Bruce Yandle: Biden’s effort to bring housing relief with price controls: Easy to conceive, hard to deliver

posted in: Politics | 0

Calling for price controls to bring down inflation is like having a baby — easy to conceive but hard to deliver.

In an ironic but understandable turn of events, given that it is “crazy season” when desperate politicians try almost anything to get elected, Joe Biden has announced a White House effort to impose IRS-administered controls on rents charged by landlords in major markets across the United States.

Let’s face it, the idea of just outlawing price increases to limit inflation has superficial appeal. But the Biden proposal should be dismissed for what it is, a clumsy election year attempt to attract some more votes by appearing to quench inflationary fires that Biden himself ignited.

The Biden proposal intends to limit rent increases to no more that 5% per year and applies to landlords nationwide with 50 or more rental units in their portfolios. One can expect to see lots of portfolios with 49 properties. Those who fail to comply will lose valuable income-tax depreciation write-offs. But, of course, the mischief comes in managing the price-control nightmare that follows.

During the failed Nixon/Ford/Carter wage-price control efforts of 1974-1978, I was a senior economist on the staff of the President’s Council on Wage & Price Stability. There were hundreds of analysts involved in managing the controls. Of course, an escape mechanism had to be provided for situations where economic shocks would raise costs that somehow had to be covered. Aggrieved parties could appeal to the secretary of treasury.

A much-discussed appeal involved Girl Scouts of America who faced rising costs for their cookies. They won. But did it make sense to have the U.S. Treasury Secretary dealing with Girl Scout cookie prices, or now, to have the President of the United States telling landlords how to price their services?

There is no doubt about it. Rising housing prices are a real issue. As noted in the Bureau of Labor Statistics most recent June 2024 Consumer Price Index report: “The index for all items less food and energy rose 3.4 percent over the past 12 months. The shelter index increased 5.4% over the last year, accounting for over two-thirds of the total 12-month increase in the all items less food and energy index.”

Interestingly, though, just a few days prior to Biden’s rent-relief announcement, Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen in congressional testimony never mentioned greedy landlords but indicated that rising housing costs are the result of efforts by the Federal Reserve (Fed) to reduce inflation by way of higher interest rates. After all, the Fed tightens, mortgage rates rise, and housing becomes more expensive.

Yellen stated: “Elevated prices and the high interest rates designed to fight them have made housing prices rise over the past few months.” She had earlier announced administrative changes designed to facilitate improved access to housing finance.

It can be argued strongly that the inflation spiral that delivered higher priced housing resulted from Biden’s 2021 decision to send $1.9 trillion of newly printed dollars to U.S. citizens to ease their unhappy COVID encounters. Very quickly, the new dollars started chasing a limited supply of goods and services. Inflation increased, and the Fed responded.

Calling for price controls to remedy the situation will likely bring less housing and more mischief than improved wellbeing.

Bruce Yandle is a distinguished adjunct fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, dean emeritus of the Clemson University College of Business & Behavioral Science, and a former executive director of the Federal Trade Commission. He wrote this column for Tribune News Service.

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Greg Meyer: Too often, police shootings show the perils of ‘de-escalation’

posted in: Society | 0

Recent reporting has highlighted the prevalence of shootings by police of people wielding knives and other edged weapons. These cases, often involving individuals in crisis, show two deadly problems: There are limits to what “de-escalation” can accomplish. And officers too often hesitate to use nonlethal force, allowing standoffs to spiral out of control.

Across the country in recent years, officers often seem reluctant to use legitimate force to end a standoff incident when verbal attempts fail to inspire the subject to give up. This hesitation to use even nonlethal weapons — in situations that clearly call for them — often leads to a police shooting, because at some point as de-escalation efforts drag on fruitlessly, suspects may suddenly attack.

People outside law enforcement sometimes have the impression that if only officers would consistently try to de-escalate standoffs with disturbed individuals, shootings could always be avoided — as though de-escalation were a miracle cure. But there is no miracle cure.

To be sure, de-escalation is a crucial tool for police officers. It is one of the first things I learned as a rookie cop in 1976: Talk instead of fight, if the situation allows the choice. The hope in engaging the resisting subject in effective communications is to lower the intensity of the incident and persuade him or her to submit. It works when it works (which is the norm), and it doesn’t work when it doesn’t. This is where the deadly mistake often lies: recognizing that de-escalation is not working, but being reluctant to use nonlethal force because of fear of the administrative, legal and media aftermath.

