A Couple Of Thoughts On The Latest Clinton Revelations

(1)  Deep in Friday's Wall Street Journal, at page C3, we find that New York State regulators are "intensifying" their investigation of entities related to one Howard Dvorkin.  The headline is "Dvorkin-Related Probes Intensify."  Mr. Dvorkin is known as an advocate for consumer debt relief, and as "founder and former president" of a nonprofit entity called Consolidated Credit Counseling Services.  He also has stakes in various for-profit businesses.  Here's the gist of the nature of the investigation:  

"The New York State Department of Financial Services is investigating whether Consolidated Credit is directing business to for-profit companies owned by Mr. Dvorkin, the agency said in response to an open-records request by the Journal.  'We suspect that personnel at CCCS, a not-for-profit entity, are steering business to for-profit companies' run by people connected to Consolidated, an attorney for the New York state regulator said." 

What -- do you mean there's something wrong with using personnel paid by your not-for-profit entity to steer business to your for-profit activities?  Somebody better tell the Clintons.

Meanwhile, no word on whether the New York DFS or any other regulator is investigating the Clinton Foundation for any such conduct.  Of course, with the latest revelations, you don't really need to do any actual investigating.  You could just read the now-famous 2011 Doug Band memo to lawyers at Simpson Thacher, helpfully available at the Washington Post website here.  In the memo, Band identifies himself as "the primary fundraiser for the Foundation for the past 11 years."  During the same period, Band also worked diligently on behalf of the for-profit activities of what we now refer to as Bill Clinton, Inc.  From the memo:

[W]e have dedicated ourselves to helping the President secure and engage in for-profit activities -- including speeches, books, and advisory service engagements.  In that context, we have in effect served as agents, lawyers, managers, and implementers to secure speaking, business and advisory service deals. . . .   [W]e have personally helped to secure [more than $50 million in for-profit activity] for President Clinton to date.

Band was well-paid for his fundraising for the Foundation during this time period.  And how much was Band paid by Bubba to bring in the $50 mil?  Answer: nada:

Neither Justin nor I are separately compensated for these [for-profit] activities [on behalf of Bill Clinton].

But don't worry, the fundraising on behalf of Bill was completely "[i]ndependent of our fundraising and decision-making activities on behalf of the Foundation."  Sure, Doug.  You worked day and night to bring in $50 mil of paid work for Bill and didn't get a dollar from it for yourself.  Any chance I could get you to work for me on those terms?

(2) On Friday we learned that the FBI has reopened its criminal investigation into matters related to Clinton emails.  Madame Hillary promptly took to the microphones to demand that the Bureau "release all the information it has" about her private email server.  From Fox News on Friday:

"We’ve heard these rumors, we don’t know what to believe," Clinton told reporters during a brief news conference in Iowa Friday evening. "And I’m sure there will be even more rumors. That’s why it is incumbent upon the FBI to tell us what they’re talking about."

Good diversion, Hillary.  But the problem is, we know that the FBI is duty-bound not to disclose what it knows in an ongoing investigation.  So, your demand was fake.  On the other hand, there is someone who works for you and who knows what is on Huma's computer, and on Anthony's, and who is not subject to the FBI's duty to keep its ongoing investigations confidential.  That person is -- Huma!  So, Hillary, when will we see you publicly instructing Huma to tell us everything she knows about what is on her or Anthony's computers?  I'm not holding my breath waiting for this.      

What Passes For Sophisticated Thinking Among Progressives

Somewhere along the line, the Republicans got the nickname of "the stupid party" -- and this election cycle, they've been working overtime to prove the label true.  But how about Democrats and progressives?  In their own minds, they are geniuses -- nuanced and sophisticated thinkers.  Is there anything to their self-image?

