What Is It About The Issue Of "Climate Change" That Makes People Lose Their Minds?

Let's face it:  Humans like to put on a facade of rationality, but more often than not the connection between human action and rational thought is seriously lacking.  Bring a narrative of sin and redemption into the mix, and in all probability any hope of applying rational thought to the problem at hand will be lost.  Are you telling me that you are in favor of evil?  Debate over.

Which brings me once again to the subject of climate change.  Somehow, at least among my favorite whipping boys the progressives, climate change has become the sin-and-redemption story of our times.  You are committing the grave sin of destroying the planet by leading a comfortable, modern, energy-enhanced life; but redemption is at hand through using government coercive action to force you (but not me!) back into a state of pre-industrial poverty.  Along the road to redemption, sign-posts keep popping up that point to things that make no rational sense.  But the true believer plunges forward.

The issue is in the news this week in multiple contexts.  Several state Attorneys General, led of course by the execrable Eric Schneiderman of New York, are investigating ExxonMobil for the alleged sin of misleading their shareholders about the risks to their business from climate change and the government response to it.   Meanwhile, in Orlando, Florida, Democratic Party operatives have been considering the party's 2016 platform, to be adopted at the upcoming convention.  Try, if you will, to make some rational sense of this.  Believe me, it can't be done.

The Christian Science Monitor on July 6 reports on the back-and-forth at the Democratic Platform Committee meetings.  On the climate change issue, it seems that the delegates broke down into two camps, one pressing for extreme measures now, and the other taking a more "moderate" approach (we will impoverish the people somewhat more slowly!).  Sanders-nominated delegates, led by one Bill McKibben, advocated for the more extreme approach:

One of Sanders’s delegates is Bill McKibben, a climate activist and founder of the environmental advocacy group 350.org, who last Monday wrote in Politico that the Clinton campaign was “obstructing change to the Democratic platform,” particularly on climate policies. In particular, he highlighted how two of his proposals – to call for a carbon tax and a ban on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in the platform – were voted down 7 to 6.   

Of course, it is the fracking revolution that is credited by just about everybody who knows about the subject with cutting the price of fossil-fuel-based energy about in half over the course of the past year.  This decline has in turn cost the major oil companies and the petro-states hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue in just the one year.  (The United States consumes about 7 billion barrels of oil annually.  A price decline of $50 per barrel, as has occurred over the past year, therefore represents a loss to oil producers, and a savings to American consumers, of about $350 billion per year on oil alone.  And that's just in the United States.  Savings just in the U.S. from the corresponding decline in the price of natural gas could easily be another $100 billion, based on ~30 trillion cu.ft. consumed and a decline of $3 per thousand cu.ft. in the price.)

So how would a ban on fracking affect the major oil companies and petro-states?  Likely it would be the best thing that ever happened to them.  With possibly a few exceptions, the oil majors and the petro-states are not the ones who practice fracking; fracking is the game of the upstarts and the new entrepreneurs.  Meanwhile, can anybody think of a reason why banning fracking would not promptly cause the price of oil to head back to the $100+ where it was found a short year ago?

Anyway, try to find a place where McKibben, Sanders, et al. admit that their agenda is explicitly to increase the annual cost of energy for the typical American family by around $2000 or so and transfer the money to the likes of Exxon, Chevron, Shell, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Qatar.  The Christian Science Monitor article points to a group in the Democratic Party that it calls the "young climate hawks," who see the climate change issue as an "urgent existential" issue with no room for compromise.

[The] climate hawks . . . increasingly see climate change not as a political or policy issue, but as an urgent existential one.  “There’s been progress made, and I’m happy to see that, but that doesn’t mean I’m satisfied,” says Adam Hasz, executive coordinator for SustainUS, a youth-led environmental advocacy group.  “I don’t think on climate we can afford a middle ground,” adds Avery Raines, the group’s environmental advocacy fellow. “Americans cannot afford to compromise in any way.”

Well, Adam, the guys from Exxon and Saudi Arabia couldn't agree with you more.  Are you sure that you've thought this through?  I guess the defining characteristic of "youth" is that, so far, somebody else has paid for the expenses of their lives.  Just wait!

