“After rejiggering its speed cameras to fine any car caught traveling as little as 6 mph over the posted speed limit, the city of Chicago collected record-breaking levels of revenue last year.
Chicago’s army of 160 speed cameras issued more than 2.81 million tickets last year and collected $89 million in revenue from motorists, according to data from the Chicago Department of Finance published this week by the Illinois Policy Institute, a free market think tank. That’s more tickets than there are residents of the city, and translates to one ticket issued every 11 seconds during the entire year.
Those numbers shatter the city’s previous speed camera ticket and revenue totals, likely due to the fact that Mayor Lori Lightfoot in March 2021 ordered the cameras to start targeting slower drivers. Previously, the speed cameras had been programmed to issue tickets and $100 fines to drivers going more than 10 mph over the speed limit. Those fines remain in place, but the city’s cameras now also issue $35 fines to drivers going between 6 and 10 mph over the speed limit.
Those $35 tickets accounted for more than two-thirds of the tickets issued by Chicago’s cameras during 2021, according to the Department of Finance data.
Lightfoot and other advocates of the speed cameras argue that they make Chicago’s streets safer by discouraging high-speed driving, but the Illinois Policy Institute points out that more people died in car accidents in the city during 2021 than in 2020 or 2019.
“The safety argument seems weak in light of the various studies and increase in accident deaths, especially when the cameras are generating so much money for a city with massive pension debt and spending it can’t seem to control,” writes Patrick Andriesen, a staff writer at the institute. “Speed cameras might be more accurately called cash cams.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the poorest parts of Chicago are where most of the city’s cameras are located and, as a result, are hardest hit by the fines. Andriesen points out that nearly half the tickets issued to drivers in low-income neighborhoods were not paid on time; with late fees, those $35 tickets for barely speeding become $85 tickets.”
“Value grocery chain Smart & Final has agreed to pay California $175,000 because, between March and June 2020, it increased the price of four different types of eggs during a period in which stores were struggling to keep their shelves stocked.
This was in the early days of the pandemic, when Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency. That declaration triggered California’s “price-gouging” law, which says that businesses cannot raise prices by more than 10 percent during state emergencies unless they can prove the price increase is due to increased production or labor costs. According to Attorney General Rob Bonta, Smart & Final raised prices for some eggs by as much as 25 percent.
The Los Angeles Times notes that Smart & Final did have a reason for raising the prices—suppliers were also jacking up prices of eggs. But apparently Smart & Final acknowledged that suppliers were raising the prices of “standard” eggs, and that the chain commensurately raised the price of “premium” eggs.
Laws against price-gouging are bad, wrong, and counter-productive, and Bonta’s own observations about this case, quoted by the Times, explain why. He notes that, “When California first went into lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a run on essential supplies, and unfortunately, some businesses saw this as an opportunity to pad their bottom line.”
“While these were premium products, remember that during this time, shelves were often bare, there weren’t a lot of choices. Consumers had few, if any options.”
This is an economically illiterate grasp of why stores jack up prices in a crisis situation. The “run on essential supplies” caused absurd amounts of hoarding and over-purchasing, which many customers were able to do largely because stores were prohibited from raising prices. That sharp increase in demand travels up the supply chain, ultimately leading to some combination of empty shelves and higher prices as suppliers ramp up production.
Price-gouging laws simply attempt to legislate away basic economics at the retail point, and the end result is reasonable prices for goods that are seldom or never available. It doesn’t matter how much eggs cost when a supermarket doesn’t have any in stock. If people actually had to pay more for goods in an emergency situation, they’d be more careful about what they bought and we wouldn’t have had people pushing entire carts of toilet paper out of the grocery stores (and then attempting to resell them online).
The way Bonta describes the store’s situation is that people were buying the more expensive premium eggs due to shortages of the standard eggs. The same demand issues were most certainly going to come into play if people continued to purchase the premium eggs at the same rate they purchased the standard eggs.”
“While these incidents supposedly underline the need for gun control, they simultaneously cast doubt on that argument, since California already has the strictest gun laws in the country.”
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“California does have a relatively low rate of gun-related deaths: the seventh-lowest in the country, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its ranking is less impressive, however, when you focus on firearm homicides, which is what Everytown for Gun Safety ostensibly is talking about in this context. Based on data from 2010 through 2017, California’s gun homicide rate was middling: lower than the rates in 24 states but higher than the rates in 25 states, including many with looser gun laws.
If you want to make the case that California’s firearm restrictions have resulted in fewer homicides than otherwise would have occurred, you need to look at what happened after those laws were passed and compare it to what happened in otherwise similar places that did not enact such laws. The observation that “California continues to have one of the lowest rates of gun violence in the country” (if you include suicides) as legislators pass one gun law after another hardly shows those laws are working as advertised.”
