The federal government provides an array of subsidies to increase the consumption of biofuels such as corn ethanol. The subsidies include tax breaks, grants, loans, and loan guarantees. The government also imposes a mandate to blend biofuels into gasoline and diesel fuels.

A new study at Down​siz​ing​Gov​ern​ment​.org describes the damage caused by these policies. Subsidies and the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) harm taxpayers, motorists, consumers, and the environment.

The study by Nicolas Loris argues that Congress should end its intervention in the biofuels industry. It should terminate subsidies and repeal the RFS. Individuals and markets can make more efficient and environmentally sound decisions regarding biofuels without subsidies and mandates.

Investor Carl Icahn said that the RFS has created a bureaucratic market in tradable credits full of “manipulation, speculation and fraud” with the potential to “destroy America’s oil refineries, send gasoline prices skyward and devastate the U.S. economy.”

That language is probably too strong, but federal ethanol policies really are stupid. President Trump says that he wants to cut unneeded regulations and wasteful subsidies. The RFS and biofuel hand-outs would be good policies to target.

So for an interesting read illustrating the craziness of special-interest policies in Washington, check out “Ethanol and Biofuel Policies.” The next time you are at the gas station and see that “E10” sticker on the pump, remember that a tag team of D.C. politicians and corn farmers are picking your pocket. 

Payday loans are small, short-term, unsecured loans. The typical borrower can not easily borrow elsewhere, and the interest rates on payday loans are quite high. These factors generate enormous criticism of payday lenders for “exploiting” borrowers.

Economists Susan Payne Carter and William Skimmyhorn of the United States Military Academy provide evidence on this criticism:

We evaluate the effect that payday loan access has on credit and labor market outcomes of individuals in the U.S. Army. … We find few adverse effects of payday loan access on service members when using any of [our empirical] methods, even when we examine dozens of subsamples that explore potential differential treatment effects.

This should not be a surprise: for people with poor credit, payday loans can be better than the alternatives. These include going to a loan shark, which is even more expensive; or not borrowing, even to fund crucial medical care, or a rental payment that avoids eviction, or travel to secure a job.

Here’s good news: President Trump may sign an executive order suspending the failed conflict minerals provisions of the Dodd-Frank law. Days before, Securities and Exchange Commission Acting Chairman Michael Piwowar had issued two statements directing the SEC to revisit its enforcement of the same provisions.

The provisions, enacted in 2010 as part of the wider Dodd-Frank law, impose a complex and in places impractical disclosure regime on publicly held companies that make products containing such minerals as tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold. The idea is that laying bare supply chains leading to war-torn areas of central Africa will facilitate consumer boycotts. Some reports on the draft executive order, such as that in the Guardian (via Simon Schama on Twitter), seem intent on judging the Loi Obama (as it was known in some of the affected regions) by these original intentions rather than by its actual results. Yet those actual results are no secret. More than two years ago, the Washington Post, confirming what was widely known already, ran front-page reportage about how the law had

set off a chain of events that has propelled millions of miners and their families deeper into poverty, according to interviews with miners, community leaders, activists, and Congolese and Western officials, as well as recent visits to four large mining areas.

As the economy of the area had destabilized, some miners with no other way to support their families had themselves thrown in with lawless armed groups.

At the same time, the law was set to impose billions of dollars in cost on American companies and consumers. I won’t repeat the case against the rules, since I summarized it in this space two years ago, and little appears to have changed since. (For more, check the coverage at Overlawyered.)

The rumored draft of the executive order looks good, but a president’s leeway under the law extends only to suspending its effect for a time. Putting this fiasco to an end will call on Congress to repeal the relevant sections of Dodd-Frank, and that is what it should now proceed to do.

When I debate one of my leftist friends about deficits, it’s often a strange experience because none of us actually care that much about red ink.

I’m motivated instead by a desire to shrink the burden of government spending, so I argue for spending restraint rather than tax hikes that would “feed the beast.”

And folks on the left want bigger government, so they argue

for tax hikes to enable more spending and redistribution.

I feel that I have an advantage in these debates, though, because I share my table of nations that have achieved great results when nominal spending grows by less than 2 percent per year.

The table shows that nations practicing spending restraint for multi-year periods reduce the problem of excessive government and also address the symptom of red ink.

