workers everywhere, while labor activists argue in the opinion pages of The New York Times that TSA agents could kickstart a new wave of working class activism. Over at The Seattle Times, columnist Danny Westneat wonders aloud if "the humble TSA agent" could be the key to saving democracy.
The contrast between this near deification of TSA agents and the reality of their jobs is glaring, and hopefully short-lived. Nevertheless, it servers as a reminder of just how overtly political—and misplaced—all the thoughts, prayers, and free pizza flowing toward federal workers really are.
The post Unpaid TSA and FBI Agents Don't Deserve Your Sympathy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A marijuana-trading website is pitching in to help federal workers affected by the ongoing partial federal government shutdown.
Roughly 800,000 federal government employees are currently furloughed or working without pay as politicians debate funding for a wall on the U.S-Mexico border. For those who also happen to be medical marijuana users, BudTrader is here to help.
"To any Federal Employee unable to pay for their medical cannabis due to the Government shutdown, BudTrader will donate to you the allowable, legal, limit according to California adult use rules and regulations to help ease your suffering in this difficult time," reads a post on the company's Facebook page.
That was back on Monday. Since then, "we've been overwhelmed with emails and social media messages," as well as dozens of phone calls, BudTrader CEO Brad McLaughlin tells Reason. So how do they know the requests are legit, and not just people trying to score some free weed? "We'll ask them what part of the government they work for or what agency they work for," McLaughlin says. "Usually we'll look at their social media pages too."
In lieu of social media information, BudTrader will ask for "follow-up" info or credentials. "You keep it 100 percent confidential because we don't want anybody to lose their job," McLaughlin says.
That's a crucial point. While marijuana is legal in some form or another in 33 states, it's still a no-no for all federal workers, even if they have a valid medical reason.
They can thank former President Ronald Reagan. Back in 1986, Reagan issued an executive order prohibiting both on- and off-duty federal employees from engaging in "the use of illegal drugs," which are defined as "a controlled substance included in Schedule I or II" of the Controlled Substances Act. And despite dozens of states legalizing pot, the Drug Enforcement Administration still classifies marijuana as a Schedule I substance "with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse."
Just because it's banned doesn't mean they'll get caught, of course. Some federal positions, particularly those in law enforcement, require drug-testing. Other agencies, meanwhile, don't bother.
BudTrader's announcement, meanwhile, appears to be having a ripple effect. "We've seen this big show of support from other cannabis brands, including dispensaries, cannabis doctors, and CBD brands," McLaughlin says. Companies are asking questions like "How can we help?" or "What can we do?" he explains.
"At a time when the nation's really divided, let's try to do something good," he added, summing up those companies' sentiments.
These Bud Samaritans appear to be doing some real good. "We have been able to connect federal employees with participating members of the cannabis community all over the United States," McLaughlin says.
The post Weed Website Offers Unpaid Federal Workers Free Medical Marijuana That They Can't Legally Smoke appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Parts of the federal government will remain closed after two proposals to re-open the government failed on the floor of the U.S. Senate Thursday afternoon.
A plan backed by Democrats that would have funded the government for two weeks without including $5.7 billion for President Donald Trump's border wall received 51 votes—short of the 60 required in the Senate to avoid a filibuster. Even if it had passed, it may have faced a veto by Trump.
Separately, a Republican-backed proposal to fund the government and Trump's wall received just 50 votes, with several Republicans voting against the proposal. That plan would have increased borrowing by about $20 billion to find the border wall and spend $12.8 billion on disaster relief, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Even if it had passed, it would have faced an uncertain future in the Democrat-controlled House.
And so the shutdown rolls on.
Thursday's votes provide a nice illustration of the dilemma facing Congress as the government shutdown reached its 34th day. It's impossible for either party to get a funding bill through the Senate without bipartisan support, and there does not appear to be enough bipartisan support for much of anything at the moment. Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.V.) was the only Democrat to cross party lines and support Trump's border wall, and the six Republicans who backed the Democratic proposal were not enough to push it over the line.
Trump's efforts at blaming House Democrats for the shutdown—a shutdown that he said last month would be his responsibility—are only going to make it more difficult to reach any compromise that could pass the Senate.
The next attempt to reach a breakthrough is expected to come from the House, where Democratic leaders are reportedly prepping a bill that would spend $5.2 billion on border security—mostly high-tech options like drones and cameras—without granting permission for Trump to build a physical wall.
Trump has rejected that idea. On Thursday, he wrote on Twitter that "very simply, without a Wall it all doesn't work."
That's the other complicating factor. Even if a compromise to reopen the government could find a path through Congress, it may face a veto from Trump—who has spent this week embarking on a misleading effort to turn his border wall proposal into a rhyming slogan. There's not much in the way of an obvious solution to all this, short of Trump backing down.
While political gridlock is almost always entertaining, the current shutdown has done nothing to actually reduce the federal government's power or cost. If anything, the shutdown is likely to swing public sentiment towards bigger government, since each passing day brings new stories of how the shutdown is creating hardships for public employees in a variety of ways.
