Category: reason

Congressional Democrats Want To Vote Themselves Into a Supreme Court Majority


upiphotostwo787783

New legislation to be introduced in both the House and Senate today would add four justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. If successful, this would bring the number of Supreme Court justices to 13.

“The number of justices on the court, which is set by Congress, has fluctuated throughout the course of the nation’s history, reaching as many as 10 seats before settling on nine in 1869,” notes The Intercept. So, it would be perfectly legal, and not unheard of, for Congress to shift the number of justices.

And yet…a  Democratic-controlled legislature doing so at a time when conservative justices outnumber liberal justices 6–3 seems—and adding not one or two more spots but enough justices to see that, if appointed under President Joe Biden, liberals would once again hold a Supreme Court majority—smacks of partisan politics, not fulfilling legitimate legal needs.

The Senate bill will be introduced by Sen. Ed Markey (D–Mass.) and the House bill is backed by Reps. Jerry Nadler (D–N.Y.), Hank Johnson (D–Ga.), and Mondaire Jones (D–N.Y.). As a reason why, Jones cited cases that were decided in ways he didn’t like.

They’re slated to hold a press conference about the effort on Thursday morning.

“But there’s little chance the bill will make headway,” notes The Wall Street Journal.

Republicans are united in opposition to a plan that would undo the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and even many Democrats critical of the court are reluctant to prejudge the issue while Mr. Biden’s commission is at work.

Moreover, some liberal-leaning scholars and jurists, including Justice Stephen Breyer, have suggested that altering the court’s makeup for ideological reasons would damage its reputation as an apolitical body.

Mr. Markey disagreed, arguing that adding four justices—thus allowing President Biden to create a 7-6 liberal majority—”will shore up the public’s confidence in the court and its legitimacy in the public’s eyes.”

FREE MINDS

U.S. will finally withdraw troops from Afghanistan. Biden announced on Wednesday that, after nearly two decades, it is “time to end the forever war” in Afghanistan. “War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking,” Biden said. From The New York Times:

Speaking from the same spot in the White House where President George W. Bush ordered the start of the war after the Sept. 11 attacks nearly two decades ago, Mr. Biden made a case that there was no longer any justification — if there ever was — to believe that the United States military presence could turn Afghanistan into a stable democracy.

The roughly 2,500 American troops on the ground there, he said, would be gradually withdrawn starting on May 1, with the process complete by Sept. 11, a timetable intended to signal his determination to end a vexing and largely failed chapter in American foreign policy.

Military officials suggested the exit could be even more rapid, leaving only a token guard force for the American Embassy. NATO forces, which today have a far larger presence than the United States, would also depart, European officials said.

FREE MARKETS

Mastercard caves to anti-porn groups. Under pressure from religious groups, Mastercard is tightening the screws on adult businesses. In order for Mastercard to be used in interactions with online adult businesses, it will now require those businesses to have identity verification on all content creators, review all content prior to publication, and enact a slew of other specific content moderation processes. Since these rules go way beyond what is required of Facebook and other social media sites—which have been found to have a way bigger problem with criminal sexual content than, say, Pornhub—this is clearly more of a political move than anything else.

Mastercard and other credit companies have been under pressure from anti-porn religious groups (such as Exodus Cry) and others to stop doing any business with Pornhub, OnlyFans, and other purveyors of online adult content, much like they were pressured to stop doing business with Backpage and Craigslist a few years ago.

QUICK HITS

• Reason‘s Nick Gillespie talks to Jesse Singal about his new book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills.

• A federal appeals court has given Ohio the go-ahead to ban abortions undertaken because a fetus has been diagnosed with Down syndrome. The ruling “evades major Supreme Court precedent and is certain to reverberate in cases nationwide,” writes CNN legal analyst Joan Biskupic.

• Last fall’s House antitrust subcommittee report on competition in digital markets “is nothing more than a Democrat attempt to reshape decades of antitrust law to the detriment of American competition and innovation,” says Americans for Tax Reform. “Not a single Republican joined the report when it was initially released, and Republicans should remain opposed to the left’s attempts to weaponize antitrust law. “

• Hawaii will allow nurses to perform some early-stage abortions.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3tkE0T6
via IFTTT

Congressional Democrats Want To Vote Themselves Into a Supreme Court Majority


upiphotostwo787783

New legislation to be introduced in both the House and Senate today would add four justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. If successful, this would bring the number of Supreme Court justices to 13.