Meanwhile, on the "fraud" front, former Bank of England governor Mark Carney has convened something called the Task Force on Climate Related Disclosures to put some pressure on the fossil fuel companies.  Carney has recruited none other than former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg to run the task force.  The task force "seeks to bring transparency and consistency to how companies warn investors about dangers they face from climate change."  Given that Mike Bloomberg is heading the thing, you can understand why Bloomberg News is all over the story.  From July 11:

The fossil fuel industry risks losing $33 trillion in revenue over the next 25 years as global warming may drive companies to leave oil, natural gas and coal in the ground, according to a Barclays Plc energy analyst.  Government regulations and other efforts to cut carbon emissions will inevitably slash demand for fossil fuels, jeopardizing traditional energy producers, Mark Lewis, Barclays’s head of European utilities equity research, said Monday during a panel discussion in New York on financial risks from climate change.

You might think that this is a really smart group of people.  But could they really not have noticed that the effect of restrictions proposed by the most radical restrictors would clearly be to increase, rather than decrease, the value of reserves of the major companies?  Yes, theoretically, all world governments could suddenly order that all fossil fuel reserves be kept in the ground, and thereby promptly plunge the world into darkness.  Really, could anyone actually believe that that's going to happen?  And if only half of production gets restricted, that makes the remaining unrestricted half all that much more valuable.  

And then there's that $33 trillion value currently put on the oil reserves by the markets.  Of course, if the markets thought that "green" substitutes like wind and solar would be a cheaper source of energy in the time frame before those reserves can be consumed, then the reserves would have no value.  That makes the $33 trillion a very rough proxy for the loss the world would incur if world-wide government regulation in the near term prevents the extraction of all the reserves.  Is it possible to think about this rationally and consider that a result that could possibly happen, let alone one that is morally acceptable?

But then, in the world of "climate change" advocacy, nothing makes any sense at all.  

Is Economic And Racial Integration Of Neighborhoods A Good Thing Or Not?

The answer to the question, of course, is that economic and racial integration of neighborhoods is a good thing, except when it is not.  To the New York progressive, some economic and racial integrations are good -- so good, in fact, that if not happening naturally they must be forced by government coercion.  On the other hand, other economic and racial integrations are bad -- so bad, in fact, that even though happening naturally they must be stopped by government coercion.  

But, you ask, how can we tell which instances of economic and racial integration are the good ones, and which are the bad ones?  To get that answer, you'll just have to get inside the progressive groupthink.  As far as I can tell, the progressives have not attempted to articulate an intelligible set of criteria for distinguishing the "good" integrations from the "bad" ones.  If you are part of the "in crowd," you just inherently know.  Looking on this phenomenon from the outside as a member of the "out crowd," all I can say is, I can't discern that there is anything more to the progressive criteria for distinguishing the "good" from the "bad" integrations than pure tribalism:  A particular integration is "good" if "our tribe" wants it to happen, and "bad" if "our tribe" does not want it to happen.  One could be forgiven for concluding that economic and racial integration is not really the goal at all, but rather is just a pretext for "our tribe" to try to get what it wants through government coercion.

And so I return to the bizarre story of the ongoing economic and racial integrations of two locations near to me -- one being Westchester County, the suburban jurisdiction located immediately to the North of New York City; and the other being the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  I last reported on these two stories on June 6.  Obviously, in one of these jurisdictions (Westchester), further economic and racial integration is good, and therefore must be forced by government; while in the other (the Lower East Side), further economic and racial integration is bad, and must be stopped by the government.  There have been new developments in both in the past week.

You may recognize Westchester as a county with racial demographics remarkably close to those of the nation as a whole.  According to 2010 Census data here, Westchester's population was 13.3% black and 21.8% Hispanic or Latino.  Most of its cities also show substantial racial balance (e.g., New Rochelle -- 18.1% black, 27.8% Hispanic or Latino; White Plains -- 13.2% black, 29.6% Hispanic or Latino).  Only two towns in the whole county had a population over 90% white, and both of them barely cleared that threshold (Lewisboro at 90.4% and Pound Ridge at 90.1%).  Nevertheless the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development joined a 2006 lawsuit against the County to force further integration through the construction of low-income and "affordable" housing; and in 2009 the County entered into a consent decree agreeing to build some 750 units of same, and also agreeing to have a "monitor" to oversee its efforts to improve integration.  The construction of the "affordable housing" has not proceeded at a pace acceptable to HUD, which has returned to court multiple times since 2009 to force Westchester to heel.

