“Fuel taxes paid by motorists are collected in the federal Highway Trust Fund, which is then spent building and maintaining the roads and bridges those same drivers use. The federal gas taxes, excluding the tax on diesel, make up about 60 percent of tax revenue dedicated to the Highway Trust Fund.
Fairness demands charging drivers for the roads. The only alternative would be to require nonmotorists to subsidize driving infrastructure for them.
A user fee-like fuel tax also keeps road spending in line with demand for roads. It’s harder to fund bridges to nowhere if people’s fuel consumption, and the taxes they pay on it, aren’t generating enough revenue for new projects.
Suspending the gas tax, therefore, makes road spending less fair and less efficient. It would also be fiscally costly. Road construction and maintenance don’t become free just because gas prices are high. Suspending the gas tax only gives road users a break from paying for it.”
“the Supreme Court partially opted to dismantle Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics—its 1971 decision that allowed a man to sue federal officers who searched his home without a warrant and then strip-searched him at a courthouse—not by hearing a case and deciding on the merits but by refusing to do that.
The justices announced..51 years after the Court handed down Bivens—that they would decline to consider two major petitions. In the first, St. Paul Police Department Officer Heather Weyker, who was serving on a federal task force, conjured a fake sex-trafficking ring and jailed a teenage girl for two years on trumped-up charges. In the second, Department of Homeland Security Agent Ray Lamb allegedly tried to kill a man who had a personal beef with Lamb’s son; video appears to show Lamb attempting to pull the trigger of his gun, though it jammed.
Federal courts in both cases agreed with what may sound intuitive: Both Weyker and Lamb violated clearly established law. They are thus not protected by qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that can make it difficult to sue local and state actors when they violate the Constitution. But because they were working for the federal government, they are protected by absolute immunity, the courts said, and their victims—Hamdi Mohamud and Kevin Byrd, respectively—may not sue them for disgracing their positions.”
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“By demurring at hearing those cases, the Supreme Court has upheld the decisions giving both officers absolute immunity for committing transgressions while policing domestically. “Today’s rulings are basically saying that you can never sue federal officials, period,” notes Bidwell.”
“The federal government prosecuted Merle Denezpi twice for the same crime. It also punished him twice: the first time with 140 days in a federal detention center, the second time with a prison sentence more than 70 times as long.
Although that may seem like an obvious violation of the Fifth Amendment’s ban on double jeopardy, the Supreme Court..ruled that it wasn’t. As the six justices in the majority saw it, that puzzling conclusion was the logical result of the Court’s counterintuitive precedents on this subject.
The Fifth Amendment says no person will “be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.” But under the Court’s longstanding “dual-sovereignty” doctrine, an offense is not “the same” when it is criminalized by two different governments.
That doctrine allows serial state and federal prosecutions for the same crime, opening the door to double punishment or a second trial after an acquittal. Although neither seems just, the Court says both are perfectly constitutional.”
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“Gorsuch, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, dissented…Even the “colossal exception” created by the dual-sovereignty doctrine, he said, is not big enough to encompass the two cases against Denezpi, both of which were pursued by the federal government under federal law.
In 2017, Denezpi and a woman identified as V.Y. in court papers, both members of the Navajo Nation, traveled to Towaoc, Colorado, a town within the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation where Denezpi’s girlfriend lived. V.Y. alleged that Denezpi sexually assaulted her during the trip, while he maintained that the encounter was consensual.
After federal officials charged Denezpi with three crimes, he pleaded no contest to assault and battery, which is defined by tribal law but also punishable under the Code of Federal Regulations by up to six months in jail. A Court of Indian Offenses, part of a system established by the Department of the Interior, sentenced Denezpi to time served: 140 days.
Accepting V.Y.’s allegations as true, most people would view that penalty as excessively lenient, and federal prosecutors in Colorado evidently agreed. Six months after Denezpi completed his Interior Department sentence, the Justice Department charged him with aggravated sexual abuse, which resulted in a 30-year federal prison term.”
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“Six justices nevertheless approved the second prosecution, tracing the authority for the first conviction to a distinct “sovereign”: the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. But as Gorsuch notes, the first prosecution was not based on tribal law per se; it was based on a federal regulation that criminalizes “violation of an approved tribal ordinance.”
Although the two convictions involved the “same defendant,” the “same crime,” and the “same prosecuting authority,” Gorsuch observes, the Court implausibly concluded that “the Double Jeopardy Clause has nothing to say about this case.” Such reasoning amplifies the danger that Gorsuch decried in 2019, inviting the government to “try the same individual for the same crime until it’s happy with the result.””