“The number of justices on the court, which is set by Congress, has fluctuated throughout the course of the nation’s history, reaching as many as 10 seats before settling on nine in 1869,” notes The Intercept. So, it would be perfectly legal, and not unheard of, for Congress to shift the number of justices.

And yet…a  Democratic-controlled legislature doing so at a time when conservative justices outnumber liberal justices 6–3 seems—and adding not one or two more spots but enough justices to see that, if appointed under President Joe Biden, liberals would once again hold a Supreme Court majority—smacks of partisan politics, not fulfilling legitimate legal needs.

The Senate bill will be introduced by Sen. Ed Markey (D–Mass.) and the House bill is backed by Reps. Jerry Nadler (D–N.Y.), Hank Johnson (D–Ga.), and Mondaire Jones (D–N.Y.). As a reason why, Jones cited cases that were decided in ways he didn’t like.

They’re slated to hold a press conference about the effort on Thursday morning.

“But there’s little chance the bill will make headway,” notes The Wall Street Journal.

Republicans are united in opposition to a plan that would undo the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and even many Democrats critical of the court are reluctant to prejudge the issue while Mr. Biden’s commission is at work.

Moreover, some liberal-leaning scholars and jurists, including Justice Stephen Breyer, have suggested that altering the court’s makeup for ideological reasons would damage its reputation as an apolitical body.

Mr. Markey disagreed, arguing that adding four justices—thus allowing President Biden to create a 7-6 liberal majority—”will shore up the public’s confidence in the court and its legitimacy in the public’s eyes.”

FREE MINDS

U.S. will finally withdraw troops from Afghanistan. Biden announced on Wednesday that, after nearly two decades, it is “time to end the forever war” in Afghanistan. “War in Afghanistan was never meant to be a multigenerational undertaking,” Biden said. From The New York Times:

Speaking from the same spot in the White House where President George W. Bush ordered the start of the war after the Sept. 11 attacks nearly two decades ago, Mr. Biden made a case that there was no longer any justification — if there ever was — to believe that the United States military presence could turn Afghanistan into a stable democracy.

The roughly 2,500 American troops on the ground there, he said, would be gradually withdrawn starting on May 1, with the process complete by Sept. 11, a timetable intended to signal his determination to end a vexing and largely failed chapter in American foreign policy.

Military officials suggested the exit could be even more rapid, leaving only a token guard force for the American Embassy. NATO forces, which today have a far larger presence than the United States, would also depart, European officials said.

FREE MARKETS

Mastercard caves to anti-porn groups. Under pressure from religious groups, Mastercard is tightening the screws on adult businesses. In order for Mastercard to be used in interactions with online adult businesses, it will now require those businesses to have identity verification on all content creators, review all content prior to publication, and enact a slew of other specific content moderation processes. Since these rules go way beyond what is required of Facebook and other social media sites—which have been found to have a way bigger problem with criminal sexual content than, say, Pornhub—this is clearly more of a political move than anything else.

Mastercard and other credit companies have been under pressure from anti-porn religious groups (such as Exodus Cry) and others to stop doing any business with Pornhub, OnlyFans, and other purveyors of online adult content, much like they were pressured to stop doing business with Backpage and Craigslist a few years ago.

QUICK HITS

• Reason‘s Nick Gillespie talks to Jesse Singal about his new book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills.

• A federal appeals court has given Ohio the go-ahead to ban abortions undertaken because a fetus has been diagnosed with Down syndrome. The ruling “evades major Supreme Court precedent and is certain to reverberate in cases nationwide,” writes CNN legal analyst Joan Biskupic.

• Last fall’s House antitrust subcommittee report on competition in digital markets “is nothing more than a Democrat attempt to reshape decades of antitrust law to the detriment of American competition and innovation,” says Americans for Tax Reform. “Not a single Republican joined the report when it was initially released, and Republicans should remain opposed to the left’s attempts to weaponize antitrust law. “

• Hawaii will allow nurses to perform some early-stage abortions.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3tkE0T6
via IFTTT

How Economists Learned to Love Minimum Wage Hikes


topicseconomics

Would raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour cost jobs? That may seem like a strange question to ask. Forcing an economy-wide hike in the price of something typically means that people will purchase less of it. Other things being equal, forcing employers to pay more for low-wage labor is likely to mean they will employ fewer people.

In recent years, however, liberal policy wonks and Democratic Party stalwarts have begun to reject this answer, claiming, contrary to considerable evidence, that raising the minimum wage might result in no job losses at all. In 2014, President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats proposed raising the federal wage floor from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour. A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis found that the proposal could reduce employment by 500,000 jobs. Yet the White House brushed off this analysis. “Zero is a perfectly reasonable estimate of the impact of minimum wage on employment,” said Obama administration economic adviser Jason Furman.

