Month: July 2014

Developer Extell moved ahead with plans last week to build a
luxury tower on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that will offer no
river views and a separate entrance for the 55 less-affluent
households that get to live in the building at way below-market
prices because they won an affordable housing lottery.

New York City’s political class is in a tizzy. Last week, Mayor
Bill de Blasio (D-New York)
pledged to change the zoning code to outlaw “poor doors” (as
the tabloids have dubbed the separate entrance). New York City
Public Advocate Letitia James (D) held a press conference on Friday

calling the arrangement “segregation,” protesting that “this
administration was elected into office based on equality, one rule
of law, one New York City.”

Among Gotham’s clownish political leaders, apparently it
qualifies as “segregation” if rich people pay more to live amongst
each other, a totally new and unheard of phenomenon.

Council Member Mark Levine (D-7th District) recently introduced
a law that would allow below-market tenants to file a
discrimination lawsuit or a complaint with the city’s Commission on
Human Rights if denied all the amenities available to market rate
tenants. Next City
reports that Levine’s bill came after a building in his
district denied rent-controlled tenants the right to use an onsite
gym. “It just so happens that the rent-regulated tenants being
blocked from the gym happen to be older and more often people of
color than the market-rate tenants,” said Levine, “which is the
same as the tenants who would be affected by the ‘poor door.’”

The rent-regulated tenants just happen to be older and
of color; they weren’t denied the right to use the gym
because they’re older and of color, which is precisely why
these policies don’t qualify as “segregation.” To call them that
devalues the word.

It’s depressing that the biggest story of the year in local
housing policy is that a few dozen families living in a luxury
building at taxpayer expense have to walk through a separate
entrance. Outlawing separate amenities for below-market tenants
will only mean that the government will have to pony up even more
subsidies, such as real estate tax abatements, tax free financing,
and Low Income Housing Tax Credits, to entice Gotham’s crony
capitalist affordable housing developers to put up new
buildings.

Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal (D-6th District)
called the poor door an “absolute disgrace.” You know what’s an
absolute disgrace? The deal Rosenthal brokered recently to give
affordable housing subsidies to families earning nearly $200K,
which
I wrote about earlier this month.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Kentucky
Sen. Rand Paul, both GOP presidential aspirants, recently had what
one might call a frank exchange of views on foreign policy. After
Paul wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal opposing
further intervention in Iraq, Perry suggested Paul is (paraphrasing
here) a hopeless naïf whose fraidy-cat isolationism presents a
standing invitation for terrorists to bomb America into rubble.
Paul replied that Perry is a shoot-first maniac who would send
American sons and daughters to their deaths because he refuses to
learn from the past. “Any future military action by the United
States,” Paul wrote, “must always be based on an assessment of what
has worked and what hasn’t.”

That would be a good start. But only a start, writes A. Barton
Hinkle. Perry’s and Paul’s concern over what works and what doesn’t
ignores an equally important consideration: what’s right and what’s
wrong.

View this article.

The State Department and
Office of the Director of National Intelligence yesterday released
satellite images they say are evidence that “Russian forces have
fired across the border at Ukrainian military forces, and that
Russia-backed separatists have used heavy artillery, provided by
Russia, in attacks on Ukrainian forces from inside Ukraine.”

From
The Washington Post:

The most recent photograph, taken Saturday, shows what are
described as “blast marks” from rocket-launcher fire on the Russian
side of the border and “impact craters” inside Ukraine.

A photograph labeled as having been taken Wednesday shows a row
of vehicles described as “self-propelled artillery only found in
Russian military units, on the Russian side of the border, oriented
in the direction of a Ukrainian military unit within Ukraine.” On
the other side of the border, “the pattern of crater impacts near
the Ukrainian military unit indicates strikes from artillery fired
from self-propelled or towed artillery, vice multiple rocket
launchers,” the label says.

Here’s the State Department’s
four-page document with pictures on the matter.

At the time the images were released, Secretary of State John
Kerry “urged [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov] to stop the
flow of heavy weapons and rocket and artillery fire from Russia
into Ukraine, and to begin to contribute to deescalating the
conflict,” and “did not accept” Lavrov’s denial of involvement,

according to the State Department.