But the ongoing shutdown does create opportunities for finding ways to get government out of areas where it really shouldn't be in the first place. Like air traffic control, for example. Or the completely unnecessary agency within the Department of Treasury that's supposed to approve the labels that go on beer bottles. Regardless of how the shutdown eventually shakes out, one can hope that the past month has at least highlighted a few ways in which government's involvement in everyday life is problematic—not just when the government is running, but when it's stopped too.
The post Two Proposals To End the Government Shutdown Just Failed in the Senate appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Employees of the American aviation industry warned this week that the government shutdown poses "unprecedented" risks for air travel in the United States. In a joint statement released Wednesday by unions representing air traffic controllers, pilots, and flight attendants, employees said that "staffing in our air traffic control facilities is already at a 30-year low and controllers are only able to maintain the system's efficiency and capacity by working overtime, including 10-hour days and 6-day workweeks at many of our nation's busiest facilities." Transportation Security Agency (TSA) employees are also working overtime without pay, and many have called in sick during the shutdown so that they can work other jobs.
Aviation unions are right to call attention to possibly increased risks to aviation safety (air traffic control) and security (checkpoint screening) due to controllers and screeners going for long periods without pay.
This is not because of any malfeasance on the part of these employees. Instead, it is a predictable consequence of increasing fatigue brought about by working excessive overtime and the stress of not getting paid. Overtime is occurring as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Transportation Security Administration, respectively, attempt to cope with staffers calling in sick, or—in the case of some controllers—deciding to retire, rather than continuing on without paychecks or enough fellow workers.
It is unconscionable that these vital safety and security functions are at risk from the growing trend of federal government shutdowns. In the case of air traffic control, about 60 other countries have de-politicized air traffic control, removing this vital function from the government budget by setting it up as a self-supporting corporate entity—generally either a government corporation or a nonprofit, private corporation. Fees and charges paid by aircraft operators provide a reliable revenue stream; so reliable that larger air traffic control companies like those of Canada and the U.K. issue investment-grade revenue bonds to pay for modernizing their technology and facilities—something the FAA can only dream about.
Regarding airport security, Canada and most countries in Europe couple national performance standards and regulation with screening by government-vetted security companies. While those companies are paid either by the airports they serve or by the national government (as in Canada), the security companies have a strong reputational interest in keeping their service operating at 100 percent, even if government is late making payments to them. The two dozen U.S. airports, such as San Francisco International, that are allowed to use screening companies have been operating normally during the federal shutdown, with the screeners receiving normal paychecks from the companies.
In other words, we know how to insulate vital aviation safety and security functions from the vagaries of the federal budget. When is Congress going to get serious about fixing this very serious problem?
The post Air Safety Is Important. We Shouldn't Let Politics Put It at Risk appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Donald Trump this morning on Twitter hit at his typical theme that his pet border wall is vital to fighting crime and protecting national security. Can you spot the flaw with this argument?
BUILD A WALL & CRIME WILL FALL! This is the new theme, for two years until the Wall is finished (under construction now), of the Republican Party. Use it and pray!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 23, 2019
We blog about crime stats enough here at Reason that this is an easy one: Crime has been going down steadily (with a few recent bumps) since the 1990s. Here's a nice handy selection of charts from Pew Research Center showing the actual truth:
If crime has been going down steadily throughout much of America without this wall, isn't that evidence we actually don't need it? Or evidence that whatever influences crime rates, it's most certainly not illegal immigration numbers? The illegal immigration population in America actually increased as the crime rate was dropping (now both crime rates and illegal immigration numbers are dropping slightly):
Trump is both a reflection of and a contributing factor to a common attitude among Americans: People think there's much more crime than there actually is. In polling, huge numbers of Americans—we're talking more than 50 percent of those who were polled—believe that crime is up over previous years' numbers even when the exact opposite is true:
So, in that sense, Trump's tweets are wildly out of step with the facts, yet also likely compelling to a certain number of Americans, and that's frustrating. He's far from the first politician who uses fear as a way of selling bad policy prescriptions, and he won't be the last. But he's also completely and utterly wrong about crime and what's causing it.
The post Crime Did Fall, So We Don't Need a Wall appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The federal government has been partially shut down now for 32 days, and nowhere is feeling the strain quite like the nation's airports, where tens of thousands of essential federal employees are required to show up to work regardless of whether they're getting paid.
On Monday, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) reported that 10 percent of its agents were absent from their posts, up from three percent in the same time period last year. Agents are reportedly playing hooky to work jobs that actually pay them.
The result has been longer wait times, closed security checkpoints, and collapsing morale among those still on the job. Headlines are filled with stories of TSA agents relying on donations of free food or playing explicit, uncensored rap music at checkpoints.
Holding it together only slightly better are the nation's air traffic controllers, some 10,500 of whom have been working without pay and without the aid the 3,000 "non-essential" support staff during the shutdown.
So far absenteeism has not been a problem, says Jim Marinitti, an air traffic controller and vice president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), the controllers' union. The longer the shutdown drags, the more likely these controllers will start looking for an exit, he says.
