Is your property safe from law enforcement? | Over 1,000 cases of voter fraud in 20 years. | Federal health care programs will bankrupt the government. | Does your state manage its money well? | The CBO is bad at its job.

July 22, 2017
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has made it easier for law enforcement to seize your property even if you have committed no crime. Yes, voter fraud exists: Over 1,000 cases have been documented in the last 20 years. Without reform, federal health care programs will add over $9,000 to average tax bill by 2047. Florida proves a state can pay its bills even with a large retired population. The Congressional Budget Office is actually not very good at its job.
Law enforcement’s ability to seize your property without a criminal conviction just grew this week. On Wednesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced an expansion of the ability of law enforcement agencies around the country to receive funds through the use of civil asset forfeiture. Civil asset forfeiture is the practice of law enforcement agencies seizing assets they believe have been used to commit a crime, including cash believed to have been obtained in illegal drug transactions. Property owners need not be convicted or even charged with any crime in order to have their assets seized. Many states have passed reforms to limit the practice, but even in those states, agencies could still receive forfeited assets when they assist in a federal investigation. In 2015, President Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder had required law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant or file charges in order to seize assets. Those limited protections have now been reversed by Attorney General Sessions. Daparna Sheth of the Institute for Justice, a national leader in fighting for the repeal of civil asset forfeiture, weighs in: “Civil forfeiture is inherently abusive. No one should lose his or her property without being first convicted of a crime, let alone charged with one. The only safeguard to protect Americans from civil forfeiture is to eliminate its use altogether. The Department of Justice’s supposed safeguards amount to little more than window dressing of an otherwise outrageous abuse of power. “We have consistently warned that the modest reforms put in place in 2015 could be rolled back with the stroke of a pen—and that is precisely what Attorney General Sessions has done today. The DOJ’s directive, announced to a room full of law enforcement officials who stand to reap the profits of this new policy, shows the fundamental absurdity of a system of justice which prioritizes funding law enforcement over protecting constitutional rights or fighting crime. “As the Justice Department’s Inspector General recently reported, the Department does not collect data to measure how often seizures and forfeitures advance criminal investigations. And the inspector general’s review of 100 cash seizures conducted by the Drug Enforcement Administration found that the agency could verify that fewer than half advanced or were related to an ongoing investigation. “The Justice Department’s new forfeiture directive restores the ability of state and local law enforcement to reap 80 percent of forfeiture proceeds by using federal forfeiture laws to circumvent protections put in place by state legislatures.” [Institute for Justice] Damon Root writes: “By ordering the expansion of this unconstitutional practice, Sessions has placed himself on a collision course with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. As Thomas recently explained in a statement respecting the denial of certiorari in the case of Leonard v. Texas, not only has civil asset forfeiture ‘led to egregious and well-chronicled abuses’ by law enforcement agencies around the country, but the practice is fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution. “Thomas did not mince words. The legal justifications offered in defense of civil asset forfeiture, he pointed out, cannot be squared with the text of the Constitution, which ‘presumably would require the [Supreme Court] to align its distinct doctrine governing civil forfeiture with its doctrines governing other forms of punitive state action and property deprivation.’ Those other doctrines, Thomas noted, impose significant checks on the government, such as heightened standards of proof, numerous procedural safeguards, and the right to a trial by jury. By contrast, civil asset forfeiture proceedings provide no such constitutional protections. Thomas left little doubt that when the proper case came before him, he would rule civil asset forfeiture unconstitutional.” [Reason] And the editors of National Review write: “There is such a thing as criminal forfeiture, but what is at issue is mainly civil forfeiture, meaning property seizures that are conducted under civil law rather than the criminal-justice process, which has more robust protections and higher standards of evidence. This produces perverse outcomes in which American citizens are punished by their government for crimes with which they have not even been charged, much less convicted. In the past decade, the Drug Enforcement Administration alone has seized some $3 billion in cash