Why You Shouldn’t Want Congress To Regulate Facebook & Other Social Media

As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg prepares to testify before both houses of Congress this week, a little more of the internet prepares to die.

We are in a social panic over social media, and the final outcome will almost certainly be some sort of government regulation or self-regulation-by-shotgun (think Comics Code Authority) that will ultimately serve only regulators and the dominant companies that help to write the new rules.

But come on, we’ve got to hurry up! Science says social media makes us depressed, alienated, lonely, bad-smelling! Social media is a vector for youth violence! FFS, even Facebook, which boasts over 2 billion users worldwide, says it makes us crazy and might even be “destroying how society works!” Worst of all, social media—and all the Russian hacking and fake news it abetted—might have helped Donald Trump become president. Regulate now!

“Net neutrality,” the federal government’s attempt to play traffic cop and CFO of the internet by regulating the business practices of mobile and fixed ISPs, is so 2015. Remember when Twitter was fomenting revolutions in autocratic hellholes and allowing the world to express its solidarity against terrorism by shading our avatars this or that color? Now, the very government that only grudgingly admitted that yes, it was in fact collecting all of our metadata and more, is riding to the rescue to save our “privacy” and all that’s still good and decent in cyberspace. It has summoned Mark Zuckerberg to explain his business, his dark arts, and his intentions. Like past barons of once-new industries whose growth curves have slowed or started falling, he’s keen to play ball with the government. “I actually am not sure we shouldn’t be regulated,” he said recently. “I think the question is more ‘What is the right regulation?’ rather than ‘Yes or no, should we be regulated?'” Folks in meatspace and online media, especially those who have seen their circulations and audiences tank over the past few years due to Facebook’s ever-changing plans, priorities, and algorithms, are cheering such developments.

We are in a slow-motion chokehold when it comes to online speech and behavior, and the Facebook drama must be seen in that larger context. Some of the new censoriousness proceeds from congressional action but much of it is cultural. For many in the media, the rise of Trump and the alt-right means that free-speech absolutism must yield to concerns over hate speech, conspiracy-mongering, Russian trolls, and fake news. Individual sites and services such as Backpage, which catered to personal ads that routinely blurred the line between friend-for-pay and prostitution, have been shuttered by the feds, while Craigslist has understandably closed down that whole wing of its operation, which often provided support and community to marginalized groups other than child molesters. Twitter is accused of “shadowbanning” people, mostly conservatives, or purposefully reducing the reach of some people’s messages on that network, when it’s not simply banning others for speech-code violations. YouTube is “demonetizing” videos with political or sexual themes, thus depriving creators of their God-given rights to make money at YouTube by selling ads against views. (The mass shooter at YouTube’s headquarters, a militant vegan, claimed as much.) YouTube’s corporate big brother, Google, sells placement in its search engine results and (again, supposedly) tamps down findings that its administrators consider awful or rotten or repellent. Nobody looks at the second page of search results, don’t you know, so if you’re not first, you’re last, or completely immaterial to the public, and that’s not fair or something. And then there’s Facebook, which has a long history of not giving a fuck about anything other than the passing whims of its creator and the wallets of its investors.

In an online-outrage culture that lurches from one screaming match about the last stand of civilization to the next, it’s genuinely difficult to remember any, much less all, of the times Facebook has supposedly violated all of us, its loyal users who provide not just content for the platform but dead souls to whom advertisers can sell shit. Do you remember the time that Facebook’s commissars told us that they get to keep our data even when we leave the platform? Or that they tracked us across even outside their “walled garden,” used our likes to direct advertising, and employed facial recognition software on us? When they suppressed conservative groups? How many websites made a “pivot to video” at Facebook’s urging only to die when audiences didn’t follow? What about that 2011 consent decree in which the service agreed to safeguard user data and privacy?

But let’s cut to the chase. The real reason many people in Washington and the media are so bent out of shape is because when Facebook wasn’t spreading supposedly fake news that supposedly threw the 2016 election to Donald Trump, it was allowing a shadowy, sketchy, pro-Trump group called Cambridge Analytica to “scrape” and “spider” and “mine” your profile and…do what, exactly?

