Reporter: Trump Misread Transgender Ban Politics
In “short-circuiting a Pentagon process to decide how to integrate transgender troops,” President Trump “has increased the chances that he will not get his way,” contends Marc Ambinder at The Week, because “he spectacularly misread the politics of his decision.” Yes, many evangelical Christians “remain opposed to transgender rights.” But three conservative Christian senators — Orrin Hatch, Richard Shelby and Joni Ernst — almost immediately “said that Trump was wrong.” Fact is, “Americans, including the white voters who switched from Obama to Trump, don’t seem to care much about transgender people. They don’t think about them. They aren’t threatened by them. So it may strike them as odd that the president has taken such a strident stance.”
Policy wonk: Westchester Finally Wins Its Freedom
Anyone “concerned about Washington’s power to affect one’s choice of where to live should breathe a sigh of relief,” declares Howard Husock at City Journal. That’s because after a years-long legal war, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has finally declared the county “compliant with housing-discrimination regulation.” Under a consent decree, Westchester now has “750 units of subsidized housing, scattered throughout well-off municipalities.” HUD long contended that “disparate impact” numbers alone were “de facto evidence of ongoing racial discrimination.” But this view, says Husock, “ignores virtually everything about how [US] housing patterns and preferences actually work” — namely, that “where you live is determined by what you can afford to pay.” HUD instead sought to subsidize “the poorest Americans to live nearby the richest — a form of social-engineering that can only deform markets and create friction.”
Transit expert: Don’t Just Throw Money at the MTA
MTA Chairman Joe Lhota’s rescue plan for the subways “is sound enough, but is mostly made up of measures the MTA should have taken months ago — and, indeed, started to take before Lhota even arrived on the scene,” says Nicole Gelinas at City & State. Because the MTA “continues to experience . . . difficulty starting and finishing capital projects.” A “$600 million project to modernize the signals on the No. 7 line, now a decade into planning and construction, is supposed to be finished later this year,” but “meeting that deadline will be ‘challenging’.” And a “core maintenance and replacement program . . . is also behind.” What Lhota hasn’t addressed is “how to do major construction work more quickly.” Indeed, “the MTA hasn’t proven that it can spend new money wisely — or even unwisely and quickly.”
Economist: Time To Reform Mortgage Deduction
With President Trump and Congress looking to craft a new tax bill, one area that is “ripe for reform” is the mortgage-interest deduction, suggests Charles Hughes at Economics21. Costing $72.4 billion in lost revenue this year and $234 billion through 2020, it is “one of the most expensive tax expenditures” in the entire tax code — yet “only about a quarter of tax filers claim the deduction.” Moreover, studies find “it has no effect on homeownership rates in the long run, and it distorts decision-making about the size and price of which homes to buy.” True, “reforming the MID would be difficult politically.” But eliminating it, “or capping the amount that could be claimed at a lower level, and using the revenue to reduce income tax rates . . . would increase the efficiency of the tax code.”
Culture critic: Princeton Wants To Emasculate Men
Princeton University, reports Cheryl Chumley at the Washington Times, has “just announced a new position: Interpersonal Violence Clinician and Men’s Engagement Manager.” The most qualified candidate “will be the man who most acts like a woman. Seriously.” The point is that “men need to be more docile.” But it’s not “a crime-stopping measure,” as Princeton claims. “It’s a propaganda push based on a radicalized feminist notion that men are aggressive, violent and misogynist, simply because they’re men, and that it’s going to take a concerted, societal effort to train them.” Frankly, she says, “if male aggression is a campus problem, hire more cops.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann