Tag: news

The press is aflutter with talk that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting may be headed for the chopping block. More specifically, The Hill informs us that Trump staffers have been “discussing” the “privatization” of the CPB.

In other words, we don’t actually know what’s happening. “Discussing” means the administration hasn’t settled on a plan; “privatization” could take many forms. Nor do we know how any particular proposal will play out politically. Usually I roll my eyes during these debates, knowing that for all the apocalyptic rhetoric they inspire they have invariably ended with the CPB still in the budget. Occasionally it gets a funding cut, but even those tend to be erased within a few years. But as you may have noticed, our new president is unpredictable. Given all the allegedly impossible things that have happened lately, you can’t just assume past will be prologue, even if the forces that have kept the CPB alive in the past are still at work.

That said: The forces that have kept the CPB alive in the past are quite definitely still at work.

Back in 2011, when congressional Republicans were threatening to cut off NPR’s money because it had fired Juan Williams, I offered a brief tour through the history of the We’re Going To Defund Public Broadcasting show. The Williams spat, I wrote, was a more exciting hook for the drama

than the one Richard Nixon used in 1971, when presidential pique at the Eastern liberals who dominated PBS spurred him to propose a “return to localism” that would have kneecapped the crowd in charge of the system. On the other hand, it doesn’t have the cloak-and-dagger spirit that the State Department flunky Otto Reich brought to the play in 1985, right after Ronald Reagan’s reelection, when he met with NPR staffers in a smoky little room and warned them that the White House thought they were “Moscow on the Potomac.” Nor is it as colorful as the 1993 spectacle starring Bob Dole and David Horowitz, who attacked the radical Pacifica network rather than NPR, providing an opportunity to quote a much weirder series of statements than anything in the Juan Williams kerfuffle. (“We didn’t have Satan before the white man. So the white man is Satan himself.”)

And the exclusive focus on NPR this time around means the stakes don’t feel as high as they did in 1994, when Speaker-elect Gingrich started musing that he might “zero out” the entire public broadcasting budget. A decade later, a House subcommittee heightened the dramatic tension by voting to eliminate federal support for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) altogether. That element of danger was a suspenseful touch.

While there are Republicans who honestly think the government shouldn’t be in the business of subsidizing public broadcasters, there are more Republicans—or, at least, more powerful Republicans—who just think the government should be subsidizing a slightly different group of public broadcasters. As I wrote in 2011, “The system was still standing after Nixon made his threats, but all save one of the programs he found objectionable went off the air. After the Gingrich-era battle ended, the Republican pundits Fred Barnes, Peggy Noonan, and Ben Wattenberg all landed gigs at PBS—and following an initial cut, the CPB’s budget crept back upward. The funding fight under George W. Bush took place against the backdrop of a conservative CPB chief crusading for a more right-friendly PBS and NPR.” (*) These exercises may not cut public broadcasters loose, but they do whip them into line.

Needless to say, it would be completely in character for Trump to try a trick like that. (Sample scenario: He ruminates about funding cuts, PBS adds a MAGA voice or two to its lineup, and then the president declares public television a great American institution.) On the other hand, it would also be in character for Trump to endorse a privatization plan as a painless concession to the more free-market wing of the Republican coalition. It’s doubtful, after all, that he has strong personal views one way or the other about the issue. Defunding some small programs that conservatives love to grouse about might give him some brownie points when he amps up spending elsewhere.

So: no predictions. At the very least, let’s wait to see what the actual proposal says.

Bonus links: To see me arguing, in a point/counterpoint with an NPR vice president, that noncommercial broadcasting would be better off without the interference that these subsidies bring, go here. For a pre-CPB example of the government using its pursestrings to influence public broadcasters, go here. For a paper I wrote many years ago about CPB subsidies undermining independent community radio, go here. For a piece I did on the history of Sesame Street, go here. For some outtakes from that article—including the story of the time one of the show’s creators mistook Jim Henson for a member of the Weather Underground—go here.

(* Interestingly, the CPB chief in question—Ken Tomlinson—later told me that he’d like to “get tax money out of CPB.” But he felt that if there was to be public funding, he wanted “balance” in how it was spent. Whatever his personal preferences were, you could make a good case that his push for balance made the GOP less interested in fighting the funding.)

Set your DVRs or stay up to the ungodly hour of 3am tonight to watch me on Fox News’ late-night gabfest Red Eye with Tom Shillue, where I’ll be appearing alongside Howard Stern Show writer Shuli Egar, comedian Tom Dillon, and Bustle Trends’ Senior Director Jessica Tarlov.

