Citizens United And Progressive Inability To Do Logical Thinking

A favorite whipping boy of today's progressive movement is the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision of 2010, which struck down as unconstitutional that portion of the 2002 McCain-Feingold "campaign finance reform" statute that limited independent political expenditures by corporations and unions in the run-up to elections.  Both Hillary and Bernie have as a main plank in their campaigns a promise to somehow legislatively reverse or otherwise find a way around Citizens United in order to "get money out of politics," and "rein in the special interests" in order to keep them from "buying elections."

Last week saw the issue again in the news.  The Senate Democrats put forth a new plan (it's not their first one) that they euphemistically call the "We The People Act" as their proposed way around the Citizens United decision.  Here is their press release.  Although the proposal contains some new tweaks to existing statutes (such as disclosure requirements for contributions to what are sometimes now called "dark money" PACs), the guts of the plan is found in a proposal to amend the First Amendment of the Constitution to give Congress and the states power to "regulate and limit" independent political expenditures:

This constitutional amendment resolution from Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) provides Congress and the states with power to enact campaign finance reforms that withstand constitutional challenges. It would fix Citizens United, McCutcheon, Buckley, and other bad precedents. Finally, it provides the authority to regulate and limit independent expenditures, including those made by corporations and Super PACs. 

The New York Times immediately weighed in on June 10 with a favorable editorial:

The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, which opened the floodgates to the buying and selling of elections, is a ruling Democrats love to deplore but nobody ever seems able to do anything about. . . .  [T]he principle of cracking down on collusion is a good one. It has been made forcefully by good-government groups, like the Brennan Center for Justice, and by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who has sponsored a bill making similar suggestions. Senate Democrats on Thursday proposed a package of campaign reforms targeting Citizens United as well.

This has to be about their fiftieth editorial deploring Citizens United and the "opening of the floodgates to buying and selling elections."  

Call me crazy, but I just can't figure out how it is that when "independent political expenditures" by "corporations" become subject to "regulations and limits," that the New York Times won't find itself in the soup.  First, they are organized as a corporation.  Second, essentially everything they do is an "independent political expenditure" for the Democratic candidate or candidates of the moment.  OK, maybe someone could quibble over whether it's "everything" they do, or just a large percentage of what they do.  For example, perhaps the coverage of sports and the arts should be excluded, and maybe the weather.  But I wouldn't be so sure about the arts.  Consider this from an article a couple of days ago about the Broadway musical Hamilton.  Excerpt:

Mr. Miranda’s depiction of Hamilton as resourceful immigrant and talented self-made man captures an important aspect of his character. But the musical avoids an equally pronounced feature of Hamilton’s beliefs: his deeply ingrained elitism, his disdain for the lower classes and his fear of democratic politics. The musical’s misleading portrayal of Hamilton as a “scrappy and hungry” man of the people obscures his loathing of the egalitarian tendencies of the revolutionary era in which he lived.

The New York Times spends about $1.5 billion per year putting out its "news" product.  How much of that could be deemed some sort of political expenditure?  It could easily be $1 billion.  Any "limits" that might be imposed, even relatively high ones ($5000?) will of course catch them.  

Read some of their many editorials on this (here and here are a couple of more examples) and all you can think is that they have totally not recognized this as an issue.  Why?  Do they think it is because they are the Sulzberger family, and therefore "good," as opposed to, for example, the Koch family, who are obviously "bad"?  That argument won't help much in court.  The only real one they might try would be to argue that they are entitled to a blanket exemption because they are the "press."  But why isn't the Citizens United entity, and any other entity that organizes to put out information relative to a newsworthy event such as an election, part of the "press"?  You don't need a license to be part of the "press" in this country, so you can't distinguish "press" from "non-press" by whether someone has a license.  Is the distinction videos versus print?  The New York Times puts out plenty of videos.  And I'm sure that Citizens United (and every other Super PAC) could put out some kind of print newsletter in addition to its movie or ads if that's what it takes to qualify as "press."  

In short, I can't see any way that the "press/non-press" distinction could hold up to protect the New York Times and its ilk when the day comes that "independent political expenditures" are subject to "regulations and limits."  And remember, the penalties for campaign finance violations are not just civil; they are criminal.  With the proposed constitutional amendment in place, why wouldn't the next Republican president go after the Times and a few other soft targets in the mainstream media?

It's likely of course that this whole constitutional amendment thing is going nowhere, and the Times is well aware of that.  What that means is that the flood of proposals and editorials is not really about changing the law, but about getting the base fired up.  They are counting, of course, on the progressive base being too ignorant to know that the main thing protected by the Citizens United decision is the mainstream Democrat-operative media itself.   

Annals Of Government Fraud: The "Social Cost Of Carbon"

Somewhere along the line in the growth of the administrative state, some very naive people got the idea that giving bureaucrats arbitrary power is no problem because the bureaucrats can be constrained by a requirement that they do a "cost-benefit analysis" before they undertake major actions or regulations.  Thus no bureaucratic regulation will proceed unless the benefits exceed the costs.  Obviously, if the benefits exceed the costs, the regulation would be a net benefit, and of course it should take effect.  What could go wrong?

In the ranks of such touchingly naive people we have, for example, the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court.  The Congress has indulged in hundreds of broad delegations of regulatory power to the administrative state, often with theoretically constraining language that either explicitly requires a cost-benefit analysis, or alternatively says something sort of close to that, such as that any regulation must be "appropriate and necessary."  In the case of a collection of power plant emissions regulations imposed by EPA in 2011, EPA attempted to take the position that the "appropriate and necessary" test under the Clean Air Act did not require it to consider cost before imposing the regulations.  The Supreme Court disagreed in the 2015 case of Michigan v. EPA, and sent EPA back to the drawing board.  So with that, agencies will almost always be required to assess cost against benefit before imposing any major action or regulation, and thus everything is now back to perfect balance and equilibrium in the world.  Right??

