The New York Times Covers The de Blasio Mayoral Campaign

Gearing up its coverage of the mayoral race, yesterday the New York Times in its New York section (page A21 in the print edition) ran a long article by Michael Barbaro on the campaign of Bill de Blasio.  de Blasio is currently Public Advocate, a city-wide elective office of no identifiable duties or purpose, serving only to give its occupant a platform to keep his name before the public and thereby try to make himself a candidate for mayor when the opportunity arises.

The Times article, like nearly everything that issues from that source, serves mostly to illustrate the New York conventional ignorance and what is wrong with it.   First, a short review of my own views of what is important in this race for mayor.  New York City government is ridiculously expensive, for reasons that have nothing to do with delivering a superior level of service to the people, and everything to do with paying back the employee unions for their support.  In a post late last year entitled Why New York City Is A High Tax Jurisdiction, I laid out the three main areas where we vastly overpay to get nothing of value:  public employee pensions (currently running a stunning $8 billion per year, 12% of the budget, and likely to double over the next ten years based on formulas already agreed to and desperately in need of reform); public schools (we spend about $20,000 per year per student, which is almost double the national average, the differential representing over $8 billion, which is 12% of the budget - and our student performance is worse than the national average); and Medicaid (we spend close to triple per beneficiary what is spent in California and Texas, for no better health results, although we are partially saved by the Feds and State picking up most of the tab; still, it is about a $2.5 billion issue in the City budget).  These three items together represent more than $15 billion in overspending for no value, about 22% of the budget down the rat hole, before getting to other large items.  This overspending is basically giveaways to favored constituencies, mainly the public employee unions, who contribute lavishly to their chosen mayoral candidates and are expert at bringing their voters out to the polls.  Every candidate for mayor needs to address this overspending issue as priority number 1.

With that in mind, let us look at the Times coverage of de Blasio's candidacy.  First of all, in an article spread over most of two full pages, there is not one word about the level of City spending, whether we are getting value for our taxes, or anything specific about worker pensions, school spending, or Medicaid spending.  Indeed, the article is almost completely devoid of substance on matters of policy.  So how can they even fill what amounts to a full page of text in the print edition without getting to any such subject?  Easy.  Here's how it starts:

Bill de Blasio drives a gas-sipping Ford hybrid and cultivates tomatoes and peppers from his backyard in brownstone Brooklyn.  He works out at the socially responsible Y.M.C.A. and opted for the all-hands-on-deck rigors of the Park Slope Childcare Collective.  His wedding was a multicultural billboard for the borough: under a pin oak tree in Prospect Park, he married an African-American writer who previously identified as a lesbian.  In the race for New York mayor, this is the new face of borough agitation.

From that inauspicious beginning, the article goes on point out that de Blasio is proudly the candidate from Brooklyn, and to spin the main issue in the race as being the guy from long down-and-out but now up-and-coming Brooklyn against all the other guys from Manhattan.  Quinn is from Chelsea, Thompson from Harlem, and Weiner now lives on Park Avenue.  But de Blasio hails proudly from progressive, multicultural Park Slope!  Well, so what?  What does he have to say about any issue of substance?

In an article of several thousand words, the entire portion on the substantive issues of the race appears in two paragraphs near the end: (apparently omitted from the on-line version, so I'm typing them out):

Mr. de Blasio . . . has amassed a running tally of the indignities and inequities in four boroughs: a yawning income gap, a surge in fines for small businesses, slighted schools and inadequate early childhood education.  He envisions an activist city government that addresses those disparities head on.  Alone among the Democratic field, he calls for a tax increase on the rich, to bankroll universal prekindergarten.

Typical of the New York Times, the reporter can conduct a lengthy interview with an apparently serious candidate for mayor, hear the candidate claim that the schools are "slighted," and not be able to ask the simplest question as to how the schools could possibly be "slighted" when we are already spending close to double the national average per student.  Even worse is de Blasio's call for "universal prekindergarten."  This proposal is of course the darling of the teachers' union, which sees in it a 10-15% increase in dues paying membership.  Meanwhile, expensive pre-K programs have never demonstrated any lasting educational benefit for the children.  For a mayoral candidate to sign on to this proposal is roughly the equivalent in competence for the job of mayor as for the CEO of Apple to agree to repatriate the $100 billion of overseas cash and gratuitously pay $35 billion in Federal taxes.  Indeed, at current wildly overgenerous pension formulas, the cost to New York City taxpayers of future pensions for the teachers in the universal pre-K program will be far more than $35 billion.  Frankly, I don't think either de Blasio or the New York Times reporter is remotely capable of doing this math.  But don't worry, he's going to pay for it with "a tax increase on the rich"!  Again, I don't think that de Blasio even knows that the entire City income tax only raises about $8 billion per year, so even a huge rate increase limited to "the rich" will only bring in maybe $1 billion, which will be extremely destructive to the economy and not remotely pay the cost of that universal pre-K program.

