Category: reason

When you subsidize something, the old adage goes, you’ll get more of it.

But some ideas make so little economic sense that even the largest corporate subsidy ever awarded by a state government isn’t enough.

It’s been obvious for quite some time that Wisconsin’s highly touted deal with Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn was going to fall well short of the lofty promises made by the project’s supporters. Then-President Donald Trump, for example, predicted in 2018 that the planned factory on the outskirts of Milwaukee would be nothing less than “the eighth wonder of the world.”

Exactly how short it will fall is now official. In filings with the state, Foxconn says it now plans to employ 1,454 people and invest about $672 million into its still-under-construction factory in Mount Pleasent, Wisconsin. That’s a long way from the $10 billion that the company initially promised to spend building a plant that would have employed 13,000 workers. In response to the amended contract, the state will recover $2.77 billion of the subsidies originally promised to Foxconn—though the company will still receive $80 million from Wisconsin taxpayers, according to a statement from Gov. Tony Evers.

But recovering those subsidies won’t bring back the residential neighborhood that was flattened to make space for the factory. Developers bulldozed 75 homes, some of which were seized through eminent domain, because why should mere houses full of people stand in the way of the eighth wonder of the world?

The town of Mount Pleasent invested more than $1 billion in the project—effectively mortgaging its entire future on the promise of thousands of new jobs and the tax-paying residents who would come to fill them. Those jobs won’t be coming, but the town did have its credit rating downgraded.

The Foxconn folly was the brainchild of former Gov. Scott Walker, a one-time darling of the Republican Party who has now vanished from the political scene. From the outset, the deal didn’t make sense. Foxconn promised to make Wisconsin a hub for the manufacturing of HD television screens and other high-tech products, but the company never explained how it planned to make the math work. Besides the relatively higher cost of American labor, there were serious supply chain and logistical issues to be overcome for a factory that was, as TechCrunch put it in 2019, “essentially [in] the middle of nowhere, without the sort of dense ecosystem of suppliers and sub-suppliers required for making a major factory hum.”

Even if the dubious economics somehow worked out, the state wasn’t going to come out ahead.

The state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau, a number-crunching agency similar to the federal Congressional Budget Office, calculated that it would take the state until 2043 to recoup the $3 billion handout, which was the largest such subsidy in Wisconsin history. Even if all 13,000 promised jobs went to Wisconsinites, the tab would be more than $230,000 per job created, the bureau found.

A separate analysis conducted by the Mercatus Center, a free market think tank based at George Mason University, found that the higher taxes needed to cover the cost of Foxconn’s tax breaks would “decrease Wisconsin’s long-run GDP by about $20 billion over the 15-year life of the handout.”

It would have been a bad deal no matter what, but it didn’t take long for Foxconn’s promises to spiral downward. The Verge has a useful rundown of the various revisions applied to the original plan in recent years:

The company spent years pivoting wildly from idea to idea. The enormous “Gen 10.5” LCD factory specified in the contract became a far smaller Gen 6, then was canceled, then came back. The company announced it was building something called “the AI+8K+5G ecosystem,” to be developed in a network of “innovation centers,” buildings that the company purchased only to leave empty. It looked into building fish farms, exporting ice cream, storing boats. It announced plans to build coffee kiosks and ventilators that never moved forward. Most recently, it said it would build electric cars — though maybe, the company acknowledged, that will happen in Mexico.

Now, the official story is that Foxconn will use the factory for “economic investment activities related to locating and operating a technology and manufacturing ecosystem,” according to the company’s new contract with the state. In short, it doesn’t seem like anyone knows exactly what, if anything, will be manufactured in Mount Pleasent.

The entire saga provides an obvious lesson about the wasteful mistakes that state governments make when they throw tax dollars at businesses that promise to create jobs. The best way to create jobs in any state, of course, is to provide a stable economy with comparatively low taxes and a light regulatory touch for all—not to provide special treatment for some and stick others with the bill.

