September 08, 2026

Update On "Homelessness" In New York

September 08, 2026/ Francis Menton

Recently (May 2026) I did an update on the “homelessness” situation in San Francisco. The title was “The Homeless Industrial Complex Eats San Francisco For Lunch.”‍ ‍
I have taken a particular interest in “homelessness” in San Francisco ever since that city had a big referendum back in 2018 to pass a special payroll tax supposedly to solve the “homelessness” problem once and for all. The result in San Francisco, you will not be surprised to learn, was that the Homeless Industrial Complex has since swallowed up all the new funding and much more, while the number of people identified as “homeless” has only gone up, and then up some more.
But how about New York? In recent years the City hasn’t exactly been bragging about its success in this area, so data have been a little hard to come by. However, a few days ago (September 5) the New York Post had a story that gives an idea of the overall picture.

August 31, 2026

For The Left, Nothing Succeeds Like Failure

August 31, 2026/ Francis Menton

A couple of weeks ago, law professor Jonathan Turley devoted one of his columns to this seeming anomaly — that the Left somehow gains from its own failures. The headline of his column was “The worse it gets, the better it is: American leftism is thriving on its own failures.”‍ ‍
The theme of the piece is that the failure of a policy of the Left is never admitted to be a failure, but rather is only seen as a reason that the taxpayers haven’t yet devoted sufficient resources to the issue, and therefore the answer is to double down and spend yet more money on the failed policy. Turley provides several examples of the phenomenon, in the areas of immigration, health care, public education and housing.
My reaction is, I’m glad that someone besides myself is finally noticing. However, Turley has barely scratched the surface, and indeed omits to mention some of the very biggest examples.

May 14, 2026

May 14, 2026/ Francis Menton

It’s been a long time since I have done an update on the homelessness situation in San Francisco. The reason is that I have avoided the issue until sufficient evidence had accumulated to make the obvious conclusion completely definitive and undeniable.
It was all the way back in 2018 that some of San Francisco’s foremost do-gooders, led by billionaire Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, organized a referendum to implement a new payroll tax to raise the revenue to solve the homelessness problem once and for all.
The referendum was designed to raise some $300 million per year, on top of San Fran’s already generous homelessness spending. All of the new spending was to be dedicated to the task of ending the homelessness crisis.
On October 24, 2018 — just a few days before the referendum was scheduled to take place — Benioff got an op-ed published in the New York Times advocating for its passage. The gist of the op-ed was that it was time for San Francisco’s business community to step up and get this done.

November 08, 2025

November 08, 2025/ Francis Menton

The first nine months of the President Trump’s second term have seen repeated instances of a Federal District Court judge temporarily enjoining some action of the administration, only to have the Supreme Court stay the injunction while the litigation proceeds. Examples of this pattern of events have occurred in cases involving such things as funding rescissions, staff lay-offs, and deportation procedures.
A recurring feature of this pattern has been dissents from the three liberal Supreme Court justices — Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson — who would have left the temporary injunctions in place during the pendency of the litigation.
Justice Jackson, in addition to joining other two liberal justices, has also issued several individual dissents strongly criticizing her conservative colleagues for vacating temporary injunctions from District Courts.
The question of whether the administration gets enjoined while litigation proceeds, versus an injunction getting issued only at the conclusion of full litigation, is very consequential.

August 08, 2025

August 08, 2025/ Francis Menton

Here in New York City, in the grip of the hysterical climate cult, we are undertaking a massive transformation of our energy system without anyone in authority having done the simple arithmetic to check whether the plans have any chance of succeeding. A big theme of this blog has been pointing out the obvious problems that mean that these “net zero” schemes can never work.
But maybe it’s not really important whether they will ever work or not. Maybe the real point is just to spend a lot of (somebody else’s) money to show that you, somehow, “care.”
A very similar scenario is now playing out in the closely related category they are calling climate “resiliency.” The word means getting ready for the impending climate armaggedon. The armaggedon isn’t coming, of course, but we will anyway spend vast sums supposedly to show we are “doing something” about the problem.
Whether the scheme in question might actually work is beside the point.

April 23, 2025

April 23, 2025/ Francis Menton

Pope Francis passed away two days ago, on Easter Monday. He had been the leader of the Catholic Church for just over 12 years.
He presented himself as a well-intentioned and deeply religious man, none of which I ever doubted. But good intentions are the paving stones of the road to hell. I often tried to find some positive things about Francis so that I could admire him. But unfortunately I think that his overall impact on the world and on the church was overwhelmingly negative.
Thinking that he was working to uplift the poor and downtrodden of the world, Francis accepted all the most destructive prescriptions of the international Left. I’m sorry, but I don’t find that acceptable in a man claiming to be a major religious leader and asserting moral authority to tell others how to lead a good life.
After a century and more of the destructive horrors of socialism, people in major leadership roles in society have a responsibility to learn about that and understand it and not continue to spread it.