Tag: hit&run

Senate Republicans just passed a major rewrite of the tax code on a party line vote, with only one GOP dissent. The vote puts Republicans significantly closer to permanently altering the shape of the U.S. tax code, which has long been a priority for party leadership.

If the legislation becomes law, it would be the first major rewrite of the tax code since the Reagan administration. The bill would substantially cut the corporate tax rate, which analysts say would help spur economic growth and make America more competitive internationally. At the same time, passage of the bill also represents a significant abdication of the GOP’s promises to legislate transparently and not increase the deficit.

A separate version of the bill has already passed in the House last month. The two pieces of legislation are now expected to advance to a conference committee where House and Senate negotiators will attempt to work out the differences, after which the two chambers will have to vote again. Alternatively, the House could simply pass the Senate bill unchanged.

The bill was in flux until the last minute, with significant objections coming from a group of senators who said they were concerned about the bill’s effect on the deficit. Under President Obama, Republicans frequently criticized Democrats for failing to read or provide sufficient time to debate major legislation.

But as of late Friday afternoon, after Republicans secured commitments to vote for the bill, final legislative text had not been published. When the final text of the legislation did appear late in the evening, it was covered in handwritten notes and alterations.

Two more pages of changes to the Republican tax bill—these ones in handwriting. http://pic.twitter.com/rYQoe9brUB

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) December 1, 2017

The Senate version is projected to increase the deficit by a little more than $1.4 trillion over the next decade. Republicans backing the bill have insisted that the plan will make up the revenue by spurring additional economic growth, but they have not produced official analysis reaching the same conclusion. Although Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin repeatedly promised that the administration would provide a dynamic analysis, no such report has been released.

Independent analyses have found that some of that decline in revenue would be made up by increased economic growth. A Joint Committee on Taxation Report released yesterday estimated that even with dynamic effects the bill would still increase the deficit by about $1 trillion; more favorable estimates have put the effect on the deficit closer to $400 billion.

Throughout the week, there were reports that the bill would address worries about the deficit with the inclusion of a “trigger” mechanism that would automatically raise taxes if yearly economic growth projections fell short. But that plan fell through last night after the Senate parliamentarian told GOP leadership that it wouldn’t be allowed under the reconciliation process that Republicans relied on to pass the bill with a simple majority.

One of the senators who objected to the bill on fiscal responsibility grounds was Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). But on Friday he announced his support for the bill after securing the elimination of an expensing provision and a promise from party leadership to enact permanent protections to recipients of the DACA immigration program that started under President Obama.

I will support #TaxReform bill after securing language to eliminate an $85 billion budget gimmick as well as commitment from the administration & #Senate leadership to advance growth-oriented legislative solution to enact fair & permanent protections for #DACA recipients http://pic.twitter.com/MGbWX7JrPq

— Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) December 1, 2017

The Senate bill makes major changes to both individual and corporate taxation. It permanently slashes the corporate tax rate from 35 percent down to 20 percent, alters the way that businesses can expense new equipment, and reduces taxes on income earned by pass-through businesses, a tax structure in which corporate profits are taxed as individual income. Those changes could create an incentive for many businesses to restructure as pass-throughs as a form of tax arbitrage, which is what happened when the state of Kansas attempted a similar change. An analysis by the Tax Foundation found that the Kansas provision encourage tax avoidance but not economic growth.

The bill also cuts individual tax rates, nearly doubles the standard deduction, gets rid of the personal exemption, expands the child tax credit, and eliminates or caps several major tax code deductions, including the state and local tax deduction. It modifies, but unlike the House plan does not repeal, the alternative minimum tax, which disallows some deductions by high earners. Over the next decade, filers at all income levels would see a tax cut.

However, unlike the corporate tax reduction, which is permanent, the individual rate reductions are phased out by 2026, creating a major policy cliff, and nearly guaranteeing high-stakes legislative showdowns. The sunset was designed largely to ensure that the bill conformed with Senate budget rules, which require that legislation passed via the reconciliation process not increase the deficit after a decade. Republican leaders have argued that Congress is not likely to let those tax cuts expire. That, in turn, would result in a significant long-term deficit increase.

Among the biggest changes in the Senate bill is the elimination of the tax penalty associated with Obamacare’s individual mandate, which could have significant effects on the stability of the exchanges, which have already seen high premiums and insurer drop outs, and thus on the number of people in the country with health insurance. The House bill did not eliminate the mandate, but repeal is likely to remain a part of whatever the two chambers negotiate in conference.

