Category: reason

In his Commentaries on the Laws of England, William Blackstone declared, “It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.” In an 1785 letter, Benjamin Franklin was even more exacting: “That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape, than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approv’d, never that I know of controverted.”

In 2011, the U.S. Department of Education took a different position. The department instructed colleges and universities to use preponderance of the evidence rather than clear and convincing evidence when considering accusations of sexual assault on their campuses.

So how high a risk of false conviction do the innocent face under the department’s guidance standards? John Villasenor, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, set out to answer that in a study that uses probability theory to model false convictions under the preponderance of the evidence standard. What he found should take all fair-minded Americans aback.

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A group of masked anarchists have taken to the streets of Portland, Oregon. But they’re not out breaking windows or burning cars—instead, they’re patching up potholes. The Portland Anarchist Road Care (PARC) group has tasked itself with addressing problems with the city streets that have plagued the community since winter, KGW reported.

“The city of Portland has shown gross negligence in its inadequate preventative care through this winter’s storms, and through its slow repair of potholes as weather has improved,” claims the group’s Facebook page. “Daily, this negligence is an active danger to cyclists and causes damage to people’s automobiles, and an increased risk of collision and bodily injury.”

“Portland Anarchist Road Care aims to mobilize crews throughout our city, in our neighborhoods, to patch our streets, build community, and continue to find solutions to community problems outside of the state,” the page also says.

In a recent outing, PARC repaired five potholes. Members assured the community that they will continue filling holes as long as they are able, according to the KGW report. But not everyone is thrilled with the group’s service.

Especially peeved is the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT). “If it’s a city-maintained street, then folks should call us and have the professionals do it,” bureau spokesman Dylan Rivera told OregonLive. “It’s generally not safe for folks to be out in the street doing an unauthorized repair like this.” The PBOT claims the city repaired 900 potholes during a recent patch-a-thon event, KGW reported; the city claims it fills up to 8,000 potholes every year.

OregonLive notes that Rivera couldn’t say whether there’s an ordinance against residents patching up potholes themselves, but he believed the action “might be illegal.”

Portland isn’t the only place where people taken it upon themselves to repair potholes in their neighborhoods. In Hamtramck, Michigan, a group that dubbed itself the Hamtramck Guerrilla Road Crew has been operating since 2015, reports USAToday. “Everyone who lives in or has been through Hamtramck recently knows how much help our roads need,” the group’s Facebook page reads. “The city is doing what they can with the major roads but unfortunately does not have funding to fix a lot of the pot holes in the residential streets.”

A 2016 report by TRIP, a national transportation research group, found that 20 percent of major roads in the United States are in poor condition, costing around $523 per motorist (or around $112 billion total) per year in vehicle wear and tear. The report also claims that investment in roads and bridges nationwide would need to increase from $88 billion to $120 billion a year to adequately cover operation and maintenance costs.

If you want to understand how awkwardly constructed the House Republican health care bill is, and how unlikely its policy scheme is to work, look no further than its continuous coverage requirement. It’s just one of the many ways that Republicans are trying to embrace Obamacare’s ideas without technically embracing Obamacare.

The rule requires insurers to tack a 30 percent, one-year “premium surcharge” onto the bill for anyone who has gone more than 63 days without coverage. The requirement is designed to create an incentive for people to avoid going without coverage, in hopes of maintaining an insurance pool that is healthy enough to be viable and affordable. If too many people wait until they are sick to buy coverage, then insurance premiums rise, more people drop out of the system, and the whole thing collapses.

Basically, the continuous coverage provision is a replacement for the individual mandate—with a crucial difference: It is likely to be even less effective. Its chief virtue is that it allows Republicans to say that the GOP health care bill repeals Obamacare’s individual mandate.

Because the continuous coverage requirement is a mandatory charge levied by insurers rather than a penalty on individuals who fail to buy a product, it doesn’t raise the same sort of constitutional concerns that plagued Obamacare’s mandate.

But as a policy mechanism, it’s virtually certain to be worse than a failure. Instead of giving people an incentive to stay covered, it would give healthy people an incentive to avoid coverage until they needed it.

