Tag: in-the-news

While the incredible costs of the Biden administration’s federal student loan forgiveness plan are widely known, yet another expense of the program is stirring controversy: maintaining the online application for loan forgiveness is expected to cost nearly $100 million annually.

This latest expense—not included in the Congressional Budget Office’s recent estimate of the program’s cost to taxpayers—is yet more evidence that sweeping student loan forgiveness will end up doing considerable economic harm.

In August, President Joe Biden announced a sweeping federal student loan forgiveness plan. Under the proposal, most borrowers making under $125,000 annually and married couples making less than $250,000 would receive $10,000 each in loan forgiveness. For borrowers who received a Pell Grant, forgiveness is increased to $20,000.

The program stands to be wildly expensive, with recent estimates from the Congressional Budget Office predicting that its cost will be $400 billion. However, as the Biden administration gears up to formally release the online application for loan forgiveness, other large costs are also becoming clear. Documents submitted by the Education Department to the Office of Management and Budget show that the department estimates it will cost $99,900,000 per year to maintain the application and the program’s associated communications through March 2024. According to the Department of Education, these costs are “related to development of website forms, servicer processing, borrower support, paper form processing and communications related to this effort.”

While the current estimate for application maintenance and support is high, there is reason for concern that the cost will come to exceed that. For example, the ill-fated HealthCare.gov website was originally estimated to cost $93.7 million—yet it eventually grew to cost taxpayers over $2 billion. Considering that the Biden administration already appears to be lowballing the cost of student loan forgiveness, estimating that federal student loan forgiveness will only cost $240 billion over the next decade, there is reason to worry that it is underestimating the cost of maintaining its application website as well.

“You might think, well, why not just link federal student loan records with IRS data so that we have automatic income verification? Because that would essentially do the trick in terms of the Department of Education knowing who would be eligible,” Beth Akers, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, tells Reason. However, Akers notes that “there is a legislative ban on the creation of what is called a unit records data system. The idea is that the Department of Education should be prohibited from following student borrowers’ income across time which would be enabled by the creation of that data set. And I guess the motivation for that initially was privacy.”

Akers says this problem could have been avoided if student loan forgiveness had been enacted through the legislative process rather than by executive fiat. “If our lawmakers in Congress had decided that this is something they wanted to do, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to think, at the same time, they would have lifted the ban even momentarily to allow for the processing of these cancellations,” Akers explains.

The staggering price the Biden administration places on upkeep for the student loan forgiveness application is yet more evidence of the true, bloated nature of the policy. It should come as no surprise that student loan forgiveness will be riddled with extra costs—costs that will no doubt be pushed onto taxpayers.

The post Maintaining the Student Loan Forgiveness Application Will Cost an Estimated $100 Million appeared first on Reason.com.

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North Americans spend an average of two hours and six minutes daily interacting with various social media platforms, according to the online database Broadband Search. Globally, Facebook’s 1.9 billion daily active users average 33 minutes per day, and Twitter’s 206 million daily active users troll and doom-scroll for 31 minutes per day.

Two new political science studies investigate how all of this time spent on social media affects our politics. The first asks what, if anything, digital denizens learn about politics, while the second develops a model to explain how social media interactions spark culture wars by sorting people into antagonistic political tribes.

Published in the Journal of Communication, the first study finds that whatever else millions of social media devotees learn from their online activity—catching up with friends and finding new ones, checking out product reviews, and watching cat videos—one thing they do not do is learn about is politics.

There are “no observable political knowledge gains from using Facebook, Twitter,
or SNS [social network sites] in general; when measuring policy-specific, campaign-related, or general political knowledge; in election and routine periods; and when individuals use social media specifically for news or for more general purposes,” find Israeli communications researchers Eran Amsalem and Alon Zoizner. They reached this conclusion after parsing data involving more than 440,000 subjects in a pre-registered meta-analysis of 76 different studies on the effect of social media on political knowledge.

One minor exception to this sweeping conclusion is that research using experimental setups finds small but statistically significant knowledge gains from using social media. However, in such experiments, Amsalem and Zoizner note that subjects are given no choice over what political information they see, so they may be artificially induced to pay greater attention to it than they ordinarily would scrolling out in the wild. The experiments also fail to account for information decay, since they test their subjects’ political knowledge gains immediately after exposure to it. “Considering these caveats, our conclusion remains that social media contribute little, if at all, to political knowledge,” write the authors.

While interacting with social media is not increasing people’s knowledge of politics, the second study finds that social media does teach partisans to increasingly dislike their opponents, according to University of Amsterdam digital geographer Petter Törnberg. In his new article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he argues that digital media are driving affective polarization by enhancing the process of partisan sorting. Affective polarization is defined as the difference between positive in-group bias toward the party someone supports and negative out-group bias toward other parties.

Törnberg observes that accumulating data indicate that political polarization in the U.S. and other countries is not growing because people are increasingly isolating themselves with like-minded folks in social media echo chambers that confirm the righteousness of their views. Instead, Törnberg notes that the “empirical literature suggests that digitalization does not appear to lead to a reduction of interaction across political divide, but quite the opposite: it confronts us with diverse individuals, perspectives, and viewpoints, often in contentious ways.” So how might social media contribute to the apparent increase in partisan rancor? Törnberg develops a model showing how political disputes, controversies, and debates on nonlocal social media can drive people to adopt increasingly extreme positions.

