Category: reason

U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (D–Ore.) has decided to close out the year by introducing the most unobjectionable piece of legislation ever conceived.

Called the Kittens In Traumatic Testing Ends Now Act, or KITTEN Act, Merkley’s bill—introduced last week—aims to stop the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) current practice of killing off cats they breed for research, requiring instead that these kitties be put up for adoption.

“The KITTEN Act will protect these innocent animals from being needlessly euthanized in government testing, and make sure that they can be adopted by loving families instead,” Merkley said in a statement.

The bill is a response to revelations from the White Coat Waste Project, an anti-animal testing group, about the USDA’s practice of essentially using kittens as parasite incubators at its Animal Parasitic Diseases Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland.

Carlin Becker described the grizzly practice for Reason in September:

“Documents obtained by the [White Coat Waste Project] show the department has been breeding around 100 kittens a year for almost 50 years just to infect them with a parasite that can cause toxoplasmosis, a disease that can lead to miscarriages and birth defects in humans and is a leading cause of death from foodborne illness. The department collects the kittens’ feces for two to three weeks and then simply euthanizes them with a shot of ketamine to the heart.”

This is a pretty shocking practice, considering the undeniable cuteness of the average kitten. It’s made worse by the fact that euthanizing the cats is almost certainly unnecessary.

According to the Center for Disease Control, the toxoplasma found in the research kitties’ poop only poses a risk to humans for up to three weeks after the animal is first infected. The parasite is easily treated in both humans and cats, and most people who become infected with toxoplasma do not even require treatment.

Nevertheless, the USDA has continued to defend the practice, arguing that it’s just following orders best practices in animal research, and that the risks to adoptive families are just too great to let these cats live.

“Our goal is to reduce the spread of toxoplasmosis. Adopting laboratory cats could, unfortunately, undermine that goal, potentially causing severe infections, especially with unborn children or those with immunodeficiencies,” a USDA spokesperson said to CNN back in May.

All things considered, this is a remarkable testament to a bureaucracy’s habit of just continuing to do the same thing it’s always done regardless of how cruel or unnecessary it might be. Indeed, it’s hard to think of anyone that could be opposed to ending needless, government euthanasia of potential fur babies.

No action has been taken on Merkley’s bill, as the text of his legilsation has not been released. A companion House bill—which would prohibit any “painful or stressful” USDA experimentation on cats—was introduced back in May, but has languished in committee for months.

Even in these divided times, one would hope that Americans could at least rally around the cause of saving a few cute kittens from needless, taxpayer-funded annihilation.

Less than 24 hours after his administration announced plans to slap new tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, President Donald Trump was already preparing to declare victory.

When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 2, 2018

The declaration that trade wars are “good and easy to win” may be one of the enduring moments of the Trump presidency, since it seems to perfectly summarize much of the current administration’s ethos. It’s an obvious oversimplification of an incredibly complex policy that was launched impulsively and backed by little more than the president’s hubris and naivete.

As 2018 comes to a close, it appears Trump continues to believe that higher tariffs are in the best interest of the United States. For those willing to look a little closer, however, the past nine months provide a sturdy lesson in the economic costs, policy failures, and political dysfunction triggered by his tariffs. Indeed, the consequences of Trump’s trade war can be grouped into four categories—and none of them, at this moment, appear to be positive outcomes for Americans.

First, and most obviously, there are the higher costs created by tariffs, which are really just taxes imposed on imported goods when they enter the country. Americans have already paid $42 billion in higher taxes due to tariffs, according to an analysis by The Tax Foundation. That works out to a decrease of $146 in after-tax income for middle class Americans.

Businesses that rely on steel and aluminum imports (along with manufacturing components made in China, another target of Trump’s tariffs) have felt the brunt of the impact. The taxes on imported steel, for example, get passed along the supply chain to increase the purchase price of everything from cars and homes to beer kegs and industrial widgets. Trump’s claims that China would pay for these tariffs are proving to be as empty as his promise that Mexico would pay for the border wall.

Second, there are the knock-on economic effects of those tax increases. In the third quarter of the year (the first economic quarter during which the tariffs were fully deployed), more than one-third of the companies in the S&P 500 cited Trump’s tariffs in earnings reports and calls with investors—including major American companies like Ford, Caterpillar, Harley-Davidson, and General Motors; the last of which recently announced massive layoffs that may have been caused, or worsened, by the sudden hike in supply costs. The Tax Foundation’s analysis suggests that the tariffs will reduce the gross domestic product, a short-hand measure for the overall size of the economy, by about $30 billion while also depressing wages and costing more than 94,000 jobs.

