The Most Important Maps You’ll See Today

by David French

Here, in map form, is a picture of America’s growing polarization (from the New York Times):

The meaning is simple — Americans are increasingly likely to live in like-minded communities. American polarization is a well-documented phenomenon, but what makes these maps more ominous is the awareness that polarization is not just geographic, but increasingly geographically contiguous. Our respective bubbles are getting bigger, and the reddest sections of America are linking with each other.

Simply put, this is how nations ultimately separate. I’m not saying that separation is imminent or at all likely, but it is worth noting the trends — trends that are continually exacerbated as many like-minded communities grow increasingly intolerant of dissent. 

Bill Bishop wrote about our geographic separation in his book, The Big Sort, making the point that it’s hard to understand people we don’t know. It was true when he published his book in 2009, and it’s more true now. It will be worth watching the 2016 map. Will it be even worse?

View Comments

Do This, Don’t Do That

by Kevin D. Williamson

There are things that the next president should do, and things the next president could do, some of which could be done by either Hillary Rodham Clinton or Donald Trump but which neither would be very much inclined to do well. If the next president is wise (I know, I know), then he or she will set aside the frothier emotional currents of the immediate post-election period and put a few important things in the hands of intelligent advisers.

I see four important coulds/shoulds. At one a year, this should hold us over until the Ben Sasse administration. 

First is a definite should: corporate tax reform. The United States has the highest on-paper corporate tax rate in the developed world but effective tax rates on the lower side. The distance between the nominal rate and the effective rate is one pretty good measure of crony capitalism as businesses take advantage of a raft of carve-outs, exemptions, and deductions targeted at politically connected industries and firms. These are not “loopholes” — they are the tax code.

While it may not be politically appetizing to put it this way, the best solution to tax competition from overseas tax havens such as Ireland and Switzerland is to be the tax haven, and the way there is to have a low and stable rate and few if any special-interest handouts.

Even better, we could simply tax income when it hits somebody’s bank account (through salary, bonuses, dividends, capital gains, profit-sharing, etc.) and do away with the corporate-income tax altogether, capturing the same tax revenue (it is only about 10 percent of all federal income) on the individual side. Eliminating the corporate income tax entirely while still capturing the revenue as individual income tax would allow the federal government to keep the same level of revenue while saving businesses billions of dollars in tax-compliance costs and eliminating countless opportunities for rent-seeking and influence-peddling.

Second: I do not expect this to be the case, but if the man who likes to call himself Mr. Brexit (someone explained to him what Brexit is) should become president, then he might consider pursuing a free-trade pact with the United Kingdom, which is on its way out of the European Union. Indeed, Donald Trump has said he favors bilateral trade deals to multilateral accords, and one suspects that trade with our British cousins is an easier sell politically to many Americans than is trade with East Asia or Latin America. A newly liberated United Kingdom will be looking for expanded trade opportunities, and we already have a very rich and mutually beneficial trading relationship with the British. Free trade is good for many reasons, and free trade with people who share our language, cultural roots, and legal foundations — and who have been our most reliable allies — is deeply desirable. The United States and United Kingdom already are the largest foreign investors in each other’s economies to the tune of more than $1 trillion in total.

Third: Hillary Rodham Clinton has rather different ideas about immigration reform than does Donald Trump, but some of her most energetic and important supporters — the members of American labor unions — do not. When I was reporting on Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign, the remarkable (hysterical, in fact) hostility toward immigrants on the part of the audiences coming out to support the Vermont socialist as he visited Iowa union halls made an impression on me. The “Build a wall and make Mexico pay for it!” nonsense is doomed to run into various geographical and political realities, but this is a country that wants something done about illegal immigration — and done yesterday — while support for restrictive reform of the legal immigration system is strong, too. The potential compromise I have described pairs strong enforcement (both at entry points and, especially, at the work place) with a reform of the legal-immigration system that replaces the family-unification chain-immigration model with one oriented toward easing the way for highly skilled, high-income, and high-net-worth immigrants, and that ought to appeal to reasonable people in both parties. There aren’t very many of those, but perhaps the ones who remain could persuade the president, whomever that ends up being.

