Tag: hit&run

Many conservatives have spent the past several years arguing that U.S. intelligence officials not only have attempted to undermine President Donald Trump, they also favor the kind of interventionist foreign policy that Trump condemned on the 2016 campaign trail. Why, then, are these conservatives suddenly willing to parrot baseless claims by American intelligence officials that the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani was a strategic necessity?

To be clear, the existence of a cabal of anti-Trumpist officials within the nation’s top law enforcement agencies was exaggerated by Trump’s defenders. That said, the FBI did, in fact, make grave errors in its investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, as demonstrated by the Justice Department Office of Inspector General’s report. The FBI violated the rights and privacy of Trump campaign advisor Carter Page, considered evidence against Page the FBI knew to be misleading, and ignored sources that clashed with their preferred narrative of events.

Of course, the Trump-Russia investigation is hardly the only time that intelligence officials have misled the public about the strength of their case. The intelligence that persuaded President George W. Bush, Congress, and the American people to go to war with Iraq turned out to be spectacularly wrong; and our spymasters and generals have a long history of hiding the extent to which the government surveils American citizens.

One of the only exciting things about Trump’s candidacy was that he condemned the Bush administration’s Iraq campaign and the disinformation that launched it. In 2008, Trump told CNN he thought Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) should pursue impeachment charges against Bush for “getting us into this horrible war by lying.”

But now, following Trump’s decision to order a drone strike on Iranian terror architect Soleimani, Trump, as well as his staffers and supporters, say the intelligence that led to that decision is unquestionable.

White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham complained today that “a lot of people are now questioning the intel. That’s really unfortunate.”

Grisham declined to explain what specific, imminent threat Soleimani posed to U.S. persons, and said that the intelligence would soon be shared with Congress. This is unacceptable: The correct order of operations here is to consult Congress before pursuing military action that could start a war with Iran. The Constitution gives Congress—not the president, and not the State Department—the sole authority to declare war.

The State Department, meanwhile, has given every indication that there was no credible, imminent threat from Soleimani. When asked about this at a press conference on Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, “We know what happened at the end of last year and ultimately led to the death of an American. If you are looking for imminence, look no further than the days that led up to the strike.” Something that already happened cannot be considered imminent.

Soleimani was a terrorist, responsible for appalling crimes. But there is good reason to question whether killing him serves America’s long-term interest in disentangling its military from Middle East politics. Any conservative who takes Pompeo or Trump on blind faith has lost the right to complain about the deep state.

If you really think the spymasters are out to get Trump—or just frequently incompetent in general—you should be very skeptical that what they whispered in his ear about Iran was the truth.

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Despite running into obstacles twice before, California’s housing supply-siders have re-introduced a controversial bill that would preempt local zoning laws statewide in order to legalize four-unit homes on residential land and allow the construction of mid-rise apartments near job and transit centers.

The state legislature has shot down versions of the bill, Senate Bill 50 (SB 50), twice now—once in 2018, and again last year. Sen. Scott Weiner (D–San Francisco), the bill’s author, is hoping that new amendments he added Monday will be enough to get the legislation passed out of the state senate before a January 31 deadline.

If Wiener’s press conference at Oakland City Hall tells us anything about the bill’s chances, it remains a tough sell.

“We have a terrible housing crisis in California here. We see the results every single day. We have a spike in homelessness, people are being forced into poverty, people are being pushed out of California,” Wiener said over loud jeers from the crowd. “We have a multi-million home shortage. We need more affordable housing. We need more housing of every variety and Senate Bill 50 will help us do that.”

The hecklers, according to reporters at the scene, were from the local Oakland group Moms 4 Housing, which describes itself as “a collective of unhoused and insecurely housed mothers” and which has taken to squatting in investor-owned vacant homes as part of a protest against the real estate speculation they blame for California’s housing crisis.

Housing Crisis clash on the steps of Oakland City Hall Sen @Scott_Wiener tried to announce amendments to his controversial transit density bill SB50. He’s shouted down by @moms4housing and others saying #SB50 doesn’t help build affordable housing pic.twitter.com/kIbJeBLzrC

— Susie Steimle (@SusieKPIX) January 7, 2020

The protesters are members of one of two interest groups that Wiener has been trying to court with recent amendments to his bills, and whose support is essential to getting SB 50 passed; tenant activists and local governments.

