The New York Times Does Connecticut Schools

A few days ago I wrote a post commenting on the recent and preposterous court decision in Connecticut, where the judge made a King Canute-like order to Connecticut's government to behave "rationally" and thereby fix its failing schools.  Yesterday, the New York Times decided to weigh in on the same subject, with a front page article ("In Connecticut, Wealth Gulf Divides Schools") as well as a lead editorial ("A Holistic Ruling on Broken Schools").  You won't be surprised to learn that their editorial take on the situation is more or less the opposite of mine.  ("[Connecticut] should welcome the judge's invitation to think more broadly about the problem of educational inequality.")  But what's more significant is that the Times's "news" article promotes a completely false narrative about poor districts getting systematically deprived of resources, while the article provides none of the relevant and easily-available data that totally disprove that narrative.  I guess you won't be surprised to learn that either. 

To illustrate the "wealth gulf" supposedly dividing Connecticut's schools, the Times picks two adjacent districts for its focus:  Bridgeport and Fairfield.  Bridgeport is Connecticut's largest city, located about 50 miles Northeast of New York City, and known for its poor and largely black student population.  Fairfield is the town adjacent to Bridgeport on the West (closer to New York City) and is a wealthy suburban district.  

With the exception of a couple of tidbits about per student spending, the Times article is devoid of statistics or other hard information.  (The tidbits of hard information are that (1) "In the 2014-15 school year, Bridgeport spent about $14,000 per student while Fairfield spent nearly $16,000," and (2) "[S]everal [Connecticut] districts spend more than $25,000 per student.")  For the rest, instead of hard information on actual available resources, the article gives a forum to various government functionaries interested in pleading for more money for themselves despite their manifest failures.  Thus we get quotes from people like Bridgeport's "interim superintendent of schools" Frances Rabinowitz, and an assistant superintendent, Aresta Johnson.  We get fed things like the following:

Ms. Rabinowitz started in Bridgeport as a teacher, then left the city 14 years ago for positions elsewhere, including a job as an associate commissioner for education for the state. When she returned to the district in 2014, she said, it was in even worse shape than when she left.  “The stripping of resources was amazing to me,” she said.

Or this:

In the morning, school buses line the circular driveway of Fairfield Ludlowe High School, dispatching a stream of students into the sandy-brick building buffered by an expansive, tree-lined lawn.  At Bridgeport’s Warren Harding High School, there is no line of buses. As Judge Moukawsher noted, the city cannot afford them for its high school students.

Or this:

Because schools are heavily supported by local property taxes, as the judge pointed out, a property-poor town like Bridgeport has less money for its schools, even while taxing its residents at higher rates. And when funds fall short — for things as basic as paper, as they sometimes do — there is no way to make it up.

Now, can we kindly get some real information?  Fortunately, the Connecticut Department of Education puts out good amounts of data on school enrollment and spending, including some historical data.  Here is a chart of total and per student spending by town for the 2014/15 school year.  Here is a link to download an Excel spreadsheet that contains data for the period 2006 - 15 by year on such things as total spending by town, and percent of revenue for each district coming from local, state and federal sources.  What do we learn?

• Looking at the chart of 2014-15 per student spending by town, you really can't find any kind of systematic gulf between spending in wealthy and poor towns, or indeed much of a difference at all.  Super-poor Hartford is actually at the higher end of spending at $19,362 per student, which is more even than super-wealthy New Canaan ($19,171).  While Bridgeport ($13,923) does indeed spend a little less than Fairfield ($15,920) per student, Hartford, New Haven ($17,194), and Stamford ($17,409) all spend more than Fairfield.  (Obviously the Times did not select Bridgeport randomly for its article.  Are you surprised?)  And literally every place in Connecticut spends well more than the national average spending of about $11,000 per student.
• Those evil districts that the Times identifies (without naming any) as spending $25,000 and up per student turn out to be predominantly in the very-sparsely-populated Northwest corner of the state.  The highest spending town on a per student basis is Cornwall ($30,364), which only has 111 students in the K-12 grades.  Clearly, if you need to have a teacher for 10 and fewer students in each grade, it's going to cost more per student.  The districts in question have a tiny fraction of the state's population, and get almost no state aid to fund their schools.
• The data on sources of revenue provide a breathtaking picture of the degree to which Connecticut, and to some extent the federal government, already allocate resources massively toward the poorer districts, while leaving the wealthier districts almost completely on their own.  Thus Fairfield gets 93.7% of its operating revenue from local sources, and only 4.7% from the state, and 1.5% federal.  In Bridgeport it's 20.6% local, 69.8% state, and 7.9% federal.  (Do you think the Times might have mentioned this vast disparity when they said there is "no way to make it up" for Bridgeport when local property taxes fall short in providing revenue?)  The same vast disparity holds for all of the poor versus wealthy towns.  Examples of 2014-15 revenue sources for poor towns and cities: Hartford -- state 68.6%, local 21.9%, federal 6.3%; New Haven -- state 61.1%, local 24.5%, federal 12.8%; New London -- state 59.0%, local 30.3%, federal 6.8%; Waterbury -- state 57.1%, local 35.9%, federal 6.1%.  Examples of wealthy towns:  Darien -- state 4.6%, local 94.0%, federal 1.3%; Greenwich -- state 2.5%, local 95.3%, federal 1.6%; New Canaan -- state 2.6%, local 95.9%, federal 1.1%. 
• The line from the Bridgeport school superintendent about "stripping of resources" from the Bridgeport schools is not supported by the data.  In 2006-07, Bridgeport got $170.4 million for its schools from the state, and provided $61.6 million from local sources.  By 2014-15, the local contribution had remained almost constant at $62.4 million, while the state contribution had gone up almost 25% to $211.7 million.  A far more accurate characterization than Ms. Rabinowitz's would be that every year the state throws more and more money at Bridgeport for its continued failure.