For its part, Russia
accuses the U.S. of “an unrelenting campaign of slander against
Russia, ever more relying on open lies.”

Today, President Barack Obama is having a joint call with
leaders of Britain, France,  Germany, and Italy. “The call
comes as the U.S. and European Union weigh tougher sanctions
against Russia,”
according to the Associated Press, which yesterday
noted that “targeted economic sanctions and threats of tougher
ones have yet to alter” Russia’s behavior in Ukraine.

The United Nations’ latest report on the war today highlights
that although both sides have been using heavy weaponry, the
insurgents have subjected civilians to a “a reign of intimidation
and terror.”  Over 1,100 people have been killed, 3,442 have
been wounded, and about 100,000 have fled the area since
separatists arrived in the contested regions of Donetsk and Luhansk
in mid-April.

The fighting
continues today, and as Ukraine’s military presses forward,
it’s further delaying an investigation of the Malaysia Airlines
crash site.

It’s probably safe to say
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of Virginia’s political future may
depend on how well he is able to tamp down the Obama administration
and the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory
“war on coal,” at least in his home state.

So with the rhetoric heating up over the “crony capitalism
machine” (Reason Contributing Editor Veronique de Rugy’s

words, not mine) known as the U.S. Export-Import Bank and its
future in jeopardy, Manchin apparently sees an opportunity to
create a bipartisan push to save a mechanism to give money to
favored business interests. He’s hoping the ability to let the
Ex-Im Bank loan money to coal companies would draw in some
Republicans to renew the bank’s charter come fall.
Politico
takes note:

The West Virginia Democrat’s measure would extend Ex-Im’s
charter for five years and lift its lending authority from $130
billion to $160 billion. But it would also roll back a rule Ex-Im
put in place last year that bars assistance to environmentally
“dirty” projects.

That provision helped attract four Republican co-sponsors: Sens.
Mark Kirk of Illinois, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Roy Blunt
of Missouri and Mike Johanns of Nebraska. But it has also drawn the
ire of environmental groups and liberal Democrats like Sen. Barbara
Boxer of California, leaving Manchin at risk of losing support from
within his own party.

Other Democrats said they don’t have a problem with Manchin’s
pro-coal provision, although they said they fear it could open the
door to a raft of reform proposals that could slow any renewal
down.

“I’m concerned about starting to add things and conditions, and
making it more complicated and bogging it down that way,” said Sen.
Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). “I don’t particularly object to Manchin’s
efforts, but I think that sets us down a path we may not want to
go.”

Manchin’s efforts at the potential cronyism gravy train it may
inspire by other members of Congress is exactly why the Ex-Im Bank
is such a problem in the first place. This is pork at its most
obvious. Any additional “reforms” are bound to favor the states or
congressional districts of the reformers.

Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) is also proposing some reforms
that would reauthorize the bank but reduce the amount of money it
loans a year to $95 billion. Campbell also tells Politico
that he is a bit surprised at how much attention to usually unknown
Ex-Im Bank is getting these days:

“The vast majority of the American public has never heard of it.
I’d never heard of it before I was elected to Congress,” he
said.

“Here’s this obscure little thing that has become the poster
child of being either in favor of business and jobs or against
crony capitalism, depending on which side you’re on,” Campbell
said. “And I think it’s overrated in both those senses.”

But killing off the Ex-Im Bank a test of commitment for actual
support of small government. De Rugy has detailed in the pages of
Reason, and elsewhere, and
even before a House Committee, that the defenses of the bank
can easily be shot down, and there’s little evidence the bank is
actually necessary. If this cronyist patronage appendix in the
federal government cannot be surgically removed, is there anything
in the federal government that can actually be cut?

Maybe that’s why progressives like Sen. Elizabeth Warren
(D-Mass.) end up
supporting the bank, even though there’s no rational or ethical
reason anybody on the left should feel anything but revulsion
toward the thing. The Export-Import Bank is proof that the size of
government can and should be cut and evidence that the federal
government is too powerful. If the bank is permitted to die, it may
well embolden both politicians and average Americans who believe
the government does too much.

