On Nicholas Kristof And The Liberal Blind Spot

Multiple people have brought to my attention two op-eds over the past few weeks by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, one from May 28 titled "The Liberal Blind Spot," and the other from May 7 titled "A Confession Of Liberal Intolerance."  The theme of the two articles is that Kristof has somehow discovered that the in the world of academics, nearly all calling themselves "liberals" and seemingly priding themselves on their boundless tolerance, there is remarkable intolerance for conservative thought and opinion.  

In very gentle terms, Kristof points out to his progressive academic comrades that perhaps it might be a slight tactical mistake to insist on complete ideological conformity in their ranks:  

We desperately need academics like sociologists and anthropologists influencing American public policy on issues like poverty, yet when they are in an outer-left orbit, their wisdom often goes untapped. . . .   We liberals should have the self-confidence to believe that our values can triumph in a fair contest in the marketplace of ideas.

The May 28 column is particular interesting in noting that thousands of liberal commenters on the earlier article had been near unanimous in agreeing that he was "dead wrong" and that conservative thought should properly be ignored if not ostracized:

It’s rare for a column to inspire widespread agreement, but that one led to a consensus: Almost every liberal agreed that I was dead wrong.  “You don’t diversify with idiots,” asserted the reader comment on The Times’s website that was most recommended by readers (1,099 of them). Another: Conservatives “are narrow-minded and are sure they have the right answers.”  

Well, good try Nick.  But I think it's hopeless.  What you fail to recognize is that modern liberalism/progressivism is essentially a religion, and under the tenets of that religion conservatives are not just people with whom our crowd respectfully disagrees; rather, conservatives are immoral and evil.  If people are immoral and evil, you don't welcome them into your institutions and encourage them to propagate their immoral and evil ideas.

If you want to understand where your comrades are coming from, I recommend that you start with the Manhattan Contrarian About page.  The specific subject there is current Manhattan political orthodoxy, but the simple principles apply equally to academic orthodoxy as well:

The central tenet of that orthodoxy is that all personal problems of the people in society can be solved by government taxing and spending.  The obvious corollary is that since all problems can be solved by taxing and spending, therefore they must be solved by taxing and spending, and anyone who stands in the way of those solutions is immoral.

All progressives instinctively know, just know, that the right government programs and spending can solve all significant human problems.  Poverty?  The right program (or 500 of them) will fix it!  Income inequality?  Same.  Education shortcomings?  You just need more money for smaller classes and more unionized teachers in the government schools!  Inequality and discrimination between and among races?  Big enough bureaucracies can fix that -- they can order businesses to behave, and prosecute them when they don't!  Housing in trendy cities is too expensive?  A bureaucracy can order that it be made "affordable"!  World temperatures seem to have crept up by a degree or so over the past century?  That can be fixed by a bureaucracy to put the coal industry out of business and ban "fracking"!  Transgender people feel uncomfortable in their assigned public bathrooms?  A bureaucracy can order equal bathroom access for all!  Healthcare too expensive?  Fix it with a 2000 page law, vast new bureaucracies and spending and endless new rules and mandates (Obamacare); or even better, make it free (with government spending)!  College too expensive?  Make it free (with government spending)!  Retirement income too low?  Double social security!  Market swings, bad guys, and natural disasters keep imposing downside risk on life?  The government can fix it all with thousands of pages of new bank regulations and infinite insurance for everything, from bank deposits to hurricanes to terrorism to crop loss!  Obviously, I could go on (and on, and on, and on).

There is actually an important distinction between the Manhattan and academic variants of the progressive orthodoxy adherents.  The Manhattanite is basically a working stiff.  S/he is making good money, and thinks that there is plenty of money in the world to solve all the human problems, but at the same time s/he is way too busy personally to figure out the solutions to so many things.  The easy answer is to outsource solving the problems to the government.  The government can hire a bunch of experts to get the job done -- just like I do at my job.  Meanwhile the government bureaucracies put out a steady stream of propaganda about how if they are just given a few more big new programs and big annual budget increases all the problems will magically be solved.  It takes a lot of work to look critically at the performance of all these bureaucracies and figure out how ineffective they are.  Everybody else around here thinks the government can solve these things.  Why should I buck the consensus?

