Tag: hit&run

Lax life insurance regulations are encouraging way too many Americans to kill their children.

This, according to the Washington Post, whose breathless Sunday editorial ran with the headline, “Too many children are killed for insurance money. Here’s how states can stop it.”

Rather than condemn the actual murderers, the Post blames the life insurance industry, whose “spotty” regulatory compliance and commission-hungry salesmen have created a “system that has turned children into prey.”

“The apparent ease with which these killers were able to obtain policies,” the Editorial Board says “shows sufficient safeguards are not in place.” What is needed, they say, are more procedural safeguards or dollar caps on child life insurance.

This call for tougher regulation is undercut, however, by the very circumstances of the murder cases outlined in the Washington Post’s article.

The Post’s piece rattles off several murder cases—many not actually involving children—where the killers are motivated by collecting on life insurance policies:

“Shane Paris Sisskoko was three months old when he was murdered in Montgomery County in 2001. Lemuel Wallace, 37, blind and developmentally disabled, was shot to death in 2009 in a Baltimore park. Latiqua Cherry, a Prince George’s mother, was stabbed nine times before her body was set on fire in May 2015. Prince McLeod Rams was 15 months old when he was drowned or suffocated in Virginia in October 2012.

“Common to all of these deaths is that the killer had secretly insured the victims’ lives and made themselves sole beneficiaries.”

The Post fails to mention that each of the crimes they describe involves the fraudulent bypassing of regulations already on the books. Murderers, in the business of fraud and deception, are more than likely to be undeterred by additional regulation.

Laquita Cherry’s ex-boyfriend reportedly had to fake her signature in order to take out an insurance policy on her life. Lemuel Wallace’s killer—a former pastor named Kevin Pushia—fraudulently altered documents to be listed as a beneficiary.

Similarly, Shane Paris Sisskoko’s father had to repeatedly lie to the child’s mother about the reasons for medical examinations and calls from insurance companies to obscure the fact that he had taken a $750,000 policy on his son’s life.

The Post editorial board simply ignores the laws in 42 states known as “slayer statues”, which bar a beneficiary from collecting on a death they knowingly caused. Often a conviction for causing the death of the insured is not required for these slayer statutes to be invoked.

Moreover, the kinds of cases the Washington Post seems most concerned about—huge life insurance claims for the death of very young children—are also the kinds that will get the most scrutiny from life insurance companies, which often leads to police investigations.

An insurance company tipped off police to the huge life insurance policy on Wallace. And the death of a ten-year-old boy in Washington state whose murder the Post uses to encourage tighter regulation was was ruled an accidental death by police until an insurance investigator informed them of the $650,000 policy that the boy’s father had taken out on him.

It should also have been made clear the type of murders referred to appear to be incredibly rare.

The Coalition to Prevent Insurance Fraud—a pro-regulation group cited in the Post’s editorial—has logged 160 cases of murder motivated by life insurance in “recent years,” according to a 2017 report.

The group offers no citation for statistic or what is meant by “recent years” so the accuracy of that number is hard to verify. Should “recent years” stretch over the last decade however, that would make them more scarce than children killed by babysitters, or fatal romantic triangles.

Most insurance-related homicides, the Coalition report admits, involve the killing of a spouse, not a child.

Calls for broad industry regulation to deal with a handful of admittedly tragic deaths are rarely justified or rational. The Washington Post’s call for regulating life insurance as a means of cracking down on child murder is no exception.

If it is a day ending with the letter “y,” there is probably some all-consuming media controversy involving President Donald Trump. But underneath the headlines and tweetstorms, the Trump administration, and even a normally reluctant Congress (at least to some degree), has already teamed up make the biggest dent in the federal regulatory state we’ve seen during the 21^st century. And if the GOP manages to follow through with other planned reforms, Trump may challenge the deregulatory records of even Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter

This threatened deconstruction of the administrative state has put many libertarian think tankers in the dissonant position of rooting hard for one aspect of a presidency they otherwise root against, and dusting off their knowledge of how much the executive branch can do on its own to peel back agencies that Congress willed into existence. As Matt Welch writes in Reason’s June cover story, “Washington’s regulatory reformers, largely sidelined for the past quarter-century, are infiltrating the halls of federal power and attempting to engineer the most ambitious executive-branch overhaul in at least three decades.”