For anyone willing to look at the data, Connecticut's experience with school funding provides the perfect disproof of the proposition that more money can fix failing schools.  You will never find that out from the Times, which systematically suppresses all of the real information, while lazily handing a forum to failing functionaries who seek more money to expand their staffs and budgets and their failing empires.   

As commenter Steve Walsh said at the prior post on this subject, Connecticut's current system of school finance rewards failure.  As long as they continue to reward failure, they will continue to fail.  

What Is The Federal Government's Most Disastrous Program?

I know you are thinking that the question is impossible to answer because there are just too many to choose from.  So I'll give you some criteria:  to be considered as the "most disastrous program," a program must (1) cost a staggering amount of money, (2) accomplish next to nothing, and (3) be permeated by vast amounts of fraud.  On these criteria, the winner by thousands of miles has to be Medicaid.  Of course, given that the socialist/progressive response to failure is always to double down, we are in the midst of a huge expansion of Medicaid as part of Obamacare.

The staggering cost of Medicaid is undeniable.  Final 2016 spending numbers are not yet in, but the federal Medicaid budget for 2016 was about $345 billion.   Throw in a couple of hundred bil  for the state share of Medicaid spending, and you get to around $550 billion total.  That's enough to notice!  And spending on this program continues to explode, as it has exploded more or less continuously since inception in 1965.  As recently as 2014, total spending on Medicaid (federal + state) was only $476 billion, per the Kaiser Family Foundation.   First year expenditures in 1965 were about $1 billion.  OK, in inflation-adjusted dollars that would be more like $8 billion.  It's still more than six doublings of spending over 49 years, for a compound annual growth rate in constant dollars of around 9%.  Whew!

But surely, Medicaid accomplishes something -- doesn't it?  That depends what you are measuring, and how you measure.  I would suggest that there are two appropriate criteria to consider as to whether Medicaid accomplishes anything:  improvement in numbers of people in poverty, and improvement in health outcomes.  On those criteria, Medicaid is a spectacular disaster.

Consider the effect of Medicaid on numbers of people in poverty.  That is a highly appropriate criterion to consider, because Medicaid is billed as an "anti-poverty" program.  Indeed, Medicaid is far and away the largest "anti-poverty" program, consuming about half, or a little more, of the $1+ trillion of total federal + state + local anti-poverty spending in the U.S. each year.  It would be rather ridiculous, wouldn't it, to have a massive trillion-dollar annual budget for alleviating poverty, and spend fully half of it on a program that doesn't reduce poverty at all?  Yes, it would be completely ridiculous.  And of course, that's exactly what we do.  In the official measurement of "poverty," in-kind spending like Medicaid does not count.  The Census number crunchers measure "poverty" only based on what they call "cash income," and nothing about Medicaid counts as cash income.  Thus, Medicaid does not reduce the number of people in official "poverty" by a single soul.

