Andrew Cuomo And Progressives Treating The Voters Like Idiots

In yesterday's post I remarked on the degree to which climate propagandists treat their readers like idiots.  How does that compare with the way New York politicians treat their voters?  You be the judge!

Today's New York Post engages in a little tea leaf reading, and foretells a likely 2020 presidential run by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.  From the article headlined "$$ moves hinting at Cuo '20 run for prez": 

Gov. Cuomo has hired two Florida fundraisers, a sign he’s building a national network to launch a presidential bid, sources told The Post. . . .  “Hiring out-of-state fundraising staff, particularly in a battleground state, opens up money spigots beyond what would normally be available and is a key first step to laying the groundwork for a run,” said one source, a Democratic operative. . . .  Karen Hinton, a former Cuomo aide [said], “He is positioning himself to be seen as a liberal who can speak to a national audience.”

So when this guy goes out and speaks "as a liberal" to the "national audience," what is he going to say?  To get some clues on that, we might look to the most recent initiatives that he has launched.  For example, in the New York Times on Friday, we have "Cuomo's $1.4 Billion Plan Targets Brooklyn in Fight Against Poor Health and Poverty."  Yes, it seems that in that corner of the universe subject to the very most intense levels of anti-poverty, Medicaid, and public housing expenditures anywhere -- namely, Central Brooklyn -- and where poverty and health never seem to get any better despite all the spending, our genius governor has decided that an extra $1.4 billion of taxpayer funds is now finally going to turn the tide.  Excerpts:

Citing persistent problems of poverty, violence and poor health, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced a comprehensive plan on Thursday that would direct $1.4 billion of New York State’s resources to long-suffering areas of central Brooklyn.  Obesity, murder and unemployment rates are all higher in central Brooklyn than the city and state averages. The plan would allot the biggest chunk of money, $700 million, to health care. It would also create 3,000 affordable housing units, 7,600 new jobs and more than five acres of recreation space at state-funded housing developments.  Mr. Cuomo said the plan also includes anti-violence programs and job-training efforts — a “soup-to-nuts” approach that he said was designed to give central Brooklyn enough resources so its residents could be “in a position to help themselves.”  The initiative, which Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, held up as a national paradigm, comes at a time he is burnishing his credentials with a string of progressive moves that have stirred talk of a possible run for the presidency in 2020. It also comes as anti-poverty initiatives have all but dropped from the national political agenda.

Now, I'm going to suggest a revolutionary concept here.  How about this:  before we spend this next $1.4 billion on health and anti-poverty efforts in Central Brooklyn, can we take just a little peek at how things are going with the current spending on health and anti-poverty efforts in the same location?  Is the current level of spending above or below national norms, and what do the results look like?  If you read through that New York Times article, you will undoubtedly note that they do not undertake this task.  That's why you have the Manhattan Contrarian!

Start with health.  New York State and City have a famously over-the-top Medicaid program that has long provided every available healthcare option, at absolute top dollar. cost to the taxpayer.  They don't break down cost per enrollee by county, let alone neighborhood; but with a little looking we can learn that New York State had 6.39 million Medicaid enrollees as of December 2016, and total spending in the most recent year available (FY 2015, Oct. 1, 2014 to Sept. 30, 2015) was $59.8 billion.  That would be about $9,500 per Medicaid enrollee, and $38,000 for each family of four.  With another year-and-a-half under our belt, we're probably right around $10,000 per enrollee and $40,000 per family of four by now.  (And you thought that $20,000 per year for a family of four was a "cadillac" health plan!  We spend double that, and on every single poor family.)  By contrast, total U.S. Medicaid enrollment was 74.2 million as of December 2016, and total spending for FY 2015 was $532.2 billion, or about $7200 per enrollee (same links).  Not cheap, but a lot less than New York.  And fiscally prudent states spend way less.  For example, Texas had total Medicaid spending in FY 2015 of $35.8 billion, less than 60% of New York's Medicaid spending, even though its population is 30% larger than that of New York.

