Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) rejected a White House offer on Friday to cut $150 billion in federal spending over 10 years as a part of a possible deal to raise the debt ceiling.
Now, $150 billion might sound like a large amount of money. But relative to how much money the federal government is set to spend over the next 10 years, the White House’s proposed cut is roughly equivalent to deciding you’ll eat one fewer Chipotle burrito per month for the next decade. That’s not going to pay off a maxed-out credit card.
The fact that Pelosi rejected such a comically small reduction without even giving her colleagues the chance to consider it tells you all you need to know about the state of fiscal responsibility in Washington right now.
Bloombergreports that the White House provided House leaders with roughly $500 billion in possible budgetary offsets on Thursday night, asking that the Pelosi find $150 billion in cuts that her members would support. Both sides are continuing to negotiate in advance of a planned vote on raising budget caps and the debt limit next week. The Treasury has been using so-called “extraordinary measures” to deal with the debt limit since March, when the U.S. surpassed the current limit of $22 trillion.
It’s possible that spending cuts will be part of whatever final deal is reached, but it’s still worth stressing just how absurd a negotiating position Pelosi is taking here—if she does indeed stick to saying that $150 billion is too steep a cut.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the federal government will spend more than $57 trillion over the next decade. A $150 billion cut amounts to less than 0.3 percent of all spending during that time. In the context of a $50,000 annual household budget, that’s like cutting about $150 per year—the cost of a single lunch each month.
That’s hardly enough to get the federal government out from under $22 trillion in debt. The CBO projects that if current policies stay in place, the government will add another $11.6 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. By 2049, the national debt will be more than one and a half times the size of the entire U.S. economy, breaking a record set during World War II. If a recession hits, those numbers could be worse.
“It’s hard to believe there is resistance to finding just $150 billion of offsets over the next decade,” comments Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “If Congressional leaders don’t like the options suggested by the administration, they should propose alternatives and additions.”
MacGuineas points out that $150 billion isn’t enough to cover the expected cost of raising the budget caps—meaning that whatever Congress passes next week is almost guaranteed to add to the deficit.
But if Congress and the White House can’t agree to cut a relative pittance, there’s practically no hope that our elected officials will meaningfully address the debt crisis barrelling our way.
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“In the colonial context there is no truthful behavior. And good is quite simply what hurts them most.”
– Frantz Fanon
“And I say that between colonization and civilization there is an infinite distance; that out of all the colonial statutes that have been drawn up, out of all the memoranda that have been dispatched by all the ministries, there could not come a single human value.”
– Aimé Césaire
“Puta”
– Ricardo Rosselló
Let’s get something out of the way quickly: this was never about the goddamned Telegram group chat. The chat messages were the proverbial anvil that fell on the camel and broke its back, drowning the poor dromedary in a cup that runneth over, but it was not the sole reason why Fortaleza Street was on fire a few nights back. Yes, I have no doubt that any mentions about current Puerto Rican woes will focus exclusively on those cursed chat messages. And why is that? Well, simply, put, because it’s much more damned convenient to blame a group chat filled written by privileged men-children with the most reprehensible content imaginable than it is to engage with the more complex reality. This revolt-in-progress is the end product of a simmering anger fed by five centuries of uninterrupted imperialism, free-market disaster capitalism, an imposed dictatorial fiscal control board controlled by the very same people that bankrupted the island, and a storm of the century which was fueled by climate change. Avoiding these small troublesome details allows for the creation of a happier narrative that both conservatives AND liberals can get behind; a nice, convenient way to pretend that whatever the Hell is going on in that dog patch of a shithole island in the middle of all that “big water” has absolutely, positively nothing to do with the good ol’ US of A. It’s all just corrupt brown people with funny sounding names that speak Mexican being stupid.
Now, having written all of that, allow me to learn ya’ somethin’ nice and neat about how this whole mess really got started. This article that you have taken the time to peruse through, dear reader, is a meandering mess, a free-flow rumination on resistance to ruination, and an on-the-fly primer on Puerto Rican revolution, so it would behoove you to not expect a polished exegesis on the intellectual fundamentals of post-colonial resistance designed to impress an academic audience. No, this piece is not intended to be a blow-by-blow replay of how we got here. Think of this piece as a scream against authority. More than a last hoorah about a failed governor, it is but one small part of a particularly loud “fuck you” to one of the worst mass-murderers in the history of my very own and beloved forever colony: Governor Ricardo Rosselló, son of former Governor Pedro Rosselló.
As you’ve seen by now, dear reader, this article will be seasoned with expletives, both my own and my governments’, as well as jubilant dirty words as I celebrate how my people have taken to the streets as one. Seasoning is a Caribbean thing, so please be mindful of its presence. As a famous Internet meme says, we Latino and Caribbean folk keep seasoning until our ancestors tell us to stop, and they have not said a word to me about stopping. On the contrary, our honored departed demand justice. And justice is what this revolution is all about. Justice for the living as well as justice for the dead.
