Notes On The Election Results

Reviewing the election result maps from last night, one thing stands out above all others: the ongoing polarization of the electorate between the Democratic coasts and the Republican flyover regions.  Here is a chart from the New York Times of results by state, including the percents of the vote won by each candidate.

In the deep blue states on the coasts, it is notable that Hillary Clinton ran up very large margins.  In a number of cases those margins were even greater than the large margins by which Obama beat McCain in 2008 and/or Romney in 2012, even though Hillary well underperformed Obama nationally.  For example, in giant California, Obama beat McCain in 2008 by 61/37 (24 points) and Romney in 2012 by 60/37 (23 points).   Last night Clinton beat Trump in California by 62/33, a full 29 points.  In Massachusetts, Obama beat McCain by 26 points (62/36) in 2008, and beat Romney by 23 points (61/38) in 2012; Hillary beat Trump in Massachusetts by 27 points (61/34). 

In New York, although Hillary's margin was not as big as those of Obama in 2008 and 2012, she still trounced Trump by a full 21 points, 59/38 -- and New York really is Trump's home state, rather than his adopted state-of-convenience.  Here in Manhattan, I can report that all conversations over the last year about the election with someone who doesn't know your politics in advance have started with the presumption that of course you support Hillary and find Trump to be a buffoon.  And the closer you get to the pinnacles of elite Manhattan, the less dissent there is from the progressive political orthodoxy.

But boy is it different out in the middle of the country.  It's not just that the middle of the country is basically red.  It's that there's a massive trend of formerly blue or purple states moving toward red and then deep red.  Consider a few examples:

Arkansas.  Arkansas was the last of the deep South states to finally break from once solid Democratic control.  It's legislature flipped from Democratic control to Republican only in 2012, after being in Democratic hands since Reconstruction.  It has had two Democratic governors since Bill Clinton left office in 1992, and one of them, Jim Beebe, served into 2015.  Not to mention that Hillary Clinton was the First Lady of Arkansas from 1983 to 1992.  Last night she lost Arkansas by 26 points, 60/34.

West Virginia.  In my lifetime, West Virginia has been one of the most reliably Democratic states.  For example, West Virginia did not have a Republican U.S. Senator all the way from the 1950s until the election of current Senator Shelley Capito in 2014.  The other Senator, Joe Manchin remains a Democrat even today.  In Presidential elections, West Virginia has been reliably Democratic since the 1930s, with the scattered exceptions of the Eisenhower (1956), Nixon (1972) and Reagan (1984) landslides; but then it started to vote steadily Republican in the Presidential races in 2000.  Then, of course, there's Obama's "War on Coal," and Hillary's war on coal miners.  Yesterday Trump won West Virginia by 42 points, 69/27.  Whew! 

Missouri.  Missouri has been the classic swing state for as long as human memory goes back.  Its voters voted for the winning Presidential candidate, whether Democrat or Republican, in every election from 1904 to 2004, with only one exception (1956).  They called Missouri the "bellwether," because it was thought that you would know how the race would finish once Missouri had come in.  Well, no more.  Obama lost Missouri in both 2008 and 2012.  In this election, Missouri was never in question.  Trump won it by 19 points, 57/38.

Minnesota.  As of this writing, it looks like Hillary has finally squeaked out a win in Minnesota, by two points, 47/45.  It was one of the last states to be called.  But this was never supposed to be remotely close.  Minnesota has been literally the most reliable Democratic state since FDR first got elected in 1932, breaking ranks only in the 1952 and 56 Eisenhower elections and Nixon's 1972 landslide.  In 1984 Minnesota had the distinction of being the only state to award electoral votes to Democrat Walter Mondale in Reagan's second-term landslide.  Late polls in this election had Clinton up by from 6 to 11 points.  Oops!

Obviously, comparable stories could be told for several more states, such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. 

Now, what is the explanation for these dramatic ongoing shifts?  One piece may be that many voters in these states engage in magical thinking that the government can somehow "bring the jobs back" by some kind of trade deals or tariffs -- not so different from the progressive's magical thinking that all human problems can be solved by government spending.  Another piece may be that these voters mostly have formed the perfectly sensible view that many new jobs would emerge in their states if only the Obama "War Against the Economy" could be ended.  

