Tag: hit&run

The so-called Camp Fire in Butte County, California, has led to the deaths of 85 people and destroyed 13,972 homes, making it the deadliest wildfire in the state’s history. Sadly, California law makes it likely that another fire will soon claim that dubious distinction.

Thanks to the state’s funky way of regulating insurance, residents in fire-prone areas have little reason to move out of harm’s way after the last ember has cooled, says Ray Lehmann, an insurance policy expert at the R Street Institute. “California makes it really difficult for the market to do what it would normally do in these cases, which is when assessments of risk go up, insurance rates go up, and a place becomes less attractive to build there,” he says.

As with many of California’s problems, its dysfunctional insurance market can be traced back to a decades-old ballot initiative, writes Christian Britschgi.

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The Chinese has stepped up its efforts against Christians and Muslims and other religious believers, and according to one officer, they have even instituted a point system and quotas for arrests of religious believers. Each police station is evaluated quarterly. They get points for the number of believers arrested, their faith and for any leadership positions the people they arrest hold. They get the most points for members of the Falun Gong and the Church of the Almighty Gong. A station chief who doesn’t meet his quota can be fired.

In recounting the story of Laurel and Hardy, whose Hollywood career spanned 24 years and more than a hundred films, a good place to begin turns out to be the end. Stan & Ollie dispenses with origin stories—Stan Laurel’s in the British music-hall business with Charlie Chaplin, Oliver Hardy’s in the remote Florida film industry of a century ago—and after making a brief stop at the Hal Roach Studios near Los Angeles in 1937, during the duo’s years of worldwide glory, heads directly to 1953, when the movie work has dried up and we find the two troupers on a theatrical tour of Britain and Ireland, parading their old comedy bits across provincial stages for adoring but meager audiences.

Director Jon S. Baird and writer Jeff Pope have made a movie of gratifying simplicity. It’s about a pair of decent men who are trying to maintain their dignity in diminishing circumstances, amid the usual trials of sickness and age, and they are so unlike most of the movie characters one customarily encounters in contemporary films that their gentle charm seems exotic. It helps, of course, that they’re played by two actors in top form. Steve Coogan deftly mimics the simpleton cluelessness of Laurel’s comedic persona while also managing to step it down a bit in order to create a plausible private personality for the man. And John C. Reilly, his face shining soulfully through a heavy padding of fat-man prosthetics, perfectly captures Hardy’s beaming sweetness, and the unexpected daintiness of his stage dancing. (And who better to deliver a ukulele-borne rendition of “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” or nuzzle into a cute duet with Coogan on “Trail of the Lonesome Pine”?)

The plot is of minimal complexity. The boys’ health isn’t what it once was (Hardy has mounting heart problems) and their hopes for a more easeful future center on a planned meeting in London with a producer who’s putting together the financing for another Laurel and Hardy movie. (Stan is already writing the script for it in his hotel room after their shows: it’s a comical Robin Hood picture, and in one small glowing scene here we see a snippet of that never-made film playing out in lush color in Ollie’s mind.)

Stan and Ollie were unlucky in love, and even more so in divorce court. (“I’m never getting married again,” Stan tells his partner. “I’m gonna just find a woman I don’t like and buy her a house.”) Fortunately, their final wives do turn up, played both amusingly and touchingly by Shirley Henderson and Nina Arianda. (Arianda’s Ida Laurel is a hard-boiled former dancer who demonstrates her concern for her husband’s well-being—which is real—by snatching up the drinks he tries to sneak and drinking them herself.) The loving support these two women provide their mates is an important part of the movie’s emotional texture, although the central love story naturally plays out between the two men.

Stan and Ollie’s tour is basically a downhill excursion—toward the end they find themselves judging a seaside bathing-beauty contest, of all things. But the movie’s spirit of loving regard for these two showbiz pros never flags, and we’re not inclined to resist the inevitable moments of eye-moistening sentiment. “It was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it?” Ollie asks Stan, “I’ll miss us when we’re gone.”

Is it good news that “the CEOs of four of the nation’s five biggest defense contractors—Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defense arm of Boeing—are now women”?

