“evidence that this actually helps women is mixed. Meanwhile, such restrictions would have unintended consequences.
“For example, employers who can’t ask about prior salary might assume that a female candidate would accept less money than a man, because women make less on average,” as The New York Times has previously noted. In this scenario, a ban on salary history discussions could lead to women getting lowballed in job offers.
Salary history bans could also cost people—particularly women and younger workers—some job offers. It’s not hard to imagine an employer choosing to hire someone whose salary requirements seem slightly lower than an equally qualified candidate with higher requirements. In this case, prior salary disclosure could mean the difference between getting a job or not.
In other cases, where an employer has a strong preference for a particular candidate, the company may be prepared to offer a higher salary than the baseline in order to recruit them. Without knowing the candidate’s salary history, however, the employer may be lost as to what to offer. They might offer lower than the candidate currently makes, leading the candidate to reject the job that could have otherwise been a good fit.
Which is all to say that surely some women may actually benefit from past salary disclosure—especially now that young women are out-earning their male counterparts.
In general, letting employers and prospective employees exchange more information, not less, seems likely to lead to the best matches and the most satisfaction.”
…
“Today’s rhetoric about wider disparities in male and female incomes tends to 1) rely on research looking at incomes across professions and positions and 2) ignore explanations other than discrimination that might explain pay disparities—things like gender differences in types of work, work schedules, and years in the workforce. Politicians and media then use this distorted picture to spawn outrage and get kudos for addressing the issue, even if nothing they’re doing can actually “fix” the complicated causes behind disparities.
There may be a broader discussion to have about whether female-heavy industries are undervalued or how choosing to have children may harm women’s salary prospects more than men’s. But the issue is nowhere near the simplistic narrative that many modern progressives often make it out to be, in which sexist bosses and companies simply choose to pay women less than men for the same work and everything can be fixed with federal mandates.”
“Shanghai, China’s bustling cosmopolis of 26 million has been under lockdown since late March under the nation’s strict “dynamic zero-Covid” protocols, a system so poorly managed that residents are frequently unable to access basic necessities like food, medications, and medical care, prompting fairly widespread, spontaneous protests both online and in real life.
The government has touted the zero-Covid strategy, the government’s system of containment using intensive testing and tracing, combined with partial or complete lockdowns when a case is detected, has kept case counts and deaths low over the past two years. But the reports coming out of Shanghai suggest that the local government was unprepared for an outbreak in the country’s economic center and cast doubt on the feasibility of zero Covid at this point in the pandemic. That’s translated into serious struggles for residents, including hours-long ambulance wait times, dwindling savings, and inadequate or rotten food supplies, among others. Although the central government is reportedly stepping up efforts to get supplies to the city, the overall policy is driving many residents to criticize the government’s policy — and Shanghai’s implementation of it — despite serious potential risks to their safety and freedom by doing so.”
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“The Shanghai outbreak is thus far China’s most serious since the beginning of the pandemic; a staggering 200,000 cases have been reported since the outbreak started in March, though that’s likely under-reported, according to the New York Times. What started as a patchwork of temporary lockdowns to limit the spread of disease quickly turned into an interminable, city-wide shutdown with people only allowed out to take PCR tests, as a New York magazine piece explained earlier this week. Shanghai’s lockdown, two years into the pandemic, is rivaled only by those in Wuhan in 2020 and Xi’an at the end of last year in terms of strictness.
Shanghai residents’ outrage — which they’ve expressed by singing and chanting from their balconies and co-opting anti-American hashtags used by government officials to criticize the US — is borne from the fact that the government isn’t providing the stability it promises in exchange for personal freedoms, according to Rui Zhong, program associate at the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. “I think what makes people angry in Shanghai, and what made people angry in Xi’an is, Covid has been a problem for years,” she told Vox. “I think they’ve been really stunned at the degree to which their local officials haven’t necessarily prepared, including non-supply-chain issues,” like hospital admissions.”
…
“Shanghai’s local government enjoys a degree of relative autonomy in the context of President Xi Jinping’s China; it’s technically directly under the control of the central government, as a province-level city, but enjoys special status as the country’s financial hub and a showpiece for the rest of the world. Until March, the local government had handled the pandemic well, with no major outbreaks. But the rapid onset of the omicron variant and the corresponding draconian government measures are pushing some citizens to the brink.
