“Myles Cosgrove, a Louisville, Kentucky, detective who participated in the fruitless and legally dubious drug raid that killed Breonna Taylor last March, told investigators the incident unfolded so quickly that he was not consciously aware of using his gun. That detail, which emerged from audio recordings of grand jury proceedings that were released on Friday, is alarming in light of the fact that Cosgrove fired 16 rounds—including the fatal bullet, according to the FBI’s ballistic analysis.”
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“A third officer, Detective Brett Hankison, blindly fired 10 rounds from outside the apartment, an act of recklessness that led the grand jury to charge him with three counts of wanton endangerment. Some of Hankison’s rounds entered the unit behind Taylor’s, which was occupied by a man, a pregnant woman, and a child. Hankison is the only officer who faces criminal charges in connection with the raid. State prosecutors concluded that the other two officers legally used deadly force in self-defense.
Cosgrove’s description of the incident does not necessarily cast doubt on that conclusion, but it does underline the dangers inherent in the armed home invasions that police routinely use to enforce drug prohibition. Those dangers include not only the well-known risk that residents will mistake cops for robbers but the possibility that police will mistake their colleagues’ gunfire for an assault by their targets. In such chaotic circumstances, there is also a risk that police will be injured or killed by friendly fire.
The plainclothes officers were serving a warrant based on Taylor’s continued contact with an ex-boyfriend who was arrested for drug dealing the same night. They approached her apartment around 12:40 a.m. Although the warrant authorized the cops to break in without knocking or announcing themselves, they claim they did both. According to Cosgrove, they waited about 90 seconds before using a battering ram to force entry, beginning with “gentle knocking” and escalating to “forceful pounding,” eventually accompanied by cries of “Police!”
Cameron accepted this account. That was an important determination, since Kentucky’s law allowing the use of deadly force in defense of a dwelling makes an exception for armed resistance to a police officer who enters a home “in the performance of his or her official duties,” but only if “the officer identified himself or herself in accordance with any applicable law or the person using force knew or reasonably should have known that the person entering or attempting to enter was a peace officer.”
In an interview played for the grand jurors, Walker said he and Taylor were watching a movie in bed at the time of the raid. He said he was “scared to death” when he heard the pounding on the door, which by his reckoning lasted for 30 seconds or so. “Who is it?” he and Taylor yelled, according to his account; he said they heard no response. The New York Times reports that “11 of 12 witnesses on the scene that night said they never heard the police identify themselves,” while “one of them said he heard the group say ‘police’ just once.””
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“it is completely plausible that Walker did not realize the armed men invading the apartment were police officers. He reported a break-in during phone calls that night, including a 911 call after the shooting in which a distraught Walker said, “I don’t know what’s happening. Somebody kicked in the door and shot my girlfriend.” In these circumstances, it is not surprising that local prosecutors, who initially charged Walker with attempted murder of a police officer, dropped that charge in May.”
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“gratuitous risks that all of the officers took that night. The Times notes that Hankison “had not anticipated a firefight” because he “expected one unarmed woman, who had no criminal record, to be home alone.” In a saner world, that expectation would have cast doubt on the tactics that police decided to use, even leaving aside the weak excuse of a search warrant that was built entirely on guilt by association.
Based on scant evidence and the immoral logic of the war on drugs, these officers created the situation in which Cosgrove found himself reflexively firing 16 rounds down a dark hallway. When a terrified man had the temerity to defend himself against a bewildering home invasion, Cosgrove and his colleagues responded with overwhelming force, firing a total of 32 bullets. The legal determination that 22 of those rounds were justified should not blind us to the fact that whole operation was a travesty from beginning to end.”
“There are 1.2 million foreign students in the United States, enrolled in 5,300 American colleges and universities. Most come to America on nonimmigrant F-1 and M-1 visas that require them to maintain a full course load at universities approved by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Student and Exchange Visitor Program. In order to guard against diploma mills, the program grants accreditation mostly to universities that offer classroom instruction and usually limits foreign students to three credit hours of online instruction per semester.