Fourth: Most Americans who are neither lobbyists for transnational firms, public wards, nor career criminals interact more with their local governments than with the federal government. Beyond pothole-filling and speed traps, the main locus of that interaction if the public school. Americans will go to great lengths to ensure that their children go to the best schools they can: In Philadelphia, the excellent suburban schools often find themselves educating city students who take up theoretical residence with a great aunt in Montgomery or Delaware County to escape the failed city schools. Mrs. Clinton’s big idea on education reform so far has been shunting vast streams of money to the unionized teachers who will do their best to put her in the White House, but, at some level, she probably knows better. Barack Obama knows better: As a candidate, he told a room full of Wall Street supporters (this according to a source present at the meeting) that he was very close to breaking ranks on the question of school choice, because he was fed up with the low standards and lack of accountability of the big-city public schools. He never had the guts to do it. Perhaps his successor will.

The federal government already has too strong a hand in the public schools, which are rightly a local concern. But it does have that hand, and a lot of funding to spread around, too, which means that it can demand reforms. Rather than trying to manage the schools from Washington with the usual uniform-standards agenda, Washington could ease back on the micromanagement and, through insisting on real school choice, delegate that micromanagement to the parents and local communities who have the knowledge and the incentive to do that job well. School districts could receive the same amount of financial support — or more, for that matter — but it would be used in a way that uses choice to enforce accountability.

People say they want pragmatic, commonsense reforms. They don’t, really: They want to punish and humiliate their enemies and reward their friends and themselves with government largesse. But there are things that the next president could do that both conservatives and people who do not have Milton Friedman quotations hanging in cross-stitch samplers on their walls could support. There is no conservative in the presidential race, which means that no matter who wins tomorrow, conservatives will have to persuade the next president to see the value in our proposals over his or her own instinctive preferences. It will not be easy, but there isn’t really another choice other than surrender and political quietism.

View Comments

Massachusetts Teachers Pressured by Union Leaders to Oppose Charter Schools

by Paul Crookston

After seeing National Review’s coverage of Massachusetts Ballot Question 2 to raise the cap on charter schools, a reader e-mailed me to describe how leaders in her small Massachusetts school district actively manipulate teachers like her. The way that unions’ political thuggery pervades the work environment is chilling:

So for the first day back to school, all of the teachers and staff in the district met in the high school auditorium for orientation. It was my first day at my new job so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. At the very beginning of the presentation (before the superintendent even gave his welcome speech) our teachers’ union president [the local chapter of the Massachusetts Teachers Association] comes on stage with another woman affiliated with the “No on 2” movement. Without even a welcome or greeting, the union president starts rattling on about the “No on 2” campaign. They passed out slips of paper to everyone that had check boxes on it. As an exit slip, we were supposed to check either “Yes” or “No” for how we would be voting for Question 2, and they were telling us to make sure to check the “No” box. They also had us fill out cards with our name and address so that they could send us all of the “No on 2” campaign info and gear. As we were exiting the presentation, they had people stationed at every door ready to collect our check boxes and address cards. I felt extremely uncomfortable with the entire presentation. I didn’t know much about the campaign and I felt like I had been slapped in the face with how to vote without being given much information on the issue.

This sort of union bullying may be disturbing, but it is not surprising. The power they wield is immense. The reader who e-mailed also said that she became a part of the union because failure to join actually entails a greater total of fees paid. She has union political muscle to thank for that equation.

Unfortunately, opposition to Question 2 has remained fierce, and the latest poll shows charter expansion back down among Massachusetts voters. This after the wild success of Massachusetts charters has been written about in papers such as the New York Times and the Boston Globe, which published an official endorsement of Question 2. The unions are actively engaged in spreading as much fear and misinformation as possible to stop this measure, and tomorrow’s vote will determine whether their efforts will stymie opportunities for over 32,000 Massachusetts students to choose a better education.

