“There’s one policy the US can pass today that can also save lives: stopping utility shutoffs in the summertime because a customer has missed one or more payments.
Right now, only 18 states have any protections that prevent utilities from shutting off a customer’s power in a heat wave because of missed payments, while 41 states have these protections for the cold. That leaves most of the population vulnerable to utility shutoffs during the deadliest extreme weather window of the year.”
“Governments have successfully addressed past housing shortages through publicly developed housing in places like Vienna, Finland, and Singapore, but citing these examples often leads to glazed eyes and weary skepticism that such models could ever work in the US, with our more meager welfare systems and our strong cultural attitudes toward private homeownership. America’s 958,000 units of federal public housing have also long suffered from reputation problems both real and exaggerated, with many seen as ugly, dirty, or unsafe. Few understand that many of the woes of American-style public housing have had to do with rules Congress passed nearly 100 years ago that predictably crippled its success and popularity, rules like restricting the housing to only the very poor.”
“Known as the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, the measure was sponsored by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D–Calif.) and Dan Newhouse (R–Wash.) and passed the House twice last year. It aims to improve the immigration mechanics behind the U.S. agricultural workforce, expanding legal pathways available to foreign workers and the domestic farmers who hope to hire them.
The ability to hire more agricultural workers translates into more helping hands for farmers and increased production of goods, which then means fewer food shortages and lower prices at the grocery store.”
“You don’t have to believe that the market produces perfect outcomes to understand that government can rarely outperform private enterprise. Political decisions aren’t driven by any market signals, profit motive, or consumer preferences. These decisions are inherently political, suffer from a serious knowledge problem and are mostly untied to any accountability regimes when they fail. Government often proves to be biased against large, successful companies that provide new technology that legislators often don’t understand well but consumers love. This is why government so often fails, and this policy is no exception.”
“These “get off my lawn” conservatives claim to be upholding the principle of local control by arguing that local government officials rather than bureaucrats in far-off Sacramento get to make development decisions. It sounds good in theory given the Jeffersonian concept that the government closest to the people governs best.
The better quotation (actually used by Henry David Thoreau but often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson) is “that government is best which governs the least.” The goal—for those of us who value freedom—isn’t to allow the right government functionary to control us, but to have less government control overall.
Local officials are easier to kick out of office than officials in Sacramento or Washington, D.C., but the locals can be extremely abusive. They know where we live, after all. I’ve reported extensively on California’s defunct redevelopment agencies, and local tyrants would routinely abuse eminent domain under the guise of local control.
“Under S.B. 9, cities are required to approve these lot splits ‘ministerially,’ without any reviews, hearings, conditions, fees or environmental impact reports,” complains my Southern California News Group colleague, Susan Shelley.
Oh, please.
Conservatives have for decades complained about the subjective nature of bureaucratic and public reviews, the evils of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and excessive fees. Now there’s a law that fixes that, albeit in a limited manner, and they are grabbing their pitchforks.
S.B. 9 and S.B. 10 do not put Sacramento bureaucrats in charge of the locals. Instead, they deregulate certain development decisions, by requiring officials to approve a project “by right” provided it meets all the normal regulations. It eliminates subjectivity and defangs CEQA. Yet this greatly upsets them.”
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“If conservatives seriously believe local control is the trump card, then they should lobby for the repeal of Proposition 13, which is a state-imposed restriction on local governments’ authority to raise property taxes. I find Prop. 13 to be one of the best laws ever passed in this state. They should also oppose Republican efforts at the federal level to limit the ability of blue states to regulate the heck out of us.”
“Getting your business vandalized sounds like punishment enough. For some San Francisco business owners, it’s just the beginning of their troubles.
A steady stream of restaurateurs and retailers have been complaining about the city’s practice of issuing them fines for not being quick enough to remove chronic graffiti being applied to their shopfronts and street cafes.”
“Industrial policy is making a comeback. For those of you under the age of 50, this is just another term for corporate welfare—a lovely name for the unlovely practice of a government granting subsidies, protective tariffs, and other privileges to politically influential industries or companies. It’s often done in the name of some lofty goal such as strengthening national security or ensuring that America is a leader in the “industries of the future.” But the outcome is always the same: wasteful, unfair, unsuccessful, and unjustified. Oh, and it invariably grows the budget deficit.