from people who have not been charged with any crime. “This is almost certainly unconstitutional, something that conservatives ought to understand instinctively. Like the Democrats’ crackpot plan to revoke the Second Amendment rights of U.S. citizens who have been neither charged with nor convicted of a crime simply for having been fingered as suspicious persons by some anonymous operative in Washington, seizing an American’s property because a police officer merely suspects that he might be a drug dealer or another species of miscreant does gross violence to the basic principle of due process.” [National Review]   Yes, there is voter fraud. Jason Snead reports: “On Thursday, The Heritage Foundation is releasing a new edition of its voter fraud database. Featuring well over 100 new cases, the database documents 1,071 instances of voter fraud spanning 47 states, including 938 criminal convictions. “This revamped edition of the database separates cases by type of disposition, allowing readers to easily distinguish not only what type of fraud occurred but the outcome of the case—criminal convictions, pre-trial diversion programs, and other types of adjudication used in various states and counties across the United States.” [The Daily Signal]   The budget problem in health care won’t go away by doing nothing. Brian Riedl writes: “After staying between two and three percent of the economy in the 1980s and 1990s, federal health spending has jumped to 5.5 percent of GDP today, on its way to a projected 9.3 percent thirty years from now – and even that assumes a long-term slowdown in the growth of per-capita health care costs. “For context, the entire federal budget has remained around 20 percent of GDP for the past 50 years. Each percentage point of the GDP translates into $190 billion, or $1,500 per household. So that overall growth from 3 to 9.3 percent of GDP would eventually require a permanent tax increase of $9,450 per household – a figure that would rise with incomes each year. “Federal spending cannot grow faster than the economy indefinitely. At some point, something has to give.” [U.S. News & World Report]   Florida proves a state can pay its bills even with a large retired population. Eileen Norcross and Olivia Gonzalez read all 50 states’ financial statements so that you don’t have to. Looking at each state’s total assets including cash on hand, liabilities including pension obligations, revenues, and expenditures, Norcross and Gonzalez ranked the 50 states by overall fiscal condition. The top five: (1) Florida, (2) North Dakota, (3) South Dakota, (4) Utah, and (5) Wyoming. The bottom five: (46) Maryland, (47) Kentucky, (48) Massachusetts, (49) Illinois, and (50) New Jersey. [Mercatus Center]   The Congressional Budget Office needs to raise its game. Andrew Wilford writes: “CBO’s structural problems have played a role in the passage of some significant legislation. For example, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) included an entitlement known as the CLASS Act, which was doomed from the start. However, it had one good thing going for it: the CBO’s budget scoring method. The agency uses a ten-year budget scoring window, but the legislation included a five-year vesting period, during which it would be collecting premiums but not paying out benefits. Not surprisingly, the resulting CBO score was favorable on paper. Fast forward two years to 2011, and the CLASS Act was quietly scrapped; an ignominious end to legislation that existed almost solely to make the ACA look more palatable to Americans concerned about the federal deficit. “Another area where CBO has come up short has been in its estimates of farm bills. Analysis in this area seems to be getting progressively worse, having underestimated the cost of the 2002 farm bill by $137 billion and the 2008 farm bill by $309 billion. The most recent legislation was sold with the promise of $16.5 billion in CBO-scored savings, driven by new commodity and disaster relief programs that were estimated to be $14.3 billion cheaper than the costly direct subsidy programs they replaced. Instead, these programs are actually on track to be more expensive than their predecessors. “Bill scoring isn’t the only place where CBO falls short of its goal. It consistently overestimates the effects of government spending on GDP growth, which was a major factor in missing the target on its estimate of the stimulus bill’s impact on employment. “CBO also has a tendency to underestimate the debt. An analysis by Dr. Antony Davies and Dr. James Harrigan found that, over the past two decades, the CBO has underestimated debt levels 99 percent of the time when projecting more than five years into the future. During this time, the debt has turned out to be, on average, about 20 percent larger than the CBO predicted five years before, and about 250 percent larger than the CBO predicted ten years earlier. Revenue projections have been off as well, with ten-year projections off by, on average, about 25 percent over the past 20 years.” [The Hill] Fortunately, as Wilford notes, his organization, the National Taxpayers Union has launched the “Taxpayers’ Budget Office” to fill the gaps where CBO falls short.
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