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Gender gap in Google pay goes against prevailing perceptions. For years, folks have insisted that Google underpays its female employees. The U.S. Department of Labor even opened an investigation into just that matter two years ago. But according to a new analysis from Google, it’s actually male staffers who may be missing out.

According to a Department of Labor assessment in early 2017, Google engaged in “systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce.” Janet Herold, the department’s regional solicitor, told The Verge at the time that the investigation was ongoing but they had “received compelling evidence of very significant discrimination against women in the most common positions at Google headquarters.”

The idea that this is an ongoing problem at Google has persisted. But according to the company’s latest yearly survey, more men were facing lower pay relative to women doing similar work.

The study “disproportionately led to pay raises for thousands of men,” reports The New York Times.

The fact that things needed to be corrected for pro-woman bias should be seen as a good sign for women’s stature and progress in the tech sector. But the study has yielded little celebration from professional gender-equality advocates.

Astonishingly, some are insisting instead that the study only masks much deeper discrimination by focusing on things like “equal pay for equal work.” From the Times again:

Google seems to be advancing a “flawed and incomplete sense of equality” by making sure men and women receive similar salaries for similar work, said Joelle Emerson, chief executive of Paradigm, a consulting company that advises companies on strategies for increasing diversity. That is not the same as addressing “equity,” she said, which would involve examining the structural hurdles that women face as engineers.

Google has denied paying women less, and the company agreed that compensation among similar job titles was not by itself a complete measure of equity. A more difficult issue to solve — one that critics say Google often mismanages for women — is a human resources concept called leveling. Are employees assigned to the appropriate pay grade for their qualifications? The company said it was now trying to address the issue.

If women do face discrimination in starting pay, that’s certainly something worth looking at, too. But it’s ironic to see some “equal pay” advocates now arguing for more nuance on the issue, when these same activists insist on lumping together all workers at all levels to make misleading proclamations like women getting only 49 cents or 77 cents for every dollar men make.

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“Why laws to fight sex trafficking often backfire.” Hallie Lieberman explains how anti-sex trafficking efforts (formerly called “white slavery,” now often referred to as “modern slavery”) from the Mann Act of 1910 to the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) that passed last year are rooted in “racial panic” and “fears of immigration, not combating sexual violence.” (For more on this history and its current iterations, check out my 2017 Reason story, “American Sex Police.“)

Harris hedges on Trump money. Donald and Ivanka Trump both donated to Sen. Kamala Harris’ campaign for attorney general of California, with him giving $6,000 in 2011-2013 and Ivanka giving $2,000 in 2014. Harris’ office told The Sacramento Bee that she had donated the money to a nonprofit promoting the rights of Central Americans. But the Bee reports that this donation didn’t happen until four years after Donald Trump first funded Harris.

Senate has the votes to rebuke Trump. It looks like a congressional resolution overturning President Donald Trump’s declaration of national emergency will really happen. The measure passed the House last week but still needs a vote in the Senate. And with Republican Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Susan Collins (Maine), and Thom Tillis (N.C.) joining Democrats in favor, the resolution has enough votes to pass. If so, it will “apparently be the first time since passage of the National Emergencies Act of 1976 that Congress has voted to overturn an emergency declaration,” notes The New York Times.

Our forgotten culture wars: The American Family Association is feeling betrayed by Walmart after an online ad campaign featured two men on a blind date.

A bittersweet announcement: Law & Order: Hate Crimes is being postponed.

More immigrant requests are being denied. The number of immigrants deemed ineligible for permanent residence here rose 39 percent between fall 2016 and fall 2018, according to a new National Foundation for American Policy analysis of State Department data. Denials of temporary visas were also up by 5 percent.

What’s next for the NSA? “The National Security Agency is considering ending a once-secret surveillance program that annually collects hundreds of millions of telephone call records, including those belonging to Americans, because it lacks operational value,” reports the Wall Street Journal. Conor Friedersdorf with the cynical but wise response:

Does the NSA now have a new secret tool that made this older, exposed tool redundant? https://t.co/9e8bNVmmN1 One wonders because the national security state feels entitled to keep such things secret from the public for years on end.

— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) March 5, 2019

A recently adopted IRS rule for tax-exempt organizations seems to violate the First Amendment by taking aim at groups that support drug policy reform.

The rule, described in an Internal Revenue Bulletin dated January 2, 2018, says the IRS will deny tax-exempt status to “an organization whose purpose is directed to the improvement of business conditions of one or more lines of business relating to an activity involving controlled substances (within the meaning of schedule I and II of the Controlled Substances Act) which is prohibited by Federal law regardless of its legality under the law of the state in which such activity is conducted.”

As Washington, D.C., lawyers David Rivkin and Randal Meyer pointed out in The Wall Street Journal, that language arguably covers organizations that advocate legalization of marijuana, writes Jacob Sullum.

View this article.

New Jersey’s Lakeland Regional High School has banned students from taking limousines or private party buses to the prom. Students can only use transportation provided by the school. Officials say the move is about safety and equity. Limos can be expensive to rent, they say. And it’s also about reducing underage drinking. “This way we have a little more control over what’s going on,” said Superintendent Hugh Beattie.

A central component of the recent investigation into Chinese massage-parlor sex was the secret installation of hidden cameras at the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, Florida. Now defense attorneys are challenging the legality of this move. On February 25, the law firm Kibbey Wagner filed paperwork in Martin and Palm Beach counties seeking an emergency declaratory judgment that police may not release images, audio, or video obtained from the secret cameras.

Permission for such surveillance stems from a provision of the PATRIOT Act that was passed with promises only to use the power against possible terrorists. “But the tactic has spilled over to infiltrating other crimes, most recently the alleged sex acts at the Jupiter business,” notes Lisa J. Hurriash at the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “In such cases, so-called sneak-and-peek warrants let authorities access private property so the government can secretly do a search without notifying people under investigation.”

In this case, police secretly filmed massage rooms in January 2019 after months of prior investigation into prostitution at Ochids of Asia and other local massage parlors. Caught on camera getting a massage and maybe more were New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and dozens of other men, who now face misdemeanor charges for allegedly soliciting prostitution. Workers and managers at the businesses were also arrested and stand accused of prostitution and racketeering.

Police were able to secretly install the surveillance cameras thanks to a sneak-and-peek warrant. Such warrants were sold after 9/11 as a way to stop terrorism, but in practice they’ve mainly been used in investigations of drug crimes.

Of the more than 11,000 such warrants issued in 2013, for instance, only 50 were related to terrorism; 9,401 were parts of drug investigations. In 2011, 5,093 of 6,775 requests for sneak-and-peek warrants were related to drug cases; just 31 were related to terrorism. “Exactly what privacy advocates argued in 2001 is happening: sneak and peak warrants are not just being used in exceptional circumstances—which was their original intent—but as an everyday investigative tool,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned five years ago.

Now they’re being used to stop prostitution under the guise of busting up international slavery rings.

To see such a tool used to investigate prostitution is “very, very troubling,” according to University of Miami law professor Celeste Higgins, who spent 25 years as a federal public defender in southern Florida. “Putting devices into locations is really the ultimate invasion,” she tells the Sun-Sentinel. “How is this a terrorism case?”

It’s not, of course. But just as local cops and federal authorities have used anti-terrorism tools to prosecute potheads, they’ve been keen on attacking all prostitution (a misdemeanor crime under local laws throughout most of the U.S.) as “human trafficking,” a federal crime. Police in Palm Beach and Jupiter counties have been trotting out that claim this time too, although no sex trafficking or forced labor charges have been filed.

As with so much of this case, that claim looks strange in light of the fact that the authorities spent months visiting and watching these businesses but not rescuing the women that they now say they suspect are trafficking victims. “Why would you allow an investigation to go on…and allow human trafficking?” defense attorney Marc Shiner asks in the Sun-Sentinel article. “That’s like being raped on a daily basis. Why would the police condone such behavior?”

Several folks quoted by the Sun-Sentinel suggest that this case represents an unprecedented use of sneak-and-peek warrants—but that’s not true even within Palm Beach County. As the same paper noted in 2014, Palm Beach authorities ran a similar massage-parlor sting operation back in 2007. They used a sneak-and-peek warrant to install cameras and catch sex acts on video back then, too.