This is actually where all the horror stories about the terrible effects of social media go to die. There appears to be little to no question that Cambridge Analytica broke Facebook’s existing privacy policies by using data it had no right to have. Facebook, too, didn’t seem particularly vigilant or interested in protecting user data, even though it promised to. These are serious terms-of-service violations and there should indeed be fallout, for Cambridge Analytica and for Facebook.

But what Cambridge Analytica did—use a social network to find and message people who might be interested in Trump—is not so different from what the Obama campaign did in 2012. Indeed, the whole point of a social network is that you can find and reach people who share particular interests and predilections with much greater ease and accuracy. You can do that to start an online group, sell soap, or push particular candidates or issues. Targeted advertising isn’t simply a boon to sellers, of course. It also means that recipients are more likely to care about what messages they’re receiving.

That basic dynamic is busily being recast as something so sinister and dark that it must be reined in by Congress, industry, or some mixture of both, especially when it comes to politics. Google’s former chief technology advocate tells The Atlantic that Cambridge Analytica “passed the data to those who could weaponize it and use to against America, FB’s homeland.” What? Since when does getting what is effectively a mailing list turn into the ability to “weaponize” anything? So many necessary steps are missing in this equation. Let’s say you receive a list of good prospects for whatever message you want to send. What does it take to motivate someone to actually get up and do something, whether buy a car or pull a lever for a candidate? And is that a bad thing, in any case?

People are talking about “social-media marketing” as if we are automatons being brainwashed by what old-school overwrought critics of postwar abundance such as Vance Packard called The Hidden Persuaders and Wilson Bryan Key (Ph.D.!) called Subliminal Seduction. Fears that we are being secretly programmed by outside forces—ad men, communists, outer-space aliens, gods, you name it—are neither new nor particularly convincing. Those very same anxieties are always thrown at new forms of communication and expression. Early critics of the novel, for instance, were terrified that the original audience of young, impressionable women, would suddenly acting out like the heroines they read about. In the 1950s, comic books and television were charged with creating juvenile delinquents, homosexuals, and worse. In the not-so-distant 1990s, conservative politicians such as Bill Bennett and Bob Dole and liberals such as Janet Reno and Joe Lieberman improbably attacked the Law & Order franchise, The Simpsons, and increasingly ubiquitous cable TV shows for violent crime rate that promptly started declining.

Every new medium breathes fear into the existing order. And that’s what is happening now, with a twist: Zuckerberg and his counterparts at other social-media platforms seem ready, willing, and able to trade some level of autonomy for a regulated sphere of activity in which they can lock down their present dominant positions. Twitter and Facebook both have hit rough patches in which they are struggling to maintain, much less, grow in the United States. Twitter lost American users year over year between 2016 and 2017; this year, even before the latest controversy, Facebook lost users in North America. Little more than a decade in, social media companies are growing soft in the middle. It only makes good business sense for them to want to structure their worlds a bit more, doesn’t it? It’s less important that they are able to grow their audiences than it is for them to keep upstarts from eating their lunch.

But while the solons of social media start working with the government to keep the internet safe from microtargeted ads and to unintentionally usher in a new age of spam and electronic junk mail, it will be up to those of us in the culture at large to create a new ethos of social-media literacy, one that fosters our abilities to filter and critically analyze the information we’re sucking in like baleen whales suck in krill. This is less difficult or novel then it might seem. If each new form of media creates a social panic, they also create new levels of self-consciousness. Indeed, in the 1990s, just as cable TV and the World Wide Web vastly multiplied our daily flow of information, popular culture standards ranging from Beavis and Butt-head to Mystery Science Theater 3000 to The Simpsons to The Onion to The Daily Show to Howard Stern’s radio program taught us how be more critical about the narratives we were consuming in ever-greater amounts. When it comes to social-media scrutiny, University of Maine journalism professor Michael Socolow floated a framework on how to avoid fake news. To “prevent smart people from spreading dumb ideas,” Socolow suggests not sharing surprising news that doesn’t include links to evidence or data, being especially skeptical when a story perfectly validates your worldview, and always asking yourself, “Why am I talking?”

