CBP Dodges Sen. Wyden’s Electronic Searches Question

By Matthew Feeney

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is concerned about Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) searches of travelers’ electronic devices at the border and ports of entry. CBP’s responses to Wyden’s queries about such searches are illuminating but far from reassuring.

In February, Sen. Wyden sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary John Kelly, asking a range of questions about searches of electronic devices. DHS responded to this letter, but the agency’s response didn’t satisfy Sen. Wyden, who posed some followup questions to CBP acting commissioner, Kevin McAleenan.

McAleenan’s answers to Sen. Wyden’s questions are revealing, in part because of what they don’t discuss.

The answers begin by noting that the Supreme Court recognizes the CBP’s “broad scope” of authority to conduct border searches.

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Topics:
International Economics, Development & Immigration, Law and Civil Liberties

Trump Administration Proposes Massive Cuts to TSA VIPR Teams

By Patrick G. Eddington

I think this is the first official act of the Trump administration that I can honestly say I can get behind, and enthusiastically. According to the Washington Post, Trump’s budget plan would dramatically cut funding for TSA’s roving Fourth Amendment violation squads, better known as “Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response” (VIPR) teams. From the Post story:

Under the proposed budget, VIPR funding would drop to $15 million from $58 million and the number of VIPR teams would be cut to 8 from 31, with 277 full-time positions being eliminated, according to the report. The Democratic staff members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee say in the report they were told that even though federal officials say eight VIPR teams can “maintain an acceptable security posture,” the three-quarters funding cut will “limit” the presence of teams nationwide.

I would’ve preferred the complete abolition of these ineffectual, costly teams–which have never stopped a single terrorist attack but which have often caused havoc at the transportation hubs they’ve haunted. But these cuts are a welcome, significant step in the right direction, and the administration is to be commended for making this move.

Topics:
Foreign Policy and National Security, Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

The International Monetary Fund Accidentally Provides Strong Evidence for the Laffer Curve

By Daniel J. Mitchell

As a general rule, the International Monetary Fund is a statist organization. Which shouldn’t be too surprising since its key “shareholders” are the world’s major governments.

And when you realize who controls the purse strings, it’s no surprise to learn that the bureaucracy is a persistent advocate of higher tax burdens and bigger government. Especially when the IMF’s politicized and leftist (and tax-free) leadership dictates the organization’s agenda.

Which explains why I’ve referred to that bureaucracy as a “dumpster fire of the global economy” and the “Dr. Kevorkian of global economic policy.”

I always make sure to point out, however, that there are some decent economists who work for the IMF and that they occasionally are allowed to produce good research. I’ve favorably cited the bureaucracy’s work on spending caps, for instance.

But what amuses me is when the IMF tries to promote bad policy and accidentally gives me powerful evidence for good policy. That happened in 2012, for example, when it produced some very persuasive data showing that value-added taxes are money machines to finance a bigger burden of government.

Well, it’s happened again, though this time the bureaucrats inadvertently just issued some research that makes the case for the Laffer Curve and lower corporate tax rates.

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Topics:
General, Government and Politics, International Economics, Development & Immigration, Tax and Budget Policy

HASC vs. SASC on BRAC

By Christopher A. Preble

Neither of the defense bills (National Defense Authorization Acts, NDAAs) wending their way through the House and Senate grant the Pentagon the authority to reduce excess infrastructure. Military leaders have asked for such permission for many years, but Congress has stubbornly refused. An amendment sponsored by Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) would have stripped the language from the House NDAA that blocks a new Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) round. That amendment failed yesterday by a vote of 175-248.

Before the vote, the House Armed Services Committee issued a “BRAC Facts” one pager to preempt the McClintock amendment and other attempts to resolve the impasse between Congress and military leaders over BRAC.

The one pager includes a few facts, but is selective to the point of misleading. For example, it states that Secretary of Defense James Mattis “does not have confidence in DOD BRAC assessments.” And quotes Mattis as saying “I am not comfortable right now that we have a full 20 some percent excess.” 