That’s because the main thing it really does it give people who don’t have coverage an incentive to avoid buying insurance. But someone who lacks coverage and then gets sick with some expensive malady suddenly has a fairly significant incentive to pay the surcharge, which only lasts a year and in many cases is unlikely to be greater than the cost of treatment, while someone who is still healthy has an incentive to stay uninsured.

Here’s how Robert Laszewski, a consultant for the health insurance industry, recently explained it:

The Republicans now want to create a scheme that doesn’t require anyone to sign up. But when they get sick enough that they need insurance, they will be able to quickly do so by paying a paltry 12-month 30% premium surcharge.

For example, a person paying $5,000 for health insurance would pay a one-time total $1,500 penalty! A family paying $10,000 in annual premium would pay only a $3,000 penalty for any late enrollment!

Obamacare is so poorly constructed it is literally an anti-selection machine. The Republican proposal is worse.

Health policy experts have found evidence that Obamacare’s mandate penalties are not particularly powerful motivators. The GOP’s provision isn’t just weak. It encourages the opposite behavior of what is intended.

The reason that Republicans included the provision is because the House health care bill leaves Obamacare’s key insurance regulations in place. Like Obama’s health law, the American Health Care Act requires insurers to sell to everyone, and restricts carriers from charging more based on an individual’s health history. Those regulations are what made the mandate a crucial part of Obamacare’s policy scheme. When states tried to implement the insurance market regulations without the mandate, their individual insurance markets melted down.

Reports this week suggest that House Republicans may soon ditch the provision. That merely leaves the original problem in place: How to make insurance markets viable with preexisting conditions rules in place? Obamacare’s attempt at a solution was the mandate. Republicans do not appear to have a solution at all.

The core problem for Republicans, and for the House health care bill, is that they are trying to replicate Obamacare’s basic structure in a form that is somehow not Obamacare. It is not the same exact plan, but like Obamacare it relies on a system of insurance market subsidies and regulations, along with financial penalties for those who don’t stay covered.

Obamacare was already a politically compromised piece of legislation with serious flaws and real uncertainty about its long-term stability. Republicans have decided to use an unstable version of its already-kludgy policy scheme for the individual market as a foundation for their own plan, buying into its essential ideas even as they claim to reject them.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. Did you know someone once decided to make a movie of Finnegans Wake? Or parts of it, anyway: The film’s full title is Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, presumably because no one is so insane as to try to fit all 628 densely packed Irish pages into an hour and a half. If you’re curious to see the results—and if you’ve ever so much as attempted to read Finnegans Wake, you must be at least a little curious—then pour yourself a green beer, or maybe take something a little more psychedelic, and behold:

This was made in the mid-’60s by Mary Ellen Bute, who is probably better known for her animations. Not long afterward, someone tried to turn Ulysses into a movie too. I don’t know when the word “unfilmable” was coined but I’ll bet it wasn’t the 1960s.

Bonus political content: James Joyce, writing in the third person, describes his ideological influences:

Among the many whose works he had read may be mentioned Most, Malatesta, Stirner, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Elisée Reclus, Spencer, and Benjamin Tucker, whose Instead of a Book proclaimed the liberty of the non-invasive individual. He never read anything by Karl Marx except the first sentence of Das Kapital and he found it so absurd that he immediately returned the book to the lender.

For those of you who don’t know your old-time anarchists and/or libertarians by surname, he means Johann Most, Errico Malatesta, Max Stirner, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and Herbert Spencer. Here’s another quote:

As an artist I am against every state. Of course I must recognize it, since indeed in all my dealings I come into contact with its institutions. The state is concentric, man eccentric. Thence arises an eternal struggle. The monk, the bachelor, and the anarchist are in the same category. Naturally I can’t approve of the act of the revolutionary who tosses a bomb in a theatre to destroy the King and his children. On the other hand, have these states behaved any better which have drowned the world in a bloodbath?

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

While Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is free to reject Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch for any reason he wants, or even none at all, his current argument is that judges should ignore the Constitution.