Surely then, New York achieves top end health outcomes for its poor citizens?  Not even close.  You actually can get some key health metrics for New York broken down by neighborhood.  The two big predominantly-black neighborhoods of Central Brooklyn are Bedford-Stuyvesant and Ocean Hill-Brownsville.  In 2015 New York City put out "community health profiles" broken down by neighborhood.  Here's the profile for Bed-Stuy, and here's the one for Ocean Hill-Brownsville.  You won't be surprised to learn that Bed-Stuy and Ocean Hill-Brownsville are at the bottom of the heap on every health metric that they report.  For example:

• Obesity rate: Bed-Stuy 33%, Brownsville 32%, New York City 24%
• Diabetes: Bed-Stuy 15%, Brownsville 15%, New York City 10%
• Alcohol-related hospitalizations:  Bed-Stuy 1713 per 100,000; Brownsville 2285; New York City 1019
• Drug-related hospitalizations: Bed-Stuy 1830 per 100,000; Brownsville 2682; New York City 907
• Stroke hospitalizations: Bed-Stuy 415 per 100,000; Brownsville 413; New York City 319
• Psychiatric hospitalizations: Bed-Stuy 1060 per 100,000; Brownsville 1727; New York City 684

Go ahead and keep this up as long as you want.  In the face of over-the-top blank check Medicaid spending, these poor black neighborhoods lag the City norms on literally every health metric you can think of.  And when this is all that $60 billion per year can accomplish, now the next $700 million of annual healthcare spending is supposedly going to turn it all around?  You'd have to be completely delusional to believe that.

The next big focus of the new Cuomo initiative is of course that regular progressive Holy Grail, "affordable housing."  Have they tried that yet in Central Brooklyn?  Yes, in spades.  It's highly likely that you have never been to the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn, and certainly I would not recommend it as a tourist destination.  It's hideous.  Basically, it's NewYork City Housing Authority projects in every direction as far as the eye can see.  So how has that worked in lowering the rate of poverty?  Actually, the poverty rate in Ocean Hill-Brownsville is 37%, as against a Brooklyn-wide rate of 24% and a City-wide rate of 21% (and a national rate of about 14%).  Bed-Stuy has a much lower concentration of projects than Brownsville, but still a few.  Its poverty rate is reported as 35%.  

It is completely obvious to anyone who is awake that subsidized and "affordable" housing initiatives increase rather than decrease the rate of measured poverty.  That is because the amount of the subsidy is not counted as "income" in determining who is in poverty, while at the same time the subsidies induce people to accept the housing and to keep their income low in order to keep the housing and/or minimize their rents under income-related rent formulas.

In short, Cuomo's new initiatives are the usual progressive doubling down on abject failure.  He's treating the voters like they are idiots!  But then, New York voters clearly enjoy being treated like idiots.  That's how you get elected here.  On the national stage, I wouldn't think this would work quite as well.

Last Gasp Of The Global Warming Scam: Treating You Like An Idiot

On Thursday, new EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt appeared on CNBC's "Squawk Box," and made a statement that has gotten a lot of attention.  The statement was: "I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so, no, I would not agree that it's a primary contributor to the global warming that we see."

I would have said that that statement was just a rather obvious truism.  I mean, we have an enormously complex climate system, affected by literally dozens of factors, many of them hugely larger than us puny little humans -- things like the sun, solar wind, oceans, clouds, volcanoes, aerosols, multiple atmospheric "greenhouse gases" of which water vapor is the dominant one, tilt of the earth's axis, position of the solar system in the galaxy, and plenty of other things that we don't even know about.  And in the era of reasonably good measurements, world average temperatures (a poorly defined concept to begin with) have varied within a range of around one to two degrees, with the accuracy of measurement not much less than the amplitude of the variation.  With all that going on, does somebody claim to have the method to know precisely how much of the variation in temperatures derives from human activities?  To what level of accuracy?  Tenths -- or hundredths -- of one degree?  Really?  Where's the proof?  The whole concept is inherently implausible.  I don't even understand how Pruitt's statement is remotely controversial.