The latest form of industrial policy is Congress’s CHIPS Act of 2022, a bill meant to subsidize the semiconductor industry by channeling taxpayer money to build up domestic production capacity and combat feared Chinese computer-chip supremacy.
This chapter began with the disruption caused by lockdowns to global supply chains. Unsurprisingly, that led to a series of semiconductor shortages aggravated by a surge in demand for automobiles. Automakers wrongly assumed that the original drop in demand would persist, canceled orders for semiconductors, and then could not keep up with the buying public.
Now, Congress is responding to this temporary chip shortage with $52 billion in subsidies and $24 billion in tax credits mostly directed at semiconductor industry beggars.
Never mind that chip firms have already expanded production without subsidies. In fact, two years into negotiating this bill, it’s obvious that it has little to do with any alleged structural deficiencies in the semiconductor market. For instance, the initial chip subsidy proposal had a $16 billion price tag. Since then, the industry has announced its own investments totaling over $800 billion, with $80 billion committed for near-term investment in U.S.-based fabrication facilities. Yet somehow, the bill more than tripled in price to target a problem that’s already being solved.
What about the argument that China is subsidizing its chip producers and thus threatening our technological leadership? Yes, China subsidizes its chip industry, but this doesn’t guarantee their subsidies will work. If U.S. politicians could for a moment stop treating every Chinese action as a threat, they would see that the Chinese semiconductor industry is both quantitatively and qualitatively weak. In fact, many of the companies subsidized would go under without the government’s help. That’s hardly the sign of a vibrant industry. These subsidies are more like life support than super-vitamins.”
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“” Any resulting new operations would still face deep-rooted issues hindering American manufacturing. Large-scale environmental assessments will be required, but over the years, the costs and delays have become excessive. Recent trends promoting or requiring unionized workers for federal contracts, combined with the current labor shortage, will hinder chipmakers’ ability to find talent and could exacerbate the cost of domestic production. ”
In other words, if you believe that moving most of our chip production onshore is important for national security reasons, you should labor for regulatory reforms rather than subsidies.”
“It is not difficult to design a good national parental leave program that provides time off and a bit of cash to all new parents based on their prior income. It is as simple as slightly increasing the Social Security payroll tax and then instructing the Social Security Administration (SSA) to provide all new parents with a few months of cash benefits equal to a high percentage of their usual weekly earnings or a decent minimum benefit.”
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“With the exception of the Cassidy-Sinema proposal, all of the parental leave bills in the current Congress use work history requirements to exclude a large minority of new parents from benefit eligibility.”
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“In addition to failing at income replacement, the Cassidy-Sinema proposal also makes no sense as an administrative matter, which perhaps explains why it is the only plan that has no accompanying bill text. Child Tax Credit eligibility is redetermined every year based on the income of the household that the child resides in. Families with very low or high incomes are not eligible for the CTC and so it is unclear how they would pay back the benefit they received. Children often move between households from year to year, whether due to divorce, family instability or otherwise. In these scenarios, the person who receives parental leave benefits under the plan is not the same person who is eligible for the subsequent years of CTC benefits, which also makes it hard to understand how paying back the benefit would actually work.
Like the Cassidy-Sinema plan, the Rubio-Romney New Parents Act also relies on parents paying back the benefits they received in order to finance the program. But in the New Parents Act, this is accomplished by docking parents’ Social Security checks when they retire.
Making people poorer in retirement in proportion to the number of children they have is strange, especially if you believe, as bill sponsor Marco Rubio does, that parents are already “double-charged for federal senior entitlement programs” because they both pay into them directly and undergo huge personal costs to raise up the next generation of workers that keep the programs afloat for parents and non-parents alike.
But even more bizarre than trimming Social Security checks to finance the program is the provision of the New Parents Act that requires the SSA to recover the leave benefits paid to parents who die before retirement by going after the deceased parents’ estate. Requiring surviving spouses and orphaned kids to pay a deceased parent’s leave benefits back to the government is as cruel as it is unnecessary.”
