Cagle World

Fear of the COVID virus may be largely gone, but the consequences of the mistakes made trying to combat its spread will be with us for a long time.

This is particularly true in the education space. Post-pandemic studies are now confirming the school closures, ordered by politicians bending to pressure from teachers’ unions, produced a learning gap that is unlikely to close. The 2022 National Assessment of Education Progress found, as one example, that math scores for 13-year-olds experienced their biggest decline in 50 years.

The fight to keep schools open – public and private – reached a state of alarming combativeness. Orthodox Jews in New York City who unsuccessfully tried to defy orders closing their schools issued by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo found themselves intimidated and threatened with arrest.

Cuomo was not alone in going overboard. The countless closures and failed experiments with masking and home-based learning led parents to rally for their children’s right to go to school. That cause continues today.

Parents understand as never before the scope of change needed. For the first time since the phrase “school choice” began to be heard in Wisconsin back in the 1980s, the war on “Big Education” is finally out in the open.

The latest campaign started in West Virginia. After persuading people in urban centers and rural communities alike how alternative education opportunities would open the doorway to success for school children, the legislature enacted a robust program tying state education funding to students rather than school systems.

Similar expansions are now occurring across the country under the rallying cry, “Fund students, not systems.” Republican state legislators joined by a very few brave Democrats willing to stand up to the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers are pushing education-improving reforms that stand in sharp contrast to the empty promises the education establishment routinely fails to deliver.

State-funded scholarships are catching on. Education funding support is making it possible for the children of low- and middle-income parents to have the ability to escape failing schools the children of the privileged have.

In Arizona, when Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs (who was elected last year with the backing of the teachers’ unions) threatened to roll back the expansion of education savings accounts that were enacted thanks to the leadership of outgoing Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, it was pressure from families already benefiting from Ducey’s reforms that forced her to back down.

In North Carolina, a Democratic state legislator crossed the aisle – giving the Republicans a veto-proof majority in the state legislature – in protest of the opposition to education savings accounts displayed by her fellow Democrats, including North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper.

Cooper – who sent his daughter to private school – responded by declaring a “state of emergency” in education. It’s a meaningless gesture because the parents in his state know that one already existed. Too many schools had failed too many children to allow business as usual to continue.

The details are still being worked out, but an expanded scholarship program for K thru 12 students will probably be in place by the beginning of the next school year in North Carolina over Cooper’s veto as it will in Iowa, where Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds made it possible for more than half a million students to participate.

In Arkansas, newly-elected GOP Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders made the expansion of education savings accounts one of the first things she did. That’s half a million more students eligible for opportunity while in Florida, GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis led the fight to expand programs that started under Gov. Jeb Bush so that more than 3 million students will have the opportunity to attend better schools than the ones they are assigned because of where they live.

It doesn’t end there. Families in North Dakota and Indiana and Tennessee are now eligible for vouchers while Oklahoma and Nebraska residents can get tax credits. In other states, like Louisiana, New Hampshire, Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, proposals to fund student scholarships instead of schools may still come into being before the start of the next school year.

The education revolution has begun, with parents leading the way. In a few years, it will be possible to prove that parents can rescue their children from failing schools simply by making it affordable to move them to better ones.

–

Copyright 2023 Peter Roff distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Peter Roff is a media fellow at the Trans-Atlantic Leadership Network, a former columnist for U.S. News and World Report, and senior political writer for United Press International. Contact Roff at [email protected], and follow him on Twitter @TheRoffDraft.

More than a few economists predicted a period of record economic growth would follow the end of the lockdowns associated with the pandemic.

It didn’t happen. What America got instead was a period of prolonged, rapidly rising inflation that devalued wages and retirement savings. Now, as USA Today recently pointed out, more and more older Americans living on fixed incomes are realizing they may need to “unretire” to make ends meet.

Bidenflation certainly plays a part in that. The Consumer Price Index rose by nearly 5% between April 2022 and April 2023. That’s forced retirees to spend more, perhaps more than they had planned or can afford to keep living the way they want.

There may, however, be another problem most people currently saving for retirement have not yet recognized. The large money management firms to whom they have entrusted their savings may not be generating the maximum possible return on their investment because they’ve joined the woke crowd on Wall Street.