But here's what I think is a big and under appreciated piece of the explanation:  The voters in these states have a deep revulsion for the smug elites in places like Washington and New York, who purport to run their lives and impose taxes and regulations on them and have no idea about their struggles.  In this revulsion, the red state voters are absolutely right.  

Will "Trumpism" Split Or Transform The Republican Party?

I'm writing this before any meaningful election results are in.  My view is that there is no likely good result from today's election.  We are probably in for four years of pain, not to mention any longer term damage that might be inflicted by one of these flawed candidates.  The best result we can hope for will be keeping the execrable Schumer from becoming Majority Leader of the Senate.    

But this is as good a time as any to look forward on a few issues.  

Number one is the future of the Republican Party.  Many have predicted that the rise of Trumpism will mean the demise of the Republican Party, particularly that it will splinter into two or more pieces.  I don't buy it.  The party will likely evolve some, but even there, my prediction is, not much.  Here's why.  Our system of popular election of the President essentially forces us into a two-major-party system.  In a parliamentary system like they have in most European countries, multiple minor parties can elect a few deputies each; and then, if no major party gets a full majority in the parliament, the major parties must go shopping to buy minor party support.  The result is that minor parties frequently can demand policy concessions or cabinet positions, and can end up with influence in running the government well beyond the numbers of their supporters.  This gives the minor parties an ongoing reason for existence; and then, sometimes, one of them will start growing until it overtakes one of the formerly major parties.  In the U.S., by contrast, the President, once elected, has the full executive authority, and doesn't need ongoing support from anybody outside his party.  Minor parties who can't hope to elect a President have zero influence on the running of the government.  To be a party that can elect a President, you need to be a broad-based coalition that aspires to 50+% support of the entire population.  By the very math of the situation, it's highly unlikely to have more than two of those at any one time.  Yes, in a year when a minor-party candidate gets some traction (think Ross Perot in 1992 or 1996), you can become President with support perhaps in the low 40s of percent.  Still, a party that actually aspires to elect Presidents regularly must be constantly working to build that 50% coalition.  If the Republicans break into two or three pieces, now no one of the pieces will have more than about 25 - 30% support.  If that happens, the Republicans will be in the wilderness essentially forever until they figure out how to re-coalesce.  The forces pushing them back together would be almost irresistible.  I literally can't imagine that it wouldn't happen. 

But how about Trump's big issues of trade and immigration?  If anything defines "Trumpism," it is his positions on these two issues.  Will the Republican Party be transformed by adopting those positions, or some variant of them?  Again, I don't buy it, except maybe a little around the edges.  Sorry, Donald, but your positions represent dead ends for the country and indeed for your most fervent supporters.  You have run further with these issues than their previous champions, like Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan; but these issues will fade away again, as they have in the past, because they are dead ends.

Trade.  If there is one major theme of this blog, it is that the fundamental driving principle of the progressive left -- which is the idea that all human problems can be solved with more government spending -- is a delusion that can't possibly work.  Here's something else in the same delusional category:  the idea that some form of trade protectionism, or "better trade deals," or punishment of American companies for having foreign affiliates, can prevent the internationalization of the world economy and thereby "bring the jobs back."  

Yes, a not small number of Americans have lost jobs in manufacturing when foreign producers figure out how to produce and deliver the same products for less.  The government cannot solve this problem with trade restrictions.  Indeed, there is no solution to the problem other than the creation of new private companies and new jobs for the displaced workers.  Trying to solve the problem with tariffs or import quotas is a total dead end for the American economy and even particularly for the blue collar workers who seem to be Trump's strongest supporters.  Tariffs act as a regressive tax that hits lower-middle-income workers the hardest.  Meanwhile, a tariff only postpones the inevitable:  sooner or later every factory will be put out of business by some form of competition, which could just as well be domestic as foreign.  And if tariffs are high enough to cut off American producers from the best international technologies and supply chains, then we get a second-rate American economy.  Today, our economy is the world's strongest, and our wages the world's highest, precisely because we are constantly exposed to the best that the world has to throw at us.

