Climate Alarmism Airheads

At the link site RealClearPolitics, when they link to one article on a topic, they often also have a link to another article giving a different or opposite perspective on the same topic.  This morning they posted a link to my article from Monday, "The 'Science' Underlying Climate Alarmism Turns Up Missing."    Sure enough, the adjacent link was to an article by uber-alarmist Bill McKibben, titled "Recalculating the Climate Math."  I thought you readers might enjoy a comparison of the two.

My post featured a new Research Report just out from a group of prominent independent scientist and mathematicians, that subjected EPA's so-called "Endangerment Finding" to rigorous validation (or invalidation) as against the best available empirical evidence from 13 different sources.  EPA's Endangerment Finding is the regulatory determination that forms the basis for the current campaign of the Obama administration to fundamentally transform the energy sector of the economy, to put coal mines and coal miners and coal power plants out of business, to reduce and restrict the use of fossil fuels, and to cost the American public hundreds of billions of dollars -- all to "save the planet."  Yet as it imposes these enormous costs, EPA somehow skipped the step of conducting any rigorous validation/invalidation exercise of the Endangerment Finding against the best available evidence.  "Science," of course, is the method by which hypotheses are proposed, and then those hypotheses are subjected to rigorous validation/invalidation tests as against the best empirical data.  After applying that method in the best tradition of science, the conclusion of the Research Report that I discussed is that EPA's Endangerment Finding has been invalidated.  

Now, a person might very reasonably want that conclusion to be subjected to meticulous scrutiny.  That's why the authors of the Report posted all of their data and methods publicly, so that anyone could take whatever potshots they want.  The key to science is reproducibility.  Maybe somebody can find other or better data that lead to a different result.  Maybe somebody can find a flaw in the math.  Maybe somebody can propose an alternative interpretation of the data under which the alarmist hypothesis survives.  Who knows?  Have at it!

And then there's McKibben's article.  Really, is there any bigger airhead in the world of climate alarmism than this guy?  As far as I can figure out, he doesn't even know what the scientific method is.  A fair description of his article is that it is pitched to college humanities majors who may have taken one basic science course in junior high school, and may have been taught about the scientific method, but have long since forgotten the part of the method that involves testing the hypothesis against the data. 

Rather than try to state the theme of McKibben's article for him, I'll quote his own words:

The future of humanity depends on math. And the numbers in a new study released Thursday are the most ominous yet.  Those numbers spell out, in simple arithmetic, how much of the fossil fuel in the world’s existing coal mines and oil wells we can burn if we want to prevent global warming from cooking the planet. In other words, if our goal is to keep the Earth’s temperature from rising more than two degrees Celsius—the upper limit identified by the nations of the world—how much more new digging and drilling can we do?

Here’s the answer: zero.  That’s right: If we’re serious about preventing catastrophic warming, the new study shows, we can’t dig any new coal mines, drill any new fields, build any more pipelines. Not a single one.    

Now, the proposition that a given amount of burning of fossil fuels and adding of CO2 to the atmosphere will lead to a given amount of global temperature rise, such as the two degrees Celsius cited by McKibben -- that's what we call in science a "hypothesis."  Mr. McKibben, can you kindly share with us the empirical data and the methodology by which this hypothesis has been quantitatively validated to the extent that it can and should now be used to justify taking hundreds of billions of dollars of assets (whose value arises out of their being able to provide cheap energy to the masses) and rendering those assets valueless? 

You will not find the answer to that question in this article.  But, McKibben claims, the answer is to be found in the "new study released Thursday"!  Here is a link to that study.  And guess what?  You won't find the answer to my question there either!  This "study" treats the relationship of CO2 ppm in the atmosphere with temperature rise as a total given, and makes no attempt to support the quantitative relationship function or tie it to empirical data of any kind.  In a chart on page 6, the report asserts that the 2 degrees C limit of temperature rise will be hit when cumulative human CO2 emissions hit about 850 gigatons.  But how do they know that?  What is the empirical basis for the quantitative relationship function that they use?  Try studying the report and see if you can find it.  After several reads, the best I can find is this on page 12:

We know from atmospheric physics that the key factor determining the extent of global warming is the cumulative amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions over time. 11

Aha!!  We "know" this is true, because of "atmospheric physics"!  And that's all you'll find here.  If you want to know any more of how we got this, you'll just have to follow footnote 11.