Well, needless to say, Pruitt's statement has caused a total freakout in the progressive press and media.  Kyle Drennen at NewsBusters has a roundup under the headline "Nets Freak Out Over EPA Chief Questioning Climate Change Dogma."    The roundup includes what Drennen describes as "hyperventilating" from the likes of Gayle King and Chip Reid of CBS, Michael Brune of the Sierra Club (“[Pruitt] should not be serving as head of the EPA and he should resign immediately”), Hallie Jackson of NBC, George Stephanopolous (Pruitt is “drawing some real fire for taking on the scientific consensus about climate change”) and Jon Karl of ABC, and so on.

But as usual, I turn to my favorite, Coral Davenport of the New York Times.  Somehow, this young lady with an English literature degree from Smith College has been given the job by the premier news outlet of progressivism to instruct you as to what you are and are not allowed to believe in the field of science.  In yesterday's edition, she has a long front-page feature on Pruitt's statement and the reaction to it, under the headline "E.P.A. Chief Doubts Consensus View of Climate Change."    As usual, it's the litany of blustery unsubstantiated statements from the regular enforcers of the official orthodoxy.  Excerpt:

A January report by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded, “The planet’s average surface temperature has risen about 2.0 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.” . . . “The scientific community has studied this issue for decades,” [said Benjamin D.] Santer, [a climate researcher at the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory]. “The consensus message from many national and international assessments of the science is pretty simple: Natural factors can’t explain the size or patterns of observed warming. A large human influence on global climate is the best explanation for the warming we’ve measured and monitored.”

We've studied this for decades!  It's the consensus!  Well, OK, where is the empirical study that quantitatively establishes that "natural factors can't explain" the observed warming, and that empirically validates the hypothesis that humans have caused x degrees of the warming (whatever x may be)?  Have you ever seen such a study, or even a reference to such a study?  I sure haven't.  And I've been looking.

What I have seen is the September 2016 Research Report by Wallace, et al. that demonstrates conclusively and empirically that just a few natural factors -- to wit, oceans, the sun, and volcanoes -- are completely sufficient to explain all warming that has been observed, leaving nothing to be explained by human emissions of "greenhouse gases."  The Research Report has been extensively peer reviewed and widely disseminated, including at this website.  No one has refuted it, or even made a serious attempt at refutation.    

In the face of the Research Report, it is just an insult to everyone's intelligence to keep on asserting that human greenhouse gases must be causing dangerous warming because there is a "consensus" and "natural factors can't explain it."  Either you can refute the Research Report, or you have nothing.  Needless to say, despite the wide dissemination of the Research Report, you will not find any mention of it in Ms. Davenport's article, nor at CBS, NBC, ABC, etc.  They just prefer to insult your intelligence.

Granted, the Research Report has some serious "heavy lifting" math, and is not for the [faint] of heart.  However, really, this is not that complicated.  For example, consider this chart of global lower troposphere temperatures from the 1979-to-date UAH satellite record:

Looking at this chart, here is something completely obvious and undeniable:  the recorded average temperature has seen several very substantial drops during this period, including a drop of almost a full degree C from early 1998 to early 1999, a drop of about 0.7 deg C from early 2010 to early 2011, and a drop of about 0.6 deg C from early 2016 to early 2017.  During this entire record, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has had a slow and steady increase.  So, does there exist some natural factor or factors that is capable of overwhelming the "greenhouse" effect of CO2 (if any) and causing temperatures to decline even in the face of increasing CO2?  Obviously, there is.  If so, how can we possibly know that human CO2 emissions are somehow the "dominant" cause of global warming?  

