Canceling U.S.-South Korea military exercises is a gift North Korea has not earned. Thomas Spoehr writes:
A typical exercise costs around $14 million—not a trivial amount, but necessary in order to practice military coordination with allies and iron out the wrinkles that inevitably emerge in complex military operations. In Korea war plans, U.S. and South Korean forces are fully integrated, and that coordination demands constant rehearsal. [...]
As The Heritage Foundation's Korea expert Bruce Klingner has written, "President Trump's decision to cancel allied military exercises has been the gift that keeps on giving for North Korea. Washington and Seoul have cancelled at least nine military exercises, including Freedom Guardian, Ulchi, Taeguk, two allied Marine Exercise Program exercises, an artillery exercise in the West Sea, land and sea drills in the East Sea, Vigilant Ace, and Foal Eagle."
The best military is of little value unless it is properly trained. And by cancelling, not just suspending, these exercises, the U.S. is unilaterally lowering its readiness.
Last month, the commander of U.S. Forces in Korea, Gen. Robert Abrams, testified that he is busy modifying exercises in Korea to reduce their "size, scope, volume, and timing" in order to "remain in harmony with diplomatic and political requirements without sacrificing warfighting readiness to unacceptable levels."
But Abrams also reported that he has detected no similar modification in the North Korean military's training cycle, stating that "we have observed no significant changes to size, scope, or timing of their ongoing exercises." So essentially, only the U.S. is altering its training regime.
[Thomas Spoehr, "Why Ending US-South Korea Joint Exercises Was the Wrong Move," The Daily Signal, March 3]
An executive order on campus free speech may be exactly what's needed. Frederick Hess writes that there is justification for President Trump's recent announcement that he would require "colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research dollars":
If Washington plans to spend $40 million in taxpayer funds to develop new airport security technology for the TSA, contractors wishing to bid on the project are asked to offer certain assurances—including various commitments intended to safeguard the quality of their work. Such requirements are rarely seen as controversial. More typically, they're held up as a hallmark of responsible government.
Well, it turns out that U.S. taxpayers spend about $40 billion—not million—a year on research at American colleges and universities. These dollars are spent by the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation, and a host of other agencies. These funds are not being used to underwrite tuition or teaching; Washington is engaging universities as subcontractors in order to conduct selected research. From the beginning, such taxpayer-funded research has presumed that recipients would abide by the tenets of responsible science—including the assurance that the research will be guided by an inviolable commitment to free inquiry.
And keep in mind here that Trump's remarks specifically alluded to "federal research dollars"—not Pell grants or student loans. (For more on this distinction, check out this National Affairs piece from last year.) So long as the promised executive order reflects this distinction, the issue is straightforward: Can taxpayers be confident that they're not spending billions to subsidize research at institutions where academic inquiry is suspect?
After all, it's no secret that the contemporary academy has a decided ideological lean. This has raised questions about whether campuses can support free inquiry on vital questions such as race relations, immigration, the Middle East, and social policy. Researchers, like anyone else, are prone to confirmation bias—and the more ideologically uniform a research environment, the greater the risk of that bias going unnoticed and tainting results. But, while campuses catering to enclaves of the like-minded is a problem, I don't see a role for Washington—at least not when the issue is teaching or campus culture. It's a different story, though, when institutions adopt speech codes or policies that stifle inquiry, speech and discourse—and then expect to collect taxpayer funds to conduct research in compromised environs.
[Frederick M. Hess, "Why Trump Is Justified in Suggesting an Executive Order on Campus Free Speech," American Enterprise Institute, March 6]
School choice reduces crime and paternity lawsuits. Corey DeAngelis writes on the findings of a new study he has coauthored with Patrick Wolf:
[S]tudents using the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) were found guilty of 60% fewer property damage crimes, 41% fewer drug-related crimes, and experienced 31% fewer paternity suits as young adults than their carefully matched peers in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS). [...]
But why?
Competition works in the market for education services. Families care about the civic and character educations their kids are getting at school each day. And, of course, private schools must cater to the needs of families if they want to stay in business. Public schools, on the other hand, hold significant monopoly power over their customers because of residential assignment and funding through property taxes. Private school choice programs could also reduce criminal activity by exposing students to peer groups and school cultures that discourage risky behaviors.
