Month: June 2021

At Least 5 Justices Seem To Think the CDC’s Eviction Moratorium Is Illegal. SCOTUS Left It in Place Anyway.


Brett-Kavanaugh-4-26-21-Newscom

The Supreme Court yesterday declined to remove a stay on a decision against the nationwide eviction moratorium that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. A concurring statement by Justice Brett Kavanaugh nevertheless indicates that a majority of the Court thinks the CDC’s order, which was recently extended and is now scheduled to expire at the end of July, exceeds its statutory authority.

On May 5, Dabney Friedrich, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that the moratorium, which applies to tenants who claim financial hardship, is not authorized by the Public Health Service Act, the statute that the CDC cited as the basis for its order. “Because the plain language of the Public Health Service Act…unambiguously forecloses the nationwide eviction moratorium,” Friedrich wrote, “the Court must set aside the CDC Order, consistent with the Administrative Procedure Act…and D.C. Circuit precedent.”

Friedrich granted a stay of her order pending the government’s appeal, and on June 2 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declined to lift that stay. The plaintiffs—landlords, real estate companies, and trade associations—appealed that decision to the Supreme Court.

Four justices—Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett—thought the stay should be lifted, meaning that Friedrich’s decision against the CDC would take effect immediately. Chief Justice John Roberts and four of his colleagues—Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Brett Kavanaugh—disagreed. But Kavanaugh, whose vote against lifting the stay was crucial, said he thought Friedrich was right.

“I agree with the District Court and the applicants that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exceeded its existing statutory authority by issuing a nationwide eviction moratorium,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Because the CDC plans to end the moratorium in only a few weeks, on July 31, and because those few weeks will allow for additional and more orderly distribution of the congressionally appropriated rental assistance funds, I vote at this time to deny the application to vacate the District Court’s stay of its order….In my view, clear and specific congressional authorization (via new legislation) would be necessary for the CDC to extend the moratorium past July 31.”

Since the CDC says it does not plan to further extend the moratorium, it is not clear whether the order’s legality will ever be definitively resolved. The D.C. Circuit differed with Friedrich, saying “the CDC’s eviction moratorium falls within the plain text” of the Public Health Service Act. But three other federal judges and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit have agreed that the moratorium is legally invalid.

The Public Health Service Act authorizes the secretary of health and human services to issue regulations that “in his judgment are necessary” to prevent the interstate spread of “communicable diseases.” One of those regulations delegates a similar authority to the CDC’s director.

The statute mentions these examples of disease control measures: “inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination,” and destruction of infected or contaminated “animals or articles.” It then refers to “other measures” deemed “necessary,” which according to the CDC encompasses pretty much anything.

Friedrich, two other federal judges, and the 6th Circuit concluded that the CDC was wrong about that, saying “other measures” must be similar in kind to the specific examples. Another federal judge ruled that even Congress does not have the authority to impose a moratorium like the CDC’s, because forcing landlords to continue housing tenants who fail to pay their rent exceeds the federal government’s power to regulate interstate commerce.

The CDC’s justification for the moratorium, which it first imposed in September, is that evicted tenants might become homeless or move in with other people, thereby increasing the risk of virus transmission. That malleable rationale, coupled with the CDC’s broad reading of the Public Health Service Act, implies that the agency has boundless authority to dictate how Americans can behave and interact with each other, provided it thinks the edicts are “reasonably necessary” to prevent the interstate spread of “any” communicable disease.

South Texas College of Law professor Josh Blackman is not impressed by Kavanaugh’s explanation for leaving the CDC’s order in place. “The application [to remove the stay] was filed on June 3,” he writes in a Volokh Conspiracy post. “The response was due on June 10. The application has been pending for 19 days. It did not take 19 days to write a one-paragraph concurrence. No one wrote a dissent in response. The Court was no doubt hoping Biden would decline to extend the moratorium so the case would go away. But the administration did extend it. And with 31 days remaining on the order,  Justice Kavanaugh now says there are only a ‘few weeks’ left….Therefore, he will decline to grant relief. If the Court moved with alacrity, the rule of law would have already been restored.”

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RIP Mike Gravel, Unapologetic Opponent of War and Star of Absurdist Presidential Campaign Ads


allstarphotos032440

Contemporary political discourse is populated by elected officials falsely claiming to oppose censorship. Former Sen. Mike Gravel, who died Sunday at age 91, was the real deal.

As a member of the U.S. Senate representing Alaska, a post he held from 1969 through 1981, Gravel first made a name for himself by attempting (and ultimately failing) to filibuster a renewal of the military draft for what he saw as a “senseless war” in Vietnam.