When COVID-19 hit and colleges moved online, ICE did the sensible thing and allowed international students to finish their spring and summer semesters by taking their classes online without voiding their visas. The agency rescinded that guidance in early July, however, ordering international students attending online-only programs to either leave or face deportation and risk getting barred from the U.S. for 10 years. This meant several hundred thousand foreign students would have had to quickly terminate leases on apartments, uproot the lives they’ve built here, and find exorbitantly expensive flights back home without any idea of when they would be allowed to return to complete their education.
Lawsuits by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology prompted the Trump administration to issue new rules in late July allowing foreigners who are already enrolled to continue their studies online. But even though students who are here will be allowed to stay, the new rules will still deny visas to incoming freshmen from abroad whose universities are offering only online courses in response to the pandemic. They can either defer for a semester or begin their programs online from their home countries—a logistically challenging proposition for many due to time differences.
Roughly 80,000 people, or about 30 percent of new international students, even before the new pandemic visa rules, had decided not to come this fall, according to Brad Farnsworth, vice president of the American Council on Education. Given the political uncertainty, many of them might permanently abandon their plans to study in the U.S. and go to more welcoming countries instead.
The ban is a major hit to American universities. International students constitute 5.5 percent of all students. They pump around $41 billion into colleges annually and support nearly 460,000 jobs on campus and in surrounding communities. Many of them pay full tuition, which subsidizes the price tag for American kids. Universities also depend on foreign graduate students to assist in classroom instruction, especially in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields.
America was already facing declining international enrollment for three years straight. The administration’s move will only intensify that trend.”
“doesn’t the logic of part I — the acceptance that my standard of living is in some fundamental way unearned — justify what I will call Gentle Socialism — a dramatically larger redistributive effort than what we currently have in America? Shouldn’t the top rate of income tax be at least 70%? Isn’t a wealth tax of 2% or more, a good idea? Shouldn’t we consider a maximum level of income, say $1 million or maybe $10 million and have a tax rate of 100% of everything above that cap? Any of these proposals would go beyond Sweden say, and take us closer to something more egalitarian.”
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“Some people seem to confuse material well-being with money. If you’re not careful, you might come to think that there’s a fixed amount of money in the world and the rich have a disproportionate share of it. Justice means simply reorganizing who has that money. This is the world of zero-sum economics. It is not the real world or at least not the one with real-world consequences.”
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“While wealthy people may have a fairly large amount of cash on hand, most of their wealth is usually in the form of assets. Wealth is a result of investment in assets, the result of people spending less than they receive in income and the using the difference to buy shares of companies or to lend out money in return for interest. Those investments create capital — it’s what fuels innovation. Capital assets are expected to yield benefits in the future. So an investor is giving up consumption today for more consumption tomorrow — the return or their foregoing of consumption.
Capital makes workers more productive. Innovation makes our lives better. Not just the people who funded the innovations who often earn large returns for taking risks, but the people who enjoy the products and the workers who use the machines that make those workers more productive. If everyone has no more than an ox and a plow and has to farm to stay alive, no one is rich. And every once in a while, the rains don’t come and some people starve. Investment and innovation lets a lot of people get rich. Once someone invents a grain combine and the other tools of modern farming, you get a lot more food, the price of food is a lot lower, not everyone has to be a farmer and the person who invented the grain combine has enough money to fund some new companies that can find new ways to make people more productive.
If you start taxing wealth and if you tax income at really high rates, you’re probably going to get less of it. But it’s not just that the super-rich will have to share their money with the rest of us. They’re going to save and invest less because the tax system is going to take some of the gains away. If that happens, it won’t just hurt the rich. It will hurt people who benefit from the savings and investment that rich people make in making the rest of us more productive.”
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“I would suggest that the world would be a better place if we spent more time as economists looking for ways to allow the poor the chance to flourish and to lead lives of dignity and agency rather than trying to measure the gap between rich and poor and proposing ways to close that gap with money.”
