What Is With This Weird Obsession With Russia?

Have you had the sense recently, and particularly so since the inauguration, that the progressive movement has completely lost its mind?  I mean, start with the #Resistance movement and its pointless, often violent demonstrations that couldn't be better designed to alienate everybody who is not already fully committed to radical leftism.  Or consider the climate change cult, desperately committed to keeping the poor poor and driving up everybody's cost of electricity and transportation because they believe that's the way to "save the planet."  But my favorite has to be this weird obsession with Russia.  I can't even begin to figure out what it is about.

The New York Times has easily had several dozen articles since the election about the supposedly nefarious relationship between President Trump and/or his team and Russian officials.  And I don't mean to single Pravda out particularly -- this obsession is all over the mainstream press.  And it goes on day after day with stories of less and less consequence told in breathless tones like they mean something.  Today (just in the last few hours -- presumably for tomorrow's print edition) we have "Kushner and Flynn Met with Russian Envoy in December, White House Says":

Michael Flynn, then Donald J. Trump’s incoming national security adviser, had a previously undisclosed meeting with the Russian ambassador in December to “establish a line of communication” between the new administration and the Russian government, the White House said on Thursday. . . .  [T]he extent and frequency of their contacts remains unclear, and the disclosure of the meeting at Trump Tower adds to the emerging picture of how the relationship between Mr. Trump’s incoming team and Moscow was evolving to include some of the president-elect’s most trusted advisers.  

Scary!  Am I the only one who thinks that it would have been completely incompetent for a president-elect's transition team not to have met at some point before the inauguration with the ambassador from Russia, and for that matter with the ambassadors from 50 or more of the more consequential countries of the world?  

Or consider the immediately prior big story, which was that new Attorney General Jeff Sessions had spoken with the Russian ambassador prior to the election.  Pravda has a brand new editorial up on the subject, again apparently for tomorrow's edition, headline "Jeff Sessions Needs to Go." Excerpt:

In the wake of Wednesday’s revelation that Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke with Russia’s ambassador to the United States while working with the Trump campaign, despite denying those contacts during his confirmation hearings, key Republican and Democratic lawmakers are calling for him to recuse himself from overseeing any Justice Department investigation into contacts between the campaign and the Russian government. Some are even saying he needs to resign.

It’s a bombshell of a story. 

Look into the "bombshell" story a little, and you find that Sessions, then a senior Senator on the Armed Services Committee, spoke on a panel put on by the Heritage Foundation in Cleveland at the time of the Republican convention.  Some 50 ambassadors from different countries attended. At the end of the panel, several of the ambassadors approached the panel members to shake hands and maybe pose a question or two, in the hearing of dozens of people.  Is this where Sessions somehow agreed with the Russians that they would rig the election on behalf of Trump? It seems that Sessions also had a big one telephone call with the Russian ambassador during the time of the campaign -- as well as other calls with ambassadors from about ten other countries.  Hey, he was a senior member of the Armed Services Committee!  Isn't that part of the job?  Also, we know from the Flynn matter that the NSA recorded all of the Russian ambassador's phone calls, and will gladly leak transcripts to the Times and Washington Post if they are in the least bit embarrassing to any Trump administration official.  So where's this transcript?  

And these are only the latest two out of twenty or more such stories, all alleging some kind of illicit Russian involvement in somehow swinging the election to Trump.  OK, suppose that the Russians wanted Trump to win, and that the Russians are the ones who hacked the Podesta emails, and that the Russians intentionally arranged with Julian Assange to leak the Podesta emails in a way to help Trump and maximize damage to the Hillary campaign.  I don't think it's a given that any of those are true, let alone all of them.  But suppose they are all true.  Why wouldn't the Russians have done it without communicating in any way with the Trump campaign?  Given that the NSA records everything, wouldn't the Russian ambassador be smart enough not to talk about any of these things explicitly on the phone?  And, if there was a transcript out there somewhere where a Trump campaign official promised the Russians something in return for help in the campaign, wouldn't that transcript have been leaked by now? 