It was that failed filibuster that caught the attention of Daniel Ellsberg, the former Pentagon analyst who had secretly made copies of more than 7,000 documents—now known as the “Pentagon Papers“—detailing just how right Gravel was about America’s involvement in Vietnam.

By the time Gravel entered the story, some of the Pentagon Papers had already been leaked by Ellsberg to The New York Times and other newspapers. In response, the Justice Department brought lawsuits against newspapers that published excerpts of the papers, claiming that doing so was a threat to national security. But Ellsberg sought a loophole in the government’s censorship scheme: The U.S. Constitution grants members of Congress immunity from prosecution for anything said during legislative sessions. All he needed to do was find a member of Congress willing to read some of the Pentagon’s most embarrassing secrets into the official congressional record.

In a 2007 interview, Gravel recalled the high-stakes political thriller that played out in the days after Ellsberg, calling from a payphone, first contacted his office. An intermediary, Washington Post editor Ben Bagdikian, passed the papers to Gravel during a clandestine midnight meeting outside the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington, D.C. Gravel smuggled the papers into his Senate office and, after being fitted with a colonoscopy bag, prepared to read the entirety on the Senate floor. Then, another complication: Not enough senators were present to constitute a quorum and allow the session to begin.

Gravel, a freshman senator at the time, had little authority in Congress’ seniority-based structure. But he was chairman of the rather insignificant Building and Grounds subcommittee, which mostly just rubberstamped federal construction contracts. Unable to speak on the floor, Gravel commandeered a committee room, called an unscheduled hearing ostensibly to discuss how spending on the Vietnam War had impinged on the construction budgets for new federal buildings, and proceeded to read the entire Pentagon Papers into the official congressional record.

“It is my constitutional obligation to protect the security of the people by fostering the free flow of information absolutely essential to their democratic decision-making,” Gravel said. A year later, the Supreme Court validated his procedural maneuvering. In Gravel v. United States, the court upheld Gravel’s immunity from prosecution and extended a portion of that immunity to cover the legislative aides who helped him.

The Pentagon Papers were the defining moment of Gravel’s political career, but not the last time that his unconventional political theatrics would make a splash. After being defeated in his senatorial re-election bid in 1980, Gravel never again held elected office despite quixotic runs at the presidency in 2008 and 2020—including a brief stint as a Libertarian Party candidate during the former effort. He was an unapologetic and principled opponent of war and the bipartisan consensus that has marched American troops into bloody, pointless conflicts in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

“There are Americans who say that by leaving Iraq, we would be saying that our soldiers died in vain,” Gravel said during a 2006 speech. “But the only thing worse than soldiers dying in vain is more soldiers dying in vain.”

During his brief flirtation with the Libertarian Party (L.P.) in 2008, Gravel told Reason that he’d “get a hell of a lot more than 3 percent” if the party had the guts to nominate him. The nomination instead went to former Georgia congressman Bob Barr, who won 0.4 percent of the popular vote that year.

Gravel also dismissed the nonsensical notion of third-party “spoiler” candidates. “I got to tell you, I want to deprive both” Barack Obama and John McCain of the presidency, Gravel told Dave Weigel.

Such was Gravel’s ethos. He rightly rejected the blue/red dichotomy of national politics as a distraction that kept Americans from considering right and wrong, war and peace. During that same 2008 campaign, Gravel said the government’s refusal to grant equal rights to same-sex couples was “immoral”—a position that Barack Obama and the rest of the mainstream Democratic Party would not embrace for several more years, and then only after many state officials took the lead.

In his final on-the-record interview with Reason, during his 2019 presidential campaign, Gravel bemoaned the lack of congressional action on marijuana legalization and state-by-state legalization efforts that often include taxes so high they effectively leave weed on the black market. “We treat all of these drugs as criminal problems. They’re not. They’re public health problems,” Gravel told Reason‘s Billy Binion.

Gravel’s willingness to stand well outside the political mainstream didn’t always lead him to productive places. He endorsed 9/11 Trutherism during a radio interview in 2016—as part of an overall call for greater government transparency—and had connections to some anti-Semitic figures on the political fringe.

Anyone who came of political age during the 2000s likely remembers Gravel not for his Vietnam-era activism or left-libertarian politics, but for his avant garde campaign ads—which he, of course, denied were actually campaign ads.

In the most famous of those 2007 pieces, Gravel stared into the camera for a full two minutes before picking up a large rock, throwing it into a nearby body of water, and walking away. In another, he gathered sticks and then stared into a campfire for several minutes.

