Month: February 2014

Justin Ross of Des Moines, Iowa told local TV
station WHO 13 that police from nearby Ankeny might’ve shot him
after using a battering ram to enter his mother’s home executing a
warrant over alleged credit card fraud. Ross said he drew his
weapon after hearing what sounded like a home invasion, but
re-holstered it when someone in the next room said “police,” and
before cops entered the bathroom where he was. WHO 13
reports:

The whole search was caught on surveillance
video.

Ankeny police tell us they knocked first, but the video shows one
officer pounding on the side of the house and seconds later,
officers use a battering ram to force their way in.

The video also shows an officer destroying a security camera
outside the home.

Another officer is seen on the surveillance video (seen as part
of WHO 13’s segment
here) covering another camera inside the home. At one point,
the video appears to show nine SWAT-like cops marching near the
home.

Ross’ mother, Sally Prince, said she would’ve opened the door if
police had knocked. Ankeny cops found nothing listed on their
warrant for the Des Moines home, but made two unrelated arrests of
non-family members, one for a probation violation, the other for
possession with “intent to deliver.”

Prince told WHO 13 she was traumatized by the incident and
couldn’t sleep at night. Ankany police say they don’t have a
written policy (!) on executing search warrants and wouldn’t
comment because there’s an “ongoing investigation”. No word on
whether Des Moines police, in whose jurisdiction the incident took
place, is investigating.

No one was hurt, including a dog seen in the video, so this
almost-home invasion could qualify as a “good” story with nothing
to see here.

More Reason on militarization
of police.

h/t Mark Johnson

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia spoke yesterday at the
University of Hawaii and when the subject of the Court’s notorious
1944 decision upholding the wartime internment of
Japanese-Americans came up, the conservative justice had a sobering
message for his law school audience. As Audrey McAvoy of the
Associated Press
reports:

Scalia was responding to a question about the court’s 1944
decision in Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the
convictions of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu for violating
an order to report to an internment camp.

“Well of course Korematsu was wrong. And I think we have
repudiated in a later case. But you are kidding yourself if you
think the same thing will not happen again,” Scalia told students
and faculty during a lunchtime Q-and-A session.

Scalia cited a Latin expression meaning, “In times of war, the
laws fall silent.”

“That’s what was going on — the panic about the war and the
invasion of the Pacific and whatnot. That’s what happens. It was
wrong, but I would not be surprised to see it happen again, in time
of war. It’s no justification, but it is the reality,” he said.

I guess this means Justice Elena Kagan is not the only
“paranoid libertarian” on the bench.

The Congressional Budget Office
just released
a big new budget report outlining its most up-to-date
expectations for the economy, the deficit, and Obamacare over the
next decade.

It’s the first major budget document from the office since the
launch of the health law’s exchanges last year, so there are plenty
of interesting new figures and projections. Here are six key
takeaways from the report:

1. Over the next decade, there will be millions fewer
full-time jobs because Obamacare creates disincentives to
work. In 2024, the labor force will be smaller by about
2.5 million full-time equivalent jobs than it would have been in
the absence of the health law. This represents a significant
upwards revision; CBO had previously estimated that there would be
about 800,000 fewer full-time positions in 2021 because of the law.
As before, the expectation is that this reduction will stem largely
from a reduction in the labor supply; with Obamacare in place, CBO
expects that fewer people will choose to work in order to maintain
their health coverage. The effect is expected to be concentrated in
amongst part-time workers, for whom “the loss of [Obamacare’s
health insurance] subsidies upon returning to a job with health
insurance is an implicit tax on working.”

2. Fewer people are expected to gain insurance through
Obamacare as a result of the botched rollout of the
exchanges. The CBO expects that 1 million fewer people
will enroll in Medicaid, and 1 million fewer will get coverage
through the exchanges, thanks to the “significant technical
problems that have been encountered in the initial phases of
implementing the ACA.” The CBO’s projections were finished last
year, however, so they don’t incorporate the latest enrollment
data. 

3. CBO estimates that Obamacare’s risk corridors
program—the provision which has been dubbed a bailout of insurance
companies—will result in a net revenue gain for the government
rather than a net payout to insurance companies. The CBO
projects that the government will make about $8 billion in payments
to insurers under the program and receive about $16 billion in
revenue in return, for a net gain of $8 billion. That estimate,
which was completed in early December, is based on the experience
with insurers participating in Medicare Part D, which also includes
a risk corridor program. This is a hard one to estimate. As CBO’s
report says, “the government has only limited experience with this
type of program, and there are many uncertainties about how the
market for health insurance will function under the ACA and how
various outcomes would affect the government’s costs or savings for
the risk corridor program.” Whether you think this is a likely
estimate, then, depends on whether you think Medicare Part D offers
a useful guide for what to expect from Obamacare. 