Actually, the more you look at the proposals of the progressive "deep thinkers," at least in the arena of domestic policy, the more you realize that all of the proposals amount to the exact same thing:  We just need to spend some more of the infinite free government money and shortly we will have fixed all human problems and eliminated all down side risk of life.  Of course in the programs we have enacted so far there are a few problems and glitches, but Democrats and Republicans just need to work together to "fix" the problems, all of which "fixes" entail no more than the costless expenditure of a bit more of the infinite free money.  Meanwhile the evil Republicans have been blocking the "fixes," undoubtedly out of a twisted desire to see old people and babies die.  Or, to put it slightly differently, just give us one more chance and this time we are going to make socialism work.  Really!  

So, is this actually any less stupid than anything that Donald Trump has come out with?  You be the judge!  

There's a limitless supply of examples to choose from, but let's consider just a couple of very recent ones from major news sources.  In Tuesday's Wall Street Journal we have an op-ed by one Alan Blinder titled "It's Not the Economy, Stupid.  It's the Political Gridlock."    You know who Blinder is -- Senior Professor of Economics at Princeton, member of Clinton administration including member of the CEA, economic advisor to Gore and Kerry campaigns, and, of course, 70s-era economics Ph.D. from MIT.  That last qualification really tells you all you need to know -- he's from the same 70s MIT groupthink as Krugman, Blanchard, Rogoff, et al.  This is a true member of the Democrat/progressive genius elite!  So what's his diagnosis of our current ills?  You guessed it -- the major Obama-period legislation (Obamacare and Dodd-Frank) "could stand improvement," but the evil Republicans "seek repeal more than repair," leading to "partisan gridlock":

ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank Act, two landmark pieces of legislation, are prime examples. The former was passed without a single Republican vote; the latter received only a handful. Even Democrats agree that both laws could stand improvement. But Republicans seek repeal more than repair. Partisan gridlock blocks progress—and makes Americans understandably angry.

Obamacare is not a socialist death spiral; it's just a little short of redistributive perfection and can be quickly fixed with few minor "repairs" (i.e., a few hundreds of billions -- or is it trillions? -- of more dollars of the infinite free money).  Sure, Alan.

The New York Times editorial page from yesterday is even more explicit in its delusions.  The unsigned editorial is titled "Taming Affordable Care Act Premiums,"  or, in the online version, "Affordable Care Act Premium Increases Are a Fixable Problem."   In New York Times-world, all human problems are subject to being "fixed" by spending more government money.  Of course, they would never be so crass as to use such explicit words.  Instead, we deal in euphemisms like "strengthening" the act, "helping" families, and applying a new "reinsurance program" -- but you get the idea:

Congress and the next president could further strengthen the health care law by offering subsidies to middle-income families who currently receive little or no help. Lawmakers should also consider applying to the health care exchanges the kind of reinsurance program Congress has used to encourage insurers to participate in Medicare’s Part D prescription drug benefit program. The Affordable Care Act’s flaws are fixable, but only if politicians from both parties work together in good faith.

And there are those evil Republicans again, who refuse to "work together in good faith."  In New York Times-world, anything short of agreement to write an infinite blank check that will make everything perfect is known as "bad faith."  How could anyone be so sinister?

Needless to say, neither in Blinder nor in the New York Times, nor in dozens of other articles of similar nature in progressive media elsewhere, is there any mention of the potential amounts of money they are talking about, nor the slightest consideration that maybe resources are not infinite, nor of the concept that maybe there are trade-offs to be made.  Equally missing is recognition that a supposed insurance program like Obamacare may be subject to adverse selection and an insurance death spiral, meaning that any attempt to solve the problem with money will then require more and more and accelerating amounts of money as time goes on.  How do we deal with that?  They won't say -- or even address the issue.  And how about mention of what else might need to be cut to make way for the blowout of new spending being proposed?  Also missing.  Hey, we're progressives -- which means we believe that all already-in-place government spending programs are sacred and must be allowed to grow on autopilot forever into the future.

Now, one possibility is that these people really are geniuses, and they have thought of these things, but they don't want to trouble their stupid readers with all the complications.  That would mean that they are willing to see the United States suffer a Venezuela-style collapse a few decades out in order to keep their friends and cronies in power in the interim.  The alternative theory is that they are a lot less smart than they think they are.   

