Month: July 2018

“Cottage food” laws let hobbyists sell baked and preserved goods in legal markets without regulatory interference. Unless, of course, the regulators try to get pedantic about the letter of the law.

As Reason columnist Baylen Linnekin reports in a piece for The New Food Economy, the Texas Department of State Health Services is claiming that only cucumbers can be called “pickles.” Any other fruit or vegetable preserved in brine or vinegar is not technically a pickle, the agency insists, and thus is not covered by the state’s cottage food law. The department has thus prohibited retirees Anita Patton-McHaney and James McHaney from selling pickled beets.

Here’s Linnekin:

According to the Department of State Health Services, a “pickle” is a “cucumber preserved in vinegar, brine, or similar solution, and excluding all other pickled vegetables.” In case that leaves any room for doubt, the agency makes things very clear in the FAQ posted on its website: “Only pickled cucumbers are allowed,” it says. “All other pickled vegetables are prohibited.”

“The purpose of food safety laws, including the Texas Cottage Foods Law, is to help make sure food being sold to the public doesn’t make people sick and that the people preparing food that could be hazardous have the training to do so safely,” says Chris Van Deusen, director of media relations with the Texas Department of State Health Services, in a recent email to me. “The law says pickles may be sold by unlicensed and uninspected producers but doesn’t mention other pickled products. Since we didn’t want to interpret something that wasn’t there, we used the most common definition of pickles when we implemented the law in 2013.”

The health department flak is being deeply disingenuous here. As Linnekin notes, what makes a pickled product safe is not the specific vegetable but the pH level of the solution. A pH below 4.6 means the solution is acidic, and acidic solutions kill harmful bacteria. While beets are naturally less acidic than some other vegetables, the “training” necessary to increase their acidity is also required for cucumbers, as well as carrots, okra, peppers, etc. You can learn this stuff online in a few minutes, or from cookbooks dating back to the 19th century.

Because the probability of infecting someone with a bacteria like the one that causes botulism (which is what most people worry about when canning and preserving veggies) has less to do with the vegetable than with the method of preparation, insisting that only pickled cucumbers are covered by the Texas Cottage Foods Law does not guarantee that everyone who decides to pickle and sell cucumbers under the law will do so correctly. But it seems most people are doing it well enough. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has recorded fewer than 200 cases of botulism across the entire U.S. each year, going back to at least 2001, and fewer than two dozen cases each year involve food.

The vast majority of botulism cases are diagnosed in infants and are unrelated to canned goods. The cases that involve both adults and food products prepared at home tend to reflect the kind of carelessness that you generally don’t see in the cottage food economy, which no regulator can prevent—for example, the case of “beets roasted in aluminum foil and kept at room temperature for several days then made into a soup,” which caused two Utah residents to develop botulism in July 2015.

You’d think a regulatory body operated by health experts would take all these factors into consideration, especially given the linguistic shakiness of insisting that only cucumbers can be pickles. But no. The McHaneys had to file suit against the Texas Department of State Health Services. Throwing this question to the courts doesn’t seem like the wisest solution, though I suspect hours of oral argument over what constitutes a pickle could be pretty entertaining.

The more troubling phenomenon, and one Linnekin has documented very recently for Reason, is the willingness of health departments to intentionally misinterpret laws that disempower them. You’ll note that I said troubling, not surprising.

A federal judge has ruled that Albuquerque’s civil asset forfeiture program violated residents’ due process rights by forcing them to prove their innocence to retrieve their cars. Under civil forfeiture laws, police can seize property suspected of being connected to criminal activity, even if the owner isn’t charged with a crime.

The city of Albuquerque “has an unconstitutional institutional incentive to prosecute forfeiture cases, because, in practice, the forfeiture program sets its own budget and can spend, without meaningful oversight, all of the excess funds it raises from previous years,” U.S. District Judge James O. Browning wrote in an order filed Saturday. “Thus, there is a ‘realistic possibility’ that forfeiture officials’ judgment ‘will be distorted by the prospect of institutional gain’—the more revenues they raise, the more revenues they can spend.”