The current upcoming generation of Puerto Ricans has galvanized those that came before in a way never before seen on the island. What musician and up-and-coming founding parent Bad Bunny called the “no more” generation has taken to the streets. Hell, they have taken the streets! And they keep coming back, day after day, beating after beating carried out by cops driven more and more unhinged. They have pushed back the armored thugs of the Puerto Rican Police Department, consistently ranked as the worst and most violent in the United States, as well as its vaunted SWAT teams. Plastic pellets shot at point-blank range and gas canisters purposefully fired into the crowd had little effect on a moving, living sea of outrage and anger other than to piss people off even further.
The sight of the government’s testosterone-and-steroid-filled storm troopers driven back—to see actual terror in their eyes—was an Earth-shattering event for me. I have been face-to-face with these thugs in uniform before, as a student attending the University of Puerto Rico, where it’s almost a sacrament required to confront these beasts every time we would go on strike. State repression on the island is an old story, regardless of the party in power, but more on that later.
If I meander a bit more, dear reader, I do humbly apologize, but I must be frank with you. You see I have barely slept since this whole business with the governor started. “Ah, the chat messages”, you might be tempted to say. Alas, no. What did I just say about the chats? No, if my obsession-driven insomnia were chat-based, then it would have granted me a couple of days of sleep that I did not get. No, I am referring specifically to the arrest-a-thon performed by the (usually hated by me, but for this they get a pass) Federal Bureau of Investigations last week, when they arrested one of Rosselló’s minions: former Secretary of Education, and generally unpleasant person, Julia Keleher.
Keleher, known by many as “the gringa”, is, well, a gringa brought to the island by the opposition party to the one currently in power (remember when I said that it didn’t matter who was in charge? We’ll get back to this in a bit). She was tasked with an “advisory” role in education. In reality, Keleher is cut from the same cloth as Betsy DeVos, another creature of darkness. Keleher was brought to the island with just one goal: to destroy the public schools system and force the adoption of private charter schools, changing the public system into a for-profit one. Dozens of schools were closed and sold off. One, I believe, was sold to one of the reactionary far-right anti-everything churches that favored the incumbent New Progressive Party for one dollar. It was a holiday of corruption, and lo, everyone in power and in Wall Street was merry.
“Ah”, you might be tempted to say, dear reader, “then that means that President Trump was right when he called your government out on its corruption.” Well, let’s play that one by ear, shall we? And oh, joy, it seems like we have reached the obligatory history lesson! Now, now, please, indulge me. I’m a historian by training, so I must bore you at least once per piece, but I’ll try to make it interesting. In order to explain the Puerto Rican government’s corruption problem, I have to explain just what the Hell Puerto Rico is, and that would be a colony.
First, what is colonialism? Well, allow me to attempt a creative example: Imagine that you own a house. Then, one day, someone that is whiter than you because it’s always someone that is whiter than you, walks in one day and says that they own this house because they say so. They’re bigger than you are. If you resist they beat you up. If you don’t resist they beat you up a little less. Then, after they steal your house they wreak its foundations and strip it of every piece of furniture. That nice silverware that grandma left you? Gone. Then, to add insult to injury, imagine that you are forced to pay rent to live in your own house, and when you complain about how messed up the house is they turn around and blame you for it. Then they beat you up again and take away what little you had left. Now, imagine that another set of white dudes comes in, kicks the other white dudes out, and keeps your home for themselves, saying that you now have to pay them rent. Stretch that little drama for five hundred years and that, dear reader, is Puerto Rico’s colonial experience. It is what I grew up with back home, where we are all abused tenants in our own home.
Trump is the new head mobster of the American Empire’s Cosa Nostra, the crew that’s had their boots on our necks since 1898. We cannot make any commercial deals without their consent. We cannot move any goods without using their merchant navy. Once they decided to take away their heavy industries to places where they could pay lower slave wages they did, leaving us without a huge part of our economy. We were granted citizenship in 1917 so that we could be used as cannon fodder during the First World War, but we are unwanted second-class citizens at best. We are reminded of that fact any time we move around the United States. A whisper here, a comment there, and so many dirty looks. We were, are, and always will be unwanted spics. We knew this to be a fact, so we looked inward. We fought amongst ourselves over politics, by design, and drank the status Kool-Aid.
I have used this analogy before, and it bears repeating here. Puerto Rican politics are a three-headed bloated hydra. Each head is a political party. Two of those heads, the Popular Democratic Party (Partido Popular Democrático, or PPD) and the New Progressive Party (Partido Nuevo Progresista, or PNP) are roughly the same size. The third head, almost vestigial, is the Puerto Rican Independence Party (Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño, or PIP), and it is almost inconsequential in the larger scheme of things. All three parties are tasked with managing the colony and keeping the status quo. To that end they have created a local political class, like in all colonies: a group of collaborators mostly drawn from historically rich families, most powerful attorneys, all career political operatives. Some kingmakers, others no more than useful fools, but all responding to the interests of the elite, regardless of any claims to the contrary. In the past few years a few non-traditional political movements have come into existence here and there, similar to Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece, but on a much smaller scale. They are, if anything, small warts on the hydra’s body politic, nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
What is most important about all of this, dear reader, is that all political life on the island is subservient to the needs of maintaining the colonial status quo running smoothly, just like all political activity in the United States is designed around keeping capitalism intact. This is where the wicked genius of the colonial system in Puerto Rico shines: they have convinced the populace that by voting for a particular party they are in fact voting to maintain or alter the current relationship with the United States. As such, loyalty to the party must be unquestioning and absolute. For voters of the party currently in office, the PNP, this means voting for statehood, or permanent incorporation into the union. They have been trying this since there were 48 stars on the American flag. They’re still trying.