“The ads are both a commentary on the emptiness of our political discourse—a parody if you like—and a refutation of that emptiness, or a triumph over it, a reinsertion of brute content, a silent explosion of truth into a world of mere and moronic fiction,” anarchist philosopher Crispin Sartwell mused in the Los Angeles Times in 2007. That’s probably as good an interpretation as any.

Gravel’s final campaign for the presidency was another exercise in political absurdism. He launched the effort with a promise to “bring a critique of American imperialism to the Democratic debate stage,” though he never actually qualified for a debate. He actively discouraged people from voting for him and turned his social media accounts over to a trio of teenagers who used it as a platform for memes, zingers, and the occasional zen-like commentary on politics. (Unfortunately, his campaign account and all its tweets have been deleted.)

“I’m not planning to contest any primaries and, if offered the nomination, would decline it. (Anyone who actually thinks they could serve as president is probably crazy.)” read one memorable, now-deleted tweet.

It’s a parenthetical that does a decent job of summing up the late Mike Gravel, who saw political power as the absurd pursuit that it is—and who understood the bloody consequences that power can produce when secrecy is valued over openness. The anti-war left is now a mere ripple of its splashier self. It could use a few more people willing to throw rocks at the political establishment.

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RIP Mike Gravel, Unapologetic Opponent of War and Star of Absurdist Presidential Campaign Ads


allstarphotos032440

Contemporary political discourse is populated by elected officials falsely claiming to oppose censorship. Former Sen. Mike Gravel, who died Sunday at age 91, was the real deal.

As a member of the U.S. Senate representing Alaska, a post he held from 1969 through 1981, Gravel first made a name for himself by attempting (and ultimately failing) to filibuster a renewal of the military draft for what he saw as a “senseless war” in Vietnam.

It was that failed filibuster that caught the attention of Daniel Ellsberg, the former Pentagon analyst who had secretly made copies of more than 7,000 documents—now known as the “Pentagon Papers“—detailing just how right Gravel was about America’s involvement in Vietnam.

By the time Gravel entered the story, some of the Pentagon Papers had already been leaked by Ellsberg to The New York Times and other newspapers. In response, the Justice Department brought lawsuits against newspapers that published excerpts of the papers, claiming that doing so was a threat to national security. But Ellsberg sought a loophole in the government’s censorship scheme: The U.S. Constitution grants members of Congress immunity from prosecution for anything said during legislative sessions. All he needed to do was find a member of Congress willing to read some of the Pentagon’s most embarrassing secrets into the official congressional record.

In a 2007 interview, Gravel recalled the high-stakes political thriller that played out in the days after Ellsberg, calling from a payphone, first contacted his office. An intermediary, Washington Post editor Ben Bagdikian, passed the papers to Gravel during a clandestine midnight meeting outside the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington, D.C. Gravel smuggled the papers into his Senate office and, after being fitted with a colonoscopy bag, prepared to read the entirety on the Senate floor. Then, another complication: Not enough senators were present to constitute a quorum and allow the session to begin.

Gravel, a freshman senator at the time, had little authority in Congress’ seniority-based structure. But he was chairman of the rather insignificant Building and Grounds subcommittee, which mostly just rubberstamped federal construction contracts. Unable to speak on the floor, Gravel commandeered a committee room, called an unscheduled hearing ostensibly to discuss how spending on the Vietnam War had impinged on the construction budgets for new federal buildings, and proceeded to read the entire Pentagon Papers into the official congressional record.

“It is my constitutional obligation to protect the security of the people by fostering the free flow of information absolutely essential to their democratic decision-making,” Gravel said. A year later, the Supreme Court validated his procedural maneuvering. In Gravel v. United States, the court upheld Gravel’s immunity from prosecution and extended a portion of that immunity to cover the legislative aides who helped him.

The Pentagon Papers were the defining moment of Gravel’s political career, but not the last time that his unconventional political theatrics would make a splash. After being defeated in his senatorial re-election bid in 1980, Gravel never again held elected office despite quixotic runs at the presidency in 2008 and 2020—including a brief stint as a Libertarian Party candidate during the former effort. He was an unapologetic and principled opponent of war and the bipartisan consensus that has marched American troops into bloody, pointless conflicts in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

“There are Americans who say that by leaving Iraq, we would be saying that our soldiers died in vain,” Gravel said during a 2006 speech. “But the only thing worse than soldiers dying in vain is more soldiers dying in vain.”

During his brief flirtation with the Libertarian Party (L.P.) in 2008, Gravel told Reason that he’d “get a hell of a lot more than 3 percent” if the party had the guts to nominate him. The nomination instead went to former Georgia congressman Bob Barr, who won 0.4 percent of the popular vote that year.

