Month: September 2020

During the chaos that was the first presidential debate, one topic largely flew under the radar: Joe Biden’s shriveling support from police unions. For Americans who believe that the government should work for us and be held accountable when it fails us, this is not a bad thing. 

The back-and-forth went something like this:

Trump: [Biden’s] talking about defunding the police.

Biden: That—that is not true.

Trump: He doesn’t have any law support—

Biden: Would you—look—

Trump: He has no law enforcement support, almost nothing.

Biden: That’s not—look—

Trump: Oh really? Why do you have? Name one group that supports you. Name one group that came out and supported you.

Biden: Look—

Trump: Go ahead.

Biden: Look—

Trump: Think. We have time.

Biden: We don’t have time to do anything except—

Trump: No, no, think about it.

As was the case for most of the evening, no actual productive exchange of ideas occurred. While Biden does not actually want to defund the police, his relationship with law enforcement groups did, in fact, used to be much cozier.

At a dinner for the National Organization for Police Organizations (NAPO) in May 2015, the former vice president courted the police lobby with talk of his 1994 crime bill: “There wouldn’t have been a Biden crime bill,” he said, “there wouldn’t have been that crime bill that put 100,000 cops in the street in the first place were it not for the fact that from the very beginning [NAPO] was the staunchest, staunchest advocate for it.”

NAPO endorsed the Obama-Biden campaign in both 2008 and 2012. After declining to weigh in on the 2016 election, they have thrown their support behind Trump.

“For Joe Biden, police are shaking their heads because he used to be a stand-up guy who backed law enforcement,” said Bill Johnson, executive director of NAPO. “But it seems in his old age, for whatever reason, he’s writing a sad final chapter when it comes to supporting law enforcement.”

A list of 175 officials, including former Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and former Madison, Wisconsin, Police Chief Noble Wray have endorsed Biden. Multnomah County Sheriff Mike Reese, who oversees Portland, Oregon, pushed back on Trump’s debate claim that he had endorsed the president. “As the Multnomah County Sheriff I have never supported Donald Trump,” he tweeted, “and will never support him.”

But Trump seems to think that having the backing of police unions reflects positively on his campaign. Whether it gives him any electoral advantage is an open question, but we know with more certainty that police support reflects Trump’s unwillingness to grapple with meaningful police reform, such as his refusal to even consider changing qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that makes it considerably more difficult to sue police officers when they violate your civil rights. Biden would not promise to eliminate the doctrine, but rather said he wants to “rein it in.”

With that in mind, NAPO’s reversal shouldn’t be a surprise. The point of police unions is to protect all cops at all costs, even the bad ones, even at the expense of the people they pledge to protect and serve. When former New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo choked and killed Eric Garner after he was caught selling loose cigarettes, a police magistrate ruled that he had violated department policy. He was terminated. The union, however, stood by his side, blaming the result on “anti-police extremists,” the implication being that all cops need to reserve the right to use unconstitutional force that violates internal guidance.

Republicans rightly acknowledge that teachers unions monopolize the education system and then weaponize it against the public. Trump should apply that logic to the law enforcement lobby. If he did, perhaps he’d understand that losing their endorsement isn’t such a bad thing.

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During the first half-hour of Tuesday’s presidential debate, moderator and Fox News host Chris Wallace asked a simple question to former vice president Joe Biden: “Are you willing to tell the American tonight whether or not you will support…packing the court?”

Prominent Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.), have suggested that adding new seats—and new progressive Supreme Court Justices—would be an appropriate response if Republicans manage to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. This comes after Republicans, in a similar situation at the end of President Barack Obama’s second term, refused to confirm Democratic nominee Merrick Garland.

In the past, Biden has dismissed the idea of packing the court if Democrats control the White House and the Senate. In July 2019, Biden said that he was “not prepared to go on and try to pack the court.” In October, he said that he “would not get into court-packing,” and in his January interview with The New York Times, he claimed that he would have no proposed judicial reforms.

On Tuesday night, however, Biden neatly dodged the issue.

“Whatever position I take on that, that’ll become the issue,” he said. Trump followed up by asking the question directly to Biden, twice. “Are you going to pack the court?” Biden refused to answer.