One of the requirements of the 2009 consent decree was that Westchester produce an "analysis of impediments" to the construction of affordable housing in the County.  The County has produced several such documents, but HUD has "rejected" them.  In the latest development, HUD and its "monitor" took Westchester back before federal judge Denise Cote to get it slapped down.  According to the New York Times yesterday:

In her ruling from the bench, the judge, Denise L. Cote, called the county’s analyses a “failed process” and gave Westchester officials 30 days to select a consultant for the study. The federal monitor in the case, James E. Johnson, may accept the county’s choice or pick his own consultant. In either case, the consultant will then have four months to prepare an analysis and recommend any zoning changes.   

So take that, Westchester!  Obviously, everybody knows that further integration in your precincts is good, and indeed required.  If you won't accomplish it at the pace we demand, then a court will order you to do it!

But then there's the story of the Lower East Side.  The Lower East Side has historically been a low-income neighborhood, but more recently has seen fairly rapid gentrification.  The gentrification, with its resulting economic and racial integration, has not required any government coercion to accomplish.  On the Lower East Side, the local Community Board 3 met last week to select a new Chairperson (the prior Chairperson being term-limited).  The Villager reports on the story here in its July 7 edition.   According to the article, although the board did "manage" to select a new Chairperson, the meeting was "marred" by protests -- protests seeking to stop the influx into the neighborhood of new luxury buildings and their high-income residents.  Obviously, this must be the "bad" kind of economic and racial integration.

At a contentious public session at the meeting’s start, activists with the Coalition to Protect Chinatown and the Lower East Side staged a vocal protest against the handling by C.B. 3 of a community-based Chinatown rezoning initiative. . . .  The plan would create a new special zoning district in Chinatown and the Lower East Side with increased height restrictions and protections to fend off sky-high luxury towers and fancy hotels. . . .   David Michael . . . charged up and down the aisles hurling abuse at C.B. 3 members and holding up a sign over [Board Chairperson] Li’s head that read, “Sell Out.”  Other demonstrators paraded up and down the aisle of the auditorium shouting, “They’re not listening to us and turning over the neighborhood to developers who are treating us like cockroaches!”

Of course, the politicians at the meeting fell all over themselves pledging to do everything in their power to keep the "developers" out -- and thereby stymie the further economic and racial integration of the neighborhood.  It's obvious to everyone that this instance of economic and racial integration is "bad" -- isn't it?  You just have to have a scorecard to tell the good integrations from the bad ones.        

The Issue No One Is Talking About: Exploding Federal Commitments

Somehow in the political season, there come to be issues of the day that everyone talks about on that day.  These issues can range from the relatively important (e.g., Hillary's breaches of national security while Secretary of State) to the relatively trivial (e.g., Trump's re-tweet of an image of a six-pointed star, alleged to be anti-Semitic).  Meanwhile, as these issues of the day draw away all the attention, everyone's gaze is diverted from what ought to be the main issues.  Even for candidates who constantly protest that they want to get away from whatever they are being asked about right now and "talk about the issues," they almost never want to talk about the really important issues.

For the federal government, in my opinion far and away the overriding issue is:  what the hell are they spending all that money on?  For those not on top of these things, the federal budget for the current 2016 fiscal year (October 1, 2015 to September 30, 2016) is just a hair under $4 trillion (and only a fool would bet on the final total coming in under the $4 trillion by the time things are done).  And the big question is, does the $4 trillion represent intelligent choices of appropriate priorities for the government, or are various programs that have once established a toe-hold now exploding out of control while nobody is paying attention?  

Given the progressive world view of government as the infinite source of costless free money, you would be right to suspect that everyone in the government is only too happy to see spending explode while nobody is watching.  Hey, we're creating perfect fairness and justice here!  Of course, somehow the exploding spending goes for programs just happen to be the domains of the progressive activists and Democratic party supporters.  But it's not corrupt because it's the government!