If you think that's ridiculous, I have something even more so.  Recognizing the vulnerability of Medicaid to the criticism made here, some defenders of the program a few years ago felt a need to do a study to show that Medicaid actually does reduce poverty.  So in 2013, researchers named Sommers and Oellerich did a big study published in the Journal of Health Economics purporting to apply a sophisticated new methodology to evaluate whether Medicaid actually reduced poverty.  Of course the first thing their new methodology had to do was to avoid use of the regular Census methodology for measuring poverty, because it's a given that Medicaid does not and cannot reduce poverty under that definition.  (Instead they used the "new Coke" Supplemental Poverty measurement that Census had just come up with.  This is the definition of "poverty" now used by all good progressive advocates whenever the traditional measure gives the wrong answer.)  I won't go through all of Sommers & Oellerich's methodology (you can find a more detailed description at the link), but I'll cut to the breathless answer:  "Medicaid kept at least 2.6 million Americans out of poverty in 2010."  Exciting!  The result gets cited repeatedly in the progressive world, for example here by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities in 2015.  

Really???  $400 billion (approximate 2010 spending level) to keep 2.6 million people out of poverty?  That's around $160,000 of spending per person relieved from poverty!  And this in a world where the official "poverty level" is under $12,000 for an individual, and around $6000 per person in larger families.  If the goal here, or any part of it, is to reduce poverty, it would be literally impossible to design a less cost-effective method even if you set out intentionally to do just that.  Medicaid is the perfect illustration of progressives treating the federal government as the infinite source of free money, without any concept of real costs or trade-offs.

But at least Medicaid must improve health outcomes, right?  Don't bet on it.  For decades literally everybody just assumed that having healthcare "coverage" must somehow improve health outcomes.  Then came the randomized study out of Oregon, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2013.  Result:

This randomized, controlled study showed that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years, but it did increase use of health care services, raise rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduce financial strain.   

After this, the best the defenders of Medicaid could say was basically, two years of data are not enough.  (But if heart attacks, or strokes, or diabetes, or other such things were actually going untreated among the uninsured, why wouldn't that turn up as at least somewhat increased mortality within two years?) Anyway, Oren Cass, in an article for the Manhattan Institute in June, points out that now longer term data are available, and the results haven't changed:

Critics of the [Oregon] study claim that two years isn't long enough for positive effects to materialize. But a longer-term statistical analysis published earlier this year found no significant correlation between health-care access and life expectancy for low-income households across different geographies.

So, on what measures is it even possible to try to defend the staggering expenditures on Medicaid?  Well, here's an article from the Huffington Post from July 27, written by Edwin Park of CBPP.  Park gives 10 reasons why Medicaid, supposedly, "works."  Not one of them has anything to do with either reducing poverty or improving health outcomes!  So what the hell are they?  Number one is "provid[ing] quality health coverage."  Number two is "cut[ting] dramatically the number of Americans without health insurance."  (Aren't those two the same thing?)  Number three is "Medicaid participation is high."  (Same thing again!)  Number four is "Medicaid has improved access to care . . . ."  (Same thing yet again!)  And so forth.  You get the idea:  "coverage" is the Holy Grail, even if it costs a bloody fortune without achieving any measurable improvements in either poverty or health outcomes.  Maybe this would make a little sense if the cost was $10 billion per year, or even $50 billion, or maybe even $100 billion.  But $550 billion per year???  

Oh, and let's not forget about the fraud.  Kevin Williamson has a post up on this subject at National Review Online, titled "The Facts about Medicaid Fraud."  I'm not sure he's got his facts perfect, but here is the key quote:

In September, the Department of Health and Human Services sent out a warning that improper payments under Medicaid have become so common that they will account this year for almost 12 percent of total Medicaid spending — just shy of $140 billion.

The $140 billion would be more like 25% of Medicaid spending than 12%, so I'm assuming that he must  be including Medicare as well.  Whatever.  Even at half the $140 billion level, the number is breathtaking.  And this is what the government admits to.  You could not go wrong betting that the real number is far higher than what they admit.

Medicaid is just the classic case of designing a program by feel-gooderism without any consideration of cost-effectiveness.  Once in place, it grows on auto-pilot, without anybody looking at it or considering whether the tens of billions of dollars of added spending every year are accomplishing anything meaningful.  Entrenched interests grow rich, while alternative uses of the money -- whether alternative government spending or returning the money to the private sector through tax cuts -- get pushed off the agenda.  

Have you noticed any mention by either side of the presidential campaign of the need to look at Medicaid for cost-effectiveness?  Neither have I.   

Connecticut Goes Completely Insane

You don't read all that much about Connecticut in the national news because it's a small state, and often overshadowed by its bigger neighbors to the West and North.  Its "big cities" (Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport, Stamford) only have around 150,000 +/- people each.  But the state deserves attention, at least from those interested in effective public policy, because it is a poster child for the dead end of "blue model" state governance.  It's one of the wealthiest states (number four in per capita income according to this list on Wikipedia), but its cities are among the poorest in the country, and in recent years it has been losing population and high income taxpayers to outmigration.  As is typical for deep blue states, the proposed solutions to social problems are always more taxes and higher government spending.  After many rounds of that, somehow the problems never get better.

