Chris Edwards for the Cato Institute: The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has another failure on its hands. In recent tests, undercover investigators smuggled mock explosives and banned weapons through U.S. airport checkpoints 96 percent of the time. According to ABC, “In one case, agents failed to detect a fake explosive taped to an agent’s back, even after performing a pat down that was prompted after the agent set off the magnetometer alarm.”
The unionized TSA has a history of inept management. Reports in 2012 by various House committees found that TSA operations are “costly, counterintuitive, and poorly executed,” and the agency “suffers from bureaucratic morass and mismanagement.” Former TSA chief Kip Hawley argued in an op-ed that the agency is “hopelessly bureaucratic.” And in 2014, former acting TSA chief Kenneth Kaspirin said that TSA has “a toxic culture” with “terrible” morale. …
Perhaps most importantly, studies have found that TSA security performance is no better, and possibly worse, than private-sector screening, which is allowed at a handful of U.S. airports.
The solution is to dismantle TSA and move responsibility for screening operations to the nation’s airports. The government would continue to oversee aviation safety, but airports would be free to contract out screening to expert aviation security firms. Such a reform would end TSA’s conflict of interest stemming from both operating airport screening and overseeing it.
INCOME INEQUALITY: THE STRUGGLE OF 2016
Richard A. Epstein for the Hoover Institution: The critical political struggle of the 2016 presidential election may well be the redistribution of wealth. How that issue plays out is likely to depend on whether it is cast in terms of economic growth or income inequality. If the Republicans successfully push the growth agenda, then the Democrats will be on the defensive. If the Democrats drive home the theme of income inequality, then the Republicans will squirm. This is a contest that the Republicans should win if they play their cards correctly.
Let’s start with this fundamental observation: It is possible to reduce income inequality in one of two ways: lower the income at the top or raise it at the bottom. Indeed, it is possible, but only by extreme measures, to eliminate all inequality by spreading the wealth of the richest individuals around so that everyone has the same income. Yet none of the critics of income inequality will go that far, because they realize that that strategy will depress the income of the poor as well as the rich. So instead these critics moderate their demands: they are willing to sacrifice some measure of overall social welfare to obtain greater benefits at the bottom. Their theoretical position is that the substantial gains in utility for the poor will override the relatively small losses in personal satisfaction and living standards that the top income earners will experience as a result of redistribution.
Pity is, they have no idea how to steer this middle course. … Indeed it is altogether possible to improve the position of the worst off in society by a set of productive measures that widen the income gap between rich and poor.
Assume that we have just two groups in society, one of whose members all have wealth at the level of 10 and the second, far smaller, have wealth at the level of 1,000. A change in legal position that increases the wealth of the bottom group from 10 to 15 and the top group from 1,000 to 1,200 will increase absolute inequality even as it improves the position of the people at the bottom. Ironically, it will also give larger percentage increases to those at the bottom.
SYNTHETIC MARIJUANA: A RESULT OF CRIMINALIZING THE REAL THING?
Andrew Breiner for ThinkProgress: Across the country, people are dying from using untested, dangerous drugs that attempt to mimic marijuana. Ironically, there’s evidence that the public health emergency is being fueled specifically by the ongoing criminalization of real marijuana.
Synthetic cannabinoids — known under a variety of names like spice, K2 or scooby snacks — are typically synthesized in foreign laboratories and sprayed onto a mix of inactive herbs, then sold with no mention of the active ingredients or their strength. Congress and state legislatures are trying to keep up with banning the baffling array of new chemicals being introduced by clandestine chemists, but that may actually be leading to the creation of newer, even more dangerous chemicals that we know even less about.
In April alone, about 1,000 people made poison control calls about the synthetic cannabinoid drugs. Several states have seen a rise in hospitalizations due to the drugs, which have been linked to long-term delusions, violent behavior, seizures, heart attacks, strokes, damage to the kidneys and liver, and several deaths. Doctors say the recent rash of hospitalizations could be the result of a new drug in circulation, MAB-CHMINACA, but the sheer number of chemicals used at various times in various products makes it impossible to pin health problems on any one substance.
Compiled by Nathan Rubbelke from think tank research