On Wednesday, Politico published an article called “How women took over the military-industrial complex.” Though “military-industrial complex” always feels like a pejorative term, David Brown’s piece strikes a positive note; it’s written in that delicately faux-neutral fashion that presumes the institutions in question are swell, and that ladies in them sweller still. And yeah, straight white men dominating every other sexuality, gender, race, and creed isn’t the answer to any good question. But the Hillary Clinton–ready logic of Wow, a WOMAN now runs the National Nuclear Security Administration feels, at best, like some serious wheel-spinning.

And yet here we have women solemnly giving their lean-in tips on being in charge of a world-threatening nuclear arsenal, writes Antiwar.com Contributing Editor Lucy Steigerwald for Reason.

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Like many politicians before him, President Donald Trump promised to address the national debt. In fact, Trump told The Washington Post reporters in 2016 that he planned on eliminating the then $19 trillion debt in just eight years—the length of his presidency should he serve a second term. While his promise was always rather aggressively optimistic, a new report indicates that the American debt is steadily moving…in the wrong direction.

A report from the Treasury Department shows that 2018 ended with the national debt standing at $21.974 trillion. This means that $2 trillion in debt has accumulated since Trump’s promise to eliminate it completely.

The debt consists of $16 trillion in public debt, or what the American government owes to domestic and foreign investors, and $5.8 trillion in intra-governmental debt, which is what is the American owes to public accounts like Social Security. If those numbers aren’t terrifying enough, Reason columnist Veronique de Rugy explains, the national debt has more than doubled since George W. Bush’s presidency in 2009. To give some perspective, in “the last 10 years, the federal government has accumulated more debt than in its entire existence leading up to that period.”

Trump is not solely to blame for this problem. Though he previously rallied voters over entitlement reform, former House Speaker Paul Ryan failed to make any meaningful changes while the Republican Party controlled Congress, and long-term structural problems plague the whole endeavor.

The impending debt crisis cannot simply be solved by economic growth either. In an interview Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Riedl told Reason‘s Eric Boehm that America essentially has two options left: “Either significantly raise taxes on the middle class or significantly cut benefits to current seniors. If we do neither, you will have a major financial crisis.”

Are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s supposed enemies on the right secretly working to make her look cool? Because that’s the impression you might gather from a series of weak-sauce attacks on the young congresswoman from New York, who was sworn in to office earlier today.

On Wednesday, an anonymous Twitter account affiliated with QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory, released video footage purportedly from Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s high school years (though her “Boston University” t-shirt suggests it was filmed while she was a college student). “Here is America’s favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is,” the anonymous account promised.

In a word, nope:

Here is America’s favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is…
…High School video of “Sandy” Ocasio-Cortezpic.twitter.com/s723Vga9zF

— AnonymousQ (@AnonymousQ1776) January 2, 2019

Not that this video needs any additional context—she’s dancing, who cares?—but it’s actually a reenactment of a parody of a famous scene from the beloved 1985 film The Breakfast Club, in which brat pack actors Molly Ringwald, Emilo Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, and Ally Sheedy find themselves dancing in detention. In the late 2000s, various young people paid tribute to the scene by filming similar dance routines set to the Phoenix song “Lisztomania.” (The first to do so was a group of friends that included Reason‘s own Elizabeth Nolan Brown, of all people.) Ocasio-Cortez’s video looks pretty much like all the others; if anything, it’s kind of adorable.

The video’s leak follows weeks of attempts by some conservatives to paint the democratic socialist darling as inauthentic. The Gateway Pundit dug into her high school activities and treated the discovery that she used to go by the nickname “Sandy” as some kind of dark revelation. The article by Jim Hoft also attempted to undermine AOC’s working-class credibility by pointing out that she attended an elite school in Yorktown rather than a struggling school in the Bronx. The Daily Wire‘s Michael Knowles has also advanced this line of argument, noting that AOC lived in relative comfort for most of her upbringing. But while Ocasio-Cortez may have occasionally overstated her working-class roots, she has always been relatively upfront abourt her time in Yorktown, and contrasted this privilege with what she encountered when she would visit the Bronx. Moreover, she did face economic insecurity after the death of her father, which forced her and her mother to work odd jobs in order to stave off foreclosure.