Go all the way to the end of the report, and here is the text of footnote 11:

Temperature change is roughly proportional to total cumulative CO2 emissions (until emissions peak, and assuming smooth variations in emissions). IPCC Climate Change 2013, Working Group 1 report, sec.12.5.4, pp.1108ff, http://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter12_FINAL.pdf.  See also Reto Knutti presentation to UNFCCC Structured Expert Dialogue 2013-15 Review, 13 November 2013, ‘Relationship between global emissions and global temperature rise’, at https://unfccc.int/files/science/workstreams/the_2013-2015_review/application/pdf/7_knutti.reto.3sed2.pdf.

Once again, it's just more ex cathedra statements without any clue as to whether or how they have been empirically validated.  Go ahead and follow the links in the footnote as well.  Here is what you will find: UN IPCC modelers treating their models (i.e., hypotheses) as proved without empirical validation of any kind.  There are no further references.  You have hit the end of the road.  That's it.

So now, in the Research Report that I discussed in my post, we have a serious rigorous effort of validation or invalidation of the climate models (as applied in EPA's Endangerment Finding).  And the result is that, once ENSO (El Nino/La Nina) effects are backed out, there is no atmospheric warming in the 13 best data sets left to be explained by the CO2 greenhouse effect.  In the report that McKibben relies on, there is no empirical validation of the key hypotheses at all, whether in the report itself or in its references.  The difference is: one is science, that is, testing of the hypothesis against the best empirical data; and the other is just argument from authority.  Hey, we're the priests here!  Of course our hypothesis is true -- we say so!  How dare you ask us to validate it empirically!

Meanwhile, all of this is fairly meaningless in terms of any possible real world effect on the climate.  The "commitment" just made by China is to cause its emissions to "peak" in 15 years; and in the meantime they plan to build hundreds of additional coal-fired power plants, far more than replacing the emissions from any that we might close.  India equally has no intention of stopping the increase in the use of coal until everyone in that country has electricity, which again will be hundreds of power plants from now.  Japan closed all of its nuclear plants after the Fukushima accident in 2012, and replaced that electricity with additional fossil fuel resources.  Most of Africa remains to be electrified.  What say you to these things, McKibben?  If just the U.S. shuts its fossil fuel resources, how does that change anything?

But yes, our President has totally signed on with the McKibben program.  So has Hillary Clinton. 

You Are Right To Be Disgusted With The Political Class: Hillary Edition

Here at the Manhattan Contrarian, I generally try to focus on policy rather than on politicians and personalities.  The basic idea is to cut through the government's endless self-promotion of itself and grubbing for bigger programs and budgets and staffs, and to look at the pervasive and inevitable failure of its efforts.  "Anti-poverty" programs that cost a trillion dollars a year without ever ameliorating poverty.  "Affordable housing" programs ("the worst possible public policy") that trap the "beneficiaries" in poverty for life.  Healthcare programs that cost hundreds of billions of annual dollars without improving either poverty status or health outcomes.  "Environmental" regulations that impose hundreds of billions of dollars of annual costs on the economy without any detectable improvements to the environment.  Plus, of course, the endless stream of fake and doctored government-issued data and statistics all carefully engineered to promote the further growth of the government and the election of the favored candidates who will promote the growth of the government.

Study this stuff enough, and you just can't help but get more and more disgusted with the political class.  These are the people who are running things.  They have to know that the "anti-poverty" programs don't ameliorate poverty.  They have to know that the "affordable housing" programs trap people in poverty for life (while making them into reliable bought votes for the ins).  They have to know that the costs of these and the other failures make all working Americans immeasurably poorer.  They have to know the major ways in which the data and statistics are fake and doctored.  Which makes these people outright frauds.  They'll say anything to get their hands on taxpayer money to be used to keep themselves and their supporters in power.  Or, maybe they don't know.  That's even worse for them!  How is it even possible to be on the inside of the government at a high level and be so willfully ignorant?

