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Gov. Andrew Cuomo Proposes Decriminalization of Marijuana in Public
Yesterday’s New York Times reports that Governor Cuomo will be asking the state legislature to change state law in a way that will sharply reduce the number of people who are arrested in that state each year for marijuana offenses.
Some background–Thousands and thousands of young males in New York City are stopped and frisked by the police each year. A remarkable number of those stops are illegal at the outset because there was no real reason for the person to be briefly detained. But once the involuntary encounter begins, an officer might direct the person to “empty your pockets!” If the stopped person brings out a plastic bag of marijuana, he gets busted for “possession of marijuana in public.” So the government that does a lousy job with the school system has been making matters worse by giving thousands and thousands of minority males a criminal record, making it even harder for them to establish themselves in the mainstream economy.
Drug warriors like to say “we’re not locking up marijuana users–that’s a myth.” Some truth in that because there is no longer any room in the prison system. Most of the marijuana prisoners are involved with the black market trade in some capacity. Still, tens of thousands of users do get busted and go thru the system.
Officials in the Cuomo administration said the marijuana‐possession arrests were problematic in part because they subjected New Yorkers, many of them young, to the process of being booked, retaining a lawyer and carrying the stigma of having been arrested. And they argued that the arrests were harming the relationship between the police and young people.
According to Harry Levine of Queens College, there were 400,000 low‐level marijuana arrests in New York City between 2002 and 2011. Prof. Levine presented some of his research findings at a Cato drug policy conference last year.
Mayor Bloomberg’s aggressive stop and frisk policy in New York City is an on‐going scandal. Governor Cuomo deserves credit for this move to scale it back.
Yemen, Drones, and the Imperial Presidency
Based on a broad theory of executive power, President Obama, and possibly his successor, has the authority to target people for death—including American citizens—without a semblance of transparency, accountability, or congressional consent. Since 9/11, officials and analysts have touted drone strikes as the most effective weapon against al Qaeda and its affiliates. Drones have become a tool of war without the need to declare one. The latest front is Yemen, where a dramatic escalation of drone strikes could be enlisting as many militants as they execute.
“In Yemen, U.S. airstrikes breed anger, and sympathy for al‐Qaeda,” a headline blared in last week’s Washington Post. The evidence of radicalization comes from more than 20 interviews with tribal leaders, victims’ relatives, human rights activists, and officials from southern Yemen, an area where U.S. drone strikes have targeted suspected militants affiliated with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The escalating campaign of drone strikes kills civilians along with alleged militants. Tribal leaders and Yemeni officials say these strikes have angered tribesmen who could be helping to prevent AQAP from growing more powerful.
According to the Post, in 2009, U.S. officials claimed that AQAP had nearly 300 core members. Yemeni officials and tribal leaders say that number has grown to 700 or more, with hundreds of tribesmen joining its ranks to fight the U.S.-backed Yemeni government. “That’s not the direction in which the drone strikes were supposed to move the numbers,” wrote the Atlantic’s Robert Wright.
As the majority of U.S. missile assaults shift from Pakistan to Yemen—allowing foreign policy planners to wage undeclared wars on multiple fronts—Americans should pay close attention to a few important and complicating factors that make the conflict in Yemen unique. First, the self‐proclaimed Marxist state of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) only merged with its northern neighbor, the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR), in 1990. In 1994, the two countries fought a bloody civil war that did not result in a smooth reunification. The International Crisis Group’s “Breaking Point? Yemen’s Southern Question” summarizes competing North‐South narratives:
Under one version, the war laid to rest the notion of separation and solidified national unity. According to the other, the war laid to rest the notion of unity and ushered in a period of Northern occupation of the South.
Media reports asserting that AQAP is taking advantage of the South’s hunger for independence should be understood in the context of this Northern‐Southern divide. Rather than encourage the Yemeni government to respond to southern demands for greater local autonomy, Washington’s tactics are helping the U.S.-backed Yemeni government repress Southern separatists. Indeed, many residents in Abyan, in southern Yemen, claim that the Yemeni government intentionally ceded territory to domestic enemies in order to frighten the West into ensuring more support against the indigenous uprising.
These developments are troubling, as the escalation of drone strikes could be creating the self‐fulfilling prophecy of helping alleged AQAP‐linked militants gain ground and increasing local sympathy for their cause. As Ben Friedman wrote recently, the misperception that comes with conflating AQAP with the broader insurgency is that it “invites a broad U.S. campaign against Yemen’s southern Islamists, which could heighten their enthusiasm for attacking Americans, creating the menace we feared.” That assessment echoes the sentiment of The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill, who has done intrepid reporting in Yemen. He recently said the campaign being conducted “is going to make it more likely that Yemen becomes a safe haven for those kinds of [terrorist] groups.”
