I sometimes think that Democrats do not realize what they’re toying with. At Outside the Beltway James Joyner takes note of a move to block ballot access to any candidate who has not released five years worth of tax returns:

A growing number of blue states are trying to force Donald Trump to release his tax returns as a condition of appearing on the 2020 presidential ballot.

The problem with this, of course, is that there have been Supreme Court decisions finding that state and local governments are not empowered to impose their own requirements or restrictions on offices whose qualifications are defined in the U. S. Constitution and the office of president is one of those. From Article Two:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident …

That’s it. No other qualifications may be piled on top of that. Imposing additional requirements for electors to the Electoral College should be seen in the same light—an attempt to do an end run around the Constitution. They can’t impose their own qualifications for president, senator, or representative and they can’t impose their own qualificiations for voting for federal offices.

Consider this scenario. One of the states decides to abolish its present government in favor of a monarchy. That would be an express violation of Article Four of the Constitution:

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government…

Citizens of the state who prefer a republican form of government would be completely legitimate in overthrowing the state’s monarchy by force.

I can think of little more likely to foment a civil war in the United States than such pseudo-legal politically-motivated gambits.

I suppose I should comment on the proposal by Sen. Elizabeth Warren that all student debt should be forgiven and that higher education should be provided free of charge or, more precisely, the full cost of higher education should be borne by the taxpayer. I think those are very bad ideas, I will attempt to explain why, and repeat the proposals for reform that I’ve suggested in the past.

To understand why those proposals are bad ideas first consider who benefits from the status quo, then consider who benefits from Sen. Warren’s proposals, and who bears risk. Educational and lending institutions are the primary beneficiaries of the present system while students who wish to pursue courses of study which will not provide credentials with which to get a job are secondary beneficiaries, bearing no more risk than they would in any event.

Under Sen. Warren’s proposal educational institutions would be the primary beneficiaries and the secondary beneficiaries would be middle to upper middle class families for whom risk, other than the risk of time, would be eliminated. Lending institutions would lose as would the children of the poor (since money is fungible). Additionally, there would be a grave increase in moral hazard—students would have even greater incentives to pursue courses of study which would not qualify them for employment or even slack off altogether. There would be no risk in doing so.

I agree with Sen. Warren that our present system is desperately in need of reform but my proposal would be to align risks with rewards. The five largest states should each close one of their non-performing institutions of higher learning (they all have them) and the savings should be used to create a free, online degree-bearing institution. I am agnostic on whether it should be a two-year or four-year course of study and degree.

Taxpayers would bear no additional risks. If those trumpeting higher education as our sole industrial policy are right, the rewards should be enormous. If they’re wrong (as I believe), all that will have been lost is time.

I would also propose the following:

1. A formula should be found by which student loan debt can be dischargeable in bankruptcy;
2. No federally-subsidized loans should be provided for courses of study for which there are no jobs available. An example of this would be journalism. Every year the J-schools graduate a third as many journalism grads as there are jobs in journalism and every year the number of jobs for journalists decreases. We need fewer journalism, psychology, French, art history, and interest studies majors. Courses of study which would qualify for federally-subsidized loans would be determined annually by the Department of Labor in conjunction with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
3. Educational institutions should bear some of the risk. Presently they bear none. Presumably, the form that would take is that students who graduate from institutions but are unable to get a job in their chosen field should have a legal cause of action against their institutions.

The editors of the Washington Post remark on the public policy nightmare that is the Central States Pension Fund:

Multiemployer plans seemed like a great idea at the time, decades ago, when they were formed, and when the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC) undertook to insure them against insolvency. It turned out, however, that many plans could not withstand the serial shake-outs that battered trucking, coal, commercial baking and other industries.

Today, the government considers about a 10th of the 1,400 plans “at risk.” The projected unfunded liabilities, in turn, could swamp the PBGC, whose multiemployer insurance fund had $2.3 billion in cash to cover insured liabilities of $56.2 billion as of Sept. 30, 2018. (PBGC’s separate fund for single-employer pensions faces no such problem.) At the heart of the issue: the mammoth Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund. With an unfunded liability exceeding $20 billion, it is on course for collapse by 2025, which could bring down the PBGC’s multiemployer pension insurance fund with it.

Basically, the retirement livelihood of hundreds of thousands of working-class Americans is in jeopardy. So, too, are many businesses for which pension obligations have become a growth-stifling burden. A meltdown must be avoided, but so, too, must a massive federal bailout that would soak the rest of society, including many taxpayers who do not even have pensions. Between those poles lie inevitable shared sacrifices: a significant but finite injection of public funds, offset by limited benefit reductions, conditioned on long-term reforms to stabilize the system.

