Category: reason

Yesterday, in advance of President Donald Trump’s trip to Canada for what promises to be one the most diplomatically testy G7 summits in modern history, his biggest Republican critic in the Senate, Arizona’s Jeff Flake, went after the president on the topic burning the ears of America’s biggest allies: trade.

I plan to speak on the Senate floor tomorrow morning to discuss the administration’s protectionist policies and the importance of America’s leadership in the world. Here is some of what I intend to say: pic.twitter.com/ox8HX75lsY

— Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) June 6, 2018

Flake yesterday also joined a bipartisan group of senators to introduce a bill requiring congressional approval of any presidential tariff imposed in the name of national security, a flimsy justification Trump has been using to absurd lengths. From the senator’s press release:

The staggering negative impact of the administration’s proposed tariffs is already being felt by workers and businesses across the country. Congress ought to assert leadership in this situation and take away the matches the president seems intent on using to ignite a dangerous trade war. I encourage my colleagues to promptly pass this legislation and push back against ill-conceived protectionist measures.

Before Flake could deliver today’s lecture, Trump took to Twitter for some taunting:

How could Jeff Flake, who is setting record low polling numbers in Arizona and was therefore humiliatingly forced out of his own Senate seat without even a fight (and who doesn’t have a clue), think about running for office, even a lower one, again? Let’s face it, he’s a Flake!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2018

The president is right about both the spelling and capitalization of the senator’s last name, and I can testify after attending a fundraiser for Flake six days before he announced he wouldn’t be running for re-election that there are some people who question the senator’s reliability vis-à-vis future commitments. What’s more, Trump is right about Flake’s polls being very low—his approval rating was at 18 percent when he peaced out last October, although it has climbed back up to 32 percent since then. (Flake’s approval/disapproval split, negative 18, was tied for worst in the first quarter of this year with Mitch McConnell’s.)

It is also true that the presidential pacesetter for record low polling numbers in a first term remains Donald J. Trump, even after some modest recent gains. Gallup has Trump these days at 41 percent, close to but still lower than Jimmy Carter in early June 1978 (44 percent), Ronald Reagan in 1982 (45 percent), Bill Clinton in 1994 (46 percent), and Barack Obama in 2010 (47 percent). For the vast majority of his presidency, Trump’s approval rating, when charted against those of his comparable predecessors, has been the floor.

What’s more, as Gallup recently noted, “The percentage of Americans who strongly disapprove of the job Trump is doing is one of the highest for any president in the history of the Gallup ‘strongly’ question, which has been asked 82 times at irregular intervals.” Trump registered a 41 percent “strongly disapprove” rating both times Gallup asked the question (in February 2017 and May 2018), while the share of respondents who strongly approved of his job performance dropped slightly, from 27 percent to 26 percent. According to Gallup, “only two presidents have had higher strong disapproval ratings”: George W. Bush and Richard Nixon, both during their second terms.

Trump’s polling softness may help explain why he’s choosing to tweak Flake, rather than merely scraping him off the #MAGA windshield. The senator, who tried to rally Republicans against Trump long after the latter had secured the GOP nomination in 2016 and then targeted Trumpism in his 2017 bestseller Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle, is making noises about challenging Trump in the 2020 Republican presidential primary.

“It’s not in my plans,” he told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press on May 27. “But I’ve not ruled anything out. I do hope that somebody runs on the Republican side other than the president—if nothing else, simply to remind Republicans what conservatism is. And what Republicans have traditionally stood for.”

If the national state of affairs remains largely as is between now and then, I would expect Flake—or (God help us) John Kasich, or (Lord have mercy on our miserable souls) Bill Kristol—to get creamed in a GOP primary. But one persistent feature of modern politics is that nothing stays stable for long. To state the obvious, Donald Trump wouldn’t be president otherwise. So far 38 percent of Republicans tell pollsters that they want Trump to face a challenger in the 2020 primaries. As FiveThirtyEight pointed out in a useful explainer, that’s pretty similar to Barack Obama’s numbers among Democrats in 2010.