"The workforce stayed strong through the first paycheck. Now facing a second missed paycheck, the reports are coming that people are looking elsewhere," says Marinitti. "Nearly 20 percent of our workforce is eligible to retire, there's no incentive for them to stay."
The shutdown has also resulted in the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)—who operates the country's air traffic control system—closing its academy for air traffic controllers, the effects of which will reverberate long after the shutdown is over says Marinitti.
While it's difficult to feel any sympathy at all for the professional privacy violators at the TSA, the fact that vital air traffic controllers are not getting paid is concerning to say the least. It's also an unfortunate consequence of federalizing so much of crucial airport operations, says Baruch Feigenbaum, a transportation expert at the Reason Foundation (which publishes this website).
The immediate problem with this, says Feigenbaum, is that these functions are funded on a discretionary basis, meaning Congress has to approve funding every year.
"If there's not a budget, or if there's a government shutdown—and we have both right now—those folks are not going to get paid," Feigenbaum tells Reason, saying that spinning off these programs from direct federal control would eliminate a lot of the pain a shutdown imposes on both workers and travelers.
There are already a number of airports in the country that have contracted out their passenger screenings to private companies through the TSA's Screening Partnership Program (SPP), helping to immunize them from the effects of the shutdown.
This includes San Francisco International Airport (the busiest airport to participate in the SPP program), where some 1,200 privately employed security screeners have continued to be paid despite all the budget drama in Washington.
According to Feigenbaum, more airports could easily jump on the bandwagon, and contract out their security screening services, although federal regulations ensure that the most noxious parts of airport security, from groin pat-downs to requirements to remove your shoes are the same at SPP airports.
Spinning off air traffic control operations to a separate, nonprofit entity would be much harder to achieve. A bill to do just that was rejected by the last Republican-controlled Congress, despite the explicit support of both the House Transportation Committee Chairman and President Donald Trump. Changes of a similar reform passing anytime soon are highly unlikely.
In addition to the instability that comes with making airport security and air traffic control federally-provided services, Feigenbaum says there is an inherent conflict of interest too: the same agencies that are responsible for providing the service, are also expected to provide oversight.
"The regulatory side of the TSA screeners is going to have a tendency to go easy on the operations side of the TSA screeners. The question is if there is accuracy there," says Feigenbaum, noting that it is a similar problem with the FAA, which runs air traffic control and is also the nation's top aviation safety regulator.
If the shutdown drags on for much longer, problems at America's airports will only worsen. More and more TSA agents will stop showing up to work, while air traffic controllers might opt for retirement or leaving their profession altogether.
Contracting out these services would ensure that they don't come to a screeching halt every time the government shuts down. Putting that distance between the government and security and safety services would also improve oversight and—at least in the case of air traffic control—improve efficiency by making the adoption of new technology easier.
And while these changes are not something that will happen overnight, it's a nice thing to think about while you're in a 45 minute security line at the airport.
The post Shutdown-Induced Bottlenecks at Nation's Airports Shows Folly of Letting the Federal Government Run Things appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This government shutdown is now longer than any in history. The media keep using the word "crisis."
"Shutdown sows chaos, confusion and anxiety!" says The Washington Post. "Pain spreads widely."
The New York Times headlined, it's all "just too much!"
But wait. Looking around America, I see people going about their business—families eating in restaurants, employees going to work, children playing in playgrounds, etc. I have to ask: Where's the crisis?
Pundits talk as if government is the most important part of America, but it isn't.
We need some government, limited government. But most of life, the best of life, goes on without government, many of the best parts in spite of government.
Of course, the shutdown is a big deal to the 800,000 people who aren't being paid. But they will get paid. Government workers always do—after shutdowns.
Columnist Paul Krugman calls this shutdown, "Trump's big libertarian experiment." But it's not libertarian. Government's excessive rules are still in effect, and eventually government workers will be paid for not working. That makes this a most un-libertarian experiment.
But there are lessons to be learned.
During a shutdown when Barack Obama was president, government officials were so eager to make a point by inconveniencing people that they even stopped visitors from entering public parks.
Trump's administration isn't doing that, so PBS found a new crisis: "Trash cans spilling… (P)ark services can't clean up the mess until Congress and the president reach a spending deal," reported NewsHour.
But volunteers appeared to pick up some of the trash.
Given a chance, private citizens often step in to do things government says only government can do.
The Washington Post ran a front-page headline about farmers "reeling… because they aren't receiving government support checks."
But why do farmers even get "support checks"?
One justification is "saving family farms." But the money goes to big farms.
Government doesn't need to "guarantee the food supply," another justification for subsidies. Most fruit and vegetable farmers get no subsidies, yet there are no shortages of peaches, plums, green beans, etc.
Subsidies are a scam created by politicians who get money from wheat, cotton, corn, and soybean agribusinesses. Those farmers should suck it up and live without subsidies, too.
During shutdowns, government tells "nonessential workers" not to come to work. But if they're nonessential, then why do we pay 400,000 of them?
Why do we still pay 100,000 American soldiers in Germany, Japan, Italy, and England? Didn't we win those wars?