Congress actually adopted such a proposal on a bipartisan basis in 2014, but the Obama administration balked at implementing the required benefit haircut for Central States retirees on the eve of the 2016 election — which sent Congress back to the drawing board. Lawmakers from both parties and both chambers formed a committee to write a new bill, which would have gotten expedited consideration on the floors of both chambers. Unfortunately, the committee missed a self-imposed Nov. 30, 2018, deadline.

It did develop a draft that would have provided $3 billion per year in taxpayer funds to cover benefits for a certain category of retirees whose former employers had gone out of business, while requiring remaining pensions to make selective benefit cuts, pay higher PBGC insurance premiums and adopt more realistic economic assumptions. Hardly pain-free or perfect, the proposal had the virtue of realism and, in rough terms, fairness.

The conflict is between justice and mercy. The truckers depending on the fund aren’t exactly fat cats and many probably have few other resources to fall back on. But demanding that people who have no pensions themselves pay for the pensions of others doesn’t seem fair, either. How did the CSPF get into its mess? This explainer at Bloomberg casts a little light on the subject:

(1) Trucking Deregulation and Employer Exodus

When Congress passed a law in 1980 that led to the deregulation of the trucking industry, it caused tens of thousands of trucking companies to go out of business. By 2003, Central States lost 70 percent of the employers that contributed in 1980.

“If you look at the top 50 employers in 1980, now only three of them still exist (in the plan),” Tom Nyhan, executive director of the Central States fund, told Bloomberg Law. The plan’s largest contributing employers are ABF Freight System Inc., Jack Cooper Transport Co., and YRC Inc.

Trucking deregulation didn’t hit the Western Conference the same way because it had a more diverse employer base, said Chuck Mack, the plan’s co-chair.

“We have been structured as a plan that would open to any employer who wants to come in. As a result we have food processing workers, public employees, bus drivers, etc.,” he said. “If employers can only contribute 50 cents an hour (per worker) not $5, they can do that. That makes a difference in employers accepting the plan.”

The Western Conference plan’s largest contributing employers include United Parcel Service Inc., Costco Wholesale Group , Albertsons Cos Inc., and Allied Waste .

(2) Active to Inactive Ratios

The two plans have different ratios of active and inactive participants. When an employer withdraws from a multiemployer plan and stops paying contributions, its workers become “inactive.” The more inactive participants a fund has, the larger the burden is on other employers still contributing.

The Central States ratio suffered after UPS left the plan and turned 44,400 active participants inactive, resulting in a loss of more than $500 million in contributions, about one-third of total contributions at that time. More recently, Kroger withdrew in late 2017 to transfer about 1,800 active participants to a new pension fund it established.

(3) Weathering Financial Storms

The UPS withdrawal also coincided with the 2008-09 financial crisis, which caused the Central States fund to lose $7.6 billion in investments in 2008. That same year, Central States paid $1.8 billion more in benefits than contributions received.

“In down markets, Western Conference generates sufficient revenue from their contribution base, but Central States has to eat into its assets in order to make all the benefit payments,” Nyhan said.

Market downturns accelerated the harm to Central States, but Western Conference’s funding helped it better weather employer withdrawals and market corrections. Immediately after the dot-com bust and the 2008-09 financial crisis, Central States’ funded percentage took bigger hits than the Western Conference.

The Western Conference likely suffered less investment losses in the market turmoils because of its “conservative but diversified” investment strategy, said Mike Sander, the plan administrator.

(4) Funding Adjustment Structure

The Western Conference had an advantage in its funding policy that gave it the flexibility to adjust benefit accrual rates to adapt to changing financial conditions.

Central States may have made bigger benefit promises than what the contribution can support, John Lowell, a partner at actuarial firm October Three, told Bloomberg Law.

Western Conference had a formal funding policy since the 1980s that adjusts its benefit accrual rates, Sander said. This allowed the plan to quickly adapt to changes in the economy. For example, the benefit accrual rate was reduced twice in 2003, because the trustees saw the market after the dot-com bust and felt it was necessary.

Central States doesn’t have such an automatic adjustment structure, Nyhan said. The benefit accrual rate remained 2 percent since the late 1980s until it was reduced by half in 2004. Benefits accrual rate is just one of the factors that determine the overall benefits promises made, and Central States took a few other measures.

In other words the problem was caused by initial overregulation, precipitous Congressional action, bad union management, and bad pension management.