Since then, progressive lawmakers have continued to minimize or dismiss the possibility of negative employment effects from raising the minimum wage, even while backing proposals to raise it higher and higher. In 2019, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) cited a study from the union-backed Economic Policy Institute (EPI) that assumed no net job loss after instituting a $15 minimum wage.

This year, Democrats on the House Education and Labor Committee who favor a $15 federal minimum wage cited another EPI analysis. “High quality academic scholarship confirms that modest increases in the minimum wage have not led to detectable job losses,” it said.

What counts as modest? The EPI didn’t say. But President Joe Biden tucked a $15 minimum wage into the initial version of his $1.9 trillion COVID relief plan, which in theory was intended to boost the economy rather than harm it.

The debate goes back to a 1993 study by center-left economists Alan Krueger and David Card. In a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, they examined the effect of a 1992 hike in New Jersey’s minimum wage by looking at fast-food restaurants in that state and a comparable sample across the border in Pennsylvania. They found no evidence that the New Jersey restaurants shed more jobs following the wage hike.

There were reasons to be wary of drawing larger policy lessons from that finding. For one, the study looked at less than a year’s worth of data. For another, the economies of New Jersey and Pennsylvania are not perfectly comparable, owing to various tax, regulatory, and other local factors. And the fast-food restaurants Krueger and Card studied were largely chains, which tend to be better capitalized than small, independent businesses, which are apt to be more sensitive to increases in labor costs. Finally, New Jersey’s wage increase was relatively small: a bump from $4.25 to $5.05 an hour.

Their paper nevertheless kicked off a revolution in left-of-center economic thinking. Many respected economists and policy makers on the left now believe and argue minimum wage hikes have minimal negative effects on employment.

Still, there are dissenters. They include University of California, Irvine, -economist David Neumark, who in January co-authored a survey that looked at 30 years of economic research on the minimum wage. That paper, also published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that a “clear preponderance”—almost 80 percent—of minimum wage studies since the beginning of the Clinton administration concluded that hikes cost jobs.

Some studies have found that fast-food restaurants cover wage hikes by passing the cost along to consumers rather than reducing employment. At best, this would mean a minimum wage hike acts as a kind of unacknowledged, poorly targeted tax increase that makes fast-food customers (not a particularly wealthy cohort) pay for higher federally mandated wages.

There is also the issue of scale. The 1992 New Jersey hike studied by Card and Krueger increased the base wage by less than 20 percent. Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour would more than double it. A small hike might have a modest effect, especially in pricey urban areas where wages are already relatively high. A national doubling of the minimum wage is likely to have a bigger impact, especially in poorer and rural areas.

Krueger himself raised concerns about the push for a $15 federal minimum before his death. Such a change, he warned in a 2015 New York Times op-ed, “is beyond international experience, and could well be counterproductive. Although some high-wage cities and states could probably absorb a $15-an-hour minimum wage with little or no job loss, it is far from clear that the same could be said for every state, city and town in the United States.” Krueger wasn’t disowning his previous work; he was simply arguing that Democratic policy wisdom had taken his conclusions too far.

The Congressional Budget Office, meanwhile, continues to challenge the notion that increasing the minimum wage has a negligible impact on employment. In February, the nonpartisan budget watchdog produced an analysis of raising the minimum wage to $15.

By the time it took full effect in 2025, the CBO found, the change would result in a net loss of 1.4 million jobs. It said the effect would be concentrated among younger, less-skilled, low-wage workers, the group hit hardest by the COVID-19 recession. As it turned out, answering the original question about whether a wage hike will cost jobs is not so difficult. It takes only one word: Yes.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3sfXdUF
via IFTTT

How Economists Learned to Love Minimum Wage Hikes


topicseconomics

Would raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour cost jobs? That may seem like a strange question to ask. Forcing an economy-wide hike in the price of something typically means that people will purchase less of it. Other things being equal, forcing employers to pay more for low-wage labor is likely to mean they will employ fewer people.

In recent years, however, liberal policy wonks and Democratic Party stalwarts have begun to reject this answer, claiming, contrary to considerable evidence, that raising the minimum wage might result in no job losses at all. In 2014, President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats proposed raising the federal wage floor from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour. A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis found that the proposal could reduce employment by 500,000 jobs. Yet the White House brushed off this analysis. “Zero is a perfectly reasonable estimate of the impact of minimum wage on employment,” said Obama administration economic adviser Jason Furman.

