During Cold War debates about the merits of capitalism and communism, Americans offered a simple gauge: the movement of people. “You have the Berlin Wall,” the argument went. “We have the Statue of Liberty. If communism is a blessing, why do people flee Cuba for America, not the other way around?”
Ronald Reagan, the hero of modern Republicans, knew that immigrants were not a threat to our way of life but a reinforcement of it. He welcomed them as allies, self-selected for their attraction to democratic ideals. They came here not because they wanted to change America but because they admired it as it was
Imagine what Reagan would think of Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, who abhors foreigners like a deadly virus. On Monday, King tweeted, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” Last year, he declared, “Cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end.” This week, King insisted that immigrants are “importing a different culture, a different civilization, and that culture and civilization, the imported one, rejects the host’s culture.” Steve Chapman explains more.
After Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton signed into law a bill that legalized Sunday liquor sales, liquor-store owner Jim Surdyk emailed customers to say he’d be open on Sunday. OK, the law doesn’t take effect until July 2, but Surdyk figured if the legislature and the governor are all in favor of Sunday sales, why wait. An official with the state licensing agency felt differently. He hit Surdyk with several citations that could bring an estimated $3,500 in fines for selling on Sunday.
What do you call a U.S. senator who opposes the expansion of NATO to include the troubled former Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, a country that survived a (reportedly Russia-backed) coup attempt as recently as last fall? If you’re Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), and that colleague is intervention-skeptic Rand Paul, you call him, remarkably, a pawn of Vladimir Putin.
“You are achieving the objectives of Vladimir Putin… of trying to dismember this small country,” McCain lectured Paul on the Senate floor today. (Was it really just five weeks ago that Mitch McConnell silenced Elizabeth Warren over impugning the conduct and motives of a Senate colleague?) McCain then asked for unanimous consent for the Senate to approve Montenegro’s accession into the U.S.-led military alliance, and Paul objected, before quickly exiting. That’s when McCain got all voice-quivery and hand-choppy:
I note the senator from Kentucky leaving the floor without justification or any rationale for the action he has just taken. That is really remarkable, that a senator blocking a treaty that is supported by the overwhelming number, perhaps 98—at least—of his colleagues would come to the floor and object and walk away. And walk away! The only conclusion you can draw, when he walks away, is he has no argument to be made, he has no justification for his objection to having a small nation be part of NATO that is under assault from the Russians. So I repeat again: The senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin.
Currently, the United States has troops in dozens of countries and is actively fighting in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen (with the occasional drone strike in Pakistan). In addition, the United States is pledged to defend 28 countries in NATO. It is unwise to expand the monetary and military obligations of the United States given the burden of our $20 trillion debt.
McCain has been getting a lot of good press these days for the usual reason—occasionally opposing a Republican president that the press also doesn’t like. Included in his latest round of re-mavericking are hosannahs for his brave stance against Trumpian conspiracy mongering. Will his friends in the press now point out that the Arizona senator has made a horrendous dual-loyalty charge against a sitting colleague with zero evidence aside from a procedural vote?
McCain has been slamming Paul over his supposed “isolationism” since 2010, famously calling him a “wacko bird” in March 2013, telling reporters a few months later that a Rand vs. Hillary presidential race would be a “tough choice,” and unhappily sharing a Foreign Relations Committee seat with the Tea Party senator these past four-plus years. Paul has frequently returned the favor by using the phrase “stale and moss-covered.” All of which is understandable, given their very different positions on an important issue central to both of them.
But just because Vladimir Putin dislikes an American policy doesn’t make it automatically virtuous or wise. Part of the original conception of NATO expansion—which I, unlike 99 percent of libertarians, both favored and covered while it was happening—was that the new members had to be stable, with border disputes with neighbors fully resolved at the treaty level, substantial minority-population protections, and no pressing disputes with adversaries. Does that sound like Montenegro to you? Or Georgia, which McCain has been pushing for NATO inclusion since at least 2008 (and which Paul single-handedly blocked in 2011)?
Despite writing a book critical of his views, I have happily defended John McCain against scurrilous charges about his patriotism and heroism. To see him go rhetorically McCarthyite against a fellow American for having the temerity to disagree with his often questionable foreign policy judgment is one of the most disgraceful moments of his long career.
How does a voter go from supporting a relatively libertarian Republican to enthusiastically backing Donald Trump? Thomas Massie, a Kentucky congressman widely seen as one of the House’s more libertarian members, offers a theory to the Washington Examiner:
“I went to Iowa twice and came back with [Ron Paul]. I was with him at every event for the last three days in Iowa,” Massie said. “From what I observed, not just in Iowa but also in Kentucky, up close with individuals, was that the people that voted for me in Kentucky, and the people who had voted for [Ron] Paul in Iowa several years before, were now voting for Trump. In fact, the people that voted for Rand in a primary in Kentucky were preferring Trump.”