And then there is the question of the geopolitical significance of Russia today.  Yes, they do have an outsize military for a country of their population and GDP, and their leader likes to play bigshot.  But really, this intense focus on Russia seems to me to be mostly a vestige of the old Soviet Union days.  Russia does not have nearly the economy it would need to try to rebuild its empire.  It's economy, such as it is, is heavily dependent on selling oil and gas to the West.  Back in the 80s, the Soviet Union had more population than the United States, and pretended to have a GDP of 60% or so of ours and catching up fast.  (And the CIA largely believed it.)  Today:

• Russia's population is about 143 million and shrinking alarmingly.  Its peak population was over 148 million back in 1995.  The current population is well less than half that of the U.S.  Russia's birthrate is not nearly high enough to sustain the population.  Projections at the link have Russian population going down into the 130 millions by the 2030s, and into the 120 millions by the 2040s.  
• Russia's GDP for 2016 was under $1.3 trillion, barely 7% of U.S. GDP.  To put that in even more perspective, countries with more GDP than Russia include the likes of Brazil, India, and even South Korea!  For that matter, Mexico is rapidly catching up to Russia in GDP.  (Mexico's GDP for 2016 was almost $1.1 trillion.)

Really, can't the progressives come up with something better to obsess about?

UPDATE, March 5:

Image via NYM and Maggie's Farm.

Meanwhile, over at Fox News, Peter Schwieizer (author of "Clinton Cash") points out that nine shareholders of a Canadian uranium company sold to the Russians donated $145 million to the Clinton Foundation.  The sale required approval from the State Department when Hillary was Secretary of State.  Don't worry, it's no big deal.

Notes From The Front Lines Of Resisting Government Aggrandizement

Among the most famous quotes from Thomas Jefferson is this: "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground."  And he said those words well before there was even a progressive movement, dedicated to the principle that all human problems can be solved by government experts with unlimited power and enough infinite free taxpayer dollars to spend.  Today we have thousands of these progressives strewn throughout the government agencies and the courts, all pushing for expansion of government (i.e., their own) power.  Is it even possible to resist?

One of the front lines in this battle in coming months looks to be over the concept of what is called "Chevron deference."  The name "Chevron" refers to a 1984 U.S. Supreme Court case, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.  In that case, the Supreme Court held that government agencies should be allowed broad latitude to interpret the statutes and regulations that they then administer.  You may have encountered the term in reading about the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.  While Gorsuch's judicial philosophy is thought to be very close to that of Scalia on most issues, he clearly differs dramatically from Scalia on this "Chevron deference" thing.  Here is Jonathan Adler, writing in the Washington Post on February 1:

Scalia feared an overweening judiciary that would use the power of judicial review to direct regulatory policy and supplant the policy judgments of presidential appointees. As a consequence, he was a strong proponent of the Chevron doctrine, under which courts are required to defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous federal statutes. . . .  Gorsuch, on the other hand, sees in Chevron a potential threat to the fundamental obligation of the judiciary to interpret federal statutes and “say what the law is.”  Writing separately in one recent case, Gorsuch explained that under the Constitution, as written, it is the job of “the people’s representatives” to “adapt the law to changing circumstances. '  . . .  Gorsuch warned that “Chevron seems no less than a judge-made doctrine for the abdication of the judicial duty.”  Allowing agencies to offer authoritative statutory interpretations, Gorsuch warned, threatens to transfer “the job of saying what the law is from the judiciary to the executive,” thereby inviting “the very sort of due process (fair notice) and equal protection concerns the framers knew would arise if the political branches intruded on judicial functions.”

Now, at first blush, it would certainly seem that "Chevron deference" is the ultimate unfettering of the government to enable it to expand as much as it wants, and with nothing to stop it.  Of course every agency interpretation of a statute or regulation will be in a way to give the agency itself more power!  For Exhibit A, look to the EPA under Obama, which has interpreted the term "waters of the United States" to cover every puddle and wet spot (in order to claim jurisdiction over a good half of all private land) and has determined that a colorless, odorless gas (CO2) is a "danger to human health and welfare" (in order to claim jurisdiction over the entire energy sector of the economy).  

