Category: reason

Even Voldemort Masks Up in New Public Service Announcement

voldemortmasked

In the ongoing infantilization of all of us, it’s come to this: A new public service announcement from WarnerMedia, the Ad Council, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) features digitally enhanced versions of Harry Potter, Wonder Woman, Rick and Ilsa (Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman) from Casablanca, and others who are now wearing masks as they go about their various feats of heroism and derring-do.

But villainous and morally ambiguous figures such as Voldemort from the Harry Potter series, Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers franchise, Pennywise from It, and Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker are similarly masked up. If we are so sad and stupid as to take our cues from not just celebrities but fictional characters played by celebrities, we might find it confusing that bad people wear masks every bit as much as the good guys. Nevertheless:

“WarnerMedia is proud to help educate and inform our fans about the importance of mask wearing during this pandemic. Wearing a mask is an effective way to protect ourselves and our loved ones from COVID-19. We hope that by seeing some of our favorite heroes and characters masked up, our fans will follow suit. Mask wearing is a simple step we all can take to show up and support our communities during this difficult time,” said Dennis Williams, SVP, Corporate Social Responsibility, WarnerMedia.

Such banal virtue signaling is mostly harmless, I suppose, but to the extent it furthers a metanarrative about the ability of popular culture to command and direct the behaviors of zombie-like consumers, we should push back. Almost four years ago to the day, executives at Red Lobster were claiming Beyonce’s song “Formation”—in which the singer coos “When he fuck me good/I take his ass to Red Lobster”—was responsible for a massive spike in sales (it wasn’t). This sort of alleged influence has a long history, including tales of Clark Gable singlehandedly destroying undershirt sales in Depression America and Fonzie from Happy Days generating a 500 percent increase in library card applications during the Me Decade.

During the 1990s, cultural and political elites alike wanted to believe risque cable TV programs, explicit music lyrics, newly ascendant video games, and unregulated content on the World Wide Web would inspire kids and dumb adults alike to act poorly, inciting rampant crime, high rates of risky sexual behaviors, and epidemic drug use, none of which happened. But creators of popular culture like to exaggerate their influence on behavior and politicians want to regulate things, so it’s an unholy alliance that is rearing its head again in contemporary discussions over the need to regulate social media.

Just as Fonzie didn’t create a nation of readers by getting his library card, Lord Voldemort’s willingness to cover his disturbing visage won’t goose the percentage of mask wearers (already pushing 93 percent, by the way). Still, it would be nice if we could be treated as adults rather than children. And if the CDC in particular would focus on its actual mission of preventing communicable disease.

 

 

 

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The Trouble With Mitt Romney’s Family Security Act

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Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) recently introduced a universal child allowance in an effort to reform federal welfare programs. That goal is worthy, but his means would be counterproductive.

For all intents and purposes, he’s proposing a kid-centric version of entrepreneur and aspiring politician Andrew Yang’s “basic income.” According to Romney’s summary of his own plan, “The Family Security Act would provide a monthly cash benefit for families, amounting to $350 a month for each young child, and $250 a month for each school-aged child.”

To his credit, the senator’s new proposed entitlement wouldn’t be unfunded. Romney would “pay for” the new child allowance plan by eliminating the state and local tax deduction, a tax break that mostly benefits higher-income taxpayers. He would also get rid of the head-of-household filing status and eliminate the Dependent Care Tax Credit, along with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Additionally, Romney’s plan would reform the Earned Income Tax Credit and reduce that program’s spending from $71 billion to $24.5 billion. The EITC has mixed incentives on work, suffers from large improper payments, and is mainly a spending program, thus financed by taxes on other people.

These offsets explain why the plan is advertised as “deficit neutral.” However, it would grow the size of government by increasing both spending and taxes. It increases spending by $66 billion and increases taxes by $46.4 billion, since most of the plan’s offsets are actually tax hikes. My objection isn’t with these specific tax hikes. It would be better to find additional welfare spending cuts.

Proponents rightfully argue that its universal feature, which pays child allowances regardless of employment status, would limit the high implicit marginal tax rates on work and hence some disincentives to work that exist in the current system. For instance, the EITC creates disincentives for workers who are in the phaseout part of the benefit, meaning that more income from work reduces the size of the benefit. Many welfare programs suffer from this issue.