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“Is $100 billion all that stands between ending homelessness and giving everyone in America clean water? If that’s true, what a brutal indictment of our government’s ability to solve problems. In 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government spent $4.4 trillion. If only taxes had been set high enough to raise $4.5 trillion! Then we could have cured homelessness and provided everyone with clean water.”
In fact, taxes weren’t really the problem at all. In 2019, the federal government collected $3.5 trillion running a deficit of $900 billion. Sanders’s claim is that an increase in the 2019 deficit of a mere 10% could have ended homelessness and provided everyone with clean water.
What should we conclude? One possibility is that homelessness cannot be solved by spending more money. I think this is true. I also think that the other “socialist” solutions on the table lately like free college, free universal health care, free child-care and so on would not be particularly effective in solving the problems they are meant to solve. The government doesn’t have the best track record of spending money effectively.
But the other reason that we don’t “solve” the problem of homelessness is that the political system responds to political power. Homelessness just isn’t at the top of most politician’s to-do lists.
Of that $4.4 trillion worth of federal spending in 2019, about $700 billion went to defense spending. Would the nation have been unsafe if spending had been a mere $600 billion? The $4.4 trillion the government spent included subsidies to wealthy farmers, subsidies to the education of wealthy individuals attending college via federal student loan programs. It also included Social Security and Medicare payments to individuals many times about the poverty line.
In other words, even though I do not deserve what I have, it is far from clear that increasing the size of government revenue by raising tax rates dramatically will lead to a better world even if I thought giving poor people money would improve their lives. We are likely to get a bunch of other stuff that we will not particularly like.”
“I realize that the case of pure socialism is something of a straw man. In the next part of this series I’ll look at the case for simply more redistribution than we have now. But a look at pure socialism on both practical and what I would call spiritual grounds is still illuminating.”
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“GDP in the US is currently about $21 trillion. There are about 250 million Americans over the age of 18. So that’s about $84,000 per adult. How about a system that gives $84,000 to every adult over the age of 18? Earn above $84,000 and you pay a tax of 100%. Earn less than $84,000 and you get a check to make up the difference. Bianca and I would be on the same footing. Bianca currently makes something on the order of $30–40,000. Pure socialism would roughly double her standard of living.”
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“Full equality simply wouldn’t work very well. If you earn $80,000 you’d get a check for $4,000. If you earn $14,000 (roughly the Federal minimum wage for full-time work) you’d get a check for $70,000. And if you don’t work at all, you’d get a check for $84,000. Some people love what they do or feel some kind of calling to their work and those people might keep doing what they’re doing. But some people will stop working and enjoy the same consumption as someone working two or three jobs to make $50,000.
A policy that equalizes income at $84,000 isn’t a safety net. It’s a safety hammock. Some people would choose to relax in it.”
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“GDP isn’t going to stay at $21 trillion. Even if everyone currently earning less than $84,000 stopped working entirely, GDP wouldn’t fall by half because the top half of the income distribution produces more than half of the output. But GDP would almost certainly fall.”
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“people currently earning more than $84,000 would work a lot less as well, knowing that any income over $84,000 would go to someone else. So the standard of living wouldn’t be sustainable at $84,000. It would be something less and whatever that lower number is, it probably wouldn’t grow much over time — the incentive to invest and innovate would be smaller. Not a zero rate of growth — as before, money isn’t the only motivator. A lot of people would still try to create new things. But presumably the growth rate would fall fairly dramatically.”
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“If everyone earns the same amount after tax, you don’t care what your market wage is. So wages won’t motivate you to do something unpleasant or something that takes skills that can only be acquired over a long period of time. Why would anyone want to wash dishes or cut lawns on hot days or work at a garbage dump? Or do anything that is dangerous? Better to stay home and collect your check”
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“The fact that basketball actually pays more than ballet is not irrelevant. The dramatically higher salary of an NBA star relative to ballet is telling Lebron that he is much more valuable as a basketball player than a ballet dancer. That dramatically higher salary is telling Lebron that a lot more people are willing to pay a lot more money to see him dance with a basketball than to dance with a ballerina.
The money is telling him something. It’s not telling him he has to be a basketball player. But it tells him something about what it costs him to be a ballet dancer. It’s pushing him toward basketball.
