CityLab: Why Edinburgh Wants a Tourist Tax

This month, Scotland’s capital became the first city in the U.K. to agree to a so-called tourist tax. Likely to be introduced next year, the tax will add a £2 ($2.60) surcharge per room, per night, for the first week of every stay in Edinburgh’s short-term accommodations (excluding campsites). The levy, which will still require already agreed-upon legislation in the Scottish parliament, could raise roughly £14.6 million ($18.8 million) a year, all of which could be allocated specifically for spending on issues directly related to tourism.[...]

If successful, it could prove a template for cities across Britain. As things stand, Northeast Scotland’s Aberdeen and the English cities of Bath and Oxford are already eyeing similar moves, hungry to gain some public funds back from an industry that places strain on both public and private space. It’s possible that other major tourist destinations, including London, could introduce a charge that’s already in place in tourist hotspots like Barcelona and Amsterdam. Indeed, if some cities in Britain start taxing overnight stays, it seems likely that other towns won’t be able to resist the temptation to do the same.[...]

The city, however, is not designed for crowds. In high tourist season, footfall in busy areas can double, while the city’s topography tends to force traffic through a few bottlenecks. After years of nationally-imposed austerity, Edinburgh’s infrastructure isn’t in great shape; basic services like street lighting and trash collection are functional, but getting threadbare, while sidewalks and even some historic buildings are somewhat battered. Locals and visitors alike are increasingly fighting for the same apartments. On top of all this, the city has to pump money into inspecting and enforcing standards for the tourist industry, but doesn’t currently have a way to source any direct funding for this from the industry itself.

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Haaretz: The Knesset Candidate Who Says Zionism Encourages anti-Semitism and Calls Netanyahu 'Arch-murderer'

Cassif is third on the slate of Knesset candidates in Hadash (the Hebrew acronym for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality), the successor to Israel’s Communist Party. He holds the party’s “Jewish slot,” replacing MK Dov Khenin. Cassif is likely to draw fire from opponents and be a conspicuous figure in the next Knesset, following the April 9 election. [...]

“I call it ‘creeping genocide.’ Genocide is not only a matter of taking people to gas chambers. When Yeshayahu Leibowitz used the term ‘Judeo-Nazis,’ people asked him, ‘How can you say that? Are we about to build gas chambers?’ To that, he had two things to say. First, if the whole difference between us and the Nazis boils down to the fact that we’re not building gas chambers, we’re already in trouble. And second, maybe we won’t use gas chambers, but the mentality that exists today in Israel – and he said this 40 years ago – would allow it. I’m afraid that today, after four years of such an extreme government, it possesses even greater legitimacy.

“But you know what, put aside ‘genocide’ – ethnic cleansing is taking place there. And that ethnic cleansing is also being carried out by means of killing, although mainly by way of humiliation and of making life intolerable. The trampling of human dignity. It reminds me of Primo Levi’s ‘If This Is a Man.’” [...]

Cassif voices clearly and cogently positions that challenge the public discourse in Israel, and does so with ardor and charisma. Four candidates vied for Hadash’s Jewish slot, and they all delivered speeches at the convention. The three candidates who lost to him – Efraim Davidi, Yaela Raanan and the head of the party’s Tel Aviv branch, Noa Levy – described their activity and their guiding principles. When they spoke, there was the regular buzz of an audience that’s waiting for lunch. But when Cassif took the stage, the effect was magnetic. [...]

Cassif terms himself an explicit anti-Zionist. “There are three reasons for that,” he says. “To begin with, Zionism is a colonialist movement, and as a socialist, I am against colonialism. Second, as far as I am concerned, Zionism is racist in ideology and in practice. I am not referring to the definition of race theory – even though there are also some who impute that to the Zionist movement – but to what I call Jewish supremacy. No socialist can accept that. My supreme value is equality, and I can’t abide any supremacy – Jewish or Arab. The third thing is that Zionism, like other ethno-nationalistic movements, splits the working class and all weakened groups. Instead of uniting them in a struggle for social justice, for equality, for democracy, it divides the exploited classes and the enfeebled groups, and by that means strengthens the rule of capital.”

Quartz: A Nobel Prize-winning psychologist says most people don’t really want to be happy (December 21, 2018)

In an October interview with Ha’aretz (paywall), Kahneman argues that satisfaction is based mostly on comparisons. “Life satisfaction is connected to a large degree to social yardsticks–achieving goals, meeting expectations.” He notes that money has a significant influence on life satisfaction, whereas happiness is affected by money only when funds are lacking. Poverty creates suffering, but above a certain level of income that satisfies our basic needs, wealth doesn’t increase happiness. “The graph is surprisingly flat,” the psychologist says. [...]

The key here is memory. Satisfaction is retrospective. Happiness occurs in real time. In Kahneman’s work, he found that people tell themselves a story about their lives, which may or may not add up to a pleasing tale. Yet, our day-to-day experiences yield positive feelings that may not advance that longer story, necessarily. Memory is enduring. Feelings pass. Many of our happiest moments aren’t preserved—they’re not all caught on camera but just happen. And then they’re gone.[...]

Indeed, although his contributions legitimized the emotion as an economic and social force and led to the creation of happiness indices worldwide, the psychologist abandoned the field of happiness research about five years ago. He’s now researching and writing about the concept of “noise,” or random data that interferes with wise decision-making.

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The Guardian Today in Focus: 9/11 and the terrorists on trial

The Guantánamo Bay detention camp was established in the months after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Among those detained there are Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of 9/11. But 17 years after the attacks, arguably the most important criminal trial in American history has yet to begin.

