Tag: hit&run

Starting Feb. 1, India will ban e-commerce companies from selling goods made by companies in which they have an ownership stake. The move follows complaints by Indian retailers that companies such as Walmart-owned Flipkart Group and Amazon are selling goods from companies they have a stake in or have exclusive agreements with at very low prices.

Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has floated the idea of increasing the top marginal income tax bracket to 70 percent to help pay for her “Green New Deal” programs. Ocasio-Cortez said the top rate would kick in on families making $10 million or more, a figure that covers the top 0.5 percent of Americans. The current top income tax bracket is 37 percent and kicks in at $600,000. “People are going to have to start paying their fair share in taxes,” Ocasio-Cortez told 60 Minutes (for what it’s worth, in 2016, the top 1 percent of income earners paid 44 percent of all income taxes).

Supporters of the hike are quick to point out that in the past, top rates have ranged as high as 92 percent and, in the words of Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, the country “did just fine”:

What we see is that America used to have very high tax rates on the rich — higher even than those AOC is proposing — and did just fine. Since then tax rates have come way down, and if anything the economy has done less well.

Krugman produces this chart, which plots annual economic growth against top marginal rates:

Accounting for 48 percent of the total, income taxes are the single-biggest source of revenue for the federal government, followed by payroll taxes (35 percent), and corporate taxes (9 percent). The Washington Post estimates that Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal might raise about “$72 billion annually — or close to $720 billion over 10 years” while stressing “the real number is probably smaller than that, because wealthy Americans would probably find ways around paying this much-higher tax.”

That’s not a small point but it’s not just rich people who find ways to avoiding tax hikes. For any number of reasons, since the end of World War II, it has proven exceptionally difficult for the federal government to substantially increase overall revenues for any period of time. The entire country, it seems, has an aversion to paying more than about 18 percent of GDP in the form of total government revenues. Despite very different income tax brackets, corporate tax policy, you name it, it’s rare when the feds’ take tops 18 percent for very long (recall that both Al Gore and George W. Bush campaigned on tax cuts in 2000, after a series of big-revenue years for the federal government).

The flip side of the “remarkably stable amount of federal revenue as a percentage of GDP“? Sadly, it’s the ability of the federal government to spend much more each year than it takes in via taxes and other fees.

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the annual deficit will rise from about 4 percent of GDP to 9.5 percent of GDP in 2048. By then, I suspect we’ll care less about the top marginal rate, if only because we’ll have bigger problems to worry about.

Now that we live in a world where neither Republicans nor Democrats even pay lip service to reducing the national debt, here’s a reminder why persistent deficits are so bad for the economy and other living things:

Talking to Roll Call in October, Sen. Cory Gardner (R–Colo.) described Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s dismay upon hearing that Utah voters seemed ready to approve medical marijuana. “McConnell looks at me, and he goes, ‘Utah?'” Gardner recalled. “Just this terrified look. And as he says that, [Republican Utah Sen.] Orrin Hatch walks up, and Mitch looks at Orrin and says, ‘Orrin, is Utah really going to legalize marijuana?’ And Orrin Hatch folds his hands, looks down at his feet, and says, ‘First tea, then coffee, and now this.'”

Utah’s medical marijuana initiative won by six points on November 6, notwithstanding vocal opposition from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Voters were even more enthusiastic in Missouri, where a measure legalizing medical use won by a margin of nearly 2–1. Counting Oklahoma, where a similar initiative passed in June by a 14-point margin, three red states approved medical marijuana in 2018, while Michigan became the first Midwestern state to legalize recreational use, writes Jacob Sullum.

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Graphic video released Friday show’s a sheriff’s deputy in Faulkner County, Arkansas casually shooting a small dog after the owner refused to walk outside of his yard to talk to the deputy, in what the owner says was an act of retaliation.

According to local news outlet NEA Report, the Faulkner County Sheriff’s Office responded to a call of an aggressive dog in the town of Conway. When deputy Keenan Wallace arrived outside of Conway resident Doug Canady’s house, Canady refused to walk out to the sidewalk to talk to him.