I then ask my leftist buddies to please share their table showing nations that got good results from tax increases. And the response is…awkward silence, followed by attempts to change the subject. I often think you can even hear crickets chirping in the background.

I point this out because I now have another nation to add to my collection.

From the start of last decade up through the 2009–2010 fiscal year, government spending in the United Kingdom grew by 7.1 percent annually, far faster than the growth of the economy’s productive sector. As a result, an ever-greater share of the private economy was being diverted to politicians and bureaucrats.

Beginning with the 2010–2011 fiscal year, however, officials started complying with my Golden Rule and outlays since then have grown by an average of 1.6 percent per year.

And as you can see from this chart prepared by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, this modest level of fiscal restraint has paid big dividends. The burden of government spending has significantly declined, falling from 45 percent of national income to 40 percent of national income.

This means more resources in private hands, which means better economic performance.

Though allow me to now share some caveats. Fiscal policy is only a small piece of what determines good policy, just 20 percent of a nation’s grade according to Economic Freedom of the World.

So spending restraint should be accompanied by free trade, sound money, a sensible regulatory structure, and good governance. Moreover, as we see from the tragedy of Greece, spending restraint doesn’t even lead to good fiscal policy if it’s accompanied by huge tax increases.

Fortunately, the United Kingdom is reasonably sensible, which explains why the country is ranked #10 by EFW. Though it’s worth noting that it gets its lowest score for “size of government,” so the recent bit of good news about spending restraint needs to be the start of a long journey.

P.S. The United States got great results thanks to spending restraint between 2009–2014. It will be interesting to see whether Republicans get better results with Trump in the White House.

Jae Lee came to the United States legally as a child but never became a citizen. In 2009, he pled guilty to a drug crime after his lawyer assured him that he could not be deported as a result. The lawyer was wrong, because the conviction made Lee subject to mandatory removal.

When Lee learned of this mistake, he asked the court to vacate his plea so he could instead face trial, arguing that his counsel’s assistance was ineffective. The district court denied this motion because of the overwhelming evidence against Lee, ruling that his conviction at trial was so certain that his counsel’s bad advice didn’t actually harm him, particularly given the much longer prison sentence he would receive if convicted after trial.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit agreed that a jury wasn’t needed to determine Lee’s guilt and that denying the “chance to throw a Hail Mary at trial is not prejudicial” and therefore doesn’t violate Lee’s Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial. The court reasoned that that the only chance Lee had was acquittal by “jury nullification” and thus such a gambit was so irrational—and the idea of nullification so antiquated—that it is not to be allowed.

Lee is now pressing the matter at the Supreme Court, which has agreed to hear his argument, which Cato is supporting with this amicus brief. The idea of an independent jury’s nullification power is encompassed in the original meaning of the Sixth Amendment. Colonists frequently viewed juries as a shield against the crown, as juries frequently protected defendants against unjust and oppressive laws.

Independent juries were important enough in the American colonies that a section in the Declaration of Independence was devoted to assailing the King for depriving them of that right. The importance of an independent jury, and what such a jury meant at the time, informed the creation and adoption of the jury-trial right in the Bill of Rights. The meaning is made clear by Alexander Hamilton, who argued as defense counsel in 1804 that it is up to the jury to decide facts and the law, and it is in the deciding of the law that the nullification power comes from. The meaning is further solidified by John Adams’s statement that it is the duty of a jury “to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.”

The Sixth Circuit actually admits in this case that the power of juries to acquit, despite strong evidence for conviction, was central to the decision to enshrine the jury right in the Constitution. In spite of the incontrovertible evidence that the right to seek an acquittal by nullification was enshrined in the Sixth Amendment, Jae Lee had this right revoked simply because it was considered irrational or unwise.

The Supreme Court must now protect the right to pursue a risky trial strategy; it may not be wise to seek acquittal by nullification, but Lee should be able to decide that the risk is worth facing as against the certainty of deportation. It is not up to courts to pick which strategy is best for criminal defendants to follow, but judges should protect the right to choose a jury trial even when they might not make the same choice under the same circumstances.

The Supreme Court hears argument in Lee v. United States on March 28.

Senators Tom Cotton (R‑AR) and David Perdue (R‑GA) recently introduced the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act. If it were to become law, RAISE would cut legal immigration by 50 percent over the next ten years by reducing green cards for family members of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, slashing refugees, and eliminating the diversity visa lottery. These goals are in line with President Trump’s stated objective to cut legal immigration in most categories. 