Now consider the following two graphs.  Both have been published by the people at NASA who are somehow the official guardians of our surface (land-based thermometer) temperature records.  The first is their 1999 graph of U.S. temperatures from about 1880 to 1999:

Here is the link to find this graph at the NASA website:  https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1999/1999_Hansen_ha03200f.pdf  The graph above is Figure 6 at the end of Hansen's paper found at the link.  Now here is NASA's current graph of U.S. temperatures, starting at the same date and going through 2017:

And here is the link to find this second graph on NASA's website:  https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/graph_data/U.S._Temperature/graph.png  

Now look at those two graphs closely.  How is it that in the graph published in 1999, the years 1998 and 1999 were noticeably cooler than the 1930s, but by the time 2017 had come around, somehow 1998-99 had become noticeably warmer than the 1930s?  If you look closely, you will see that I am not making this up.  The 1930s to the late 1990s is 60 years of increasing CO2 emissions.  If temperatures went down, and for that long a time, how could it possibly be that CO2 emissions are the principal driving force in global climate?  It's completely obvious that there has to be some other natural factor or factors that overwhelm the effects of the CO2, if any.

So they "adjusted" the temperatures.  But the record of the temperatures prior to the adjustments still exists.  Hat tip to the great Tony Heller for doing the detective work to catch these people red-handed.

Thus you do not have to be a math whiz to understand that other natural factors, known or unknown, overwhelm the influence, whatever it may be, of CO2 on climate.  Just look at the charts above -- or dozens of others at Heller's website.  And when you read the output of the likes of Coral Davenport, know that she is treating you like an uninformed idiot.

Don't pay any attention to these people, Mr. Pruitt!  

Another Thing Not To Pussyfoot Around On: Cutting Public Housing Subsidies

Just a couple of weeks ago (February 20), I asked that critically important question that is on everyone's mind, "Which Will Collapse First: North Korea Or The New York City Housing Authority?"  The post noted that the new administration had not yet announced any plans for what to do about the debacle of HUD-backed low income housing, but that "if they focus on this a bit, it could all unravel very quickly."

The first indications that they may be focusing on this subject a bit have emerged in the past couple of days.  Yesterday's Greater New York section of the Wall Street Journal has as its lead headline, "Housing Agency Sees $35 Million Cut in U.S. Aid."   The "housing agency" referred to is the New York City Housing Authority -- NYCHA.  

My only question is, why is the cut only $35 million?  The annual HUD subsidy to NYCHA is running at around $2 billion.  It should be zeroed out entirely, and the sooner the better.  A cut of $35 million represents less than 2% of the current annual subsidy.  What is the possible reason for pussyfooting around on this?

To be fair, new HUD officials (unnamed in the article) do seem to have indicated that bigger cuts are coming, perhaps as soon as the upcoming fiscal year.  Bigger, but still ridiculously small -- less than 10% of the current subsidy level:

Citing conversations with federal housing officials, [NYCHA officials] said they were bracing for additional cuts that could be far greater, and total $150 million. Shola Olatoye, the agency’s chief executive officer, said a reduction of that size would be devastating.  “The direction we’re moving in is one where public housing is drastically different or doesn’t exist,” she said. “The progress we have made over the course of the last three years—it’s not that it’s at risk. It evaporates.”

I have no idea what Ms. Olatoye is referring to as "progress" at NYCHA.  There is no respect in which NYCHA is not an unmitigated disaster.  A fair description of it is a socialist-model scheme whereby local New York politicians use billions of dollars of federal handouts to trap hundreds of thousands of people into lifetimes of poverty and dependency.  Like all socialist-model economic schemes, it has been in a decreasing-productivity death spiral essentially ever since it started, and is kept alive only by subsidies from productive (capitalist) economic activities.  The subsidies must constantly increase in order to keep the death spiral from playing out to its crash.