While our new study is the first to link a private school voucher program to adult paternity suits, four other studies have also examined the intersection between school choice and crime. As shown in the table below, all five studies on the topic have found that school choice reduces criminal activity. For example, an experimental study published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2015 found that winning a lottery to go to a charter school in Harlem Children's Zone completely eliminated (a 100% reduction) the chance male students would be incarcerated and reduced the likelihood of teen pregnancy by 59% for female students.
[Corey A. DeAngelis, "School Choice Reduces Crime and Paternity Suits," Cato Institute, March 1]
Pain from the 2008 financial crisis may still lie ahead, thanks to monetary policy. David L. Bahnsen writes:
In 2017, the Federal Reserve began selling the assets it had acquired through quantitative easing. [...] If the policy objective was to reach some sort of post-crisis equilibrium, it could be argued that the Fed still has $1.5 to $2 trillion to go.
And it is this that has created one of the most significant economic vulnerabilities we face. The quality of corporate borrowings has, in concert with the massive liquidity expansion of 2009–16, declined, but this was not unexpected.
Corporate borrowings rated as triple-B have grown from 32 percent of the sector to 50 percent. Borrowing ratios have moved toward less earnings coverage and less asset coverage. Leverage is higher, and with it, so is economic vulnerability.
In other words, the great risk in a reversal of post-crisis policy is the unwinding of what the Fed very purposely created post-crisis: a releveraged corporate sector.
When markets began their violent selloff in the fourth quarter of 2018, the levered-loan bank market was no exception, and high-yield bond spreads expanded rapidly, indicating the beginnings of distress in credit markets. The numbers did not indicate a complete cutoff of access to credit, but it is clear that the path to Fed normalization now threatens a backlash in the very area of the economy that most participated in the policy initiatives of the central bank since the financial crisis. [...]
As America has become less tolerant of Keynesian fiscal interventions, we have become much more reliant on monetary interventions intended to ease the pain of difficult business-cycle hangovers. The question facing the Fed and the entire American economy is whether a "hair of the dog" approach to monetary policy will just make the hangover worse.
[David L. Bahnsen, "Did the Financial Crisis End?" National Review, March7]
Protectionism costs. Sen. Mike Lee wants to end the Jones Act's protectionism that drives up the cost of shipping between American ports, reports Eric Boehm:
The Jones Act, a vestige of the 1920s that prohibits non-American ships from carrying cargo from one American port to another American port—including ports in American territories, such as Puerto Rico, Guam, and other far-flung islands. [...]
"Restricting trade between U.S. ports is a huge loss for American consumers and producers," says Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah), who introduced a bill this week to repeal the Jones Act. He's from a landlocked state himself, but Lee says it's long past time to act, "so that Alaskans, Hawaiians, and Puerto Ricans aren't forced to pay higher prices for imported goods—and so they rapidly receive the help they need in the wake of natural disasters."
Lee's bill, the Open America's Water Act of 2019, would simply allow any otherwise qualified vessel to engage in trade between U.S. domestic ports. If a ship can carry cargo from Miami to Jamaica, it could also carry cargo from Miami to Puerto Rico.
The Jones Act got a bit of attention back in 2017, when President Donald Trump waived the law for a brief period after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. An attempt to permanently exempt Puerto Rico from the Jones Act failed in Congress as shipping companies argued that their right to earn artifically higher profits was important enought to force hurricane-ravaged Puerto Ricans to continue suffering artificially higher prices.
One of the great ironies of the Jones Act is that, for all the economic damage it causes, it hasn't even achieved its primary policy goal of strengthening the U.S. shipbuilding industry. The number of ships that meet the Jones Act's requirements for operating between American ports has shrunk from 193 in 2000 to just 99 in 2018. It costs more than three times as much to build a cargo ship in America as it does in some other countries, according to a 2017 report from the Cato Institute, and American shipping companies respond to that incentive by buying foreign-built ships. That means there are fewer ships capable of serving American ports, and fewer ships means higher prices.
[Eric Boehm, "The Jones Act Is an Antiquated Protectionist Policy Failure. Mike Lee Is Aiming to Kill It." Reason, March 8]
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