Tag: hit&run

When Florida started experimenting with sales tax holidays in the late 1990s and early 2000s, something interesting happened. According to a paper by four economists at the University of West Florida, some businesses actually increased their prices during the holidays, thus likely capturing a portion of the savings that the policy was supposed to create for consumers.

That’s just one of the many potential downsides that these tax-free weekends have: They’re gimmicky ways for states to dodge the tough work of making their regular taxes less harmful, and they don’t deliver many benefits for consumers. It’s always nice to be able to pay a little bit less taxes, of course, but research shows that the bulk of sales tax holidays’ benefits don’t go to the people most hurt by sales taxes, that they often impose higher compliance costs on small businesses, and that they distract states from more substantive reforms of their burdensome tax codes. 

Numerous states will have sales tax holidays this month. Most will primarily exclude common back-to-school purchases, such as backpacks and school supplies, while some states have more expansive exemptions.

These weekends are supposed to help working-class families afford basic necessities and increase consumer spending. But creating a holiday in which the government doesn’t collect sales taxes for a couple days doesn’t benefit lower-income people as much as just slightly reducing the sales tax rate year-round would.

Why? Because people living paycheck-to-paycheck can’t afford to time their purchases to take advantage of the holiday. A 2010 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago found that households with more than $70,000 in annual income benefit the most, thanks to their greater ability to time their purchases. 

Nor do sales tax holidays help increase consumer spending by much—they mostly just lead consumers to time their spending differently. And consumers don’t get all of the benefits of the sales tax holiday. With higher demand on sales tax holiday weekends, retailers sometimes raise prices. 

Some businesses don’t see the benefits of sales tax holidays either—so much that they sometimes opt out of the holiday altogether. Participating businesses have to adjust their cash registers to take into account the temporary change in sales taxes. This is easy for big businesses and department stores, but for a small business those compliance costs are much more burdensome. In a survey of independent retailers in Massachusetts, one small businessman said that the state’s sales tax holiday “has created more problems than benefits.”

“If you need to give people a holiday from your sales tax to keep them shopping in your state,” says Janelle Cammenga, state policy analyst at the Tax Foundation and author of a new study of sales tax holidays, “then your tax code probably isn’t that competitive to begin with.”

And then there are the often arbitrary boundaries between which consumer goods get a tax holiday and which don’t. Consider those exemptions for school supplies: Some states exempt backpacks but not messenger bags. 

In 2013, North Carolina eliminated its sales tax holiday and used the revenue it gained to help lower tax rates across the board. Other states should follow its lead: Instead of gimmicks like sales tax holidays, make real reforms to their tax codes.

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Less than 24 hours after President Donald Trump announced an escalation of the trade war with China, he got some predictable news: America’s trade deficit has hit a new high.

The gap between how much America exports to China and how much it imports from the Asian nation grew to $30.2 billion in July, up from $30.1 billion the previous month, according to Commerce Department figures. The widening gap was due to a decrease in the value of American exports, Bloomberg notes.

In normal circumstances, this wouldn’t be a big deal. Economists generally agree that trade deficits don’t matter, for the same reason that you wouldn’t worry about running a “deficit” with a grocery store. But Trump has used America’s trade deficit as a key justification for his trade policies, and he has repeatedly promised that tariffs on China would reduce that deficit.

Instead, the opposite has happened.

Trump’s tariffs are having an impact. During the first six months of 2018, U.S. exports to China fell by 18 percent relative to the same period last year. Imports from China slipped by 12 percent. Both sides are doing less trading, but the trade deficit persists.

Here are three more recent data points that show problems with Trump’s trade war:

1. BUSINESS INVESTMENTS

According to the Commerce Department, investment in American businesses has fallen off sharply since the start of Trump’s trade war in mid-2018. Nonresidential domestic investment was buoyed by the tax cuts Trump signed in December 2017, but during the second quarter of 2019 investment dipped into negative territory. That’s a sign that businesses are holding back on hiring or expanding in the face of the uncertainty created by the president’s trade policies.

Equally significant is the recent sharp drop in American exports. This is an expected but perhaps underappreciated consequence of Trump’s policies. “Exporters can be successful only if they are viewed as reliable suppliers,” writes C. Fred Bergsten, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “But Trump’s trade policies have rendered US firms among the most unreliable in the world.”

2. GOODS-PRODUCING JOBS DECLINING

As a perfect encapsulation of where the economy is right now, after a gangbuster 2018, job growth year-over-year in goods is just about where it is for services. Goods has seen a dramatic slowdown, while services has held up better. pic.twitter.com/WvTcdGLjMB

— Martha Gimbel (@marthagimbel) August 2, 2019

Trump has also tried to justify his bellicose trade policies by citing the importance of American manufacturing jobs . Trump talked about “an extraordinary resurgence of American manufacturing” during a photo op at the White House last month.