4. Taken by themselves, Obamacare’s insurance provisions
will increase the deficit by $1.4 trillion. The Affordable
Care Act is a sprawling piece of legislation with a variety of
revenue mechanisms built in that are supposed to offset the
significant cost of the law. But CBO broke out the provisions that
are specifically related to the provision of insurance coverage—the
cost of the subsidies, the Medicaid expansion, the penalty payments
made as a result of the mandate, the tax on high-end coverage,
etc.—and found that, over the next 10 years, they will increase the
deficit by $1.48 trillion. (See the CBO’s table below.) This
doesn’t mean that Obamacare, as a legislative whole, is now scored
as a deficit hike. But it does mean that its central component, the
coverage expansion scheme, is. 

5. Under current law, annual budget deficits will remain
roughly equal to their current size for a few years before they
start to rise again. This year’s deficit is projected to
total $514 billion, a big drop from the $1 trillion annual
shortfalls we were seeing during Obama’s first term. And next
year’s is projected to be slightly smaller—about $478 billion. But
that’s where the reduction stops. After that, CBO projects that
deficits will begin to rise again, both in dollar terms and as a
percentage of the economy.

6. Total federal debt is huge. In part
because the nation has run such large annual deficits over the past
few years, the total amount of federal debt is enormous. By the end
of this year, outstanding national debt will equal about 74 percent
of gross domestic product (GDP), rising to 79 percent over the next
decade. That’s going to create a drag on the economy for a long
time to come. “The amount of debt relative to the size of the
economy is now very high by historical standards,” the CBO’s report
says. “Such large and growing federal debt could have serious
negative consequences, including restraining economic growth in the
long term, giving policymakers less flexibility to respond to
unexpected challenges, and eventually increasing the risk of a
fiscal crisis.”

The Congressional Budget Office
just released
a big new budget report outlining its most up-to-date
expectations for the economy, the deficit, and Obamacare over the
next decade.

It’s the first major budget document from the office since the
launch of the health law’s exchanges last year, so there are plenty
of interesting new figures and projections. Here are six key
takeaways from the report:

1. Over the next decade, there will be millions fewer
full-time jobs because Obamacare creates disincentives to
work. In 2024, the labor force will be smaller by about
2.5 million full-time equivalent jobs than it would have been in
the absence of the health law. This represents a significant
upwards revision; CBO had previously estimated that there would be
about 800,000 fewer full-time positions in 2021 because of the law.
As before, the expectation is that this reduction will stem largely
from a reduction in the labor supply; with Obamacare in place, CBO
expects that fewer people will choose to work in order to maintain
their health coverage. The effect is expected to be concentrated in
amongst part-time workers, for whom “the loss of [Obamacare’s
health insurance] subsidies upon returning to a job with health
insurance is an implicit tax on working.”

2. Fewer people are expected to gain insurance through
Obamacare as a result of the botched rollout of the
exchanges. The CBO expects that 1 million fewer people
will enroll in Medicaid, and 1 million fewer will get coverage
through the exchanges, thanks to the “significant technical
problems that have been encountered in the initial phases of
implementing the ACA.” The CBO’s projections were finished last
year, however, so they don’t incorporate the latest enrollment
data. 

3. CBO estimates that Obamacare’s risk corridors
program—the provision which has been dubbed a bailout of insurance
companies—will result in a net revenue gain for the government
rather than a net payout to insurance companies. The CBO
projects that the government will make about $8 billion in payments
to insurers under the program and receive about $16 billion in
revenue in return, for a net gain of $8 billion. That estimate,
which was completed in early December, is based on the experience
with insurers participating in Medicare Part D, which also includes
a risk corridor program. This is a hard one to estimate. As CBO’s
report says, “the government has only limited experience with this
type of program, and there are many uncertainties about how the
market for health insurance will function under the ACA and how
various outcomes would affect the government’s costs or savings for
the risk corridor program.” Whether you think this is a likely
estimate, then, depends on whether you think Medicare Part D offers
a useful guide for what to expect from Obamacare. 

