Category: reason

On Tuesday, Defense Department Press Secretary John Kirby announced that the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan is almost half complete. Though President Joe Biden set a September 11 exit deadline, military officials now estimate that U.S. and NATO troops will be out of Afghanistan by early to mid-July. 

Twenty years on, the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan has become increasingly difficult to justify, and Kirby’s announcement is a welcome milestone. But Biden’s withdrawal plan is rife with unanswered questions and it is far from clear that the U.S. is truly exiting the conflict. 

While Biden’s plan called for the withdrawal of the remaining 3,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, what will become of military contractors is less clear. The New York Times reports that around 17,000 contractors, over 6,000 of them U.S. citizens, “are expected to leave along with U.S. and allied military forces.” A May New York magazine piece contradicts that account. Lynzy Billing writes that “in April, 70 American security and defense firms started advertising more than 100 new security and intelligence positions, some with year contracts that go beyond September 11, 2021.” Billing reports that many contractors currently working in Afghanistan have heard few details about whether they will leave the country. 

There is a distinct possibility that the U.S. will also maintain “clandestine Special Operations forces, Pentagon contractors, and covert intelligence operatives,” as current and former officials project. Bonnie Kristian writes for The Week that many potential stragglers are employed by agencies like the State Department and the CIA, which don’t often publicize their personnel numbers. They could very well fly under the radar. (See also: “U.S. Has 1,000 More Troops in Afghanistan Than It Disclosed.“)

As the American presence contracts in Afghanistan, it looks poised to move elsewhere. U.S. military officials are now assessing the possibility of establishing a base in a neighboring country. That facility would host troops and drones and act as a rapid-response center. Even around the withdrawal announcement, the Biden administration admitted that it would continue airstrikes and surveillance missions in Afghanistan if certain terrorist threats emerged. 

The withdrawal timeline has long been politically pliable, as have its details. What was once supposed to be a May 1 withdrawal turned into a September 11 one and could very well be extended again. A full U.S. departure from Afghanistan may simply not be realized, at least not in the near future. But even if all troops leave the country, our ongoing operations could allow a covert conflict to continue as our most visible involvement fades. 

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Andrew Doyle is an Irish journalist and writer best known as the creator of the Twitter personality Titania McGrath, a parody of an ultra-woke, 24-year-old, militant vegan who thinks she is a better poet than William Shakespeare. Though the 43-year-old Doyle describes himself as a left-winger, he is a fierce critic of cancel culture and a proponent of Brexit. He holds a doctorate from Oxford in early Renaissance poetry, is the host of the new nightly show GB News, and is a columnist for Spiked Online. (He’s a previous guest on The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie.)

Doyle is also the author of the new book Free Speech and Why It Matters, a comprehensive, learned, and compelling argument in favor of unfettered debate and open expression. Nick Gillespie talks with him about why cancel culture is on the rise, how to combat it, and what Titania McGrath is up to as she approaches her quarter-life crisis.

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The editorial board of the Los Angeles Times is telling the city’s NIMBYs to stop trying to use historic preservation laws to shut down a needed housing development.

Today’s editorial is about the future of Taix French Restaurant, which has been operating on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park since 1962. Its owner, Michael Taix, is attempting to sell the property to developers, who want to replace it with a mixed-use project that would include housing and commercial space.

Taix wants to reopen in a smaller space within this new development. He told Times reporter Emily Alpert Reyes that this change was necessary for his business to survive because he cannot continue to financially support the current building.

But historic preservationists—or those who claim to be but really just don’t want new housing in their neighborhood—have been fighting to stop the deal. Despite Taix saying that he can’t keep operating this space, one woman told Reyes that she wanted to preserve the building entirely because she had such great feelings about having eaten there. Taix’s livelihood is no match for her desire to “feel like [I] belong, and that the city means something to [me] other than real estate.”

Her memories will persist regardless of whether or not Taix French Restaurant remains, and it’s absolutely reprehensible for nostalgia to be used as an excuse to overrule somebody’s property rights and to stand in the way of L.A.’s need for more housing.

Reason has taken note of several terrible examples of people in Los Angeles (and elsewhere) attempting to use historic preservation regulations not to restore something that’s actually significant, but to stop development they don’t like, even over the objection of the longtime owner of the business. Here, the Times editorial board is just not having it:

It should be an easy choice. There’s no point in preserving the cutesy faux French shell of Taix if the restaurant goes out of business. And there’s no good reason to forgo much-needed housing, especially affordable housing, just so people can drive by the old Taix building and savor their memories. Nostalgia is not a sufficient reason to reject development.

