CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman about to take a spin in the Google car. (Photo by Marc Scribner)
This morning, CEI’s resident transportation policy junkies — General Counsel Sam Kazman and myself — had the opportunity to test-ride Google’s prototype self-driving car in downtown Washington, D.C. In October 2010, I wrote about the Google driverless car’s feat of secretly logging 140,000 miles on U.S. public roads without a single accident. Sam and I were able to ask questions about the car’s features, practical traffic concerns, and the future implications of driverless automobiles with respect to crash reduction, congestion mitigation, and air quality improvement.
Google’s car uses a wide variety of sensors that detect pedestrians, objects, and infrastructure in real time. It is the sustained rapid collection of conditions data that allows the car to slow or stop suddenly if a pedestrian enters the street, a car suddenly changes lanes or pulls away from the curb, or a lane is closed for construction or an event. It was quite impressive to see all of this happen right before our eyes.
Of course, there are still kinks to be worked out. Most small debris, say paper or a plastic bag, would not erroneously be detected as a collision threat by the Google car’s forward-mounted radar. But small metallic objects, say a discarded can of soda, potentially have a radar cross-section large enough to trigger a crash-avoidance response. This is a problem, but one Google’s engineers hope to solve in the coming years.
But these slight technical glitches should not overshadow the monumental progress robotic cars represent. Given that a computer is far more precise and subject to far fewer potential errors than a human, accident rates will plummet when these vehicles become available to consumers. While fatal crash rates have been falling thanks to improved technology (due to both vehicle and infrastructure safety improvements), the crash reductions that would result from adopting driverless technology would make past progress seem like a drop in the bucket.
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OPINION
HARLAN J. PROTASS: “The Criminal Crackdown on Insider Trading Is Stupid”
“Pouring money into criminal insider trading cases is a huge waste of public resources. There is a much more cost-effective way to go after this particular form of fraud, and switching to it would free up prosecutorial resources to fight other economic crimes that pose a far greater danger to Main Street investors. [...] The government has at its disposal alternative methods for going after traders on insider information—civil charges that generate pocket-book penalties instead of criminal ones that lead to prison sentences. Civil charges are more proportional to the wrongdoing, less expensive to prosecute, and still get the job done.”
JUDITH WARNER: “Blaming Brain Science”
“Is understanding human behavior as being driven, at least in part, by neurobiology, tantamount to ‘blaming the brain’? Does talk about genes, and brain structure and chemistry relieve us of personal responsibility for our actions, reinforcing a kind of hopeless fatalism, and allowing us such easy excuses for our bad behavior as – to borrow the headline from a New York Times opinion piece last weekend—’The Amygdala Made Me Do It’?”
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY EDITORIAL: “Obama Wages War on Capitalism”
In the summer of 2009, the federal government gave General Motors $49.5 billion in aid, including a $6.7 billion loan, to finance its bankruptcy. The result: Washington, not private shareholders, took roughly 61% ownership of GM. The bailout wasn’t to save capitalism; it was a payback to the United Auto Workers union that gave Obama and his party more than $4 million. [...] Obama has continued his capitalism-wrecking, union-favoring campaign by naming members to the National Labor Relations Board who tried to block Boeing from opening a plant in South Carolina to build the company’s 787 Dreamliner.”
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Early large-scale human migration is the story of dispersal, spreading out as resources were used up and populations expanded past sustainability. The Agricultural Revolution brought greater inter-community trade and migration, including significant migration from rural areas to cities. Empires created the most widespread intercultural migration yet, but it wasn’t until the Age of Exploration that migration and trade increased dramatically. Falling travel costs brought millions of (mostly free) migrants to the New World and other European colonies for employment. Economic liberalism reinforced this trend toward globalization, but world war, nationalism, and more effective bureaucratic states ended this free system.
Humanity’s great migration began in Africa around 80,000 years ago when the human population seems to have dwindled to a few thousand. Richard Klein—author of The Human Career—has argued that genetic mutations in this small population gave rise to abstract thought and perhaps other capacities that led to rapid growth thereafter. In any case, the human population quickly expanded beyond the savannahs of eastern and southern Africa to the northern savannah between Ethiopia and Senegal.