Of course the flaw here is the naive faith that a bureaucracy can be trusted to do an honest cost-benefit analysis, when in fact the essential dynamic of all bureaucracies is that they are only interested in growing their own power, staff, and budget.  For today's lesson, consider what goes by the name of the "Social Cost of Carbon."

The "Social Cost of Carbon" can fairly be described as the mother of all government cost-benefit analyses.  Supposedly it is a sophisticated tote-up of plusses and minuses that stands behind all government efforts to impose regulations in the area of "climate change."  In reality it is a completely dishonest scam that wildly exaggerates costs and ignores benefits in order to justify vast seizures of power unto the government.  

You may or may not have heard of the specific term "Social Cost of Carbon," but undoubtedly you do know that in 2009 when the Obama administration came in, "climate change" was one of its top priorities; yet it was clear that there was going to be no new legislation (even though the Congress was fully in Democratic hands).  The administration thus had a huge impetus to proceed by regulations to increase its power and authority.  This was several years before the Supreme Court's decision in Michigan v. EPA, but the Obamanauts were smart enough to realize that if they were going to have an aggressive regulatory agenda, somewhere in some statute would be something that someone would claim required a determination that the benefits of any proposed regulations exceeded costs.  And this "climate change" thing had the potential to impose hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars of costs on the U.S. economy.    

This was way too big to entrust to any one little agency.  So instead, the White House itself took the reins, and convened what it called the "Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon."  To do the mother of all cost-benefit analyses, you need the mother of all Interagency Working Groups.  What agencies?  In government acronym-speak, it was CEA, CEQ, DOA, DOC, DOE, DOT, EPA, NEC, OECC, OMB, OSTP, and DOT (here's a document with the list) -- all co-ordinated through the White House itself.  Whew!  The mission was to assess the costs versus the benefits of emitting carbon into the atmosphere via the burning of fossil fuels.  With this huge collection of scintillatingly brilliant geniuses from literally every important government agency, certainly you could be assured that the result would be perfect and fair and accurate.  They came out with their initial results in 2010.  The results were subsequently updated in a further document issued in 2013, with with yet a further revision in July 2015.

Now, step back from this for a moment.  Think about what fossil fuels have brought to the world over the course of the past century or so.  To start with, there's electricity.  Could you go as long as a few days without it?  It is light, telecommunications, computers, smartphones, the internet, music, television and movies, refrigeration, air conditioning, tools, appliances, and so many other things.  About 90% of electricity worldwide comes from fossil fuels and thus from the emission of carbon into the atmosphere; and by the way, most of the remaining 10% (nuclear, hydro) is also not OK with environmentalists.  Next, coming virtually 100% from fossil fuels, we have transportation -- automobiles, planes, trains, buses, ships, even motorcycles.  Then we have mechanized agriculture, also depending almost entirely on fossil fuels.  Mechanized agriculture is the difference between having our food supply produced by 2% of the population (as we have today) versus the 90% of the population it took to produce the food before mechanization.  Without mechanized agriculture, you would almost certainly be working on a farm today if you wanted to eat; and by the way you would be using a horse to plow the field rather than a tractor.  And your plow would be made of wood (can't make metal without fossil fuels).  Then come mechanized and automated factories, which also depend almost entirely on fossil fuels.  Is it even possible to run a steel mill on power from wind turbines?  Still other things dependent on fossil fuels:  Try mowing your lawn without a mower powered by fossil fuels; or trimming a tree without a trimming device powered by fossil fuels; or plowing your driveway after a snowstorm without a plow powered by fossil fuels.  Almost all homes that are heated use fossil fuels to do it.  This list is almost endless.  Fossil fuels literally have transformed human life, hugely for the better, over the course of little more than the past one hundred years.

Are there any negatives in the use of fossil fuels?  Of course there are.  Fossil fuels have impurities that end up as pollution in the atmosphere -- SO2, NO2, "particulates" (but great progress has been made in reducing the amounts of these impurities that make it into the atmosphere).  And then there's the threat of "climate change," largely theoretical at this point and projected in models that you may or may not believe.  

Suppose that you even believe some of the worst case scenarios projected by the most alarmist of the climate models, and you are then given the task of doing a cost-benefit analysis for the use of fossil fuels by mankind.  Your first reaction would probably be, how do you quantify something like this?  How do you put a value on what it is worth to people to have basically free streaming music, or air conditioning in Texas, or jet travel to Europe and back?  But even as you ponder some of those questions, I hope that your second reaction would be, this is not even remotely close.  On any conceivable scale of measurement, the benefits to mankind from the use of fossil fuels have to outweigh the negatives by a factor of hundreds if not thousands.  The benefits so wildly exceed the costs that the whole effort to try to quantify and weigh the two can't really even be justified.  Even if you hugely minimize the benefits and exaggerate the costs, there couldn't possibly be any way to make the use of fossil fuels by mankind into a net negative.  Indeed, if you need a reasonable proxy for the positive benefits of carbon-based energy, a pretty good start would be 100% of GDP.  For the U.S. that's around $17 trillion per year.  After all, without carbon-based energy GDP would be a very small fraction of what it is.  Maybe you could knock off a couple of tril for the part produced by nuclear and hydro, the infinitesimal part produced by wind and solar, and the even more infinitesimal part that you could produce by your own backbreaking human labor in the absence of an energy boost from something else.  So a good estimate of what we might call the Social Benefit of Carbon, or alternatively the Negative Social Cost of Carbon, would be around $15 trillion per year. 