This is what we are dealing with here.

Go to de Blasio's campaign web site to find out what his campaign is really about.  It's one union endorsement after another, the biggest being 1199SEIU -- those are the hospital workers on the receiving end of the Medicaid spending.  The Times is just totally oblivious to this.

UPDATE:  In the online version of this article today, the Times ran a correction, noting that de Blasio is not the only candidate for mayor who has called for tax increases on "the rich," since Comptroller John Liu has also done so.

An Issue Where I Can't Even Understand The Other Side Of The Argument

Since I'm a contrarian, there are many issues where I disagree with seemingly most other people.  But at least on a lot of those issues I have some understanding of the other side's argument, even if I disagree.  Then there are the many issues where I just can't understand what the argument is at all.

An example from the recent news comes from the Apple tax hearings.  Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, Chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate, is shocked, shocked that Apple, after years of success at selling computers, iPhones and iPads, has accumulated some $100+ billion of cash overseas and declines to repatriate it to America.  Since the USA levies a tax of about 35% on corporate income, bringing this cash into the US would cost Apple's shareholders about $35 billion.

To me it is completely obvious that any Apple executive who even thought for a second about bringing this money to the US and throwing away $35 billion of shareholder money would be totally incompetent and should be fired immediately.  It is ridiculous to suggest that any executive who knows anything about his job and his fiduciary duty to his shareholders would give this idea a moment's consideration.  So what in heaven's name is this hearing about?

Granted, Levin is an idiot.  But how do you explain the likes of John McCain making statements like this (reported at cultofmac.com):

McCain concluded, “Apple has a negotiated tax rate of less than 2%. They have created loopholes to avoid paying $44 billion in taxes on income. $102 billion of $145 billion of Apple’s cash on hand is overseas. It’s time for Apple to reinvest in America.”

That man was the 2008 Republican candidate for President! Couldn't a high ranking former military officer like McCain give even a little deference to the fact that this man has a job and legal duties to his shareholders?  By the way, Senator Rand Paul did a fairly good job standing up for Apple, although in reading his remarks I can't find any mention of the idea that bringing this money to the US and paying a $35 billion voluntary tax bill would be total dereliction of duty by Cook.

Record Late Ice Break Up At Nenana, Alaska

From the department of global warming ain't happenin' comes news of the ice break up on the Tanana River at Nenana, Alaska.  This year it occurred yesterday, May 20, at 3:43 PM Alaska daylight time.  That set a new record for lateness of the break up.  I guess that doesn't fit the official global warming narrative.

In 1917 engineers working on construction of the Alaska Railroad started a pool betting on the date and time of break up of the ice at Nenana.  The betting has continued every year since, and these days the organizers amass a pool of over $300,000 to distribute to whoever guesses the time of break up time most closely.  In the 97 years of the records, the earliest break up has been on April 20 (1940, 1998), and the latest May 20 (1964), with the majority clustered from about April 29 to May 8.   Here is the log of all break up times from 1917 to 2011.

In the 2000s many global warming promoters got the idea that the Nenana ice break up records could serve as an indicator of ongoing climate change.    In 2001 two authors from Stanford, Raphael Sagarin and Fiorenza Micheli, analyzed the Nenana data and declared that recent records indicated that the break up was then occurring 5.5 days sooner than it did back in 1917.  That study got play, for example, in the New York Times.  Although before this year no records for early or late break up had been set post 2000, recent data have tended somewhat to the earlier portion of the range, leading plenty of global warming promoters to use these data to hype their cause.  For example, here is a post from the Daily Kos in 2007, pointing out that break up times for the years 2003 - 2007 were all (a little) earlier than the median.  The book Understanding Global Warming by Rebecca Johnson, published in 2009, declared "For scientists the Nenana Ice Classic, as this contest is called, is a source of data about climate change.  Based on event records, spring arrives ten days earlier around Nenana than it did in 1960."

