For A Brief Respite From Trump Derangement, Try Venezuela

Let's face it, there's going to be a new, and most likely completely baseless, instance of Trump derangement blaring from the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post more or less every day for at least the next three and a half years.  It can be amusing to make fun of these things, but at some point the Manhattan Contrarian has to find something better to do.  How about looking into recent reporting on Venezuela?

Based on a tip from a reader, I turned to interior page A4 of Monday's edition of the New York Times, and found there an article on Venezuela, occupying the full page, mostly text, but accompanied by several pictures of empty store shelves and of riot police clashing with demonstrators.  The authors are Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, and the headline is "How Venezuela Has Stumbled to the Brink of Collapse."    

My reader's question was, how is it possible that they could write this mountain of text about the collapse of Venezuela's economy and its causes without even once using the word "socialism"?  And he's right about that -- the word "socialism" doesn't appear a single time.  But it's much  worse than that.  By itself, the omission to mention "socialism" in a discussion of the causes of Venezuela's economic collapse could be attributed to mere ignorance or stupidity.  This article goes far beyond mere ignorance and stupidity, and veers deep into dishonesty and malice.  

The basic idea here is to gin up a narrative to describe the reigns of Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela in terms to tie them to Trumpism, and to make the story of Venezuela into a call to resist Trump.  Don't believe me?  Try a few excerpts:

Distrust of institutions often leads populists, who see themselves as the people’s true champion, to consolidate power. But institutions sometimes resist, leading to tit-for-tat conflicts that can weaken both sides. . . .  

Because populism describes a world divided between the righteous people and the corrupt elite, each round of confrontation, by drawing hard lines between legitimate and illegitimate points of view, can polarize society.  Supporters and opponents of a leader like Mr. Chávez come to see each other as locked in a high-stakes struggle, justifying extreme action. . . .  

He and his supporters now saw politics as a zero-sum battle for survival. Independent institutions came to be seen as sources of intolerable danger. . . .  The result was intense polarization between two segments of society who now saw each other as existential threats, destroying any possibility of compromise.  

That's right, the real causes of Venezuela's economic collapse have nothing to do with socialism, and instead the collapse arises from "populism" and "polarization."  Gee, do you think there are any lessons to be learned here for the United States?

And, besides never mentioning "socialism," here are a few more things that somehow never come up in this article's description of the causes of Venezuela's crisis:  massive nationalizations of businesses, including uncompensated takings of large sectors of the economy; orchestrated attacks on important economic sectors, like the sector providing food, as "hoarders and speculators"; blow-out increases in government spending, particularly on vast increases in government hand-out programs; huge increases in the level of government debt; and the crash program to build as much subsidized public housing as possible.  Price and currency controls do get one tiny mention near the end of the article.

So my effort to avoid Trump derangement for a day was not completely successful.  It seems that everything in Pravda, down to the Sports Section and the crossword puzzle, today exists in service to the overriding anti-Trump imperative.  The big problem is that the readers, having plowed through a massive piece like this one, might come away thinking themselves informed about a complex international matter.  In truth, when they finish the article, they will know far less about how Venezuela got into this mess than they likely knew when they started.  

This Russia Thing Can't Really Get Any Weirder -- Can It?

Back in 2000, when the close election result in Florida provoked a flurry of lawsuits seeking either to force or to halt repeated ballot recounts, I noted a phenomenon which on reflection is not really that remarkable.  The phenomenon was that I could not find a single person whose view of the legal merits of the lawsuits did not align with that person's desire as to which candidate should win the election.  If somebody wanted Gore to win, somehow that person would have a carefully thought-out view of every technical issue of Florida election law, and that view somehow aligned perfectly with the views of Gore's legal team.  Same for the views of Bush supporters with those of the Bush legal team.

We are now more than six months into the weird "Russia hacked the election" obsession -- or maybe it's the "Trump is a puppet of Putin" obsession.  I first wrote about the Democrat media's weird Trump/Russia obsession back on March 2 here, noting then the total absence in the plethora of breathless news coverage on the subject of any evidence of wrongdoing with respect to Russia on the part of Trump or his campaign.  Meanwhile I had actually seen an appearance of Julian Assange on the Fox News Hannity program on January 3 where Assange had stated it was "1000 percent" that the source for the leaked DNC and Podesta emails was "not the Russian government" and "not a state party."  OK, maybe Assange was not telling the truth; but I couldn't think of any good reason why he might have gone on national TV to tell this particular lie about this particular subject.  After all, he could have just not said anything.  

On the day of my March 2 post, the particular cause of the hyperventilating of the moment seemed to have reached yet another new low.  That day's "revelation" was that Jeff Sessions had spoken briefly with Russian ambassador Kislyak, in full hearing of dozens of people, in a public auditorium, immediately after speaking on a panel sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, where Kislyak had been in the audience.  The New York Times editorialized "Jeff Sessions Needs to Go," and called the revelation a "bombshell."  