We could take a chainsaw to so much of government.
The New York Times shrieks, "Shutdown Curtails FDA Food Inspections!"
Only if you read on do you learn that meat and poultry inspection is done by the Department of Agriculture. They're still working. And the FDA is restarting some inspections as well.
More important, meat is usually safe not because of government—but because of competition.
Food sellers worry about their reputations. They know they'll get bad publicity if they poison people (think Chipotle), so they take many more safety measures than government requires.
One meat producer told me that they employ 2,000 more safety inspectors than the law demands.
Lazy reporters cover politicians. Interviewees are usually in one place—often Washington, D.C. Interviewing politicians is easier than covering people pursuing their own interests all over America. But those are the people who make America work.
While pundits and politicians act as if everything needs government intervention, the opposite is true.
Even security work is done better by the private sector. At San Francisco's airport, security lines move faster. Passengers told me, "The screeners are nicer!" The TSA even acknowledged that those screeners are better at finding contraband. That's because San Francisco (Kansas City, Seattle, and a dozen smaller airports) privatized the screening process. Private companies are responsible for security.
Private contractors are better because they must compete. Perform badly, and they get fired.
But government never fires itself.
Government workers shout, "We are essential!" But I say: "Give me a break. Most of you are not."
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The post The Lessons of the Government Shutdown appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The government shutdown is now longer than any in history. The media say it's a "crisis."
The Washington Post talks talks about the "shutdown's pain." The New York Times says it's "just too much."
John Stossel says: wait a second. Looking around America, everything seems pretty normal. Life goes on. Kids still play and learn, adults still work, stock prices have actually increased during the shutdown. It's hardly the end of the world.
But he adds that the government shutdown is still a problem. For some 400,000 furloughed workers, and another 400,000 working without pay for now, the shutdown hurts.
But while New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls it "Trump's big libertarian experiment," Stossel notes that the shutdown is not libertarian. Government's rules are still in effect, and soon workers will be paid for not working. Stossel calls that an un-libertarian experiment.
Libertarians want to permanently cut government, not shut down parts for a few weeks and then pay the workers anyway.
There are lessons to be learned from the shutdown.
Government stopped collecting trash and cleaning up public parks in DC, so volunteers stepped in to pick up trash. Without so much government, Stossel says, private citizens will often step in to do things government workers used to do.
Stossel says the shutdown highlights where some government waste can be trimmed.
Farmers don't get their "support" checks during the shutdown. But Stossel asks–why should they get checks at all? While the big subsidies go to grain and corn farmers, most fruit and vegetable farmers get no subsidies. They survive without them. Other farmers could, too.
FDA inspection of food has stopped during the shutdown. Paul Krugman asks smugly, "does contaminated food smell like freedom?"
But Stossel notes that the main reason food is safe isn't government. It's competition. Companies worry about their reputation. Just ask Chipotle, Stossel says. Their stock fell by more than half after food poisoning incidents at their stores; since then they have instituted far more food inspection than government requires.
Most food producers already do that. Beef carcasses undergo hot steam rinses, and microbiological testing goes well beyond what government requires. Market competition protects us better than rule-bound government bureaucrats.
Stossel says most of government could be done away with or privatized.
Even airport security. TSA workers aren't getting paid. But some airports (San Francisco, Orlando, Kansas City, and 19 others) privatized security. Those workers are still getting paid. They also do a better job. A leaked TSA study found that the private security agents, in test runs, are much better at detecting weapons in bags than the TSA. A congressional report found they are also faster at processing passengers.
Stossel says that while politicians bicker about $5.7 billion in wall funding (much less than 1 percent of the federal budget) what they really should worry about is that America's debt will soon reach $22 trillion because government squanders money on useless things.
At union protests, government workers say "We are essential!"
But based on the above, Stossel says: Give us a break.
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The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.
The post Stossel: Government Shutdown Shows Private Is Better appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Burgers and a side of memes. It's a classic conundrum: You've invited the championship-winning college football team over for dinner, but your kitchen staff has all been furloughed because of your temper tantrum about a giant wall. What to do? Why, order some good old-fashioned American Food, obviously.
When asked by reporters, President Donald Trump wouldn't pick a favorite from the (cold!) fast-food smorgasbord he served Clemson University football players yesterday evening. Instead, he refused to differentiate between the McDonald's, Wendy's, and other burgers and fries served, repeatedly referring to it as simply "American food" and saying that he loved it all.
Trump was quickly condemned by some as "tacky" and "cheap," and then those folks were condemned by others for being snobs, and so on. (I'm not sure what cycle of the backlash we're currently in.) But with all due respect, who cares? This is comedy gold.
News you can use! Read Reason Associate Editor Mike Riggs' feature from the February print issue:
I wrote a big thing about CBD, which is either a miracle cure or a marketing scam, depending on what kind of CBD you buy, who you buy it from: https://t.co/bBaXAUqExp
— Mike Riggs (@MikeRiggs) January 14, 2019
Kamala Harris and the return of the "Bernie Bros." As Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) gets ready to announce her presidential run, her fans have started rehashing rhetoric from the 2016 presidential election every time they see any criticism of her. Critiques of Harris are dismissed as simple sexism or racism, and often attributed to the nefarious Bernie Bros, who have allegedly regrouped and set their sights on Harris this time.