“All this time,” Massie explained, “I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”
I should note that Massie himself wound up endorsing Trump over Clinton last August, though not exactly enthusiastically. “I think you’re more likely to get change,” he said last August. “I don’t know if it’s gonna be a good change, but you gotta break eggs to make an omelette.” I suppose that’s not so far from saying Trump was the craziest son of a bitch in the race.
The Federal Reserve announced today it will be raising its federal funds interest rate target (the rate banks charge each other for overnight loans) by a quarter of a percentage point, to a range of 0.75 to 1 percent. The two previous hikes since 2006 were in December 2015 and December 2016. Two more rate hikes are expected before the end of 2017, and by 2019 the Fed expects to be looking at 3 percent interest rates again.
In the normal course of events, this will likely lead to consumer interest rates to also rise down the line. USA Today warns “Consumers with credit card debt, adjustable-rate mortgages and home equity lines of credit are the most likely to be affected by a rate hike.”
As per Chicago Tribune, the Fed credits “a strengthening job market and rising prices [that] had moved it closer to its targets for employment and inflation.”
As CNBC reports, the Fed thinks things are going pretty OK for the U.S. economy, though:
According to reports released just before the Fed decision, home builder confidence is at a 10-year high, and manufacturing in New York is surging due to a multi-year high in orders and a decade-high in unfilled orders.
However, the confidence has been slow to transfer to actual growth.
The Atlanta Fed on Wednesday cut its view for first-quarter GDP to a 0.9 gain – coincidentally, the same level of fourth-quarter growth when the FOMC approved the December 2015 rate hike.
Yellen said Wednesday that GDP is a “noisy” indicator from quarter to quarter and believes the economy over the long run is running at about a 2 percent pace.
Some reporting here from the December 2015 rate hike quoted some experts expecting the hike to disrupt the heated stock markets rise. That has, so far, not happened at all.
Scott Sumner, king of the “market monetarists,” thinks that the Fed has moved itself into a position where actions like this likely won’t have quick and obvious effects on visible financial markets:
A few years ago, markets reacted very strongly to rumors of a possible Fed rate increase. That’s because NGDP [nominal gross domestic product] was at a suboptimal level, and the Fed policy stance had been too contractionary for a number of years. A rate increase would make the economy noticeably worse off than if the Fed refrained from increasing its fed funds target. (Recall that the Fed uses the fed funds rate as a signal of easing and tightening of policy.)
In recent months the level of NGDP is close to the level that results in macroeconomic equilibrium (employment close to the natural rate and inflation expectations close to 2%. Thus the market is relatively indifferent as to whether the Fed raises rates or not. As a result, Fed related news doesn’t have much impact on asset prices. But this doesn’t mean the Fed no longer matters, just that they are no longer the destabilizing force that they were during the 2008-15 period.
On its way out the door in January, the Obama administration rushed to lock in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) standards at 54.5 miles per gallon for light duty vehicles by 2025. The final determination also calculated that the higher CAFE standards would save American drivers nearly $100 billion in fuel costs by 2025.
Today, President Donald Trump told a cheering audience of auto industry workers in Michigan: “We’re going to work on the CAFE standards so you can make cars in America again. We’re going to help companies so they are going to help you. We’re going to be the car capital of the world again.”
New EPA administrator Scott Pruitt also announced today that the agency in coordination with the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will reconsider the final determination and decide by April 1, 2018 whether the Obama-era CAFE standards will stand. The reconsideration of the stringent CAFE standards is taking place at the request of American automakers who argue in a February letter to Pruitt that they are unachievable using currently foreseen automotive technologies. In its letter the Alliance of Auto Manufacturers asserts that the Obama adminstration’s EPA final determination is “riddled with indefensible assumptions” regarding available technologies, consumer acceptance, technology affordability, and industry employment effects. The Alliance is not asking for a different final determination “at this time.” The group just wants the agency resume the evaluation “consistent with the timetable embodied in the EPA’s own regulations.”
The environmental lobby is not happy. “Americans don’t want to return to days of more pollution and higher fuel costs. They want a clean, efficient economy. Rolling back vehicle fuel standards would make Americans spend more at the pump, leaving them with less for their families and basic needs,” declared Kristin Igusky, Climate Program Associate at the World Resources Institute in a statement. “In compelling a review of these standards, the administration is creating more uncertainty and blocking progress toward cleaner, more efficient vehicles for America.”
Whatever else they do, CAFE standards especially hurt the poor. As I reported in January:
In a new study contrasting the effects on consumers of energy efficiency standards versus energy taxes, the Georgetown economist Arik Levinson notes that both energy efficiency standards and energy taxes function as a regressive tax, taking a larger percentage of a lower income and a smaller percentage of a higher income. His analysis aims to find out which is more regressive—in other words, which is worse for poor Americans.
