The Heritage Insider: regulations hinder Zika fight, tourism promotion is a waste, minimum wage rises will cost jobs, Kevin Kane brought free market ideas to Louisiana, states are fixing their criminal law

November 5, 2016

 

 

Regulations are getting in the way of fighting Zika. States love to spend taxpayer money promoting tourism—but it doesn’t pay off. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are at stake in minimum wage votes next week. States are leading on criminal law reform. Kevin Kane brought free market ideas to Louisiana.

 

Regulations are getting in the way of fighting Zika. Angela Logomasini writes: “This problem began decades ago. In 1992, a National Academy of Sciences report warned: ‘A growing problem in controlling vector-borne diseases is the diminishing supply of effective pesticides.’ Because all pesticides must go through an excessively onerous registration process at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), ‘some manufacturers have chosen not to reregister their products because of the expenses of gathering safety data. Partly as a result, many effective pesticides over the past 40 years to control agricultural pests and vectors of human disease are no longer available.’ In 1996, Congress made the problem worse with the passage of the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA), which tightened pesticide regulation when changes were not warranted to protect public health. […] As a result of the FQPA, pesticide companies are abandoning products at an increasing rate because of costly regulations imposed by the EPA, and are introducing few new products to replace them. That means mosquito control officials are forced to use a handful products, which hinders efforts to control resistance.” And: “In 2009, a federal court ruled that the law applied to already legal products used for vector control. As a result, local vector control operations must get Clean Water Act permits before adding larvicides to standing water or spraying pesticides near waterways. These regulations require expensive and time-consuming bureaucratic paperwork and drain local government budgets.” [Competitive Enterprise Institute]

 

Does state-funded tourism promotion pay off? According to an analysis by Michael Hicks and Michael LaFaive of the Mackinac Center, Michigan’s Pure Michigan campaign generates $1 in extra income for the hotel and accommodations industry for every $50 it spends on tourism promotion. The state’s own analysis claims the net return is positive, generating nearly $8 for every $1 spent. Unlike the Mackinac Center analysis, however, nobody gets to see how the state reached its conclusions. Hicks and LaFaive write: “[The state’s] evidence comes from a report produced by a consultant, Longwoods International, whom they selected on a no-bid basis to provide analysis for their program’s success. Internal documents from the MEDC make it clear that it expected to get positive results from this report. Longwoods International refuses to provide a transparent explanation for how it derives these return on investment calculations. The method, they report, is proprietary.” [Mackinac Center for Public Policy]

 

Hundreds of thousands of jobs are at stake in minimum wage votes. By 2023, Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and Washington can expect to have 289,782 fewer jobs than they otherwise would have had if initiatives to raise the minimum wage in those states are passed, calculates Ben Gitis: “Recently, Meer & West (2015) found that raising the minimum wage reduces job creation. Specifically, they found that a 10 percent increase in the real minimum wage is associated with a 0.3 to 0.5 percentage-point decrease in the net job growth rate. As a result, three years later employment becomes 0.7 percent lower than it would have been absent the minimum wage increase. […] In Arizona, Colorado, and Washington, these ballot initiatives if successful would mandate a 39.5 percent, 32.3 percent, and 35.1 percent increase in each minimum wage, respectively. In Maine, the ballot initiative would mandate a massive 60 percent increase in the statewide minimum wage. […] Applying the Meer & West (2015) estimate, if the minimum wage initiatives in these states were to be fully implemented by 2020, then by 2023 employment would be 2.3 percent to 4.2 percent lower than under current law. Using the official employment projections from each state’s labor department as a baseline, this comes out to losses of 89,733 jobs in Arizona, 73,001 jobs in Colorado, 27,982 jobs in Maine, and 99,066 jobs in Washington.” [Internal citations omitted.] [American Action Forum]

 

Kevin Kane, R.I.P. Quin Hillyer writes: “Some people can make a big difference without making a lot of noise. Such a man was Kevin Kane, founder and president of the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, who died of complications related to gastrointestinal cancer Oct. 27 at the too-young age of 50. Kevin, originally from New York’s Long Island, was a Tulane University grad and captain of the university’s rugby team before getting his law degree at Loyola University. During those years, he developed an abiding love of New Orleans’ music and its rich culture. His law-related career took him to Mobile and then back to New York City — but, after seeing the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, he and wife Lesley were determined to move back to New Orleans to help it recover. A libertarian/conservative, Kevin thought that if he founded a research-intensive ‘think tank,’ he could help promote innovative policy options for the city and state. […] Most significantly, Kevin and Pelican for several years played an absolutely seminal role in the successful, bipartisan effort to pass criminal justice reform in Louisiana by providing rehabilitative options, rather than habit-forming jail sentences, for minor offenses.” [Gambit]

 

The states are leading on criminal law reform. States are moving forward with reforms to fix overcriminalized legal codes. There are seven such reforms, John-Michael Seibler writes, that Congress should also consider: enacting mens rea reform to decriminalize morally innocent mistakes or accidents; repealing outdated, unnecessary criminal laws; codifying the rule of lenity (which instructs courts to construe ambiguous laws in favor of the accused); enacting a mistake of law defense; modifying sentencing laws to prevent instances of manifest injustice; expanding the use of earned-time credit as correctional reform; and reducing obstacles to lawful employment to help reduce recidivism. [The Heritage Foundation]

 

 

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