Tag: hit&run

On his
HBO show last Friday, Bill Maher
asked Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) about
remarks he made in 2000 concerning the war on drugs: 

Maher: You said in 2000, “The war on drugs is
an abysmal failure and a waste of money.” Are you still on that
page?

Paul: I’m absolutely there, and I’ll do
everything to end the war on drugs….The war on drugs has become
the most racially disparate outcome that you have in the entire
country. Our prisons are full of black and brown kids.
Three-fourths of the people in prison are black or brown, and white
kids are using drugs, Bill, as you know…at the same rate as these
other kids. But kids who have less means, less money, kids who are
in areas where police are patrolling…Police are given monetary
incentives to make arrests, monetary incentives for their own
departments. So I want to end the war on drugs because it’s wrong
for everybody, but particularly because poor people are caught up
in this, and their lives are ruined by it. 

It is encouraging to hear Paul reiterate his opposition to the
war on drugs in general, as opposed to particular aspects of it
(such as overfederalizaton, mandatory minimum sentences, and civil
asset forfeiture). Although it is still not entirely
clear what
he means by ending the war on drugs, the disparities that worry
him cannot be fully addressed as long as the government continues
to arrest people for supplying arbitrarily proscribed
intoxicants.

California has had a prison
overcrowding problem for years and has been ordered, repeatedly, to
reduce the problem, so bad it has been determined to be cruel and
unusual punishment.

California hasn’t done a particularly good job at meeting goals
(maybe the recent passage of
Proposition 47 might help). Federal judges have ordered them to
expand the parole program to let more folks out and determined that
the state had not implemented an order from all the way back in
February.

The Los Angeles Times reported the order, along with
this rather interesting explainer of why the state was resisting

letting prisoners out early:

Most of those prisoners now work as groundskeepers, janitors and
in prison kitchens, with wages that range from 8 cents to 37 cents
per hour. Lawyers for Attorney General Kamala Harris had argued in
court that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would
lose an important labor pool.

Prisoners’ lawyers countered that the corrections department
could hire public employees to do the work.

So, yeah, that’s a pretty horrifying argument for keeping people
in overcrowded prisons. Adam Serwer followed up over at
BuzzFeed, and Harris is pulling a page from President
Barack Obama’s playbook.
She says she had no idea this was going on:

“I will be very candid with you, because I saw that article this
morning, and I was shocked, and I’m looking into it to see if the
way it was characterized in the paper is actually how it occurred
in court,” Harris told BuzzFeed News in an interview Monday. “I was
very troubled by what I read. I just need to find out what did we
actually say in court.”

Serwer identifies the actual attorney responsible for the
argument as Deputy Attorney General Patrick McKinney. His argument
extends even further than what the Times reported.
California uses thousands of prisoners to help fight wildfires,
each paid $2 a day. In a roundabout fashion, releasing prisoners
early could reduce the number of firefighters they’d have
available. Read more
here.

The feds did not find the arguments compelling. To me, what’s
fascinating (and scary) is what’s going to happen when the state
does indeed have to hire hundreds, possibly thousands of new public
employees to do the work they were getting on the cheap. These
employees will, of course, be unionized, well-paid (in comparison
with both the prisoners and what they’d get in the private sector)
and would qualify for some very nice pensions that would put
California even further in debt. It could possibly demolish Gov.
Jerry Brown’s (already inaccurate) claims the state no longer has a
budget deficit.

Oh, and as a reminder: California raised its minimum wage to $9
an hour in July. It goes up to $10 an hour in 2016.

The Tufts Center for the Study of Drug
Development has just completed a new study estimating how much it
costs to bring a new pharmaceutical to market. The Center’s 2003
report estimated that the cost per new drug developed between 1983
and 1994 at $800 million. In the analysis, the Center uses data on
a random selection of 106 new drugs developed by 10 pharmaceutical
companies between 1995 and 2007 to calculate the current costs of
getting a new drug across the regulatory finish line. From the

press release:

The $2,558 million figure per approved compound is based on
estimated:

• Average out-of-pocket cost of $1,395 million
• Time costs (expected returns that investors forego while a drug
  is in development) of $1,163 million

Estimated average cost of post-approval R&D—studies to test
new indications, new formulations, new dosage strengths and
regimens, and to monitor safety and long-term side effects in
patients required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a
condition of approval—of $312 million boosts the full product
lifecycle cost per approved drug to $2,870 million. All figures are
expressed in 2013 dollars. …

Factors that likely have boosted out-of-pocket clinical costs
include increased clinical trial complexity, larger clinical trial
sizes, higher cost of inputs from the medical sector used for
development, greater focus on targeting chronic and degenerative
diseases, changes in protocol design to include efforts to gather
health technology assessment information, and testing on comparator
drugs to accommodate payer demands for comparative effectiveness
data.