A couple of developments this past week in Connecticut illustrate the blind alley into which the state has backed itself.  One is a big decision handed down by the state Superior Court in Hartford in the latest school funding litigation, Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding v. Rell.  The second is an enforcement action taken by the State Elections Enforcement Commission against two (Republican) state senators for the sin of mentioning the name of the (Democratic) governor unflatteringly in their campaign advertisements.

The CCJEF case is the latest in the endless series of constitutional litigations brought by various activist groups around the country challenging state methods for funding the government schools.  Connecticut has many of the usual circumstances for these cases: the major cities are relatively poor, the schools in the major cities have student populations with heavy majorities of blacks, and those schools are failing the students miserably.  In many of the cases around the country over the last several decades, the activists have succeeded in getting courts to order remedies in such circumstances that have included either simply more money for the poor urban districts, or new funding formulas that reallocate funding from wealthier to poorer districts.  (The famous seminal case was Serrano v. Priest, decided by the California Supreme Court in 1971.)  So why not try another run at this in Connecticut today?

Actually CCJEF started this case in November 2005, now almost 11 years ago.  Of course the initiators were the usual suspects from the Yale Law School, who rounded up a bunch of school kids to serve as plaintiffs.  In 2010 the case reached the Connecticut Supreme Court, which declined to dismiss it as without basis, and instead remanded the case to the Superior Court on the vaguest of standards as to what the state constitution of Connecticut requires of the government schools.  The case then ended up in the courtroom of Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawsher for a "trial" that started in January this year and ran into August.  The good judge rendered his 90-page decision on September 7.

The best that can be said about the opinion is that it's a total mess; but, to be fair to the judge, he was put to an impossible task.  Here's the governing clause of the state constitution:

There shall always be free public elementary and secondary schools in the state.  The general assembly shall implement this principle by appropriate legislation.    

OK, take it from there, Tom!  Needless to say, what the plaintiffs wanted was lots more money for the poorer districts, which they were happy to see taken away from places like Greenwich and Darien for the sinful conduct of getting rich.  But here was the rub:  Connecticut already had one of these constitutional school funding cases, back in the seventies in the wake of Serrano v. Priest.  And that case, Horton v. Meskill, decided in 1977, had already forced the reallocation of state spending such that the poorer districts got lots more money out of the state than the richer ones, and the overall level of per pupil spending was as high or higher in the poorer districts than in the richer ones.   And now, just since 2012, the state legislature had added one handout after another to try to improve things in the poorer and failing schools: $400 million in new money for the state's 30 lowest performing schools under the "Alliance Districts" program; "additional resources," including $13 million in 2015 alone, for 14 failing schools under the "Commissioner's Network" program; $4 million in new "school improvement grants" for 30 high needs schools; etc., etc., etc.  

So, how about a few more programs?  You can't even name one they don't already have!

State and federal programs also beef up needy school districts by providing students breakfast, lunch, and many times food to take home.  Schools in some districts feed students even in the summer.  After-school programs instruct and care for kids.  Parents are invited into schools to share in learning.  Homeless children are sought out and their needs tended.  There are programs to prevent sexually-transmitted diseases, young parents programs, pregnant student supports, and mental health programs.

And yet the urban and heavily black schools continue to fail.  So what is the "solution" demanded by the geniuses from the Yale Law School to finally bring success to Connecticut urban education after decades of failure?  You guessed it!  More money for everything:

The plaintiffs claim that all of these programs are under-effective because they are under-funded.

What is a judge to do?  And here's where the whole thing goes completely off the rails.  After recognizing that lack of programs and money can't possibly be the problem, the judge claims to have now finally discovered the problem that nobody else previously noticed:  the allocation and spending of the state education money have been "irrational."  The legislature came up with a spending formula without "explain[ing] how it was chosen," and then they failed to follow it.  They have no explanation for how current levels of spending have been decided.  (Suggestion: political horse trading?)  They spent money on buildings "without rhyme or reason."  The teacher training and evaluation system is completely irrational.  The use of money for special education makes no sense at all.  It's just chaos!  And what we need to straighten this all out is so obvious: "a rational plan."