That's how you would approach the problem if you were honest, or if you had even a smidgeon of integrity.  But remember, this is the government, and their power is at stake.

So in case you haven't already guessed, the huge collection of government geniuses in the mother of all Interagency Working Groups sweated and struggled over this problem for about a year, and then in February 2010 they came out with a document titled "Technical Support Document: -- Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis -- Under Executive Order 12866."    And sure enough, their conclusion was that the use of fossil fuels by mankind imposes big costs upon society, hereafter to be known as the "Social Cost of Carbon."  And not just small  costs.  Gigantic costs.  Of course they give multiple scenarios and estimates to make the whole thing as confusing and incomprehensible as possible.  But the simplest answer was, on our preferred assumptions and for this year of 2010, the Social Cost of Carbon is $35 per ton of carbon emitted.  (Total carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. run in the range of 7 billion tons per year.  That would put the total annual "Social Cost of Carbon" in the range of $250 billion, for the U.S. alone.)  As mentioned above, since 2010 there have been two updates, most recently in 2015, and you will not be surprised to learn that the claims as to the Social Cost of Carbon have only increased.  At the comparable spot in the model ranges to the $35 per ton claim in 2010, the new 2015 number is $56 per ton.  That would put annual U.S. SCC now at around $400 billion.  But on other assumptions (particularly as to discount rate) it could be as high as $700 billion!  And also, rapidly increasing every year!

So what possible approach to valuing costs and benefits could possibly lead to such frankly insane conclusions?  Go to those two "technical support documents" put out by the IWG, and try to even figure out what they are doing.  It's endless bureaucratic doublespeak and bafflegab.  We're using really sophisticated models from the smartest of the smartest at the very best Ivy League schools!  We have the DICE model and the FUND model and the PAGE model! 

It's impossible to quote from documents like these in a short blog post, but I'll try to summarize at least a little.  It seems that the enormous costs projected by the models trace almost entirely to temperature rises assumed to occur from greenhouse warming, and that the increased temperatures are assumed to cause harm in four main ways:  sea level rise, health effects, agricultural productivity, and so-called "discontinuity events."  

For example, for sea level rise, here's how they say it works:  CO2 will cause global warming in the future; global warming will cause ice to melt; enough ice melting will cause sea level to rise; we project that rising seas will flood Manhattan in, say, the year 2060.  How much loss will come from that?  Pick an arbitrary large number!  How about $1 trillion.  No, make it $5 trillion!  Now discount that back to the present at a ridiculously low discount rate.  It's easily $1 trillion of "present value."  (Less than that?  Then make the 2060 loss $10 trillion!)  Your heating your house puts 2 tons per year of CO2 into the air.  The Social Cost of Carbon is $56 per ton.  Thus your personal contribution from home heating to the flooding of Manhattan in 2060 costs "society" $112 right now this year!  And sorry, there is no offsetting credit for your being warm in your house in the winter.  You should have heated your house with a wind turbine!  It is really far, far beyond ridiculous. 

My short comments on the four things that underlie the bulk of the projected "loss":

• Sea level rise.  I can find no convincing evidence that the rate of sea level rise is any faster now in the intensive fossil fuel era than it has been consistently since the end of the last ice age.  (The rate, by the way, is about 8 inches per century.)  Here's my favorite indicator:  The headquarters of Goldman Sachs is located just a few hundred feet from the Manhattan waterfront, and at most about 15 feet above sea level.  That's what the smart money thinks about sea level rise, at least over the next many decades.  (At 8 inches increase in sea level per century, the Goldman Sachs headquarters is safe from the sea for another good couple of millennia.)
• Health effects.  Assume worst case projected scenarios of five or even six degrees of warming.  That's a lot less than the average temperature difference between, say, New York and Houston.  As far as I know, Houston is no less healthy than New York.
• Agricultural productivity.  There is no question but that higher temperatures and more CO2 make for better, not worse, agricultural productivity.
• "Discontinuity events."  This seems to refer to future natural and weather disasters that they have no reason to think will be more frequent or severe in a warmer future than they are now.  They are completely making it up.

So to summarize: The government has convened literally everybody who is anybody in the regulatory apparat to put out a document to "prove" to the world what every thinking person knows can't possibly be true, namely that carbon fuels are a cost rather than a benefit to humanity.  It's hard to imagine a more transparent and obvious fraud.  

Anyway, I take up this subject today because the internet has been abuzz this past week with critiques of the government's Social Cost of Carbon analysis that somehow seek to deal with it on its own terms.  A paper in April by Dayaratna, McKitrick and Kreutzer re-ran the government's SCC numbers using lower climate sensitivity estimates based on empirical evidence (rather than just models).  Michael Bastasch of the Daily Caller picked up on that article on June 7 in a piece titled "Experts Debunk Obama's 'Social Cost of Carbon' Estimate -- It Might Be Negative!"   (Might be???  It's at least $10 trillion per year negative on any reasonable assumptions.)  The generally sensible Judith Curry also comments here on the issue, and equally points out that the government's SCC figures rely on climate sensitivity estimates that have been refuted by empirical evidence of the past several decades.