Annals Of Fake, Politicized "Science"

If you have never read President Dwight Eisenhower's January 1961 farewell address, you should.   It's not long.  He clearly foresaw the oncoming unchecked expansion of the federal government, and the associated dangers.  The famous passage deals with the risks to science from the new-found gusher of federal grant spending:

A steadily increasing share [of scientific research] is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.  Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. . . .   The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.  

Fast-forward 55 years, and we are deep in the dystopia that Eisenhower foresaw.  In science today, government funding is everything, and control of it empowers orthodoxy enforcement and the banishment of skeptics and dissenters -- the antithesis of science.  Many examples can be cited of science gone completely off the rails through the perverse incentives of government monopoly funding (see, for example, my posts on the government-backed low fat diet, here and here).  But really, nothing can top the hysteria -- underwritten by tens of billions of dollars of annual federal spending -- of the climate change machine.

Readers here are well aware that the scientific house of cards of anthropogenic global warming becomes more unstable with each passing day.  As adverse information continues to pour forth -- from the Climategate emails, to the near-twenty-year unexplained "pause" in world temperature rise, to repeated revelations of alterations of historical temperature records by government functionaries trying to support the failing warming narrative -- nothing slows down the federally-funded juggernaut of political climate activism and fossil fuel restriction.  The most recent body blow to the catastrophic warming narrative was the Research Report from Wallace, et al., reported here last month, showing no statistically significant warming in any major world temperature time series after controlling only for concededly-non-anthropogenic El Nino and La Nina effects.  

So where do our major scientific societies stand on this issue?  If you don't already know, you will be demoralized to learn that, with one notable exception, the principal societies are on record as supporting the official government narrative of dangerous human-caused global warming.  In June 2016, some 31 scientific societies sent a joint letter to Congress, supposedly to "remind [it] of the scientific consensus view of climate change," and to urge further government action to restrict fossil fuel use.  You can follow the link to get the complete list of subscribing societies, and if you do, see if you can spot the big one that is missing.  It's the American Physical Society, the association of physicists!  But, you ask, isn't the so-called "science" of "climate change" a matter specifically of atmospheric physics?  Turns out that the APS commissioned a review of the science of climate change by a panel of its own members in 2014, and the panel's report failed to support the consensus "science."  A battle continues to rage on the issue at the APS (you can read more about it here) but meanwhile, the key fact is that group of people who actually know the subject matter has so many dissenters and skeptics that it hasn't joined the bandwagon.

So who has joined the bandwagon?  Well, as an example, there's the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists.  Do they know anything about climate physics?  Probably not much.  But they do know that if you want to study snakes and you want to go where the government money is, you will put something about global warming in your grant proposal.  How about seeking a grant for "the effect of global warming on the range of the lesser eastern tree boa"?  That should work!

Anyway, the issuance of the Wallace, et al., Research Report prompted me to join up with Alan Carlin, an MIT-trained economist and 40-year senior analyst and manager at EPA, to send letters last Friday to each of the 31 unscientific scientific societies demanding to know the alleged scientific basis for their position on climate change in light of the recent findings.  The full text of our letter can be found here.  A few key excerpts:

The June 28 Letter to which you subscribed contains statements strongly implying that there had previously been some sort of empirical validation of a quantitative causal relationship between increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and increasing global average surface temperatures. . . .  However, as noted above, the authors of the [Wallace, et al.] Research Report have been unable to find in any scientific study a rigorous empirical validation of a statistically significant quantitative relationship between rising greenhouse gas concentrations and tropical, contiguous U.S. or global temperatures.  Indeed we can find no paper that actually provides mathematically rigorous empirical proof that the effect of increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations on world temperatures is different from zero with statistical significance.  

As you might realize, we are concerned that prestigious scientific societies, including your own, have subscribed to a letter to Members of Congress purporting to convey scientific propositions as having been definitively established, when in fact there has never been a mathematically rigorous empirical validation of the propositions stated, and indeed there now appears to be a definitive scientific invalidation of those propositions. . . .  

In short, if you have mathematically rigorous empirical validation of the hypotheses that underlie your advocacy, kindly provide it. If you do not, kindly say so. 