But there’s also a lesson here for politicians who would pursue economic nationalism through greater industrial policy at the federal level. Trump saw the Foxconn deal not only as a way to create jobs, but as proof that reorienting supply chains was a matter of political will rather than economics. The factory, he said in 2018, was evidence that his policies were “reclaiming our country’s proud manufacturing legacy.”

If the largest subsidies ever offered to a foreign company were insufficient to make the Foxconn deal work, maybe that says something about the ability of our political leaders to steer the economy. But you can be sure they will keep trying.

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A jury this week convicted former Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) Officer Derek Chauvin on all counts for the murder of George Floyd, but one case can’t fix a series of broken systems. While Minneapolis has compensated the Floyd family and Chauvin has been convicted, few cases of police misconduct conclude in favor of their victims.

To help more people abused by police get justice, the U.S. must reform qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that makes it perniciously difficult to hold police officers accountable in civil court when they violate your constitutional rights.

It’s remarkably rare for a police officer to face criminal charges for the misuse of force. We know that Chauvin had 22 complaints filed against him by the time he was arrested for Floyd’s death, and that he was allowed to remain with the MPD through all of them.

When it comes to fatal encounters, we have a slightly better idea of the disparity: Only about 139 officers since 2005 have been charged with murder or manslaughter in relation to an on-duty shooting, though about 1,000 fatal police shootings occur each year. Of the officers charged, a small minority are convicted.

Counting fatal encounters omits many more victims of police misconduct who live to tell about it. The data we do have paints an incomplete but unsettling picture, as police departments often refuse to make public reports against officers. A report from ProPublica is instructive: “In 2018, the [Civilian Complaint Review Board] looked into about 3,000 allegations of misuse of force [in the New York Police Department],” wrote Eric Urmansky last summer. “It was able to substantiate 73 of those allegations. The biggest punishment? Nine officers who lost vacation days.”

In other words, people whose rights are violated by police can’t always count on the criminal courts or even police departments to reprimand their employees; civil suits are often the only avenue to justice. Yet thanks to qualified immunity, those individuals often find that road blocked off, too.

The legal doctrine, manufactured by the Supreme Court, protects government officials from federal civil rights lawsuits if the official’s specific behavior was not “clearly established” as a rights violation in a precedent handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court or by another court within the same federal circuit. In other words, for a plaintiff to sue a police officer in federal court, a prior plaintiff must’ve already sued over the exact same violation and won. Any plaintiff who sues after being harmed in a remotely unique way risks being told that the officer who harmed them could not have been expected to know they were violating the Constitution.

Federal judges, meanwhile, are able to agree that someone’s rights were indeed violated, while in the same breath making it legally impossible for them to sue the violator. Convincing a judge to deny qualified immunity simply allows the plaintiff to press forward with their lawsuit.

Consider a decision delivered by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which granted qualified immunity to two cops in Fresno, California, after the men allegedly stole $225,000 while executing a search warrant. In theory, the officers should know stealing is wrong, the court noted, but without a court precedent on the books expressly saying so, they couldn’t be expected to know. The men were never charged in criminal court, and the victim was legally barred from suing.

Consider a more recent case. Two plainclothes officers in Cleveland, Ohio, assaulted and arrested a man who happened to be standing outside his own house. They then turned around and charged him with assault, booking him in jail for several days, although the charges were eventually dropped. The cops were never charged with any criminal wrongdoing—for the bogus charges or the beating—and the victim, Shase Howse, had no way of suing. The Supreme Court last month declined to hear his case.

There are many such stories—those who survive malicious or negligent encounters with state actors with almost no hope of criminal accountability and a remote hope for justice in the civil sphere. There was the 10-year-old who needed orthopedic surgery after Coffee County, Georgia, Deputy Sheriff Matthew Vickers shot him while aiming at the boy’s non-threatening dog, leaving the family to bear those medical costs themselves. (The Supreme Court also refused to hear that case.) There was the man who sustained a lasting eye injury after an officer allegedly kneed him 20 to 30 times after he’d been subdued. There was the 15-year-old boy shot on his way to school, the surrendered suspect who cops sicced their police canine on, the man whose car was ruined during a bogus drug search.