So let's consider a few examples:

• Student loans.  When Barack Obama took office in 2009, the amount of outstanding federally-backed student loans was $657 billion according to federal data here.  When I first covered the issue in 2012, the total had just hit $1 trillion; and when I returned to the issue in early 2015 it had broken $1.1 trillion.  Now?  The Q2 2016 number is $1.255 trillion.  Oh, and these numbers don't appear anywhere in the federal budget.  A student loan hits the budget only when the borrower fails to pay and the government has to take the loss.  So how much of the trillion and a quarter will actually be repaid?  Just try to find that out.  It used to be that you could look up the "default rate" and get a good idea, but then the government got into granting every kind of deferment and forbearance you can think of -- like "income-based" repayment plans and write-offs of balances for people who go to work in non-profits and "public service" -- so that they could make the "default rate" look small.  Today they claim the "default rate" is down to 11.7%, but that's only because they are hiding millions and millions of borrowers who are going to be excused without repaying in full.  Easily half of the tril-and-a-quarter will not be repaid; and of course, the tril-and-a-quarter continues to grow daily.  Who benefits from this huge handout?  Of course it's the key Democratic constituency of the Higher Education Blob.
• Pension guarantees.  Charles Blahous at E21 writes on July 5 about "The Worsening Pension Problem Nobody Talks About."  This one is the crisis in federally-insured multi-employer pension plans.  Haven't heard of those?  The "multi-employer" plans cover workers in industries with lots of employers of workers who all do the same thing.  The classic example is trucking.  Most of the plans are sponsored by unions.  According to a chart in Blahous's article, when President Obama took office in 2009 the federal multi-employer program was thought to be solvent.  The most recent figures are a "$52.3 billion deficit estimate consist[ing] of $54.2 billion in liabilities against only $1.9 billion in assets."  That was quick!  And believe me, this is just the beginning of an explosion to come.   Supposedly the taxpayers are insulated from having to pay for this disaster through the PBGC, which charges premiums to the plans; but of course, when they set this up nobody took account of the fact that unions gradually put their employers out of business.  So like all government insurance programs eventually, the PBGC is dead broke.  The biggest disaster for the moment is the Teamsters' massive so-called "Central States" pension fund, which is coming close to running out of money.  They have recently been knocking on the government's door seeking the inevitable bailout.  Who benefits?  Another key constituency of the Democratic party, labor unions.
• Food stamps.  When Obama took office in 2009 the number of food stamp recipients was about 33 million, and the annual budget of the program was about $54 billion.  Since then, it's been eight years of economic "recovery."  In the past, food stamp usage increased during recessions and went back down during recoveries.  This time it was the opposite.  Today, the number of recipients is around 46 million, and the budget for the program soared to about $80 billion in 2013, before falling back in 2015 to about $74 billion.  How has that happened?  Part was a loosening of eligibility restrictions, for which the Congress bears much of the responsibility; but a bigger part was overt and aggressive promotion of expansion of the program by the Obama administration.  The good news for this one is that the budget and number of recipients have both declined marginally in the last couple of years.  But why aren't we back down to levels well below where we were in 2009?  Without doubt, this administration believes -- with a good deal of justification -- that recipients of monthly federal handouts are likely to vote for continuation of same.
• Medicare/Medicaid.  According to data available from CMS here, in 2009 expenditures on Medicare were $499 billion and  on Medicaid $375 billion.  By 2014 it was $619 billion for Medicare and $496 billion for Medicaid.  It all just marches forward on autopilot. Obamacare in particular has caused a great expansion in the ranks of Medicaid beneficiaries.  

I could go on, but you get the picture.  The federal government has long left the world of rational consideration of cost-effectiveness of spending, in favor of massive autopilot increases for whatever programs got themselves in the door at some magical historical moment.  Anyway, it's all way too complicated to focus political attention on.  Let's get back to calling Trump a racist!   

What Is The Most Important Thing Disqualifying Hillary From The Presidency?

Of course all the chatter today is about yesterday's big speech by FBI Director James Comey.  Comey first laid down the lay-down criminal case against Hillary for putting her classified emails on a non-secure server, and then said he would nonetheless recommend against indictment because her conduct constituted only "extreme carelessness" rather than (the statutory standard) "gross negligence."  I certainly hope that you understand that critical distinction!