The academic is in a very different position, and is far more deeply committed, both intellectually and financially, to the progressive orthodoxy, and to suppressing dissent from it.  Academics are the people who have created, designed and advocated for the government programs that are supposed to be solving these problems.  At the prestigious universities with the fancy professors, essentially everyone is living off government grants, all of which to some degree are used to subcontract to academia the solving of the vast array of human problems that the government is supposed to be solving.  Many prominent academics regularly go into and out of government.  These people (whether currently in or out of government) know that they are the very best and the very brightest, and that the helpless people have entrusted to them the great and weighty responsibility to fix the world.  Obviously the solutions devised by the best and the brightest, by these greatest and most scintillating luminaries of the intellectual world, will be the best and most perfect solutions that could possibly be devised!  How could any sane person doubt that?  And to stand in the way of our solutions is to advocate that the poor starve, that babies die, that income inequality persist, that education remain inadequate and underfunded, that dominant races and genders suppress the non-dominant races and genders, that the planet be desecrated, and so forth.  Can't every thinking person see that that is the very essence of evil?

And then come along those pesky "conservatives" to point out that the whole enterprise is wildly expensive and doesn't work; and indeed that most aspects of the enterprise are counterproductive and make worse the problems they are supposed to be solving.  People like the Manhattan Contrarian (and, fairly speaking, many right-side bloggers and think tanks, and such "conservative" academics as continue to exist) point out things like: anti-poverty spending on progressive-designed anti-poverty programs actually makes measured poverty worse; measured income inequality is worst in the jurisdictions where government spending supposedly designed to improve income inequality is the highest; race- and gender-based mandates and set-asides only worsen and prolong racial and gender inequality and resentments; government "affordable housing" programs make housing more expensive; massive government spending on healthcare has hugely driven up the cost of healthcare without improving health outcomes; government subsidies to colleges and student loans have only made college more expensive and have burdened young people with huge amounts of debt; the deeper countries go into pervasive government and bureaucratic solutions to all problems, the poorer they become, with economic collapse in the most extreme cases (sometimes going by the name "socialism"); and, worst of all, that voluntary transactions among free human beings (sometimes going under the name "capitalism") provide far better solutions to all of these problems than do government bureaucracies and their academic allies.

So to the progressive academic, the conservative is not just immoral and evil, but even worse.  S/he is posing an existential threat to the entire enterprise.  S/he is putting the income and career of everyone around here at risk.  S/he is giving the know-nothing Congress ammunition to cut funding to a degree that could leave this place looking like Dresden after the blitz!

Because the position of the Manhattan progressive groupthinker really just stems from intellectual laziness, there is hope that that position can be subject to change through persuasion by facts and reason.  The academic?  Sorry, Nick, but I don't think so.              

New York: A Tale Of Two Neighborhoods

A fascinating subject for study is the demographics of New York neighborhoods, many of which have been transformed multiple times in the course of little more than a century by successive waves of new residents.  Perhaps the most famous example among many is the Lower East Side of Manhattan (a couple of miles east of where I live), which was first predominantly Irish and German in the late nineteenth century, then became heavily Eastern-European Jewish in the early twentieth century, then after World War II gradually became predominantly Hispanic, and most recently has been undergoing "gentrification" largely due to recent arrivals from elsewhere in the U.S.  For even more wild examples of ethnic diversity and constant change, check out the Borough of Queens.  

Is this process of neighborhood ethnic change just a natural result of independent choices of millions of individuals, or is there something sinister about it?  Two articles in yesterday's (Sunday) New York Times separately discuss the process in two different neighborhoods -- Harlem (in Manhattan) and Belmont (in the Bronx).  You won't learn much about the process of ethnic change from reading the articles, but as usual you can learn a lot about the New York Times/progressive mind set.