Lengthening development and approval times were not responsible
for driving up development costs, according to DiMasi.

Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News further

reported:

At a briefing this morning to announce study results, DiMasi
said the overall clinical approval success rate for new drugs, the
likelihood that a Phase I drug will be approved for marketing,
stood at less than 12% (11.83%). “Approximately seven out of eight
compounds that enter the clinical testing pipeline will fail in
development. Put another way, this says more precisely that on
average, you need to put 8.5 compounds into clinical development to
get one approval.”

That less than 12% percentage rate was lower than a Tufts study
four years ago “the higher failure rate had a substantial impact on
R&D costs. Higher out-of-pocket costs of conducting R&D,
and proportionately more failures in clinical testing are what
really drove the increase in cost per approved new drug.”

Whatever the costs for developing new pharmaceuticals, the price
that patients pay for them is whatever the market will bear. That
being said, if the prices don’t cover the development costs, then
there won’t be more new drugs.

As I have explained earlier, one good way to lower costs is to
reform the clunky hypercautious FDA regulatory system by moving
toward
conditional approval of new drugs after Phase II clinical
trials.

Alfredo Beltran Leyva, allegedly a former leader
of the drug cartel Beltran Leyva Organization,
entered a not guilty plea in federal court in Washington, D.C.
yesterday after being extradited over the weekend from Mexico,
where he was arrested in January 2008. He was indicted by federal
prosecutors in 2012

According to a
Department of Justice release, after his arrest the Leyva
organization blamed another group, the Sinaloa Cartel, for Beltran
Leyva’s capture, causing a “violent war between the two drug
cartels, and the murder of thousands of citizens in Mexico,
including numerous law enforcement officers and officials.”

After his 2008 arrest, the Leyva organization was added to a
“Blocked Persons” list under the Kingpin Act and Beltran Leyva
himself was later “specifically designated…  as a specially
designated drug trafficker under the same Kingpin Act.” The DOJ
insists in the same release that Leyva “is presumed innocent unless
and until proven guilty.”

Beltran Leyva’s entered his not guilty plea through a public
defender, according to
the Washington Post, but says his family will provide
him a lawyer. Beltran Leyva’s 2008 arrest did nothing to stem the
flow of narcotics across the Americas, but it did, by the
Department of Justice’s own admission, increase the level of
drug-related violence in Mexico, an expected consequence of a drug
war offensive.

Harvard University and the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill are facing lawsuits over their race-based
admissions schemes, which hold Asian and white students to higher
standards because of their skin color.

The lawsuits were filed Monday by a group of interested parties,
including two unnamed college students who were rejected from
Harvard and UNC. According to Inside Higher Ed, the
Harvard applicant is of Asian ethnicity: He had a perfect ACT
score, two 800s on SAT II subject exams, and was valedictorian of
his high school. He didn’t get in.

Remarkably, Harvard has managed to keep its Asian student
population constant over the years, while universities that don’t
consider race as an admission factor have seen more and more Asians
gain admittance. According to
Inside Higher Ed:

What Harvard calls a holistic approach to admissions (in which
applicants are reviewed individually, with a range of criteria
considered) is actually a disguise for racial balancing in a system
where Asian Americans are held to higher standards for admission,
according to the lawsuit. As evidence, the lawsuit says that the
racial demographics of Harvard’s admitted class, first-year
enrollment and total student body have remained stable over the
last several years. …

“In light of Harvard’s discriminatory admissions policies,
[Asian Americans] are competing only against each other, and all
other racial and ethnic groups are insulated from competing against
high-achieving Asian Americans,” the lawsuit reads.

The Supreme Court has previously upheld racial considerations in
university admissions, but the recent Fisher v. University of
Texas at Austin decision in 2013 further limited the
permissible uses of affirmative action. Plaintiffs believe UNC’s
admissions system would fail the Fisher rationale. It’s
also conceivable that the Court would rule affirmative action
entirely unconstitutional if presented the right kind of case.