Chauvin might seem like an example unbefitting of this discussion—the City of Minneapolis settled with Floyd’s family for a reported $27 million. Had the case not been filmed and highly publicized, as in the above examples, that might not have happened.

“Incredibly, had the city not chosen to settle the lawsuit, Derek Chauvin would have had a very plausible chance of getting the suit thrown out on qualified immunity grounds—even after being convicted of murder,” says Clark Neily, vice president for criminal justice reform at the Cato Institute. “There is no preexisting case in the Eighth Circuit under which it was ‘clearly established’ that pinning a suspect under one’s knee for nearly ten minutes until they lose consciousness and their heart stops beating violates the Fourth Amendment.”

The video footage here was the game-changer—something that victims aren’t always afforded. It’s also something that government officials may take issue with. In 2014, officers in Denver, Colorado, attempted to force a bystander to delete a film he took of them beating a suspect during an arrest. Though a federal court ruled those cops violated the First Amendment in doing so, it gave them qualified immunity.

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Jane Coaston is the new host of The Argument, a massively popular New York Times podcast that seeks to host civil and informed discussions about the most pressing issues of the day. A 33-year-old Cincinnati native, Coaston has worked at Vox, MTV, and the Human Rights Campaign, among other places. She’s the daughter of a black father and a white mother, was raised as a devout Catholic, is married to a woman, and identifies as queer.

She’s also a registered Libertarian who is “especially distrustful of efforts by the state to get people to do things.” She explains that “at some point, a regulation or a law with the absolute best of intentions will be wielded by people who may not have the absolute best of intentions.”

Coaston tells Nick Gillespie that growing up in a liberal household in a conservative part of the country made her concerned about giving authorities a lot of power. Adding to that was a sense of being isolated because of her race and sexuality. “My libertarian sensibilities really came from a sense of, I know what it is like politically to always lose and to see what the winners look like,” she says.

One of Coaston’s goals for The Argument is to bring in a lot of new voices to debates about politics, partly to learn new arguments but also to model true pluralism. She says she is sick of performative politics in which people act out predetermined roles rather than actually engage with one another and she’s wary of the idea that everything needs to be adjudicated at the national level. She also says that we the people—not the feds, or Donald Trump, or Joe Biden—are the ones politicizing every aspect of our lives. That’s an individual decision, she insists, and people can make that decision or not.

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President Joe Biden has invited the leaders of 40 countries to participate in a virtual Earth Day climate change summit starting tomorrow. To address the problem of man-made climate change caused by burning fossil fuels that load up the atmosphere with heat-trapping carbon dioxide, Biden is reportedly going to announce during the summit that by 2030, the U.S. will cut its carbon dioxide emissions from energy related sources by 50 percent below what the country emitted in 2005.

Back in that year, the U.S. emitted nearly 6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, which means that the Biden administration is aiming to reduce emissions to 3 billion metric tons by 2030.

By 2019 U.S. carbon dioxide energy-related emissions had dropped to just over 5.1 billion metric tons, that is, to 14 percent below their 2005 levels. In 2020 carbon dioxide emissions fell steeply to under 4.6 billion metric tons, that is, they dropped by 11 percent, largely as a result of the economic contraction associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. (It is worth noting that U.S. real GDP fell 3.5 percent in 2020.) This means that U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in 2020 were around 24 percent lower than they were in 2005. However, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that CO2 emissions will bounce back up to 4.8 and 4.9 billion metric tons in 2021 and 2022 respectively.

In 2015, the Obama administration promised in its intended nationally determined contribution under the Paris Climate Change Agreement to reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions 17 percent by 2020, and 26 to 28 percent by 2025. As a result of the pandemic, the U.S. greatly exceeded its 2020 emissions cut pledge.

So, what would it take to meet Biden’s goal of cutting U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 50 percent over the next 10 years? University of Colorado political scientist Roger Pielke, Jr. parses some figures. He notes that getting from 4.6 billion metric tons (2020) to 3 billion metric tons would require emission reductions of more than 4 percent annually. Since 1991, he notes, “The only annual reductions > ~3% occurred during global financial crisis and COVID-19, but some other years have been close, sustained annual reductions have not yet occurred.”