Still, we don’t know what (if anything) the Robert Mueller investigation will turn up, how Congress will respond, how the composition of Congress will change this fall, or how the mercurial president will react to it all, let alone how the political context would change if, say, the economy turned sour or some unforeseen calamity occurred on the world stage. Maybe Mark Cuban throws his billions into the ring, maybe Justin Amash decides to go full Libertarian, maybe the L.P. finally vaults itself permanently into the double digits, maybe the Bernie-Hillary war becomes a full-fledged fracture on the left. America is just too weird right now to predict.

In the meantime, I’m glad there’s a person on Team R objecting loudly to the party’s recent conversion to mercantilism. If major-party ideologies are up for grabs right now, I want at least some people inside the tents fighting for economic sanity.

Speaking of which, here’s Flake’s speech today, in which he explains that “a trade war only guarantees that there will be losers” and complains that “this is not grown-up leadership”:

Every summer, it seems, brings a parade of outrageous stories about petty local officials who shut down kids’ front-yard lemonade stands because the little moppets don’t have the right permits. But this summer things might be different as civil disobedience meets corporate marketing. Young lemonade entrepreneurs are getting some support against local bureaucrats from powdered lemonade manufacturer Country Time.

This morning the company launched an ingenious summer promotional campaign. Country Time wants your kids to open lemonade stands. If some stiff suit from city hall comes calling, Country Time will help you out by covering the costs of fines and permit fees:

Kids across the country are getting busted for operating lemonade stands without a permit. We’re taking the lead to #SaveLemonadeStands by paying for kids’ fines + permits this year. For every RT this gets we’ll donate $1 (up to $500,000) to help kids next year + beyond.

— CountryTime (@CountryTime) June 7, 2018

This promo site provides the details. To take advantage of the offer, you need to be the parent of a child 14 or younger who has a lemonade stand. Country Time will cover fines or fees up to $300 per child. The company has budgeted $60,000, enough to help at least 200 kids, for the program, which runs through August. But the tweet says Country Time is prepared to create a fund of up to $500,000 to help more kids in future summers.

Country Time has an obvious agenda here: More lemonade stands potentially means more people purchasing and consuming its product. But the promotional stunt is a reminder that these meddling local officials are not protecting public safety but interfering in people’s lives for stupid reasons and demanding to be paid for the service. Kudos to Country Time for trying to discourage this awful behavior, although in some cases $300 might not be enough to cover rapacious city permitting demands.

Every night, the crowd at Shmeisani Circle chants “ooh, ah, thief government!” and waves Jordanian flags. An unlikely alliance of labor unions and business owners have united against an unpopular tax bill, setting off a series of daily protests at a major highway roundabout in Amman, the capital of Jordan. Their movement started on May 31. In just four days, they forced the Prime Minister to resign.

Jordan, a constitutional monarchy in the Middle East with a population around 10 million, is experiencing its most widespread unrest in years. While the kingdom has not suffered from the violence of some neighboring countries, it also does not have the oil wealth of other Arab monarchies. Tax increases aimed at balancing the government budget have squeezed the poor and middle class, sparking general strikes on May 31 and June 6, with days of spontaneous demonstrations in between, writes Matthew Petti.

View this article.

London Breed, president of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors and former acting mayor, indisputably won the popular vote for the city’s mayoral race. The latest tally has her ahead of rival Mark Leno with a difference of 35 percent to 26 percent in a crowded field of eight choices.

But due to the city’s electoral system it’s looking increasingly like Leno is actually going to be named the winner of the election. This is not an accident or a mistake. This is how the voting system works.

San Francisco uses what’s known as a “ranked choice” voting system, implemented in 2004, as a way of (hopefully) better representing the interests of the greatest number of voters and to make sure that a candidate wins with a majority of the votes, not just the plurality.

