Tag: in-the-news

The commander of the prison at Guantanamo Bay has been terminated just 7 weeks before he was set to formally depart his post.

Navy Rear Admiral John Ring was fired over a “loss of confidence in his ability” to lead, according to a statement from the United States Southern Command. U.S. Army Brigadier General John Hussey has assumed the role of acting commander of the prison, which houses accused terrorists and enemy combatants at a U.S. military base in Cuba.

“This change in leadership will not interrupt the safe, human, legal care and custody provided to the detainee population,” the statement says.

Admiral Ring, a former commander of the aircraft carrier Nimitz, took the reins at Guantanamo in April 2018. There he oversaw approximately 1,800 employees and 40 prisoners. His legacy will likely be dominated by his loud calls to build a new prison to replace Camp 7, the segregated unit that has held Guantanamo’s most notorious inmates, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind. Ring argued that the building lacks the resources and infrastructure to serve its aging population.

“Unless America’s policy changes, at some point we’ll be doing some sort of end of life care here,” Ring told The New York Times before his dismissal was announced. “A lot of my guys are prediabetic. Am I going to need dialysis down here? I don’t know. Someone’s got to tell me that. Are we going to do complex cancer care down here? I don’t know. Someone’s got to tell me that.”

The project came with an estimated $88.5 million price tag, which might sound like quite the renovation. That pales in comparison, though, to the $454 million it costs to operate the prison each year. Taxpayers have spent nearly $5 billion on the detention center since its inception in 2002, all to maintain a fortress that holds prisoners indefinitely without charges, and thus without trials.

A spokeswoman for the Southern Command has told The New York Times that Ring’s advocacy had nothing to do with his termination, declaring that he was fired after a monthlong investigation that began in March. “The vast majority of commanders complete their assigned tours with distinction,” Colonel Amanda Azubuike said to the Times. “When they fall short, we hold our leaders accountable, which reflects the importance we place on the public’s trust and confidence in our military leaders.”

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The Satanic Temple is suing the city of Belle Plaine, Minnesota, because it won’t let them erect a Satanic monument in a public park.

The story behind the case begins in 2016, when the Belle Plaine Veterans Club put up a steel monument called “Joe” in the Belle Plaine Veterans Memorial Park—a publicly owned space. The monument depicts a soldier kneeling before a Christian cross, and it was removed after a few months after critics accused the city of violating the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. (To refresh, that’s the bit prohibiting the government from creating laws “respecting an establishment of religion.”)

In February 2017, the city council voted to let private parties erect temporary displays in the memorial park. “Joe” received a permit to return. The Satanic Temple also applied for, and received, a permit for its own monument. This display was to consist of a black cube covered in pentagrams, with an upturned helmet at the top; a plaque would say, “In honor of Belle Plaine veterans who fought to defend the United States and its Constitution.”

Though “Joe” returned to the park, the Satanic Temple never got an opportunity to erect its effort. That July, the city council unanimously passed a second resolution to rescind the first, explaining that “allowing privately-owned memorials of displays in [Belle Plaine Veterans Memorial Park] no longer meets the intent or purpose of the Park.” The council also encouraged the voluntary removal of “Joe,” to make the resolution easier to pass.

The Satanic Temple is now arguing that the government violated its right to free speech and discriminated against its “controversial but constitutionally protected religious viewpoints.” Had the monument been erected, it would have been the first Satanic Temple display on public property.

This latest lawsuit joins the list of Satanic Temple First Amendment fights. The group made headlines last August after demanding that its statue of Baphomet—a demonic, goat-headed creature—be placed in the Arkansas State Capitol. The statue was unveiled after a Republican state lawmaker sponsored and quietly installed a Ten Commandments display.

Bonus video: A new documentary depicts devil worshippers as unlikely defenders of the First Amendment.

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Since last the Editors’ Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) announced a massive new student-loan forgiveness proposal, Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) said she’d like to ban right-to-work laws, Beto O’Rourke unveiled a $5 trillion climate change plan, Joe Biden officially began his campaign/apology tour, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) yet again declined an invitation to disavow his prior support for nationalizing the major means of production. Is anyone else sensing a pattern?