Well, with this year's record late break up the trend seems to have turned in the other direction.  And by the way, not just by a little.  Not only is May 20 the latest break up day ever, but there has only been one prior break up after May 16, and three after May 14.  It was a really, really cold spring in interior Alaska.  Funny that I can't find any mention of that in places like the New York Times, Washington Post, or big web sites like Daily Kos or Huffington Post, or climate alarmist web sites like realclimate.  However, there is plenty of coverage at climate skeptic web sites like wattsupwiththat.com and stevengoddard.wordpress.com.  Remember, it's only news if it fits the narrative.

The Government Is Not Capable Of Being Apolitical

Do you indulge yourself in the illusion that government bureaucracies are apolitical actors who perform their duties in a neutral fashion that is fair and just to all? Well, welcome to the IRS scandal.

My view is that government bureaucrats are human beings, and therefore behave like all other human beings. In other words, they seek to advance themselves in life, and part of that is growing and enhancing the organizations with which they are associated, which in this case means the government. Also, they seek to diminish or destroy those who would diminish them and their organizations. These ideas are not new with me. In fact, they are the fundamental principles of a branch of economics called Public Choice Theory, for which an economist named James Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1986.

The corollary is that there is no such thing as a neutral apolitical actor or agency in the government. All government personnel are part of the main project, spoken or unspoken, to grow the government and to attack or destroy its enemies. It's like the sun coming up in the east.

Which is why, of course, nothing about the current IRS scandal surprises me. Well, maybe the nakedness and thuggery of it surprises me a little, but not really, because the current administration has 90+% of the media prepared to cover for it, and given the dynamics of the process it was inevitable that the administration would push the envelope a little farther, and then a little farther, and sooner or later a nerve would be struck. This doesn't even have much to do with whether the members of the current administration are particularly bad guys. It's just the nature of human existence.

And now that the nerve has been struck, we start to find out how far things have gone. I've put together here a little sampling from around the web, not to mention from my personal e-mail.

• From Mark Hemingway at the Weekly Standard of May 27 (not yet out in print edition), comes a report, via attorney Cleta Mitchell, that the number of conservative groups seeking 501(c)(4) status that were subject to some form of IRS special scrutiny, delay and/or harassment over the last several years is no fewer than 471. According to Mitchell, "80 or 90 groups all got letters that are virtually identical, that are oppressive, with 30, 40, 50, 70 questions with parts and subparts and sub-subparts." Oh, all of this is in the context of a close election, of course, when applications by "progressive" groups could sail through without delay.
  
• From John Eastman of the Claremont Institute, and also Board Chair of the National Organization for Marriage, comes a mass e-mail stating that "A year ago, someone at the IRS
  illegally disclosed the confidential portions of [NOM's] tax return to the Human
  Rights Campaign, the leading organization on the other side of NOM in the war
  over the definition of marriage. At the time, HRC was headed by someone
  who had just been named national co-Chair of the Obama for President campaign. . . ." Eastman states that NOM has submitted an FOIA request demanding the name of the perpetrator, but the IRS has denied the request, stating that the name is "confidential." Disclosure of a tax return is a felony.
• From Jillian Kay Melchior at today's National Review Online comes the story of Catherine Engelbrecht, a co-proprietor with her husband of a small-ish Texas metal manufacturing business with about 30 employees, and founder of a right-leaning organization called True the Vote, a group seeking to prevent voter fraud and train poll volunteers. Catherine filed for 501(c)(4) status for her group in July 2010. The application went into limbo. Later that year, the FBI called to investigate an individual who had attended an event of the group. In February 2011, the IRS initiated audits of the Engelbrechts' business and personal tax returns. In April 2011 the IRS sent one of its long questionnaires for information about True the Vote. In October 2011, the application still pending, the IRS sent another questionnaire asking for more information. In February 2012 came a third request for information from the IRS. On the same day, representatives of ATF showed up unscheduled to inspect the manufacturing plant (it makes parts for firearms, among many other things). In July 2012 OSHA showed up unscheduled, at a time when the Engelbrechts were out of town, for another inspection.
• From Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, via ICECAP, comes the story of trying to get information out of the EPA by FOIA requests. Turns out that if you are friendly to the EPA, they give you the information you seek promptly and moreover waive the fees otherwise payable; but if you are perceived as unfriendly (like CEI), they fight you tooth and nail for information, and then charge you as much fees as they can get away with. All this, of course, in service of what Horner calls EPA's "anti-affordable energy policies."
  