The Guardian’s world affairs editor, Julian Borger, recently flew to Guantánamo Bay to attend the 33rd pre-trial military tribunal hearing against Mohammed and four other alleged 9/11 conspirators. They were first charged in 2008 and the military commission proceedings began in 2012. The accused are getting old, some of the witnesses have died and the trial is still at least a year off as the hearings have been bogged down in procedural arguments. Julian speaks to Anushka Asthana about why the trial has still not started and the impact that three years of “enhanced interrogation” at CIA black sites has had on the case.

Plus: the Guardian’s environment editor, Damian Carrington, on the first global scientific review of insect populations, which shows that the world’s insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems.

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4Liberty: Spring in Poland: Liberal View on Robert Biedron’s New Political Party

Robert Biedron’s project may be strategically significant if it leads to gaining the support of the entire leftist electorate before the forthcoming parliamentary elections. In this scenario, Robert Biedron would succeed in minimizing the loss of votes that may be otherwise issued in favor of the Razem or the Green parties, etc., but which would not be enough to land these parties any parliamentary seats.[...]

The launch of the Spring party has one crucial advantage: its leaders must now reveal the party platform. When analyzing the planks recently presented by Robert Biedron, a praise should be the starting point. It must be clearly stated that a bold party platform covering issues of ideology, gender equality, minority rights, secular state is very much needed and deserves a spokesperson in Poland.[...]

However, from he liberal perspective, the planks related to ideology are the only part worth praise. The presented socio-economic program is a combination of wishful thinking, social populism, and (oddly enough) ultra-liberalism mixed with lack of any serious financial analysis that would explain how the proposed changes shall be financed (and who should pay for them).[...]

Robert Biedron’s Spring has one more advantage. It is chiefly a party of a new generation and a group of thirty- and fourty-year-olds. Although I’m not a hard-core supporter of promoting only young politicians (I welcomed, for instance, the news that the European Coalition is created with participation of such seasoned politicians as Radosław Sikorski or Marek Belka), it is evident that Polish political scene suffers from a generation gap.

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UnHerd: What snapped in Spain?

Spain was due to hold a general election next year anyway, but it was always more likely than not that the PSOE would be forced to go to the polls before then. The party ousted the scandal-hit Rajoy government in a parliamentary vote of no confidence that won the backing of 180 MPs back in 2018. The vote followed a ruling by Spain’s highest criminal court that the PP had profited from illegal kickbacks from government contracts. Yet the anti-Rajoy alliance – which Sanchez himself described at one point as the “Frankenstein coalition” – crumbled soon after the PP had been deposed.[...]

In a country that had grown tired of the financial scandals surrounding the governing PP, Sanchez’s ruthless action in toppling Rajoy proved popular. As such, the PSOE currently sit at around 24% in the polls – granted a modest improvement on the 22% it was polling at prior to Rajoy’s departure, but nonetheless the largest share for any single party. [...]

Support for Podemos has almost halved in the polls from a high of 27% in December 2014 to 15% today, putting them in fourth place, and only four points ahead of Vox, a party of the hard Right. The steady decline of Podemos – in part the victim of that familiar curse of Left-wing political parties, the factional squabble – offers Sanchez breathing space on his Left. [...]

Only a fool would write off ‘Mr Handsome’ – as Pedro Sánchez is nicknamed. Like Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Sanchez has been written-off many times in the past by establishment politicians and commentators only to re-emerge ahead of the pack. After almost a decade of austerity, fatigued voters may yet throw a spoke in the wheel of Spanish politics and return the Prime Minister who promised more money.

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Independent: The key takeaway from Finland's universal basic income experiment is that countries need to learn from each other

In a nutshell, giving people a universal income did not help them get into jobs, but they did feel somewhat happier than those in the control group.

The general reaction to this is that the experiment has been somewhat disappointing. You would expect people to be more willing to take on a job if they knew that they would still keep their state benefit, but this has not happened. And the difference in happiness, while statistically significant, is not that huge.

But I take away a rather different lesson. It is that the idea of doing randomised trials is a really sensible way of evaluating social policies. If this technique were more widely applied, it would be possible to fine-tune welfare support systems so that they gave taxpayers better value for their money, and recipients a higher quality of benefits. The universal basic income is an idea that has generated a lot of global interest. For example, the opposition party in India wants to do something similar. But this is the first proper national randomised trial on a national basis anywhere in the world to see whether it works. [...]

Finland has done a randomised trial of a particular welfare policy. We should learn from this. And governments throughout the developed world should carry out more such studies about other social policies before they launch some politically-attractive new initiative – and find it doesn’t work.

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Politico: Trump’s National Emergency Is Great News for Future President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

The notion that a president of the United States can simply circumvent the national legislature out of pique, declare something that has been going on for years as an “emergency,” and then implement policies our elected representatives did not vote for, allocate money for or in any other way authorize is totally antithetical to representative democracy and the checks and balances system. If Trump is correct constitutionally, which he isn’t, then what did the Founders create a Congress for in the first place? I’d like to think that the Supreme Court will call a stop to this nonsense in a 9-0 decision, as they did in 1974 when they forced the executive branch to turn over to Congress tapes of President Richard Nixon’s private conversations. Unfortunately, I’ve lost so much faith in conservatives’ ability to draw any red line against Trump that I find it easy to believe that the conservative majority of the court will go along with this, anyway. As a result, Congress will no longer matter. As a result, the Supreme Court will no longer matter, either.[...]

For a decade now, the right has warned about a progressive “dictator” like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton forcing the United States to pursue policies that the majority does not want. Now they are making it so much easier for the next Democratic president to do exactly that. Shortly after learning of Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency to build his beloved border wall, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said a left-wing president might just as well declare an emergency to impose any policies they want, too. As Elizabeth Warren tweeted: “Gun violence is an emergency. Climate change is an emergency. Our country's opioid epidemic is an emergency.” You see where this is headed.

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