But meanwhile, while Chevron deference hands enormous powers to the agencies, it also acts as a constraint upon the courts.  Could it be that the courts are even more dangerous than the executive agencies in expanding their own power?  Before racing too quickly to a conclusion, you might want to consider the Chevron case itself.  The case arose out of an EPA interpretation of the Clean Air Act in a way that actually reduced the number of projects that would be required to obtain an air quality permit from EPA.  Essentially, EPA said that all "sources" of pollutants within any overall project (referred to in the jargon of the time as a "bubble") would be considered as one "source," and there would therefore be no need to obtain a permit to make changes as long as the total emissions within the particular "bubble" did not go up.  This was in the early days of the Reagan administration, and the EPA Administrator was none other than Anne Gorsuch -- Neil Gorsuch's mother.  Meanwhile, the DC Circuit continued to be dominated by appointees of previous Presidents, including Jimmie Carter.  

Needless to say, the Natural Resources Defense Council sued EPA to force it to apply the more intrusive regulatory regime that had preceded.  And the DC Circuit agreed!  This was in the pre-Scalia era of statutory interpretation, when courts often looked to what they thought was the "overall purpose" of a statute in deciding how to interpret it.  Hey, this statute was intended to clean up the air!  (Notice that this method of statutory interpretation does not require any consideration of the actual words of the statute.)  Therefore, there may not be an interpretation that allows projects to proceed while only keeping the level of air pollution the same as before.  Here is how the DC Circuit stated its reasoning:

 [I]n ASARCO, Inc. v. EPA, 578 F.2d 319 (D.C.Cir.1978), the court ruled out application of the ["bubble"] concept to national new source performance standards ("NSPSs") which the Act directs EPA to set with a view to enhancing air quality. In each case the court focused on the purpose Congress envisioned for the particular program at issue. ASARCO declared the bubble concept impermissible when the congressional objective was improvement, rather than simply preservation, of existing air quality. . . .  Congress, EPA does not dispute, intended the new source review requirements to operate not simply as a quality-maintaining scheme but specifically to promote the cleanup of nonattainment areas.  We are therefore impelled by the force of our precedent in Alabama Power and ASARCO to hold that EPA's regulatory change, its employment of the bubble concept to shrink to relatively small size mandatory new source review in nonattainment areas, is impermissible.

So there!  As you may have guessed by now, the Supreme Court reversed, and thus we have the concept of "Chevron deference."  But this was only one of many circumstances of that Reagan era where the courts, particularly the DC Circuit, thought it was their business to direct agencies what to do if the court thought the agency was being insufficiently aggressive in its regulation.  The courts had become a major factor in resisting Reagan's efforts to reduce the size and impact of government.

During the Obama era, it was the opposite -- agencies aggressively seeking to expand their power, and courts often dominated by Bush appointees.  Of course, those judges "deferred" -- and government power expanded.  And now things have reversed yet again: we have new President Trump, but a DC Circuit (and most other Circuits) dominated by the appointees of the President Obama.  Will those courts be resistant to agency efforts to roll back regulation, as Trump has directed the agencies to do?  Without doubt, they will.  As of now they are constrained, at least a little, by Chevron deference.  But do you now see how we seem to have gotten ourselves onto a one-way ratchet of increasing government power (as foreseen by Jefferson)?  So long as the progressives control one or the other of the executive agencies or the courts, they can somehow keep the power of government expanding.

For the long pull, I am not a fan of deference to agencies as interpreters of statutes.  Gorsuch is right that statutory interpretation is at the core of the judicial function.  This is why appointing non-progressive judges, at all levels, is so important.  Meanwhile, maybe the Supreme Court will not get around to undoing deference until Trump gets at least a few appointments to the DC Circuit.      

Today's Entry In The Fight To Preserve All Government Spending Everywhere

As reported here on Friday, the battle is on to protect every last dollar of government spending everywhere.  Tomorrow President Trump will make his first speech to a joint session of Congress.  The buzz is that much of the speech will be about major spending cuts in certain departments.  How to head this off?

