“They point out that restricting the price of housing discourages owners from maintaining and improving their property. It can also make it attractive for landlords to pull apartments from the rental market and put them up for sale as owner-occupied dwellings. Those enjoying deals on housing costs might also find themselves in the equivalent of golden handcuffs.
“Tenants in rent‐controlled units become less mobile to avoid losing access to below‐market rents,” add Miron and Aldighieri.
The authors point to studies finding that rent control has reduced the supply of rental housing in communities as far apart as Cambridge, Massachusetts, and San Francisco.”
…
“the 2019 study cited last month by Miron and Aldighieri looked at a 1994 law change in San Francisco that suddenly extended rent control to housing constructed before 1980. Sure enough, tenants benefiting from controlled rents became less likely to move, while landlords subject to restrictions converted their properties to condos and co-ops or redeveloped them to escape regulation.
Rent controls “reduced the supply of available rental housing by 15 percent,” the study concluded. “This reduction in rental supply likely increased rents in the long run.” Contrary to housing activists’ intentions, “the conversion of existing rental properties to higher-end, owner-occupied condominium housing ultimately led to a housing stock increasingly directed toward higher income individuals.””
“What lies behind this shift? Some Americans prefer bigger cars, especially when gas prices are low, for their ample storage space, ability to see over other vehicles on the road, and perceived safety benefits (more on that later). But shifting consumer demands tell only part of the story.
For half a century, a litany of federal policies has favored large SUVs and trucks, pushing automakers and American buyers toward larger models. Instead of counteracting car bloat through regulation, policymakers have subtly encouraged it. That has been a boon for car companies, but a disaster for everyone else.”
…
“After the 1970s OPEC oil embargo triggered a spike in gas prices, the federal government adopted an array of policies intended to reduce energy demand.
One of Congress’s most consequential moves was creating the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, which require that the average fuel economy (miles per gallon, or MPG) of a carmaker’s vehicles remain below a set threshold.
Pressed by auto lobbyists, Congress made a fateful decision when it established CAFE. Instead of setting a single fuel economy standard that applies to all cars, CAFE has two of them: one for passenger cars, such as sedans and station wagons, and a separate, more lenient standard for “light trucks,” including pickups and SUVs. In 1982, for instance, the CAFE standard for passenger cars was 24 mpg and only 17.5 mpg for light trucks.
That dual structure didn’t initially seem like a big deal, because in the 1970s SUVs and trucks together accounted for less than a quarter of new cars sold. But as gas prices fell in the 1980s, the “light truck loophole” encouraged automakers to shift away from sedans and churn out more pickups and SUVs (which were also more profitable).”
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“In the early 2000s, the federal government made these distortions even worse.
During the George W. Bush administration, CAFE was revised to further loosen rules for the biggest cars by tying a car model’s efficiency standard to its physical footprint (which is basically the shadow cast by the vehicle when the sun is directly above it). President Obama then incorporated similar footprint rules into new greenhouse gas emissions standards that are overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Dan Becker, who led the Sierra Club’s global warming program from 1989 to 2007, told me that he and others warned federal lawmakers that adopting footprint-based standards was a mistake. “People like me were saying, ‘give carmakers another loophole and they’ll use it,’” he said. “But we lost.”
Those concerns proved justified. The average vehicle footprint expanded 6 percent between 2008 and 2023, a “historic high,” according to an EPA report, which also found that some carmakers, such as General Motors, actually had lower average fuel economy and higher average carbon emissions in 2022 than in 2017. To its credit, the EPA recently announced revisions to its vehicle GHG rules that would narrow (but not close) the gaps between standards for large and small cars.”
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“In the early 1960s, Europe raised the ire of American officials by slapping a 50 percent tariff on chicken exported from the United States. In retaliation, the US enacted a 25 percent tax on pickup trucks imported from abroad. The dispute is long forgotten, but the “Chicken Tax” lives on.
Although the tariff was initially aimed at Germany’s immense auto industry (Volkswagen in particular), it also applies to pickups imported from newer automaking powers such as Japan and South Korea, where carmakers are often adept at building vehicles much smaller than those available to Americans.”
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“In 1984, Congress stopped allowing small business owners to take a tax deduction for the purchase price of cars used for work. But the bill included a giant loophole: To protect those who need a heavy-duty vehicle (think farmers or construction workers), Congress made an exception, known as Section 179, for cars that weigh over 6,000 pounds when fully loaded with passengers and cargo. Today such behemoths are eligible for a tax deduction of up to $30,500, while business owners who opt for a smaller car can claim nothing at all.”
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“Every time a car owner fills her gas tank, a portion of the bill goes into the federal Highway Trust Fund, a central source of funding for roads and mass transit. That tax rate is set at $0.184 per gallon, a level that has been frozen since 1993, when Bill Clinton was less than a year into his presidency. Congressional proposals to increase the gas tax to close a yawning highway budget gap, or at least tie it to inflation, have gone nowhere.