In San Francisco, rather than just deciding a winner, voters are asked to rank candidates by preference. When the votes are tallied, if nobody gets more than 50 percent of the votes, the candidate with the least votes gets eliminated. Then the votes are tallied again, but for those who voted for the eliminated candidate, their second choice is now tallied instead. And so it goes, until one candidate claims a majority vote, not just the plurality.

While Breed got the plurality of the initial votes, Leno was a popular second and third choice for voters whose first choice candidate was eliminated. As of this morning, Leno has a bare majority of the vote, 50.4 percent to Breed’s 49.6 percent. Leno picked up thousands more votes as candidates were eliminated than Breed. But with less than 1,500 votes separating the two of them and many more ballots to still tally, it may be days before we know for certain who actually wins.

The ranked choice system is not flawed if, or because, Breed ends up losing. Ranked choice voting exists as an alternative to America’s winner-takes-all voting system, which tends to benefit incumbents and entrenched parties and makes voting for independent and third-party candidates a tough proposition. In ranked choice voting, you’re not “throwing your vote away” if you vote for somebody from the Libertarian Party, or Green Party, or Communist Party, or who isn’t a member of any party at all. With ranked choice voting, you can now vote for the longshot and also for alternative candidates who are more likely to win.

This is an excellent way to encourage voter participation among those who feel disenfranchised by systems where you might as well stay home if you’re not going to vote for the bigger names. FairVote, an advocacy group that encourages “ranked choice” voting (and whose board is led by former Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic), supports San Francisco’s system. In a piece posted on their site June 1, Pedro Hernandez notes:

Ranked choice voting offers a proven solution for voters. RCV played a key role in last year’s exciting high turnout mayoral and city council wins in Minneapolis and St. Paul by people of color, LGBTQ candidates, and other underrepresented communities. Bay Area’s four cities with RCV have seen significant increases in representation of women and people of color. When San Franciscan first adopted RCV, it led the nation on a plethora of social issues, and voting in a fair, inclusive process is part of that progress.

RCV is easy for voters. In San Francisco, we have the opportunity to rank our favorites, and choose two backups should my first choice lose. That power should extended to all voters throughout California and the country. When voters have a greater choice through RCV, election outcomes at all levels become more representative of the electorate.

While ranked choice voting can help diminish the issue of “spoiler” candidates—those who are similar enough to another candidate to draw votes away, causing both candidates to lose—ranked choice voting can result in a new set of concerns and political gaming. In this case, San Francisco saw the opposite problem of “vote-splitting.” Leno openly campaigned with fellow mayoral candidate Jane Kim and encouraged their supporters to also choose to list the other candidate as their second choice. Kim came in third place in the vote, and when she was eliminated, that’s how Leno got all the votes pushing him ahead of Breed. So two candidates working together have the potential to play “spoiler” for a third. (Of interest to Reason readers: Breed was also the candidate with a reputation for being more open to development to solve the city’s housing shortage.)

And then there’s the issue of what happens to the ballots of voters who don’t rank the top candidates at all. Those ballots get “exhausted” and are tossed out. Voters who ranked neither Leno nor Breed have been tossed from the tally, just like a typical winner-takes-all ballot. According to the election figures, that currently counts out to more than 13,000 ballots.

Does that matter? Well, if the point of ranked choice voting is to make sure the winning candidate has a majority of the voters’ support, that’s not what’s going to happen in this race. Leno will only have the “majority” of the vote because of all the ballots that have been eliminated or “exhausted” for not selecting either him or Breed. In the end, regardless of who wins, they technically will still have less than 50 percent of the vote.

The better determinant of success might be whether San Francisco voters feel like the winning candidate has the support of enough citizens. That can be a challenging thing measure when the candidate with the most votes in the first round ends up losing.

Video game company Valve—which last week was weighed down with the controversy over its hosting of the virtual school simulator Active Shooter (since pulled)—is out with a new content policy. From a libertarian perspective, it’s pretty amazing.

In a Wednesday blog post, Valve employee Erik Johnson laid out a vision for what kind of games will be allowed on Steam. According to Johnson, that will include pretty much anything save those titles that “are illegal, or straight up trolling.”