At the New York Times, today's contribution is a big unsigned editorial about the travails of Kansas, headline "Kansas' Trickle-Down Flood of Red Ink."  The gist is that the state of Kansas has already tried this ridiculous idea that tax cuts can spur economic growth, and all it has to show for the effort is a big $1.2 billion two-year projected budget deficit -- a "flood of red ink."  Tax cuts are a proven failure!  The editorial reports on the recent noble efforts of some Kansas legislators to close the budget gap by undoing tax cuts dating from 2012-13, an effort just now thwarted by a veto from Governor Sam Brownback.  As usual for a Times editorial, it drips with scorn for the idiots who think that tax cuts might ever be a good idea.  Excerpt:

[Kansas Governor Brownback] made his state an experimental showcase for the driving philosophy of supply-side theorists like Paul Ryan, the House speaker, who served as a staff acolyte when Mr. Brownback was in the Senate. . . .  The result [in the Kansas legislature] was less a victory for Mr. Brownback than a rebuke to his leadership, in particular his near-suicidal clinging to his trickle-down obsession when he should be engineering a compromise with the Legislature. Kansas faces a $1.2 billion budget gap across the next two years that must be dealt with.

Somehow though, in the editorial and elsewhere in this edition of the rag, the Times does not mention anything about our neighboring state of Connecticut, or how it is doing relative to Kansas.  I'm not saying they have to, but then, Connecticut is a state quite similar to Kansas in some respects.  For example, the population of Kansas is just under 3 million, while Connecticut's is just under 3.6 million.  However, Connecticut's state budget, at about $20.5 billion (about $5900 per capita) is noticeably higher than that of Kansas, which is about  $16 billion (about $5300 per capita).  

Kansas and Connecticut in recent years have adopted opposite approaches to dealing with the demands of government constituencies for more spending.  In Kansas, as the Times notes, there have been income tax cuts.  Until 2013, there was a top rate of 6.25%, but the cuts at that time lowered the rate to 4.9%, and also put into effect further scheduled cuts.  The top rate for 2017 is 4.6%.  The Times attributes Kansas' projected deficit of $1.2 billion to those cuts.  In Connecticut, top income tax rates have only gone up.  The Connecticut income tax only began in 1992, at a top rate of 1.5%; the most recent increase was from 6.7% to 6.99% in 2015.

So how have the ever-increasing income tax rates done in ending Connecticut's budget deficits?  According to the Connecticut Mirror from November, "nonpartisan analysts" who had been given a look at Connecticut's numbers were projecting a deficit of $1.5 billion for 2017, and $1.8 billion for 2018 -- a total of $3.3 billion over the two years.  That's close to triple Kansas' projected deficits over the same period.  Funny that Pravda doesn't mention this.  (I'm old enough to remember when in 1991 then Connecticut Governor Lowell Weicker pitched his 1.5% income tax as a temporary measure to deal with a one-time budget "emergency.")

Meanwhile, how is Kansas faring versus Connecticut in the area of economic growth?  I would preface this by pointing out that the effects of either good economic policy or bad take effect slowly and can only be noticed over a number of years.  For an example on the "bad" side, note that Venezuela was reporting an economic "miracle" of spectacular growth as late as 2013, some 15 years after the ascendancy of Chavez, supposedly as a result of blowout government spending of the socialist regime.  Then the bottom fell out.  On the reverse side, Kansas' income tax cut of 1.65% over several years is not nothing, but is relatively small when viewed against a federal top rate of about 39% that applies nationwide.  Gov. Brownback has rather exaggerated his case by calling the cuts "revolutionary" at some times (although perhaps it is the direction of the change, rather than the magnitude, that he is referring to).  Anyway, can we find anything noticeable in the numbers?  In summary, not much.

The unemployment rate from the U.S. Labor Department for Kansas for December 2016 was 4.2%.  For Connecticut it was 4.4%.  (Not a big deal.)  A chart from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics here shows that Kansas gained about 60,000 jobs from 2012 to 2016 (on a base of about 1.4 million), but then promptly lost about 30,000 of them back in 2016.  That loss of 30,000 jobs came without any noticeable increase in the unemployment rate.  Was it even real, versus a quirk of the statistics?  A chart here from the Connecticut Department of Numbers shows Connecticut employment growing about 40,000 from 2012 to 2016 on the employer survey.  Overall, on these two measures, the results of Kansas and Connecticut over the past few years cannot really be distinguished.