In that case, one massage parlor worker was arrested for prostitution and 25 men were arrested for solicitation of prostitution. One woman in her fifties wound up charged with permitting an employee to practice massage without a license, living off proceeds from prostitution, and money laundering, but the case against her was eventually dropped.

The California Supreme Court may have saved taxpayers some money today, but it also nimbly dodged the question of whether public employees’ pension benefits can ever be scaled back.

The ruling leaves intact what is known as the “California Rule,” a series of court precedents that have set up a legal regime where the state and its municipalities are only able to alter pensions benefits in one direction: more. Even as pension obligations threaten to bankrupt cities and even the entire state, courts have consistently ruled that pension benefits for employees cannot be scaled back once they have been offered.

In this particular case, the state’s Supreme Court was asked to determine whether local governments could end the practice of “airtime purchases.” This is the pension-spiking practice where public workers were permitted to “buy” an additional five years to attach onto their total time as a government employee. So, for example, a firefighter who worked for 20 years could be credited as working for 25 years, which jacks up the total pension that firefighter will be paid in retirement.

In 2011, Gov. Jerry Brown, who saw the state’s pension crisis ballooning, pushed through reforms allowing local governments to end this practice if they wanted. This prompted Cal Fire Local 2881, a union representing firefighters, to sue on the basis that this reform counted as an impermissible rollback of pension benefits.

Today the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the fire union. That’s good news for anybody who cares about the state’s fiscal sustainability. But the California Rule remains intact. The court ruled that airtime purchases are not contractually protected benefits under the state’s pension regulations. Thus, the state can alter the rules for airtime purchases at it sees fit without violating the “California Rule.” It’s not a contractual benefit—it’s a bonus.

That means the Supreme Court wasn’t obliged to decide whether the “California Rule” is a constitutionally protected right of public employees. And so they punted that part entirely. The old precedents are still in place, and the state and its municipalities are stuck: They’re unable to reduce what their financial commitments, even though the state’s pension fund may be underwater and carrying more than $360 billion in unfunded liabilities.

Giving governments a chance to cut one type of pension spiking is a win. But keeping the California Rule intact is a loss.

Bonus link: Just last week, Steven Greenhut predicted the Supreme Court would “create yet another unresolved mess” with its ruling. He was right. Read his piece here.

Who does the best insult comedy about the Green New Deal? Well, President Donald Trump, of course, but let’s not leave out of the conversation Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.), who famously referred to it as “the green dream or whatever they call it.”

Pelosi gets some surprising shout-outs on the new Editors’ Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast (featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and me), over her stiff-arming progressive fantasia and opposition to the president’s emergency declaration, in which she was joined by a lonely libertarian-leaning congressman and senator. The gang also has a good long talk over the contemporary political meaning of “socialism,” the ideological content (such as it existed) of the Conservative Political Action Conference, and why you should stop what you’re doing and check out this great new Claypool Lennon Delirium video about weirder-than-life rocketeer/cultist Jack Parsons.

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

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

‘Keymonica’ by Pietnastka is licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0

Relevant links from the show:

“Trump Just Might Have Won the 2020 Election Today,” by Nick Gillespie

“At CPAC, the Culture War Matters More than Politics or Policy,” by Nick Gillespie

“‘Everyone’ Here Is a Socialist Except Most Americans,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Top Pelosi Aide Tells Insurance Industry Medicare for All Would Be Costly, Politically Perilous, and Difficult To Implement,” by Peter Suderman

“Rand Paul Will Vote to Block Trump’s Emergency Declaration,” by Eric Boehm

“Rep. Justin Amash: ‘The President Doesn’t Get To Just Declare an Emergency,’” by Joe Setyon

“House Votes to Terminate Trump’s National Emergency,” by Christian Britschgi

“Kamala Harris Wants to Revive the ERA,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Rather Than Running for President, Maybe Joe Biden Should Just Launch an Apology Tour,” by Scott Shackford

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

Subscribe at Apple Podcasts.

Follow us at SoundCloud.

Subscribe at YouTube.

Like us on Facebook.

Follow us on Twitter.