And then, of course, there was conservative writer Eddie Scarry’s infamous creepy tweet in which he posted a picture from right behind Ocasio-Cortez, claiming “that jacket and coat don’t look like a girl who struggles.”

Conservatives who obsessively comment on Ocasio-Cortez’s wardrobe and dance video are feeding into the narrative that the right is anti-women and doesn’t treat them seriously. Bafflingly, they are also attacking her strengths. Being a young person with a sense of style is a good thing! Occasionally unwinding, dancing, and livestreaming dinner while taking questions from constituents: also good.

Stop wasting time on these personal attacks and criticize Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist ideas instead. Explain why they are unaffordable and unworkable. For an example of going after Ocasio-Cortex the right way, see this post from my colleague Peter Suderman, who notes that by opposing pay-as-you-go accounting, AOC and her allies have signaled they won’t even try to pay for their progressive policies.

But don’t be surprised if deriding Ocasio-Cortez for, uh, having danced one time actually makes her more popular. If it’s a personality contest, AOC has just about everybody in politics beat.

A Tennessee man’s case drew national attention last year when he was sent back to prison after two years of freedom because a court ruled he had been released in error. Now Matthew Charles will be released again.

Charles’ supporters say a federal judge agreed today to resentence him to time served under the retroactive reductions for crack cocaine sentences included in the FIRST STEP Act, passed by Congress last month. That means he will be released immediately.

Charles’ plight led to calls across the political spectrum for President Donald Trump to commute his sentence, including a personal appeal from Kim Kardashian.

“Matthew’s story caught the public’s attention in a way few cases have,” Kevin Ring, president of FAMM, a nonprofit advocacy group that opposes mandatory minimum sentence, says in a press release. “People who have never met him are crying with happiness today over news of his release. There is a sense that justice—even if delayed—is still possible.”

Charles was released early from federal prison in 2016, having served 21 years of a 35-year sentence for selling crack to a police informant. Although he had a serious criminal record prior to his sentencing, Charles was a model inmate. He was a GED instructor and law clerk, he helped illiterate inmates decipher court documents, and he served his time without a single disciplinary infraction.

After his release, he reconnected with his family, found a job, and volunteered at a food pantry every week. Yet federal prosecutors appealed his release—despite a request from a federal judge to drop the appeal, citing Charles’ “undisputed rehabilitation”—arguing that, because he had been originally been classified as a “career offender,” he was ineligible for the retroactive sentencing reductions put into place during the Obama presidency.

A federal appeals court ruled that, by the letter of the law, Charles should never have been released, and last year he was sent back to federal prison.

According to Ring, Charles may be the first beneficiary of the retroactive sentencing reductions passed by Congress last month in the FIRST STEP ACT.

“We can’t think of a better person to demonstrate the value and importance of second chances,” Ring says.

Perhaps the biggest question looming over the progressive economic policy agenda is how to pay for it. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) and a handful of other left-leaning Democrats appear to have settled on answer: Don’t.

As Democrats take control of the House this week, Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, and other progressives have come out against the reinstatement of a House rule known as PAYGO, or pay-as-you-go.

Broadly speaking, PAYGO would require the House to offset expansions of mandatory spending (which mostly means entitlements) with either tax hikes or spending reductions, making the spending deficit-neutral. PAYGO would replace CUTGO, a rule adopted by the Republican House in 2011 requiring spending reductions to offset increases in entitlement spending; CUTGO does not require deficit increases stemming from a tax reduction to be offset.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi included the rule in a package of changes intended to signal a sharp break from her Republican predecessors. The message she wants to send is that Republicans, who in 2017 passed a deficit-increasing tax-cut bill on party lines and then followed up by agreeing to a bipartisan spending increase, were fiscally irresponsible. This is a political promise that Democrats won’t be.