Gravel also dismissed the nonsensical notion of third-party “spoiler” candidates. “I got to tell you, I want to deprive both” Barack Obama and John McCain of the presidency, Gravel told Dave Weigel.

Such was Gravel’s ethos. He rightly rejected the blue/red dichotomy of national politics as a distraction that kept Americans from considering right and wrong, war and peace. During that same 2008 campaign, Gravel said the government’s refusal to grant equal rights to same-sex couples was “immoral”—a position that Barack Obama and the rest of the mainstream Democratic Party would not embrace for several more years, and then only after many state officials took the lead.

In his final on-the-record interview with Reason, during his 2019 presidential campaign, Gravel bemoaned the lack of congressional action on marijuana legalization and state-by-state legalization efforts that often include taxes so high they effectively leave weed on the black market. “We treat all of these drugs as criminal problems. They’re not. They’re public health problems,” Gravel told Reason‘s Billy Binion.

Gravel’s willingness to stand well outside the political mainstream didn’t always lead him to productive places. He endorsed 9/11 Trutherism during a radio interview in 2016—as part of an overall call for greater government transparency—and had connections to some anti-Semitic figures on the political fringe.

Anyone who came of political age during the 2000s likely remembers Gravel not for his Vietnam-era activism or left-libertarian politics, but for his avant garde campaign ads—which he, of course, denied were actually campaign ads.

In the most famous of those 2007 pieces, Gravel stared into the camera for a full two minutes before picking up a large rock, throwing it into a nearby body of water, and walking away. In another, he gathered sticks and then stared into a campfire for several minutes.

“The ads are both a commentary on the emptiness of our political discourse—a parody if you like—and a refutation of that emptiness, or a triumph over it, a reinsertion of brute content, a silent explosion of truth into a world of mere and moronic fiction,” anarchist philosopher Crispin Sartwell mused in the Los Angeles Times in 2007. That’s probably as good an interpretation as any.

Gravel’s final campaign for the presidency was another exercise in political absurdism. He launched the effort with a promise to “bring a critique of American imperialism to the Democratic debate stage,” though he never actually qualified for a debate. He actively discouraged people from voting for him and turned his social media accounts over to a trio of teenagers who used it as a platform for memes, zingers, and the occasional zen-like commentary on politics. (Unfortunately, his campaign account and all its tweets have been deleted.)

“I’m not planning to contest any primaries and, if offered the nomination, would decline it. (Anyone who actually thinks they could serve as president is probably crazy.)” read one memorable, now-deleted tweet.

It’s a parenthetical that does a decent job of summing up the late Mike Gravel, who saw political power as the absurd pursuit that it is—and who understood the bloody consequences that power can produce when secrecy is valued over openness. The anti-war left is now a mere ripple of its splashier self. It could use a few more people willing to throw rocks at the political establishment.

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Putin Raises Question Of Russia’s Next President, Setting Off Alarm In US

Putin Raises Question Of Russia’s Next President, Setting Off Alarm In US

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday held an annual event that’s somewhat unique to Russia referred to as a marathon call-in, which allows ordinary citizens to ask questions of their leader via a “direct line” telethon show lasting for hours.

Putin engaged in discussion on multiple pressing topics, perhaps the most interesting which was the question of his successor. Reuters and other US-based press agencies misleadingly characterized Putin as saying that “the time will come when I name my possible successor”.

This suggests that he spoke as if he’s a dynastic king or emperor or something, an image which Western pundits have long tended to blindly promote. 

However, here’s how The Moscow Times more accurately translated the remarks:

“The decision regarding who should lead the Russian Federation should ultimately be up to the citizens. They exercise their freedom of choice through direct secret ballot voting. This is the only way,” Putin began.

That’s when he added:

“When the time comes, I hope I can say that such and such person, in my opinion, is worthy of leading such a wonderful country as our Motherland Russia.”

This of course is very different from the slew of misleading headlines saying he will be choosing or “naming” his successor. The whole question is also sensitive and fraught with controversy given last year’s Kremlin-approved drastic constitutional overhaul which theoretically gave Putin the ability to run for two more six-year terms if he desired. This could potentially see him stay in power all the way to 2036.

Another interesting topic broached during the public call-in event was the state of relations with the United States, coming off the summit with Joe Biden earlier this month.

From Wednesday’s marathon call-in show.

“The world is changing and changing rapidly. No matter what sanctions are taken against Russia, no matter how they try to scare us, Russia is still developing, its economic ability and defense power is improving, in some respects even better than in the United States,” Putin said.

“Our partners in the United States on one hand understand this, but on the other hand, they are still trying to preserve their monopoly position at all costs, and that’s where the threats and destructive behavior with exercises, provocations and sanctions stems from. It’s not up to us, it’s up to them. I hope that the realization that the world is changing will lead them to revisit their values,” he explained while discussing Russia’s response to the sanctions. 

