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President Donald Trump is about to challenge Bill Clinton and Lyndon Johnson for a record few Republicans would want to achieve.

If Trump follows through with his plan to hit all Mexican imports with tariffs, the 5 percent import taxes scheduled to take effect on June 10 would push the cumulative cost of Trump’s trade war ahead of the 1993 tax increase signed by then–President Bill Clinton.

According to an analysis from the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank, existing tariffs imposed by the Trump administration would generate $69 billion in federal revenue over a full year—equivalent to about 0.32 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). As Axios notes, the hit from new 5 percent tariffs on all Mexican imports would be another $17 billion, or about 0.08 percent of GDP.

The 1993 tax increase, which triggered a Republican takeover of Congress and fueled a decades-long GOP aversion to raising taxes, increased federal revenue by about 0.36 percent of GDP, according to U.S. Treasury data. The only larger tax increase to pass since 1993 was the Affordable Care Act, which hiked taxes by 0.43 percent of GDP—though it did not hit that level until the fourth year after it had been passed (in part because the law was specifically structured to avoid looking like a large tax increase).

The White House has threatened to escalate those tariffs each month unless Mexico takes as-yet-unspecified actions to curb the flow of migrants toward the United States’ southern border, with a maximum tariff of 25 percent to be implemented by early October. Trump is “absolutely, deadly serious” about following through with those threatened tariff hikes, White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told Fox News on Sunday.

If Trump goes through his with threats to raise tariffs to 25 percent on all Chinese and Mexican imports, the Tax Foundation says, federal tax revenue would increase by $241 billion—about 1.24 percent of GDP.  That would be the biggest tax increase since the Johnson administration, according to Treasury data.

It’s not hard to see why tariffs on Mexican imports would be a drag on the American economy. Mexico is the United States’ third biggest trading partner, behind only China and Canada. In 2018, the U.S. imported $346.5 billion worth of goods from Mexico. Mexico is the biggest source of agricultural goods into the United States, but it’s also a major supplier for other industries.

The automotive sector would likely be hardest hit. Last year, American companies imported more than $115 billion worth of cars and car parts from Mexico. Thanks to decades of mostly tariff-free trade between the two countries, many automakers have supply chains sprawling freely from one side of the Rio Grande to the other. As Bloomberg demonstrated in a useful 2017 infographic, a single car seat might zig-zag across the border several times before being installed in a sedan built in South Carolina or a truck in Michigan.

“The auto sector—and the 10 million American jobs it supports—relies upon the North American supply chain and cross border commerce to remain globally competitive,” says David Schwietert, interim president and CEO of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, in a statement about the proposed tariffs. “Any barrier to the flow of commerce across the U.S.-Mexico border will have a cascading effect—harming U.S. consumers, threatening American jobs and investment, curtailing the economic progress that the administration is working to reignite, and potentially stalling efforts to ratify the agreement in Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. Congress.”

Those cross-border supply chains have bolstered manufacturing jobs on both sides of the Rio Grande. There’s been a 50 percent increase in American automaking jobs since 2011, according to the American Automotive Policy Council. And greater job prospects in Mexico have been credited with slowing illegal immigration, so disrupting U.S.–Mexican trade may well increase the illegal immigration it is supposed to stop.

“Intertwining difficult trade, tariff and immigration issues creates a Molotov cocktail of policy,” tweets Jay Timmons, president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers.

And it means a huge tax increase for Americans—one that might even make Democratic presidents think twice.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2QN5m1K
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I’ve recently started looking into anonymous “John Doe” (or “Jane Doe”) litigation; generally speaking, people are presumptively required to sue in their own names, but sometimes courts allow them to sue anonymously. Thus, from the tellingly named Sealed Plaintiff v. Sealed Defendant #1 (2d Cir. 2008):

Pursuant to Rule 10(a) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, “[t]he title of [a] complaint must name all the parties.” This requirement, though seemingly pedestrian, serves the vital purpose of facilitating public scrutiny of judicial proceedings and therefore cannot be set aside lightly. Certainly, “[i]dentifying the parties to the proceeding is an important dimension of publicness. The people have a right to know who is using their courts.”