The anti-Kamala Harris campaign by the Sanders-oriented predominantly white "progressive" left has started. We all knew it was coming.
— Tom Watson (@tomwatson) January 14, 2019
Many a think piece back in 2016 characterized Bernie Bros as left-leaning white dudes who marginalized the concerns of women and people of color and dismissed women like Hillary Clinton (and now Harris) to signal socialist purity. But in practice, then and now, anyone can be dismissed by Democrats as a Bernie Bro if they criticize Clinton or Harris. And then as now, another common way to dismiss concerns about Harris has been to downplay them as petty, unserious, or representing an excessive concern with ideological purity. It's going to be a long year…
Congress should rein in the president's #EmergencyPowers before a *competent* authoritarian comes along, I argue @CatoInstitute:https://t.co/dvBCl54J5a
— Gene Healy (@GeneHealy) January 11, 2019
The post Government May Be Closed, But McDonald's Is Open: Reason Roundup appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>One feel-good story making the rounds today is about the crews of Canadian air traffic controllers who are sending pizza to their American counterparts, working without pay during the now 24-day partial shutdown of the federal government.
The pizza deliveries started last Thursday, when a team from Edmonton, Canada sent pizzas across the border to Anchorage, Alaska. It then snowballed from there, with at least 300 pizzas sent to 40 different U.S. facilities, according to the Washington Post.
Canada does it again! "Canadian air traffic controllers send pizza to US counterparts affected by shutdown" https://t.co/ZxEJbbaBlf #NATCA #CATCA #USshutdown #Canada
— David Perry (@SocialDave) January 14, 2019
It's a nice gesture, one that is no doubt welcome for U.S. controllers, who're some of the few federal workers that are required to show up to work even if though they are not being paid. (Several air traffic controllers are suing the federal government over this.)
It's also a gesture that wouldn't be necessary if the U.S. had the same air traffic control system as our northern neighbor.
Back in the mid-1990s, Canada spun off its air traffic control system from a government-controlled and operated entity to the private, non-profit corporation NavCanada.
Though the government of Canada still appoints several members of its board, NavCanada is independent of government subsidies. Instead users of Canada's airspace, including airlines, general aviation, and business jets, pay for the navigation and flight information services that NavCanada provides.
The immediate upshot of this is that NavCanada is spared having to be part of Canada's (admittedly more tranquil) budgetary politics.
The same cannot be said of America's air traffic control system. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)—which operates the country's air traffic control system—must be reauthorized by Congress every five-years, as must be the taxes that fund it. Salaries for air traffic controllers are likewise subject to discretionary appropriations from Congress.
This leaves the system, and air traffic controllers themselves, at the mercy of our increasingly erratic and dysfunctional Congressional politics. When that dysfunctional politics caused a shutdown of the government on Dec. 20, air traffic controllers stopped getting paid.
This instability has been one reason why the National Air Traffic Controllers Association—the air controllers' union—has long been a proponent of Canada-style reforms that would spin the air traffic control system off into a non-profit, self-funded entity.
"We're looking for stable, predictable, reliable funding," said NATCA president Paul Rinaldi in a 2017 video. "Since 2007, we've seen 23 short-term extensions of FAA re-authorization. We've experienced the partial shutdown of the FAA. We've seen a full shutdown of the government. What we really need to seek is to insulate us from the day-to-day actions of Congress."
A spun-off air traffic control corporation like the one Canada has, and which has been proposed here (even earning the endorsement of Trump back in June 2017) would solve this problem by getting its funding from fees paid by airlines and other users of the country's airspace.
Not only would that insulate the incredibly important business of air traffic control from a government shutdown, it would also mean America's woefully outdated air traffic control system would be able to adopt newer technology more quickly.
"In America in 2017, pilots are still guided by radio beacons on the ground that date to the 1930s, and by instructions delivered via shared voice radio frequencies. Surveillance of U.S. airspace still relies almost entirely on 1950s-era radar, despite widespread use of GPS by ordinary citizens," wrote Reason's Bob Poole in November 2017, pinning the blame on the slow-moving appropriations process and the innovation-crushing FAA.
In contrast, the independent, self-funding air traffic control systems of places like Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany, are able to buy new technology off-the-shelf as it becomes available, putting them decades ahead of the U.S. in terms of safety technology.
Unfortunately, air traffic control reform has proven incredibly controversial, and has so far failed to make its way through Congress. Some had hoped that Trump's endorsement of reform would help finally get a bill passed, but by all accounts, the president failed to do the legislative arm-twisting to get the job done.
That's left air traffic controllers dependent on Congressional funding, and—when that ran dry—pizza from Canada.
The post U.S. Air Traffic Controllers Are Working Without Pay During the Shutdown. Canada's Privatized Air Traffic Control System is Bailing Them Out With Free Pizza. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) has had an interesting week of defending President Donald Trump's bluster in the ongoing government shutdown, most recently yesterday on Fox News, which is where we start this week's Reason Podcast, editors' roundtable edition.
Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and yours truly talk about national emergencies, prohibition metaphors, opportunistic defenders of "freedom," and whether Paul Krugman was right when he called the shutdown a "big, beautiful libertarian experiment." Also up for discussion are the negative reactions to Democratic presidential contender Tulsi Gabbard, the hawkish anti-Trumpery of the D.C. foreign policy/intelligence consensus, and the modern capitalistic miracle of eyewear.
Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Hallon' by Christian Bjoerklund is licensed under CC BY NC SA 3.0
Relevant links from the show:
"Sorry, Paul Krugman, the Government Shutdown Is No Great Libertarian Experiment," by Peter Suderman
"Trump's National Emergency Is an American Obscenity," by Matt Welch
"'Our Porous Border' and Other Myths of Trump's Increasingly Popular Wall Mania," by Nick Gillespie
"Freedom Caucus Chair Mark Meadows Supports Asset Forfeiture, National Emergency Declaration to Fund Wall," by Robby Soave
"The Democrats' Alternative to Trump's Wall Isn't Good for Privacy or Property Rights Either," by Christian Britschgi
"Mitch McConnell is Keeping the Senate Out of the Shutdown Fight. It's a Hypocritical Abdication of Congressional Responsibility," by Peter Suderman
"Please, TSA Workers, Don't Come Back," by J.D. Tuccille
"For Once, the TSA Is Right," by Joe Setyon
"Tulsi Gabbard, Iraq War Veteran and Skeptic of America's Wars, Will Run for President in 2020," by Eric Boehm
Don't miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)
The post Are Government Shutdowns Good for Libertarians?: Podcast appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A passenger sneaked a firearm through airport security in Atlanta earlier this month before flying with it to Tokyo. This has attracted a lot of media attention, with CNN, Time, CBS, The Hill, The Washington Post, and others publishing write-ups of the incident.
Meanwhile, we've seen a lot of stories about Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees, who are working without pay during the partial government shutdown, calling in sick. Airports in Houston and Miami have even closed down some security checkpoints.
So is the shutdown making airports less safe? Was it the stalemate in Washington, D.C., that allowed someone to slip a gun past TSA screeners?
The short answer: probably not. The story about the firearm appears to have been first reported by WSB-TV, an ABC affiliate based in the Atlanta area. On January 2, a man boarded his Delta flight to Japan with a firearm. Once he landed, he informed Delta workers that he had a gun. Delta in turn informed the TSA, who said in a statement that "standard procedures were not followed."
The TSA insists the shutdown had nothing to do with the incident. "The perception that this might have occurred as a result of the partial government shutdown would be false," the agency said in a statement to the press. "In fact, the national callout percentages were exactly the same for Wed, 1/2/19 and Wed, 1/3/18 (when there was no shutdown)—5%," an agency spokesperson added in an email to Reason.
In other words, this wasn't the shutdown; it was just normal TSA incompetence.
Sounds plausible to me. The TSA has a pretty bad track record when it comes to identifying items that could actually pose a threat. A 2015 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) investigation, for instance, revealed that in 67 out of 70 cases, undercover investigators succeeded in smuggling weapons or explosives through security.
Acting TSA Administrator Melvin Carraway lost his job as a result of that investigation, but things didn't get much better. In March 2017, a woman made it through airport security in Charlotte, North Carolina, before realizing she had forgotten to remove a loaded gun from her purse. In July of that year, KMSP reported that undercover investigators had been able to smuggle explosives or fake weapons through Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport security 16 out of 17 times. And in November 2017, another DHS investigation revealed that TSA screeners were still failing to identify test weapons at a high rate. The failure rate was "in the ballpark" of 80 percent, a source told ABC News at the time.
The TSA just isn't very good at evaluating risk. It may be great at confiscating plastic toys and bullet-shaped ice cubes. But firearms and explosives are a completely different story, shutdown or no shutdown.
This post has been updated with an emailed statement from a TSA spokesperson.
The post For Once, the TSA Is Right appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>National parks, new kinds of beer, and paychecks for hundreds of thousands of federal workers are just a few casualties of the ongoing partial government shutdown. And while the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security remain unfunded, the parts of the government authorized to shoot you are functioning just fine.
One agency that's not functioning like normal is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is in charge of enforcing federal laws against "obscene, indecent and profane broadcasts" on the radio and television. "Due to the partial government shutdown," the FCC notes at the top of its website, "the FCC suspended most operations at mid-day Thursday, Jan. 3, 2019."
That raises some burning questions: What happens if you curse on the air during a government shutdown? Will the FCC hunt you down and dole out punishment? Hungry for answers, I started investigating.
Profanity, according to a page on the agency's website, is banned on broadcast radio and TV from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. The same goes for "indecent" content, which involves "sexual or excretory organs or activities."
