Category: reason

The average American needs to earn $22.10 an hour in order to afford a place to live. Minimum wage earners would have to work three full time jobs in some states just to afford housing.

These are some of the audacious claims made in the 2018 “Out of Reach” report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), which proports to show that millions of Americans can’t afford a place to lay their head, a problem that will only be fixed with a massive infusion of federal cash.

“In the richest country in history, no family should have to make the awful choice between putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their heads,” writes Sen. Bernie Sanders (I –Vt.) in the report’s preface. “This is America. We have the resources to solve the affordable housing crisis. We have the solutions that work. What we need is the will to do what is right.”

The media were quick to jump on these findings.

“Bleak New Figures Show Just How Unaffordable Rent Is In Every U.S. State,” reads the headline over at HuffPo. “Where is all the affordable housing? Nowhere,” declares The Outline. “A minimum-wage worker can’t afford a 2-bedroom apartment anywhere in the U.S.,” says The Washington Post.

From Oregon to Indiana, local papers fretted that rental housing was out of reach for even median wage earners.

Yet in order to reach its conclusion about American’s housing woes, NLIHC’s report constructs a deceptive and arbitrary standard of housing affordability that ignores the options available to even low-income workers for how they live, work, and spend.

The “Out of Reach” report assumes that housing affordability looks like a person spending no more than 30 percent of their income renting out a two-bedroom home or apartment—which costs in the 40^th percentile of area rent—all to themselves.

When the report’s authors claim that you need to earn $22.10 an hour to afford housing—what it dubs a “renter’s wage”—that’s what they envision you renting. When they say that a minimum wage worker in California has to work 116 hours out of a 168 hour week to afford a place to live, this is how they envision that worker spending his or her money.

All of these assumptions are problematic, beginning with the idea that you should only spend 30 percent of your income on housing.

This 30 percent rule has its roots in income eligibility standards for public housing assistance established by the Department of Housing and Urban Development back in the late 1960’s. It can be useful in a pinch to compare rents between cities or states. It should not be treated as some eleventh commandment dictating how much people can or even should spend on housing.

For starters, almost no one actually spends 30 percent of their income on rent. Indeed, there is a good reason why people might choose to spend more.

The University of Virginia’s David Bieri has argued that focusing on housing affordability as some arbitrary percent of income ignores the non-housing benefits folks receive from living in higher-cost cities. Writes Bieri, “local differences in the quality of life compensate households for below-average housing affordability, as approximated by the housing cost-to-income ratio.”

In other words, people are willing to pay more to live in cities like New York, Seattle, or even Washington, D.C., because of the amenities, people, and opportunities they can access living in those cities. You can see this within metro areas, too, with some people choosing to pay more expensive city rents in order to be closer to the office, the train station, or the bar, while others might opt for less convenient—but cheaper—housing out in the suburbs.

Equally as arbitrary as how much income people should be putting toward housing is the report’s focus on renting out a two-bedroom apartment all to oneself.

Renters have way more options, and way cheaper options than that. For starters, people are not stuck living alone. They can instead split the rent with a partner or roommates. That’s not going to work for everyone, but for a lot of low-wage workers, who are disproportionately single and young, that is perfectly practical, maybe even desirable.

The addition of just one roommate drops that renter’s wage from $22.10 to $10.05 an hour, a figure that looks a lot more affordable for a lot more people.

Low-income workers can economize on quality too. The “Out of Reach” report measures the price of units by looking at units priced in 40^th percentile of rents. A lot of minimum wage earners might be in a bind trying to find something in that price range. They mercifully have the option of shopping for the 40 percent of units that costs less than that however.

In short, the report zeros in on the lowest paid workers in the country, artificially caps the amount of income they should be spending on rent, and then posits that they should be trying to rent some relatively expensive options. This is not a realistic portrayal of housing affordability. It’s a numbers game.

NLIHC’s solutions involve more games: increasing the minimum wage and dolling out more federal dollars to build below-market housing units. If people don’t earn enough to afford housing, why not just use legislation to increase their wage and lower their rent?