David Harsanyi writes:

If Democrats want to filibuster President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, they’re entitled to do it. In fact, Democrats are free to try and stop federal appeals court Judge Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation for any reason they desire, whether ideological or personal, or even no particular reason at all. There is nothing in the Constitution that compels senators to vote on judicial nominees the president forwards.

Make no mistake, though: Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) now opposes a potential SCOTUS justice because he promises to be impartial when upholding the Constitution.
Since Gorsuch’s confirmation hearing starts Monday in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee and opponents have found “little to latch onto,” according to Politico (which means they’ve found nothing to spin into accusations of misogyny or racism), Schumer and his allies have launched a ham-fisted effort to paint Gorsuch as a corporate stooge.

This argument includes a preposterous New York Times piece headlined “Neil Gorsuch Has Web of Ties to Secretive Colorado Billionaire.” Who is this mysterious tycoon? Philip Anschutz, who is probably one the most familiar names in Colorado. He’s so secretive, in fact, that one of the largest medical facilities in the state is named after him. That’s just one of the many buildings that bears his name. If it’s disqualifying for one of the state’s leading lawyers to have a relationship with one of its leading businessmen, then nearly every Coloradan in Washington, D.C., will have to pack up and head home—including Schumer’s colleague Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.).

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The International Energy Agency is reporting data showing that economic growth is being increasingly decoupled from carbon dioxide emissions. Basically, human beings are using less carbon dioxide intensive fuels to produce more goods and services. The IEA attributes the relatively steep drop in U.S. emissions largely to the ongoing switch by electric generating companies from coal to cheap natural gas produced using fracking from shale deposits Renewals also contributed a bit to the decline. From the IEA:

Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions were flat for a third straight year in 2016 even as the global economy grew, according to the International Energy Agency, signaling a continuing decoupling of emissions and economic activity. This was the result of growing renewable power generation, switches from coal to natural gas, improvements in energy efficiency, as well as structural changes in the global economy.

Global emissions from the energy sector stood at 32.1 gigatonnes last year, the same as the previous two years, while the global economy grew 3.1%, according to estimates from the IEA. Carbon dioxide emissions declined in the United States and China, the world’s two-largest energy users and emitters, and were stable in Europe, offsetting increases in most of the rest of the world.

The biggest drop came from the United States, where carbon dioxide emissions fell 3%, or 160 million tonnes, while the economy grew by 1.6%. The decline was driven by a surge in shale gas supplies and more attractive renewable power that displaced coal. Emissions in the United States last year were at their lowest level since 1992, a period during which the economy grew by 80%.

“These three years of flat emissions in a growing global economy signal an emerging trend and that is certainly a cause for optimism, even if it is too soon to say that global emissions have definitely peaked,” said Dr Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director. “They are also a sign that market dynamics and technological improvements matter. This is especially true in the United States, where abundant shale gas supplies have become a cheap power source.”

In 2016, renewables supplied more than half the global electricity demand growth, with hydro accounting for half of that share. The overall increase in the world’s nuclear net capacity last year was the highest since 1993, with new reactors coming online in China, the United States, South Korea, India, Russia and Pakistan. Coal demand fell worldwide but the drop was particularly sharp in the United States, where demand was down 11% in 2016. For the first time, electricity generation from natural gas was higher than from coal last year in the United States.

In addition, China’s emissions fell by one percent, suggesting that its use of coal to generate electricity may be close to peaking. This is good news for those who think that man-made global warming could become a signifcant problem later in this century. In any case, whatever else the Trump administration may say, domestic coal use ain’t never coming back.

Democrats in California are looking to cover a reduction in sales taxes on baby diapers and feminine products with a tax hike on hard liquor.

Steven Greenhut writes:

In his veto message of a series of tax-reduction bills last September, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) explained that “tax breaks are the same as new spending—they both cost the general fund money.” He said such measures should be on the table during budget negotiations, “so that all spending proposals are weighed against each other at the same time.”