View Comments

A Choice for Tomorrow

by Ramesh Ponnuru

As I wrote a few days ago, I cannot agree with those people who believe that it is always irresponsible to vote for a third-party presidential candidate; that an election can never present choices, that is, that deserve protest. I’m glad that Evan McMullin entered the presidential race, even late in the day and without a shot at winning, because he gave conservatives who cannot in good conscience vote for either of the top two candidates in the race someone for whom to vote. But McMullin has undertaken a more ambitious goal than just serving as a placeholder for conservative values that would not otherwise be on the ballot. Instead of just making the case that conservatives should vote for him rather than for Trump or Clinton, he has also been making the case against the Republican party and its leadership as they stand. The party’s support for Trump, he has been arguing, has shown it to be hopelessly compromised and proven the case for a new party. This new party would, apparently, take most of the positions of the old one but be much more welcoming to people of different hues and less tolerant of racism.

I disagree with much of this. Starting a new party won’t solve any of conservatism’s problems. While Republicans must do more to appeal to nonwhite voters in the future—and could hardly do less—racism seems to me overstated as an explanation for Trump’s support. And I have not seen any indication that McMullin appreciates that an economic platform of free trade, entitlement reform, tax cuts centered on high earners, and (vague) calls for deregulation needs to be rethought, or at least supplemented, for voters to find it compelling.

But I’ve disagreed with some of the views of every candidate I’ve ever backed for president. And the many places where I agree with McMullin, from the need to protect unborn children to the desirability of unobstructed trade, seem more important. McMullin’s philosophy of government and character are much closer to what I want in a president than are those of Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Gary Johnson—all three of whom I consider, for various reasons, unfit for the presidency. I intend to vote accordingly.

View Comments

How My Dinner Guests Last Night Exemplify the Democrats’ Continuing Immigration Insanity

by Jeremy Carl

Last night my wife and I had the parents of two friends of our older boys over for dinner. The parents in question are smart, educated, and talented people—he’s from New Zealand and she’s from Japan. They relocated to Silicon Valley from New Zealand about five years ago. He’s a computer scientist who has started and sold two small technology companies – one of which had millions of monthly users. He’s now working on some new ideas in the commercial drone space. Despite being well-educated and fluent in English, she is not able to work in the U.S. because of the visa they are on.

I asked the father of my boys’ friends whether their kids were likely to stay in the U.S. for college—he said he had no idea, because he had no idea whether he could even get his visa extended in 18 months—evidently whatever type he is on cannot lead to a green card. He has entered the 2018 Green Card lottery.

His is not the first story of this kind I have heard after years of living in Silicon Valley.

Let’s stop and ponder this for a second. Here’s a talented and successful engineer. He’s started two successful companies and is working on an exciting new one—who knows, perhaps the next Google or Amazon? And yet he’s not sure that he can stay in the U.S. because of visa issues. Yet, we have no problem letting in tens of thousands of unskilled Somalis, a not insignificant number of whom have attempted to join the Islamic state? Trump was in Minneapolis today hitting the Somali refugee issue that has been shamefully ignored by our mainstream media. In San Francisco, (joined by hundreds of other sanctuary cities) we refuse to deport known criminal aliens, such as Francisco Sanchez who recently killed Kate Steinle in broad daylight in a popular San Francisco tourist area.

The GOP has had a good set of policies on skilled immigration, though they don’t talk about them enough: Most notably the GOP voted for the STAPLE Act, which would have made it much easier for American-trained scientists and engineers of foreign backgrounds to get green cards—this increase in skilled immigrants would have been perfectly offset by a corresponding reduction in immigration through the elimination of a “diversity” visa category, which was, predictably, opposed by the Congressional Black and Hispanic caucuses. For those lawmakers, protecting racial prerogatives was more important than making sure we brought in and kept the most talented immigrants, regardless of ethnic background.

In the Democrats’ dystopian future, America has no control of its borders—we bring in millions of immigrants who don’t have the skills we need or who are security risks. As the Center for Immigration Studies has shown, we are bringing in immigrants who are much more likely to use welfare programs of all types than are native-born Americans. Meanwhile, highly skilled English-speaking engineers have to hope they win the visa lottery just to stay in the country. This is not the serious policy of a 21st-century superpower—it’s just insanity—unless you think the only purpose of immigration policy is to churn out voters who are dependent on the government, and on the political party that will deliver more of it.