The amendments that Wiener introduced Monday would provide more flexibility to local governments by giving them two years to come up with their own alternative upzoning plans, provided they zone for the same amount of housing that SB 50—which would legalize apartments up to five stories tall near rail stations, and smaller apartments in wealthier areas, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“A city could decide to go taller in some areas and shorter in other areas or to focus density in some areas but not other areas,” Wiener wrote Tuesday in a post on Medium outlining his amendments.

State authorities would be in charge of certifying if these local rezoning plans satisfy the bill’s requirements. In addition to zoning for an equivalent amount of housing, these local plans would also have to show that they are not increasing vehicle miles traveled and that they are not exclusively upzoning in lower-income communities.

The latter provision is meant to address the concerns of tenant rights groups and other anti-gentrification activists who worry that upzoning low-income areas will result in a bunch of luxury developments popping up, which will then raise rents and force out long-time residents.

Ameliorating that worry has been behind a number of amendments that Wiener has previously added to SB 50, including strict demolition controls that would prevent the redevelopment of land that’s had rental housing on it in the past seven years.

The bill also includes some pretty stringent affordability requirements. Developers making use of SB 50 to build apartments would be required to rent out as much as 25 percent of their new units at below-market rates to low-income tenants.

Lower-income neighborhoods, described as “sensitive communities” in the bill, would have five years, not two, to adopt their own local upzoning plan before SB 50 would kick in.

The changes have helped win over the support of some local governments. Wiener’s Medium post lists new endorsements from the mayors of Culver City, Carson, Alameda, and the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors.

The government of Wiener’s own city, San Francisco, passed a resolution opposing SB 50 in December.

As the heckling at his press conference demonstrates, Wiener has had less success winning over anti-gentrification groups, most of whom fundamentally disagree with the idea that adding market-rate housing supply will help bring rents down.

Indeed, despite all the affordability and anti-demolition controls that the senator has added to his bill, activists are still writing finger-wagging op-eds telling him he needs to be a “better ally of unhoused people, housing insecure people, low-income people, and people of color.”

Times reporter Liam Dillon also notes that it’s still unclear if SB 50 has enough support in the state senate, where Wiener’s bill stalled last year, to get it to a floor vote. California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) also has yet to endorse the bill.

This means that the fight for SB 50 will be an uphill one. In addition to having to pass out of the state Senate by the end of the month, the bill will also have to be approved by the state Assembly by the end of August.

From a free market perspective, the amendments added to SB 50 have generally been for the worse.

The more below-market-rate units developers are forced to include in their project, the fewer of those projects developers will build. The more parcels of land that are excluded from the bill’s upzoning provisions, the less housing supply it will ultimately add.

In addition, Wiener’s focus on spurring the construction of high-density housing near transit does nothing to peel back the state’s urban growth boundaries that prevent the development of affordable housing on the fringes of urban areas.

That’s by design, as SB 50 is supposed to serve as both a “climate bill” and a housing affordability bill.

Privileging one type of housing over another, however, is a clear attempt to interfere with a free market that would, in the absence of government constraints, probably add a lot of new multi-family housing and a lot of new suburban housing.

But at the end of the day, anything that allows private developers to add more housing supply in the state is a good thing. If SB 50 does that, it’ll be an improvement over the status quo.

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An internal investigation uncovered several officers within the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) falsely identified innocent Californians in traffic stops as gang members in an effort to make their police work appear more successful.

A statement released Tuesday by the LAPD says that the investigation began in 2019 when a mother living in San Fernando Valley contacted the department after receiving word from the LAPD that her son was a gang member. A supervisor at a local station investigated body camera footage and other documentation gathered by an officer and found inconsistencies with the information provided. The department has not disclosed any other details about how the investigation began. 

The woman’s son’s name was cleared and three officers were investigated as a result. An Internal Affairs investigation found that over a dozen officers assigned to Metropolitan Division crime suppression duties had falsified information on field-interview cards to identify non-gang members as belonging to gangs. 

The offending officers were either “assigned to inactive duty or removed from the field,” according to the statement.