All of which brings me to Hillary Clinton's op-ed in today's New York Times, headlined "My Plan For Helping America's Poor."   This is just as bad as it gets.  In a bare 600 or so words, the Democratic candidate manages to utter virtually every significant cliche of New York Times conventional ignorance and groupthink on the subject of anti-poverty efforts.  And what is her proposal of what to do?  You guessed it:  double down on failure!  Here's how it starts:

The true measure of any society is how we take care of our children. With all of our country’s resources, no child should ever have to grow up in poverty. Yet every single night, all across America, kids go to sleep hungry or without a place to call home.  We have to do better.

Can we have any recognition that the American taxpayers are already spending a trillion dollars a year or so on these "anti-poverty" efforts?  How is it even possible to spend that much money and still have "kids go[ing] to sleep hungry or without a place to call home"?  Hey, Hillary:  you were the First Lady for eight years.  You were a U.S. Senator for eight years.  Then you were a senior member of the current administration.  Isn't it time to take ownership of the failure?  Who is to blame here, if not you?  Haven't you known all this time that the government was blowing a trillion a year of taxpayer money without making any dent in poverty?  Where has been your advocacy over the eight years of Obama's presidency to redirect some the the trillion a year of "anti-poverty" money into something that might work?  I sure haven't heard it.  

And who is this "we" throughout your article?  I get the clear impression that you're trying to guilt me and the other overly-generous taxpayers with the government's failure to spend the immense resources it has been given in any remotely effective manner.  Sorry, but it's not the taxpaying class that has been given the trillion per year and has failed to solve the problem of poverty.  It's the political class -- you and your cronies.

So let's look at a few of the specific proposals.  First, note of course that there isn't the slightest suggestion here that any of the current spending might be cut as worthless.  What, and make some of my supporters go out and get a real job?  No, instead it's all new and additional government spending and programs!

I will work with Democrats and Republicans to make a historic investment in good-paying jobs — jobs in infrastructure and manufacturing, technology and innovation, small businesses and clean energy.

All wealth comes from government spending!  Hey, it's an "investment"!  And that "clean energy" thing can pass a lot of government billions to supporters of the Clinton Foundation!

If we want to get serious about poverty, we also need a national commitment to create more affordable housing.

As long as we're going to go for bad public policy, we might as well go for the "worst possible public policy"!  So-called "affordable housing" is how you spend as much money as possible to benefit as few people as possible, while being absolutely sure that no one currently in poverty ever exits.  It's not possible, is it, for Hillary not to know that "affordable housing" subsidies don't count as income and therefore never raise a single person out of poverty?  I really don't know the answer to that.

And how to finance the new "affordable housing" initiative?  With tax credits, of course!  That will make sure that the program enriches a handful of her wealthiest supporters:

My plan would expand Low Income Housing Tax Credits in high-cost areas to increase our affordable housing supply. . . .  

And is there anywhere here any recognition that what we have done so far hasn't worked?  It's totally the opposite:

[W]e’re making progress, thanks to the hard work of the American people and President Obama. . . .   In the United States, a new report from the Census Bureau found that there were 3.5 million fewer people living in poverty in 2015 than just a year before.  Median incomes rose by 5.2 percent, the fastest growth on record. 

Yes, you knew that one was coming:  claiming that the Census Bureau's transparently fake pre-election methodological change not only fairly presents a real rise in incomes and decline in poverty, but also can be somehow attributed to policies of the Obama administration that were in fact intentionally designed to keep poverty high.  See my previous two posts on this subject here and here.

Yes, you are absolutely right to be disgusted.  