In my view, since consumers were among the main beneficiaries of trucking deregulation, putting the taxpayer on the hook for some of the shortfall is just. But consumers weren’t the only ones who benefited. So did Congressmen, union leaders, the investment managers involved, and the truckers themselves. In a just world some massive clawbacks would be in order. That’s pretty unlikely.

I think that the House should begin its impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump or STFU about it and it should do so as quickly as possible. I do not know what another investigation would accomplish. I also think that impeaching a president with an approval rating over 30% would be political hara-kiri for the Democrats.

Keep in mind that “high crimes and misdemeanors” are whatever the House thinks they are.

That said and harkening back to things I’ve said previously I think that lots of politicians, mostly lawyers who should know better, are playing fast and loose with some serious accusations, e.g. “treason”. Whatever you think Trump did or did not do there is no case for treason.

However, in this post I want to ask a question about obstruction of justice. Is it possible for the President of the United States to obstruct justice solely by exercising his legal authority? It’s hard for me to believe it is.

At the incarnation of The Volokh Conspiracy now hosted at Reason.com, Eugene Volokh articulates the seemingly contrarian argument that not only does the Census Bureau have the authority to ask a citizenship question in the context of the decennial census, it is obligated to do so:
The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, provided that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified two years earlier in 1868, provided another mechanism to prevent states from disenfranchising the freedmen: states that abridged the right to vote would lose representation in Congress.

Section 2 has three relevant clauses (emphasis added):

1. “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.
2. “But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime,
3. “the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.”

Basically, there is no way to make that determination other than by asking the question. Since it’s an affirmative obligation (“shall be reduced”) and consequently so is a citizenship question.

The underappreciated musical comedy Destry Rides Again has a delightful production number in Act II, “Are you ready, Gyp Watson?”. In it the argument is made that the accused, Gyp Watson, could not possibly be guilty, because “he ain’t got the brains to be bad”.

At first glance that appears to be the defense that Lori Loughlin and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, are making in the college admissions bribery scandal that has been in the news lately. From Yahoo Entertainment:

Lori Loughlin and her husband Mossimo Giannulli didn’t fully grasp that their alleged bribery in the college admissions scandal was illegal, a source familiar with the case tells PEOPLE.

“You read the complaint and they look like criminal masterminds,” the source tells PEOPLE. “But they really didn’t know the legalities of what was going on. They’re not lawyers and they’re not experts. They were parents who simply wanted to make sure that their daughters got into a good school.”

The source tells PEOPLE that Loughlin and Giannulli truly believed that their actions were comparable to those of other parents who take extraordinary steps to help their their children get into upper-tier colleges.

“Calling in favors, donating money to the alumni association, hiring consultants. Those are all things that parents do,” says the source. “And so they gave money to this consultant, not entirely knowing everything that was going to be done. When it all fell apart, nobody was as surprised as they were that they were in trouble.”

The source continues, “She never intended to break any laws, and if she did, it was inadvertent.”

I don’t think that’s quite as loopy as it sounds. Under California law bribery requires intent. If they did not intentionally break the law, there is no crime.

We could actually see the situation in which Felicity Huffman does time for paying $15,000 and pleading guilty while Loughlin and her husband who paid $500,0000 skate by pleading innocent an claiming ignorance.

We have two annual days of mourning in the United States, the first on April 15th when we’re supposed to file our 1040 individual income tax forms. The second is a movable feast, sometimes in April, occasionally in May. It’s the day when the Social Security actuaries publish their annual report on the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. Both days are celebrated with mourning, breast-beating, occasional curses, and a barrage of editorials on our profligacy and improvidence and the general imcompetence of our elected leaders.

The Social Security Actuaries published their report this week. There’s a bit of good news. Due to fewer people on the disability rolls the Disability Insurance trust fund will not become insolvent until 2052, a major improvement over last year when it was expected to become insolvent in 2032.

The date when the OASI fund, the Social Security retirement fund, is expected to become insolvent, is unchanged at 2034. What that means is that unless something changes by that time the Social Security system will not have the money to pay all of the benefits that have been promised and Social Security checks will be reduced. The depletion of the Medicare hospital fund is even more imminent, expect in just 8 years in 2026.

At the American Spectator Quin Hilyer presents his plan for reforming Social Security and Medicare:

The first is a very rough tradeoff of “general fund” revenue for money specifically dedicated to Social Security and Medicare — with the added goal of making accounting less complicated by dealing in whole or round numbers. The current payroll tax dedicated to Social Security is 6.2 % each for the employee and the employer, and the Medicare tax is 1.45% each for the employee and employer. I would bump the former up to 6.5% each, and the latter up to 1.5% each. End those weird fractions, and put the tiny increases into the two trust funds.