Fair enough.  But these people give the government way too much credit for fairness and honesty. The Social Cost of Carbon is a preposterous and transparent fraud by the government that is ridiculous in forty different ways.  I suppose these people deserve some credit for doing hard work to establish that the government's representations fall apart even on their own terms, but really, this whole Social Cost of Carbon thing is something that no intelligent person should take seriously.  And yet, it seems that we have to.  Meanwhile, the idea that imposing a "cost-benefit" requirement on the government is any meaningful constraint is exposed as complete futility.  If they can put out an analysis purporting to make use of fossil fuels a negative for mankind, then they can do literally anything.

Socialist Death Spirals And Politicians' Claims About Economic Growth

Understanding the phenomenon of the Socialist Death Spiral is critical to evaluating politicians' claims about how their policies will affect the economy.  For example, there is Hillary Clinton's oft-repeated claim that economic growth is stronger under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents.  As one example among many, here was Hillary at one of the Democratic debates on October 13:

I have a five-point economic plan, because this inequality challenge we face, we have faced it at other points. It’s absolutely right. It hasn’t been this bad since the 1920s. But if you look at the Republicans versus the Democrats when it comes to economic policy, there is no comparison. The economy does better when you have a Democrat in the White House and that’s why we need to have a Democrat in the White House in January 2017.

Should anyone give the claim any credit?  

About a year ago in this post, I started writing about the phenomenon of the Socialist Death Spiral.  The concept is that increased government spending and tightening government control of an economy in the "socialist" model reverses the positive incentives of the private ownership/free exchange model (aka "capitalism"), undermines the dynamic of economic growth, and causes a gradual but then accelerating decline of the real economy.  Yet somehow as gradual economic decline sets in, official government economic statistics at first do not reflect that reality.  Instead, in the early phases of increased government economic control, official statistics appear to reflect continued, sometimes even increased, economic growth.  What is occurring is obvious to anyone who looks at how economic growth is measured:  government counts its own spending as a one-hundred-cents-on-the-dollar addition to GDP.  Even completely non-productive and wasteful spending can thereby be made to appear, for a time, to be "growing" the economy.  That is, until (in Margaret Thatcher's words) the government runs out of other people's money.  Then everything falls apart at once.

The single most notable example of this phenomenon was the former Soviet Union and its satellites, who continued to proclaim rapid growth and economic triumph into the 1980s, even though it was obvious that the communist economies were in stasis and decline.  It all fell apart within a period of a couple of years from about 1989 to 1991.  Today, we have Venezuela.  Official government statistics there reflected rapid economic growth from about 2003 to 2013, driven by blowout government spending and fortuitously strong oil prices.  As recently as 2013 David Sirota in Salon called Hugo Chavez's record in Venezuela an "economic miracle."  (Really???  Really!!!)  In 2014 the air started to leak out of the balloon; and in 2015 it burst.  Today the people of Venezuela are starving and rioting.  In retrospect, it is obvious that the government was able to use increasing spending, increasing control of the economy and control of the economic statistics to maintain an illusion of strong economic growth for about ten years.  Then it ran out of other people's money.

And then there's Brazil.  Former President "Lula" da Silva came into office in 2003 with an explicit left-wing agenda of higher government spending and much redistribution of wealth.  I do not claim to be an expert on Brazil's economic policies over the past 13 years.  Certainly Lula turned out to be more moderate in governing than many had feared, and did not try to nationalize the whole economy (although Brazil's economy was already dominated by state-owned enterprises before he came to power).  Here is an assessment (from approximately 2010, near the end of Lula's term) by a guy named Mark Langevin listing many of Lula's enacted policies:  the family cash stipend (bolsa familia) going to about 25% of the population; increased social pensions; in-kind benefits including dental care and rural electricity; repeatedly increasing the minimum wage; etc.  Anyway, when Lula left office at the end of 2010 the general feeling about his term of office can best be characterized as euphoria.  Literally dozens of articles talked about his economic "miracle" or his "alchemy."  He proved that you can engage in massive redistribution of wealth while still preserving economic growth!  Example (from CBS News, December 27, 2010, "Lula's Legacy: A Transformed Brazil"):

Early fears that the leftist union leader who battled Brazil's dictatorship would turn the nation socialist proved unfounded. . . .  Under Silva, the economy expanded twice as fast per year as it did in the previous two decades, growing an average of 4 percent yearly.
But Silva's legacy goes beyond figures. It's caught in the glint of an eye of a slum dweller such as Lima, who sees herself in Silva's impoverished roots, and feels pride that it was a man from the poor masses who finally delivered on the promise of Brazil.

Unfortunately, it didn't last; and much of the "growth" was likely illusory.  According to The Economist here, economic growth (by the official numbers) stopped in 2014 and has turned sharply negative in 2015 and 2016.  The government's budget deficit is up to around 10% of GDP, and projections for the future (given massive social spending commitments) are even worse.  They have run out of other people's money.  The current President is undergoing impeachment proceedings in a corruption scandal.

Walter Russell Mead has a post at the American Interest on May 23, "Brazil's Economic Nightmare."  Excerpt:

[T]he country faces a genuinely wrenching adjustment in the immediate term. The experiment with leftwing rule began reasonably well under Lula and had some genuine social accomplishments to show for itself. But Brazil has missed another historic opportunity, squandering the income from the China-driven commodity boom instead of taking advantage of the good years to build a more solid foundation for the future.