Those three practices are hardly a start. But they’ll do far more than any likely policy from D.C. or Facebook to empower us to enjoy the internet without turning cyberspace into a shadow of itself. As Mark Zuckerberg talks to Congress, remember that the only regulations that might be worse than those dreamed up by governments are those suggested by an industry itself.

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Bombs Away in Syria: Podcast

“Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria,” President Donald Trump tweeted over the weekend. “Area of atrocity is in lockdown and encircled by Syrian Army, making it completely inaccessible to outside world. President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price…to pay.” So what will that mean, precisely?

The president said this morning that he would make a decision on responding to the “heinous attack” within the next 24-48 hours, adding that such a “barbaric attack…can’t be allowed to happen.” As he was making that announcement, the Reason Podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and me, was wrapping up its Monday episode. In addition to wargaming Syria, assessing new National Security Adviser John Bolton, and wondering what this all does to Trump’s favored policy of troop withdrawal, the editorial quartet discussed refugee policy, the president’s deployment of National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, our burgeoning trade war with China, and Facebook honcho Mark Zuckerberg’s coming perp walk on Capitol Hill.

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Relevant links from the show:

Hawks Cheer and Doves Cry as Trump Fails to Follow Through on Syrian Withdrawal,” by Christian Britschgi

The Trump Administration Is Pursuing Regime Change in Syria Under the Guise of Fighting Terrorism,” by Daniel DePetris

5 Things About John Bolton That Are Worse Than His Mustache,” by Jacob Sullum

As World Refugee Population Hits All-Time High, U.S. on Pace to Welcome Third-Lowest Percentage in Recorded History,” by Matt Welch

Wait: Why Do We Need MORE Troops To Stop FEWER Illegals?” by Nick Gillespie

Trump’s National Guard Deployment to the Border Is Political Theater, Just Like Obama’s and Bush’s,” by Matt Welch

How Congress Could Stop Trump’s Trade War, and Why It Might Not,” by Eric Boehm

Trump’s Trade War Will Crush American Farmers, Fuel Soy Boys,” by Eric Boehm

Trump, the Anti-Business President,” by Steve Chapman

‘Free-Market’ Conservatives Welcome Their New Protectionist Overlord,” by Matt Welch

Beware Censorship by Proxy,” by Jesse Walker

Apple Wants Washington to Fix Facebook,” by Ira Stoll

Don’t Look to the State to Keep Social Media Companies From Imposing Ideological Conformity,” by J.D. Tuccille

Obama Harvested Data from Facebook and Bragged About It. Why Are We Only Freaking Out About This Now?,” by Declan McCullagh

Don’t miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)

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Rep. Justin Amash on Trump, Ryan, and the ‘Stupidity’ of How the Government Spends Your Money

Since arriving in Washington in 2011, Justin Amash has cast more consistently libertarian votes than any other member of Congress. A lawyer by training, the 37-year-old Michigan Republican is an outspoken defender of due process, civil liberties, and defendants’ rights. He is also resolutely non-interventionist and friendly toward immigrants. Outspoken in his principles, he rarely misses an opportunity to excoriate his GOP colleagues when they fail to live up to the party’s limited-government rhetoric.

“There is such a level of stupidity right now in the way we spend money,” says Amash, an opponent of ever-increasing Pentagon budgets and adventurism overseas. He is also a fierce critic of Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.): “The speaker has not been protecting the institution. You need a speaker in there who is an institutionalist, who cares about the institution first, who is not a partisan.” Instead, Amash tells Reason‘s Nick Gillespie, Ryan is protecting individual members from having to cast votes for which they might be held responsible. “Let Republicans and Democrats and others offer their amendments, and let’s have votes on all sorts of things, substantive things, not just post offices like they do now.”