Economists believe these firms own about 75% of all the publicly traded shares available in the United States. This gives them tremendous power to set the agenda for individual corporations, which they do by casting proxy votes in favor of intrusive, ESG-related (Environmental, Social, Governance) resolutions opposed by company management at stockholder meetings.

The ultimate effect of this, says the Committee to Unleash Prosperity in a report available at Pensionpolitics.com, might be to flatten the income stream for retirees and other investors. Despite what some of the most notable Wall Street wizards claim, the ESG investing strategy does not produce the best returns.

Some people believe corporate power should be used to push for social justice, racial and gender equity in the C suite, responsible climate policy, and other progressive nostrums. On a case-by-case basis, individual investors should be free to pursue that course. After all, it’s their money.

If, on the other hand, fund managers use their positions to push policies that work against their ability to obtain the highest return on investment for their shareholders, they are abusing their power and turning their back on their fiduciary responsibility.

“More than half of the total investment in stock-based funds is allocated to passively managed ETFs and index funds, which simply mirror benchmarks such as the S&P 500,” the Committee to Unleash Prosperity says. Yet, as many people are unaware, participation in a fund does not convey ownership of the stock in the fund to its participating investors. The fund owns the stocks, with the voting rights attached to them vested in its manager or managers.

The bigger the fund, the more power the relatively small universe of fund managers (when compared to the total number of people invested in those funds) have to use other people’s money to dictate how publicly traded corporations should operate. They can vote Exxon out of the oil business and gasoline engines out of General Motors products because it’s allegedly good for the climate, even if leaves the people who depend on their investments in those funds even a little bit poorer.

All that’s fine with Joe Biden. His commitment to fighting climate change is total, even if it causes hardships for seniors living on fixed incomes. It was his administration, after all, that promulgated the rules loosening the requirements on investment firms to put their need to generate the best rate of return as the thing they needed to consider when making investments.

Instead, Biden wanted to make it possible for ESG concerns to carry equal weight. When Congress objected, passing on a bipartisan basis a measure to repeal those new rules, Biden cast the fest veto of his presidency.

At the corporate level, whether the decision to vote in favor of these ESG resolutions meant to change corporate behavior is being made at the top or by younger, less experienced middle managers whose social conscience dictates are ultimately at odds with their obligations to their clients, it’s putting social politics into boardrooms where they don’t belong.

At the moment, the remedies available to retirees whose portfolios are making as much as they should or could have little recourse. The only way to fight back right now is for investors to move their money out of the hands of people using it to pursue social justice and into the hands of those who are using it to make money. That’s rarely the same thing.

–

Copyright 2023 Peter Roff distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Peter Roff is a media fellow at the Trans-Atlantic Leadership Network, a former columnist for U.S. News and World Report, and senior political writer for United Press International. Contact Roff at [email protected], and follow him on Twitter @TheRoffDraft.

In its infinite wisdom – or lack thereof – Congress recently gave the U.S. Internal Revenue Service $80 billion in new funding as part of the Inflation Reduction Act before the agency had a plan for spending it.

It’s typical for Washington to do things that way – provide the funding first, figure out how to spend it second. That’s not in the American taxpayers’ interest but it works for the bureaucrats. Giving the IRS more money without specifying how it will be spent is akin to giving more power to a megalomaniac. The odds it will be abused are not just high, but near certainty.

IRS chief Danny Werfel, who appeared recently before the House Committee on Ways and Means, said nothing to put anyone at ease. Taxpayers fear his agency, and rightly so. It has immense power it uses ruthlessly. Ask any honest, blameless taxpayer who’s gotten a dunning letter whether their first thought was to fight or pay up.

It’s easier and cheaper to submit and settle. In tax court, the burden falls on the accused to prove their innocence. Putting the IRS on trial, even if you’re innocent, is too expensive a proposition for most Americans to consider.

Someone somewhere probably should someday. The agency’s reputation has been tarnished – insiders might think it was burnished – by recent scandals in which private taxpayer information was leaked to partisan interest groups and the press and involving senior officials who played politics with the power to grant non-profit status to organizations seeking to participate in the marketplace of ideas.