One sees the pattern when police are in a standoff with someone who is armed with a knife. The norm would be for officers to keep their distance, to talk to the individual and listen, to keep communication going as an effort to resolve the situation peacefully. Instead, with the best of intentions, officers “talk the person to death.” When police fail to recognize that talk isn’t working, then officers decline to use nonlethal means such as Tasers to subdue an armed individual, the result often goes the other way: The individual grows more agitated the longer the standoff drags on and charges with the knife at officers or bystanders. This is when shootings occur.

If only officers had abandoned de-escalation on their own terms instead of waiting for the suspect to end it by attacking. If only the officers had used a Taser or other nonlethal option and saved a life — not to mention avoided an expensive shooting investigation and litigation — instead of “talking the person to death.”

As a longtime consultant on police use of force, I believe that officers should use talk in most situations but must assess each case on its own merits for how long they will talk without acting. It seems likely to me that officers have become gun shy because so many colleagues have faced backlash after shootings, but no one’s interest is served by extending this attitude to nonlethal force. Don’t let an overemphasis on de-escalation put civilians’ and officers’ lives at risk. Don’t hesitate to use tools such as Tasers and other force options when appropriate. Fewer and less severe injuries from nonlethal weapons are preferable to avoidable shootings.

A hope that all police standoffs could end with talk is unrealistic. But can most end with talk or nonlethal means? Absolutely — and in fact most standoffs already do. The exceptions that become shootings are the cases that make the headlines. We can make those exceptions more rare with better policy and training and a cultural shift that encourages use of nonlethal weapons at the right moments.

The public and the media have a role to play. Just as public pressure and equipping officers with a variety of nonlethal weapons have contributed to reducing the frequency of police shootings compared with decades ago, public support can make a difference for officers and departments that use lower levels of force — before a standoff situation becomes a shooting.

Greg Meyer, an expert on police use of force, is a retired Los Angeles Police Department captain who conducted the department’s nonlethal weapons research, testing and training in 1979-80. He wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.

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F.D. Flam: Guns maybe aren’t as good for self-defense as America thinks

posted in: Society | 0

A couple of hours before a young man shot an AR-15 rifle at former President Donald Trump, killing one bystander and wounding others, I had been finishing a column about gun violence as a public health threat. It was an eerie coincidence but not an unlikely one: More than 100 people die from gunshots on an average day in the United States.

In June, the surgeon general declared gun violence a public health crisis. Data show it’s now the leading cause of death for American kids 17 and under. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in 2022, there were 48,000 deaths from firearms, about 40% of which are homicides. Many more people were disabled or maimed. And yet many Americans believe owning a gun makes them safer. In fact, self-defense is the number one reason people give for owning a gun.

Like other public health crises, gun violence has been studied, and scientists have data pointing to ways the carnage can be reduced. But Congress has been slow to pass any laws that would meaningfully restrict gun violence. Although there are more gun safety laws at the state level, the Supreme Court and lower courts have rolled some of them back, sometimes pointing to data allegedly showing guns make people safer. Those data are being grossly misinterpreted.

In the precedent-reversing 2022 New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen decision, which struck down longstanding restriction on who could carry a handgun in New York, justices cited an unpublished survey that seemed to show guns are used well over a million times a year in self-defense. That survey, by Georgetown University researcher William English, was paid for by the gun lobby, according to reporting by the New York Times, who also picked apart his research methods. English responded in a WSJ op-ed, arguing that he’d not hidden his funding sources — they were declared in all his published work.

But research funding is only part of the story. English’s research raised a different question: Are his estimates credible? What do they tell us about the overall impact of guns on public health? How do they line up with what other researchers have found?

Stanford University law professor John Donohue said in the 35 years he’s been doing gun research, he’s never seen any work by English that met “what I consider to be the relatively low standards it takes to get something published.”

