Category: reason

When New York City’s subway opened in 1904, a ride cost a nickel. Today the system is breaking down in virtually every possible way and boasts the worst on-time performance of any major transit system in the world.

Last summer, the system was declared “in crisis” and got an $800 million infusion in emergency cash and repairs. A year later, the head of the MTA, which operates the system, is now pushing a plan to fix the subway that carries a jaw-dropping price tag of $19 billion—about the same amount as nearby Connecticut’s total state budget. The fixes will take decades, promises MTA head Andy Byford, but the first few years will focus on the signal system, which breaks down all the time, causing backups, jams, and delays. The New York Times reports:

There have been serious delays in installing a new signal system, which is known as communications-based train control, or C.B.T.C.

Of New York’s 22 subway lines, only the L train has the advanced signal system. An effort to install the technology on the No. 7 line is years overdue.

Mr. Byford has said he hoped the No. 7 line signal upgrades would finally be completed this year.

That promise—and a nickel—gets you nothing but delays on today’s subway. The L train is a major line that goes between Manhattan and Brooklyn and the East River tunnel it uses was damaged by “Superstorm Sandy” in 2012. As a result, the tunnel will be be shut down for at least 15 months starting next year, massively disrupting service for hundreds of thousands of people and leading to fears of what is colloquially dubbed the “L-pocalypse.” So it’s especially dank that the L is the city’s only subway line with advanced technology.

Don’t expect this new fix to work, even with those $19 billion. (If passed, the plan will almost certainly cost much more.) The MTA has an almost perfectly uninterrupted history of failing to get any job done well, on time, or effectively. Importantly, the plan doesn’t address the core issue with the NYC subway and many other transit systems around the country: The people who operate it are not responsible to the riders who use it. The riders who use it also pay a smaller and smaller share of the operating costs, thanks to subsidies from tolls levied on drivers using bridges and tunnels. Last year alone, those tolls kicked more than $1 billion to MTA buses and subways. And then there are the endlessly proliferating taxes and fees on people who purposefully avoid the subway.

As Jim Epstein and I explain in the Reason video “How to Fix New York’s Totally F*cked Subway System,”

These include a special sales, corporate, and payroll tax, plus fees on real estate transfers, car rentals, drivers license renewals, and vehicle registrations. And the state just imposed a brand new surcharge on taxis and ride shares coming into Manhattan, with the money going to the MTA.

The predictable result of such subsidies is rotten service, periodic bailouts, and out-of-control costs (“subway workers on average make $155,000 in total annual compensation, or more than twice the passengers they serve”).

The rambling wreck that is the New York subway isn’t just the MTA’s fault. It’s the result of a dysfunctional management system, borne of earlier crises in cash flow and operating failures, that centralizes a huge amount of power over the system in the governor’s office in Albany.

Any reform plan that doesn’t fundamentally alter how the subway generates and uses its revenue is doomed to failure. The single best practice for any transit system, says Reason Foundation policy analyst Baruch Feigenbaum, is to have its riders pay as close to the full cost of the system as possible. Low-income riders, students, and other special cases, he notes, can get special fares or rebates. “That is the most efficient system,” he explains, and it’s “also the best system for the rider, because if the rider is the one paying the cost, then the transit agency is serving the rider. If Albany is bailing out the transit system, then it’s going to be whatever Albany wants.”

It took decades for New York’s subway to upgrade its turnstiles and to modernize its payment systems away from tokens to electronic cards. Such laggard behavior was always justified in the name of New York exceptionalism. (When I lived and worked in New York in the 1980s, people would seriously claim that subway tokens were somehow as integral a part of the greatest city in the world as bagels, street crime, and public urination.) To this day, the service doesn’t charge riders based on the length of their trip or whether it’s rush hour, as most other systems do. When riders, who currently pay around $2.75 a trip, are bearing the actual costs of the system, they will be motivated to demand top-flight service; if there’s something New Yorkers are exceptional at, it’s bitching and moaning about bad service. The difference under Reason‘s plan is that the MTA will also be in a position to use its revenue wisely and directly, rather than answering to an overlord who lives 150 miles north of the city.