While a Times editorial is probably a good avenue to reach these NIMBY types, I don’t hold out much hope they’ll change any minds. Most of the arguments against development in Los Angeles stem from a selfish love of the status quo from people who already own property and don’t want things to change. Sunset Boulevard is a transit corridor and prime for this exact kind of development. This should be the kind of location where battered old buildings that no longer serve their purpose are replaced with bigger buildings that can help make space for more people to live.

But a lot of Taix’s opponents don’t actually want to solve the city’s housing problem if it means changing the L.A. they know and love. The L.A. Conservancy pulls the typical NIMBY trick of insisting that it does support more and denser housing, but just not this particular housing because it’s … not more or dense enough. I smell disingenuousness:

In addition to standing up for historic places, the Conservancy strongly supports increased density and new housing when it makes sense, especially if much-needed affordable housing is provided. In this case, it is a “lose-lose” proposition as the proposed project provides minimal affordable housing, the design and density achieved is underwhelming, and it needlessly demolishes a longtime legacy business building and neighborhood landmark.

The proposal is for 170 apartments on the property. There are currently zero apartments on the property. That’s far from “underwhelming” density.

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A growing number of people from far-flung nations are trying to cross into the U.S. from Mexico. That trend is challenging President Joe Biden’s attempts at stemming migration at the border. 

Over the past few decades, border crossers have shifted from mostly Mexican nationals to mostly citizens of Central America’s Northern Triangle region of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. In 2000, Mexican nationals comprised 98 percent of migration volume at the border, while Central Americans made up 1 percent. By May 2019, Northern Triangle nationals made up 78 percent of border crossers, and Mexicans 13 percent. 

That breakdown seems to be shifting once again, judging by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Southwest border encounter data for April 2021. According to DHS, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered 33,150 citizens of nations outside El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico at the border in April 2021. In January, that number was just 9,416. 

With 173,460 CBP encounters in April, migrants from nations outside Mexico and the Northern Triangle accounted for nearly 20 percent of border crossers. Most are single adults or members of family units. 

Miriam Jordan writes in The New York Times that these are largely “pandemic refugees” escaping COVID-addled economies. While agents in the past few months have encountered people from over 160 countries, numbers of migrating Ecuadorians, Brazilians, and Venezuelans have skyrocketed. 

Beyond the Americas, Jordan reports that migrants are going to great lengths to reach the border. Those from India have traveled to major hubs “like Mumbai, where they boarded planes to Dubai and then connected through Moscow, Paris, and Madrid, finally flying to Mexico City. From there, they embarked on the two-day bus ride to reach the Mexico-U.S. border.” Over 2,000 Romanians have already made the journey in fiscal year 2021, compared to 266 in 2020. According to Reuters, these migrants often fly from Paris to Mexico City and are then smuggled by bus to the Rio Grande River, which they cross by raft into Texas.

Biden campaigned on a promise to help solve “the humanitarian crisis at our border.” His proposed solution includes a four-year, $4 billion plan to invest in security and development in the Northern Triangle nations. That’s in addition to the $310 million in aid he sent to those countries in April. All told, these sums are meant “to encourage would-be migrants to stay home” by alleviating the issues that might compel people to come to the U.S., writes Tana Ganeva for Reason. 

That approach yields mixed results. In a 2019 policy paper, Michael A. Clemens of the Center for Global Development, and Hannah M. Postel, a Princeton University Ph.D. student, reported that “the evidence suggests that the capacity of development assistance to deter migration is small at best.” Further, they find that successful development in nearly all formerly poor countries has led to increased emigration. The Obama administration failed to effectively address root causes of Central American emigration with its aid-driven Alliance for Prosperity Plan, and by the end of the president’s tenure, he had deported around 3 million people—many of whom were from the Northern Triangle. 

Those findings cast doubt on Biden’s plan to send aid to nations to keep would-be migrants at home—an approach that would be costly and questionably effective, now that citizens of over 160 countries are arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. 