Mead is generally an insightful guy, but I'm sorry, this is ridiculously naive.  The "experiment with leftwing rule . . . began reasonably well" but they "squandered the income" from the commodity boom?  No.  The whole idea behind the leftwing rule was the blowout government spending.  That's the model: you spend as much money as you can as fast as you can and you pretend that it is all a 100% addition to economic growth.  That's how you claim a booming economy and a decrease in income inequality (assuming you count handouts as income), all at the same time.  It all seems to work (if you believe the official numbers), until the day that you run out of other people's money and the bottom falls out.  If you want to find out how much of the economic "growth" in the "growth" period was real versus illusory, I'm sorry, but no official statistics exist for that. 

So we return to Hillary Clinton's claim that "the economy does better when you have a Democrat in the White House."  Robert Farley checks that claim here at factcheck.org.  He uses a 2015 academic paper by Blinder and Watson.  (Yes, it's the same Alan Blinder who served on the Council of Economic Advisors under President Clinton.  Somehow Farley forgets to mention that.)  The B&W analysis measures the success of each President's economic policies by using the official government GDP numbers and the performance of the economy during exactly the period of that President's term -- in other words, assuming that each President gets his economic agenda enacted on day 1 and that that agenda produces its economic effects with no lags and is perfectly measured by government statistics that count increased spending as a 100% increase to GDP.  It's not hard to see how that methodology would favor presidents who increase government spending, and disfavor those who cut or stabilize government spending, even if the latter policy is far better for real growth.  John Gaski here at the City Journal on May 30 points out that if you merely introduce a two-year lag into the calculations, the apparent advantage to the Democratic presidents disappears.  The experience of Venezuela and Brazil suggests that the real lag before the harm of increased government spending becomes too obvious to ignore may well be more like ten years.

The Paradox Of How To Raise The Poor From Poverty

If you follow official government propaganda on the issue of housing, then you know that it is absolutely obvious to all thinking people that the poor are poor in large part because they live in concentrated areas of poverty, isolated and remote from economic activity and successful people.  If only the poor could live amidst the wealthy and successful, then they would have access to opportunities and to good jobs, and would quickly rise up from poverty.  Or something like that.

And thus currently one of the government's biggest pushes in the anti-poverty realm is HUD's so-called AFFH (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing) Rule, made final about a year ago in July 2015.  Here is the text of the rule.  The idea behind the rule is that, since exclusion from wealthy areas is what keeps the poor poor, therefore wealthy towns must be forced by government coercion to accept HUD-subsidized public housing as the means to assist the poor on their way up.  The rule has most recently gotten itself into the news due to HUD's lawsuit against Westchester County, New York to force the construction of low income public housing in the wealthy hamlet of Chappaqua, part of the Town of New Castle.  (The Town of New Castle is famously home to all of Democratic presumptive presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, her husband Bill, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.)  Here is HUD's statement of the reason for its AFFH Rule, from its release:

The Fair Housing Act not only prohibits discrimination but, in conjunction with other statutes, directs HUD's program participants to take significant actions to overcome historic patterns of segregation, achieve truly balanced and integrated living patterns, promote fair housing choice, and foster inclusive communities that are free from discrimination.

I know what you are thinking.  You are thinking that, if the way to assist the poor to rise up is to have them live in proximity to the wealthy and successful, then it should be absolutely just as good an idea to have the rich move in among the poor as to have the poor move in among the rich.  Both lead to comparable integration of races and income levels.  Really what's the difference?  Actually, there is one significant difference, which is this: having the poor move in among the rich doesn't seem to be happening much naturally, and therefore requires government coercion and massive subsidies; whereas, having the rich move in among the poor does seem to be happening naturally, and therefore requires no government coercion and no subsidies.  If anything one would think that that difference, which is no small matter, should make the process of integration through gentrification the preferred method.   At the least, the processes by which the rich may move in among the poor should receive the encouragement and approval of government entities, and certainly should not be subject to obstruction from the government.  Right?  Oh, you are so naive.

Which brings us to the current situation on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  As readers here know, the story of the Lower East Side waterfront of Manhattan is truly one of the most bizarre and disastrous real estate tales in the world.  A stretch of almost three miles of Manhattan waterfront real estate, running from approximately the Manhattan Bridge up to 14th Street, which in any rational universe would be some of the most valuable real estate in the world, is occupied almost entirely by low-income HUD-subsidized housing projects.  Based on comparable values from the private housing on the Lower West Side waterfront of Manhattan, the approximately 20,000 apartments in these 100 or so buildings, if in private ownership, would have an aggregate value somewhere in the range of $50 billion to $100 billion.  But because they are owned in socialist-model public ownership, the value of these buildings is exactly zero -- zero dollars and zero cents.  Nobody can sell them, and nobody can buy them.  They pay no property taxes.  The tenants' rents cover less than half of operating costs, and the buildings require millions of dollars in annual government operating subsidies to keep them from crumbling.  The buildings' residents live predominantly in poverty.  (If somehow it makes no sense to you to talk about "poverty" for people living in apartments that if appraised by standard methods would be valued at an average of maybe $3 million -- or even $5 million for the ones with water views -- then you just have no understanding of what "poverty" means in today's world!)

But the occupation of this stretch of waterfront by the projects is not 100%.  Somehow, when the government urban-renewal bulldozer bulldozed through here in the 1930s through 60s, a few sites were missed.  And now -- horror of horrors! -- some private developers have recognized the value of the real estate, have bought up some of the few privately-owned sites, and are proposing to put up big high-rises so that they can sell valuable water views to wealthy newcomers.  Indeed, one such big new high-rise is already under construction.  Would you think that the existing community of predominantly low-income people would welcome the wealthy newcomers as the way to help themselves exit from poverty?  Absolutely not!