Granted, it’s not much of a commitment. House Democrats could waive the rule any time they wanted to, and if doing so was necessary to pass big-ticket legislation they likely would. Some Democrats appear to support the rule changes only on the understanding that they won’t really be binding.

And in a larger sense, it doesn’t matter anyway, since PAYGO is encoded in statute, which requires the Office of Management and Budget to implement across-the-board spending cuts under certain conditions. But even statutory PAYGO has limits: Programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and Social Security are exempt from those across-the-board cuts; reductions to Medicare spending are capped on annual basis; and no cuts have actually gone into effect since 2010.

So the fight over the House PAYGO rule is almost entirely symbolic. At heart, it’s a debate about whether Democrats will maintain the pretense of self-imposed fiscal responsibility. Ocasio-Cortez and others who oppose the rule are arguing, essentially, that Democrats should drop it entirely, because maintaining even the pretense could make it prohibitively difficult to pass expensive legislation like single-payer health care.

On Twitter, Ocasio-Cortez, who campaigned on Medicare for All, singled out health care legislation as a reason to oppose PAYGO:

Tomorrow I will also vote No on the rules package, which is trying to slip in #PAYGO.

PAYGO isn’t only bad economics, as @RoKhanna explains; it’s also a dark political maneuver designed to hamstring progress on healthcare+other leg.

We shouldn’t hinder ourselves from the start. https://t.co/WW3UaBs7vh

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 2, 2019

In some ways, this is a response to Republicans running up the deficit over the last two years. Rep. Tim Ryan (D–Ohio) tells Vox, “Critical investments in education, infrastructure, and health care should not be held hostage to budgetary constraints that Republicans have never respected.” Other PAYGO opponents are making a pro-growth argument that mirrors the Republican argument that tax cuts pay for themselves. Khanna tells Vox, “We should make it clear that our policies will lead to growth and that’s how, long term, we will avoid uncontrollable deficits.”

Republicans certainly haven’t done themselves any favors by enacting legislation that has caused debt and deficits to rise, and this response from the Democrats was entirely predictable. Ambitious progressives were nearly certain to seize on Republican deficit hypocrisy as a way to advance their own agenda.

But this isn’t just political tit-for-tat. It’s a response to the question of how to pay for progressive policies that rejects the premise. Underlying this intra-Democratic dispute is an admission on the part of the progressive faction that they not only are unlikely to find a politically workable way to pay for their agenda, they don’t believe they should even have to try.

Even in the worst-case climate scenarios, the world’s farmers will be able to produce more than enough affordable calories to feed 10 billion people in the year 2050. So concludes a team led by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign agronomist Gerald Nelson, whose study appeared recently in Nature Sustainability; Nelson has summarized the results in an op-ed for The Washington Post.

While that’s excellent news, Nelson and his colleagues are worried that a diet rich in carbohydrate calories from abundant wheat, rice, corn, sorghum, and potatoes will be deficient in vital micronutrients needed to maintain health. “Micronutrient shortages such as Vitamin A deficiency are already causing blindness in somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 children a year and killing half of them within 12 months of them losing their sight,” notes Nelson. “Dietary shortages of iron, zinc, iodine and folate all have devastating health effects.”

Nelson argues that crop breeders need to shift their research emphasis from food security to nutrition security. “A major effort must be made to increase the productivity—the yield per hectare—of nutrient-rich foods such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and beans,” he urges. “By enhancing their productivity, we’ll make them more available and affordable.”

Certainly that would help. But an additional strategy would be to use modern biotechnology to enhance the nutritional value of such staple crops as wheat, rice, corn, sorghum, and potatoes. This is exactly what Swiss researchers have sought to do by developing golden rice, which boosts the amount of the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene in that grain. Unfortunately, fearmongering anti-biotech ideologues have for nearly two decades managed to block the commercial development of golden rice, thus condemning hundreds of thousands of children in poor countries to blindness and death each year.

Other biofortification researchers have used biotech to create rice that boosted folate in that grain by 150-fold; folate in lettuce by 15-fold; folate in beans by 84-fold. Crop breeders have used biotech to create rice varieties with higher iron and zinc content. Tomatoes, carrots, and lettuce varieties have been bioengineered to increase iodine levels.

