The Racial Gap Among the Vaccinated Has Essentially Disappeared
“According to a new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation, as the rate of U.S. adults who report having received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccines continues to climb, the rates among racial groups are now basically identical, comprising 71 percent of white adults, 70 percent of black adults, and 73 percent of Hispanic adults.”
Survey Finds No Rise in Anti-Asian Violence, Assaults Declined in 2020
“Some recent evidence has suggested that the national period of declining crime—which began in the mid-1990s, as rate of violence fell dramatically in the U.S.—may be over: The most recent Uniform Crime Report (UCR), an important though incomplete snapshot of homicides nationwide, found that homicide had increased by 30 percent from 2019 to 2020.
But just-released data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) paints a much less depressing picture. According to the 2020 NCVS report, the violent crime rate actually declined last year, if homicides are excluded. Moreover, the popular narrative that former President Donald Trump’s anti-China rhetoric caused some spike in hate crimes against Asian-Americans appears to be wrong. For Asian-American victims, both the violent crime rate and simple assault rate declined from 2019 to 2020.
It’s important to interpret these findings cautiously. The NCVS does not count homicides; the data comes from telephone interviews with random Americans. It’s thus a scientific survey, rather than a tally of actual crimes.
The UCR, on the other hand, consists of crimes reported to the FBI by law enforcement agencies. Police departments are not required to report any information at all, which means that the UCR is in some ways more accurate—these are verified reported crimes—but also more statistically unreliable. Year-to-year fluctuations in the data might represent different reporting procedures rather than any actual increase in crime; the overall number of crimes reported to the FBI is obviously just a small snapshot.
The public should take the findings from both reports with a grain of salt. It could be the case, obviously, that murders in cities increased while other categories of crime decreased elsewhere; it’s also possible that certain minority communities suffered increased crime in a manner that isn’t captured by the data. But with so much bad news about rising violence, the NCVS data suggests that things might not be as bad as we think.”
New Research Says Police in Schools Don’t Reduce Shootings but They Do Increase Expulsions and Arrests
“A working paper published last week by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University and written by researchers at the University at Albany, SUNY and RAND Corporation bills itself as the broadest and most rigorous examination at the school-level of how SROs impact student outcomes. Using national school-level data from 2014 to 2018 collected by the U.S. Department of Education, the paper found that while SROs “do effectively reduce some forms of violence in schools,” they do not prevent school shootings or gun-related incidents.
“We also find that SROs intensify the use of suspensions, expulsions, police referrals, and arrests of students,” researchers wrote. “These effects are consistently over two times larger for Black students than White students.”
The study found that the introduction of SROs to schools did appear to improve general safety and decrease non-gun-related violence, like fights and physical assaults. However, the authors say, those benefits come at the cost of increasing both school discipline and police referrals.”
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“The number of police in schools has skyrocketed in schools over the past four decades, first in response to drugs, then mass shootings. Police departments and organizations like the National Association of School Resource Officers argue that well-trained SROs act as liaisons between the school and police department. A good SRO, they argue, can actually reduce arrests.
Civil liberties groups and disability advocates, on the other hand, have long argued that increases in school police and zero-tolerance policies for petty disturbances have fueled the “school-to-prison” pipeline and led to disproportionate enforcement against minorities and students with disabilities.
Other recent research has come to similar conclusions as the new working paper. For example, a study published last August by researchers at the University of Maryland and the firm Westat found that increasing the number of police in schools doesn’t make school safer and leads to harsher discipline for infractions.”
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“The authors of the new working paper say that school districts should weigh the benefits of safer hallways against the high cost of putting more kids in contact with the criminal justice system.”
Why Biden’s $3.5 Trillion Spending Plan Would Be Worse for the Economy Than Manchin’s $1.5 Trillion Proposal
“The larger spending package would increase government debt at a faster rate, which would increase the amount the government has to pay in interest. In the $3.5 trillion scenario, higher levels of spending and higher amounts of government debt “crowds out investment in productive private capital. Less private capital leads to lower wages as workers become less well-equipped to do their jobs effectively,” the report states.
Now, the PWBM has completed an analysis of the $1.5 trillion framework that Manchin reportedly offered as an alternative. In order to do the estimate, PWBM analysts assumed that Manchin’s proposal would increase spending by about $540 billion for means-tested childcare programs, like universal pre-K; $439 billion for a five-year extension of the expanded Child Tax Credit; $260 billion for public infrastructure; and $260 billion for other assorted government spending.
That’s still a lot of money, and there are still some negative long-term consequences—but the most important part of Manchin’s proposal is that it does not require additional borrowing, and relies on smaller tax increases than what President Joe Biden has proposed. As a result, government debt would actually fall slightly over the next 30 years. The tax increases would reduce private capital by less than 1 percent by 2050—as opposed to the 6.1 percent drop that would come with the passage of the larger reconciliation package. Wages and national GDP would remain flat under the $1.5 trillion plan, instead of the projected decline under the $3.5 trillion plan.