The "Science" Underlying Climate Alarmism Turns Up Missing

In the list of President Obama's favorite things to do, using government power to save the world from human-caused "climate change" has to rank at the top.  From the time of his nomination acceptance speech in June 2008 ("this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal . . ."), through all of his State of the Union addresses, and right up to the present, he has never missed an opportunity to lecture us on how atmospheric warming from our sinful "greenhouse gas" emissions is the greatest crisis facing humanity.  Just a couple of weeks ago, while on his way in Air Force One to China to "ratify" his new climate non-treaty treaty, he stopped off to make two speeches on the subject, one in Nevada and the other in Hawaii.  From the Guardian on September 1:

Obama embraced language that would not be out of place from an environmental group, calling on politicians “to be less concerned with special interests and more concerned about the judgment of future generations”. He lamented the “withering” crops in the Marshall Islands and the fact that the government of Kiribati, another low-lying Pacific nation, has purchased land in Fiji to relocate its people due to the rising seas.

And don't forget, Air Force One is two 747s, not just one.  Hey, you wouldn't want the President to go crossing the Pacific without a backup 747, now would you?  And while the President lectures us about our sins against the planet, his EPA and other agencies embark on the project to impose penance on us by forcing the closure of coal and other fossil fuel power plants, blocking pipelines, bankrupting the coal mining industry, subsidizing intermittent power sources that can't possibly run a fully operational electrical grid at reasonable cost, and multiplying our cost of electricity by an order of magnitude or so.  To save the planet!

But is there actually any scientific basis for this?  Supposedly, it's to be found in a document uttered by EPA back in December 2009, known as the "Endangerment Finding."  In said document, the geniuses at EPA purport to find that the emissions of "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere are causing a danger to human health and welfare through the greenhouse warming mechanism.  But, you ask, is there any actual proof of that?  EPA's answer (found in the Endangerment Finding) is the "Three Lines of Evidence".  From page 47 of the Endangerment Finding's Technical Support Document:

The attribution of observed climate change to anthropogenic activities is based on multiple lines of evidence. The first line of evidence arises from the basic physical understanding of the effects of changing concentrations of GHGs, natural factors, and other human impacts on the climate system. The second line of evidence arises from indirect, historical estimates of past climate changes that suggest that the changes in global surface temperature over the last several decades are unusual (Karl et al, 2009). The third line of evidence arises from the use of computer-based climate models to simulate the likely patterns of response of the climate system to different forcing mechanisms (both natural and anthropogenic).  

But, guys, have you actually checked the empirical data to see if your "lines of evidence" stand up?  Climate skeptics have been carping for years that the serious studies that should have been done to back up the "lines of evidence" seem to be completely lacking.  And now, this morning, we get this, first appearing at the ICECAP website: "The most important assumption in EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding has been conclusively invalidated."  

The news is that a major new work of research, from a large group of top scientists and mathematicians, asserts that EPA's "lines of evidence," and thus its Endangerment Finding, have been scientifically invalidated.  Here is a relatively long quote from the summary:

On December 15, 2009, EPA issued its Green House Gas (GHG) Endangerment Finding, which has driven very significant and costly regulations beginning with CO2. Focusing primarily on the time period since 1950, EPA’s Endangerment Finding predicated on Three Lines of Evidence, claims that Higher CO2 Emissions have led to dangerously Higher Global Average Surface Temperatures.

The assumption of the existence of a “Tropical Hot Spot (THS)” is critical to all Three Lines of Evidence in EPA’s GHG/CO2 Endangerment Finding.

Stated simply, first, the THS is claimed to be a fingerprint or signature of atmospheric and Global Average Surface Temperatures (GAST) warming caused by increasing GHG/CO2 concentrations[1]. The proper test for the existence of the THS in the real world is very simple. Are the slopes of the three temperature trend lines (upper & lower troposphere and surface) all positive, statistically significant and do they have the proper top down rank order?

Second, higher atmospheric CO2 and other GHGs concentrations are claimed to have been the primary cause of the claimed record setting GAST over the past 50 plus years.

Third, the THS assumption is imbedded in all of the climate models that EPA still relies upon in its policy analysis supporting, for example, its Clean Power Plan - recently put on hold by a Supreme Court Stay. These climate models are also critical to EPA’s Social Cost of Carbon estimates used to justify a multitude of regulations across many U.S. Government agencies. . . .  