Does Biden actually oppose packing the court? Last night, despite the general mayhem, was a chance to plant a flag on the issue. That’s important considering that members of Biden’s party—Sen. Ed Markey (D–Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), most notably—want to pack the court if Barrett is confirmed. During the Democratic primary, several other candidates were open to the idea as well, including Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), who is now Biden’s running-mate.

Biden is often described as a centrist, but he’s more accurately described as a reflection of the center of the Democratic Party, whatever that may be at a given moment. The man behind the 1994 Crime Bill is now the head of the party most supportive of racial justice; the man who voted for the bill that created our deportation immigration system is the candidate for immigration reform. He is, to quote Reason‘s Matt Welch, a “rusty political weather vane.”

Does that mean Biden’s views on court-packing are now changing as well? His answer on Tuesday night was not substantial enough to tell, but it certainly seems like the Democratic wind is blowing that direction.

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Last night presidential debate moderator Chris Wallace asked President Trump, “You believe that human pollution, gas, greenhouse gas emissions contribute to the global warming of this planet?” Trump replied, “I think a lot of things do, but I think to an extent, yes. I think to an extent, yes, but I also think we have to do better management of our forest.”

The president added, “Every year I get the call. California’s burning, California’s burning. If that was cleaned, if that were, if you had forest management, good forest management, you wouldn’t be getting those calls.” As it happens, the federal government, which the president oversees, owns 57 percent of California’s forests, whereas state and local governments own around 3 percent. (The rest is in private hands.)

In the Trump administration’s latest budget request, the U.S. Forest Service asks for no funding for forest management practices such as prescribed burning or timber salvage. The agency says it has a backlog of 80 million acres in need of active management but plans to reduce fuel loads using current budget allocations on just over 1 million acres in 2021. While the president rightly complains about poor forest management, his administration is doing nothing to significantly reduce future wildfire risks on federal forest lands.

The president’s fleeting acknowledgment that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to climate change is a shift in tone at least from the president’s response during a briefing on California’s fires in Sacramento earlier this month. At that briefing, California’s Natural Resources Agency Secretary Wade Crowfoot urged the president to “recognize the changing climate and what it means to our forests.” Trump responded, “It will start getting cooler, just you watch.” Crowfoot countered that he wished the science agreed with the president. Trump replied, “I don’t think science knows, actually.”

Of course, there is no contradiction between the two concerns of climate change and poor forest management. Man-made greenhouse gases, chiefly carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, are responsible for most of the recent rise in the average temperature of the planet. And yes, decades of bad federal government forest management have contributed to the recent rising annual trend in burnt area in the western U.S. Rising temperatures and lengthier droughts in California are increasing the fire danger of badly managed overgrown federal forests in that state.

As an example of his commitment to addressing the problems of climate change, Trump declared, “We’re planting a billion trees, the Billion Tree Project and it’s very exciting for a lot of people.” The president did promise in his latest State of the Union speech that the “United States will join the One Trillion Trees Initiative, an ambitious effort to bring together government and private sector to plant new trees in America and all around the world.” In fact, no trees, much less a billion, have so far been planted at the behest of the Trump administration. The only activity so far is an EPA press release and a moribund bill in Congress.

For his part, former Vice President Joe Biden thinks that man-made climate change is a major problem and is responding with his plan for “a clean energy revolution and environmental justice.” Turning to Biden’s $2 trillion dollar plan to address climate change, moderator Wallace asked him about his goal of “ending the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity by 2035 and net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050. The president says a lot of these things would tank the economy and cost millions of jobs.”

In his response, Biden insisted that his climate plan spending would generate millions of new jobs building renewable power infrastructure, weatherizing millions of businesses and houses, and incentivizing the adoption of electric vehicles. Scanning through Biden’s plan, it’s uncanny how fixing the problems associated with man-made climate change just happens to coincide with the exact same economic policies long advocated by political progressives.

With respect to phasing out the burning of fossil fuels to generate electricity by 2035, Biden declared, “Nobody’s going to build another coal-fired plant in America.” He is quite likely right. In May, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that the output of the U.S.’s fleet of coal-fired electric power generating plants in 2019 fell to the lowest level since 1976. In July, the agency noted that 2019 coal production dropped to its lowest level since 1978. Coal is being outcompeted by natural gas and renewable electricity generation. (Despite Trump’s promise to bring back coal, it’s worth noting that more than half of the coal mines operating in 2008 have now closed and that coal production employment continues its fall, dropping by 42 percent since 2011.)