Harlem is the neighborhood in Manhattan immediately north of Central Park.  Although Harlem is scarred by many huge public housing projects, its remaining streets are characterized by long rows of stately townhouses, mostly built between about 1880 and 1910.  Between about 1910 and 1930 there was a huge influx of African-Americans into Harlem, some coming from the downtown parts of Manhattan, and many from the Jim Crow South.  According to a compilation of Census data at Wikipedia, by 1920 Central Harlem was 32.43% black, and by 1930 it was 70.18%.  In the mid-century Harlem became the hub of African-American culture in the U.S., and the concentration of blacks in Harlem only increased.  A 2014 article in New African magazine here asserts that by 1990 there were only 672 whites in Central Harlem (out of a population of well over 100,000).   More recently, other ethnic groups have been increasing in Harlem, and the black percentage of the population has been declining.  A famous New York Times article from 2010 took note of the development that Harlem was suddenly "No Longer Majority Black."   But that of course did not mean that it had become majority white.  Ethnic data compiled at city-data.com from the 2010 Census show approximate percentages for Harlem of 40% black, 25% Hispanic, 15% white, 5% Asian, and the remainder consisting of various mixtures and combinations.  Although the Census data are notoriously lagged, it is safe to assume that the percentages of whites, Asians and mixed races in Harlem's ethnic mix have only increased since.

Belmont is the neighborhood smack in the middle of the Bronx, which has long been known as a center of Italian-American culture.  Its main drag, Arthur Avenue, continues to be lined with old-fashioned Italian restaurants and Italian specialty food shops.  Several Catholic churches continue to say mass in Italian.  But like most every other New York neighborhood, Belmont has undergone substantial ethnic change over time.  The New York Times article from yesterday discussed below gives the following ethnic data for the Belmont neighborhood from Census's 2009-13 American Community Survey: 58.2% Hispanic; 20.9% white non-Hispanic; 17.9% African-American; and 1.8% Asian.  Although you wouldn't necessarily guess it walking around Belmont today, the Italians are a relatively small minority of the population.

So how does a good New York progressive react to these trends?  In the paper's Review section (the section that contains opinion articles and editorials) the lead article is titled "The End Of Black Harlem," by Michael Henry Adams.  Adams surveys the ongoing ethnic change in Harlem, as well as accompanying physical changes to the neighborhood (e.g., new stores, new trees being planted) and sees some kind of sinister plot.  Summary:

To us, our Harlem is being remade, upgraded and transformed, just for them, for wealthier white people. 

Adams quotes a guy named Horace Carter as to a supposed "plan" to "take back" Harlem:

As Horace Carter, the founder of the Emanuel Pieterson Historical Society, insisted to me, “I tell you, they have a plan. Harlem is too well placed. The white man is ready to take it back.”    

There's no clue in the article as to who may have hatched this "plan."  Adams accuses the newcomers to Harlem of being "insolent" and "insulting," and as evidence provides a second-hand quote via an unnamed "real estate speculator," who says that his unnamed source accused blacks of being "freeloaders" for continuing to remain as low-rent tenants in non-eviction condo conversions.  According to Adams, Mayor de Blasio's programs for affordable housing are essentially useless, and the net effect of government efforts on Harlem is to "deny us our heritage":

They have no idea how insulting they are being, denying us our heritage and our stake in Harlem’s future. And, far from government intervention to keep us in our homes, houses of worship and schools, to protect buildings emblematic of black history, we see policies like destructive zoning, with false “trickle down” affordability, changes that incentivize yet more gentrification, sure to transfigure our Harlem forever.   

Whew!  That's quite an outpouring of anger!  Let's compare that to the Times's treatment of the ethnic change in Belmont, where in very much the reverse process, taking place over roughly the same time period, a white ethnic group (Italians) has been substantially replaced by Hispanics and blacks.  Note that as per the most recent Census data cited above, the percent of blacks in Belmont (17.9%) actually exceeds the percent of whites in Harlem (about 15%) (although both of these numbers may have shifted by a few percent since they were compiled). 

The article on Belmont, "Home to Immigrants and Students," appears in the Real Estate Section.  Here the new ethnic diversity appears as an unalloyed positive.  The Times quotes Catholic priest Father Jonathan Morris on how he "upholds" Italian heritage while also welcoming newcomers:

Father Morris . . . feels a duty to uphold the neighborhood’s rich Italian heritage, which dates to the early 20th century, when the area attracted families of Italian laborers who helped build the nearby Bronx Zoo and New York Botanical Garden.  ”It’s an immigrant church still today,” said Father Morris, who says Mass weekly in English, Spanish and Italian. “We’re trying to welcome the new immigrants while honoring the church’s Italian history.”  The priest . . . sees “a spirit of survival and entrepreneurship” in the neighborhood, pointing to a number of Mexican delis and restaurants that have opened. Father Morris said those owners could find inspiration in the successes of the longstanding shops that make up Belmont’s Little Italy.