Back in the good old days, political and other differences of opinion were largely local and neighbors had many cross-cutting issues and commonalities that moderated their views of those who disagreed with them. “Social conflict is sustainable as long as there are multiple and non-overlapping lines of disagreement: we may differ on our views on one issue but agree on another; we may vote differently, but if we support the same football team or go to the same church, there remains space for interpersonal respect,” writes Törnberg. “The recent rise in polarization is thus expressive of a gradual breakdown of this cohesive glue, driven by a gradual alignment of social, economic, geographic, and ideological differences and conflicts.”

In Törnberg‘s model, the moderating influences of cross-cutting local social ties have loosened as people spend more time attending to and picking sides in nonlocal partisan Twitter fights. “By connecting individuals with others from outside their local social bubbles, digital media pressure local political cultures to align globally,” he argues. “Over time, the system comes to sort on the global scale, with a single political culture becoming system-wide.” That single political culture polarizes into two mutually hostile tribes.

Based on the results of his model, Törnberg argues that we need to rethink “digital media as not merely arenas for rational deliberation and political debate but as spaces for social identity formation and for symbolic displays of solidarity with allies and difference from outgroups. Digital media do not isolate us from opposing ideas; au contraire, they throw us into a national political war, in which we are forced to take sides.”

The paradoxical conclusion of his analysis is it “suggests that attempts of media platforms to reduce polarization by acting against echo chambers—algorithmically increasing exposure to opposing ideas—may backfire, instead resulting in intensified polarization and conflict.” Any similar effort by, say, a federal Disinformation Governance Board would surely inflame cultural warfare even more.

Of course no political science research is dispositive, but the disheartening upshot of these two exploratory studies is that social media users learn essentially nothing about actual political issues—but do learn to hate their political opponents.

For more background on political polarization in the United States, check out my article, “Why Is It So Hard To Admit When You’re Wrong?“

The post Social Media Interaction Does Not Improve Political Knowledge, but Does Polarize Us appeared first on Reason.com.

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Common sense needs a bigger tent.

LYRICS:

This could use a brand-new coat
That’s not allowed, I’d warn you don’t
That guy is crapping on the ground
Eh, it happens. Wait, how’s that even allowed?

Because you’re living in a clown world
A cool-to-pull-your-pants-on-down world
There’s only one you can paint brown world
(You’ll never guess which one in clown world!)

The cost of rent is getting dear
We should build our new neighborhood here
Zoning forbids new housing builds
We were actually just gonna throw up some tents and
You know, do some heroin?

Well, that’s acceptable in clown world!
A can’t-let-children-walk-downtown world
They’re playing hopscotch—look around world!
They’re avoiding needles…
Oh, it’s OK in clown world

He saved that disabled lady
Risked his life to save two babies
And to his valor we’re in debt
Wait—have you had your booster yet?

Well, I’ve had COVID and I had an adverse—

Looking for a new job in clown world
A risk-your-life-so-they-don’t-drown world
A down-is-up and up-is-down world
Fired his dangerous butt from clown world

Oh we’re all living in a clown world
A common-sense-cannot-be-found world
A you-can-paint-the-sidewalk-brown world
We’re living in a clown world

 

Written and performed by Remy; video produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg

The post Remy: Clown World appeared first on Reason.com.

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Re the controversy over nine student groups banning speakers who think Israel should exist.

Chemerinsky:

The Jewish Law Students Association can refuse to invite Holocaust deniers. The Black Law Students Association can refuse to invite white supremacists. I may not like the choices they make about what viewpoints they invite or not invite, but that is their First Amendment right.

What is not allowed is excluding a speaker based on religion or race or sex or sexual orientation. And that has not – and I am confident will not happen at Berkeley Law. To be clear, the law, and campus policies, distinguish between word and deed, expression and action. To date the offending student groups have issued statements, declarations, and intentions. Those are constitutionally protected forms of expression. To date, no student has been excluded, cancelled, disinvited, or interrupted. To date no student has been denied the right or the ability to express themselves, to exercise their freedom of speech. Should that happen—and we are working hard to make sure it does not—that would represent a cross-over from expression to conduct and that would be subject to serious discipline.

Marcus:

if he had reached out, Dean Chemerinsky would stop denying that “no speaker has been excluded on account of these or any other views.” With due respect to the good dean, this is absurd. Mr. Chemerinsky and his Berkeley Law colleagues now acknowledge that these nine groups’ bylaws “impermissibly exclude a large majority of [Berkeley’s Law] faculty from participating in the work of these organizations, including [him].” Since he acknowledges that this is impermissible, he should stop permitting it. More to the point, he should stop funding it.

In addition, we all know what happens when campus groups announce “no Zionists”– Jewish students either stop participating or they suppress that part of their Jewish identity to be accepted. Dean Chemerinsky suggests he will act once a Jewish speaker is turned away or a Jewish student is formally excluded. Once the bylaws were formalized that ship sailed. By not acting now, the damage is done.