The Oval Office seems to be giving this issue of sympathy short shrift. President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, has publicly argued that the precision of drone strikes limits civilian casualties. However, the New York Times revealed last week that the president and his underlings resort to dubious accounting tricks to low‐ball the estimate of civilian deaths, counting “all military‐age males in a strike zone as combatants” while the Department of Defense even targets suspects in Yemen “whose names they do not know.” The Times’ article recounts one of the administration’s very first strikes in Yemen:
It killed not only its intended target, but also two neighboring families, and left behind a trail of cluster bombs that subsequently killed more innocents. It was hardly the kind of precise operation that Mr. Obama favored. Videos of children’s bodies and angry tribesmen holding up American missile parts flooded You Tube, fueling a ferocious backlash that Yemeni officials said bolstered Al Qaeda.
As foreign policy planners in Washington deepen our military involvement in Yemen, the American people—rather than focusing on the number of senior al Qaeda killed—should be asking whether we’re killing more alleged militants than our tactics help to recruit.
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To VMT or Not to VMT
“Gasoline taxes are not generating enough revenue to pay for roads and bridges,” says USA Today, so some states are experimenting with vehicle‐miles traveled (VMT) fees. Actually, as I show in my recent Cato paper on this subject, gas taxes are currently generating enough revenue to maintain roads and bridges, but that revenue is expected to decline as cars become more fuel‐efficient.
Better arguments for replacing gas taxes with VMT fees, my paper shows, are that such fees can virtually eliminate traffic congestion and save local governments $30 billion a year in general funds that are now used to subsidize local roads and streets. However, as I relearned after Cato published my paper, proposals for vehicle‐mile fees produce two strong, visceral reactions from the public.
First is a fear that VMT fees will allow the government to invade your privacy by tracking your location. Second is a worry that government will waste the revenues it collects from vehicle‐mile fees by spending them on pork barrel or other foolish things. Both of these complaints are really about problems with government, not the user‐fee proposal.
Every time you make a phone call, send an email, or even walk out of your house into the possible view of a closed‐circuit camera, you are giving the government an opportunity to track your whereabouts. This doesn’t mean we should ban telephones, email, or people leaving their homes; it does mean that we should design our technologies and institutions in ways that will preserve people’s privacy. As I explained in my paper, the VMT fee systems tested in Oregon and Minnesota are designed to make it impossible for the government to know where people drove or when they drove there; the systems only transmit the amount of money people owe for using the street and road network.
Similarly, any revenue source can be abused, but we can design institutions that minimize or even completely avoid such abuse. My paper points to county toll road authorities in Texas and other states as model institutions for vehicle‐mile fees. These authorities, while technically governmental, rely exclusively on their tolls for revenues, so they act like private businesses. Other elected officials have no say in how they spend their money, while the toll road authorities have to provide services people will use or they will collect no revenue, so the tolls provide sound incentives for both the agencies and the users.
My paper also points out that one of the side‐effects of replacing gas taxes with VMT fees will be a devolution of transportation decisions from the federal to the local level. The only real justification for a federal gas tax is that it is cheap to collect (since it is collected directly from refineries and importers). As one of the people interviewed by USA Today observed, federal officials fear VMT fees because such fees will reduce if not eliminate federal involvement and power.
VMT fees will also offer opportunities for privatization that are lacking today. It would be hard for a private road owner to collect a share of gas taxes, but if fees are collected from everyone driving on all roads and streets, anyone — private companies, homeowner associations, non‐profit groups — could take over a portion of the road network and start collecting fees to maintain those roads.
Due to declining gas tax revenues, VMT fees are almost inevitable. Rather than object to any change, fiscal conservatives should work to insure that such fees are designed to avoid the pork‐barrel and other problems associated with gas taxes.
I also discuss the future of highway financing in this video from a May 17 Policy Forum:
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Protectionist Denial and Bribery
The Democratic members of the House Committee on Natural Resources have sent President Obama (and the rest of us) a letter urging him not to water down dolphin‐safe labeling requirements in response to a ruling by the WTO, which found that the law unjustifiably discriminates against the Mexican tuna industry. The substance of the letter offers an excellent example of how NOT to respond to an adverse WTO ruling, and there are two particularly interesting parts that are worth a moment of analysis.
The next to last paragraph reads as follows:
When Congress approved the Uruguay Round Implementation Act, we never intended to allow non‐discriminatory, voluntary labeling regimes like the dolphin‐safe labels to be a subject of this type of trade dispute. The voluntary labels represent the good faith effort of the U.S. to use less trade restrictive regulatory approaches. The implication of the recent WTO ruling, in contrast, is that the US should expend significant regulatory resources around the globe in an untargeted fashion, or alternatively, that imports from Mexico could utilize dolphin safe labels without having to meet the same requirements as tuna caught by US or other nations’ fleets. Neither result is acceptable, and “complying” in either way simply invites further costly WTO litigation from other nations, not to mention serious disruption of the canned tuna market in the US and loss of consumer confidence in environmental laws and labels.