Somehow the Italians seem to be doing just fine "upholding" their heritage, even as their presence in the neighborhood has shrunk far below the presence of blacks in Harlem.

Anyway, Mr. Adams is very representative of the New York Times mindset, but something tells me he is far from representative of all opinion in Harlem.  In particular, there are many, many blacks in Harlem who own those stately old homes, the values of which have now multiplied by a factor of ten and more over the past couple of decades.  Suddenly, they are multi-millionaires (although only to the extent that their ability to sell to the highest bidder is preserved).  Are we to believe that this is a bad thing?  Meanwhile, a larger number of blacks in Harlem threw in their lot with the government programs of public housing and rent regulation.  The Harlem renaissance and the great increase in housing values have passed these people by.  They have good cause to be resentful; but should they be resentful of the newcomers who are helping to drive up values, or of the government programs that have trapped them in dependency and prevented them from participating in the success of their neighbors?         

Venezuela: Has The Word "Socialism" Been Banned From American Mainstream Press?

A few days ago in a post titled "The Deep Mystery Of Why Venezuela Is Failing," I made fun of the New York Times and Time Magazine for publishing long articles about why Venezuela is failing without so much as mentioning its adoption of socialism.  But as I've read more on this subject in the last week, I've realized that this is not just a couple of isolated instances of cluelessness.  This really is "the one whose name must not be spoken."  My conclusion is that there is an official list of talking points, and "socialism" has been banned from the list.  Am I wrong?

The Times followed up its article from May 15 with another long one yesterday titled "How Venezuela Fell Into Crisis, and What Could Happen Next."   OK, this time they explicitly say that they are going to tell us the "how" of what got Venezuela into this mess.  And the official answer is, falling oil prices, too much borrowing, and a drought.  Socialism?  We've never heard of it!  Don't believe me?  Here are their words:

How could this happen in a country that has the largest reserves of oil in the world?

The price of oil, Venezuela’s only significant export, has plummeted, which means revenue could fall by 40 percent this year. The government’s huge borrowing, partly a legacy of the years when oil prices were far higher, has helped bring the crisis to a head because Venezuela now has far less money to repay its foreign debt, forcing Mr. Maduro to slash imports in order to avoid default.  On top of that are the consequences of a drought, which has shriveled the country’s hydropower generation, a critical source of electricity.

Let's try another left wing news site.  How about the Huffington Post?  They have a post titled "Why Venezuela Is on the Verge of Actual Collapse" from May 20.  Five reasons are given:

1. Murder—lots of murder; 2. Low oil prices—not always a good thing; 3. Plummeting economy; 4. Scarcity of essential goods; 5. Widespread corruption

I particularly like reasons 3 and 4.  The economy is collapsing because the economy is collapsing!  Why hadn't we figured that out on our own?

Try CNN.  They took a crack at this back in January, in "5 reasons why Venezuela's economy is in a 'meltdown.'"    It won't take you long to guess most of the five, because remember, they come from an official list of talking points:

1. Oil crash hurts Venezuela the most; 2. A currency worth less than a penny; 3. New power struggle dooms 2016; 4. Default in 2016 is 'difficult to avoid'; 5. Food crisis.

Probably you are wondering what Official Manhattan Contrarian Worst Economics Writer Paul Krugman has to say about Venezuela.  Well, you'll just have to keep wondering, because Krugman doesn't choose to write about Venezuela.  Same goes for the other bombastic voices of left-wing "economics."  Ezra Klein?  Silence.  Matthew Yglesias?  Silence.

Bernie Sanders?  He got cornered on the subject of Venezuela a few days ago at an interview on Univision.  Here's the transcript on the subject:

LEÓN KRAUZE, UNIVISION: I am sure that you know about this topic: various leftist governments, especially the populists, are in serious trouble in Latin America. The socialist model in Venezuela has the country near collapse. Argentina, also Brazil, how do you explain that failure?

BERNIE SANDERS, DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE: You are asking me questions…

LEÓN KRAUZE, UNIVISION: I am sure you’re interested in that.