In the long run, making immigration pathways easier to navigate could make streams of migration more predictable, which would help stem sudden influxes like the one currently challenging Biden. And given the changing face of immigration at the Southwest border, spot treatment via foreign aid cannot possibly be a solution. The Trump-era “zero tolerance” policy at the border is not the answer, but neither is Biden’s deterrence through development scheme. 

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There is little debate about what President Joe Biden’s recent budget proposal represents. The headline figures speak for themselves: $6 trillion in federal spending this year, rising to more than $8 trillion in a decade, with deficits totaling at least $1.3 trillion every year in the process. It’s a budget plan that The New York Times—in a news article, not an opinion piece—recently described as a call for “a permanent increase in the size of the federal footprint on the U.S. economy” and “an attempt to expand the size and scope of federal engagement in Americans’ daily lives.” 

Biden’s budget plan is a proposal, not a law, and it has not been passed by Congress. But it is a vision of America’s fiscal future in which a substantially expanded federal government is at the center of much of everyday life. And if anything, its vision is actually more expansive than the headline figures represent. 

That’s because Biden’s budget includes rhetorical support for a number of policies that it leaves out of its cost estimates. In particular, it expresses support for expanding Medicare, already among the most costly federal programs, by adding new benefits and expanding eligibility options to people as young as 60. 

It also calls for the creation of a “public option”—a government-run health plan that would be sold alongside regulated private insurance plans on the health insurance plans created under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. 

Some reports have framed this move as Biden leaving out the public option, frustrating progressives who have long supported the creation of a government-run insurance plan. But while it’s true that neither the public option nor the expansion of Medicare are included in Biden’s budget estimates, I think this is not quite the right way to read the president’s budget.

It’s not that Biden left these health care expansions out of his budget. It’s that he included them—without detailing how they would work or how much they would cost. Biden’s budget is an attempt to push for these policies without having to wade into the sure-to-be-controversial policy mechanics or additional budgetary costs they would entail. 

Biden’s budget plan doesn’t just vaguely suggest that expanding Medicare and creating a public option might be nice. Instead, in a paragraph that opens with an explicit call for Congress “to take action this year to further strengthen health care” by “expanding and improving health coverage,” it declares that expanding Medicare, creating a public option, and a number of other health care policies are all part of “the President’s health care agenda.” 

The Biden administration said in advance of the budget’s release that several major health care initiatives had been postponed, and the budget wouldn’t “propose new initiatives,” and that’s true enough in some technical sense. 

But the clear expression of support means that these are, in effect, off-budget policies. But they would have a significant impact on both the budget and the delivery of health care services. Biden just won’t say what that impact would be. 

Biden’s reluctance to specify how either policy would work goes back to his campaign. As the Kaiser Family Foundation recently noted, Biden’s campaign proposal to let people aged 60–64 use Medicare leaves out many details: “Important policy design features have yet to be specified, including how it would be financed or administered.” Put a little more bluntly, there isn’t actually a plan here. But there is little doubt that adding millions of people to Medicare would increase total federal health care spending.  

Similarly, Biden has declined to provide much in the way of specifics for how a government-run health insurance plan might work. Some analyses in the past have suggested that a public option might reduce the deficit. But such analyses also assume that the public option, like Medicare, would pay health care providers much lower rates than private insurance. Yet paying lower rates inevitably threatens patient access to care, especially at rural hospitals that serve poorer populations. 

That helps explain why it’s been politically difficult to make such plans work: Several years ago, Democrats in Washington state attempted to set up a state-run public option with rates close to Medicare’s. It only passed after the rates came up. 

A recent paper by a trio of policy analysts at the Hoover Institution, meanwhile, found that depending on how it was implemented and which taxes were used to offset the cost of the program, a public option could end up becoming the third-largest federal program, and running an $800 billion deficit over its first decade in operation. And because Congress would have control over the health insurance premiums charged by a government-run plan, it’s easy to imagine that lawmakers would come under significant pressure to cap or otherwise limit increases to those premiums—offsetting the difference via additional taxes or deficit spending. 

The point is that all of this is contentious, and any actual plan would inevitably spark significant debate and opposition from a wide constellation of interests. But Biden didn’t want to have those debates or answer specific questions about his policies, so he tried to have it both ways, backing some major policy initiatives while pointedly declining to say how those initiatives would affect the budget. Which means that Biden’s expansive, expensive budget plan—his vision for the federal government’s fiscal future—is probably much more expansive and expensive than even the big headline numbers look. 

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