There’s probably a lot more going on behind the walls of the IRS’s imposing, fortress-like Constitution Avenue headquarters than Wefel and other senior leaders would like anyone to know. Transparency is not its long suit. A few issues are festering, as the pro-taxpayer group Americans for Tax Reform reminded congressional leaders before Werfel went to Capitol Hill. One involves the destruction of 30 million of what the think tank called “active taxpayer paper documents” it held at its Ogden, Utah facility.

No one at the IRS will tell Congress how it destroyed the documents, the groups said, chock full of sensitive, private, personal financial information that, if stacked one page on top of another would form a pile rising two miles into the air.

Of course, no one at the IRS told Congress the documents were going to be destroyed either. The destruction was discovered, Americans for Tax Reform said, only after a walk-through of the Utah facility by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Inspector for Tax Administration. The agency still refuses to supply lawmakers with internal memos providing details on what happened.

It’s maddening, and not just because of the government’s apparent malfeasance. No taxpayer in America could get away with destroying documents the IRS wanted to see – even if they didn’t know any of its auditors, agents, or administrators wanted to see them.

Worse things are already in the pipeline – like using the $80 billion in new funding it gets over the next decade to hire 87,000 new agents, auditors, and other personnel. That would, as Pennsylvania GOP Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick got Wefel to confirm, make the IRS “larger than the entire State Department, the entire Border Patrol, the entire Pentagon, and the entire FBI.”

Think about that. Larger than the Pentagon and the Border Patrol and those other agencies? For what possible reason? It doesn’t make sense unless there’s a plan in the works to impose taxes that require us to account for our total worth and annual spending as well as income. Like a wealth tax or a Value Added Tax, which Americans for Tax Reform head Grover G. Norquist likes to quip “Is French for money machine.”

Having tax levies like that in mind might explain why the IRS was recently advertising for new hires “willing to use force up to and including the use of deadly force.” That level of intrusiveness would make a lot of otherwise reasonable people very mad.

Werfel assured Congress when he testified that not all the new 87,000 agents would be armed, but one wonders. Empowered by the influx of $80 billion in new funding to go after what Joe Biden and other Democrats refer to as tax cheats, it’s easy to see how things going forward might get heated.

–

Copyright 2023 Peter Roff distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Peter Roff, a former United Press International and U.S. News & World Report columnist and political writer, is now affiliated with several Washington-D.C.-based public policy organizations as well as the Trans-Atlantic Leadership Network. Contact Roff at [email protected], and follow him on Twitter @TheRoffDraft.

It’s tax season again and, with the possible exception of President Joe Biden and a few members of Congress, we’re not happy about it.

Overall, thanks to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the federal tax bill many of us will pay is down from what it might have been. Biden thinks that’s a problem, even though tax revenues soared as a result of the lower rates. His core economic message continues to be that the wealthiest among us need to pay more even though the IRS data shows they are. After the tax cuts became law, tax payments by the top 1% of income earners rose by 17.3%.

What Biden and the other Democrats won’t admit is that by “more” they don’t mean just more than everybody else. They mean “more” much in the way Karl Marx did when he wrote about the distribution of resources: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

For Marx, it was a matter of abundance. He believed the economic system he advanced would produce enough for everyone. We know how that turned out. Biden and his fellow travelers likewise see abundance unequally distributed but call it “income inequality.”

To address it, they want to impose a wealth tax, tax unrealized capital gains, and levy higher taxes on incomes above a certain amount. They’re for just about everything that would transfer more of the assets of the so-called rich to Washington so they could redistribute it – enlightened progressives that they are – to the poor, the needy, and the favored.

Sounds benign, especially if you think you’d be on the receiving end. That’s how class warfare rhetoric is used to buy votes – making people believe the rich do well while the poor do not because the tax rates and the taxes paid by the highest earners are too low.

That’s nonsense. The real problem is the horrific state of the U.S. economy, which has swung back and forth toward recession during Biden’s presidency. Coming out of the lockdowns, the economy should have grown by 5% a quarter or more getting back to where it was before the politicians forced businesses to close during the pandemic.

Plenty of jobs were re-created for a while, but they’re starting to go away. The government, meanwhile, keeps spending. The American Recovery Act pumped trillions into the economy. The Inflation Reduction Act pumped in more. Pretty soon we had so much money chasing too few goods and services that inflation caused prices to rise faster than many people in the United States have ever seen. Those who have hadn’t since Jimmy Carter was president.

