Category: reason

Republican lawmakers on the House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday released a proposal to make permanent last year’s tax cuts, which are currently set to expire in 2025.

Without a plan to cut a commensurate amount of federal spending, the so-called Tax Cuts 2.0 package could add trillions of dollars to the national debt during the next few decades. Extending the tax cuts would reduce annual revenue by about $165 billion, according to an analysis from the Tax Foundation.

Without a balanced budget in sight, the national debt, currently $21 trillion, will continue to rise, and the rate of increase will also rise. According to Congressional Budget Office projections, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will add $1.5 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years, even after economic growth is accounted for. But that’s only if Congress lets the tax cuts expire in 2025. If that does not happen, higher deficits will plunge us into further unsustainable debt well after 2025.

“The further we go down this road, the more catastrophic the inevitable U-turn will be,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a Washington, D.C., group that favors balanced budgets, said in a statement. “The irresponsibility is just baffling.”

The expiration date for the personal income tax cuts was widely regarded as a gimmick that was included in the tax cut bill to game the CBO analysis. Without that gimmick, the CBO projections would have shown a much larger increase in the national debt. But Republicans never intended to let the tax cuts lapse. “Those are sunsets that will never occur, we don’t believe will ever occur, we don’t intend to ever occur,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said last year as the bill was being debated.

The House GOP plan to extend the tax cuts includes the creation of tax-free “universal savings accounts,” aimed at encouraging people to save for retirement. The proposed changes would also allow individuals to crack open their retirement accounts without penalty whenever they have a new child.

The plan would expand 529 education accounts so individuals can “use their education savings to pay for apprenticeship fees to learn a trade, cover the cost of home schooling, and help pay off student debt.” Finally, the framework suggests increasing the costs startup businesses can write off to reduce barriers to entry.

If the tax cuts were offset with spending cuts, Tax Reform 2.0 could be a step in the right direction. Taxes discourage work and investment while directing money from productive sectors of the economy to the government. Letting Americans keep more of the money they earn is therefore good policy. Universal savings accounts in the United Kingdom and Canada have been very successful at encouraging people to save for their retirement. Nearly half of all Canadians opened accounts within six years after they were authorized.

The Tax Cuts 2.0 proposal looks like election-year bait for the conservative base—a way to let them know that Republicans still pay lip service to small-government ideals, even if they’re unwilling to be fiscally responsible once they are elected.

New numbers released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics show a dramatic increase in reports of sexual assault in America’s jails and prisons.

The new numbers cover the years 2012 through 2015. In 2015, jails and prisons across the country reported 24,661 claims of sexual assault or misconduct. That is nearly triple the number recorded in the last report of this type, which was published in 2011. That year the bureau reported 8,768 sexual assault or misconduct complaints.

Some of that increase probably can be explained by increased pressure to report and track these incidents. In 2012, jails and prisons implemented new standards for detecting, investigating, and reporting prison rape. The reforms were prompted by research that began back in 2003 with the passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act.

Beginning in 2012, allegations of sexual misconduct began to shoot up. Officials say most of the claims, both against staff and against fellow inmates, were either unfounded or unsubstantiated. In 2015, officials said, more than 80 percent of sexual assault and misconduct allegations were either false or unprovable.

But substantiated sexual misconduct claims also increased, albeit at a lower rate. In 2015, officials substantiated 1,473 sexual assault and misconduct claims, up from 902 in 2011. That’s a 63 percent increase. It could mean that more sexual assaults are happening, but it could also mean that the new system is resulting in increased reporting of sexual assaults that had been taking place but not noted by the feds.

In 2015, inmates were the perpetrators in 58 percent of substantiated sexual assault and misconduct cases, while the other 42 percent involved staff members. Most sexual assaults happen in state prisons, which house more people than local jails and federal prisons combined.

Local jails, however, see a higher rate of substantiated sexual assault and misconduct claims. In every type and perpetrator category of sexual assault and misconduct examined by the study, victims’ claims were found to be substantiated at higher rates in jails than in state or federal prisons. The number of substantiated claims per 1,000 inmates was also higher in jails. Assuming the numbers are trustworthy, inmates in local jails are at greater risk of sexual assault than inmates in state or federal prisons.