But as the chart above indicates, goods-producing jobs have been declining steadily since last summer. The drop-off begins almost exactly when the trade war began.

The latest jobs report continues this trend.

Almost all the US job gains are now coming from the service sector, not blue collar. Manufacturing jobs are basically flat this year.

Here’s a look at July:
Professional services +31,000
Health care +30,000
Social assistance +20,000
Fin Services +18,000#jobs

— Heather Long (@byHeatherLong) August 2, 2019

3. THE TRADE WAR HAS BEEN A NET LOSER FOR THE TREASURY

Another of Trump’s favorite defenses for the trade war is the claim that tariffs are generating billions of dollars for the U.S. Treasury. He’s right about that much—though it’s Americans who are paying, not China.

But the tariffs have also failed as a revenue-generating strategy. As of May, they were on pace to generate about $20 billion in revenue by the end of 2019. By comparison, Trump’s bailouts to farmers hurt by China’s retaliatory tariffs totaled over $25 billion.

Those bailouts, meanwhile, have been a complete mess. A report released this week by the Environmental Working Group, a agricultural policy watchdog, found that 54 percent of those payments went to just 10 percent of all farmers.

With more Chinese tariffs set to take effect in September, it’s possible that Trump’s tariffs and bailouts might balance each other out by the end of the year. If so, an 18-month experiment in economic nationalism will have been, at best, a wash for the Treasury while serving as a massive transfer in wealth from America’s manufacturing and agricultural sectors to a small sliver of farmers. Great success!

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Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation. PBS. Tuesday, August 6, 9 p.m.

It’s perfectly reasonable to wonder why anybody feels the need for another documentary about Woodstock. We’ve already got the film of the same name that was released in 1970, a staggering 224 minutes of dope, drizzle, and dishabille, which won an Oscar and is part of the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry.

But there are a few reasons you might want to take a peek at PBS’s new effort, Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation. For instance, its revelation of the novel funding idea of Artie Kornfeld, one of 1969 rock festival’s principal organizers.

Told that construction crews hadn’t been able to get fences built in time and Woodstock would have to be declared a free concert, Kornfeld asked: “Can’t we get a whole bunch of girls and put them in diaphanous gowns and give them collection baskets and send them out into the audience?”

Then there’s the video of that bumper sticker posted on one of the food stands that dotted the perimeter of the concert ground: “DON’T WORRY BE HAPPY,” a full 19 years before Bobby McFerrin’s record drove a nation to homicidal madness.

Oh, and a reminder that rodents were rocking their own Age of Aquarius: A glimpse of the log kept at the medical tents remembered mostly for taking care of the consumers of Woodstock’s infamous brown acid reveals they also had 11 patients suffering from rat bites. I blame Nixon.

To be fair, this Woodstock is very different than the film, which lacked interviews or narration and was more immersion than explication. Director Barak Goodman (Oklahoma City) conducted interviews with several of Woodstock’s organizers that he uses to trace the festival’s evolution from its conception as a recording studio for Bob Dylan to an outdoor concert for 5,000 people to (at least for a weekend) a city that was the 10th-biggest and most-stoned in America.

(Actually, I assume that Goodman’s crew did the interviews, but that may not be true. Several of the interviewees, including Joe Cocker and Jefferson Airplane guitarist Paul Kantner, have been dead for years, and the film’s credits don’t reveal where their comments came from.)

The result is a story in equal parts amusing and appalling. The organizers spent weeks lurking around the bathrooms in Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden and timing the occupants to determine how many Porta Potties would be needed at Woodstock. Answer: “Tens of thousands … just impossible numbers.” They went ahead anyway.

Pretty much the same degree of planning went into food, security, shelter and everything else about Woodstock. Even the power lines into the festival site—literally the life blood for all the guitars, amps, speakers and soundboards necessary for the show—were installed chaotically. During the apocalyptic rainstorm that struck on the second day, a 50,000-volt cable was unearthed, which—as one of the organizers admits—could easily have resulted in a mass electrocution. “Fortunately,” he observes breezily, “that didn’t happen.”

It’s narrow misses like that one that make the documentary’s subtitle—”three days that defined a generation”—so arrogantly infuriating. Woodstock, it’s true, did not live up to the famous New York Times headline, “Nightmare in the Catskills.”

