Tag: hit&run

Lots of folks will give themselves and their relatives direct-to-consumer genetic testing kits as holiday gifts this year. Millions of customers have already used such kits to learn about their genetic ancestry. For example, 23andMe reports that 99.6 percent of my genes derive from Europe, with 43.2 percent being British and Irish. Also, I bear more Neanderthal variants than 85 percent of 23andMe customers, although Neanderthal ancestry accounts for less than 4 percent of my overall DNA.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) thinks the testing companies don’t provide enough privacy protection for their customers’ genetic data. “Many don’t realize that their sensitive information may end up in the hands of many other third party companies,” he said at a press conference Sunday. Schumer wants the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the situation, with an eye toward establishing rules that forbid testing companies from sharing your genetic information with other companies or researchers.

The senator did not cite any evidence that genetic testing customers are actually much worried about their privacy. I reached out to various testing companies asking if they had received many (or any) complaints from customers about their privacy policies. Only 23andMe got back to me: Spokesperson Andy Kill claimed there is “nothing substantial to report as far as customer concerns on this front.”

That sounds about right to me.

First, my bona fides. Seven years ago, I wrote an article arguing that worries about genetic privacy are way overblown. I have gone so far as to post publically my 23andMe genotype scanning results. My results are constantly updated as new information about the genetic variants tested for become available. My point is that genetic information is not special, toxic, or occult.

In any case, the direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies all post their privacy policies so that consumers can review them. All of them promise not to disclose your information without your permission. If the companies change their privacy policies, they notify users of the changes and give them an opportunity to withdraw from their services.

For example, 23andMe states, “We will not sell, lease, or rent your individual-level information (i.e., information about a single individual’s genotypes, diseases or other traits/characteristics) to any third-party or to a third-party for research purposes without your explicit consent.” MyHeritage similarly declares: “In no case is the personal information provided by our users sold, licensed or otherwise shared by us with advertisers, sponsors, partners or other third parties. We will never sell or license DNA samples, DNA Results, DNA Reports or any other DNA information, to any third parties without your explicit informed consent, and we will never sell or license such information to insurance companies under any circumstances.” Ancestry.com won’t disclose personal information to third parties without your knowledge and consent, except “as reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation, valid legal process (e.g. subpoenas or warrants served on us) or governmental or regulatory request.”

Of course, no company can promise absolutely that it can prevent disclosure through hacking.

For what it’s worth, I have basically consented to let 23andMe do whatever it wants with my genetic test results. I think that doing so advances biomedical research that will end up helping lots of people and figuring out what makes us humans tick. For example, my 23andMe genetic data was used in a study published in Nature Communications that found genetic associations with the susceptibility with some common infectious diseases and another in Molecular Psychiatry that identified genetic correlations associated with empathy. You’re welcome.

At any rate, if any people do have concerns about their genetic privacy, they have a simple way to avoid the issue: Don’t take the tests.

Disclosoure: I am a longtime happy customer of 23andMe.

Lawyers for the U.S. government are asking a judge to order the forfeiture of millions of dollars’ worth of noted “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli’s assets, including an unreleased, one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album.

Shkreli, who is facing up to 20 years in prison after being convicted of securities fraud in August, gained infamy in 2015 for jacking up the price of a life-saving AIDS drug. In a court filing today, the U.S. government is seeking $7.4 million of Shkreli’s assets in total, including a Picasso painting and a World War II Enigma machine.

But perhaps the most intriguing of Shkreli’s assets is the never-heard Wu-Tang Clan album, “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” which he bought from the Staten Island rap group for $2 million. Shkreli released a series of videos of himself smugly listening to the album, but it has yet to be released to the public.

Most property seized by the federal government is auctioned off by the U.S. Marshals Service, so in the near future you might be able place a bid on the Wu on, of all places, a federal law enforcement web site.

The U.S. Marshals Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether it has plans to auction the album, if it is forfeited.

Protect ya neck and your assets, kiddos.

Oregon has a well-deserved reputation as a progressive state, so it should come as no surprise that the state spends a lot of money on healthcare for its citizens. The surprise is how increasingly wasteful and incompetent it is at that spending.

The state released an audit that found the Oregon Health Authority spent $88 million on ineligible Medicaid recipients between the months of March and September. That in addition to revelations earlier in November that OHA made $186 million in improper, wasteful, or overgenerous payments to individuals and healthcare providers.