BERNIE SANDERS, DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE: I am very interested, but right now I’m running for President of the United States.

LEÓN KRAUZE, UNIVISION: So you don’t have an opinion about the crisis in Venezuela?

BERNIE SANDERS, DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE: Of course I have an opinion, but as I said, I’m focused on my campaign.

So can you really blame all these twenty-somethings for knowing nothing about socialism and its failures?  Won't anybody level with them?

Does Anyone In The United States Live On Less Than $2.00 Per Day?

The current issue (with a date of June 9) of the New York Review of Books has a review by Christopher Jencks of a book by Kathryn Edin and Luke Schaefer that came out last year, titled "$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America."  The review is generally respectful, if somewhat skeptical; indeed Jencks's general acceptance of the book's findings is indicated by the title of the review, which is "Why the Very Poor Have Become Poorer."  Several readers have asked me to comment.

When "$2.00 a Day" came out last year, it got the usual fawning reviews from the usual suspects.  For example, consider this from the review in the New York Times by William Julius Wilson:

This essential book is a call to action, and one hopes it will accomplish what Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” achieved in the 1960s — arousing both the nation’s consciousness and conscience about the plight of a growing number of invisible citizens. The rise of such absolute poverty since the passage of welfare reform belies all the categorical talk about opportunity and the American dream.   

You won't be surprised to hear that I have a different take.  This book is completely preposterous.  

Edin and Schaefer purport to have discovered -- through careful analysis of Census data -- that there is a greatly increasing number of people in "extreme poverty" in the United States.  For their definition of "extreme poverty," they say they take a definition from the World Bank, which uses a figure of $1.90 per day per person; and then they round it up to the $2.00 in the title of the book.  The methodology of the book consists of two parts.  Schaefer, whose expertise is in government statistics, analyzes the Census data from the survey known as SIPP (Survey of Income and Program Participation) to get aggregate numbers of people who report income of less than $2.00 per day.  This work yields figures of as much as 4 - 5% as the percent of the population of the United States "living" at this level of dire poverty, a figure which, according to the Schaefer's statistical data, nearly doubled between 1996 and 2011.  Then Edin, whose thing is "talking to low income Americans," goes out and interviews a number of people with stories of serious personal hardship.  And thus the book.

I hope that your first thought was, is there really anyone in America who lives on less than $2.00 per day, at least as averaged over some reasonable period of time?  The idea is completely ridiculous, and frankly an insult to the hundreds of millions of people in the world who actually do live in grinding poverty at this very low level.  Edin and Schaefer just intentionally confuse two very different concepts, which are, first, having "income" of only $2.00 per day, and second, only having $2.00 or less of resources per day available on which to live.  The second is what the World Bank is talking about when it talks about serious poverty out there in the world.  The first is a statistical artifact of the particular definition of "income" that you choose to use.  As I have discussed many times on this blog, the Census Bureau, including in its SIPP surveys, defines "poverty" in terms of an arbitrary artifact of "cash income" that excludes almost all government programs and many, many other resources available to people, in order to generate ridiculously high "poverty" statistics to defraud the American people.  To be fair to Edin and Schaefer, they do realize that they can't get away without at least discussing the plethora of government benefits available to those of low income; but their basic strategy is to just dismiss things like food stamps and housing assistance as not nearly as good as cash -- and therefore fair to just not count at all in a book that is supposedly about living on "$2.00 a Day" or less.  And they don't even think about, let alone discuss, the many non-cash, non-income resources that people may be living on.

There are sensible reviews of the Edin/Schaefer book out there.  For example here's one at Forbes by Tim Worstall titled "The Number Of Americans Living On $2 A Day Or Less Is Zero."   From Worstall:

[T]he real incidence of $2 a day poverty in the US is zero. The numbers cooked up for this book look only at cash income, not any other form of aid that people might get. They are also measuring transient populations flowing through a rocky patch, not some vast underclass. And finally they are measuring income, not the thing that we really want to measure, consumption possibilities.    