Eliminating the mandate lowers the deficit by about $340 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, as a result of about 13 million fewer people signing up for Medicaid and subsidized coverage in the exchanges. The savings help offset the budgetary effects of the bill’s tax reductions. Some Republicans, however, have argued that the CBO’s estimate attributes too much coverage to the mandate, which would mean that the deficit reduction is also too high as well.

Under the Obama administration, Republicans frequently criticized the president for high deficits and allowing the national debt to increase. Throughout the year, GOP leadership promised that the bill’s budgetary effects would be fully offset by eliminating loopholes and deductions. That didn’t happen.

The bill could still change in conference, but between the effects of repealing the mandate and the expiration of the individual tax cuts, it is probable that the final legislation will end up increasing the deficit far more than most estimates suggest.

So while it represents a significant legislative victory for the GOP, and the advancement of several longtime policy goals, it is also one that confirms that for the Republican party, fiscal responsibility was never more than a politically convenient pretense.

Yesterday, I taped a spirited conversation with former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler about net neutrality for WNYC’s On the Media program.

My main points included the following: Net neutrality rules are unnecessary based on the actual history of the internet and set a dangerous prededent for government control of the ‘net; the way in which net neutrality rules were implemented is a classic case of overreach by the administrative state; and to the extent we all agree that competition is the best way to create better, more varied products and services at ever-more-affordable prices, net neutrality is a complete diversion.

Here’s the edited version of that debate, which was moderated by Bob Garfield.

For more Reason coverage of net neutrality, go here.

This is Reason’s annual webathon week, during which we ask our audience to support our activities with tax-deductible donations. If you like what we do, please consider supporting us. More details here.

On November 21, current FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced a draft resolution to repeal the agency’s 2015 net neutrality rules. I spoke to him hours after his announcement. Go here to read a full transcript and click below to listen to my interview with Pai.

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Good, old-fashioned goats and the ancient Hindu practice of yoga are two things that don’t seem to go together.

And yet, last year, a small farm in Corvallis, Oregon started offering classes that combined the two. Goat yoga is exactly what it sounds like: the practice of yoga in the presence of goats.

Watch the video to find out what happened when the unstoppable force of goat yoga locked horns with the immovable object of the Washington, D.C. Department of Health. When Congressional Cemetery Director Paul Williams applied for a livestock permit in the District of Columbia, he was greeted by four lawyers “ready to throw every curve ball they possibly could at me to prevent goat yoga.”

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• Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn has plead guilty to lying to the FBI, and has said that he will cooperate in the ongoing Russia inquiry. Read Reason‘s coverage of the news here.

• White House is apparently a roach motel.

• More Republicans get on board with DACA fix.

• Trump says Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is keeping his job for now, calls reports to contrary fake new.

• Quebec’s provincial legislature passed a motion instructing all shopkeepers to greet customers with the French ‘bonjour’, not the English-French ‘bonjour-hi’ used by many.

Part of the get-out-the-vote campaign for the special Senate election in Alabama includes a push to get felons freed from prison registered again so they can cast a ballot on December 12.

When AL.com reported on a pastor who claims to have gotten thousands of felons registered to vote before a deadline that passed earlier this week, here’s how GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore responded:

BREAKING: Democrat operatives in Alabama are REGISTERING THOUSANDS OF FELONS all across the state in an effort to swing the US Senate election to Doug Jones! #ALSen https://t.co/tIaKPMJDPd

— Judge Roy Moore (@MooreSenate) November 29, 2017

The organization involved is actually a religious nonprofit involved in things like soup kitchens, adult literacy classes, and youth programs.

What’s actually happening here is that Alabama, back in May, passed a law that allowed more felons to regain the right to vote after they’ve been released from prison. It was backed by both GOP-controlled halves of the state legislature and was signed into law by Republican Gov. Kay Ivey.

Alabama law strips voting rights from citizens convicted of felonies “of moral turpitude.” But the state didn’t clearly define what it meant by “moral turpitude,” instead listing five offenses that specifically did not count. The new law, dubbed the Definition of Moral Turpitude Act, lists all the crimes—more than 40—that are bad enough that offenders will lose their vote. It hits all the major felonies: murder, manslaughter, rape, kidnapping, etc. (Also, “enticing a child to enter a vehicle, house, etc., for immoral purposes.” Just making note of that, given the allegations of sexual misconduct against Moore.)