On the day of Trump’s [address to a joint session of Congress], I paid a visit to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a libertarian nonprofit focusing on regulatory issues, to speak with Myron Ebell, director of the institute’s Center for Energy and Environment. Ebell had been the Trump transition team’s point man at the EPA, a personnel selection witheringly characterized by former League of Conservation Voters official Daniel Weiss as “like picking Colonel Sanders to protect your chickens.” So what can libertarians expect from the Trump administration? “I think,” Ebell says, “he could be the most serious deregulatory president ever.”

View this article.

Last night, The Washington Post reported that President Trump revealed classified information to the foreign minister of Russia and the Russian ambassador to the U.S. The White House denied the report “as written,” but Trump may just be the right guy to deflate excessive expectations for the presidency anyway.

J.D. Tuccille writes:

Has Donald Trump been sent among us to demonstrate the foolishness of placing cult-like faith in the presidency?

I don’t mean “sent” in the literal sense, of course. Maybe it’s more like he slipped and fell among us, tumbling backwards down the escalator of history, to land on the presidency just in time to squish the hopes of a political also-ran who thought the office was hers.

Let’s review just last week’s parade of horribles (because this week’s tales of poor judgment are coming too fast to keep up). There was the clumsy firing of James Comey, which managed to convert an FBI director about whom almost everybody harbored doubts into a martyr. He also left us to wonder whether it’s worse that he thinks he originated the phrase, “prime the pump,” or that he believes the Keynesian nostrum is a good idea. Then the White House apparently got pwned by a photographer for Russian state media, predictably feeding into the ongoing questions about the president’s relationship with that country.

The overall impression was certainly not that of “a soul nourisher, a hope giver, a living American talisman against hurricanes, terrorism, economic downturns, and spiritual malaise,” as Gene Healy of the Cato Institute described Americans’ vision for the nation’s chief executive in an article published nine years ago in Reason and even more relevant today.

View this article.

• President Donald Trump is defending his “absolute right” to share “facts…pertaining to terrorism and airline security” with Russia.
• “President Trump appeared to acknowledge Tuesday that he revealed highly classified information to Russia — a stunning confirmation of a Washington Post story and a move that contradicted his own White House team after it scrambled to deny the report.”
• Turskish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is meeting today with President Trump.
• According to South Korean officials, North Korea’s missile program is “progressing faster than expected.”
• Ford is reportedly planning to cut 10 percent of its global workforce.
• Sen. Rand Paul says Attorney General Jeff Sessions “will accentuate the injustice in our criminal justice system” through his plan to seek mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. “We should be treating our nation’s drug epidemic for what it is — a public health crisis, not an excuse to send people to prison and turn a mistake into a tragedy,” Paul says.

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Marain Tupy follows up on his previous column about population growth and the prospects for progress in Africa.

He writes:

In my Reason column last week, I wrote about Africa’s economic prospects in view of the continent’s explosive population growth. A number of readers wrote to me in response to the article and I will attempt to address their most important concerns below.

First, readers wondered if my population estimates reflected the expected changes to the total fertility rate (TFR) among African women. Indeed, they have. The population data in the original article came from the United Nation’s database, which adjusts for different fertility rate scenarios.

Holding TFR constant, the world would contain 26 billion people in 2100. Of those, 16 billion would live in Africa. Contrast that with the “low” fertility variant, which estimates a global population of 7.3 billion (3 billion in Africa). In my article, I referenced the “medium” fertility variant, which assumes a global population of 11.2 billion and African population of 4.4 billion.

View this article.

Officials at North Carolina’s Richmond Early College High School confiscated copies of the yearbook from those who had paid for them, claiming that some of the student quotes were “inappropriate.” The only inappropriate quote cited by local media was “Build that wall.”

President Donald Trump shared “highly classified” intelligence with two Russian government officials—jeoparding the U.S.’s already contentious relationship with the source of said intelligence.

This happened during a meeting between Trump and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador, at the Whit House—just one day after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was investigating potential links between Russia and the Trump campaign.

An ISIS plot was the subject of the intelligence, according to The Washington Post, which broke the story. The Post redacted significant details of the plot, including the name of the city where the intelligence was gathered. The city is within ISIS territory, and if the intelligence became public, ISIS might be able to determine the identity of the people or organization providing the U.S. with the information.

Trump, on the other hand, exercised no such caution, according to The Post. He was apparently eager to share it with Kislyak and Lavrov. “”I get great intel,” he said at the meeting. “I have people brief me on great intel every day.”

Indeed:

The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.

Some are already calling this “a firing offense,” or potentially “treason.” But even The Post admits that Trump probably didn’t break the law: the president gets to decide what information he shares with leaders of foreign governments. And we don’t know who the sources are, or whether they characterized the intelligence correctly.