However, this universality creates other work disincentives. For example, experiments with the universal basic income provide evidence that unconditional cash payments can be detrimental to beneficiaries’ employment. This undermines the importance of work as a pathway out of poverty for some low-income Americans and their children. In fact, Scott Winship at the American Enterprise Institute has made a powerful case that the work requirements included in welfare reform of the 1990s played an important role in reducing child poverty.

Some say that these disincentives are worth it, if it means that single moms can stay with their kids more. I believe it is a plus for these moms. It is also likely to remove the marriage penalty built in the current system. Yet these facts don’t mean that it’s necessarily worth it on net, once you include all of the present and future costs and distortions of the plan.

These distortions include the reduction of federalism resulting from a plan that gives an even bigger role to Washington. In addition to more federal spending added to many other and often duplicative welfare programs, one of the plan’s offsets, TANF, allowed variation and experimentation in the states, as opposed to the one-size-fits-all approach with federal spending. As fiscal policy expert Dan Mitchell notes: “The right approach is to get Washington out of the business of income redistribution. We’re far more likely to get good outcomes if we let states decide (and learn from each other on) how best to reduce poverty.”

Finally, my Republican and Democrat friends who support this plan believe that it’s the role of the federal government to redistribute money toward families and subsidize children, but I don’t share this view. It is low on the list of things I would cut, but I’d always prefer a system where government doesn’t favor one activity over another, such as having children as opposed to not having them. This is a difference of opinion we may never bridge, I’m afraid.

That said, at the very least, we should all agree that anti-poverty programs shouldn’t benefit higher-income households, which Romney’s allowance does. As AEI’s Angela Rachidi notes, “It is a rare thing to see proposals that benefit high-income families nearly as much as low-income families marketed as poverty-reduction plans.”

COPYRIGHT 2021 CREATORS.COM

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The Trouble With Mitt Romney’s Family Security Act

spnphotosnine706110

Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) recently introduced a universal child allowance in an effort to reform federal welfare programs. That goal is worthy, but his means would be counterproductive.

For all intents and purposes, he’s proposing a kid-centric version of entrepreneur and aspiring politician Andrew Yang’s “basic income.” According to Romney’s summary of his own plan, “The Family Security Act would provide a monthly cash benefit for families, amounting to $350 a month for each young child, and $250 a month for each school-aged child.”

To his credit, the senator’s new proposed entitlement wouldn’t be unfunded. Romney would “pay for” the new child allowance plan by eliminating the state and local tax deduction, a tax break that mostly benefits higher-income taxpayers. He would also get rid of the head-of-household filing status and eliminate the Dependent Care Tax Credit, along with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Additionally, Romney’s plan would reform the Earned Income Tax Credit and reduce that program’s spending from $71 billion to $24.5 billion. The EITC has mixed incentives on work, suffers from large improper payments, and is mainly a spending program, thus financed by taxes on other people.

These offsets explain why the plan is advertised as “deficit neutral.” However, it would grow the size of government by increasing both spending and taxes. It increases spending by $66 billion and increases taxes by $46.4 billion, since most of the plan’s offsets are actually tax hikes. My objection isn’t with these specific tax hikes. It would be better to find additional welfare spending cuts.

Proponents rightfully argue that its universal feature, which pays child allowances regardless of employment status, would limit the high implicit marginal tax rates on work and hence some disincentives to work that exist in the current system. For instance, the EITC creates disincentives for workers who are in the phaseout part of the benefit, meaning that more income from work reduces the size of the benefit. Many welfare programs suffer from this issue.

However, this universality creates other work disincentives. For example, experiments with the universal basic income provide evidence that unconditional cash payments can be detrimental to beneficiaries’ employment. This undermines the importance of work as a pathway out of poverty for some low-income Americans and their children. In fact, Scott Winship at the American Enterprise Institute has made a powerful case that the work requirements included in welfare reform of the 1990s played an important role in reducing child poverty.

Some say that these disincentives are worth it, if it means that single moms can stay with their kids more. I believe it is a plus for these moms. It is also likely to remove the marriage penalty built in the current system. Yet these facts don’t mean that it’s necessarily worth it on net, once you include all of the present and future costs and distortions of the plan.