Katherine Mangu-Ward,  Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch discuss the leftward bent of Democratic economics, drilling down particularly hard into the bucket of higher education (ed note: the mixed metaphor makes even less sense in the podcast), while also getting into Social Security insolvency, long-term fiscal unsustainability, conversations about conversations, and—yes!—the HBO/Marvel Studios programming y’all were consuming over the weekend.

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

‘Fluffing a Duck’ by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under CC BY 3.0

Relevant links from the show:

“Elizabeth Warren’s Plan To Cancel College Debt Is a Giveaway to the Well-Off and Well-Connected,” by Peter Suderman

“The Immorality of Student Loan Forgiveness and Free College,” by Nick Gillespie

“Most Democratic Presidential Candidates Think College Should Be Free. Here’s Why They’re Wrong.” By Nick Gillespie

“Elizabeth Warren’s Fake Wonkery,” by Peter Suderman

“Harris Wants to Ban Right-to-Work Laws, Chooses Union Endorsements Over Worker Well-Being,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Harris Would Hike Teacher Pay Across the Nation by 23 Percent,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Harris Is Rising Above the 2020 Pack With Promises to Be Everything to Everyone,” by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“Here’s What’s in Beto O’Rourke’s $5 Trillion Plan To Fight Climate Change,” by Joe Setyon

“Joe Biden Officially Enters the Presidential Race,” by Christian Britschgi

“Bernie Sanders Wanted ‘Public Ownership of the Major Means of Production’ in 1976,” by Matt Welch

“Social Security Will Be Insolvent in 16 Years,” by Eric Boehm

“GAO: Current Federal Fiscal Situation Is ‘Unsustainable,’” by Eric Boehm

“The Long Night Is Over on Game of Thrones, but the Real Villain Is Still Coming,” by Robby Soave

“Elizabeth Warren Wants You To Know She Totally Loves Game of Thrones. Especially Daenerys. Yay, Women!” By Robby Soave

“What Elizabeth Warren Gets Wrong About Daenerys Targaryen,” by Ilya Somin

“What Game of Thrones Can Teach Us About Political Power,” by Katherine Mangu-Ward

“Movie Review: Avengers: Endgame,” by Kurt Loder

“Avengers: Endgame Is Exactly the Movie You Want It to Be,” by Peter Suderman

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This month Colorado became the 15th state to enact a “red flag” law that authorizes court orders forbidding gun possession by people deemed a threat to themselves or others. The new law, which has drawn strong criticism from Second Amendment advocates, including some county sheriffs, illustrates the civil liberties concerns raised by such attempts to identify and disarm people prone to suicide or homicide.

Colorado’s Deputy Zackari Parrish III Violence Prevention Act, which takes effect next year, is named for a 29-year-old Douglas County sheriff’s deputy who was killed in 2017 by a 36-year-old veteran with a history of psychological problems. The law allows a long list of people, including law enforcement officers, current or former household members, and people related by blood, marriage, or adoption, to seek a temporary “extreme risk protection order” (ERPO) against someone they believe “poses a significant risk of causing personal risk to self or others in the near future.” The standard of proof at this stage, when the “respondent” does not have an opportunity to respond, is a “preponderance of the evidence,” meaning he is more likely than not to pose a significant risk.

Depending on what counts as a “significant risk,” the probability that the subject of a temporary order actually would have used a gun to hurt himself or someone else may be quite low. If 10 percent is significant, for example, that probability might be around 5 percent (51 percent times 10 percent). So even if judges are weighing the evidence with such precision, they will be taking away the Second Amendment rights of people who almost certainly would not have committed suicide or murder.

In practice, judges will be inclined to err on the side of what they take to be caution. When the only evidence comes from someone who believes the respondent poses a threat, judges will rarely, if ever, decline to issue a temporary ERPO. The possible downside of rejecting a petition—the death of the respondent or someone else—will weigh heavily on the judge’s mind, while the temporary deprivation of the subject’s constitutional rights will seem trivial by comparison.