To make cuts of this magnitude, Pielke points out, would require annually retiring and replacing 3 to 5 percent of coal- and natural gas-fired electric power generation plants, 3 to 5 percent of fossil-fueled transportation, including cars, trucks, airplanes, and ships; and 3 to 5 percent of industrial emissions from sources such as concrete, petrochemical, and steel plants. Since 80 percent of future global warming is projected to result from carbon dioxide emitted from burning fossil fuels, Pielke cautioned against “accounting games” that include reductions attributed to land use and other offsets.

A recent study commissioned by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) lobbying group and performed by the Rhodium Group energy consultancy traced a pathway toward a 50 percent carbon dioxide emissions reduction by 2030. That study calculates that almost 60 percent of the carbon dioxide cuts would come from electric power generation. In 2020, emissions from that sector fell from 1.62 billion metric tons to 1.45 billion metric tons. A further 60 percent reduction of carbon dioxide emissions would mean that electric power generation would be emitting only about 580 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2030. This implies cutting annual carbon dioxide emissions from the electric power sector by around 100 million metric tons annually for the next nine years.

The good news, according to Pielke, is that the timeline implied by Biden’s pledge provides solid benchmarks that make his administration accountable, such that observers will know within a year or two if his administration is succeeding or failing to meet its emissions reduction goals.

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Daunte Wright, who was shot and killed this month by a Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, police officer who apparently mistook her handgun for a Taser, was pulled over because of an expired registration sticker. But after the cops stopped him, they also noted that the air fresheners hanging from his rearview mirror violated Minnesota’s traffic code, which by itself would have been legally sufficient to detain him. That rule illustrates how easy it is for police to justify traffic stops by citing a petty civil violation, even when it is merely an excuse for conducting a criminal investigation that would otherwise be unconstitutional.

State transportation codes include hundreds of rules governing the operation and maintenance of motor vehicles. Many of them are picayune (e.g., specifying acceptable tire wear, restricting window tints, and dictating the distance from an intersection at which a driver must signal a turn) or open to interpretation (e.g., mandating a “safe distance” between cars, requiring that cars be driven in a “reasonable and prudent” manner, and banning any windshield crack that “substantially obstructs the driver’s clear view”).

“The upshot of all this regulation,” University of Toledo law professor David Harris observed in a 1998 George Washington Law Review article, “is that even the most cautious driver would find it virtually impossible to drive for even a short distance without violating some traffic law. A police officer willing to follow any driver for a few blocks would therefore always have probable cause to make a stop.”

In the 1996 case Whren v. United States, the Supreme Court said such stops are consistent with the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures even when the traffic violation is merely a pretext for investigating other matters. If an officer stops a car for a traffic violation in the hope of finding illegal drugs or seizable cash, for instance, that is perfectly constitutional, even without any evidence of criminal conduct.

The arbitrary rule that Daunte Wright violated shows how even the pettiest violations can lead to interrogation, searches, arrests, and violent, potentially deadly confrontations. It says “a person shall not drive or operate any motor vehicle with…any objects suspended between the driver and the windshield.”

The law specifies six exceptions: sun visors; rearview mirrors; electronic toll collection devices; “driver feedback and safety monitoring equipment when mounted immediately behind, slightly above, or slightly below the rearview mirror”; “global positioning systems or navigation systems when mounted or located near the bottommost portion of the windshield”; and “identifying device[s]” used by commercial transportation services “when the device is mounted or located near the bottommost portion of the windshield.”

Air fresheners did not make the list, meaning they are categorically prohibited, even when they are designed to be hung from rearview mirrors. Graduation tassels, rosaries, crucifixes, and fuzzy dice are likewise verboten, so any of them is a license for an armed agent of the state to forcibly interrupt a Minnesota driver’s travels.

