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The Hill
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Hill
Trump's war against DEI isn't going so well in Virginia
Apparently when President Trump says 'illegal DEI,' he means lawful and common-sense efforts to integrate public schools. At least, that's the takeaway from the Department of Education's new investigation against Fairfax County Public Schools. Trump officials claim Fairfax County violated federal law when it adopted an admissions policy designed to 'change the demographic make up' of its most competitive high school. This theory, which equates integration with segregation, dates back to Barry Goldwater, who remarked in 1964 that 'the Constitution is color-blind … and so it is just as wrong to compel children to attend certain schools for the sake of so-called integration as for the sake of segregation.' It seems Trump agrees. Unfortunately for him, the Supreme Court does not. Just last year, the court declined to overturn a ruling for Fairfax County. As I explained at the time, that decision made sense. Even as the Supreme Court has shifted hard right, decades of conservative case law — including from Chief Justice John Roberts — condone racial goals such as diversity, equality and inclusion. The new investigation tracks Trump's disregard for courts and his tendency toward bluster over substance. But in important respects, it also exposes that Trump's war on DEI lacks any moral and legal basis. Some context is helpful. For decades, Black advocates sought to desegregate Thomas Jefferson High School, one of the nation's top-ranked public schools. As recently as 2012, the NAACP filed a civil rights complaint alleging that the school's admissions policies discriminated against African American and Hispanic students and students with disabilities. Things shifted in 2020. As racial justice protests erupted across the globe, local leaders grappled with the fact that in a county with roughly 100,000 Black residents, Thomas Jefferson High School admitted so few Black students that the number was too small to report. The state convened a task force to examine the causes of this ongoing exclusion at Thomas Jefferson and other Virginia schools. Following a series of hearings, the board revised the school's admissions process, eliminating a $100 application fee and a standardized testing requirement. Contrary to ongoing claims that the new policy compromised 'merit,' the board raised the minimum GPA for admission from 3.0 to 3.5 and added an honors course requirement. The new policy also implemented a holistic evaluation that included new 'experience factors,' such as whether the applicant qualified for reduced meals or is an English language learner. The updated process also ensured that each middle school receive a number of seats equal to 1.5 percent of its eighth-grade class. The school board resolved that '[t]he admission process must use only race-neutral methods that do not seek to achieve any specific racial or ethnic mix, balance or targets.' This means that admissions officials are not told the race, ethnicity, sex or name of any applicant. In Supreme Court parlance, the entire admissions process was 'colorblind.' The new process produced promising results. In its inaugural year, Thomas Jefferson High School received 1,000 more applicants than the prior cycle. This larger applicant pool also 'included markedly more low-income students, English-language learners, and girls than had prior classes at TJ.' Consistent with the heightened GPA requirement, the admitted class's mean GPA was higher than in the five preceding years. The new process also yielded greater racial diversity. Black students comprised 10 percent of the applicant pool and received nearly 8 percent of offers and Hispanic students comprised 11 percent of the applicant pool and received over 11 percent of offers. The overall percentage of Asian American students decreased from the preceding year, but Asian Americans continued to enjoy the highest percentage yield of all racial groups. And as the Fourth Circuit detailed, Asian American students from historically underrepresented middle schools 'saw a sixfold increase in offers, and the number of low-income Asian American admittees to TJ increased to 51 — from a mere one in 2020.' In short, Thomas Jefferson High School adopted a 'race-neutral' process to pursue a set of goals that included increasing Black and Hispanic representation. This is the precise type of practice the Trump administration denigrates as 'illegal DEI.' Efforts to promote racial diversity do constitute DEI. But they are far from illegal. In fact, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard — the 2023 decision striking down Harvard University's formal consideration of applicant race — supports most of the DEI policies Trump now targets. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts deemed Harvard's underlying goals as 'worthy' and 'commendable.' Justice Brett Kavanaugh made the point more directly; writing for himself, Kavanaugh noted that 'racial discrimination still occurs and the effects of past racial discrimination still persist' and that 'universities still can, of course, act to undo the effects of past discrimination in many permissible ways that do not involve classification by race.' The actions of the high school square with Kavanaugh's call for policies that attend to race but do not differentiate between individual students on this basis. This should short-circuit the Department of Education's investigation against Fairfax County. But it is unlikely to stall Trump's desire to outlaw integration. The Pacific Legal Foundation, which initiated the lawsuit against Fairfax County and remains a force on the right, wants to revive Goldwater's hostile approach to integration. Consider the following FAQ on Pacific Legal's website: 'schools may use or not use standardized tests, essays, interviews, or auditions, as long as their reasons for using or not using them are not racial.' By this logic, a high school could lawfully eliminate an admissions fee if motivated by public relations concerns, but it would be unlawful to take that same action if done to decrease racial barriers that exclude low-income Black and Hispanic students. Now consider higher education. Per Pacific Legal, Harvard University could eliminate admissions preferences for the children of alumni and wealthy donors if done to appease alumni pressure. But it would be unlawful for Harvard to take the same action if the goal is increasing the number of Asian American students or mitigate unearned racial preferences that flow to wealthy white applicants. The upshot is that affirmative efforts to reduce racial inequality — everything Trump dubs 'illegal DEI' — remain legal and morally just. So, at least for now, integration does not equate to segregation. Jonathan Feingold is an associate professor at Boston University School of Law. He is an expert in affirmative action, antidiscrimination law, education law, and critical race theory.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Sports Betting Is a Plague
When do practical policy effects trump cherished principles? The mess that has come with gambling liberalization should force the thoughtful kind of libertarian to consider that question. Set aside, for the moment, the recent ideological devolution of the Republican Party into national socialism: Traditionally, most of the Americans who called themselves 'libertarians' were in effect conservatives ('Republicans who like weed and porn,' as a Marxist friend of mine used to put it), while American conservatism was thoroughly libertarian, and not only as an economic matter but also in a way deeply rooted in the live-and-let-live sensibility of figures such as Barry Goldwater, with his suspicion of Moral Majority types. ('Mark my word,' Goldwater famously said, 'if and when these preachers get control of the party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem.') Libertarians and conservatives both prioritize freedom; libertarians and conservatives both admit the unwelcome reality of trade-offs; libertarians tend to lean a little more into freedom, and conservatives tend to dwell more on the unpleasanter facts of life. Here is a sobering write-up of a study published in December by scholars at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management: At the outset, the researchers observed a sharp increase in sports betting in the states where it was legalized. 'The figure goes from zero in most states to sizable amounts, and it continues to increase for several months as people learn about it,' [Kellogg professor Scott] Baker says. 'Only a year or two after it's been introduced do we see a bit of a plateau, and this is at a pretty high level in terms of money spent and people involved.' By the end of their sample period, the researchers saw that nearly 8 percent of households were involved in gambling. These bettors spent, on average, $1,100 per year on online bets. While the amount of money people put into legal sports gambling rose, their net investments fell by nearly 14 percent. For every $1 a household spent on betting, it put $2 fewer into investment accounts. As bad as that sounds, the report in toto is considerably worse. For example, the researchers also found that sports gambling correlated with greater participation in other forms of gambling, especially lotteries, and that this trend is more pronounced 'among households that frequently overdraw their bank accounts,' i.e., poor people and those living on the financial edge. There is an open question of real relevance to policymakers in this: whether sports gambling is a cause of other reckless economic behavior or is a symptom of more general economic recklessness, especially among those already under economic stress. Economic pressure moves some people in the direction of conservation (cutting spending, saving more, etc.) but moves others in the opposite direction as their anxiety and sense of hopelessness work together to make high-risk activities seem more attractive: Gambling is fundamentally a form of entertainment based on wishful thinking about the likelihood of a big payoff—the economic version of George Orwell's man who 'may take to drink because he feels himself a failure but then fail all the more completely because he drinks.' The cause/symptom distinction is relevant, but the answer, whatever it is, is not dispositive: Even if increased gambling is only a secondary effect, it remains the case that, other things being equal, people in financial distress probably would be better off if opportunities to increase their distress were less readily available. A few regular readers will be thinking: 'Wait—this from the guy who supports legalizing heroin?' The thing about the prohibitionist argument is, it isn't always completely wrong. Alcohol consumption really did go down in the early years of Prohibition—it was a bad policy, but it did not fail on every front. And the benefits to be had from libertarian reform often turn out to be more modest in practice than what had been hoped for. For example: The presence of legal prostitution in some parts of Nevada has done little or nothing to alleviate the problems associated with street-level prostitution in Las Vegas and elsewhere and may have made it worse in some ways, with poorly informed visitors to Sin City believing that prostitution is legal there, which it isn't. Experiments with de facto legalization of some 'hard' drugs, and the more general liberalization of marijuana laws, has not eliminated the black market for drugs and thus defunded the cartels, while drug use generally has increased where drugs are legal. And now gambling legalization has led to more gambling and arguably to more destructive and addictive forms of gambling via app. You can make a good libertarian case that some of these intractable problems above point to reforms that were insufficiently libertarian: There is not very much legal prostitution in Nevada, and what there is remains relatively difficult to access and much more expensive than illegal prostitution—a couple of high-priced brothels an hour's drive from the Strip were never going to eliminate prostitution on the street of Las Vegas or in casino bars; black markets in marijuana and other drugs endure because prohibition of marijuana and other drugs endures, and this has effects even on legal production as marijuana cultivated for use in the liberal states is diverted to the black market in the prohibition states. ('What's the matter with Kansas?' indeed.) But if your best argument amounts to, 'The ideal hypothetical version of my policy is preferable to the non-ideal real-world version of your policy,' then you haven't made a very good case for your policy. And clear-eyed libertarian critics might have a few important things to say about legal gambling, too: that lotteries are state monopolies and that the casino industry is a series of regional state-organized cartels, that neither really is an example of free enterprise in action, and that, as with drinking alcohol, only a minority of gamblers develop problem habits. It is difficult to make a cost-benefit analysis here, because the benefits are almost entirely a matter of taste: Walking through an Atlantic City casino, I myself do not see anything that seems worth preserving—but, then, we have free markets, and more general liberty, precisely because different people have different values, interests, and priorities. (Given the advertising footprint of the sports-betting industry, you can bet that bro media would push back hard against any attempt at limitation.) Still, my thoughts linger on that money being diverted from retirement savings to be pissed away on sports gambling. The Kellogg authors offer the possibility that this is only partly a problem with sports gambling per se and that the pathology is made much worse, as so many things are in our time, by its having migrated to the lonely world of the smartphone, where you can make a spur-of-the-moment bet on a sleepless night at 3 a.m., perhaps after a few drinks. They suggest that the situation might be improved by restricting sports gambling to on-premises wagers in gambling parlors. But if you ever have visited any of those ghastly little mini-casinos that have popped up in converted convenience stores and gas stations around the country – or most of the big gambling palaces, for that matter – then you may come to assume that location constraints are unlikely to produce substantial results. Gambling is an ugly business, morally and aesthetically, almost everywhere it exists. Even the world's most famous baccarat enthusiast knows that. But you know what I'm still thinking about: $2 in vanished retirement savings for every $1 gambled. That's not the kind of return a reformer would hope for.