But that was mostly due to the eternal saviors of teenagers, Mommy and Daddy. The National Guard helicopters ferried in food (nearly all of it donated by the middle-aged townsfolk of nearby Bethel, N.Y., who were home watching Lawrence Welk instead of Jimi Hendrix) and carried out medical casualties. Without their help, and a generous amount of blind luck like the power line not zapping everyone, Woodstock might have more literally resembled what the crew that stayed behind two weeks after the festival to clean up compared it to: a Civil War battlefield.

The most notable thing about the PBS Woodstock is the contortionist specter of a generation blowing smoke up its own ass. The last 15 minutes or so are mostly devoted to people who attended Woodstock declaring it a utopically transformative event that changed everything. Really? Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin would be dead of drug overdoses within a year. The Vietnam War continued for another three. The next president elected was not George McGovern but Richard Nixon, and when Baby Boomers finally did start electing presidents, the result was Afghanistan and Iraq. And raise your hand if you think race relations are any better today than they were in 1969.

You could as easily make the argument that what defined a generation was not Woodstock but Altamont or the Manson Family. Baby Boomers didn’t change the world at Woodstock, or create a New Man. Their only accomplishment was to stand up in public, half a million strong, and chant the word “Fuck!” without getting spanked. It’s sad that, 50 years later, they still can’t tell the difference.

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Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.

New on the Short Circuit podcast: Special guests Scott Michelman of ACLU-DC and Adrian Snead of Whiteford Taylor Preston tell us what’s what. There’s a pending petition for cert over a police dog bite, a pending petition for en banc review that seeks to hold prison officials responsible for a guard who sexually assaulted inmates, and a case where police shot an innocent bystander (that the panelists agree is due for further review). Click here for iTunes.