The report released Wednesday adds damning details to the performance of an agency caught up in repeated scandals and leadership shake-ups over its lack of transparency and poor stewardship of taxpayer dollars. The latest audit focuses on the state’s payouts to ineligible Medicaid recipients, a legacy of OHA’s past IT boondoggles.

Wednesday’s audit comes a little more than a month before Oregon voters will decide whether to approve a $673 million tax on healthcare providers to fund OHA’s Medicaid program.

“The amount of wasteful and incompetent spending at OHA has been staggering and has gone on for at least the past four years,” said Oregon Secretary of State Dennis Richardson, whose office conducted the audit.

Medicaid—the mostly federally-funded, state-managed healthcare program for the poor—comes with specific eligibility requirements (for income, residency, etc.). Following passage of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), Oregon had planned to verify Medicaid recipients’ eligibility through something called Cover Oregon, the state’s Obamacare exchange.

However, after spending roughly $300 million the state abandoned Cover Oregon in favor of the federal Healthcare.gov exchange. In addition to the wasted tax dollars, the state was without a systematic method of verifying Medicaid eligibility. Over the next three years, annual eligibility determinations were only conducted sporadically, leaving a long backlog of verifications.

Oregon spent another $116 million on Oregon Eligible (ONE) system—four times what it initially estimated—to fix the problem. ONE was supposed to eliminate the backlog by February, but did not complete the task until the end of August.

Wednesday’s audit determined the delay caused the state to pay out the additional $88 million to ineligible recipients. The audit also uncovered glaring inadequacies in OHA’s ability or even willingness to identify and prevent improper payments.

Declining to audit Coordinated Care Organizations (CCO)—which pass payments between the state and Medicaid providers—resulted in $74 million in overpayments to individuals who were eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare.

OHA reportedly took months to respond to audit requests that should have taken minutes, and often provided incomplete or erroneous information. Lower-level OHA staff were told not to communicate with auditors’ requests directly, but instead pass information through managers.

Auditors also report OHA managers sitting in on their interviews with lower-level staff, something they said might have led staff to be less forthcoming.

During the course of the audit, Lynne Saxton, OHA’s Director, was forced to resign over an unrelated scandal. Her replacement, Patrick Allen, has so far proven more forthcoming about the agency’s shortcomings, revealing in a letter to Gov. Kate Brown that OHA had dispensed at least a further $112 million in improper payments on a grab- bag of programs, including $1.5 million in federal funds for abortions.

The audit comes at a time when an increasing number of national and state-level Democratic lawmakers are endorsing a single-payer healthcare system, in part because they will believe it will save money and reduce inefficiencies in our current healthcare system.

If progressive Oregon is any guide, government bureaucrats are about as good at managing a healthcare system as they are at pretty much everything else.

Should The New York Times be lobbying followers of its Opinion Twitter account to call a senator about the tax bill?

David Harsanyi writes:

Journalists will often complain that readers don’t properly understand the distinction between editorialists and reporters. To be fair, it’s often quite difficult to tell. That’s not only because of some biased coverage or because the internet has largely wiped away the compartmentalization of the traditional newspaper; it’s because reporters now regularly give their opinions on TV, write “analysis” pieces and make their ideological preferences clear on social media. Many news outlets—The Daily Beast, BuzzFeed, etc.—unapologetically report from a left-wing perspective.

I’m not sure whether this kind of transparency is necessarily a bad thing, but whatever the case, an editorial board is still run separately from a newspaper. It offers arguments regarding public policy and culture. Ideally, it publishes op-ed columns by an array of voices with varying points of view, and it even occasionally challenges the preconceived notions of readers. When I was a member of an editorial board, our mission, at least as I saw it, was to offer rigorous good-faith arguments for whatever point of view we were taking. I never once consulted anyone in the newsroom.

In his botched sting on the Washington Post this week, conservative provocateur James O’Keefe demonstrated just how easy it is to either confuse the editorial board with the newsroom or manipulate readers to confuse them. At some point, though, it can also be the paper’s fault. What happens when an editorial board goes beyond arguing for liberal positions and debating policy to actively politicking? There’s a vital distinction to be made between political discourse and partisan activism.

View this article.

“Our fertility decline is on par with serious, durable fertility declines in other big, developed countries, and may be extremely difficult to reverse,” warns Lyman Stone, an economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. By his calculations, America’s total fertility rate has dropped from 2.1 kids per woman in 2007 to 1.77 now. Stone thinks this is a problem. Is it?