The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm, filed the lawsuit in 2016 on behalf of Arlene Harjo, whose car was seized after her son drove it while drunk.

“It’s a scam and a rip-off,” Harjo told Reason at the time. “They’re taking property from people who just loan a vehicle to someone. It’s happened a lot. Everybody I’ve talked to has had it happen to them or somebody they know, and everybody just pays.”

Harjo was one of thousands of Albuquerque residents whose cars were seized under the city’s aggressive forfeiture program. While lawsuits have forced cities like Philadelphia to reform their programs, federal judges have for the most part been unwilling to directly address the issue of profit incentive.

Law enforcement groups say civil forfeiture is a vital tool to disrupt drug trafficking and other organized crime. But civil libertarians note that there are far too few safeguards for property owners and that the profit incentive leads police and prosecutors to go just as often after everyday citizens rather than cartel bosses.

New Mexico essentially banned civil asset forfeiture in 2015, but Albuquerque argued the state law didn’t apply to its own city codes and continued to seize cars.

City officials offered to give Harjo her car back for $4,000—a typical settlement tactic—but she refused to pay up. The city then returned the car in an attempt to render her lawsuit moot and keep its program intact. But in a opinion issued in March, Judge Browning allowed the case to proceed, warning the city that Harjo had raised plausible claims that the city’s profit incentive and hearing process violated her constitutional rights.

Shortly after the March opinion was released, Albuquerque officials announced they were ending the city’s forfeiture program. But Saturday’s decision is still important: Two other New Mexico local governments continue to flout the reform law and seize vehicles, and almost all of them have failed to conform with new reporting requirements on their forfeiture activities.

Florida’s leading candidate for the GOP’s gubernatorial nomination wants voters to know he’s a big fan of Donald Trump. So he’s airing an ad that shows him using toy blocks to teach his young daughter how to build Trump’s border wall.

“Everyone knows my husband Ron DeSantis is endorsed by President Trump,” DeSantis’ wife Casey says at the start of the 30-second spot, which was released online today and will be televised statewide starting tomorrow. “But he’s also an amazing dad. Ron loves playing with the kids.” At that point, the commercial cuts to the candidate and his young daughter constructing a wall out of cardboard blocks. “Build the wall!” Ron says:

Rep. DeSantis also reads to his children—from Trump’s book The Art of the Deal. “Then Mr. Trump said, ‘You’re fired,'” DeSantis tells his infant son. “He’s teaching Madison to talk,” Casey adds, before the camera reveals Ron showing his daughter how to say “make America great again.”

It’s meant to be lighthearted; instead it’s cringeworthy. But from a political standpoint, it may be the right move: DeSantis currently has an 11-point lead in the RealClearPolitics polling average.

And it could be worse. If Trump ever does build his border wall, the project will cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. So I guess I should give DeSantis some credit. His wall serves an actual purpose—getting elected—and it’s cheap.

A plan to bring single-payer health care to the United States by expanding Medicare to cover nearly all Americans would cost more than $32 trillion over the first 10 years—and paying for it would require a doubling of current tax revenues, plus some.

That’s the bottom line in a new study released Monday by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a free market think tank. The analysis attempts to apply a price tag to the single-payer proposal backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), otherwise known as the “Medicare-for-all” plan. Sanders’ plan would see the federal government replace private health insurance that Americans currently receive as a benefit of employment or purchase independently, and would have the federal government become responsible for current state-level health care spending.

Even with conservative cost estimates—conservative because the estimate assumes, as Sanders does, that the single-payer plan would deliver savings in administrative costs and drug prices—the Medicare-for-all plan would require an “unprecedented” increase in government spending, writes Charles Blahous, the study’s author.

