Grow That Government!

By Jim Harper

What does it take to make a state-level Republican policymaker work to grow the power of the Obama Administration? Not much! Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman is a case in point.

In the wake of a shooting at a Macy’s in Mount Vernon, Washington, late last month, Secretary Wyman called for Washington State to comply with the national ID program run by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under the REAL ID Act.

Secretary Wyman’s rationale for joining the national ID is that state authorities (including, for some reason, election officials) were unable to immediately identify the citizenship status of the shooter (who turned out to be a naturalized American citizen).

Washington State has hitherto declined to embrace REAL ID, and has been one of the states most actively pushing back against the federal program. Secretary Wyman argues that adopting REAL ID would allow the state to more quickly access federal databases and records and help prevent voter fraud in Washington State elections.

Whatever a state’s need for securing their vote, that’s no reason to join the national ID system. And REAL ID is a bloated, costly, and opaque federal program. Compliance would require Washington State to share its drivers’ personal data and copies of their digitally scanned documents with departments of motor vehicles across the country through a nationwide data sharing system. This database sharing is a two way street: Secretary Wyman might be able to access other jurisdiction’s databases, but any bad actor in a DMV from California to Connecticut could access Washington State’s.

In the wake of recent DMV hacking scandals in Louisiana and elsewhere, this concern is not overblown. Because of the hacking and identity fraud risks, and the lack of any real national security benefit, adoption of REAL ID would only make Washingtonians less safe.

Topics:
Regulatory Studies, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

Bulk-Scanning E-mail for Spy Agencies

By Julian Sanchez

Reuters dropped a bombshell story Tuesday afternoon, reporting that in 2015 Yahoo agreed to scan all their users’ incoming e-mails on behalf of a U.S. intelligence agency, hunting for a particular “character string” and turning over messages where it found a match to the government. Yet the vagueness of the story—which appears to be based on sources with limited access to the details of the surveillance—leaves a maddening number of unanswered questions.  Yahoo did not greatly help matters with a meticulously worded non-denial, calling the story “misleading” without calling it substantively false, and asserting that the “scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems.” (Obvious follow-up questions: Did it exist in 2015? Does it now exist on some other systems?)  Then, on Wednesday, Charlie Savage and Nicole Perlroth of The New York Times published a follow-up article fleshing out some of the details: The bulk scan was conducted pursuant to an order from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and hunted for a “digital signature” associated with a foreign state-sponsored terror group.

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

Politicians and Spending Caps

By Chris Edwards

Budget experts worried about the growth of federal spending and deficits have proposed various statutory and constitutional restraints to get the budget under control. I favor a simple cap on the percentage growth in annual total outlays.

Many state governments have spending, deficit, and debt restraints on the books, both statutory and constitutional. The restraints do help to tame state fiscal policy, but there is lots of cheating by the politicians.

Researching Cato’s new Governors Report Card, I came across an illuminating story about Connecticut’s spending restraint mechanism. I quote here at length:

The 1991 General Assembly tried to temper outrage over enactment of the state income tax by drafting a statutory spending cap. Voters would add the cap requirement to the state Constitution one year later by adopting the 28th Amendment.

The cap is supposed to keep spending increases in line with the annual growth in personal income or inflation, whichever is larger. For most of the cap’s history, the legislature has relied on personal income.

The cap system uses an average of personal income growth over the previous five years. That means that the sluggish growth years immediately following the last recession — which ended in 2010 — will continue to limit spending growth under the current cap system.

That makes sense to me—citizen income is stagnant in slow-growth Connecticut, so government growth should be limited so that it doesn’t squeeze people more when they can least afford it.

But that’s not how Connecticut politicians see it:

Both political parties have looked for ways around the cap over the past decade. The governor and legislature can exceed the cap legally if they agree and take special steps.

That happened in 2005 when Gov. M. Jodi Rell, a Republican, signed a declaration of fiscal exigency — declaring a budget emergency. More than 60 percent of the Democrat-controlled House and Senate voted to approve the plan.

Two years later, Rell and lawmakers used the same approach, this time approving a biennial budget that shattered the cap by a record-setting $690 million in the first year.

Since in 2011, Malloy has refused to declare a budget emergency. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t bent to the cap’s weight.

The governor has proposed or approved moving spending outside of the cap – in large quantities …

The Democrat-controlled Appropriations Committee stunned the Capitol in April 2015 when it proposed a budget that moved billions of dollars in spending for pensions and other retirement benefit costs out from under the cap — for the first time since the spending control was established in 1991.

Both Rell and Malloy have been awarded “F” grades from Cato for their fiscal irresponsibility. It’s a shame that politicians of both parties in Connecticut aren’t abiding by a sensible constitutional restraint passed with the support of 80 percent of voters. 