Since then, progressive lawmakers have continued to minimize or dismiss the possibility of negative employment effects from raising the minimum wage, even while backing proposals to raise it higher and higher. In 2019, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) cited a study from the union-backed Economic Policy Institute (EPI) that assumed no net job loss after instituting a $15 minimum wage.

This year, Democrats on the House Education and Labor Committee who favor a $15 federal minimum wage cited another EPI analysis. “High quality academic scholarship confirms that modest increases in the minimum wage have not led to detectable job losses,” it said.

What counts as modest? The EPI didn’t say. But President Joe Biden tucked a $15 minimum wage into the initial version of his $1.9 trillion COVID relief plan, which in theory was intended to boost the economy rather than harm it.

The debate goes back to a 1993 study by center-left economists Alan Krueger and David Card. In a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, they examined the effect of a 1992 hike in New Jersey’s minimum wage by looking at fast-food restaurants in that state and a comparable sample across the border in Pennsylvania. They found no evidence that the New Jersey restaurants shed more jobs following the wage hike.

There were reasons to be wary of drawing larger policy lessons from that finding. For one, the study looked at less than a year’s worth of data. For another, the economies of New Jersey and Pennsylvania are not perfectly comparable, owing to various tax, regulatory, and other local factors. And the fast-food restaurants Krueger and Card studied were largely chains, which tend to be better capitalized than small, independent businesses, which are apt to be more sensitive to increases in labor costs. Finally, New Jersey’s wage increase was relatively small: a bump from $4.25 to $5.05 an hour.

Their paper nevertheless kicked off a revolution in left-of-center economic thinking. Many respected economists and policy makers on the left now believe and argue minimum wage hikes have minimal negative effects on employment.

Still, there are dissenters. They include University of California, Irvine, -economist David Neumark, who in January co-authored a survey that looked at 30 years of economic research on the minimum wage. That paper, also published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that a “clear preponderance”—almost 80 percent—of minimum wage studies since the beginning of the Clinton administration concluded that hikes cost jobs.

Some studies have found that fast-food restaurants cover wage hikes by passing the cost along to consumers rather than reducing employment. At best, this would mean a minimum wage hike acts as a kind of unacknowledged, poorly targeted tax increase that makes fast-food customers (not a particularly wealthy cohort) pay for higher federally mandated wages.

There is also the issue of scale. The 1992 New Jersey hike studied by Card and Krueger increased the base wage by less than 20 percent. Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour would more than double it. A small hike might have a modest effect, especially in pricey urban areas where wages are already relatively high. A national doubling of the minimum wage is likely to have a bigger impact, especially in poorer and rural areas.

Krueger himself raised concerns about the push for a $15 federal minimum before his death. Such a change, he warned in a 2015 New York Times op-ed, “is beyond international experience, and could well be counterproductive. Although some high-wage cities and states could probably absorb a $15-an-hour minimum wage with little or no job loss, it is far from clear that the same could be said for every state, city and town in the United States.” Krueger wasn’t disowning his previous work; he was simply arguing that Democratic policy wisdom had taken his conclusions too far.

The Congressional Budget Office, meanwhile, continues to challenge the notion that increasing the minimum wage has a negligible impact on employment. In February, the nonpartisan budget watchdog produced an analysis of raising the minimum wage to $15.

By the time it took full effect in 2025, the CBO found, the change would result in a net loss of 1.4 million jobs. It said the effect would be concentrated among younger, less-skilled, low-wage workers, the group hit hardest by the COVID-19 recession. As it turned out, answering the original question about whether a wage hike will cost jobs is not so difficult. It takes only one word: Yes.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3sfXdUF
via IFTTT

Brickbat: Can I Take a Look at Your Photos, Too?


NHStest_1161x653

The British government is allowing pubs to reopen, with one catch. Drinkers will have to present their phones to pub staff to show they have registered on the National Health Services COVID-19 test-and-trace app. The app alerts people if they have been close to someone who tested positive for the disease. Pubs that don’t comply with the requirement may be fined up to £1,000 ($1,370 U.S.).

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3acZytd
via IFTTT

Brickbat: Can I Take a Look at Your Photos, Too?


NHStest_1161x653

The British government is allowing pubs to reopen, with one catch. Drinkers will have to present their phones to pub staff to show they have registered on the National Health Services COVID-19 test-and-trace app. The app alerts people if they have been close to someone who tested positive for the disease. Pubs that don’t comply with the requirement may be fined up to £1,000 ($1,370 U.S.).

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3acZytd
via IFTTT