“An officer’s integrity must be absolute,” said LAPD Chief Michel R. Moore in the statement released Tuesday. “There is no place in the Department for any individual who would purposely falsify information on a Department report.”

Both the LAPD’s traffic stops and California’s gang database have faced scrutiny. The Los Angeles Times reports that nearly half of the drivers stopped by the division are black, despite blacks comprising only 9 percent of the city’s population and the fact that such stops had a low arrest rate. The LAPD announced last fall that it would reduce the number of random stops due to the disparate impact on minorities.

Reason‘s Scott Shackford has also covered the gang database. In addition to its numerous privacy abuses and errors, an audit revealed that some gangs were added to the database without the proper documentation showing that they met the state’s definition of a gang.

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Several criminal justice advocacy groups and a member of Congress are demanding the Justice Department investigate conditions inside Mississippi’s decrepit and understaffed prisons after violence last week left five inmates dead. 

Three inmates were killed at Mississippi State Penitentiary, more infamously known as Parchman Farm, last week. Two more were killed in South Mississippi Correctional Institution and Chickasaw County Regional Correctional Facility. Another two inmates also escaped during the chaos but have since been captured.

Now, in a letter to the Justice Department released today, the Southern Poverty Law Center, The ACLU of Mississippi, and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D–Miss.) say the state’s “deliberate indifference to the risk of harm caused by overincarceration and grossly inadequate staffing violates the federal rights of the people in its custody and care.”

“As indicated by its track record over the last several years and substantiated by the events of the last ten days, Mississippi is deliberately and systematically subjecting people in its care to a substantial risk of serious harm due to understaffing, in violation of the rights secured and protected by the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and it is no exaggeration to say more lives will be lost absent immediate intervention,” the letter says. 

In a statement last week, Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) Commissioner Pelicia Hall said these are “trying times for the Mississippi Department of Corrections. It is never a good feeling for a commissioner to receive a call that a life has been lost, especially over senseless acts of violence.”

The times have been trying for quite a while inside Mississippi prisons, but the state has done nothing about it. About half of the correctional officer positions in Mississippi prisons are vacant, the pay for guards is among the lowest in the country, and the state legislature has cut prison funding by $185 million since 2014.

In August of last year, the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting ran a story on the conditions at South Mississippi Correctional Institution: “Inside The Prison Where Inmates Set Each Other On Fire and Gangs Have More Power Than Guards.”

That same month, a state audit of conditions inside Parchman found inmates and staff were subjected to black mold, raw sewage, broken toilets and sinks, exposed wiring, and vermin.

The severe staff shortage has led to extended lockdowns and months-long suspensions of visitations.

After last week’s disturbances, inmates at Parchman were moved into a maximum security unit that has been closed for 10 years as part of a settlement in an ACLU lawsuit alleging inhumane conditions.

Contraband cell phone video taken by one inmate shows the conditions inside the condemned unit:

Local outlet 12 News also interviewed one inmate who’d been moved into the condemned unit:

12 News talked to a man who claimed he’s an inmate at Parchman. The alleged inmate said, “I ain’t took a shower since December 31st. Ain’t brush my teeth. We ain’t got mats, no blankets, no running water. I’m in Parchman. We are locked in 32, a condemned building. It’s the closest thing to hell.”

12 News asked the man how he got the cellphone. He said, “Soon as I got to 32, an officer sold it to me.”

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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The same people who never wanted bail reform in New York in the first place say the latest anti-Semitic attacks in New York City are a reason to kibosh the reforms before the state gets a chance to implement them.

The start of 2020 ushered in looser bail requirements across the state of New York, significantly reducing the ability of courts to demand that defendants pay the state money or spend their time awaiting trial in a jail cell. Courts can no longer demand cash bail for most misdemeanors and many non-violent felonies. The reforms are similar, but not nearly as extensive, as the changes New Jersey has made to its own bail system.

These changes are intended to curb some of the bad outcomes of the cash bail system, which is supposed to make sure that defendants show up for court and don’t cause trouble while they’re free. In reality, cash bail demands have led to thousands of people stuck in jail not because they’re a danger or flight risks, but because they simply don’t have the money to pay. It has left many people who have not been convicted of crimes stuck behind bars as though they’re guilty. Poorer defendants are being punished before ever getting their day in court, often for minor crimes. The prospect of awaiting trial behind bars incentivizes defendants to accept plea deals as a means of shortening or ending their ordeal.