Yahoo
13-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The 10 Worst Republican Budget Gimmicks
Being an elected Republican today means navigating a fundamental contradiction: Voters love bold spending cuts in theory but hate them in practice. Surveys have long shown that Americans want deficit reduction and a smaller government. "Washington spends too much money" is one of the easiest applause lines in politics. But when asked about specific programs—Social Security, Medicare, defense, veterans' benefits, infrastructure, education, border security, the safety net, and nearly every other federal budget item except, perhaps, the 1 percent of total spending going to foreign aid and NASA—the electorate demands even more spending. Across the spectrum, voters prefer to talk like Sen. Barry Goldwater and spend like LBJ. Democratic lawmakers handle the voter contradictions by emphasizing their support for expanding popular programs and vaguely hinting that taxing the rich can pay for it all (it cannot). Republicans, by contrast, square the circle with budget gimmicks. They make grand pledges to balance the budget within a decade and push for popular budget rules to create the illusion of spending restraint. Then GOP lawmakers simply ignore their own rules and continue spending and borrowing as usual. The current budget and tax debates have become a festival of gimmicks—here are the GOP's 10 most egregious ploys: Fake Expiration Dates. When Congress passes an expensive new policy but wants to hide the enormous long-term cost, it often employs fake expiration dates. The 2017 tax cuts were always intended to be permanent, but to hide their true long-term cost, lawmakers set the most popular aspects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) to expire at the end of 2025. As that expiration date nears, Republicans are not only preparing to extend (and likely expand) these tax policies but will probably make them expire within five to eight years again to create the illusion of a 10-year price tag no higher than $4.5 trillion. As Congress continues to renew these popular policies, the federal budget will face a long-term cost that has never been fully disclosed or admitted. Current Policy Baseline. A corollary to the fake expiration dates above, this wonky term refers to Congress bypassing its own budget rules to pretend that removing the expiration dates has no deficit cost. The lawmaker two-step begins with Congress first making a new tax cut temporary, so that it requires offsets only up to the expiration date. Then, down the road, Congress simply eliminates the expiration date—with no offsets of the extended cost—under the argument that "extending current policies doesn't count as a new tax reduction." The result is a permanent tax cut that includes offsets only for the first few years. GOP lawmakers are considering using this gimmick to extend the expiring TCJA without any offsets. Fake Budget Resolutions. The new Republican Congress entered 2017 facing steeply rising deficits. The House of Representatives responded by passing and trumpeting a bold budget resolution aiming to save $6.5 trillion over the decade and balance the budget. Except the whole exercise was fake. It did not require Congress to actually enact the savings or even detail specifically how it could meet the targets. The budget was merely a set of numbers showing how the deficit would theoretically decline in the (extraordinarily unlikely) event that Congress enacted $6.5 trillion in 10-year savings. This did not stop Congressional Republicans from triumphantly declaring that they had in fact passed a balanced budget—and then proceeding to instead blow up the deficit with a $1.5 trillion tax cut, a budget-busting farm bill, and a 13 percent discretionary spending expansion. This 2017 example is no outlier, but rather one of many fake GOP budgets that have been produced over the last few decades. Rosy Economic Scenarios. Nearly every Republican budget relies on implausibly aggressive deficit reduction. One trick is assuming—with little to no basis—that a historic economic boom will suddenly generate trillions in new tax revenue. For instance, this year's House Republican budget assumes a permanent leap in economic growth rates that would require labor productivity growth rates to nearly double. This questionable assumption adds $13 trillion to the projected 10-year gross domestic product and $2.6 trillion in projected new tax revenues. Similar past rosy assumptions have repeatedly proven false, and this year's Republican budget contains no major policy changes that could plausibly produce this historic productivity jump. Discretionary Spending "Magic Asterisks." Another staple of Republican budgets is assuming that 10-year deficit-reduction targets will be accomplished by future Congresses drastically slashing discretionary appropriations by as much as nearly half of their share of the economy. For instance, this year's House GOP budget combines a $300 billion short-term expansion of defense and border appropriations with the absurd assumption that future Congresses will slice discretionary spending as a share of the economy one-quarter below current levels—to its lowest level since the 1930s. These future savings are never specified and never take place. The following year brings another short-term appropriations hike and promised future savings