What is so maddening about these policy prescriptions—aside from the normal complaints one has about the minimum wage—is that it totally ignores why housing is so expensive in the first place: namely zoning laws that constrain the supply of housing.

In Los Angeles, some 57 percent of residential areas are zoned exclusively for single-family homes. In growing Seattle, it’s 69 percent. In San Jose, three-quarters of residential land is restricted to just single-family homes. Preventing the construction of cheaper, multi-family units predictably raises prices.

The picture is particularly bad in a number of California cities—the third most unaffordable state according to the “Out of Reach” report—where the effects of tight zoning laws are compounded by a lengthy approval process and onerous development fees.

The average fees on development in the state clocked in at $23,455 for a single-family home and $19,558 for a multifamily unit—which the U.C. Berkeley’s Terner Center found was three times the national average. In the ultra-expensive city of San Francisco for example, less than four percent of housing projects over 10 units are completed within a year. A plurality (roughly 15 percent) take four years to finish. Over half of projects take six years or more, according to a study from U.C. Berkeley’s Terner Center. Other cities are not much better.

Reason has covered a number of individual examples of this, from a San Francisco man spending four years and almost $1 million trying to turn a laundromat he owns into an apartment building, to the ten 10 years and counting it’s taken a government agency in Los Angeles to get permission to build an affordable housing complex on a vacant lot.

The Cato Institute’s Vanessa Brown Calder summarizes the academic findings on the effects of all this zoning and regulation in an October 2017 white paper:

“A study by John Quigley and Steven Raphael estimated that each regulation in Californian cities is associated with a 4.5 percent increase in the cost of owner-occupied housing and a 2.3 percent increase in the cost of rental housing… Edward Glaeser and coauthors estimated that zoning rules pushed up the cost of apartments in Manhattan, New York; San Francisco, California; and San Jose, California, by about 50 percent. A study by Salim Furth found that residents of high-cost coastal cities would pay 20 percent less in homeownership costs and 9 percent less in rent if cities adopted zoning regulations typical of the rest of the country.”

It is true that many people pay far more for housing than they otherwise would in the absences of taxes, fees, and regulation.

The response to this however should not be to fiddle with policy dials until some arbitrarily chosen housing option eats up an arbitrary percentage of one’s earnings. Rather, policy makers should focus on deregulating land use as much as possible so that a wide variety of housing options can be built as quickly and inexpensively as possible.

Powerful forces—including Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R), the Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn, and President Donald Trump—have aligned, to turn more than 1,000 acres of Wisconsin farmland and family homes into an LCD screen manufacturing facility.

Reason visited the village of Mt. Pleasant to speak with homeowners facing the threat of eminent domain, and the local government officials responsible for acquiring the land on behalf of Foxconn, which is receiving $4.5 billion in subsidies and tax breaks. The project was sold to the public with a promise of 13,000 jobs and billions in additional tax revenue.

To assemble land for the project, local officials have already declared entire neighborhoods to be “blighted,” with the goal of seizing homes with eminent domain, a legal term that typically describes the process of taking property from a private owner to facilitate a public use.

But what qualifies as a “public use?” In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that the Connecticut town of New London was justified in seizing the land of homeowner Susette Kelo to hand it over to the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer on the grounds that it would spur economic development in an economically depressed area. The Pfizer project was never built, and the lot where Kelo’s house once stood is empty and overgrown 13 years later. Public backlash led 43 states, including Wisconsin, to enact legislation protecting property owners from eminent domain for private projects.

With lawsuits planned, this project may test the strength of Wisconsin’s post-Kelo law. Can public officials override the property rights of homeowners in pursuit of big development deals?

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Justin Monticello and Weissmueller. Additional graphics by Meredith Bragg.

View this article.