• Allegation: Hamas terrorists post messages on Facebook encouraging violence in Israel; Facebook’s algorithms display those messages to people receptive to them who then injured and killed Americans in Israel. Second Circuit: Can’t sue Facebook over that. Congress immunized internet publishers from these kinds of claims. Dissent: Using algorithms to match people with messages means Facebook is more than a publisher.
• White-collar defendant requests pre-trial release, offering to pay for private armed security guards to ensure he doesn’t skip town. District court: No. Second Circuit: Affirmed—not least because the sort of “self-funded private jail[]” the defendant requested would benefit the wealthy alone.
• In which the Third Circuit examines the “non-utilitarian, sculptural features” of a full-body banana costume. (See Appendix A for photographs of said costume.)
• Allegation: Following up on vague tip, police interrogate two teen brothers, each with severe mental disabilities, suspected of the rape and murder of 11-year-old Red Springs, N.C. girl. After hours of continuous questioning punctuated by threats, racial epithets, and empty promises, the brothers sign contradictory confessions written by the officers. They spend 31 years in prison until DNA evidence exonerates them and proves another man was the culprit. Can they sue the officers for coercing their confessions, suppressing evidence that pointed to the other man during the initial investigation? The Fourth Circuit says yes.
• Unemployed sexagenarian—now suffering from degenerative ailment—seeks to discharge student-loan debt she incurred while enrolled in community college in 2012. Fifth Circuit: Gotta talk to Congress about that. They write the bankruptcy laws. And they say discharge is not available under the demanding “undue hardship” standard that applies to student loans.
• In 1896, the Supreme Court ordered new trials for two men convicted of seeking to aid Cuban revolutionaries seeking to secure independence from Spain. In so doing, the Court invented the doctrine of plain error review, an exception to usual rule that appellate courts mustn’t consider arguments that weren’t raised below. So writes Judge Oldham of the Fifth Circuit, tracing the doctrine’s waxings and wanings and concluding the Supreme Court has allowed it to overwax of late.
• Allegation: Parma, Ohio man satirizes local police department with fake Facebook page. (Minorities need not apply, pedophiles to receive police honors, etc.) The displeased police respond by arresting the satirist. Sixth Circuit: Ridiculing the government is as American as apple pie. Most of the satirist’s claims survive a motion to dismiss. [There’s more at Popehat.]
• Drunk U.S. Marshal in Chicago takes phone call at the movies, threatens other patrons when they heckle him. Moviegoers then complain to the Marshal Service—and it turns out the guy isn’t a marshal at all. The last time he (allegedly) did this—when he used emergency lights to run a red light, then lied to the cops who pulled him over—the Marshals told him to quit it. So this time he’s promptly convicted of impersonating a federal officer. Seventh Circuit: No First Amendment problem there. You can’t falsely shout marshal in a crowded theater. [There’s more at Popehat.]
• Man spends 10 years in prison for cocaine possession based on the testimony of a dirty Chicago cop. Now freed, he sues the (now incarcerated) cop, who pleads the Fifth while claiming that he would “love to” testify if his own case were not on appeal. Seventh Circuit: The jury should have been told that you can only invoke the Fifth to avoid incriminating yourself. New trial.
• Allegation: Three Rockford, Ill. detectives use physical force, threat of prison time to obtain false statements from witnesses that helped put three innocent men in prison for more than 10 years. Seventh Circuit: Which is not fabricating evidence unless the detectives knew the statement was false. One detective has admitted as much (and also admitted to handcuffing a mother and leaving her baby crying on the floor in attempt to get a statement), so the fabricating evidence claim against him can proceed. The other detectives are off the hook. (Though different claims against them can proceed.)
• Allegation: Inmate in Chester, Ill. penitentiary attempts suicide three times in solitary. A nurse mocks him for failing and urges him to try again. Cruel and unusual punishment by the nurse? District court: No. Seventh Circuit: That claim should have gone to trial. And it could be that he gets a new trial (on separate claims that were allowed to proceed to trial) if the gov’t didn’t have a good enough reason to strike three of the four potential black jurors.
• Craighead County, Ark. officials use private company to run probation for people convicted of misdemeanors. The company charges probationers monthly fees, other fees on pain of arrest, which results in more fees. (On one day in 2016, of 34 defendants brought to court, only six were charged with crimes. The remaining 28 were in jail for failing to pay the company.) Voters elect new judges who promise to cease using the company, erase outstanding debts. Company: Which violates the Contracts Clause, Takings Clause. Eighth Circuit: Can’t sue the judges over that. The judges are entitled to modify probation conditions and discharge debts.
• In Minnesota, if wineries want to offer tastings at their farms and sell directly to consumers, at least 51 percent of the grapes they use must be grown in state. An unconstitutional boon to Minnesota’s grape industry at the expense of out-of-state growers? The wineries certainly have standing to find out, says the Eighth Circuit. The case should not have been dismissed. (This is an IJ case. Click here to learn more.)
• Allegation: Teased incessantly by another student, 7-year old yells at the other student, declines to calm down as instructed. By the time a Kansas City, Mo. school resource officer arrives, the student has stopped yelling. But the officer drags him crying to the principal’s office in handcuffs and leaves them on until the student’s father arrives 20 minutes later. District court: Could be an unreasonable seizure or excessive force. Eighth Circuit: Reversed. The kid tried to pull away from the officer, and, if he wasn’t handcuffed, he might have attempted to leave and posed a harm to himself.
• Missouri law permits random roadside inspections of commercial vehicles without any probable cause. Rancher: Which violates the Fourth Amendment as applied to my dump truck, which I only use for ranch operations and am legally barred from using to transport people or goods for hire. Eighth Circuit: Not so. Warrantless inspections are okay in highly regulated industries, which commercial trucking is.
• Allegation: St. Louis prosecutor dismisses all charges against man, but he remains in jail for eight days. Can he sue the prosecutor? The Eighth Circuit says no. While there is a right not to be imprisoned without charges, the prosecutor has no clearly established duty to ensure that anyone is released from jail. (The man’s claims against other officials are still pending.)
• North Dakota is the only state that does not require voters to register. You just show up with ID and vote. Plaintiffs: A 2017 change to the law disenfranchises roughly 10% of the state’s eligible Native American voters, many of whom lack residential street addresses and thus can’t get the requisite ID. Eighth Circuit: The law is not a substantial burden to the vast majority of eligible voters, and it’s not clear how many would-be voters tried to obtain ID and were unable to. Dissent: The law was purportedly enacted to address voter fraud, but there is no evidence of voter fraud.
• Guam officials seek to hold referendum allowing voters to express their opinion about the future of the relationship between Guam and the United States but will only permit “Native Inhabitants of Guam” to vote. Ninth Circuit: Which means restricting voting based upon race, which is explicitly prohibited by the Fifteenth Amendment.
• Mexican national enters the U.S. 20 miles east of a port of entry. It’s a federal crime for aliens to enter the U.S. at any point other than that designated by immigration officers. And it’s a separate federal crime to elude examination by immigration officers. He’s charged with the latter. Ninth Circuit: Nope, you can only elude examination at a place where examinations occur—ports of entry. Concurrence: But I sympathize with the gov’t, because we’ve basically made it impossible to enforce the other law about border crossing.
• In the Tenth Circuit, we encounter the following allegation: “shepherds tend herds of 1,000 sheep or more, . . . protecting them from the constant threat of natural predators like coyotes, mountain lions, and wolves . . . . During lambing . . . season, the shepherds assist the animals in the birthing process, and at all times, the shepherds provide for the health and medical needs of the herd.” Will this somehow result in a civil RICO claim surviving a motion to dismiss? Ewe bet it will. [There’s more at Popehat.]
• Jury convicts investor of wire fraud for participating in scheme wherein attractive women lured men to Miami Beach night clubs to buy wildly overpriced drinks. Eleventh Circuit (2016): Conviction overturned. The jury should have been instructed that the failure to disclose the financial arrangement between the women and the night clubs isn’t by itself wire fraud. Eleventh Circuit (2019): It’s not double jeopardy to retry the investor for concealment-based money laundering, a charge the first jury did not reach a verdict on. His new conviction stands.
• And in panel rehearing news, the Ninth Circuit has withdrawn its decision in a lawsuit with broad ramifications for businesses that classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees. The California Supreme Court will have a chance to weigh in.