In that kind of economy, the rich still get richer. To be blunt, they always manage to ride it out because they’re better able to plan for the tough times. The poor and the working class have to take it as it comes, which means they do worse, and the income gap widens.

When the economy is growing, everyone benefits. The rich get richer, but so does everyone else because they have the opportunity to move up the income scale by finding better-paying jobs or by starting their own businesses. If that sounds simple, it is.

It’s basic economics, just like the fact a growing economy is more likely to produce greater tax revenue at lower rates than could be gleaned from a badly performing economy at higher rates. A bigger pie yields more slices than a smaller one.

People who are struggling may think Biden’s push to have government effectively redistribute the nation’s wealth more equitably sounds good. They don’t realize the numbers don’t add up – even after the IRS gets through hiring new agents and new auditors to uncover what the president and others like to suggest are hundreds of billions in potential tax revenue hidden each year by so-called tax cheats.

The pathway back to a healthy economy doesn’t include a trip down Tax Hike Lane or a stop at the Inn of Enhanced Collection Procedures. Overall spending by the federal government needs to come down.

As a mediating step, reducing the rate by which it increases (the liberals like to call that “cuts in vital services” and few people ever challenge them on that) is the quickest way to bring back the prosperity everyone needs. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” as the late Jack Kemp used to say.

–

Copyright 2023 Peter Roff distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Peter Roff, a former United Press International and U.S. News & World Report columnist and political writer, is now affiliated with several Washington-D.C.-based public policy organizations as well as the Trans-Atlantic Leadership Network. Contact Roff at [email protected], and follow him on Twitter @TheRoffDraft.

It’s budget time again – and the one President Joe Biden proposed is a beaut!

Biden’s budget proposal is the kind of thing only a progressive could get enthused about it. It grows the executive branch’s regulatory power, takes total yearly spending to nearly $10 trillion by 2033 (up from just over $6 trillion now, post-Covid), and depends on increased regulatory enforcement actions to bring additional revenue in.

That last idea is especially bad. Biden ran for the nomination as the moderate alternative to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, but he’s governing as Sanders would have. The federal government’s capacity to print and borrow money is just about infinite, so there’s little to stop his planned growth in government from happening.

You can blame the politicians all you want. What they’re doing, Democrats and Republicans alike, reflects what they believe are the wishes of the people who put them in office. And they, just in case it’s not clear, are us.

It’s often said Americans want more government than they’ll pay for. That’s not quite true. What we want is the illusion of safety and security and to be protected from the adverse consequences of bad choices without having to consider the costs.

That’s especially true when the subject turns to government regulation of the economy, where the costs are not transparent, the benefits are hard to define, and the reality doesn’t match the rhetoric.

Consider the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Many of the so-called experts were quick to point to the relaxation of federal banking rules set by the Dodd-Frank law by Donald Trump as the reason it failed.

That’s a great story for regulation-happy politicians like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who want to make case for even more burdensome rules. But it’s not accurate.

It’s already been shown the regulators who were supposed to keep watch were asleep at the switch. Some economists think it may be that the regulations already on the books helped drive SVB out of business.

It’s time to consider whether the total U.S. regulatory burden does as much to contribute to business failure as it does to prevent it. Is the American business safety net worth what it costs?

By some estimates, the regulations issued during Biden’s first two years drained more than $300 billion from the economy. That’s a 50% increase over Barack Obama’s first two years and eight times more expensive than all the rules released in all four years of the Trump administration.

The Biden numbers reflect the 443 final rules issued through late October 2022, which required roughly 193,000,000 hours of compliance paperwork across the nation, according to data collected by the American Action Forum, a public policy group. By contrast, the Trump administration released 500 final rules in its first two years that saved the economy an estimated $3.4 million and took up just 500,000 hours of compliance time.

That’s a clear contrast. It’s time to talk about which worked better – the heavy-handed one taken by Obama and Biden or the light touch, cooperative method used under Trump.

Business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others prefer the latter – and we should listen. They’ve been active in pushing back against the regulatory onslaught because they understand from their members that it kills jobs, lowers wages, and causes economic growth to stagnate. Rather than vilify these groups as the media and the liberal special interests invariably do, we should listen to their arguments more carefully. And we need to accept that the responsibility for keeping the economy going is not theirs alone, it’s ours.