He is also fed up with Republican scapegoating of immigrants and refugees. “My parents are immigrants,” he explains. “My dad’s a Palestinian refugee. I think that a lot of his experience rubbed off on me. That he came from a place where he had no rights. He came here as a refugee. He told me all the time how wonderful it was to be in this country. How blessed we were to have been born in this country. That we have an opportunity here.”

Amash is known for explaining each of his votes on Facebook and for maintaining a lively Twitter feed, where he excoriates Democrats and Republicans whenever they seek to expand the size, scope, and spending of the federal government.

“The omnibus is one of the worst—and most costly—pieces of legislation ever to become law. Period. That’s why I voted no,” Amash tweeted after his congressional colleagues passed a 2,300-page bill they clearly had not read.

This interview was conducted at Reason Weekend, our annual donor event, which was held this year in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Click here for full text, transcript, links, and downloadable versions.

View this article.

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Trump Mulls Military Response to Syrian Chemical Attack

The guided-missile destroyer USS Porter (DDG 78) conducts strike operations while in the Mediterranean Sea, April 7, 2017.An apparent chemical weapons attack against a rebel-held Damascus suburb has left dozens dead, prompting condemnation from Western leaders and raising the specter of a military response from the U.S. government.

At least 42 people were found suffocated in their homes in the town of Douma, while an additional 500 sought medical aid for exposure to chemical agents, according to the Syrian American Medical Society. Photos and video circulated by Syrian Civil Defense, an opposition group, likewise showed lifeless bodies with foam around their mouths.

“Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria,” tweeted President Donald Trump yesterday. He pinned the blame on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his allies: “President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price…”

Israel has already responded with an airstrike against a Syrian military base. The U.S. has since given indication that it may take further action, with Defense Secretary James Mattis saying that he wouldn’t rule out airstrikes. Trump promised a “major decision” on Syria within 48 hours.

In rushing to respond to this latest attack, policymakers are failing to consider either the effectiveness or the risks of military action, says John Glaser, a foreign policy expert at the Cato Institute.

“What are we actually trying to achieve? The last strike had zero strategic or tactical utility,” Glaser tells Reason, referencing the missile strike Trump ordered against Assad last April for a prior use of chemical weapons. “It didn’t improve the humanitarian situation. It didn’t deter the Assad regime from taking action against his own people and killing his own people.”

At least three uses of chemical weapons by the Syrian government have been alleged in 2018 prior to Sunday’s attack. Both the Syrian government and rebel forces have used chemical weapons during the country’s now eight-year-old civil war, according to the United Nations.

Only a fraction of the 400,000 people killed in the Syrian civil war have been victims of chemical weapons attacks notes Glaser, making the attention spent on their use “strange.”

“Gas and chemical weapons hold a special place in our minds for revulsion and cruelty,” says Glaser, “but it’s not all that rational, I think, given how deadly the other forms of warfare have been in this civil war.”

John Mearsheimer, an international relations scholar at the University of Chicago, has made this point as well, saying in 2014 that “the idea that getting killed by gas is more horrible than getting ripped apart by shrapnel and bullets is not one I buy.”

While there is little chance that U.S. air strikes will deter Assad from targeting civilians in the future, says Glaser, there is a good chance that it will escalate the conflict, given that both Russian and Iranian forces continue to fight alongside the Syrian government.

“We’re going to be competing in the air with Russia and potentially coming into a clash with them,” he says. “Iranian forces are on the ground. If we kill a bunch of Iranians in these strikes, is it going to disentangle into some kind of fight against Iran in the region which would be deeply costly?”

In addition, the Trump administration lacks the legal authority to take action against Assad regime. Congress has not authorized military action against the Syrian government.

Whether any of this will be enough to deter Trump from escalating military involvement in Syria remains to be seen.

Trump expressed a desire for the U.S. to pull out of Syria—where we currently have some 2,000 troops tasked with fighting ISIS—as recently as last week. But the president has also failed to follow through on these more dovish instincts.