Who can defend abject racial discrimination against Asians?
Harvard’s administrators and some of its faculty can. One professor
even had the gall to suggest that discriminating against Asians is
good for Asians. According to Fox
News:

“Asian-American students benefit greatly from attending the
racially and socio-economically diverse campuses that affirmative
action helps create,” Julie Park, assistant professor of education
at the University of Maryland and author of the book “When
Diversity Drops,” told FoxNews.com.

I should think Asian-Americans wold be better served by a
non-discrimination policy. All student applicants should have the
same right to a colorblind evaluation of their academic merits.
With any hope, the sinister justifications offered by Park and
others are becoming less compelling to the voting public, as well
as the courts that will adjudicate lawsuits like this one.

The number of inmates in state prisons is set to rise 3 percent by
2018, according to a new report from The Pew Charitable Trusts. The
organization collected data from 34 states, containing about 70
percent of the current U.S. prison population. Most said they
expect inmate increases, some quite substantially (Iowa, for
instance, anticipates 16 percent growth by 2018). Only six states
foresee their prison populations dropping.

“This snapshot suggests that, without policy reforms, the recent uptick in the number
of state inmates reported by the Justice Department in 2014—the
first increase in four years—could continue over the next four
years,” Pew cautions.

From the mid-1970s through 2008, state prisons grew steadily. Then 2009 saw the
state prison population drop modestly for the first time in
decades. But this trend reversed again in 2013, according
to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

When measured against projected population growth by 2018, state
imprisonment rates could remain steady or decline, even as
the number of inmates continues to rise. States expecting
the biggest inmate population increases include Iowa (up 16
percent), Wyoming (14 percent), Alaska (11 percent), Arizona (9
percent), Tennessee (9 percent), Utah (8 percent), Arkansas (7
percent), California (7 percent), and Nebraska (7 percent).
“Projections in some states do not incorporate recent policy
changes that may significantly affect future prison populations,”
such as California’s passage of Proposition 47, Pew
notes. 

The six states that project to actually lower the number of
people imprisoned include: Hawaii (by less than 1 percent),
Louisiana (by 3 percent), Massachusetts (2 percent), North Carolina
(1 percent), Oregon (1 percent), and Pennsylvania (6 percent).

Most of these states have recently passed sentencing or prison
reform legislation (Oregon in 2013; North Carolina in 2011; Pennsylvania in 2012; Hawaii in 2014). Prior to passing its reforms,
North Carolina was looking at a 10 percent increase in the state prison population by
2020.  

Reason TV recently sat down with Martin Masse, one of the
leading figures in Canada’s libertarian movement. Masse explained
to us how free market ideas now inform Canadian public policy to a
degree that’s probably surprising to the average American. Watch
above or click on the link below for video, full text, supporting
links, downloadable versions, and more Reason TV clips.

View this article.

The U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) is in
prime position to win its second seat in the House of Commons,
with the Rochester and Strood by-election set to take place
Thursday. This could be a significant victory for UKIP, but it
comes at a time of increasing discord between the left and right—or
populist and libertarian-leaning—wings of the party.

The latest controversy surrounds the party’s economic spokesman,
Member of the European Parliament Patrick O’Flynn. O’Flynn has
angered libertarian-leaning members of UKIP by vocally supporting
increased taxes and opposing some of the party’s free market
policies­, culminating in a move to oust him from his position as
economic spokesman.
Breitbart London reports:

Senior members of UKIP are campaigning behind the scenes to have
Patrick O’Flynn MEP removed as economic spokesman after his
appearance on the BBC’s Newsnight programme last Monday night. In
the interview O’Flynn called for higher taxes on business, having
previously called for a tax on the turnover of companies so they
would pay even if they did not make a profit.

Political intrigue can be found in all political parties, but
this attempted ouster is the symptom of a much larger divide within
UKIP—a conflict The
Daily Telegraph has described as being “far deeper and more
divisive than anything currently going on inside the Conservative
Party, or even in Ed Miliband’s Labour Party.”

The roots of this division lie in UKIP’s attempt to represent
two conflicting strains of thought. On the one hand, UKIP gained
most of its initial support from disaffected members of the
Conservative Party. These supporters look back at Thatcher for
inspiration and support more libertarian-leaning policies,
especially when it comes to economics. In conflict with this group
are people who were attracted to UKIP by the party’s more populist
policies, such as its opposition to large scale immigration. The
populists, who represent a growing proportion of the party base,
are far less interested in free market reforms.