Scheduled topics include the various stages of protesting Donald Trump, the anger directed at Taylor Swift for not protesting Trump, the increasing animosity between the Trump administration and the political news media, and the trend that’s probably not a trend of naked exercise.

Check out my interview with Red Eye‘s inimitable ombudsman Andy Levy below:

In the newest Reason podcast, Reason magazine Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward and Reason.com Associate Editor join me to talk about the spectacle and substance of Donald Trump’s inaugural address, the size and force of the Women’s March (which pulled an estimated 500,000 people), and the start of National School Week, an annual event promoting the ability of parents and students to have greater options in K-12 education.

School choice—whether via charter schools, education savings accounts, vouchers, or other measures—has been growing by leaps and bounds over the past 20 years, even in the face of a powerful establishment that mostly wants to keep things the way they are. Whatever else you can say about President Trump, he is full-throated in his support of choice and his controversial pick for Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, is a high-profile activist in the school-choice movement. Will the Trump era be the moment when letting parents and kids choose where to go to school becomes the norm? Or will the toxicity of Trump on other issues kill the momentum in favor of choice?

Produced by Ian Keyser.

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National School Choice Week runs from through January 28. Over 21,000 events involving almost 17,000 schools from all 50 states will take place over the coming days. Go here to get more information about events and data about how increasing school choice—charters, vouchers, educational savings accounts, and more—is one of the best ways to improve education for all Americans.

As a proud media sponsor of National School Choice Week, Reason will be publishing daily articles, podcasts, videos, interviews, and other coverage exploring the ways in which education is being radically altered and made better by letting more people have more choices when it comes to learning. For a constantly updated list of stories, go to Reason’s archive page on “school choice.”

As far as President Trump’s Cabinet picks go, the left seems to have settled on Betsy DeVos as the person whose derailment is most attainable, or perhaps, most important. At the end of the day, the Democratic Party is still the Democratic Party, and still beholden to teachers unions—an interest group that reflexively opposes even modest education reforms.

Democrats are pulling out all the stops. MSNBC host Joy Reid put Michael Moore on her show to explain that DeVos “helped to ruin public education in Michigan,” which is a lie. Sen. Cory Booker, a former ally of DeVos’s who sat with her on the board of the Alliance for School Choice, has announced that he will vote against her confirmation (now that he wants to run for president, he can’t risk alienating teachers unions, one presumes). And even liberal celebrities are anti-DeVos. Cher recently tweeted:

202-2243121 Contact senator& congressman-woman .Call both &Say NO”Betsy Devos”.HER QUEST,2 DEFUND PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
UR CHILD DESERVES MORE.RT

— Cher (@cher) January 22, 2017

The contention that DeVos wants to defund public schools is as absurd as the contention that she poisoned the water in Flint, Michigan. (Embarrassingly, many liberals are indeed insisting that DeVos had something to do with Flint, which is ludicrous.) DeVos merely recognizes some of the flaws inherent to the public education system: it takes in a whole lot of cash, and produces a whole lot of kids who can’t read or do math well.

Cher is right that “UR CHILD DESERVES MORE.” But what is meant by the more in that sentence? Is it more of the same exact system—a system that doesn’t seem to improve, no matter how much money is thrown at it? Keep in mind that inflation-adjusted spending on education has doubled, while reading and math scores have stayed the same and high school graduation rates may have dipped.

Giving children more means giving them more choices. It means liberating them from the system as it exists currently—a system that requires kids to attend the public school in the zip code assigned to them at birth.

Not all public schools are bad; on the contrary, many public schools are great. But every kid is different, and what works for one family might not make sense for another. A certain zip code might have a school with a great college prep program that focuses on STEM education, but what about the kid who wants to study music? Why not let that kid take the per pupil funding allotted to him by the state and use it to pay for classes at an artsier institution?

When public schools are bad, the need for school choice reform is even more obvious. Give the money to the kids and let families decide what they should do with it. Competition for public dollars would incentivize public schools to improve their outputs—they wouldn’t be able to afford to hang on to ineffective teachers. Indeed, this is precisely what frightens teachers unions so much about school choice: it threatens their monopoly.

Whether DeVos will be able to use the education secretary gig to push for reforms remains to be seen. But the fact that she supports the existence of alternatives to traditional public schooling should be viewed as positive, not a liability.

National School Choice Week, an annual event promoting the ability of parents and students to have greater options in K-12 education, starts today. Over 21,000 events involving almost 17,000 schools from all 50 states will take place over the coming days. Go here to get more information about events and data about how increasing school choice–charters, vouchers, educational savings accounts, and more–is one of the best ways to improve education for all Americans. As a proud media sponsor of National School Choice Week, Reason will be publishing daily articles, podcasts, videos, interviews, and other coverage exploring the ways in which education is being radically altered and made better by letting more people have more choices when it comes to learning. For a constantly updated list of stories, go to Reason’s archive page on “school choice.”