The advice he is going to be receiving is likely to become even more hawkish. John Bolton’s first day as national security advisor is today, and CNN is reporting that he’s leading an emergency meeting to formulate a Syrian response.

While Bolton has previously expressed some skepticism about U.S. intervention in Syria, he has also endorsed military action against Iran and has suggested a sustained U.S. military presence in Syria could check Iranian influence in the country.

“John Bolton has never been met with an opportunity to use U.S. military force that he didn’t say yes to,” says Glaser. “If he sees this as an opportunity to use military action as a demonstration that we’re still number one, we’re the boss, we’re the global superpower—that very well might convince Trump.”

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The Simpsons Admitted Apu Is Problematic, Just Not the Way People Wanted

On last night’s episode of The Simpsons, the show finally addressed the controversy surrounding the character of Apu, who some viewers consider a racist character of an Indian man.

Apu, an Indian immigrant and manager of the Kwik-E-Mart, is voiced by Hank Azaria, a Jewish man. His portrayal of Apu has drawn criticism—most recently in the 2017 documentary, The Problem with Apu—for relying on ethnic stereotype. Indian comedian Hari Kondabolu, the film’s star, is a Simpsons fan who grew up being thankful for Apu’s existence but has come to view the character as extremely problematic.

In a clip from the episode, Marge sanitizes a bedtime story, prompting Lisa to point out that the politically correct version is pretty boring. “Something that started decades ago and was applauded and inoffensive is now politically incorrect,” she says. “What can you do?” A portrait of Apu sits in the corner of the screen as she says this.

Kondabolu was not pleased.

Elsewhere, public reaction was thunderous. NPR’s Linda Holmes accused The Simpsons of essentially telling Kondabolu to “drop dead.”

“So Lisa, the show’s unshakable crusader for justice, including in matters of popular culture, has been reduced to a mouthpiece for the lazy idea that asking for better representation is an unfair burden on creators; an unreasonable demand that things be ‘politically correct,'” wrote Holmes. “That is regrettable, to say the least.”

Joe‘s Carl Kinsella went even further, calling the episode “a gaping wound where the show’s funny bone used to be. A malignant tumour in its brain blocking the path of any possible introspection whatsoever.”

I don’t agree. The clip was clearly introspective. After lamenting that erasing all offense can make for uninteresting comedy, Lisa tacitly references the show’s history of depicting Apu as a stereotype. Marge say that “some things will be dealt with at a later date, if at all.” Many seem to be interpreting this as the writers letting themselves off the hook (The New York Times called it “a dismissal”), but I’m not so sure. It sounds like The Simpsons is making fun of itself for not handling this whole thing better, ater also mocking the humorlessness of political-correctness-run-amok. The expressions on their faces say a great deal: Lisa and Marge look uncomfortable, even regretful, rather than defensive.

This falls well short of a full apology, and thus it isn’t surprising that Kondabolu and company aren’t satisfied with it. But The Simpsons didn’t dodge The Problem with Apu. The writers evidently think the problem is more complicated.

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Medicare Agency Retreats From Arbitrary Limit on Pain Medication

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has retreated from a proposed rule that would have forced many patients to choose between living in agony and shelling out thousands of dollars more every year for pain medication.

Under the original proposal, Medicare generally would not have covered prescriptions for 90 or more morphine milligram equivalents (MMEs) per day. While there were exceptions for cancer and hospice patients, other Medicare beneficiaries suffering from severe chronic pain would have been out of luck unless their doctors mounted successful bureaucratic appeals. CMS reported that 1.6 million Medicare patients received daily opioid doses of 90 MME or more in 2016.