A temporary ERPO lasts for up to 14 days, at which point the judge has to schedule a hearing where the respondent finally has a chance to challenge the claims against him. The respondent has a right to a court-appointed attorney if he cannot afford legal representation or would rather not pay for it. If he does not show up at the hearing, the court can issue an ERPO without any adversarial process.

To obtain an ERPO at this stage, the petitioner must present “clear and convincing evidence” that the respondent poses a significant risk. Unlike with the temporary, ex parte order, that risk need not be “in the near future.” The judge may consider “any relevant evidence,” including, but not limited to, recent threats or acts of violence, violations of civil protective orders, violations of previous ERPOs, criminal convictions involving violence or cruelty to animals, unlawful or reckless use of firearms, a “history of stalking,” drug or alcohol abuse, recent acquisition of a firearm, a job requiring the respondent to carry a firearm, and “any available mental health evaluation or chemical dependency evaluation.” While some of these factors are clearly relevant, others, such as illegal drug use or the purchase of a firearm, may have little or nothing to do with the question of whether the subject poses a significant threat to himself or others. Furthermore, the judge is authorized to consider literally any other fact or allegation that he deems relevant.

If the judge issues an ERPO, it lasts for 364 days unless the subject seeks early termination and shows by clear and convincing evidence that he does not pose a significant threat. That case will be hard to make, especially since “significant risk” is undefined and judges will not want to take the blame should something terrible happen after they terminate an order. The petitioner has a right to seek an extension of the order before it expires, based on the same standard of proof.

Eagle County Sheriff James van Beek argues in a Facebook post that the ERPO process makes gun owners “guilty until proven innocent.” He notes that when the subject of an ERPO tries to have it terminated, “the burden of proof is not on the petitioner (the accuser), as in every other legal case, but instead, is placed on the respondent (defendant) to prove that the accusations are wrong.” He observes that “proving one’s sanity could be very difficult, as it is highly subjective.” Nor is “proving one’s sanity,” however that’s defined, enough to prevail, since a person may be considered a threat even if he does not qualify for a psychiatric diagnosis.

Van Beek also worries that “if a person is truly in a mental crisis, this aggressive approach will create even greater stress, possibly resulting in a violent overreaction, as their personal property has been taken, without a crime ever having been committed.” When police seize guns from the subject of a temporary ERPO, Van Beek notes, it happens “with no warning or ability to defend themselves against the charges.” Furthermore, he says, the possibility of that outcome may deter troubled people from seeking professional help.

The law gives the respondent a civil cause of action against someone who files a “false or malicious” ERPO petition, allowing him to recover damages, costs, and attorney fees. But knowing falsehoods or maliciousness will be difficult to prove, and in any case the more likely scenario is one in which the petitioner sincerely but mistakenly believes the respondent poses a “significant risk,” whatever that means. With everyone from ex-girlfriends and former roommates to grandparents, in-laws, and second cousins empowered to seek ERPOs, the opportunities for maliciousness or honest error are multiplied.

The basic problem, as with other “red flag” laws, is that the process is rigged against the respondent from the beginning. Once a temporary, ex parte ERPO is issued (as it probably will be), there is apt to be a bias in favor of extending it and against terminating it early, since the respondent already has been deemed a threat (even if the standard of proof was initially weak), and the possibly deadly consequences of letting him possess guns will loom large. Given that bias, the indeterminacy of “significant risk,” and the difficulty of predicting a respondent’s behavior, it seems inevitable that the vast majority of people who lose their constitutional rights under this sort of law will pose no real threat to themselves or others.

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Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has had enough of with the militarized “warrior cop” who treats every interaction with citizens as though we’re a potential threat. So this month he announced that the city was going to ban police participation in “warrior-style” training that fosters paranoid overreactions and makes it more likely that innocent people will be shot.

In response, the Minneapolis Police Union has declared that Frey’s order is unlawful and is partnering with a national organization to give officers this forbidden training for free.

