Five successive Secretaries of Defense have asked Congress for permission to reduce excess and unnecessary military bases. The fairest and most transparent way to make such cuts is through another Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) round. So far, however, the SecDefs’ requests have gone unanswered. For their sake, but mostly for the sake of the men and women serving in our armed forces, I want one, too. All I want for Christmas is a BRAC.
According to the Pentagon’s latest estimates, the military as a whole has 19 percent excess base capacity. If it helps to visualize the nature of the problem, nearly 1 in every 5 facilities that DoD operates are superfluous to U.S. national security, or their functions could be consolidated into other facilities elsewhere. This is important because requiring the military to carry so much overhead necessarily compels the services to divert resources away from more important things — from salaries and benefits for military personnel, to maintenance and upkeep for their equipment, and even to the purchase of new gear.
Cato at Liberty
Cato at Liberty
Email Signup
Sign up to have blog posts delivered straight to your inbox!
Topics
Justice Department Tackles Rule By Guidance Letter
The U.S. Department of Justice, November 17 [press release/memo]:
Today, in an action to further uphold the rule of law in the executive branch, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo prohibiting the Department of Justice from issuing guidance documents that have the effect of adopting new regulatory requirements or amending the law. The memo prevents the Department of Justice from evading required rulemaking processes by using guidance memos to create de facto regulations.
In the past, the Department of Justice and other agencies have blurred the distinction between regulations and guidance documents. Under the Attorney General’s memo, the Department may no longer issue guidance documents that purport to create rights or obligations binding on persons or entities outside the Executive Branch….
“Guidance documents can be used to explain existing law,” Associate Attorney General Brand said. “But they should not be used to change the law or to impose new standards to determine compliance with the law. The notice-and-comment process that is ordinarily required for rulemaking can be cumbersome and slow, but it has the benefit of availing agencies of more complete information about a proposed rule’s effects than the agency could ascertain on its own. This Department of Justice will not use guidance documents to circumvent the rulemaking process, and we will proactively work to rescind existing guidance documents that go too far.”
This is an initiative of potentially great significance. For many decades, critics have noted that agencies were using Dear Colleague and guidance letters, memos and so forth — also known variously as subregulatory guidance, stealth regulation and regulatory dark matter — to grab new powers and ban new things in the guise of interpreting existing law, all while bypassing notice-and-comment and other constraints on actual rulemaking. To be sure, many judgment calls and hard questions of classification do arise as to when an announced position occupies new territory as opposed to simply stating in good faith what current law is believed to be. But the full text of the memo shows a creditable awareness of these issues. Note also, even before the Justice memo, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s statement in September, on revoking the Obama Title IX Dear Colleague letter: “The era of ‘rule by letter’ is over.”
Another notable pledge in the DoJ press release:
The Attorney General’s Regulatory Reform Task Force, led by Associate Attorney General Brand, will conduct a review of existing Department documents and will recommend candidates for repeal or modification in the light of this memo’s principles.
Note also this recent flap over certain financial regulations and the possibility that they may have been issued without notice to Congress, which could preserve Congress’s right to examine and block them under the terms of the Congressional Review Act. [cross-posted from Overlawyered; earlier in this space on the era of “rule by letter” at the Education Department]
One in a Billion Chance a Year of Being Killed by a Chain Immigrant in a Terror Attack
Yesterday, Bangladesh-born Akayed Ullah attempted a suicide bombing in New York City. Fortunately, he only injured a few people and severely burned his own torso. Ullah entered the United States on an F4 green card for the brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens.
Some are using Ullah’s failed terrorist attack to call for further restricting family-based immigration and the green card lottery. After hearing about the failed terrorist attack, President Trump argued that “Today’s terror suspect entered our country through extended-family chain migration, which is incompatible with national security … Congress must end chain migration.” Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R‑VA), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, also argued for ending chain immigration and the visa lottery program. He said ending those green card programs “would make us safer.”
Neither President Trump nor Rep. Goodlatte indicated how much safer ending chain immigration or the diversity visa would make us. Since September 2016, I have been updating information on the number of people killed in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil by foreign-born terrorists according to the visa they initially used to enter the United States.
Muslim Ban? Fewer Muslim Refugees, Immigrants, and Travelers Enter U.S. in 2017
During his campaign, President Trump promised to ban all Muslims outright until he could figure out “what is going on.” He later explained that this idea had developed into several policies that would have the same effect. Since his inauguration, Trump has begun to implement them—they include slashing the refugee program, banning all immigration and travelers from several majority Muslim countries, and imposing new burdens on all visa applicants as part of “extreme vetting” initiatives. So far, these policies appear to have “worked,” strongly reducing Muslim immigration and travel to the United States.