These distortions include the reduction of federalism resulting from a plan that gives an even bigger role to Washington. In addition to more federal spending added to many other and often duplicative welfare programs, one of the plan’s offsets, TANF, allowed variation and experimentation in the states, as opposed to the one-size-fits-all approach with federal spending. As fiscal policy expert Dan Mitchell notes: “The right approach is to get Washington out of the business of income redistribution. We’re far more likely to get good outcomes if we let states decide (and learn from each other on) how best to reduce poverty.”

Finally, my Republican and Democrat friends who support this plan believe that it’s the role of the federal government to redistribute money toward families and subsidize children, but I don’t share this view. It is low on the list of things I would cut, but I’d always prefer a system where government doesn’t favor one activity over another, such as having children as opposed to not having them. This is a difference of opinion we may never bridge, I’m afraid.

That said, at the very least, we should all agree that anti-poverty programs shouldn’t benefit higher-income households, which Romney’s allowance does. As AEI’s Angela Rachidi notes, “It is a rare thing to see proposals that benefit high-income families nearly as much as low-income families marketed as poverty-reduction plans.”

COPYRIGHT 2021 CREATORS.COM

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Impeachment Evidence Leaves Republicans Cold, Dems Hot, and America Tired

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Impeachment managers will wrap up their case against former President Donald Trump today, after spending yesterday showing senators hours of video taken from inside the U.S. Capitol building on January 6. One shows a Capitol police officer screaming while being smashed between two doors as rioters try to rush past him to get inside. Another shows Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) narrowly avoiding a direct encounter with the mob.

But will the footage—while evocative and chilling—make a difference?

Most of it had already been made public, as had clips of Trump’s words and conduct that impeachment managers say incited the riot.

And most Republicans in the Senate seem unwilling to budge a smidge on backing their dear leader, even now. They’ve been calling the impeachment trial at best a waste of time and, at worst, unconstitutional.

Whether or not Trump’s actions and rhetoric rise to the level of impeachment-worthy conduct, they’re still deceitful, dastardly, and deserving of blame for the events that ensued on January 6.

Trump may not have imagined things going down exactly as they did, but his lies still created the conditions that led to them—a situation the Wall Street Journal editorial board sums up nicely in a new editorial about how much responsibility Trump bears in all of this:

Mr. Trump’s defenders point out that he also told the audience to make their voices heard “peacefully.” And contra Rep. Eric Swalwell, who argued the incitement to attack the Capitol was “premeditated,” it’s difficult to think Mr. Trump ever envisioned what followed: that instead of merely making a boisterous display, the crowd would riot, assault the police, invade the building, send lawmakers fleeing with gas masks, trash legislative offices, and leave in its wake a dead Capitol officer.

But talk about playing with fire. Mr. Trump told an apocalyptic fable in which American democracy might end on Jan. 6, and some people who believed him acted like it. Once the riot began, Mr. Trump took hours to say anything, a delay his defenders have not satisfactorily explained. Even then he equivocated. Imagine, Rep. Joe Neguse said, if Mr. Trump “had simply gone onto TV, just logged on to Twitter and said ‘Stop the Attack,’ if he had done so with even half as much force as he said ‘Stop the Steal.'”

Republican leaders, had they any backbone or integrity, might at least condemn Trump’s encouragement of stolen-election conspiracy theories and role in rallying rioters to action without conceding that this warrants his impeachment.

Instead, however, they’ve competed with one another to see who can perform the most nonchalance over what happened and denied that they, Trump, or anyone else should have to show some personal responsibility.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R–Calif.) yesterday blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the Capitol riot and suggested that the impeachment trial was part of a continued “coup” attempt by Democrats.

Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee (RNC) is viewing it as a fundraising opportunity:

FREE MINDS

Who’s afraid of Clubhouse? Another day, another media outlet freaking out about the fact that somewhere, somehow, people might be communicating with one another in ways that neither the mainstream press nor government officials can control. Vice takes issue with the fact that some users of the new audio-based chatroom app might utter untrue things without being fact-checked. At this rate, we’re not far off from this imaginary headline conjured by podcaster Katie Herzog:

FREE MARKETS

Democrats are pushing to free abortion pills from a rule requiring that they be prescribed in person. A federal judge lifted the medically unfounded requirement toward the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the Trump administration fought the deregulatory move in court and the Supreme Court took the administration’s side.