Voters of the PPD believe that they are preserving a mythical “estado libre asociado” or “commonwealth”, a nicer word for colony that is somehow a “pact” with the United States, even though we are not, and have never been, equal. Voters of the PIP believe that independence for the island is achievable via the ballot box and respond to a watered-down rhetoric of cultural nationalism. Traditional nationalists, much lower in number than even the PIP voters, do not vote at all in what they consider to be an imposed imperial system, a laudable conclusion. Their rhetoric and heraldry are reminiscent of earlier Twentieth-Century nationalisms, and just as problematic.
At this point, dear reader, you might be asking yourself, “why the info dump?” The reason is obvious: you need to understand how the colony works in order to see how it no longer works.
There are two main reasons as to why the colonial system has broken down so severely recently.
The first was Hurricane María.
Hurricane María made landfall on 20th September 2017. It was a devastating natural disaster made worse by the austerity policies imposed by the dictatorial fiscal control board, a grandiose victory of bipartisanship that essentially sold off what was left of the island to vulture capitalists for the next four decades. Puerto Rico faced the uncertainty of a complete collapse of communications, utilities, and transportation in the storm’s wake. And all of this happened with an incompetent president in the White House and an incompetent governor entrenched in his mansion of La Fortaleza, San Juan, like some overgrown tick. While mainland liberals rediscovered Puerto Rico for a few weeks after Trump’s paper towel-throwing incident, they paid no attention to the island’s Democratically aligned petty tyrant. For weeks Ricardo Rosselló engaged in a public relations campaign. Instead of desperately needed food and water, Puerto Ricans got Rosselló on a helicopter, or Rosselló with a military helmet on, out on the road with the National Guard (even though he never really goes anywhere). Attempts were clumsy and haphazard, FEMA was completely useless, and President Dumbass insisted that it was difficult to move aid to the island because of all the “big water”. The island’s First Lady gifted small handmade candles to the mayors of the municipalities that were hit the worst by the monster hurricane. One candle per municipality, mind you. ONE. Many of these places had been without power for months. Their very public responses were less than delicate.
Nearly five thousand people died after María. Some to suicide, others from preventable illnesses. Some died due to complications from not receiving dialysis treatments. I lost someone because of that. Some people asphyxiated from a lack of oxygen or power. Newborn babies died in hospitals. Some starved, some died of thirst. The old and infirm died in their homes, sometimes alone, sometimes with relatives. Many were buried there, in their backyards. Many more would never be found. To this day both the federal government and the Puerto Rican government are in full denial of the thousands of lives lost. But the dead demand justice.
The second reason for systemic collapse is the recent arrests of Keleher and others of her ilk in charges of conspiracy to defraud as well as a host of other crimes. Keleher was intimately connected to Rosselló and his government. She knew secrets. Widely despised, she resigned earlier this year, then moved back to the United States, where members of the Puerto Rican diaspora occasionally hounded her. She was widely known to be corrupt, but no evidence had been provided. When she was finally arrested it was like a psychic damn had been broken. Elation followed by rage was palpable. How could the government feign ignorance? Ricardo Rosselló’s father, former governor Pedro Rosselló, had presided over the, until recently, most corrupt government in the history of the island. His son has not only carried on the family’s legacy of corruption but also made it his very own, besting his father’s record in every way.
These two things had primed the country towards an explosion. Puerto Ricans had desperately clung to a sense of normalcy after María. They believed that going back to their ways would work, just as it had before. But something was fundamentally broken. The island never felt the same way again. Everything came off as performative, precisely because it was. Beneath a veneer of normalcy stood a stark reality of a permanent state of emergency. It was communal post-traumatic stress disorder. The whole island was in shock.
The text messages broke that shock, and it became incredulity. Incredulity, however, quickly turned into outrage, and then into anger. Once the chat was uncovered Puerto Ricans finally had proof. Proof that what they imagined about their political class was true all along: That the parties played favorites with the local press; that they manipulated news and figures, buried stories, lied every minute of every day; that they made fun of ordinary citizens behind their backs; that they used sexist and homophobic remarks in a sickeningly casual way; that they held democratic institutions in contempt; that they considered themselves above the law. Anger quickly set in.
Then the jokes about the dead surfaced. After María there was no room for the corpses. They were placed in cargo containers, waiting to be processed. It became a national scandal that was clumsily buried by the press, like so many scandals. The hundreds of thousands of pounds of supplies in hidden caches all over the island, and how this life-saving cargo never arrived for mysterious reasons. But the jokes about needing carrion birds to devour the dead, that was the lit match. The chat messages didn’t start this. They primed the fuse. The detonator was Ricardo Rosselló himself, when he refused to step down. Anger gave way to rage, and here we are.