Government overreach and excessive regulation by the Biden administration is crippling businesses, stifling economic growth, and infringing on our freedoms. Not all regulation is bad but, if we keep accepting the predictions of doom and gloom that come from the special interests and politicians who promote more government intervention in the marketplace, things will only get worse.

–

Copyright 2023 Peter Roff distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Peter Roff, a former United Press International and U.S. News & World Report columnist and political writer, is now affiliated with several Washington-D.C.-based public policy organizations

Correction: This column has been updated to correct Biden’s budget proposal as $6 trillion, not $6 billion. 

Washington is full of groups that claim to represent the interests of the American people. Some have lots of members, which makes them formidable actors in the ongoing effort to craft public policy.

Among the most powerful is AARP (formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons), which has developed a network of politically active seniors who vote and who defend their benefits zealously. That makes them a group the politicians fear, which gives them outsized influence on issues like healthcare.

According to a new report, what the group seems to be may not be what it is. “How AARP Puts Profits over Patients and Principles,” issued by a conservative non-profit called American Commitment, says that rather than being a genuine grassroots lobby organization, AARP’s ties to the health insurance industry have turned into something like a corporate influence operation working to sway the decisions of Capitol Hill lawmakers.

Many times, the report says, AARP has done things that create apparent conflicts of interest between the needs of the people the group claims to represent.

“If AARP were an honest broker for seniors, they would have acknowledged, and likely fought against, Democrats’ budgeting ruse allowing them to raid $280 billion from the supposed Medicare savings in the IRA,” wrote economist Stephen Moore in National Review. “Billions were instead diverted to fund subsidies for non-Medicare healthcare policies paid to big insurers.”

Critics of price controls on pharmaceuticals allege they will discourage future research and innovation which in turn will eventually cause the quality of care available to seniors to diminish over coming years.

All this, American Commitment President Phil Kerpen said, “provides further evidence that AARP does not serve the interests of seniors, but rather its principal funders, UnitedHealth and its subsidiary OptumRx—respectively the largest health insurance company in the country and a pharmacy middleman.”

Accusing AARP of having made “its allegiance to these companies clear,” Kerpen goes on to decry the group’s support for legislation that siphoned “billions of dollars from seniors’ Medicare to subsidize big health insurers and liberal spending priorities.”

AARP’s internal polling continually shows the cost of health insurance premiums, the size of deductibles and copays, and other out-of-pocket expenses are what close to three-quarters of seniors cite as the biggest financial issue they face in healthcare. Less than 20 percent say it’s the price of prescription drugs, which is a major concern for the insurance companies. Which issue gets most of AARP’s attention?

Well, AARP pushed Congress to enact the trillion-dollar Inflation Reduction Act, which included provisions helpful to the health insurance industry but overall damaging to Medicare’s long-term financial security. That doesn’t sound like something a seniors’ lobby should be doing – yet it reportedly spent millions on paid ads urging passage of the act as well as petition drives and meetings that almost exclusively benefited congressional Democrats backing the measure’s cap on prescription drug prices.

Congress has investigated AARP’s financial relationship with big insurance more than once without reaching any conclusions. It should do so again, in its interests and the public’s. Unless it does, the risk that legislative and regulatory actions will be pushed ahead under the guise of helping America’s seniors that will hurt them.

AARP members have a right to know what’s going on. So does Congress, and so do we all. It is a matter of trust.

–

Copyright 2023 Peter Roff distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Peter Roff, a former United Press International and U.S. News & World Report columnist and political writer, is now affiliated with several Washington-D.C.-based public policy organizations as well as the Trans-Atlantic Leadership Network. Contact Roff at [email protected], and follow him on Twitter @TheRoffDraft.

The most recent Real Clear Politics polling average finds nearly two-thirds of all Americans  think the country is on the wrong track. Real wages are down for 22 straight months, inflation has people worried about the security of their economy, and we are, to recall the words of Jimmy Carter, suffering through a period of malaise.

Not all of this is the president’s fault. He did promise during his inaugural address to bring us all together, and not only has he failed, but through his harsh rhetoric he’s further divided us.  But the problems run much deeper. We have lost confidence in our exceptionalism, thanks in no small part to the perversions of the American story now being taught to our children.