Among the bills that were vetoed at that time were two that would have repealed sales taxes on diapers and tampons. Both measures passed unanimously, but the governor wanted to assure that new spending-related measures didn’t lead to deficits. So the authors of those two measures are back again this year—but this time they are addressing the revenue issue.

The Common Cents Tax Reform Act, Assembly Bill 479, would “exempt diapers, tampons, pads and other basic necessities from California’s sales tax,” according to a statement last week from its authors. The February version of the bill would have exempted sales taxes from the sale, storage and use of various physician-prescribed medicines, but was amended to target diapers and feminine products.

To deal with the governor’s concerns, its co-authors (Assembly members Cristina Garcia, D-Bell Gardens, and Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, D-San Diego) want to raise taxes to offset the tax cut. The bill would increase the excise tax by $1.20 per gallon on hard liquor that is 100 proof and and by $2.40 a gallon for liquors that are more than 100 proof.

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Louisiana dwarfs the rest of the country when it comes to putting people in prison, but now state officials say they have a plan to reduce the state’s staggering incarceration rate and save hundreds of millions of dollars over the next decade.

The Louisiana Justice Reinvestment Task Force—composed of state legislators, corrections officials, public defenders, judges, law enforcement, and district attorneys—finalized a report Thursday to overhaul the state’s criminal justice system.

“Louisiana is not only the incarceration capital of the country, we are the incarceration capital of the world,” Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said in a statement Thursday. “For too long this has been a stain on our reputation and a drain on our communities. It’s not a reflection of who we are and what we stand for. We now have a roadmap that will allow us to keep our streets safe while shrinking our bloated prisons.”

The task force’s proposals would introduce a more rigorous felony classification system, which would reduce sentences for nonviolent crimes and expand eligibility for parole and drug courts. It would also increase the amount of “good time” some inmates could use to shave off their sentences, and increase funding for transition and work programs to assist inmates reentering society. Also, those sentenced to life without parole as juveniles would be made eligible for parole, bringing the state in line with a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that declared such sentences unconstitutional.

Overall, the task force estimates that its plan could reduce Louisiana’s prison population by 13 percent—more than 4,000 prison beds—and save the state $305 million over the next decade. Half of those savings would be spent on research into reducing recidivism and victim support.

For perspective on just how much of an outlier Louisiana is when it comes to incarceration: Louisiana’s rate as of 2015 was 816 incarcerated individuals per 100,000, almost double the national average, which is itself the highest in the world. Louisiana also has the second-highest wrongful conviction rate, according to the National Registry on Exonerations. The task force is blunt in its assessment of why Louisiana’s numbers are so high.

“A chief reason Louisiana leads the nation in imprisonment is that it locks up people for nonviolent offenses far more than other states do,” the report says. “The Task Force found that the state sent people to prison for drug, property, and other nonviolent offenses at twice the rate of South Carolina and three times the rate of Florida, even though the states had nearly identical crime rates. More than half of those sent to prison in 2015 had failed on community supervision. Among the rest—those sentenced directly to prison rather than probation—the top 10 crimes were all nonviolent, the most common by far being drug possession.”

James LeBlanc, the head of the Louisiana Department of Corrections and the chair of the task force, says the numbers alone should be a warning sign to policy makers.

“First of all being a poster-child for locking up twice as many people as the national average is a good sign that, hey, we’re not doing something right,” LeBlanc says in an interview with Reason. “On top of that, as many people as we’re locking up, we still rank in many categories in the top 10 if not top five in the country on crime.”

LeBlanc, who has worked in Louisiana corrections for 40 years, said the state has stubbornly clung to a “lock ’em up and throw away the key” mentality—encouraged by federal grants in the ’90s that rewarded states for passing tough sentencing laws—that most other states have moved away from over the past two decades.

Louisiana is also unique in that a significant amount of state prisoners serve their sentences in local parish jails, where there is often scant rehabilitative, work-training, and reentry programs. Those lengthy sentences and lack of support services led to high recidivism rates, funneling many ex-offenders right back into the system. “A recipe for disaster,” LeBlanc says. According to the report, one in three people return to Louisiana’s prisons within three years.