Historically, there has never been a successful revolution in Puerto Rico. Both major attempts in Lares in 1868 and in Jayuya in 1950 ended in failure after fierce repression. This, however, is different. There have been huge marches before, yet there has never been such a monumental shift in Puerto Rican attitudes. After the messages broke, the political class deployed its old weapons of misinformation and partisanship. They bounced off the populace. They then shifted to their old allies in the media, with Rosselló using the very same people singled out in the chat as the government’s stooges to try and sway public opinion. It backfired, and the rest of the press, emboldened by communal rage, has not allowed the Rosselló regime to lie its way out of this situation.
After the first Battle of San Juan this past week, when police attempted to sell the lie, saying that protesters had thrown tear gas canisters at police, the press aggressively pinned them down with a barrage of questions and with photographic and video evidence showing that it was in fact the police that had initiated hostilities. Faced with an enraged press the government took the unbelievable course of action of abruptly calling off their very own press conference. From that point on the regime has known no peace with the press, as the crowds swell up every day. And I choose to call this government a regime, as it has no backing from the people whatsoever. Meanwhile, as the very last survivors of the post-Chatergate purge insist on television that all is normal, the streets overflow with Puerto Rican flags in their normal colors as well as in black and white, the mourning flag, adopted after the fiscal control board took over the island. There is no sign of this momentum stopping. Perhaps for their first time in history, Puerto Ricans have found a voice so loud that even Secretary of State and CIA straw man Mike Pompeo himself was forced to cancel his announced flash visit to the island.
Puerto Ricans have long accepted the imposed opinion, first by the Spaniards and then by the Americans, that they were a peaceful people who abhorred violent confrontation and welcomed authority. It played well during the Cold War, but after Hurricane María Puerto Ricans discovered something about themselves: that they could do anything. Left to rot, they rediscovered community and strength through unity. They realized that, perhaps, the Americans really did not give a damn about them after all. And while they tried to bury that realization behind a comfortable masquerade of normality, it never worked. The spell was broken. The arrests proved that they were indeed living a lie, and the revelations of that Telegram chat proved to be too much. This rage, this new reality, has proven that the Puerto Rican will is strong, fiery, and founded on resistance, and resistance breeds determination. Determination breeds bravery. And when a population that has been crushed for centuries discovers its inner bravery, well, that’s when history is made. As of the writing of this article, there were more than 50,000 people in Old San Juan alone, with countless thousands still flooding towards the old city, and thousands more marching across the island. With the whole country on the move, the governor still refuses to budge. The people are not budging either. So excuse the mess. We’re carrying out a revolution and putting our house back in order. You might get an eviction notice, dear reader. Please, don’t take it personally. This house was never yours to begin with.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2M0xvBX Tyler Durden
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) rejected a White House offer on Friday to cut $150 billion in federal spending over 10 years as a part of a possible deal to raise the debt ceiling.
Now, $150 billion might sound like a large amount of money. But relative to how much money the federal government is set to spend over the next 10 years, the White House’s proposed cut is roughly equivalent to deciding you’ll eat one fewer Chipotle burrito per month for the next decade. That’s not going to pay off a maxed-out credit card.
The fact that Pelosi rejected such a comically small reduction without even giving her colleagues the chance to consider it tells you all you need to know about the state of fiscal responsibility in Washington right now.
Bloombergreports that the White House provided House leaders with roughly $500 billion in possible budgetary offsets on Thursday night, asking that the Pelosi find $150 billion in cuts that her members would support. Both sides are continuing to negotiate in advance of a planned vote on raising budget caps and the debt limit next week. The Treasury has been using so-called “extraordinary measures” to deal with the debt limit since March, when the U.S. surpassed the current limit of $22 trillion.
It’s possible that spending cuts will be part of whatever final deal is reached, but it’s still worth stressing just how absurd a negotiating position Pelosi is taking here—if she does indeed stick to saying that $150 billion is too steep a cut.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the federal government will spend more than $57 trillion over the next decade. A $150 billion cut amounts to less than 0.3 percent of all spending during that time. In the context of a $50,000 annual household budget, that’s like cutting about $150 per year—the cost of a single lunch each month.
That’s hardly enough to get the federal government out from under $22 trillion in debt. The CBO projects that if current policies stay in place, the government will add another $11.6 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. By 2049, the national debt will be more than one and a half times the size of the entire U.S. economy, breaking a record set during World War II. If a recession hits, those numbers could be worse.
“It’s hard to believe there is resistance to finding just $150 billion of offsets over the next decade,” comments Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “If Congressional leaders don’t like the options suggested by the administration, they should propose alternatives and additions.”
MacGuineas points out that $150 billion isn’t enough to cover the expected cost of raising the budget caps—meaning that whatever Congress passes next week is almost guaranteed to add to the deficit.
But if Congress and the White House can’t agree to cut a relative pittance, there’s practically no hope that our elected officials will meaningfully address the debt crisis barrelling our way.
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While speaking to a group of reporters on Friday, President Trump said something that’s almost guaranteed to send Democrats back into fits of hysterical rage: He insisted that members of the audience during his North Carolina rally earlier this week – the same ones who burst into the “racist” “send her back” chants – are “incredible patriots.”
Trump said this despite disavowing the chant, which he didn’t start or actively encourage, after a severe backlash from Democrats and Republicans. While disavowing the chant, Trump did say he “felt a little bit bad” about it.