The local Villager newspaper has the story in its current issue.  The headline is "Activists call on C.B. [Community Board] 3 to take a stand against wave of luxury high-rises."  Here is the Villager's picture of a rendering of what the stretch of waterfront immediately north of the Manhattan Bridge will look like with two new high-rises.  The green one on the right, by mega-developer Extell, is already under construction.       

Note the row of projects along the waterfront toward the right of the picture, which is only the beginning of several comparable miles and dozens of comparable buildings.  And, in case you are wondering if there are any good jobs in this area, that's the new One World Trade Center with the spire in the background on the left.  It's easy walking distance (less than one mile) away.  The Financial District, with its several hundred thousand jobs, is equally close.

So what is the reaction of the community to these new buildings?  From the Villager:

Members of the Chinatown Working Group — a coalition of grassroots organizations whose goal is to draft a master plan that would preserve housing affordability in a wide swath of Lower Manhattan — spoke out angrily at the full board meeting at P.S. 20 on May 24. They repeatedly demanded that C.B. 3 at its next monthly meeting issue a strong statement of support for the coalition’s housing preservation agenda.  “We want you to sign a pledge at your June meeting that says ‘no’ to more luxury development,” a C.W.G. member said. . . .  

Francisca Benítez, a member of C.W.G. and Chinatown & Lower East Side Artists Against Displacement, or CLAAD, made a desperate plea for action.  “Passing the C.W.G. plan is now more urgent than ever, with Extell and other skyscrapers being built on the Lower East Side waterfront,” she said. “C.B. 3 should support the community’s demand to stop Extell. . . .  

And the reaction of the Chairwoman of the Community Board?:

[C.B. 3 Chairwoman Gigi] Li later told this newspaper that the community board has been working hard to come up with a plan that would stop the proliferation of high-rise luxury development on the Lower East Side.

But don't these people realize that having wealthy and successful people move in next door is the best route to their escape from poverty?  It seems that they didn't get that memo.  Then again, it was always obvious that the idea behind HUD-subsidized projects is not to help poor people escape from poverty, but rather to keep the poor people poor.  If HUD-subsidized projects in wealthy areas helped the poor escape from poverty, then some eighty years on into the game the people in HUD projects in wealthy Manhattan would not still be poor.  But they are still poor (at least if you don't count the market value of their housing in their income).

If you listen to the thoughts of the community representatives as expressed above, their main goal is to "preserve affordability" in the neighborhood.  To put that in terms somewhat less flattering to them, what they want is to keep their multimillion dollar apartments and not have to pay for them.  Can't say I blame them.  On the other hand, no existing housing was demolished for these two new high-rises (one site was basically vacant, and the other was a supermarket). The so-called "affordable" housing in the area is already protected either by New York City rent regulations or socialist-model ownership by the Housing Authority.  So what are these people worried about?  (The obvious answer is, they're worried that someday someone will wake up and realize how ridiculous this situation is.  Sorry, the Manhattan Contrarian already did that.  And really, the situation is so ridiculous that it's only a question of time until lots of people start waking up, no matter how many supposedly ironclad city "plans" are put in place to "stop" the developers.)

As to HUD's AFFH, one might be forgiven for getting the idea that the whole thing is not really about helping the poor rise from poverty, but rather is just a way to stoke some racial and class resentments, to take some revenge against some of the wealthy and successful and, not incidentally, to give HUD an ongoing and ever-growing mission and budget.  It's not pretty.

More Dangerous Government-Backed "Consensus" Science: Salt

A regular theme here is how the government -- supposedly consisting of all-perfect experts who can use their expertise to run the people's lives -- regularly falls for scientific nonsense promoted by the loudest and most-insistent self-promoters (always living entirely on the government nickel).  See, e.g., climate, the "low-fat" diet, etc.  Of course, in every case the scientific nonsense translates into lots more power for some power-obsessed government bureaucracy.  

A particularly egregious example of the phenomenon is the campaign against dietary salt.  Back in 2013 I wrote two posts on this subject, the first (in May) titled "Junk Statistics And The Government's Campaign For More Power," and the second (in July) "The Endless Supply Of Fake Scares And Statistical Scams."  The particular thing that inspired those posts was that the Institute of Medicine -- which had long supported government initiatives to regulate salt in the diet -- had just come out with a report analyzing the literature on dietary salt, and had concluded that there was little evidence of harm at levels consumed by most Americans, and some substantial evidence that reducing salt much below these levels could well be harmful to many people.  The May 2013 post quoted from a New York Times article of that month reporting on the brand-new IOM study, title "No Benefits Seen in Sharp Limits on Salt in Diet."  Excerpt:

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. . . .  “As you go below the 2,300 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.    

And it hasn't gotten any better since then for the anti-salt campaign.  For example, the Washington Post wonkblog reported in April 2015 on the latest, in a post titled "Is the American diet too salty?  Scientists challenge the long-standing government warning."   

[U]nknown to many shoppers urged to buy foods that are “low sodium” and “low salt,” this longstanding warning has come under assault by scientists who say that typical American salt consumption is without risk. . . .  [A]ccording to studies published in recent years by pillars of the medical community, the low levels of salt recommended by the government might actually be dangerous.  “There is no longer any valid basis for the current salt guidelines,” said Andrew Mente, a professor at McMaster University in Ontario and one of the researchers involved in a major study published last year by the New England Journal of Medicine. “So why are we still scaring people about salt?”