These analysis results [in this Report] would appear to leave very, very little doubt but that EPA’s claim of a Tropical Hot Spot (THS), caused by rising atmospheric CO2 levels, simply does not exist in the real world. Also critically important, even on an all-other-things-equal basis, this analysis failed to find that the steadily rising Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 13 critically important temperature time series data analyzed.

Thus, the analysis results invalidate each of the Three Lines of Evidence in its CO2 Endangerment Finding. Once EPA’s THS assumption is invalidated, it is obvious why the climate models they claim can be relied upon, are also invalid. And, these results clearly demonstrate - 13 times in fact - that once just the ENSO impacts on temperature data are accounted for, there is no “record setting” warming to be concerned about. In fact, there is no ENSO-Adjusted Warming at all. These natural ENSO impacts are shown in this research to involve both changes in solar activity and the well-known 1977 Pacific Climate Shift.

So the authors of this Report, operating without government or industry funding, compiled the best available atmospheric temperature time series from 13 independent sources (satellites, balloons, buoys, and surface records), and then backed out only ENSO (i.e., El Nino/La Nina) effects.  And with that data and that sole adjustment they found: no evidence of the so-called Tropical Hot Spot that is the key to EPA's claimed "basic physical understanding" of the claimed atmospheric greenhouse warming model, plus no statistically significant atmospheric warming at all to be explained.

For those interested in all the gory technical details, here is a link to the full Executive Summary, and here is a link to the full 68 page Report, complete with zillions of charts and access to all the archived underlying data.  Note that, in great distinction to the tradition of climate "science," where hiding data from adversaries is the norm, here the authors have made all data and methods fully available.  Try to prove them wrong!

Well, back to you EPA!  Do you mean that you're trying to impose hundreds of billions of dollars of costs on the American economy and citizens and the so-called "scientific" basis for your project never existed? You'd better come up with something pretty good and quick!

Meanwhile, Hillary is saying that she supports Obama's climate agenda because she "believes in science."  Does she even know that science is a process of testing hypotheses against data, and not a set of enforced orthodox beliefs?  Don't count on it.

How Incompetent Are The Mainstream Media?

On Tuesday last week the government (Census Bureau) came out with new 2015 numbers for income and poverty in the United States; and on Wednesday morning, as I discussed in this post that day, the Census release was the lead story on the front pages of both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.  The Census Bureau numbers were obviously and transparently fake.  Supposedly, in a year when GDP increased by a meager 2.4%, median household income had jumped more than 5%, and the number of people "in poverty" had declined almost 10%.  The reported changes in income and poverty could not possibly be real if the GDP numbers were also real, and could only have resulted from a methodological change that was carefully buried.  No remotely competent economic journalist could fail to spot something so obvious.  Nonetheless, both the NYT and WSJ fell for it hook, line and sinker.

(As I noted in an update to Wednesday's post, John Crudele of the New York Post promptly spotted the methodological revisions that were likely to have driven the income and poverty changes.  In my view the new methodology, while still terrible, is actually preferable to the old.  In the old numbers, income was greatly understated and poverty greatly overstated.  Now, income is somewhat less greatly understated, and poverty somewhat less greatly overstated.  But meanwhile, the reported "changes" to income and poverty in 2015 have next-to-nothing to do with real changes, and derive substantially if not entirely from the changed methodology.)

So then yesterday I received my weekly copy of The Economist magazine.  (Actually, they call themselves a "newspaper.")  Surely they are the high end of sophisticated economic journalism.  Here is their article on the Census income/poverty release.  And yes, they also fell for the Census release hook, line and sinker:

THE median real household income grew by a whacking 5.2%, or $2,800, in 2015, according to figures released on September 13th. . . .  Bucking recent trends, the wallets of the poor and least-educated swelled the most. Income at the twentieth percentile (meaning the level at which exactly one-fifth of the population earns less) grew by over 6%. . . .  That also helps to explain a fall in the poverty rate from 14.8% to 13.5%—the largest annual percentage-point drop in poverty since 1999.

The article contains no skepticism at all as to how this could be consistent with 2.4% GDP growth, and zero curiosity as to whether methodology was changed to obtain convenient numbers for an election.