When pressed by reporters, Trump refused to repeat his criticism of the chant from Thursday, and instead criticized Ilhan Omar – the object of the chant.
“Those are incredible people, those are incredible patriots,” Trump said.
In reference to Omar, he said: “She’s lucky to be where she is, let me tell you. And the things that she has said are a disgrace to our country.”
Later in the afternoon, during a brief huddle with reporters to address Iran’s seizure of two British tankers, Trump criticized her again for introducing a bill supporting the BDS movement directed at Israel.
“They can’t go around saying that our country is ‘garbage’,” Trump said, referring to Omar and her fellow “Squad” members. “When they do that, I don’t care about politics.”
He added that “what they say is a disgrace to them, a disgrace to our country and a disgrace to Democrats.”
Trump calls the North Carolina crowd, some of whom chanted ‘send her back,’ “incredible people. Those are incredible patriots.”
Trump says of Ilhan Omar: “She’s lucky to be where she is, let me tell you. And the things that she has said are a disgrace to our country.”
Via CNN pic.twitter.com/rmuDIZf09A
Bloomberg reported that Trump’s seeming back-and-forth over the chant “reflect the political tension he faces as the 2020 campaign gets underway. He is trying to rev up core supporters while at the same time appeasing more mainstream Republicans.”
Trump has been feuding with the Squad for nearly a week now, ever since he tweeted on Sunday that the four Congresswoman should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” – a comment that Democrats immediately pounced on and condemned as racist.
However, Trump’s rhetoric about the Squad has helped beef up his approval rating, which according to a poll out Friday climbed to its highest level yet, and just a few points short of a majority of popular support. That means voters are responding to Trump’s criticisms of the Democrats, who are becoming increasingly beholden to the party’s progressive wing, despite Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s insistence that “the Squad”‘s following on Capitol Hill is limited to “just four votes” (criticism which AOC, the Squad’s de facto leader, swiftly denounced as racist).
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2SttVBn Tyler Durden
This week, libertarian-leaning Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) and progressive Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D–Oregon) introduced a bill that would cut federal spending on airports in exchange for letting those airports raise the fees they charge passengers.
These fees, known as Passenger Facility Charges (PFCs), can be used to finance the expansion of passenger terminals, something the federal government’s main airport grant program doesn’t pay for. Allowing airports to raise more money for terminal expansion, the thinking goes, will let more airlines offer more flights, raising service levels and lowering ticket prices.
Since 2000, the maximum PFC an airport can charge has been capped at $4.50 per boarding, the purchasing power of which has been whittled away by inflation. The Airports Council International–North America, a trade group, estimated in 2017 that the country’s airports will need $100 billion in infrastructure improvements over a five-year period.
Massie and Blumenauer’s bill would help airports fund those improvements by lifting the PFC cap.
Large airports that raise their fees above $4.50 would have to return all funding they get from the feds’ Airport Improvement Program (AIP). The bill would also cut funding for AIP grants, currently a $3.3 billion program, by $400 million a year.
“Simply put, we want to deregulate the airports,” says Massie, telling Reason that getting rid of the PFC cap is a way to fund infrastructure “without raising taxes and not having the federal government make local decisions.”
The bill’s biggest opponent is the airline industry, which argues that airports have plenty of money and that higher PFCs will mean higher ticket prices.
In a May blog post, Airlines for America argued that removing the cap on PFCs would raise prices for travelers, causing a depressing ripple effect throughout the economy. Airports, the industry association argues, have some $14.5 billion in cash reserves that they can spend on infrastructure without raising PFCs.
That latter point is misleading, replies Bob Poole, director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation (which publishes this website).
“Prudent management says [airports] have to have reserves,” Poole says. That ensures “they can pay their debt service in a recession when there’s less air service and they’re not making as much on parking charges and rental car fees.”
Far from raising ticket costs, uncapping PFCs would likely be a net win for passengers’ budgets. The revenue from PFCs have “opened up a number of airports to be able to do large-scale expansion of terminals,” Poole notes. “The ultra-low-cost carriers like Allegiant and Spirit and Frontier have been able to get increasing amounts of gate space.”
Big airlines oppose removing caps on PFCs, Poole argues, precisely because it would bring in more revenue that airports could then spend on adding gate space for their competitors.
Massie had introduced an identical PFC cap bill in 2017 with Rep. Peter DeFazio (D–Oregon), but that effort proved unsuccessful. With DeFazio now chairman of the House Transportation Committee, Massie thinks his bill stands a much better chance of success.
A handful of conservative groups have opposed lifting the cap on PFCs, including Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and the National Taxpayers Union, claiming that it is effectively an tax increase.
Massie argues that PFCs are basically the platonic ideal of a user fee, saying “the money does not go to the government. It goes directly to the airports.”
“Airports are in need of investment. The president has talked about trying to get $1 trillion for infrastructure investment,” says Massie. “This is the single easiest way to get that money.”
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Anyone else feel like we’re “on a highway to the danger zone” in stocks?
Only China’s tech-heavy ChiNext ended the week positive…
European stocks were red across the board with Italy worst on headlines about a fresh election…
US equities “lost that loving feeling” this week as Iran tensions re-escalated and The Fed teased with 50bps and then took the punchbowl away…Small Caps and Nasdaq were the week’s biggest losers, Trannies outperformed (but were red)
NOTE – major vol in Trannies this week.