CNN reports this week on a particularly evil example of U.S. policy toward separating mothers and children enmeshed in our immigration enforcement laws. Natalia Cornelio, an attorney working with the Texas Civil Rights Project, told of how during an interview with a Honduran immigrant who had crossed the border without navigating the near-impossible maze of U.S. immigration law, the woman “sobbed as she told…how federal authorities took her daughter while she breastfed the child in a detention center, where she was awaiting prosecution for entering the country illegally. When the woman resisted, she was handcuffed.”

While not always in such a dramatically horrific manner, in the past month alone immigration law enforcement, according to a federal public defender speaking to CNN, has separated 500 children from their parents in Texas. Some, the public defender reports, have no idea where their children are. There are also reports of children being taken away to be bathed and then never returned to their parents.

And what does life become like for those children taken from their parents? This week some journalistic accounts of what those immigration kid jails are like have hit, though involving kids older than breast-feeding age.

Jacob Sobaroff of MSNBC in a tweetstorm notes the weird banana republic detail of “[o]ne of the first things you notice when you walk into the shelter—no joke—a mural of Trump with the quote ‘sometimes losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.’ Presidential murals everywhere. But that one is 1st.”

The “shelter” in Brownsville, Texas, he visited, called Casa Padre, is overcrowded with 1,500 boys ages 10-17, five to rooms meant for four. Nary an MS-13 member to be seen in this “shelter” that used to be a Wal-Mart where the kids spend 22 hours a day locked inside. The facility Sobaroff got invited to visit (good he was invited because uninvited press are supposed to have cops called on them) is run by licensed child care pros from an operation called Southwest Key, though the proposed new tent city prisons for these poor kids won’t be.

The Washington Post also got inside Casa Padre, and reports that:

Yellow lines on the ground mark the area boys must line up. In the cafeteria, a mural tells kids to speak quietly, ask before getting up and not share food. Next to their beds are lists of each boy’s belongings: two T-shirts, three pairs of socks, three pairs of underwear, one polo, a pair of jeans. Lights go out at 9 p.m. and come back on at 6 a.m.

There are so many children that they attend school in two shifts: one in the morning, the other in the afternoon. They sit in small, numbered classrooms with yellow walls covered in posters of planets. On Wednesday, through tiny windows they waved to the reporters outside.

“You might want to smile,” Southwest Key executive Alexia Rodriguez told the journalists at one point. “The kids feel a little like animals in a cage, being looked at.”

The number of children in federal custody spiked by more than 20 percent between April and May of this year. Casa Padre doubled its population over that period, from 542 to 1006, according to a monthly census by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, the agency that licenses such shelters.

The CNN story paints a picture of the federal courtroom where these cases are decided as men plead for mercy to be able to attend to their 8-year-old daughters before being sentenced to a couple of weeks in jail.

Cornelio told CNN that, naturally, when interviewing immigrant women about these child-snatchings they “would start crying and would need to take a couple of minutes before being able to continue talking about it.” For their part, the Justice Department in Texas’ Southern District “could not comment on the number of parents who had been separated from their children or how families were separated because of the zero-tolerance policy.”

The application of this policy is not business-as-usual:

It has long been a misdemeanor federal offense to be caught illegally entering the country, punishable by up to six months in prison and a $5,000 fine. But previous U.S. administrations generally didn’t refer everyone caught for prosecution…

Supporters of the new program credited it with reducing the number of crossings and repeat offenders, while critics said it overwhelmed the courts and U.S. attorneys’ offices with low-level crimes that made it difficult to use resources to go after serious and dangerous crime, like drug smuggling and cartels.

Blacks and Indians were past victims of this particularly cruel injustice, and the Trump administration remains pretty proud of their cruelty along these lines when it comes to petty law breakers.

Shikha Dalmia explains everything wrong with the general zero-tolerance family-disrupting immigration policy.

It is rare to see a politician admit that he or she was wrong. That’s why Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) tweet on Thursday morning was so refreshing.