Now, Democrats in the House Committee on Oversight and Reform are asking the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to intervene.

“Imposing this requirement in the midst of a deadly pandemic—one that has disproportionately impacted communities of color across the United States—needlessly places patients and providers in harm’s way, and further entrenches longstanding health inequities,” the representatives wrote in a letter to the FDA.

QUICK HITS

• RIP Larry Flynt.

• Inside the internal dysfunction at The New York Times.

• A retired physics and botany professor in Minnesota is being hounded by city authorities for having what the city feels is too many plants and flowers growing in his own yard.

• States are considering some important criminal justice system reforms:

• Is there a future for fusionism?

• Former Republican officials are reportedly considering the launch of a new political party.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Nf7zVS
via IFTTT

Impeachment Evidence Leaves Republicans Cold, Dems Hot, and America Tired

covphotos117120

Impeachment managers will wrap up their case against former President Donald Trump today, after spending yesterday showing senators hours of video taken from inside the U.S. Capitol building on January 6. One shows a Capitol police officer screaming while being smashed between two doors as rioters try to rush past him to get inside. Another shows Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) narrowly avoiding a direct encounter with the mob.

But will the footage—while evocative and chilling—make a difference?

Most of it had already been made public, as had clips of Trump’s words and conduct that impeachment managers say incited the riot.

And most Republicans in the Senate seem unwilling to budge a smidge on backing their dear leader, even now. They’ve been calling the impeachment trial at best a waste of time and, at worst, unconstitutional.

Whether or not Trump’s actions and rhetoric rise to the level of impeachment-worthy conduct, they’re still deceitful, dastardly, and deserving of blame for the events that ensued on January 6.

Trump may not have imagined things going down exactly as they did, but his lies still created the conditions that led to them—a situation the Wall Street Journal editorial board sums up nicely in a new editorial about how much responsibility Trump bears in all of this:

Mr. Trump’s defenders point out that he also told the audience to make their voices heard “peacefully.” And contra Rep. Eric Swalwell, who argued the incitement to attack the Capitol was “premeditated,” it’s difficult to think Mr. Trump ever envisioned what followed: that instead of merely making a boisterous display, the crowd would riot, assault the police, invade the building, send lawmakers fleeing with gas masks, trash legislative offices, and leave in its wake a dead Capitol officer.

But talk about playing with fire. Mr. Trump told an apocalyptic fable in which American democracy might end on Jan. 6, and some people who believed him acted like it. Once the riot began, Mr. Trump took hours to say anything, a delay his defenders have not satisfactorily explained. Even then he equivocated. Imagine, Rep. Joe Neguse said, if Mr. Trump “had simply gone onto TV, just logged on to Twitter and said ‘Stop the Attack,’ if he had done so with even half as much force as he said ‘Stop the Steal.'”

Republican leaders, had they any backbone or integrity, might at least condemn Trump’s encouragement of stolen-election conspiracy theories and role in rallying rioters to action without conceding that this warrants his impeachment.

Instead, however, they’ve competed with one another to see who can perform the most nonchalance over what happened and denied that they, Trump, or anyone else should have to show some personal responsibility.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R–Calif.) yesterday blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the Capitol riot and suggested that the impeachment trial was part of a continued “coup” attempt by Democrats.

Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee (RNC) is viewing it as a fundraising opportunity:

FREE MINDS

Who’s afraid of Clubhouse? Another day, another media outlet freaking out about the fact that somewhere, somehow, people might be communicating with one another in ways that neither the mainstream press nor government officials can control. Vice takes issue with the fact that some users of the new audio-based chatroom app might utter untrue things without being fact-checked. At this rate, we’re not far off from this imaginary headline conjured by podcaster Katie Herzog:

FREE MARKETS

Democrats are pushing to free abortion pills from a rule requiring that they be prescribed in person. A federal judge lifted the medically unfounded requirement toward the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the Trump administration fought the deregulatory move in court and the Supreme Court took the administration’s side.