For a few months this past winter and spring, Jessica Barron and Kenny Wylie let their son’s 19-year-old friend crash at their Granite City, Ill. home because he didn’t have anywhere else to go and it was cold. But the friend lied to them and tried to steal from them, and they ultimately kicked him out after he burglarized a restaurant. That should have been the end of the matter, but now city officials are trying to evict Jessica, Kenny, and their three teenage children using an ordinance that requires landlords to evict tenants if any member of the household commits a crime. Though their houseguest is long gone and their landlord views them as model tenants, the city wants to render the family homeless. This week, they joined with IJ to challenge the constitutionality of the ordinance. Click here to read more.

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Last fall and winter, Jessica Barron and Kenny Wylie let one of their teenaged son’s friends, who described himself as homeless, stay at their house in Granite City, Illinois. At first the teenager, Jason Lynch, slept at the house intermittently; later, as the weather got colder, he often was there several nights a week. Barron and Wylie’s reward for that act of kindness, if the city has its way, will be government-ordered eviction from their home.

After Lynch broke into a local restaurant last May, the city invoked its “crime-free housing” ordinance, which demands eviction when “any member of lessee’s household” commits a crime. In this case, the crime did not happen at the rental property, and Barron and Wylie did not participate in it, know about it ahead of time, or help Lynch evade the police afterward. In fact, Barron turned Lynch in after she found him hiding in her basement. But none of that matters under Granite City’s ordinance, which holds tenants strictly liable for the crimes of household members, including temporary residents like Lynch.

“This effort to make an innocent family homeless violates the federal Constitution at a bedrock level,” the Institute for Justice argues in a federal lawsuit it filed yesterday on behalf of Barron, Wylie, and their landlord, Bill Campbell, who does not want to evict them. The complaint says the crime-free housing ordinance violates their due process rights, the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, the Fifth Amendment’s ban on taking property for “public use” without “just compensation,” and freedom of association, which is protected by the First Amendment.

Barron and Wylie, who have three teenaged children, have been living in the house at 1632 Maple Street in Granite City for two years. They had planned to buy it eventually under a rent-to-own contract with Campbell. But the city is demanding that he abrogate that contract and threatening to revoke his rental license if he fails to do so. One officer even threatened to arrest Campbell, although it’s not clear what the charge would be.

If Barron and Wylie are evicted, they will lose their property interest in the home and will have to find somewhere else where they and their children can live, which may be difficult in light of the eviction. “They do not own or rent any other property,” the complaint says. “If they are kicked out of their home, they are not sure where they would go. They do not have the resources to immediately rent another property. They would likely need to rely on charity from family to avoid rendering themselves and their children homeless.”

Campbell, meanwhile, considers Barron and Wylie good tenants, is happy with their arrangement, and would like it to continue. If the city forces him to evict them, that process will cost money, as will the effort to find new tenants, and he will lose rental income in the meantime.

Given these costs, the Institute for Justice argues,  Granite City is depriving Barron, Wylie, and Campbell of their property without due process or just compensation. The lawsuit also describes three equal protection violations: The city is arbitrarily treating residents who have rent-to-own contracts differently from residents who have mortgages or own their homes outright; arbitrarily treating Campbell differently from all the other landlords in Granite City, who unlike him are free to accept Barron and Wylie as tenants; and arbitrarily treating Barron and Wylie differently from “everyone else in the world (except for Jason Lynch),” who, like the couple, “have no responsibility for Jason Lynch’s crime.” These distinctions cannot survive “any level of scrutiny,” the complaint says.

The attempted eviction also implicates freedom of association, I.J. argues. “The only reason that Granite City is trying to force Jessica and Kenny out of their home is that they allowed Jason Lynch to stay there,” the complaint says. “Allowing a teenager to stay in your home to shelter him from the cold is a form of association. Punishing Jessica and Kenny for crimes committed by Jason Lynch is punishing them for their decision to associate with Jason Lynch.”