On the other hand, I would point out that the state of Connecticut was booming back in the 70s and 80s, when New York income taxes were higher than they are today and Connecticut had no income tax at all.  Then Connecticut put in the income tax in 1992, and they have had essentially no job growth at all in the 25 years since.  Moreover, in the most recent three years, Connecticut has seen population declines.  There could be other causes for this kind of long-term stagnation, but the ever-increasing income tax stands out as a major one.  The other big ones are aggressive public sector unions and an associated massive pension debt.  Is this what the New York Times would recommend for Kansas?  And how about for the federal government?

UPDATE, March 1:  In the comments, mvs4000 suggests comparing real GDP growth of Kansas versus Connecticut from economic data published by the St. Louis Fed.  For those interested, the answers are:  Connecticut real GDP for 2012 was $228.2 billion, and for 2015 (latest) $225.5 billion, a decline of $2.7 billion, or 1.2% over those three years.  Kansas real GDP went from $131.3 billion in 2012 to $134.3 billion in 2015, growth of 2.2% in three years.  Not great, but hey, way better than Connecticut.  Also, as Michael Moran points out in the comments, two of Kansas' main industries, energy and agriculture, had downturns in the period; Connecticut does not have the same excuse.  Out there in the rest of the states, there is not a perfect correlation between top income tax rates and economic growth, at least in this particular relatively short window, but there definitely is a general trend in favor of the lower-tax states.  Highest-tax California saw respectable growth over the same 2012-15 period of 10.5% ($2,013.6 billion to $2,225.4 billion), while next-highest-tax New York saw not-so-respectable growth of only 1.8% ($1,231.8 billion to $1,254.8 billion).  At the other end of the tax scale, zero income tax Texas had growth of 15.2% ($1,310.5 billion to $1,509.8 billion) -- and that's even with the collapse of oil prices in 2014-15.  Zero income tax Florida had growth of 9.0% ($729.4 billion to $795.0 billion).  If you want to check out any other states, go to fred.stlouisfed.org.

What It Takes To Cut The Government Even A Little

I do not disagree with the proposition that political debate in the United States has become as polarized as at any time in my life.  But, as I have observed on multiple occasions, severe polarization is the inevitable result of the rise -- finally! -- of a movement seeking significant reduction in the role of the federal government.  There is no obvious "compromise" between the basic principle of the progressive left, which is that government can and should solve all of the personal problems of the people with government taxing, spending and regulation, and the basic principle of the economic right, which is that government is incapable of solving the personal problems of the people and only makes things worse when it tries.  The one principle says that the government should grow, and the other says that it should shrink.  

What's the "compromise"?  Certainly, neither side finds it acceptable to leave everything as is, in permanent stasis.  The progressive left has a long list of new and expanded spending and regulatory programs that it proposes in order to fix every last personal problem and eliminate all downside risk of life:  more anti-poverty spending (the current $1 trillion per year being woefully inadequate), "green" energy subsidies and "clean power" regulations to "save the planet," single payer health care, free college, free childcare, etc., etc.  We just need to muster the political will to get it done!  The right has a similar list of spending and regulatory programs to be cut or even eliminated:  Obamacare subsidies, "green" energy subsidies and regulations, Dodd-Frank financial regulation, education subsidies to failing unionized schools, public and "affordable" housing subsidies, the national endowments, and plenty more.

Always before the issue on the table was how much the government would grow; the "compromise" was that it would grow a little slower than the left wanted, and some of the new programs would have to wait for a few years.  Now, we have advisor to the President Steve Bannon saying at the CPAC conference yesterday that the administration plans to begin a "deconstruction of the administrative state."  What?  In an era of shrinkage of the government's role, do you actually expect progressives to sign on to a "compromise" to shrink things, but just a little slower?  The whole concept challenges the very legitimacy of their enterprise.

For an analogy, consider the long-deceased Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev.  I guess a good half of the population is too young to have personal memory of him.  Here is a picture:

This guy ruled the Soviet Union with an iron hand from 1964 to 1982.  He had plenty of time to award himself gazillions of medals and honors!  For everybody else in the Soviet realm, it was a long period of stagnation and decline, not to mention repression.  Brezhnev is most famous for the "Brezhnev Doctrine," which held that any piece of territory once in communist hands must forever after remain in communist hands.  The underlying rationale was obvious, although it generally went unstated:  if any piece of territory, no matter how seemingly small or insignificant, were to leave the communist sphere, that would call into question the fundamental legitimacy of the whole project.  And if that ever happened, the entire house of cards could collapse very quickly.  In the end, that is exactly what happened.  From the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 to the final collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 was barely over two years.  Right up until the final collapse, there was no possibility of "compromise."