While in #Florida legislature I voted for a bill that allowed state to suspend professional licenses of those who defaulted on student loans. I WAS WRONG. Today I filed a bill with @SenWarren to fix this. How can they pay back if they can’t work? #Sayfie https://t.co/fcbJUkJ6BJ

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) June 14, 2018

Just as refreshing is the bipartisan effort to fix a particularly galling aspect of America’s occupational licensing problem. Rubio is backing a proposal from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) that would prohibit states from suspending professional and occupational licenses if a license-holder defaults on their student loan payments. Warren, in a statement, called those rules “wrong and counterproductive.”

“It makes no sense to revoke a professional license from someone who is trying to pay their student loans,” says Rubio. “Our bill would fix this ‘catch-22’ and ensure that borrowers are able to continue working to pay off their loans.”

If it becomes law, the Protecting Job Opportunities for Borrowers (Protecting JOBs) Act would prevent states from suspending, revoking or denying state professional licenses solely because borrowers are behind on their federal student loan payments. The federal government has the authority to order states to do that, Rubio says, because of the Higher Education Act, a federal law that, among other things, require states to offer in-state tuition rates to members of the military. The bill also gives borrowers a legal recourse if states refuse to comply.

An analysis by The New York Times last year found that at least 20 states had rules on the books allowing licensing agencies to deny or revoke professional and occupational licenses from individuals who defaulted on student loan debt. The Times found more than 8,700 cases in which individuals had lost their licenses, though the actual number is likely much higher due to the decentralized and often obfuscated nature of licensing boards.

Sure, it’s important to incentivize the repayment of student loans, but that hardly seems to justify a punishment that literally means denying someone the right to do their job legally. And with licenses required for more than 25 percent of all jobs in America, falling behind on student loan payments can close off a wide range of potential careers.

There is no logic to such laws. For individuals who are already struggling to repay debts, their situation will only get worse if they cannot continue working.

“These policies don’t make sense, because they make it even harder for people to put food on the table and get out of debt,” said Warren.

Though licensing is largely a state issue, the federal government is partially to blame for these state-level policies. In 1990, the Department of Education recommended that states “deny professional licenses to defaulters until they take steps to repayment.” That year defaulted student loans totaled about $7.8 billion. Last year the figure topped $32 billion.

As Rubio admitted in his tweet Thursday morning, he voted for a law allowing Florida occupational licensing boards to suspend licenses for individuals who defaulted on student loans. But he has a personal reason for changing his opinion. Rubio graduated from law school in 1996, and revealed in a 2012 speech that it took him more than 15 years to pay off more than $150,000 in student loan debt that he’d accumulated while pursuing his degrees.

For many others—particularly low- and middle-income professions where occupational licensing can already be a major hurdle to gainful employment—that sort of debt could make it impossible to work in a licensed profession.

Sticking to a policy to avoid looking like you’ve flip-flopped is a major impediment to fixing bad policy in particular. Indeed, doing so is really an act of cowardice. More politicians should be willing to show the kind of bravery that Rubio put on display Thursday.

If the current decline in our incarceration rate holds steady, America will return to imprisonment levels not seen since the 1970s by, oh, the year 2166 or so.

Yes, that’s about 150 years. No, that’s not good news. Today’s new report on the state of incarceration in the U.S. by the Vera Institute of Justice isn’t actually intended to throw ice-cold water on the successes of modern day criminal justice reform efforts. But it is a sobering look at the slow speed by which we’re scaling back on throwing people behind bars, particularly when compared to the rush to lock people up during the drug wars of the past few decades.

Furthermore, this reduction in incarceration is far from evenly distributed across the country. Ten states are driving the biggest decarceration numbers. The other 40 states, when combined, actually show a small increase in incarceration rates.

Fundamentally, what the Vera Institute report shows is a need to look deeper at statistics and adjust how we look at incarceration rates because of such wide variations from state to state. It is true that nationally we’ve seen a 24 percent drop in prison admissions over the past decade. That sounds awesome. But it’s almost entirely due to incarceration reforms in those 10 states. Across the other 40 states, there’s been a one percent increase.

The Vera Institute’s report is titled “The New Dynamics of Mass Incarceration,” and it’s all about delving into these numbers and how we interpret them. It’s not trying to be a downer, but because of these dramatic differences between states, determining success in criminal justice reform needs deeper analysis beyond a single national trend figure.