Seeing that The Economist too could be so easily duped, my curiosity was piqued to look around the web at some other major sources.  Sure enough, with the exception of Crudele at the NY Post and John HInderaker at PowerLine, all the major sources got duped.  For example, see the Washington Post, with headline "Middle class incomes had their fastest growth on record last year":

Real median household income was $56,500 in 2015, the bureau reported, up from $53,700 in 2014. That 5.2 percent increase was the largest, in percentage terms, recorded by the bureau since it began tracking median income statistics in the 1960s.  In addition, the poverty rate fell by 1.2 percentage points, the steepest decline since 1968. There were 43.1 million Americans in poverty on the year, 3.5 million fewer than in 2014.

Or try Bloomberg News, "Four Charts Show How Much Poverty and Income Have Improved in the U.S.":

According to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau, last year saw poverty in the U.S. decline the most in 16 years.  The report released on Tuesday morning shows the official poverty rate in the United States declined to 13.5 percent in 2015, a 1.2 percentage drop from 2014. That is the largest drop seen on a year-over-year basis since 1998 and 1999. 

CNN?  Their headline is "The middle class gets a big raise . . . finally!"

Median household income rose to $56,516 in 2015, up 5.2% from a year earlier, according to data released by the U.S. Census Bureau Tuesday. It marks the first increase in median income since 2007, the year before the Great Recession started.  Also, the poverty rate ticked down to 13.5% in 2015, from 14.8% a year earlier.

Hook, line, and sinker.  They all just regurgitate the Census press release without a hint of critical thinking.  The only real question is, are they just that dumb, or are they all part of the Hillary campaign?  Or, it could be both.

Keepin' 'Em Down On The Reservation

Yesterday I attended a presentation by Naomi Schaefer Riley on the subject of her new book, "The New Trail Of Tears."  The topic of the book is the deplorable conditions and extreme poverty that exist on Indian reservations in the United States today.  Riley traveled in both the Eastern and Western U.S. and spent considerable time on several of the larger reservations as part of her research.  She came back with plenty of stories -- of unemployment, idleness, extreme levels of alcoholism and drug abuse, and of violence.  Yet all of this is in the face of high levels of spending by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other federal bureaucracies, not to mention that some tribes run casinos that generate large monthly checks for every tribal member.  How then could conditions be so bad?  

Riley's fundamental diagnosis is that the problems of the reservation-based Indians stem from lack of property rights.  By federal law, reservation land is held "in trust" for tribe members.  That means that nobody owns anything, which in turn means that tribe members have nothing to sell, and nothing to use as security to borrow.  Starting businesses becomes virtually impossible.  There's nothing to do but sit idle and live off the handouts.  It's a little microcosm of socialist utopia.

To me, the most fascinating (if tragic) part of the story is the complete lack of comprehension, among the people who set up these systems, of what makes for a successful human community, whether economically or otherwise.  Allow people to own things and to trade them freely (a system sometimes going by the name of "capitalism"), and before you know it you get New York, with very little need for input by government functionaries and busybodies.  Prevent people from owning things or trading them, and you get the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.  So a massive and well-funded government bureaucracy, tasked with "helping" the Indians, sets up Pine Ridge (and many others like it), and keeps it the way it is, completely resistant to change, for decade after decade.  How could they possibly be so unobservant and so ignorant?  (Let alone, so overcome with loathing for the American enterprise system and everything that it stands for.)  By the way, also complicit are the Congress (also, as to many if not most of its members, filled with dislike for the American enterprise system, as well as with the hubris that they can devise something so much better directed by themselves), and also the leadership of most of the Indian tribes (who are only too happy to get the control over the economic resources that goes to the leaders under a socialist model).

Well, fortunately, back here in New York, we are the capital of capitalism.  We have the success of the enterprise system all around us, right in front of our eyes, so we can observe how it works at close range and apply the lessons of its success to quickly eliminate our remaining pockets of poverty.  Right???  Hah!!  What we actually have is a political class that hates capitalism and enterprise as much or more than do the BIA bureaucrats and the Indian tribal leaders.  Bashing banks, "Wall Street," and/or some other successful business (ExxonMobil anyone?) is the sure route to the top in New York politics.  And to "help" the remaining poor?  We have our own little analogs of the Indian reservations, otherwise known as the New York City Housing Authority and all the new "affordable housing" initiatives.