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 12:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3hgQeqW Tyler Durden

A New Case Gives the Supreme Court a Chance To Defend Gun Rights


Screen Shot 2021-06-30 at 11.37.16 AM

Would carrying a gun make you feel safer?

Robert Nash and Brandon Koch thought so. But the state of New York denied them gun permits, saying they hadn’t demonstrated a “special need.”

Why did they have to prove such a “need”? The Supreme Court ruled more than 10 years ago that all Americans have a right to keep and bear arms, no matter where they live.

“Many other courts have thumbed their nose at that Supreme Court ruling,” Alan Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation tells me. He’s excited that the Supreme Court will soon rule on Nash and Koch’s lawsuit over New York’s law.

I understand Nash and Koch’s frustration. I once tried to get a carry permit in New York.

First, I had to read 60 pages of instructions about irrelevant things like “metal knuckle knives” and “kung fu stars,” fill out a confusing 17-page form, get it notarized, and then go in person to police headquarters.

There they fingerprinted me, demanded reasons why I should be allowed to have a gun, and charged me $430.

I heard nothing from them for half a year. Then they wrote me saying that my application was “denied.”

I called to ask if I could appeal. They said I could try again if I could prove that “special need” to carry a gun. After years of confronting crooks on TV, I actually do have a special need for self-protection. I showed the cops threats on my life.

Not good enough, said the NYC permit department. They turned me down again.

Apparently, my mistake was not bribing the cops. Later it was revealed that the police in the permit department were giving out permits for money.

Scams like that thrive whenever politicians impose too many restrictions on people’s freedom. In parts of California, people got gun permits if they donated to a sheriff’s campaign.

It’s one more reason why Gottlieb is excited about this new Supreme Court case. Court watchers predict his side will win, especially because there are now more originalist judges on the court.

That means it’s likely that soon, almost all Americans will be legally able to carry guns.

Some people say that will be terrible.

“Women are less safe!” says professor Lisa Moore of the University of Texas on TV. “Every vulnerable population—LGBT people, students of color—has more to fear!”

But then why are 58 percent of new gun owners Blacks, and 40 percent women?

“An awful lot of women bought a firearm to protect themselves and feel a whole lot safer!” says Gottlieb. “Eight hundred thousand times a year, a person uses a firearm to protect themselves. If you call 911, the police usually get there after the crime is over.

Over the last decades, most states liberalized their gun laws. More allow concealed carry. Gun control advocates predicted that would lead to an epidemic of shootings.

The opposite happened. As concealed carry was legalized, violent crime went down. Especially telling, crime dropped in each state right after the law was changed.

Gottlieb says that’s because “an armed society is a polite society.”

As a reporter who attended only liberal schools and worked in liberal newsrooms, I’d been taught that more guns means more violence. Even after interviewing violent criminals in prison and hearing many say that what they feared most was “not the police” but that the person being robbed “might be armed,” I still believed that more guns meant more crime.

Only when I started researching gun crime and studying the data did it become clear that most of my anti-gun assumptions were wrong.

More guns really does mean less crime.

COPYRIGHT 2021 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

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A New Case Gives the Supreme Court a Chance To Defend Gun Rights


Screen Shot 2021-06-30 at 11.37.16 AM

Would carrying a gun make you feel safer?

Robert Nash and Brandon Koch thought so. But the state of New York denied them gun permits, saying they hadn’t demonstrated a “special need.”

Why did they have to prove such a “need”? The Supreme Court ruled more than 10 years ago that all Americans have a right to keep and bear arms, no matter where they live.

“Many other courts have thumbed their nose at that Supreme Court ruling,” Alan Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation tells me. He’s excited that the Supreme Court will soon rule on Nash and Koch’s lawsuit over New York’s law.

I understand Nash and Koch’s frustration. I once tried to get a carry permit in New York.

First, I had to read 60 pages of instructions about irrelevant things like “metal knuckle knives” and “kung fu stars,” fill out a confusing 17-page form, get it notarized, and then go in person to police headquarters.

There they fingerprinted me, demanded reasons why I should be allowed to have a gun, and charged me $430.

I heard nothing from them for half a year. Then they wrote me saying that my application was “denied.”

I called to ask if I could appeal. They said I could try again if I could prove that “special need” to carry a gun. After years of confronting crooks on TV, I actually do have a special need for self-protection. I showed the cops threats on my life.

Not good enough, said the NYC permit department. They turned me down again.