LeBlanc says the state correctional system has been improving: Its recidivism rates are down and the prison population has dropped every year over the past four years, for a total of nearly 5,000 fewer inmates. But it has only been over the past couple of years, and especially after the exit of conservative Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, that bipartisan momentum started to build for a more comprehensive fix to Louisiana’s criminal justice system.

State prosecutors, however, are not on board with the proposals. Pete Adams, the executive director of the Louisiana District Attorneys Association, says his organization opposes any efforts that would lead to the release of violent offenders, including the task force’s proposals to introduce parole valves for those serving mandatory life sentences.

“We’re in support of what the task force was originally trying to do, which was identify and reduce incarnation of nonviolent offenders to the extent it would not increase the risk to public safety,” Adams says in an interview with Reason. “When the task force starts floating proposals that would reduced sentences for violent offenders, we’re not in support of that, conceptually.”

The split illustrates what many criminal justice experts say is the biggest roadblock to significantly reducing the prison population, not just in Louisiana but across the entire country: moving beyond so-called “low-hanging fruit” like nonviolent drug offenders to criminals convicted of violent crimes.

“We’re not saying let all these violent offenders out,” LeBlanc counters. “Look, I’ve been in this business long enough to know and spent enough time at Angola. You sit down and you talk to some of these guys that have been down 45 or 50 years, they’re 60 or 70-years old, even have gotten married since they’ve been in prison. Their propensity to commit crime stops around 45. I call it criminal menopause. I think they deserve at least an opportunity. I’m not saying let them out. I’m saying give them a process.”

There are nearly 5,000 lifers in Louisiana prisons, and in Louisiana, a life sentence means means exactly that, no exceptions. Louisiana is only one of two states where second-degree murder is a mandatory life sentence without parole.

Beyond the opposition of district attorneys, the task force has the support of a broad group of state organizations, from business to evangelical to liberal to conservative, and from national groups like the Pew Charitable Trusts, which advised the task force. The Pelican Institute for Public Policy, a conservative Louisiana think-tank, says in a statement it “fully supports” the task force’s recommendations.

“These evidence based, data driven recommendations offer the potential for millions of dollars in taxpayer savings, expanded workforce opportunities for the recently incarcerated, and a reduction in crime rates as seen in other Southern states that have implemented similar reforms,” the think-tank says. “As the state with the highest incarceration rate in the country, Louisiana cannot afford to continue to invest in a system that does not work and does not produce results. At least 33 states have already passed justice reinvestment reforms and have seen taxpayer costs and crime decline. Now is the time for our legislature to be tough and smart on crime so that Louisiana, too, can finally get the results its citizens deserve.”

The task force proposals are expected to be introduced as legislation this April.

• U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met with South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se in Seoul on Friday, telling him “all options are on the table” to deter threats from North Korea. “Let me be very clear: the policy of strategic patience has ended,” Tillerson said.
• Donald Trump’s budget plan isn’t likely to go far on Capitol Hill.
• Venezuela’s government is addressing a national bread shortage by lashing out at bakers and seizing bakeries.
• A Cincinnati, Ohio, police officer was arrested this week for allegedly pointing his AR-15 rifle at another cop and pretending to be on duty while actually drunk and off duty.
• Quoting Beyonce while white is cultural appropriation.

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Experiencing Disney’s new live-action Beauty and the Beast is like being held down and force-fed candy for two hours. Candy fans can take this as a recommendation, and lovers of blazingly well-made fantasy films and full-belt Broadway musicals will surely have a good time. I had a good time myself, up to a point. But the movie is possibly overstuffed with Disney’s warm artificiality—the cozily cluttered interiors, the bustling village square, the broody castle, the vivid weather—and at the end you may feel bloated.

Like the phenomenally successful live-action Cinderella of two years ago, Beauty is a remake of an earlier Disney animated fairy tale—the Oscar-winning 1991 film of sainted memory. As you may know, that picture was translated straight onto Broadway for a 13-year run, and continues traipsing the world to our very day. Now this.

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