These two perspectives were able to coexist in relative harmony
when UKIP was focused predominantly on opposing the European Union.
But tensions have increased as the party has slowly
abandoned its libertarianism in pursuit of domestic electoral
success.

The problem for the libertarian-leaning section of UKIP is that
the electoral
strategy is working, and the makeup of the party is changing as
a result. YouGov’s Peter Kellner recently highlighted UKIP’s
changing demographics in
The Guardian, writing:

Ukip is now building support in traditional working-class Labour
areas. Initially, Ukip was a far greater threat to the Tories, for
it took nine votes from the Conservatives for every vote it took
from Labour. Since early last year, for every nine votes it has
taken from the Tories it has taken six from Labour.

The growing proportion of disaffected Labour voters is likely to
further weaken the influence of libertarian-leaning
UKIP members. This is not just because the free marketeers
will be increasingly outnumbered, but also because the populists’
success will make UKIP politicians wary of taking hard line stances
that might alienate their new supporters.

UKIP’s pivot toward populism will likely continue regardless of
whether O’Flynn remains the party’s economic spokesman. To reverse
course now would represent a monumental change in strategy, and an
electorally risky one. It seems this is a battle
libertarian-leaning UKIPers are destined to lose.

Politico got enough House Democrats to
state the obvious about Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s
leadership vis a vis the midterm elections, where Democrats lost
TKTK seats in the House. Faced with two consecutive midterm losses
in the lower chamber of Congress, Democrats are still uneasy
blaming the message of the Democratic Party over the last six years
and its messenger-in-chief, Barack Obama.
Via Politico:

“The president is the president; we can’t control him. Good, bad
or indifferent. I think the Democratic Caucus, we can be loyal to
the president, we can be part of the team, which we should to the
best of our ability. But we need to focus more on middle-class
issues,” said Rep. Michael Capuano of Massachusetts. “We now have
lost three elections in a row based on those themes [health care,
immigration, minimum wage, pay equity for women] — all of which I
agree with, all of which I can run on in my district, they’re fine
— but middle-class Americans are not hearing that message. When was
the last time the Democratic Caucus as a caucus — not individually
— really talked about jobs? For me, we don’t do that enough.”

Democrats don’t talk enough about jobs? It seems that’s all
anyone in the establishment, Democrat or Republican, talk about.
Who doesn’t have some kind of “Jobs
Act“? They’re not going to create jobs in any meaningful way
because economic growth and government intervention are almost
entirely mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, Politico
reports House Democrats are still most likely to blame President
Obama, not Nancy Pelosi, and the “six year itch.” This despite
losses in 2010 and winning only 8 seats in 2012, a year Democrats
insist they saw a mandate for President Obama and the 51.1 percent
of voters he won in the election.

Pelosi is running unopposed for re-election as caucus leader. In
2010 she became the first Speaker to hold on to a leadership
despite her party losing the House since Sam Rayburn stayed on in
1954. Rayburn had served two non-consecutive tenures as Speaker and
would return to the position two years later, dying in office in
1961. Politico reports on some token opposition to Pelosi
this time around and grumbling over her decision to remain in
leadership:

A few Democrats — including some new members-elect such as Gwen
Graham of Florida — are expected to vote against Pelosi on Tuesday,
although the number of defections is still expected to be small.
Pelosi has bristled at suggestions that it may be time for her to
move on after a dozen years running the Democratic Caucus,
dismissing questions about her age and ability.

Pelosi even told POLITICO that she might have thought about
retiring if Democrats had won the House, but she needs to stay all
the more because the party lost seats. That comment caused some
eyes to roll in Democratic circles.

“If we had lost 30 or 40 seats, rather than the dozen we lost,
then [Pelosi] would have said she’s never leaving,” joked one
Democrat, speaking on condition of anonymity. “If we keep losing
seats, she’ll be here until she’s 90.”

Pelosi dismissed suggestions she should step down after House
Democrats’ losses in the midterm election by claiming the question
was
about age, and therefore sexist. She insisted nobody asked
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that question. McConnell
will be taking over as Majority Leader for the first time after
Republicans won control of the Senate in the midterms.

It appears as though the Senate
is one vote short of getting the votes it needs to
approve the Keystone XL pipeline and push it forward to
President Barack Obama to possibly sign or veto. Sen. Mary Landrieu
(D-La.), who is facing a
run-off re-election for the Senate and desperately needs some
sort of a win before December, is trying to whip up support among
Democrats. If she fails, obviously Keystone will be back before a
Republican Senate (possibly without her).

