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Reason-Rupe has a new survey and report out
on millennials—find the report
here.

At first glance millennials appear to prefer a “larger
government providing more services” (54%) over a “smaller
government providing few services” (43%). However, once tax rates
are mentioned support for large government flips. Instead 57
percent favor “smaller government, providing fewer services, with
low taxes” and 41 percent want “larger government providing more
services, with high taxes.” We also find that the race/ethnicity
gap on the size of government disappears among Hispanic, Asian, and
white millennials once tax rates are explicit.

Other
surveys have asked the first version of this question, in
which taxes are not mentioned, finding millennials are the only
generation to support large government. In stark contrast,
Americans nationally favor smaller
government with fewer services over larger government providing
more services (35%).

Typically, “big government” has implied high taxes, heavy
regulation, and the power to play favorites and control
individuals. However, debate about the role of government was put
on hold in the aftermath of 9/11, when millennials came of a
politically impressionable age. Furthermore, the national enemy was
no longer a large totalitarian regime like the Soviet Union, but
terrorist groups from whose attacks our government sought to
protect us.

This raises the question: Do millennials know what the phrase
“big government” means? Recent evidence suggests they may
not.  If millennials don’t know what large government is, do
they know what it costs?  If not, perhaps their preference for
“more services” over “fewer services” drives their desire for
“larger government.”

To investigate this, Reason-Rupe divided the sample in half and
asked one half:

“If you had to choose, would you rather have a smaller
government providing fewer services, or a larger government
providing more services?”

It then asked the other half of the sample the same question but
with explicit tax rates:

“If you had to choose, would you rather have a smaller
government providing fewer services with low taxes, or a larger
government providing more services with high taxes?”

When taxes are mentioned, millennials’ preference for large
government flips, and a majority (57%)— favor small government and
41 percent favor large government.

Our results indicate that millennials don’t immediately make the
connection between larger government and the high taxes it
requires. Consequently, support for “larger government providing
more services” among millennials doesn’t necessarily imply an
endorsement for a large activist government that levies heavy
taxes. Instead, many are favoring “more services” rather than more
services plus high taxes. Perhaps older Americans would also favor
more over less government services if they felt it wouldn’t cost
them.

Are Non-white Millennials More Likely To Support Large
Government?

Congruent with findings from
the Pew Research Center, white millennials (50%) are considerably
more likely to favor smaller government when taxes are not
mentioned than African-American (32%), Latino (36%), and Asian
American (29%) millennials. Consequently, at first glance,
non-white millennials are far more likely to favor larger
government.

However, after considering taxes, the racial gap on the
preferred size of government starts to disappear. The share of
Latino, Asian, and white millennials preferring small government is
statistically identical, with roughly six in 10 in support.
African-American millennials are divided, with a slim majority
favoring larger over smaller government, even if that means higher
taxes (53 to 46 percent). It appears that white millennials are
more likely to implicitly associate large government with high
taxes.

Available data suggest that Latino and Asian millennials, many
of whom are themselves immigrants or children of recent immigrants,
will likely experience a good deal of upward income mobility. For
instance, the Pew Research Center reports that
the median annual household income for first generation Hispanics
is $34,600, and this increases to $48,400 among the second
generation. Since higher incomes often diminish
support for government services, our results indicate that
desire for activist government may decline over the next decade if
large government and high taxes are explicitly connected in voters’
minds.

Millennials Respond More Favorably to Concrete Proposals to
Limit Government Than Abstract References About Government’s
Size

If the abstract notion of government’s “size” does not convey
the same substantive meaning for millennials that it has for
previous generations, perhaps more concrete policy proposals would
garner greater support than calls to “reduce the size of
government.”

To test this, the survey presented millennials with several
policy proposals aimed at reducing the scope of government,
including cutting government spending by five percent, cutting
taxes, and reducing the number of regulations. They were asked if
each proposal would primarily hurt or primarily help the economy.
The survey then compared responses for these concrete proposals to
responses for whether the relatively abstract act of “reducing the
size of government” would primarily help or harm the economy.