That reality matters in the context of the push to free some of the 400,000 to 500,000 pretrial arrestees who are being detained every day in jails across the United States. Judging from this study, people detained prior to trial (often because they cannot afford bail) are actually at a higher risk of sexual assault than people who have been convicted and sent to prison.

Read more details about the latest prison sexual assault numbers here.

There’s no good reason for tattoo parlors to be considered akin to strip clubs or sex shops, but that’s the situation Louisiana tattoo artist and shop owner Ted Legendre has found himself in. Due to a Puritanical shift in city zoning, Legendre has found himself cash strapped and unable to open the tattoo shop he had nearly finished renovating.

Legendre, a resident of LaPlace, Louisiana, was readying a decades-old tattoo shop for business in St. John the Baptist Parish in 2017. He received approval from the parish to alter the space, and he figured he would receive approval to open, too, given existing law. But when the parish changed its zoning ordinances in August 2017, tattoo shops became classified as “adult use” which presented new hurdles. “They never included tattoo shops in any of their postings on the ordinance,” Legendre says. “So no one knew they were included,” writes Liz Wolfe in her latest piece at Reason.

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The Pulitzer-winning columnist George Will has been in Washington, D.C. since the 1970s and he’s basically seen it all. But at a special Reason Podcast recorded at FreedomFest, the annual gathering of libertarians held every July in Las Vegas, he admits to be being frightened of what he’s calling “the Big Flinch” or “a recoil against the churning of an open society, against the spontaneous order that is the alternative to statism, against the frictions of economic growth that becomes more necessary as the entitlement state becomes more rickety. Meanwhile, the fatal conceit—the abandonment of [Friedrich] Hayek’s epistemic humility—is everywhere, particularly in the Republican Party’s embrace of protectionism.”

On the latest Reason Podcast, I talk with baseball fanatic Will about the causes and consequences of the Big Flinch, what it’s like to be completely let down by the GOP’s leadership, the unquestionably positive dimensions of Donald Trump’s presidency (think federal judiciary), and the really odd am-I-having-a-stroke-or-not experience not just of the Chicago Cubs finally winning a World Series but the Houston Astros snagging a world championship too…but for the American League.

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“You may learn about eminent domain, but until you are in the crosshairs of the government, you don’t understand how it really works,” says Marianna Trevino-Wright, the director of the National Butterfly Center, a 100-acre private wildlife refuge located in Texas near the U.S. border with Mexico.”They invoke it, they take your land, and they do what they want.”

The National Butterfly Center, or NABA, is directly in the path of Donald Trump’s planned border wall. Part of the Rio Grande Valley Conservation Corridor, it’s home to the largest concentration of butterflies in North America.

The border wall project is moving ahead in the Rio Grande Valley. In the 2018 omnibus spending bill, Congress authorized one component of the project, a 33-mile section of fencing running through the Valley. And the Department of Homeland Security is threatening to use eminent domain to seize the land.

The National Butterfly Center’s land will be cut in two by the border wall—70 percent of the preserve will become contiguous with Mexico and difficult to access. The government is also planning to establish a “control zone” for monitoring illegal entrants, which will mean clearing up to 200 yards of vegetation, specifically planted to host butterflies, on the river side of the wall. That land could be taken through eminent domain.

“The border wall is doing what General Santa Anna couldn’t do 150 years ago,” says Trevino-Wright. “He couldn’t push the border of Mexico north of the Rio Grande River, and that is what the border wall is doing.” Trevino-Wright says NABA’s property rights are being trampled in other ways as well.

Federal immigration law gives the agency the authority to search and patrol private property within 25 miles of the border without obtaining a warrant.

“They drag tires, they have drones and helicopters, they have agents on foot, on bicycle, on dirt bike, on horse, on four-wheeler, in SUVs, on boat on our shores,” she says. “Every kind of presence you can imagine.” The government doesn’t have the authority to enter and alter private property in preparation for the border wall, but Trevino-Wright says that she encountered a group of government contractors on the Butterfly Center’s property clearing foliage that had been planted to host butterflies.

When she asked them what they were doing there, she was told a representative from U.S. Border Patrol would contact her. A few days later Manuel Padilla, who’s the chief border patrol agent for the Rio Grande Valley, paid the Butterfly Center a visit.

