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New York Post
7 minutes ago
- New York Post
Just say no to Big Dope — and its push for even more legal marijuana
Will more marijuana use make America a better place? Not many who've seen and smelled what legalizing the drug has done to cities like New York, Washington, DC, and San Francisco would say so. Yet President Donald Trump is contemplating a change to marijuana's federal classification that would make it easier to buy and more profitable to sell. The pot industry — Big Dope — is heavily invested in getting its product recategorized from a Schedule 1 to a Schedule 3 drug. Industry leaders ponied up for a $1-million-a-plate Trump fundraising dinner earlier this month to hear what the president had in mind, according to The Wall Street Journal. The president should ignore the well-funded cannabis lobby: What matters is what more and cheaper marijuana will mean for ordinary Americans. Twenty-four states have legalized recreational use of the drug, despite the ugly results experienced by the first state to do so. Taking advantage of high Democratic turnout the year of President Barack Obama's re-election, activists passed a Colorado ballot measure to make pot legal back in 2012. Legalization didn't take effect until 2014, but by 2022 marijuana use in Colorado and other states that had then legalized was 24% higher than in states where recreational use remained illegal. A study by the South Korean scholar Sunyoung Lee published in the International Review of Law and Economics this year examines what's happened to crime levels in US states that legalized pot. Lee reported his findings 'do not yield conclusive evidence supporting a reduction in crime rates after legalizing recreational marijuana. Rather, they underscore notable positive associations with property crimes and suggest potential correlations with violent crimes.' The marijuana lobby claims that drug prohibition, not the drug itself, drives violent crime. That would be a bad argument even without evidence like Lee's, which suggests legal weed makes crime worse. After all, any profit-driven criminal enterprise could be shut down by simply legalizing the crime in question. If bank robbery were legal, bank robbers wouldn't need to use guns. If auto theft were legal, carjackers wouldn't have to use force, and there wouldn't be any violence associated with black-market chop shops because the chop shops would all be as legal as the commercial marijuana industry is today. Legalize everything Tony Soprano does, and Tony won't have to get rough — but he'll only do more of what he was doing before. Libertarians who argue for legalizing drugs to stop drug violence are closer than they realize to the radical leftists who argue property crimes shouldn't be prosecuted. The psychology is the same: They sympathize with the people who make it harder to live in a civilized society and reject society's right to defend its rules. There are downsides to laws against marijuana, just as there are costs to protecting private property and citizens' bodily safety. But the costs are well worth paying when the alternative is passivity in the face of aggression, handing your belongings or your life over to any thug who makes a demand. For a time marijuana legalization was sold to voters as just a matter of leaving people alone to consume whatever they want in private, without bothering anybody else. Yet millions of Americans have now lived long enough with pot legalization, or the non-enforcement of laws still on the books, to know the pot lobby perpetrated a fraud. What the country has actually had to deal with is pot smoking so rife in public that the offensive smell — and the sight and sounds of intoxication — smacks you in your face. It's hardly different from dope-users blowing smoke right in your eyes on the street. That's not the worst crime in the world — but neither is shoplifting, and there's no reason to tolerate that, either. Tolerating such things only breeds more tolerance for worse abuses, which is what has led progressives to treat even violent criminals with the utmost leniency. Two scenes in the suburbs of DC convinced me pot tolerance has gone too far. First was seeing an African-American bus driver, on a blazing hot summer day, order two dope-smoking teens to put out their joints and be aware there were children around. To the extent our cities work at all it's because of working-class men like him — and the rest of us have to decide whether we're on his side or the punks'. A year or so later I watched a young mother one bright October afternoon hold her small daughter's hand as they walked through a neighborhood reeking of high-potency pot. The multibillion-dollar weed industry got to advertise its product to a little girl about 4 years old that day. It's an industry that notoriously even sells its drug in candy form, as 'gummies.' Our cities and towns shouldn't be open-air drug dens — and Trump shouldn't let a lobby get high off of making Americans' lives worse. Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.
Axios
37 minutes ago
- Axios
"Utterly unqualified": Trump BLS pick gets panned by economists left and right
President Trump 's nomination of Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Monday drew criticism from economists across the political spectrum. Why it matters: The growing negative consensus among conservative economists is unusual given Antoni's own conservative pedigree. Driving the news: Trump announced Antoni as the next BLS commissioner weeks after firing the previous head, Erika McEntarfer, which he did after jobs data showed cracks in the economy. The president's decision to effectively turn the non-partisan agency into an outpost of the White House makes vital economic data unreliable, economists of varying political stripes have said. What they're saying: Antoni's fellow conservatives criticized his record as chief economist at the right-wing Heritage Foundation's Hermann Center for the Federal Budget. Antoni's "work at Heritage has frequently included elementary errors or nonsensical choices that all bias his findings in the same partisan direction," Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Axios' Courtenay Brown and Emily Peck. Dave Hebert, an economist at the conservative American Institute for Economic Research (AEI), wrote in a post on X that he's worked with Antoni before and implored the Senate to block the nomination. "I've been on several programs with him at this point and have been impressed by two things: his inability to understand basic economics and the speed with which he's gone MAGA," Hebert said. Conservative economists have cited examples of Antoni "appearing to misunderstand" the data he would be responsible for as BLS head. Daniel Di Martino, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, showed an instance of Antoni citing the rising number of Americans who aren't in the labor force without accounting for the role of the aging population. "This is one of the many elementary errors that show me Mr Antoni is unqualified for the labor market data collection and analysis role he was nominated to," Di Martino wrote on X. Jessica Riedl, a senior Manhattan Institute fellow, shared another example from X, in which Antoni appeared not to know that the BLS' measure of import prices did not account for the impact of tariffs. "The articles and tweets I've seen him publish are probably the most error-filled of any think tank economist right now," she wrote. "I hope we see better at BLS." Economists who lean left also criticized the nomination. Jason Furman, who chaired the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama, wrote on X: "I don't think I have ever publicly criticized any Presidential nominee before. But E.J. Antoni is completely unqualified to be BLS Commissioner." Economists also decried Antoni's suggestion that he would suspend the jobs report. "That would (be) a serious mistake in my estimation. It would only fuel critiques of a politicization of job market data and likely result in volatility across asset classes," RSM US chief economist Joe Brusuelas told Axios. Friction point: "President Trump selected Dr. E.J. Antoni III to restore America's trust in the jobs data that has had major issues, without any real attempt at resolution, for years," said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman. "Antoni's education and vast experience as an economist has prepared him to produce accurate public data for businesses, households and policymakers to inform their decision-making." Catch up quick: Trump condemned the BLS on Aug. 1, claiming that a worse-than-expected jobs report was "rigged."
NBC News
an hour ago
- NBC News
Black mayors and leaders decry Trump's threats to deploy National Guard in cities
Black civil rights leaders and the mayors of several cities on Tuesday denounced the deployment of the National Guard to the nation's capital to combat crime, calling it 'fundamentally grandstanding' and 'a federal coup.' And by suggesting that other cities, also run by Black mayors, may be next, President Donald Trump was 'playing the worst game of racially divisive politics,' one rights leader said. Trump announced Monday that he would deploy 800 guard members to Washington, D.C., suggesting that the same could happen in New York City, Baltimore, Chicago and Oakland, California. 'When you walk down the street, you're going to see police or you're going to see FBI agents,' Trump said about Washington on Monday. 'And we will bring in the military if it's needed.' Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, said the president's actions and words were racially polarizing, considering crime rates in these cities are largely declining. 'This is a distraction at a time when these cities deserve credit because crime and violence are down in most American cities right now, and this is trying to distract from that success, and in effect, create a de facto police state in these cities,' Morial told NBC News. 'He's playing the worst game of racially divisive politics, and that's all it is,' Morial said. The Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader and head of the National Action Network, said in a statement that 'the people of Washington, D.C. ‒ especially those living on the streets, who need the most care ‒ will suffer, alongside the core principles of our Democracy.' And NAACP president Derrick Johnson questioned the declaration of an emergency in D.C., calling it a 'federal coup.' The White House responded to the criticisms in a statement to NBC News: 'There is nothing divisive about cracking down on crime in our nation's capital to make it safer and more beautiful for all residents and visitors from all around the world,' said White House assistant press secretary Taylor Rogers. 