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“The converted handgun that police recovered after the shooting was stolen, which is not the sort of transfer that would be affected even by perfect compliance with a law requiring “background checks on all gun sales.” According to a 2019 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, just 10 percent of guns used in crimes were obtained from a “retail source” such as a gun store, a pawn shop, a flea market, or a gun show. Nine out of 10 were obtained from informal sources, including friends or relatives, the “underground market,” and theft.
It makes sense that criminals would prefer such sources, especially if they have felony records that disqualify them from legally possessing firearms.”
“Three Republicans voted to confirm Jackson: Romney, and Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine. Of those three, only Romney voted last year against confirming Jackson to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, often considered the second-highest court in the land.
After meeting with Jackson last month and reviewing her confirmation hearings, Romney changed his mind, saying he had “concluded that she is a well-qualified jurist and a person of honor.” It was an implicit rejection of the narrative that his fellow Republicans had pushed about the first Black woman to be put forward for the Supreme Court, who many of them portrayed during her confirmation hearings as a liberal extremist who was soft on crime.
“While I do not expect to agree with every decision she may make on the court, I believe that she more than meets the standard of excellence and integrity,” Romney said in a statement this week.
He is, at the moment, seemingly in the middle of everything. He just brokered a bipartisan deal to salvage a $10 billion coronavirus response package that had stalled amid partisan haggling, this time fully paid for by previously allocated federal funds. He is part of bipartisan efforts to rewrite the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which President Donald Trump sought to manipulate to keep himself in office after losing the 2020 election.
And Romney has appealed to Democrats to work with him on legislation to support children and families, now that the expanded child tax credit has expired and President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better safety net legislation is moribund. All of that is coming after he helped deliver what might be the crowning achievement of Biden’s first year in office: the $1 trillion infrastructure bill.
As Democrats have struggled to pull together 50 senators to advance social safety net legislation, they may find that Romney is a more persuadable bet for that pivotal 50th vote than Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the Democrat who has stymied their efforts so far.
“Whenever there is a bipartisan effort to tackle an issue, its success is nearly guaranteed,” Romney said in a recent interview. “Bipartisan efforts pass. What does not pass in a 50-50 Senate is legislation crafted entirely by one party.””
“The fact that the BAA is allowing residents from other countries whose governments have committed similar sins of aggressive war and mass civilian killings to participate in the marathon shows that it’s not indeed acting on some universal revulsion at government atrocities. Instead, its decision appears to be knee-jerk discrimination against the most visible war occurring right now. It’s hard to treat that as a particularly noble stance.
Of course, trying to exclude every athlete from a country with a nasty government would be a near-impossible task for the BAA. Even if it were feasible to have a consistent policy on when to exclude particular nationalities, that would hardly be desirable for the association. The marathon would become increasingly less inclusive and lose its international recognition. It may even lose its domestic participants. Perhaps, U.S. runners should have been prevented from competing in the 2003 Boston Marathon because of their government’s invasion of Iraq?
The world isn’t made a better place by treating individual athletes as appendages of their governments and sporting events as perpetuations of war and politics.
Particularly during these times of conflict and war, we want international events where people can compete or collaborate peacefully. Excluding Russians from the Boston Marathon just moves us further in the wrong direction.”
“Police in Rochester, New York, seized $8,040 from Cristal Starling during a raid on her apartment in October 2020. Starling was never charged with a crime, but she may never see her money again due to missing a court deadline during the complicated process of challenging the seizure.
Starling’s apartment was one of two locations Rochester police hit while investigating her former boyfriend, who was suspected of dealing drugs. The police didn’t find any drugs in the apartment, but they did find and take Starling’s cash. Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police can seize property suspected of being connected to criminal activity. (Starling’s ex-boyfriend was arrested for drugs found at a separate raid in the same investigation, but he was later acquitted.)
Starling, who runs a food cart and says she was saving up for a food truck, began trying to fight the seizure without a lawyer. She managed to get her seized car back, and she thought that, with no criminal charges pending in the case anymore, she would no doubt soon get her cash back, too.
Instead, she got a nasty surprise. The Rochester Police Department had sent her money to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and although she had filed a notice with the Justice Department that she was challenging the forfeiture, she had missed a deadline to do so in federal court, meaning the government could move to forfeit her money by default.
After a judge rejected Starling’s request for an extended deadline, the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm, announced this week that it will file an appeal on her behalf, arguing that people like Starling should have greater opportunity to challenge government seizures.”
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“What Starling has learned the hard way is that asset forfeiture laws not only allow police to seize one’s property without an accompanying criminal charge, but that the process to challenge a seizure is tilted in favor of the government. It’s extremely hard for everyday people to navigate the labyrinthine process to get their money back without paying for an attorney, which in Starling’s case would have probably cost enough to make a victory in court negligible.”