Watch “How to Fix New York’s Totally F*cked Subway System”:

Links and details here.

Evgeny “Gene” Freidman, the flamboyant 46-year-old “Taxi King” of New York and a perennial tabloid muse, has been sued for ripping off drivers, spent time last year in a Chicago prison, and once faced criminal charges for slamming his now ex-wife against a wall.

This recently disbarred Russian immigrant, who in 2013 elicited an angry tirade from former Mayor Michael Bloomberg (“I’m going to destroy your fucking industry”), is now cooperating with federal prosecutors in the case against Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, as The New York Times reported yesterday. Freidman managed cabs for Cohen—the embattled attorney had at least 34 medallions to his name—and agreed to talk to investigators as part of a deal to downgrade state charges that he skipped out on $5 million owed to the government, which could have sent him to prison for 25 years.

Freidman, once the owner of an estimated 900 medallions, has had financial difficulties since Uber started upending the city’s cab industry. New York medallions, valued at over $1 million apiece as recently as 2014, now sell for about $120,000—mostly through bankruptcy and foreclosure sales.

When Reason interviewed Freidman in 2015, a handful of his taxi garages had just filed for bankruptcy protection and he was angling for a city bailout in the form of loan guarantees for medallions. “We want big poppa paying attention to us,” he said. “I want the government interested in me and protecting me….It’s a scream for help and a scream by a child for attention.”

In April of that year, New York City Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez (D–10th District), chair of the Transportation Committee, participated in a private meeting Friedman arranged with bankers, medallion owners, and politicians to build support for a city bailout. “As medallion values continue to drop, Council Member Rodriguez takes steps to stymie further decline,” his press aide announced in a statement at the time. At that private meeting, as the New York Post reported, Rodriguez stated that the city needs to “explore the possibility to pay restitution for those who value in that investment.”

Freidman made age-old justifications for government support in his inimitably crude fashion, telling Reason that “our industry brings billions of dollars to funding the MTA, to funding schools, to funding policeman, ambulances, firefighters, and so on.” He also took pains to depict the taxi industry as a force for civic good, stating that “my best days” started on September 12, 2001, when people wouldn’t employ “people of color or different ethnicities, and they all became taxi drivers.” During Ramadan, to help his Muslim drivers “feel great” when breaking fast, Freidman says he provided them with “Subway sandwiches with vegetable[s], tuna, cheese, and chips.”

For more on Freidman and how Uber destroyed his business, scroll down to watch “Uber and the Great Taxicab Collapse.”

Related: Freidman is cooperating in the Cohen case as part of a deal related to charges that he defrauded the Metropolitan Transportation Authority by pocketing a 50-cent surcharge on every taxi ride that’s earmarked to subsidize subways and buses. As Nick Gillespie and I recently argued, schemes of this sort violate a central tenet of good transportation policy, which is that every mode of travel should be self-sustaining. Diverting money from drivers to pay for the subway instead of raising fares is the root cause of transit’s problems. For more on that topic, watch “How to Fix New York’s Totally F*cked Subway System.”

Tuesday election results. Tuesday saw primaries and runoffs in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, and Texas. The most attention-grabbing result comes from Georgia, where former state House minority leader Stacey Abrams won the Democratic nomination for governor. If she wins, she’ll be the first black female governor in the U.S.; she is already “the first black woman to be a major party’s candidate for governor,” notes The Week. “She will face the winner of a July Republican runoff between Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and Secretary of State Brian Kemp in an election that will test whether the state’s politics have shifted enough for a liberal Democrat to win after more than a decade of Republican rule.”

Cagle and Kemp competed in a five-way contest notable for “the candidates [trying] to one-up each other on who would be toughest on immigration,” reports NBC.

One of Cagle’s ads featured images of MS-13 gang tattoos and guns being fired at the screen, while Kemp pledged to round up undocumented immigrants in his “big truck.” A third contestant, state Sen. Michael Williams, outfitted an entire “deportation bus” for the purpose.