But wait a minute, you say:  How exactly is this "carelessness" at all?  Isn't it obvious to everyone that Hillary used her own private server so that her emails would not turn up on the State Department system when its functionaries were responding to subpoenas or FOIA requests from litigants or the curious public?  If that was her reason, then "carelessness" had nothing to do with this; her conduct was completely intentional.  

Of course Hillary has never admitted that her intent with the private server was to evade legitimate subpoenas or FOIA requests.  But then very few criminals ever actually admit to the intent to commit the crime; and yet intent is an element of nearly all serious crimes, and somehow the prosecutors prove it all the time.  How does this work?  The answer is, most of the time intent is proved with some kind of circumstantial evidence.  For example,  a witness testifies that the accused had a grudge against the murder victim, or that the missing money has turned up in the accused's bank account.  Another excellent form of circumstantial proof of intent is when the accused makes a statement about his intent, and gives a seemingly plausible alternative explanation for what he did; and then other facts emerge that demonstrate that the alternative explanation is clearly a lie.  With the alternative explanation blown up, the only reasonable remaining inference is that criminal intent was present.  Applying this to the case of Hillary, Hillary in a public statement in March 2015 gave as the reason for the private server that she "didn't want to carry two devices."  Multiple sources (including Comey yesterday) have since revealed that at various times she had up to four devices.  The alternative explanation was a lie.  QED.

So we have a presidential candidate who is perfectly willing intentionally to compromise national security, up to and including "top secret" information, in order to evade legitimate FOIA requests.  That seems rather disqualifying for someone seeking to be President.  

But is this the thing about Hillary that is the very most disqualifying for her presidential ambitions?  It's a hard one to top, but I have a candidate:  Hillary has literally no idea how the economy works.  Like all good progressives, she does not understand that wealth is generated by the hard work of the people in the presence of property rights, freedom of exchange, and the rule of law.  Instead, she thinks that the wealth comes from the tooth fairy; that government taxing and spending is costless;  and that it's up to the government to distribute the free money in a way to create a world of perfect fairness and justice.  The idea that this agenda might have the side effect of undermining incentives and wealth creation and impoverishing the people has literally never occurred to her.

Am I being too harsh?  As with proving criminal intent, we can only proceed by circumstantial evidence.  But I think that the circumstantial evidence here is sufficiently damning to meet the standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt."  I'll start with Hillary's website, and particularly the part titled "A plan to raise American incomes":

• First, is there a single place here (or elsewhere on her website) where you can find any recognition that the wealth and success of the United States has come from the hard work of the people instead of from the government?  If there is, I can't find it.
• The first thing that Hillary will do as President (according to her own statement): "Give working families a raise . . . ."  Nothing to it, I guess.  It's just all free money coming from the government.  Hillary thinks she can make Americans richer by passing out government money.
• Next item in her list: "Create good-paying jobs and get pay rising by investing in infrastructure, clean energy, and scientific and medical research to strengthen our economy and growth."  That's right, "good paying jobs" in Hillary world are all funded by government spending.  Try to find a counter-example on her website.
• How about the "New College Compact."  Under pressure from the forces of Bernie, Hillary now proposes free college for all, or almost all.  Cost?  $350 billion, according to her website.  Whew!  But don't worry, it's all free money.  Does it ever occur to Hillary that with $350 billion to blow, the state universities will just raise their prices and make it all disappear?
• Take a moment to focus on that part that says "investing . . . in clean energy."  Recognize that the government does not need to invest a dime in energy for the U.S. economy to provide all the energy that it uses at the lowest cost that anyone can find.  "Investing in clean energy" is obvious code for spending government dollars to subsidize environmentally-correct renewables produced by government cronies at uneconomic cost.  This is what competent economists call "wealth destruction."  Does Hillary know or understand that government subsidies to uneconomic businesses destroy the wealth of the people and the country?  I can't find any recognition of that anywhere.

Not convinced yet?  Then consider Hillary's involvement in Haiti.  I previously covered that subject here.  You will recognize Haiti as one of the very poorest countries in the world, with a per capita GDP at the unbelievably low level of under $1000 in the listings of all of the IMF, World Bank and UN.  (By comparison, U.S. per capita GDP is about $55,000.)  But Haiti is literally the world champion of foreign aid.  You will find more statistics at the link, but at times foreign aid to Haiti has equalled or exceeded its entire annual GDP.  If foreign aid or other handouts from government worked to raise people's incomes, Haiti would be one of the richest countries in the world.