In 2002 the Supreme Court upheld a “one strike” public housing policy under which  tenants were evicted based on drug-related activity involving a household member, even if the lessees were not involved in it and did not know about it. But that was a situation where the government was acting as landlord. Here the government is trying to force eviction over the objections of a private landlord.

“No one should be punished for a crime someone else committed,” says I.J. senior attorney Robert McNamara. “That simple notion is at the heart of our criminal justice system—that we are all innocent until proven guilty. And yet Granite City is punishing an innocent family for a crime committed by someone they barely knew.”

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A judge has recommended that New York Police Department (NYPD) officer Daniel Pantaleo be fired for his role in the death of Eric Garner in 2014, a killing that was captured on cellphone video and provoked nationwide outrage.

Pantaleo was recorded confronting Garner, apparently suspecting that he was selling loose, untaxed black market cigarettes. Garner resisted when Pantaleo attempted to arrest him. Pantaleo put the man in a chokehold, and Garner ultimately died; an autopsy blamed the chokehold for his death. Garner’s final words, a repetition of “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement.

A grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo for any crimes, and in July, five years later, the Justice Department announced it would not file civil rights charges against him. The city has been dragging its feet in determining what sort of discipline, if any, Pantaleo should face for his role in Garner’s death. Protesters showed up at the Democratic primary debates earlier this week to heckle Mayor Bill de Blasio for failing to force Pantaleo out of the NYPD. (Pantaleo, meanwhile, has been on desk duty.)

Today, following an administrative hearing, NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Trials Rosemarie Maldonadoa—the judge presiding over Pantaleo’s disciplinary trial—recommended that the officer be terminated. But this does not actually end Pantaleo’s employment with the NYPD. The recommendation now goes to NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill, who will ultimately decide whether to fire Pantaleo.

While it’s not impossible, it seems unlikely that O’Neill would decide to buck the judge and keep Pantaleo on the force. CNN reports from inside sources that O’Neill is expected to follow the recommendation. But New York state has laws that mandate official secrecy about police discipline and shield misconduct records from the eyes of the press and the public. If Pantaleo is fired, he could quietly be hired by another police department in New York or another state.

After the the announcement, Pantaleo was suspended for 30 days without pay, which is standard procedure when firing is recommended.

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A police officer responding to a welfare check in Arlington, Texas, attempted to shoot a dog on the property. He killed the 30-year-old woman he was dispatched to check on instead.

When police arrived at the scene, they were initially unable to find the woman in question, but they later located her lying in a grassy area next to an unrestrained dog. According to a statement from the Arlington Police Department, the animal allegedly “began to run towards the officer while barking,” prompting the man to fire multiple shots. He missed the dog and hit the woman. She was transported to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

A body camera captured the incident, and the video will be included in the investigation.

American police officers have an unfortunate track record when it comes to shooting nonthreatening dogs on the job. The Department of Justice calls puppycide an “epidemic,” estimating that 25 to 30 dogs are killed by cops every day. That’s almost 11,000 dog deaths per year.

In Detroit, Michigan, 54 dogs were killed in 2017 alone. “The rise occurred at the same time Detroit is trying to fend off lawsuits from residents who say police wantonly killed their dogs during drug raids,” wrote Reason‘s C.J. Ciaramella in September. In St. Louis County, a woman received a $750,000 settlement after a SWAT team killed her dog during a raid on her home over an unpaid gas bill.

And it isn’t unprecedented for a cop to inflict a human casualty while fending off a nonthreatening animal. In 2014, Deputy Sheriff Matthew Vickers of Coffee County, Georgia, shot and seriously wounded a 10-year-old child after opening fire on the family’s dog. The officer was in pursuit of a fugitive who had no connection to the family and had wandered onto their property. A court recently ruled that the officer is protected by qualified immunity, so the family will receive no compensation for medical bills.

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Mike Gravel, the quirky 89-year-old former senator from Alaska, is shuttering his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The DNC kept us off the stage tonight even though we qualified, but the #Gravelanche is not over. We're gonna keep going.

As the campaign ends, we're going to help build institutions on the left which can grow power, shape policy, and create strong activists for the long haul.

— Mike Gravel (@MikeGravel) August 1, 2019

Gravel served in the U.S. Senate from 1969 to 1981, and he ran for president once before, making unsuccessful bids for the Democratic and then the Libertarian nominations in 2008. Although he never appeared on a debate stage this time around, Gravel garnered attention for his eccentric campaign strategy: His operation is spearheaded by two teenagers, and the former senator did not leave his house in pursuit of his White House ambitions.