Despite desperate efforts to get the S&P green for the week and above 3,000; tensions in Iran and The Fed walking back 50bps cut hopes were too much for the algos…
NFLX was ugly…
And The FANG stocks stalled at critical resistance…
Microsoft surged to a new record high, well north of $1 trillion market cap, after earnings…
VIX was higher on the week, testing 14, and while IG risk was flat, HY spreads jumped notably on the week…
Bonds and Stocks remain extremely decoupled…
Treasury yields ended the week lower, despite a spike today as The Fed desperately walked back Williams’ comments…
10Y Yields tumbled on the week…
The yield curve (3m10Y) remains inverted for the 40th day (despite testing zero for the 5th time in a week)…
The odds of a 50bps rate-cut plunged from over 70% after Williams’ comments to just 22% tonight…
For now, expectations are for around 30bps of cuts in July…
The Fed’s jawboning has rippled down to Main Street too…
Expectations of lower interest rates in today’s UMich sentiment survey shot up to 19%, the highest level since May 2009! What do households see that investors don’t see?? pic.twitter.com/E0k4W0Lp6x
This week, libertarian-leaning Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) and progressive Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D–Oregon) introduced a bill that would cut federal spending on airports in exchange for letting those airports raise the fees they charge passengers.
These fees, known as Passenger Facility Charges (PFCs), can be used to finance the expansion of passenger terminals, something the federal government’s main airport grant program doesn’t pay for. Allowing airports to raise more money for terminal expansion, the thinking goes, will let more airlines offer more flights, raising service levels and lowering ticket prices.
Since 2000, the maximum PFC an airport can charge has been capped at $4.50 per boarding, the purchasing power of which has been whittled away by inflation. The Airports Council International–North America, a trade group, estimated in 2017 that the country’s airports will need $100 billion in infrastructure improvements over a five-year period.
Massie and Blumenauer’s bill would help airports fund those improvements by lifting the PFC cap.
Large airports that raise their fees above $4.50 would have to return all funding they get from the feds’ Airport Improvement Program (AIP). The bill would also cut funding for AIP grants, currently a $3.3 billion program, by $400 million a year.
“Simply put, we want to deregulate the airports,” says Massie, telling Reason that getting rid of the PFC cap is a way to fund infrastructure “without raising taxes and not having the federal government make local decisions.”
The bill’s biggest opponent is the airline industry, which argues that airports have plenty of money and that higher PFCs will mean higher ticket prices.
In a May blog post, Airlines for America argued that removing the cap on PFCs would raise prices for travelers, causing a depressing ripple effect throughout the economy. Airports, the industry association argues, have some $14.5 billion in cash reserves that they can spend on infrastructure without raising PFCs.
That latter point is misleading, replies Bob Poole, director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation (which publishes this website).
“Prudent management says [airports] have to have reserves,” Poole says. That ensures “they can pay their debt service in a recession when there’s less air service and they’re not making as much on parking charges and rental car fees.”
Far from raising ticket costs, uncapping PFCs would likely be a net win for passengers’ budgets. The revenue from PFCs have “opened up a number of airports to be able to do large-scale expansion of terminals,” Poole notes. “The ultra-low-cost carriers like Allegiant and Spirit and Frontier have been able to get increasing amounts of gate space.”
Big airlines oppose removing caps on PFCs, Poole argues, precisely because it would bring in more revenue that airports could then spend on adding gate space for their competitors.
Massie had introduced an identical PFC cap bill in 2017 with Rep. Peter DeFazio (D–Oregon), but that effort proved unsuccessful. With DeFazio now chairman of the House Transportation Committee, Massie thinks his bill stands a much better chance of success.
A handful of conservative groups have opposed lifting the cap on PFCs, including Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and the National Taxpayers Union, claiming that it is effectively an tax increase.
Massie argues that PFCs are basically the platonic ideal of a user fee, saying “the money does not go to the government. It goes directly to the airports.”
“Airports are in need of investment. The president has talked about trying to get $1 trillion for infrastructure investment,” says Massie. “This is the single easiest way to get that money.”
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Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) tore into Democrats during a Thursday House Oversight Committee hearing, reminding the selective-outrage brigade that “Not One Single So-Called Cage Has Been Constructed By The Trump Administration…not one.”
“During the presidency of Barack Obama, we didn’t see outrage from the Democrats then. We didn’t see prominent Democrat members of Congress condemning the “concentration camps” torture then. Again, President Trump has not built a single “cage.”
The cages you see in the news and on Twitter were constructed by President Obama’s administration.
Watch below (via BlazeTV)
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2XTttCA Tyler Durden
A 24-year-old inmate was found unresponsive at a Bexar County, Texas, jail Thursday morning. The prisoner, Leon Julius Casey, had been booked for possessing less than a gram of a controlled substance.
Casey’s death is the most recent in a string of recent fatalities at the Bexar County Jail. Janice Dotson-Stephens, 61, died in December of last year after being held there for 5 months on $300 bond following her arrest for misdemeanor criminal trespassing. She lost 136 pounds while in custody.