It’s a trend that must be reversed. We cannot continue as a nation if the critics of the American founding are allowed to win the argument that some of our faults are, if you will, baked into the cake. Therefore, the cake must be destroyed and we must begin again.

Nonsense. The American ideal of equality before the law may have taken too long to become meaningful to us all, but democracy is a process, a lesson taught to us by George Washington, whose birthday we are soon to observe.

At one time, Washington’s birthday was a major occasion and an opportunity to focus on why America is the exceptional place it has come to be. Remember, despite what the critics say, people from around the world are fighting to get in. No one, aside from the occasional Hollywood celebrity who usually fails to follow through on a promise to leave, is trying to get out.

Washington’s story is inspirational. Now, because we refer to his birthday as Presidents’ Day his significance has been allowed to erode over time. Yet can any figure now on the national stage even come close to Washington’s achievements? He was, as the eulogist said at his passing, “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Leader of the fight to secure America’s independence. President of the constitutional convention. Pioneer, agronomist and planter. Successful farmer. Accomplished horseman and dancer. Lover. A leader who nonetheless open his home at Mt. Vernon to anyone who came calling.

What Washington told us about the need to limit the powers of government remains relevant today. His wise leadership guaranteed the survival of our republic in its earliest days so it could become the greatest, freest, most prosperous, most generous society ever to exist. Despite his failure to fully embrace the Jeffersonian promise of equality for all, he must not be consigned to the pantheon of the mediocre.

That is the objective of the cultural commentators and pseudo-academics who now insist on emphasizing his ownership of slaves over his accomplishments. Talk of his greatness has been made unfashionable.

This is unfortunate. Washington the man was once a venerated American institution, purposefully set apart from men who followed him into the presidency. Even those who do not subscribe to the so-called “Great Man” theory of history must acknowledge his centrality to the creation and survival of a nation founded on the idea of liberty that ended up changing the world for the better.

All this should have been foreseen when the nation chose, for the most mundane of reasons, to end the celebration of Washington’s Birthday as a day to consider the man, his flaws – which were mercifully few – and his greatness. He deserves a special place of honor, his birthday a national day of celebration and remembrance.

We cannot move forward toward a greater, brighter future if we cannot bring the nation and its people together. Washington can be our rallying point. It is time for Congress to restore Washington’s Birthday to the national calendar and move it back to February 22, where it belongs.

–

Copyright 2023 Peter Roff distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Peter Roff, a former United Press International and U.S. News & World Report columnist and political writer, is now affiliated with several Washington-D.C.-based public policy organizations as well as the Trans-Atlantic Leadership Network. Contact Roff at [email protected], and follow him on Twitter @TheRoffDraft.

There are lot of things that have come out of Washington over the past few years that have done more harm than good.

Partisan divisions have hardened to the point it’s almost impossible to reach across the aisle. One place progress had been made, happily, was in reforming the criminal justice system. Unfortunately, some people decided reform also meant the implementation of  policies like “no cash” bail in places like Manhattan and Los Angeles, which keep bad people on the streets committing additional crimes instead of behind bars where they belong.

As a result, the reform movement has ground to a halt, even as there’s much real work still to be done. From the 1980s onward, national figures like then-Sen. Joe Biden, onetime chairman of the Senate Judiciary and principal author of the 1994 Crime Bill, decided minor crimes should be subject to major penalties. He and people like him who wanted to be president decided they needed to prove they were “tough on crime.” As a result, too many people went to prison for too long.

That doesn’t change because criminals who should be “sent away” now aren’t. We can make our communities safer without abandoning the drive for reform that began more than a decade ago out of a bipartisan desire to see old wrongs righted.

The cause of reform, for reasons previously mentioned, has become politically unpalatable. The Gallup organization says that in 2020, just 10 percent of Americans said they had “a great deal” of confidence in the criminal justice system. By 2021, that number dropped to 7 percent and by 2022 it was down to 4 percent.

Unless those numbers can be reversed, the inequities will remain and people who no longer deserve to be behind bars will remain there. People like Tadd Vassell, who at age 17 was arrested and charged with a series of non-violent drug offenses that, upon his conviction, earned him the equivalent of a life sentence.