More broadly, the tariffs may be contributing to the stock market’s recent stumbles. The Dow Jones is down more than 1,000 points from where it was on March 1, when Trump announced the first round of tariffs, and down more than 1,500 points since June 1, when the steel and aluminum tariffs took affect.

Third, the tariffs have grown the size and power of the federal government. Trump has arguably abused his executive power in laying tariffs for supposedly “national security” reasons, despite his own admission (and that of his soon-to-be-former defense secretary) that they are not necessary for national security. But the bigger abuses of power have occurred within the administrative state, where Commerce Department bureaucrats have been empowered to hand out tariff exemptions for some businesses. Getting an exemption can be a lifeline for a company, but the process is murky, slow, and fraught with politics. American steelmakers have been accused of exerting influence over the exemptions, and there’s no due process for businesses to appeal denials.

In short, the Commerce Department’s implementation of Trump’s tariff policy amounts to a huge expansion of government power over the independence of American businesses and the livelihoods of their employees. It’s a far cry from the “open and transparent process” promised by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross when he announced the tariff exemption process in March.

Finally, the trade war has put American taxpayers on the hook for direct bailouts to American farmers harmed by the trade war. This is perhaps the ultimate example of how Trump’s tariffs have turned into an own goal. Using a New Deal era crop insurance program, Trump has funneled more than $9 billion to farmers who have been unable to sell their goods to China due to retaliatory tariffs raised in response to Trump’s tariffs. Soybean farmers have been particularly hard hit—the U.S. is the top global supplier of soybeans, but China has all but stopped buying American soybeans—but suppliers of cotton, dairy, and hogs have also received payments.

Trump has tried to frame these payments as him “making good on my promise to defend our farmers.” But those farmers would be better off if they were able to sell their goods—like they used to do—rather than being bailed out by the same federal government that’s also driving up their equipment and supply costs.

It’s also worth considering what hasn’t happened since the tariffs were imposed. Despite Trump’s repeated assertions (which have now earned him a “bottomless Pinocchio” from The Washington Post‘s fact-checkers), there are not seven or eight new steel plants being built across the country. There’s not even one—unless you count U.S. Steel making some upgrades to its main facility in Gary, Indiana.

Meanwhile, steel stocks have taken it on the chin since the tariffs were imposed—U.S. Steel’s stock price has collapsed by more than 50 percent since early March. Aluminum manufacturers have added a mere 300 jobs since the protectionist tariffs were imposed, but American aluminum-consuming companies have paid more than $690 million in import taxes. Do the math on that one.

One major aluminum manufacturer, Alcoa, has actually sought an exemption from the tariffs that were meant to be protecting it from competition. It turns out that businesses that make aluminum also have to buy things made of aluminum—and those purchases are now more expensive.

There’s also been no major breakthrough on trade with China. The rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Trump has claimed as a major victory for his zero-sum view of the world, is far from a sure bet to make it through Congress. And the tariffs have heightened tensions between America and many of its key allies and trading partners, including Canada and Europe.

In the end, America may very well “win” the trade war—or, more likely, it may “lose” less badly than other countries. Still, it’s plain to see that it hasn’t been good, and it won’t be easy to recover.

American law tends to favor people who sue large corporations for liability, particularly plaintiffs who’ve contracted mesothelioma or other ailments after being exposed to the mineral asbestos, used for decades as a construction material. But is it reasonable to order manufacturers that never made, distributed, or sold asbestos to pay for its ill effects anyway, on the grounds that they had reason to foresee that the mineral would be used in conjunction with the products they did make?

The Supreme Court considered that question when it heard Air and Liquid Systems v. DeVries in October. Questions of tort law like this generally stay in the state court system and seldom make it to SCOTUS. But the Air and Liquid Systems case is an exception. It arises from maritime law, a sector of common law entrusted to the federal judiciary and ultimately to the high court, writes Walter Olson in his latest piece at Reason.

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British citizens trying to craft a New Year’s resolution for 2019 don’t have to worry. Your government is taking care of it. You’re going to commit to eating less food.

