“The State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap, part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), placed a $10,000 limit on the amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted from federal taxable income. This move predominantly affected high earners in high-tax states like New York, California, and many others that are Democratic strongholds.
That’s a tax hike on the rich. This shouldn’t bother Democrats, who are usually happy to demonstrate their egalitarian chops by clamoring for that very thing. Yet this time, by demanding repeal of the SALT cap, they are on the front lines of a battle to restore tax breaks for the rich. As it turns out, when affluent Californians and Northeasterners felt the pinch, Democrats were ready to cha-cha for tax relief.”
https://reason.com/2023/10/26/democrats-say-theyre-fighting-inequality-but-many-of-their-policies-favor-the-rich/
“What can a bipartisan commission on the debt accomplish? The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), which has been advocating for such a commission, argues that special congressional task forces can focus discussions, generate greater public awareness of major issues, and create the opportunity for lawmakers to put all ideas on the table.
In 1983, for example, Social Security was approaching insolvency—a problem that sounds pretty familiar today—when a commission of congressional leaders and presidential appointees worked out a series of potential fixes. Afterward, Congress enacted many of those reforms, making Social Security solvent for another five decades.
More recently there was the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, formed by President Barack Obama in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. It produced a plan that could have reduced the debt by $4 trillion over 10 years by raising taxes, cutting spending, and selling off federal property. Even though most of those proposals were never enacted, the CRFB points hopefully to the fact that 11 of the 18 commission members supported the final recommendations, including five Republicans and five Democrats.”
https://reason.com/2023/10/27/new-speaker-mike-johnsons-first-good-idea-a-debt-commission/
“The US Defense Department believes the Chinese People’s Liberation Army is developing a new Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. That is, a heavy, multi-stage missile that leaves the Earth’s atmosphere and travels around the world at huge velocities before re-entering and descending toward its target at 20 times the speed of sound. Such missiles normally have a nuclear warhead: but this one, uniquely, would be armed with conventional explosives.
It’s an incredibly dangerous idea. A bad idea the Pentagon is intimately familiar with. After all, it tried to develop the same kind of “conventional” ICBM years ago – and ultimately gave up as it began to appreciate everything that could go wrong.
Namely, there seemed to be a good chance that, if US forces ever fired a conventional ICBM in anger, nuclear-armed countries would detect the launch, recognize the energy and trajectory of an ICBM – and be faced with an impossible dilemma.
Were the Americans launching a nuclear first strike? Would they lie, if asked? And how long could America’s nuclear rivals wait for clarification before launching their own nukes?
A non-nuclear ICBM was, and still is, a nuclear nightmare. That was the cold truth when the missile was an American idea. And it’s still the truth now that it’s a Chinese idea. “Conventionally-armed ICBMs would present significant risks to strategic stability,” the Pentagon warned in its latest annual report on Chinese military capabilities.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-working-weapon-us-decided-113322091.html
“Bill Maher is the latest convert to the idea that America’s addiction to regulatory process and public input is preventing us from having nice things like renewable energy and new housing.”
https://reason.com/2023/10/30/bill-maher-attacks-the-real-deep-state-of-government-regulators-administrators-and-zoning-officers/
“The law takes a regulation-first approach that all too often makes an endangered species a liability to avoid, rather than an asset to conserve. The presence of a listed species can bring prohibitions on how property owners can use their land or even forbid state biologists from relocating animals to a proper habitat. Even the mere existence of habitat for a listed species can lower land values by entangling properties with federal designations.
Punitive policies turn would-be partners in recovery into enemies of rare species. It’s why a popular colloquial stance toward endangered species has long been called “the three S’s”: shoot, shovel, and shut up. It’s unfortunate, because farmers, ranchers, and other private citizens provide the majority of habitat for many listed species, and an estimated two-thirds of all listed species have at least some habitat on private land. Unless there’s a change in the law’s approach toward the people who can provide so much important habitat for at-risk species, the prospects for rare species don’t seem likely to improve.”
https://reason.com/2023/11/12/the-endangered-species-act-at-50/
“”A 2017 task force report on the involuntary referrals of children under Florida’s Baker Act found that one-third of them were not necessary,” according to a recent article by Kaitlin Gibbs of the University of Florida Levin College of Law. “Many children are Baker Acted more than once, which shows the initial Baker Act may not have successfully treated children with mental illness. At least thirty percent of all children Baker Acted will have a repeat Baker Act within five years.”
Nor is throwing people into mental wards likely to reduce the number of mass shootings. As Ragy Girgis, a clinical psychiatrist at Columbia University, wrote in 2022, “Serious mental illness—specifically psychosis—is not a key factor in most mass shootings or other types of mass murder.” And while 25 percent of mass shootings “are associated with non-psychotic psychiatric or neurological illnesses, including depression,” he notes that “in most cases these conditions are incidental.”
In the case of last week’s murders in Maine, the shooter, 40-year-old Robert Card, was hospitalized during the summer. But officials say there is no evidence this hospitalization was involuntary. And Card’s history of mental illness makes him unusual among other mass murderers.”
…
“If DeSantis’ plan were enacted, the likely result would be a rapid increase in the unnecessary institutionalization of mentally ill individuals—and a negligible impact on criminal violence.”
https://reason.com/2023/10/30/desantis-wants-to-reduce-mass-shootings-by-locking-more-people-in-mental-hospitals/
“The series of subsidies and tariffs that the federal government uses to artificially inflate sugar prices in the United States cost consumers between $2.5 billion and $3.5 billion every year, according to a timely Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released today. Those protectionist policies aren’t the cause of the recent spike in sugar or candy prices, of course, but prices would absolutely be lower without them.”
…
“Those higher prices get baked—quite literally—into the cost of everything from Milky Ways to Sour Patch Kids. And, as the GAO also points out, this is a classic case of concentrated benefits for a special interest that results in huge, but very diffused, costs for everyone else: “Because the program guarantees relatively high prices for domestic sugar, sugar farmers benefit significantly, and sugar farms are substantially more profitable per acre than other U.S. farms.””
https://reason.com/2023/10/31/why-is-halloween-candy-so-expensive-sugar-protectionism/
“In February 2019, police in Satsuma, Alabama, pulled over Halima Culley’s son and arrested him for possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia. They seized the car, which belonged to Culley, and tried to keep it under Alabama’s civil forfeiture law. Although Culley ultimately got her car back as an “innocent owner,” that process took 20 months.
That same month, a friend borrowed Lena Sutton’s car. He was pulled over in Leesburg, Alabama, and arrested for methamphetamine possession. Like Culley, Sutton successfully invoked the “innocent owner” defense to get her car back after police seized it. But that did not happen for over a year. In the meantime, her lawyer told the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, “she missed medical appointments, she wasn’t able to keep a job, she wasn’t able to pay a cell phone bill, and as a result” she “was not in a position to be able to communicate about the forfeiture proceedings.””
https://reason.com/2023/10/31/several-justices-express-dismay-at-long-delays-in-returning-seized-cars-to-innocent-owners/