Vox: The important questions about universal basic income haven’t been answered yet

Their takeaway? We’re studying the wrong things. We’ve pinned so many hopes to UBI — some of them contradictory — that it’s not clear anymore what concrete empirical results from our pilot programs would help us conclude it’s a good idea. At the same time, proponents typically haven’t characterized their plans in enough detail that we can figure out how to pay for them and how they’ll affect the poor.

That doesn’t necessarily mean UBI is a utopian pipe dream. But it does suggest that, right now, UBI is proposed as a solution to many different social ills, and the details of UBI proposals are often underspecified — so it’s not clear who’d get money, how much, or how we’d pay for it. If we want to fix our welfare system, that has to change. [...]

But other arguments for UBI assume it will decrease the labor supply. The technological unemployment argument, for example, seems to rest on the assumption that UBI will decrease the labor supply — and that this is a good thing. Under this model, UBI is part of how we transition from a society where people need to work to a society where they don’t. Complaining that they won’t get jobs is beside the point.

As the paper spells out, this makes it tricky to evaluate whether UBI programs are living up to expectations. We haven’t decided what problem we want to solve, much less what experimental results we’d see if we’d successfully solved it. [...]

And that’s not the only problem. Eliminating all existing transfer programs in favor of a UBI would leave some big holes. For example, under the UBI they propose, a single parent of three children would be eligible for $12,000 a year in total assistance. Under the current system, that parent would likely be eligible for a lot more: health care through Medicaid, food stamps, rent and housing assistance, and potentially transfer payments through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. “Replacing existing anti-poverty programs with a UBI would be highly regressive,” the paper argues. That’s not what anyone’s going for.

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Politico: Winners and losers of Europe’s copyright reform

The European Commission, Parliament and EU countries agreed Wednesday on the controversial copyright reform, after two and a half years of painful negotiations and unprecedented lobbying campaigns from all sides of the argument.[...]

The legislation agreed this week creates a new EU-wide right for press publishers, allowing them to seek compensation from Google for having their content displayed on Google News. It also makes it mandatory for platforms such as Google’s YouTube to strike licensing deals with the cultural industry, film producers, record companies, collecting societies and other rights holders seeking such deals as a condition for their content to be shared on platforms. Platforms will also become legally responsible for copyright-protected, licensed content that has been unlawfully uploaded. [...]

Authors and performers: Songwriters, film and movie directors, actors, musicians, screenwriters — they all won a lot more from the reform than what was originally expected. They managed to add to the text a “principle of appropriate and proportionate remuneration.” This means they’ll be able to seek compensation for the exploitation of their work, proportionate to the revenues generated by their material, rather than based on a flat rate.[...]

Small and medium-sized enterprises: Small and medium-sized enterprises almost derailed the reform, when Germany and France couldn’t agree in the Council of the EU on whether they should be included within the legislation. Germany wanted a broad carve-out for platforms with an annual turnover under €20 million. France preferred only a targeted exception on very specific measures. Paris ultimately had the last word, and the targeted exception only applies to enterprises with an annual turnover under €10 million, a monthly audience under 5 million unique visitors and which are less than three years old.

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Vox: A year after Parkland, support for stricter gun laws wanes

A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that 51 percent of Americans support stricter gun laws in the United States. While that’s still a slim majority, it’s a significant drop from when the same poll was conducted last year, soon after the Parkland shooting, when 71 percent of Americans said gun laws should be tightened. [...]

It’s a familiar pattern: In the immediate aftermath of mass shootings, there is a bump in support for gun restrictions, and calls for gun control increase. But over time, public attention on the issue fades, and Congress fails to act. It’s what happened after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, at Pulse nightclub in 2016, and at a Las Vegas concert in 2017. [...]

According to the Giffords Law Center, legislators on both sides of the aisle in 26 states and Washington, DC, enacted 67 new gun safety laws last year. And gun control advocates saw some important victories in the 2018 midterms — Washington state voted to raise the legal age to buy semiautomatic refiles from 18 to 21, and Democrats won governorships in states such as Wisconsin and Nevada and took back the House of Representatives, potentially setting the stage for more action at both the federal and state level. The House Judiciary Committee just this week approved two bills that would expand background checks for gun purchases. [...]

Those attitudes show up in the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll. Fifty-eight percent of Americans say it’s more important to control gun violence, but 37 percent prioritize protecting gun rights. And 58 percent of Americans believe the right to own and carry a gun is just as important as other constitutional rights, such as freedom of speech, religion, and the press. Americans seem divided on what guns mean for crime: 28 percent think more people owning guns leads to more crime, 26 percent think less, and 42 percent don’t think it will make a difference.

