“The idea behind these vacancy taxes is two-fold. First, the financial penalty would incentivize the owners of empty homes—supposedly real estate speculators holding out for higher rents—to put their properties on the market. Second, the revenue from the tax could then be spent on affordable housing programs.”
…
“Yet a new report published on vacant properties in San Diego—one of the cities that is now considering a vacancy tax—suggests that any levy on empty units would do little to raise revenue or boost housing supply.
That report, published by the city’s Housing Commission (SDHC), used utility records to determine how many units in the city were left vacant for six months or more. (The study considered a unit unoccupied if its utility usage fell three standard deviations below a 60-month average.)
The SDHC obtained gas and electric records for 468,352 individual units from 2014 to 2019. During those five years, between 1,500 and 3,700 units were vacant for six months or more, giving the city a long-term vacancy rate of between .32 percent and .79 percent.
When examining water records, the SDHC study found 2,183 out of 252,324 units were potentially vacant for six months or more—a vacancy rate of .85 percent.
Contrary to what some politicians think, there isn’t a mass of hoarded homes that would be pushed onto the market by a vacancy tax.”
“As commander in chief, Biden is still operating under the authority of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which, on paper, grants the president only authority to bring the military to bear against those responsible for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but in reality has been used by multiple U.S. presidents to authorize very broad military interventions throughout the world.
Furthermore, the 2002 AUMF, which directly authorized the military invasion of Iraq, is still in force. The House voted in June to repeal the 2002 AUMF, but that repeal hasn’t passed the Senate yet. We still have thousands of troops in Iraq and are currently planning to keep them there indefinitely. The plan is that these troops will serve as logistics and advisory help for Iraq’s government, but they will most definitely still be involved in fights against the Islamic State.
We may have pulled troops out of Somalia, but we’re still performing airstrikes there against Al Qaida affiliate al-Shabab. In June, the Pentagon announced that it is considering putting troops right back in there.
And none of that gets into the countless—well, not countless, but the numbers are deliberately concealed from the American public—drone strikes in places like Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan, and Libya. We don’t really have data on drone use under the Biden administration yet, save the disastrous one from late August in Kabul that killed 10 civilians, including 7 children. Biden has reportedly quietly implemented stricter rules on the use of drones outside of war zones and the White House is evaluating the legal and policy “frameworks” for continuing to use them.
Biden might not see all of this piecemeal military intervention as “war,” but let’s be clear here: We’re talking about thousands of U.S. troops overseas involved in potentially killing armed combatants. And Biden currently still has congressional permission to wage war.”
“At the core of former President Donald Trump’s aggressive trade policies was a relatively simple—perhaps overly simplified—promise: Tariffs on Chinese-made products would drive manufacturers out of China.
“Many tariffed companies will be leaving China for Vietnam and other such countries in Asia,” Trump claimed in May 2019, about a year after his tariffs were first imposed. “China wants to make a deal so badly. Thousands of companies are leaving because of the Tariffs,” he tweeted a few months later, suggesting that the outflow was already underway. “If you want certainty, bring your plants back to America,” Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s U.S. trade representative, lightly threatened in a New York Times op-ed in May 2020, as the trade war’s second anniversary arrived.
But the tariffs failed to achieve that primary policy aim, according to a new paper published by researchers at the University of Kansas and the University of California, Irvine. Roughly 11 percent of multinational companies exited China in 2019, the first full year in which tariffs were in place—a significant increase from previous years. But the overall number of multinational firms operating in China actually increased during that same year, as foreign investment continued to flow into China even as the trade war ratcheted up costs.
In fact, the number of U.S.-based multinationals in China actually increased from 16,141 in 2017 to 16,536 in 2019. Non-U.S. companies were more likely to exit China during 2019 despite not being subjected to Trump’s tariffs.
“We estimate that less than 1 percent of the increase in U.S. firm exits during this period was due to U.S. tariffs. And U.S. firms were no more likely to divest than firms from Europe or Asia,” researchers Jiakun Jack Zhang and Samantha Vortherms wrote in The Washington Post this week.”
…
“Trump is no longer running U.S. trade policy, but his failed tariffs on Chinese imports are still in force. Lighthizer’s replacement in the Biden administration, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, has said the tariffs provide “leverage” over China.
But that perspective is no more grounded in reality than Trump’s promises that his tariffs would cause companies to flee China. American consumers are bearing nearly 93 percent of the costs of the tariffs applied to Chinese goods, according to a recent report from Moody’s Investors Service. How is this giving the White House leverage over China?”
