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Putin’s war economy ‘has grown weaker’ as West considers ‘zero trade option’ | Timothy Ash

Posted on by Lone Candle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXQlmpdydPY

American Steel Production Has Fallen to Pre-Tariff Levels

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Former President Donald Trump’s decision to impose huge new tariffs on imported steel came with an explicit promise about resurrecting the American steel industry.”

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“But nearly six years after those tariffs were announced, government data show that America’s annual steel output has fallen below the level recorded in 2017—the last full year before Trump’s tariffs were imposed.”

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“The USGS data show that Trump’s tariffs may have helped goose domestic steel production in the first few years after they were implemented. Production rose to 86.6 million metric tons in 2018 and 87.8 million metric tons in 2019, before cratering in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Production bounced back in 2021, as American steel mills produced 85.8 million metric tons of raw steel that year.
Those modest gains in the immediate aftermath of the tariffs seem to have faded away over the past two years—despite President Joe Biden’s unwillingness to remove the Trump tariffs, which have hammered steel-consuming industries and have added to inflation.

That pattern—a short-term boost in production followed by a decline later—is exactly what economists would expect to happen after tariffs are imposed, wrote Ed Gresser, a former assistant U.S. trade representative and vice president and director for trade and global markets at the Progressive Policy Institute.

Gresser noted that large new tariffs typically create a four-stage chain of events: First, an increase in prices; then, a shift toward domestic production as buyers try to avoid paying the new tax; next, a decline in consumption by domestic industries that consume the tariffed product as they fall behind competitors elsewhere in the world; and finally, that decline in domestic demand rebounds onto the protected producers who see fewer orders for their products—in this case, steel.”

https://reason.com/2024/02/29/american-steel-production-has-fallen-to-pre-tariff-levels/

The Myth of the Migrant Crime Wave

Posted on by Lone Candle

“There’s no question that some undocumented immigrants have committed heinous crimes. But there are many reasons to be doubtful that recent incidents are evidence of a surging migrant crime wave.
For one, crime is down in the cities that received the most migrants as a result of Texas’ busing operations under Operation Lone Star, per an NBC News analysis. “Overall crime is down year over year in Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, New York and Los Angeles,” NBC News reported.

David J. Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, echoes that finding. “We don’t have real-time data, but the partial crime data that exist for this year show consistent declines in major crimes in major cities,” he says. “The most significant crime spike in recent years occurred in 2020—when illegal immigration was historically low until the end of the year.”

“National crime data, especially pertaining to undocumented immigrants, is notoriously incomplete,” since it “comes in piecemeal and can only be evaluated holistically when the annual data is released,” cautions NBC News. What’s more, “most local police don’t record immigration status when they make arrests.”

However, several analyses conducted at both the state and federal levels find that immigrants—including undocumented ones—are less crime-prone than native-born Americans. Looking at “two decades of research on immigration and crime,” criminologists Graham Ousey and Charis Kubrin found that “communities with more immigration tend to have less crime, especially violent crimes like homicide,” wrote The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler. A 2015 Migration Policy Institute report indicated that undocumented immigrants have a lower rate of felony convictions than the overall U.S. population does.

The Cato Institute’s “research has consistently shown that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes and less likely to end up incarcerated than natives,” Bier continues. An article this week by Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, indicated that illegal immigrants have a lower homicide conviction rate in Texas than native-born Americans do, while legal immigrants have a lower conviction rate than both groups.”

https://reason.com/2024/03/01/the-myth-of-the-migrant-crime-wave/

Israeli Civilian Harm Mitigation in Gaza: Gold Standard or Fool’s Gold?

Posted on by Lone Candle

“This gives us a minimum number of civilian war deaths of approximately 15,700. Based on 29,000 airstrikes, this leads to an average of 54 civilians killed per 100 attacks.
How does this compare to other operations? A roughly comparable operation where we have similar data is urban operations in Raqqa, Syria, against the Islamic State. In the Raqqa operation, according to DOD reporting, there were 178 civilian deaths and 10,663 airstrikes—an average of 1.7 civilian deaths per 100 attacks. This number for Raqqa was not considered to be good—never mind a gold standard. In fact, there was so much concern about the levels of civilian harm and destruction in Raqqa that DOD conducted an independent assessment of civilian harm (disclaimer: I was a member of the team that authored the report). The findings of this assessment contributed to the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan (CHMR-AP) directed by U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. In the report, we also mention that this DoD estimate is likely low. For example, our study team considered the Airwars estimate of 744 civilian deaths to be more realistic. This yields a higher average of 7.0 civilian deaths per 100 attacks.