It’s not hard to understand why Frey would want to put the brakes on the warrior-cop mentality. This past weekend, Connecticut officials released surveillance video of two officers opening fire on an unarmed couple’s car in New Haven as the man exits the automobile with his hands up. And that’s just one recent example. A skim through our police coverage at Reason will net you story after story of officers choosing to shoot or punch or Tase people for the slightest of provocations. Even complying with police orders might not be enough to protect you, as the young man in New Haven discovered.

Fortunately, he wasn’t injured. Others have not been so lucky. In March, North Carolina police shot and killed a man who appeared to be following their orders to put down a gun. In 2017, jurors in Arizona acquitted a Mesa officer who shot and killed a man who was attempting to follow the officer’s orders to crawl down a hallway.

In the Minneapolis area Frey represents, Philando Castile’s fatal shooting at the hands of a St. Anthony police officer became a national news story. Castile was abruptly shot and killed by Officer Jeronimo Yanez at a traffic stop after telling the officer he had a gun (which he had a permit to carry). Yanez was ultimately acquitted of any charges for the shooting.

Yanez had taken 20 hours of training in a program called “The Bulletproof Warror“—the kind of program Frey wants to stop. It encouraged the officer to treat all encounters as potential threats to his safety. By contrast, Yanez received all of two hours of training in de-escalation tactics.

The “warrior cop” mentality has also led to the use of violent, dangerous SWAT raids to execute basic search warrants in situations where they’re not called for, often in the perpetuation of the drug war. This mimicking of “shock and awe” military-style raid tactics have led to innocent people—even children—hurt or killed.

And then, when the justice system attempts to hold officers responsible for these deadly overreactions, the training itself is invoked in court to justify these actions. One psychologist who teaches officers to see every encounter as a potential threat then presents himself as an expert witness on the stand, where he tells juries that it was reasonable for cops to fear for their lives regardless of whatever actions the citizens around them were taking. Yes, even if it turns out they’re unarmed and completely innocent of any criminal behavior.

So Frey should be commended for trying to bring about an end to this sort of training. But the Minneapolis Police Union doesn’t agree. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports:

Lt. Bob Kroll, president of the police union, was undeterred on Wednesday, saying in an interview that he consulted with the union’s attorneys, who said Frey’s directive was unlawful. Kroll also defended the training, saying, “It’s not about killing, it’s about surviving.”

Frey said in a statement that the city attorney’s office was consulted during the drafting of the policy, and, “They are confident in its legal position.”

Frey says that any officer taking this training in violating of the city’s policy will be disciplined.

On Friday it looked like the two sides had come to an agreement, and Frey said that the union had “come around” and accepted the ban. But the union then put out a statement that said they had not come to such an agreement, and that the mayor and city had in fact agreed that no officer would be punished for going to any sort of off-duty training.

It’s not entirely clear how Minneapolis could stop police officers from taking these courses on their own time, as long as they’re not using any city resources and they’re not getting paid for doing so, but perhaps we’ll see.

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Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman who’s running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, today released a four-part, $5 trillion plan to fight climate change.

The framework for O’Rourke’s plan, which is posted on his campaign website, promises he will make quick use of his executive authority, though it also pledges the candidate will work with Congress. O’Rourke is not proposing that the federal government fully fund his plan, which sets it apart from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D–N.Y.) much-criticized Green New Deal. Rather, O’Rourke believes a “$1.5 trillion investment” from the federal government will “mobilize” trillions more in additional investments from the private sector to combat climate change.

Part one of the plan would use of executive authority “not only to reverse the problematic decisions made by the current administration, but also to go beyond the climate actions under previous presidents.” O’Rourke says he’ll reverse President Donald Trump’s decision to back out of the Paris climate agreement, and he promises to strengthen emissions standards, reduce various sources of pollution, and require that federal lands plan for net-zero emissions by 2030.

Part two is where Congress comes in. “In the very first bill he sends to Congress,” the plan says, “Beto will launch a 10-year mobilization of $5 trillion directly leveraged by a fully paid-for $1.5 trillion investment—the world’s largest-ever climate change investment in infrastructure, innovation, and in our people and communities.” How are we supposed to pay for that initial investment? The plan doesn’t go into specifics, though it does say “structural changes to the tax code” will “ensure corporations and the wealthiest among us pay their fair share and that we finally end the tens of billions of dollars of tax breaks currently given to fossil fuel companies.”