Have ever wondered how the wealthiest county in the United States, New York County (Manhattan), can have a reported "poverty" rate well above the national average (21% versus 13.5%, although the most recent Manhattan rate is from 2013)?  NYCHA is the biggest piece of the explanation.  In essence the business of NYCHA is to subsidize people with an irresistible offer of gigantically subsidized rent in return for their commitment to stay poor and dependent.  The magnitude of the subsidies in Manhattan, if measured by the market values of apartments often next door or across the street, literally boggles the mind.  In the most extreme of many extreme examples, a nearly three mile long stretch of the waterfront of the Lower East Side of Manhattan is lined, with very few breaks, with close to 100 NYCHA buildings.  Directly across the island, on the Lower West Side, there is a highly comparable stretch of waterfront, but this stretch has a row of gleaming new condos.  The Lower West Side waterfront condos sell for at least $3000 per square foot, or something like $3 - 5 million for a standard two bedroom apartment.  To rent one of these waterfront apartments would cost you around $10,000 per month.  On the Lower East Side, rent in the NYCHA projects averages about $500 per month.  Thus the rent subsidy is in the range of $9000+ per month per family, well over $100,000 per year.  And yet after this enormous taxpayer giveaway, the NYCHA residents have no spendable income to show for it, and the majority of them are classified as "poor."  And the Lower East Side NYCHA projects are just one example among many now located in top-priced areas.  Other such enormously valuable projects can be found in the Chelsea neighborhood, in West Midtown (right next to the "Trump Place" development!), and immediately adjacent to the Upper East Side.

And I've just begun to describe the magnitude of the NYCHA disaster.  In a report that NYCHA put out in mid-2015, it declared that it had a backlog of some $17 billion of necessary capital maintenance projects, with no source of the funds anywhere on the horizon.  Apparently, when they built these things 30 - 60 years ago, nobody thought that they might ever need major upgrades.  NYCHA pays no property taxes on its projects, which house about 6% of New York City residents.  The crime rate in NYCHA projects is about four times higher than that for the city as a whole.  That's what dependency and hopelessness will do to the human spirit.

The federal government has the power to put NYCHA completely out of its misery by the simple expedient of zeroing out the subsidy.  To cut NYCHA's annual subsidy by 2%, or even 10%, will just prolong the misery.  NYCHA will continue to limp along in an increasingly-desperate situation, hands out to beg from the state and local taxpayers, buildings crumbling, and residents with nowhere to go.  The closest analogies in today's world are North Korea and Venezuela.

But if the subsidies are zeroed out, then the jig is up.  NYCHA will be forced into immediate drastic restructuring or exit from this unsustainable business.  The obvious strategy is to give away the projects to the residents.  Of course, this would be the best thing that could ever happen to the residents.  Thousands would become instant multi-millionaires, and tens of thousands instant millionaires.  They could sell the apartments, rent them out, or borrow against them.  The funds for renovation and upgrade would magically appear.  The need for taxpayer subsidies would go away.

Please, please don't pussyfoot around on this one!

President Trump: Don't Pussyfoot Around On Climate Policy!

One of President Trump's unequivocal campaign promises was to pull out of President Obama's Paris Climate Agreement.  Now there is talk that he is going squishy.  Trump going squishy?  And on this issue of all things?

Climate propagandist Coral Davenport has a report in the New York Times on March 2, headline "Trump Advisors Are Split on Paris Agreement on Climate Change."    The advisors advising Trump to stick with the Paris Agreement are said to include Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, First Daughter Ivanka Trump, and of course the Washington Blob of career diplomats.  Tillerson -- wasn't he the very embodiment of evil in his role as CEO of ExxonMobil until just a few weeks ago?  Here's how Davenport articulates the position allegedly now advocated by Tillerson et al.:

[Ivanka] Trump, Mr. Tillerson, and a slew of foreign policy advisers and career diplomats who argue that the fallout of withdrawing from the accord could be severe, undercutting the United States’ credibility on other foreign policy issues and damaging relations with key allies. . . . Foreign policy experts say withdrawing from Paris would have far greater diplomatic consequences than President George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the world’s first global climate-change accord, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.  “I think it would be a major mistake, even a historic mistake, to disavow the Paris deal,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a retired career diplomat and under secretary of state under Mr. Bush.  "In international politics, trust, reliability and keeping your commitments — that’s a big part of how other countries view our country,” Mr. Burns said.

