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President Obama recently conceded that marijuana is no more dangerous than alcohol. That might be an understatement. According to research published in the medical journal The Lancet, alcohol is a more dangerous drug than crack and heroin when the combined harms to the user and to others are assessed. While the methodology behind the rankings can be credibly challenged—surely, heroin is more addictive and prone to overdose—it nonetheless highlights the arbitrary societal exemption granted to alcohol over other mind-altering substances.  Spending on drug enforcement, both in real terms and as a percentage of the budget, has increased under President Obama. (Image: CBS news)
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Parking tickets are irritating. They are especially irritating in Los Angeles where a failure to properly feed your meter can run you nearly $70—and even more if you forget to pay it on time, as I regrettably learned this summer. To be fair, parking violations play a necessary role in deterring scofflaws, easing mobility, and creating equitable opportunities for commerce in commercially vibrant urban centers. There is an economic cost for businesses and consumers if parking spaces are not optimally utilized (consumers may waste fuel searching for parking or forgo shopping altogether) and this must be safeguarded against. As we learned from Seinfeld, the scarcity of parking can be the source of considerable agony: Comedy aside, there must be a point where the cost of a parking ticket transcends from a socially just deterrent to a punitive and regressive gouge—regressively taxing low income residents who lack access to off-street parking and can least afford to pay.
Every four years we are put through the increasingly prolonged charades that are the Iowa (IA) caucus and New Hampshire (NH) primary. Research across countries has found that campaigns of a sufficient duration allow voters to more accurately assess economic conditions. In the case of the United States, we have by leaps and bounds eclipsed this threshold and in its place constructed a money-sucking circus that benefits the near-pathological who want to endure it.
While the country is surely losing out in the dysfunctional process, NH and IA continue to benefit from political empowerment (otherwise obscure local chieftains can elicit legislative pledges—subsidized farming being paramount), the framing of winners and losers (catapulting obscure candidates or dethroning anointed ones), and a windfall of local economic benefits (In 2000, and it is surely larger now, it was estimated that the NH primary generated $147 million in additional economic activity). With such obvious and undemocratic advantages afforded NH and IA, why is the process allowed to continue? And how did it begin? |
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