Jack Michael Ule, 63, died in April at the same facility. Like Dotson-Stephens, he was booked on a misdemeanor trespassing charge; like Dotson-Stephens, he had been diagnosed with a mental illness. Ule was also homeless, and would have likely been released had he been able to pay a $50 fee toward bond.
“In my opinion, [Ule] should not have been in jail,” Sheriff Javier Salazar told the local ABC affiliate. “The Adult Detention Center should not be used to house the mentally ill or those who simply cannot afford to pay their way out.”
Fatalities in U.S. prisons came to the forefront of mainstream conversation with the death of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old woman who was stopped by a police officer over a routine traffic violation. She was found dead in a Waller County, Texas jail.
Bland’s end sparked national outrage, particularly around the overincarceration of petty crimes. At least 4,980 prisoners died in 2014, the latest year for which we have data. That was up 3 percent from 2013. The U.S. has experienced a 500 percent increase in its prison and jail population over the last 40 years.
Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.
New on the Short Circuit podcast: We make the stirring, strident claim that the Second Circuit was pretty much on the mark in its recent opinion finding a First Amendment problem with President Trump blocking critics on Twitter. Click here for iTunes.
In 2018, President Trump issues three executive orders instructing the feds to, among other things, limit the time federal employees can spend working on union business on the taxpayer’s dime. A bevy of federal labor unions challenge the orders, arguing, among other things, that the President has no authority to issue executive orders related to federal labor relations and that the orders violate the First Amendment. D.C. Circuit: The claims must be presented to an administrative review board before they can be heard in court.
Twelve-year-old at Southborough, Mass. boarding school allegedly suffers from electromagnetic hypersensitivity, meaning that the radio waves generated by common electronics cause him headaches, nausea, and other symptoms. (A school staffer’s internal email: “Blahahahahahahahaha!”) Does the student have any claims for the school’s refusal to turn off the Wi-Fi? First Circuit: He does not. [Fun fact: The scientific consensus is that electromagnetic hypersensitivity doesn’t exist. But that hasn’t stopped dozens of supposed hypersensitives from moving to West Virginia to live in a federally designated radio-quiet zone.]
Friends, Judge Selya of the First Circuit has seen fit to give us this vocab quiz: encincture, rescript, assay, gainsay, repastinate, algid.
New York City bans advertising in for-hire vehicles like Ubers because passengers find them deeply, deeply annoying. Yet the city allows similar ads in taxicabs (via Taxi TV, which, depending on one’s perspective, is either a “pleasant diversion” or a nightmare squawkbox). Makers of an advertising app see this as an unconstitutional restriction on commercial speech. Nonetheless, the ban will stand, says the Second Circuit.
Notorious “pharma bro” hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli is convicted of securities fraud for (among other things) regularly sending false performance reports to investors and using their money to pay his personal debts. Second Circuit: No need to disturb the conviction or $7.3 mil forfeiture order.
Allegation: Police barge into Camden, N.J. home, beat man unconscious, drag him down stairs. The man serves half of three-year sentence for drug possession, but his case is among 200 criminal cases vacated or dropped after five Camden, N.J. officers admit to planting drugs, filing false reports, lying under oath. Jury: Two officers used excessive force and committed a false arrest, but the man ultimately failed to prove that Camden’s (in)action caused these violations. Third Circuit: He gets another chance to prove that claim (and others), this time with the aid of important evidence the district court wrongly excluded.
The Affordable Care Act mandates that employers, apart from some religious ones, pay for contraception for female employees with reproductive capacity. In 2017, the Trump administration expanded the exemption to include a wider array of religious employers as well as nonreligious employers with moral objections to the mandate. Third Circuit: The district court did not err in imposing a nationwide preliminary injunction. Among other infirmities, the feds likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to provide the public notice and a chance to comment on the new exemptions.
Pennsylvania prohibits billboards within 500 feet of a highway interchange: Third Circuit: And while that’s legal in some respects, an exception for certain kinds of billboards means the state has to produce evidence justifying the general prohibition. Also, PennDOT needs to issue or deny permits for other highway billboards within a reasonable time limit.
Virginia law lets circuit courts declare someone a “habitual drunkard,” which makes it a crime for that someone to possess alcohol or be drunk in public. Several homeless alcoholics, each prosecuted multiple times after being so declared, sue. Fourth Circuit (en banc, over a dissent): The case should not have been dismissed. The law doesn’t specify what makes someone a “habitual drunkard,” so judges can make up their own subjective standards. And if a “habitual drunkard” is just anyone who suffers from alcoholism, that potentially violates the Eighth Amendment since the law has the effect of punishing people for drinking they cannot control.
Campaign consultant is criminally prosecuted, convicted of violating Maryland election laws. He obtains a new trial, and a jury acquits. He then seeks to mail a letter criticizing the prosecutor (a political appointee) to Maryland voters. But he’s forbidden access to Maryland’s list of voters because he is a resident of Virginia. Fourth Circuit: Which might violate the First Amendment.
Baltimore man assaults his wife, self-surrenders to police officer that he knows. But the man’s arrest warrant goes missing under suspicious circumstances, and he is permitted to leave the station. He corresponds with the officer about self-surrendering the following week and in the meantime murders his wife (outside courthouse where she had just gotten a protective order). Fourth Circuit (2013): No qualified immunity for the officer. Fourth Circuit (2019, over a dissent): Discovery didn’t turn up evidence that the officer conspired with the man. Qualified immunity.