Muslim refugee admissions have fallen dramatically over the past year. According to figures from the State Department, Muslim refugee flows fell 94 percent from January to November 2017 (the last full month of available data). In calendar 2016, the United States admitted almost 45,000 Muslim refugees, compared to a little more than 11,000 in 2017—fully half of those entered in January and February. Of course, the administration has cut refugee flows generally, but the Muslim share of all refugees has dropped substantially too—from 50 percent in January to less than 10 percent in November.
Related Tags
Estate Tax Lobbying
Pundits of every political persuasion decry corporate lobbying in Washington, and a major tax bill is a great opportunity for businesses to gain benefits if they convince members of Congress to help them out. However, battles over tax provisions are sometimes not what they appear on the surface.
For years, liberal pundits have characterized efforts to repeal the estate, or death, tax as the plutocrats pulling the levers of power on the Republican side of the aisle. But a new investigative piece at Daily Caller by Richard Pollock exposes the lobbying that is undermining good policy on estate taxation.
I favor estate tax repeal, for numerous reasons, as I laid out here. One reason is the large waste of resources spent on paperwork and avoidance. I noted:
Read the rest of this post →The estate tax is probably the most inefficient tax in America. It has a high marginal rate and is very difficult for the government to administer and enforce. It has also created a large and wasteful estate planning and avoidance industry. The industry overflows with high-paid lawyers and accountants doing paperwork, litigation, asset appraisals, and creating financial structures to minimize the tax burden using trusts, life insurance, and private foundations.
Related Tags
Global Science Report: Another Indication of Lukewarming
In March 1990, NASA’s Roy Spencer and University of Alabama-Huntsville’s (UAH) John Christy dropped quite a bomb when they published the first record of lower atmospheric temperatures sensed by satellites’ microwave sounding units (MSUs). While they only had ten years of data, it was crystal clear there was no significant warming trend.
It was subsequently discovered by Frank Wentz of Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), a Santa Rosa (CA) consultancy, that the orbits of the sensing satellites successively decay (i.e., become lower) and this results in a spurious but slight cooling trend. Using a record ending in 1995, Wentz showed a slight warming trend of 0.07⁰C/decade, about half of what was being observed by surface thermometers.
In 1994, Christy and another UAH scientist, Richard McNider, attempted to remove “natural” climate change from the satellite data by backing out El Niño/La Niña fluctuations and the cooling associated with two big volcanoes in 1983 and 1991. They arrived at a warming trend of 0.09⁰C/decade after their removal.
Over the years, Spencer and Christy slightly revised their record repeatedly, and its latest iteration shows a total warming trend of 0.13⁰C/decade, which includes natural variability. But it is noteworthy that this is biased upward by very warm readings near the end of the record, thanks to the 2015–16 El Niño.
Related Tags
SALT Deduction Changes Could Improve State Tax Systems Too
Thirteen law professors have written about how the GOP tax plan will provide incentives for tax planning and behavioral changes that might undermine current revenue estimates.
The document, “The Games They Will Play: Tax Games, Roadblocks, and Glitches,” is clearly written by professors skeptical of the overall tax package. But it provides useful examples of potential problems, such as ways new passthrough provisions could lead to complex battle lines between tax authorities and taxpayers.
It also assesses how the elimination of the state and local income and sales deduction (SALT) from the federal income tax code might encourage changes to state tax systems. Remember both House and Senate Bills would only retain a deduction of up to $10,000 for property taxes.
The restriction of the SALT deduction will, ceteris paribus, raise the cost of state and local government expenditures for affected taxpayers, particularly in higher-income, higher-tax jurisdictions. That might be expected to put pressure on states to reduce spending—a feature of this reform, rather than a bug.
But according to the professors, states may also seek to “reshape their tax systems so as to respond to this change and retain the benefit of the deduction for their taxpayers.” One means is to shift towards collecting more revenue from deductible taxes.
How might they do so?
One way for states to achieve this is by shifting to use of the property tax. The liquidity impact on taxpayers of a shift to property taxes can be mitigated by circuit breakers administered through a state’s income tax—essentially, reducing income tax liability in exchange for higher property taxes. Such responses would effectively allow taxpayers to deduct the full amount of state and local property and income taxes, up to the $10,000 cap.
Now, the professors paint this as a bad thing, because they believe it means federal revenue losses from tax reform will be greater than currently projected. From an economic perspective though, property taxes are broadly regarded as being less distortionary to economic decisions than income taxes. They also tend to encourage localism, and given they are widely disliked (particularly by elderly constituencies who turn out in elections), may be even more effective at bringing attention to the scale of state government spending than an increased income tax burden.
Whilst it would be better to have no SALT property deduction at all, if a consequence of tax reform is states using property taxes instead of income taxes, then that could be a good thing for the economy.