Month: January 2022

“About three times as many Europeans leave their homelands and immigrate to the United States every year as the other way around,” reports David Harsanyi. Yet “a growing number of American elites—politicians, academics, pundits, journalists, among others—argue, with increasing popularity, that we should look across the Atlantic for solutions to our most pressing problems.” Figures such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman want us to follow Europe’s lead when it comes to healthcare, government spending, tax policy, business regulations, and restrictions on free speech.

In Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent, Harsanyi, a syndicated columnist and senior writer at National Review, documents how the United States is doing far better across a wide array of economic, cultural, and political indicators than Europe. It’s a powerful argument that is as nuanced as it is polemical. For instance, he notes that Scandinavian countries are hardly as socialist as their American champions and critics both claim. He also notes that many nationalist conservatives seem hellbent on importing a loathsome blood-and-soil populism from Hungary and other European countries.

I talk with Harsanyi about all that and how his career—which includes stints at The Denver Post, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, and The Federalist—reflect massive changes in the media landscape and what it means to be on the political right (he considers himself a conservative with some libertarian leanings). Born in 1970 and raised in Queens and Long Island by Hungarian refugees from communism, he remains deeply critical of many of former President Donald Trump’s protectionist policies while also freaked out by President Joe Biden’s massive government spending.

The post David Harsanyi: Why America Must Reject 'Eurotrash' Ideas appeared first on Reason.com.

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In a paradox only the federal government could produce, St. Louis officials are having to decide whether they want to spend money reviving the city’s long-troubled, currently mothballed trolley line or lose even more money shutting it down permanently.

Late last month, media outlets reported on a letter that the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) sent St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones saying that local officials had until February to come up with a plan to get its 2.2-mile Loop Trolley back up and running or else return the $37 million in funds the federal government provided for the project.

This is only the latest setback in the long, sad saga of the St. Louis streetcar.

The trolley started operational life in 2018—six years behind schedule and about $10 million over budget. Neighboring businesses—which were supposed to be the primary beneficiaries of the new streetcar—complained that the inconvenience of the trolley’s construction was instead costing them customers.

When it did open, ticket sales brought only around 10 percent of expected revenue, almost immediately throwing the line into financial distress. Creative efforts to boost ridership, including a Friday-night Laugh Tracks service during which comedians performed 40-minute sets along the 2-mile route, produced about as many chuckles as it did new customers.

The streetcar was then mothballed in December 2019 after county officials refused the trolley operator’s request for a $700,000 bailout to keep the system running into 2020. (The Loop Trolley’s website says it is currently shut down to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.)

All of these examples recommend against reviving the Loop Trolley. But The FTA’s ultimatum has St. Louis officials in a bit of a bind.

Reviving the streetcar will obviously require officials to find additional operating funds. Not reviving the streetcar will require paying back $37 million in capital costs the feds sunk into the project. Worse still, returning federal funds would also hurt the St. Louis region’s ability to secure federal grants for future projects.

The St. Louis streetcar’s supporters have long used that latter risk to justify keeping the line alive.

“We have come entirely too far and invested too much with the Loop Trolley to just walk away,” said then-Mayor Lyda Krewson in December 2019, when the trolley was first shuttered. “What critics of the project fail to realize is that walking away would put us all at risk of defaulting on federal grants and losing out on future federal transportation funding.”

The logic is proving convincing for even long-time streetcar critics.

“While the mayor did not support the Loop Trolley’s construction, she is committed to fixing this problem to protect our region’s transit dollars and our ability to receive federal support moving forward,” said Nick Dunne, a spokesperson for Jones, in an email to Center Square.

Taxpayers are also being put in a no-win situation, says Baruch Feigenbaum, senior managing director of transportation policy with the Reason Foundation (which publishes Reason).

“I like the idea that you have to continue operating it if you get federal funding. Otherwise, what’s to stop an entity from applying for federal funding [and then] shutting it down?” says Feigenbaum. “There have to be some consequences or the taxpayer is going to get screwed worse than they already are.”

Still, he says, that threat of losing federal funds for future transit projects incentivizes local and state governments to milk taxpayers in order to keep zombie transportation systems few people ride alive.