And if student groups take further discriminatory action by excluding Zionists in the future, there will be no way for Chemerinsky to know that they have done so. It is not as if they will tell the dean that they are doing what he has described as “impermissible.”

Comment: Parsed closely, Chemerinsky is arguing that the students have a First Amendment right to ban “Zionist” speakers, but no such right to ban or discriminate against “Zionist” students. I’m not sure that’s right for reasons I expressed in a previous post, but let’s assume it is. In practice, there would be only one way for a student group to ban “Zionist” speakers (i.e., speakers who believe that Israel should continue to exist), and not in practice discriminate against Jewish speakers–given that, in practice, campus groups’ hostility to “Zionists” has fallen entirely on Jews. That would be to ask all speakers, Jewish or not, to sign a pledge that that don’t think Israel should exist. Would *that* be ok? Would the campus groups be willing to require such a pledge, including for law firm recruiters who would like to speak with them?

Indeed, I think this should, perhaps must, be the compromise. If the law school determines that it’s legal and within school policy for clubs to ban speakers who believe Israel should exist, that policy needs to be transparent, and enforced uniformly. No Dean Chemerinsky or other faculty who support Israel’s existence at club events. No law school recruiters who support Israel’s existence. No speakers on abortion rights, trans rights, or anything else within the clubs’ purview unless they avow that they support Israel’s destruction. These groups have made the policy, make them live with it in a way that won’t be selectively enforced against Jewish speakers.

As an aside, Dean Chemersinsky is incorrect that expressing discriminatory “intentions” is protected by the First Amendment. It’s illegal for an employer to announce that he won’t hire a protected group, for a landlord to announce that he won’t rent to a protected group, and so on, regardless of whether they follow through if they get applicants from those groups.

The post Chemerinsky and Marcus Go Another Round Re Antisemitism at Berkeley Law appeared first on Reason.com.

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A new investigative series looks at child welfare system deficiencies, from mandatory reporting laws to child protective services search policies. It finds that policies meant to protect kids may be putting them and their families in harm’s way.

Mandatory reporting laws say that certain classes of professionals are legally obligated to report suspected child abuse and neglect to authorities. Federal law requires states to have such laws in place.

While mandatory reporting might seem at first rather uncontroversial—one hopes that any adult, mandated or not, would report suspected child abuse—the nature of these laws leads to a lot of unfounded reporting. Mandatory reporters who fail to do so face penalties ranging from criminal charges to professional sanctions and loss of occupational licenses, so it behooves them to report liberally. (“Mandatory reporters are required to report the facts and circumstances that led them to suspect that a child has been abused or neglected” but “do not have the burden of providing proof that abuse or neglect has occurred,” notes a report from the U.S. Children’s Bureau.) This can lead to a lot of false reports of abuse that cause major headaches and heartaches for the families involved.

The problem is exacerbated by states perpetually expanding the list of people considered mandatory reporters.

In Pennsylvania, “the vast expansion of the child protection dragnet ensnared tens of thousands of innocent parents, disproportionately affecting families of color living in poverty,” reported NBC News and ProPublica on Wednesday. Their investigation found that “while the unintended and costly consequences are clear, there’s no proof that the reforms have prevented the most serious abuse cases….Instead, data and child welfare experts suggest the changes may have done the opposite.”

Reason has long been warning about the downsides of mandatory reporting laws. “Last year, mandatory-reporting laws led to more than 3 million child-abuse ‘reports’ in the United States,” noted Lisa Snell in a post two decades ago for Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website. “Yet child-welfare agencies managed only to substantiate with evidence fewer than one-third of these cases.”

Since then, states have drastically expanded the bounds of these laws. Mandatory reporters now include not only groups like social workers, teachers, health care professionals, and child care providers, but also computer technicians, drug counselors, parole officers, employees and volunteers at day camps and recreation centers, film processors, animal control officers, clergy, and college staff in some states. “In approximately 18 States and Puerto Rico, any person who suspects child abuse or neglect is required to report,” notes the Children’s Bureau report.

In Pennsylvania, “in the five years after the reforms took effect, the state’s child abuse hotline was inundated with more than 1 million reports of child maltreatment, state data shows,” report ProPublica and NBC News:

More than 800,000 of these calls were related not to abuse or serious neglect, but to lower-level neglect allegations often stemming from poverty, most of which were later dismissed as invalid by caseworkers.

The number of children reported as possible victims of abuse or serious neglect increased by 72% compared to the five years prior, triggering Child Protective Services investigations into the well-being of nearly 200,000 children from 2015 to 2019, according to a ProPublica and NBC News analysis of federal Department of Health and Human Services data. From this pool of reports, child welfare workers identified 6,000 more children who might have been harmed than in the five previous years. But for the vast majority of the 200,000 alleged victims — roughly 9 in 10 — county agencies dismissed the allegations as unfounded after inspecting families’ homes and subjecting parents and children to questioning.