Concrete policies that effectually reduce government’s scope
receive greater support than the proposal to reduce government’s
size. Cutting government spending receives the greatest support,
with 65 percent saying it would “primarily help” rather than harm
the economy, followed by cutting taxes (58%), reducing the number
of regulations (55%), and reducing government’s size (53%).
Intensity of support also reflects this pattern, with a quarter of
millennials saying that cutting government spending would help “a
lot,” compared to 14 percent who have a similar favorable intensity
for shrinking government.

In sum, cutting spending and taxes garners more support than
reducing government’s size. Offering explicit methods for how to
reduce the power and scope of government may better resonate among
millennials than just asserting the need to rein in “big
government.”

To learn more about millennials, check
out Reason-Rupe’s new report.

• Read
  the full report here
• Read
  the toplines here
• 
  10 Findings About the Millennial Generation, found here
• Read detailed
  tables/crosstabs of the results here
• Survey methodology described
  here

• The fallout from the discovery of two U.S. spies
  within the German government is
  creating bad blood between the two nations. Germany has asked
  the U.S.’s CIA station chief in Berlin to leave the country.
• University of Texas at Austin President Bill Powers
  does not have to resign, after all. Allies of Republican Gov.
  Rick Perry had pressured Powers to quit after a
  scandal over law school admissions, but an outpouring of
  support from faculty and students persuaded administrators to let
  him keep his job.
• “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin
  had choice words for fans worried that he will die before
  finishing the series: “Fuck you.” The Washington Free
  Beacon’s Sonny Bunch
  writes that Martin should calm down, before he hurts
  himself.
• Ex-New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin
  was sentenced to 10 years in prison for numerous corruption
  charges. “I’ve been targeted, smeared, and tarnished,” he
  said.
• Millennials are not the government-loving Democrats they are
  made out to be,
  according to a Reason-Rupe survey.

Follow Reason and Reason 24/7 on
Twitter, and like us on Facebook. You
can also get the top stories mailed to you—sign up
here.

One man attempted to take a
photo of a storage tank painted in rainbow colors. One man
attempted to purchase several computers at once. One man had a
flight simulator game operating on his home computer. And one man
was standing around, waiting for his mother outside the bathrooms
of a train station.

All of this behavior drew the attention of the police and landed
the men in databases for engaging in what authorities decided was
suspicious behavior that could potentially indicate terrorist
leanings. They are men who have had what are called suspicious
activity reports (SARs) made up about them and stored in
antiterrorism databases. And now they’re suing, with the help of
the American Civil Liberties Union and the Asian Americans
Advancing Justice — Asian Law Caucus. Wired
makes note of the lawsuit, filed today in northern
California:

[D]ue to the standards the government uses for determining
suspicious activity that might be related to terrorism, all of the
plaintiffs found themselves written up in reports stored in
counterterrorism databases and were subjected to unwelcome and
unwarranted law enforcement scrutiny and interrogation, according
to the lawsuit.

“This domestic surveillance program wrongly targets First
Amendment-protected activities, encourages racial and religious
profiling, and violates federal law,” said Linda Lye, staff
attorney with the ACLU of Northern California. “The Justice
Department’s own rules say that there should be reasonable
suspicion before creating a record on someone, but the government’s
instructions to local police are that they should write up SARs
even if there’s no valid reason to suspect a person of doing
anything wrong.”

The complaint accuses the police of profiling on the basis of
the backgrounds of the affected men and violating their civil
liberties. The guy with the flight simulation game on his computer?
He was a convert to Islam in Chicago. A police officer deemed him
suspicious on the basis of his reluctance to interact with police
(in Chicago? How could that be?), and on a later occasion, the
officer searched the man’s residence briefly looking for a suspect
in a completely unrelated domestic violence case. The officer noted
he appeared to be accessing a flight simulator game. That was
pretty much all. And so the officer made up a record of his
behavior.

In the train station case, a security officer in California
deemed a man of Middle Eastern descent suspicious on the basis of
him “meticulously” observing his surroundings of the Santa Ana
station, then hanging outside the bathrooms until a woman (wearing
a burqa) exited the restroom and joined him. That woman was his
mother.