To help corporations pay for the added cost, let’s cut the top corporate income tax rate from 21 % to an even 20%. At the same time, the 20% deduction for pass-through businesses, which under current law will end after 2025, should be made permanent.

Two more major changes will lengthen the actuarial life of both programs. First, lawmakers should bite the bullet and do exactly what Dole and company did in 1983, and allow the age for qualification for full benefits once again to rise. The Social Security full-eligibility age is now rising to 67 by 2027. Let it keep rising, over the subsequent six years, to 68. Likewise, the Medicare full-eligibility age, now 65, should start rising slowly to 66.

Now come the two bolder proposals. First, it’s long past time for adoption of some version of what presidential candidate Pete DuPont proposed as early as 1987, and as the Institute for Policy Innovation think tank again proposed on Monday: Allow younger workers to use some of their payroll tax money to go into separate, private accounts (with their future claims on ordinary Social Security being reduced accordingly).

Second, it’s time for the tax code to stop favoring executive pay over that of ordinary workers. Right now, payroll taxes end for earnings above $132,900. I propose eliminating that cap, but only for the business’s part of salaries above that. In other words, the business would pay 8% of all earnings (Social Security and Medicare combined), but the employee (presumably an executive) would stop paying his 8 percent at the currently scheduled limit. (The topline benefit down the line, however, would not rise.)

To summarize: a small increase in FICA, a small reduction in the corporate income tax, a small increase in the Social Security retirement age, and eliminating the employer FICA max. With the exception of that last provision all of those proposals have been examined by the Social Security actuaries and found to be inadequate to restore solvency to the system.

That last proposal is interesting and suggests to me that Mr. Hilyer is not particularly mathematically or politically sophisticated. It would constitute the largest tax increase in the history of the Social Security system and, if enacted despite the enormous hue and cry that would ensue, would, in theory, increase FICA receipts by just about 4%. In practice that wouldn’t happen. What would happen is a decrease in wage incomes on the part of the highest income earners in favor of other non-wage compensation. In other words not only wouldn’t it solve the problem it would have serious run-on effects.

In his column in the Washington Post Robert Samuelson remarks:

The trustees suggest that, if nothing is done, benefits might have to be cut so that Social Security’s spending is covered by its revenue, which comes mainly from payroll taxes. The prospective cuts to Social Security benefits would initially be around 20 percent and grow to 25 percent. Though this is possible, it seems unlikely. Based on experience, presidents and congresses will simply divert more non-payroll tax revenue to Social Security and Medicare (Medicare is health insurance for the 65-and-older population).

Of course, this will trigger chain reactions, because the money has to come from somewhere, and the choices are no secret: (a) higher taxes; (b) higher borrowing — and bigger budget deficits; (c) cuts in other programs, from scientific research to the FBI to the National Park Service, indeed, most other federal programs. (Note: One other possibility — creating inflation — is left off this list, because it has yet to be tried.) The message here is familiar. The aging of the population, including the high cost of health care, is determining the nation’s budget priorities.

By and large, both parties are practicing the politics of evasion. That is, they have taken Social Security and Medicare spending as a given and have ignored its impact on the rest of the budget. This is true of both Republicans and Democrats. President Trump successfully proposed his $1.5 trillion tax cut (over 10 years), while many of the already-announced candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination have proposed major new programs.

Consider. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) plugs his Medicare-for-all proposal. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wants to make tuition at public colleges free. Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) touts a roughly $3 trillion tax cut (over a decade), which she describes as “the most significant middle-class tax cut in generations.” On paper, each of these proposals is financed by some sort of tax increase. But what isn’t acknowledged or emphasized is that the proposals typically ignore the existing budget deficits, which are now approaching $1 trillion annually.

What is to be done about these deficits? The answer, according to most of the candidates, is that nothing is to be done. The large deficits don’t yet seem to have hurt the economy, so cautious candidates conclude they should be left alone. It’s more rewarding politically to peddle grandiose and costly proposals and pretend that the large deficits won’t cause any long-term problems. By and large, this is the path of least resistance.

As is not unusual he suggests no solutions, satisfied with lamenting the problem.

This post is already long enough but I wanted to make a few observations. First, the present program is not FDR’s Social Security program. When the program was enacted into law, U. S. life expectancy was 61 years and full Social Security retirement was 65. In order for today’s program when life expectancy is 78 to resemble FDR’s program full Social Security retirement age would need to be increased to 83. Need I point out that isn’t going to happen?

