“Biden administration officials are now working to undo some of the harmful legal policies put in place by Trump-era attorneys general—less visible than controversial measures like the border wall and family separation, but nonetheless damaging to due process and punitive toward the people who seek asylum on American soil. Last June, Attorney General Merrick Garland scrapped rules that made it difficult for victims of domestic violence or gang violence, as well as family members of threatened individuals, to qualify for asylum.”
“Rising rents are a very real phenomenon driven by a mismatch in many cities between the number of homes that are being built and the number of people who would like to live in them. The wedge between supply and demand is created by cities’ elaborate zoning codes, price regulations, and permitting processes that all combine to reduce housing availability and raise prices.
It should be no surprise that rents are high when a majority of land in major cities is off-limits to new development, it takes years to approve whatever new housing is allowed, and some of those new units have to be given away at below-market rates.
The details of these restrictions are a wonky topic, to be sure. One expects only so much depth or insight from a comedic explanation of it all. But even allowing for that handicap, Oliver’s treatment of the housing supply issue proves to be superficial, brief, and confused.
Oliver either misunderstands or fails to explore the link between government regulation, housing supply, and housing market outcomes. His perfunctory explanation of it serves only as a brief prelude to his attack on the real villains in his story: greedy private landlords with carte blanche to raise rents and evict tenants.
The solutions he puts forward, therefore, have little to do with eliminating needless, harmful regulatory barriers to new supply. Instead, he calls for legally constraining landlords’ ability to raise rents and evict tenants and declaring housing a federally funded, government-provided right.”
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“building new housing, even high-end housing, improves affordability for everyone by absorbing the demand of high-income renters, who are no longer bidding up the costs of older, naturally cheaper housing units. A growing body of empirical research shows this is a fact, not a free market fantasy.”
“It’s time for America to move beyond zoning.
At surface level, zoning is an impossibly boring topic, even by the terms of public policy debate. The mere thought of a weeknight zoning hearing or a 700-page zoning ordinance is enough to make even the most enthusiastic policy wonk’s eyes glaze over. Until recently, zoning might have been blithely dismissed as a mere technical matter, simply a way of rationalizing our cities, a planning policy so obvious as to be beyond reproach.
But zoning is at once so much less and so much more. While occasionally used as a stand-in for city planning or building regulations more broadly, its scope is far more limited: At a basic level, all zoning does is segregate land uses and regulate densities. Your local zoning ordinance sets out various districts, each with detailed land use and density rules, while an associated local zoning map establishes where these rules apply. The bread and butter of what most people think of as city planning—such as street planning or building regulations—has almost nothing to do with zoning.
Yet from these seemingly innocuous zoning rules have emerged a set of endlessly detailed parameters controlling virtually every facet of American life. Arbitrary lines on zoning maps determine where you can live by way of allowing housing to be built here but not there. Through a dizzying array of confusing and pseudoscientific rules, from “floor area ratio” restrictions to setback mandates, zoning serves to heavily restrict the amount of housing that may be built in any given neighborhood and the form it may take. In most major cities, zoning restricts roughly three-quarters of the city to low-slung, single-family housing, banning apartments altogether.
The combined effect is that, in already built-out cities, zoning makes it prohibitively difficult to build more housing. As a result of the further tightening of zoning restrictions beginning in the 1970s, median housing prices have dramatically outpaced median incomes in many parts of the country over the past half-century, such that millions of Americans now struggle to make rent or pay their mortgage each month. That is if they have the luxury of having a stable home at all: In places where demand for new housing is especially high—as in cities like New York and Los Angeles—zoning restrictions have facilitated acute housing shortages, with attendant surges in displacement and homelessness. The COVID-19 pandemic has only expedited these trends, with home prices in 2020 rising at the fastest rate since 1979.
The arbitrary restrictions that zoning places on cities also show up in our capacity to grow and innovate as a nation. By severely limiting new housing production in a handful of our most productive cities—including San Jose and Boston—we have made moving to our most prosperous regions a dubious proposition. Your income might double if you were to move from Orlando to San Francisco, but your housing costs would quadruple. Should we be surprised that many people are turning down that deal? For the first time in history, Americans are systematically moving from high-productivity cities to low-productivity cities, in no small part because these are the only places where zoning allows housing to be built. According to the 2020 census, the population of California—one of our most productive and innovative states—is now basically stagnant, such that the Golden State will be losing a congressional seat for the first time in its 170-year history.
The downstream economic implications of this unprecedented reversal of historic trends are hard to overstate. After all, big cities make us more productive, in that they allow us to find a job perfectly suited to our talents and exchange ideas with colleagues working on the same issues. They provide a platform for individuals to experiment and innovate, nursing the young firms that go on to remake the American economy every few decades. To the extent that zoning has made it exponentially more difficult for Americans to move to these hubs of activity—for a software engineer to relocate to San Jose or for a medical researcher to relocate to Boston—we are all poorer as a result.”
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“zoning makes more environmentally friendly forms of urban growth effectively illegal. By banning developers from building up, zoning forces them to build out.”
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“zoning assumes universal car ownership and all the emissions and traffic violence this entails.”
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“zoning isn’t merely a good policy misapplied toward selfish ends. Zoning is a fundamentally flawed policy that deserves to be abolished. Set aside for a moment the debilitating local housing shortages, the stunted growth and innovation, the persistent racial and economic segregation, and the ever-expanding sprawl: The very concept of zoning—the idea that state planners can rationally separate land uses and efficiently allocate density—has repeatedly failed to materialize. Far from the fantastical device imagined by early 20th-century planners, zoning today has little to do with managing traditional externalities and works largely untethered from any guiding comprehensive plan.”
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“Cities found ways to separate noxious uses and manage growth for thousands of years before the arrival of zoning, and they can do the same after zoning. Indeed, some American cities—including Houston, America’s fourth-largest city—already make land use planning work without zoning. To the extent that zoning has failed to address even our most basic concerns about urban growth over the past century, it’s incumbent on our generation to rekindle this lost wisdom and undertake the project of building out a new way of planning the American city.”
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“the fact that zoning is only now turning 100 might speak to the fact that we shouldn’t take it for granted. A 100th anniversary is as good a time as any for a reevaluation”
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“Zoning is not only ineffective in achieving its stated goals—it’s also unnecessary. In our focus on drawing district boundaries or listing out permitted uses, we have lost touch with the innumerable ways that cities organize themselves, from the natural use separation helped along by land markets to the bottom-up agreements formed by neighbors. Where these institutions fail, a robust set of impact regulations for new development and a civil service committed to managing—rather than stalling—growth would do a far better job than zoning at keeping neighbors happy and quality of life up. Now is the time to rediscover these lost traditions and start planning for what comes after zoning.”
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/hundreds-key-u-warplanes-aren-162400482.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/27/what-fed-rate-increases-really-mean-00048042
“Though Biden appears willing to overlook Khashoggi’s death in order to shore up America’s access to Saudi oil, he is at least on record as explicitly having condemned that murder. At a November 2019 primary debate, Biden said he would “make [Saudi Arabia] the pariah that they are” and stop arms sales to the Middle Eastern nation. A month after Biden took office, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines released a government report confirming that the Crown Prince directed the assassination. The administration also delayed most weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, in light of its continued involvement in Yemen’s brutal civil war.”
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“For many Middle East analysts, Biden’s trip signals pragmatism. “A successful foreign policy for a global power such as the US cannot choose values over interests,” wrote Council of Foreign Relations president Richard Haass in a recent article. “What the Biden administration is contemplating in Saudi Arabia appears to be righting the balance.””
“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.”