Category: reason

Trump Changes Course on Reopening the Economy After Georgia Governor Tries To Follow His Lead

Last week, President Donald Trump was calling for Americans living under shelter-in-place orders to “liberate” their states. Now, he’s condemning governors for daring to take his advice. On Wednesday, Trump said it’s “too soon” for reopening plans like the one Georgia plans to implement on Friday.

The about-face provides even more evidence that Trump’s big “liberation” energy was nothing more than a cynical political calculation.

It goes something like this: Push loudly for “reopening the economy”—knowing full well that local leaders, state authorities, and many individuals will resist. When collective reluctance to rush back to normalcy keeps the COVID-19 death toll lower than it otherwise might be, point to the low death toll as evidence that people were overreacting about the virus all along. As we draw closer to the election, Trump can then claim that the country’s economic pain could have been avoided if only everyone had listened to his advice by going out to eat and swarming the beaches months earlier.

Trump only gets to have his cake and eat it if the U.S. avoids a massive spike in new COVID-19 cases and many more deaths. And that’s less likely to happen if local leaders and business owners aren’t extremely careful about how and when they decide to open things back up.

Doing it too soon or too haphazardly will not only mean more COVID-19 infections but longer and worse economic hardship, unemployment, and unrest (and no boost for Trump come November). A president can sometimes survive mass unemployment or mass deaths, but probably not both.

It’s no wonder Trump is now acting like he never meant for people like Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to allow movie theaters, gyms, bowling alleys, and a broad swath of other businesses to open back up on Friday.

“Maybe you wait a little bit longer until you get to a phase two,” Trump said during his nightly televised Q&A session on Wednesday. “I’m going to let him make his decision, but I told him, I totally disagree.”

Trump added that “it’s just too soon” for the likes of “spas and the beauty parlors and the barber shops”—the very types of small business owners out protesting shutdown orders— to open up.

Anthony Fauci put it more strongly:

I plead with the American public, with the governors, with the mayors for the people of your responsibility, although I know one has the need to leap frog over things, don’t do that. Do it in a measured way. This is a successful formula. The problem is if we don’t do that, there is a likelihood that we will have a rebound.

“According to some models,” Georgia is “one of the last states that should be reopening,” suggest Washington Post health reporters. “The state has had more than 830 covid-19 deaths” and “tested less than 1 percent of its residents,” with “the limited amount of testing so far shows a high rate of positives at 23 percent.”

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• “I didn’t say that this was going to be worse. I said it was going to be more difficult,” CDC Director Robert Redfield said yesterday, asked to clarify his earlier comment to The Washington Post that “there’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through.” Trump had tried to claim earlier in the day that Redfield had been “totally misquoted by Fake News.”

• There’s more evidence that COVID-19 was infecting Americans earlier and in greater numbers than initially realized. “By the time New York City confirmed its first case of the coronavirus on March 1, thousands of infections were already silently spreading through the city, a hidden explosion of a disease that many still viewed as a remote threat as the city awaited the first signs of spring,” reports The New York Times.

• Jobless claims again exceed predictions:

• An Illinois judge cleared the way for the Libertarian Party to get on the state’s ballot even though COVID-19 has prevented traditional methods of gathering signatures to petition for obtain ballot access. Brian Doherty explains how.

• Why isn’t Canada seeing the same supermarket shortages as the U.S.?

• Two domestic cats in New York have tested positive for COVID-19.

• The return of drive-ins?

• You’re Wrong About podcast looks at the 1980s Satanic Panic:

• Yesssssss:

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GOP Debt Hypocrisy  

Republicans in Congress, on the whole, no longer care about debt or deficits—at least not in any substantive sense. That’s a problem for a number of reasons, not least that it increases the risk of a debt crisis in the future.

Those same Republicans spent the better part of Barack Obama’s presidency complaining bitterly about the trillion-dollar budget gaps the country ran during his first term, and President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail to eliminate all federal debt. But since Trump’s election, deficits have increased even faster than expected, and the total federal debt has risen accordingly. That, in turn, is likely to have long-term consequences for both the economy and for the broader politics of debt and deficits.

You can see the nation’s trajectory spelled out in painstaking detail in the annual budget outlook from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Not only does it show that the trillion-dollar deficits that followed the financial crisis have returned, it projects that deficits of that magnitude will be a fixture throughout the coming decade. Indeed, the next decade’s cumulative deficits are now projected to be $160 billion higher than was projected as recently as August 2019.

By 2030, CBO projects the deficit—the annual gap between spending and revenues—will reach $1.7 trillion, which was roughly the size of the entire federal budget in 1999. Rising debt and deficits, the budget office predicts, will coincide with slowing economic growth, dropping from 2.2 percent this year to 1.5 percent a decade from now. The federal government will be borrowing more, and the economy will be expanding at a slower pace. It may not lead to an immediate economic crisis, but the nation is spending and borrowing into stagnancy and decline.