Or to put it another way, the functionaries have been failing to execute socialism properly.  Now, they will be ordered to execute correctly!  Anybody who believes this can actually work has to be completely insane.  But hey, what else was the judge to do with the mandate handed him by the Supreme Court?  Anyway, the decision contains no orders for remedies, but rather directs the state to "develop" and submit "rational policies" in each of the areas of irrationality that have been identified in his opinion.  Connecticut is now in for decades of judicial meddling in K-12 education.  The chance that the court can do a much better job than the bureaucrats who have been running things so far is probably about zero; but then again, he probably can't do much worse either.

And in another area where Connecticut decided that it could achieve a more perfect world through more government spending, we find that they are one of a minority of states that have adopted a so-called "clean campaign" system for public funding of political campaigns.  Here is a write-up from Restoring Liberty on September 3.  Collect enough "very small donations" of $5 or less from constituents, and you will get a "near fully-funded campaign" courtesy of Connecticut's taxpayers.  Thus we will "get money out of politics."  Enforcement is entrusted to something called the State Elections Enforcement Commission.  What could go wrong?

Well, next thing you know the SEEC started an enforcement proceeding against 16 Republican state senators.  (Of course it's Republicans.  The Democrats control the governorship and both houses of the legislature.)  What did the evil Republicans do?

The state’s sanction against the legislative candidates was for mentioning Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy, a Democrat, by name in mailings that referenced “Malloy’s bad policies” and “Malloy’s tax hike” for their own races in 2014, when Malloy was also on the ballot.

Well, obviously we can't have criticism of our governor or of high taxes in a political campaign!  Fourteen of the accused promptly settled.  But two -- Joe Markley and Rob Sampson -- have chosen to fight.  A hearing is scheduled for later this month.

Really, why haven't these guys thought of the idea of creating a "foundation" and collecting a few hundred mil from Wall Street banks and mid-East petro-states before the campaign officially gets under way?

Constitution R.I.P.

Admittedly, blatantly unconstitutional acts by our government are not a new phenomenon.  Examples from the earlier days of our Republic include John Adams's Sedition Acts of 1798 (a direct violation of the First Amendment, although duly approved by Congress), and Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 (where did the President get the unilateral power to abolish slavery?).  But there were notable differences between these acts and today's versions.  In those days, such acts ignited powerful debates about abiding by the Constitution, and became significant factors in elections.  The Sedition Acts played no small part in the defeat of the Federalists and the election of Jefferson in 1800, and the Acts were then allowed to expire by their own terms shortly thereafter.  Lincoln himself recognized the need for promptly replacing the Emancipation Proclamation with a constitutional amendment, campaigned on that issue in 1864, and the Thirteenth Amendment (abolishing slavery) was well on its way to ratification at the time of his death.

Today?  The constitutional violations come fast and furious, and it's like almost nobody even notices that it's happening.  In the midst of a presidential campaign, the candidates studiously avoid the issue.  Also studiously avoiding the issue is the progressive press.  This Constitution thing is so tiresome!  How is the government supposed to implement perfect fairness and justice in the world, let alone "save the planet," if it can't do whatever the hell it wants?  So it falls to a few cranks, such as yours truly, to point out the obvious.  For today, let's take a few recent examples.

Clean Power Plan

Suppose you are the President, and you think that the greatest crisis facing the world is the crisis of global warming caused by mankind's sinful use of fossil fuels.  In your heart, you know that the government can solve the crisis, but only by (for starters) taking over the electricity-producing sector of the economy and shutting down all coal-fired power plants as well as the entire coal mining industry. You also know that the majority in Congress thinks this is nuts and won't pass any new legislation to help you out.  And then there's the Constitution.  It gives you no legislative powers whatsoever (Article I, Section 1: "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States"), and prescribes that you must execute the laws as written (Article II, Section 3: "[The President] shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed . . . .")  How to proceed?

Easy!  You just have to find something -- anything! -- in the existing U.S. Code to claim to support you.  That gives you hundreds of volumes of impenetrable text to select from.  Who cares if nobody remotely thought any of this would give you the authority to force the closure of all coal-fired power plants and the entire coal mining industry?  And thus we light upon Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act (most recent major amendments in 1990 -- before we knew that carbon dioxide was a "pollutant"):

The Administrator shall prescribe regulations . . . under which each State shall submit to the Administrator a plan which (A) establishes standards of performance for any existing source . . .  which is not . . . regulated under section [1]12 of this title . . . .  

But wait!  Power plants are already regulated under Section 112.  How can you possibly use this section to regulate power plants?  I won't try to give you the government's incomprehensible and convoluted response.  You can read it for yourself here.  