Vassell’s been behind bars for 21 years. The 12 men arrested with him including the two principal defendants in the case (both were charged with crimes far more severe) are all out of prison. He’s become a model prisoner, helping others prepare for reintegration into society and helping them learn a trade so they can lead productive lives and stay on the right side of the law once they’re released.

Then there’s Ross Ulbricht, who created the controversial Silk Road peer-to-peer online marketplace. Developed to facilitate e-commerce transactions that could be conducted away from the prying eyes of the government, it became popular, especially with libertarian-leaning types who thought what they bought and sold was none of the government’s business.

The government, as is probably no surprise, objected to that, specifically because certain features of the Silk Road site attracted the business of people selling drugs and other illicit products. In 2013, the FBI arrested Ulbricht and shut the website down.

The prosecution chose to make an example of him, charging him with a handful of crimes connected to transactions conducted on his site to which he was not a party. Upon his conviction, he was sentenced to two life terms in prison plus 40 years without the possibility of parole.

The judge in the case intended for Ulbricht to die in prison, but was that because he committed heinous crimes or to make him an example to others under federal investigation? When informed of the facts, most people would wonder and, if they thought the latter was true, be outraged.

That’s not exactly an example of equal justice under the law and, if true, would further validate the public’s increasing distrust in the criminal justice system.

Meanwhile, public opinion on non-violent drug offenses is shifting. People who did far worse than either Vassell or Ulbricht have received sentences that were far less severe, or had their sentences commuted or received presidential pardons. Yet, because the forward progress on criminal justice reform has stalled out, Vassell and Ulbricht and people like them continue to languish behind bars.

President Biden has an opportunity to give the effort some gas, and in doing so keep a promise he made to the voters. Vassell and Ulbricht deserve executive clemency and should get it as part of a larger effort to ensure that going forward the sentence always fits the crime.

–

Copyright 2023 Peter Roff distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Peter Roff is a media fellow at the Trans-Atlantic Leadership Network, a former columnist for U.S. News and World Report, and senior political writer for United Press International. Contact Roff at [email protected], and follow him on Twitter @TheRoffDraft.

In 1790. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, by that time bitter rivals serving together in Washington’s Cabinet, dined privately with James Madison and struck a deal. The Virginians would get Hamilton the votes in Congress needed to adopt a financial system of his design in exchange for putting the new capital city on the banks of the Potomac.

Hamilton got the better end of the deal, which is memorialized in Lyn Manuel-Miranda’s musical retelling of his life in the song “The Room Where It Happens,” where he reminds Aaron Burr that, “You don’t get a win unless you play in the game.”

That was true in 1790 and it’s true today. The places where leaders in politics, media, and business intersect are the modern rooms “where it happens.” The most well-known is the World Economic Forum, which just concluded its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

A pricier gathering of global glitterati would be hard to find. The deals and decisions made at and because of this meeting each year shape the world of today and tomorrow. So you’d think supporters of things like free markets and free minds would be breaking down the doors trying to get in.

They’re not. Instead, they’re leading the charge against it. Writing the New York Post, prominent libertarian scholar James Bovard highlighted a 2016 video made for Davis that included eight predictions of what life would be like in 2030. “The highlight of the film,” he wrote, “was a vapid millennial guy pictured alongside the slogan: ‘You will own nothing and be happy.’”

“This bizarre notion,” he continued, “was no WEF aberration.”

He might be right but, with so much intellectual, economic, and cultural power in one place at the same time, how can lovers of liberty, classically defined, afford not to go? What better place to mount a defense of freedom generally than among the people who may have enough power to strip it away?

“Criticism of Davos used to come mostly from the left,” wrote Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street Journal. “These days, its most bitter critics come from the populist right. And a Davos elite that once saw doctrinaire leftism as the greatest obstacle to global prosperity and progress now increasingly sees right-wing populism as the enemy of everything good.”

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely 2024 Republican presidential candidate, described Davos as where “All these elites come in for the World Economic Forum and, basically, their vision is they run everything and everybody else is just a serf.”

The few Republican lawmakers who did attend got roasted for their trouble by conspiracy-minded conservatives who see Davos as a global cabal of influencers. One of them, California Republican Darrell Issa, who attended as part of the official U.S. delegation, explain the virtue of attending.