The GOP’s acquiescence to this eventuality has been driven mostly by political considerations: In the absence of a crisis, lawmakers have little incentive to close the budget gap, because doing so requires some combination of raising taxes and cutting spending, neither of which are particularly popular. The biggest drivers of long-term debt are Medicare and Social Security, which benefit seniors, many of whom are reliable Republican voters. Trump ran against cutting those entitlements, and although his rhetoric has wavered slightly in recent months, he has not pressed the issue. Republicans in Congress don’t exactly seem eager to tackle it either. (Trump’s 2020 budget proposed reducing some Medicare payments, similar to proposals made by the Obama administration, but would leave the program’s essential benefit structure intact.)

Trump also does not appear to worry much about what happens down the road. When his advisers in 2018 raised the possibility of a future deficit crisis, the president reportedly shrugged it off, saying, “Yeah, but I won’t be here.” Absent some event to force his hand, it’s unlikely that attitude will change.

One possible forcing event would be the election of a Democratic president in 2020, which would almost certainly see the GOP return to its Obama-era complaints about sky-high debt and deficits.

Yet if that were to happen, Democrats would most likely dismiss these complaints as hypocritical—not as honest efforts to enforce needed fiscal restraint but as self-interested attempts to check the opposite party’s agenda. The Democratic primary race, which has prominently featured calls for tens of trillions in new spending, has already provided evidence for this view.

That view is also evident in the liberal intelligentsia’s embrace of simplistic deficits-don’t-matter economic theories and in complaints about how the CBO’s emphasis on basic budget math hampers the progressive agenda. The GOP’s rank deficit hypocrisy is empowering liberals who view concerns about fiscal soundness as barriers to political and policy success.

With every passing day, the Trump-era GOP lends credence to the idea that Obama-era Republicans cared about deficits only as a means of hampering a Democratic president. By demonstrating how little they care about fiscal restraint while in a position to do something about it, Republicans are creating a political environment that makes it even more likely that Democrats will proceed with a deficit denialist agenda of their own.

Republicans under Trump haven’t just carelessly let deficits rise and debt pile up. They’ve made it even harder to find a politically plausible way of righting the nation’s fiscal trajectory.

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GOP Debt Hypocrisy  

Republicans in Congress, on the whole, no longer care about debt or deficits—at least not in any substantive sense. That’s a problem for a number of reasons, not least that it increases the risk of a debt crisis in the future.

Those same Republicans spent the better part of Barack Obama’s presidency complaining bitterly about the trillion-dollar budget gaps the country ran during his first term, and President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail to eliminate all federal debt. But since Trump’s election, deficits have increased even faster than expected, and the total federal debt has risen accordingly. That, in turn, is likely to have long-term consequences for both the economy and for the broader politics of debt and deficits.

You can see the nation’s trajectory spelled out in painstaking detail in the annual budget outlook from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Not only does it show that the trillion-dollar deficits that followed the financial crisis have returned, it projects that deficits of that magnitude will be a fixture throughout the coming decade. Indeed, the next decade’s cumulative deficits are now projected to be $160 billion higher than was projected as recently as August 2019.

By 2030, CBO projects the deficit—the annual gap between spending and revenues—will reach $1.7 trillion, which was roughly the size of the entire federal budget in 1999. Rising debt and deficits, the budget office predicts, will coincide with slowing economic growth, dropping from 2.2 percent this year to 1.5 percent a decade from now. The federal government will be borrowing more, and the economy will be expanding at a slower pace. It may not lead to an immediate economic crisis, but the nation is spending and borrowing into stagnancy and decline.

The GOP’s acquiescence to this eventuality has been driven mostly by political considerations: In the absence of a crisis, lawmakers have little incentive to close the budget gap, because doing so requires some combination of raising taxes and cutting spending, neither of which are particularly popular. The biggest drivers of long-term debt are Medicare and Social Security, which benefit seniors, many of whom are reliable Republican voters. Trump ran against cutting those entitlements, and although his rhetoric has wavered slightly in recent months, he has not pressed the issue. Republicans in Congress don’t exactly seem eager to tackle it either. (Trump’s 2020 budget proposed reducing some Medicare payments, similar to proposals made by the Obama administration, but would leave the program’s essential benefit structure intact.)

Trump also does not appear to worry much about what happens down the road. When his advisers in 2018 raised the possibility of a future deficit crisis, the president reportedly shrugged it off, saying, “Yeah, but I won’t be here.” Absent some event to force his hand, it’s unlikely that attitude will change.

One possible forcing event would be the election of a Democratic president in 2020, which would almost certainly see the GOP return to its Obama-era complaints about sky-high debt and deficits.

