North Dakota Police Can Now Legally Use Taser Drones
It’s a classic case of unintended consequences. A Republican lawmaker in North Dakota put forth legislation meant to prevent law enforcement officials from using unmanned aerial vehicles to conduct surveillance on private property without a warrant. It was transformed by fellow lawmakers into a bill allowing the police to mount Tasers, pepper spray, sound cannons and other “less-than-lethal” weapons on flying drones.
The legislation, House Bill 1328, was passed and signed into law earlier this year, but got little attention until this week, when a Daily Beast report pointed out the implications of the legislation: Law enforcement officers many miles away from suspects could have the authority to stun or otherwise incapacitate them.
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To be clear, the fact that something like this is technically legal doesn’t mean that state and local police departments will necessarily embrace the practice of remotely subduing suspects. Police officers are generally subject to local and departmental rules that can substantially limit what tactics are allowed.
The original version of the bill included language that would have barred law enforcement from mounting weapons of any kind on a drone: “A state agency may not authorize the use of, including granting a permit to use, an unmanned aircraft armed with any lethal or nonlethal weapons, including firearms, pepper spray, bean bag guns, mace, and sound-based weapons,” it said.
Supporters of the state’s police union introduced an amendment to the bill that would allow less-than-lethal weapons to be mounted on drones, according to the Daily Beast’s Justin Glawe. The amended bill was ultimately passed and signed into law.
Related: Europe Faces Up to Flight Safety Threat Posed by Drones
State Rep. Rick Becker this spring voiced his dismay at the changes to the bill in a public hearing, saying, “In my opinion there should be a nice, red line: Drones should not be weaponized. Period.”
Drones have, of course, been weaponized for years — the strikes just haven’t been in the U.S. If North Dakota is taking the lead, however, that might be about to change.
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Premiums for Affordable Care Act policies are set to rocket higher in many places in 2018. Many of the rates for next year won't be made public until November, but The New York Times found that Georgia has already approved increases of up to 57.5 percent, while the average rate in Florida will jump by about 45 percent and the average in New Mexico will climb by 30 percent. Minnesota, on the other hand, announced this week that a new state reinsurance program has helped stabilize rates and price changes for individual plans in the state will range from a decrease of 38 percent to an increase of 3 percent.
Confusion stemming from the White House and Congress, including uncertainty about whether the Trump administration will continue to make cost-sharing payments to insurers, is largely driving the increases. Keep in mind, though, that about 85 percent of people who buy insurance through Obamacare exchanges won’t feel the price hikes because their plans are subsidized — but the federal government will have to shell out more for those subsidies.
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Treasury Pulls a Paper That Contradicts Mnuchin’s Corporate Tax Argument
The Treasury Department has taken down from its website a 2012 analysis that found that business owners and shareholders — not workers — bear most of the burden of corporate taxes. The findings of the report run counter to the argument Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has been making in selling the benefits of a reduction in the corporate tax rate. The Trump administration’s tax reform framework calls for dropping the corporate rate from 35 percent to 20 percent.
The 2012 report from the Office of Tax Analysis found that “workers pay 18 percent of the corporate tax while owners of capital pay 82 percent” — figures that are “in line with many economists’ views and close to estimates from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation and Congressional Budget Office,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
A Treasury spokeswoman told the Journal: “The paper was a dated staff analysis from the previous administration. It does not represent our current thinking and analysis.”
Jason Furman, who was chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, tweeted that the goal of the technical paper series that included the removed study “was to be more transparent about the methodology Treasury used for its modeling and analysis.”
Treasury website has 40+ yrs of Tax Working & Technical Papers. This is the only one removed https://t.co/QzLTSHderk https://t.co/MFZRd7HoFQ
— Jason Furman (@jasonfurman) September 29, 2017