Part of the reason English found so many defensive uses of guns is that he allowed survey respondents to define “self-defense” for themselves. When I asked him about the 1.67 million number, he said in only 300,000 of those cases was a shot likely fired. He estimated that in 852,000 times the gun was only brandished, and in about 518,000 times neither happened — e.g. someone may have said they had a gun to intimidate the other party.

But David Hemenway, a professor of public health at Harvard, says it can be a problem to define self-defense so broadly. Hemenway has also done surveys asking people about their defensive use of guns, and he says most are not defending themselves against a mugger or a rapist. They are more like the subject who told Hemenway he went and got his gun after arguing with a neighbor who threw a beer. Or the guy who said that the alarm at his business went off, so he went down to the site, saw people standing outside on the sidewalk, and shot the ground. Or two groups of young men who exchanged gunfire at a gas station at 3 a.m. Should any of these cases really be considered self-defense?

To look more directly at how guns may be used by innocent people to defend themselves from criminals, he and other researchers have looked to a dataset from the National Crime Victimization Survey, put together each year by the Census Bureau and the Department of Justice. Recently that’s included more than 200,000 people. They’re asked whether they were victims of a crime or attempted crime and how they responded.

The results, said Hemenway, show that in cases where a person was present during a crime attempt, only about 1% responded by using or brandishing a gun. Extrapolating to the population at large, the data suggest fewer than 100,000 incidents each year in which guns are used to defend against actual criminals.

What’s often missed in surveys such as the one English conducted, said Stanford’s Donohue, are the cases where something went horribly wrong. He’s thinking of a man responding to a break-in and shooting his 16-year-old son by mistake, or a man who used a gun to pursue someone who robbed him at an ATM, in the process shooting a 9-year-old girl on her way to a Valentine’s Day party.

Other researchers have tried to answer a different question — does having a gun with you make you safer? In 2017, 75% of gun owners told Pew Research they believed that it did.

But Donohue said he was impressed by a 2022 study by colleague David Studdert, comparing gun-owning households and gun-free households in comparable neighborhoods and showing the gun-owning households were twice as likely to die by homicide. And in that 2017 Pew survey, gun owners were three times as likely to have ever been shot as non-gun owners.

Back in 2009, Charles Branas, now a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, was at the University of Pennsylvania and gathered data on shootings in Philadelphia between 2003 and 2006. He compared the victims to a control group matched for age, sex and race who had not been shot. His results, published in the American Journal of Public Health, showed the shooting victims were four times as likely as non-victims to be carrying a gun at the time.

I wrote about that study for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and quoted critics who pointed out that cause and effect are hard to tease out. The correlation might be explained by the gun carriers living in more dangerous situations than the unarmed group. Or it could be that gun owners felt braver, and avoided de-escalation because they felt protected by their firearm.

Suicides by guns have spiked over the last decade, and make up the majority of gun-related deaths. Experts say many of these are impulsive acts by people who might have had a chance to recover from their suicidal thoughts if a gun wasn’t easily available.

The cost of gun proliferation is clear in terms of homicides, suicides and accidents, but it’s harder to compute the other side of the balance — the benefits people derive from the ability to protect themselves. Gun researchers can’t conduct a randomized controlled trial, handing out guns to a subset of volunteers the way they would with a new medicine.

Instead, the pro-gun side is assuming that in these allegedly defensive gun uses, someone would have been hurt or killed if not for their gun. It’s the kind of assumption that’s fooled patients and doctors into believing in unnecessary or unhelpful treatment or prevention strategies. In this case, the most careful, thoughtful studies show how those assumptions are wrongheaded.

Neither Hemenway or Donohue have come across any studies that show more firearms make for a safer or healthier society — and no evidence that the proliferation of semiautomatic rifles like AR-15s make people safer.

English wrote that he thought guns like the AR-15 were “rather ideal for home defense,” which was the primary reason people say they buy them. Other researchers disagree. These are guns developed to kill on the battlefield — as Hemenway puts it, “to rip up your insides.” Donohue pointed out that the defensive benefits of such guns is “zero” because if it’s someone breaking into your house, you don’t need a weapon that can shoot 400 yards. And because these guns can shoot through walls, it creates more potential for hurting innocent bystanders. In the hands of a criminal, an AR-15-style rifle can deter police from intervening to restore safety, as reportedly happened in Uvalde, Texas.