The report analyzes some key trends that help explain what’s currently actually happening in America’s jails and prisons:

Decarceration is primarily an urban phenomenon. In states that are seeing significant declines in people behind bars, it’s cities and suburbs that are driving the changes. In New York State, its largest cities have seen drops in prison admissions going back almost two decades. But once you get out of places like New York City and Buffalo, the incarceration rate is actually still increasing. Criminal justice and sentencing reforms are leaving rural and mid-sized cities behind even in states that have seen dramatic drops in decarceration.

The report notes that Virginia, as a whole, has seen only a 4 percent growth in prison population since 2000. But rural communities in the state have seen a 54 percent increase in prison admissions and smaller cities have seen a 34 percent increase.

The report’s appendix truly highlights how widespread this phenomenon is. From 2000 to 2013, only four states (South Carolina, California, Nevada, and Utah) saw a drop in the prison admissions from rural communities. Two remained flat—the rest all saw increases. Very similar trends hold in small and mid-sized cities as well.

Shifting incarceration from prisons to jails messes with the numbers. Some states have been reclassifying some felonies as misdemeanors and otherwise scaling back on custodial prison sentences, which is largely a good thing. But there’s a down side: There is a trend of shifting sentences from serving time in state prisons to local jails, creating an appearance of decarceration that’s not entirely accurate.

The report notes, “Jails are not designed to support long stays, which can mean harsh conditions even if sentences are shorter than prison sentences.” Between 2010 and 2015, 11 states reduced their prison populations while at the same time increasing their local jail populations.

California most notably used such a method to reduce its state prison populations in order to comply with a federal court order to reduce overcrowding. Indiana implemented laws that sent people who committed certain low-level felonies to local jails rather than state prison. The end result has been a drop in the state prison population, but the state’s overall incarceration has increased due to people being sent to local jails to serve out their sentences instead.

Some states are still seeing all-time high incarceration rates. The report notes that if the state of Kentucky keeps up its current incarceration rate it established in 2000, every citizen of the state will be imprisoned in 119 years. Oklahoma, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Louisiana are all states tagged as still having notable incarceration increases.

But even so there’s good news in these states, too. It’s just too soon to track the results. Oklahoma voters, for instance, passed an initiative in 2016 reclassifying some drug offenses as misdemeanors. It will be some time before the effect on incarceration of the most recent efforts can be quantified.

Read the full report here. Christian Henrichson, Center Research Director at the Vera Institute, said in a statement that the report’s intent is not to dampen interest in criminal justice reform, but to heighten it.

“Vera’s research shows there is an urgent need to rethink our approach to ending mass incarceration,” he writes. “While we celebrate the successes that have been achieved, the road to countering systemic injustice is difficult and complex. And failure comes at too high a cost. Mass incarceration leaves behind a long legacy that has stripped away the dignity of those behind bars, overly burdened people of color, ripped apart families and communities, and caused intergenerational harm that we cannot begin to quantify. We can and we must do better.”

Donald Trump’s cheerleaders claim that he deserves credit for lowering tensions with North Korea—that he himself created, btw— and pulling off a successful summit with King Jong Un. And, to be sure, I note in my column at The Week, any day that Trump does not blow up the world should feel like a victory.

But the problem with Trump is not that he is making a deal with Kim, it is that Trump is tearing up similar deals his predecessors had made just because he didn’t make them. The North Korea deal is likely going to end up being much weaker than the one Obama signed with Iran. But called it a “terrible” and “the worst deal ever” and tore it up. But he’s celebrating his handiwork because it is his.

Trump’s foreign policy isn’t “We’re America, bitch,” as a senior White House advisor told The Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg. It is “This is Trump, bitch.”

Go here to read the piece

Today the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a sweeping Minnesota law that banned voters from wearing “political” badges, button, insignia, or attire inside polling places on election day. The ban applied to all apparel “designed to influence and impact voting” or “promoting a group with recognizable political views.” According to the majority opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts, “the First Amendment prohibits laws ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Minnesota’s ban on wearing any ‘political badge, political button, or other political insignia’ plainly restricts a form of expression within the protection of the First Amendment.”