Second, the program’s economic and demographic assumptions have failed. Either not enough people are paying into the system or not enough income is being taxed or both. That’s where Mr. Hilyer’s FICA max proposal fits in. He wants to subject more income to the tax. It won’t happen but it’s a practical solution.

Third, for much of the history of the Social Security system defined benefit pensions were actually a thing. They no longer are except for government workers.

Fourth, I don’t see how anyone who lived through the 17 years during which stock prices didn’t rise at all and the double digit inflation of the late 1970s-early 80s can really believe that individual saving for one’s retirement is a realistic alternative for most people. There are too many factors that are simply beyond our control. Besides the amount by which consumption would need to be reduced would bring on an economic collapse. Need I point out that businesses aren’t investing in domestic facilities the way they used to? In other words if Americans were saving at the level that would be necessary for them to provide for their own retirements, that money would simply be withdrawn from the American economy.

There’s an interesting analysis of European politics by Ivan Krastev, Mark Leonard & Susi Dennison at the European Council on Foreign Relations. They divide European political opinion into four categories:

• “House of Stark” —those who believe in the present system
• “The Sparrows” (the Gilets Jaunes)
• “The Daeneryses”—the Pro-European Left Behind
• “The Free Folk”—nationalistic Euroskeptics

It might come as a surprise to you as it did to me that the single largest group is “The Sparrows” and the smallest the Euroskeptics. Read the whole thing.

At RealClearScience Chris Hawes surveys some developments in carbon capture technology:

According to a recent major UN report, if we are to limit temperature rise to 1.5 °C and prevent the most catastrophic effects of climate change, we need to reduce global CO₂ emissions to net zero by 2050. This means eliminating fossil fuel use fast – but to cushion that transition and offset the areas in which there is currently no replacement for combustibles, we need to actively remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. Planting trees and rewilding are a large part of this solution, but we are highly likely to need further technological assistance if we are to prevent climate breakdown.

So when recent news emerged that Canadian company Carbon Engineering has harnessed some well-known chemistry to capture CO₂ from the atmosphere at a cost of less than $100 a tonne, many media sources hailed the milestone as a magic bullet. Unfortunately, the big picture isn’t as simple. Truly tipping the balance from carbon source to carbon sink is a delicate business, and our view is that the energy costs involved and likely downstream uses of captured CO₂ mean that Carbon Engineering’s “bullet” is anything but magic.

I haven’t summarized my views on this issue for a while so this looks like a good opportunity. I think it is evident to anyone who cares to observe that climate is changing and it has always been changing. That human beings are a contributing factor to the process can hardly be denied as well. Human beings have been, at the very least, a contributing factor to the desertification of the Arab Peninsula and the Sahara through overgrazing.

Most of the Chicago area used to be a marsh. That people drained and filled in the marshes, even redirecting rivers to make things more conducive to the population is a matter of record. Before the Spanish arrived in the 18th century, the Los Angeles basin was home to at most a few thousand people. Now more than 10 million people live there, paving over the pre-existing scrub, bringing in water and all of the other things people need to live.

There is presently an enormous accumulation of heat in the ocean off the coast of China. It’s hard to find an explanation for it other than the the huge number of people and the industrialization of the last several decades. All of these examples I’ve presented are local change but all have implications that reach far beyond those localities.

I don’t know whether carbon in the atmosphere is the primary culprit. I think it’s probably a factor. I’m skeptical of fine-tuned predictions of what is going to happen. I think the matter is too complex for that. I do think that extracting carbon that has been stored for millions of years and injecting it into the atmosphere in the millions of tons is bound to have some effect.

I also think that demanding that the Chinese and Indians eschew any ambitions for improving the lots of their people because doing so emits too much carbon will be futile while demanding that we first reduce the amount of carbon we’re emitting, then become net zero, then net negative is not only futile but fantastical.

I think that reducing the amount of oil that we burn for fuel would be a good idea if only because the stuff is to darned useful for other purposes. I think that wind and solar power are good for some niche uses, particularly for producing consumer electricity where sunlight is plentiful, e.g. Southern California and the American Southwest, but we still need reliable sources of power for places not so blessed and presently the best candidate for that would be nuclear power. I have expressed a preference for small scale nuclear reactors based on thorium as “inherently safe”.

I think that carbon capture is a promising technology and we should be looking to it, particularly in the areas adjacent to power plants, to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Consequently, I see a diverse energy future that includes nuclear in our future. Less coal and oil, more natural gaS.
And for goodness sake don’t do what the Germans have been doing.