View Comments

Whoever Is Elected, the Next President Will Face Significant Challenges

by Veronique de Rugy

On Tuesday night (or maybe a few days after that) we will finally be able to talk about something other than this awful election season. No matter who wins, the new president will face real challenges. Here are a few:

1. A lack of trust in government and all institutions. According to Gallup, the average citizen’s confidence in American institutions is 32 percent — close to historic low. Gallup explains that:

Americans’ confidence in the nation’s major institutions continues to lag below historical averages, with two institutions — newspapers and organized religion — dropping to record lows this year. The overall average of Americans expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in 14 institutions is below 33% for the third straight year.

Here is a striking chart:

Many institutions have lost ground between 2006 and 2016 — but none as much as Congress, which went from 19 percent to 9 percent.

Indeed, trust in the federal government is awfully low. According to Pew:

The public’s trust in the federal government continues to be at historically low levels. Only 19% of Americans today say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” (3%) or “most of the time” (16%).

Fewer than three-in-ten Americans have expressed trust in the federal government in every major national poll conducted since July 2007 — the longest period of low trust in government in more than 50 years. In 1958, when the American National Election Study first asked this question, 73% said they could trust the government just about always or most of the time.

The lack of trust is lower for Republicans than Democrats — but it’s not as if the Democrats are booming with confidence in government. Pew again:

26 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners say they can trust the federal government nearly always or most of the time, compared with 11% of Republicans and Republican leaners.

Needless to say, no matter what you think of the FBI’s handling of the Clinton e-mail scandals, it hasn’t helped the trust we have in our governmental institutions.

2. Economic growth will be a great challenge, no matter who is in office. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently released its 2016 Long-Term Budget Outlook about our worrisome fiscal situation. In all the data, no trend is more striking than the projection of an upper bound on real economic growth in the United States of 2.2 percent over the next 30 years. The average projected-annual-growth rate over the next decade, between 2016 and 2026, is expected to be even lower at 1.9 percent — and that unrealistically assumes that there will be no recession or slowdown over the next ten years. Slower growth means that incomes grow more slowly and efforts to reduce poverty become much harder.

If you wonder whether either major-party candidate has what it takes to get the economy moving again, check out the column by John Cochrane that spells out very clearly what we need.

3. Obamacare will be a huge challenge. If Hillary Clinton is the president she will have to deal with the fact that so many insurers are leaving the exchanges and that premiums are going up, while many people remain uninsured.

If Donald Trump is elected, he will face the challenge of getting Republicans to finally articulate and push forward a replacement for Obamacare. It’s a much bigger challenge than most imagine.

Ultimately, I think it remains the wrong way to think about fixing health care — as I have explained here, here, and here. Health insurance isn’t health care. Republicans should stop trying to meet a goal dictated by Democrats and finally commit to lifting all the regulatory and governmental barriers that have made health care immune to the type of technological revolutions we have seen in other areas.

4. The growth of entitlement spending. No matter what Hillary Clinton and Democrats say — and no matter what Trump has said — about not touching Social Security and Medicare, the growth of the entitlement state is going to be a challenge for anyone in office. When all federal revenue collected is only enough to pay for entitlement spending, it puts a lot of pressure on the rest of the budget.

5. The U.S. is losing the global-regulatory arbitrage. When forward-thinking companies engage in global-innovation arbitrage, America isn’t always a winner. My colleague Adam Thierer puts it the best:

Capital moves like quicksilver around the globe today as investors and entrepreneurs look for more hospitable tax and regulatory environments. The same is increasingly true for innovation. Innovators can, and increasingly will, move to those countries and continents that provide a legal and regulatory environment more hospitable to entrepreneurial activity.

As I wrote in my latest Reason column:

Regulatory uncertainty (when innovators can’t be sure what the rules will look like in the coming months and years) and regulatory burdens (when the rules that do get handed down make operations and compliance significantly more costly) both create powerful incentives for people to exercise their right to take their businesses to countries where the legal regime is friendlier.