Really, is this the best they've got?  "Undermining the United States' credibility" and "damaging relations with key allies"?  Under the Paris Agreement, the United States will supposedly cut its "carbon emissions" by 26 to 28% by 2025.  That's only eight years away.  The only mechanism that might actually work that has ever been proposed for achieving such drastic reductions would be to multiply the cost of electricity and gasoline to such a high level that American citizens will become hugely poorer and will be stuck shivering in the dark at home.  China's side of the "agreement" is to continue increasing its carbon emissions by as much as it feels like through 2030, and then (when it thinks it will have fully electrified the countryside and everybody will have cars and its emissions will be about triple ours) maybe leveling off, unless it changes its mind.  (As usual for a Davenport article, she just brazenly lies about China's supposed commitments:  "[T]he Paris agreement includes commitments from every nation, rich and poor, to cut emissions, including China and India, the world’s largest and third-largest polluters."  Fake news, anyone?)  Among all people who are actually awake, this "agreement" makes the United States a laughingstock.  The representatives of the other countries were all giggling behind Obama's back when he signed off on this.  The guys from China and India must have split a gut.  OK, many of the representatives from Europe were likely exceptions.  They are also laughingstocks.

And what exactly is this supposedly "severe fallout"?  That other countries will suddenly realize that we are no longer so stupid that we will cripple our economy for no purpose?  In what way is our failing to decrease carbon emissions drastically over the next eight years even something that other countries care about?  Maybe because they were planning to move in on our export markets as we stupidly priced our exporters out of business?  Why do we owe them that?  I say let's go for the "severe fallout"!

James Delingpole, now working at Breitbart, has a somewhat different take:

Man-made global warming is evidently and demonstrably not a problem.  The people who pretend otherwise are crooks, liars, idiots or shills.  CO2 does far more good than harm.  Fossil fuels aren’t running out – especially not now we’ve discovered the game-changing technology of hydraulic fracturing – and are the ideal solution to our energy needs.  Renewables are a waste of everyone’s time – and always will be.

There is copious evidence to support all these statements and it’s really about time those of us on the winning side of the argument stopped pussyfooting around and apologising for being 100 per cent right. That should include everyone in the Trump administration.  No more cautious speeches equivocating as to whether carbon dioxide is a problem or not, and whether we ought to have more renewables in the mix.  This is a revolution; we’ve got truth and justice on our side. . . .  

I could quibble with a few things there.  For example, renewables are not just a "waste of everyone's time"; instead, they are a tool of impoverishment for the masses and enrichment for a handful of well-connected crony capitalists.  But overall, amen!    

People Don't Pay Any Attention To The Busybodies

On the New York subway these days, they have endless automated announcements about anything you might imagine.  Of course the result is that nobody pays any attention whatsoever.

Riding home last night about 10 PM, an announcement came on that said "Protect your belongings.  Keep your cellphone out of sight."  Here was the scene in my car at the time.

I realized that, in about a third of one car, I was looking at at least half a dozen people doing something or other on their cell phones.  (You may have to enlarge this picture some to spot them all.)  Not one of them paid any attention to the announcement.  They all kept doing exactly what they had been doing.  So I took out my own cell phone and snapped the picture.  Good job busybodies!  

The Airbnb Racial Divide: What's Your Take?

There's a site called "Inside Airbnb" that collects and publicizes data about Airbnb activity and usage in cities around the world.  Its take on Airbnb is generally highly critical.  Founder Murray Cox describes himself as "an independent digital storyteller, community activist and technologist."

A few days ago this site came out with a Report on Airbnb in New York City titled "The Face of Airbnb, New York City."  The subtitle is "Airbnb as a Racial Gentrification Tool."  I am interested on the reaction of readers to the issues raised by this Report.