Yet if that were to happen, Democrats would most likely dismiss these complaints as hypocritical—not as honest efforts to enforce needed fiscal restraint but as self-interested attempts to check the opposite party’s agenda. The Democratic primary race, which has prominently featured calls for tens of trillions in new spending, has already provided evidence for this view.

That view is also evident in the liberal intelligentsia’s embrace of simplistic deficits-don’t-matter economic theories and in complaints about how the CBO’s emphasis on basic budget math hampers the progressive agenda. The GOP’s rank deficit hypocrisy is empowering liberals who view concerns about fiscal soundness as barriers to political and policy success.

With every passing day, the Trump-era GOP lends credence to the idea that Obama-era Republicans cared about deficits only as a means of hampering a Democratic president. By demonstrating how little they care about fiscal restraint while in a position to do something about it, Republicans are creating a political environment that makes it even more likely that Democrats will proceed with a deficit denialist agenda of their own.

Republicans under Trump haven’t just carelessly let deficits rise and debt pile up. They’ve made it even harder to find a politically plausible way of righting the nation’s fiscal trajectory.

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Brickbat: Cheers!

In Australia, Adelaide City Council members say they may ban the consumption of alcohol during council meetings. The proposal comes after council member Harvey Jones was seen drinking during a four-and-a-half-hour council meeting conducted by Zoom. Jones polished off a bottle of cider and two glasses of red wine during the meeting. “When you’re working from home the two kinda blend into each other,” Jones said.

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Brickbat: Cheers!

In Australia, Adelaide City Council members say they may ban the consumption of alcohol during council meetings. The proposal comes after council member Harvey Jones was seen drinking during a four-and-a-half-hour council meeting conducted by Zoom. Jones polished off a bottle of cider and two glasses of red wine during the meeting. “When you’re working from home the two kinda blend into each other,” Jones said.

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More Bureaucracy Is Not the Answer to COVID-19

In times of crisis like the one we are now going through, calls to grow an already-bloated bureaucracy abound. Whether it’s through more centralization, more powers to the federal government, or the creation of new bureaucracy to address the pandemic, the hope is that next time around, a new arrangement will allow for a better and faster response. Not likely.

Yet, it happens each time there’s a crisis. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the federal government created the Department of Homeland Security and a centralized airport security agency, the Transportation Security Administration. Oh, and don’t forget about the Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, which expanded many other government powers.

Similar growth in government occurred after the Great Recession. For instance, the federal government created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Financial Stability Oversight Council, the Federal Insurance Office, and many other bureaucracies and programs meant to prevent the next financial crisis. Uncle Sam also accumulated more control over the extension of credit, both mortgage and personal.

This crisis is no different. For instance, former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently called for the creation of another program or cabinet-level department to prepare for, and fight, the next pandemic.

Please don’t.

First, even if one assumes that the problem with our lack of preparedness was excessive government decentralization, I’m curious as to whether Emanuel would agree to get rid of the many agencies and programs that already exist, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that would become redundant under his plan. The only thing this new growth would do is add another agency to interfere with the others already charged with doing the same tasks.

Second, a lack of preparation for the COVID-19 pandemic is a government failure of epic proportions and has nothing to do with an inadequate budget or a lack of programs and agencies supposedly charged with preparing for such a risk. This failure is the product of the well-documented and terrible incentives that exist in government. These disincentives spring from the absence of market discipline that each private-sector business faces if it doesn’t perform. And these perverse incentives within government are enhanced by the fact that bureaucrats and politicians carelessly spend other people’s money. The product is a slew of dysfunctional agencies and programs that often focus on goals that have nothing to do with what the agencies and programs were created for.

Consider the CDC. Preparing for a pandemic like COVID-19 should have been at the forefront of what it does. But instead, bureaucrats there waste most of their resources on fighting things like teen vaping. Create a new department and we’ll soon see its original intent buried underneath many other new and politically shiny priorities. And like all bureaucracies, it would find a way to continually expand its purpose and budget.

So, the creation of a new agency would not make us more prepared for the next pandemic. Any new bureaucracy would be part of the same unwieldy government that failed us during this pandemic, botched the launch of the Affordable Care Act website, and pushed us into a 17-year war in Iraq under the notion that it threatened us with weapons of mass destruction. Why would we believe that a government that fails repeatedly will somehow suddenly perform better if only we add another agency?

A better alternative is to continue the deregulatory trend that is helping combat this pandemic. The private sector has proven to be more resilient and flexible than the government. The private sector is far better at delivering solutions for this crisis.