NYCHA and the new "affordable housing" really could not be more like the Indian reservations.  You are granted your apartment by the grace of the authorities, and you can live there for life; but you can't own it.  Therefore, you can't sell it, and you can't borrow against it.  The incentives, once you're in, to stay in place and live off the handouts, are enormously powerful.  And thus we find in the NYCHA projects a poverty rate exceeding 50% (even in the midst of Manhattan, the wealthiest county in the country!) and an average tenure exceeding 20 years.

But here at the Manhattan Contrarian, I have been advocating for several years for getting rid of the socialist NYCHA model and giving the public housing away to the residents.  Thus will they get meaningful property rights, and the remaining poverty will quickly decline and disappear.  Surely, someone is listening?  No, actually, what is occurring is that just yesterday the City Council approved a massive new socialist-model "affordable housing" complex to be built in the South Bronx.  

View fullsize

Rendering of New "Affordable Housing" Project, Melrose, The Bronx

Yikes!  This soon-to-be-built new project even looks like the projects of old.  It's close to 1000 units.

So, for those of you who were hoping that there was some chance for this part of the South Bronx to start to move up in the world, get over it.  Our City Council is doing everything in its power to assure that this area will remain a permanent slum, and the residents permanently in poverty -- the better to be loyal supplicants for the continuation of their handouts.

Should You Trust Any Numbers Coming Out Of The U.S. Government?

The big economic news today comes from the release yesterday by the Census Bureau of its annual report on Income and Poverty in the United States.  Data in the report are the basis for today's lead front page articles in both the New York Times ("Incomes In U.S. Are Up Sharply; Poor Gain Most") and the Wall Street Journal ("Family Incomes Rise After Lull").  

And the news -- if you believe it -- is indeed remarkably good.  Median household income is reported to have risen $2,798, or 5.2%, from $53,718 in 2014 to $56,516 in 2015..  The official "poverty rate," is reported to have declined from 14.8% in 2014 to 13.5% in 2015.  That's a full 1.3%, and represents some 3.5 million fewer people "in poverty" in 2015 compared to 2014.  And the biggest gains in income were at the lowest income levels: real household incomes are reported to have risen 7.9% for households at the 10th percentile of the income distribution, and 6.3% for those at the 20th percentile.

Of course, the report emerges in the heat of the presidential election campaign, where it cannot fail to be interpreted to support the candidacy of the candidate of party of the incumbent President.  From the Times:

The data was [sic] released into a heated presidential race, where Democrats seized on the statistics to promote Hillary Clinton's candidacy and undercut Donald J. Trump's dark assessment of the nation's well-being.

And President Obama himself took the opportunity to take credit at a speech in Philadelphia:

"We lifted three and a half million people out of poverty, the largest one-year drop in poverty since 1968," President Obama said on Tuesday at a rally in Philadelphia for Mrs. Clinton.  "The uninsured rate is the lowest since they began keeping records.  The pay gap between men and women shrank to the lowest level on record," he said, adding, "Thanks, Obama."

So is there any reason to be suspicious?

Well, start with this.  Any possible idea you might have that the bureaucrats at the Census Bureau are just neutral experts reporting the data fairly and accurately will be completely shattered if only you look into the matter of the "poverty rate" and how it is compiled and reported.  I have written about this too many times to count, and will not go into all the details here.  For more background and links, try this post, or this one.  But here's the summary:  The definitions and categories that underlie the "poverty rate" have been intentionally manipulated and gerrymandered to support the ongoing growth of failed government "anti-poverty" efforts and of government staff and budgets.  Over many years, definitions have been set to exclude most government benefits from the measure of poverty in order to keep the "poverty" figures high so that they can be used to advocate for yet more spending -- spending that then again will not be counted when "poverty" is measured.  And the blame for this cynical game can only be placed on the Census Bureau itself, which sets the definitions and parameters for collecting and reporting the data.  So, without a doubt, the Census Bureau is suspect.  It puts out numbers which are clearly and obviously manipulated to support advocacy for more and bigger government programs, and that support political candidates who will support and advocate for the same.