Abrams won against Stacey Evans “in a primary that pitted competing visions for the future of the Democratic Party against each other,” writes Sean Sullivan in The Washington Post. Abrams “ran on a liberal platform, while Evans, also a former state legislator, rooted her pitch in being able to win over crossover voters in the general election. The AP called the race with 30 percent of precincts reporting; Abrams led with 74 percent of the vote at that point.”

In Kentucky, Lexington Mayor Jim Gray—who unsuccessfully challenged Rand Paul in 2016—lost the Democratic nomination for a seat in Congress to former fighter pilot and first-time candidate Amy McGrath. Record producer Hank Linderman also won a Democratic congressional nod, in the state’s second district.

Current Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson fended off a challenger with 72 percent of the vote.

.@AsaHutchinson, the great Governor of Arkansas, is in a primary tomorrow. He has done an incredible job with a focus on lower taxes, border security, and crime prevention. Asa loves our military and our veterans. I fully endorse Asa for Governor!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 21, 2018

FREE MINDS

The FBI has been lying about encrypted cell phones. A Washington Post investigation finds that the FBI “has repeatedly provided grossly inflated statistics to Congress and the public about the extent of problems posed by encrypted cellphones.” The agency claimed that encryption prohibited it from accessing 7,800 phones tied to criminal investigations last year. The actual number was somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000, according to the Post.

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray has repeatedly cited the imaginary 7,800 inaccessible phones as a reason why tech companies should make “back doors” to encrypted devices that allow them to be accessed by law enforcement.

FREE MARKETS

Ditching Dodd-Frank. Congress voted yesterday to roll back several bits of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, thereby freeing up banks from regulations passed in the wake of Great Recession. “The bill chips away at several parts of the Dodd-Frank Act,” explains Reason‘s Eric Boehm.

The most significant changes are targeted towards small banks. Those with less than $250 billion in assets are exempted from Dodd-Frank’s so-called “enhanced prudential standards”—strict regulations regarding liquidity, risk management, and capital meant to serve as a “stress test” for banks’ balance sheets. It would also exempt banks with less than $10 billion in assets from the so-called Volcker Rule, which limits speculative investments.

Other major parts of the Dodd-Frank law remain unchanged, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the so-called Durbin Amendment, which imposed price controls on debit card fees and has been blamed for reducing the availability of free checking accounts.

QUICK HITS

I was astonished and moved by Philip Roth’s frankness about his own mortality in what I believe was his last interview https://t.co/YxSg0U05np pic.twitter.com/WjQ63jprRM

— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) May 23, 2018

• RIP Phillip Roth.
• A transgender student’s lawsuit against Virginia’s Glouchester County School Board can go forward, a federal judge said yesterday.
• Do we need to diversify our digital archives?
• Over at HuffPost, it’s just a short jump from letting Milo Yiannoupoulos speak to The Handmaid’s Tale.
• A respected British cancer researcher now thinks that luekemia is triggered by a lack of early exposure to germs and dirt.
• The House passed a “right to try” bill that President Trump is expected to sign.

President Trump on his potential summit with Kim Jong Un: “See what happens, whether or not it happens. If it does, it’ll be great. It’d be a great thing for North Korea. And if it doesn’t that’s okay too. Whatever it is, it is” https://t.co/GY7H4vkjgZ https://t.co/zWJ1cvLuJL

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) May 22, 2018

Last week the House of Representatives, by a margin of more than 10 to 1, approved a bill that would make assaulting a police officer a federal crime. The lopsided vote on the Protect and Serve Act was a portrait in bipartisan cowardice that vividly showed how readily politicians forsake their oaths of office to keep their hold on power, argues Jacob Sullum, who says the bill is redundant and unconstitutional.

Assaults on police officers are already illegal in all 50 states, Sullum notes, and there is no reason to think local law enforcement agencies are reluctant to pursue such cases. In any case, the Constitution does not give Congress the authority to fight local crime, and the interstate angles mentioned by the bill are so oblique that they could justify federal prosecution of pretty much any assault (or attempted assault) on a cop. If the alleged assailant drove on an interstate highway or used a weapon produced in another state, for instance, that would be enough to make a federal case out of it.