Obama recently commented on the pipeline in a fashion that
suggests that he understands the new party dynamics in play in
Washington. Ha, ha, no I’m just kidding. He is full of partisan
bullshit.
Here’s what he said last week:

“Understand what this project is: It is providing the ability of
Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the
Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else. It doesn’t have an
impact on US gas prices,” he said, growing visibly frustrated.

“If my Republican friends really want to focus on what’s good
for the American people in terms of job creation and lower energy
costs, we should be engaging in a conversation about what are we
doing to produce even more homegrown energy? I’m happy to have that
conversation,” he continued.

Because, you know, increasing the supply of oil “everywhere
else” won’t put also supply downward pressure on oil prices
produced by other nations and sold to the United States. Perhaps
the prices of goods at Walmart are completely unrelated to the
prices of goods at Target, right? People just shop where they shop
and never look for bargains. It’s not like fracking in the United
States has caused OPEC to
drop oil prices to compete or anything, right?

But even more absurdly, there is now a talking point that
KeystoneXL maybe isn’t so great because it actually doesn’t produce
a bunch of jobs. The job numbers people are tossing about are only
temporary. This is technically true, but the absurdity comes from
these same folks pushing other infrastructure and energy projects
that have the same fundamental “flaw” (scare quotes because it’s
not a flaw). Most of the jobs touted by these projects are only
temporary. Fixing roads and bridges, something Obama keeps
hammering about? Those are all temporary jobs. The “homegrown
energy” projects Obama mentions? Mostly temporary jobs!

CNN’s Van Jones noted the temporary nature of the KeystoneXL
jobs back in February, prompting a
Politifact check declaring his claim it would create only 35
permanent jobs to be true. Some have been attempting to claim that
there would be
thousands of permanent jobs, so it’s not as though Politifact
is carrying water for the left and advancing a one-sided argument
in this particular case. I looked to see if they were fact-checking
other exaggerated claims of permanent jobs from infrastructure
projects that the left loves, and they dinged Charlie Crist for
saying that Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s rejection of federal stimulus
money to build
high-speed rail eliminated the possibility of 60,000 jobs.
Those jobs were mostly temporary, Politifact points out.

But for pundits and politicians, trying to use the temporary
nature of the KeystoneXL jobs is pure hackery entirely because so
many projects near and dear to the Obama administration and any
Democrat looking to bring home the bacon heavily depend on
temporary jobs. That massive Ivanpah solar project I wrote about
last week? The one that got
$1.6 billion in federal loans and is now looking for hundreds
of millions in federal grants to help pay off its federal loans
because it’s not producing nearly as much energy as it promised? It
produced more than 2,000 temporary construction jobs and only 86
permanent jobs. These are their own numbers from their web page.

Now take a look at this self-promoting hackery from Bob Keefe of
Environmental Entrepreneurs (featuring an embedded advertisement
from NRG, which operates the aforementioned Ivanpah solar project)
at the
Huffington Post:

Keystone XL will create about 35 full-time jobs and 15 temporary
jobs, according to the U.S. State Department’s analysis. Granted,
about 1,950 construction jobs will be created, but those jobs —
while important — disappear after the pipe goes in the ground.

Clean energy companies, meanwhile, announced more than 18,000
jobs in more than 20 states in just the last three months alone,
according to the latest report from my organization, Environmental
Entrepreneurs (E2).
See the full report here.

Thanks for the link, Keefe! Did you check out the report
yourself? Because thousands of those jobs are also only temporary.
From his own organization’s report:

Solar generation accounted for 4,600 announced jobs — three
quarters of clean power generation’s total. All the announcements
came from companies with operations in states that have strong
public policies designed to expand solar power generation,
including California, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Maryland. For
example, nearly 2,000 announced solar construction jobs came from
California’s Imperial, Merced and Madera counties. ­… Duke Energy
expects to complete three utility-scale solar PV projects next
year, bringing 800 construction jobs to Bladen, Duplin, and Wilson
counties.

These are temporary jobs. More than half the solar power
generation jobs he is promoting are only temporary, but note the
absence of the word in the text. The charts in their report do not
differentiate between permanent or temporary jobs, but Keefe is
more than happy to critique the nature of Keystone’s employment to
serve his own agenda.  

(Hat tip to William Freeland for
pointing out this trend)