“Doubling all federal individual and corporate income taxes going forward would be insufficient to fully finance the plan, even under the assumption that provider payment rates are reduced by over 40 percent,” says Blahous, who was a health policy advisor to President George W. Bush and served as a Medicare trustee during the Obama administration. “Such an increase in the scope of federal government operations would precipitate a correspondingly large increase in federal taxation or debt and would be unprecedented if undertaken as an enduring federal commitment.”

Instead of responding to the details of the Mercatus analysis, Sanders attacked the think tank’s connections to the Koch Brothers. In a statement to the Associated Press, Sanders called the report “grossly misleading and biased.”

But the Mercatus study is roughly in line with other assessments of how much it would cost to implement a single-payer health care program in America. A 2016 study from the Center for Health and Economy, a centrist health policy think tank, said Sanders’ Medicare-for-all plan would add $27 billion to the federal budget deficit over the first decade. An Emory University analysis of Sanders’ plan estimated that it would require $25 trillion in new federal funding.

It also fits with what some states have found as they have explored the idea of state-level single-payer plans.

Vermont experimented with single-payer health care a few years ago, but ultimately abandoned the project in 2014 because it was too costly. In Colorado, voters rejected a proposed single-payer system in 2016 when faced with the prospect of increasing payroll taxes by 10 percent to meet the estimated $25 billion annual price tag.

More recently, lawmakers in both California and New York have passed legislation to create single-payer health care at the state level, but both ran into difficulties when it came to figuring out how to pay for them. New York’s single-payer plan would have required doubling (and possibly quadrupling, depending on which projection you believe) the state’s tax burden, while California’s single-payer legislation would cost an estimated $400 billion—more than twice the size of the entire state budget of $180 billion.

Figuring out how to pay for a single-payer system remains a serious problem for supporters of the idea. With more than $21 trillion already on the national credit card, it would be beyond irresponsible to pass a wildly expensive overhaul of the health care system without adequately funding it. Supporters of single-payer will have to convince Americans that it is worth paying twice (or more) as much in taxes in order to get “free” health care (and abolish premiums, co-pays, and deductibles).

Progressives seem prepared to make that sales pitch. Writing at the People’s Policy Project, a progressive think tank in favor of single-payer, Matt Bruenig makes the case that reducing health spending is a trade-off worth making. “Rather than paying premiums, deductibles, and co-pays for health care, people will instead pay a tax that is, on average, a bit less than they currently pay into the healthcare system and, for those on lower incomes, a lot less,” he argues.

While Bruenig is right that the Mercatus study shows that national health expenditures would fall by about $300 billion as the federal government, Blahous is merely accepting Sanders’ projected savings there. And it’s probably right to be skeptical of those assumptions. Even though single-payer advocates point to potential administrative savings by having the government step-in to replace health insurance companies, but those numbers usually require a degree of deception—for example, not counting current Medicare costs as “administrative costs” of the existing health care system.

Beyond that, Blahous notes that increased demand for health care—eliminating co-pays and deductibles means people will get treatments they otherwise wouldn’t—wipes out the savings achieved by reducing drug prices.

Moving to a single-payer system also comes with costs that aren’t captured by a balance sheet. Much of the outcry over the implementation of the Affordable Care Act revolved around the disruption of health care coverage in the individual market. But Obamacare caused a few million Americans to move from their existing health insurance plans. Moving to single-payer means a disruption for literally everyone.

Single-payer health care may very well be an improvement on some aspects of the current American health insurance system, which is a weird mish-mash of overlapping programs, subsidies, mandates, and highly regulated markets that often makes little coherent sense. At the very least, a debate over a robust overhaul of the system is badly needed.

But part of that debate has to be about paying for it. So far, that’s been a stumbling block for progressives. In polls, support for single-payer health care declines substantially after respondents are told about the associated costs.