“He showed up unannounced, in plain clothes, and his attache, and a uniformed border agent,” says Trevino-Wright. Padilla presented plans for the border wall to Trevino-Wright, and according to her account, said the contractors would be back. This time he was accompanied by a “green uniformed presence.”

NABA decided to take legal action, suing the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection on the grounds they have exceeded their authority. “You know, private property is supposed to be for the owner and their enjoyment and use and purpose,” Trevino-Wright says. “Well, we don’t enjoy that here. Our land, according to Border Patrol, is theirs to do with as they please.”

Click here for full text, a transcript, and downloadable versions.

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The Fourth District Court of Appeal in West Palm Beach, Florida, has ruled that outdoor footage from the February 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School must be released.

As Reason previously reported, media outlets believe the footage will show what Broward County sheriff’s deputies were doing outside the school as the incident unfolded. Sheriff Scott Israel confirmed that Scot Peterson, the deputy who was the school’s resource officer at the time, did not enter the school to confront the shooter. After this revelation, plus news that Peterson would receive a lifetime pension of $8,702 a month, Coral Springs police officers told CNN three additional sheriff’s deputies remained outside the school, hidden behind their vehicles, when they arrived at the scene. While it was not immediately clear whether the shooter was still in the building when the deputies arrived, the Coral Springs cops were upset that they did not join them inside the school.

On Wednesday, the appeals court ruled in favor of the news organizations seeking access to the video, saying the Broward County Sheriff’s Office (BSO) must release it by Friday. “It is a sad commentary on our times that there must be a full and open public discussion about (1) the type of security system that is appropriate for a large public high school and (2) the appropriate law enforcement response to an active shooter on a high school campus,” Judge Robert Gross wrote in the ruling.

Gross said parents also had a right to “have access” to the footage and “not blindly rely on school board experts to make decisions for them.” He criticized law enforcement officials, writing, “The media showed the need for the public to actually witness the events as they unfolded because the narrative provided by ‘the authorities’ is confusing and has shifted and changed over time.” BSO initially resisted requests for the footage but ultimately decided not to join the school board and the state attorney’s office in appealing a previous ruling in favor of the media.

Judge Burton Conner dissented, echoing the school district’s argument that the footage could expose details of the high school’s security system, a claim that Dana McElroy, an attorney for the news organizations, had rebutted by noting Broward Superintendent Robert Runcie’s promise to improve that system. Still, Conner agreed that “the public has the right to know” so it can evaluate the law enforcement response.

“The footage is the only objective evidence of what occurred and when,” said Barbara Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation, which joined the media outlets in the lawsuit, in an interview with the Miami Herald. “The whole purpose of our open government laws is oversight and accountability. Access to the video footage allows us to hold those accountable who may not have done their jobs.”

A lot of criticism of Twitter takes the form of public tweets aimed at Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey (@jack). Those tweets have heated up in recent years because Twitter is President Donald Trump’s second-favorite tool for reaching has base. (Perpetual campaign rallies ranks number one, because of all the cheering.) These days, many of the complaints charge that Dorsey and his company aren’t doing enough “conversational health work” to make Twitter an inclusive public forum for divergent opinions that also reduces or prevents “abusive” speech.

The hard fact is, no matter how much Dorsey commits himself to making Twitter a safe space for debate, conversation, and entertainment, he’s always going to be criticized for not doing enough, writes Mike Godwin in his latest piece at Reason.

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Attorney General Jeff Sessions says he should have reminded a group of high school students about due process after they called for Hillary Clinton’s imprisonment.

Sessions was delivering a speech on Tuesday at the Turning Point USA High School Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., when the students started chanting, “Lock her up,” referring to Clinton. Sessions repeated the phrase, laughed, and said, “I heard that a long time over the last campaign,” before going back to his speech. “Lock her up” chants were a frequent feature of then-candidate Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign rallies, as many conservatives were upset that Clinton wasn’t prosecuted for using a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.

At a press conference today, Sessions was asked about his response to the students’ chant. “I perhaps should have taken a moment to advise them” that “you’re presumed innocent until cases are made,” he replied.