It doesn’t matter whether you want to or even need to eat less food. Public Health England has decided that growing obesity numbers require all British citizens to eat less food. And they’re going to force the matter by controlling the size of just about every single piece of food and prepared available for purchase.

This proposal has been brewing for a while (we made note of it in October), but over Christmas the full extent of the draft plan was leaked to The Telegraph. The plan is both very expansive, capping calories for every prepared food, including vegetables and salad dressings, and repressive, setting limits at around 550 calories for lunches and a weirdly specific 951 calories for restaurant entrees.

The Telegraph notes that these calorie limits hit many prepared meals popular in England, including helpful lists of dishes that are well over the caps. Even a representative from the National Obesity Forum in England who generally supports calorie caps thinks the 550 number is too small and should be more like 800. Public Health England wants citizens to cap their calorie intake from meals at 1,600 per day, which is significantly less than most health experts recommend.

Christopher Snowdon of the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute has been blasting this whole plan, which seems comically impossible, but may lead to some dangerously incompetent outcomes. Public Health England says that it’s going to be pushing for voluntary changes to reach these goals, but given how low caps are, it seems designed to fail. And then what happens? Snowden is certain that this is all going to become a lot less voluntary:

Some of the companies will attempt to play along, mainly by reducing portion sizes, but it is a doomed enterprise. The government initially threatened to use ‘other levers’, such as advertising restrictions, ‘if progress isn’t made’, but it has already capitulated to the ‘public health’ lobby on this, so the only thing left is to threaten them with more taxes and mandatory calorie limits. Make no mistake, the industry is being blackmailed.

If mandatory limits are introduced, it will mean an effective prohibition on many of Britain’s best loved dishes. Steak and kidney pudding far exceeds the 951 calorie limit for out-of-home food, as does ham, egg and chips, the all day breakfast, fish and chips, and beer and ale pie (based on Wetherspoons’ nutritional information). So does a normal Christmas dinner.

As for foreign cuisine, you can kiss goodbye to kebabs, curries, pizzas and Chinese food. But it’s a treat, you say! Tough luck. No exceptions.

Allow me to point out another flaw. You can just buy more food. Attempts by government to control human consumption by controlling portion sizes can (and does) backfire. In South Carolina, prohibitionists tried to control alcohol consumption by limiting the size of liquor bottles. The end result was that individual cocktails ended up having more liquor in them, not less, as bartenders poured the entire bottle into the drink.

It’s not wrong to tell people who are overweight that they should eat less. (Disclosure: I used to be overweight myself, and learning to adjust portion sizes to appropriate levels was vital to losing and keeping off weight. But also exercise! And having realistic goals and expectations that don’t include trying to starve yourself thin.) But this is the wrong way to do it, both on principle and in execution. A person who leads a very physically active life is more certainly not going to get enough to eat if he or she attempts to comply with what this organization thinks they’re supposed to consume each day. A person who probably should eat less may end up eating way more, particularly if they resort to double orders in order to circumvent smaller portions.

It’s an awful plan that probably won’t accomplish its goals. And when it inevitably goes sideways, the government response will be to go back for seconds.

In the September 1968 issue of the newly created Reason magazine, founding editor Lanny Friedlander dreamed up a scenario of individualized telecommunications beyond just about anyone’s contemporary imaginations. “Our man sits down to his telephone,” Friedlander wrote. “It is a deluxe model, with a television screen, television camera, teletype outlet, electronic writing pad, copier, and, yes, a handset. He flips on the machine and speaks towards the television screen (there is a mike and speaker next to it). He identifies himself and asks for his “mail.'”

Forward-looking and occasionally prescient writing about the wonders of science is baked right into this magazine’s DNA. So it was altogether appropriate at our 50th anniversary celebration in November to convene a panel, which I was fortunate to moderate, on where the future is taking us. Giving us that glimpse were Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey, Reason TV Managing Editor Jim Epstein (who talked about blockchain), and legendary skeptic Michael Shermer.

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The Broward County Sheriff’s Office (BSO) has updated some of its active-shooting policies following an intense backlash to how officers responded to shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Some officers within the Coral Springs Police Department allegedly expressed frustration after BSO deputies remained outside while Coral Springs cops rushed into the school. Sheriff Scott Israel later confirmed that Scot Peterson, the resource officer assigned to the school, remained outside. Peterson resigned as a result of the controversy, but not before locking down an $8,702.35-a-month lifetime pension.