But the SecDef also said that a new BRAC round could save the Pentagon $2 billion a year. In written testimony last month, Mattis called BRAC “a cornerstone of our efficiencies program” and necessary to “ensure we do not waste taxpayer dollars.” Granting the Pentagon authority to reduce overhead, Mattis continued, “is essential to improving our readiness by minimizing wasted resources and accommodating force adjustments.” He observed, “Of all the efficiency measures the Department has undertaken over the years, BRAC is one of the most successful and significant.”

Meanwhile, deputy defense secretary Robert Work has also called for BRAC. “Spending resources on excess infrastructure does not make sense,” he wrote last year. In short, it simply isn’t accurate to imply that current Pentagon leaders doubt whether the military has more bases than it needs. And that is true even if the military were to grow in the next few years, as the HASC claims it must.

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Topics:
Foreign Policy and National Security

No ‘Freedom Option’ in the Revised Senate Health Care Bill

By Michael F. Cannon

The other day, I wrote a piece lauding an amendment Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was proposing to add to the Senate GOP’s health care bill. Cruz called it the Consumer Freedom Amendment. If insurers offered two ObamaCare-compliant plans to all comers, the Cruz amendment would have freed them to sell–and freed consumers to purchase–health-insurance plans that did not comply with those regulations. The legislative language I saw appeared to free consumers, not from all the regulations I would like, but from enough that it would have made the Senate bill a step in the right direction. It also included more restrictions on the use of this “freedom option” than I would like, but same thing. The changes would have dramatically reduced premiums for consumers. Perhaps more important, it would have offered more comprehensive and more secure coverage to people who develop expensive illnesses than ObamaCare does.

Today, Senate GOP leaders released an updated draft of their health care bill. 

This draft imposes ObamaCare’s “single risk pool” price controls on “freedom option” plans. Long story short, that means there is no “freedom option” in this bill. Insurers probably would not even offer non-compliant plans. If they did, ObamaCare’s “single risk pool” price controls would make secure, guaranteed-renewable health insurance impossible by taxing such plans to death. Here’s how.

  • The “single risk pool” price controls would require insurers to increase premiums for both ObamaCare-compliant plans and non-compliant plans by the same percentage. If claims in the compliant market necessitate a 10 percent increase, while claims in the non-compliant market necessitate only a 6 percent increase, the insurer would have to increase premiums in the former market by too little and/or increase premiums in the latter market by too much.
  • Let’s say insurers split the difference by increasing premiums in both markets by 8 percent. In the second year, insurers would be over-charging consumers in the non-compliant market. The problem would only get worse with time. By year five, the insurer would be overcharging consumers in the non-compliant plans by almost 10 percent. That creates an incentive for the insurer or a competitor to issue new, appropriately priced non-compliant plans that lure the healthy people out of the old non-compliant plans.
  • Consumers who developed expensive illnesses in the first year could not switch to the new non-compliant plans, because insurers would underwrite them and charge them an even higher premium. So those folks would stay in the old non-compliant plans until the hidden tax imposed by the “single risk pool” price controls made those plans a worse deal than the heavily subsidized ObamaCare-compliant plans. At that point, those consumers would switch to the ObamaCare-compliant plans. Actually, the effect would be a lot like that of the MacArthur waivers in the House’s health care bill. [Update: Astute reader Doug Badger notes that because the non-compliant plans do not qualify as creditable coverage, people in those plans could not automatically switch to ObamaCare-compliant plans. “They would either have to renew their existing policy, buy another non-ACA-compliant policy, or remain uninsured for a period of six months before enrolling in a policy sold through the Exchange,” he writes. Another option would be for the enrollee (or a parent or spouse) to take a job with health benefits for twelve months and then switch to an ObamaCare-compliant plan. Since employer-sponsored insurance would count as creditable coverage, there would be no waiting period, and while employers may impose waiting periods of up to 90 days for health benefits, the enrollee could keep her non-compliant plan until she is eligible to enroll in the employer plan. To the extent these strategies are feasible, newly sick enrollees in old non-compliant plans would and could migrate to compliant plans. To the extent such strategies are infeasible, the “single risk pool” price controls would create a trifurcated market of (1) healthy people hopping among non-compliant plans and (2) newly sick people stuck in increasingly overpriced non-compliant plans that subsidize (3) people with preexisting conditions in ObamaCare plans. Presumably, however, at a certain point, the costs of remaining in increasingly overpriced non-compliant plans would exceed the costs of those switching strategies.]
  • In other words, secure, long-term, guaranteed-renewable coverage would be impossible, because the “single risk pool” price controls would tax those plans to death.
  • This dynamic would happen even faster if insurers increase both the compliant and noncompliant plan premiums by 10 percent, which they probably would.