So now to today's numbers.  Median household income up 5.2%?  So, how did GDP do?  Real GDP was up 2.4% in 2015 over 2014, according to BEA here.  So, supposedly, median household income increased by more than double the increase in GDP?  That seems to stretch the limits of plausibility.

The Census report that came out yesterday compared 2015 data to 2014.  Let's take a look at the comparable Census report that came out at this time last year, comparing 2014 data to 2013.  Here it is.  As further background, the increase in GDP from 2013 to 2014 was reported to be exactly the same as the increase from 2014 to 2015 -- 2.4%, according to Forbes here.  And how did that 2.4% increase in GDP in 2014 get reflected in median household income and poverty?  According to last year's Census report:

• Median household income was reported to be $53,657 in 2014, which was actually down from $54,462 in 2013.  (They do claim that the decrease was "not statistically significant.")
• "In 2014, the official poverty rate was 14.8 percent. There were 46.7 million people in poverty. Neither the poverty rate nor the number of people in poverty were statistically different from the 2013 estimates."   

So, in summary, from 2013 to 2014, as reported in 2015, GDP went up 2.4%, and that translated into a small decrease in median household income, and no change at all the the poverty rate or number of people in poverty.  From 2014 to 2015, as reported yesterday, GDP went up the same 2.4%, and that translated into a 5.2% increase in median household income, and a nearly 10% decrease in the poverty rate and number of people in "poverty."  Do you believe it?  The critical difference between the two years is, of course, that in 2015 the administration needed low numbers for income and high numbers for poverty in order to advocate before Congress and the people for more government spending and programs, while in 2016 the administration needed higher numbers for income and lower numbers for poverty in order to support the candidacy of Hillary for President.

While I'm at this, I should remind you of a few other relevant things.  The Census Bureau has long been a part of the Department of Commerce.  In 2009, after being elected President, and in preparation for the 2010 decennial census, Obama caused the Census Bureau to change its reporting to report to the White House directly.  Many at the time (e.g., John Fund here) were critical of that move as undermining the "independence" of the Census Bureau (although I was dubious that they ever had any real independence).  Fast forward to today, and I can't say what the practical reporting lines of the Census Bureau may be, whether to the Secretary of Commerce or to the White House directly.  However, the Secretary of Commerce is one Penny Pritzker.  She made her fortune selling your confidential personal information without your permission as head of the Trans Union credit bureau, and followed that by serving as finance chair of Obama's campaigns.  So really, is there any conceivable reason why you would trust anything coming out of the Census Bureau?  By the way, both the Times and the Journal report yesterday's numbers without the slightest trace of skepticism.  Hey, it's the government!  Of course they are the fair and neutral experts!

UPDATE, September 15:  John Crudele of the New York Post -- a long time critic of the Census Bureau -- has gone through the methodology, and thinks he has discovered how they came up with this year's numbers:

Census moved the goal posts. Starting in 2013 with a partial phase-in, which was fully implemented in 2014, Census changed the questions and the methods in calculating household income.  For example, Census, starting in 2014, began to “collect the value of assets that generate income if the respondent is unsure of the income generated.”  Also, the government started to use “income ranges” as a follow-up for “don’t know” or “refused” answers on income-amount questions.  There are plenty of other changes — but with just these two, income levels reported could be noticeably higher, say 5.2 percent higher, without the actual income being 5.2 percent higher.  In the fine print, Census admits the change. “The data for 2013 and beyond reflect the implementation of the redesigned income questions.”  Americans, in their guts, know the 5.2 percent gain in median household incomes isn’t true.  Now they know why they should follow their gut.

Now, when Census cooked up these methodology changes just in time for their pre-election income and poverty report, did they know that the changes would drive a nice apparent income increase and poverty decrease?  Of course they did.  Unfortunately, there is nothing honest about this.