And I would say that even Worstall is somewhat misdirected by the Edin/Schaefer sleight-of-hand.  The mistake is assuming that because the Census Bureau records someone as having no or next-to-no "income," that that person is "poor" at all in any meaningful sense.  There are lots of people who have no "income" for some period of months or even years but have lots of resources.  They may even be "rich" as you would normally think of the term.  Large categories include retirees living off savings (consumption of savings does not count as "income") or reverse mortgages (borrowing doesn't count as "income"); students living off scholarships, fellowships and loans (scholarships, fellowships and loans don't count as "income"); kids supported by their parents while they look for their first job (family support doesn't count as "income").  My favorite category is business owners who have a losing year -- and many, many businesses, including large ones, have a losing year sooner or later.  Hey, a big enough business could lose a million dollars in a year!  Does an income of negative one million dollars in a year represent "extreme poverty" -- even as the owners continue to live in their mansions, paid for by the earnings of prior years, and expected earnings of future years?

For a serious analysis of the data that underlies the Edin/Schaefer work, consider this from Brookings -- "How Poor Are America's Poorest: U.S. $2 A Day Poverty In A Global Context."  Brookings is not exactly part of the vast right wing conspiracy.  Their conclusion:

Based on an assessment of consumption in the fourth quarter of 2011, we obtain a much lower $2 a day poverty rate of only 0.07 percent. To verify this result, we rerun our calculation using a more selective definition of consumption with the same survey data. This yields a similar poverty rate of 0.09 percent.    

OK, it's not quite zero, but just about.  And what does the World Bank itself say?  Here's their data for the $1.90 per day benchmark.  Again, they are talking about resources to live on, not some arbitrarily-defined "cash income."  They find no extreme poverty in the U.S. by their definition.

So to Mr. Wilson, the New York Times, the Huffington Post, or others who took this ridiculous book seriously, I ask, if it is a "call to action," what is the action you are thinking of?  More of the hundreds of billions of dollars of annual government spending that, according to your own statistics, only seem to be making "extreme poverty" worse?  If not that, then what?

As to the real reason why Census's SIPP figures show increasing numbers of people with reported "income" under $2.00 per day, there could be many explanations.  For example, today's near-zero interest rates mean that many retirees earn next-to-nothing on their savings.  Perhaps more young people are staying in school longer, or living on their parents' nickel for longer.  Obviously, none of these things has anything to do with "extreme poverty."  Edin and Schaefer do not even give consideration to any such scenarios.   

How Does The High Income Tax Strategy Play Out?

At Forbes Magazine a guy named Rex Sinquefield writes from time to time about the counterproductive tax strategies followed in recent years by the state of Connecticut.  A friend in that state sent me a link to Mr. Sinquefield's latest contribution, from May 23.  The article is titled "25 Years, $13 Billion Lost: Connecticut Income Tax Continues To Fail."  

I previously linked here to a post about a year ago by Mr. Sinquefield that focused on the big round of individual and corporate tax increases enacted by Connecticut in 2015.  Those increases included a permanent extension of a 20% corporate income tax surcharge, which led several large corporations with headquarters in Connecticut to threaten to leave.  Subsequently, in January 2016, the very largest Connecticut-headquartered company, General Electric, followed through and announced it will move its headquarters to Boston.  (Wow!  You really know that you've reached the top of the tax pyramid when companies leave your state to save taxes by going to Massachusetts!)  The 2015 increases also got Connecticut's top personal income tax rate up to 6.9% (on income above $250,000), which puts the top Connecticut rate above New York (outside NYC) for incomes under $1,070,350, and above New Jersey for incomes between $200,000 and $500,000.

Somehow the people of Connecticut failed to notice that they got rich precisely by being a haven of low taxes.  Prior to 1992 Connecticut had no income tax at all.  High income people flooded into the state, but not into the whole state.  Overwhelmingly the wealth was concentrated in that tiny panhandle that sticks out in the southwest corner of the state, toward New York City.  The panhandle contains four towns -- Greenwich, Stamford, Darien and New Canaan -- sometimes known as Connecticut's "gold coast."   To anyone who looked, it was obvious that the business model of those towns in their heyday was for their citizens to be able to deal with the New York business community without having to pay New York taxes.  Anyway, that was then.  Today, Connecticut has frittered away essentially all of its former tax advantage over New York and New Jersey, and is well above Massachusetts in overall tax burden.  The office building boom in downtown Stamford gradually came to a halt.