In short, the restoration of these felons’ voting rights is not about Moore at all. It’s about bringing people who have done their time and moved on with their lives back into a role as contributing members of society.

There’s no reason these people shouldn’t have their rights restored—no reason, at least, that isn’t fundamentally bound up with a candidate or party’s political concerns. Moore’s tweet doesn’t make a coherent argument about why these felons shouldn’t have their voting rights restored. He cares only that they might vote for his opponent. This, somehow, is supposed to be an inherent outrage.

“We trust that time is linear,” says the narrator in the early moments of Netflix’s new sci-fi series Dark. But what if “yesterday, today and tomorrow are not consecutive”? A few minutes later, a young boy is showing his newest magic trick to his dad, a variant of the venerable street hustle in which a pea moves from under one cup to another, unseen. “How did it do that?” wonders the dad. “The question is not how,” replies the magisterial young kid. “It’s when.”

From these snapshots, you can tell a good deal about Dark: that it’s about time travel. That the producers read a screenwriting textbook that contained a chapter or 10 about foreshadowing. And that watching this thing will require a degree of patience that would make Job look like somebody who accidentally took crystal meth in place of his OCD medicine. Television critic Glenn Garvin explains more.

View this article.

Clinging to Obama-era Title IX guidelines, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute pursued rape charges against a male student that were later tossed out in court. The kicker, Lindsay Marchello writes, is the student wasn’t enrolled at RPI.

Even had the university had jurisdiction, Elliott said, “the procedure followed by RPI in this case was arbitrary, capricious, and in clear violation of [the] Petitioner’s rights.”

According to court documents, there was a possible language barrier between John Doe and the Title IX investigators. The university requested a meeting with John Doe without informing him that he was under investigation. It wasn’t until he arrived at the meeting that he was told he was the subject of a sexual misconduct complaint. His Title IX inquisitors gave him only a few minutes to review documents pertaining to the charge before questioning him. Without counsel.

The court ordered RPI’s findings overturned and the statements John Doe gave to RPI purged from the record.

“The court has spoken, and actions taken by universities without jurisdiction and in excess of their sexual misconduct policies and Title IX will not be tolerated,” Brent French, one of John Doe’s attorneys, told the Times Union.

View this article.

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Check out this novel take on the sexual harassment and assault scandals that are clear-cutting vast parts of Hollywood, the news business, and private companies:

We’re rightfully concerned about how the internet gives corporations more opportunities to exert power over consumers, but we talk far less about the flip side: We have more power over companies now, too. For better or worse, we’ve all become remarkably effective at mobilizing it to our own causes.

In contrast, look at Washington. If either Representative John Conyers Jr. or Senator Al Franken were in today’s corporate world, they’d be long gone. And just imagine if Roy Moore was a candidate for a C-suite job this month. He’d have no shot….

The modern American capitalist system is far from perfect. But for all its flaws, our system — and the digital communication channels it enabled — has delivered social justice more swiftly and effectively than supposedly more enlightened public bodies tend to.

As we observe and adjust to the sociosexual storm we’re all in, let’s appreciate the powers and paradigms making it possible: feminism, but also free markets.

That’s an op-ed written by Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown and published in The New York Times earlier this week. It’s not simply a sharp, bold, and provocative take on changing social mores, it’s an explicitly libertarian take that stresses individual agency and responsibility, the ways in which new forms of communication empower the voiceless, and why even powerful corporations can be brought to heel by market forces.

Brown’s piece, titled “NBC Didn’t Fire Matt Lauer. We Did,” exemplifies one of the major services Reason provides for its readers and like-minded libertarians. Not only do we publish dozens of articles every day, hundreds of videos and podcasts every year, and an award-winning magazine every month, our writers and editors appear all over the place, representing libertarian views where they are mostly lacking.

We don’t just preach to the choir at Reason, we go into the dragon’s lair and do battle with right-wingers, left-wingers, and everyone in between who wants to limit the way you can live your life. We strive to be your voice in national debates about politics, culture, and ideas, a voice that argues for hard-core libertarian principles such as autonomy and self-ownership, the right to be left alone, and the ability to live without having to ask permission for every deviation from the “norm” when it comes to lifestyle, business, or whatever.