As background, you undoubtedly know or suspect that there are a large number of predominantly black neighborhoods in New York City.  For this Report, Inside Airbnb counts 72 of them.  While some of those neighborhoods are rather gritty, many of them are quite beautiful.  Examples of the latter include much of Harlem in Manhattan (excluding its public housing projects), and places like Fort Greene, Clinton Hill and Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.  The website 6sqft, covering the Inside Airbnb Report, includes this picture of a typical block in Bed-Stuy:

Now that these neighborhoods have become quite safe, Airbnb would seem to be a perfect income-making opportunity for the legions of black homeowners.  The houses -- many purchased decades ago for under $100,000 -- now go for $1 million and up; but of course the homeowner can't get the mil without selling and moving.  Airbnb offers the chance to get some considerable income while staying put, and also not having to deal with long-term tenants.

So what is the take of Inside Airbnb?  You can guess it from that subtitle ("racial gentrification tool").  Black residents "suffer the most":

Black neighborhoods with the most Airbnb use are racially gentrifying, and the (often illegal) economic benefits of Airbnb accrue disproportionately to new, white residents and white speculators; while the majority Black residents in those communities suffer the most from the loss of housing, tenant harassment and the disruption of their communities.

Inside Airbnb documents what appears to be a dramatic discrepancy between the rates at which white versus black homeowners make their spaces available via the Airbnb site.  For example:

• Across all 72 predominantly Black New York City neighborhoods, Airbnb hosts are 5 times more likely to be white
  In those neighborhoods, the Airbnb host population is 74% white, while the white resident population is only 13.9%
• White Airbnb hosts in Black neighborhoods earned in total an estimated $159.7 million, compared to only $48.3 million for Black hosts
  73.7% of income accumulating to a group representing only 13.9% of the population is a 530% economic disparity . . . .  
• The neighborhood with the highest Airbnb racial disparity was Stuyvesant Heights, in the heart of Black Central Brooklyn, where there was:
  • a 1,012% disparity in the number of Airbnb listings by white hosts
  • an economic disparity of 857% for the total revenue accumulated by white hosts
  • housing and neighborhood disruption due to Airbnb 12 times more likely to affect Black residents than white residents

Funny, but here in Bill de Blasio's New York, I had thought that the single biggest issue, and particularly for African Americans, was "income inequality."  I'm old enough to remember when de Blasio called income inequality the "biggest economic challenge we face."  Actually, that quote is from 2015.  And de Blasio has said plenty of similar things on dozens of occasions both before and after.  

Yet here -- if you believe the Inside Airbnb data (and I have no particular reason to doubt it) -- we have large numbers of African Americans presented with a relatively easy income-generating opportunity, and somehow just not taking advantage of it.  And as far as I can see, in this instance, there is no possibility of asserting some kind of discrimination as the cause for black homeowners not earning the income.  This is not like an employer paying one employee more and another less.  Unless I'm missing something, the black home and apartment owners should have the exact same opportunity as their white peers to list some of their space on Airbnb.  It might take some effort to clean your place up and make it presentable for guests, but doing the actual listing is not very hard at all.

And by the way, I'm not saying that I blame the black residents if they don't want to rent out any of their space on Airbnb.  I don't do that with any of my own space.  But then again, I'm not complaining about any lack of income.  If I was in need of income, I would definitely consider renting out some of my space to generate some.

Anyway, if the big issue really were income inequality, you would think that the progressive response would be to try to help and encourage the black residents to get in on the income opportunities.  If that were your goal, a first step would be to ease up on the restrictive regulations so that more blacks can use Airbnb legally.  (Currently use of Airbnb is generally legal for homeowners, but not for renters.)  Another step might be to offer a seminar on how to use Airbnb.  But instead the push is in exactly the opposite direction.  It seems that we must be horrified at all that despicable income-generation going on all around us.  (According to Inside Airbnb, people trying to make a buck off their properties cause "loss of housing, tenant harassment, and disruption of communities.")

One might get the impression that, to the progressive, the income inequality issue is much more about stoking resentment against the successful, and much less about finding ways for low income people to rise to middle and upper income.  But as I said, I'm interested in the views of readers on this subject.