“If you’re a player, we shouldn’t be choosing for you what content you can or can’t buy. If you’re a developer, we shouldn’t be choosing what content you’re allowed to create. Those choices should be yours to make,” wrote Johnson. “Our role should be to provide systems and tools to support your efforts to make these choices for yourself, and to help you do it in a way that makes you feel comfortable.”

For a company who earns its keep selling all sorts of games to all sorts of gamers this comes across as imminently sensible. It amounts to the realization that taste is subjective, and that it is near impossible to impose objective standards of permissible content that will please all the company’s customers and vendors.

The issue is tricky enough that debates over what content can go on Steam are occurring not just in the wider world, but indeed within Valve itself.

As Johnson wrote, “Valve is not a small company—we’re not a homogeneous group. The online debates around these topics play out inside Valve as well. We don’t all agree on what deserves to be on the Store. So when we say there’s no way to avoid making a bunch of people mad when making decisions in this space, we’re including our own employees, their families and their communities in that.”

As if to prove Valve’s point that there is no way to make everyone happy, video game journalists have reacted with near-apoplectic rage that the company will be less-than-proactive in telling its customers what kind of games they’re allowed to play.

For Kotaku‘s Nathan Grayson, Valve’s new policy wreaks of hypocritical nihilism, writing on Twitter that “Valve dedicates so much of this post to talking about how allowing a game onto steam doesn’t constitute an expression of values or taking a ‘side.’ but the knowing creation of an all-is-permitted libertarian paradise ABSOLUTELY constitutes an expression of values”

The argument here seems to be that no content policy can exist in an ideological vacuum, and Valve has chosen the wrong ideology by trying to choose none of them. The right policy, Grayson seems to be arguing, would have Valve act as not just a screener for illegal content, but for acceptable content. Valve clearly doesn’t want that role, both because it would be a monstrous headache, and because they have taken the stance that it is not up to them to make hosting decisions based on personal taste.

For a long time, this is how the internet worked and what made it a force for democratization and liberation. Every type of person could find content and products to suit their tastes somewhere on the legal web. That kind of freedom, however, is now being recast as a total abdication of responsibility that will invite the worst kinds of abuses. Grayson expressed fears, for instance, that woke game developers will be scared off Steam by an imminent flood of neo-nazi games.

Over at video game website Polygon, Ben Kuchera excoriates Valve for asking individual gamers to make decisions about what they want. “Saying there are no rules is a good way to make sure no one gets mad, and if people get upset about the flood of abusive and hateful games that now, by policy, have a home on Steam … well, tough shit,” writes Kuchera. “This solution keeps things simple, and profitable. Anything goes, and Valve is going to make money on all of it.”

But gamers who don’t want to play Nazi games don’t have to and won’t have to. They may have to live with the knowledge that these games exist, just as they have to live with the knowledge that Nazis exist. Neither Kuchera nor Grayson have done much to articulate the full spectrum of “hateful and abusive” games. Would it be limited to admittedly repugnant titles like Active Shooter? Or would we have to start roping in more mainstream titles like Grand Theft Auto, which that lets you beat prostitutes, kill cops, and hunt down illegal immigrants? Should Valve start going after seemingly sedate strategy games like Rome: Total War, where players can use their legions to commit genocide? What about Hearts of Iron, which features Nazi Germany as a playable faction?

These questions bedevil line drawers of all stripes, and Valve is making the prudent decision to not put itself in the middle of these contentious debates.

And it’s not like the company would be free of controversy had they gone the other way and come out with a vague, mealy-mouthed policy against “hate games.” The Graysons and Kucheras of the world would be asking why this or that offensive game could still be found on Steam’s digital shelves, while other gamers might be litigating why seemingly mainstream titles like those mentioned above are suddenly unacceptable.

This is exactly what happened to music-streaming service Spotify when it came out with its own “hate content” policy. Within days, feminist group Ultraviolet published a list of artists it wanted suppressed on the app, arguing convincingly that the company’s new policy of not promoting artists who’ve done evil and obscene things was not being applied as broadly as the company’s language seemingly allowed.