And then there is Trump's concept of "better trade deals."  I have no idea what he is even talking about there.  By a "better trade deal," does he mean a deal that makes foreign products more expensive for Americans to buy?  How exactly is that "better"?  Even to state it that way shows how crazy it is.  In fact, existing trade deals like NAFTA or the pending TPP have essentially nothing to do with setting the terms of trade.  (Those are set by private agreements between buyers and sellers.)  The trade deals do lower tariffs, which makes foreign products cheaper for Americans to buy.  Sorry, but that's a good thing for Americans.  Going forward, the Republican Party is going to have to decide whether it wants to be in favor of making the things that Americans buy cheaper or more expensive.  There's only one right way to go.  Besides, the Democrats -- because of their ties to unions and crony capitalists, let alone environmentalists -- are already the party in favor of making the things Americans buy more expensive.  

My prediction is that, even if Trump becomes President, his trade agenda will largely fade away.  OK, TPP may die (although it also might get approved in the lame duck session of the Senate).  But I can't imagine a major general tariff increase getting approved by Congress, let alone the repudiation of NAFTA, which is deeply baked into our economy at this point.  Most likely if Trump is elected:  Trump makes a few proposals, they sit in Congress without action, and then everybody moves on to other things.  If Hillary gets elected, TPP likely also gets stalled, but she is more likely to revive it a year or two down the road.  Probably, she gets some modifications and re-submits it.  Her best hope to get it approved will be in the next Congress.  Of course, that's because there will be more Republicans then.

Immigration.  The immigration issue is subject to far more complexities and ambiguities than the trade issue.  With trade, while there are clearly some losers among American workers, trade overall is a huge net plus for the American economy.  With immigration, it's much less clear.  And also, the political divide over immigration is so stark that the chances for a meaningful reform that actually improves things are not good.  As I have written before, as bad as our immigration system is, almost any reform that might get passed is likely to make things worse.

Meanwhile, how big a problem is immigration?  Many sources have reported that net illegal immigration has been negative for many years, basically since the big recession.  Here is a report on the subject from Pew.  There just aren't that many poor Mexicans looking to get into the U.S. any more.  Of course, the biggest factor contributing to the waning of the illegal immigration problem with Mexico has been -- you guessed it -- NAFTA!  And anyway, for all the talk of the problem of illegal immigration, somehow nobody seems to mention that the big numbers are in legal immigration.  The Pew report just cited has a figure for illegal immigrants in the U.S. in 2015 of 11.1 million.  According to migrationsource.org here, the number of legal immigrants in the U.S. exceeds 40 million, almost half of whom are already citizens.  And new legal immigrants continue to arrive in the U.S. at a rate of about 1 million per year.  One could debate whether that number is too high -- or, maybe, too low.  I haven't really heard much if any debate over that subject.  Have you?  And nobody really says that the U.S. should dramatically lower that number, let alone cut it off entirely.  After all, we are a nation of immigrants.  In my view, given that it's just not possible to take in everybody in the troubled world, a smart reform would be seeking to get the highest quality and best educated immigrants we can find to fill our limited quotas.  As sensible as that would be, I don't think that the Democrats would agree to it.  To put it cynically, they want to import people who will become dependent on government.  So the law will likely not change.  

That means that the difference between the candidates going forward will be in the enforcement of existing law, rather than the likelihood of any new laws.  Hillary is on record (at fundraisers, or course, not campaign rallies) as being in favor of open borders, at least within the Americas.  That really means that she represents no change from the intentionally lax enforcement regime of Obama. Trump promises stricter enforcement and a wall.  OK, but net illegal immigration is already negative.  In a Trump administration, I would expect immigration to fade as an issue, as would trade.  There are far more important things to focus on.  The pain will be in other areas, and on other issues, of which there are plenty.

So will "Trumpism" transform the Republican Party?  Not likely.

UPDATE, November 9:  In Trump's short victory speech late last night, suddenly the issues he's talking about are infrastructure spending and "taking care of our vets."  What happened to trade and immigration?  That was fast!  Meanwhile, with solid Republican control of both houses of Congress, I really should be more optimistic than indicated at the beginning of this post.  Hey, will they actually roll back some of Obama's War Against the Economy?  It's entirely possible that that could give the economy a real boost.