Feigenbaum says federal transit officials need to adopt more objective criteria and around ridership and financial sustainability when dolling out grants to localities to avoid future St. Louis Loop Trolley scenarios.

Indeed, the Urban Circulator grant program, which provided the bulk of federal funding to St. Louis’s streetcar, vetted grant applications based on hard-to-quantify criteria like livability, environmental sustainability, economic development, and “stakeholder collaboration.”

The circulator program also funded streetcar projects in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Charlotte, North Carolina, that—while not as disastrous as the Loop Trolley—suffer from low ridership and are almost entirely dependent on taxpayer funding to cover operating expenses.

The mess that is the St. Louis streetcar suggests that much less transit funding overall should come from the federal government. If local and state policymakers had to rely more heavily on their own voters and taxpayers to fund projects, they’d have to be more thoughtful about which ones they chose. Those same taxpayers and voters would have a real incentive to pay attention to their local and state governments.

Politicians would also likely be more willing to walk away from clearly failed projects if they weren’t also putting future federal grants at risk.

The $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed into law by President Joe Biden in November 2021 moves federal transportation policy in the opposite direction. The law provides $550 billion in new spending, including $39 billion in new transit spending.

That leaves a lot more money that could potentially go to the next St. Louis Loop Trolley.

The post St. Louis Taxpayers Paid a Lot To Run a Money-Losing Streetcar. It Could Cost Them Even More To Shut It Down. appeared first on Reason.com.

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Last week I blogged about a similar controversy brewing in Maine, and yesterday I blogged about the split among courts on whether students could sue pseudonymously to challenge discipline for COVID protocol violations. Today, we have yet another decision, which comes down in favor of pseudonymity as to the vaccine mandate challenge: Magistrate Judge Kathleen Tafoya’s opinion in Does v. Bd. of Regents (D. Colo.).

“Ordinarily, those using the courts must be prepared to accept the public scrutiny that is an inherent part of public trials.” Ultimately, the “test for permitting a plaintiff to proceed anonymously is whether the plaintiff has a substantial privacy right which outweighs the customary and constitutionally-embedded presumption of openness in judicial proceedings.” …

Plaintiffs first argue that medical and other privacy issues are woven throughout Plaintiffs’ claims, and that their Amended Complaint asserts claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act … requiring the Court to take special notice of Plaintiffs’ medical privacy rights. Plaintiff[s] assert[] that the vaccination status of a person is recognized to be protected, confidential information by an array of federal statutes, including the ADA itself, as well as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, and the Health Insurance Portability and Privacy Act….

This court specifically rejects an argument that statutorily-imposed confidentiality protection, in and of itself, satisfies the highly sensitive and personal part of the anonymity argument. Nonetheless, the court will consider the statutory privacy schemes as part of making its discretionary findings here.

In this case Plaintiffs seek, first and foremost, to enforce their non-medical constitutional rights. In particular they seek a religious, not medical, exemption to the University’s policy regarding mandatory vaccination against COVID-19 and its variants. The only medical condition common to the Plaintiffs that is pertinent to the case is their unvaccinated status. It is this status which has caused all Plaintiffs to incur damages related to their employment.

Absent the current political climate, whether a person has been vaccinated or not from various maladies that might befall a human being is not particularly sensitive or personal, even though such information is protected from disclosure under HIPPA as medically related…. [S]tanding alone, a medical condition that is described as unvaccinated against COVID-19 is not so highly sensitive and personal in nature as to overcome the presumption of openness in judicial proceedings….

[H]owever, neither the court nor the litigants undertake litigation in a vacuum; the political climate and public attitudes concerning those who refuse vaccination from COVID-19 actually do exist and must be considered by the court under the balancing required by [Tenth Circuit precedent]. Plaintiffs argue that if outside persons know they have chosen to be unvaccinated, they are personally subject to a substantial risk of retaliation, including physical harm. (See Am. Compl.: online commentator stating about those attending a vaccine-mandate protest: “The anti-vaxers are ignorant trash and don’t deserve to live. Gun them down while they’re all in one place and let God sort it out”; President Biden quoted as saying “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin, and the refusal has cost all of us ….”)