The case is Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky. It originated in 2010 when Andrew Cilek, the executive director of the conservative group Minnesota Voters Alliance, tried to vote while wearing a t-shirt adorned with an image of the Gadsen Flag, the phrase “Don’t Tread on Me,” and a Tea Party Patriots logo. Cilek was also wearing a “Please I.D. Me” button from the conservative group Election Integrity Watch.

In other words, this case asked whether or not a state government may ban voters from wearing “Don’t Tread on Me” t-shirts at the polls. By a vote of 7-2, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment trumps the state law.

Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion was joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel Alito, and Elena Kagan.

Writing in dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Stephen Breyer, maintained that the Court should have avoided a constitutional ruling and instead turned the case over “to the Minnesota Supreme Court for a definitive interpretation of the political apparel ban.”

Sotomayor and Breyer wanted to save the law from total destruction. “Especially where there are undisputedly many constitutional applications of a state law that further weighty state interests,” Sotomayor wrote, “the Court should be wary of invalidating a law without giving the State’s highest court an opportunity to pass upon it.” Unfortunately for the two dissenters, the rest of the Court saw no reason to withhold final judgment.

The law’s demise comes as no surprise to me. During the February 28 oral arguments, the lawyer representing Minnesota elections official Joe Mansky admitted that the state could even ban voters from wearing t-shirts that feature nothing else but the text of the Second Amendment. His reasoning? The amendment’s language “could be viewed as political.”

“How about the First Amendment?” asked Justice Samuel Alito, prompting laughter in the courtroom. The law’s fate was pretty much sealed at that point. Banning voters from wearing First Amendment t-shirts would certainly seem to qualify as an overly broad restriction on freedom of speech.

In his ruling today, the chief justice stressed that constitutional failing. “Would a ‘Support Our Troops’ shirt be banned, if one of the candidates or parties had expressed a view on military funding or aid for veterans?” Roberts wrote. “What about a #MeToo shirt, referencing the movement to increase awareness of sexual harassment and assault? At oral argument, the State indicated that the ban would cover such an item if a candidate had ‘brought up’ the topic.”

In short, a far-reaching restriction on political expression was overruled by a strong majority of the Supreme Court. Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky is an important win for First Amendment advocates.

Every year, college campuses across the country conduct sexual assault prevention workshops, courses, and orientation sessions. Yet every year, little research is done on whether these interventions result in fewer sexual assaults. A new article published in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior suggests that sexual assault prevention programs might actually be making the problem worse.

Researchers Neil Malamuth and Mark Huppin, from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Daniel Linz of the University of California, Santa Barbara, found growing evidence of a “boomerang effect,” where high-risk men behave more aggressively, not less, after interventions designed to change their behavior, writes Liz Wolfe.

View this article.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders allegedly plans to leave the White House by the end of 2018. Her deputy, Raj Shah, is leaving, too.

That’s according to several unnamed White House sources, as reported by multiple media outlets. Neither Sanders nor Shah confirmed their departures. Sanders said on Twitter that she was attending an event at her daughter’s kindergarten and is “honored to work for @POTUS.”

Assuming the reporting is true, this would represent yet another significant defection from the Trump White House, according to CBS:

Over the course of the Trump administration, the White House has consolidated its workforce, eliminating jobs and assigning multiple portfolios of responsibility to individual staffers. Some positions have never been filled. Despite the smaller number of positions, the record-setting turnover rate has not slowed. Less than halfway through Mr. Trump’s term, the turnover rate stands at 51 percent, according to the Brookings Institution. Turnover during Mr. Trump’s first year in office was 34 percent — nearly four times higher than turnover during the first year of the Obama administration.