AG Sessions on echoing a “lock her up!” chant earlier this week: “I perhaps should have taken a moment to advise them that … you’re presumed innocent until cases are made.” pic.twitter.com/f909WUIC18

— NBC News (@NBCNews) July 26, 2018

It’s encouraging to see that the attorney general of the United States knows due process exists. Those accused of a crime are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, which the high schoolers chanting “lock her up” would have done well to remember. And though Sessions didn’t actually join in on the chant (as some in the mainstream media seemed to imply), it wasn’t a good look for him to act so amused. Due process rights should have nothing to do with politics, and as the country’s top law enforcement officer, Sessions certainly shouldn’t be laughing at the idea of a former political foe facing jail time without a trial.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R–Ohio), co-founder of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said today he intends to run for speaker of the House.

The Daily Caller News Foundation was the first to report on Jordan’s plans, and Jordan himself quickly confirmed the news. If Republicans maintain their House majority in the 2018 midterms, he will seek to replace current House Speaker Paul Ryan (R–Wisc.), who is leaving Congress once his term is up at the end of the year.

The Ohio Republican’s announcement could set up a battle between the establishment and conservative wings of the Republican Party. On the establishment side, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) said yesterday he wants the next speaker “to be me,” though his aides later clarified that he was simply emphasizing the need for Republicans to keep control of the House.

Regardless, McCarthy has been rumored to be interested in the job, and he’s already received Ryan’s support. There’s also been speculation House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R–La.) wants to be speaker, though he too has endorsed McCarthy.

Jordan, meanwhile, has received the backing of Fox News host Sean Hannity and conservative groups like Tea Party Patriots and FreedomWorks. But his run for the speakership won’t come without controversy, as he’s been accused of ignoring allegations of sexual abuse made by Ohio State wrestlers back when he was an assistant coach at the school. Jordan has denied that he knew any sexual abuse was going on.

And while Jordan’s candidacy may seem like a win for freedom-loving libertarians, his association with the House Freedom Caucus might not be such a great thing after all. As Reason‘s Matt Welch notes, Jordan and many of the other so-called “constitutional conservatives” on the Freedom Caucus have lost interest in holding President Donald Trump accountable, particularly in matters related to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. Welch says:

By crying wolf over a never-ending series of Mueller-related scandals and document reveals that fizzled on the launching pad—most notably, the long-awaited February memo from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R–Calif.) showing the investigative origins of the Russia probe—Trump’s apologists are training Americans to tune out even those critiques that have some merit, such as evidence of dishonest leakage from the likes of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

By looking more like partisan hacks than constitutional stalwarts, Republicans give a disgruntled populace even less reason to vote for them, potentially jeopardizing their majorities in both the House and the Senate, where any future impeachment trial would take place.

Jordan and his Freedom Caucus colleagues claim to be all about government accountability, but in this case they’re failing badly. And if Jordan becomes speaker, things might only get worse.

Body camera from the Chicago Police-involved shooting of a 24-year-old man on the South Side has been released by Chicago’s (?) Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA).

The video shows Maurice Granton, Jr., running from the police in June. At one point, he reaches for the top of a fence in an attempt to climb it. When he does, an officer shoots him in the back and he falls down to the ground. The officer who shot Granton reportedly tells another officer to “get the weapon.” A longer video is available here. (Warning: Video may be disturbing to some viewers.)

Granton was transported to the hospital, where he later died from his wounds.

According to an investigation conducted by ABC 7 Chicago, police took interest in Granton during a drug investigation. A longer video reportedly shows Granton approaching a car at one point and conducting what is believed to be a cash transaction. At one point, police indicate that Granton brandished a gun on camera. The investigation notes that the video is dark and unclear at the point police say Granton showed his gun. He was shot about half an hour later.

Police in the area reportedly knew of Granton long before the shooting as he was arrested at least eight previous times for charges relating to drugs, robbery, and parole violations.

Andrew Stroth, who is representing the family, condemned the officer’s actions in the video. “It shows an unarmed black man running away from police, and police don’t have a right to shoot and kill in that situation,” he observed. “We continue to have young black men unjustifiably shot by police. When is it going to stop?”

The Chicago Police Department released a statement saying that at least one officer involved was given administrative duties for 30 days following the incident and that an investigation was underway.