Reform critics are finding media outlets like the New York Post to be a helpful megaphone. Several Post writers and contributors have been bluntly treating the new bail rule as though it’s the end of the world, ignoring the fact that these reforms aren’t as extensive as those passed by New Jersey. News coverage in the run-up to the changes have referred to the number of “inmates” that will be released under the new law, a description that suggests to the reader or viewer that these are people who have already been found guilty.

Former Republican Senator Al D’Amato took the umbrage to a new level in an opinion piece saying the reforms as already “botched,” despite being just days old. He claims that eliminating bail is “forcing judges to grant criminals ‘early release’ by severely limiting their discretion in setting bail.” In D’Amato’s ideal New York, just getting arrested for a crime is exactly the same as being convicted. Who needs juries or judges at all?

It’s been just one week since the bail reforms were implemented, and policymakers are already having second thoughts. The outrage over anti-Semitic violence in New York is causing bail reform supporters like Gov. Andrew Cuomo to consider the possibility of tweaking the law.

In this case, the discussion is whether people accused of hate crimes should be given more scrutiny. Cuomo said on Monday he’d be open to possible changes and even one of the reform bill’s architects, State Sen. Michael Ginaris (D–Queens), is open to adjustments for hate crimes.

A lot of this reconsideration stems from just one person: Tiffany Harris, who was arrested for allegedly attacking three Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn last year. Harris was released without bail, and the very next day was accused of punching another woman. She was released again and then arrested New Year’s Eve after allegedly skipping out on a meeting with Brooklyn Justice Initiatives, a group that runs supervised release programs intended to help defendants.

Harris is a problem defendant and the courts need a way of dealing with folks like her regardless of bail reform. Based on news reports, it appears that Harris needs a psychiatric evaluation, even though her lawyer insists that Harris is mentally sound.

Harris represents complicated, difficult cases that shouldn’t be used to dismiss all of bail reform. In fact, one of the odder parts of the state’s bail reform conflict is that New York City has already made significant changes over the past three decades that reduce the dependency on and demands of cash bail. Over the past 30 years, New York City’s use of cash bail has slowly been cut in half. The city went from demanding bail in 48 percent of cases to just 23 percent of cases. Crime fell alongside the decline in pretrial detention, and defendants are still showing up to their court dates at rates higher than the national average.

Of course, the bail reforms in New York will need regular evaluation because of folks like Harris and others who can’t stay out of trouble. But it’s unconstitutional to treat people as though they’ve already been convicted just because they’ve been arrested, regardless of what sort of outrageous language the New York Post uses to describe this conflict.

And while opponents of bail reform are trying to seize on these hate crimes in order to attack it, Jewish organizations who care about criminal justice reform are not having it. Several Jewish organizations put out a group statement Monday saying that they support bail reforms and don’t want hate crime incidents to be used as a justification for compromising changes.

“We won’t let Jewish pain be weaponized against our neighbors,” tweeted out Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. “The many violent incidents targeting Jews in 2019 and bail reform are not related, as bail reform only went into effect a week ago. We need real reforms to the danger facing the Jewish people, not regressive political moves that will needlessly hurt thousands of New Yorkers.”

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The Illinois Comptroller’s office will no longer help cities collect fines from red light cameras due to a pay-for-play investigation involving contractor SafeSpeed.

In 2017, ABC7 and the Chicago Sun-Times discovered that most of the drivers cited for running the light were actually making right turns, some even doing so after making a complete stop. In 2019, ABC 7 also found that the Chicago intersections that racked up the most fines had shorter timed lights, giving drivers less time to pass through legally. The investigation identified one intersection where the green and yellow lights were only up for a combined 20 seconds.

“As a matter of public policy, this system is clearly broken. I am exercising the moral authority to prevent state resources being used to assist a shady process that victimizes taxpayers,” Comptroller Susana A. Mendoza announced in a press release.

The final straw, the press release indicated, was a federal investigation into red light contractor SafeSpeed.