• And so it goes.
  

Well, we now have hundreds of agencies at all levels that can regulate your business. They have hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations that you are supposed to comply with. Of course, it is not possible to comply perfectly with all of them. So, when you identify yourself as an enemy of the perpetually growing state, they can sic as many regulators on you as they feel like, each empowered to fly-speck your operations until they find something.

And into this mix, let us throw Obamacare, otherwise known as government access to all medical records. Supposedly this is for the completely neutral and apolitical purposes of finding the best cures for disease and helping to control medical costs. Right! If they can access and leak your tax return, can they access and leak your medical records? Of course. We'll just have to see how long it is before someone posing a serious electoral threat to those in power (control of the Senate, perhaps?) finds something embarrassing in his medical records leaked to the friendly press. Not long, I predict.

Junk Statistics And The Government's Campaign For More Power

Almost everything you read or see in the press or the media that makes use of statistics is at the minimum wrong and misleading, and at least half is intentionally fraudulent.  The fraud is always of the same sort, namely efforts by the unholy alliance of academics looking to build up their visibility and funding with government officials looking to order people around and grow their bureaucracies and budgets.

This works because most people are very naive when it comes to statistics.  Admittedly, it's a complicated subject, and you can't know everything.  I majored in math, and took a course in statistics, but I'm certainly not an expert in statistics.  However, I do know the one thing of significance.  This is an extremely important thing to know, so I'm putting it in bold:  From an observational or epidemiological study (as opposed to a random double-blind study), Relative Risk of less than about 3 is meaningless, not statistically significant, and no conclusion can be drawn from it.   If you can learn that one principle and internalize it, it will be a real eye-opener in your reading of every day's news.

From the department of "I told you so," let us take up the subject of salt.  I have been saying for years that salt in the diet is not a problem and you should eat as much as tastes good. Why did I say that?  Because I have been looking to see if there is any observational study showing a RR over 2, or a significant random double blind result, and I've never seen it.  QED.  Obviously and as usual, I have all the forces of the great and good know-it-alls arrayed against me.  For example, the Federal government gets into the act through the National Dietary Guidelines, issued jointly by the Departments of Agriculture and HHS.  The World Health Organization of course piles on.  The American Heart Association has totally bought into the anti-salt jihad.  Mayor Bloomberg of New York has somehow become a national leader on this subject, and just a few months ago, according to the New York Times on February 13, "declared victory" in his national anti-salt campaign by strong-arming 21 food companies (including Kraft, Goya and FreshDirect) into lowering the salt content of their foods.

What evidence have these people had for their campaign?  Essentially nothing -- some very weak observational studies and, according to yesterday's New York Times, "the well-known fact that blood pressure can drop slightly when people eat less salt [together with] other studies linking blood pressure to risks of heart attacks and strokes [and] models showing how many lives could be saved . . . ."

Pushing back against this ignorance, we have had only a few lonely unfunded amateur individual voices.  On the salt issue, my favorite is John Brignell of the website "numberwatch."   At a post from 2008 called March of the Zealots, he says this about the salt campaign:

Weirdest of all, but so typical, is the anti-salt campaign. It seems to have no other function than to keep the names of certain professors in the newspapers. The paucity of the evidence offered in contrast to the drama of the claims and the draconian nature of the demanded action is quite startling, but so characteristic of the genre.

Brignell also has this brief write-up to help you understand the concept of Relative Risk.  A couple of useful quotes:

"As a general rule of thumb, we are looking for a relative risk of 3 or more before accepting a paper for publication." - Marcia Angell, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine"

"My basic rule is if the relative risk isn't at least 3 or 4, forget it." - Robert Temple, director of drug evaluation at the Food and Drug Administration.

Well, the salt jihad has always been such complete BS that it was only a matter of time before someone took a look at some real data.  A couple of days ago, the Institute of Medicine, at the behest of the Centers for Disease Control issued a report examining the existing evidence.  From the article in yesterday's Times:

In a report that undercuts years of public health warnings, a prestigious group convened by the government says there is no good reason based on health outcomes for many Americans to drive their sodium consumption down to the very low levels recommended in national dietary guidelines.