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“What’s remarkable about how bad all of these proposals are is that their problems are so easy to fix. In some policy areas, badly designed programs are the result of difficult decision-making and navigating powerful interests and entrenched constituencies. With parental leave, the policymakers are essentially starting from scratch. There is no good reason why an ideal leave program — i.e. one that is publicly-administered, inclusive of all new parents, provides scaled income-replacement, has a decent minimum benefit, and does not need to be paid back — could not be implemented.
Yes, it would mean raising taxes, but only by a tiny amount: Washington, D.C.’s paid leave program, which includes both parental leave and medical leave, is funded by a 0.26 percent employer payroll tax, more than a standalone parental leave program would cost. That’s all it takes to create simple, popular programs.
Lawmakers in both parties seem hellbent on much worse approaches, but it’s not too late to get it right. Doing so would deliver not only much-needed help to the public but likely a major political win to whichever party can figure it out.”
“The initiative would connect participants in a federal program that subsidizes energy costs for low-income residents with developers of community solar projects, which sell subscriptions to households for renewable power with the promise of lowering their monthly electricity bills.
The Biden administration has big aspirations for the program, projecting it could spur the development of 134 gigawatts of new solar power capacity nationwide, the agency official said. To put that in perspective, total U.S. solar capacity today sits at 97.2 gigawatts, according to the Energy Department.
And it could lead to sizable savings, too: DOE estimated participants in the five initial pilot project states and the District of Columbia alone would save more than $1 billion on their energy bills annually.”
“Since the early 20th century, the US has been a world leader in innovation and technical progress. In recent decades, however, some experts have worried that the country’s performance on these fronts has been slowing, even stalling.
There are many possible explanations for this phenomenon, but one has seemed especially salient in recent years: an immigration system that discourages, and often turns away, the most highly skilled and talented foreign workers.
Historically, immigrants have played a vital role in American innovation. As Jeremy Neufeld, an immigration policy fellow with the Institute for Progress, a new innovation-focused think tank, remarked to me, “It’s always been the case that immigrants have been a secret ingredient in US dynamism.” Robert Krol, a professor of economics with California State University Northridge, describes it this way: “The bottom line is that when you look at the impact of immigrants — whether you think about starting businesses or innovating patents — they have a large, significant impact.”
Multiple analyses of historical immigration patterns show that more migrants to a region correlates with a higher rate of innovation and related economic growth. By contrast, when immigration is more restricted, companies — especially tech companies and those that conduct innovative R&D work — are less successful, and growth in jobs and wages slows. Studies have also shown that immigrants tend to be entrepreneurial: Based on survey data between 2008 and 2012, 25 percent of companies across the US were founded by first-generation immigrants. Other research shows that immigrants are more likely than native-born US citizens to register patents.
As Neufeld points out, the Covid-19 pandemic might have gone much worse if immigration had always been as restrictive as it is now. A number of co-founders and critical researchers with Moderna are immigrants, as is Katalin Karikó, a pioneer of mRNA research — who, if she had tried to immigrate after the 1990 H-1B reforms to the skilled guest worker program, might not have been able to come to the US at all.
Those H-1B guest visas are at the center of the issue today, some experts say. Designed in 1990 to bring in skilled professionals to meet labor market shortages, visas through the H-1B guest workers program are sponsored by employers, who submit petitions to bring in particular foreign professionals appropriately qualified for specific, highly skilled roles. Guest workers generally need at least a bachelor’s degree in a relevant field.
According to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), there are about 580,000 foreign workers currently on H-1B visas, a small percentage of the US workforce and immigrant population. But they are disproportionately concentrated in STEM, particularly computer-related occupations, often in fields where cutting-edge technologies are being developed.
Unfortunately, the H-1B process is falling increasingly out of date and badly failing to serve its original purpose of turning on the talent tap for top innovative companies. Congress sets an annual cap on how many H-1B visa holders can come in, and that cap is now far below what the labor market demands. The crush of applications once the window opens for a given year on March 1 is so intense that, in every year since 2014, USCIS has resorted to a lottery system instead of a first-come, first-serve process. That means that year in and year out, hundreds of thousands of high-skilled workers from abroad try to come to the US and ultimately fail, so that both the prospective employee and the company hoping to hire them end up losing out on their preferred option.”