Read more about the cases at Wired or read the lawsuit yourself

here. Reason TV’s Paul Detrick recently
won a SoCal Journalism Award for his own investigation of how
similar behavior by authorities in Los Angeles resulted in the
harassment
of a photographer taking pictures of the L.A. subway system.
Watch below:

From CBS Sacramento, your daily example of the
disgusting and perverse
lengths law enforement will go to in order to catch “sex
criminals.” Yesterday it was Virginia cops
taking pictures of a teen boy’s junk to compare to the
photos he’d texted his girlfriend, for which they were now
prosecuting him for chlid pornography. Today brings us the story of
California cops trolling online personal ads to trick lonely men
into arranging dates with fake underage girls. 

Daniel Eugene Kirschner, 28, apparently placed an ad online
saying he was looking for a girlfriend. He did not say he was
looking for an underage girlfriend, mind you, nor did
undercover Placer County cops pretend to be underage when they
initially reached out to him. But after a while, the “girl”
revealed that she was only 13.

After that, Kirschner continued the correspondance and
eventually agreed to come to the county jail, where cops said she
would be for her mom’s boyfriend’s court appearance. When Kirschner
showed up, he was immediately arrested and charged with
“communicating with a minor with the intent of committing a sexual
act” and “attempted lewd and lascivious acts with someone under
14.”

A lot of people would probably look at this and say, meh,
he’s a creep or a criminal and deserves it. He should have backed
off when he found out she was 13. And, sure, he should have.
But people are flawed. We don’t know much about Kirschner, but we
do know he was looking online (on what sounds like Craigslist, but
the police are merely calling “a popular website) for a girlfriend.
Maybe he was lonely, vulnerable, in a bad place. A female responds
to his ad and seems friendly and eager (and probably quite mature,
since she is actually a team of cops). She gains his trust and
affection. Then she says she’s only 13.

Under those circumstances, deciding to continue the relationship
certainly reveals a lapse in judgement from our grown perp. But it
doesn’t necessarily reveal him
as predatory or pedophilic. It doesn’t even reveal that he
would have gone through with any sexual activity with this alleged
13-year-old. To me the whole set-up seems similar to the
undercover cops who befriend young people by pretending to be
their age, goad them into selling them pot, then throw them in jail
for it.

How is any of this not entrapment? And by what logic does it
make sense to entice people into crimes they probably wouldn’t
otherwise commit just to arrest them for those crimes?

I’m serious about the entrapment question; the second one, I
guess, is rhetorical. It makes sense when your job, budget, and
prestige depend on making more arrests. I’m sure it’s easier to
arrest regular people you nudge into criminal-ish activity than
people engaged in more stealth and serious criminal behavior. Cops
get their 15-second soundbites about “sex traffickers” and “sexual
predators” on the evening news, communities get to feel safe and
like their cops are actually competent, and if some people and
rights get thrown under the bus along the way, that’s just the
price of doing business. 

This
isn’t the first time this year that Placer County cops have
gone undercover as a 13-year-old girl. Unlike “to catch a predator”
plots past, they seem to be reaching out to men seeking
girlfriends, rather than putting up ads from “teens” and seeing who
responds. The department has also been busy with undercover
operations to lure people into
buying alcohol for minors. 

New
York’s Jonathan Chait
needles me for having “accidentally” shown “how Obamacare is
succeeding.” To make his point, Chait summarizes and briefly quotes
several posts I wrote between January and the second week of March
of this year noting low or overstated enrollment figures in various
parts of Obamacare, and then jumps forward to a post I wrote
earlier this week arguing that a recent estimate combining all of
Obamacare’s coverage expansion provisions is almost certainly too
high. 

“We have gone from learning that the law has failed to cover
anybody to learning it would cover a couple million to learning it
would cover a few million to learning that it has probably insured
fewer than 20 million people halfway through year one,” he
concludes, as if the items he links to are all discussing
comparable components of the law’s coverage expansion.