Over the last 31 years, consumer prices have risen 113 percent, making the real value of the gas tax less than half what it was in 1993. That decline has reduced the cost of powering a huge SUV or truck with abysmal gas mileage”
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“Car safety rules are laid out in the encyclopedic Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS), which touches on everything from power windows to seat belts. But the FMVSS revolves around protecting a vehicle’s occupants; nothing within its 562 pages limits a car’s physical design to protect someone who might come into contact with it in a collision. That omission invites an arms race of vehicle size — precisely what the US is experiencing.”
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“consider who benefits from oversized vehicles. American carmakers like Ford and GM (which are headquartered in Michigan, a crucial swing state) rely on juicy margins from big SUVs and pickups, which are more expensive and profitable than smaller models. They enjoy protection from foreign competition through tariffs like the Chicken Tax, as well as favorable policies like CAFE’s light-truck loophole.
The regulatory status quo suits domestic automakers just fine — and they act as a roadblock to even modest attempts to change it.”
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“As American sales of big SUVs and trucks have surged, their owners are likely to resist policy moves they see as penalizing them. Many are likely to be unaware of the federal loopholes and policy oversights that have distorted their vehicle choices.”
“Former President Donald Trump’s plan to impose a 10 percent tariff on all imports to the United States would hike prices and cost the average American household $1,500 annually.
That’s the sobering conclusion reached by a new economic analysis from the Center for American Progress (CAP) Action Fund, a left-leaning think tank and advocacy organization. The proposed tariff, which would be applied on top of existing tariffs according to Trump’s campaign, would translate into $1,500 in higher costs for the average American household. That includes “a $90 tax increase on food, a $90 tax increase on prescription drugs, and a $120 tax increase on oil and petroleum products,” according to Brendan Duke and Ryan Mulholland, the two economists who authored the report.”
“The 53-car freight train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, last year was operated by a crew of three men, none of whom were able to prevent the cascade of mechanical and communication failures that led to the unfortunate accident.
In response to that crash, the federal Department of Transportation announced on Tuesday a new policy requiring freight trains to operate with at least two-person crews—a mandate that the Biden administration says will enhance rail safety.
If you’ve passed first grade, you might now find yourself asking a rather basic question: Isn’t three more than two?
Rest assured that it is. However, in Washington, the policy-making calculus often relies on fuzzy math that is heavily influenced by the pull of special interests and the strong sense of do-something-ism.
Both are on display in the new freight railroad mandate. The derailment in East Palestine was bad, and something must be done. This is something, so now it is being done—and bonus points can be scored because doing this specific thing will please the Biden administration’s labor union allies, which have been lobbying the government for years to impose exactly this two-person crew mandate.
On Tuesday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said it should be “common sense” that “large freight trains, some of which can be over three miles long, should have at least two crew members on board.”
The length of the train has absolutely nothing to do with it, but Buttigieg is gesturing toward the idea that a second person on board could bring the train to a halt if the driver is somehow incapacitated. And, indeed, it was longstanding railroading practice to have multiple people in the cab of freight trains for exactly this reason.
These days, however, it is automation and not a backup engineer that is responsible for a dramatic decline in railway accidents and injuries. Thanks to positive train control (PTC)—essentially a computer-based override system that monitors speed and track signals to avert collisions, and which railroads have been mandated by Congress to use since 2008—rail accidents have fallen by 30 percent while employee injuries are down 40 percent since 2000, according to data from the Association of American Railroads (AAR), an industry group.
Additionally, Buttigieg’s claim about “common sense” comports with neither the specifics of the East Palestine accident nor recent governmental reviews of the two-person crew mandate.
The Federal Railroad Administration spent three years investigating a proposed two-person crew mandate before concluding in 2019 that the rule was not “necessary or appropriate for railroad operations to be conducted safely,” largely because of the safety gains already made by automation. More recently, Congress considered—but, notably, did not enact—a two-member crew mandate in the wake of the East Palestine derailment.
As for the the East Palestine incident, having a crew of 10 people driving the train likely wouldn’t have made any difference. The crash was caused by an overheated wheel bearing, which failed and derailed the train as the crew was attempting to bring it to a stop. The three-person crew should have been alerted to the problem sooner, but at least one track-side detector meant to spot the wheel issue was not working properly.”
“Even if these subsidies were to create a manufacturing boom, it probably wouldn’t lead to an employment boom because most manufacturing output today is produced by robots.”
“Rubio doesn’t even get through the first paragraph of the piece before making a significant error. “Today,” he writes, Congress no longer views industrial policy with the same skepticism that it once did, but “what replaces unfettered free trade remains hotly debated.”