The proposal does give some specifics on where that $1.5 trillion will go. A total of $600 billion will be invested in “infrastructure necessary to cut pollution across all sectors,” including “$300 billion in direct resources through tax credits and another $300 billion in direct resources through additional investments.” Another “$250 billion in direct resources” will go to various scientific endeavors meant to determine how to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, as well as “the climate science needed to understand the changes to our oceans and our atmosphere; avoid preventable losses and catastrophic outcomes; and protect public safety and national security.”

Finally, $650 billion will be spent on the people whose lives are affected by climate change. O’Rourke hopes this investment will “mobilize” additional spending in such areas as housing and transportation as Americans adapt to the effects of climate change.

The third part of the plan focuses on that guarantee of net-zero emissions by the middle of the century. “To have any chance at limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 °C and preventing the worst effects of climate change, the latest science demands net-zero emissions by 2050,” the plan says. “By investing in infrastructure, innovation, and in our people and communities, we can achieve this ambition, which is in line with the 2050 emissions goal of the Green New Deal, in a way that grows our economy and shrinks our inequality.” The plan promises O’Rourke will “work with Congress to enact a legally enforceable standard—within his first 100 days.”

“We will harness the power of the market, but also recognize that the market needs rules in order to function equitably and efficiently—not just incentives, but accountability too,” the plan adds.

The “latest science” to which O’Rourke’s plan refers is a 2018 U.N. report that says the world must cut its dependence on fossil fuels by 2050. Climate activists have seized on this report, claiming we’re racing against the clock to save the world. But as Reason science correspondent Ron Bailey explained last month, the doom-and-gloom predictions are exaggerated:

The IPCC asked a group of climate scientists to evaluate how it might be possible to keep the global mean surface temperature from rising 1.5°C above the average temperature of the late 19th century….The report’s authors calculated that in order to have a significant chance of remaining below the 1.5°C threshold, the world would have to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 40 to 50 percent by 2030 and entirely eliminate such emissions by 2050. So yes, the report says there’s an expiration date if humanity decides to aim for that temperature target. But is it an expiration date for doom? Not so much.

According the report: “Under the no-policy baseline scenario, temperature rises by 3.66°C by 2100, resulting in a global gross domestic product (GDP) loss of 2.6%,” as opposed to 0.3 percent under the 1.5°C scenario and 0.5 percent under the 2°C scenario. In the baseline 3.66°C projection, the estimate of future GDP losses ranged from a low of 0.5 percent to a high of 8.2 percent. In other words, if humanity does nothing whatsoever to abate greenhouse gas emissions, the worst-case scenario is that global GDP in 2100 would be 8.2 percent lower than it would otherwise be.

Let’s make those GDP percentages concrete. Assuming no climate change and an global real growth rate of 3 percent per year for the next 81 years, today’s $80 trillion economy would grow to just under $880 trillion by 2100. World population is likely to peak at around 9 billion, so divvying up that GDP suggests that global average income would come to about $98,000 per person. Under the worst-case scenario, global GDP would only be $810 trillion and average income would only be $90,000 per person. Doom?

Part four of O’Rourke’s plan cites the parts of the country that have been fighting (or at least prepping for) extreme weather. O’Rourke calls for raising spending by a factor of ten “on pre-disaster mitigation grants that save $6 for every $1 invested”; he supports legislation “to make sure that we build back stronger after every disaster”; he wants to invest “in the climate readiness and resilience of our first responders”; and he says we should support U.S. troops “with technologies that reduce the need to rely on high-risk energy and water supply.”

O’Rourke’s climate plan is his first major policy proposal. It could set him apart from many of the other 2020 Democratic candidates—though stopping climate change is already the main platform of one other presidential hopeful, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.

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There’s only one way for President Donald Trump to get his much-touted rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through Congress: End the tariffs.