The RAISE Act’s goal is to increase wages for lower-skilled Americans by reducing the supply of lower-skilled immigrants. Their press release argues that the “generation-long influx of low-skilled labor has been a major factor in the downward pressure on the wages of working Americans, with the wages of recent immigrants hardest hit.” Under such a worldview, only a drastic reduction in green cards and the supply or workers can raise American wages — and it’s not crazy.

The National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) exhaustive literature summary on the economic effects of immigration concluded that: “When measured over a period of 10 years or more, the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers overall is very small. To the extent that negative impacts occur, they are most likely to be found for prior immigrants or native-born workers who have not completed high school—who are often the closest substitutes for immigrant workers with low skills.” Although the effect is small, RAISE seeks to take advantage of the finding in the academic literature by inferring that if an increase in the supply of workers slightly lowers some wages then a decrease in that same supply will do the opposite.

It might seem odd then that RAISE doesn’t target employment-based green cards but that category is for highly skilled workers while the categories this bill would cut are more likely to allow in lower-skilled workers who have fairly high labor force participation rates. I’ve rebutted Senator Cotton’s poor economic arguments for immigration restrictions before but recent research is even more compelling. 

A recent paper by economists Michael Clemens, Ethan Lewis, and Hannah Postel seems tailor-made to test what would happen if a bill like the RAISE Act were to become law. The paper studies the effectiveness of an immigration policy “designed to raise domestic wages and employment by reducing the total size of the workforce.” The U.S. government’s 1964 termination of the Bracero program for Mexican farm workers provides a natural experiment for their paper which is comparable to what would happen if RAISE becomes law. Senators Cotton and Perdue will be disappointed to discover that this new research found that ending lower-skilled migration for farm workers had little measurable effect on the labor market for Americans who worked in those occupations.

Figure 1

Figure 1 from their paper compares the quarterly average real farm wages by states where Braceros made up more than 20 percent of their seasonal agricultural labor (black line), states where Braceros were fewer than 20 percent of the workforce (gray line), and states where there were no Braceros at or very negligible numbers (dashed line). Clemens et al write that “[t]he figure shows that pre- and post-exclusion trends in real farm wages are similar in high exposure states and low-exposure states. It also shows that wages in both of those groups rose more slowly after bracero exclusion than wages in states with no exposure to exclusion.”

How can that be the case, shouldn’t a leftward shift in labor supply increase wages? Not necessarily as farmers had other options not usually contemplated by those who only think about the supply and demand for labor in isolation. Instead of hiring more American workers or raising their wages, farmers turned to machines and altered the crops they planted to take account of the new dearth of workers. Instead of planting crops that required labor-intensive harvesting or care, they planted other crops that required many fewer workers. Farmers turned to machines like tomato pickers and changed methods for planting and harvesting other crops to take account of the newer wages they would have faced had they stuck with the Bracero-era farm techniques. 

The farmer’s actions in response to Bracero’s cancellation were economically inefficient and presumably raised the costs of production relative to their employment of legal workers under the Bracero program. But since the Bracero program wasn’t available anymore, using more machines and changing techniques were still the cheapest options available. Those options did not include hiring more Americans or raising their wages. The detailed empirical work in this paper considers many other possibilities but convincingly answers them, such as pointing out that nearly all of the Braceros went home instead of staying on illegally and that the flow illegal Mexican farm workers did not pick up immediately.

The similarities between the end of the Bracero program and the RAISE Act are enough to make this new research a compelling reason to reject the RAISE Act out of hand. The Bracero program allowed in half a million workers a year before it was eliminated which is about the same number of green cards that RAISE would cut. Bracero workers were lower-skilled and many of those that would be cut by RAISE are also low-skilled. Braceros were concentrated in some states and not others just like the new immigrants who would not be allowed under RAISE. 

The ending of the Bracero program was a policy shift very similar to that proposed by the RAISE Act. Ending Bracero didn’t raise wages for American farm workers and we shouldn’t expect the RAISE Act to do the same for other low-skilled Americans who are suffering for myriad reasons that have nothing to do with immigration. Senators Cotton and Perdue may intend to raise the wages of lower-skilled Americans, but their bill is more likely to line the coffers of firms that manufacture machines that can substitute for them.