Around 60,000 years ago, humans crossed the strait of Bab el Mandeb into Arabia, and they “quickly” dispersed along the coasts, and by 40,000 years ago, humans lived along the coasts from West Africa to Australia (the first movement out of the tropics). After Australia, people moved into colder climates in Eurasia and China. By 20,000 years ago, people had entered North America, and by 10,000 years ago, migrants lived on every continent in the world, except Antarctica. Although long-distance, cross-culture trade began as far back as 40,000 years ago—based on seashell jewelry found far inland and stone tools constructed from nonlocal materials—most inter-community migration was local, the most important being migrant brides who transferred customs between tribes.
The Agricultural Revolution saw these divergent communities begin to reconnect. The Revolution was brought on by the end of an ice age and a warmer, but more volatile climate. Sedentary communities began to appear and gradually adopt agriculture. Urbanization created epidemics that wiped out huge portions of the Sumerian working population, only to be replaced by Akkadians from rural areas. So great was this rural to city migration that Akkadian became the official language of the empire. As trade between communities increased, immigration also increased. Clay tablets, for example, record that Assyrian traders had established commercial communities in modern Turkey by 2000 BCE. At the same time, large-scale trade networks emerged from Mesopotamia to Asia Minor.
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Whether or not a retail investor buys shares of Facebook when it finally goes public tomorrow — and OpenMarket provides public policy, rather than investment, advice — the company’s rise is something to celebrate. The firm’s ascent is a tribute to brilliant and driven entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, far-sighted venture capitalists like Peter Thiel, and (what’s left of) America’s free-market system and creative destruction.
Yet the lengthy process leading up to Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO) – and the fact that it is going public only after becoming one of America’s biggest companies — illustrates how over-regulation of the stock market through laws like Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank has made it harder for investors to grow wealthy with emerging growth firms. These regulatory barriers on smaller and younger companies have also been fingered by a wide range of experts, including those at the respected Kauffman Foundation and on President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness (on which Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg serves), as slowing job growth and the overall economic recovery.
After the JPMorgan Chase loss of $2 billion, the Beltway elites are painting any criticism of financial regulation as siding with the “big banks.” But the fact is that Jamie Dimon and Chase were going strong after Sarbanes-Oxley was signed by George W. Bush in 2002 and after Dodd-Frank was signed by Obama in 2010. It’s smaller firms and smaller investors who have been the most burdened by these costly and complex rules.
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OPINION
LEONARD KILROY and HARRIS KENNY: “States and Cities Going Private With Infrastructure Investment”
“As public debts grow, cities and states simultaneously face pressing needs to repair and modernize critical infrastructure assets that can’t wait if citizens hope to keep goods and services moving in the economy. For example, many interstate highways, which are owned and maintained by states, are reaching the end of their useful lives and will cost tens of billions of dollars to reconstruct.”
NEW YORK POST EDITORIAL: “Channeling George Orwell”
“‘War is peace,’ wrote George Orwell. ‘Freedom is slavery.’ He would have made a hell of a New York City councilman: Turn truth on its head, he understood so well, and power is yours. Clearly that understanding animates Council Speaker Chris Quinn and her band of brigands and boodlers. Consider the council’s latest masterpiece — The Responsible Banking Act, passed into law Tuesday by a veto-proof 44-4 margin.”
STUART HOLLIDAY: “The French Elections and the Future of the Franco-American Relationship”
“The electoral victory of François Hollande as president of France presents an opportunity to reflect on how far U.S.-France relations have evolved in recent years. This opportunity should also form the basis for a renewed commitment toward cooperation rather than a step backward.”
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Business spends around the world almost $1 trillion annually, seeking to sell its goods and services. These communiqués are focused almost exclusively on influencing the choices that consumers make. Logical, of course, since failure to sell one’s products in the private world means bankruptcy. But, in today’s world, sustainable profitability requires also that businesses find ways of reducing costly political predation (excessive regulation, government support of competitors, high taxes, direct governmental agency competition). And business does spend a minor fraction of its overall communication budgets on political advertising. Unfortunately, these ads tend toward rent-seeking — increasing the overall burden of government on others — not on reducing the firm or sector’s vulnerability to such predation.