In response to a question from the moderator about his administration pulling out of the Paris climate change agreement, Trump replied, “If you look at the Paris Accord, it was a disaster from our standpoint.” Why? At least in part because he thinks it’s disadvantageous for the U.S. “China sends up real dirt into the air. Russia does. India does. They all do. We’re supposed to be good,” he said.

In fact, China emits nearly twice as much greenhouse gases as does the U.S. which is in second place in the ranking of national emitters, followed by India and Russia. Keeping in mind the malleability of promises made by politicians, China’s leader Xi Jinping just pledged earlier this month that his country would “aim to have [carbon dioxide] emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.” That Chinese carbon neutrality goal falls just 10 years later than Biden’s similarly proposed deadline for the U.S.

For his part, Biden pledged that the U.S. would rejoin the Paris climate change agreement.

Biden called out Trump for rolling back the Obama administration’s automobile fuel efficiency standards. “Why have you relaxed fuel economy standards that are going to create more pollution from cars and trucks?” he asked. Translating the president’s garbled response, the point that he seemed to be trying to make is that the lower standards would make new cars less expensive thus encouraging consumers to replace their old polluting clunkers much faster. My Reason Foundation colleagues point out fuel taxes instead of the cumbersome federal fuel efficiency standards that Biden wants to restore would be a much more efficient and less expensive way to incentivize the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants from automobiles.

Biden is also interested in the climate-friendly aspects of trees. “The rainforests of Brazil are being torn down, are being ripped down,” he asserted. “More carbon is absorbed in that rainforest than every bit of carbon that’s emitted in the United States.” Although it doesn’t appear in his formal climate plan, Biden seemed to be proposing in the debate that rich countries of the world pay Brazil $20 billion to stop ripping down its rainforests. Research suggests that the Amazon does annually absorb about 2.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide (about 5 percent of humanity’s annual emissions). On the other hand, more recent research projects that the Amazon and other rainforests are becoming fully saturated and may lose their ability to absorb additional carbon dioxide in the next couple of decades.

Toward the end of the debate segment on climate change, the two candidates sparred over the cost of Biden’s climate plan with Trump claiming it would cost $100 trillion which “is more money than our country could make in 100 years.” Trump may be channeling a cursory analysis by the conservative American Action Forum think tank of the ambitious 2019 Green New Deal (GND) proposal by Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.). The AAF calculated it would cost between $52 trillion and $93 trillion. However, about 85 percent of the cost of the Ocasio-Cortez/Markey Green New Deal stems from a jobs guarantee (up to $44.6 trillion) and universal health care ($36 trillion). There’s every reason to think that Biden’s climate change plan numbers are cooked, but, contrary to Trump’s assertion, he is not aiming toward anything as costly as the Ocasio-Cortez/Markey plan. (For the record, U.S. GDP in 2019 was $21.5 trillion, so our country “could make” $100 trillion in under five years.)

Finally, one of the more amusing exchanges in this unedifying debate occurred when Biden said, “By the way, he has an answer for hurricanes. He said, maybe we should drop a nuclear weapon on them.” Trump replied, “I never said that at all. They made it up.” Biden’s assertion was evidently based on a 2019 article by Axios citing unnamed sources that Trump during a hurricane briefing suggested, “I got it. I got it. Why don’t we nuke them?”

As Snopes says, unproven.

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Scott Barry Kaufman is a psychologist, podcaster, and the bestselling author of the new book Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, which updates Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs and his theories of personal fulfillment for a time of global pandemic, racial unrest, and polarized politics.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Kaufman discusses how self-actualization—fulfilling our personal potential and goals—intersects with contemporary debates about Black Lives Matter and racial strife, nastiness and bad-faith arguing in partisan politics, and rising rates of depression and anxiety during pandemic-related lockdowns. They also talk about how aspects of Maslow’s thought map onto libertarian ideas about autonomy, individualism, freedom, and self-fulfillment.

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The U.S. economy may be slowly pulling itself out of the doldrums inflicted by social distancing and government lockdown orders promoted as efforts to stem the spread of COVID-19, but many Americans continue to suffer.