What you may not know is that after Haiti's big earthquake in 2010, the Clintons -- both Bill and Hillary -- made Haiti specifically their baby in a massive push to improve conditions.  Bill made Haiti the big project of the Clinton Global Initiative.  Hillary as Secretary of State saw to directing massive new government foreign aid flows to Haiti.  Both Bill and Hillary have made multiple trips to Haiti to showcase their efforts.  And what do they have to show for it?  After six years of massive spending, Haiti is literally as poor as ever.  The money just disappears.

Have you heard Hillary so much as mention Haiti in her campaign?  You can understand why she wouldn't want anyone focusing on it.  On the other hand, would you think that she might be capable of learning from the experience what works and what doesn't in economic policy?  I know that the evidence is circumstantial, but I have no doubt that she still thinks that more and still more foreign aid and government handouts are sure to work sooner or later to make people wealthy.  So she proposes programs for the United States that are the analogs of what has worked so well in Haiti.  For me, this is more disqualifying than mere compromise of national security.         

Update On Ridiculous New York Crony Capitalism

I don't watch a lot of television, and most of that is news shows.  But in the little television that I watch, it seems like far and away the biggest advertiser is the State of New York, on behalf of a program called "Start-Up New York."  Watch a half hour of news in the evening in New York, and you can easily see three of these ads.  The message is, we're creating lots of great new jobs in upstate New York by handing out tax exemptions for exciting new start-ups!  The videos show attractive young people in obviously new and clean facilities, wearing some kinds of trendy clothes or lab coats and looking very, very high tech.  Of course the cynic in me cannot help thinking, why are they spending all this money on advertising for this?

You don't have to be a genius to predict that this program will inevitably be a disaster -- at least for the taxpayers.  Thankfully, the Legal Insurrection website over the weekend put out a compilation of the latest information.  That post in turn relies substantially on this article from the Ithaca Journal.  It seems that the state put out a report on the program -- late on Friday afternoon going into the July 4 weekend.  Really, that already tells you all you need to know.  No matter how bad you thought it might have been, it's worse.  The Legal Insurrection headline is "Much-touted Start-Up New York programs spent over $53 million to create just 441 jobs."  And the sub-headline is "And it's only going to get worse."  Excerpt:

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s “tax-free” plan to bring technology jobs to New York has long been considered a failure, and buried in Friday afternoon’s holiday weekend document dump is a report that demonstrates the degree of the latest NY boondoggle’s failure.  

The Ithaca Journal has this to say about the timing of the state report:

The report from Empire State Development, the Cuomo administration's economic-development branch, was released Friday evening ahead of the holiday weekend, a time notorious for government agencies to release unflattering news.  It was more than 90 days late: By law, the report was due March 31.

So what has the $53 million gone for?  Again, from the Ithaca Journal:

The state has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting the program, including $53 million from late 2013 to early 2015. The bulk of that cost was spent on seemingly ubiquitous television advertisements.

Yes, basically all the state money has gone for the ads.  And the (pitiful) results:

In some regions, the report showed few results in the first two years, including the Southern Tier, which saw nine companies in the Start-Up program create seven total jobs. The six Start-Up companies at Binghamton University combined to create a single job in 2015.  In the mid-Hudson region, which stretches from Westchester County north to Sullivan County, Start-Up businesses created five jobs last year — all in Kingston.

And the amount of private investment?

So far, 159 companies have been approved for the program, including 102 that are new businesses. Together, they invested $11.4 million in New York in 2015 and received $1.2 million in tax benefits.

Of course the tax benefits will go on for years, so it's impossible to calculate how much the taxpayers will pay for each job "created."  But it's already around $125,000 per job before the tax benefits really even get going.

Well, there's one thing that can be said about this program, and that is, it's not as big a disaster as the "Buffalo Billion."  That's the program under which Governor Cuomo proposes to "invest" $1 billion or so of state taxpayer funds in Buffalo to turn around that long-struggling city.  Oh, it seems that the lion's share of the billion is going to just one company, SolarCity, a company (supposedly) engaged in manufacturing and installing solar panels on people's houses.  I say "supposedly" because the factory -- basically built at taxpayer expense for the Elon Musk-led company -- is still not finished, and the smart money is betting that it never will go into operation.  In this post in February I noted that SolarCity was near bankruptcy.