Joseph D'Aleo (one of the co-authors of the Wallace, et al., Report) has posted the full text of our letter, along with commentary, on his excellent ICECAP website.  Carlin's treatment of the subject can be found at his CarlinEconomics website here.  D'Aleo minces no words in his description of the corruption of the unscientific scientific societies:

The once professional societies continued their slide into unprecedented advocacy in recent years as they boarded the politically-driven grant gravy train and recruited to their memberships a whole generation of eco fanatics indoctrinated in our failing schools at all levels. Their advocacy with congress is not at all scientific. 

What To Do About The Obamacare Death Spiral?

It was back in January 2015 that I first wrote about the phenomenon of the socialist death spiral.  (Not that I was the first person ever to notice this phenomenon.)  The basic idea is that, in a private property/free exchange system (aka "capitalism"), people apply their ingenuity to get ahead, leading to constantly increasing productivity, and every year the economy grows some; but in a world of government giveaways based on demonstrated need, many people apply their ingenuity to appear needy, thus productivity starts to decline, and then faster, and you enter an economic death spiral.  The Soviet Union is the classic case.  Today it's happening in Venezuela.

And it doesn't have to be the whole economy.  The New York City Housing Authority sits on some of the most valuable real estate in the world.  But with socialist-model public ownership, the rents fail to cover operating expenses, there is nothing for property taxes, capital needs go unmet, and the buildings deteriorate.  The need for subsidies goes up every year, already in many cases $50,000 and even $100,000 annually per family, even as the residents live out their lives in deepening poverty.  Higher and higher costs pay for a situation that only gets worse.  The socialist death spiral!

And then, my friends, there is Obamacare.  "To each according to his needs."  Don't worry, this time it's going to work!  We'll "bend the cost curve" downward!  (By what hubris do government functionaries think that they have an ability to do such a thing?)  In this post back in April I reported on new so-called "short term plans" by which healthy people were avoiding all the Obamacare mandates and leaving the federal exchanges to deal with the sickest of the sick.  Why wouldn't they?  And of course the most recent news is that the next round of premium increases will be well into the double digits in most places -- for that small number of suckers who actually pay the full freight.  The New York Times has a roundup last month that projects average increases of 11% even for people who are "savvy" shoppers and make optimal changes to get the cheapest plans.  Of course, that doesn't apply if you are "needy" and can qualify for a government subsidy: 

Most current customers will be insulated from the full increases. To help people afford insurance, the law offers sliding-scale subsidies to people earning less than 400 percent of the federal poverty level, which at $11,880 for a single person means just under $48,000 to qualify.

These things move slowly, but all the classic trappings of an incipient death spiral are here.

So, to get to the $64,000 question, what do our presidential candidates plan to do about this?  Hillary has some so-called "detailed proposals."  Actually, they all consist of exactly the same thing:  transfer more and yet more of the taxpayer money to paper over the problem and pretend that this is all free.  Here is her site on the issue.  It's too long to put it all here, but here are the first five:

• Defend and expand the Affordable Care Act, which covers 20 million people. Hillary will stand up to Republican-led attacks on this landmark law—and build on its success to bring the promise of affordable health care to more people and make a “public option” possible. She will also support letting people over 55 years old buy into Medicare.
• Bring down out-of-pocket costs like copays and deductibles. American families are being squeezed by rising out-of-pocket health care costs. Hillary believes that workers should share in slower growth of national health care spending through lower costs.
• Reduce the cost of prescription drugs. Prescription drug spending accelerated from 2.5 percent in 2013 to 12.6 percent in 2014. It’s no wonder that almost three-quarters of Americans believe prescription drug costs are unreasonable. Hillary believes we need to demand lower drug costs for hardworking families and seniors. Read more here. 
• Protect consumers from unjustified prescription drug price increases from companies that market long-standing, life-saving treatments and face little or no competition. Hillary’s plan includes new enforcement tools that make drug alternatives available and increase competition, broaden emergency access to high-quality treatments from developed countries with strong safety standards, and hold drug companies accountable for unjustified price increases with new penalties. Read more here.
• Fight for health insurance for the lowest-income Americans in every state by incentivizing states to expand Medicaid—and make enrollment through Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act easier.