So, Mr. Menton, your side appears to have won this one, so why are you still complaining?  The reason is that adverse data seems to have completely lost its ability to deter bureaucracies bent on increasing their power.  We're now three years into the era when everybody who follows the issue knows that salt in the diet at levels you find tasty is not harmful, and yet just this week we have two pieces of news on bureaucracies not only continuing, but ramping up the anti-salt jihad.  

First, the FDA.  Just this week the FDA has come out with a new thing called its "Draft Guidance" for "Voluntary Sodium Reduction Goals."   Do you like that "voluntary" part?  Good luck to a Kraft or a Goya if they try to say they decline to participate.  So why is the FDA doing this at this time? Here's their justification:

According to the 2010 Institute of Medicine (IOM) Report, “Strategies to Reduce Sodium Intake in the United States” (Ref. 5), multiple public health efforts have attempted to reduce sodium intake over the past 40 years. However, these efforts, which mainly included education initiatives, have not been successful. The IOM noted this and concluded that without an overall reduction of the level of sodium in the food supply, consumers will not be able to reach intakes recommended by the Dietary Guidelines. 

Yes, it's based on a 2010 IOM report.  But what about the 2013 IOM report that found that the dietary sodium levels recommended by the Dietary Guidelines were borderline dangerous?  They somehow spin it as supporting their position, and completely ignore all the recent adverse research and data out there.  From a June 1 New York Times article reporting on the FDA initiative:  

David A. McCarron, a research associate in the Department of Nutrition at the University of California, Davis, said a number of studies had shown risks of too little salt.  “Going below 3,000 is dangerous — that’s what the data has shown,” said Professor McCarron, who has consulted for the food industry.

By the way, the government's guideline for salt is 2300 mg per day.  And by God we're going to make the food companies get us there, no matter how many people we kill along the way!

Also in the news, on May 26 a panel of the New York State Appellate Division, First Department (the district that covers Manhattan and the Bronx) has upheld the denial of a preliminary injunction sought by the National Restaurant Association against the New York City Department of Health to prevent it from enforcing new rules requiring that the amount of salt in each dish be specified on the menu.  You say that it's impossible even to know how much salt the cook may have shaken from his salt shaker onto your steak?  Too bad!  Hey, if the FDA can put through a bunch of anti-salt regulations, then so can we!

Among all the government crusades and jihads, the anti-salt campaign has to be about the most pointless.  Your body tells you when you need more salt, and if you're not getting enough from your industrial salad dressing and canned soup, it's likely that you will suddenly find yourself with a craving for potato chips or a ham.  But meanwhile a bunch of bureaucrats get to feel really self-important about flexing their power.  The result will show up in your cost of food, but you'll never be able to attach any specific amount as the incremental cost imposed by the regulators.  Meanwhile the amount of your dietary salt intake will remain the same. 

Which Candidate Would "Bring Fascism To America"?

In an op-ed a couple of weeks ago in the Washington Post, a guy named Robert Kagan (of Brookings and the Council on Foreign Relations) opined on the subject of Donald Trump that "This is how fascism comes to America."   The op-ed inspired considerable commentary, including this piece by Peter Baker in the New York Times -- supposedly a news article rather than an opinion column -- titled "Rise of Donald Trump Tracks Growing Debate Over Global Fascism." 

Calling someone a "fascist" -- and thereby analogizing that person to Hitler and Mussolini and invoking the memory of their crimes -- is of course the easiest and cheapest and most overused way for a political commentator to try to demonize and de-legitimize a politician he does not like.  But that does not necessarily mean that every commentator who applies the "fascist" label to a candidate is wrong.  And lord knows that I have plenty of my own differences with Trump (e.g., here and here).  But the question for today is, is there something about Trump that is particularly or uniquely "fascist"; and, if so, is there really good reason to believe that Trump is likely to take America down a road toward "fascism" any more so than, say, an Obama, or a Clinton, or a Sanders?

One of the problems with trying to tag someone as a "fascist" is that fascism never was known for any kind of coherent policy program.  As perhaps the most important example, Hitler demonized and vilified Stalin and the Soviet Union, while at the same time adopting the label of "socialist" for his own movement and engaging in massive industry nationalizations and government control of the economy.  Yes, it didn't make any sense; but at the same time there's little doubt that Hitler himself thought that his policies were highly intelligent and coherent -- even brilliant.

Kagan thinks that the very meaninglessness of trying to attach the "fascist" label to any particular set of policies is what gives him the license to declare Trump a fascist.  It's not that any particular policy of Trump is the same as one of Hitler or Mussolini; it's that all three men are known for policy prescriptions that are incoherent and contradictory! :

[T]he entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology.  It has nothing to do with the Republican Party, either, except in its historic role as incubator of this singular threat to our democracy.  Trump has transcended the party that produced him. His growing army of supporters no longer cares about the party. . . .  [W]hat Trump offers his followers are not economic remedies — his proposals change daily. . . .  His [policy utterances are] incoherent and contradictory. . . . 

So is every politician whose policy utterances are "incoherent and contradictory" and "change daily" a "fascist"?  (Trump may be a somewhat extreme case, but can anyone name a single politician not guilty of those charges to at least some degree?)  Apparently recognizing that mere "incoherence" would be an overbroad definition, Kagan then adds a couple of other things that he asserts are defining characteristics of the "fascist" category -- the first being a "play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger"; and the other one that "[it's] about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Führer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation."  Surely with that definition we have isolated Trump as the perfect and only reincarnation of Hitler and Mussolini.