Rather than engage in this never-ending debate, Valve has decided to take a step back from it, letting user tastes dictate what gains a following on the platform. That’s a refreshing and broadly liberal attitude that a lot more content platforms would do well to adopt.

“President Trump has now joined his two immediate predecessors in substituting the judgment of the president alone for the judgment of a Congress charged by the Constitution with the sole authority to decide whether, where, and against whom to go to war,” said Christopher Anders of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in a hearing yesterday before the Senate Subcommittee on Federal Spending Oversight, chaired by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

Anders joined two other constitutional scholars in an attempt to convince the senators listening to oppose S.J. Res. 59, known as the Corker-Kaine authorization for use of military force (AUMF), introduced by Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) with Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.).

Corker-Kaine would reset the legal authority for the Forever War on Terror granted by two earlier AUMFs in 2001 and 2002. Those AUMFs, as Anders spelled out, “squarely focus[ed] on those who planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks and those who harbored them” but “has been invoked 37 times for conflicts occurring in 14 countries…The 2001 AUMF is the claimed authority for the use of force even against groups that did not exist on 9/11 and are at odds with core al Qaeda.”

Corker-Kaine, from Anders’ perspective, would be even worse. “It would be hard to overstate the depth and breadth of the dangers to the Constitution, civil liberties, and human rights that the Corker-Kaine AUMF would cause,” he said. “Not only would it almost irretrievably cede to the Executive Branch the most fundamental power that Congress has under Article I of the Constitution—the power to declare war—but it also would give the current president and all future presidents authority from Congress to engage in worldwide war, sending American troops to countries where we are not now at war and against groups that the President alone decides are enemies.”

That proposed new AUMF would instantly codify that currently ongoing wars are presumptively approved, whether or not they legitimately fit the demands of the original AUMFs; empower the president to start wars in new countries non-defensively without requiring a vote from Congress, though Congress could decide not to allow it retroactively; and the AUMF would allow the president to unilaterally add any new “associated force” with which we shall then be at war, including potentially U.S. persons on U.S. soil.

Attempts to second-guess the president under Corker-Kaine would be vetoable bills, thus requiring a likely impossible two-thirds vote in both houses to reverse the president’s war-making decisions.

As Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, pointed out in his written testimony to the subcommittee, the power of the purse is essentially meaningless given modern budgetary practices. For example, for President Obama’s Libyan intervention “the Administration funded an entire military campaign by shifting billions in money and equipment without the need to ask Congress for a dollar. It was a war essentially funded from loose change owing to the failure of Congress to fully carry out its constitutional duties over appropriations.”

Turley, who was lead counsel in a failed suit fighting for congressional war powers in court over Obama’s Libya adventures, said that Corker-Kaine ultimately would serve “to give members [of Congress] a statutory shield from their constitutional obligations over war making,” an obligation Turley considers a “moral imperative” because “if there is a sacred article in the Constitution, it is Article One, Section Eight,” which clearly defines making war as one of Congress’ powers.

Andrew Napolitano, Fox News senior judicial analyst, professor of constitutional law, and longtime New Jersey Superior Court judge, stressed that separation of powers was the secret sauce of the U.S. constitution, and that Corker-Kaine would make a mockery of it. “The Framers never imagined,” Napolitano said in his written testimony, “that one branch of government would abdicate its authority and cede an essential power to another branch since such a giveaway would be unconstitutional.”

Turley reminded the subcommittee that when one person at the United States’ constitutional convention suggested giving war-making power to the executive, he couldn’t even get anyone to second the motion. The desire to avoid political blame or responsibility on the part of the legislature, Turley noted, led them to begin evading that responsibility before the 18th century was even over when John Adams’ administration sought war with France. Despite all the wars we’ve waged, only five of them (the last in 1942) involved constitutionally obligatory declarations from Congress.