Apparently, my mistake was not bribing the cops. Later it was revealed that the police in the permit department were giving out permits for money.

Scams like that thrive whenever politicians impose too many restrictions on people’s freedom. In parts of California, people got gun permits if they donated to a sheriff’s campaign.

It’s one more reason why Gottlieb is excited about this new Supreme Court case. Court watchers predict his side will win, especially because there are now more originalist judges on the court.

That means it’s likely that soon, almost all Americans will be legally able to carry guns.

Some people say that will be terrible.

“Women are less safe!” says professor Lisa Moore of the University of Texas on TV. “Every vulnerable population—LGBT people, students of color—has more to fear!”

But then why are 58 percent of new gun owners Blacks, and 40 percent women?

“An awful lot of women bought a firearm to protect themselves and feel a whole lot safer!” says Gottlieb. “Eight hundred thousand times a year, a person uses a firearm to protect themselves. If you call 911, the police usually get there after the crime is over.

Over the last decades, most states liberalized their gun laws. More allow concealed carry. Gun control advocates predicted that would lead to an epidemic of shootings.

The opposite happened. As concealed carry was legalized, violent crime went down. Especially telling, crime dropped in each state right after the law was changed.

Gottlieb says that’s because “an armed society is a polite society.”

As a reporter who attended only liberal schools and worked in liberal newsrooms, I’d been taught that more guns means more violence. Even after interviewing violent criminals in prison and hearing many say that what they feared most was “not the police” but that the person being robbed “might be armed,” I still believed that more guns meant more crime.

Only when I started researching gun crime and studying the data did it become clear that most of my anti-gun assumptions were wrong.

More guns really does mean less crime.

COPYRIGHT 2021 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

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The Fed: Why Federal Spending Soared In 2020 But State And Local Spending Flatlined

The Fed: Why Federal Spending Soared In 2020 But State And Local Spending Flatlined

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

In the wake of the Covid Recession and the drive to pour ever larger amounts of “stimulus” into the US economy, the Federal Government in 2020 spent more than double—as a percentage of all government spending—of what all state and local governments spent in 2020, combined.

By the end of 2020, the US’s federal government was spending 68 percent of all government spending in America, while state and local governments spent only 31 percent of all government spending.

More specifically, federal expenditures reached 6.8 trillion for the year while state and local spending reached “only” 2.9 trillion.

This was a sizable change from the decade leading up to 2020 when the federal government’s share of all government spending tended to hover around 60 percent, while state and local spending remained close to 40 percent.

The sudden spike to 68 percent pushed the federal share up to the highest it’s been since the 1960s and the Vietnam War.

Moreover, from 2019 to 2020, growth in state and local spending nearly flatlined, dropping to 0.38 percent growth over the previous year. That’s the lowest growth rate in state and local spending since 2011 in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Yet, at the same time, federal spending increased by 25 percent. This was the largest year-over-year increase in federal spending since the Korean War.

A Lot of State and Local Spending Is Really Federal Spending

Yet, these numbers actually understate the extent to which federal spending dominates all government spending in America. This is because a lot of state and local spending is really federal spending, thanks to federal grants.

As noted by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in 2018,

Federal grants to state and local governments help finance critical programs and services across the country. These grants provide roughly 31 percent of state budgets and 23 percent of state and local budgets combined, according to the most recent data.

The share of state spending composed of federal grants varies from state to state with the largest share at 41.9 percent in Michigan, and the smallest in Hawaii at 17.5. Of course, this percentage is driven both by total state spending and by the total amount of federal grants. States that tax a lot and spend a lot in general (e.g., Hawaii, Massachusetts) tend to have a small share of federal spending within their state budgets.

In any case, this is a continuation of a well-established trend. In fiscal year 2011, federal grants accounted for about 25 percent of state and local spending.

So when we’re comparing federal spending with state and local spending, that “60 percent” figure for federal spending over the past decade (as a proportion of all spending) is a low-ball figure.

We should also expect this number to get a lot bigger. Thanks to rising Medicaid costs (mandated by federal law but only partly covered by federal grants) total state spending will increase, but federal grants will rise as well.

In fiscal year 2011, “the federal government provided $607 billion in grants to state and local governments.” By 2019, that figure had risen to $721 billion. My mid-2020, it was clear this total was around $800 billion, and that’s not counting bailout funds and other covid-related funds handed over to state and local governments.

The Role of Deficit Spending and the Central Bank

Perhaps the biggest reason we should expect the federal role to keep getting bigger is because it can do so easily.

That is, state and local governments will continue to find it politically difficult to keep raising taxes to cover rising costs. The federal government, on the other hand, has a lot more freedom to spend.