The expanded reporting requirements were even less effective at detecting additional cases of sexual abuse. Some 42,000 children were investigated as possible sex abuse victims from 2015 to 2019 — an increase of 42% from the five years prior — but there was no increase in the number of substantiated allegations, the analysis of federal data showed. In other words, reforms enacted in response to a major sex abuse scandal led to thousands more investigations, but no increase in the number of children identified as likely victims.

And Pennsylvania is far from alone in expanding its mandatory reporting requirements:

Over the past decade, at least 36 states have enacted laws to expand the list of professionals required by law to report suspicions of child abuse or imposed new reporting requirements and penalties for failing to report, according to data compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures, a group representing state governments.

Some legal experts and child welfare reform activists argue these laws have created a vast family surveillance apparatus, turning educators, health care workers, therapists and social services providers into the eyes and ears of a system that has the power to take children from their parents.

Being investigated by child protective services can be a disturbing experience for parents and children alike, and even lead to children being temporarily removed from their parents’ homes. It can also lead to a range of other invasive measures.

Social workers frequently search homes without a warrant, according to another report from ProPublica and NBC News. New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) “obtains an average of fewer than 94 entry orders a year to inspect homes, meaning it has a warrant less than 0.2% of the time” it conducts searches, they reported yesterday.

And it’s not just New York City:

Across the nation, child protective services agencies investigate the home lives of roughly 3.5 million children every year, according to statistics from the federal Department of Health and Human Services. Only about 5% of them are ultimately found to have been physically or sexually abused.

With rare exceptions, all of these investigations include at least one home visit, and often multiple, according to a review of all 50 states’ child welfare statutes and agency investigative manuals.

Yet in a ProPublica and NBC News survey that drew detailed responses from 40 state child welfare agencies, all said they would only obtain a warrant or court order to search a home — or call the police for help — in rare cases when they are denied entry. None said they keep any data on how often they get an entry order.

It’s a staggering reality — likely millions of warrantless searches a year — and one that has not been reported before.

Last year, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held in In the Interest of Y.W.-B. that orders for social worker home visits require a showing of probable cause similar to that which would be required for a police search. “We expressly hold that there is no ‘social worker exception’ to compliance with constitutional limitations on an entry into a home without consent or exigent circumstances,” wrote the justices.

But many families comply with warrantless searches because they don’t know their rights, or worry that exercising them will lead to worse consequences. In New York City, report NBC News and ProPublica, “caseworkers frequently say things that are coercive and manipulative in order to get inside homes without going to a judge, according to interviews with more than three dozen former ACS workers, New York City Family Court judges, parents, children and attorneys.”

Social workers are often thought of as altruistic public servants. But all too often they act like cops who aren’t required to play by constitutional rules.

That was the gist of a recent piece in The New Republic, by Emily Cooke. “Since mid-2020, as outrage over police violence reached an apex and calls to defund police departments gained momentum, it has seemed obvious to many on the left that social work is the solution,” notes Cooke.

“It seems like common sense, the idea that you could reduce violence by diverting money from bloated police departments and sinking it into programs populated by social workers,” she writes. But critics of this idea—including some social workers—”suspect that any substitution of their colleagues for police would amount to dressing wolves in sheep’s clothing.…The concern is that if you measure in terms of the power to coerce, surveil, and inflict lasting harm, social workers are, thanks to very nature of the job, cops by another name.”

Cooke’s piece also delves into the problems of mandatory reporting, noting that “only a quarter of children end up in foster care because of abuse; the majority are put there because of alleged neglect”—a vague category with a subjective definition.

“Nationally, the families of more than half of Black children will be investigated by child protective services before those kids turn 18; in much of the country, more than one in 10 Black kids will be removed from their home,” she writes. “In New York City, Black families are six times more likely than white families to be investigated and 11 times more likely to experience a separation. If social workers are by and large earnest, gentle, well-intentioned individuals, they are also unavoidably narcs, bound by laws demanding that they rat on the very communities they’re supposed to help.”

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FREE MINDS

Virginia lawmaker wants to criminalize parents who don’t affirm child’s gender identity. Yesterday, Reason reported on an atrocious Michigan bill that would define gender transition treatment for minors as child abuse. Virginia is now considering a bit of ridiculous overreach in the opposite direction. WJLA reports that “Virginia parents could face a felony or misdemeanor charge if they do not affirm their child’s sexual orientation and gender identity, according to a state lawmaker with plans to introduce the legislation in Virginia’s upcoming legislative session.”

The lawmaker, Virginia Delegate Elizabeth Guzman (D–Woodbridge), said her bill would define failing to affirm a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity as child abuse. “If the child shares with those mandated reporters, what they are going through, we are talking about not only physical abuse or mental abuse, what the job of that mandated reporter is to inform Child Protective Services,” Guzman told WJLA.

“And then that’s how everybody gets involved. There’s also an investigation in place that is not only from a social worker but there’s also a police investigation before we make the decision that there is going to be a CPS charge.”

“What could the penalties be if the investigation concludes that a parent is not affirming of their LGBTQ child? What could the consequences be?” 7News WJLA-TV Reporter Nick Minock asked Guzman on Thursday.

“Well, we first have to complete an investigation,” Guzman answered. “It could be a felony, it could be a misdemeanor, but we know that CPS charge could harm your employment, could harm their education, because nowadays many people do a CPS database search before offering employment.”

“What would you tell your Republican colleagues who say this is criminalizing parents? What would you tell them?” Minock asked Guzman.

“No, it’s not. It’s educating parents because the law tells you the do’s and don’ts,” Guzman answered. “So this law is telling you do not abuse your children because they are LGBTQ.”

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FREE MARKETS

New inflation report confirms what consumers know.

The CPI rose +0.4% in September, and is now running at 8.2%, down from 8.3%.

Excluding food and energy, prices rose +0.6% in the month, so core inflation is 6.6%.

Inflation is proving to be more resilient — and more troubling — than many had hoped or forecast.

— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) October 13, 2022

The cost of everything from food to health care continued to go up last month, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Overall, prices were up 0.4 percent last month, putting the overall price increase at 8.2 percent for the past 12 months. In some categories, the climb has been ever more steep. For instance, “food prices have climbed by 11.2 percent in the past year, while energy prices are up by a whopping 19.7 percent despite falling by about 2 percent in September,” notes Reason‘s Eric Boehm.

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QUICK HITS

For 2+ years I’ve been researching the case of CJ Rice, whom my pediatrician dad says was physically incapable of committing the crime for which he’s doing up to 60 years in prison…

The injustice is actually much worse than I thought:https://t.co/68MZ8CNppI pic.twitter.com/mLbig3PYoP

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) October 12, 2022

• “Mainstream media has portrayed PCP as a substance that makes people violent and erratic—but that’s not the whole story,” writes Zeus Tipado at DoubleBlind Mag.

• The Biden administration is extending the pandemic emergency designation through January 11, 2023—despite President Joe Biden recently declaring that the pandemic is over.

• The Biden administration has dramatically ratcheted up the deportation of Venezuelans:

After making up a very small number of new deportation cases, Venezuelans saw dramatic month-over-month increases from the start of the Biden administration to now, from 363 in January 2021 to nearly 15,000 in a single month at the end of the year.https://t.co/YcNRs5zgjT pic.twitter.com/amQv7ONcjd

— Austin Kocher, PhD (@ackocher) October 13, 2022

• “The U.S. Department of Justice announced today that the Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD) and the Orange County District Attorney’s Office (OCDA) in California routinely violated civil rights and tainted numerous criminal cases by operating a jailhouse informant program that flouted multiple amendments to the U.S. Constitution,” reports The Appeal.

• Reason‘s Jacob Sullum reviews Can Legal Weed Win?

The post Another Analysis Suggests Mandatory Reporting Laws May Be Doing Children More Harm Than Good appeared first on Reason.com.

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In its opposition to a new state law that eliminates parking requirements for developments located near transit lines, the city of Newport Beach offered this whiny complaint to the Legislature: “We believe cities, not the state, are best suited to determine the parking needs of development projects in their jurisdiction.”

Well, I’ll one-up the Newport Beach City Council. I believe citizens and businesses, not city officials, are best suited to determine the parking needs of their customers as they propose new projects. Why fight over which level of bureaucrat will run our lives? Why not just let people make their own decisions? When it comes to local development issues, that’s the central political question of the day.

Sadly, many Republicans have abandoned free-market principles in favor of culture wars, which often puts them on the side of the Not In My Back Yarders (NIMBYs) who oppose market-oriented housing policies. Equally weird, Democrats—who believe that more government is the solution to virtually every problem—are starting to learn about the value of deregulation.

Conservatives often depict Democratic efforts to jumpstart urban housing construction as a plot to force us all to live in “stack and pack” housing. They act as if single-family-only rules are sacrosanct, rather than being a government-imposed, post-World War II construct. Those who think that way should, just for fun, visit downtown Fullerton or Pasadena and note the diverse land uses that were common before modern zoning took shape.

Democratic inconsistency is equally bizarre. As my former Orange County Register editor used to say, “Everyone, Steve, is a libertarian on the 25 percent of things they really care about.” Regarding housing policy, a majority of Democrats is so committed to increasing urban density and walkability that they are willing to do the unthinkable—reduce the role of government and allow markets to work.

Sure, some Democrats are in the “protect our communities” NIMBY group and some Republicans have admirably voted in favor of major housing-deregulation bills. Generally speaking, though, the housing debate has caused an ideological shift. Liberals are open to less government (because it yields the results they want) and conservatives want more government (because it yields the results they want).

The “get off my lawn” crowd still is fuming about last year’s passage of two housing laws—and wealthy cities (including liberal and conservative ones) are trying to obstruct their implementation. Senate Bill 9 allows Californians to build duplexes in single-family neighborhoods on a “by right” basis—eliminating bureaucratic subjectivity and the heckler’s veto from your nosy neighbor. Senate Bill 10 eases permitting of 10-unit developments near transit.

Other similar land-use statutes are coming their way. Gov. Gavin Newsom touts a list of 41 housing bills that he signed this year that should help jumpstart housing construction. Most of them offer minor legislative tweaks or include the usual array of subsidies. But a handful of them are as significant as SB 9 and 10—and worthy of applause.