Editor-at-Large Matt Welch is a one-man wrecking crew when it comes to appearing on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, making sure that “Free Minds and Free Markets” have a seat at the table; he’s a regular on satellite radio to boot. He and I have both had memorable appearances on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, where libertarians are greeted the way Nikolai Volkoff and the Iron Sheikh were greeted by professional wrestling crowds in the 1980s. In recent months, Liz Brown has been joined in the Times’ pages by colleagues Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Robby Soave. We show up in The Washington Post, too, which employs a couple of former Reason staffers (David Weigel and Radley Balko), The Daily Beast, The Week, and just about every place in print, online, or on air that you can think of.

Later today, for instance, you can catch me on NPR’s wildly popular show On the Media, where I’ll debate net neutrality with Tom Wheeler, the former Federal Communications Commission chairman who implemented those very rules.

We’re not shrinking violets when it comes to representing, that’s for sure. We take our ideas, beliefs, and policies seriously. And we take seriously our role as the leading libertarian organization advocating not simply for reducing the size, scope, and spending of government but for a world in which individuals are free to pursue happiness as they define it.

I’ll leave you with more recent example of how Reason is taking its message—and yours—to the streets. Or at least to people who haven’t been exposed to libertarian ideas. On November 3, Katherine Mangu-Ward and I debated the editors of the socialist magazine Jacobin about the ethics and effects of capitalism at New York City’s Cooper Union. It was packed house (900 tickets were sold!) and mostly hostile not simply to laissez-faire but to even the idea of private property or wage work.

This sort of missionary work is part and parcel of what we do. In advertiser-speak, it’s part of our unique-selling proposition: We go out into the world spreading the good word of Reason wherever and whenever we can create an opportunity. Even and maybe especially in hostile territory.

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Dallas’ new “cite and release” program for marijuana possession illustrates just how ridiculous marijuana prohibition laws are to begin with.

The program for offenders caught with up to 4 ounces of marijuana is limited to a very certain kind of offender. Only offenders who have not been caught in a drug-free school zone, who have not previously been convicted of a crime, who have no outstanding warrants, have a valid state ID, and are residents of Dallas County will be eligible.

And despite its name, the penalty for marijuana possession is still not actually a citation. Possession of up to two ounces of marijuana can be punished by up to six months in jail and a fine of $2,000, while possession of up to four ounces of marijuana can be punished by up to a year in jail and a fine of $4,000. First time offenders will continue to have the opportunity to enter a diversionary program.

Police, of course, will continue to confiscate your marijuana if they catch you with it.

According to the Dallas Police Department, more than 400 people who were taken to jail last year would have been eligible for “cite and release.” Between January and May of last year alone, police arrested more than 1,300 people for marijuana possession.

Police officials insist the new program will cause less disruption in people’s lives but that relief is temporary; eventually they will have to go to court and succesfully fight the charge to avoid a jail sentence. It’s also not a one-way street—police benefit because they won’t have to spend limited resources hauling non-violent drug offenders into jail.

As marijuana is decriminalized and legalized around the country, the attempts to hold on to the principles of prohibition appear increasingly antiquated and outdated.

Half-measures like this one, especially, bring the motivations behind prohibition into stark relief. Who are anti-marijuana laws are supposed to benefit, anyway? The fewer the penalties against marijuana possession the clearer the answer to that question is.

Moves like keeping marijuana offenders out of jail prior to trial, converting marijuana possession from a misdemeanor to a merely citable offense, or even legalizing and regulating marijuana, reveal revenue generation to be the primary driver of anti-marijuana laws.

No matter how liberal currently existing marijuana laws have gotten, government revenue is still at the center. To lawmakers and bureaucrats, the taxes and fees associated with legal marijuana appear to be the most important component.

So it likely is with virtually all government ventures.

According to the story the Wyoming Attorney General’s Office is telling, Phil Parhamovich was moved during a traffic stop last March to donate $91,800, his life savings, to the state’s Division of Criminal Investigation to help it wage the war on drugs. Parhamovich’s version is rather more plausible: He says state police took his money after pressuring him to sign a “waiver” that circumvented even the limited protections offered by Wyoming’s civil asset forfeiture law. Today Parhamovich is in state court, trying to get his money back with help from the Institute for Justice, which argues that Wyoming’s roadside waivers are a thin disguise for highway robbery.