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The Guardian: Four in five Vatican priests are gay, book claims

The 570-page book, which the French journalist and author Frédéric Martel spent four years researching, is a “startling account of corruption and hypocrisy at the heart of the Vatican”, according to its British publisher Bloomsbury.

It is being published in eight languages across 20 countries next Wednesday, coinciding with the opening day of a conference at the Vatican on sexual abuse, to which bishops from all over the world have been summoned.

Martel, a former adviser to the French government, conducted 1,500 interviews while researching the book, including with 41 cardinals, 52 bishops and monsignors, 45 papal ambassadors or diplomatic officials, 11 Swiss guards and more than 200 priests and seminarians, according to a report on the Catholic website the Tablet.

Many spoke of an unspoken code of the “closet”, with one rule of thumb being that the more homophobic a cleric was, the more likely he was to be gay. [...]

Although the book does not conflate homosexuality with the sexual abuse of children, Martel describes a secretive culture among priests that creates conditions in which abuse is not confronted, say people familiar with the book’s contents.

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The Atlantic: The New Shape of American Politics (JANUARY 1987 ISSUE)

After six years in office Ronald Reagan has changed everything about American politics except ideology. Democrats and Republicans agree that Reagan has transformed the agenda, but in a peculiar way. We want to do the same things as before--stabilize the economy, protect the poor and the elderly, fight drug abuse--only with less government. Public opinion, however, hasn't shifted to the right. If anything, the voters have moved slightly to the left since Reagan took office--there is less support for military spending, more support for domestic social programs, increased concern about arms control, hunger, and poverty. Why hasn't there been a discernible conservative shift in public opinion? Because the impact of the Reagan revolution is more likely to be felt in the long run than in the short run. The President has not, after all, dismantled the New Deal welfare state. As Hugh Heclo, of Harvard University writes in *Perspectives on the Reagan Years,* "Much as F. D. R. and the New Deal had the effect of conserving capitalism, so Reaganism will eventually be seen to have helped conserve a predominately status quo, middle-class welfare state." [...]

Another element in this new institutional order is the new coalition structure that the Reagan revolution has given to American politics. Reagan brought together a variety of interests united by a distaste for big government. That coalition is not only larger than the traditional Republican Party but also more diverse. It includes business interests and middle-class voters who dislike taxes and regulation. It includes racial and religious conservatives who dislike the reformist social agenda embraced by the federal government in the 1960s, as well as neo-conservatives who want a tougher foreign policy. [...]

What keeps the Reagan coalition together is not affection or agreement but the perception of a common threat. The threat is that liberals will regain control of the federal government and use it, as they have in the past, to carry out their "redistributionist" or "reformist" or "anti-military" program. The threat will not disappear when Reagan leaves office, and neither will the Reagan coalition--not even if it loses the 1988 election. A coalition may be defeated, as Reagan's was in the 1986 Senate elections, but that does not mean it has been destroyed. In the short run the Republicans are likely to lose many elections, just as the Democrats did over the fifty-year history of their New Deal coalition. The short-term fate of the Republican Party is highly dependent on the condition of the economy. That is what brought the party to power in 1980 and kept it in power in 1984. A major recession would spell the end of Republican rule. But the Reagan coalition would dissolve only if the various groups that compose it no longer felt they had a common interest in limited government. The Republicans are now the party of a weak government and a strong state, attracting people who are committed to one or both objectives. The Reagan revolution, not just Reagan himself, has acquired a popular constituency.[...]

It worked because Ronald Reagan has two different political personalities. His rhetoric is that of the hard-core conservative ideologue, a bold and uncompromising man of principle who portrays every issue as a confrontation between "us" and "them." But his actions are those of a shrewd, practical politician, maneuvering for political advantage and accepting the best deal he can get. When it is useful, Reagan abandons his harsh rhetoric and speaks soothingly in terms of unifying values and symbols. Sometimes he even seems to abandon his principles, as when he accepted a tax increase in 1982 or when he reversed himself in early 1986 and facilitated the departure of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, or, most troublesomely, when he violated his own Administration's anti-terrorist policy by secretly selling arms to Iran. [...]

The anti-government revolt had been brewing for many years. Polls taken by the University of Michigan showed steadily rising anti-government feeling beginning in 1964. The percentage of Americans who believed that they could trust the government in Washington "to do what is right" most or all of the time went from 76 percent in 1964 to 54 percent in 1970, to 33 percent in 1976, and to 25 percent in 1980. The proportion who felt that the government was run "by a few big interests looking out for themselves" was 29 percent in 1964, 50 percent in 1970, and 69 percent in 1980. Less than half of the public in 1964 thought that the government wasted a lot of tax money; the figure was two thirds in 1970 and more than three quarters by 1980. Reagan's conservative regime is a natural consequence of this trend.

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