Activists who continue to oppose the deployment of crops created by safe modern biotechnology will only exacerbate the challenges posed by the climate change they claim to worry about.

Donald Trump ran for president promising to slash red tape and deregulate the American economy. According to some recent headlines in conservative media, he’s been wildly successful.

“Trump issues fewest regulations ever,” reads the headline from The Washington Examiner. “Trump Administration Issues Fewest New Regulations in History,” blares PJ Media. The Washington Free Beacon was only slightly less boosterish, declaring: “Trump’s Deregulatory Agenda Still Rolling, but Pace Slows Slightly.”

All these posts rely on the work of Wayne Crews, a regulatory expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who noted in a New Year’s Eve blog post that the Trump administration had issued 3,367 rules in 2018, a slight uptick from 2017 but fewer than any other year going back to the 1970s (when the government first started recording such things).

The number of pages published in the Federal Register—a collection of all federal rules and public notices—is likewise only slightly higher than it was in 2017, which itself saw the lowest page count since 2001.

That might sound encouraging for fans of deregulation, but neither figure is a very good measure of how much regulation is actually occurring.

For one, the laws governing bureaucratic rulemaking require a new regulation to be written in order to get rid of an old one. This means, as Crews notes, that the “Federal Register and rule counts can both grow even in a deregulatory environment.”

More importantly, not all rules are created equal.

A rollback of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, for instance, means much more than the Coast Guard issuing a regulation about a New Year’s Eve fireworks barge in federal waters. Similarly, the number of pages in the Federal Register counts not just regulatory commands but everything from background on existing rules to summaries of public comments on potential new ones.

Perhaps a better way to gauge Trump’s deregulatory progress is to look at the Unified Agenda, a centralized collection of rules under development by some 60 federal agencies. Unlike the Federal Register, the Unified Agenda excludes most routine rulemaking that only effects the internal workings of federal departments, as well as most regulations relating to military or foreign affairs. Since 2017, most rules included in the Unified Agenda must be explicitly marked as either regulatory or deregulatory, thanks to Trump’s executive order demanding that two regulations be cut for every new one added.

According to the Unified Agenda, the Trump administration has completed 236 explicitly deregulatory actions from January 2017 through the end of Fiscal Year 2018 in September, with 85 of these being ruled ‘significant’—meaning the rule either has an annual effect of $100 million or more, or is deemed a significant departure from previous policy. That compares to 31 significant rules marked as explicitly regulatory.

This comes out to about 2.7 significant deregulatory actions for every significant regulatory one, which adds up to $33 billion in net regulatory savings since the Trump administration took office according to an October administration report.

That the balance of significant new rules is tilting toward the deregulatory side of things is encouraging, but some free market economists are still critical. Scott Sumner, an economist at George Mason University, argues that Trump’s deregulatory progress must be weighed against his administration’s restrictionist approaches to foreign trade, immigration, and investment.

Sumner also argues that some of Trump’s deregulatory efforts could be harmful if they loosen restrictions on risky, externality-causing corporate behavior while leaving in place federal subsidies and protections that encourage said corporate risk-taking.

“Imagine removing all regulations on building homes right on fragile oceanfront sand dunes, while continuing to provide federal flood insurance to those homes,” writes Sumner, arguing the result would not be a freer market but an equally distorted one where risk takers can rely on government subsidies to bail out their bad decisions.

Meanwhile, many of the Trump’s deregulatory actions—even ones promoted as examples of his regulation-slashing success—were initiated by past administrations.

That last point is less an indictment of Trump than a demonstration of the limits of how much any executive can do unilaterally to pare back the regulatory state. Taking more impactful actions—say, by eliminating some of the agencies producing these rules—would require congressional action.

The current Republican-controlled Congress has showed little interest in wholesale regulatory reform, and the incoming Democratic majority in the House will want to move in the opposite direction. As long as that is the case, the executive branch’s deregulatory efforts will continue to be, at best, marginal reductions.