Levinson cites earlier research that estimates a gasoline tax would cost 71 percent less than the comparable CAFE policy per gallon of fuel saved. Meanwhile, a 2013 study calculates that CAFE standards cost more than six times as much as a corresponding gas tax for the same reduction in fuel consumption. In other words, if policy makers want people to use less fuel and drive more fuel-efficient cars, taxing gasoline is a much cheaper way to achieve that goal than mandating automobile fuel efficiency. Levinson concludes that “efficiency standards are, ironically, inefficient.”
I have long been a critic of CAFE standards. Back in 2009, for example, I concluded that Obama’s proposed CAFE standards operate as an inefficient stealth tax on driving. It’s inefficient because drivers pay more, car companies make less money, and state and federal governments don’t get any extra revenues. If activists and politicians want Americans to drive more fuel-efficient cars, the simple and honest thing to do would be to substantially raise gasoline taxes concluded a 2002 National Academy of Sciences report. Ultimately, I argued, setting CAFE standards is just a way for cowardly politicians to avoid telling their fellow citizens that they should pay more for the privilege of driving. If that’s what our political leaders think, then they should just be honest and come out in favor of higher fuel taxes.
From cowboy-hat-wearing robot arms to stress-detecting aromatherapy diffusers to futuristic audio speakers, everyone with a booth at South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive is trying to disrupt the status quo with technology.
But if you were looking for something truly disruptive at SXSW, look no further than a group of activists using tech to spread information to citizens oppressed by authoritarian regimes.
Click below for full text, links, and downloadable versions.
It seems the most privileged students in the country are also the most fragile. Highly expensive, elite college campuses are more likely to play host to the kind of censorious madness on display at Middlebury College two weeks ago.
That’s according to data compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and crunched into chart form by the Brookings Institution’s Richard Reeves and Dimitrios Halikias. Reeves and Halikias put it all together in a format that makes the trend obvious:
In the figure below, we plot every university in America based on the proportion of students from families with incomes in the top quintile (vertical axis) and from the bottom quintile (horizontal). Marked in red are the “disinvitation colleges” described above. The pattern is clear: the more economically exclusive the institution, the more likely the students have attempted to hinder free speech.
The researchers note that they can’t be exactly sure which students are shutting down speakers. It could be the case, for instance, that low-income students do more than their share of censoring. But Halikias and Reeves think that’s unlikely, and I do as well.
Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me if students from humble backgrounds are underrepresented among the activist heckler class. They’re probably going to class, hitting the library, and making sure their investment in an incredibly expensive college education does not go to waste. Highly privileged students, on the other hand, are probably less likely to appreciate the tremendous opportunity they are being afforded.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the students shrieking Marginalization! Oppression! Microaggression! at Charles Murray are some of the least marginalized or oppressed people in all of human history, given their substantial financial resources. The average yearly household income of a Middlebury student is nearly a quarter million dollars.
That’s one reason that the average Middlebury student might have actually benefitted from Murray’s talk. He had come to campus to discuss his recent book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, which examines the perceived divide between the white upper class and working class whites who are struggling financially. The book’s themes certainly resonate in 2017, after Donald Trump won the presidency by appealing to the exact sort of economic issues Murray identified.
Agree or disagree with Murray, it’s inarguable that his thoughts about the white working class are well worth considering, especially for college students who are more likely to uninformed about those voters’ concerns. Unfortunately, the exact people who have the most to gain from exposure to intellectual diversity—elite college students—are the ones rejecting it most forcefully.
The European Chemical Agency’s (ECHA) Committee for Risk Assessment has concluded that the available scientific evidence does not warrant classifyinig the weedkiller glyphosate “for specific target organ toxicity, or as a carcinogen, as a mutagen or for reproductive toxicity.” Glyphosate is sold by Monsanto under the brand name Roundup. A wide variety of commodity crops have been enhanced using biotechnology to resist the herbicide enabling modern farmers to use it for weed control. Consequently, banning glyphosate has become a major goal of anti-GMO activists.
In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (a part of the World Health Organization) ruled that glyphosate was probably carcinogenic to humans. Notoriously, the IARC supposedly evaluates the weight of the evidence as to whether an agent is capable of causing cancer (technically called “hazard”), but it does not measure the likelihood that cancer will occur (technically called “risk”) as a result of exposure to an agent. The ECHA also evaluated glyphosate on the basis of the “hazard” it might pose and, in contrast to the IARC, found that it is not a carcinogen. Why the difference? Well, perhaps because the IARC committee that evaluated glyphosate was headed by a long-time anti-pesticide activist.
It’s interesting that this ECHA finding comes out at the same as a judge reveals emails between EPA and Monsanto researchers as part of litigation in which some folks are suing Monsanto. They are claiming that their exposures of glyphosate is the cause of their non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas. Will keep readers posted if the trial lawyers turn up anything irregular.