4. Taken by themselves, Obamacare’s insurance provisions
will increase the deficit by $1.4 trillion. The Affordable
Care Act is a sprawling piece of legislation with a variety of
revenue mechanisms built in that are supposed to offset the
significant cost of the law. But CBO broke out the provisions that
are specifically related to the provision of insurance coverage—the
cost of the subsidies, the Medicaid expansion, the penalty payments
made as a result of the mandate, the tax on high-end coverage,
etc.—and found that, over the next 10 years, they will increase the
deficit by $1.48 trillion. (See the CBO’s table below.) This
doesn’t mean that Obamacare, as a legislative whole, is now scored
as a deficit hike. But it does mean that its central component, the
coverage expansion scheme, is. 

5. Under current law, annual budget deficits will remain
roughly equal to their current size for a few years before they
start to rise again. This year’s deficit is projected to
total $514 billion, a big drop from the $1 trillion annual
shortfalls we were seeing during Obama’s first term. And next
year’s is projected to be slightly smaller—about $478 billion. But
that’s where the reduction stops. After that, CBO projects that
deficits will begin to rise again, both in dollar terms and as a
percentage of the economy.

6. Total federal debt is huge. In part
because the nation has run such large annual deficits over the past
few years, the total amount of federal debt is enormous. By the end
of this year, outstanding national debt will equal about 74 percent
of gross domestic product (GDP), rising to 79 percent over the next
decade. That’s going to create a drag on the economy for a long
time to come. “The amount of debt relative to the size of the
economy is now very high by historical standards,” the CBO’s report
says. “Such large and growing federal debt could have serious
negative consequences, including restraining economic growth in the
long term, giving policymakers less flexibility to respond to
unexpected challenges, and eventually increasing the risk of a
fiscal crisis.”

British Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of
the Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg has
said that British drug policy is not working. According to the BBC,
Clegg said that he does not back legalization and that the Liberal
Democrats will publish a study on an alternate drug policy later in
the year.

Clegg’s recent comments are not the first time that he has
criticized British drug policy. Last October,
Clegg said, “I don’t think we’re winning the drugs war,” and
expressed frustration that the Conservatives, led by Prime Minister
David Cameron, “are not prepared to look more openly” at
alternative drug policies.

Clegg is right. In December 2012, Cameron rejected
a report on drug policy written by members of the Home Affairs
Committee, who said that the Portuguese model of decriminalization
“is a model that merits significantly closer consideration.” and
that “We were impressed by what we saw of the Portuguese
depenalised system.” The report recommended “the establishment of a
Royal Commission to consider the best ways of reducing the harm
caused by drugs in an increasingly globalised world.”

Responding to the report, Cameron
said, “I don’t support decriminalisation. We have a policy
which actually is working in Britain.”

In the BBC’s reporting on Clegg’s recent comments it is
mentioned that The Home Office does not think that drug policy in
the U.K. needs to be changed because the use of illegal drugs has
been falling.

According to the British government’s figures on England and
Wales, this is the case. The
graph below from the British government plots the percentage of
people between the ages of 16 and 59 who used illegal drugs
(excluding mephedrone) in the last year in England and Wales from
1996 to 2013. Class A
drugs are crack cocaine, cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, LSD, magic
mushrooms, methadone, and methamphetamine.

While it might be the case that there has been a decrease in the
number of people who have used illegal drugs in England and Wales,
this does not necessarily mean that British drug policy should not
be changed.

While the U.K.’s war on drugs is nowhere close to the scale of
the American effort to fight the use of illegal drugs, it is still
the case that Britons face time behind bars if caught in possession
of illegal drugs. In fact, some of those who work in British
prisons are not pleased about current drug policy. The president of
the Prison
Governors Association said last year that “The current war on
drugs is successful in creating further victims of acquisitive
crime, increasing cost to the taxpayer to accommodate a higher
prison population and allowing criminals to control and profit from
the sale and distribution of Class A drugs.” and that “A
fundamental review of the prohibition-based policy is desperately
required.”

Cameron might think that the current British drug policy is
working, but he should be open to changes, especially if they would
reduce the prison population and save taxpayers some money.

The eruption of Chris Christie’s very Jersey
scandal (traffic, bullying, cronyism) earlier this year as a
national news story may have had more to do with his perceived 2016
aspirations than its wider newsworthiness.
New early 2016 polling from CNN suggests the scandal’s taken
away the very early “lead” in the Republican presidential
nominating contest even earlier CNN polling found, to the benefit
of Hillary Clinton, the very early Democrat frontrunner, who’s
hoping to leave her national scandals in the past, and who earlier
polling found polling within the margin of error in a hypothetical
matchup with Christie.