“I have no more money … What am I to do? I don’t care anymore,” one man shouts to his whole building in a viral video on Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter. “Just let the Communist Party take me.””
“Health care policy researchers Erin C. Fuse Brown and Elizabeth McCuskey tracked the number of unique single-payer bills introduced in state legislatures across the country from 2010 to 2019, finding a sharp uptick in bills introduced since 2017. During each of those three years, at least 10 single-payer proposals were introduced, according to Brown and McCuskey’s research, for the first time since 2013. In total, state legislators proposed more single-payer bills from 2017 to 2019 than in the previous seven years combined. And for 2021, we’ve identified 10 single-payer bills that legislators introduced across the country, from liberal states like California and Massachusetts to more conservative ones including Iowa and Ohio.1
What do all these proposals have in common? They’ve all universally failed. In fact, Vermont, the only state that managed to pass single-payer health care in 2011, ended up shelving its plan three years later.”
…
“passing single-payer health care at the state level is next to impossible, as states are particularly limited in how they can allocate federal and private health care funds. There is, however, evidence that Americans may have an appetite for a public option, or government-run health insurance that people can opt into at the state level. Three states (Colorado, Nevada and Washington) have already passed a public option. It’s not single-payer health care reform, but it’s possible that we might see more states adopt their own public-option reforms.
One big reason single-payer proposals haven’t caught on at the state level is because finding a reliable way to pay for such a program is challenging. Single-payer advocates originally envisioned a federal proposal that would cover all Americans under a more generous version of a preexisting program — that is, Medicare, but now for all. Doing this state-by-state would require each state to apply for waivers to divert federal funds used for Medicare, Medicaid and Affordable Care Act exchanges to be used for their own single-payer plans. And that’s tricky because the Department of Health and Human Services has wide discretion to approve or deny states’ requests, which makes any proposal highly dependent on the national political climate.”
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“Employer-sponsored health insurance plans, which cover 54 percent of Americans, are another hurdle for states trying to pass single-payer health care. Federal law largely prevents states from regulating employer-provided health insurance, so states can’t just stop employers from offering their own health care benefits. The exact scope of this law has been litigated for decades, but suffice it to say that it’s successfully put the kibosh on many statewide health care reforms. Single-payer health insurance is particularly tricky as there’s no way to get everyone onto the plan without first changing how private insurance works. States have tried to address this through measures like increasing payroll taxes or restricting providers’ ability to accept reimbursement from private insurance plans. But the more elaborate these mechanisms get, the more complicated it becomes to implement — and the more people that could slip through the cracks.
Finally, another big financial barrier is that state governments have far less leeway than the federal government to increase budgetary spending. That means tax increases, which come with their own political challenges, are often necessary for states to secure the funding they need.”
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“All of this creates a daunting picture for statewide single-payer health care.”
“Whenever I write about police abuse and use-of-force issues, I often hear from the “back the badge” crowd to defend whatever it is the police officer did in a given situation. They’re not always wrong, of course, but one recurring theme always sticks in my craw, especially given that these writers typically describe themselves as “conservatives.”
Police defenders instinctively view most situations—and expect the rest of us to do so—from the perspective of the officer. “Well, sure that African American teen was holding a cellphone rather than a gun, but how was the officer to know before he shot him?” “Sure, the SWAT team broke down the door to the wrong apartment, but mistakes happen (note the passive voice).”
One of the stated principles of conservatism is fealty to the constitution, which protects the rights of individuals against the abuses of government. Police are the face of that government. They enforce the rules that lawmakers pass. Having the right to detain or even kill you, officers literally hold all of your “rights” within their grasp.
Therefore, I spend less time worrying about the genuinely difficult challenges of officers than about my fellow citizens’ right to life and liberty. As Charlton Heston says in a Touch of Evil, “Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy.” Likewise, I worry less about the frustrations of IRS agents than I do about the rights of taxpayers. Tax collectors have a legitimate job, but a true freedom-lover is primarily concerned about protecting individuals from the state.