And that, I suggest, is exactly what is going on with the crazed resistance of the left to the new Trump administration.  He's hardly done anything yet!  Why the insanity?  The lead article in the New York Times today describes the demands from the Democratic Party "base" for "all-out war" against the Trump administration:

Democratic Party leaders will gather in two cities this weekend to plot strategy and select a new national chairman with the daunting task of rebuilding the party’s depleted organization. But senior Democratic officials concede that the blueprint has already been chosen for them — by an incensed army of liberals demanding no less than total war against President Trump. . . .  [S]purred by explosive protests and a torrent of angry phone calls and emails from constituents — and outraged themselves by Mr. Trump’s swift moves to enact a hard-line agenda — Democrats have all but cast aside any notion of conciliation with the White House.

The answer is that the entire legitimacy of the enterprise is at stake.  What happens if taxes and financial and energy regulation get cut and economic growth actually increases?  What happens if green energy subsidies and climate regulations get cut and rescinded and world temperatures remain steady or even decline?  What happens if "anti-poverty" spending is cut and poverty actually declines, or if education spending is cut and educational results actually improve?  If any of these things are allowed to happen, the floodgates will open!  Literally half or more of the federal bureaucracy could be exposed to elimination.  

So I'm not sure that Trump himself has a whole lot to do with this.  We're just seeing what we need to go through to cut back the government, even by a little.   

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XIV

The Daily Caller reported over the weekend that Congress is about to pass a bill zeroing out the budget of NASA's "Earth Sciences" division for global warming research:

Republicans plan to end the more than $2 billion NASA spends on its Earth Science Mission Directorate.  “By rebalancing, I’d like for more funds to go into space exploration; we’re not going to zero out earth sciences,” Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, told E&E News. 

Well, this couldn't come soon enough.  These NASA bureaucrats are the people who, under leader Gavin Schmidt, engineer just enough "adjustments" to world temperature records each year to make it possible to claim that this year has just set a new "record" for high temperatures.  Always, the "adjustments" seem to make the past cooler and the present warmer.  For lots of detail on this subject, see parts I through XIII of this series, available at this link.  

I come back to this topic today because a guy named John Mauer has a post today at Watts Up With That about NASA adjustments to temperatures at a weather station near and dear to myself, namely the one at Falls Village (Town of Canaan), Connecticut.  I own a house in the adjacent town of Salisbury, about 3 miles from this weather station; and I pass it regularly.  Mauer has collected the details of recent adjustments made by NASA to the temperatures at Falls Village, as well as NASA's stated rationale for the adjustments.  It couldn't be more preposterous.

Here's Mauer's picture of the aerial view of the siting of the weather station.  It's next to the Falls Village power station, and right down by the Housatonic River, which is visible in the view.  The river forms the border between Canaan and Salisbury, so the small piece of land visible in the picture on the other side of the Housatonic is actually in the Town of Salisbury.

The temperature record for this station goes back 101 years, to 1916.  You might think that the power station might affect the record some, but it was actually built in 1914.  Also, it's not very big (11 MW), and is a hydro plant associated with the waterfall on the river that's just out of view.

Mauer points out that NASA chose to make some substantial adjustments to the historical temperature record at this station in 2015, conveniently timed to be shortly before the big Paris climate conference at the end of that year.  You won't be surprised that the adjustments are completely typical for NASA adjustments at all weather stations:  the past has gotten substantially cooler when compared to the raw data, while the recent years to the present have either stayed the same or gotten a little warmer.  NASA itself actually provides a graph demonstrating the changes, and Mauer has copied that graph in his post:

Mauer has then backed the adjustments out of this graph and compiled them into this new graph of his own:

Suddenly what might have seemed like some sophisticated scientific work when you looked at NASA's graph is revealed as not so sophisticated at all.  From 1916 to 1924, they have just lowered all annual average temperatures by a flat 0.8 deg C.  Then, after a gap of a few years in the adjusted series (unexplained), they lower all temperatures from 1927 to 1939 by a flat 0.6 deg C.  In the 70s they seem to have gone for a negative 0.6 deg C adjustment, while for the 80s they went for negative 1.2 deg C.  But suddenly in the 2000s, the adjustment became + 0.4 deg C.