Congress’ unwillingness to stand up for its war-making prerogatives, Turley argues, allows executive branch apologists in the Office of Legal Counsel at DOJ to “claim a type of expanded authority by default…Article I could now be interpreted through a ‘historical gloss’ of past unilateral military actions and the absence of congressional opposition.” This has made “congressional acquiescence into a critical element of constitutional interpretation” that allows the executive to assume powers willingly abandoned by the other branches are powers no longer worthy of legal respect.

The scholars speaking in opposition to Corker-Kaine made their complaints bipartisan, calling out both Barack Obama for his attacks on Libya and Donald Trump for his attacks on Syria as examples of unconstitutional presidential power grabs, the sort Corker-Kaine will not solve.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), though not a member of the subcommittee, was an invited guest to the hearings and stood up for congressional power over war for the “one very simple reason that Congress is…most accountable to the people,” and that “it is time for us to reassert that authority and to start asking very tough questions about the wars we are in currently.”

Sanders stressed that though they were being spoken to by constitutional scholars and lawyers, that this was no “abstract discussion…our abdication of congressional responsibility over war has had incredibly dire and horrific consequences for people around our country and in fact the world.”

Sen. Paul pointed out that disconnecting the war-making power from the people’s representatives led to a situation where we are involved in military activities, such as in Mali, that even most members of Congress literally have no idea are happening.

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), ranking minority member of the subcommittee, pointed out that the Trump administration is hoping to expand its freedom from Congress to allow the secretary of energy to develop new nuclear missiles without specific congressional sign-off.

Keeping war powers out of the hands of the president, as Napolitano stressed, was one of founding father James Madison’s primary goals. “In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found,” Madison wrote, “than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive…the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man; not such as nature may offer as the prodigy of many centuries, but such as may be expected in the ordinary successions of magistracy. War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. ….The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honourable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.”

The very Senate he was speaking to, Turley said, is essentially to blame that Madison would weep over how his brainchild has dealt with war-making powers. “We find ourselves at this ignoble point not by accident,” Turley rightly notes, “but through decades of concerted effort by Congress to evade the responsibility for the most important decisions committed to it by the Framers.”

Anders noted with alarm that Corker-Kaine would also presumptively expand the president’s illegitimate power under the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to indefinitely detain people “by adding the new AUMF as a basis for the military to capture and imprison, and under some circumstances, imprison suspects indefinitely without charge or trial. The Corker-Kaine AUMF, like the NDAA detention provision itself, has no statutory prohibition against locking up American citizens or anyone picked up even in the United States itself.”

There’s good news on income inequality that nobody’s talking about. The income gap between America’s wealthiest and poorest people has generated a lot of attention and fueled a resurgence in left-wing activism and interest. But what hasn’t grown in recent years is income inequality itself.

A recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) looked at U.S. income data from 1979 through 2014. For most of this period—between 1979 and 2007—the gap between the country’s lowest and highest earners widened at a steady and relatively rapid pace.

This held true whether CBO looked at “market income” (employment and other earnings before taxes are taken out or public-assistance funds added in), income after taxes, or income plus government benefits (including social insurance programs like Social Security and means-tested programs like “food stamps”).

In 2007, however, this trend came to a halt. After that, income inequality either grew much more slowly or even decreased, depending on how you slice the data. Measuring market income, the income gap was 3 percent higher in 2014 than in 2007 (compared to an average 1.3 percent increase per year over the larger period). With public benefits included in the calculation, income inequality actually shrank.

Income inequality after government transfers is down since 2007, according to CBO’s measure. pic.twitter.com/mqm1MO9Jsl

— Michael R. Strain (@MichaelRStrain) June 2, 2018

“Though few seem to care or have noticed, this trend has important implications for economic policy,” writes Bloomberg columnist and American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael R. Strain. He suggests that this lack of attention may arise from the fact that income inequality per se isn’t a very telling or important measure.

It’s critical to remember that inequality — the income gap between higher- and lower-income households — is conceptually different from income and earnings growth among non-rich households. Inequality can be slowing while non-rich Americans are doing better, worse or the same.