“The root of the problem is the agency’s self-conception: It sees itself as the ultimate arbiter of what is true and what to do on all matters of infectious disease. In essence, the CDC believes there is no other authority besides the CDC, so it shuts out private labs from the testing process, insists that its faulty tests actually work pretty well long after problems arise, sticks with overly complicated plans that bog down processes, and resists calls to update its guidance, even when that guidance makes living ordinary life difficult or impossible. In a pandemic, where information is scarce and evolves rapidly—and when hundreds of millions of people have to make decisions right now—the agency’s preference for deliberative slowness and absolutist pronouncements would be a problem even if it were largely competent. And as it turns out, the agency isn’t that competent at all.”
“While progressive Democrats in Congress have yet to pass a universal student loan forgiveness bill, the Department of Education has nevertheless forgiven billions of dollars in federal student loan debt since Joe Biden became president. And even without new statutory authority, the federal government is slated to forgive increasingly more student loan debt in the future, thanks to the Biden administration’s expansive interpretation of the Education Department’s existing authorities, as well as a law signed by George W. Bush way back in 2007 that mandates loan forgiveness for certain borrowers.”
“The horse patrols aren’t the point. Democrats promised a different sort of immigration policy than what former President Donald Trump offered. But with a few tweaks around the margins, the Biden administration has continued—or even expanded—its predecessor’s policies.
It gets away with this in part because of symbiotic bullshitting between the Biden administration and the people opposed to it. The latter really want their base to think that Democrats are ushering in “open borders” and an influx of scary criminal immigrants, so they rant and rave as if President Joe Biden isn’t just largely continuing Trump policies. And since Democrats don’t want to seem like Trump 2.0 on immigration, both teams of bullshit artistry benefit.”
…
“The administration’s tone-deaf response? To announce that border patrol agents would stop riding horses, for now.
“We have ceased the use of the horse patrol in Del Rio temporarily,” a Department of Homeland Security official told reporters on Thursday.
They’ll still be capturing and sending home asylum seekers on sight. In fact, they’ll be doing more of it. But by foot! Or by truck! Not on a horse! Doesn’t that make you feel better about our government rounding up migrants, chaining them, and shipping them back to their countries of origin without so much as a chance to plead their case for a better life here?”
“The Biden administration, perhaps worried about the political toll that rising food prices could extract in next year’s midterms, announced plans earlier this month to offer up to $500 million in loan guarantees to beef producers. That’s on top of $500 million approved as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that was supposed to “expand processing capacity and increase competition in meat and poultry” industries, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The second prong of the White House’s plans seems to involve shaming meat-processing companies. “Just four large conglomerates control the majority of the market for each of these three products (beef, pork, and poultry), and the data show that these companies have been raising prices while generating record profits during the pandemic,” Brian Deese, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said during a press briefing last Friday, the Detroit Free Press reports.
Taken together, the White House’s approach to high meat prices can be summarized as an argument for greater government subsidies based on the idea that stimulating more competition in the meat-packing industry will expand supply and reduce bottlenecks.
But, as David Frum details in The Atlantic today, there are some good reasons to be skeptical of this argument. For starters, it takes about $200 million (and several months, if not longer) to build a single new meat-processing plant. That means the Biden administration’s new loan programs will not purchase much additional capacity, and whatever gains are made will not happen immediately. Even if the plan is successful, smaller producers will likely need ongoing support beyond the initial loans—if there was a market for more, smaller meat processors, the private sector would be investing in them already.
“There’s a real risk,” writes Frum, “that the initial commitment of $500 million in aid and loan guarantees to small packers will expand into continuing intervention in the marketplace to keep smaller competitors in business in the face of the higher efficiency and lower prices of the big packers.””
…
“Offering $500 million in loan guarantees to anyone who wants to build a new meat-processing plant isn’t going to address the supply chain problems at the existing plants or end the Western drought.
Higher prices, while politically difficult for the Biden administration, will send signals up the supply chain that result in more workers being hired and more cows being raised.”
“When New Mexico lawmakers make its owners choose between selling gas or selling liquor.
Some gas stations in a rural New Mexico county are being forced by an inane new law to choose between selling gas or selling liquor and wine. Some have chosen to close their pumps in protest and sell alcohol instead of gas.
The new ban is part of a larger package of changes to the state’s liquor laws—one its chief sponsor, Sen. Daniel Ivey-Soto (D–Albuquerque), calls “the biggest reform of liquor laws in 60 years in our state.” The new law contains several key elements in addition to the gas station liquor ban. Many of those changes are steps in the right direction. In fact, the “original intention” of the alcohol bill was deregulatory in nature. Among other things, it lifts a ban on home delivery of alcohol, introduces a new, less expensive liquor license for restaurants, and allows alcohol to be sold longer hours on Sundays (on par with allowable sales hours on other days).