That’s what salaries do in a market economy. They send us signals. The signals are sometimes distorted — they can ignore costs and push us to do something tawdry but financially pleasant. They can understate what the full impact of something is. Hard as it is to believe, many people are able to enjoy Lebron James without buying tickets to Lakers games or buying his jersey or watching him on television. You can actually make the case he’s underpaid. But ignore that. The point is that salaries and prices more generally are imperfect. But they’re not irrelevant.
When you go to a world of complete equality, salaries play no role in assigning people to tasks. That task has to be performed by some other mechanism, usually the State, which means that a bunch of people with little or no skin in the game have the job of figuring out who should do what. That isn’t going to turn out very well. It certainly didn’t work well in the Soviet Union where the workers in the workers’ paradise had an informal motto: we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.
So pure socialism doesn’t work very well in the sense that I don’t think Bianca would be better off in that world in the sense of material well-being. This is essentially Rawls’s criterion for redistribution — we should maximize the well-being of the poorest member of society. Bianca’s not the poorest but the point is similar. I think Bianca would have a lower standard of living and her children would have less of a chance to flourish — the world would be a more static place. And by a lower standard of living, I don’t mean just a little lower. Without incentives and the informational content of wages, we couldn’t achieve anything like a modern standard of living for 330 million people. We’d be much much poorer in material ways with consequences for non-material aspects of our life like health.”
“Later I got to thinking. Is there anything just or fair about the differences between Bianca and me, between her son and my children? And the answer is, of course not. I don’t deserve the comfortable life I have relative to hers. Oh, I can fool myself and talk about the time and effort it took to attend graduate school, but as I outlined above, there was so much luck in all of that.
I can cook up a story that makes the differences between Bianca and me seem more fair than they are, the kind of story economists tell about why some jobs pay a little and some pay a lot. Those stories are true, I think, as far as they go. My skills are much more valuable than Bianca’s. A lot of people can shine shoes. Not as many people can learn enough economics to explain it to people and help them understand it. The demand to understand economics is much greater than the demand for shined shoes. I have a lot more human capital. I have a Ph.D while Bianca probably didn’t finish college. She may not have finished high school.
All of that is true. All of that explains my higher standard of living. But it doesn’t justify that higher standard of living. She may be a much better person than I am, a better mother than I am a father, a better spouse than I am. I don’t know. But it is strange that because of the luck I describe above, I earn a lot more than Bianca.
All of which is to say that there is a case to be made for taking a lot of the money I earn and giving it to Bianca. A $10 tip is nice, but it’s a drop in the bucket of what it takes to even the score or get close to making our life experiences a little more equal. Of course the federal and state and local governments already takes a lot more money from me than they take from Bianca. And it probably gives a chunk to her. She may be getting the earned income tax credit. Her son probably goes to a public school while my children didn’t. Maybe she is on Medicaid. Maybe she gets food stamps. But surely you can make a case that the government should take a lot more from me than it currently does from people like me who have relatively easy lives and give it to Bianca and those in a situation similar to hers.
So what’s wrong with that?
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“What’s wrong with real socialism? Given the injustice or at least non-justice of the current state of the world, why not strive for something dramatically more redistributive? Why not take the justice argument seriously?
I’ll give that a shot in Part II of this essay.”
“As to why the Trump administration is suddenly up in arms about racial bias training and critical race theory — a framework that’s existed for about 40 years — the OMB memo cites press reports as factors in Trump’s decision. In July, Fox News began airing segments featuring conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo, who in mid-August told Tucker Carlson that he was “declaring a one-man war against critical race theory in the federal government, and I’m not going to stop these investigations until we can abolish it within our public institutions.” He tweeted on August 20, “My goal is simple: to persuade the President of the United States to issue an executive order abolishing critical race theory in the federal government.”
Rufo appeared on Carlson’s show once more on September 2, just two days before the memo’s release. Conservative media celebrated the document as a win; in response to a Breitbart article about the memo, Trump tweeted on September 5: “This is a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue. Please report any sightings so we can quickly extinguish!””