“We should not accede to being excluded from a deeper dialogue at the World Economic Forum any more than being shut out of college campuses, online platforms, or public forums,” Issa said. “This is what liberals are doing all over the world to drive away dissent.”

People willing to defend the classical liberal initiatives that liberated humankind from the dark ages, produced economic growth, raised global living standards, and made it possible for people even in undeveloped countries to live longer, healthier, more productive, and better-educated lives need to be where they are under attack. There is no virtue in staying away.

By attending meetings like the World Economic Forum in Davos, traditional conservatives and populists can make their views known and shape the tone of the meeting in proximity to the private luncheons, tennis games, and other fol-de-rol friendships are formed and deals are made.

For free markets and free minds to endure, those who advocate on their behalf must make themselves part of the global conversation. That requires being in Davos and at gatherings like it as part of a global collection of decision-makers and thought leaders discussing the world’s problems “in the room where it happens.”

–

Copyright 2023 Peter Roff distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Peter Roff is a media fellow at the Trans-Atlantic Leadership Network, a former columnist for U.S. News and World Report, and senior political writer for United Press International. Contact Roff at [email protected], and follow him on Twitter @TheRoffDraft.

Serious policymakers who want to bring business as usual in Washington to an end would do well to explore the connections between trial lawyers, so-called science and safety groups, and the progressive activists who consort with them to promote the regulation of business.

These groups may have more influence over U.S. regulatory policy than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Federation of Independent Business, and the AFL-CIO. Yet most people don’t realize they’re there.

Their powerful and cross-promote each other’s interests while pretending to be independent. That way the media lambs who go for such stories can portray them as acting purely in the public’s interest, not their own.

When these white hats beat the so-called evil business interests, lives are saved, animals are spared, and condemned communities come back to life. Think “Working Girl” meets “Erin Brockovich.” Easy-to-understand narratives overwhelm real science, while sob stories lead readers and viewers to the desired conclusions.

One example is the fight to stop the production of chemicals used to make heat, oil, stain, grease, and water-resistant coatings and other products. They’re everywhere, from non-stick pots and pans to the insulation around electric wire.

These wonder chemicals have made our lives easier and safer for 75 years. But the regulatory advocates, who’ve labeled them “forever chemicals” because of the length of time it takes for them to break down, say they’re harmful to people and animals. Their targets are the bank accounts of some of the most famous names in American business who they say act irresponsibly and accuse of poisoning entire communities.

They’ve filed lots of lawsuits. They expect big payouts when the companies settle, since that is the cheaper outcome. Yet even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is angling to put these chemicals on the Superfund list says in play English on its website they don’t fully understand yet how harmful PFAs are to people and the environment.

That’s hardly conclusive. Yet it hasn’t stopped interest groups from pressuring the EPA to come down hard on the manufacturers of PFAs. The regulatory assault they want, and which the White House or Congress could stop on the basis that the costs incurred by an industry shutdown would far outweigh the proven benefits, continues.

These lawsuits, as they do for other industrial manufacturers, threaten the corporate bottom line. As a defendant, it’s usually cheaper to settle than fight these kinds of suits. Some companies are already moving to protect themselves. Bloomberg reported in December that Minnesota-based 3M Corporation would soon stop PFA production because of “accelerating regulatory trends” and increasing customer concerns over their use.

Company executives are meant to feel the heat from what the business news service called “regulatory pressure and lawsuits that threaten billions of dollars in damages.” It weakens their opposition and opens their checkbooks.

The health and safety of the public are important. So are their jobs and the economic health of the communities they live in. Regulations have to make sense, and that has to be a priority for Washington policymakers. Compelling stories don’t always lead to correct public policy.

Congress needs to take another look at the total federal regulatory burden, and at the interest groups interested in making it grow. Laws like the one that created the Superfund need to be revisited and made smarter, more accountable to real science, and able to function in support of rather than in opposition to community and business interests.

In many important ways, they’re the same thing. Sound, sensible regulation emerging from the informed interests of all stakeholders rather than from screaming headlines is the way toward prosperity, security, and a cleaner, safer world.

–

Copyright 2023 Peter Roff distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Peter Roff is a media fellow at the Trans-Atlantic Leadership Network, a former columnist for U.S. News and World Report, and senior political writer for United Press International. Contact Roff at [email protected], and follow him on Twitter @TheRoffDraft.