Unfettered free trade? That’s hardly an accurate description of the current status quo in the United States—a fact that Rubio surely knows, since Florida’s sugar and fruit industries are the beneficiaries of some of the most aggressive protectionist policies on the books. Even before former President Donald Trump ramped up the use of tariffs, America had more protectionist policies than other large, developed economies: A 2015 report from Credit Suisse called the United States the world’s most protectionist developed nation.
Rubio’s inability to describe the current status quo matters. It’s a failure of the ideological Turing Test, and it reveals that he misunderstands the economic policies he’s trying to shift—or that he is deliberately misinforming readers about them. Either way, this ought to call the rest of his claims into question.
Unfortunately, that’s far from the only mistake in the piece.”
“A bill recently introduced in Colorado aims to make dating apps such as Hinge and Bumble safer for users. The first section of S.B. 24-011 would force all dating services with any users in Colorado to submit an annual report to Colorado’s attorney general about misconduct reports from users in the state or about users in the state. If that isn’t available, the app must report all misconduct reports from the entire United States. These reports would all become public.
While the bill leaves some of the details up to the state’s attorney general, this would probably mean that when people file false reports about each other on dating apps, the reports would all become public record. The bill uses the term “information about a member,” suggesting that it would require disclosure about each individual member. Scorned lovers, racists, incels, and others with hostile motives could file false reports and harm people’s job and dating prospects in the future. And a report on a government website looks a lot more legitimate than someone mad on social media. These reports might even lead to law enforcement investigating innocent users.”
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“Dating apps are horrible because they have horrible users—like the man who brought me to a cafeteria, drank a beverage that he packed for himself without asking me if I wanted one, grilled me for 15 minutes, and ghosted. (I later learned he was 14 years older than he claimed and Hinge had repeatedly banned him. He’s tried to match with me three times more since that day.)”
“As far as consumer complaints go, of course, there’s nothing wrong with some of the DOJ’s concerns. We might wish that every product we owned was compatible with every other product we owned and that they worked in perfect tandem. We might wish we never had to consider tradeoffs between price, function, design, compatibility, etc.
Where this gets crazy is the federal government saying: Consumers being able to choose whether to use a product is not good enough. We’re going to step in and say that this business has to make a competitor’s products more accessible. It has a legal duty to undermine its own business interests to help outside—and many would argue inferior—products compete.
In the vein of other recent antitrust actions against tech companies, particularly under the Biden administration, the Apple suit relies on an absurd conception of how the law should work. And it’s a conception that could seriously harm innovation, weaken the position of U.S. tech companies, and mess with products many people like.
And many people really, really love Apple products, including iPhones.
The bottom line: Nobody has to use an iPhone, and no developer has to distribute its app through the App Store. There are other ways to communicate, other smartphone options, and other ways to distribute apps (including other ways to distribute apps to iPhone users). That many people still carry iPhones and distribute their apps through the App Store speaks to the fact that many people find the phone’s upsides and the App Store’s upsides stronger than any downsides.”
“For more than a year, the U.S. has experienced a shortage of Adderall, the medication used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Now, while continuing to deny its own role in the shortage, the federal government is making the problem worse by threatening manufacturers that could help ameliorate the crisis.
In October 2022, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced a shortage of amphetamine mixed salts, Adderall’s primary ingredient. The announcement noted that manufacturers were “experiencing ongoing intermittent manufacturing delays” and it anticipated that the shortage could last until March 2023.
As Reason has reported since the FDA’s first announcement, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) imposes production caps on Schedule I and II narcotics. Each year, drug manufacturers apply for a piece of the overall quotas. Even after a spike in demand during the COVID-19 pandemic, the DEA did not lift the production quotas on the ingredients used to make Adderall or its equivalents.”
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“In April 2022, Ascent submitted its annual quota applications for 11 total drugs, but instead of a speedy approval, the company was subjected to a DEA audit.
Investigators pored over Ascent’s books and identified discrepancies that indicated sloppy record keeping. For its part, the company admitted to committing infractions, though the details seem needlessly petty: In one example, “orders struck from [DEA forms] must be crossed out with a line and the word cancel written next to them,” Walsh wrote. “Investigators found two instances in which Ascent employees had drawn the line but failed to write the word.”
The audit forced Ascent to shut down production at its facility on Long Island, near New York City; company officials told New York that this constituted 600 million annual doses that it is unable to produce. It began laying off workers after more than a year in regulatory limbo.
Ascent sued in September 2023, seeking an injunction “compelling DEA to respond, to Ascent’s applications for quotas.” The DEA quickly denied all of Ascent’s quota applications, saying that it “lacks confidence in the data provided by Ascent in its quota requests” but giving no specifics.”
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“It’s entirely possible that Ascent did keep shoddy records, and perhaps it did misplace doses of drugs like opioids or stimulants that are ripe for abuse (allegations that the company denies). But the DEA’s policy of artificially constraining the supply of those drugs continues to harm those patients who actually need them.”