Not surprisingly, the 90-MME cap provoked strong objections from patients and doctors. “The 90 MME hard edit guidance was strongly opposed by nearly all stakeholder groups for a variety of reasons,” CMS reported last week. “Physician groups opposed the forcible/non-consensual dose reductions due to the risks for patients of abrupt discontinuation and rapid taper of high dose opioid use. Similarly, we received hundreds of letters from patients who have taken opioids for long periods of time and are afraid of being forced to abruptly reduce or discontinue their medication regimens with sometimes extremely adverse outcomes, including depression, loss of function, quality of life, and suicide.” Furthermore, “the overall consensus was that a 90 MME-per-day hard edit threshold would have little clinical impact against opioid overuse.”

The final policy adopted by CMS instead requires a pharmacist who receives a prescription above the threshold to confirm it with the doctor and document the discussion. Stefan Kertesz, the University of Alabama at Birmingham internist who organized a letter in which hundreds of physicians objected to the original plan, told The Hill the revised policy is “humane and reasonable.”

The 90-MME cutoff was copied from the supposedly nonmandatory opioid prescribing guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Controll and Prevention in 2016. The CDC said doctors “should avoid increasing dosage” above 90 MME per day, or at least “carefully justify a decision to titrate dosage” above that level. Critics say that threshold, which many doctors have interpreted as a hard cap, is arbitrary because patients vary widely in the way they metabolize and respond to opioids, especially if they have developed tolerance after taking pain medication for years. Thanks to the CDC’s advice, patients across the country have seen their doses dramatically reduced, even when they had been responding well to opioids for years.

Given that experience, it is hard to believe the CMS did not anticipate the backlash that its “hard edit guidance” would generate. Like the CDC, it seems to be pursuing the mission of reducing opioid abuse with little thought of the consequences for innocent bystanders.

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If Police Kill Because Citizens Are Afraid, That’s a Problem

On Saturday evening in Portland, Oregon, a pack of police cornered and fatally shot a man who apparently was wielding and stabbing himself with a knife in a homeless shelter. Observers have been questioning whether the cops rushed too quickly to open fire.

The man, since identified by family as John Elifritz, 48, was suspected of involvement in a reported carjacking that evening. Police followed him into a homeless shelter, where witnesses say he was cutting himself and otherwise behaving erratically. He had a criminal history and drug issues.

The man’s shooting was captured on film and posted on social media. Watch below (warning: it’s intense):

There’s an awful lot of cops in there, and their behavior absolutely magnifies the terror of an already scary situation. Whatever “de-escalation” looks like, it’s certainly not a dozen cops screaming at somebody. (Meanwhile, Mayor Ted Wheeler is calling on citizens to demand Portland City Council fund more than 90 new police officers for the apparent purpose of busting up homeless camps.)

The shooting also provides an important insight into eyewitness responses. A bystander who captured the incident on video says he thinks the police were justified and that Elifritz “lunged” at an officer before they shot him. That’s not what the video shows. The man was staggering a little bit and was nowhere near the officers before they began open firing. Police say he waved his knife at a police dog on the scene, which also isn’t apparent in the video.

But he clearly scared the hell out of a lot of people, including the witness. And on the basis of fear, some people will accept any response from police.

Just last week, some New York cops killed a man who had been carrying a small metal pipe. The police shot Saheed Vassell almost immediately after arriving on scene. Security footage showed him walking up to people and pointing the pipe at them as though it were a gun, these people’s fear is certainly real and justifiable.

Neighborhood police knew that Vassell was bipolar and apparently had helped him out several times and taken him to a psychiatric hospital. They had also, according to The New York Times, handed him 120 court summonses for offenses over the years. But the officers who responded to the 911 calls were not the neighborhood police who dealt with Vassell and knew about his problems. His shooting was not captured on police body cameras.

I am not here to downplay how scary it must have been to be in either of these situations surrounding these two men. But when we justify police shootings based on fear of what might happen versus actual identifiable threats, the end result is that we end up giving police permission to shoot and kill citizens just entirely on the basis of being afraid (or saying they were afraid).