Many will no doubt interpret this revelation as yet more evidence that Trump is at best a Russian stooge, and at worst, a willing participant in a vast conspiracy orchestrated by Moscow. An independent investigation, which Reps. Justin Amash and Eric Swalwell have called for, still seems like the best way to resolve the question. In the meantime, gross incompetence and stupidity, exacerbated by a sociopathic need to make inappropriate boasts (the best intelligence, everyone says so), still seem like the most logical explanations. One might have expected that in the wake of the Access Hollywood tapes, Trump had learned his lesson about making rash statements to random public figures, but apparently not. Or maybe the lesson he learned was that he truly can get away with anything.

• The United States government believes that Syria has a large crematorium to conceal mass atrocities. The State Department is calling on Russia to do something about it.
• President Donald Trump’s call for a ban on Muslim immigrants on the campaign trail came back to haunt the administration yet again today in a federal appeals court hearing in Seattle on his executive order barring travel from several countries.
• The Supreme Court declined to hear a North Carolina voter ID law case, which effectively kills the law. A lower court had determined that it deliberately discriminated against black voters and poor minorities by allowing use of some government-issued identification methods (driver’s licenses) but not others (public assistance cards).
• President Trump will have the White House lit up in blue tonight in honor of police officers killed in action last year. He also complained that police are subject to “unfair defamation and vilification.”
• Meanwhile, an unarmed, erratically behaving man died in Las Vegas after being Tasered, punched several times, and put in a “neck restraint” hold by police there.
• I was on vacation last week and wasn’t around to blog the Kentucky T-shirt shop that won a court case after refusing to print shirts with pro-gay messages. Read more about the case here and why it’s legally distinct from wedding cake cases (mind you, whether it should be distinct is a whole different question). The Supreme Court is still considering whether to take on a case over whether it’s legal for a baker to refuse to make cakes for same-sex weddings. They punted again this morning on making a decision.
• Speaking of which, support for legal gay marriage recognition among Americans has reached a new high—64 percent, according to a new Gallup poll.

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Under the headline “Trump Tax Plan Will Not Bolster Growth, Economists Say,” The New York Times offers two estimates of how tax cuts might bolster growth. But the bit about “will not bolster growth” is inaccurate, notes Ira Stoll. As the Times article itself conveys, Trump’s proposed tax cuts would bolster growth, at least by some estimates, just not by the amount that the Times has arbitrarily set up as a goalpost.

Nor are the growth numbers the only way that this Times article misleads—the newspaper is also spinning when it comes to tax rates. It’s no wonder Trump rails against the “fake news” of the “failing New York Times,” suggests Stoll. On the topic of taxes, Times coverage has gone off the rails.

View this article.

People are so conditioned to avoid contrary viewpoints that they will actually forego an opportunity to win more money if it requires them to read something with which they disagree.

That’s according to a fascinating—and deeply depressing—study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

The study gave participants two options: they could read an article about same-sex marriage that matched their own perspective, or they could read an article about same-sex marriage that contradicted their views on the subject. They were told that if they selected the article with which they disagreed, they would be entered in a drawing to win $10. But if they selected the more comforting, self-affirming article, they would only stand to win $7.

“You’d think everyone would want to win more money, right?” wrote Vox‘s Brian Resnick in his write-up of the study. Resnick is right—I did think that.

As it turns out, a solid majority of participants—a whopping 63 percent—would rather read the article they already agreed with, even if it meant winning less money.

One of the study’s authors, Matt Motyl, described this phenomenon as “motivated ignorance” in an interview with Vox. Participants were misinformed about the other side’s arguments, and determined to remain that way. The emotional comfort they would lose by being exposed to contrary information was worth more to them than $4.

This has consequences for a democratic society, since it suggests that people do not tend to remain open to the best arguments for and against a certain policy. They willfully close their minds, because receiving contrary information is psychologically painful.

Of course, libertarian thinkers like Bryan Caplan and Ilya Somin have long argued that voters are rationally irrational: they make uninformed political decisions because the cost of becoming educated is too high relative to the ability to produce change—a well-informed voter still only gets one vote. The fact that people are perfectly willing to forego money in order to avoid the mental anguish that comes with processing new information fits well within a framework of rational irrationality.

If there’s a policy consequence here, perhaps it’s this: the bipartisan, decades’ old effort to make the American government bigger and more powerful is placing a great deal of unwarranted trust in the collective wisdom of voters who, like children, prefer to place their hands over their ears and yell not listening!