My Mercatus Center colleagues Matthew Mitchell, Adam Thierer, and Patrick McLaughlin have proposed what they call the “Fresh Start Initiative,” modeled after the Department of Defense’s Base Realignment and Closure, or BRAC, Commission. Their proposed commission would identify and study all the rules revised or suspended during the current crisis and then make recommendations for each rule to be terminated or reformed, thereby crafting “a plan and timetable for automatically sunsetting or comprehensively reforming those policies or programs as part of a single reform package.”

If it works as well as BRAC did, many of these useless rules will be permanently terminated. That beats creating more bureaucracies.

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More Bureaucracy Is Not the Answer to COVID-19

In times of crisis like the one we are now going through, calls to grow an already-bloated bureaucracy abound. Whether it’s through more centralization, more powers to the federal government, or the creation of new bureaucracy to address the pandemic, the hope is that next time around, a new arrangement will allow for a better and faster response. Not likely.

Yet, it happens each time there’s a crisis. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the federal government created the Department of Homeland Security and a centralized airport security agency, the Transportation Security Administration. Oh, and don’t forget about the Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, which expanded many other government powers.

Similar growth in government occurred after the Great Recession. For instance, the federal government created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Financial Stability Oversight Council, the Federal Insurance Office, and many other bureaucracies and programs meant to prevent the next financial crisis. Uncle Sam also accumulated more control over the extension of credit, both mortgage and personal.

This crisis is no different. For instance, former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently called for the creation of another program or cabinet-level department to prepare for, and fight, the next pandemic.

Please don’t.

First, even if one assumes that the problem with our lack of preparedness was excessive government decentralization, I’m curious as to whether Emanuel would agree to get rid of the many agencies and programs that already exist, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that would become redundant under his plan. The only thing this new growth would do is add another agency to interfere with the others already charged with doing the same tasks.

Second, a lack of preparation for the COVID-19 pandemic is a government failure of epic proportions and has nothing to do with an inadequate budget or a lack of programs and agencies supposedly charged with preparing for such a risk. This failure is the product of the well-documented and terrible incentives that exist in government. These disincentives spring from the absence of market discipline that each private-sector business faces if it doesn’t perform. And these perverse incentives within government are enhanced by the fact that bureaucrats and politicians carelessly spend other people’s money. The product is a slew of dysfunctional agencies and programs that often focus on goals that have nothing to do with what the agencies and programs were created for.

Consider the CDC. Preparing for a pandemic like COVID-19 should have been at the forefront of what it does. But instead, bureaucrats there waste most of their resources on fighting things like teen vaping. Create a new department and we’ll soon see its original intent buried underneath many other new and politically shiny priorities. And like all bureaucracies, it would find a way to continually expand its purpose and budget.

So, the creation of a new agency would not make us more prepared for the next pandemic. Any new bureaucracy would be part of the same unwieldy government that failed us during this pandemic, botched the launch of the Affordable Care Act website, and pushed us into a 17-year war in Iraq under the notion that it threatened us with weapons of mass destruction. Why would we believe that a government that fails repeatedly will somehow suddenly perform better if only we add another agency?

A better alternative is to continue the deregulatory trend that is helping combat this pandemic. The private sector has proven to be more resilient and flexible than the government. The private sector is far better at delivering solutions for this crisis.

My Mercatus Center colleagues Matthew Mitchell, Adam Thierer, and Patrick McLaughlin have proposed what they call the “Fresh Start Initiative,” modeled after the Department of Defense’s Base Realignment and Closure, or BRAC, Commission. Their proposed commission would identify and study all the rules revised or suspended during the current crisis and then make recommendations for each rule to be terminated or reformed, thereby crafting “a plan and timetable for automatically sunsetting or comprehensively reforming those policies or programs as part of a single reform package.”

If it works as well as BRAC did, many of these useless rules will be permanently terminated. That beats creating more bureaucracies.

COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM

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“Car Parades, Cruises, and Joyriding” “Are NOT Prohibited,” at Least in Osage County, Kansas

From the County’s page:

Q: Are car parades, cruises, and joyriding prohibited?

A: No, they are NOT prohibited by any stay at home order issued by the Osage County Health Department. In addition, according to guidance issued by the Adjutant            General, the Governor’s stay at home order does not prohibit “joyriding, cruising or parades” so long as the “occupants of the vehicle reside in the same residence and        vehicles do not stop and congregate.”

The Kansas Justice Institute / Kansas Policy Institute helped bring that about, and it does seem to me that a total ban on parades, including car parades, would likely be unconstitutional: It wouldn’t leave open any alternative channels for public assembly, and it wouldn’t be necessary to serve a compelling government interest (given that people driving in cars with closed windows seem quite unlikely to infect each other).

Of course, some content-neutral regulations would still be permitted, for instance to keep the slow-moving parade from tying up traffic during rush hour; but that’s generally true of any large parade that risks tying up traffic.

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