That’s the blunt message that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) delivers in an op-ed that ran in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal. Grassley’s opinion matters more than most, given that he is chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, which would likely have to give its approval to Trump’s United States-Canada-Mexico Agreement (USMCA) before it could face an up-or-down vote from the full Senate.

Congress must approve the USMCA before it can take effect, but Grassley says it will not do that until the Trump administration lifts tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada and Mexico. “These levies are a tax on Americans, and they jeopardize USMCA’s prospects of passage in the Mexican Congress, Canadian Parliament and U.S. Congress,” he writes. “Canadian and Mexican trade officials may be more delicate in their language, but they’re diplomats. I’m not. If these tariffs aren’t lifted, USMCA is dead. There is no appetite in Congress to debate USMCA with these tariffs in place.”

Grassley is concerned not only about the tariffs’ effects on American businesses—many of which face higher prices due to the administration’s import taxes—but about the retaliatory tariffs placed on U.S. goods by Canada and Mexico, which have hit American farmers.

“Jobs, wages and communities are hurt every day these tariffs continue—as I hear directly from Iowans,” he writes. “It’s time for the tariffs to go.”

Rewriting NAFTA has been a priority for Trump since the start of his presidential campaign. In his State of the Union address this year, Trump called for Congress to replace “the catastrophe known as NAFTA”—though in reality, the USMCA is only a modest overhaul.

As Congress returns from recess this week, it is putting the squeeze on Trump’s USMCA plans. While some Republicans remain skeptical of the USMCA because it creates higher barriers for tariff-free trade of cars and car parts, many Democrats are seeking changes to the USMCA that will beef up enforcement mechanisms. Sens. Sherrod Brown (D–Ohio) and Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) have proposed stricter audit rules that would give the U.S. the ability to reinstate tariffs on certain goods if Mexican factories are found to be skirting USMCA rules about wages and other labor standards.

With Democrats preparing to fight, Trump can hardly afford to lose support from Republicans too.

Grassley’s message to Trump is exactly the kind of binary, transactional negotiating tactic that the president seems to prefer. But the substance of Grassley’s op-ed is not exactly new. Congress—and outside interest groups—have been signalling to the White House for months that lifting the tariffs would be an essential condition for passing the USMCA. In November, shortly after Trump finalized the USMCA in a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and then–Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, I reported that the steel and aluminum tariffs were a major stumbling block for getting the deal through Congress.

Since then, Trump has given no indication that he’s willing to withdraw the tariffs on Canadian and Mexican metals. The ball now appears to be in the president’s court.

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In many state capitols and city halls, politicians debate how much affordable housing developers should be required to build. Not so in the Florida legislature, where a rapidly advancing bill would prohibit cities from mandating that new private housing projects include any percentage of rent-restricted units at all.

This past Thursday, Florida’s Republican-controlled House passed HB 7103 by a commanding, mostly party-line vote. The bill is now working its way through the state Senate’s committee process.

The bill would ban cities from adopting “inclusionary zoning” ordinances. These laws require that developers rent out a certain percentage of new housing units at affordable rates to tenants earning less than a city’s median income. (“Affordable” in this context usually means that the monthly rent is no more than 30 percent of a tenant’s median income.)

These mandates are often used by cities and states trying to grapple with increasingly high housing costs. Proponents argue that they ensure that lower-income residents see the benefits of new construction without having to ask taxpayers to fund fully public housing projects. Critics counter that shifting the costs of providing affordable housing onto developers will make some housing projects uneconomical, reducing the overall supply of new housing and driving up prices in the long run.

“When you start having mandates and [the] state setting price controls, you create all kinds of distortions in the market,” the bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Jason Fischer (R–Jacksonville), explains to radio station WJCT.

The literature on inclusionary zoning ordinances is mixed. A 2004 study from the Reason Foundation (which publishes this website) looked at the effects of inclusionary zoning ordinances adopted in California’s Bay Area, finding that they produced few new affordable units while driving up costs for builders and homeowners alike.

“By restricting the supply of new homes and driving up the price of both newly constructed market-rate homes and the existing stock of homes, inclusionary zoning makes housing less affordable,” the report concludes.