In December, U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom dismissed a lawsuit filed by some of the survivors claiming that their 14th Amendment rights were violated when the deputies did not enter the school. Bloom wrote in her opinion that neither the school nor the sheriff’s department had a constitutional duty to protect children. While Florida has criminal penalties for nonattendance, Bloom ruled that custodial protections extended only to groups like prisoners.

The BSO changed its active shooter policy despite the decision. An internal memo states that deputies “shall attempt to protect the life of innocent persons through immediate tactical intervention to eliminate the threat.” According to the Miami Herald, a previous version stated that deputies “may” enter a scene.

“The use of the word ‘may’ in the BSO policy is ambiguous and does not unequivocally convey the expectation that deputies are expected to immediately enter an active assailant scene where gunfire is active and neutralize the threat,” wrote a state public safety commission in a report. They also found that several deputies could not remember the last time they attended an active shooter training, and many instead referenced the old policy.

The BSO’s decision to remain outside the school spurred months of criticism, speculation, and lawsuits. Local newspapers and free speech groups sued to obtain footage from the outside of the school, arguing that the public had a right to know how law enforcement responded. The school board and the state attorney refused to release the footage until an appeals court ordered them to release the footage in July.

Interview transcripts released by prosecutors revealed that school officials monitoring a video feed from the scene rewound the feed by more than 20 minutes, which confused efforts to assess the shooter’s location. Despite this, interviews show that the Coral Springs officers still attempted to act on the information they had. One officer, Richard Best, recalled making his way into a building with his rifle and a medical bag. Best also recalled encountering Peterson, who told him where he believed the shooter to be located. When Best headed to another part of the school, he said, “Deputy Peterson just stayed where he was.”

One of the issues conspicuous by its absence in this government shutdown is the fate of Dreamers. The last time the government shut down in January, it was over them. This time, Democrats, allegedly their great champions, have said not a peep on their behalf.

Misguided as Trump’s wall is, the smart thing for Democrats to do would be to give him some money for it in exchange for legalizing Dreamers and those he kicked off “temporary protected status.” The fact that Trump can’t credibly blame Democrats for the shutdown this time has given them an unusually strong hand to get what they couldn’t in January. Why aren’t they playing it?

Go here to find out.

Progressive urbanists and Ben Carson, President Donald Trump’s conservative Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), hardly seem like bosom buddies. That makes Carson’s embrace of a core item on the progressives’ wish list all the more surprising.

In August, Carson announced that he would be revising Obama-era HUD regulations that required local governments to perform extensive (and expensive) studies of how concentrated their neighborhoods were along class and racial lines, and then come up with plans to remedy the housing segregation they found. In their place, Carson wanted HUD to issue new rules that would put the emphasis not on integrating housing but on building new housing, period. For Carson, that means cracking down on byzantine local zoning codes, writes Christian Britschgi.

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It’s been a while since America’s budget deficit has been in the headlines, but the gap between how much money the federal government brings in and how much it spends is growing once again. During fiscal year 2018, which ended on September 30, Washington ran a $779 billion deficit—the largest since 2012. We are likely to hit $1 trillion in deficit spending in the current fiscal year.

Even those massive numbers have struggled to break through in a news environment dominated by presidential tweets and the culture wars. The Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl is trying, however, to keep lawmakers’ eyes on the challenge. In a recent paper, he floats several ways the United States could change course before it hits the financial iceberg. But talking with Reason‘s Eric Boehm in October, Riedl explains why he thinks the ship is nonetheless more likely to sink than to veer to fiscal safety.

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An anti-technology movement from early 19th century Britain has long been part of our lexicon. Luddites were knitters who destroyed textile machines to protect their jobs. Today the term applies to anyone who fights a crusade against the modern economy.

Original Luddites weren’t against technology per se, Smithsonian magazine explained, but only attacked manufacturers “who used machines in what they called ‘a fraudulent and deceitful manner’ to get around standard labor practices.”

California’s modern-day Luddites don’t commit acts of violence against Google, Uber, Amazon and other firms that have shaken up the existing economic order. No one is toasting cellphones in bonfires or sabotaging Federal Express delivery vans, but these New Luddites have used the courts and the legislative process to throw that figurative wrench in the machine. Indeed, the biggest redoubt of Luddite-ism appears to be the California Supreme Court, which in April issued a ruling that has threatened to grind California’s high-tech economy to a halt, writes Steven Greenhut.

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