Don't worry, it's all infinite free money.  Of course she gives no idea of how much it will cost, or whether that is of any concern. 

So, instead of Obamacare being in a death spiral, we'll put the burden on the general taxpayer, and put the whole government in a death spiral.  It will just move more slowly and last longer. 

Donald Trump?  He says he will "repeal and replace" Obamacare.  I haven't found any specifics, but hey, it's a start.  

The Worst Presidential Election Ever

Unlike with the first two of this year's debates, last night I didn't have something better to do, so I actually watched a good chunk of the debate.  And of course, my reward was to be reminded over and over again why this is the worst presidential election ever.  

I could comment on many things, but let me narrow the focus.  There's not much point in paying attention to anything the candidates say about how they will deal with foreign affairs or foreign powers, because whatever they say now, it will all become inoperative in the specifics of any situation that might arise.  And who really cares about the name calling and character attacks?  If you follow the news at all, you are not going to learn anything new about their respective bad characters from what they say about each other.  

But I do care about domestic economic policy, and what candidates say on that subject can be a rather good predictor of what they will do, or at least try to do, once in office.  So my ears perked up around the middle of the debate when moderator Chris Wallace said he was going to "move on to the next topic," namely "the economy," and asked each candidate to "please explain to me why you believe your plan will create more jobs and growth for this country and your opponent's plan will not."  The exchange that followed really encapsulated the awfulness of the whole thing for me.  The candidate's answers are a little long for this blog post, so I will edit them for space, while attempting to capture the essence.

Hillary went first, and proceeded to lay out a vision where all improvement in human economic condition comes from additional government spending, rules, and programs, all to be paid for by taxes and yet more taxes on the successful.  She didn't put it in exactly those terms, but the idea that private economic activity is the source of wealth and needs to be allowed to flourish doesn't seem ever to have occurred to her.  Here is the somewhat edited version:

I want us to have the biggest jobs program since World War II. Jobs in infrastructure and advanced manufacturing. I think we can compete with high wage countries and I believe we should. New jobs in clean energy. Not only to fight climate change, which is a serious problem but to create new opportunities and new businesses. I want us to do more to help small business, that’s where two-thirds of the new jobs are going to come from. I want to us raise the national minimum wage because people who work full time should not still be in poverty. And I sure do want to make sure women get equal pay for the work we do. I feel strongly that we have to have an education system that starts with preschool and goes through college. That’s why I want more technical education and community colleges, real apprenticeships to prepare young peel for the jobs of the future. I want to make college debt-free and for families making less than $125,000, you will not get a tuition bill from a public college or a university. . . .  [W]e are going to have the wealthy pay their fair share. We're going to have corporations make a contribution greater than they are now to our country. That is a plan that has been analyzed by independent experts which said that it could produce 10 million new jobs.     

This is an economic program truly worthy of a Venezuela or a North Korea, and couldn't be more destructive on many levels.  A government "jobs program" is going to create zillions of jobs in "advanced manufacturing"?  Can anybody give a single example where any government has succeeded at such an endeavor?  Indeed, this is exactly what New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is in the midst of failing at spectacularly.  And there will be lots of jobs in "clean energy," to create "new opportunities and new businesses"!  Sure!  Dozens more Solyndras!  How ignorant do you have to be not to know that so-called "clean energy" jobs only exist by reason of massive government subsidies, which tells you that they destroy rather than create wealth, and that the so-called "opportunities" can only exist for Hillary's politically-connected cronies like the "FOBs" and the donors to the Clinton Foundation.  And then we'll price all poor kids completely out of the job market with a greatly increased minimum wage!  And then, deep into unsustainable and exploding deficits resulting from out-of-control entitlements and the new Obamacare program, let's create another huge new entitlement of free college!  It can all be paid for by having the "wealthy pay their fair share."  Does she have any idea that much of this money to be taken from the wealthy was going to be invested in businesses and now won't be?  But don't worry, "independent experts" (who? Paul Krugman?) tell her that this world of massively increased spending and programs and taxes will "produce 10 million new jobs"! 