Courts have nevertheless “carved out a limited number of exceptions to the general requirement of disclosure [of the names of parties], which permit plaintiffs to proceed anonymously.” Indeed, we have approved of litigating under a pseudonym in certain circumstances [such as] “… the privacy of plaintiff’s child ….” …

The courts that have considered this issue have framed the relevant inquiry as a balancing test that weighs the plaintiff’s need for anonymity against countervailing interests in full disclosure…. “[A] party may preserve his or her anonymity in judicial proceedings in special circumstances when the party’s need for anonymity outweighs [1] prejudice to the opposing party and [2] the public’s interest in knowing the party’s identity.”…

This balancing of interests entails the consideration of several factors that have been identified by our sister Circuits and the district courts in this Circuit. We note with approval the following factors, with the caution that this list is non-exhaustive  and district courts should take into account other factors relevant to the particular case under consideration:

1. whether the litigation involves matters that are “highly sensitive and [of a] personal nature,”
2. “whether identification poses a risk of retaliatory physical or mental harm to the … party [seeking to proceed anonymously] or even more critically, to innocent non-parties,”
3. whether identification presents other harms and the likely severity of those harms, including whether “the injury litigated against would be incurred as a result of the disclosure of the plaintiff’s identity,”
4. whether the plaintiff is particularly vulnerable to the possible harms of disclosure, particularly in light of his age,
5. whether the suit is challenging the actions of the government or that of private parties,
6. whether the defendant is prejudiced by allowing the plaintiff to press his claims anonymously, whether the nature of that prejudice (if any) differs at any particular stage of the litigation, and whether any prejudice can be mitigated by the district court,
7. whether the plaintiff’s identity has thus far been kept confidential,
8. whether the public’s interest in the litigation is furthered by requiring the plaintiff to disclose his identity,
9. “whether, because of the purely legal nature of the issues presented or otherwise, there is an atypically weak public interest in knowing the litigants’ identities,” and
10. whether there are any alternative mechanisms for protecting the confidentiality of the plaintiff.

From what I’ve seen, courts are especially likely to allow anonymous litigation where the plaintiff is alleging that the defendant raped her, as item 1 above suggests; one of the women suing Harvey Weinstein, for instance, is apparently litigating under the pseudonym “Emma Loman.” (The defendant would of course have to know the plaintiff’s name to be able to properly put on a defense, but the question is whether the name is disclosed to the public.) But what if the plaintiff is alleging that the defendant had falsely accused him of rape (or other sexual misconduct)? Some cases seem to say that there too the plaintiff can sometimes proceed anonymously (depending on the circumstances), e.g.,

There can be no doubt that the litigation here focuses on “a matter of sensitive and highly personal nature.” Plaintiff has been accused of sexual misconduct, the mere accusation of which, if disclosed, can invite harassment and ridicule. “[C]ommon sense suffices to understand that an adjudication of responsibility for sexual misconduct carries a much more powerful stigma than an adjudication of run-of-the-mill assault or vandalism.” Moreover, it is possible that plaintiff could be targeted for “retaliatory physical or mental harm” based on the accusations alone.

This threat is all the more serious given that this case has drawn significant media attention, which means many people across the country are aware of Roe’s accusations against plaintiff. Indeed, some responses to the media’s reporting on this case have been vitriolic, which is not particularly surprising given the highly-charged nature of the accusations. Moreover, it bears reiteration that the fact that accusations of this sort inspire passionate responses and have severe ramifications is reflected in the anonymity afforded to the accusers and the accused when participating in GMU’s disciplinary proceedings. It makes little sense to lift the veil of pseudonymity that—for good reason—would otherwise cover these proceedings simply because the university erred and left the accused with no redress other than a resort to federal litigation….