“the administration revealed plans to require cigarette makers to severely cut the amount of nicotine in their products. A proposed rule change “would establish a maximum nicotine level in cigarettes and certain finished tobacco products.” The idea, it says, is to make cigarettes less addictive.
Nicotine is the substance in cigarettes that makes them physically addictive. But nicotine itself isn’t what makes cigarettes so dangerous. (Some scientists “wonder if a daily dose could be as benign as the caffeine many of us get from a morning coffee,” notes Scientific American.) It’s the other ingredients in cigarettes, and the byproducts of combustion, that make smoking cigarettes so bad for you.
This is one reason why the war on vaping is so stupid, and also speaks to the half-baked premises of the Biden administration’s latest anti-smoking plan.
In a world with lower-nicotine cigarettes, people already addicted to nicotine will still be addicted—they’ll just have to smoke more cigarettes to get their nicotine fix. That means that mandating all U.S. cigarettes be low-nicotine cigarettes could actually make smoking riskier by requiring smokers to smoke more and consume more of the other substances in cigarettes in order to get the same level of nicotine they’re used to.”
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“If the U.S. goes all low-nicotine smokes, other countries will still be producing full-nicotine cigarettes. And this opens up a great opportunity for smuggling and black market sales of higher nicotine cigarettes.
A bigger black market in cigarettes means three things, none of them good. First, it creates more room for organized crime to operate. Second, it creates more room for counterfeit cigarettes that could be even more dangerous for consumers. And third, it invites more policing of cigarette sales, which means more police time wasted on victimless crimes, more monitoring and harassment of business owners, and more potentially dangerous interactions between individuals and police.”
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“lowering nicotine could also backfire by convincing some smokers that their habit is harmless.”
“After nearly two years of review, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is preparing to deny Juul’s application to keep its tobacco- and menthol-flavored vaping products on the market, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. The news is surprising; when compared to competitors’ applications, Juul’s was one of the most detailed and data-heavy, showing just how effective it was at transitioning smokers away from cigarettes, toward a safer alternative.”
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“But what appeared to be a classic Silicon Valley success story soon became a victim of an intensely ideological war on nicotine. Unfortunately, Juul also for a time became the most popular product among minors who were experimenting with vaping. Youth vaping rates rose substantially. Current e-cigarette use, defined as taking a puff or more in the past 30 days, jumped from 11.7 percent in 2017 to 27.5 percent in 2019.
Juul was squarely blamed for the rise of youth vaping, with critics pointing to its initial marketing campaigns showing people in their early twenties enjoying the product. Critics alleged that flavors like mango and cucumber were especially appealing to the younger demographic. But what they forget is that in late 2016, the company switched to exclusively using models who are 35 or older in their advertising campaigns, as well as only using real customers who have switched from smoking to vaping. What anti-vaping campaigners also ignore is that the vast majority of adult vapers quit smoking using sweet or fruity flavors; such products are not just desired by teens.
The claim that Juul’s flavors were the underlying cause for the rise in youth vaping is highly dubious, considering there were thousands of different flavors for other e-cigarettes on the market years before Juul took off. Surveys of teenagers by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that just 13.2 percent of young people who use e-cigarettes say they do so for the flavors. Experimentation with e-cigarettes mimics other behaviors like alcohol and illicit drug use, often with the same populations engaging in these types of activities. But to appease critics, Juul voluntarily removed all flavors other than tobacco and menthol from the market in 2019.”
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“In 2020, the Cochrane Review, widely considered the gold standard for evaluating evidence-based medicine, concluded that e-cigarettes are more effective than traditional nicotine replacement therapies for helping smokers quit. By banning the most effective and popular e-cigarette on the market, there is no doubt that the FDA’s choice will force a portion of current Juul users to go back to smoking, and an unknown number of smokers to never make the healthier switch to vaping. What economist Alex Tabarrok calls the FDA’s “invisible graveyard” just got a whole lot bigger.”
“Inflation isn’t getting much better: Consumer prices surged again in June, reaching a new four-decade high as many Americans are already feeling frustrated with higher costs denting their budgets.
The US Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measures the change in prices for goods and services, rose 9.1 percent from a year earlier and 1.3 percent from May, according to Labor Department data released on Wednesday.
The new numbers mean the Federal Reserve is likely to continue aggressively raising interest rates, making it more expensive to borrow money in the hope that Americans will spend less. The jump in inflation is bad news for President Joe Biden, whose approval ratings are stubbornly low. And although gas prices have started to drop in recent weeks, economists and forecasters warn that the situation might not significantly improve for some time, making it harder for people to afford essentials like housing and groceries.”