Let’s look at a recent example. On Dec. 23, Los Angeles police shot to death Valentina Orellana-Peralta. who was shopping for quinceañera dresses in a Burlington store dressing room in North Hollywood. Officers were responding to reports of an assault with a deadly weapon and opened fire. A bullet penetrated the dressing-room wall, where Valentina and her mom were hiding from the ruckus. The girl died in her mother’s arms.
Those who scream (rightly) about government encroachment on our liberties when, say, legislators pass a new gun-control measure, tax hike or business regulation need to acknowledge that the government’s killing of a young girl who is out enjoying her day is a rights-destroying offense of a much higher order. It doesn’t matter that the girl was not the intended target.
The Los Angeles Police Department released a bland statement saying that officers didn’t know the girl was in the dressing room. The union argued the officer followed active-shooter protocols after getting 911 calls. It appears there was no active shooter. Police killed the suspect, who was a danger, but the weapon was a bike lock and cable.”
“On his first day in the presidency, Biden began to tackle some of the harsh immigration measures imposed by Trump. He lifted Trump’s so-called Muslim ban, which prevented citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries from coming to the U.S. He signed an executive order halting construction of a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. And he sent the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 to Congress. Among other things, that bill set out to create a path to citizenship for undocumented people, clear backlogs in the family-based immigration system, and improve immigration courts.
However, many of those early wins—and supposed reversals of Trump’s policies—came with asterisks. Biden was right to rescind Trump’s “Muslim ban,” but nearly all families affected by the policy remained separated because of visa application backlogs. He was right to halt construction of the border wall (which was never going to work), but his administration failed to stop Trump’s land grab lawsuits and the federal government continued to seize private property along the U.S.-Mexico border through eminent domain. That ambitious immigration bill has gone nowhere.
Since taking office, Biden has cherry-picked which of Trump’s most controversial policies he’ll keep and which he’ll discard. The ones he’s kept are cruel, counterproductive, and are failing to please either side of the political aisle.
Key among them is Title 42, which critics say violates longstanding U.S. asylum law. The policy was first imposed by the Trump administration and allows Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to expel migrants on public health grounds. Deprived of the opportunity to present their cases for asylum, migrants are very often returned to dangerous communities and countries. Biden has kept Title 42 in place, even though it was the brainchild of notoriously anti-immigration Trump adviser Stephen Miller. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials have questioned its efficacy as a COVID-19 mitigation measure from the very beginning.
CBP expelled over 1 million people under Title 42 in 2021, with over 7,000 migrants getting kidnapped and attacked by cartels and Mexican authorities post-expulsion since Inauguration Day. The Biden administration has also used Title 42 to deport thousands of Haitians to Haiti, even though many of the deportees hadn’t lived in Haiti for years and were actually coming from South America. Some Biden appointees have suggested that the president’s continuation of Title 42 “is largely based on optics—that it’s staying in place because of concerns that ending it will fuel perceptions of a chaotic border.”
But Biden’s critics falsely claim that the Southern border is open. It’s true that CBP reported a 21-year high of 1.66 million migrant encounters at the border in fiscal year 2021. The majority—61 percent—of those apprehensions resulted in Title 42 expulsions, and the figure fails to account for repeat crossings. “Perversely, continuing this Trump policy has also given ammunition to the hard-right nativists, because it has the unintended consequence of inflating the count of U.S. border crossings,” writes The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell. Over one-quarter of encountered individuals were apprehended multiple times by CBP, Rampell notes—”nearly quadruple the share in 2019.”
All the while, inefficiency has plagued day-to-day aspects of the U.S. immigration system. Two years into the pandemic, 60 percent of U.S. embassies and consulates are still partially or completely closed for visa processing. Nearly 440,000 immigrant visa applicants whose cases are “documentarily complete” are still waiting for visa appointments (the State Department scheduled just 26,605 appointments for this month). The nation’s refugee intake hit a record low in fiscal year 2021 and our numbers aren’t on pace to be any better in 2022. Legal immigration collapsed under Trump; it hasn’t rebounded under Biden.