It's actually worse than that, because some of the recent studies cited actually found adverse health consequences from achieving low levels of salt in the system.

“As you go below the 2,300 [milligrams of salt per day] mark, there is an absence of data in terms of benefit and there begin to be suggestions in subgroup populations about potential harms,” said Dr. Brian L. Strom, chairman of the committee and a professor of public health at the University of Pennsylvania. He explained that the possible harms included increased rates of heart attacks and an increased risk of death.

You mean that the anti-salt campaign may actually be killing people?  The incredible thing is that the campaigners seem never even to have thought of that possibility.

OK, you may be thinking, it's stupid, but what's the harm?  You can still get salt and salt up your food if you want (the options aren't quite so good if you are Kraft or Goya).  But salt is only one example out of hundreds of this kind of nonsense, so let's turn to a really important one, the standard for DUI.  Turns out that yesterday's NYT also had an article on that subject.  Reason: on Tuesday the National Transportation Safety Board issued a recommendation that the states reduce the allowable blood-alcohol concentration from 0.08% to 0.05%.  It's the difference between basically 4 glasses of wine for a man and 3 for a woman putting you over, to 3 and 2.  In other words, it is a proposal to criminalize essentially half the population.  What is the authority of the Federal government to do this?  The answer is that starting with a bill signed by Clinton in 2000 they coerced all the states that previously had a 0.1% standard to go down to 0.08% by threatening to withhold highway funding, and they could well do that again.  This is very serious business.

So what is the evidence?  Drum roll!!!!

People with a blood-alcohol level of 0.05 percent are 38 percent more likely to be involved in a crash than those who have not been drinking, according to government statistics.  People with a blood-alcohol level of 0.08 percent are 169 percent more likely.

Those numbers sound rather paltry, but "169 percent more likely" (Relative Risk of 2.69) at least approaches the bare minimum of statistical significance, so where did the Times get the "government statistics" they refer to?  They don't say, but a little searching on the internet turns up this collection of academic papers, the first one of which (Compton, et al, no date in the pdf) contains the numbers cited by the Times.  Read the paper if you can stomach it, but it turns out that their raw data only came up with a relative risk of  1.57, and then they made a series of adjustments based on assumptions to get to the 2.69.  For example, they made an assumption that there were a bunch of hit and runs that got excluded from the data because the driver was not available to be tested, and that that driver's blood alcohol must be elevated.  In short, they made up the 2.69.  The only data they have is 1.57, and there is good reason to think even that is elevated -- for example, the drinkers may be on average younger and thus less experienced drivers, or may have more propensity to drive with others who distract them.  And by the way, the authors compare the Relative Risk from their data against the results of the previous major study from Grand Rapids in the 60s, which came up with a 1.88 Relative Risk at 0.08% blood alcohol.

Relative Risk of 1.57, or even 1.88?  That is NOTHING!.  For that matter, 2.69 is pretty damn close to nothing.  We're talking here about criminalizing half the population!  Now let's look at quotes in the Times from some of the creeps promoting more government control:

“These tragedies affect both sides,” said Robert J. Sumwalt, one of the board members. He said his wife’s first cousin was killed by a drunken driver who was traveling down a highway in the wrong direction. And his own cousin, he said, goes on Sundays to visit her 21-year-old daughter who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for drunken driving.  Progress is mostly a matter of political will, board members said.

OK, Sumwalt, are you telling us that the guy who killed your wife's cousin had blood alcohol between 0.05 and 0.08?  Of course not - if he knew the exact BAC and it were useful he would have said it.  And believe me, nobody with BAC of 0.08% is so drunk as to drive down the highway in the wrong direction.  This is just craven use of irrelevant tragedy in aid of a naked power grab for the government.

Well, people, I live in Manhattan, which is the only place in the USA where we don't have to drive home after drinking.  If you are outside Manhattan, it's your issue not mine.  But you had better wake up quickly.

UPDATE, 7:30 PM:  Just now riding in the elevator here at 787 Seventh Avenue and the news screen  has the headline "People who eat peppers have 50% lower risk of developing Parkinson's."  In other words, yet another one of these phony studies that came out with no statistically significant results and yet is blared around the world as if it means something.  Once you are on to this issue, you start to realize how nearly everything you read is a lie.