I previously mentioned the parking bill, AB 2097. Current parking minimums are absurd (and designed for peak hours)—and a constraint on the market. If you own a store or are building condominiums, then you should determine the amount of parking your customers need. These requirements explain why so much of our built environment has the ambiance of an airport landing strip. By the way, the coolest downtowns I’ve visited have little parking—and the bleakest ones are a sea of parking lots.

It’s an issue everywhere, of course. “Excessive parking obstructs housing development, impedes adaptive reuse of buildings, and hinders the creation of vibrant spaces that allow our community to flourish and feel connected,” wrote Alaska Assemblyman Kevin Cross (R–Eagle Creek) in calling for Anchorage to reduce its parking minimums.

Newsom also signed Assembly Bill 2011, which “allows for ministerial, by-right approval for affordable housing on commercially-zoned lands, and also allows such approvals for mixed-income housing along commercial corridors,” wrote California YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard). Senate Bill 6 does something similar, but is more restrictive. Both bills passed as a compromise to placate competing union demands.

In plain English, the measures allow conversion of decrepit shopping malls into housing–provided developers follow a number of conditions related to the amount of “affordable” housing included in the project. I don’t care for the “we’re deregulating provided you follow all these new regulations” aspect of the laws, but they are more good than bad.

It was encouraging that both shopping-mall measures had overwhelming bipartisan support, as did two other new housing laws. Assembly Bill 221 further loosens the rules surrounding the construction of granny flats. Senate Bill 886 exempts from CEQA housing projects at public universities–made necessary after a community group used the environmental law to challenge Berkeley’s expansion plans.

Perhaps the best news is it’s getting increasingly difficult to be a NIMBY in Sacramento anymore.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

The post California's Housing Policy Fight Is Flipping Traditional Political Alliances appeared first on Reason.com.

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Halloween Ends

The story so far:

1978: In suburban Haddonfield, Illinois, teenage babysitter Laurie Strode meets suburban man of mystery Michael Myers for the first time.  She is drawn to him (sometimes with a great big knitting needle clutched in her fist), but only sticks around for one sequel. Which, in what will become a tradition, is very bad.

1982-2002: Laurie and Michael call it quits for a bit, but eventually reunite for another pair of sequels, one of them truly awful. Michael then slips away for two solo outings with trash-film master Rob Zombie.

2018-2021: Laurie and Michael are reunited by fanboy director David Gordon Green and cowriter Danny McBride. Ignoring the abundant cheese of all the previous movies, they make a direct sequel to the very first Halloween, and it’s a lot of fun. However, hewing to the franchise SOP, they follow this with another dud, which makes $130 million anyway.

2022: And here we are.

The chief problem with the Halloween franchise, as has been demonstrated over and over again over the last 44 years, is its bloody tedium. There are only so many variations on a knife in the eye or a bone-crunching tumble from a high bannister that can hold up against endless repetition, and only so many shameless jump-scares that even the least discerning viewer will tolerate. In Halloween Ends, the thirteenth installment in the series, returning director Green attempts to freshen things up with a bold violation of the unspoken cinematic prohibition against inflicting violence on small children. This shouldn’t work, but the shot in which it occurs is so sudden and in-your-face—and the child imperiled is such a brat—that it triggers an irrepressible bark of laughter: It’s just—regrettably, I suppose—funny.

The movie feels longer than it is (a little under two hours) because of a serious Michael Myers deficit in the early innings. A whole lot of time is spent, instead, with a mopey teen named Corey Cunningham (minimally expressive Rohan Campbell), a nutcase who has some sort of spiritual connection to Michael, and the returning Allyson (Andi Matichak), the girl who, for some hard-to-grasp reason, loves this whiney trouble-magnet. (Corey keeps mumbling things like “I killed someone.”) Allyson is the granddaughter of the aging Laurie Strode, whose house burned down in the last movie with Michael inside. That she now believes Michael is really dead shows how little she’s learned about Halloween logic over the past four decades.

This is not a very good movie, but at least the dialogue is overdone in an amusing way. (How many times do we really need to be told that Michael is “pure evil”?) And it’s a treat, as always, to meet the snotty kids and abrasive grownups who we know won’t be accompanying us to the end of the picture. Most of all, it’s a movie that fully delivers on the one front where it really matters—it’s fearlessly committed to the slasher tradition of gross-out gore. (The sight of a man being juicily ground up in a car compacter is so lovingly contemplated that you can’t help but smile, or at least grimace, in appreciation.)

There are some classically batty B-movie lines here. When Allyson is feeling down, for instance, Laurie tells her she should “cut off your shirt and show grief your tits.” Surely there’s an aspiring Ed Wood out there who could build an entire movie around such an inspired notion.

The Banshees of Inisherin

The Banshees of Inisherin is a stirring demonstration of the actor’s art. The stars, Brendan Gleeson and (especially) Colin Farrell, mine their seemingly simple characters—two men paying out their days on a rustic island off the western coast of Ireland—for every nugget of human complexity they can gather, and at the end we behold them, if not transformed, at least reconstituted.