are again pushed out to another day that will never arrive. Fake Spending Caps. While Republican Congresses have been happy to give GOP presidents a blank check on spending, they have tried to clip the wings of Democratic presidents by pressuring them to sign laws setting tight multi-year caps on discretionary spending. After bragging about such caps, Congress then discards them as soon as the ink is dry. The 2011 Budget Control Act set strict spending caps that were almost immediately bypassed, with Congress ultimately canceling or replacing nearly half of the promised 10-year savings. The 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act also contained multi-year spending caps that Republican lawmakers and President Joe Biden agreed to regularly violate with expensive "side deals" before the bill had even been signed into law. Even now, as Congress negotiates the FY 2025 spending levels, Republican lawmakers have maintained that they will not allow the law's spending reductions to take place. The spending caps are public relations, not policy. PAYGO and CUTGO Rules. For most of the past 35 years, Congress has lived under Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) laws, as well as occasional Republican "CUTGO" rules. Together, these policies require that Congress fully offset any new tax reductions and mandatory spending expansions or face automatic "sequestration" spending cuts. While these restrictions have discouraged certain expensive proposals from being considered, Congress and the president have canceled every sequestration cut for the last three decades. Since 2015 alone, Congress has slashed taxes and expanded mandatory spending by $7 trillion with zero enforcement of PAYGO and CUTGO. As Congress prepares $4.5 trillion in new tax relief that will violate PAYGO, another cancellation of the law's enforcement is a foregone conclusion. DOGE's Fake Savings. Elon Musk pledged that President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would slash spending by $2 trillion in one year. In its first six weeks, DOGE has claimed more than $100 billion in spending reductions. The actual savings are estimated at just $2 billion (or 1/35 of one percent of federal spending), as the rest of the claimed savings have either never been detailed or are the product of basic mathematical and accounting errors—such as confusing an $8 million cut for $8 billion, canceling contracts that ended decades ago, and triple-counting the same contract cancellation. Moreover, impoundment laws prevent DOGE from reducing spending below Congressionally appropriated levels, allowing only a reprogramming of spending within a given program. DOGE is merely government spending cut theater. Pork Project Ban Ends. After a decade of embarrassing earmark scandals, including Alaska's infamous "bridge to nowhere" and lawmakers going to prison for auctioning these federal grants for bribes and campaign contributions, a Republican-led Congressional effort banned earmarks in 2011. A decade later, however, Republicans teamed up with Democrats to quietly bring back Congressional pork projects. While some anti-corruption controls have been added, history suggests that it's likely a matter of time before Congress returns to essentially selling government grants for campaign contributions. Balanced Budget Amendment. The more Republicans drive up budget deficits, the more they call for a balanced budget amendment. Such an amendment faces no path to approval from the required two-thirds of Congress and 38 state legislatures. And that's the point. Proposing a balanced budget amendment is an easy way for GOP lawmakers to look tough on spending and deficits while continuing to vote for new tax relief and spending expansions. The fact that virtually no lawmakers can specify any set of reforms to achieve a balanced budget—and that most instead continue to demand expensive new initiatives—exemplifies the emptiness of this proposal that exists mainly in campaign ads that are to be forgotten soon after election day. The purpose of these budget gimmicks is for Republican presidents and lawmakers to look tough on spending and deficits without actually doing anything substantive to save taxpayer dollars. Republican voters get the illusion of deep spending and deficit reductions without anyone seeing painful tax increases or benefit losses. In a world of busy lives and short attention spans, it is not difficult for lawmakers to fool voters into believing deficits are being reduced. But the economy will not be fooled. Congress can manipulate baselines, set fake expiration dates, and ignore their own budget rules—but they can't repeal the laws of economics or math. Deficits will continue to rise—from $1.8 trillion today to a projected $3.6 trillion in a decade. Another $25 trillion in 10-year borrowing will push interest rates higher and bury the budget under trillions in interest costs. And, perhaps most dire, the bond market will not be fooled. At some point between the national debt's current level of $30 trillion and the 30-year projected level of nearly $200 trillion (!), the bond market will likely tap out and stop lending money to Washington at plausible interest rates, triggering a possible debt crisis. When that happens, we may discover that all this time we were only fooling ourselves. The post The 10 Worst Republican Budget Gimmicks appeared first on
