“Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) has reportedly brokered a deal with Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) to pass a slimmed-down version of President Joe Biden’s spending plan—now to be marketed as an attempt to curb inflation.”
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“The bill will include $370 billion in new spending on climate change initiatives and green energy projects—a linchpin of Biden’s Build Back Better plan through its many, many interactions over the past year—and would dedicate about $300 billion of revenue toward reducing the deficit, which has been Manchin’s top priority.
The bill also reportedly includes a three-year extension of the expanded Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies originally passed as a temporary measure during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as changes to how federal health insurance programs price prescription drugs. Though pitched as a way to cut costs for households, the extension of those ACA subsidies could actually worsen inflation, as Reason’s Peter Suderman has explained.
The spending and deficit-reduction items will be funded with a series of proposed tax increases. Politico reports that the bill would impose a 15 percent corporate minimum tax, expand the IRS’ enforcement division (a questionable means for generating revenue, it should be noted), and close a commonly used business tax break for carried interest. The tax changes would generate about $739 billion over the next decade, according to The Washington Post.”
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“For today, at least, Joe Manchin seems to have gotten his way.”
“Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s main formal claim to Sweden and Finland was their loyalty to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is recognized in Turkey as a terrorist organization, as well as to the “Gulenists” – Ankara has been raiding for many years those it considers followers of the preacher Fethullah Gulen and accuses them of organizing a coup attempt in 2016. About 100,000 Kurdish refugees have found refuge in Sweden.”
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“Clarifying the wording of the compromise memorandum between the three countries, UK newspaper the Guardian noted that Finland and Sweden have promised not to “support” the Kurdish Democratic Union (PYD) and the Kurdish People’s Self-Defense Forces (YPG). And according to the Turkish pro-government daily newspaper the Daily Sabah, the memorandum also states that “Finland and Sweden commit to preventing activities of the PKK and all other terrorist organizations and their extensions, as well as activities by individuals in affiliated and inspired groups or networks linked to these terrorist organizations.””
“In theory, voting machines are already offline, even air-gapped. In practice, however, “many polling places around the country transmit voting results to their county election offices via modems embedded in or connected to their voting machines,” The New York Times reported in 2018, and that’s a point of internet access. Independent investigators in 2019 said they found “nearly three dozen backend election systems in 10 states connected to the internet,” including systems in swing states Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida—just a “few” weak points. The nonpartisan National Election Defense Coalition says the “assertion that voting machines or voting systems can’t be hacked by remote attackers because they are ‘not connected to the internet'” is a “myth” and has called for results to be transmitted by offline methods, like USB sticks.
That sort of tool would work because the proposal here isn’t that we return to paper ballots in a wooden box or hand-written voter rolls. Paper and the trail it leaves have an important place in electoral security, but I’m not suggesting a completely nondigital approach. We can still have machines as the main counting mechanism, a useful timesaver in uncontested races. Likewise, election authorities can continue to manage voter databases with computers.
Think 1990, not 1890—there’s no need to go full Luddite. But we should disconnect our voting processes from the internet where it’s feasible. We already know online voting is insecure, and given the detrimental effects even small hacks could have on Americans’ confidence in our election outcomes, we’d be wise to harden electoral targets against digital attacks.”
“Biden administration officials are now working to undo some of the harmful legal policies put in place by Trump-era attorneys general—less visible than controversial measures like the border wall and family separation, but nonetheless damaging to due process and punitive toward the people who seek asylum on American soil. Last June, Attorney General Merrick Garland scrapped rules that made it difficult for victims of domestic violence or gang violence, as well as family members of threatened individuals, to qualify for asylum.”
“Rising rents are a very real phenomenon driven by a mismatch in many cities between the number of homes that are being built and the number of people who would like to live in them. The wedge between supply and demand is created by cities’ elaborate zoning codes, price regulations, and permitting processes that all combine to reduce housing availability and raise prices.
It should be no surprise that rents are high when a majority of land in major cities is off-limits to new development, it takes years to approve whatever new housing is allowed, and some of those new units have to be given away at below-market rates.
The details of these restrictions are a wonky topic, to be sure. One expects only so much depth or insight from a comedic explanation of it all. But even allowing for that handicap, Oliver’s treatment of the housing supply issue proves to be superficial, brief, and confused.
Oliver either misunderstands or fails to explore the link between government regulation, housing supply, and housing market outcomes. His perfunctory explanation of it serves only as a brief prelude to his attack on the real villains in his story: greedy private landlords with carte blanche to raise rents and evict tenants.
The solutions he puts forward, therefore, have little to do with eliminating needless, harmful regulatory barriers to new supply. Instead, he calls for legally constraining landlords’ ability to raise rents and evict tenants and declaring housing a federally funded, government-provided right.”
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“building new housing, even high-end housing, improves affordability for everyone by absorbing the demand of high-income renters, who are no longer bidding up the costs of older, naturally cheaper housing units. A growing body of empirical research shows this is a fact, not a free market fantasy.”
At surface level, zoning is an impossibly boring topic, even by the terms of public policy debate. The mere thought of a weeknight zoning hearing or a 700-page zoning ordinance is enough to make even the most enthusiastic policy wonk’s eyes glaze over. Until recently, zoning might have been blithely dismissed as a mere technical matter, simply a way of rationalizing our cities, a planning policy so obvious as to be beyond reproach.