I’m not saying there’s no way Senate Republicans can redeem their bill. I have offered ideas that might. But at this point, the Cruz amendment does not redeem or even add to the bill.

I don’t get Republicans’ sudden infatuation with price controls. 

Topics:
General, Government and Politics, Health Care & Welfare, Regulatory Studies

It’s the Slingshot, Not the Nuke, That’s the Bigger Danger?

By Neal McCluskey

For most of American educational history, government massively discriminated against African Americans, first with some states prohibiting any education for them, and long after that districts maintaining de jure, and to this day de facto, segregated schools. But we are to believe that the big segregation danger is school choice? That’s like saying it’s not the nuke we’ve been using that’s the big threat, but that someone might use a slingshot. It is also what the Center for American Progress is asserting in a new brief: The Racist Origins of Private School Vouchers.

This may be a new report, but that modern proposals are a huge danger because some states and districts used choice to evade public school integration after Brown v. Board of Education isn’t a new argument. Some places absolutely did do this, but the argument remains as logically and factually untethered from full history as it has ever been.

For one thing, the large-scale drive to have education dollars follow students to chosen schools did not start with white people trying to escape racial integration, but Roman Catholics—and others—trying to direct funding for their children to schools that taught their religious values, not someone else’s. They wanted to be treated equally, which public schools did not do. Meanwhile, as even the CAP report hints, often private people tried to help African Americans in the face of government discrimination.

Of course, we continue to have segregation in education: if you want to access a “good” district, you have to be able to pay for a home there. That is why most people probably do not think of private schooling when they think of “white flight,” but of families moving out of districts with growing African-American populations into suburban districts that tended to be largely white. This happened most famously in Michigan, not deep in the kudzu of Alabama or Mississippi.

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Topics:
Education and Child Policy

No Surveillance Reform in Defense Policy Bill

By Patrick G. Eddington

As I predicted 72 hours ago, the FY18 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) will not be a vehicle for reforming National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance authorities under Sec. 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). The twist is that while the House Rules Committee did disallow an amendment to prevent “back door” warrantless searches of the stored communications of Americans (the full NDAA amendment list is available here), the author of all three surveillance reform amendments to the bill, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) withdrew the other two before a Rules Committee vote. Lieu’s office offered the author the following statement on the decision:

Mr. Lieu has always been a strong advocate for protecting our civil liberties and our privacy. He introduced these NDAA amendments (which have been offered previously by other Members) to prevent warrantless searches of Americans’ data under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Warrantless searches are just one of many problems with the law, which is set to expire at the end of this year. The House Judiciary Committee is currently negotiating a package that reauthorizes the necessary foreign surveillance authorities while adding sweeping reforms to protect Americans’ civil liberties. We were asked to withdraw our amendments this week to allow those reform discussions to continue in good faith, and we obliged because we are optimistic about achieving our goals. The amendment decision in no way changes the fact that a broad, bipartisan coalition of Member’s will fight any attempt to reauthorize Section 702 without serious reform.

So where does that leave FAA reform prospects? That will depend in no small measure on how determined reformers are to push the House GOP leadership on the question. As I write these lines, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and Ranking Member John Conyers (D-MI) are working on competing FAA bills; while I expect the Conyers bill to offer more sweeping reform proposals, Goodlatte will no doubt not allow the Conyers bill to get a vote in committee. All of this means that unless at least 5-6 GOP House Judiciary members make it clear to Goodlatte that any FAA Sec. 702 reform bill brought up in committee must be amendable, what passes out of that committee and goes to the House floor for a vote may be just as anemic a reform measure as the 2015 USA Freedom Act. 

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Topics:
Foreign Policy and National Security, Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

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