On the other hand, at least one case takes the opposite view:

[T]hose courts allowing plaintiffs to proceed pseudonymously when the cases involved sexual assault did so because the plaintiff allegedly was the victim of such conduct, not because the plaintiff alleges that he was falsely accused of such conduct.

Anonymity, by the way, may sometimes be allowed only for pretrial proceedings; the jury may well be told who the plaintiff is, and then the media would learn the information and be able to publicly report it. But since over 99% of all filed civil cases don’t go to jury trial, many plaintiffs would find anonymity valuable even if they know that it would be lost if a jury trial takes place.

What do you folks think? Should it be easier for plaintiffs (and defendants) to litigate anonymously? Harder? How should this play out in sexual misconduct cases, in libel cases where the libel consisted of allegations of sexual misconduct, and in other cases? Should it matter whether the case has drawn a good deal of publicity, and which way should that cut?

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2IadNA0
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Claims that millions of Americans are mired in extreme poverty, barely surviving on $2 or $4 a day, are false, according to a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The paper, released June 3, is by Bruce Meyer, Derek Wu, and Victoria Mooers of the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago and by Carla Medalia of the U.S. Census Bureau. Some households that income surveys erroneously categorized as extremely poor actually had “net worth in the millions” of dollars, the authors found.

The discrepancy between what people tell government survey-takers that they earn and how much money these same respondents actually make or have may seem like an arcane statistical argument. But the new research comes at a moment when poverty is an issue in the presidential campaign. The academic quarrel about the scope and severity of the poverty problem could find its way into the campaign and shape voters’ views.

On Sunday, a Democratic presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, published a New York Times opinion piece claiming that “millions of workers earn starvation wages” and that “today our rate of childhood poverty is among the highest of any developed country in the world.”

As is often the case, the politicians are parroting the professors. The new NBER paper takes aim at a Nobel laureate in economics, Angus Deaton, who claimed that 5.3 million Americans in 2015 were living on less than $4 a day. It also criticizes work by a professor at Johns Hopkins, Kathryn Edin, and by a professor at the University of Michigan, H. Luke Shaefer. Edin and Shaefer are authors of a book, “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America,” that claimed about 3 million children lived in households with incomes of $2 a day or less.

“We find that 92% of the households categorized as extreme poor based on survey-reported cash income are misclassified,” Meyer and his coauthors write. “Many of the households included in survey-reported extreme poverty appear to be better off than the average American household based on numerous indicators of material well-being.”

Rather than millions of extremely poor American children, Meyer and his co-authors found the 285,000 households in “extreme poverty” were either single individuals or “households with multiple childless individuals.”

They write, “this result likes in stark contrast to the focus in academic and policy circles on the plight of extreme poor households with children.”

They write that “the errors in the income level exaggerate the level of extreme poverty.”

The paper is titled “The Use and Misuse of Income Data and Extreme Poverty in the United States.” To research it, the authors checked the income data reported by participants to survey-takers against administrative records from the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, and state agencies.

It’s difficult to be poor even at income levels above $4 a day. And if extreme poverty is rare for American children, it’s the result in part of both government programs and voluntary, family- or community-based assistance. Whatever the imperfections in terms of unintended consequences, these programs do important work in helping ameliorate the circumstances of those, especially children, suffering from poverty.

To win public support for new programs to lift people out of poverty or to ease the plight of those who have fallen into it, though, exaggerating the problem may be counterproductive. It erodes credibility. If a politician or professor can’t be trusted to describe the problem, why would they be trusted about a solution?

And, as the authors of this new study point out, more accurate data can help prevent miscast blame. It’s unlikely, for example, that the time limits and work requirements of the 1996 welfare reform are responsible for any increase in extreme poverty, because the federal welfare program affected by that reform, Aid to Families With Dependent Children or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, is aimed at families rather than at childless singles.

No one’s claiming that poor people do not exist. But to help them out, it’d be useful to have an accurate picture of the situation rather than an exaggerated one.

Maybe Senator Sanders will ask The New York Times to run a correction to his op-ed piece.

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com and author of JFK, Conservative.

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