• President Donald Trump’s big actions today: Withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership (which was never approved by Congress anyhow); reinstituting a federal ban on funding clinics that provide abortions outside the United States; and freezing the hire of new federal employees (with exceptions for “military, public safety, and public health”).
• Which day does Trump want to make the National Day of Patriotic Devotion? Guess before clicking here.
• The Supreme Court will not be hear a case over the constitutionality of Texas’ voter ID law, but it could later on as it passes through lower courts.
• The Supreme Court also declined to hear a case challenging a Utah law against polygamous cohabitation brought by the stars of reality show Sister Wives.
• The Department of Defense is rejecting a report by Russian-owned media that Russia and the United States had cooperated on a strike against the Islamic State in Syria.
• Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) will support Trump’s pick of Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, despite his previously declared reservations.
• An Australian man accused of driving his car into a crowd of people, killing five, apparently did so after stabbing his own brother in the face after the brother came out of the closet as gay.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and don’t forget to sign up for Reason’s daily updates for more content.

You know the world, including this great nation, is screwed when a nationalist like Donald Trump and a socialist like Bernie Sanders agree on something. That happens to be the case with the TPP – or the Trans Pacific Partnership — the 12-nation free trade agreement that Barack Obama, in a rare move of inspired leadership, negotiated. Together these countries account for 40 percent of the world GDP and house 800 million of the world’s population, almost double that of the European Union. Fulfilling one his core campaign promises on the first full day of his presidency, Trump officially pulled the United States from the deal.

This was largely a symbolic move because the treaty had not been ratified and Congressional leaders had already signaled after the November elections that there was no path forward for it. But Bernie Sanders instantly tweeted that he is “glad the Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead and gone.” And Trump declared as he made the withdrawal announcement that this was a “great thing for the American worker.” He didn’t mention that American consumers – aka “importers” – on the other hand would be “raped” (to use his own description for the ill-fated treaty).

Particularly hard hit will be low income households – you know those poor white working-class schlubs that this election was all about – who purchase foreign shoes and apparel at WalMart given that the agreement would have phased out U.S. tariffs most steeply on such items. But it will also affect manufacturers looking for cheap raw material, subverting Trump’s core goal of rebuilding American manufacturing, while also limiting their reach in overseas markets given that the deal would have immediately eliminated all tariffs on US non-agricultural goods, and almost all agricultural goods.

But that’s not the only Trump goal this move will subvert.

In classic mercantilist vein, Trump believes that exports are good because that means you are selling things and imports are bad because that means you are buying things, not understanding that the whole point of exports is to import just as the point of production is consumption. If we keep selling goods but don’t buy anything in return, what would be the point of earning all that money?

But even if exporting is Trump’s goal, the TPP would have slashed to zero 18,000 tariffs that the partner countries currently impose on US exports, Mercatus Center’s Dan Griswold has pointed out. Americans, especially farmers, would have gained tremendous access to overseas markets.

The most bizarre thing about Trump’s hostility to the TPP is that if it has a geo-political goal it is to balance China’s growing influence in the Pacific, exactly what Trump wants. The deal, which included, besides the United States, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Peru, pointedly left out China. Now China will cut its own deals with many of these countries with whom it already doesn’t have one, basically isolating the United States in the region. (Let me hasten to add, I am not by any means in favor of restoring the 1990s neo-conservative demonization of China when The Weekly Standard had made opposition to Most Favored Nation status and isolation of the Middle Kingdom its signature issue. I’m just trying to point out the internal contradictions in the new president’s policies.)

To be sure, the TPP, like most multi-lateral trade agreements, was long and cumbersome and far from perfect. Indeed, it favored more politically connected U.S. exporters who helped write the rules – precisely also what happened in the partner countries, as Reason contributor Veronique de Rugy notes. And it also tried to force all countries to hew to America’s intellectual property, environmental and other standards, basically raising the global cost of doing business. Hence, if Trump wanted to replace this 5,500-page treaty with simpler and shorter bilateral agreements with these countries, that would be one thing.

But Trump is doing the exact opposite. As part of his America First rhetoric, he is threatening to restore a 10 percent tariff on all foreign imports and impose an even bigger one on American companies that move operations overseas and then try and import goods back.

In short, he wants to build not just a physical wall around America but also a tariff wall, basically ending America’s decades-long championship of global free trade — not to mention mark a stunning turn for the Grand Old Party to the Grand Old Protectionist party.