OK guys, can you kindly explain.  This time I will quote from the NASA website:

GHCN-adj-homogenized is the adjusted, cleaned data with the GISTEMP removal of an urban-only trend.

"Removal of an urban-only trend"?  Really?  In Falls Village, Connecticut?  I can't even start to figure out what this means.

First of all, Falls Village is about the opposite of "urban."  It is approximately 100 miles from New York City.  The latest Census estimate of the population of the Town of Canaan is 1195 people in 33 square miles.  (Adjacent Town of Salisbury has 3665 people in 60 square miles.)  In my only quibble with Mauer, he says that the Town of Canaan is "mostly farmland."  Actually not -- it is about 80% forest, and of the unforested part, much is lawns or fields that are not farmed.  There are very few farms left.  This part of Connecticut has been reverting to forest for a good century and a half.  See my famous Defunct Agriculture Tour of the area here.  The population of the Town of Canaan actually peaked in 1850 at 2627, and hasn't remotely recovered.

But even if the Town of Canaan were an "urban" area, or even semi- or partially-urban, how could it make sense to adjust temperatures from 50 and 100 years ago down by half a degree or more? If Canaan had become an urban "heat island," wouldn't that mean that you should adjust recent temperatures down (to account for distortions coming from buildings or pavement or whatever), while leaving the past the same?  Well, that's not the way it works at NASA.  I think that the game plan is to bury this stuff in lots of details and hope that nobody has the time or inclination to get into the weeds and ask any difficult questions.

Again, they can't fire these guys fast enough.  But I'll still believe it when I see it.  Meanwhile, they could use about 100 new people to go in and audit what's been going on for the last 20 years.

Which Will Collapse First: North Korea Or The New York City Housing Authority?

Sadly, blogs had not been invented in the 1980s.  That's when I regularly predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, to anyone who would listen.  My wife, and plenty of other people, thought I was crazy.  Unfortunately, I have no written record to prove my prescience.

In fact, it's a pretty safe bet to predict that any economy, or piece of an economy, organized on a socialist model will sooner or later collapse.  That's because socialism reverses the virtuous incentives of a private ownership/free exchange system (sometimes known as "capitalism").  In a private ownership/free exchange system, individuals can improve their economic well being by working a little harder or a little smarter.  In a socialist "to each according to his needs" system, individuals cannot improve their economic well-being by hard work, and often can improve their economic well-being by doing nothing and waiting for handouts.  As a result, in capitalism you have continuous economic growth; but in socialism you have productivity decline, and the people get poorer and poorer year after year.  This is what I've called the "socialist death spiral."  It's only a matter of time until the collapse.

But unfortunately, no one knows when the collapse will come.  It could be tomorrow, or a year from now, or ten years, or fifty.  Which is what makes betting on the timing of any particular collapse an interesting sport.  When will the Castros finally give up the ghost in Cuba, or Maduro in Venezuela?  Put your money down!

Today's challenge is to try to guess which will collapse first as between North Korea and the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA).  The question is tricky because both entities have survived well past any date on which they could reasonably have been expected to collapse absent massive outside support to prop them up.  So far both have received just enough outside support to keep going.  Might that end in either case?

North Korea has been surviving on fumes for decades.  Even in between periodic famines and mass starvation, defectors still report living by eating grass and tree bark.  The economy produces next to nothing, and night time satellite photos show a country in total darkness while adjacent South Korea is ablaze with light.  Surely this cannot continue much longer!  