The Election: #nevertrump versus #neverhillary

Really, it's very difficult to find anything good to say about this election.  But I'll try.

Somewhere even before the candidates were finally chosen, the hashtags #nevertrump and #neverhillary appeared on social media.  The hashtags are headings to collect in one place the writings of people who refuse to support the candidate in question, and who advocate that others should do the same.  But if you take a look at the discussions aggregated under the two hashtags, you quickly realize that the two represent very different phenomena.

First, the #nevertrump phenomenon.  It very substantially consists of Republicans and conservatives, including prominent ones, who find either Mr. Trump's character, or his positions on certain issues, or both, to be disqualifying from the Presidency.  The Hill back in August published a long list of over one hundred prominent Republicans who had stated a "never Trump" position.  The list included presidential candidates (Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush), numerous Senators and Congressmen, Governors, top-ranking pundits (e.g., columnist George Will, editors Bill Kristol and Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard), major Republican donors (e.g., Paul Singer of Elliott Management), and others.

One might agree or disagree with these people on whether their position constitutes a good political tactic that would lead to a superior outcome for the country.  (After all, the most likely result of many Republicans repudiating Trump will be the election of Hillary.)  But clearly these are serious people who are genuinely concerned about getting the best outcome for the country and its people.

And #neverhillary?  Almost everything you can find about that phenomenon consists of Trump supporters advocating that people should not support the Democratic candidate.  How about the reciprocal of #nevertrump?  Is there such a thing as a group of prominent Democrats -- or even one prominent Democrat -- publicly saying that they just can't support Mrs. Clinton?  If there is, I can't find it.  Back on August 29, Marc Thiessen wrote a column in the Washington Post asking "Where Are The #NeverHillary Democrats?" and noting that he couldn't find any.  The intervening two months haven't caused any to turn up.

Now, that's rather remarkable.  I mean, as bad as Trump's flaws are, are Hillary's any less so?  Compromising national security to that your emails will be inaccessible to FOIA requests -- emails that will then reveal the workings of the pay-to-play Clinton Foundation?  Destroying documents after the Congressional subpoena has been served?  (No client I ever had would have survived in his or her job after doing that.)  Using a "foundation" to support a personal lifestyle of private planes and top hotels, let alone to arrange tens of millions of dollars of supposedly "independent" personal income from donors with a clear interest in influencing a Secretary of State/soon-to-be presidential candidate?  And not one prominent Democrat is sufficiently troubled by any of it to publicly proclaim an inability to support this person?  

It does turn out that there is at least one group of Democrats in the #neverhillary camp.  Of course, this is the unreconstructed Bernie supporters.  Here is a letter from a Harvard freshman to that group of #neverhillary Democrats.  It seems that most of the people in this group are young "millennials," and probably their biggest issue is ballooning college debt and Bernie's promise of free college for all.  Perhaps in their minds they have convinced themselves that in advocating for this issue they are looking out for the good of the country and its people.  A more honest way of looking at it is that they just want to get in on the infinite pile of free government handout money before it all gets handed out to somebody else.

Well, from this we learn something.  After all, Hillary has no particular political vision that anyone can perceive.  What she stands for is continuation and ongoing growth of all government spending and support with taxpayer money of all Democratic lobby groups.  So what we learn is that, for the left-leaning voters in general and all prominent Democrats in particular, far and away the over-riding value is protecting the continuation of the government gravy train for themselves and their crowd.  OK, it's demoralizing.  But if this election has accomplished on useful thing, it is to make that conclusion abundantly clear.  

The Odious Senior Senator From New York Goes National

You are probably not paying much attention to the U.S. Senate races that are not close, so you may not even know that New York's odious senior Senator, Charles "Chuck" Schumer, is up for re-election.  The RealClearPolitics poll average has Schumer up by some 23 points over his Republican rival, Wendy Long.  There's not much chance of getting rid of this guy in the current cycle.  But it's actually much worse than that.  With Harry Reid retiring, Schumer is next in line to be the leader of the Democrats in the Senate -- either Minority Leader or, God forbid, Majority Leader, depending on the outcomes of the various close races.

