Doug Irving for the RAND Corp.: More than 5,000 people died trying to cross the Mediterranean last year, the deadliest on record. They came from the shelled neighborhoods of Syria, the desperate villages of Eritrea and Gambia. Somalia lost so many people to the sea that a warning began to make the rounds of Twitter there: #DhimashoHaGadan, or “Don’t Buy Death.”
That’s what people see on the nightly news: the bodies washed ashore, the crowded migrant camps, the boats. But Persi Paoli, who left the Italian Navy in late 2013 and joined RAND as a research leader specializing in national security, wanted to widen the lens. He called the project the Mediterranean Foresight Forum.
The researchers traced the roots of the crisis back to the shattered promise of the Arab Spring and the cratered cities of Syria and Libya, but also to European capitals too divided to act. They mapped the smuggling routes that now crisscross Africa and the Middle East and then followed the money — billions of dollars every year — to criminal networks flourishing in North Africa and Southern Europe.
They showed that what may have once been many individual threats to the stability of the region have now merged, creating a cycle of unrest that feeds on itself. In Libya alone, for example, the same black markets that provide fake passports and flimsy boats to migrants also can deliver hashish to European drug dealers and shoulder-fired missiles to Syrian fighters.
The grinding poverty of West Africa, the unrest of North Africa and the terrorist threat of the Islamic State no longer can be treated as unrelated challenges, the researchers concluded. Those problems now all seem “to literally spill into the Mediterranean Sea,” they wrote, threatening the security and stability of the two continents that share its shores. The future of Europe has become inextricably linked by sea to the future of the Middle East and North Africa.
The case for housing vouchers
Will Fischer for the Center On Budget and Policy Priorities: Housing Choice Vouchers are very effective at helping a wide range of groups — such as the homeless, working families, children, the elderly and people with disabilities — live in decent, stable housing. They’re also very efficient.
Vouchers reduce rents for low-income families at a lower cost to the government than other forms of housing assistance, research shows. That’s partly because vouchers mainly help families rent existing housing, which generally costs less than building new housing developments. The program also comes with cost controls. Housing agencies check the rent for each voucher unit to make sure it’s in line with the local market. The Department of Housing and Urban Development also sets rent standards that are used to cap voucher subsidies in each metropolitan area and rural county, and HUD is expanding its use of neighborhood-level standards that could raise efficiency further.
Administrative costs are modest, and streamlining measures that policymakers enacted in 2015 and 2016 will trim costs more once they’re implemented. Waste and abuse in the voucher program are also low, partly due to aggressive efforts by HUD and state and local agencies to strengthen income verification and ensure that rent calculations are accurate. By 2014, the last year for which data are available, erroneous payments had dropped 64 percent since 2000 and only added about 0.5 percent to program costs.
Keep taxing tampons
Nicole Kaeding for the Tax Foundation: Over the last two years, a number of states have considered bills to exempt tampons and other feminine hygiene products from their sales tax bases. Supporters of “tampon tax” repeal bills argue that women face an injustice when buying these necessity items, but that argument doesn’t hold water. First, it’s factually inaccurate — no state subjects tampons to a special or unique tax. Second, the solution — exempting tampons and other feminine hygiene products from the sales tax — violates the principles of sound tax policy. Ideally, sales taxes should tax all consumer purchases, without regard to whether items are classified as necessities or luxuries.
Exempting feminine hygiene products from the sales tax base results in less revenue for the state, leading to higher overall rates in the long run. …
In 2016, California considered a bill to remove feminine hygiene products from its sales tax base. The California Board of Equalization estimated that California would lose $20 million in state and local revenue from this one change. New York estimated that it would lose $10 million in revenue from its feminine hygiene exemption. While these exemptions are a small part of California’s and New York’s total state and local revenues, the exemption of feminine hygiene products is part of a broader trend to continue to shrink the state’s sales tax base. Over time, these small changes lead to large losses of revenue.
That is particularly troubling for the exact reason why proponents suggest exempting feminine hygiene products: They are necessities for some individuals. Other items that are still included in the sales tax base could be “necessities” for other individuals. Exempting one item from the sales tax base puts all the remaining items at risk of a higher rate. Unfortunately, this is the trade-off that exists within sales taxes.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by the various think tanks.