“OK, I’m going to come to you, and if your dog gets aggressive, I’m going to shoot it,” Wallace responds in cell phone video captured by Canady.

The dog in question was more chihuahua than pit bull, but nevertheless, Wallace strode onto the lawn, and when the small animal started yapping at him from several feet away, he shot it in the face.

Watch the video below:

The dog, somewhat miraculously, survived with a shattered jaw. A GoFundMe page to raise money for the animal’s veterinary bills has already exceeded its goal.

Arkansas outlet KATV reports the deputy has been placed on paid administrative leave while the sheriff’s office investigates the shooting. The deputy is a K-9 handler.

Reason has been reporting on egregious incidents of police shooting dogs for years now. As I wrote last September, reporting on a new pilot program to train officers how to read dog behavior and avoid shooting them:

[T]he proliferation of video technology and social media has led to local stories of dog shootings going viral and ricocheting around the country. There’s a whole category of stories on Reason’s website called “puppycide.” For example, there was the time last year that a Louisiana cop shot a 12-pound dog and then allegedly told the family it was a “shame” he “had to waste that bullet because it’s a really expensive bullet.” Or the NYPD officer who shot a woman’s dog seconds after it slipped through the door and walked toward him wagging its tail. Or the Oklahoma cop who used a high-power rifle to shoot a dog through a fence during a five-year-old’s birthday party. Or there was the time in 2012 that a SWAT team in St. Paul executed a wrong-door raid, shot the family dog, and then allegedly forced three handcuffed children to sit next to their dead pet.

Just how many dogs a year are shot by police is not known or tracked in any systematic way. A Justice Department official speculated in a 2012 interview with Police magazine that the number could be as high as 10,000 a year, calling it “an epidemic,” but that figure is little more than a guess. A 2012 study by the National Canine Research Council estimated that half of all intentional police shootings involved dogs. Public records obtained by Reason showed Detroit police shot 54 dogs last year. Chicago police shot or shot at 700 dogs over the last decade, according to the Chicago Tribune.

But the above video might be one of the most malicious and inexcusable instances caught on camera, besides maybe the time a Detroit cop was caught on dashcam video executing a dog while it was chained to a fence.

To the extent that the dog posed any threat to the sheriff’s deputy, there was no attempt, at least in the video, to resolve the situation with anything other than lethal force. The deputy didn’t ask the Canady to restrain the dog. He didn’t attempt to use a less-than-lethal alternative, like the taser he was armed with and which he subsequently drew on Canady. He simply pulled his gun and shot to kill.

A movement to ban porn is gaining steam on some college campuses—and it’s mostly led by male students.

Jim Martinson, a senior at Notre Dame, penned a letter to the campus newspaper in October asking the administration to install a porn filter so that students wouldn’t be able to access websites like Pornhub and Redtube on the university’s wifi. Martinson’s argument against porn is threefold: He claims it is immoral, it warps men’s brains, and it dehumanizes women. As he wrote in his letter:

Pornography is the new sex education, providing a disturbing script about what men find sexually appealing and what women should do to please them. Notre Dame’s sincere efforts to educate students about consent and other aspects of healthy sexuality are pitifully weak in light of the fact that by the time students arrive on campus, many have been addictively watching pornography for years.

Porn is not acting. The overwhelming majority of contemporary pornography is literally filmed violence against women — violence somehow rendered invisible by the context.

More than 1,000 students signed his petition to ban porn, according to Inside Higher Ed. What’s more, he is now in contact with students at other campuses working on the same issue. As The Daily Beast reported:

Georgetown senior Amelia Irvine, a conservative firebrand, told The Daily Beast that Martinson’s letter inspired her to push for something similar at her Catholic university. She plans to recruit support over the winter break and start an open letter or petition in the spring.

Students at secular schools like Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania also said they were excited by the idea, but were still figuring out how it could work on their campuses. At Princeton and Penn, students said they were already tabling and handing out fliers about the dangers of pornography on campus.

“I’m excited and I think we can really get this done,” Martinson said. “And I’m also confident that if we do get it done at Notre Dame, that other universities will follow suit.”