All that said, it would be unfair to say that Biden’s immigration policy has been a complete failure. The administration evacuated a staggering number of Afghans after their country fell to the Taliban in August. Visa processing has been imperfect and many vulnerable people are still trapped in Afghanistan, but the Biden administration smartly introduced a private refugee sponsorship program that allows U.S. citizens to help support and resettle evacuated Afghans. Biden has rescinded some Trump-era rules that needlessly slowed down visa and work permit processing, and recently added 20,000 visas to this fiscal year’s cap for the nonimmigrant nonagricultural worker H-2B visa. The administration restarted the Central American Minors program, which allows at-risk children from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to come to the U.S. as refugees.”
“Governments make choices that shape millions of lives. Workers and businesses are taxed to provide health care to the elderly and to the least fortunate. Men and women are incarcerated or even killed for crimes defined by the state. Wars are fought. Refugees are given a place of safety or turned away at the border.
If you believe in democracy, such power is justified only because it flows from the will of the people. “Governments,” the United States declared in its formational document, “are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The premise of any democratic republic is that there are some decisions that must be made collectively, and that these decisions are legitimate because they are made by elected officials.
On Friday, the Supreme Court will hear two sets of cases that test the justices’ commitment to the idea that the right to govern flows from the will of the people, and both involve challenges to President Joe Biden’s efforts to encourage vaccination against Covid-19.
The first bloc of cases, which is likely to be consolidated under the case name Biden v. Missouri, challenges a federal rule requiring nearly all health care workers to become vaccinated. The second bloc, which is likely to be consolidated under the name NFIB v. Department of Labor, challenges a rule requiring workers at companies with 100 or more employees to either get vaccinated or be regularly tested for Covid-19.
Even on their faces, the stakes in Missouri and NFIB are enormous. These cases ask what steps the United States can realistically take to quell the spread of a disease that has already killed more than 820,000 Americans. But the full stakes in these cases are even higher.
Someone has to decide how the United States will respond to a global pandemic, and the Biden administration’s argument essentially boils down to a case for democracy. An elected Congress authorized the executive branch to take certain steps to encourage vaccination, and Joe Biden was elected to lead that branch. So that means that President Biden and his duly appointed subordinates get to make difficult decisions, even if some Americans don’t like those decisions.
The parties challenging Biden’s policies, meanwhile, effectively argue that the Supreme Court should decide America’s vaccination policy. They couch their arguments in arcane legal doctrines, with weighty-sounding names like the “Major Questions Doctrine” or “nondelegation,” But these doctrines are vague — so vague that they are easily manipulated by justices who disagree with the Biden administration’s policies and wish to conceal their desire to halt those policies behind a patina of legal reasoning.
I don’t want to minimize the significance of the policies at issue in Missouri and NFIB. In creating these policies, the Biden administration determined that its fundamental duty to preserve human life overrides many individuals’ interest in refusing medical treatment. This is a weighty decision, placing the collective health of the nation before the individual liberties of many of its citizens.
But the Biden administration estimates that its two vaccine regulations will save hundreds or even thousands of lives every month. And it decided that saving those lives is worth requiring some Americans to do something they don’t want to do. This decision is no more significant than many of the decisions governments make — to send troops to a distant conflict, to tax and to spend that money in service of a nation’s people, to save lives, or to take them. This is what governments do.
Again, someone needs to decide what America’s vaccination policy will be. It will either be made by the man chosen by the American people, or the Supreme Court will wrest that decision away from him and give it to themselves.”
“The money for the program was included in the American Rescue Plan—passed back in March—a massive $1.9 trillion spending bill that was sold as a COVID-19 response but contained very little that had to do with the epidemic. The bill set aside $4 billion for use for drug addiction programs and mental health treatment.”
“Another housing development in St. Paul, Minnesota, is on hold after losing its financing partner this week.
On Monday, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that developer Alatus had a previously-committed equity partner renege on its commitment to invest $23 million in a proposed 304-unit project in the city’s Frogtown neighborhood. Two other investors who had proposed preliminary financing terms for the project—in which half the units would be rented out at below-market rates—have also walked away.
The reason? St. Paul’s newly-passed rent control ordinance, which Alatus’ principals say is making their once-eager investors skittish about doing business in the city.”
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“It’s a near-universal consensus—held in common by progressive policy wonks, radical free marketeers, and the three most recent presidential administrations—that America’s highest-cost cities are so unaffordable because government zoning regulations prevent enough new housing from being built.