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“Nearly everything grew more expensive, but the price gains were mainly fueled by an increase in energy, food, and shelter costs, which have been climbing for months amid supply chain disruptions and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Energy prices drove most of the gains, with gas prices up 11.2 percent in June from the month before. Food prices increased 1 percent as consumers paid more for cereal, dairy products, fruits and vegetables, and other items at the grocery store.
Core prices, which exclude volatile food and energy costs, rose an uncomfortably high 0.7 percent from May to June, a slightly bigger increase compared to the month before, when core prices jumped 0.6 percent.”
“The median home value in San Francisco in 2022 is above $1.5 million, according to the Zillow Home Value Index, which shows home values rising by more than 10 percent in the past year alone. In nearby San Jose, Redfin reports a median home price of $1.45 million—but home values have risen by a staggering 24 percent in the last year. Today’s Bay Area is simply unaffordable for most people, in part because California regulations hinder new construction and in part because natural geographical constraints reduce the total amount of buildable space; San Francisco has a huge housing supply shortage that shows no signs of being remedied soon.
Pair this with complaints that the city has failed to handle its homelessness problem, leading to open-air drug scenes and massive tent encampments in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin. One in every 100 San Franciscans is homeless, and California is a national outlier in terms of what proportion of the homeless population is actively “unsheltered,” as in, sleeping on the streets or under highway overpasses. In San Francisco, 73 percent of the city’s homeless population is considered unsheltered. That’s not normal, even for a big city: In New York City, the figure is about 3 percent.
And then there was the pandemic, which made many big tech offices obsolete: Twitter, Yelp, and Airbnb attempted to sublease their expensive Bay Area office spaces. Pinterest paid almost $90 million in the third quarter of 2020 to break the lease of their almost 500,000-square-foot office space. For many workers, the value of living in San Francisco dropped. Why pay a premium to live near an office you aren’t going to?
Finally, there was the broader sense, especially among high-value tech workers, that San Francisco and its neighbors were uninterested and unresponsive, focused only on extracting from their most productive citizens in the form of high taxes, which fund poor city services. In the last few years, many have simply grown tired of paying exorbitant taxes for the privilege of living in California—one that now bestows little in return.
Hence the Golden State exodus. In 2021, for the first time ever, California lost a congressional seat. The state didn’t technically lose population, but it didn’t have the same growth rate as the rest of the country.”
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“the shift also owes something to responsive governance. Leaders of other cities have actively courted the movers. In December 2020, venture capitalist Delian Asparouhov tweeted “ok guys hear me out, what if we move silicon valley to miami.” Miami Mayor Francis Suarez responded promptly, “How can I help?”
Yet as Bay Area tech workers depart, it remains an open question whether those new pastures will truly be greener. The city of Austin has faced rising housing costs, stemming in part from restrictions on development. Miami has struggled with corruption and policing problems. San Francisco’s urban competitors are cheaper, for now, but there are already worrying signs that the cities luring tech’s highly mobile, highly desirable workers are already poised to repeat many of the same mistakes that drove so many Californians away.”
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“In 2012, Austin city officials saw the writing on the wall and proactively tried to remedy these problems by moving toward a zoning code rewrite. The 30-year-old code had outlasted its usefulness, and with massive population growth, city planners needed to allow for much more density.
The city’s newly proposed zoning code was dubbed CodeNEXT, as part of a forward-looking urban revitalization plan, Imagine Austin. The new code aimed to reduce the strict separations between Austin’s residential and commercial corridors, allowing for more mixed-use buildings and more housing overall.
It would’ve scrapped single-family zoning restrictions in many areas, allowing for duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and apartment buildings to be built in their stead; it would’ve allowed for urban in-fill instead of forcing newcomers to gravitate toward far-flung suburbs; it would’ve reduced or eliminated minimum parking requirements in some places too. It wasn’t exactly an urbanist’s dream—some criticized it for not going far enough with regard to density—but it was a reasonable step toward that ideal.”
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“By 2018, the project was dead in the water, having been met with fierce opposition primarily from neighborhood preservationists and homeowners, who had seen their homes double in price over the last five or 10 years.”
“At the heart of the case was the question of whether the discretion that New York placed in the hands of local licensing officials was consistent with how constitutional rights are typically treated in the American system. New York’s licensing scheme failed that test. “We know of no other constitutional rights that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need,” Thomas wrote. “That is not how the First Amendment works when it comes to unpopular speech or the free exercise of religion. It is not how the Sixth Amendment works when it comes to a defendant’s right to confront the witnesses against him. And it is not how the Second Amendment works when it comes to public carry for self-defense.””