This case is currently before the D.C. Circuit on a challenge to the government's authority to proceed brought by some 27 states plus various utilities and coal companies.  Oral argument before the en banc circuit is scheduled for September 27.  This is one of those cases where it seems that how a judge views the case entirely depends on the party of the President who appointed him.  The Democrats have a majority of the judges on the D.C. Circuit.  Does it matter to any of them that the statute on which the government claims to rely forbids this action by its clear terms, and the Constitution gives the executive no authority to legislate?

Obamacare

Well, if there's one thing that's clear in the Constitution, it's that the Congress has the "power of the purse."  (Article I, Section 9: "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law . . . .")  And then, for good measure, there's 31 U.S.C. § 1301(d) (“A law may be construed to make an appropriation out of the Treasury . . . only if the law specifically states that an appropriation is made”)  But of course, that's unless the government claims it really, really "needs" to spend the money to make some statute "work."  

And thus it seems that under the Obamacare statute the government has been spending some tens upon tens of billions of dollars without Congressional appropriation.  The details are laid out in the May 2016 opinion by Judge Rosemary Collyer of the D.C. District Court.  The issue relates to Section 1402 of the Affordable Care Act, dealing with something called "cost sharing reductions," under which insurers provide reduced deductibles and co-pays to qualifying enrollees in return for subsidies from the government.  The problem is that the statute contains no language permanently appropriating the money for the subsidies.  As you would expect, the Obama administration submitted budget requests asking Congress for appropriation of the money.  But Congress did not include any money for this purpose in its appropriations.  So the government just went ahead and spent the money.  They did not seek any kind of permission from anyone.  They just went ahead and spent it.  Tens upon tens of billions of taxpayer dollars.

Judge Collyer describes the government's position as follows:

The Secretaries rely on 31 U.S.C. § 1324, which expressly appropriates money for Section 1401 premium tax credits. In order to explain their paying Section 1402 reimbursements out of a permanent appropriation for IRS refunds, the Secretaries posit that Sections 1401 and 1402 are economically and programmatically integrated. A contrary reading of the amended appropriations statute, they contend, would yield absurd economic, fiscal, and healthcare-policy results. 

So that's it:  Forget this obsolete "appropriations" thing.  We can spend whatever money we want, just as long as we have determined that not to do so would produce "absurd results."  But aren't ninety percent of the statutes passed by Congress "absurd"?  Anyway, this one also is headed to the D.C. Circuit, and then likely on to the Supremes.  Will it be as politically pre-determined as the Clean Power Plan case? 

Paris Climate Accord

You will be happy to learn that over the Labor Day weekend, President Obama went to China, and while he was there the United States "ratified" the Paris Climate Accord.  Or maybe it was "formally ratified."  Or at least you would think that was true if you read most of the media reports of the event.  For example, there was Reuters ("The United States has joined China to formally ratify the Paris agreement to curb climate-warming emissions. . . ."); or Scientific American ("U.S. and China  formally commit to Paris Climate Accord"); or The Guardian ( "U.S. and China agree to ratify Paris climate deal").

But wait!  Under the Constitution, doesn't "ratification" of an international commitment require a two-thirds vote in the Senate?  (Article II, Section 2:  "[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.")  Well, it seems that Obama just skipped this step.  It was completely obvious that the Senate wasn't going to have any part of this thing, and a two-thirds vote was completely out of the question.  The "ratification" they are talking about consisted of nothing more than Obama himself putting his John Hancock on the document.  

Granted, there are such things as "executive agreements" between nations.  But don't they cover only routine, administrative, and short-term matters?  This one purports to commit the United States to achieve a 25 to 28% reduction in "greenhouse gas emissions" by 2025, and then to continue to make further reductions after that -- commitments that could cost the U.S. economy easily hundreds of billions of dollars.  In the range of international agreements entered into by the United States, this one is at the highest end in terms of scope and burdens of the commitments undertaken and time period covered (essentially, forever).  Here is an analysis by the Heritage Foundation of whether this agreement meets the usual criteria for determining what is a treaty.  Conclusion: it's not even close.

Meanwhile, what did China commit to?  Are they going to reduce their "greenhouse gas" emissions 25 to 28% by 2025?  You won't believe this, but what China is supposedly "committing" to is not a reduction at all, but rather only to have their emission "peak" by 2030.  Between now and then they are planning to increase their emissions by somewhere around 50%, by which time theirs will be well over double ours.  They will be building literally hundreds of new coal power plants, even as we shut all of ours and close down our coal industry.  And when 2030 comes, are they really going to do anything -- or will this whole "climate change" fad be past and forgotten?  Really, this couldn't be funnier -- if you are President Xi of China.  Watch your main geo-political rival commit economic suicide without your having to do anything.