Those trade-offs must be fully understood—not just by health care policy wonks, but by average Americans—before single-payer proposals can be seriously considered. Abolishing the disaster that is the American health insurance system sounds great, but government-run health insurance will be one of the costliest undertakings in the nation’s history.

New Mexico State Land Commissioner Aubrey Dunn, the first-ever Libertarian to hold statewide office in a position determined by partisan election, has officially announced his anticipated withdrawal from the U.S. Senate race in New Mexico, clearing the path for two-time former governor and presidential third-place finisher Gary Johnson.

“He seems sincerely grateful that I’m offering him this opportunity. I believe he’ll accept it,” Dunn tells Reason. “With Gary taking this race over, I think this is the best thing that could happen to the Libertarian Party of New Mexico. I think that it’s going to cause an unbelievable shift in the way that people look at the Libertarian Party.”

Johnson, who received 9.3 percent and 3.6 percent of the presidential vote in New Mexico in 2016 and 2012, respectively (both results constituting 50-state highs, tripling his nationwide percentages), is still just “strongly considering” a run, even with the general election only three months away.

“He’s not going into the race unless he thinks he can win,” two-time Johnson campaign manager Ron Nielson has been telling reporters. (A year ago, Nielson’s line was that there’s “no doubt that Gary would be a fantastic senator. He would do an amazing job and be great at that task.”)

Until very recently, Johnson was adamant about never running for office again after the miserable last two months of the 2016 presidential campaign, during which he was battered by negative advertising from Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer, hobbled by his own serial verbal gaffes, and blindsided by Hillary Clinton–burnishing statements from his own running mate.

When I asked the L.P. presidential candidate on Election Day 2016 whether we’d ever see a Johnson-for-Senate campaign, his answer was an emphatic and repeated “No!” When Nick Gillespie asked him just five months ago whether he was considering getting back into the political fray, the conversation went like this:

Johnson: No. No.

Gillespie: Absolutely not?

Johnson: No. I’m done. I’m done with elected political office.

So what changed? Polling. In late June, amid the New Mexico L.P. bungling its way through getting candidates qualified for the November election despite the party’s freshly minted ballot access, Dunn, who had switched from Republican to Libertarian in January and announced his Senate bid 10 days later, decided to compare his name with Johnson’s in a three-way poll against Democratic incumbent Martin Heinrich and Republican nominee Mick Rich.

“His poll numbers were three to four times better than what mine were,” Dunn recalled. “He was in the high twenties, and I was in the sevens….It was pretty evident that if Gary were to take on this opportunity…he has a real chance to win.”

Dunn’s pollster was none other than Ron Nielson. One thing led to another—including this awkward video interview Nielson conducted with his old pal two weeks later at FreedomFest—and now the L.P. has arguably its most promising senatorial candidate in its 47-year history.

But that doesn’t mean it will be easy, even if Johnson were as enthusiastic about campaigning as he is about participating in absurdly strenuous cycling competitions. The Senate race in this solidly blue state had been universally forecast until now as “Safe D.” Registered Democrats in New Mexico outnumber Republicans, unaffiliateds and Libertarians by a ratio of 46 to 28 to 24 to 1. Combine that with anti–Donald Trump animus in a midterm year, and the path looks rockier than the Continental Divide.

Unless, that is, the Republican drops out.

Mick Rich, an entrepreneur turned political novice described by Santa Few New Mexican columnist Milan Simonich as a “tomato can” (Simonich argued that the GOP instead “should have sweet-talked former Gov. Gary Johnson into leaving the Siberia of the Libertarian Party to become a Republican again”), was already in pretty miserable shape before the Johnson chatter began. As of mid-May, Rich trailed Heinrich in available campaign funds, $166,000 to $3.993 million, with Dunn limping along at $7,000. A Johnson entry, speculated NM Politico‘s Dax Contreras Sunday, would make it “practically impossible for Mick Rich to pull off an upset.”