That is a total shame and to hear more about why, view Todd Krainin’s interview with Cato Institute’s Dan Ikenson here.

Yes, it’s National School Choice Week and, as it happens, I recently recorded a podcast with Don Wettrick, a public-school teacher based in Indiana and the voice behind StartEDup, a weekly interview program that covers “where educators, innovators, and entrepreneurs connect.” It’s a wide-ranging conversation about the need for more variety in educational options for all kids, and more variety in life in general. We also get talking about what it means to be a small “L’ libertarian at a time when traditional conservatives and liberals are doubling and tripling down on the very madness that has left their ranks depleted.

It’s a rollicking, fun conversation, and you can listen along simply by clicking below:

Full website is here.

National School Choice Week, an annual event promoting the ability of parents and students to have greater options in K-12 education, runs from January 22 through January 28. Over 21,000 events involving almost 17,000 schools from all 50 states will take place over the coming days. Go here to get more information about events and data about how increasing school choice—charters, vouchers, educational savings accounts, and more—is one of the best ways to improve education for all Americans.

As a proud media sponsor of National School Choice Week, Reason will be publishing daily articles, podcasts, videos, interviews, and other coverage exploring the ways in which education is being radically altered and made better by letting more people have more choices when it comes to learning. For a constantly updated list of stories, go to Reason’s archive page on “school choice.”

Obscured amid the controversy over crowd size and the women’s march that followed was the substantive policy at the heart of President Trump’s inaugural address. That came in the language about “we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the people,” and is being followed up with a reported congressional initiative to turn Medicaid, the federal healthcare program for the poor, into “block grants to the states.”

States already exercise substantial discretion over Medicaid. And it may be that the proposed changes are an improvement over the current system. Local control puts decisionmakers closer to end-users, shortening the distance that information needs to travel, and making it easier to adjust programs to local circumstances, as Ira Stoll notes. But it’s worth remembering that there are some drawbacks, too. First of all, “block grant to the states” still often gives the politicians in Washington and their lobbyist hangers-on ample opportunity to play a role in directing the cash flow. At the state level, meanwhile, the “block grant” provides an opportunity for government spending unconnected to the act of revenue-raising. It’s practically free money, so the state and local officials want to spend as much of it as possible.

View this article.

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order freezing federal civilian workforce hiring. At a press conference today new White House press secretary Sean Spicer stated that the freeze was established because it “counters the dramatic expansion of the federal workforce in recent years.” Just one problem: There has not been a dramatic expansion in the federal workforce in recent years. According to the latest Office of Personnel Management, the number of federal civilian employees stands at around 2.7 million, just about where it was in 1966. In fact, civilian federal employment is down from its 1990 peak of just under 3.1 million. Relatively speaking this means that in 1966 there was 1 federal employee per 70 citizens and now there is 1 per 121 citizens.

It does bear noting that number of state and local government employees have increased 7.8 million in 1966 to 19.5 million today*; up from 1 per 24 citizens to 1 per 17 citizens today.

While federal government civilian employment has been essentially flat, it is interesting to consider the role of government contractors. Some have argued that lots of services provided by government contractors should actually be moved into the federal government to achieve greater efficiencies. Setting that argument aside, it is very hard to estimate the number of jobs that are supported by government contracts. A 2015 Congressional Budget Office report noted:

Regrettably, CBO is unaware of any comprehensive information about the size of the federal government’s contracted workforce. However, using a database of federal contracts, CBO determined that federal agencies spent over $500 billion for contracted products and services in 2012. Between 2000 and 2012, such spending grew more quickly than inflation and also grew as a percentage of total federal spending. The category of spending that grew the most in dollar terms was contracts for professional, administrative, and management services, and the category that grew the most in percentage terms was contracts for medical services.

So how many jobs might $500 billion create? By one very rough estimate, spending that amount would result in about 5 million jobs. Another study that tried to estimate the number of jobs created per billion dollars spent on infrastructure would boost that number to 11.5 million jobs. So notionally speaking, the federal civilian workforce including contracted employees would be, taking the lower estimate, somewhere around 7.7 million, or about 1 for every 42 citizens. Of course, the wages of contracted employees are not frozen.

Whatever the case for freezing federal employees wages, Spicer and the Trump administration have undermined it by offering up an “alternative fact” with regard to actual trends in the number of civilian federal government employment.

Guys, if you don’t want “the most dishonest people on earth” distracting the public from your messages, try harder to get, you know, the fact-facts right.

Disclosure: I was a federal government employee for about 3 years working as a medium-level staff economist for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission 1979-1981. Although it was fairly well paying, I hated my job so much I quit to go work for magazine for half the pay in New York City.