Yet gun enthusiasts keep buying them. Nancy Lanza believed she needed an assault rifle to protect herself in the upscale neighborhood of Sandy Hook, Connecticut. She was later gunned down by her own troubled son before he went to an elementary school and killed 26 people, most of them children.

Now, investigators are desperately searching for missed signs that would have identified the shooter in Butler, Pennsylvania, before his assassination attempt, but so far they’ve found nothing in the way of motives. Except of course that he appeared to be a loner, possibly troubled, and thanks to his parents’ gun collection, with easy access to a very dangerous weapon.

F.D. Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is host of the “Follow the Science” podcast.

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New food truck Greater Tater is a whirlwind dream for lifelong Stillwater friends, one of whom has Down syndrome

posted in: News | 0

The motto of Greater Tater, a new Stillwater food truck run by two lifelong friends, is “It’s what’s inside that counts.”

In part, it’s literal: The trailer’s signature menu item is stuffed “potato kegs,” which resemble enormous tater tots with a variety of fillings, from bacon-jalapeño to reuben sandwich to breakfast eggs and sausage.

But the motto has a figurative meaning, too, especially for David Kaetterhenry, who has Down syndrome.

“I want to let [our customers] know that I may have this Down syndrome, I want to show them that I don’t want to be different,” Kaetterhenry said. “I think special needs need to be out there, so we can show the world that we can do it.”

Kaetterhenry and Chas Lecy, both 28, met as elementary schoolers at Stillwater Evangelical Free Church and quickly became friends. They went to school together, worked at summer camp together and are both passionate about food, Lecy said. They’d been bouncing around the idea of opening a food business for years, he said.

So in February, when Lecy and his father saw another food vendor was selling their trailer, the two friends jumped on the opportunity.

“I have this dream to have a three-story restaurant,” Kaetterhenry said. “I remember that me and Chas’s dad talked about this restaurant, so God worked through Chas and [his dad], and they got the food truck and asked me to be part of that.”

Kaetterhenry’s dream restaurant would be a tropical, Caribbean-themed spot, he said — admittedly a bit different from Greater Tater’s menu, though it makes the food truck no less exciting.

And since the duo decided to start the business, it’s been a whirlwind, Lecy said.

At the end of May, Lecy quit his job of 10 years working for his family’s construction company, Cornerstone Concrete, to focus full-time on the Greater Tater. He and his wife have spent months overseeing logistics of bringing the trailer up to health department code, securing operating licenses and designing the branded wrap for the exterior. The potato kegs they sell are made by Stone Gate Foods, a local manufacturer.

Already this summer, Kaetterhenry and Lecy have brought the trailer to several fairs around the St. Croix Valley and western Wisconsin.

Kaetterhenry is the culinary brains of the operation, the two friends said. Outside of the food truck, he works at Hagbergs in Lake Elmo, cutting and cooking specialty meats, and previously worked at Culver’s and Kowalski’s Market.

So at the first fair they worked, his and Lecy’s plan was for Kaetterhenry to start out manning the fryer while Lecy took orders. But the duo quickly realized Kaetterhenry had a knack for working the window and chatting with customers, something other jobs had not necessarily allowed him to do.

“We want to get our customers to be part of me and Chas’s friendship,” Kaetterhenry said. “We want people who come up to us to enter our friendship, the history of us.”

Kaetterhenry has also been coming up with other menu ideas beyond the stuffed potato kegs.

“Within the first day, he was doing the register, and he was killing it,” Lecy said. “And something David is really good at is making unique ideas out of anything. We have plans, in the future, of making a ‘Davey’s Special’ menu and showing people his creations.”

Besides food, Kaetterhenry was also a Special Olympics athlete for many years. He ran track and played basketball on the St. Croix Valley Lumberjacks team, and also competed in soccer, flag football, bowling and golf, he said. In fact, he just got a new set of golf clubs this summer — though he hasn’t had much time to play, given the food truck.

“It’s been so fun,” Lecy said. “Just a different chapter for both of us, in our lives and our friendship, working with each other every single weekend. We’re not sick of each other!”

Greater Tater: 651-560-2028; info@greatertater.org; for location announcements, search Greater Tater on Facebook or find them on Instagram @greater.tater.

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