The total fertility rate is defined as the average number of children that would be born to a woman over her lifetime, all things being equal. The population replacement rate is conventionally defined as 2.1 children per woman: one to replace each parent, plus a few more to make up for kids who die or fail to reproduce.

Lyman acknowledges that fertility in the U.S. has fallen even more steeply in the past. For example, the total fertility rate dropped in just six years from 2.48 to 1.74 kids per woman between 1970 and 1976. It bounced back to basically the replacement rate in the 1990s and 2000s.

Lyman suggests that this time the fall will continue, dropping soon to the lowest domestic rates ever. Most other developed countries, he notes, have stayed below the replacement rate for decades. Low fertility, he fears, threatens the future of American economy and culture. He glumly notes that even extremely generous pro-natalist policies in European Union countries, Russia, and other developed nations have failed to boost fertility above replacement in those countries.

For example, France provides 26 weeks of paid maternity leave for a third child, highly subsidized day care, and monthly allowances for families with children amounting to as much as $300 per month. Such policies correlated with a fertility boost from 1.7 children per woman in the 1990s to just over 2.0 by 2015. Yet the country’s total fertility then fell to 1.93 in 2016.

Stone’s article provoked New York Times columnist Ross Douthat into a Twitter paroxysm. Trumpian populists, he despaired, were failing to engage in a “‘natalists versus globalists’ policy debate.” Specifically, the pro-natalist Douthat was peeved that populist-in-chief Trump had dismissed a tax-bill amendment from Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah). The bill already includes language doubling the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000 per kid; Rubio and Lee want to make the credit refundable against payroll tax liability. The idea is to enable lower-income folks who pay little or no income tax to benefit from the credit by offsetting their payroll tax payments. (Without something like the Rubio/Lee amendment, the Center for Budget Priorities calculates that about 10 million children with low-income parents would receive a token benefit of $75 or less from the Senate’s increase in the child tax credit.) Rubio and Lee want to pay for their proposal by lowering the corporate income tax rate to just 22 percent, not the 20 percent preferred by the president.

The current $1,000-per-child credit phases out at incomes higher than $150,000 for married filers with two children. In the Senate version, it would phase out in the case of married couples with two children whose incomes exceed $580,000. Since high-income people pay more income tax, they would be able to take full advantage to the new child tax credit to reduce their tax bills. This could be interpreted as trying to bribe high-income folks—who have lower fertility rates—into having more kids.

In any event, it costs about $233,610 to rear a child, so $2,000 a year isn’t likely to be all that persuasive. But from Douthat’s point of view, every little bit helps.

I, on the other hand, can’t see why the government should be trying to manage how many kids people have in the first place. Fertility is falling because people are making trade-offs between having more children and more education, more career advancement, more disposable income, and more leisure. In addition, many people are choosing to have fewer children so that they can invest more in helping the children they do have to lead successful lives. Falling fertility is a sign that increased wealth and technological progress have given increasing numbers of people greater freedom to decide if, when, how, and with whom they want to reproduce. And that’s a good thing.

For more background, see my article “Why Are People Having Fewer Kids?“

Disclosure: My wife and I try not to flaunt our voluntarily child-free lifestyle too much.

“Our fertility decline is on par with serious, durable fertility declines in other big, developed countries, and may be extremely difficult to reverse,” warns Lyman Stone, an economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. By his calculations, America’s total fertility rate has dropped from 2.1 kids per woman in 2007 to 1.77 now. Stone thinks this is a problem. Is it?

The total fertility rate is defined as the average number of children that would be born to a woman over her lifetime, all things being equal. The population replacement rate is conventionally defined as 2.1 children per woman: one to replace each parent, plus a few more to make up for kids who die or fail to reproduce.

Lyman acknowledges that fertility in the U.S. has fallen even more steeply in the past. For example, the total fertility rate dropped in just six years from 2.48 to 1.74 kids per woman between 1970 and 1976. It bounced back to basically the replacement rate in the 1990s and 2000s.

Lyman suggests that this time the fall will continue, dropping soon to the lowest domestic rates ever. Most other developed countries, he notes, have stayed below the replacement rate for decades. Low fertility, he fears, threatens the future of American economy and culture. He glumly notes that even extremely generous pro-natalist policies in European Union countries, Russia, and other developed nations have failed to boost fertility above replacement in those countries.