But wait -- Is there anything about this definition that does not also perfectly fit Barack Obama?  A "play on feelings of resentment, disdain . . . fear, hatred and anger"?  What about Obama's railings against the "millionaires and billionaires," and the "top 1%," and "income inequality" being the "defining challenge of our time"?  The messianic cult of "the strongman, the leader"?  Who can forget Obama's acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic convention?:

I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment [i.e., my nomination] when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal. . . .   

And "incoherent" policy prescriptions?  Dare I mention proposing Obamacare as a way to decrease the cost of healthcare; proposing Dodd-Frank as a way to decrease (or eliminate) risk in the financial sector; taking over the energy sector of the economy and closing down the coal industry for no possible effect on world climate (let alone on the "rise of the oceans")?  I could go on about this for a long time.  Obviously, Obama deeply believes in government as the solution to all human problems.  In my view that is the very definition of incoherence.

Yes, we have had eight years of everything Kagan describes, in spades.  I tried a few Google searches to see if I could find the place where Kagan had labeled Obama as a "fascist," but somehow I can't find it.

Well, what about Hillary and Bernie?  Can they avoid Kagan's "fascist" label?  Let's try each of Kagan's tests:

• A "play on feelings of resentment, disdain . . . fear, hatred and anger."  Isn't this the defining characteristic of both the Clinton and Sanders campaigns?  Yes, they name different number one enemies.  For Bernie, the focus is economic resentment by the middle classes against "Wall Street," "the top 1%" and "the millionaires and billionaires."  Hillary's focus is more on stoking racial resentments among African Americans and gender resentments among women.  It's a distinction without a difference.  Both easily meet Kagan's test.
• "Incoherent" policy prescriptions.  Hey, Bernie openly avows that he is a socialist!  And Hillary?  She sees government as the solution to every human problem -- isn't that the same thing?  Indeed, asked by Chris Matthews back in January what is the difference between a Democrat and a Socialist, Hillary was famously stumped and could not give an answer.  As just one of hundreds of examples of Hillary policies that make no sense, if a minimum wage at all is a good idea, why is Hillary's $12 better than Bernie's $15?  Why not $1000?  Help us out here Hillary!  Anyway, clearly both meet Kagan's test.
• "[it's] about the strongman, the leader."  I'll admit that neither Clinton nor Sanders has the charisma of an Obama, or a Hitler, or a Mussolini, or for that matter, even of a Trump.  (I for one don't find Trump particularly charismatic, but that's a discussion for another time.)  On the other hand, if you are buying into the idea that government is the solution to all human problems, let alone into the idea of socialism -- which is what Hillary and Bernie are asking -- then aren't you inherently buying into the idea of this leader as the most important influence in your life?  In other words, Hillary and Bernie may not be very good at selling themselves as the potential "duce" or "fuhrer", but that role is still what they are asking you to accept.  I say that they both meet Kagan's test.

For myself, I don't find the "fascist" category particularly helpful in thinking about whom to vote for.  Let's face it -- all the candidates are imperfect.  I don't even hope for an election in which that won't be true.  All the candidates are running precisely because they want to be able to exercise big power for what they see as the good; and I see the concentration of too much power in one place as the biggest problem and the antithesis of the good.  But it's possible for a candidate to envision spheres of life that are better left to the private sector, or even the states, rather than to an all-knowing, perfect federal government.  If either Bernie or Hillary has ever harbored such a thought, I've never seen or heard about it.  Both of them see the federal government as an unalloyed force for fairness, justice, goodness, and the solution to every human problem (with enough taxing, spending, and regulations).  Trump?  Yes, he has an overblown sense of his own ability to fix everything by doing the right "deals."  But at the same time, he has expressed at least some reservations about the all-perfectness of the federal government.  See for example his energy policy speech here.  Excerpt:

We will get the bureaucracy out of the way of innovation, so we can pursue all forms of energy. This includes renewable energies and the technologies of the future. It includes nuclear, wind and solar energy – but not to the exclusion of other energy. The government should not pick winners and losers. Instead, it should remove obstacles to exploration. Any market has ups and downs, but lifting these draconian barriers will ensure that we are no longer at the mercy of global markets.

It may not be much, but it is a difference -- and, in the direction away from fascism, fairly defined.

UPDATE, June 3:  Apparently there was some serious violence outside a Trump rally last night in San Jose, California (by the way, it's the 10th largest U.S. city by population, in case you didn't know).  Ann Althouse has a roundup of links here, and it's all over Drudge here.  As far as appears from any of the articles I can find, including "mainstream" sites linked at Drudge (e.g., ABC News, NBC News), all of the violence came from the anti-Trump side, identified largely as Mexicans (many carrying Mexican flags) and Sanders supporters.  I'm not standing up for all of Trump's rhetoric, but as far as I know in this country, rhetoric of any sort is completely fair game, no matter how obnoxious, insulting, demeaning, disgusting, or whatever.  Violence is another story.  So who are the brownshirts here?  Meanwhile, according to every source I can find, the San Jose police stood by and did nothing to stop the violence.  Buzzfeed has this quote from San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo (a Clinton supporter):  “At some point Donald Trump needs to take responsibility for the irresponsible behavior of his campaign."  Really?  This guy supposedly went to Harvard Law School!  

The New York Times reports on the events in a tiny article in a corner on page A13, title "Clash Erupts At an Event For Trump."  I love that "clash erupts" bit -- hey, it wasn't any actual people that did this, it was just that a clash "erupted"!  Anyway, you can't accuse them of not reporting on the event, but it is rather effectively buried.  In the article, the perpetrators of the violence are identified only as "protesters."  Three instance of violence are specified, each of them committed by a "protester" against one or more Trump supporters.