View this article

On TV crime shows like CSI, NCIS, and Law & Order, science gets the bad guys. On TV, experts identify killers by their bite marks.

In real life, writes John Stossel, “science” often ensnares the innocent. Stossel argues that it’s time for judges to ban junk science from the courtroom.

View this article.

Students in Pennsylvania’s Northern Lebanon School District must smile when they are in school hallways between classes. Students who are caught without their happy face on are told to smile or go to a counselor to discuss their problems. If they refuse those options, they are given detention.

People with life-threatening illnesses may eventually see improved access to experimental drugs at an earlier stage of the federal approval process, thanks to a bill that passed the House today.

By a vote of 250-169, the House passed federal “Right to Try” legislation, pushed by the Arizona-based libertarian Goldwater Foundation. This bill allows patients with what the government classifies as a “life-threatening” illness or condition to get access to drugs that have completed the first stage of clinical trial but are not yet fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Most states have such laws on the books, but the federal government itself has lagged behind them in giving citizens permission to try experimental medication sooner if they’re dying.

It seems like it would be slam dunk to let people decide for themselves whether to take such risks when they’ve got nothing left to lose, but there are still legislators and experts who seem to think that this is going to result in dire consequences:

From the Washington Post:

During the House floor debate, Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., the ranking Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, warned that eliminating FDA oversight “will provide fly-by-night physicians and clinics the opportunity to peddle false hope and ineffective drugs to desperate patients.” He said he was especially concerned that patients who have “life-threatening” illnesses such as heart failure and diabetes would be eligible for right-to-try, even if they are not close to death.

The law specifically requires that the drugs have made it through the first stage of clinical testing. It seems a bit absurd to suggest that the snake-oil salesmen are going to pop out of the woodwork and try to sell fake cures. It also does not mandate pharmacy companies provide them. It gives both sides of the equation options.

The bill passed the Senate by a voice vote last year. President Donald Trump declared support for the legislation in his last State of the Union address and is expected to sign the bill into law.

Below, ReasonTV covered the Right to Try movement in 2015:

Congress voted Tuesday to roll back some Obama-era financial regulations. It’s a significant policy change for small banks that had been unduly burdened by those federal rules, and a symbolic victory for Republicans.

The House voted 258-159 on Tuesday evening, sending the Senate-crafted reform bill to President Donald Trump’s desk. The bill chips away at several parts of the Dodd-Frank Act, passed in 2010 in the wake of the economic collapse to give the federal government greater oversight of financial institutions. The most significant changes are targeted towards small banks. Those with less than $250 billion in assets from Dodd-Frank’s so-called “enhanced prudential standards”—strict regulations regarding liquidity, risk management, and capital meant to serve as a “stress test” for banks’ balance sheets. It would also exempt banks with less than $10 billion in assets from the so-called Volcker Rule, which limits speculative investments.

Other major parts of the Dodd-Frank law remain unchanged, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the so-called Durbin Amendment, which imposed price controls on debit card fees and has been blamed for reducing the availability of free checking accounts.

“The bill’s major accomplishment is some much-needed tailoring of regulation to a financial institution’s size so that hometown banks and credit unions are no longer regulated like Wall Street behemoths,” says John Berlau, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “To provide real financial relief for Americans, much more is required of Congress, the president and regulatory agencies.”

The Independent Community Bankers Association, which represents small banks, celebrated the passage of the bill. Community banks have struggled to comply with the 27,000 new regulations included in the 2010 law’s 800-plus pages.

Policy aside, the bill’s passage is symbolically important for Republicans, who have railed against Dodd-Frank for years. The importance of striking a blow—even if a less than lethal one—to the signature financial regulatory measure of the Obama era was demonstrated last week when House Republicans conceded to Senate demands and agreed to pass a scaled back Dodd-Frank reform.