Really, Hillary could not possibly have handed Trump a better opportunity to rip her to shreds.  But it was not to be.  To be fair to him, he did start out OK with a couple of sentences about her destructive plans for big tax increases:

[H]er plan is going to raise taxes and even double your taxes. Her tax plan is a disaster. . . .  We will have a massive, massive tax increase under Hillary Clinton's plan. 

But from there it was immediately off into irrelevancies.  I'll make Japan and Germany and South Korea and Saudi Arabia pay us for their defense!  We have "horrible" trade deals (NAFTA) and I'll do better ones!  We'll bring our jobs back!  That's about it.  Here's the (somewhat edited) transcript:

[W]hen I said Japan and Germany and I'm not just singling them out. But South Korea, these are very rich countries. Saudi Arabia. Nothing but money. We protect Saudi Arabia. Why aren't they paying? . . .  We're protecting people. They have to pay up. And I'm a big fan of NATO but they have to pay up. She comes out and says “we love our allies. We think our allies are great.” Well, it is awfully hard to get them to pay up when you have somebody saying we think how great they are. We have to tell Japan in a very nice way, we have to tell Germany, all of these countries, South Korea. We have to say, you have to help us out. . . .  So my plan, we’re going to negotiate trade deals. We’re going to have a lot of free trade. More free trade than we have right now. But we have horrible deals. Our jobs are being taken out by the deal that her husband signed. NAFTA. One of the worst deals ever. The jobs are being sucked out of our economy. You look at the places I just left. You go to Pennsylvania, you go to Ohio, you go to Florida, you go to any of them. You go to upstate New York. Our jobs have fled to Mexico and other places. We're bringing our jobs back. I'm going to renegotiate NAFTA. . . .  We're going to cut business taxes massively. They're going to start hiring people we're going to bring the $2.5 trillion that’s offshore back into the country. We are going to start the engine rolling again because right now, our country is dying.

OK, at the very end he did work in that bit about tax cuts for businesses, which is not a trivial point.  But other than that, he basically veered off on tangents and forgot to mention what his economic plan is or why it is superior to Hillary's government-only vision.

The phrase "It's the economy, stupid" is generally given more credit than anything else for getting Bill Clinton elected in 1992.  Today, it's still "the economy, stupid," and we continue to live with a way sub-par economy afflicted by too high taxes, too much spending, and too many regulations.  We have before our very eyes the living cases of Venezuela, not to mention Cuba and North Korea, to teach us what happens to an economy when the government takes everything over.  And we have the entire European Union to show us that when the government gets up to 50% of the economy and above everything goes into stagnation.  But the Republican candidate seems unable to articulate the optimistic free market small government vision.

It's a good thing there aren't any more debates.   

The Government Puts A Gigantic Lead Weight On The Scale Of This And Every Election

Trump's new big thing in the campaign is the claim that the election has been "rigged" against him.  The word "rigged" conjures up an image of election officials somehow stuffing ballot boxes or jiggering with electronic voting machines to produce a false count of votes cast.  Given our highly decentralized election system, largely run by state rather than federal officials, that scenario is rather improbable.  But just because the election is not "rigged" -- in the sense of the government definitively determining in advance the number of votes for each candidate -- does not mean that the government does not exercise huge influence to swing the election the way it wants the election to go.  A better analogy for this huge influence, rather than a direct "rigging" of the vote, would be the placing of a big weight on the favored side of the scale.  And this is not some minor thing like the proverbial "thumb on the scale"; it's more like the placing of a gigantic lead weight on the favored side of the scale.  

Of course, the favored side of the scale is the side that supports continuing and expanding all existing government programs and functions, plus adding new programs and functions; and on the disfavored side is found any candidate who might disrupt the status quo.  In the current election, that means that the forces of government want Hillary to win.