And what has happened to the location decisions of wealthy individuals?  That brings us to Mr. Sinquefield's latest article, where he focuses on data available from the IRS, and compiled by the Yankee Institute in Hartford, that reveal net migration of income earners between any two paired states.  The results should not surprise anyone:

Between 1992 and 2014 (the most recent year for which Internal Revenue Service taxpayer data is available), Connecticut lost $12.36 billion in net adjusted gross income (AGI). Perhaps not surprisingly, the bulk of this outwardly migrating AGI went to states that do not punish work by levying an income tax. The state of Florida won the lion’s share of Connecticut’s fleeing AGI, with $7.96 billion leaving the Nutmeg State for the Sunshine State.  

Florida, of course, has no income tax at all.  The $12.36 billion, by the way, is an annual amount, meaning that, on net, individuals who have migrated out of Connecticut since 1992 have annual income $12.36 billion higher than the annual incomes of those who have migrated in.  Moreover, the number has grown every year, and has accelerated in recent years.  For example, from 2006 to 2011 the figure crept up from about $6 billion to $7 billion; but then there was a prior big round of tax increases in 2011, and the figure shot up to about $9 billion in 2012 and $11 billion in 2013.  In a process that has now continued over 25 years, the income tax has transformed Connecticut's economy from tax-haven boom to high-tax stasis.

The funny thing is, somehow the income tax and its big gusher of state revenue has not solved Connecticut's problem of persistent annual budget crises.  The income tax -- initially a flat 1.5% -- was sold as the ultimate one-time fix that would end Connecticut's budget problems for all time.  Today, with the rate more than four times higher, the budget problems are the same.  All the money just disappeared down the maw of endemic overspending and seemingly far-off pension promises for public employees.  

Are there any lessons to be learned here for other states?  You might think so, but consider this article from James Nash of Bloomberg News on Monday, titled "States Eye Wallets Of Richest Residents With Income Tax Measures."   Nash discusses potential measures for the November ballot seeking to raise income taxes on high earners (or retain special high-earner tax rates otherwise scheduled to expire) in states including California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts and Minnesota.  Several of these are being sold as supposedly a special revenue stream to pay for a particular need.  For example, the Minnesota ballot initiative will supposedly provide money to "care for senior citizens and people with disabilities"; a Los Angeles County initiative will supposedly raise money to provide for "homeless services."

Nash quotes a guy named Morris Pearl, of something called Patriotic Millionaires, who believes that higher taxes on the wealthy few should be enacted because they are broadly popular:

"There is more action in the states because the federal government, particularly the Republicans in the House of Representatives, don’t really care what the people think," said Morris Pearl, a 56-year-old former managing director at Wall Street investment firm BlackRock Inc. who now heads the Patriotic Millionaires, a coalition of wealthy Americans advocating higher taxes on the rich. "In a lot of states, people are realizing that the wealthy are taking advantage of the system."   

Well, I can't say I'm surprised that a lot of people are in favor of higher taxes as long as they are to be paid by someone else.  But be careful what you wish for.  Remember that here in highest-in-the-nation tax-and-spend Manhattan we supposedly pay our highest-in-the-nation taxes to provide for a progressive utopia, but what we seem to have instead is highest-in-the-nation income inequality, well-above-average poverty rate, and schools that cost about double per student the national average for bottom-of-the-barrel results.  For that we put this huge drag on our economic performance?

The Deep Mystery Of Why Venezuela Is Failing

Last week in a post on the death spiral that is Venezuela's economy, I linked to a New York Times front page article ("Dying Infants And No Medicine") that described the disastrous state of that nation's healthcare facilities.  What I failed to mention was the usual cluelessness of Pravda in analyzing the causes of Venezuela's economic crisis.  In a lengthy article of several thousand words, here is all they say about how Venezuela came to its present economic extreme:

This nation has the largest oil reserves in the world, yet the government saved little money for hard times when oil prices were high. Now that prices have collapsed — they are around a third what they were in 2014 — the consequences are casting a destructive shadow across the country. Lines for food, long a feature of life in Venezuela, now erupt into looting. The bolívar, the country’s currency, is nearly worthless.  The crisis is aggravated by a political feud between Venezuela’s leftists, who control the presidency, and their rivals in congress.