After Paul Ryan’s proposals
for fighting poverty were released late last week, the Wisconsin
congressman’s plan was heavily
criticized as paternalistic.
Those critics are correct: If you don’t like the way the welfare
state opens the door for bureaucrats to interfere in their clients’
lives, you’ll recoil from Ryan’s notion that providers should “work
with families to design a customized life plan to provide a
structured roadmap out of poverty,” with “sanctions for breaking
the terms of the contract” and “incentives for exceeding the
terms.” I’m
no fan of welfare-state paternalism, so I’ll have to side with
the critics on that one.

But there’s some good stuff in Ryan’s proposals too. Recognizing
the
substantial role that prison plays in the persistance of
poverty, the congressman has
endorsed reforms aimed at rolling back America’s ridiculously
high incarceration rates. He also wants to root out the sorts of
red tape that disproportionately affect low-income Americans, with
a special focus on the ways licensing laws are used to protect
established businesses from upstart competition. (“Occupational
licensing laws should protect the public—not incumbents,” his draft
says.) And the Ryan plan makes a good point about the
perverse incentives that can result when different transfer
programs phase out at uncoordinated rates: “At key points on the
income scale, the drop in aid is so abrupt that it creates an
incentive to earn less in order to remain eligible.” To ease that
problem, Ryan wants to experiment with consolidating many of those
programs into a single Opportunity Grant. I’m not persuaded by his
ideas about how that grant would work, but the basic idea of a
merger is sensible.

These ideas aren’t as far-reaching as they could be. He says we
should reduce the use of mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent
offenders; he doesn’t say we should end the war on drugs. He wants
to consolidate certain programs into a block grant sent to the
states; he doesn’t want to combine them all into a negative income
tax sent to individuals. But they’re steps in the right direction.
If we can come out of this with fewer people behind bars, fewer
dumb licensing laws, and fewer bizarre bureaucratic incentives,
Ryan will have done some good here. If we can avoid his more
paternalist proposals, so much the better.

After Paul Ryan’s proposals
for fighting poverty were released late last week, the Wisconsin
congressman’s plan was heavily
criticized as paternalistic.
Those critics are correct: If you don’t like the way the welfare
state opens the door for bureaucrats to interfere in their clients’
lives, you’ll recoil from Ryan’s notion that providers should “work
with families to design a customized life plan to provide a
structured roadmap out of poverty,” with “sanctions for breaking
the terms of the contract” and “incentives for exceeding the
terms.” I’m
no fan of welfare-state paternalism, so I’ll have to side with
the critics on that one.

But there’s some good stuff in Ryan’s proposals too. Recognizing
the
substantial role that prison plays in the persistance of
poverty, the congressman has
endorsed reforms aimed at rolling back America’s ridiculously
high incarceration rates. He also wants to root out the sorts of
red tape that disproportionately affect low-income Americans, with
a special focus on the ways licensing laws are used to protect
established businesses from upstart competition. (“Occupational
licensing laws should protect the public—not incumbents,” his draft
says.) And the Ryan plan makes a good point about the
perverse incentives that can result when different transfer
programs phase out at uncoordinated rates: “At key points on the
income scale, the drop in aid is so abrupt that it creates an
incentive to earn less in order to remain eligible.” To ease that
problem, Ryan wants to experiment with consolidating many of those
programs into a single Opportunity Grant. I’m not persuaded by his
ideas about how that grant would work, but the basic idea of a
merger is sensible.

These ideas aren’t as far-reaching as they could be. He says we
should reduce the use of mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent
offenders; he doesn’t say we should end the war on drugs. He wants
to consolidate certain programs into a block grant sent to the
states; he doesn’t want to combine them all into a negative income
tax sent to individuals. But they’re steps in the right direction.
If we can come out of this with fewer people behind bars, fewer
dumb licensing laws, and fewer bizarre bureaucratic incentives,
Ryan will have done some good here. If we can avoid his more
paternalist proposals, so much the better.