In a post on Monday at RealClearPolitics, George Will comments that even in the absence of actual "rigging," "Mr. Trump has a point if he would just make it more clearly."  As an example of concrete government action to favor one side of elections over the other, Will cites the IRS efforts in 2010, '12 and '14, as well as the current election, to delay and obstruct the formerly routine granting of tax-exempt status to conservative-side organizations. 

We know -- we don't surmise -- we know that the 2010, '12 and '14 elections were rigged by the most intrusive and potentially punitive institution of the federal government, the IRS. . . .  I have talked to lawyers in a position to know [and] they say it's still going on. The IRS is still intolerantly [sic - intolerably] delaying the granting of tax exempt[ions] to conservative advocacy groups to skew the persuasion of this campaign.       

Again, I would use the term "placed a gigantic lead weight on the scale" rather than "rigged."  Still, with this example (as opposed to the stuffed-ballot-box hypothetical) the point is clearly-established and valid.

Will's post is brief, and only gives the one example.  Are there others?  If you start giving the matter a little thought, and coming up with a list of examples, you really wonder how it is possible for any Republican to be competitive in any race ever.  Let me start:

• Government benefits.  During the 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney famously stated that he had little hope of winning the votes of some 47% of Americans because they either received some form of government benefits and/or paid no income taxes.  He was rightly criticized for the specifics of his statement -- the biggest single group of the 47% being Social Security beneficiaries, who in fact voted for Romney in large numbers.  But there was an underlying valid point, namely that receipt of payments from government programs makes the recipients substantially more likely to vote for candidates who favor the continuation and growth of those and other such programs.  According to Census data here covering 2011 (released in 2013 - they always have big lags), the figure had gone up another 2% to 49%.  It likely has crossed the 50% threshold today.  Further Census data here released in 2015 have some 21.3% of the population (over 52 million people) participating in the so-called "means tested" federal benefit programs -- food stamps, WIC, housing assistance, Medicaid, etc.  It's not that not a single one of those people will ever vote against the status quo; but do you think that this massive handout enterprise might swing the vote in a national election by, say, 5% or 10%?  It's hard to imagine that it does not.
• Labor unions.  One group of organizations in this country has been granted the privilege by the government of taking for themselves money deducted without specific approval from millions of people's paychecks.  That group of organizations consists of labor unions.  A large percentage of the money so deducted -- some say it's the majority, although exact figures are impossible to come by -- goes to support favored candidates in political races.  Almost all of the money goes to Democrats.  Although union members theoretically have the right to prevent their involuntary dues from being used for political purposes, that right has proved almost impossible to enforce, under procedural rules coming from the unions themselves and from the government's NLRB.  Any union member who wants to try to enforce his theoretical right must conduct a lonely and self-funded battle through multiple obstructions and appeals.  An article from yesterday's Wall Street Journal puts the amount of money contributed by labor unions during the current election cycle (January 2015 to August 2016), to support Hillary Clinton and Democratic candidates for the Senate, at $108 million.  That's up 38% from the prior election cycle.  And labor unions also provide massive support for get-out-the-vote efforts, including such things as phone banks and driving people to the polls, again almost entirely funded with involuntarily-collected dues and spent on behalf of Democrats.  How much does this "union factor" swing the vote in national elections?  Three to five percent would be a good guesstimate.
• Academia and non-profits.  Of all the identifiable interest groups in our country, the one most closely associated with near-unanimous support of the Democratic party and its candidates is academia.  Many surveys of professors put support for Democratic and progressive causes (i.e., growth of government) at well upwards of 90%.   Many professors also proselytize their students in favor of the progressive agenda.  The federal government (and also all state governments) massively fund and subsidize academia.  A 2015 report from Pew published in Inside Higher Education put total federal spending on higher education in 2013 at $76 billion; states spent some $73 billion the same year.  The federal number has increased substantially since.  Thus, between federal and state money, around 40% of all funding for this pure-Democrat higher education constituency comes from the taxpayers.  Has there ever been a single academic who lived off government grants advocating for elimination of his/her own grant?  How about a single academic who has advocated that the whole massive government grants-to-academia thing is a bad idea?  And after academia proper, add in a massive government-funded not-for-profit sector, largely devoted to so-called "anti-poverty" efforts that never remove a single person from poverty, and absorbing many tens of billions of federal dollars for itself annually -- and delivering the votes of its employees with near-unanimity to Democrats.  Altogether, another 2-3% swing?