In one of the earliest posts on this blog, in December 2012, I declared Schumer to be "the worst United States Senator."   In the four years since then, he has only gotten still worse.  Nobody has ever noticed the guy having an actual political philosophy.  He is entirely about using federal taxpayer money to buy votes and entrench the power of the left-wing interest groups that support himself and the Democratic Party.  

Schumer is said to have a campaign "war chest" of some $20 million -- largely extracted as protection money from the local financial industry -- but he doesn't trouble himself to use much of the money on his own safe race.  I have seen almost no advertising for him in this cycle.  However, I did see one ad, which indeed exemplified Schumer's approach to politics.  The theme of the ad was that we should re-elect Schumer because he had gotten lots of money for New York for recovery efforts in the aftermath of non-hurricane Sandy in 2012.  The ad showed several scenes of Schumer touring devastated sites and hugging constituents.

Now, let's analyze that a little.  As I pointed out in this post in 2013, blank-check federal relief from ocean storms is a bad idea for the country, but it's a particularly terrible idea for New Yorkers.  Why?  Because historically New York is not very subject to tropical storm strikes, and gets hit by only about one serious tropical storm for every twenty or so that hit Florida, the Gulf coast and the Carolinas.  That means that, over time, New Yorkers will pay out around twenty dollars in federal taxes for hurricane relief for every dollar they may receive in hurricane relief handouts.  There is no possible way that New York can come out ahead in this game.  But hey, the fundamental qualification for being a "progressive" is inability to do basic arithmetic.  Schumer is the master of using that failing of his voters to entrench the power of himself and his crowd.

And of course, hurricane relief is just one example among many of the same phenomenon.  Even after many decades of having its once-dominant economic position eroded by high taxes and a poor business climate, New York remains one of the wealthier states.  Obviously then, a federal machine that massively redistributes away from the wealthier states is to the disadvantage of New York.  Our one-time senior Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, produced annual reports tallying the net negative suffered by New York each year in this game.  Moynihan was replaced by Hillary Clinton in 2001, whereupon Schumer became the senior Senator.  The reports were discontinued, and I've barely heard the subject mentioned since.  Schumer is of course a leader in regular efforts of Democrats in Congress to increase income tax rates on high earners.  

You won't find out much if anything about what Schumer stands for by going to his campaign website.  But his official Senate website is entirely about just what you would expect:  handing out the free federal money to buy votes.  In just the last few days we have:  $47 million in new federal money for "Sandy-related" repairs in the Rockaways!  (i.e., bailing out oceanfront homeowners; aren't we done with that yet, more than four years after the storm?).  $2.3 million of new Department of Agriculture funds for New York farmers!  $325 million of new federal funds for home energy assistance!  There's a new one of these almost every day.  If Schumer has ever considered that somebody has to pay for this, or if he has ever thought about trade-offs or limits on the federal fisc, I've never seen it.

To find out more of what Schumer stands for, you'll have to go to an independent site, like ontheissues.org.  Admittedly there are enough issues here that even I could find a few things where I agree with him.  But you can be sure that he is on the wrong side of anything big.  Clearly, he is a leader, if not the main leader, of Democratic efforts to repeal the First Amendment to the disadvantage of conservative groups.  He says he wants "money out of politics," even as he is one of the most prodigious fundraisers by reason of his strategic position where he can hobble the financial industry (or selected members of it) if they don't pay him off.  He is a big gun controller, and would gladly see the Second Amendment repealed or limited out of existence by the Supreme Court.  He is in favor of any and all additions to federal spending, and will do everything he can to be sure that the money goes to Democratic party lobby groups.  He couldn't care less whether $700 billion of annual federal anti-poverty spending actually gets anyone out of poverty, so long as the spending creates big budgets and lots of jobs for the Democrat lobby groups.  He has totally bought into the global warming scam, and supports all proposals to subsidize uneconomic energy and to hobble cheaper fossil fuels.  (We're impoverishing the American people?  So what, if my friends and I can stay in power!)  He supports more and yet more federal money for the black hole of healthcare at every opportunity.  His record on free trade is not completely negative -- but then, the idea that a Senator from New York would not be completely pro-free trade really boggles the mind.

