Will America Become Detroit, Part 4: The End of the Victimless Crime Spree

"Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could."
- William F. Buckley, Jr.

"Oh what a delight to
Be given the right to
Be care free and gay once again"
- From "Cocktails for Two" by by Arthur Johnston and Sam Coslow

Some of humanity's greatest advances emerged from severe crises. As bad as the looming U.S. debt crisis is, it will force badly needed reforms in our criminal code. This nation devotes and a tremendous amount of resources prosecuting victimless crimes, especially the war on drugs. This relentless pursuit of adults engaging in consensual behavior is wasteful, ineffective, and frequently violates our civil liberties. But this particular form of government overreach will almost certainly end, and it will do for a rather mundane reason: the state simply won't have the funds to continue.

Prohibition Repeal as the Ultimate Rent Party

There is a historical precedent for the immanent demise of most victimless crimes. Consider the Volstead act, commonly known as prohibition. This forerunner of the war on drugs banned intoxicating alcoholic beverages. Even though the failures of this act became apparent soon after the act's passage in 1919, it was not repealed until 1933. What happened in 1933 that finally did in the Volstead act?

In part, prohibition was ended by the great depression. At a time when the economic downturn was drying up tax revenue, governments were saddled with the substantial costs of enforcing prohibition. Moreover, keeping bars and liquor closed also closed off a badly needed source of tax revenue. When it became clear that prohibition could only be continued by asking an impoverished public to tighten their belts still further, the prohibition repeal effort passed overwhelmingly.

The Volstead Act on Crack

If 1930's depression era America found prohibition too dear a luxury, then twenty-first century debt crisis America will almost certainly reject its even more expensive offshoot, the war on drugs. Essentially, the war on drugs is the Volstead Act on Crack. Consider these expenses:

Jail House Rock

Key element of the war on drugs is harsh minimum sentences for drug offenses and extremely aggressive enforcement. Since President Nixon kicked off the war on drugs in 1971, American incarceration rates have more than quadrupled. We now hold the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in the world. We have more prisoners than all of China, which has four times our general population. We jail a larger portion of our black population than did Apartheid era South Africa.

The costs of all these prisoners is straining state budgets.
California pays $45,563 a year to keep a man in prison, so now the Golden state spends more on jails than it does on universities. And that does not even could the loss of tax revenue from taking these prisoners out of the economy. Longitudinal studies show an even greater expense: those serving lengthy drug sentences are less likely to ever become a productive member of society.

In the past, the mantra of the drug warrior has been that it is important to "send a message" to users of illicit drugs. But as states such as California and Michigan face the threat of default, they are bound to ask if we could please send this message via Western Union.

Putting the War into "The War on Drugs"

The war on drugs quickly took up a large portion of law enforcement efforts at all levels. It even has its own enforcement agency, the DEA, which has spend $536 billion on drug enforcement since its inception in 1973. (See the suitable tacky DEA museum gift shop). But victimless crimes are notoriously hard to enforce. When this effort fell short, harsher tactics such as SWAT teams and no-knock raids were tried. Some police departments have even acquired military equipment from the DOD. When they called it the "War on Drugs", they were not kidding!

Like most wars, this one has had plenty of collateral damage. There have been raids on the wrong house that have resulted in innocent people or even pets getting shot. To be fair, raids on real drug dealers are highly dangerous operations, so police are bound to make mistakes in these high stress situations. But this is a danger of our own making. The day prohibition was repealed, the bootlegger gangs went out of business, and with their demise, there was a marked decrease in gang violence. Drug decriminalization would likely have the same effect, saving us both money and lives.

Too Poor to Keep Screwing Up

Due to budget constraints, Detroit has had to make cuts in its police force. In order to protect themselves, some of this city's citizens have formed a citizen's group called Detroit 300 that patrols the streets that Detroit's finest used to patrol. Not surprisingly, all the crimes that Detroit 300 deal with are crimes with victims: rape, robbery, assult, murder, etc. They are not chasing down dope smokers. When hard choices have to be made, enforcing victimless crimes is the first thing to go.

As the nation's debt crisis comes to a head, we will forced to take the same approach as Detroit 300. There are many better reasons to end the war on drugs, but it will definitely end for one reason: we cannot afford it. Lack of funds will force our government to do the right thing.

Speaking of victimless crimes, check out the documentary Derrick J's Victimless Crime Spree, where one activist gets into an amazing amount of legal trouble for peaceably protesting his local public officials.

Will America Become Detroit, Part 3: Paul Ryan, Rambo, and J. Alfred Prufrock

"We fail far more often by timidity than by over-daring."
- Ray Stannard Baker

"Do I dare eat a peach?"
- From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot

The most controversial deficit reduction plan was put forward by Wisconsin Representative and Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan. In 2008, he introduced H. R. 6110, entitled "Roadmap for America's Future Act of 2008", as a plan to balance the budget and create jobs. This proposal has garnered both high praise and scathing condemnation.