The movie’s writer-director, Anglo-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, last guided Gleeson and Farrell through his wonderful 2008 film In Bruges, which followed two expatriate Irish hitmen from London, where they made their violent living, to the twinkling medieval city of Bruges, Belgium. Banshees, being confined to a (fictional) island, tells a more concentrated story, one that subjects its principal characters to more minute examination.

The year is 1923, and the Irish Civil War is loudly underway—you can hear the mainland cannon-roar from Inisherin and see the battle smoke clouding the sky. But life goes on as always for the island’s residents, among them Colm Doherty (Gleeson), a crusty, retired music tutor. As age advances on him, Colm feels a need to redirect his life toward higher things: art, poetry, a more serious commitment to music. (Gleeson, an accomplished musician himself, does his own fiddling here, plays mandolin as well, and also composed the movie’s title song.) He feels he no longer has time to waste on unnecessary activities—like listening to the empty prattle of his sweet, devoted friend Pádraic (Farrell).

This simpleminded man is a problem. Unlike Colm, who thinks only of spiritual expansion, Pádraic is entirely content with his lot in life. He lives in a small cottage with his sister, Siobhan (Kerry Condon), and tends a clutter of sheep and cows whose milk he sells. He also dotes on a miniature donkey, which he likes to keep indoors, like a house pet.

Pádraic and Colm are daily patrons of the village pub, and their placid, untroubled life, with its plaster saints and clattering horse carts, was always all they needed—until one day Colm tells Pádraic he no longer wants to be his friend. “I just don’t like you no more,” Colm says. “You liked me yesterday,” Pádraic says, baffled. Siobhan gets wind of this rift and quickly confronts Colm about it: What does he suddenly have against her brother? “He’s dull,” Colm says. “But he’s always been dull,” Siobhan says. “What’s changed?” “I’ve changed,” Colm says.

This petty conflict takes on a more alarming tone when Colm tells Pádraic that if he doesn’t stop trying to talk to him, he’ll begin chopping fingers off his hands for each infraction—a terrible thing for a musician to say. But would Colm really do such a thing?

Farrell gives a transporting performance in this movie, capturing the tragic sadness of a dim but cheerful man who has trouble coping with the challenge of everyday life, and can barely withstand the sudden hostility of his only friend. (When Siobhan asks Pádraic to take his donkey outdoors, her brother is stricken. “I’m not putting the donkey outside when I’m sad,” he says.)

Condon is likewise wonderful as a woman who loves her brother but is being smothered by the contentious and small-minded society in which she is marooned; she’s desperate to be gone. And Barry Keoghan as Dominic, the village simpleton, manages the difficult feat of giving a full account of his seemingly uncomplicated character without condescending to him. But it’s Farrell who owns the movie. His Pádraic is a man who’s beginning to suspect that people are ridiculing him as a dullard behind his back, and he hasn’t the first idea what to do about it.

The post Review: <em>Halloween Ends</em> and <em>The Banshees of Inisherin</em> appeared first on Reason.com.

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Are Americans getting tired of the “choice” between dictatorial Democrats and control-freakish Republicans? Many of us would like to think so, and evidence from the crucial Arizona U.S. Senate race suggests that at least some voters are looking for an option that doesn’t represent a competing brand of authoritarianism. In that contest, Libertarian Party nominee Marc Victor is polling at 15 percent and may get a further boost from his appearance in a well-timed televised debate.

“Live and let live. That’s my position on every issue,” Marc Victor introduced himself during his opening statement at the October 6 debate, which was broadcast by PBS. “Live your life however you choose, just let other people do the same thing. My name is Marc J. Victor, and if you’re tired of the same old politics, I’m your guy. I’m a proud Marine Corps combat veteran, and for the last 28 years, I’ve been thinking outside the box as a criminal defense attorney.”

In a phone conversation this week, Victor expressed disappointment that he didn’t get as much airtime as incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly (the Democrat in the race) and Republican challenger Blake Masters. But his appearance was enough for The New York Times to note “he held his ground Thursday night, insisting that the moderator allow him to answer all the same questions as Mr. Kelly and Mr. Masters.”

“There could be a receptive audience for that message,” Jennifer Medina and Jack Healy added for the Times. “Roughly a third of Arizona’s voters are not registered as Republicans or Democrats, and many view themselves as moderates or describe themselves as leaning libertarian.”

In appealing to those voters, Victor, who also represented the Libertarian Party in the 2012 Senate race ultimately won by Republican Jeff Flake, emphasized the inclusive “live and let live” message with which he opened. By comparison, Kelly and Masters spent much of the debate redefining their political identities: Kelly, by trying to distance himself from his party’s positions on immigration and border policy; and Masters, by attempting to put some daylight between his campaign and his earlier support for a national ban on abortion and his party’s claims of a rigged 2020 election.

Victor is adamant that his approach contrasts well not just with the messages of Republicans and Democrats, but with ineffective messaging by libertarians in the past.