First off, the labeling regime IS discriminatory—that’s why it lost at the WTO—and the regime isn’t exactly voluntary considering that you can’t include information about dolphin safety on your label unless you meet the requirements of the law. The concern for expending “significant regulatory resources around the globe in an untargeted fashion” would normally be as laudable as it is uncharacteristic, but the targeting that exists under the current law results in a lot of concern for dolphins where the Mexican fleet operates and none where the U.S. fleet operates.
As far as consumer confidence is concerned, the real issue is that the current labels are controlled by a regulation that is misleading and protectionist. As I have noted here and elsewhere, consumers don’t need labeling laws, whose only function is to restrict the flow of information, in order to make ethical purchasing decisions. Examples abound of how informative labels can thrive and adapt in the free market, including this story about the meaning of fair trade coffee and a recent controversy surrounding once‐kosher chocolate chips.
The most revealing part of the letter, however, is in the last paragraph when the representatives ask the President to bribe the Mexican government to go away.
If the Mexican government continues to pursue WTO action in this case, we ask that your administration reconsider the level of economic assistance Mexico receives from U.S. taxpayers.
This doesn’t seem very respectful of a dispute settlement process the U.S. has used on numerous occasions to challenge WTO‐inconsistent measures like Europe’s aircraft subsidies, Korea’s beef restrictions, India’s chicken restrictions, China’s export quotas, China’s duties on chicken parts, China’s duties on steel, and China’s green energy subsidies, to name a few recent examples. Criticizing the WTO judicial process as overreaching because it revealed the inadequacies of a favored piece of protectionist legislation and then threatening to abuse the process through petty sanctions does nothing to enable consumers to protect dolphins and makes it more difficult for the United States to mount effective challenges to foreign protectionism.
Why ObamaCare Won’t Help the Sick
The Financial Times published my letter to the editor [$]:
Sir, “Imminent ‘ObamaCare’ ruling poses challenge for Republicans” [$] (May 25) doesn’t quite capture my views when it reports that I believe “resurrecting protections for patients with pre‐existing conditions would be wrong.” ObamaCare is wrong precisely because those provisions will not protect patients with pre‐existing conditions.
Those “protections” are nothing more than government price controls that force carriers to sell insurance to the sick at a premium far below the cost of the claims they incur. As a result, whichever carrier attracts the most sick patients goes out of business. The ensuing race to the bottom will even harm sick Americans who currently have secure coverage.
The debate over ObamaCare is not between people who care and people who don’t care. It is between people who know how to help the sick, and those who don’t.
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Romney Etch‐a‐Sketches His Opposition to ObamaCare with Leavitt Pick
Mitt Romney has appointed ObamaCare profiteer and former Utah governor Mike Leavitt to head his presidential transition team. Politico reports that Leavitt has “headlined health care policy discussions at $10,000 per‐person Beltway fundraisers for Romney” and may become White House chief of staff if Romney wins. ObamaCare opponents should be outraged.
Leavitt has spent the last couple of years spreading dangerous (but self‐enriching!) nonsense about how states would benefit by establishing ObamaCare’s health insurance “exchanges.” He seldom mentions that his “consulting” business Leavitt Partners rakes in tons of ObamaCare cash by bidding on those contracts. Perhaps this is because reporters seldom ask.
Here’s a video Cato produced about why states should flatly refuse to create ObamaCare Exchanges:
Ben Domenech blogs about Leavitt’s ObamaCare‐related iniquities here and here. Domenech writes, “Thankfully, this has been a push that Leavitt has been losing.”
But don’t count Leavitt out. Politico writes:
Leavitt has said some relatively positive things about certain elements of Obama’s health reform law…
[Leavitt’s longtime chief aide, Rich] McKeown, who still works with Leavitt at his Utah‐based health care consultancy [Leavitt Partners], acknowledged that the former governor does not want to undo one key part of the controversial legislation.
“We believe that the exchanges are the solution to small business insurance market and that’s gotten us sideways with some conservatives,” he said.
The exchanges are not only a matter of principle for Leavitt — they’re also a cash cow.
The size of his firm, Leavitt Partners, doubled in the year after the bill was signed as they won contracts to help states set up the exchanges funded by the legislation.
And yet someone somehow managed to say this:
“He’s 100 percent in it for Mitt, no secret agenda for himself,” said one Romneyite.
The Romney camp still says Mitt will “repeal[] Obamacare, starting Day One.” If he were serious, he would announce that he will rescind this IRS rule on day one. But the fact that Romney picked Leavitt suggests he really doesn’t mind ObamaCare that much, and that he is just saying whatever he needs to say to get what he wants. I know. Mitt Romney. Go figure. In this case, that means assuaging all the Republicans and independents who hate ObamaCare.
Romney’s appointment of Leavitt is a first step toward flip-flopping–or Etch‐a‐Sketching, or Romneying(TM), or whatever–on ObamaCare repeal. But it’s hard to blame Romney for thinking Republicans won’t care. These are, after all, people who picked Mitt Romney as their presidential nominee.