A bevy of Chinese investors put $500k each into a startup electric car company, which later collapses. The investors sue, among others, the company’s former chairman (Terry McAuliffe, who went on to become governor of Virginia), asserting that misstatements he made to the media about the company’s achievements defrauded the investors into putting up the cash. Fourth Circuit: “We decline to whitewash the alleged misstatements here.” But the investors failed to adequately plead they justifiably relied on the misstatements—not least because the misstatements were in English and many of the investors don’t understand English.
Fifth Circuit (2015): No qualified immunity for Lafayette, La. officer who set dog on (allegedly) compliant suspect and shot the suspect at point-blank range, killing him. Jury: The officer used unconstitutionally excessive force but is entitled to qualified immunity. Fifth Circuit (2019): No reason to disturb the jury’s verdict.
This Sixth Circuit decision, on whether a homeowner can sue a lender, turns on the not-insignificant distinction between a loan and a mortgage. (Loan = The money a lender gives a home buyer so they can afford a house. Mortgage = The legal interest the lender acquires in the house that provides assurance, on pain of foreclosure, that the loan will be repaid.)
Man camping in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest has a gun, which is illegal on account of his multiple felony convictions. Later, the man readily admits to being a white supremacist and proclaims his desire to return to Germany to retrace his Nazi ancestral heritage. Seventh Circuit: And it’s just fine for the judge to have considered those beliefs and imposed a longer sentence than the gov’t requested. Even though he’s never been convicted of a hate crime, such views demonstrate a threat of future dangerousness.
Allegation: Illinois prison required female inmates to stand naked, remove sanitary products, and undergo body and cavity searches—all in groups and in full view of male officers not conducting the searches. Seventh Circuit (over a dissent): This is a visual inspection of a prisoner, not a physical intrusion, so the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply. Dissent: Forcing a prisoner to manipulate her own body (as opposed to the guards doing it themselves) doesn’t make a search reasonable.
St. Peters, Mo. officials threaten homeowners with up to $180k in fines and 20 years in prison if they do not tear out garden (photos here) and replace it with grass on at least 50% of the yard. (Later, officials say just 5% grass will suffice.) An excessive fine? A violation of the substantive due process right to quiet enjoyment of one’s property? The Eighth Circuit dismisses the case on procedural grounds.
Allegation: Fort Madison, Iowa police enter home of tire-slashing suspect, order him to drop knife. The suspect instead withdraws to a closet. An officer opens the closet door and shoots, kills the suspect (who had not lunged toward or otherwise threatened the officer). Eighth Circuit: Qualified immunity. “It was not clearly established in August 2014 that an officer was forbidden to discharge his firearm when suddenly confronted in close quarters by a noncompliant suspect armed with a knife.”
The DOJ has a pot of money for local police departments who undertake various initiatives. Los Angeles officials: We didn’t get the $3.125 mil grant we sought because the DOJ favors jurisdictions that assist with the feds’ immigration enforcement efforts, which we decline to do. Ninth Circuit (over a dissent): The DOJ has broad discretion to decide how to allocate funds, and the grant program merely incentivizes, rather than coerces, jurisdictions to provide said assistance. And anyway, lots of jurisdictions that do not provide it were given grants, and lots of jurisdictions that do were not.
Utah chiropractor is prosecuted for trying to pay $340k in back taxes with checks from closed bank accounts. Usually, courts bring down the hammer when such a defendant—a sovereign citizen—tries to discharge the trial judge “from his emergency war powers jurisdictional duties.” Or says that trial must be rescheduled because the defendant is unavailable. Or signs filings with a thumbprint. But not today! The Tenth Circuit holds that the defendant—or, in his view, “the fiction that the court has named as a defendant”—wasn’t sufficiently warned before he waived his right to counsel. Conviction vacated.
San Juan County, Utah officials draw up three voting districts such that white residents predominate in two districts and Navajo residents (who make up 52% of the population) mostly all live in one district, all but guaranteeing two whites and one Navajo are elected to the three-member commission that governs the county. Tenth Circuit: Which violates the Equal Protection Clause and the Voting Rights Act.
And in en banc news, the Fifth Circuit will not reconsider its holding that landlords do not violate the Fair Housing Act when they decline to accept “Section 8 vouchers,” which are used disproportionately by minorities, in neighborhoods that are disproportionately white. Seven judges dissent: Plaintiffs plausibly alleged the defendants are perpetuating segregation.
It’s illegal in Florida to give individualized dietary advice without a license that takes years and costs thousands of dollars to obtain. So when Heather Del Castillo, a military spouse who ran a successful health coaching business in California, relocated to Florida, regulators (tipped off by a local dietitian) ordered her to shut down or face a year in jail—per client. But the First Amendment protects the right to give advice on diet and nutrition, and the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that there is no exception for so-called “professional speech.” This week, a federal judge nonetheless relied on now-overruled precedent to uphold Florida’s law—and ignored evidence that there is no good public safety justification for it. On to the Eleventh Circuit! Click here to read more.
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