The Daily Beast correctly noted that some of Martinson’s claims are dubious. There’s scant evidence, for instance, that porn makes men behave more violently toward women, or rewires their brains in some fundamental way. If anti-porn students don’t want to consume it, that’s fine—but they shouldn’t force this choice on everyone else.

Notre Dame is a private institution, and administrators would be within their rights to restrict students’ access to pornography. They could block access to other websites that may conflict with religious doctrine as well: They could stop students from accessing websites that were pro-abortion or pro-gay marriage. Most people would probably recognize such restrictions as fairly obvious abridgements of free expression, legal though they may be. Banning porn websites is no different. Thankfully, few colleges have indicated that they will acquiesce to the demand.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education told The Beast that Notre Dame would earn a “red light” rating—mean that the campus is highly restrictive of speech—if it banned porn.

“Most pornographic, sexually explicit, and offensive material is protected under the First Amendment,” wrote a FIRE spokesperson. “As such, any institution that claims to protect free speech should not treat pornography substantially different than other protected speech.”

The best argument against banning porn on campus, though, was articulated by Notre Dame student Jeffrey Murphy, whose editorial in the student paper, “Give Me Pornhub or Give Me Death,” is worth reading in full.

On June 14, 1993, President Bill Clinton announced his pick to replace retiring Justice Byron White on the U.S. Supreme Court. “Ruth Bader Ginsburg cannot be called a liberal or a conservative,” Clinton declared of his nominee. “She has proved herself too thoughtful for such labels.”

The president was half right. Ginsburg, who was 60 years old at the time, already had a long and distinguished record as a litigator, a law professor, and a judge on the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. She was undeniably thoughtful.

At the same time, Ginsburg was undeniably a liberal. Indeed, she was arguably one of the greatest liberal lawyers of her generation. Today, after serving 25 years on the high bench, Ginsburg stands as the outspoken leader of its liberal wing, writes Damon Root.

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In December, England’s chief medical officer, Sally Davies, urged the nation to adopt still more “taxes on unhealthy food high in sugar and salt.” This was just months after England’s soda tax took hold.

“Those sectors that damage health must pay for their harm or subsidise healthier choices,” Davies says in a report that suggests the tax money should be used to underwrite purchases of fruits and vegetables.

Davies’s argument came just days after details of a draft British government proposal to institute byzantine calorie restrictions on a variety of foods.

“Calorie limits will be imposed on thousands of foods sold in supermarkets and restaurants in a bid to combat obesity,” The Telegraph reported on Christmas day. “Draft proposals seen by The Telegraph set out detailed caps for ready meals, sandwiches[,] and even portions of vegetables served across the country.”

Will Britain’s plans to regulate the country to better eating habits and health succeed? It sure doesn’t seem likely, writes Baylen Linnekin.

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The U.S. Supreme Court will once again tackle the question of political gerrymandering—and whether there should be any limitations on the practice—later this year.

The justices announced Friday that they would hear a pair of cases appealing lower court ruling that struck down congressional districts for being unfairly crafted to benefit one party. In a case coming out of North Carolina, Republicans are appealing a district court ruling that struck down the state’s latest congressional map (drawn in 2016 after a previous map was also struck down by the courts) for being a partisan gerrymander. In the other case, Maryland’s Democratic attorney general is appealing a district court ruling that found the state’s congressional map, drawn in 2011, unfairly turned a Republican-leaning district into a Democratic one.

Together, the two cases present a new opportunity for the high court to provide further legal guidance regarding partisan map-making before all 50 states are scheduled to redraw their congressional and state legislative district maps following the 2020 census.

But reformers probably should not get their hopes up just yet, in part because of what happened just a few months ago at the Supreme Court. In June, the court issued rulings in a pair of challenges to congressional district maps from Maryland and Wisconsin, but ultimately declined to place any limitations on partisan map-making. A case from North Carolina was also heard by the Supreme Court in 2018, but was remanded to a lower court without a ruling.