Aha -- now we know!  The Venezuelans somehow forgot to "save money" when oil prices were high!  And now there's a "political feud" to boot!  The concept that Venezuela explicitly and aggressively pursued socialism and that that might have something to do with the problem -- that concept appears nowhere in the article.

If you think it is impossible to top the New York Times for economic cluelessness, I recommend to you this article from last week in Time magazine, "These 5 Facts Explain Why Venezuela Could Be on the Brink of Collapse."   OK, they say they are going to explain why Venezuela is in this mess.  Surely, they won't be able to do that without at least mentioning socialism?  Wrong!  Here's the entire text under the heading of "How Venezuela Got Here":

As Hemingway would say, Venezuela went bankrupt gradually, then suddenly. For years, the country has been deeply dependent on its vast oil reserves, which account for 96 percent of export earnings and nearly half its federal budget. That was manageable when oil was selling at more than $100 dollars a barrel. Venezuela has budgeted for oil at $40 per barrel for years now, but instead of saving the surplus when prices were higher, much of this emergency oil fund was either spent or stolen. Venezuela would now need oil prices to reach $121 per barrel to balance its budget—instead, they’re hovering around $50. Damage to Venezuela’s economy has been exacerbated by drought. About 65 percent of the country’s electricity is generated by a single hydroelectric dam that’s now in serious trouble.

Basically, it's the same non-explanation that we were fed by Pravda -- they failed to "save[] the surplus when prices were higher."  Oh, and of course Time adds in that there has been a big "drought."  Could the people at Time really be this dumb?  

Funny, but the economy of Texas is also heavily reliant on the oil business.  Texas has experienced the same decline in the price of oil as has Venezuela.  So how's the Texas economy doing?  Here's a brand new report out from Texas A&M University, with data through March 2016, well into the oil price decline.  A fair summary is that because of the oil price decline, the economy of Texas has gone from booming growth to much slower growth, with small negatives in some indicators.  For example, "real total private hourly earnings" were down 1.5% from March 2015 to March 2016; but the total number of jobs in the state was up over the same period, and the unemployment rate remained well below the U.S. national average (4.6% versus 5.0%).  Oh, and Texas had a huge drought from about 2010 to 2014.  Its economy boomed throughout that period.  

And of course, it's not just Texas.  Countries or states with high reliance on oil but a market economy do just fine when the price of oil declines.  Places like Norway and Canada come to mind; even Mexico!  Really, Time and the Times, can't you look around for some explanation that is even plausible?

Actually, the Time article above links to a prior effort in the same publication from December 2015, titled "These 5 Facts Explain Why Venezuela Is In Big Trouble -- Still."  It's unbelievable, but again there is no mention at all of socialism and its effects.  Fact #2 that "explains" why Venezuela is in "big trouble" is headed "Woeful Economy":

Let’s start with the economy, which is on course to contract by 10 percent this year. Venezuela must pay back $15.8 billion in debt between now and the end of 2016, but the country only has $15.2 billion in foreign reserves to make good on that. 7.3 percent of Venezuelan households are classified as living in “extreme poverty.” Working for the minimum wage in Venezuela means you can only afford a week’s worth of groceries per month—40 percent of people working in Venezuela make the minimum wage or less.  Come 2016, the country is projected to have an 18.1 percent unemployment rate. Inflation this year has already reached a staggering 159 percent; Venezuelans have taken to using their country’s currency as napkins. The only thing worse than not having the money to buy food and basic goods? Having the money and finding bare shelves in the supermarket.

Got that?  The economy is bad because the economy is bad!  Thank God we have read Time to find that out!  In case you're curious, the other four "facts" that "explain" why Venezuela is in big trouble are: #1 - "election fallout" (it's the "political feud" referred to by the Times); #3 - "petro-state in a cheap oil age"; #4 - "crime and no punishment"; and #5 - "a little help from my friends" (i.e., Venezuela over-borrowed during the good times and now the debt is coming due).  What about things like massive nationalizations, seizing businesses, price controls, currency controls, blowout government spending, redistributionism, and all the other elements of socialism?  Somehow, those things completely escape Time's notice.

So, if you are wondering how millions of young people can think Bernie Sanders and his policies are just fine, now you know.  Why would anyone associate the disaster in Venezuela with socialism?