But wait!  A couple of weeks ago, Tesla (another Musk company) announced that it was buying SolarCity!  Huh?  The Wall Street Journal "Heard on the Street" column immediately said that the deal "defies common sense" -- why would a cash-hungry money-losing electric car manufacturer want to buy an even more cash-hungry money-losing solar panel manufacturer?  From the WSJ:

Both businesses, for different reasons, are cash hungry. In the past four quarters  alone, Tesla burned up nearly 50 cents of cash for every dollar of sales it made. But it was practically the U.S. Mint compared with SolarCity which burned nearly $6 for each dollar of sales.

Of course the obvious answer is that, with SolarCity looking like it was about to go bust, the State of New York was getting skittish about paying off the remainder of its $750 million investment in the factory.  Tesla continues to be a market darling, and now, with Tesla in the loop, presumably the state investment in SolarCity's factory will go through.  Of course Tesla is also totally dependent on government subsidies and handouts to have a viable business model.  It's just one form of wealth destruction versus another.  The wealth destruction, of course, is for the taxpayers.  Not for Musk.  And not for the construction contractor on the factory, LP Ciminelli, which, as the New York Times points out in this article from May, was a major Cuomo campaign contributor.  Oh, and the bidding documents for the construction project seem to have been written so that the only contractor who could qualify for the job was Ciminelli.  

Things That Aren't "Sustainable": Socialism, Obamacare

It was just over a year ago that Manhattan Contrarian won the award for the "World's Most Sustainable Web Site."   OK, admittedly we gave the award to ourselves, but nevertheless it was richly deserved.  For example, as noted in the linked post, unlike Barack Obama we did not fly to Florida on Air Force One to give a speech celebrating Earth Day; and, unlike Leonardo DiCaprio, we did not take six flights on private planes within one month.  That's true sustainability!

But if you are following the news on the subject of "sustainability," you have undoubtedly noticed that the word has become more and more separated from any connection it may once have had to the root "sustain."  Indeed, you could be forgiven for concluding that, as currently used by the forces of the environmental Left, the word "sustainability" means something more like "imposing new regressive taxes in order to further lower the living standards of low income people."  For example, if you go to the "sustainability" section of the web site of prestigious Yale University, you will find that Yale believes it is achieving "sustainability" by joining something called the Global Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition.  What is the GCPLC?  It is the cabal among the likes of the World Bank, the IMF, governments and non-profits seeking to jack up the price of energy for everybody else, including the poor and low income people of the world:

Yale will become the first university member of the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition (CPLC), a private-public partnership among the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), governments, nonprofits, and private sector companies to strengthen carbon pricing policies. . . .  

And why stop with energy?  How about still further impoverishing the poor by jacking up the price of food?  Actually, our friends at the U.N. have exactly that as their next plan -- all in the name of "sustainability" of course.  Consider this article from June 30 at the Washington Post's wonkblog, advocating intentionally increasing the price of food, particularly the price of red meat, because meat is not sufficiently "sustainable":

Maarten Hajer, professor at the Netherlands's Utrecht University, led the environment and food report that recommended the meat tax.  “All of the harmful effects on the environment and on health needs to be priced into food products,” said Hajer, who is a member of U.N.’s International Resource Panel, which comprises 34 top scientists and 30 governments. “I think it is extremely urgent.”

Before we get too far here, perhaps we should step back and consider the original meaning of the term "sustainable," and what it would entail under that meaning for something to be truly "not sustainable."  According to a standard dictionary definition, something that is not sustainable should be something that cannot "be maintained at a certain rate or level."  In other words, a thing or process is "not sustainable" if it is on an unavoidable glide path to oblivion, i.e., a "death spiral."  And of course, when you think of death spirals, the first thing that comes to your mind is socialism.  