“No party’s gonna carry me other than these kids,” he told Reason in June, referring to David Oks and Henry Williams, the two teens at the heart of his campaign. “But I’m gonna have a patio campaign. I’m gonna sit on my patio, and see what happens.”

He was ready and willing to make a debate appearance, though. Gravel hit the 65,000-donor threshold for the July matchup, but he did not meet the 1 percent polling requirement. While candidates were only required to hit one mark to qualify, only 20 slots were available, with 21 presidential hopefuls checking off at least one box. The Democratic National Convention prioritizes polling results over donors, making Gravel the one candidate to be excluded.

Gravel told Reason in June that he wants to see federal marijuana legalization enshrined via constitutional amendment. He also said he wants to eradicate private health insurance in service of a single-payer system. And Gravel—who famously read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record in 1971 and who fiercely criticized the Iraq war during his previous presidential run—positioned himself as a committed foe of the military-industrial complex, calling among other things for ending the drone war, pursuing normal relations with North Korea, closing all military bases abroad, ending all aid to Saudi Arabia, and pulling out of the fights in Yemen and Afghanistan.

Though the former senator is retiring from the race, he—and his online teens—are not letting the sun set on his career. They plan to create the Gravel Institute, a think tank that will write policy papers on “ending the American empire,” “reforming our Democracy,” and “direct action by elected officials to end injustice and suffering.”

“We need to keep up Mike’s fight until the wars are over, until no one is too poor to live, until the people’s voice is heard,” the teens tweeted.

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A $10 billion tech contract with the U.S. military is under review, in what many perceive as a political move by President Donald Trump against Amazon.

In mid-July, Trump said his administration was looking into the Pentagon’s likely decision to award the contract to Amazon Web Services, amid “complaining from different companies like Microsoft and Oracle and IBM.”

“Amazon Web Services, which virtually created the cloud computing industry and has long provided cloud services to the Central Intelligence Agency, has always been seen as the strongest competitor,” reports The New York Times. But Trump—a frequent Amazon critic—told reporters in July that “great companies are complaining about it, so we’re going to take a look at it. We’ll take a very strong look at it.”

This week, a spokesperson for Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper announced that the contract would be postponed while Esper was “looking at” it further. No word was given on how long that will take or whether the White House had in fact intervened.

Google had initially been in the running for the contract, but it “pulled out amid employee opposition to military work, though many analysts said it was unlikely to win the project because it lacked the right security credentials,” says the Times.

IBM and Oracle had also been vying for the contract, but the Department of Defense said in April that they were no longer being considered and the contract was between Amazon and Microsoft.

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ELECTION 2020

Gabbard calls Harris response “pathetic.” More fallout from Tulsi Gabbard challenging Kamala Harris during Wednesday night’s debate:

.@TulsiGabbard on Kamala Harris: "Honestly it’s pathetic that when confronted with the facts & the truth about her record that she claims to be proud of as a prosecutor, as AG of CA, all she can do is lob cheap smears." @HillTVLive https://t.co/fkdlrEjcGa pic.twitter.com/veHrmsK0rO

— The Hill (@thehill) August 2, 2019

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FREE MARKETS

Big-four broadcast networks fight the TV distribution nonprofit Locust. ABC, CBS, Comcast NBCUniversal, and Fox are suing a video-streaming company called Locust:

New York based Locast offers viewers access to over the air broadcasts via the internet to roughly 13 cities (about 31% of the US market). Its website notes the operation is funded by donations and that access to this content (again, already accessible for free via an antenna) should be a consumer “right” given that US consumers technically own the airwaves these programs are broadcast over.

The networks disagree.

Locust is “funded in part by AT&T and Dish Networks” and “was developed by former FCC lawyer and media executive David Goodfriend, who…designed the service entirely from the ground up in a bid to try and comply with (and test the logic of) the current legal minefield,” notes TechDirt. Goodfriend told The New York Times: “We really did our homework. We are operating under parameters that are designed to be compliant within the law.”