This is because the federal government has much greater access to borrowed funds than state and local governments, and this borrowing process is also subsidized by the US’s central bank. 

This isn’t normal. In most of the world, and for most state and local governments, rising deficits and mounting debt will tend to lead to rising interest rates and greater difficulty in finding a growing pool of borrowers to take on the government’s debts. The US government, on the other hand, has two things working its favor which allows it to take on trillions in new debts without having to face the realities of rising interest rates: the Federal Reserve, and the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. 

Thanks to the Federal Reserve, when the US government needs to borrow another $500 billion or even another trillion dollars—as has been the case in recent years—the feds need not worry about flooding the debt markets with “too much” debt. Rather, the central bank will swoop  in to buy up trillions of dollars in government debt—as has happened since 2008—to ensure that interest rates remain low. The central bank thus prints up trillions in new money in order to put more government debt in its portfolio, essentially monetizing the debt and subsidizing the federal government’s ability to spend. 

Of course, if the US were a “normal” country with an ordinary fiat currency, it could never do that. All those trillions of dollars used to force down interest rates on government debt would cause the currency to devalue at catastrophic rates. Things would look more like the situation in Argentina. Fortunately for the federal government and the central bank, however, the dollar remains the world’s reserve currency, partly because the other central banks of the world are at least as irresponsible as the US’s central bank. So, investors and other central banks are still willing to mop up all those extra dollars and store them away. 

States and local governments can’t do anything like this. The State of Illinois can’t just spend an extra $100 billion because if it did so, the interest rate it had to pay on its debt would skyrocket. Moreover, even if Illinois had its own currency and a central bank to buy up a lot of this debt, the “Illinois dollar” would not have the benefits of being a global reserve currency. 

So, the US’s federal government is in a unique position to keep funds flowing into state and local governments when those governments couldn’t get away with taxing, spending, and borrowing on their own. This means that over time, the federal government will continue to replace state and local tax-and-spend mechanisms with federal spending and federal taxes.

It’s just another way that the central bank enables the centralization and growth of political power in the United States. 

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 11:44

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3hoQpQW Tyler Durden

Microsoft, Google Abandon “Truce” As Tech Giants Turn On Each Other Amid Anti-Monopoly Push

Microsoft, Google Abandon “Truce” As Tech Giants Turn On Each Other Amid Anti-Monopoly Push

Now that humbling America’s tech giants has become an issue with bipartisan support, a package of restrictive new measures targeting Big Tech is slowly moving through Congress, while President Biden prepares to slap the industry with a new executive order empowering regulators to tighten scrutiny of any anti-competitive behaviors.

While all the money firms like Facebook, Amazon and Google spend on lobbying may have saved them from being forcibly broken up, the new restrictions will unquestionably hurt the bottom line of big tech, while making it more difficult for the biggest firms to simply buy out any competitors who might threaten their dominance. While Facebook recently won a major court victory when a judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by the DoJ and a handful of State attorneys general, Google has once again found itself squarely in the sight of regulators hoping to humble the company’s display ads business, an integral piece of Google’s dominance of the digital advertising space.

Despite recently becoming one of only a small handful of American tech giants to see its market capitalization top $1 trillion, Microsoft has largely escaped scrutiny from Congress and the Biden Administration. And while one might expect Big Tech to close ranks in response to the antitrust scrutiny, to the contrary, Microsoft and Google are abandoning a longstanding “truce” that ended an extensive conflict between the two companies, according to the FT.

One source said the agreement wasn’t an attempt to screw competitors, but rather an agreement between Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai (CEOs of Microsoft and Google) to end “dirty tricks” that the companies were playing on each other. The truce also involved settling outstanding lawsuits, along with a deal to abandon further litigation. Additionally, Microsoft dropped its infamous “Scroogled” ad campaign attacking its rival.

Still, some academics can’t help but be suspicious of the deal.

“It’s always a little puzzling when you see direct competitors working on private agreements,” Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, said of the 2015 pact. However, he said that ending the “dirty tricks” employed by both sides appeared to be a way to end the destructive rivalry without necessarily weakening competition.

“The tricks Microsoft was playing on Google were hurting the entire industry — including Microsoft,” Goldman added.

Signs of renewed rivalry have cropped up recently with Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, publicly attacking Google over its threats to withdraw its search service in Australia over a ruling that it must compensate publishers. It’s exactly these types of ruthless advertising practices that have attracted scrutiny from international regulators.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 11:20

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2USvFJY Tyler Durden

La Niña Ended In May, So When Is The Break From This Heat In The US?

La Niña Ended In May, So When Is The Break From This Heat In The US?

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

La Niña weather patterns generally associated with dry condition in the Southwest ended in May. So when is the relief?