Consider what’s happening in the examples above. U.S.-based companies such as Amazon have moved their drone research offshore to escape the zealous yet risk-averse regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration. Ignoring the pleading by innovators and consumers, the agency has banned the use of commercial drones under many circumstances and imposed inane regulations — like requiring that a drone operator be within sight of the device at all times unless granted a waiver — on the rest.

Meanwhile, whereas the U.S. won’t allow companies to experiment with disruptive technologies without first getting permission from the government, the U.K.’s leaders have communicated loud and clear that that country is open for business — and not just for drones, but also for driverless cars and other technologies to boot.

These are only a few of the challenges. But make no mistake: Whoever is in office will have to face them. And no matter who you are voting for, we Americans will be on the hook for any failure to address these challenges.

View Comments

Three Things That Will Happen Immediately if Trump Wins

by David French

I read and listen to quite a bit of liberal commentary (I believe it’s my obligation to seek and hear the best arguments from the opposing side), and I’ve been struck at the extent to which no one seems to be seriously contemplating a Trump victory. Sure, they think of it in theoretical terms, but it’s simply not sunk in that he could actually win this thing. Heck, even Republicans seem to preparing the ground more for a post-Trump civil war than a Trump presidency. But what happens if Trump wins? Three things, right away:

1. The more extreme edges of the Left (and some on the mainstream) will immediately attribute the loss to “voter suppression” or “voter intimidation.” If Trump wins, that means black voters almost certainly turned out less for Hillary. If that happens, watch for apocalyptic, inflammatory, and irresponsible rhetoric about Jim Crow, voting rights, and disenfranchisement. 

2. Smarter Democrats will drop Bill and Hillary Clinton like a hot potato. They’ll understand their party’s colossal blunder — nominating the one Democrat who could have lost to Trump. After a quarter-century of tawdry scandal, the nation will finally be rid of the Clintons. This one fact will keep me happy for days on end . . . until I remember that we’ll still have an unfit president in the Oval Office.

3. Conservatives will understand their place in the new pecking order — somewhere behind Ivanka’s clothing line. The win will be all about Trump and Trumpism, not conservatism or the GOP. It will be the vindication of a man, his most loyal followers, and his made-up ideology. 

Of course, there are other things that will happen (I say this to reassure my progressive friends) — the sun will rise in the east, the markets will open on Wednesday, and the NBA will still be the greatest show on earth. In other words, our nation has to break through quite a few more firewalls before any one president can truly do catastrophic harm, and most of those firewalls remain intact.

View Comments

If Rubio Wins and Trump Loses in Florida...

by Jim Geraghty

With Election Day looming, Hillary Clinton holds the narrowest of leads in Florida in the RealClearPolitics average, 46.9 percent to 46.7 percent.

Meanwhile, in the Senate race, Marco Rubio leads in the RealClearPolitics average, 49 percent to 45.3 percent.

The two most likely scenarios right now appear to be a modest Rubio win and a narrow Clinton win, or a modest Rubio win and a narrow Trump win.

If Rubio wins and Trump loses in the Sunshine State, will the Florida senator feel a little vindication, that while his style and agenda didn’t appeal to his home state’s Republicans as much as Trump’s did, it appealed more to the electorate as a whole?

Yes, Trump won the Florida Republican Primary overwhelmingly and won every county except for Miami-Dade.

The final margins in Miami-Dade County will be important. This county is the most populous in Florida and the early vote there was huge — 61 percent higher than in 2012, with 475,864 early voters and 287,224 voters by mail. This is a mostly Democratic county, but it also includes Miami’s Little Havana and is Rubio’s home turf. Four years ago, Obama won, 61 percent to 38 percent. The county has 368,395 registered Republicans, as of September.

The early vote in Florida has been gargantuan – 6.4 million voters – and registered Democrats outpace registered Republicans by a small margin, 39.9 percent to 38.5 percent.

The differing courses of Trump and Rubio in Florida encapsulate the problem for Republicans in 2016 in a nutshell: one candidate is more appealing to an all-Republican pool of voters; the other is more appealing to the voter pool as a whole. The voters in the GOP primary didn’t want to pick the candidate(s) who could best appeal to the electorate as a whole.

View Comments