*Number calculated by substracting OPM federal employment numbers from the overall government employment numbers provided by the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

On his first Monday in office, Donald Trump signed executive orders instituting a hiring freeze for all federal government positions outside the military and reinstating a ban on international aid going to nonprofits that provide abortions or promote information on them, regardless of what other services they offer. The contentious abortion rule represents a back and forth that’s been taking place under Republican and Democratic administrations since the 1980s. Known as the “Mexico City Policy,” it was instituted under President Ronald Reagan, reversed by Bill Clinton, restored by George W. Bush, and again reversed by Barack Obama.

Not to be confused with the 1973 Helms Amendment, which bans groups from using U.S. government funds directly for abortion services abroad, the Mexico City Policy targets broader conduct, requiring that “as a condition of their receipt of federal funds,” groups must agree to “neither perform nor actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations.”

A diverse group of more than 100 public health, women’s issues, and civil liberties organizations have already issued a statement opposing the return of the Mexico City Policy, which they refer to as “the global gag rule.” “The global gag rule … interferes with the doctor-patient relationship by restricting medical information healthcare providers may offer, limits free speech by prohibiting local citizens from participating in public policy debates, and impedes women’s access to family planning by cutting off funding for many of the most experienced health care providers who chose to prioritize quality reproductive-health services and counseling over funding that restricts care and censors information,” it says. Groups endorsing the statement include the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Amnesty International USA, the National Organization for Women, the Alliance to End Slavery & Trafficking, the Unitarian Universalist Women’s Federation, the International Medical Corps, New York University’s Global Justice Clinic,and Human Rights Campaign.

The Mexico City Policy is one of several federal aid conditions that have been contingent on controversial social issues. Since 2003, the U.S. has banned groups that get grants to fight HIV/AIDs and/or human trafficking from supporting the decriminalization of prostitution. Referred to as the anti-prostitution pledge, the policy was proposed for anti-HIV groups as part of Bush’s “Emergency Plan for AIDs Relief,” passed by Congress in May 2003 as the “United States Leadership against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act.” It stipulated that no grant money could be used “to promote or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution or sex trafficking” nor to “provide assistance to any group or organization that does not have a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking.”

The anti-prostitution pledge was also part of the bipartisan 2003 reauthorization of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), which stated that no federal money “may be used to promote, support, or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution” and no funds “may be used to implement any program” by an organization that “has not stated in either a grant application, a grant agreement, or both, that it does not promote, support, or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution.”

Many public-health and human-rights groups opposed these policies on the grounds that decriminalizing prostitution is often supported as a means to stop the spread of sexually-transmitted infections and sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion. The pledge was initially applied only to foreign nonprofits, but in 2005 the Bush administration began applying it to U.S. groups, too.

In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the part of the pledge requiring anti-HIV/AIDs groups to explicitly denounce prostitution was unconstitutional as it violated the First Amendment. “This case … is about compelling a grant recipient to adopt a particular belief as a condition of funding,” wrote Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.. The problem with the second part of the rule was that it didn’t just put limits on “the activities Congress wants to subsidize” but sought “to leverage funding to regulate speech outside the contours of the program itself.”

Despite this ruling, the Obama administration continued to apply the anti-prostitution pledge to international groups, prompting another round of legal battles. These culminated in a 2015 Supeme Court case stipulating that the rule couldn’t be enforced domestically or internationally.

This year, U.S. Rep. Randy Hultgren (R-Illinois) is reintroducing previously failed legislation to insert a different sort of anti-prostitution pledge into federal law. Each year, the U.S. Department of State (DOS) issues a “Trafficking in Persons” report to assess how well other countries are doing at fighting sex and labor trafficking and uses these grades to assess which countries we will do which sorts of business with or bestow aid upon. Hultgren’s bill would require DOS to look at what countries are doing to end “demand” for prostitution more broadly—not just combat forced prostitution—via the implementation “serious and sustained efforts” to target commercial-sex clients and to criminalize the sex trade overall.

The measure, called the Sex Trafficking Demand Reduction Act, “affirms that if the government of a country has the authority to restrict or prohibit the purchase of commercial sex acts and fails to do so, it would be deemed a failure on the part of that government to make a serious and sustained effort to reduce the demand for commercial sex acts despite other efforts it may be undertaking to fight human trafficking.” It is co-sponsored by Democratic Reps. Chris Smith (New Jersey) and Carolyn Maloney (New York) and Republican Reps. Robert Pittenger (North Carolina), Alex Mooney (West Virginia), Brett Guthrie (Kentucky), and Tim Walberg (Michigan).