We see this play out again and again in police killings. A Sacramento officer screamed “Gun!” over and over as he and his partner opened fire on Stephon Clark. Clark had been holding a phone, not a gun. It happened in St. Anthony, Minnesota, when a police officer panicked at a traffic stop and opened fire on Philando Castile after Castile told him he had a gun legally in his possession.

Because we give police the power and authority to kill people, it’s of utmost importance to hold officers to a higher standard than merely “fear.” The fact that an eyewitness in Portland justifies a shooting by how scared he personally felt goes a long way toward explaining how this keeps happening.

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Sniffing Out Fake News Isn’t Hard: New at Reason

True or false?Say you’re a person of average intelligence (or higher) who likes to keep abreast of the news and who therefore follows several sources of it. Lately you’ve seen a number of people, not least among them the president of the United States, screaming about Fake News. You may well be wondering how, in the current fractured media landscape, you’re supposed to discern who is telling the truth, who is lying—and who is telling the truth or lying about who is telling the truth. What is to be done?

Here’s one thing that is emphatically not to be done: Emulate Malaysia, which has just outlawed “fake news” and authorized prison terms of up to six years for so-called offenders. If there’s anything worse than having giant news corporations, social-media censors, and search-engine algorithms decide what you can and cannot see, it’s having the government make that decision.

Besides: Teasing out the true from the false is really not so hard. A. Barton Hinkle offers a few tips.

View this article.

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Trillion-Dollar Deficits Are Back and Here to Stay

Budget-watchers have been predicting the return of trillion-dollar deficits for months. That forecast will likely become offical—or as official as these things can ever be—later this week, when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) releases its annual outlook for revenue and spending.

The 2018 Budget and Economic Outlook will be the CBO’s first major assessment of the federal government’s fiscal trajectory since December’s sweeping tax bill and February’s two-year budget deal, which shattered spending caps and boosted federal outlays by more than $400 billion. Either of those developments would have been likely to increase future deficits, but together they’ll be like adding cocaine to your morning coffee. Even under the sunniest set of assumptions, the tax bill will add between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion to the deficit over the next decade; the spending plan tacked on another $320 billion.

That means trillion-dollar deficits are the “new normal,” says Stan Collender, author of The Guide to the Federal Budget, in a new column at Forbes. It fact, the deficit is likely to push well above the $1 trillion in future years.

Because the CBO can only make projections based on current law, its outlook will include the phase-out of some tax cuts in the middle of the next decade. That means the CBO will be forecasting higher revenue levels near the end of its 10-year forecast, even though it’s politically unlikely that those phaseouts will be allowed to occur, Collender explains.

For much of the same reason, other independent analysts, such as the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, are already saying the deficit could push toward (or even past) the $2 trillion threshold by the end of the 2020s.

President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are likely to use a well-worn page of their playbook to remind everyone that trillion-dollar deficits happened under Barack Obama too. This is true, of course, but there key differences between the years 2008–2012 and today. Those four years of trillion-dollar deficits happened during and immediately after the so-called Great Recession, which cratered tax revenues and saw increased government spending on a variety of mostly ill-conceived and generally wasteful efforts to stimulate the economy or bail out certain industries.

Today, unemployment is less than 4 percent and the economy has been humming along with hardly a hiccup for several consecutive years. Government coffers should be full to the brim, or at least they shouldn’t be running dry.

It’s also true that the White House’s official budget projects a mere $363 billion deficit in 2028. But getting to that level requires Congress to enact more than $1 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade—something that seems well beyond the realm of fantasy and nearing the border of complete political impossibility. While some members of Congress care about reducing deficits, it is now clear that the Republican majority in both chambers and the Republican in the White House have little interest in being responsible stewards of the federal purse. And the Democrats aren’t exactly offering a fiscally responsible alternative.

Keep in mind that all these projections include the underlying assumption that the economy will continue to grow for the next decade. What happens if there’s another recession?

“If the economic outlook doesn’t turn out to be as rosy as the White House is promising, the very high Trump era federal budget deficits will be even higher,” says Collender.

Within a few years, we might be wishing for the return of merely trillion-dollar deficits.

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