But by Strain’s calculations, income inequality is waning, whether we use the CBO methodology or another estimate.

Another measure of inequality is more straightforward than the “Gini coefficient” used by the CBO, and considers only labor-market earnings. It begins by ranking workers by how much they usually earn each week. Take the worker who earns more than 90 percent of all workers. Now take the worker who only earns more than 10 percent of workers. Compare their earnings.

If the rich are getting richer, then “ninth decile” workers will earn increasingly more than “tenth decile” workers. This is exactly what was happening until recently. In the late 1990s, the ninth-decile workers earned about 4.5 times as much as the tenth-decile workers. This shot up to 5.2 times as much by 2012. But over the past six years, inequality has stabilized, echoing the findings in the CBO report.

Looking at household income data from 2014 alone, the CBO found that average yearly income among the lowest-earning quintile was around $19,000. Among the highest earners, it was $281,000. “Means-tested transfers and federal taxes cause household incomes to be more evenly distributed,” the office reports.

In 2014, those transfers and taxes:

• Increased income among households in the lowest quintile by $12,000 (or more than 60 percent), on average, to $31,000.
• Decreased income among households in the highest quintile by $74,000 (or more than 25 percent), on average, to $207,000.

FREE MINDS

Google drops politics ads in Washington. Google has announced that it will no longer run political ads for Washington-state users because the company can’t comply with Washington’s onerous disclosure laws. The move is good news for incumbent political candidates and not so good for independents and newcomers.

FOLLOW UP

Alice Marie Johnson freed. Kim Kardashian’s meeting with President Trump got results: Alice Marie Johnson, the 63-year-old woman in federal prison for having a small amount of marijuana, was released yesterday following Trump’s commutation of her sentence.

I also urge @POTUS to do the same for the 2,600 other federal prisoners who are serving similar draconian sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. He should also support the #SAFEJusticeAct, which focuses mandatory minimum sentences on drug kingpins, instead of people like Alice.

— Rep. Bobby Scott (@BobbyScott) June 6, 2018

QUICK HITS

• An Ohio dad whose son died of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy—famously found in professional football players with dementia—has filed a lawsuit against the maker of youth football helmets.
• The Environmental Protection Agency is melting down.
• Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is under fire from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio for arresting a pizza delivery dude who was dropping off an order at a Brooklyn military base.
• An Austrian copyright case against YouTube could have big implications for “on how not just YouTube but also other online platforms such as Facebook operate.”
• An Indiana public-school teacher is fighting back after declaring that the school district’s policy of requiring teachers to use the preferred pronouns of transgender students goes against his religious beliefs.
• Immigration agents arrested 114 undocumented immigrants in Ohio Tuesday after a raid on a landscaping company that was eight months in the making.

Are there any free market principles Republicans won’t abandon at the altar of political expediency? They certainly have long stopped standing up for fiscal responsibility, observes Veronique de Rugy, and though they held on to their free trade principles for some time and seemed to understand that trade “remedies” (such as tariffs) mostly hurt the American people rather than foreign exporters, that didn’t last long after Donald Trump took office. It’s astonishing what the Trump presidency has done to the GOP’s position on trade.

View this article.

It was March 29, a brisk spring day in Ohio, and President Donald Trump was speaking about his infrastructure plan to a crowded arena. But the comment that grabbed many people’s attention was not about roads or bridges. It was on Syria, and Trump’s message was simple: U.S. troops would soon be packing up their bundles and coming home.

“We’re knocking the hell out of ISIS,” he said. “We’ll be coming out of Syria like very soon. Let the other people take care of it now.” A week later, at the White House, he told his national security team that he wanted U.S. forces to pull out as soon as the mission could be declared a success, writes Daniel DePetris.

View this article.

Shaun Harrison, dean of Boston’s English High School, has been sentenced to 26 years in prison for shooting one of his students. Prosecutors say that soon after arriving at the school, Harrison recruited Luis Rodriguez to sell marijuana for him. When sales were not as brisk as Harrison wanted, he shot Rodriguez.