Parhamovich, a Wisconsin musician, was on his way to a gig in Salt Lake City on March 13 when a state trooper, Jeramy Pittsley, pulled him over on Interstate 80 in Laramie County for failing to buckle his seat belt. The stop turned into an interrogation, during which Pittsley asked, “Is there anything in your vehicle I should know about, such as guns, drugs, large amounts of cash, methamphetamines, heroin, cocaine, marijuana, PCP, LSD, etc.?” Parhamovich, startled that Pittsley suddenly suspected him of criminal activity, said no.

Pittsley walked a drug-sniffing dog around Parhamovich’s minivan. “At first,” the Institute for Justice says, “the dog seemed to find nothing interesting about the vehicle. Then, the trooper gestured with what appeared to be a hidden tennis ball, and the dog responded.” The cops used that “alert” as an excuse to search the minivan, and eventually they found $91,800 inside a speaker cabinet. The cops were so excited by their discovery that they high-fived each other. The windfall also apparently made them forget that there was no trace of the drugs that Pittsley’s dog supposedly had detected.

Parhamovich had earned the money legally, largely by fixing guitars and selling old farmhouses after renovating them. He brought the cash with him when he went on tour because he worried that it wouldn’t be safe at his apartment in Madison. He planned to used $80,000 of it for a down payment on a Madison recording studio he was in the process of buying.

Now the troopers were insinuating that there was something illegal about carrying that much cash. There isn’t, but Parhamovich was so intimidated that he initially denied the money was his, saying the speakers and the cash belonged to a friend. Despite that denial, the troopers presented him with a waiver saying, “I…the owner of the property or currency described below, desire to give this property or currency, along with any and all interests and ownership that I may have in it, to the State of Wyoming, Division of Criminal Investigation, to be used for narcotics law enforcement purposes.” Because he had the impression that he would not be free to go otherwise, Parhamovich signed the form without understanding the legal consequences.

The waiver Parhamovich signed is aimed at getting around Wyoming’s civil forfeiture rules, which the state legislature had tightened just a year before. The 2016 reforms included a requirement that law enforcement agencies prove seized property is connected to a crime by “clear and convincing evidence,” a tougher test than the “preponderance of the evidence” standard it replaced. The legislation also mandated a probable cause hearing within 30 days of a seizure, required that property owners receive 15 days’ notice of forfeiture hearings, and allowed judges to award them damages and attorney’s fees when they successfully challenge forfeitures. But because Parhamovich “voluntarily” signed away his property, the cops did not have to worry about any of that.

Four days after the traffic stop, Parhamovich sent a letter to the Wyoming Highway Patrol and the Attorney General’s Office, seeking to rescind his waiver and asking to be informed of any relevant legal proceedings. The Attorney General’s Office received three pieces of mail from Parhamovich in March and April, including documents verifying the sources of his money and his planned purchase of the recording studio. Parhamovich also submitted an electronic public records request. Each time he included his contact information, and he got two letters back from the Attorney General’s Office, which nevertheless failed to notify him of its May 4 petition seeking to keep his money or the July 5 hearing at which the petition was granted. Instead the office placed a notice in a Wyoming newspaper, where Parhamovich, who lives in Wisconsin, would be sure not to see it.

Parhamovich is now seeking a new hearing, one that he will actually have an opportunity to attend. He also argues that his traffic stop was illegally extended, since Trooper Pittsley had no reasonable grounds to suspect he was involved in criminal activity; that he was entrapped by “misleading and compound questions that wrongly suggested it was illegal for him to be traveling with cash”; and that Pittsley and his colleagues did not have probable cause to search his minivan or seize his money.

Like other cases of highway robbery by police officers, Parhamovich’s experience illustrates not only the perversity of civil forfeiture and the immorality of the war on drugs but the peril of giving cops license to harass motorists at will. If Wyoming did not have a paternalistic law authorizing it, Pittsley would not have been allowed to pull Parhamovich over for failing to buckle his seat belt, a quintessentially self-regarding decision. If the Supreme Court had not ruled that a canine’s olfactory inspection does not count as a search under the Fourth Amendment, Pittsley would not have been allowed to walk his drug-sniffing dog around Parhamovich’s minivan. If the Court had not ruled (unanimously!) that an “alert” by such a dog provides probable cause for a search, Pittsley and his buddies would not have found Parhamovich’s money. The sort of conscious cuing alleged by Parhamovich is just one reason the Court’s faith in police dogs is misplaced.

These are the decisions that have created a society where armed agents of the state detain and search people on the slightest pretext, stealing whatever money they happen to find.