A recent example was a full-page ad by the National Association of Realtors in Politico [PDF] calling for a number of expanded housing subsidies. Now realtors have suffered to varying degrees by past housing promotion policies. The FHA, Fannie and Freddie and a wide array of other special provisions pushed far too much capital into this capital investment sector, rather than allowing capital to flow where it would yield the greatest societal returns. Moreover, the failure of housing markets to clear, for the excess supply to quickly be absorbed at discounted prices (via foreclosures, bankruptcies, lowering sale price, etc) have been slowed by political efforts to delay these adjustments. Thus, one can sympathize with realtors, home owners and others but be saddened by this latest attempt to delay the recovery of the housing markets.
Wouldn’t the housing market be far more stable, far more efficient, if current regulatory and other government interventions disappeared? Wouldn’t realtors be better — once the transition pains were overcome – in that more entrepreneurial world? Perhaps, but clearly that is the path not taken by the National Association of Realtors or other business groups today. Their more entrepreneurial members suffer, too many incompetents remain cluttering the field, and their comparable advantage in wealth creation suffers while their rent-seeking skills expand. Gradually, realtors (like health or flood insurers) can be expected to be little more than state employees. Sad.
President Obama’s proposed budget is so irresponsible that even the Senate, controlled by Obama’s own political party, just rejected it in a 99-to-0 vote. Reading the proposed budget does not inspire confidence, even in liberal journalists. In February, USA Today wrote that “Obama’s budget plan leaves debt bomb ticking… The best test of a budget proposal these days is whether it reins in the national debt… The election-year budget President Obama sent to Congress on Monday fails that test.”
The Los Angeles Times noted on February 14 that Obama’s proposed budget “offers no real solution to the United States’ long-term fiscal problems.” That same day, the Washington Post wrote that “Mr. Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2013 falls short. At the end of the 10-year budget window, he would have the national debt at a disturbing 76.5 percent of gross domestic product” even under very optimistic assumptions. “The final budget of his first term does not reflect the leadership on issues of debt and deficit that Mr. Obama once vowed.”
The Detroit News noted that “President Barack Obama’s 2013 budget proposal should be dismissed as a blueprint for his re-election campaign. But it’s worse than that. If passed as presented — and there’s little likelihood of that — the spending plan would lock America on an auto-pilot course for Greece.” (Editorial, “Obama Budget Shirks Off Any Pretense To Fiscal Responsibility,” The Detroit News, 2/14/12.) The Chicago Tribune called Obama’s budget the blueprint for a “debt debacle.” In March, the House rejected the Obama budget in a 414-0 vote. In 2008, Obama promised a “net spending cut,” but as soon as he was elected, he proposed massive spending increases.
While the GOP-controlled House has passed a budget plan of its own, the Democratic-controlled Senate has not passed a single budget during the Obama administration, leaving the country without an official budget for over a thousand days. Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) acknowledged that “there’s no excuse” for Senate Democrats’ failure to pass a budget, and that a state governor might face impeachment for similarly failing to put together a budget.
The Cato Institute has identified $17-20 billion in readily-achievable savings to the 2013 military budget. Such cuts can help stave off tax increases. As Cato’s Christopher Preble notes, if no other action to cut the deficit is taken, “the Budget Control Act (BCA) of 2011″ will require “$110 billion in spending cuts in January 2013 via sequestration, half of which need to come from DoD.” Such spending cuts are a long overdue first step towards getting America’s skyrocketing budget deficit under control. The deficit is now so huge that America racked up more debt in just one month of 2010 than it did in an entire year in 2007. The national debt rose more in Obama’s first three years in office than all of Bush’s eight years.
But unfortunately, “neither the White House nor Congress” wants the automatic budget cuts through sequestration “to occur; both sides hope to amend the law and achieve equal deficit reductions by other means. . .Republicans want to cut other spending, Democrats to raise taxes.” Liberal Senators can block many of the cuts in social programs sought by House Republicans to reduce the deficit, leaving tax increases as a possibility if cuts are not made elsewhere, such as to the Pentagon budget. (And a few GOP congressmen like Duncan Hunter, who have close ties to Defense contractors, have said they would prefer tax increases to Pentagon cuts.)