'Instead of criticizing the President's lawful actions to Make DC Safe Again, Democrat-run cities plagued by violent crime should focus on cleaning up their own streets. This is why Democrats continue to be so unpopular among everyday Americans — they think the President of the United States cracking down on crime in our nation's capital is a bad thing.' Trump federalized the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department over the weekend and called the nation's capital 'one of the most dangerous cities in the world.' It followed the fatal shooting of a congressional intern in July and the carjacking of a former Department of Government Efficiency staffer in D.C. last week, resulting in the arrest of two teenagers. Even with these violent acts, crime in D.C., has been declining for years and is currently at a 30-year low, according to the Justice Department. Nationwide, violent crime has declined, specifically murders, rape, aggravated assault and robbery, according to data released last week by the FBI. Black Americans are four times more likely to experience homelessness in their lifetimes than white Americans, according to a 2023 study published in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. The D.C. police union, citing staffing shortages and 'mismanagement,' said it supported the federal takeover, but only in a limited, temporary capacity that resulted in a better resourced department. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said Trump's move, which he had hinted at for months, is 'unsettling and unprecedented.' The administration forced the removal of the Black Lives Matter street painting that had been prominent in the city since 2020 by threatening to hold back millions in funding if it remained. On Monday, Bowser said that the city's police chief maintains authority over the police force. But Trump said that he had appointed the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency, Terry Cole, as the head of the Metropolitan Police Department. Morial said that while many National Guards are his friends, 'this is not an assignment they were trained for. This is not an assignment they signed up for. They're being used as political pawns. 'What the White House should be doing is restoring the SNAP cuts and restoring the Medicaid cuts, which are going to do damage to Washington, D.C., and other urban communities,' Morial said. Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott was not happy Trump mentioned his city as a potential place where the National Guard would be deployed. 'This is the latest effort by the president to distract from the issues he should be focused on — including the roller coaster of the U.S. economy thanks to his policies,' Scott said in a statement Monday. 'When it comes to public safety in Baltimore, he should turn off the right-wing propaganda and look at the facts.' Homicides are down 28% in Baltimore this year alone, reaching the lowest level of any year on record, with overall crime rates lower than it's been in more than 50 years. 'We still have real work to do to build on this progress—but that work starts and ends here in Baltimore with the local, state, and federal partners who have gotten us this far.' And as Scott pointed out, 'it's not just Baltimore.' In Chicago, violent crime also is down by more than 30% and shootings almost 40%. Mayor Brandon Johnson said the dramatic reductions occurred even as Trump cut ' $158 million in funding for violence prevention programs in cities like Chicago,' as well as Los Angeles, New York, D.C. and Baltimore. Those cuts, he said, are on top of the Trump administration dismantling the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and terminating hundreds of grants for anti-violence programs across the country. 'If President Trump wants to help make Chicago safer, he can start by releasing the funds for anti-violence programs that have been critical to our work to drive down crime and violence,' Johnson said. 'Sending in the National Guard would only serve to destabilize our city and undermine our public safety efforts.' The mayor of Savannah, Georgia, Van R. Johnson II, president of the African American Mayors Association, said that while he respects the federal government's responsibility over ensuring national security, deploying the National Guard in D.C. 'may not be the most productive approach, especially when local leaders and law enforcement are already making significant strides in reducing crime and improving community trust.' Johnson implored the Trump administration to work with mayors and to 'support solutions that strengthen law enforcement partnerships and community engagement.' Republicans backed Trump's move. Rep. James Comer, of Kentucky, chair of the House oversight committee, said in a statement: 'For years, the D.C. Council's radical soft-on-crime agenda has emboldened criminals and put public safety at risk in our nation's capital.' Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, of New York, the House Democratic leader, vehemently disagreed, saying the action will be a negative force against 'the city's youth and homeless population.'