Both the Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune have reported on SafeSpeed’s chumminess with local officials, including connections to a county commissioner’s chief of staff as well as a former police chief; the latter was fired from his job in the police department after his relationship with the company came to light. These local officials worked as consultants to negotiate SafeSpeed’s presence in various communities. At least one of the officials went on record saying that he received a kickback for every fine paid in certain communities.

When SafeSpeed sought to install red light cameras in Oakbrook Terrace, against the wishes of state bureaucrats, the decision was largely supported by state Sen. Martin Sandoval (D–District 11), whose campaign received large donations from SafeSpeed. Sandoval’s relationship with SafeSpeed was just one of the questionable connections that triggered an FBI raid into his residence and office. (Sandoval announced his resignation in November amid the corruption scandal.)

“This kind of arrangement stinks—it’s plain rotten,” Mendoza added of the scandal. “It exploits taxpayers and especially those who struggle to pay the fines imposed, often the working poor and communities of color. We can’t continue the practice of municipal employees directly pocketing cash from contracts they arrange.”

In addition to concerns about corruption, studies all across the country have found that their local red light cameras have made little positive impact on safe driving practices. In 2014, Reason reported that Chicago’s red light cameras may have traded in one traffic accident for another: While the rate of right-angle crashes causing injury at intersections decreased by 15 percent (much lower than the city’s touted 47 percent), rear-end collisions causing injury rose by 22 percent. Additionally, 40 percent of the cameras were placed in intersections with low rates of injury-causing collisions.

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You can be forgiven for not having noticed, but at the tail end of 2019, Congress repealed three significant components of Obamacare. 

The three repealed provisions were all taxes, each of which was included in the initial legislation as a way of raising revenue to pay for the hundreds of billions in spending the law called for. By far the biggest of the three was the so-called Cadillac tax, which was expected to raise about $197 billion over the next decade. Congress also nixed the law’s health insurance tax, projected to raise $150 billion over 10 years, and the medical device tax, projected to raise $25.5 billion. All three taxes were eliminated as part of a $1.4 trillion year-end budget bill that President Trump signed at the last possible minute in order to keep the government open. 

The repeal of these taxes was predictable, as all three were marked for death from the outset. The Cadillac tax had already been delayed, thanks to pressure from unions, among others, who worried that it would hit their high-priced health benefits. The health insurance tax faced relentless opposition from the health insurance industry, and the medical device tax was the target of heavy oppositional lobbying from the industry it taxed. 

You may be wondering: What is the problem with the repeal of a bunch of taxes no one ever really liked? That is probably what the lawmakers who voted to end the taxes were thinking too. 

The main effect of eliminating these taxes will be to increase the deficit by a little more than $373 billion over the next decade—and, in the process, to further weaken a central argument made by supporters of the law. 

Obamacare was passed on a promise that it would be deficit-neutral, or even reduce the deficit slightly, with spending cuts to existing health care programs and tax hikes falling heavily on health care industry groups to offset the nearly $1 trillion in additional spending the law would require during its first decade. And, indeed, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the law would reduce the deficit during its first decade, provided that all of its provisions were enacted as the statute called for. 

But over the years, many of those pay-fors have been whittled down; not only this trio of taxes, but also the CLASS Act, a long-term care program that was packaged with Obamacare largely to goose the deficit estimates. That program was eliminated after it proved fiscally unsustainable—more budget gimmick than substantive policy.

It’s difficult to track the specific budgetary effects of a piece of legislation this far into its life, but it’s safe to say that the Obamacare of 2020 is less fiscally responsible than the Obamacare of 2010, which only ever existed mostly on paper. 

The elimination of these taxes also serves as a broader lesson in the limits of American health care policy and the ways in which promises of fiscal responsibility tend to fall by the wayside as political considerations take center stage. 

The repeal of the Cadillac tax is particularly notable. The provision, which imposes an excise tax on high-cost health plans, was intended not only as a revenue raiser but as a way to hold down health care spending and mitigate the negative effects associated with the tax carve-out for employer-sponsored health insurance. As The New York Times noted last summer, the Cadillac tax “was expected to be a key cost-containment provision in President Barack Obama’s signature health law and one of the main ways it was supposed to pay for itself.” 