Previously, the House had passed a more sweeping series of reforms that that rolled back more Dodd-Frank rules and fundamentally altered the CFPB’s structure to allow the president to dismiss the head of the CFPB at will and prohibit the bureau from regulating payday loans or arbitration agreements, two areas where there has been significant conflict between the CFPB and financial firms. The Senate had crafted the bipartisan plan (16 Senate Democrats supported the bill; ??? House Democrats did the same) that ultimately reached Trump’s desk with Tuesday’s House vote.

“You take what you can get,” said Stephen Moore, an economist and informal adviser to the Trump administration, told Politico. “If I can get half a loaf, I take that over no loaf at all.”

The House passed legislation that would introduce several significant reforms to the federal prison system today, but the bill’s future is uncertain and its passage has openly divided a criminal justice coalition that has worked together, at least in public, for the past several years.

The FIRST STEP Act, which includes a number of substantive changes to the federal prison and reentry system, passed by a vote of 360-59 and now goes to the Senate, but advancing to the White House is not a sure thing. Democrats are split on it, old-school conservatives are drumming up opposition from law enforcement groups, and progressive advocacy groups are attacking it from the left. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Republican pointman on criminal justice reform, says the bill is dead in the water unless it includes major reforms to federal sentencing law as well.

Trying to keep the whole thing from falling apart are a bipartisan group of House members, the White House—where prison reform has been a priority for President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner—and criminal justice groups who say some progress is better than none.

“I think unfortunately there are groups that would like to see sentencing reform happen right now and are not willing to settle for less,” says Jessica Jackson Sloan, co-founder of #Cut50, a group that works to lower the U.S. prison population. “In some ways it’s strategic because they helped us to make this bill as good as it can be, but at this point it’s splitting the Democrat vote and we need a strong show of support to have this taken up in the Senate.”

Among other things, FIRST STEP would

• allow inmates to accrue up to 54 days of good time credit a year. The changes would apply retroactively, resulting in the release of approximately 4,000 federal inmates, according to the U.S. Justice Action Network, a criminal justice advocacy group.
• ban the shackling of pregnant inmates, including while giving birth and postpartum. It would also require Bureau of Prison facilities to provide female hygiene products free of charge and increase available phone and in-person visitations for new mothers.
• require the Bureau of Prisons to place inmates in facilities within 500 driving miles of their families.
• increase the use of compassionate release for terminally ill inmates, and require new reporting on how many applications for compassionate release are accepted or denied.

The bill has sharply divided Democrats. On one side is Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the bill’s co-sponsor, and others who say it would provide better conditions and the possibility of earlier release for the roughly 180,000 inmates serving time in federal prison.

“Any objective reading of this bill is that it will improve inmates’ quality of life,” Jeffries said on the House floor prior to the vote.

On the other side are Democrats who say the good provisions in the bill are outweighed by core concerns over how the overcrowded, underfunded Bureau of Prisons system would handle the new programs and changes. In a “dear colleague” letter released last week, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), and Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Tx.) wrote that the reforms would fail without broader sentencing reforms.

“These fundamental concerns are not simply that the FIRST STEP Act does not ‘go far enough,'” the lawmakers wrote, “but instead that the recidivism reduction plan that is the core of the bill could actually worsen the situation in our federal prisons by creating discriminatory non-evidence based policies.”

Meanwhile in the Senate, Grassley and a bipartisan group of co-sponsors are pushing the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, which includes reductions to federal mandatory minimum sentences. The bill is the result of years of negotiation between Senate Republicans and Democrats, and the lead negotiators don’t want to see their work languish.

“With the President’s encouragement, I believe we can reach a deal on criminal justice reform,” Grassley said in a statement Tuesday. “For that deal to pass the Senate, it must include sentencing reform. This is necessary for practical as well as political reasons.”

However, sentencing reform is a non-starter for the White House, where Attorney General Jeff Sessions—a staunch opponent of criminal justice reforms—holds sway.

Last Friday, the White House held a prison reform summit to push for the bill.