A publication called The Diplomat from January 27 has some history of this subject, titled "The Long History of Predicting North Korea's Collapse."  You won't be surprised to learn that the predictions started shortly after the Soviet Union went under, with another spike after the death of Kim Jong-Il:

Predicting the end of North Korea has a long history marked by countless false dawns. Claims of impending collapse gained prominence after the death in 1994 of North Korea’s founder Kim Il-sung, the current leader’s grandfather, only for his son, Kim Jong-il, to smoothly take the reins of power. Former President Bill Clinton was reported to have agreed to an ill-fated denuclearization deal with Pyongyang that year largely out of a belief the regime’s end was near. Nearly a decade and a half later, Kim Jong-il’s sudden death again sparked predictions of regime implosion, only for his son to successfully assume power and keep the system intact.

But miraculously, they are still around.  Actually, it may not be so much of a miracle, but rather the result of backing from their one kind-of ally in the world, China.  Although nobody knows the exact amounts, China has clearly been helping the Norks by buying some of their stuff, let alone by providing enough border enforcement assistance to keep the entire population from escaping.  But is some or all of that about to end?  According to the Washington Post on Saturday, China has suspended its purchases of coal from North Korea as of yesterday, and will keep the suspension in place at least until the end of the year.  The suspension is seen as a punishment to the Norks for their recent missile test, and as a tightening of compliance with the U.N. sanctions regime.

China will suspend all imports of coal from North Korea until the end of the year, the Commerce Ministry announced Saturday, in a surprise move that would cut off a major financial lifeline for Pyongyang and significantly enhance the effectiveness of U.N. sanctions.  Coal is North Korea’s largest export item, and also China’s greatest point of leverage over the regime.

This is not a small change.  Coal to China constitutes around a third of all of North Korea's exports, around $1 billion out of a total of about $3 billion, according to an MIT website here.  Seems like Mr. Xi might be a little upset, maybe by the recent nuclear and missile tests, or maybe by the assassination of Kim Jong-Nam (who had been living in China and under its protection).  Are the Norks getting to the end of their rope?  Place your bet!

Or, you can bet on NYCHA.  NYCHA is not a full sovereign economy, but just a small piece.  Nonetheless, it is run on the full classic socialist model.  Prove yourself to be poor and incapable of providing housing for yourself, and qualify for deeply a deeply subsidized apartment for life, many of them now located in highly desirable areas.  In this post last May I characterized NYCHA as being in the "terminal phase" of a socialist death spiral.  Their rents cover barely a third of their operating costs, and they have a backlog of some $17 billion of capital repairs, with no source of the money anywhere on the horizon.

But here they are about 10 months later, still going on as if nothing is wrong.  Hey, none of the buildings has collapsed yet!  In this instance, the New York Post has joined the Manhattan Contrarian as finally noticing that something is badly wrong.  They had a lead editorial devoted to NYCHA yesterday, titled "The slow death of New York's public housing."  Excerpt:

New York City’s public housing is slowly sinking into decrepitude as its oldest developments creakily approach 80 years in age. It’s long past time to set ideology aside to fund vital repairs — and to think about a future without public housing. Nearly half the New York City Housing Authority’s properties won “troubled” or “low-performing” ratings in the most recent federal inspections. . . .  The clear truth is that time will inevitably spell the end of all current NYCHA properties — with no hope that new ones will replace them. A rational city would face those facts . . . .

My only quibble is with the Post's assertion that it is "time to set ideology aside to fund vital repairs."  If NYCHA is in the terminal phase of a death spiral, and if "the clear truth is that time will inevitably spell the end" of its properties, then isn't the right answer to get this over with sooner rather than later, before we throw more tens of billions of dollars down the hopeless rathole?  The right answer to the miseries of NYCHA, and of its tenants, as proposed many times here, is to give away the projects to the tenants and make them owners.

In the case of NYCHA, the mystery financial backer that has kept it going long past its sell-by date is the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.  HUD in recent years has been sending some $2 billion of annual operating subsidies to NYCHA.  As far as I know, it's all subject to annual appropriation from Congress.  (When they built these things, nobody seems to have thought that they might need to do capital improvements some day.)  

As of today, Ben Carson is still awaiting his confirmation as HUD Secretary, and of course, HUD's budget for the coming year has not begun to be considered.  But if they focus on this a bit, it could all unravel very quickly.

So, which do you bet will collapse first, North Korea or NYCHA?  Put your money down!