“There will be even more people leaving the White House sooner rather than later, laid off or just leaving out of exhaustion. And it is going to be harder to find good people to replace them,” a source close to the administration told CBS News. “I do think they’re going to have a harder time getting the second wave of people in than the first, because those people were loyalists, and [new] folks will have to be recruited and encouraged and then survive the vetting process. In addition to all of that, the president prefers to have a small communications staff.”

It’s not immediately clear who would succeed Sanders. She never enjoyed a particularly good relationship with the press, but neither did her predecessors, Sean Spicer and Anthony Scaramucci (though Scaramucci barely lasted a week). Defending the president’s frequent misstatements can’t be easy; even so, Sanders has a habit of dodging virtually all uncomfortable questions, dubiously claiming that Trump’s position on the given issue is already clear.

FREE MINDS

Two campus conservative groups are preparing for war. Young America’s Foundation (YAF) circulated an internal memo warning staffers about the pernicious influence of Charlie Kirk, the founder and president of Turning Point USA (TPUSA). YAF, a 50-year-old organization, is the grandaddy of conservative student organizations, whereas TPUSA appeared on the scene just five years ago, capturing much of the energy and enthusiasm on the college right.

YAF’s griping isn’t just sour grapes. There are serious tactical and philosophical differences between the two groups. Kirk and his second-in-command, Candace Owens, have been credibly accused of working harder to advance their own cults of personality than their underlying ideological agenda. On any given day Kirk’s Twitter feed mostly consists of Trump worship, while Owen courts controversy but can’t handle criticism.

“[Kirk’s] focus has always been on building his own brand, not strengthening the conservative movement,” said the memo, which was obtained by The Washington Examiner‘s Philip Wegmann.

FREE MARKETS

London Breed won a special election to become the next mayor of San Francisco. Breed, a Democrat, will be the city’s first black female mayor. She’s also seen as an ally of the “Yes In My Backyard” (YIMBY) movement, which supports the construction of new housing developments in crowded urban environments.

That’s good news, because San Francisco is in the midst of a massive housing crisis. There simply aren’t enough homes for the people who want to move there for work. Repressive government zoning regulations—supported by existing residents who bristle at the idea of noisy, ugly construction—often make it very difficult for developers to meet the demands of would-be occupants.

“We are in a housing crisis and need to be producing more affordable housing at a range of income levels,” Breed told a pro-growth activist group. “We should be removing barriers to constructing these desperately needed affordable housing projects to ensure they are not subject to endless appeals and delay, which too often result in these projects becoming more expensive to build, downsized or denied. We’ve already seen some people fighting to stop or make infeasible a 100% affordable housing project at Haight and Stanyan, which will replace a blighted McDonalds. I look forward to supporting this measure in June.”

QUICK HITS

• I’m no fan of Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.), but I don’t think he should have to apologize for calling Kim Jong-un a weirdo.
• Scott Pruit, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, should resign. Pruitt is accused of a litany of misdeeds, including trying to get his wife a government job.
• Republican Reps. Justin Amash and Thomas Massie are co-sponsoring Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan’s note of extreme caution regarding future U.S. military involvement in Yemen, which “could threaten 250,000 lives and force millions more to starve to death.”

Happy to join @repmarkpocan on this letter. We must reclaim congressional war powers and stop these endless wars. https://t.co/2Yr6mRiHx2

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) June 13, 2018

• Meanwhile, GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel (formerly Ronna Romney McDaniel, until that association became toxic for her), tweeted out a bizarre call for everyone to unite behind Trump or be crushed underfoot.

Complacency is our enemy. Anyone that does not embrace the @realDonaldTrump agenda of making America great again will be making a mistake.

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) June 14, 2018

• For Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland, it gets worse.

Here in the U.S., we tend not to think of insects as food, and we’re horrified when they show up in our food.

But in other parts of the world, people eat bugs on purpose. The United Nations calls insects “a highly significant food source for human populations.” The website edibleinsects.com claims people in 80 percent of all countries—amounting to one of every three humans—eat bugs. The things Americans want to keep out of our food are actually a great source of protein, fat, and fiber, writes Baylen Linnekin.

View this article.