Some subsequent research has been less critical of these zoning policies, concluding that they produce affordable units without deterring the overall construction of new housing. All of these studies, both pro and con, have been limited by how much variation exists between different localities’ individual affordability mandates. One city might require 20 percent of units be reserved for tenants making 80 percent of the area’s median income, while another mandates that 10 percent be rented at affordable rates to residents making less than 50 percent. One city might require developers to build affordable units on-site, while another allow those units to be build elsewhere, or let developers to pay a fee that funds public housing projects.

Making things even more complicated, the zoning requirements on the books are often not the requirements developers are held to, as local governments often either reduce or increase the amount of mandated affordable units on a project-by-project basis.

Big-picture debates aside, it’s not hard to find individual examples of projects stalling after being slapped with impossibly high affordability requirements.

In addition to the ban on these mandates, Fischer’s bill limits local governments’ ability to impose impact fees on new development. It also sets strict timelines for localities to review and approve construction permits. The bill would still allow density bonus programs, whereby developers voluntarily offer to include affordable units in exchange for waivers on local height and density limits.

All said, these come across as sensible measures that will reduce local governments’ power to pile additional costs or delays onto new housing construction.

The bill does not target underlying zoning codes that dictate what kind of housing can be built where. That makes it the polar opposite of a major housing bill in California, SB 50, which hacks away at some local zoning controls on building apartment buildings while also imposing new inclusionary zoning requirements.

Both approaches leave a lot of development restrictions untouched. If both pass, they’ll serve as interesting experiments in how states experiencing staggeringly high housing costs can kickstart new construction.

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So now college should be free in the same way K–12 education is. That’s what most (though not all) of the Democratic presidential candidates are saying, with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren offering the most-detailed plan to make tuition at public universities free, forgiving “95 percent” of existing student debt, and increasing the amount of money for Pell grants and historically black colleges and universities. Ironically, the push for “free” college is coming at a time when a historically high percentage—about 70 percent—of recent high-school graduates are already enrolling in college. College has somehow become so unaffordable and remote that more and more people are attending.

“This is the kind of big, structural change we need to make sure our kids have opportunity in this country,” says Warren in a video she posted at Twitter. But just like Bernie Sanders’s routine and misleading invocation of “people with $300,000 in student debt,” Warren’s plan doesn’t just misrepresent the impact of student loans on the individual level and the historically high availability of access to higher education; it’s one more step toward an America where the people who benefit from something get somebody else to pay for it. Above and beyond any financial considerations, that’s a bad attitude to inculcate.

Warren would pay for her plan with an “Ultra-Millionaire Tax” on the 75,000 richest households in America, which she says would raise $2.75 trillion over a decade. As Peter Suderman has noted, “European countries that have imposed wealth taxes have largely given up on them; of the dozen OECD nations that had wealth taxes in 1990, just four still have the tax on the books.” Warren also keeps promising to spend her new revenue on all sorts of things, to a degree that there isn’t enough money to cover her growing list of giveaways.

Warren’s plan is of a piece with progressive Democrats pushing for more and more goods and services to be provided by the government regardless of citizens’ ability to cover their own costs. From a financial perspective, this sort of reflex is flatly unsustainable in a country that has already run up a $22 trillion tab and whose rising debt service will cost more than Medicaid next year and more than military spending in 2023. But there’s also a moral argument to be made here: Why shouldn’t we expect people who can pay for their own education, health care, and retirement to do so? And why shouldn’t we expect people who benefit from something to fund all or most of their activity?

I’m calling for universal free college and the cancellation of student loan debt for more than 95% of Americans. This is the kind of big, structural change we need to make sure our kids have opportunity in this country. pic.twitter.com/KERw3APDMo

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) April 22, 2019

When it comes to college, high-school grads are enrolling at historically high rates, a sign that they have access to higher education. Using three-year moving averages (which smooth out minor fluctuations) the National Center for Education Services (NCES) reports that a record-high level 69.5 percent of “recent high-school completers” are enrolled in college. In 1975, the first year for which data is presented, the figure was 49.1 percent. In 1980, it was 50.8 percent. Warren can rhapsodize about how much cheaper college tuition used to be, but the reality is that far higher percentages of people are attending college than ever before. In fact, according to NCES, a record high level of students from low-income households are attending college right out of a high school. The three-year moving average for low-income students in 2016, the latest year for which data is presented, was an unprecedented 67.1 percent—more than double the figure in 1980.