So why are a growing number of politicians, wonks, and pundits suddenly embracing a policy that’s been long maligned for further reducing the supply of housing?
The argument from rent control proponents boils down to the need to create short-term stability for renters. That will then, hopefully, give cities some breathing room to get to work on fixing their pressing supply issues.”
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“That study looked at a 1994 San Francisco ballot initiative that expanded preexisting rent controls to cover four-unit apartment buildings constructed prior to 1980, but which exempts four-unit apartments built after 1980.
That created something of a natural experiment on the effects of rent control.
The Stanford study concluded that tenants living in the older, rent-controlled buildings were 10–20 percent more likely to stay at their same address than people living in newer, unregulated buildings. The study also concluded that the expansion of rent control caused a 15 percent decline in the availability of rental housing among affected units.
In short, there’s a clear tradeoff in rent control policies between creating stability for existing tenants and preserving and expanding rental housing supply for new tenants. The goal of politicians, according to some, should be to strike the right balance between the two.”
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“We actually have a good, real example of what this balance striking in the real world looks like: San Francisco.
The rent stabilization ordinance that’s been in place in San Francisco since 1979, and which the Stanford study examined, has all the features Demsas would want in a well-designed rent control policy: post-1979 construction is exempt from price controls, landlords can raise rents by the lesser of 60 percent of yearly inflation or 7 percent, and there’s vacancy decontrol.
Some 40 percent of San Francisco’s housing stock is covered by these rules. Another 9 percent is deed-restricted affordable housing, meaning that rents can’t generally consume more than 30 percent of tenants’ pretax earnings.
That leaves only 16 percent of housing stock in the city where rents follow the ebb and flow of market forces. (That was at least the case prior to January 2020, when California’s statewide rent control law went into effect.)
The result is, again, San Francisco; a synonym for housing dysfunction and unaffordability. That obviously makes it a place that’s antagonistically expensive to newcomers. Copious amounts of rent control also haven’t stopped it from ranking first among American cities in some measurements for gentrification and displacement, either.”
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“Rent control is always going to disincentivize housing construction, regardless of how tight or loose the zoning code is. Repealing zoning restrictions will allow for more housing. It will also make the supply-killing effects of rent control all the more apparent and relevant.”
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“Rent control also could disincentivize renters—who should be natural proponents of new housing construction—from supporting zoning reforms.
If government price controls are keeping your rent stable, you have much less of an incentive to support new market-rate construction. At best, it would just be doing more of the same. At worst, it would be adding more construction noise, more traffic, and, God forbid, more shadows.
Indeed, rent-controlled tenants have an incentive to oppose any rezoning on the grounds that it might make their own rental unit a candidate for redevelopment. They’re at risk of losing the below-market rents they’re currently being charged.”
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“if rent control isn’t the answer to short-term housing affordability issues and displacement, what is? I’d argue it’s zoning reform, and, failing that, federalism.
New housing units, even if they’re really expensive housing units, act almost immediately to lower the costs of rent for everyone. That addresses both affordability and displacement in the short-term thanks to the magic of the “moving chain.”
When a new “luxury” apartment comes online (and basically all new construction is high-cost “luxury” housing), it’s often filled by a high-income person who moves from his previous, older apartment building in the city. His now-vacant home is then snapped up by a middle-income person who leaves behind an even older unit that a third, lower-income person can now move into.
Follow this “moving chain” back far enough, and soon enough you see that each new unit of luxury housing is freeing up lots of housing in the lowest-cost, lowest-income neighborhoods in the city. That presumably puts downward pressure on prices and displacement.”
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“An August 2021 paper from Finnish researchers looking at moving chains in Helsinki found that for every 100 new market-rate apartments built in the city center, “29 units get created through vacancy in bottom-quintile income zip codes and 60 units in bottom-half income zip codes” within two years.”
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“Research by economist Evan Mast on the effects of luxury apartment construction in 12 American cities has also found that new, pricey units open up more housing options for middle- and lower-income neighborhoods.”
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“relying on rent control to keep that renter in the same home comes at the expense of new housing supply, which in turn raises rents for everyone else in the city and prevents others from moving there entirely.”