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“critical race theory rejects the belief that “what’s in the past is in the past” and that the best way to get beyond race is to stop talking about it. Instead, America must reckon with how its values and institutions feed into racism.
Critical race theory was also a lens through which these legal scholars could analyze policies and the law, accepting that “racism has contributed to all contemporary manifestations of group advantage and disadvantage along racial lines,” like differences in income, incarceration rates, health outcomes, housing, educational opportunities, political representation, and military service. The ultimate goal was to eliminate racial oppression as part of the broader mission of ending all kinds of oppression — including that based on class or sexual orientation. According to the authors, it’s not enough to just make adjustments within established hierarchies; it’s necessary to challenge the hierarchies themselves.”
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“According to Crenshaw, at the foundation of many of these theories is a psychological insecurity on the part of white people who fear their racial status is being threatened. Historically, the tendency has been for white people to align with whiteness, even across class lines, Crenshaw noted. “What remains to be seen is whether the resistance to it is nearly as powerful as the tendency toward it.”
Trump drove the tendency home in his address at the White House Conference on American History, acknowledging that he plans to take this fight beyond federal contractors and into America’s schools with an executive order that bolsters “patriotic education.”
“Critical race theory is being forced into our children’s schools, it’s being imposed into workplace trainings, and it’s being deployed to rip apart friends, neighbors, and families,” Trump said. “Teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words.”
Trump wants his critics to accept the status quo — that we already live in a fair and just America — Crenshaw said. Yet critical race theory remains relevant as people in cities and small towns across the country lead ongoing protests for Black lives following the death of George Floyd in late May. Americans and organizations have pledged to become anti-racist, to actively recognize how silence or inaction amounts to complicity. Activists are also pushing for anti-racist education in schools and anti-racism trainings in workplaces”
“With Merrick Garland, the Republican Senate prevented a president from appointing a judge, then a president of that senate’s party came into office and filled the seat. This action broke the norms and constitutional intent of Advice and Consent. That was a stolen seat.
The stealing of Merrick Garland’s seat deeply damages the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. In a two-party system with the judiciary not completely separated from the ideology and policy goals of the political parties, abusing Advice and Consent to hand a Supreme Court seat from one party to another greatly damages the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.”
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“Court packing now, can be seen as a mechanism to right a wrong — to restore the partisan divide to what it should have been if not for the Republican Senate’s illegitimate action.”
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“I suspect court packing would just lead to a series of court packing and an ever-expanding court and potentially undemocratic escalation that leads to the downfall of the republic…so I’m still against court packing”
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“[But,] I understand why a democratic congress and presidency would look at the Supreme Court with its stolen seat, with its undemocratic minority-nominated justices, and with potentially its overturning of the Democrats’ most basic agenda…I understand why democrats would then say that U.S. democracy under the thumb of the Supreme Court as currently constructed is already illegitimate, so court packing is justified as the best way to save democracy.”
“If you survey Americans about how many children they want, on average they say about 2.5. That includes the ones like me who want six and the ones who want zero. But while people want 2.5 kids on average, in practice they have fewer — about 1.72 in 2018, the book says. Increasing America’s population needn’t involve regression from modern liberal ideas. It would just require making it possible for people to get the thing that they already want.
The book’s proposed policy changes are mostly changes at the margins — more immigration but not open borders, an expansion of public education to also provide free preschool and day care, subsidies and tax credits for parents, fixes to our housing and transportation policy so the cost of living isn’t intolerable.
Despite its simplicity — maybe because of its simplicity — it’s compelling. Matt Yglesias thinks America is good and it’d be good if everyone who’d benefit the country was allowed to live here and everyone who lived here was able to have their ideal family size. And while that simple vision elides a lot of challenges — some of which are beyond its scope — its vision of America is at least worth rooting for.”
“Imagine China — the world’s top emitter of carbon, which in 2019 released nearly double the emissions of the US — with almost zero coal power plants.
Imagine it with zero gasoline-powered cars, and with more than four times the 1,200 gigawatts of solar and wind power capacity installed across the world today.