In the Wisconsin case, Chief Justice John Roberts authored a unanimous opinion outlining where the court stands on the question of gerrymandering. Roberts’ opinion made it clear that a successful challenge to partisan redistricting must rest on the disenfranchisement of individual voters, rather than on the claim that one political party has been harmed. “This Court is not responsible for vindicating generalized partisan preferences,” he wrote. In other words, specific cases of disenfranchisement are fair game—and, indeed, courts at all levels have for decades acted to strike down political maps that seem gerrymandered to limit the political influence of racial minorities, for example—but Roberts does not want to step into the middle of what is ultimately a political fight between Democrats and Republicans.

Paul Smith, a vice president with the Campaign Legal Center, which is working on the North Carolina case this year, said Friday he believed the new challenge was “following the road map” outlined by Roberts last year.

The other major reason why the Supreme Court has never ruled conclusively on gerrymandering has to do with the lack of an objective standard for identifying just how badly gerrymandered a district is. Without that, the court must deal with “a quantifying judgment that is unguided and ill-suited to the development of judicial standards,” is how the late Justice Antonin Scalia put it in a 2004 Supreme Court ruling that also declined to set substantial limits on gerrymandering.

Reformers thought they had cracked that problem last year. The Wisconsin case rested on a mathematical formula known as the “Efficiency Gap” that promised a quantifiable standard for gerrymandering. But, as I wrote in a Reason feature last year, the Efficiency Gap had its own flaws, and the court was not convinced.

The two cases before the court this year are more narrow than the statewide challenges from 2018, and thus seem to reflect Roberts’ guidance that the Supreme Court would only consider cases where specific voter disenfranchisement has occurred. The Maryland case, for example, deals exclusively with the state’s 6th district. Prior to 2011, that district occupied the relatively rural northwestern corner of the state and was decidedly Republican, but the current district includes a long tendril that stretches into the Washington, D.C., suburbs, where high concentrations of Democratic voters helped flip the district from red to blue.

There’s one other wrinkle as the court revisits the gerrymandering question: where does newly minted Justice Brett Kavanaugh stand on the issue?

He replaced Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was the court’s swing-vote on redistricting issues. In that 2004 redistricting case, for example, he sided with the conservatives in refusing to scrap Pennsylvania’s congressional map, but he wrote a concurring opinion that seemingly opened the door to future judicial intervention if a workable, objective standard could be found. In 2015, however, Kennedy sided with the four liberal justices in a case that upheld states’ authority to transfer redistricting powers to special commissions.

Last year, Kennedy declined to join the four liberal justices who signed a concurring opinion in the Wisconsin case. In that opinion, Justice Elena Kagan outlined a potential legal path forward for the broader, statewide approach to evaluating redistricting that Roberts eschewed. Once there is sufficient standing established, Kagan argued, then statewide evidence (such as the Efficiency Gap metric) and a statewide remedy could be on the table.

Kavanugh’s appointment is widely assumed to shift the court to the right, but there’s practically nothing in Kavanaugh’s judicial record to indicate how he would approach the thorny legal questions surrounding redistricting (something that Congress maybe could have asked about during his confirmation hearings, instead of focusing almost exclusively on his drinking habits during high school).

This year’s redistricting cases, then, present not another another opportunity for the Supreme Court to clarify it’s stance on how much gerrymandering is too much gerrymandering. It will also give states an idea of how the new majority on the court will view future redistricting cases. If Kavanaugh sides firmly with Roberts and the rest of the conservative wing, it will indicate that reformers must look elsewhere to put an end to state legislatures abusing their redistricting powers.

f there were any doubt of the direction the Trump-dominated GOP is taking, Tucker Carlson’s monologue on Fox News Wednesday should remove it. Carlson’s not a political leader, but he’s a bellwether, and his words are already being cheered by prominent conservatives. Meant as a rebuttal to Mitt Romney’s New Year’s Day op-ed, the speech wasn’t original, but it reveals the degree to which Republicans have embraced the populist authoritarianism they once condemned.