• Democratic co-chair of President Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform called the Ryan plan “sensible, serious . . , and honest”.
• In April at an Associated Press Luncheon, President Obama denounced Ryan's plan as "nothing but thinly-veiled Social Darwinism."
• New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote "Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is scheduled to release the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes"
• Even the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have blasted the Ryan plan, writing that it fails to meet a basic moral test.

As is often the case, the truth lies between the extremes. Paul Ryan's plan would not produce a future ripped from the pages of Oliver Twist. On the other hand, the plan would also not succeed in its primary mission of eliminating the deficit. The reason why the Ryan proposal would fail is that, contrary to what both his supporters and critics contend, this plan is actually too timid to be effective. Contrary to popular rhetoric, the senator who is likened to Rambo is much closer to J. Alfred Prufrock. 

Bill Clinton, Social Darwinist?

One of the more popular attacks on the Ryan plan is that it would cut spending much too quickly, threatening our fragile economic recovery. President Obama even went so far as to call the plan a "prescription for decline". Everyone agrees that spending cuts are inevitable, but Obama asserts that these cuts must be done more gradually to preserve both the safety net for the poor and this nation's greatness.

This argument focuses its line of attack on the notion that Ryan's plan spends considerably less than recent federal budgets, a major talking point for the plan's proponents. So how does the Ryan plan compare to federal spending levels, or for that matter, how does it compare to Obama's proposal? An analysis of the numbers shows how Washington's definition of a cut differs from the rest of the nation: the only sense in which Ryan's budget for the next 10 years can be considered a "cut" is in the sense that spending will not increase a fast as politicians originally planned:

• Even after adjusting for inflation, Ryan's plan for the each of the next ten years would be 46% higher than Bill Clinton's last budget; and
• In this 10 year period Ryan plan spends only 5% less than Obama's proposed budget.

If Paul Ryan is a Social Darwinist, wouldn't that make Bill Clinton one as well? And if we are to believe that the Ryan plan would put us on the path to decline, why should we have any confidence in a plan that only differs from the Ryan by only 5%?

Voting for the Party That Will Throw Granny Off a Cliff

The most contentious issue with the Ryan Plan is the entitlement program reforms. As an alternative to the current defined benefit program, Ryan proposed block granting the program, and an opt-out for younger people who wish to vest in private retirement plans instead of Social Security and Medicare.

The imminent debt crisis has finally forced a senator to touch the "third rail" of American politics. And predictably, his opponents have played upon the public's fear of changes in these popular programs. The Agenda Project produced an infamous ad depicting Paul Ryan throwing an old woman off a cliff. The Romney campaign responded by producing its own ad, attacking Obama's plans to divert Medicare "savings" to pay for Obamacare. So which party will really preserve Medicare as we know it?

The honest answer is neither party: no matter who wins the elections here and in the next few decades, our entitlement programs as we know them will come to an end, period. These programs are completely and utterly unsustainable. As early as 2008, the trustees reports for Social Security and Medicare place their unfunded liability (that is, what they are obligated to pay out minus anticipated revenue) at $101 trillion. Given that our annual GDP is around $14 trillion, this is a hole that even a 100% tax rate cannot fill. A health care economist put the Medicare situation in far stronger language (warning: possibly NSFW) here.

Ryan's plan is probably insufficient to fix the entitlement crisis, but it is better than the current administrations' non-plan. In reality, the most likely outcome for the entitlement programs is that they will become means tested. But saying that is not politically popular (ask Ron Paul and Gary Johnson), so the two major party candidates will continue to argue over which one will push granny off the cliff.

Watching the Glaciers Speed By

For all the hoopla about the rapidity of the Paul Ryan's cuts, what is amazing is how agonizingly slow this plan is in terms of solving the debt crisis. CBO projections show that the plan won't even produce a balanced budget until 2040. Even this is based on optimistic assumptions, such as that no other national crises will arise in the next 28 years, and that congress will remain committed to this plan for nearly three decades. Part of the problem is that Senator Ryan has his own sacred cows: he leaves the budgets for defense and the war on terror untouched. Given the severity of the debt problem, everything should be on the table. The Pentagon and the Office of Homeland Security both have a lot of waste that could be eliminated.

To really fix the debt crisis, what is needed is a plan far more bold than the Ryan plan. But since Washington views this plan as reckless, what will actually be implemented is something weaker, and therefore even more inadequate, than the Ryan plan. This is the strongest evidence yet that no serious remedy will be attempted until it is too late, i.e. in financial terms, America will become Detroit.

What we are facing is nothing short of default of our nation. Granted, the consequences of this will be terrible: treasury bonds are frequently purchased because of their reputation for stability. Many who are depending on these bonds, including some who were dependent on them for their retirement, will be devastated. But there will be a few upsides to this crisis, as will be detailed in the next installments.