This could become reality by mid-century if China follows through on President Xi Jinping’s latest commitment to addressing the climate emergency.”
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“the target puts China more closely in alignment with the European Union, the UK, and other countries that have committed to carbon neutrality by 2050, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said is required to prevent over 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. In the US, some states and cities have moved in this direction, too. For instance, former governor Jerry Brown signed an executive order in 2018 for California to be carbon neutral by 2045. And Michigan’s governor made the same commitment Wednesday.
Along with the pledge to be carbon neutral by 2060, Xi Jinping also announced that China would submit a stronger set of goals under the Paris agreement and that China would aim to peak carbon emissions before 2030, upping the commitment from “around” 2030.
Meanwhile, in his UNGA remarks, President Trump defended his decision to withdraw the US from the “one-sided” Paris agreement while criticizing China for “rampant pollution.”
Increasingly, China is demonstrating it will use climate as a way to upstage the US, with Xi repeatedly committing to incremental climate action on the international stage in recent years.”
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“Besides the geopolitical motivations, China also has a lot to lose from unmitigated climate change, from catastrophic floods like those this summer in the central Yangtze River Basin to worsening heat waves and sea-level rise, which will have a huge impact on coastal cities like Shanghai by 2050.”
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“China has yet to publish an official plan for how it would achieve carbon neutrality, but climate researchers have mapped out pathways. The good news: Researchers say it is possible. Some of the key shifts are already underway — toward electric vehicles and renewable energy, for example. But China will be entering uncharted territory when it comes to cleaning up its behemoth steel and cement industries.”
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“The next few months will reveal how serious China is about accelerating its decarbonization.”
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“China’s announcement may also have ripple effects on other countries as they choose whether to more aggressively tackle climate change, in the absence of US leadership, approaching the next major UN negotiations on climate change (COP 26), which will be held in November 2021.
“For China, who is experiencing economic ramifications of Covid like every other country, to come out and make this kind of bold statement on carbon neutrality could potentially sway the balance of countries who have been taking a ‘wait and see’ approach to their enhanced ambition climate pledges ahead of COP-26,” Hsu said. Here’s hoping it does.”
“House Democrats passed a $2.2 trillion HEROES Act, which includes $50 billion for emergency rental assistance, and $21 billion in funding for states and territories to spend assisting homeowners.
Of that $50 billion in rental assistance, at least 40 percent would have to go to tenants making 30 percent or less of their area’s median income, and 70 percent of it would have to be spent on those making less than half their area’s median income. Tenants making up to 120 percent of area median income would be eligible for assistance.
These income restrictions are identical to those found in the enlarged $3.5 trillion HEROES Act back in May, which earmarked $175 billion to renter and homeowner assistance. The $71 billion in renter and homeowner assistance proposed by Democrats now is still too rich for many congressional Republicans but is much closer to the $60 billion that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said the White House could accept.”
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“Eviction filings are below historic averages in 15 of 17 cities tracked by Princeton University’s Eviction Lab. Places like Boston and Austin—both of which have local eviction moratoriums in addition to the CDC’s policy—have seen evictions drop close to zero. The two exceptions are Columbus, Ohio, and Richmond, Virginia, where evictions are above historic averages by 48 and 300 percent respectively.
With eviction rates below historic averages in most cities and rental payment rates staying pretty steady throughout the pandemic, a massive new federal program to bail out tenants and rental property owners seems excessive.
That’s particularly true when most of the stimulus proposals on offer include expanded unemployment benefits and another round of $1,200 stimulus payments. Renters report using those types of benefits, which were included in the March coronavirus relief bill, to cover their housing costs earlier in the pandemic.
Whether the mercurial Trump will stick to his decision to walk away from stimulus talks remains to be seen. After tweeting that he was done negotiating, the president again took to Twitter to urge the passage of a bailout for the airlines and another round of stimulus checks.
It’s possible renters and homeowners will also benefit from Trump’s backtracking. If they don’t, they’ll have to wait until 2021 for more help from the feds.”