But Chait’s argument relies on on selective quotations from
posts of mine that examine different aspects of the law that aren’t
really comparable, stringing them together in a way that implies
they are all referring to the same thing. And he fails
to mention other posts I wrote, between March and July, noting the
law’s late-March enrollment surge and effects on covering the
uninsured.

Mostly, then, his item serves to demonstrate is that enrollment
in Obamacare’s insurance exchanges was, as was widely reported,
sluggish from the beginning of the year until the middle of
March, and that it grew afterwards. (Until the very end, it lagged
behind the administration’s own projections.)

Throughout the year, I noted the low enrollment figures as they
came in, arguing that the numbers weren’t promising. And when the
enrollment did pick up at the end of March, I also wrote items on
the surge and its effects on multiple occasions—including a March
31
post noting a “last-minute sign-up surge,” an April 1
post noting the White House’s announcement that 7 million had
signed up for coverage, an April 17
post noting the administration’s report that 8 million had
signed up for coverage, and a May post
specifically saying that early speculation that the law might have
no or negative effect on coverage was not plausible.

Chait does not mention any of these items in his post, which
does not quote or link to any post I wrote between March 11 and
this month. He also says my posts are useful as a “lagging
indicator of Obamacare’s progress.” But all of these posts were
written within a day of the information becoming public.

Chait also fails to quote my own caveats in the posts he does
cite, or to provide important context for comparing the posts he
quotes. For example, he quotes me
saying on January 21 that “it appears possible that there has
been no net expansion of private coverage at all.” Note that this
is presented as a possibility, not a certainty, and that I also
wrote in the same post that that even if this were true, “there’s
still time for that to change. As the administration is keen to
remind us, people who want coverage have until the end of March to
sign up for coverage this year.”

The
March 11 post Chait quotes from, meanwhile, dealt specifically
with the question of how much effect Obamacare was having on the
uninsured rate, based on a Gallup survey, which turns out to be a
completely different metric from what’s being looked at in the next
post he selects.

The Gallup survey, I said, was the “best evidence” that
Obamacare was reducing the rate of the uninsured. This effect,
which was measured prior to the late-March surge, is separate from
the question of how many people now have coverage through some
coverage-expanding provision in the law. But the total-coverage
question is what the next post he quotes from (a July
item taking issue with a New England Journal of
Medicine (NEJM) study estimating 20 million total covered
by Obamacare, through the exchanges, Medicaid, and other
provisions) discussed.

The authors of that study specifically note that, unlike the
Gallup survey, it was not an attempt to judge the law’s effect on
the uninsurance rate. As the authors of the study say, “We do not
know yet exactly how many of these people were previously
uninsured…”

Chait pairs the two posts without much context, implicitly
suggesting that they are looking at the same thing. They are
not.

The July post on the NEJM‘s total-coverage estimate is
also not really comparable with the
the February 24 post that Chait quotes from, which specifically
deals with President Obama’s claim that almost 7 million people had
gained coverage under Obamacare just through the law’s Medicaid
expansion.

Obama’s claim was wrong at the time. It’s still wrong. I was not
the only journalist to say so at the time. (The Washington
Post’s fact checker
gave Obama’s statement four Pinocchios.) By now even the
administration has backed off that number for the Medicaid
expansion, saying only that total enrollment in the program (which
additionally counts the surge month after Obama made the 7 million
claim) has increased by 6 million following Obamacare’s coverage
expansion, and that
not all of that increase is directly attributable to the law.
If you read that post on the day that it was published, you got an
accurate and real-time impression that President Obama was wrong.
If you read it now, you get an accurate impression that Obama was
overstating the health law’s coverage effects.

Obamacare has, without question, enrolled far more people since
January, and the evidence is pretty strong that it has cut the rate
of the uninsured by several points. But even as the coverage
figures have increased, what you also see is that the president,
his administration, and the law’s backers have consistently relied
on dubious, misleading, or incomplete metrics to overstate what can
be known about the law’s impact based on the information
available.

Chait may see my posts noting this as inadvertent proof that
Obamacare is actually a success, but to me it looks more like
evidence that the administration and its supporters are desperate
to convince people that it is more of one than the evidence
supports.