Then, last month, I got the crazy idea that this weird obsession would all just fade away after UN Ambassador Niki Haley had taken a hard stance with respect to Russia, and then Trump had fired off that barrage of Tomahawk missiles to punish Russia ally Syria.  Seemed logical, but boy, was I wrong!  Instead, a new angle to the Trump/Russia story gets cooked up at least once per week to keep the thing alive.  Last week, of course, it was the Comey firing -- "obstruction of justice" according to various media sources like Vanity Fair (headline:  "Will Comeygate Lead To Impeachment?").  (Andrew McCarthy at NRO has a good laugh over the "idiocy" of throwing around the charge of "obstruction," when the most serious allegation at issue -- "collusion" between Russia and the Trump campaign -- is completely evidence-free and isn't even a crime.) 

Yet this week we have topped even that piece of idiocy.  Of course, it's the lead story on the front page today of both the Washington Post and the New York Times ("Trump Revealed Highly Classified Information to Russia").  Dozens of other "mainstream" sources have picked up the story.  The Post had the story first, of course attributing it to "current and former U.S. officials," aka anonymous leakers.  According to the Post article, the particular subject of the disclosure of classified information was "an Islamic State terrorist threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft."

But wait a minute!  Isn't the President specifically allowed to reveal classified information to other countries if he wants to?  Indeed, isn't that the very essence of being given the authority (by the Constitution!) to conduct the foreign policy of the United States?  Of course the President has that authority!  I would have said that the whole idea behind collecting classified information in the first place is to assist the President in conducting the foreign policy of the United States in whatever manner as he may see fit in his discretion.  And, while Russia and the U.S. may be geopolitical rivals on many subjects, the two countries certainly share an interest in preventing having their aircraft blown up by ISIS terrorists. (Recall that an ISIS bomb blew up a Russian aircraft over Egypt back in December 2015.)  Why wouldn't the President and senior Russian officials discuss this subject when they have one of their infrequent chances to meet?  And why wouldn't they share information to help each other prevent future attacks?

So what is it about this story that makes it news at all, let alone front page news?  The Post does not claim that Trump did not have the authority to disclose the information -- and indeed grudgingly concedes that fact.  Instead they breathlessly suggest that Trump went too far in his revelation, or gave up information that may have compromised a U.S. intelligence source.  But of course, they do not provide enough information for you to evaluate whether that is true or not.  Guess what?  It's in the nature of having elected a guy as President that you have to trust his judgment on these subjects.  I'm guessing that the Washington Post and New York Times do not trust Donald Trump's judgment.  But then, "We Don't Trust Donald Trump's Judgment" would not have made for a very good front page headline.

Meanwhile, Fox News today leads with a story relevant to this same "Trump/Russia" issue, but the story could not be more different.  The headline is "Seth Rich, slain DNC staffer, had contact with WikiLeaks, say multiple sources."   If you don't recall the name, Seth Rich was a tech guy who worked for the DNC and was murdered on a street near his home in a nice section of Washington (Bloomingdale) on July 10, 2016:

The Democratic National Committee staffer who was gunned down on July 10 on a Washington, D.C., street just steps from his home had leaked thousands of internal emails to WikiLeaks, investigative sources told Fox News.

The DC police have called Rich's murder a "botched robbery" -- a narrative that is rather undermined by the fact that nothing on Rich was stolen, including his wallet, cell phone, watch, and a necklace.  And also by the fact that he was shot from behind.  Fox News had previously gotten information that Rich had provided DNC information to WikiLeaks from a guy named Rod Wheeler, a former DC homicide detective and Fox News contributor who had been hired on behalf of the Rich family to investigate the unsolved matter.  Now Fox says they have another source who confirms the same information.  The new source is identified as a "federal investigator" who "requested anonymity."  (Can't say I blame the fellow in requesting anonymity, given that one guy who knew too much in this matter has already been bumped off.)

“I have seen and read the emails between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks,” the federal investigator told Fox News. . . .  The federal investigator, who requested anonymity, said 44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments between Democratic National Committee leaders, spanning from January 2015 through late May 2016, were transferred from Rich to MacFadyen [of WikiLeaks] before May 21.

Well, that would certainly explain where WikiLeaks got all the DNC emails showing the collusion between DNC and the Hillary campaign to obstruct the ability of Bernie Sanders to advance in the primaries.  What, it wasn't collusion between Trump and the Russians?  The Fox story is sourced to two different eye witnesses, albeit one of them anonymous, who state exactly what they have seen.  And then there's the small matter of the highly convenient murder.  How about this from Wheeler:

“My investigation shows someone within the D.C. government, Democratic National Committee or Clinton team is blocking the murder investigation from going forward,” Wheeler told Fox News. “That is unfortunate. Seth Rich’s murder is unsolved as a result of that.”

So is this story news?  It is at Fox.  Also at the Washington Examiner, ZeroHedge, the New York Post, Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and plenty of others -- conservative sources all.  I can't seem to find anything about this at the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, etc., etc. Funny, isn't it?  They are too busy hyperventilating about our President making use of classified information to conduct the foreign policy of the United States.

The Comey Firing -- Have The Progressive Journalists Completely Lost Their Minds?