Half of Americans who lost their job because of the pandemic are still out of work, and the resulting damage to finances falls hardest—as you might expect—on lower-income people who have little cushion against hard times. That’s something to keep in mind as politicians contemplate renewed restrictions, especially given the potential for economic pain to worsen already-simmering social tensions.

“Overall, 25 percent of U.S. adults say they or someone in their household was laid off or lost their job because of the coronavirus outbreak, with 15 percent saying this happened to them personally,” Pew Research reported last week. “Of those who say they personally lost a job, half say they are still unemployed, a third have returned to their old job and 15 percent are in a different job than before.”

What makes the situation even worse is that the burden falls hardest on those who can least afford it. “Lower-income adults who were laid off due to the coronavirus are less likely to be working now than middle- and upper-income adults who lost their jobs (43 percent vs. 58 percent),” Pew adds.

Among those who have continued working or are back to work, many are making do with reduced hours and pay cuts. About a third of adults report they or their households have suffered such trimmed income opportunities. That means less money in-hand and greater difficulty in making ends meet.

“A quarter of U.S. adults say they have had trouble paying their bills since the coronavirus outbreak began,” the Pew report notes. “Among adults with lower incomes, 46 percent say they have had trouble paying their bills, and about a third (32 percent) have had problems paying their rent or mortgage since February—significantly higher than the share of middle- and upper-income adults who have faced these struggles.”

Fortunately, the economy shows signs of recovery, though not full health by any means. An economic index created by Moody’s Analytics and CNN shows unemployment declining from its pandemic peak and both hiring and hours worked at small business on the rise. But overall economic activity is only at 81 percent of where it was when lockdowns began back in early March. While not everybody is affected to the same extent, we’re living in a poorer country than we did just months ago.

And the effects are expected to linger.

“The ongoing public health crisis will continue to weigh on economic activity, employment, and inflation in the near term, and poses considerable risks to the economic outlook over the medium term,” the Federal Reserve cautioned on September 16.

Likewise, the Congressional Budget Office expects the vast sums of money spent by the federal government in an attempt to keep people fed and housed while the economy was in a holding pattern “to raise borrowing costs, lower economic output, and reduce national income in the longer term.”

Obviously, this is a big deal in terms of people’s ability to pay for necessities, save for the future, and create prosperity for themselves and their children. But continuing joblessness and economic distress also have important implications for the stability of the society in which we live.

Recent months have been marked by protests, riots, and political violence in cities across the country. Yes, we were in for a rough ride, anyway. We entered this contentious election year with Congress and the president locked in an impeachment struggle, amidst high social tensions and a polarized population divided into mutually loathing political and cultural factions.

But, as I warned in March, drawing on historical examples and research by social scientists, unemployment and economic distress have proven time and again to fuel social unrest.

“Results from the empirical analysis indicate that economic growth and the unemployment rate are the two most important determinants of social unrest,” noted a 2013 report (PDF) from the International Labour Organisation (ILO), a United Nations agency that maintains a Social Unrest Index in an attempt to predict civil disorder based, in part, on economic trends. “For example, a one standard deviation increase in unemployment raises social unrest by 0.39 standard deviations, while a one standard deviation increase in GDP growth reduces social unrest by 0.19 standard deviations.”

As the pandemic lockdowns started to affect people’s lives in March, David L. Katz, former director of Yale University’s Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, wrote in The New York Times that he was “deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life—schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned—will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself.”

Six months later it appears that Katz’s fears have been fulfilled. We’ve had months of social unrest with no end in sight. Millions of Americans remain un- or underemployed and, as Pew points out, “many Americans continue to face deep financial hardship” and are struggling to pay their bills. The economic damage inflicted by the lockdowns looks destined to extend into the foreseeable future.

And now politicians are contemplating or already imposing new restrictions as the pandemic continues and the numbers of cases rise in some places. Israel is under a renewed lockdown. Spain and the U.K. are sliding in the same direction piecemeal. Some U.S. jurisdictions are tightening the screws as public health professionals call for putting the whole country back in suspended animation.

Given what we know now after months of unpleasant experience, it should be obvious that restrictions intended to preserve our health are making us poorer and angrier. Further disrupting people’s social connections and economic activity would be worse than pouring salt on open wounds. It would amount to throwing a lit match on a pile of oil-soaked rags.

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