Now, Democrats in the House Committee on Oversight and Reform are asking the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to intervene.

“Imposing this requirement in the midst of a deadly pandemic—one that has disproportionately impacted communities of color across the United States—needlessly places patients and providers in harm’s way, and further entrenches longstanding health inequities,” the representatives wrote in a letter to the FDA.

QUICK HITS

• RIP Larry Flynt.

• Inside the internal dysfunction at The New York Times.

• A retired physics and botany professor in Minnesota is being hounded by city authorities for having what the city feels is too many plants and flowers growing in his own yard.

• States are considering some important criminal justice system reforms:

• Is there a future for fusionism?

• Former Republican officials are reportedly considering the launch of a new political party.

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via IFTTT

Will Biden ‘Listen to the Science’ on GMOs?

topicsscience-march-2021

“Listen to the science” was an oft-heard riposte in political debates about how the government should respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. While Donald Trump’s administration failed on that front, it did “listen to the science” last May, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) streamlined some of its outdated and scientifically unwarranted regulations of modern biotech crops. Will President Joe Biden stay the course?

This is not a niche issue. Since the 1980s, biotech crop varieties have been engineered with new genetic traits that enable them to resist diseases, insect pests, and herbicides. Today, 94 percent of all soybeans, 83 percent of corn, and 95 percent of sugar beets grown in the U.S. are biotech varieties.

At the dawn of genetic engineering, the USDA contorted its regulations to assert a right to review new biotech crops before they could be offered to farmers. For 30 years, the department individually evaluated each new bioengineered (B.E.) crop variety, even though the department had determined numerous times that the same genetic traits in previously approved varieties were safe for consumers and the environment.

In May 2020, the USDA issued its final Sustainable, Ecological, Consistent, Uniform, Responsible, Efficient (SECURE) rule. Under SECURE, an engineered crop variety is exempt from regulation if it contains only minor genetic changes of the sort that would endow a plant with a trait that could have been achieved through traditional breeding. Previously, plant breeders had to ask USDA regulators to evaluate the risk of every new biotech crop they sought to commercialize. Now the department exempts new varieties to which plant breeders have simply added genes that achieve the same biochemical result (e.g., insect resistance) that has already been deemed safe.

Under the new rules, plant breeders are no longer required to submit their products to the USDA to determine whether they qualify for an exemption. As the preamble to the rule notes, this change reduces “the regulatory burden for developers of organisms that are unlikely to pose plant pest risks” and “provides a clear, predictable, and efficient regulatory pathway for innovators” to develop improved biotech plants. Should developers have a question about whether their crop varieties are exempt from the regulation, they can still contact the department for a consultation.

Anti-biotech groups immediately decried the modernized rules. “Under the newly released regulations, the overwhelming majority of genetically engineered (GE) plant trials would not have to be reported to USDA, or have their risks analyzed before being allowed to go to market,” declared a press release from the Center for Food Safety. “The USDA’s shameful decision to gut essential safety regulations for genetically engineered organisms puts more power in the hands of corporate agribusiness and removes all transparency,” asserted Friends of the Earth spokesperson Dana Perls.

What particularly upsets the activists is that many newly exempt varieties will not be subject to National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standards (NBFDS) requirements. As the USDA noted in 2018, when it issued the labeling regulations, “the NBFDS is not expected to have any benefits to human health or the environment….Nothing in the disclosure requirements set out in this final rule conveys information about the health, safety, or environmental attributes of B.E. food as compared to non-B.E. counterparts.” But the activists know that some consumers mistakenly view those labels as warnings and thus tend to avoid foods made using ingredients from modern biotech crops.

Will the Biden administration listen to the science regarding biotech crops? One possibly good omen is the nomination of biotech-friendly Obama administration Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to his former post.

“While public skepticism around the safety of GMOs is significant,” Vilsack noted in a 2017 op-ed for The Hill, “the overwhelming evidence demonstrates that these crops have not been linked to a single health risk in the more than two decades they’ve been in our marketplace.” He added that “embracing innovative farming technologies and practices like seed improvement through genetic modification puts us on the path toward a more food-secure and environmentally stable future.”

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