Who does the best insult comedy about the Green New Deal? Well, President Donald Trump, of course, but let’s not leave out of the conversation Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.), who famously referred to it as “the green dream or whatever they call it.”

Pelosi gets some surprising shout-outs on the new Editors’ Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast (featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and me), over her stiff-arming progressive fantasia and opposition to the president’s emergency declaration, in which she was joined by a lonely libertarian-leaning congressman and senator. The gang also has a good long talk over the contemporary political meaning of “socialism,” the ideological content (such as it existed) of the Conservative Political Action Conference, and why you should stop what you’re doing and check out this great new Claypool Lennon Delirium video about weirder-than-life rocketeer/cultist Jack Parsons.

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

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

‘Keymonica’ by Pietnastka is licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0

Relevant links from the show:

“Trump Just Might Have Won the 2020 Election Today,” by Nick Gillespie

“At CPAC, the Culture War Matters More than Politics or Policy,” by Nick Gillespie

“‘Everyone’ Here Is a Socialist Except Most Americans,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Top Pelosi Aide Tells Insurance Industry Medicare for All Would Be Costly, Politically Perilous, and Difficult To Implement,” by Peter Suderman

“Rand Paul Will Vote to Block Trump’s Emergency Declaration,” by Eric Boehm

“Rep. Justin Amash: ‘The President Doesn’t Get To Just Declare an Emergency,’” by Joe Setyon

“House Votes to Terminate Trump’s National Emergency,” by Christian Britschgi

“Kamala Harris Wants to Revive the ERA,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Rather Than Running for President, Maybe Joe Biden Should Just Launch an Apology Tour,” by Scott Shackford

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

Subscribe at Apple Podcasts.

Follow us at SoundCloud.

Subscribe at YouTube.

Like us on Facebook.

Follow us on Twitter.

There will be no charges against the Sacramento police officers who shot and killed Stephon Clark last year after mistaking his cellphone for a gun. But the outrage that followed Clark’s death has led to some real reforms in California, and more may be coming.

Two officers shot Clark seven times following a foot chase. They were responding to some 911 calls about an individual breaking car windows. They cornered Clark behind his grandmother’s house. The body camera videos from the two cops showed them attempting to confront Clark, then screaming “Gun!” and opening fire.

It turned out ultimately that Clark was not holding a gun but a cellphone. Protests and an investigation followed.

On Saturday afternoon, a year after Clark’s death, Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert announced that she has concluded that the two police officers genuinely feared that Clark had a gun and that they “acted lawfully” when they shot him.

In a lengthy press conference, she walked through all the details, arguing that the officers had honestly mistaken a flash of light from Clark’s phone for muzzle fire. Furthermore, an investigation of Clark’s phone and the events of that weekend showed that he was deeply troubled following an apparently violent confrontation with the mother of his children. Clark was on probation for multiple crimes (two charges of domestic violence; one for robbery) and was likely concerned about the pending police response to the incident. A search of his phone showed that he had been both texting the woman over and over again, and also had been searching for online tips for killing himself. And he wasn’t even stealing anything from the cars he was breaking into.

Police didn’t know any of this at the time of the confrontation. But as Schubert explained, all this evidence of Clark’s increasingly erratic and desperate behavior would be presented to a jury if she attempted to charge the police in the case. The implication is that it would be hard to get a jury to convict the officers given the entire context of what happened.

She might be right about that, given how hard it can be to hold a police officer accountable for misconduct in a courtroom. Nevertheless, her decision not to charge either officer has inspired a lot of anger. Clark’s mother has called the press conference by Schubert a “smear campaign” against her son. Many media outlets and activists have noted that Schubert’s office has investigated 34 police shootings and has not recommended charges for any of them. This shooting is being investigated separately by the California attorney general’s office.

In a statement, Lizzie Buchen, legislative advocate for the American Civil Liberties Union of California’s Center for Advocacy and Policy, opined: “As a society, we give police officers the most significant power we confer on the government—the power to take someone’s life. Our laws must set appropriate standards to ensure police officers use that power sparingly and with the goal of preserving human life. Of equal importance is the requirement that officers be held accountable when they violate these standards.”