As you well know if you spend time trying to observe the world (or if you are a regular reader of this website), economies, or parts of them, that are organized on a socialist model inevitably go into death spirals.  For an introduction, check out posts here and here.  The one sentence version is that, when it's "from each according to his abilities, and to each according to his needs," rational people organize their lives to decrease their abilities and increase their needs.  Thus productivity gradually declines, at first slowly and then faster, unto the inevitable collapse.  Importantly, though, governments engaged in socialist policies have numerous tools available to conceal the early stages of the decline, so that when the collapse comes it appears to hit all at once.  An excellent example of this process is currently unfolding in Venezuela.  And yes, the government of Venezuela put out cooked economic statistics purporting to show rapid growth right up through 2013, when they just stopped reporting any economic statistics at all.  (Their main fraud was reporting all government spending, no matter how wasteful, as a 100% addition to GDP.  Our government practices the exact same fraud.)

Is there any example of such blatant "death spiral" unsustainability going on in the U.S. right now?  Well, there's Obamacare.  That's the program where we pretend that it's possible for people who are already sick to buy "health insurance" by the government decreeing that it be so. We'll just have "guaranteed issue," by which rule a health insurer must accept all customers who present themselves, no matter how sick they may already be.  It's just like fire insurance, where insurers are happy to sell you an "insurance" policy after your house has already burned down -- not!!  Anyway, nobody would game this "guaranteed issue" thing and wait until they got sick to buy the insurance, would they? 

That brings us to the great article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, headlined "UnitedHealth Sues Kidney-Care Chain."  It seems that American Renal Associates is a company that provides dialysis services to patients whose kidneys have failed.  ARA would like to charge some $4000 per dialysis session to patients.  Since patients who need dialysis require about three sessions per week, this would mean that each patient would represent about $600,000 per year in revenue to ARA.  But some of these patients were previously uninsured, and still can't afford the premiums.  No problem.  ARA has created a "charity" called the American Kidney Fund, and contributes to the "charity" (tax deductible of course!), which in turn makes grants to fund the Obamacare premiums of patients on dialysis.  So some patient goes uninsured until his kidneys fail and he needs dialysis, then finally buys an Obamacare exchange policy under "guaranteed issue" and gets his premiums of about $10,000 per year paid by the "charity"; and then UnitedHealth from then forward must pay $600,000 per year to ARA.  Somehow UnitedHealth doesn't think this is a good idea, and has sued ARA for "fraud."

Whatever you may think of UnitedHealth's claim against ARA, it's not hard to see how this is something that can't go on for long.  It's unsustainable!  But why hasn't the unsustainability manifested itself yet?  Writing in Investors Business Daily on July 4, Sally Pipes points out that it's the usual government deception.  The Obamacare statute came complete with various subsidy programs designed to cover over and hide the statute's losses for several years until the law could become entrenched.  One of these programs is called the "reinsurance program," although, as Pipes points out, the word "reinsurance" is a complete misnomer -- this is no more than a federal handout to health insurance companies.  Pipes:

The "reinsurance program," on the other hand, is just a federal handout. If an enrollee's medical bills cost an insurer between $60,000 and $250,000, the government picks up part of the tab.  Originally, the feds planned to pay 80% percent of the cost within that window. But in 2014, they made the program more generous -- by paying 100% of costs between $45,000 and $250,000 per enrollee. They gave out almost $7 billion that year.  As the Mercatus Center study concluded, ObamaCare has depended on these subsidies to keep the exchanges from collapsing. Without the reinsurance program, premiums in ObamaCare's first year would have been 26% higher than they were.

But these statutory subsidies run out in 2017.  It's just in time for Obama to leave office, and leave the problem to somebody else.  As usual with the unsustainable socialist death spiral, the government covers over the problem during the early stages of the decline, and then when the government cannot continue the deception any longer, everything falls apart all at once.

And the kidney dialysis issue is just the tip of the iceberg of the gaming of Obamacare's "guaranteed issue" provisions.  For another example, see this post from April 11 on so-called "short term" health insurance policies.

How long can a socialist death spiral go on before the final collapse?  For the Soviet Union, it was 74 years.  Chavista Venezuela has only been 18 years so far, and the end already appears to be near.  Cuba is at 56 years.  North Korea is at 71 years.  Compare those to the eating of red meat or burning of carbon-based fuels by humans, both of which have been going on for many millennia and don't seem to be heading toward any kind of imminent denouement as far as I can see.  I'd be willing to bet on either of those outlasting any socialist economic system by easily thousands of years.  I'd say it's rather obvious which is "sustainable" and which not.