Carlson began with several swipes against “bankers” who exploit the working class to line the pockets of spooky elites. If that anti-capitalist lingo sounds familiar, so does his contemptuous shrug at the ways free markets improve lives. “Does anyone still believe that cheaper iPhones or more Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to make us happy? They haven’t so far.” This is a time-worn rhetorical technique of freedom’s enemies, who sneer at material standards of living in order to elevate abstract social goals over the needs of actual people. In fact, cheaper consumer goods have benefited Americans immeasurably. Some 85 million now own iPhones, for instance, and use them not as trinkets, but as work tools or devices to keep in touch with loved ones. And while Amazon may deliver “plastic garbage,” it also delivers syringes to diabetics, toys for special-needs kids, and even prosthetic limbs for the disabled—all, of course, made of plastic. Freer markets and abundant, affordable imports, have made the average American wealthier than Rockefeller, and 90 times richer than the average human being, writes Timothy Sandefur in his latest at Reason.

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A hearing is scheduled on January 15 in a U.S. District Court in Austin, Texas, in a federal lawsuit over the state of New Jersey’s law that bars distributing digital information that could assist in making a gun to anyone in that state who is not a registered or licensed gun manufacturer.

Defense Distributed, a company founded by Cody Wilson, inventor of the first plastic 3D-printed pistol, and dedicated to distributing hardware and software aiding in home gunsmithing, is involved in a multi-front legal battle over the distribution of their digital files. In this particular case, they are insisting that the Jersey law violates “violates the First Amendment, Commerce Clause, and Supremacy Clause.”

Their argument in Defense Distributed and Second Amendment Foundation vs. Gurbir Grewal (New Jersey’s attorney general) seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against enforcing the law is that New Jersey has:

enacted a criminal law for the purpose of silencing one specific entity’s speech…Proof lies in the words of the New Jersey Governor that signed the bill and the Attorney General charged with enforcing it. They are not hiding from the fact that New Jersey created a speech crime for Defense Distributed in particular. They are embracing it. New Jersey’s Governor signed Senate Bill 2465 at a public ceremony with Attorney General Gurbir Grewal and the bill’s leading legislative sponsor, Senator Joseph Cryan….The official statements delivered in conjunction with Senate Bill 2465’s enactment prove that this law is an integral part of the censorship effort against the Plaintiffs…This is not a matter of inference. The Governor and Attorney General both said so expressly and repeatedly, in no uncertain terms.

Their argument is based on the principle that computer code counts as speech protected by the First Amendment. As the suit says, “New Jersey’s law obviously imposes content-based speech restrictions, in that its penalties apply only to speech with this content: ‘digital instructions’ that ‘may be used to program a three-dimensional printer to manufacture or produce a firearm, firearm receiver, magazine, or firearm component.'”

In addition, “the statute covers not just actual distribution of the ‘instructions’ at issue, but also an ‘advertise[ment]’ of instructions or an ‘offer’ of instructions. But of course, if no actual delivery of the instructions occurs, none of the state interests that could possibly justify the statute come into play.”

The attorney general of New Jersey explicitly said regarding the law in question that:

bad actors were trying to take advantage of loopholes because no law squarely addressed printable guns or ghost guns. So we had to rely on other laws, like our public nuisance law or our assault weapons law, to fight back…a law right on point strengthens law enforcement’s hand even more. And so today, there is no question that printable guns and ghost guns are deadly, and selling them in New Jersey is illegal. And that’s why I’m so proud to support Governor Murphy’s efforts and the legislature’s efforts to close those loopholes, to stop the next Cody Wilson, to fight the ghost gun industry…

In addition to the speech claims, the suit further insists New Jersey’s law violates the commerce clause as that clause “does not allow a state to ‘regulate conduct that takes place exclusively outside the state,'” Defense Distributed further argues that the law violates the Supremacy Clause by attempting to outlaw certain acts legal under the federal Communications Decency Act of 1996 and to override a federal decision to license Defense Distributed to distribute computer files that can facilitate gunmaking.

New Jersey had been threatening Defense Distributed with such legal actions even before the new law at issue in this suit was passed, as Attorney General Grewal indicated above. This suit insists that since “[New Jersey’s] demands could not allege that the speech at issue violated any statute because, at that point, no state had dared to enact such a law” the state passed the law merely to bedevil them. This injunction request is meant to stop them from getting away with it.