But even when the government is functioning normally, the FCC doesn't actively seek out violators. Instead, the agency relies on consumers to notice banned content and file complaints. It's usually not until much later that the FCC takes punitive action. "Any enforcement that happens is way after the fact," Bob Corn-Revere, an attorney specializing in First Amendment law and communications, media, and information technology law told me. "It isn't instantaneous."
There are two major kinds of complaints you can file with the FCC: formal and informal. Formal complaints cost $225 to file and "are heard very much like court proceedings," according to FindLaw.com. "When [the FCC] receives a complaint, it looks [at] the complaint in due course and then makes a determination whether or not enforcement is warranted," says Corn-Revere.
Informal complaints, on the other hand, cost nothing. While the FCC does look them over, it usually only takes action based on "trends or patterns," reports Wired.
Both formal and informal complaints can normally be filed online. But links to the FCC's "Consumer Complaint Center" appear to be redirecting users to a page titled: "Impact of Potential Lapse in Funding on Commission Operations." Included on that page are links to the FCC's "Public Notice" regarding the funding lapse.
According to the notice, "the systems unavailable" during a shutdown "include, among others, the Consumer Complaint Center (including the main FCC Call Center and the American Sign Language Consumer Support Video Line)."
So if consumers can't file complaints with the FCC during the shutdown, does that mean you can curse on the air without fear of reprisal? Not necessarily. Angry consumers can wait until the shutdown's over, or file a complaint via mail. That being said, the shutdown will certainly slow down the process. And it's possible some folks who planned to file a complaint online will have forgotten by the time the shutdown is over.
Ultimately, I can't know for sure what will happen to people who swear on the air while the shutdown is ongoing. I reached out to the FCC's Office of Media Relations but did not hear back (probably because their representatives are furloughed). I also tweeted at FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, and will update this post if I hear back.
There's still one way to find out what might happen. Broadcasters, I'm looking at you.
The post Can You Curse On-Air During a Government Shutdown? <em>Reason</em> Investigates appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In The New York Times, columnist Paul Krugman declares that the current government shutdown can be understood as "a big, beautiful libertarian experiment." Government programs have been forced to pause, federal workers aren't being paid, the swamp of Washington is relatively quiet. Isn't this exactly what libertarians want?
Even Krugman understands that it isn't. As he acknowledges in the column, the sudden nature of a shutdown like this means private sector companies that might take over some of the federal government's current activities "don't exist now and can't be conjured up in a matter of weeks. So even true libertarians wouldn't necessarily celebrate a sudden government shutdown." To be clear: A temporary, unplanned shutdown of an undetermined length that probably won't save money is not what most libertarians have in mind when they talk about limited government.
For one thing, shutdowns like this one are shortlived and limited in scope: During the shutdown, much of the government—including automatic spending on the major entitlement programs that make up the bulk of government spending and the biggest drivers of long-term debt—remains open. And although it is at least theoretically possible that the impasse lasts for months, it increasingly looks as if President Donald Trump will declare a state of emergency, continue fighting for a border wall in the courts, and move on to ending the shutdown. So whether it lasts another two days or another two months, the rest of the government will eventually reopen. When it does, no significant long-term progress toward reducing the size of government will have been made.
Federal workers affected by the shutdown are almost certain to eventually receive backpay. That's what happened during previous shutdowns, and given that the Senate has already approved a backpay resolution for after the current shutdown ends, that's what is likely to happen this time as well.
At the same time, the federal government will, by law, owe interest on contract payments and other fiscal obligations it didn't meet during the shutdown. Which means that ultimately, the shutdown won't save taxpayers money. If anything, it might actually cost more than if the government had stayed open.
There's also public opinion to consider: Government shutdowns tend to be unpopular, and, if anything, drive support for expanding government.
Consider what happened in October 2013, when Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) led a push to shut down the government over Obamacare.
The shutdown started the same day that the health law's insurance exchanges opened for business. The federal exchange system, however, crashed on launch and was barely operable for months. But initially, the shutdown drew more attention, and Obamacare, despite its obvious technical problems, actually grew more popular.
It's not too hard to imagine that keeping the government open would have led to even more intense scrutiny and criticism of the exchange failures, and stronger out-of-the-gate public disapproval. Instead, the shutdown served as a distraction. Forcing a shutdown was meant to serve as an impediment to Obamacare, but it probably made no difference, and might have been an own goal.
Which illustrates the biggest problem with shutdowns: As a tool for promoting limited government, they are nearly always tactically ineffective.
That's why I largely agree with Jeff Miron, the director of economic studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, when he writes at Vox that "shutdowns distract from the serious conversations that need to be had about fiscal reform and the size of government."
That's particularly true of this shutdown, which is happening mostly because President Trump is demanding roughly $5 billion for a border wall (sorry, "steel barrier"). The border wall is a pointless boondoggle, premised on lies, that Trump wants mainly to fulfill an insipid campaign promise. The showdown over the wall is a partisan food fight, not a way of drawing attention to the problems with a government that is too expensive and too powerful.