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QUICK HITS

• Thousands of troops are being withdrawn from Afghanistan today. “The agreement, which would require the Taliban to begin negotiating a larger peace deal directly with the Afghan government, could cut the number of American troops in the country from roughly 14,000 to between 8,000 and 9,000,” reports The Washington Post.
• The U.S. is pulling out of a missile treaty with Russia. “France and Germany and other allies have backed the U.S. plan to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty on Friday unless Russia destroys missiles that the U.S. says violate the pact,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “Moscow has shown no sign of complying with the deadline.”
• New Jersey just joined eight states and D.C. in legalizing physician-assisted suicide.
• Trump announced yesterday that another $300 billion in Chinese goods would face 10 percent tariffs come September. “Combined with the existing tariffs of 25 percent on about $250 billion worth of Chinese-made goods, the new tariffs will effectively cover all goods imported from China,” notes Reason‘s Eric Boehm.
• Jail nurse charged in inmate’s death:

This was so painful to read. Incredible reporting by @laurenk_gill on the death of Madison Jody Jensen, who died of dehydration at the Duchesne County jail. A jail nurse has been charged with negligent homicide. https://t.co/40IbNBrE3Y

— ElizabethWeill-Greenberg (@elizabethweill) August 1, 2019

• Playboy is being relaunched as a quarterly magazine. CEO Ben Kohn said Playboy merchandise and services still net $3 billion annually, and so reviving the magazine worked well as a form of “brand extension.” The New York Times says Kohn “likened the future of the company to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop.”
• The FBI thinks conspiracy theories could be a terror threat, and it has issued a bulletin warning about them. Yahoo News, which obtained the document, quotes some skeptical thoughts from Joe Uscinski, Michael German, and David Garrow.
• Women in Saudi Arabia can now get their own passports.

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Contrary to the conventional narrative of the “opioid crisis,” it is clear from U.S. data that there is no straightforward relationship between narcotic analgesic prescription rates and deaths involving those drugs, or between the volume of analgesics prescribed and the incidence of misuse or addiction. A recent study sheds further light on this issue, finding that “the number of persons addicted to opioids in Germany has hardly changed over the past 20 years,” notwithstanding a sharp increase in opioid prescriptions that began in the 1990s.

Here is a chart showing the volume of opioids prescribed by German doctors, measured in morphine milligram equivalents per capita, from 1980 through 2014:

That comes from a 2017 article in the journal PAIN Reports. The newer study, published last March in Deutsches Arzteblatt International, estimates that in 2016 there were 166,294 “opioid-addicted persons in Germany.” The researchers add that “comparisons with earlier estimates” indicate the number was about the same two decades before then, prior to the dramatic increase in opioid prescriptions. In other words, a large increase in consumption of narcotic pain relievers did not lead to a surge in addiction, whether to those drugs or to illicit opioids such as heroin.

What’s more, OECD data compiled by J.J. Rich, a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation (which publishes this website), show that deaths involving licit and illicit opioids did not rise in Germany either. In fact, both the number of deaths and the death rate declined during the same period when prescriptions were climbing.

“There are signs of an opioid epidemic in Australia and Canada, but not in Germany,” the authors of the 2017 PAIN Reports study concluded after looking at data from those three countries, all of which have seen big increases in opioid prescriptions during the last two decades. According to the OECD data, total opioid-related deaths fell in Australia from 2000 through 2006, then rose from 2007 through 2015, when the number was about the same as it was in 2000. In Canada, opioid-related deaths rose steadily from 2000 through 2012, then fell for the next three years. Yet in Germany, opioid-related deaths were declining or steady throughout that period.

What makes Germany special? Its regulations and guidelines, as described in the PAIN Reports study, seem pretty similar to those in Australia and Canada. One notable difference in prescribing guidelines is the dose at which “particular caution” is recommended, which was lowest in Australia and highest in Canada, with Germany in the middle. The study notes that “fentanyl patches are the most frequently prescribed strong opioids in Germany,” and such products may be less appealing to nonmedical users than pills that can be crushed and snorted or injected.

But it seems clear that other factors are at work, including social and cultural conditions that make addiction more likely or less likely. “The US leads the developed world in per capita opioid-related overdose deaths, while Germany’s overdose rate is among the lowest in the developed world,” notes Phoenix surgeon Jeffrey Singer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, who brought both of these studies to my attention. “Germany’s overdose rate has been essentially unchanged for most of this century. Opioids were considered responsible for just under 800 overdose deaths in 2016, compared to more than 42,000 deaths in the US that year.”

The vast majority of those opioid-related deaths involved heroin or illicit fentanyl. The U.S. has a population four times as big as Germany’s and an opioid problem more than 50 times as big.

There are also significant drug policy differences between the two countries. “Unlike the US, Germany has embraced harm reduction strategies for the treatment of substance use disorder and non-medical drug use for decades,” Singer writes. “These strategies include safe injection facilities, needle exchange programs, medication assisted treatment and heroin assisted treatment, and distribution of test strips and naloxone.”

Even if the U.S. copied German harm reduction policies, drug use would still look different in the two countries, because it is influenced by many variables beyond the substances themselves or the policies aimed at controlling them. But those policies can make drug use more dangerous or less dangerous, depending on the priorities of the people who formulate and execute them.

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