Well, America, you are about to be seeing a lot more of this guy.  If you think Hillary Clinton is annoying and grating to watch, wait until you get a good dose of Schumer.  All I can say is, if you are in one of those states with a close race, and you think you might vote for the Democrat, remember that one more Democrat in the Senate could very likely be the difference in making Schumer Majority Leader.  The next few years could be really, really painful.   

Quote Of The Day, Hillary Edition

Way back at the beginning of this endless campaign, in April 2015, I had a post titled "What Does Hillary Stand For?"  My inspiration for the post began when I went to Hillary Clinton's then-new campaign website, looking for specific policy proposals, and found next to nothing -- other than the vaguest of platitudes, like "I want to be your champion."  (Egads!  How can I avoid having this numbskull as my "champion"?)  A further inspiration for the post was that both the Wall Street Journal and the Economist had just run editorials asking the exact same question, with both coming up equally empty handed.

Anyway, my conclusion was, at least on the domestic front, you don't really need specific proposals from Hillary to know what she stands for.  Don't expect any actual vision from her.  She just stands for the absolutely conventional thinking of the unthinking left -- more money out of the infinite taxpayer fountain to fund my friends and cronies to create every new program they can think of and to fix every known human problem.  Of course it will work this time!  Here's how I put it in that post:

We know that she is the very most conventional of left-wing thinkers.  We know that she has no interest whatsoever in rocking the government gravy boat.  We know that she deeply believes in the main project of the Left, which is to bring social justice and equality to the world through government action and crony capitalism.   

Fast forward a year and a half, and Hillary's website has at least a few specifics, very much along the lines that I foresaw.  But she mostly avoids talking about policy specifics, let alone any concept of vision for the country.  When I see parts of her campaign events on the news, in every case she is not engaged in promoting her own policy proposals, but rather is trying to scare her potential supporters about Donald Trump, while avoiding discussion of any actual issues in the election.

Which brings me to the quote of the day.  Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal has a column today, headline "Hillary Becomes the Unsafe Hand," with the theme that various aspects of the email/national security controversy make Hillary far the more risky choice in this election.  And then we come our quote of the day, on Hillary's "vision" for the country:

With Mrs. Clinton, as with Mr. Obama, a voter naturally struggles to understand what the overarching vision is. There isn’t one. They exist to deliver the wish-list of Democratic lobby groups for more power over the people of the United States. Period.

Too bad I wasn't the first to come up with that pithy turn of phrase.  Anyway, if you're wondering why there is near total unanimity among the government-funded and government-cradled sectors of the economy (federal and state government workers, teachers, academia, crony capitalists, unions) in favor of Hillary, that's all you need to know.  

The New York Times Does Poverty

Just a couple of days ago I pointed out that in New York Times-world "all human problems are subject to being "fixed" by spending more government money."  That post was in the specific context of "fixing" the death spiral of Obamacare.  

The Times's treatment of the problem of poverty is not different.  This week it chooses to give the lead article of its Sunday Review section to one of its regular op-ed writers on the subject, Nicholas Kristof.  The headline is "3 TVs and No Food: Growing Up Poor in America."   

This is the New York Times, and one of its signature op-ed writers.  So therefore, do you expect -- or even hope for -- any meaningful insights?  Don't be ridiculous.  It's completely the usual formula:  first, to rouse your sympathies, a few descriptions of the lives of selected people living in bad circumstances; and second, outraged calls for politicians to fix the problem with the universal cure of more government money and more government programs.

Of course, there's a small difference between Obamacare and poverty.  Obamacare has only been around for a few years, and has only recently begun to collapse.  The War on Poverty has been around for over 50 years, and has been subject to dozens of efforts to expand it and fix it to make it work, usually by throwing more, and yet more, and yet still more money at it.  We're up to a trillion dollars a year in round numbers in so-called "anti-poverty" spending, none of which has ever worked to cure poverty, or even reduce it by a little.  Indeed, in the face of vast spending supposedly designed to reduce poverty, the number of people in measured poverty, per the Census Bureau, has gone up from about 27 million when the War on Poverty began in 1965 to about 47 million today.  This distinction between the issues of Obamacare and poverty makes Kristof's article particularly insulting to the reader.  Does he even know about, or will he acknowledge, the trillion or so dollars of current annual spending on so-called "anti-poverty" programs?  Will he acknowledge, or even mention, the vast increases in recent years of spending on things like food stamps, disability, EITC, and Medicaid?  Actually, from all indications, Kristof is completely unaware of the vast existing government efforts to cure poverty, let alone of the total failure of them all.  Certainly, if he is aware, he does not acknowledge their existence.  It's really appalling.