Yes, some libertarians might appreciate shutdowns as form of political theater, but if your goal is to actually reduce the size of government, mere theatrics won't get you very far. As Miron writes, "libertarians will only succeed in reducing the size of government when they convince non-libertarians that smaller government is better. A government shutdown does little to nothing to change minds." If anything, the opposite is true. A shutdown comes across as chaotic, and creates the opportunity for someone like Krugman to declare that this haphazard, partial government closure is a demonstration of an ideal libertarian government.
The government should be smaller on a permanent basis, ideally with public buy-in and plenty of time for everyone to prepare. A shutdown that hijacks the federal government's broken budget process so the president can make a futile attempt to fulfill a foolish and wasteful campaign promise is little more than a cheap political stunt, not a substantive libertarian victory.
The post Sorry, Paul Krugman, the Government Shutdown Is No Great Libertarian Experiment appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When then-president Barack Obama attempted in November 2014 to expand the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to protect an additional 3.7 million illegal immigrants from deportation, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.), a longtime supporter of comprehensive immigration reform, opposed the move. Indeed, he signed onto an amicus brief challenging the executive order at the Supreme Court.
"What is at stake in this matter is nothing less than an effort to supplant Congress's constitutional power," the brief read. "There is little doubt that the Executive adopted the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents ('DAPA') program as part of an explicit effort to circumvent the legislative process."
Graham, who has since graduated to the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was right then. He's a disgrace now.
Mr. President, the Democrats are not working in good faith with you.
Declare emergency, build the wall now.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) January 11, 2019
President Donald Trump, according to the latest reporting, is "laying the groundwork for a declaration of national emergency to build [a] border wall," telling his phone buddy Sean Hannity last night: "Now if we don't make a deal with Congress, most likely I will do that….I would actually say I would. I can't imagine any reason why not because I'm allowed to do it. The law is 100 percent on my side."
Needless to say, people with more familiarity with law don't share the president's view. "The validity of this claim is dubious at best," Ilya Somin explains at The Volokh Conspiracy. "It's a terrible idea," editorializes National Review. "Even if it's legal—which is unclear, at best—it would represent another unwelcome step in America's long march toward unilateral government by the executive." Opines NR's David French: "If you look at the plain language and clear intent of the relevant statutes, they do not permit Trump to defy Congress and build his wall. He knows it. Congress knows it. His own lawyers know it."
The congressional Republican most vocally opposed to the national-emergency scheme is, unsurprisingly, the self-described libertarian Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.). "I think it would be a huge mistake," Amash told Michigan Advance yesterday, "and it would be a massive executive overreach….There's no national emergency. Obviously, there are problems at the border, but to declare a national emergency—and assume all sorts of powers—would be way beyond what I think is authorized."
But Amash's is a lonely view even within his own Freedom Caucus bloc of ostensible constitutionalists. "I would prefer the legislative option," Freedom Caucus Rep. Scott Perry (R–Pa.) tells The Huffington Post. "But if he keeps on trying and trying and trying, and the other side is so intractable that they refuse to discuss it, what other option do you have?"
This foul immigration cycle—legislative impasse, presidential policymaking, legal challenges, all lubricated by grotesque partisan hypocrisy—long predates Trump. Both Obama and George W. Bush, like the 45th president, deployed National Guard troops to the U.S.–Mexico border as political theater to influence legislation. Both consciously increased deportations as a reaction to Congress—Obama to demonstrate his seriousness about border security as a negotiating precursor, Bush to teach senators what the "consequences" would be for its inaction.
You can have sympathy for the desired ends of a policy while still opposing the unsound means. That's one of the core principles animating America's founding documents—redirecting government is supposed to be hard, not easy, requiring arduous navigation of co-equal branches and the protection of individual rights. Overriding congressional intent is supposed to come through the veto power, not situational emergency declarations.
Yes, presidents have wide latitude to prioritize law enforcement resources, declare national emergencies, and invoke "national security." And yes, Congress has serially and consciously abdicated even the most basic of its constitutionally mandated functions. The presidency gets more imperial by the day.
But the proper response to this pathology is not to shrug and say "what other option do you have," but rather to rally against America's creeping re-monarchization. As Mel Brooks taught us, it's good to be the king—but it's not so hot to be the king's subject. In a polarized country where only three of the past seven presidential winners received a majority of the popular vote, ceding new powers to the White House is a recipe for heightened social conflict. Particularly when the new power involves the deliberate trampling of property rights.
The forthcoming Elizabeth Warren administration would no doubt enjoy the power to re-write corporate charters, create a government-run pharmaceuticals industry, and spend a half-trillion dollars on public housing. But the Constitution requires that those who agree with such proposals convince enough legislators to get them passed, while not running afoul of the Bill of Rights. That is how the system was designed.
Congressional Republicans who endorse the declaration of an emergency that isn't an emergency, who support using presidential action and threats thereof as a backstop to legislative negotiations, might as well turn in their security passes. What is the point of a legislative branch that won't legislate? If we are to halt the long slide into one-man governance, politicians will have to adopt more than a situational constitutionalism—and voters will have to reject with prejudice those who'd rather kiss the president's ring than do their damn jobs.
The post Trump's National Emergency Is an American Obscenity appeared first on Reason.com.
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