• Fake government statistics.  As repeatedly discussed on this website, all major government statistics on things like the economy and poverty are fraudulently conceived and reported so as to deceive the people into going along with increased government spending and growing programs supposedly intended to ameliorate falsely-depicted problems.  As examples, the GDP statistics adopt the ridiculous convention of counting all government spending on goods and services as a 100% addition to GDP.  Thus progressive politicians can pretend with apparent justification that completely wasteful added spending grows the economy, while any attempt to cut even the most wasteful spending can be falsely portrayed as shrinking the economy.  Similarly the government statisticians have adopted false conventions to keep the "poverty" rate preposterously high (and thus sell the public on more anti-poverty spending) by refusing to count as "income" nearly all government benefits, even many of those handed out as cash or near-cash like the EITC and food stamps.  Last month, as reported on this site in multiple posts including here, the Census Bureau revealed itself (as if we didn't already know) as being a part of Hillary's campaign when it released a new report announcing that the "poverty" rate had suddenly fallen by some 1.3% and 3.5 million people between 2014 and 2015.  The numbers were based on methodological changes and can only be viewed as fake in light of the anemic growth of GDP in the same period.  But essentially all of the media fell for it (even the Wall Street Journal!), and Hillary promptly followed with a personally-signed op-ed in the New York Times claiming that the new fake numbers proved that Obama's progressive policies were suddenly working.  Another percent or two?
• The oppressive regulatory state.  The myth of government regulation is that the regulators are just fair, neutral experts with nothing in mind but the public interest, who will carefully watch over the economy to keep the evil, greedy capitalists in check.  Ridiculous!  In fact regulators are normally flawed human beings with personal agendas, who really care about only one thing, which is growing their own staff, budget and prerogatives.  Because the regulators can torture and ruin any entity under their jurisdiction, no such entity will cross its regulator on any matter of significance.  And the matter of greatest significance is the ongoing growth of the government.  So, in the hyper-regulatory world of Dodd-Frank, is there any such thing as a financial institution that will say a negative word in public about the government?  I sure haven't seen it.  Try it, and they have a hundred ways to make your life miserable -- declining permission for your next merger, or for your entry into a new line of business, or launching one, or two, or twenty new criminal investigations against you.  Same thing for a pharmaceutical company, which inevitably has ten or twenty items before the FDA for approval at any given time.  Cross them and your next drug approval could be held up for a decade.  When did one of those guys last utter a serious criticism of the government regime?  Another hundred examples could easily be cited.  Another percent or two?
• Government employees effectively working as operatives of Hillary's campaign.  One of the unsigned editorials in today's Wall Street Journal, titled "Hillary's State Assist," is a real eye-opener.  The editorial quotes from documents released Monday by the FBI from its recently-concluded investigation of Hillary.  It seems that a group of "senior State department employees," referred to by the regular staff as the "Shadow Government," put "enormous pressure" on staff reviewing Hillary's emails for production to "not label anything as classified."  This, at a time when Hillary was claiming that she had never dealt with classified information on her private server.  Our taxpayer dollars at work! 

I have several more examples here that I could use, but I think the point has been made.  Meanwhile, can anybody provide a single example of the use of taxpayer funds in a way to support Republican candidates or the shrinkage of the government or the elimination of government programs?  OK, maybe somewhere in the vast enterprise, some free-market-oriented economist has gotten a grant of maybe a few hundred thousand dollars.  That, up against around $4 trillion of annual spending, all devoted in some way to the further growth of government and the support of candidates who favor that growth.  

Is the election "rigged"?  I wouldn't have used the term.  But the weight that the government puts on the scale is enormous, and in this election it's all behind Hillary.  Is it possible that the combined effect of all of these things is less than the margin currently separating the two candidates in the polls?  I can't imagine how it could be.