“We have the best message,” Victor told me. “There’s absolutely no question in my mind that if you are interested in freedom, in peace, in raising standards of living, we have the right message. So, I sit and scratch my head and say I’ve been a libertarian 30 years, why are we still in the minority?”

“We start by saying ‘I’m for legalized meth’ and ‘fuck the government,'” he continued. “Things that just turn people off. So, my mission, as a libertarian, has been to reboot the libertarian message. And I’ve done that, I’ve reformatted it into what I call the live-and-let-live message.”

Ironically, one prominent Libertarian Party figure was turned off anyway. During the debate, Victor complained that “our big problem with voting is that everything is up for a vote” and pointed to age of consent laws along with legislative representation as examples of the few issues that should be subject to political decision making. In response, Dave Smith, widely considered a contender for the 2024 Libertarian Party presidential nomination as part of the now-dominant Mises Caucus, endorsed one of Marc Victor’s opponents.

“JFC,” tweeted Smith. “This guy is a clown who has absolutely nothing to do with us. He went outside the party and got the signatures to be on the ballot. Stupid AZ laws. I support Masters.”

“If you want to see what’s wrong with the Libertarian Party, look at what’s going on now,” Victor told me of Smith’s attack, and the prominent Mises Caucus figure’s support for the very unlibertarian Masters (at last month’s National Conservatism Conference in Miami, Blake Masters sniped “Libertarianism doesn’t work”). “This is the kind of chaos that we need to get away from, and it only makes me want to separate from the Libertarian Party.”

Victor isn’t alone in his doubts about the Libertarian Party. The Mises Caucus takeover prompted New Mexico’s state Libertarian Party to break away from the national organization, and the Virginia chapter moved to dissolve itself after the state central committee complained that the national organization was “functionally indistinct from other alt-right parties and movements.”

But, while Marc Victor is concerned about the political party, he hasn’t lost faith in libertarian ideas.

“I’m putting out a very hardcore, pro-libertarian position in a very agreeable, non-threatening kind of a way,” he told me of his efforts through the campaign, which he intends to continue with a separate Live and Let Live organization. “I think the future of this movement, whether you want to call it classical liberalism, the enlightenment, libertarianism, voluntaryism, anarcho-capitalism, whatever, I think it will be live-and-let-live-ism and that’s what I’m trying to promote.”

Arizonans, at least, seem receptive to that message.

“If the elections were held today, incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly sits at 46% support among likely voters, Republican Blake Masters at 33%, and Libertarian Marc Victor at 15%,” reports the Arizona Public Opinion Pulse Poll conducted by OH Predictive. 

“Victor’s 9% jump from the previous poll in early September, highly driven by Republican support, could be due to Blake Masters’ struggle with his candidate image among likely voters,” add pollsters.

The latest poll was conducted from October 4–6, mostly before the televised debate took place. That means we’ll have to wait for the next poll to get a better idea of the debate’s impact on the Senate race. The appearance should raise his profile, but third-party candidates tend to show up better in polling than they do on Election Day. Still, ballots are already being mailed to voters, and 89 percent of voters chose to vote early during the 2020 general election. That means Marc Victor may be gaining prominence at just the right moment to maximize support in a race that could decide control of the currently evenly divided U.S. Senate. 

Beyond the election, while he’s unlikely to take his message to that legislative body, Marc Victor intends to keep promoting live-and-let-live as a value long after the votes are counted.

The post In Arizona, Libertarian Party Senate Candidate Polls at 15 Percent appeared first on Reason.com.

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10/14/1911: Justice John Marshall Harlan I dies.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: October 14, 1911 appeared first on Reason.com.

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When California legalized recreational marijuana in 2016, the state had more than 3,000 weed shops. They ostensibly served the medical market, but the rules were so loose that pretty much anyone who wanted pot could buy it legally. Six years later, California had less than half as many licensed marijuana merchants, accounting for between a quarter and a third of total sales.

Something clearly has gone wrong “when you try to legalize weed and accidentally end up illegalizing it instead,” note University of California, Davis, economists Robin Goldstein and Daniel Sumner. In their book Can Legal Weed Win?, they explain how burdensome licensing requirements, regulations, and taxes have frustrated plans to displace the black market.

“In many states that have fully ‘legalized’ weed,” Goldstein and Sumner write, “there is now a relatively small legal weed market and a much larger illegal one.” That’s not surprising, since legal marijuana often costs substantially more than illegal marijuana. Even apart from the direct costs of going legit, the authors note, the vicissitudes of that process impose a “risk premium” that can be bigger than the one reflected in black market prices.

While legal pot prices can be expected to fall over the long term thanks to increased efficiency, Goldstein and Sumner say, tax and regulatory reform would hasten that trend. They suggest that policy makers could learn a thing or two from Oklahoma, where legal medical marijuana is strikingly cheap and accessible, thanks largely to fast application approvals, light regulation, and modest taxes. “When the bluest of blue-state liberal activists are looking to red states for guidance on regulatory policy,” they observe, “you know something’s gone haywire.”

The post Review: <i>Can Legal Weed Win?</i> Yes, but Only Through Deregulation appeared first on Reason.com.

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