Despite the alarm over the high rate of civilian deaths in Raqqa, one finds the minimum equivalent in Gaza—54 civilians killed in 100 attacks—is eight times greater than the Airwars-based estimate and 32 times greater than the DOD estimate. And recall that 54 is a lower bound for the Gaza ratio; it is likely far higher than this. Just as miners in California could see the appearance of iron pyrite—fool’s gold—and think they had struck the real thing, it is possible to look at the IDF’s precautionary measures and at first glance think they are practicing civilian harm mitigation. But whether evaluating the IDF’s performance on its process or its results, it fails to qualify as a gold standard.”

https://www.justsecurity.org/93105/israeli-civilian-harm-mitigation-in-gaza-gold-standard-or-fools-gold/

Everything Is Getting Bigger in Texas

Posted on by Lone Candle

“This problem is so big, there’s not enough money to buy your way out. Some policymakers try to do demand-side incentives to buy off mortgages or supplement rent. If you don’t increase supply, those demand-side incentives have unintended consequences that actually make the problem worse.”

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“A major way that Texas has kept prices down is through building gobs of new housing. Lone Star State jurisdictions collectively permitted about twice the number of new homes that California did last year, despite the state having around 8 million fewer residents.
Data culled by the Financial Times shows that the difference in per capita building is even more pronounced when one compares cities like Austin and Houston to San Francisco, which is in turn reflected in prices. Median home prices in Houston are a quarter of what they are in San Francisco.

The state has some of the most affordable housing of all the booming sunbelt states (save North Carolina) and is more affordable on average than the U.S. as a whole.”

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“Part of Texas’ housing success is its uninteresting geography that Glock alluded to—lots of flat, dry land around its major cities that’s ideal for building new exurban subdivisions.

“A couple of the metros might have some physical constraints, but not really,” says Jacob Wegman, an associate professor at the University of Texas Austin’s School of Architecture. It’s “nothing compared to the California coastal metros or the Northeastern metros with their harbors. That’s got to be part of the story.””

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“Texas’ policies also put no real regulatory obstacles in front of new suburban housing either. The state’s counties, for instance, can’t adopt zoning laws. That means housing is allowed on all unincorporated land.

High-cost, low-growth California and New York both have environmental laws that require endless studies on new development, and which give third parties the right to sue over new housing approvals. The result is new subdivisions can take half a century to approve.

Texas, in contrast, has no such laws.

“There’s just no real mechanism for neighbors who don’t want greenfield development to happen to stop it in any meaningful way,” says Wegman. “That’s got to be a big, big part of the story.””

https://reason.com/2024/03/05/everything-is-getting-bigger-in-texas/

The Political Sabotage of Nuclear Power

Posted on by Lone Candle

“According to Dawson, nuclear power is “the most scalable, reliable, efficient, land-conserving, material-sparing, zero-emission source of energy ever created.” Wind and solar aren’t as reliable because they depend on intermittent weather. They also require much more land than nuclear plants, which use about 1 percent of what solar farms need and 0.3 percent of what wind farms require to yield the same amount of energy.
The economics of nuclear power are undoubtedly challenging, but its advocates say that’s primarily because of its thorny politics. The headache of building a new power plant is vividly exemplified by Georgia’s Plant Vogtle. The first U.S. reactor built from scratch since 1974, the project turned into a nightmare scenario: It took almost 17 years from when the first permit was filed for construction to begin, it cost more than $28 billion, and it bankrupted the developer in the process.

Nuclear regulation is “based on politics and fear-mongering and a lack of understanding,” explains Indian Point’s vice president, Frank Spagnuolo. If they aren’t shut down, he says, power plants such as Indian Point could safely continue to provide clean energy for decades. ”

https://reason.com/video/2024/03/05/the-political-sabotage-of-nuclear-power/