Plaintiffs assert that not only are they potential targets of physical harm from others because of their unvaccinated status, they will also face harm to their professional standing from employers and educational institutions where Plaintiffs may seek employment or admission in the future, particularly in the healthcare field. Plaintiffs claim “they run the risk of ostracization, threats of harm, immediate firing, and other retaliatory consequences, if their names become known.” These anticipated damages are not currently part of those claimed in this lawsuit against the named Defendants. Therefore, in addition to considering whether potential harm to Plaintiffs by exposure of their true identities is a real threat, the court must also determine if “the injury litigated against would be incurred as a result of the disclosure of the plaintiff’s identity.” …

[T]here are no allegations that any of the plaintiffs have received any direct physical threats from anyone. Plaintiffs’ identities are currently known to the Defendants, who received each application for religious exemption from the COVID-19 vaccine mandate and were responsible for turning down the specified religious exemption requests. There is no indication that anyone associated with any defendant, knowing Plaintiffs’ identities, has threatened or harmed any plaintiff, other than as alleged in the Amended Complaint….

The harm that Plaintiffs fear if their identification is revealed comes from the public; that very same group that was invoked by President Biden in his lament that “all of us” are hurt by an individual choice to not receive a vaccination. The same public, of course, has a right to open access to judicial records and documents in civil cases.

The reality at this stage of the pandemic in the United States is that vaccines are readily available to all adults in this country, free of charge, who want to be vaccinated. There is no question that there exists in our nation a certain enmity from some persons in society against those persons who choose not to become vaccinated. Plaintiffs’ Motion has presented evidence that supports their contention that choosing not to become vaccinated can stigmatize an individual as uncaring for the well-being of others, especially in light of the many mutations that have been identified thus far and the unknowns surrounding protection through vaccination if the virus is not definitively stopped from spreading. Arguments on both sides of the vaccine mandate controversy are often vitriolic and personal.

It is not this court’s place to attempt to resolve these conflicts, but simply to recognize them and balance the danger posed to individuals being labeled so-called “anti-vaxxers” against legal precedent holding that “[c]ourts are public institutions which exist for the public to serve the public interest [and] … that secret court proceedings are anathema to a free society.”

Considering the merit of this litigation, the identity of each of the Plaintiffs is of little-to- no value to the underlying allegations of the complaint. There has been no argument that the plaintiffs are not sincere in their religious objections to receiving the currently available vaccines. In fact, the individual plaintiffs who requested a religious exemption from a requirement to receive a COVID-19 vaccine are knowingly placing their own health at risk in order to uphold their religious convictions….

Further, the court agrees with Plaintiffs that there is a uniquely weak public interest in knowing the litigants’ identities in this case. The public will know that a group of people working and/or studying at the University of Colorado Anschutz medical campus have asserted religious objections to receiving the currently available COVID-19 vaccines, generally but not universally, on the basis of the use stem cells derived from aborted fetuses during research.

These exemptions were denied by the University, which only allowed religious exemptions for those individuals who are members of organized religions whose teachings entirely forbid vaccinations. Plaintiffs allege that the disallowance of their requests for religious exemption, and the ultimate penalties that were visited upon them as a result of them being unvaccinated, violated individual constitutional guarantees of religious neutrality and the entanglement between government and religion, as enshrined in the First … Amendment[] ….

The issues before the Court on the merits, therefore, do not depend on the identities of the Plaintiffs, but rather on the actions of Defendants, who are public, governmental entities and actors. The public has a very significant interest in the constitutionality of the policies of its public institutions. But, it is the policy itself and its execution at the University’s Anschutz campus that is on trial, not the individual Plaintiffs who are asserting the constitutional violations.

Therefore, … the court finds that the Plaintiffs have a substantial privacy right in protecting against public knowledge of their identities that outweighs the presumption of openness in judicial proceedings under these limited circumstances and that they should be allowed to proceed via pseudonyms until further order of the court.

The post May University Faculty/Staff/Students Sue Pseudonymously Over Limits on Religious Exemptions from COVID Vaccine Mandate? appeared first on Reason.com.

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