January 2012

CEI Weekly: CEI Releases 2011 Edition of Ten Thousand Commandments

by Nicole Ciandella on April 22, 2011

in Features

CEI Weekly is a compilation of articles and blog posts from CEI’s fellows and associates sent out via e-mail every Friday. Also included in the weekly newsletter is a brief description of CEI’s weekly podcast and a feature on a major CEI breakthrough made during the week. To sign up for CEI Weekly, go to http://cei.org/newsletters.

CEI Weekly
April 22, 2011

>>Featured Story

On Tax Day, CEI released this year’s edition of Ten Thousand Commandments, an annual report by CEI Vice President Wayne Crews. Every year, Crews tallies up the compliance costs of federal regulations and explains how these costs constitute a huge hidden tax imposed on American consumers. In 2011, according to Crews, regulations costs American taxpayers $1.75 trillion. Read the full report here.

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Super-sized Convention Centers: The Boondoggles that Refuse to Die

by Marc Scribner on April 22, 2011

in Economy, Stimulus to Nowhere

Post image for Super-sized Convention Centers: The Boondoggles that Refuse to Die

Today, Boston Globe reporter Casey Ross has an article about a proposed expansion of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. I’m quoted bashing the rosy predictions that hired-gun real estate analysts frequently use to convince local politicians to pour millions and millions of taxpayer dollars into these projects:

“These consultants always say there is this untapped potential out there,’’ said Marc Scribner, an analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “But they are consistently wrong.’’

Ross mentions the new Walter E. Washington Convention Center, which has been underperforming for years. With D.C. media now focused on the development of the old Washington Convention Center site and, to a lesser degree, the new hotel for the current convention center, it is important to note a few inconvenient truths surrounding the Walter E. Washington Convention Center:

  1. D.C. spent $834 million to open the new convention center in 2003. From 1990-97, the old convention center generated attendance that resulted in attendees using 337,640 hotel room nights on average per year.
  2. The old convention center was 380,000 square feet. The new convention center is 725,000 square feet.
  3. When the new convention center opened, it generated conference attendance that resulted in attendees using 315,307 hotel room nights.
  4. According to the Washington Convention Center Authority’s latest annual report available on its website, the Walter E. Washington Convention Center’s attendees in FY 2009 used just 280,478 hotel room nights.

So, since the Walter E. Washington Convention Center opened eight years ago, convention center space increased by nearly 90 percent yet hotel room nights used by attendees is only about 82 percent of the 1990-97 annual use averaged by the old Washington Convention Center. There is little doubt that the $834 million could have been far better spent. But this is hardly an exception to the rule; this is essentially the rule! The downtown convention business, thanks to more competition from airport convention facilities and innovation in telecommunications services, is hardly the business it once was. The problem is overbuilt existing facilities and ever-declining demand, not too-small convention centers in urban cores in need of more publicly financed expansion.

Read Ross’s full article here, and you’ll come away with a far better picture of reality than the one possessed by most city officials.

Paul Ryan Attacked Because His Father Died Early, Resulting in Survivor Benefits

by Hans Bader on April 22, 2011

in Healthcare, Politics as Usual, Regulation, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

At the age of 16, Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) suffered the death of his 55-year-old father. Because of his father’s early death, the government made survivor payments for a few years to Paul Ryan’s family — including for Paul Ryan himself, for the two years until he turned 18.

The death of Paul Ryan’s father probably cut government spending on Ryan’s family, since his father never got to collect a dime in retirement benefits despite paying into social security for many years, and since retirees typically collect at least a decade’s worth of benefits. Thus, the Ryan family got no special breaks.

But the liberal magazine The American Prospect, and liberal blogs like Crooks and Liars, Firedoglake, and Daily Kos, are using Ryan’s father’s early death against him, falsely accusing him of hypocrisy. For example, a Daily Kos diary attacks Ryan as an “evil hypocrite” in a post entitled, “Entitlement-hating Paul Ryan collected Social Security benefits until he was 18.” Never mind that Ryan’s recent budget proposal doesn’t in fact seek to abolish entitlements, much less get rid of Social Security, and doesn’t seek to reduce the survivor benefits he once received. It merely seeks to cut the rate of growth of exploding Medicare costs by eventually giving its recipients vouchers they can use to shop around for medical care.