For example, France provides 26 weeks of paid maternity leave for a third child, highly subsidized day care, and monthly allowances for families with children amounting to as much as $300 per month. Such policies correlated with a fertility boost from 1.7 children per woman in the 1990s to just over 2.0 by 2015. Yet the country’s total fertility then fell to 1.93 in 2016.

Stone’s article provoked New York Times columnist Ross Douthat into a Twitter paroxysm. Trumpian populists, he despaired, were failing to engage in a “‘natalists versus globalists’ policy debate.” Specifically, the pro-natalist Douthat was peeved that populist-in-chief Trump had dismissed a tax-bill amendment from Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah). The bill already includes language doubling the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000 per kid; Rubio and Lee want to make the credit refundable against payroll tax liability. The idea is to enable lower-income folks who pay little or no income tax to benefit from the credit by offsetting their payroll tax payments. (Without something like the Rubio/Lee amendment, the Center for Budget Priorities calculates that about 10 million children with low-income parents would receive a token benefit of $75 or less from the Senate’s increase in the child tax credit.) Rubio and Lee want to pay for their proposal by lowering the corporate income tax rate to just 22 percent, not the 20 percent preferred by the president.

The current $1,000-per-child credit phases out at incomes higher than $150,000 for married filers with two children. In the Senate version, it would phase out in the case of married couples with two children whose incomes exceed $580,000. Since high-income people pay more income tax, they would be able to take full advantage to the new child tax credit to reduce their tax bills. This could be interpreted as trying to bribe high-income folks—who have lower fertility rates—into having more kids.

In any event, it costs about $233,610 to rear a child, so $2,000 a year isn’t likely to be all that persuasive. But from Douthat’s point of view, every little bit helps.

I, on the other hand, can’t see why the government should be trying to manage how many kids people have in the first place. Fertility is falling because people are making trade-offs between having more children and more education, more career advancement, more disposable income, and more leisure. In addition, many people are choosing to have fewer children so that they can invest more in helping the children they do have to lead successful lives. Falling fertility is a sign that increased wealth and technological progress have given increasing numbers of people greater freedom to decide if, when, how, and with whom they want to reproduce. And that’s a good thing.

For more background, see my article, “Why Are People Having Fewer Kids?“

Disclosure: My wife and I try not to flaunt our voluntarily child-free lifestyle too much.

Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, was charged this morning with lying to FBI officials in connection with conversations with a Russian ambassador.

The charging document is short and simple, suggesting that Flynn may be cooperating with the feds in their investigation of whether Russian officials colluded with the Trump campaign and the extent that the Russian government might have meddled with the 2016 presidential election outcome.

The charges allege that Flynn lied when he told FBI officials he had not asked Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak last year to avoid escalating tensions over U.S. sanctions against Russia. He’s also accused of lying to FBI officials when he said he did not ask Kislyak last December to delay or oppose a U.N. resolution (though the charging document doesn’t specify, it’s likely referring to this resolution condemning Israeli settlements).

There’s going to be a whole lot of speculation and analysis throughout the news cycle of what these charges “mean” to the Trump administration. Flynn only served as national security adviser for a very brief time, but he’s the first person in Trump’s campaign who actually made it into his administration to have been charged with misconduct. Paul Manafort and George Papadopoulos were part of Trump’s campaign team, not his administration.

The paucity of the charges against Flynn could mean that the retired lieutenant general is cooperating with FBI special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Flynn’s legal team cut ties with president’s legal team in November and stopped sharing information they had been learning about the investigation, leading to theories that Flynn was working on some sort of deal.

His plea hearing is scheduled for later this morning. If more relevant information comes out about where these charges are leading, I’ll update this blog post. Until then, much like the Manafort charges, I’m going to resist trying to either overplay or underplay the meaning of these accusations in terms of the Trump presidency’s fate.

California’s marijuana rules are going to be heavy-handed, but an end to prohibition is coming.

Steven Greenhut writes:

It’s an old cliché, but one doesn’t find beer distributors gunning each other down in the town square in battles over market turf. Whisky distillers don’t dump pollutants in streams and rivers—and bars and restaurants that serve cocktails tend to be safe places that follow modern building codes. People rarely go blind drinking hooch that some disreputable “distiller” made in a bathtub.