One can certainly argue about whether the Cadillac tax was the best mechanism by which to hold down health care spending, or whether even in a stronger form it would have done much to de-link health coverage from employment. But what’s clear, in retrospect, is that even if it wasn’t the best policy, it was the best policy that could pass, in part because it was an indirect attack on employer-sponsored insurance rather than a full-frontal assault. And yet, over the course of a decade, it was delayed and ultimately repealed—a failed policy, not because it didn’t work, but because politics wouldn’t even let it try. 

One might argue that taxing individual health insurance was always political folly, and that the health law should have leaned more heavily on industry taxes, but the repeal of both the health insurance tax and medical device tax offer reminders of the power of industry-specific lobbying. Nor can one really argue that tougher, more principled legislators would have helped—the medical device tax was opposed by a bipartisan group of legislations, including, notably, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.). Massachusetts, the state she represents, is home to a thriving medical device industry. 

There are obvious lessons here about what we might expect from various plans to “pay for” Medicare for All and other expansions of government-provided health coverage; about the shameful and predictable ways that interest group lobbying on both the right and the left interact with lawmakers’ what-me-worry approach to spending and deficits; and about how little public attention these issues command. The history of American health policy is a history of ambitious ideas watered down and undermined by the predictable forces of politics. 

If nothing else, it’s a reminder that this is how Washington lawmaking often works: One Congress passes a law setting up an expensive new program—in this case, an expansion of Medicaid and subsidies for private health insurance—along with a system to pay for it. Years later, amidst a bipartisan spending binge, those taxes are repealed while the rest of the program remains on the books. The public barely notices, and the lawmakers involved simply shrug and move on. The result is legislation that is fiscally ruinous, but also more popular. There is a reason that debt and deficits have continued to climb ever upwards: That is what the public wants. 

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In the last several weeks, I ran across two documents written by lawyers that looked redacted—but all the supposedly secret information in them could be extracted with literally three keystrokes (ctrl-A, ctrl-C, ctrl-shift-V). One was a court filing that was filed pursuant to a court order authorizing the redaction; but the material so carefully marked secret proved not to be secret at all. Ugh.

For at least one of the documents, I know what improper redaction mechanism was used: The lawyer used Google Docs to highlight passages using black highlighter, and then saved the document as a PDF. That looked blacked out on the screen; but the underlying text still remained in the PDF document—as far as the software was concerned, the text wasn’t removed but was just set in a different color.

By clicking ctrl-A in PDF, I selected the whole document. By clicking ctrl-C, I copied all the text to the clipboard. And then by clicking ctrl-shift-V in another app, I pasted it with all the formatting, including the highlighting, removed. (Ctrl-V in Word works, too, if I select the Keep Text Only paste option.) The text was then completely visible.

To the best of my knowledge, Adobe Acrobat Pro redaction actually deletes the underlying text, if you mark the text for redaction and then apply the redactions. I’m sure there is other software available to do this, including free software. Just make sure that whatever you do, the redaction is actually complete.

Of course, the most reliable redaction mechanism is still printing, blacking out the material completely, and then scanning it back into a new file. But this option won’t work for court filings in the many courts that require full-text-searchable PDFs generated directly from the computer, rather than from a scanner.

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A year and a half after President Donald Trump’s trade war with China began, the economic data is becoming irrefutable: American consumers and businesses have paid for the full cost of the tariffs, and then some.

In papers published this week, two groups of economists examined how the trade war has impacted the prices that Americans pay for imports from China, and how those higher import prices have affected American manufacturing exports. In both cases, it looks like Americans have come out behind: we are paying the full cost of the Chinese tariffs, and those higher costs have “significantly dampened U.S. export growth.”

In the first paper, economists Mary Amiti, Stephen Redding, and David Weinstein find that, “in most sectors, these U.S. tariffs have been completely passed on to U.S. firms and consumers.”

The trio of researchers—from the Federal Reserve, Princeton, and Columbia, respectively—note that this finding is somewhat surprising because tariffs typically have the consequence of forcing foreign producers to lower prices in order to stay competitive in an environment where those goods are subject to import taxes. But that hasn’t happened despite the Trump administration’s five waves of new tariffs on goods imported from China. The average U.S. tariff has increased from 1.6 percent to 5.4 percent since the trade war with China really got rolling in July 2018, but “the tariffs do not appear to be affecting foreign export prices,” the trio of economists conclude.