Not all Daily Kos diaries reflect the views of Daily Kos as a whole, but this one does, since it was briefly featured on the top of the front page of Daily Kos, and was listed as a “recommended” blog post in the sidebar on the right side of Daily Kos’s main page in recent days. 282 Daily Kos readers have commented in response to it, seemingly all agreeing with its hateful sentiments.

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Biofuels Policy — Death and Disease Follow

by Fran Smith on April 22, 2011

in Agriculture, Energy, Environment, Ethanol, Features, Health and Illness, International, Regulation

Post image for Biofuels Policy — Death and Disease Follow

The inestimable Indur Goklany has an important new report on biofuels and developing countries. “Could Biofuel Policies Increase Death and Disease in Developing Countries?” appears in the Spring 2011 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. In his analysis, Goklany concludes that biofuels production “may have led to at least 192,000 additional deaths and 6.7 million additional lost DALYS [Disability Adjusted Life Years] in 2010.” He points out that those estimates may be low:

These estimates are conservative.

First, they exclude consideration of a number of health risks that are, in fact, directly related to poverty (e.g., indoor smoke from burning coal, wood and dung indoors; and iron deficiency). Second, the analysis only considered the poverty effects of biofuel production over and above the 2004 level; therefore, it does not provide a full estimate of the effect of all biofuel production. Despite the underestimations, these estimates exceed the WHO’s estimates of the toll of death and disease for global warming. Thus, policies to stimulate biofuel production, in part to reduce the alleged impacts of global warming on public health, particularly in developing countries, may actually have increased death and disease globally.

CEI has long warned of the human, land, and environmental problems with ethanol mandates, incentives and other subsidies for biofuel production.  See here and here and here (which includes discussions relating to the politics of ethanol).

Laura Ingraham on Protecting Email from Unwarranted Governmental Access

by Ryan Radia on April 22, 2011

in Privacy, Tech & Telecom

On Wednesday, I appeared on the Laura Ingraham Show to discuss the Obama administration’s stance on reforming the 1986 law that governs law enforcement access to private electronic communications.

CEI has joined a number of policy groups, corporations, and academics in urging Congress to amend outdated U.S. laws originally intended to protect citizens against unwarranted law enforcement access to their private information held electronically by third parties. However, as CNET’s Declan McCullagh has chronicled, the Justice Department recently expressed to Congress its opposition to strengthening privacy laws.

You can listen to the whole interview here (subscription required). Here’s an excerpt:

MS. INGRAHAM: The Electronic Communications Privacy Act . . . was passed back in 1986, and now it’s being interpreted . . . to allow e-mails stored with an Internet provider for more than 180 days as if they were abandoned. And it makes them available to the government to access with only a subpoena. No search warrant. . . . How does a 1986 law . . . apply to e-mails when e-mails weren’t around in 1986?

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CEI Podcast for April 21, 2011: The Male-Female Pay Gap

by Ryan Young on April 21, 2011

in Employment, Podcast

Have a listen here.

Carrie Lukas, Managing Director of the Independent Women’s Forum, argues that the pay gap between men and women isn’t due to discrimination. She also wrote about the issue last week in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Education Department Financial Aid Rules Backfire, Harming Students

by Hans Bader on April 21, 2011

in Economy, Employment, Legal

The Education Department tried to restrict the use of financial aid by for-profit colleges by barring them from getting more than 90 percent of their funding from federal financial-aid programs.

How did they respond? By raising tuition, so that at least 10 percent of their students’ education would not be paid for by federal loans and grants. Thus, financial aid actually encouraged them to increase tuition, radically increasing their students’ future indebtedness.

The net result was to “create a perverse, no-win ‘Catch-22’ that could prevent low-income students from attending college,” by encouraging such colleges to raise tuition to outstrip rising financial aid by more than ten percent.

Over the past three years, the federal government has increased student aid by more than 40 percent. As a result, students are entitled to as much as $15,000 in grants and loans during their first year of study. The result has been to drive up tuition at some colleges by even higher percentages.