Alcoholism causes terrible problems, but since the end of Prohibition Americans have made their peace with booze. It’s been harder convincing policy makers to take a similar approach with marijuana, even though the War on Drugs has left a trail of destruction that’s as troubling as the ill it seeks to combat. Conservative icon William F. Buckley warned years ago about the toll that war would take on civil liberties and budgets, but few heeded his warnings. When will politicians learn?

Fortunately, voters are learning that the relatively benign drug of marijuana is best dealt with using a tax-and-regulatory approach rather than SWAT teams and prosecutions. The federal government is behind the times, of course, with Attorney General Jeff Sessions blathering about weed in a way that would make members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union proud, if there were indeed still members of that group.

View this article.

Reason does not have a Johannesburg bureau. Or a Caracas bureau. Or a Havana bureau.

Which means that when we get tips for stories abroad that we think Reason readers need to know about, we have to (a) find a friendly reporter on the ground to cover the story for us, or (b) send someone in to get the facts and footage we need. Interpid overseas libertarian freelancers are precious, rare, and often in high demand. Meanwhile, plane tickets and hotels and translators and fixers and travel insurance all typically require the kind of money that can be hard to come by at a nonprofit publication.

Even the simplest, straightforward international reporting trip can easily run to $5,000, more if we send Reason TV to produce video as well. Would you consider funding a feature in the future? Or at least pay Reason TV’s massive checked bag fees for all that gear?

To remind you what you’d be getting for your money, why not browse through some (well, most) of the original, on-the-ground international reporting Reason has produced in the last year and change:

In March, freelancer Francisco Toro reported on why Ugandans are starving because they can’t trust their seed markets, traveling around the countryside to discuss the situation with East African farmers, bureaucrats, and businessmen.

Toro, a journalist previously based in Caracas, has also reported on the plight of ordinary Venezuelans as their country undergoes a disastrous bout of socialist deja vu. Another Venezuela journalist, Maria Alba Toledo, reports from Guayana City on the ways that President Nicolas Marudo has brought the country to the edge of starvation, death, and despair.

Photographer Tor Birk Trads captured shots of one of the world’s most daring journalists, Flemming Rose, in Denmark.

Managing Editor Stephanie Slade went to Havana, shortly after Donald Trump announced plans to restrict trade with the poor island nation. Starvation won’t turn Cubans into capitalists, Slade argued, but trade and tourism might.

Former Reason intern Tate Watkins checked in from the dysfunctional coffee plantations of Haiti, in search of the answer to the question: Why Are Haiti’s Coffee Trees So Tall?

Leon Louw, executive director of the South Africa–based Free Market Foundation, sat down with Johannesburg’s newly elected classical liberal mayor, Herman Mashaba, to talk about his planned reforms.

(Sometimes the subjects of our international stories come to us, as in the case of “Egypt’s Jon Stewart,” Bassem Youssef, whose comedy news show had 30 million viewers. Then he was forced to flee to Los Angeles, where he spoke with Reason TV’s Justin Monticello. But we’re not usually so lucky, and they’re not always so unlucky.)

Reason TV’s Jim Epstein reported on the Students for Liberty chapter in Brazil that helped bring down left-wing populist Dilma Rousseff, leading protests where millions flooding the streets, many carrying signs that read “Less Marx, More Mises.”

If you like what you see here, and want Reason to engage more often and more deeply with the people fighting for (and against!) free minds and free markets around the world, why not donate now?

• The New York Times is reporting that the Trump administration plans to oust Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and sub in current CIA director Mike Pompeo. Sen. Tom Cotton is reportedly also on President’s Trumps shortlist for the position.
• FBI Director Christopher Wray told the House Homeland Security Committee yesterday that the agency was working on “a number of what we would call anarchist-extremist investigations, where we have properly predicated subjects of people who are motivated to commit violent criminal activity on kind of an Antifa ideology.”
• Academic criminologists aren’t happy about the FBI withholding certain crime data.
• A Chicago bakery that makes hamburger buns for McDonald’s just lost more than one-third of its workforce—800 employees—in an immigration raid.
• “In truth, there is no substantive reason why this zucchini interaction should have escalated into the most trending online debate on feminism in South Korea this past weekend. But it did…”
• The mayor of Canton, New York, is in court after he “admitted to using Craigslist to pay a woman $300 for a sexual massage.”
• Def Jam records co-founder and music mogul Russell Simmons has resigned from his companies in the midst of sexual assault allegations.