Meanwhile, the White House has sacrificed national security for short-run political gain. Obama administration officials outed an undercover agent to wrongly take credit for his work exposing bomb plots against America, endangering his life. Recently, news reports discussed how an al-Qaeda infiltrator exposed the bomb plots, erroneously claiming he was a “CIA mole.” But it now turns out that the al-Qaeda infiltrator was working for the Brits, not the CIA, and his cover was blown for election year politics: “The leaks about the operation from the American side have infuriated British intelligence officials, who had hoped to continue the operation. The leaks not only scuttled the mission but put the life of the asset in jeopardy. Even CIA officials, joining their MI5 and MI6 counterparts, were describing the leaks as ‘despicable,’ attributing them to the Obama administration.” Reprehensible acts like this make it more difficult and expensive for the U.S. and its allies to achieve their security goals.
OPINION
FARHAD MANJOO: “What Does Facebook’s $100 Billion IPO Mean for You?”
“When Facebook filed for its initial public offering in February, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a frank letter to potential investors in the firm. ‘Facebook was not originally created to be a company,’ he began. ‘It was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected.’ The founder went on to say that while making money was important to Facebook, raking in cash was not its primary goal. ‘Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.’”
SEN. LISA MURKOWSKI and SEN. DAVID VITTER: “Obama’s Mulligan on Keystone XL”
“TransCanada’s decision to reapply for a federal permit to build the Keystone XL pipeline across the U.S.-Canadian border offers President Obama something that rarely comes around – a second chance to do the right thing. When the president rejected TransCanada’s original Keystone XL application – finding a project capable of delivering roughly 1 million barrels of oil a day to American refineries not in the national interest – he threw away a golden opportunity to create jobs and improve America’s energy security.”
TIM CARNEY: “Look Who Favors Corporate Jet Subsidies Now”
“Remember when Obama was railing on about “the tax-break for corporate jets,” during the debt-ceiling fights of 2011? He repeatedly invoked this “tax break,” which was really about how some corporate jets were depreciated over five years instead of seven. The message was clear: Republicans are in bed with corporate-jet owners. His loyal legions on the Left joined the chant. But today, Obama’s export-subsidy chief promised a billion dollars in taxpayer-backed subsidies for corporate jets, according to Bloomberg News.”
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I’ve written extensively about federal surface transportation reauthorization, which is currently pending in conference. CEI, along with The Independent Institute and Reason Foundation, will be holding a Capitol Hill briefing tomorrow at noon titled, “Reforming Federal Surface Transportation Policy: Problems, Solutions, And A New Path Forward.”
The Highway Trust Fund is facing imminent insolvency. This is the result of keeping federal fuel excise tax rates at the same level since 1993. Since then, inflation has eroded about one-third of those dollars’ buying power. Rather than attempt to fix this very serious problem, the Senate’s Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) merely kicks the can down the road. We find this unacceptable.
In addition, MAP-21 — which is more accurately described as a 15-month extension relying on 10 years of revenue — contains some very undesirable provisions. It mandates the installation of electronic onboard recorders for commercial motor vehicles, something the independent trucking industry expects will cost $2 billion. Now is certainly not the time to saddle our nation’s small businessmen with additional, unnecessary regulatory burdens.
Non-germane policy changes include the RESTORE Act, which includes a seven-year reauthorization of the Department of Interior’s Land and Water Conservation Fund (Sec. 1701) — a land-grab tool used by environmentalists. In total, MAP-21 contains $6.8 billion in new non-highway program spending.
It also contains a particularly loathsome amendment offered by Senator Jeff Bingaman that attacks the public-private partnership (P3) model. Even some self-described fiscal conservatives are siding with Bingaman, relying on farcical misinformation that argues that P3s somehow constitute double-taxation. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, these P3s are friendly to taxpayers in that they reduce public costs and the risk associated with construction (cost overruns) and financing — while bolstering state treasuries in the short-run. If you have not read it already, I highly recommend Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’ excellent rebuttal to Sen. Bingaman’s falsehoods and distortions in The Washington Post.
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