The CNN poll found Mike Huckabee (a “new name” it called him)
rising a point above the rest of the GOP field, at 14 percent.
(Rand Paul had 13, followed by Christie and Jeb Bush at 10) The
murmurs about the former Arkansas governor mulling a 2016 run may
be new, but Huckabee, who ran for president in 2008, was considered
by some Republican operatives as a presumptive frontrunner in 2012,
and has hosted an eponymous weekend show on Fox News for more than
five years, is hardly a new name. Less than a year out from the
first GOP primaries, Gallup
started tracking candidates’ name recognition and “positive
intensity” to get a clearer sense of what it actually meant when
more familiar names appeared at the top of “trial heat”
results.

We’re still twice as far from a 2016 election as Gallup was when
it started doing that, but there is some limited polling from them
on the name recognition of some of the names thrown around as the
primordial 2016 GOP pool. In June of last year, a Gallup poll
(pdf)
found 20 percent of respondents had never heard of Chris Christie,
and 26 percent had never heard of Rand Paul. Mike Huckbaee’s Name
ID, and Jeb Bush’s for that matter, weren’t measured. But consider
that Paul Ryan, who got 9 percent in CNN’s poll, was “never heard
of” by only 19 percent of Gallup responded. Marco Rubio, tied at 9
with Ryan, had 29 percent never hear of him in the Gallup polling.
Presumably, Huckabee, a cable news figure and former Republican
contender, and Jeb Bush, the brother of a former president and the
son of another one, would have far higher name recognition. Without
that information, it’s hard to tell what the number means, except
that Republicans aren’t sure who they want running for president
yet. The more important decision might be in what ideological
direction the party should go, something that’s being litigated in
Congress and on the state level, not just in the 2014 elections,
but in the debates about the party’s agenda that are already
preceding them, as Peter Suderman noted when he declared Obama, not
in this round of polling questions, was over.

The eruption of Chris Christie’s very Jersey
scandal (traffic, bullying, cronyism) earlier this year as a
national news story may have had more to do with his perceived 2016
aspirations than its wider newsworthiness.
New early 2016 polling from CNN suggests the scandal’s taken
away the very early “lead” in the Republican presidential
nominating contest even earlier CNN polling found, to the benefit
of Hillary Clinton, the very early Democrat frontrunner, who’s
hoping to leave her national scandals in the past, and who earlier
polling found polling within the margin of error in a hypothetical
matchup with Christie.

The CNN poll found Mike Huckabee (a “new name” it called him)
rising a point above the rest of the GOP field, at 14 percent.
(Rand Paul had 13, followed by Christie and Jeb Bush at 10) The
murmurs about the former Arkansas governor mulling a 2016 run may
be new, but Huckabee, who ran for president in 2008, was considered
by some Republican operatives as a presumptive frontrunner in 2012,
and has hosted an eponymous weekend show on Fox News for more than
five years, is hardly a new name. Less than a year out from the
first GOP primaries, Gallup
started tracking candidates’ name recognition and “positive
intensity” to get a clearer sense of what it actually meant when
more familiar names appeared at the top of “trial heat”
results.

We’re still twice as far from a 2016 election as Gallup was when
it started doing that, but there is some limited polling from them
on the name recognition of some of the names thrown around as the
primordial 2016 GOP pool. In June of last year, a Gallup poll
(pdf)
found 20 percent of respondents had never heard of Chris Christie,
and 26 percent had never heard of Rand Paul. Mike Huckbaee’s Name
ID, and Jeb Bush’s for that matter, weren’t measured. But consider
that Paul Ryan, who got 9 percent in CNN’s poll, was “never heard
of” by only 19 percent of Gallup responded. Marco Rubio, tied at 9
with Ryan, had 29 percent never hear of him in the Gallup polling.
Presumably, Huckabee, a cable news figure and former Republican
contender, and Jeb Bush, the brother of a former president and the
son of another one, would have far higher name recognition. Without
that information, it’s hard to tell what the number means, except
that Republicans aren’t sure who they want running for president
yet. The more important decision might be in what ideological
direction the party should go, something that’s being litigated in
Congress and on the state level, not just in the 2014 elections,
but in the debates about the party’s agenda that are already
preceding them, as Peter Suderman noted when he declared Obama, not
in this round of polling questions, was over.