Do such items obstruct a driver’s vision more than an electronic device mounted “slightly below the rearview mirror” or “near the bottommost portion of the windshield”? Probably not. Minnesota legislators nevertheless thought it made sense to let cops stop drivers based on nothing more than small objects hanging from their rearview mirrors, including small objects expressly sold for that purpose.

Minnesota is hardly unique in that respect. The New York Times reports that most states have similar laws. Some of them are less categorical than Minnesota’s rule. Maryland, for example, prohibits dangling objects only when they “interfere with the clear view of the driver through the windshield,” although that stipulation still gives police a lot of discretion. More important, Maryland’s law specifies that “a police officer may enforce this paragraph only as a secondary action when the police officer detains a driver of a motor vehicle for a suspected violation of another provision of the Code.”

Until a few years ago, Maryland allowed primary enforcement of that provision. Legislators changed the statute in 2017, thereby slightly reducing the potential for police harassment of drivers who pose no threat to public safety.

The Times describes two incidents that illustrate that danger.

After a La Paz County, Arizona, sheriff’s deputy stopped Phil Colbert in 2019, Colbert wondered why. “You can’t have anything hanging from your rearview mirror,” the deputy informed Colbert (who recorded the encounter on his cellphone) before grilling him about drug use. Maybe the deputy surmised that the air freshener was meant to cover the odor of marijuana, or maybe he routinely asks drivers such questions in the hope of finding contraband to justify an arrest. Either way, Colbert suddenly became a criminal suspect simply because he unknowingly flouted Arizona’s traffic code, which prohibits any “object” attached to a car “in a manner that obstructs or reduces a driver’s clear view through the windshield.” As in Minnesota, the exceptions do not include air fresheners

Although Colbert, now 23, got off with a warning, things could have turned out much worse. If the deputy had ready access to a drug-sniffing dog, he could have used it to justify a search that would have been inconvenient and humiliating even if it turned up nothing incriminating. In practice, this judicially approved end run around the Fourth Amendment requires nothing more than a handler’s claim that the dog “alerted” to the car.

If the deputy came across a substantial amount of cash, he could have seized it based on the bare allegation that it was somehow related to criminal activity. If the deputy decided to order Colbert out of the car, which the Supreme Court has said is allowed during any traffic stop, any objection or perceived resistance could have led to violence, an arrest, or both. All because of that air freshener.

Brittany Mixon, now 35, had a similar experience as a high school senior in 2003. After an officer pulled her over in Galesburg, Illinois, ostensibly because of her air freshener, he immediately asked whether she owned the car she was driving, implying that it might be stolen. “He kept asking me questions like he wanted to trip me up,” Mixon told the Times. To this day, she keeps her rearview mirror pristine and becomes anxious when she rides in a car whose owner has hung anything there.

Colbert and Mixon are both black. Is that relevant? Studies of traffic stops, which have repeatedly found that black people are especially likely to experience such harassment, suggest it is. But even if you are unimpressed by the evidence of racially skewed enforcement, the fact that cops have the legal authority to hassle people for such trivial reasons is more than a little troubling.

I have never hung an air freshener (or anything else) from my rearview mirror, but it never occurred to me that doing so might invite a cop to pull me over. Texas, where I live, authorizes arrests even for minor traffic offenses such as failing to buckle your seat belt, which the Supreme Court also has said is constitutionally kosher. That means you can go to jail for violations that are not punishable by jail. Can Texas drivers be arrested for air fresheners?

Under the Texas Transportation Code, it is a misdemeanor to drive a car with an “object” that “obstructs or reduces the operator’s clear view,” but only when that object is “placed on or attached to the windshield or side or rear window.” KPRC, the NBC station in Houston, reports that Texas currently has no law that explicitly forbids “hanging items such as air fresheners, graduation tassels and chains around your rearview mirror.” Whew.

Texas cops, of course, have plenty of other excuses to pull people over,  as do cops throughout the country. Incidents like the senseless deaths of Daunte Wright, Philando Castile, Walter Scott, and Sandra Bland suggest the hazards of giving police the power to mess with just about anyone who dares to travel in an automobile.

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