The bad parts of the law are, well, bad. Ask the owners of Kokoman Fine Wines in Pojoaque, which was forced to try to offload $65,000 worth of nip bottles—those little liquor bottles commonly found lurking in a hotel mini-fridge—after the new law banned their sale across the state.
And then there’s the ban on gas station sales in McKinley County, where three out of four county residents are Native American. Sen. George Muñoz (D–Gallup), who introduced the gas-station amendment to the new law, says he did so because “people die in McKinley County because of alcoholism.”
While I have no doubt that some people in McKinley County who abuse alcohol die from that abuse, compelling gas stations that sell alcohol to become alcohol stores that don’t sell gas probably won’t save many (or even any) lives, and may do just the opposite. The ban is also likely unconstitutional. That’s why one chain of gas stations has sued the state to overturn it.”
“A 2020 meta-analysis of 26 randomized controlled trials concluded “there is moderate-certainty evidence that [e-cigarettes] with nicotine increase quit rates compared to [e-cigarettes] without nicotine and compared to nicotine replacement therapy.” The results of population studies, Balfour et al. say, “are consistent with a near doubling of quit attempt success, found in the randomized controlled trials, and the fact that e-cigarettes are smokers’ most used aid in quit attempts.” They also note that declines in U.S. cigarette sales accelerated sharply as sales of vaping products took off, which reinforces the impression that more vaping means less smoking.”
“The federal government hasn’t fully paid for its normal, run-of-the-mill spending in a single year since 2001. If you believe the projections of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), there is not a single year in the next 30 (the longest length of time for which the office projects spending and revenue) in which the budget will balance. Despite that, lawmakers from both parties continue to peddle this line whenever they want to make big policy changes. Democrats promised that Obamacare would be revenue-neutral. It hasn’t been. Republicans promised the Trump tax cuts would pay for themselves. They didn’t.
Now it’s the Democrats’ turn to play this game, and President Joe Biden has dutifully stepped up to the plate. Speaking Friday about the combination infrastructure package and budget reconciliation bills that the House may vote on sometime this week, the president declared that anyone worried about the latter legislation’s $3.5 trillion price tag should calm down.
“We talk about price tags. It is zero price tag on the debt,” Biden said. “We are going to pay for everything we spend.””
…
“Democrats are proposing to pay for their $3.5 trillion reconciliation package with about $2.3 trillion of tax increases and $700 billion in savings from changing how Medicare and Medicaid purchase pharmaceutical drugs. The rest is written off as being paid for with future economic growth—the idea being that increases in government spending will cause more hiring and greater economic activity, which will cause future tax collections to be higher than projected.
It’s a little bit like saying that your drinking habit can pay for itself, as Reason’s Peter Suderman has explained.
The math doesn’t add up. In order to achieve the amount of “dynamic scoring” necessary to offset that last $600 billion or so of new spending, the reconciliation bill would have to boost America’s economic output by about 3.5 percent by 2031. That’s far in excess of what every independent assessment of the package says it will do. In fact, at least one assessment of the package says the bill’s tax increases and borrowing will more than cancel out the benefits of heightened spending, dragging growth lower.
The debate over those projections is pretty esoteric. But regardless of which forecast you believe, there’s no getting around the fact that some of the lawmakers now championing the magic of “dynamic scoring” used to be quite skeptical of it. Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee—the very committee that put together the details of the reconciliation bill over the past few weeks—blasted Republicans for relying on “dynamic scoring” to make it look like the Trump tax cuts would balance over the long-term. In the Senate, meanwhile, Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) used to call dynamic scoring a “gimmick” meant to “conceal” the real cost of legislation. Now, he’s fine with using it because Republicans did it first.
If hypocrisy could be taxed, maybe we’d be able to balance the budget.”
…
“That isn’t the only dubious assumption behind Biden’s promise that everything will be fully paid for. It doesn’t fully account for the long-term budget impact of the newly expanded child tax credit, which allows Congress to claim $700 billion in “savings” that are unlikely to materialize. The reconciliation bill also calls for boosting IRS enforcement in the hopes of generating $239 billion in revenue from taxes that are currently going uncollected. That is likely an overestimation, as the CBO says the provisions would generate no more than $120 billion from increased tax compliance.”
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“If the bill is truly paid for, Democrats in Congress should prove as much by asking the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation to provide a detailed analysis of the “dynamic scoring” promises contained in the reconciliation bill. Without that, argues Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, Democrats’ claims that higher spending will generate sufficient economic growth have no hard backup.
“There is no magic money tree in Washington,” Edwards says. “Rather, taxpayers will ultimately pay for the spending through current tax increases, debt and future tax increases, and inflation.””