That directly contradicts the message that Trump and his allies have been sending since the trade war began. Peter Navarro, Trump’s top economic adviser, for example, has stubbornly maintained the fantasy that “China is bearing the entire burden of the tariffs,” even when confronted with data suggesting exactly the opposite.

Amiti, Redding, and Weinstein note that the first few months of tariff data could have been misleading for a number of reasons. Existing contracts could have created “sticky” prices that did not reflect the influence of the tariffs, for example.

Now, with 18 months of trade war data available, there’s little reason to believe Navarro’s nonsense—with one small exception.

There is some evidence that foreign steel prices did drop as a result of Trump’s tariffs—but those steel tariffs, which were imposed in March 2018, were mostly lifted midway through last year. That’s good news for steel consumers in the U.S., the economists note, but it also means the steel tariffs were ineffective at driving up the cost of foreign steel in order to boost domestic steel producers.

Indeed, that seems to have been the case. After an initial surge of optimism, the American steel industry seems to have not benefited much from the Trump administration’s protectionism. Major steel producers like U.S. Steel and Nucor have slowed production amid slackening demand, laid off some workers, and seen their stock prices tank during the past two years.

“By contrast, we find that for consumer and non-steel inputs,” the economists report, “complete tariff passthrough was immediate and then rose above 100 percent.”

In the second study, economists Kyle Handley, Fariha Kamal, and Ryan Monarch found that one-fourth of U.S. exporters—companies that accounted for more than 80 percent of U.S. exports, by value—imported products subject to tariffs during 2019. On average, the higher costs created by those tariffs equaled $900 per worker.

To understand how this works, think about a manufacturing company in the United States that imports parts from China—like AudioControl, a Seattle-based manufacturer of speakers and headphones—before doing final assembly in the United States. The trade war has hit those businesses in two ways. Tariffs on Chinese-made parts have increased the prices that businesses like AudioControl pay to purchase necessary components. Those higher costs are built into the final product, putting those American firms at a disadvantage when they sell goods overseas.

Firms have a few choices when facing those higher import costs. Some might choose to absorb them, while others might try to find alternative sources for industrial inputs. Others might simply exit the export market entirely if they can no longer compete.

That’s one reason why governments have typically tried to avoid imposing tariffs on intermediate goods that are used as inputs in the production of other goods, the three economists note. But the heaviest tariffs imposed by the U.S. against Chinese imports have fallen on exactly that sector of the economy, in part because the Trump administration has tried to avoid having tariffs hit consumer goods.

“In practice, trade policy designed to avoid tariffs on consumer goods may disproportionately impact imported inputs, spilling over to affect exports of other products to third countries,” write Handley, Kamal, and Monarch, who work at the University of Michigan, the Census Bureau, and the Federal Reserve, respectively.

When it comes to the trade war, then, it seems like there aren’t really winners and losers—just losers and bigger losers.

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Congressional hearings date back to the first Congress in 1789, and they’re supposed to educate lawmakers. But now hearings are more about scoring points.

During recent impeachment hearings, Rep. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.) shouted at least five times, “Gentleman is not recognized!” to shut down opposition points.

Republicans are ridiculous, too. Some should wish they’d been shut down. Several years ago, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R–Utah) asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg the silly question: “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?”

After a pause, Zuckerberg responded, “Senator, we run ads.” Hatch couldn’t figure that out on his own?

Rep. Al Green (D–Texas) interrogated Zuckerberg about groups that Facebook partners with to create a new cryptocurrency.

“How many are headed by women?” Green demanded.

“Congressman, I do not know the answer,” Zuckerberg replied.

“How many of them are minorities, Mr. Zuckerberg? … Are there any members of the LGBTQ+ community?”

Republican Steve King (R–Iowa) complained to Google’s CEO about what his granddaughter saw on an iPhone. He demanded, “how does that show up on a 7-year-old’s iPhone, who’s playing a kid’s game?” he asked.

“Congressman, the iPhone is made by a different company,” Google’s CEO had to tell King.

The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.

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