What the report essentially says is that Manchin’s proposal would be less bad than the $3.5 trillion proposal.”
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“It is a little bit crazy that everyone in Washington is talking about $1.5 trillion as a small sum of money. What Manchin is willing to support would cost about $500 billion more than the Obama stimulus, even after adjusting for inflation. And this isn’t an emergency spending plan meant to float the country through a recession—it’s a massive increase in government spending at a time when the economy is growing significantly (despite the weirdness in labor markets and supply chains).”
Coastal Carolina University Is Trying To Fire a Professor for Saying Hurt Feelings Were Not ‘a Big Deal’
“In general, universities should stop caving to students who are unreasonably upset about minor infractions—but this wasn’t an infraction at all. Campus administrators would be well-advised not to put themselves in the position of being responsible for every hurt feeling, no matter how ill-founded or slight. There’s little benefit to making diversity synonymous with absurdity.”
Barely Legal Strippers Now Illegal in Texas
“In May, the Lone Star State raised the minimum legal age for working in a sexually oriented business from 18 to 21.”
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“Since the new law passed, adult businesses in Texas have laid off “droves” of 18- to 20-year-old workers, according to the Texas Entertainment Association (TEA), an organization that represents the interests of sex-oriented businesses and one of the plaintiffs challenging S.B. 315. Kevin Richardson, a TEA member who owns five adult cabarets, told the court he had to lay off more than 700 people due to the new law.
Evanny Salazar is one of the young adults who lost a job after S.B. 315 reclassified her as a child. Salazar “worked at two adult cabarets in San Antonio, Texas, where she earned about $1,000 a night” and did not witness any human trafficking, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman noted in a July ruling. “Before she worked as an exotic dancer, Salazar was homeless and lived in her car,” he wrote. “Her job at the adult cabarets allowed Salazar to obtain housing and cover her living expenses. Since losing her job as an exotic dancer, Salazar has become homeless again and works for Door Dash [sic], where she makes about $30 a night.””
More Evidence Emerges that the NIH Funded Coronavirus Gain-of-Function Research in China
Biden’s Support Among Independents Has Crashed
“Trump after a tumultuous four years in office actually won more of the national popular vote in 2020 than he did in 2016, 46.9 percent compared to 46.1 percent. But what sealed his fate was the collapse of the independent and third-party vote, from a combined 5.7 percent to 1.8 percent, and the transference of much of that support to the Democratic nominee. Biden improved by 3.1 percentage points over Clinton, with surveys showing that people who in 2016 voted Libertarian or Green or Constitution overwhelmingly preferred the non-Trump Democrat.”
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“Because the two-party system works like a pendulum, with the centralization of executive power and attention making much of politics a referendum on the sitting president, the independent anti-vote is likely to defrock Democrats in the 2022 midterms.
“If Biden is struggling to win independents and Hispanics, that could snuff out any hope Democrats have of holding either chamber of Congress,” Skelley wrote. “After all, independents backed Democrats in the 2018 midterms and Biden last November, and even though Republicans made gains with Hispanics in places like Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, Hispanics still largely backed Biden and helped him win in key swing states, like Arizona. But if Republicans can capitalize on Biden’s weakness among these groups, that could be their ticket back to controlling Congress next year.””
What Did Public Schools Do With COVID Relief Money? Whatever They Wanted.
“The federal government sent around $190 billion in aid to public schools across the nation during the COVID-19 pandemic. That is a lot of money by any standards, but in terms of federal spending on primary education, it is a shockingly large amount: as Reason’s Matt Welch explained when surveying the Biden administration’s weak moves toward promoting public school reopening back in February, that’s more than four times as much as the federal government tended to push toward K-12 education a year in pre-COVID times.
Is the money being diligently used for its intended purpose? Of course not. A survey by ProPublica found, when examining some of the “provisional annual reports…by state education agencies” for about $3 billion worth of the aid from March to September of 2020, that “just over half of the $3 billion in aid was categorized as ‘other,’ providing no insight into how the funds were allocated.”
Over the last school year, 15 states constituting around a quarter of the total U.S. population didn’t even manage to achieve 50 percent effective in-person education, the alleged purpose of all that federal COVID money.”
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“”The law places few restrictions on how districts can spend the federal aid, as long as the investments are loosely connected to the effects of the pandemic,” ProPublica explains, while noting that various districts, as reported by the Associated Press, are diverting the cash to athletics. The schools are supposed to spend all the money by 2024. The Associated Press reports that although schools “are required to tell states how they’re spending the money…some schools are using local funding for sports projects and then replacing it with the federal relief—a maneuver that skirts reporting requirements.””