El Niño and La Niña

SciJinks discusses the Difference Between El Niño and La Niña.

In Spanish, El Niño means “the little boy” and La Niña means “the little girl.” They are sort of like a brother and sister. Like many siblings, the two weather patterns are opposites in almost every way. La Niña causes water in the eastern Pacific to be colder than usual. In the same region, El Niño can cause the water to be warmer than usual. Areas that are hit with drought during La Niña years are pummeled with rain in El Niño years.

El Niño and La Niña: Frequently Asked Questions

Climate.Gov discusses Frequently Asked Questions.

El Niño and La Niña are opposite phases of a natural climate pattern across the tropical Pacific Ocean that swings back and forth every 3-7 years on average. Together, they are called ENSO (pronounced “en-so”), which is short for El Niño-Southern Oscillation.

The ENSO pattern in the tropical Pacific can be in one of three states: El Niño, Neutral, or La Niña. El Niño (the warm phase) and La Niña (the cool phase) lead to significant differences from the average ocean temperatures, winds, surface pressure, and rainfall across parts of the tropical Pacific. Neutral indicates that conditions are near their long-term average.

El Niño Conditions

During El Niño, the surface winds across the entire tropical Pacific are weaker than usual. Ocean temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean are warmer than average, and rainfall is below average over Indonesia and above average over the central or eastern Pacific.

La Niña Conditions

During La Niña, it’s the opposite. The surface winds across the entire tropical Pacific are stronger than usual, and most of the tropical Pacific Ocean is cooler than average. Rainfall increases over Indonesia (where waters remain warm) and decreases over the central tropical Pacific (which is cool). Over Indonesia, there is more rising air motion and lower surface pressure. There is more sinking air motion over the cooler waters of the central and eastern Pacific.

How long do El Niño and La Niña typically last?

El Niño and La Niña episodes typically last 9-12 months. They both tend to develop during the spring (March-June), reach peak intensity during the late autumn or winter (November-February), and then weaken during the spring or early summer (March-June).

Both El Niño and La Niña can last more than a year, but it is rare for El Niño events to last longer than a year or so, while it is common for La Niña to last for two years or more. The longest El Nino in the modern record lasted 18 months, while the longest la Niña lasted 33 months. Scientists aren’t sure why the duration of the two types of events can be so different.  

Does global warming affect El Niño and La Niña?

There are many ways in which global warming could affect the frequency and intensity of El Niño / La Niña (see this ENSO blog post, for example), but scientists currently have low confidence in their ability to predict exactly how a warmer world affect the ENSO. Scientists have high confidence, however, that ENSO itself has been occurring for thousands of years, and will continue into the future. Global warming is likely to affect the impacts related to El Niño and La Niña, including extreme weather events.

Bye for Now, La Niña!

On May 13, Climate.Gov said Bye for Now, La Niña!

La Niña conditions have ended and NOAA forecasters estimate about a 67% chance that neutral conditions will continue through the summer. The ENSO forecast for the fall is less confident, with odds of a second-year La Niña currently hovering around 50–55%.

That’s the problem. La Niña has ended but there is no El Niño in sight. Worse yet, the odds of another La Niña are about 50%. 

Blistering, Record-Breaking Heat

Lytton, B.C. hit 113.9 degrees F, 45.5 degrees C. Amazing. Then it smashed that record. 

47.9 Degrees C is 118.2 degrees F. Wow!

When Does It End?

Climate Predictions 6-10 Days

8-14 Day Climate Probability

Official 30-Day Forecast

The above maps are from the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center.

Unfortunately, the models see no end to the heat wave. And the odds of rain are generally below average where rain is needed the most.

World Record Update

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Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 10:59

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3h8fNvD Tyler Durden

Robinhood Pays $70 Million To Settle Allegations Of Manipulation, Opening Door To IPO

Robinhood Pays $70 Million To Settle Allegations Of Manipulation, Opening Door To IPO

Following reports that regulators have been throwing up obstacles to Robinhood’s planned IPO, forcing the company to push back its expected timeline for the offering, the Wall Street Journal reported just minutes ago that the discount brokerage has just agreed to pay $70MM to settle allegations that have been giving the firm serious problems.

The settlement with Finra, the industry’s self-regulatory body, will resolve allegations that Robinhood misled customers, approved ineligible traders for risky strategies and didn’t supervise technology that failed and locked millions out of trading.

The fine is, of course, merely a speeding ticket: The firm’s revenue growth has surged, with its revenue from trading more than tripling during Q1. Critics of the company have complained about all of these practices in the past.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 10:48

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3qBwWRc Tyler Durden