There’s a reason for her focus on the standards applied when police shoot citizens. Clark’s shooting has prompted pushes to reform California’s laws. In the wake of Clark’s death, Assemblymember Shirley Weber (D–San Diego) introduced legislation intended to change the rules of force for California police officers. Under Weber’s bill, cops could not use deadly force unless “it is necessary to prevent imminent and serious bodily injury or death,” with no reasonable alternative courses of action such as deescalation or retreat. The argument here is that had the two officers retreated when they thought Clark had shot a gun, they might have realized he was not armed and that they had been mistaken.

Weber’s bill was shelved last summer, but she has reintroduced it with the new legislative session. Her bill is opposed by the Police Officers Research Association of California, the state’s top law enforcement lobbying organization, which has promised to craft rival legislation.

The reform push that followed Clark’s death also helped create the groundswell to open records of police misconduct so that California media and citizens can find out if officers who kill on the job have a history of bad behavior. For decades, all that information was kept secret from the public, but last year SB 1421 finally opened certain police personnel and investigation records to the public. Police unions, and even the state’s Democratic attorney general, are fighting against compliance with the law, but it looks like they’re losing.

Democratic presidential contender Kamala Harris shored up her progressive bona fides this weekend by endorsing Oregon’s first-in-the-nation statewide rent control policy, which became law last week.

“Earlier this week, [Oregon Gov. Kate Brown] made it easier for families to stay in their neighborhoods by enacting statewide rent control,” Harris tweeted yesterday. “No one should ever have to choose between paying their rent each month or feeding their children,” the California senator added.

Oregon’s new law caps rent increases at 7 percent plus inflation per year, and it imposes new restrictions on landlords’ ability to kick out tenants.

The law resembles the rent control system in San Francisco, where Harris was once district attorney. There, the price controls on rental properties resulted in exactly what most economists warn will happen: The supply of rental housing fell, and rents increased citywide.

That’s according to a 2018 study from three Stanford economists who looked at an expansion of San Francisco’s rent control in 1994. That year the city expanded its already existing rent regulations—which, as in Oregon, capped annual rent increases at 7 percent per year—to owner-occupied rental properties with four or fewer units, which had previously been exempted.

Because this expansion did not cover buildings that were constructed after 1980, the researchers were able to measure the effects of rent control by comparing very similar sets of housing in the same city. What they found vindicated a lot of standard critiques of rent control.

The Stanford study found that pre-1980 rent-controlled small apartment buildings saw a 25 percent decline in the number of tenants living in them compared to post-1980, non-rent-controlled buildings—often driven by landlords buying out or evicting their tenants and then converting formerly rent-controlled units to condos they’re able to sell at a market price.

The same study found that tenants in rent-controlled housing were more likely to be living at the same address ten years later, and that they saved anywhere from $2,300 to $6,600 a year on rent, adding up to some $2.9 billion in savings during the period examined in the study. That sounds like fodder for rent-control fans—except that the $2.9 billion saved by tenants in rent-controlled units was matched by a 5.1 percent increase in citywide rents, which cost tenants in non-rent-controlled buildings $2.9 billion.

San Francisco today is one of the most expensive places in the country to rent, with the average one-bedroom rent going as high as $3,000 a month. It also has a persistent and worsening homelessness crisis.

Harris’ enthusiastic endorsement of a policy that has failed so miserably in her own backyard is concerning, particularly as the senator has tried to present herself as a bold housing reformer.

Last summer, she introduced the Rent Relief Act, which promised refundable tax credits to folks earning as much as $125,000 per year and paying more than 30 percent of their monthly income in rent. As many pointed out at the time, this would if anything make housing more expensive by essentially subsidizing landlords for increasing rents without actually increasing the supply of rental housing.

There’s a broad consensus that high housing costs in and around many of America’s urban areas are the result of restrictions on new construction, and the best way of bringing prices down is to get rid of some of those restrictions. Instead, Harris is doubling down on counterproductive measures like poorly designed rent subsidies and price controls.

There’s not a lot any president can do about local restrictions on new housing supply. Land use decisions are almost entirely the province of state and local governments. But there is a lot that the feds could do to make America’s housing affordability problems worse. If a presidential candidate endorses statewide rent control, it’s not a good sign.