Kristof has recruited an intern to go off traveling with him around the United States to get some first-hand observation of poverty in America.  The first subject up is a 13-year-old kid named Emanuel Laster in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.  Here's the description:

Emanuel has three televisions in his room, two of them gargantuan large-screen models. But there is no food in the house. As for the TVs, at least one doesn’t work, and the electricity was supposed to be cut off for nonpayment on the day I visited his house here in Pine Bluff. . . .  The home, filthy and chaotic with a broken front door, reeks of marijuana. The televisions and Emanuel’s bed add an aspirational middle-class touch, but they were bought on credit and are at risk of being repossessed. The kitchen is stacked with dirty dishes, and not much else.  “I just go hungry,” Emanuel explained.    

Do you read that and immediately wonder if it is really Kristof's intention to suggest that it's the government's responsibility to help a family clean up the filth and put away the dishes?  Or perhaps you are wondering, if American taxpayers spend well over $100 billion per year on food stamps and multiple other nutrition programs for the poor, how is it possible that these people could still have "no food in the house" and a kid who "go[es] hungry"?  Another thought you may be having is, if these people have enough credit to buy three flat-screen TVs and enough cash to buy marijuana to make the place "reek," are they actually "poor" at all within federal definitions?  You will not find out any information in answer to those questions here.  

Rather, we move immediately to the calls for more government spending and programs:

[T]here is . . . an array of policies that [can] make a difference. Early childhood initiatives have a particularly good record, as do efforts to promote work, like the earned-income tax credit. Financial literacy programs help families manage money — and avoid buying large-screen TVs on credit. . . .  In short, what we lack most is not means but political will. The main public response to American poverty has been a great big national shrug — and that is why I wish the candidates were talking more about this, why I wish the public and the media were demanding that politicians address the issue. . . .  Chipping away at these cycles of poverty isn’t easy, and we won’t have perfect success. But we aren’t even trying. We aren’t even paying attention.         

So, a trillion dollars of annual anti-poverty spending on literally hundreds of programs and programs and more programs, and this guy believes that if only we just tried a couple more -- specifically "early childhood initiatives" and "financial literacy programs" -- it would all suddenly start to work?  Aren't Head Start and universal or near-universal pre-K "early childhood initiatives"?  

So which is worse?  Is it the touching naivety -- the idea that, if only these people had been offered a federally-sponsored course in financial management they never would have bought the three flat-screen TVs on credit?  Or, really, is the thing that is worse the total failure to acknowledge the trillion dollars a year that the taxpayers are already spending on so-called "anti-poverty" efforts that never get anyone out of poverty?  I'll go with the latter.  How could this guy have the nerve to suggest that Americans are responding to poverty with a "national shrug," and not "even paying attention," when in fact they commit a fresh trillion dollars every single year to fixing the problem?  A trillion dollars a year -- only to have the bureaucracy make it all disappear, and poverty remain right where it was before we spent a dime, and guys like Kristof accuse you of "not paying attention."

Really, could it get more insulting than that?  Yes!  Kristof finally turns to an effort to guilt and shame the people into yet more spending on yet more programs that can't possibly work.  Try this:

Child poverty is an open sore on the American body politic. It is a moral failing for our nation that one-fifth of our children live in poverty, by one common measure.

Child poverty may be an "open sore" and a "moral failing," but it's sure not on the "American body politic" or on "our nation," which have with spectacular generosity committed vast resources to relieve the suffering and end the problem -- only to be lectured by supercilious fools like Kristof that they are "not paying attention" and have a "moral failing."  The failing is not on the American people, but specifically on the government bureaucracies, who take and spend the annual trillion in a way guaranteed never to end or even reduce poverty, but instead to perpetuate their bureaucracies and to grow their own power.

Here's who has a "moral failing":  Nicholas Kristof, and people like him, who claim to be concerned about people living in poverty, but then advocate for more and more government programs that only foster dependency and the perpetuation of poverty.