Topics:
Tax and Budget Policy

Statement on the Ratification of the Paris Agreement

By Patrick J. Michaels

Earlier this afternoon in the Rose Garden, President Obama celebrated the ratification of the Paris Agreement. I had this to say in response:

President Obama was a bit less than candid in his speech about the adoption of the U.N.’s Paris Agreement. Using realistic assumptions about role of carbon dioxide in climate change, the Agreement will prevent 0.1 to 0.2°C of global warming by the year 2100, not the inflated figure the U.N. gets by assuming all warming since the Industrial Revolution is caused by human emissions of carbon dioxide. Few, if any, climate scientists would defend that. It also assumes that emissions will—without the Paris Agreement—increase much faster than the average increase used in climate simulations. In reality, the UN’s own Climate Panel states only that carbon dioxide is causing more than 50% of the warming observed since 1950, not 1800. Further, the switch from coal to natural gas for electrical generation has already invalidated the UN’s assumptions about the growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

He is also a bit optimistic about China, which has said it will stop increasing carbon dioxide emissions “around” 2030. This is exactly the time that researchers in Obama’s own Department of Energy said, in 2011, that their emissions would level off due to their maturing economy, and without any explicit policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, best known as “business as usual.”

Topics:
Energy and Environment

Debating Universal Coverage with Norwegian Minister of Education and Research Torbjørn Isaksen

By Michael F. Cannon

In this Norwegian documentary, former Conservative Party MP and Norway’s current Minister of Education and Research Torbjørn (“Thor Bear”) Røe Isaksen and I debate which provides a better guarantee of access to health care – government or a market system?

Washingtonians may recognize the locale: Bob & Edith’s Diner in Arlington, Virginia. 

A rough translation/transcript of the documentary is available here.

Topics:
Government and Politics, Health Care & Welfare

A Report on Urban Policy from DC’s Front Lines

By Vanessa Brown Calder

A law-abiding resident has few options to protect herself, if she is luckless enough to live in the Nation’s Capital. This truth became abundantly clear this weekend, when a neighborhood drunk attempted to break into my apartment way past either of our bedtimes. Once the situation resolved, I became hell-bent on determining how someone in my circumstances should respond in case next time they fared less agreeably.

A cursory web search of DC urban policy was less-than-encouraging: in the Nation’s Capital, urban policy so markedly favors the assailant that the victim’s best tool in the event of an emergency seems to be something like practicing jujitsu moves in the corner while she runs the clock out.

Conventionally speaking, there are two options when you are assaulted; lethal or nonlethal resistance. Guns fall into the former category, but leaving the matter of D.C.’s gun laws aside – as bewildering as they are – the perhaps more asinine urban policies are those surrounding non-lethal deterrents.

Non-lethal deterrents include 1) self defense sprays (mace or pepper spray) and 2) tasers. If you’re a woman, don’t own a gun, and would like to protect yourself, your best option is probably a good self-defense spray, followed by a taser or knife, except that in D.C. all of these options are either sometimes or always illegal.

For self-defense sprays, this is because certain sprays do not meet the requirements the City Council has set forth, requirements like containing approved chemicals from a list, being labeled with “clearly written instructions for use, and dated with [their] anticipated useful life.” (Apparently, in a life-or-death situation you should be thinking about whether you’ve labeled your itty bitty mace keychain’s expiration date properly.)

City council members are also rarefied luddites, insisting that your self defense spray use an aerosol-propelled mechanism, rather than the more effective, recent innovations that use a incendiary charge to direct the spray, like the Kimber Pepperblaster.*

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Topics:
General, Government and Politics, Health Care & Welfare, Law and Civil Liberties

Governors Fiscal Report

By Chris Edwards

Most state governments are in an expansionary phase, as revenues are growing at a steady clip. Some governors are using the growing revenues to expand spending programs, while others are pursuing tax cuts and tax reforms.

That is the backdrop to this year’s 13th biennial fiscal report card on the governors, which Cato released today. It uses statistical data to grade the governors on their taxing and spending records since 2014—governors who have cut taxes and spending the most receive the highest grades, while those who have increased taxes and spending the most receive the lowest grades.

Five governors were awarded an “A”: Paul LePage of Maine, Pat McCrory of North Carolina, Rick Scott of Florida, Doug Ducey of Arizona, and Mike Pence of Indiana.

Ten governors were awarded an “F”: Robert Bentley of Alabama, Peter Shumlin of Vermont, Jerry Brown of California, David Ige of Hawaii, Dan Malloy of Connecticut, Dennis Daugaard of South Dakota, Brian Sandoval of Nevada, Kate Brown of Oregon, Jay Inslee of Washington, and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania.

The report describes the record of each governor and discusses the outlook for state budgets. Medicaid costs are rising, and federal aid for this huge health program will likely be reduced in coming years. At the same time, many states have high levels of unfunded liabilities in their pension and retiree health plans.

Those factors will create pressure for states to raise taxes. Yet global economic competition demands that states improve their investment climates by cutting tax rates, particularly on businesses, entrepreneurs, and skilled workers.

News reports about the states often focus on policymaker efforts to balance their budgets. Balanced budgets are important, but policymakers should also be running their governments in a lean and frugal manner, reforming tax codes to spur growth, and generally expanding fiscal freedom for state residents.

Cato’s new report helps to sort out the governors who are moving in that direction from those who are not. An oped describing the main results is here.

Topics:
Government and Politics, Tax and Budget Policy

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