And despite claims that “we’re crushing an entire generation with student-loan debt,” the typical undergrad borrower is doing fine. About 70 percent of the Class of 2018 graduated with some debt, and their median monthly payment is $222. The overall amount of student debt is gigantic—about $1.5 trillion—but when you break it down to what the typical borrower is actually on the hook for, the picture changes dramatically.

If college students have skin in their own game, they’ll think more seriously about going to college in the first place and be more motivated to be serious and to finish. Also, one reason why tuition hikes have outpaced the general rate of inflation is that government-guaranteed student loans have helped to goose the costs. Meanwhile, the returns to a college degree remain immense even if they have flattened a bit in recent years. In a 2016 paper for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Robert G. Valletta found that in 1980, the average worker with a high school degree made $16.33 per hour while the average worker with a college degree made $22.85. In 2015, the high school grad made $17.98 per hour while the college grad averaged $30.93. (All those figures are in 2015 dollars.) While studies of the effect of college on take-home pay vary, all show large gains and lower unemployment rates. If you’re going to make as much as a million extra dollars over your working lifetime by getting a B.A., you should be the one footing the bill.

There’s nothing wrong with asking people who benefit from something to shoulder all or part of the costs. Our national finances are falling apart largely because we keep insisting that all benefits be universal and that nobody pay their own way when it comes to big-ticket items such as health care, education, and retirement. One result in those areas are markets that don’t function as efficiently as they would otherwise. Another is a pervasive belief that we can always pass the costs of our choices onto other people. Our government is trying to be all things to all people It would be better to let it focus on helping people who can’t help themselves, and let the rest of us get on our with our own lives.

 

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Next fall, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral argument in County of Maui v. Hawaii Wildlife Fund, a major environmental case concerning the scope of the Clean Water Act. Depending on how the Court handles the case, Maui could easily be one of the most significant environmental cases of the past decade, but only if it does not settle before argument.

The issue in Maui is “whether the Clean Water Act requires a permit when pollutants originate from a point source but are conveyed to navigable waters by a nonpoint source, such as groundwater.” Put in lay terms, the question is whether the County of Maui was required to get a CWA permit for injecting pollutants into groundwater if some of those pollutants could eventually reach “waters of the United States.” According to the Hawaii Wildlife Fund, when groundwater acts as a conduit of pollutants that were discharged by a point source, a permit should be required. According to the County of Maui, no CWA permit should be required because the CWA does not regulate groundwater and does not require a permit for nonpoint source pollution.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit accepted the Hawaii Wildlife Fund’s argument, thereby requiring the County of Maui to obtain CWA permits for the continued operation of underground injection control wells at its wasterwater treatment plants. Other courts to consider this question, such as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, have disagreed. The resulting circuit split made this case an obvious candidate for certiorari, and the outcome could have far-reaching consequences. In Hawaii alone there are over 6,000 UIC wells and 21,000 septic systems that could be subject to CWA permit requirements if the Ninth Circuit’s position is upheld.

While the County of Maui would prefer not to have to obtain permits for its wastewater treatment plant UIC wells, some local political leaders are also wary of pushing an aggressive anti-regulatory argument in the Supreme Court. According to local press reports, Maui is considering whether to settle the case before it is heard by the Court.

If Maui is settled, it would end the case and prevent the Court from issuing an opinion in the case. This would delay, though not deny, the Supreme Court’s ability to resolve the underlying question. The existence of other cases addressing this question means that, in all likelihood, it would only be a matter of time before the groundwater-conduit question returns to the Court. Settling the case would, however, eliminate an important, high-profile case from what is shaping up to be a quite significant Supreme Court term.

(Thanks to Jesse Richardson for the pointer.)

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