The Rich campaign as of Sunday evening had not been quoted on the record about the Libertarian Party intrigue. (I’ve got a phone call in.) The New Mexican has reported without further detail that “Rich’s campaign said the Albuquerque contractor is not dropping out.”

Dunn for one is bullish on Johnson’s chances even in a three-way race. “I think he has an opportunity to win whether the Republican stays in or out,” he said. “He wins either way….One thing with Gary in the race—it’s going to dry up any of the Republicans’ ability to raise any funds.”

There is some softness to the incumbent’s obvious advantages. Heinrich, then a congressman, won his first Senate race by just six percentage points in 2012, a year Barack Obama won the state by 10. He has not exactly been cutting a broad swath since—a full 25 percent of New Mexico voters have no opinion of their junior senator, according to Morning Consult’s latest data, and among the rest he has a modest 43 percent–32 percent favorable-unfavorable advantage.

A Johnson win, however far-fetched, would reshape the long-term trajectory of the Libertarian Party, and perhaps some short-term fortunes on Capitol Hill as well. Republicans now essentially control the Senate 51-49 (two of the Senators who caucus with Democrats are independents), and though there have been some indications that 2018 will be a “wave” election for Team Blue, the Senate math is brutal: As Wikipedia succinctly states, “Democrats are defending ten seats in states won by Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, while Republicans are only defending one seat in a state won by Hillary Clinton in 2016.”

Though state polling data of even contested Senate races can be shockingly sparse, and polls for the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body are more error-prone than presidential surveys, the very preliminary consensus among forecasters is that Democrats have maybe a one in three chance of wresting control back from Republicans. Replace safe-D Heinrich with Libertarian Johnson, and those odds take a serious tumble.

If Democrats were to take a 50-49-1 post-election advantage, they’d still need to woo the Libertarian on party-line votes in order to avoid a tiebreaker from Vice President Mike Pence. Given that Johnson leans closer to Trump than Sen. Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) on regulation, domestic taxes, and the more dovish aspects of the administration’s foreign policy, that swing vote would no doubt prove to be an irritant, despite Johnson’s more copacetic views on immigration, criminal justice, and social issues.

For the L.P., having a first elected federal official would be a watershed event, replacing overnight nearly five decades of conjecture with the concrete. Elected Libertarians such as Nebraska State Sen. Laura Ebke (a party-switcher) and Calimesa Mayor and Riverside County Board of Supervisors candidate Jeff Hewitt (technically a nonpartisan, though his affiliation is nobody’s secret) are already demonstrating that Libertarians as legislative swing voters can accomplish real policy victories on the state and local level. A federal Leviathan run by a mercantilist who is bringing back the bad old days of $1 trillion annual deficits is more than ripe for libertarian-flavored reform.

Until now, the best performance among the more than 330 Libertarian Senate candidates since 1976 has been Alaska’s Joe Miller, who finished second in a four-way race with 29 percent of the vote in 2016. Miller, a former Tea Party Republican, endorsed Donald Trump instead of Gary Johnson that year; also, Libertarian vice-presidential nominee Bill Weld endorsed Miller’s victorious opponent, incumbent Lisa Murkowski.

The next-best L.P. Senate performances, according to a very useful Smart Politics article and chart by Eric Ostermeier, were Michael Cloud’s 18.4 percent in Massachusetts (2002), Steve Osborn’s 12.6 percent in Indiana (2006), and Carla Howell’s 11.9 percent in Massachusetts (2000). No other Libertarian has cracked double digits.

But breaking the previous L.P. record for a Senate race while still finishing second would represent a net loss in the party’s number of elected officials. That’s because Aubrey Dunn will no longer be state land commissioner of New Mexico in 2019, and the chances of L.P. nominee Michael Lucero beating Republican Patrick Lyons for the office are remote indeed. “We polled [the race] a year ago,” says Dunn, who has been engaged in a series of political skirmishes with the GOP, “and I didn’t poll well.”