But zoning is at once so much less and so much more. While occasionally used as a stand-in for city planning or building regulations more broadly, its scope is far more limited: At a basic level, all zoning does is segregate land uses and regulate densities. Your local zoning ordinance sets out various districts, each with detailed land use and density rules, while an associated local zoning map establishes where these rules apply. The bread and butter of what most people think of as city planning—such as street planning or building regulations—has almost nothing to do with zoning.
Yet from these seemingly innocuous zoning rules have emerged a set of endlessly detailed parameters controlling virtually every facet of American life. Arbitrary lines on zoning maps determine where you can live by way of allowing housing to be built here but not there. Through a dizzying array of confusing and pseudoscientific rules, from “floor area ratio” restrictions to setback mandates, zoning serves to heavily restrict the amount of housing that may be built in any given neighborhood and the form it may take. In most major cities, zoning restricts roughly three-quarters of the city to low-slung, single-family housing, banning apartments altogether.
The combined effect is that, in already built-out cities, zoning makes it prohibitively difficult to build more housing. As a result of the further tightening of zoning restrictions beginning in the 1970s, median housing prices have dramatically outpaced median incomes in many parts of the country over the past half-century, such that millions of Americans now struggle to make rent or pay their mortgage each month. That is if they have the luxury of having a stable home at all: In places where demand for new housing is especially high—as in cities like New York and Los Angeles—zoning restrictions have facilitated acute housing shortages, with attendant surges in displacement and homelessness. The COVID-19 pandemic has only expedited these trends, with home prices in 2020 rising at the fastest rate since 1979.
The arbitrary restrictions that zoning places on cities also show up in our capacity to grow and innovate as a nation. By severely limiting new housing production in a handful of our most productive cities—including San Jose and Boston—we have made moving to our most prosperous regions a dubious proposition. Your income might double if you were to move from Orlando to San Francisco, but your housing costs would quadruple. Should we be surprised that many people are turning down that deal? For the first time in history, Americans are systematically moving from high-productivity cities to low-productivity cities, in no small part because these are the only places where zoning allows housing to be built. According to the 2020 census, the population of California—one of our most productive and innovative states—is now basically stagnant, such that the Golden State will be losing a congressional seat for the first time in its 170-year history.
The downstream economic implications of this unprecedented reversal of historic trends are hard to overstate. After all, big cities make us more productive, in that they allow us to find a job perfectly suited to our talents and exchange ideas with colleagues working on the same issues. They provide a platform for individuals to experiment and innovate, nursing the young firms that go on to remake the American economy every few decades. To the extent that zoning has made it exponentially more difficult for Americans to move to these hubs of activity—for a software engineer to relocate to San Jose or for a medical researcher to relocate to Boston—we are all poorer as a result.”
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“zoning makes more environmentally friendly forms of urban growth effectively illegal. By banning developers from building up, zoning forces them to build out.”
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“zoning assumes universal car ownership and all the emissions and traffic violence this entails.”
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“zoning isn’t merely a good policy misapplied toward selfish ends. Zoning is a fundamentally flawed policy that deserves to be abolished. Set aside for a moment the debilitating local housing shortages, the stunted growth and innovation, the persistent racial and economic segregation, and the ever-expanding sprawl: The very concept of zoning—the idea that state planners can rationally separate land uses and efficiently allocate density—has repeatedly failed to materialize. Far from the fantastical device imagined by early 20th-century planners, zoning today has little to do with managing traditional externalities and works largely untethered from any guiding comprehensive plan.”
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“Cities found ways to separate noxious uses and manage growth for thousands of years before the arrival of zoning, and they can do the same after zoning. Indeed, some American cities—including Houston, America’s fourth-largest city—already make land use planning work without zoning. To the extent that zoning has failed to address even our most basic concerns about urban growth over the past century, it’s incumbent on our generation to rekindle this lost wisdom and undertake the project of building out a new way of planning the American city.”
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“the fact that zoning is only now turning 100 might speak to the fact that we shouldn’t take it for granted. A 100th anniversary is as good a time as any for a reevaluation”
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“Zoning is not only ineffective in achieving its stated goals—it’s also unnecessary. In our focus on drawing district boundaries or listing out permitted uses, we have lost touch with the innumerable ways that cities organize themselves, from the natural use separation helped along by land markets to the bottom-up agreements formed by neighbors. Where these institutions fail, a robust set of impact regulations for new development and a civil service committed to managing—rather than stalling—growth would do a far better job than zoning at keeping neighbors happy and quality of life up. Now is the time to rediscover these lost traditions and start planning for what comes after zoning.”
“Though Biden appears willing to overlook Khashoggi’s death in order to shore up America’s access to Saudi oil, he is at least on record as explicitly having condemned that murder. At a November 2019 primary debate, Biden said he would “make [Saudi Arabia] the pariah that they are” and stop arms sales to the Middle Eastern nation. A month after Biden took office, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines released a government report confirming that the Crown Prince directed the assassination. The administration also delayed most weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, in light of its continued involvement in Yemen’s brutal civil war.”
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“For many Middle East analysts, Biden’s trip signals pragmatism. “A successful foreign policy for a global power such as the US cannot choose values over interests,” wrote Council of Foreign Relations president Richard Haass in a recent article. “What the Biden administration is contemplating in Saudi Arabia appears to be righting the balance.””