At least the good news here is that the next President (not Hillary, but some hypothetical sane one at some time in the future) will likely just walk away from this absurdity.  (Or, if he/she is more nuanced, submit the document to the Senate and have it voted down.)

But meanwhile, the extent to which our government just pays no attention whatsoever any more to the Constitution is just breathtaking.  I'm half expecting that the next move will be to award a few more Senators to California and New York.       

The Solution For The Failure Of Socialism: Double Down!

Down in Venezuela, things just get worse and worse.  Writing yesterday in Canada's Globe and Mail, Alberto Vargas Llosa describes how Venezuela's dictator Nicolas Maduro has only one solution to propose, which is to "double down."  The title is "As despair spreads in Venezuela, Maduro doubles down."  Seems that they took blowout government spending, price controls and industry nationalizations as far as they could.  But now they have run out of other people's money, and they are moving into the military repression phase.  Excerpt:

The more the country sinks into despair, the worse the repression and militarization. . . .  The military, which already controls more than half the ministries, oil giant PDVSA and a bank, now commands the crippled economy. Mr. Maduro has given exceptional powers to General and Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez, who is in charge of food distribution. The government, which had already reduced the National Assembly’s opposition majority to impotence, has now barred from office every elected official who signed up to recall Mr. Maduro.

And how is the economy doing?

The country’s GDP has had 10 consecutive quarters of negative growth. (The annualized rate is now minus 12 per cent.) Investment is down 26 per cent from 2015. Consumption, which had fallen precipitously, is down another 16 per cent this year.

Well, thank God that we don't have that kind of thing in the United States!  But wait, should we check in on what's happening with Obamacare?  A fair description is that Obamacare is in the relatively early stages of the Socialist Death Spiral.  Millions of individuals ordered to purchase mis-designed and overpriced government insurance products are declining to do it.  Insurers are rapidly exiting markets where they have figured out that they can't make money.  Those remaining are often increasing premiums in the range of 20 - 40%.  Can this thing possibly survive?

And if you look around, you will find that progressives all think they have they answer.  We just need to double down!  At FiveThirtyEight on August 31, we have "Insurers Can Make Obamacare Work, But They Need Help From Congress."  Excerpt:

Congress needs to make fixes, the most important being subsidizing more of the premiums paid by middle-class customers — the kind of midcourse adjustment that Congress routinely makes for Medicare but which has been politically impossible for Obamacare.

Some more money from the Infinite Credit Card will surely do the trick!  Or try Jeffrey Young at the Huffington Post on July 6, "If Obamacare Is Here To Stay, It's Going To Need Some Fixing.  Here Are 5 Ways How."  The short version of all five is, just spend more of the free government money and order that everybody must have affordable healthcare.  

Cover More Of The Uninsured. . . .  Make Health Care More Affordable. . . .  Expand Medicaid In More States.   

Nothing to it!  Oh, and throw in a big dose of price controls:

For people with health insurance policies that require them to pick up a bigger share of their medical costs out-of-pocket, these new miracle drugs are largely unaffordable. . . .  “Right now, there’s no control over what those costs should be,” [Ron] Pollack [of FamiliesUSA] said. “There probably ultimately will need to be some kind of control in prices.

Yes, price controls -- they sure have worked out well in Venezuela!  Well, at least we're still in the more handouts and price controls phase of doubling down on socialism.  The military repression phase seems so far away!

Political Corruption, Money In Politics, And The Clinton Foundation

The revelations just keep coming, new ones seemingly every few days.  The first one I can remember came to light back in April 2015, when it emerged that, in a series of transactions from 2009 to 2013, Russian state nuclear energy agency Rosatom had taken control of uranium mining firm Uranium One (including major uranium mines in the U.S.) with approval of the Hillary Clinton State Department.  According to the linked New York Times article, the deal had been "orchestrated" by Canadian mining financier and Bill Clinton buddy Frank Giustra.  Giustra had contributed $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation.  The Chairman of Uranium One (Ian Telfer) contributed $2.35 million.  And then there was the $500,000 "speech" fee to Bill personally.