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UN Embarrassed as “Climate Refugees” Fail to Show

by Ivan Osorio on April 20, 2011

in Energy, Environment, Global Warming

It’s hardly novel to compare global warming alarmism to a doomsday cult, but it’s hard to avoid the comparison whenever yet another doomsday scenario is called off, or at least postponed. The recurring embarrassment renders doomsday cults, well….doomed, practically by definition. Now the latest such embarrassment seems bad enough to spark an exodus from the compound — or it should.

To make a long story short, 50 million “climate refugees” failed to materialize in 2010, as projected way back in 2005. Then the United Nations Environment Program deleted a map from its website illustrating where those climate migrations would occur. Then Gavin Atkins of Asian Correspondent asked, “What happened to the climate refugees?” and uncovered the map’s absence.

How could an error so large happen? Der Spiegel offers one likely explanation: sloppiness.

Scientists have been claiming for years that some 25 million people have already been displaced by adverse environmental conditions. Drought, storms and floods have always plagued parts of the world’s population. The environmentalist Norman Myers, a professor at Oxford University, has been particularly bold in his forecasts. At a conference in Prague in 2005, he predicted there would be 50 million climate refugees by 2010.

“As far back as 1995 (latest date for a comprehensive assessment), these environmental refugees totalled at least 25 million people, compared with 27 million traditional refugees (people fleeing political oppression, religious persecution and ethnic troubles),” Myers said. “The environmental refugees total could well double between 1995 and 2010.”

“When global warming takes hold,” he added, “there could be as many as 200 million people overtaken by disruptions of monsoon systems and other rainfall regimes, by droughts of unprecedented severity and duration, and by sea-level rise and coastal flooding.” Myers’ report may have been the basis for the UN statements in 2005.

Forecasts in Doubt

But Myers’ forecasts are controversial in scientific circles. Stephen Castles of the International Migration Institute at Oxford University contradicted the horror scenarios in an interview with SPIEGEL in 2007. Myers and other scientists were simply looking at climate change forecasts and counting the number of people living in areas at risk of flooding, said Castles, author of the “The Age of Migration.” That made them arrive at huge refugee numbers.

Castles said people usually don’t respond to environmental disasters, war or poverty by emigrating abroad. That appears to be confirmed by the behavior of victims of last month’s devastating earthquake and tusnami in Japan. Many survivors are returning to rebuild their ruined towns and villages.

Of course, the climate doomsday cult will go on. What is really crazy is the how commonplace such End Times claims are now — what Spiked Online’s Brendan O’Neill aptly calls, “the unexceptionable nature of apocalyptic thinking.” (Hat tip: Margaret Griffis)

Icemakers: Mankind’s Doom

by Ryan Young on April 20, 2011

in Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Regulation

An article at Time explains “How the Ice in Your Drink is Imperiling the Planet,” and what regulators are doing about it:

NIST is thus urging refrigerator manufacturers to look closely at the design of their icemakers, insisting that there are “substantial opportunities for efficiency improvements merely by optimizing the operations of the heaters.”

That appeal to reason, NIST officials hope, will be enough. But just in case it isn’t, the Department of Energy has announced that it intends to add 84 kilowatt hours to the efficiency rating of every refrigerator equipped with an icemaker. Consumers will feel that fact in the wallet—and if manufacturers don’t scramble to improve their numbers, they soon will too.

Morning Media Summary

by Lee Doren on April 20, 2011

in Odds & Ends

Tech:

“At Dropbox, Even We Can’t See Your Dat – Er, Nevermind” [Update]:
“Dropbox, the online backup and file sharing service claims to have hit 25 million users in a single year. Big news for any start-up. A change in its terms and conditions received a lot less attention because it seemed like adding a common term for online services.”

Michigan: Police Search Cell Phones During Traffic Stops:
“The Michigan State Police have a high-tech mobile forensics device that can be used to extract information from cell phones belonging to motorists stopped for minor traffic violations. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan last Wednesday demanded that state officials stop stonewalling freedom of information requests for information on the program.”

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