“Sentencing reform is something people still have different opinions on,” Kushner said when asked why it wasn’t being included in the bill. Kushner also said that, while he appreciated the efforts, “they’ve been trying to do sentencing reform for the past eight years and they’ve done nothing.”

Criminal justice advocacy groups, too, are divided on the legislation. Organizations like Families Against Mandatory Minimums, #Cut50, the U.S. Justice Action Network, the Equal Justice Initiative, and Koch Industries support it. They all also want to see sentencing reform, but agree that the bill, as its name suggests, is a first step toward broader reforms.

“Roughly 96 percent of federal inmates will one day be released, so common-sense dictates that our prisons allow for programs that help individuals leave prison in better shape than when they went in,” Koch Industries general counsel Mark Holden said in a statement. “States have proven that preparing prisoners for reentry starting on day one of their sentences will increase public safety, reduce recidivism, bring incarceration rates down and save taxpayers money.”

But on a conference call with reporters last Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and several other organizations said the bill fell far short of their requirements. ACLU senior legislative council Jesselyn McCurdy said the bill is only “masquerading as some form of criminal justice reform.”

Its rehabilitation provisions exclude too many inmates, its risk-assessment program would in fact exacerbate racial disparities in the Bureau of Prisons system, and there aren’t enough halfway houses to implement the bill’s core parts, the groups argued.

On other side of the political spectrum, Politico reported that Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who once argued that the U.S. has an under-incarceration problem, was coordinating with law enforcement groups to oppose the bill.

In letters to Congress, the National Sheriffs’ Association and Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association expressed “deep concerns” about the bill.

“In its current form, this legislation authorizes the early release of thousands of convicted armed violent criminals and repeat drug traffickers through retroactively increasing good time credits and program participation credits,” the National Sheriffs’ Association wrote.

For supporters of the bill, the last few months have felt like an unending game of whack-a-mole.

“One obstacle pops up and you knock it down,” says Holly Harris, Executive Director at the U.S. Justice Action Network. “This has been a delicate dance from the beginning. I think this will be the most well-vetted bill that Congress has seen in years. It’s been a long time coming, and those who stand in the way of progress, those will be the losers in this situation.”

The White House remains confident. During the prison reform summit on Friday, Trump expressed his usual sunny optimism.

“Get a bill to my desk,” Trump said. “I will sign it, and it’s going to be strong, it’s going to be good, it’s going to be what everybody wants.”

But if the last few months have shown anything, it’s that, when it comes to criminal justice reform, no one gets everything they want.

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt evidently arranged to have journalists from media outlets he perceives to be unfriendly excluded from covering a National Leadership Summit that he convened today with the purported goal of taking action on Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) that are contaminating drinking water around the nation. Reporters from AP, CNN, and E&E News were banned from the Summit, and the reporter with the AP was forcibly ejected from the EPA’s headquarters.

The Summit is being held on the heels of the revelation in Politico that the EPA is apparently suppressing a new report on the safety of PFAS from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. That report suggested that the EPA’s safe level of exposure at 70 parts per trillion is about six times too high. Most of the concerns about exposure to PFAS are based on a large number of epidemiological studies that detect fairly subtle health effects. Subtle, however, does not mean no effects.

Naturally, the fact that the PFAS report is being withheld attracted the attention of reporters. Pruitt and his public relations crew initially claimed that there was simply no space in the meeting room. According to reporters who were allowed to cover the conference this was false; there were several empty seats in the area assigned to journalists. In fact, the journalists who were permitted to attend were initially limited to one hour—basically just enough time to hear Pruitt’s canned remarks at the opening of the conference.

Apparently embarrassed by the backlash from this surpassingly clumsy attempt to protect the EPA’s boss from uncomfortable questions, reporters will now be allowed to cover the rest of the two-day meeting. Setting reasonable limits on the number of press at public events is OK, say, by letting reporters in on a first-come basis. But excluding them because federal public servants don’t like their reporting is wrong and, as EPA public relations minions have just learned, it will backfire. As a result of this self-inflicted wound, much more media and public attention (including me) will be turned toward how the EPA will handle the regulation of PFAS from now on.