And that one was before the long-buried Hillary emails started coming out in response to FOIA requests.  In the past couple of months, we now have, as further examples:

• ABC News reported in June 2016 that Chicago securities trader Rajiv Fernando, a guy with no particularly relevant experience, got himself appointed to the government's International Security Advisory Board.  He had donated "between $100,000 and $250,000" to the Clinton Foundation.
• Last week we learned from the Daily Caller that in 2009 the Crown Prince of Bahrain, having gotten nowhere in efforts through official channels to get a meeting with Madame Secretary of State, tried going through Clinton Foundation channels.  He promptly got the meeting he wanted.  His contribution to the Foundation?  $32 million.
• And now this week it emerges that if you wanted to get invited to official State Department functions during Hillary's tenure, and seated next to the right people, the way to do it was to make a generous contribution to the Clinton Foundation.  Judith Rodin of the Rockefeller Foundation wanted to go to a State Department dinner and sit next to Joe Biden?  No problem.  She contacted Doug Band of the Clinton Foundation, who contacted Huma Abedin of Hillary's State Department staff, and voila! it was done.  Rockefeller Foundation contribution to Clinton Foundation?  $25 million.  The linked Washington Examiner story from August 29 includes numerous other examples of same.

OK, you kind of knew this was how it worked, but this is seeing it taken to whole new levels of payments, pervasiveness, and brazenness.  This can't possibly be OK, can it?  Let's have a review of the relevant law.

Just over two months ago, in June, the case of Bob McDonnell, former governor of Virginia, came before the U.S. Supreme Court.  The funny thing is that, in many written and televised discussions of the Clinton Foundation situation that I have seen over the past few weeks, few have mentioned the McDonnell case at all, and those few only in passing.  Here is a copy of the decision.  McDonnell had accepted a series of personal gifts from a businessman interested in getting his product studied by the University of Virginia.  The total amount of the gifts (some were in kind) was in the range of $200,000 -- really, ridiculously small time compared to the Clintons.  In return, McDonnell set up several meetings with university officials in a position to green light the studies the guy wanted done.  But the officials never gave the approval and the studies were not done.  Nevertheless, federal prosecutors prosecuted McDonnell, and he was convicted of multiple counts of bribery; and the conviction was affirmed by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.  But the Supreme Court reversed -- unanimously.  The Court held that the mere act of setting up meetings was not an "official act" as defined by the federal bribery statute, and not a sufficient quid pro quo to support a conviction under that statute.

If you think about that, you will realize that this recent precedent makes a criminal prosecution of Hillary for these Foundation transactions rather difficult.  In the large majority of what has come to light to date, Clinton did more or less the same thing that McDonnell did -- facilitate meetings for big donors.  The big exception is the Russian uranium deal, where a major transaction actually occurred to the significant benefit of Hillary's donors.  Of course, this is the one of the listed incidents on which email traffic (that might establish a quid pro quo) has not yet surfaced.

But, you ask, what about campaign finance restrictions?  Surely it can't be OK to give tens of millions of dollars to a "foundation" of someone you completely know is shortly going to be running for President -- particularly when it was obvious to everyone that contributions to the Clinton Foundation were being used to keep the campaign-staff-in-waiting employed, and to support the personal lifestyles of the three Clintons, including private and first-class air travel and top hotels.  For example, this Politico article from 2014 reports that the Clinton Foundation raised $145 million in 2013, of which almost $9 million was spent on travel expenses.  There's this classic line:

The Board recognizes that, due to extraordinary security and other requirements, William J. Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Chelsea Clinton may require the need to travel by charter or in first class, the determination of which will be made on a case-by-case basis.

No, actually the campaign finance laws don't cover this subject at all.  That's some $2 billion in contributions to the Foundation, of which tens of millions went to support the Clintons' personal lifestyle and proto-campaign, and none of it counts at all against the "campaign finance" restrictions.  Hey, it wasn't yet a "campaign"!  Keep that in mind next time you hear Hillary talking about the need to "reverse Citizens United" and "get money out of politics."  You can be one-hundred-percent sure that any "reform" put through by Hillary would not touch any of her own sordid activities.

So there you have it!  And let's just add one more thing to the mix:  Hillary's entire economic plan for how to supposedly "improve the economy" consists of one government spending program after another.  Who do you think is going to get those multi-tens-of-billions-of-dollar government contracts for uneconomic "green energy" and "infrastructure" projects?  Do you think that contributions to the Clinton Foundation, or for that matter, to the Clinton campaign, might give anyone a leg up?

So what are you going to do about it?  I have only two ideas:

1. You don't have to vote for this woman.
2. You need to recognize that government spending of money and allocation of the resources of society is inherently corrupt.  Government spending will always preferentially go to those who have curried the favor and greased the palms of the relevant government functionaries.  There is no conceivable collection of anti-bribery laws, or campaign finance laws, that can improve this situation other than a little at the margins.  The only significant improvement can come from shrinking the government and letting the private sector expand.  

At least Hillary has done us the favor of showing us how this game is played at the highest levels.