One theory is that in order to consider yourself a progressive, you need first to have lost your mind.  The other theory is that the progressives had at least some slight cognition of the real world up until last week, but the Comey firing gave them that last push over the edge.  Either way, can there be any doubt that at this point that most if not all progressives -- at least those calling themselves journalists -- have completely lost their minds?

My favorite bits of evidence are the assertions from various quarters that by firing FBI Director Comey Trump has committed some kind of "coup" against the American republic, or maybe has thrown the country into some kind of "constitutional crisis."  OK, there can always be one or two kooks to make ridiculous statements on any subject.  But this was not that.  This was dozens of mainstream voices everywhere you looked.  Over at the Daily Caller they had a round-up a couple of days ago of one after another seemingly respectable news source making these kinds of statements.  Examples:

From CNN's legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin:

"It's a grotesque abuse of power by the President of the United States," said Toobin, speaking with Wolf Blitzer on "The Situation Room." "This is the kind of thing that goes on in non-democracies, that when there is an investigation that reaches near the President of the United States, or the leader of a non-democracy, they fire the people who are in charge of the investigation." . . . "This is not normal," he continued. "This is not politics as usual. This is something that is completely outside how American law is supposed to work."

From McClatchy, May 9, "Donald Trump takes a dictator’s stand against inquiry":

Trump has taken the kind of steps that would be routine for the dictatorial leaders—the Putins, the Dutertes, the Erdogans of the world—whom he appears to admire.  

From David From of the Atlantic:

The day began with Trump attempting to intimidate a former acting attorney general & Senate witness. It ends with a coup against the FBI. 

And then there's this important question, asked by Chris Hayes of MSNBC:

If we're in a constitutional crisis, what's the proper response?

Do you have the impression that because these people are on TV and talk with a tone of authority, they must know what they are talking about?  The fact is that all they are doing is displaying their profound ignorance of first principles.  

Let's have a basic civics lesson.  This is not the stuff you need to go to law school to know, but rather the most basic stuff that they teach (or ought to teach) in high school, or even junior high school.  The relevant provision of the U.S. Constitution is not exactly hidden.  It's the first sentence of Article II -- the article that defines the powers of the Presidency. It is all of 15 words long:

The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

That's it.  There is no executive power of the United States that does not belong to the President.  The power to investigate and prosecute is an executive power, and therefore belongs to the President, and only to the President.  

This is what is sometimes known as the "unitary executive."  Making the President a unitary executive with all of the prosecutorial authority under his control was a very intentional decision of the framers of the Constitution.  To learn more, read Federalist 70, by Alexander Hamilton.  It does not have to have been this way.  For example, our 50 states have their own constitutions, and 45 of the 50 have not adopted the unitary executive concept when it comes to the prosecutorial power.  Instead, they divide their executive powers, and have their attorneys general separately elected (or, in a couple of cases, appointed by some entity other than the governor, in one case by the legislature (Maine) and in another case by the state Supreme Court (Tennessee)).  Thus, in the large majority of the states, the governor cannot fire the attorney general.  But the President of the United States absolutely can fire the Attorney General, and can also fire anybody else in a policy-making role in the Justice Department, including the Director of the FBI.  That's what the Constitution says, and there isn't the slightest doubt about it.

Separate from the question of constitutional powers are issues of tradition, or maybe of good judgment.  Some saner voices than those quoted above have asserted some kind of inviolable tradition in the U.S. that a president should not fire the FBI director, so as to maintain the complete independence of the FBI.  Look into the subject, and you will find that there is no real evidence of any such tradition.  The FBI as currently constituted only traces its roots back to 1935, and the first occupant of the position of Director, J. Edgar Hoover, came over from the prior Bureau of Investigation.  Hoover then proceeded to serve under six presidents without ever getting fired, but it's hard to claim much precedent from that.  The first few of those presidents (Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower) had no particular reason to consider firing Hoover, but by the time we got to Kennedy Hoover had accumulated to himself way more power than was appropriate.  And thus we had Kennedy appointing his brother to be Attorney General, and Nixon appointing his closest crony and ex-law partner (John Mitchell) to the job, in both cases undoubtedly in large part to have an assured way to zap Hoover if the need arose.  The need would have arisen for Nixon, but Hoover had died in 1972, just before the Watergate thing got going. 

So has any other President ever fired an FBI Director?  Yes -- Bill Clinton.  Clinton fired William Sessions a few months after taking office in 1993.  Sessions had been appointed by Reagan, served through the term of Bush 41, and still had more than 4 years to go in his 10 year term when Clinton came in.  Clinton gave some kind of excuse for firing Sessions having to do with alleged improper use of an FBI airplane.  Sessions denied it, but maybe it was true.  Do you think Clinton may have had some skeletons in his closet that he did not want investigated?  Funny, but I don't remember a single outraged word in the press about Clinton's firing of Sessions.  (Coup?  Constitutional crisis?)  Of course, Clinton shortly thereafter got Ken Starr as a Special Prosecutor, so the Sessions firing did not do him a whole lot of good.

Now, does Trump have some skeletons in his closet that he does not want investigated?  Anything's possible.  But, as previously stated in a post here, I find the whole idea of "collusion with the Russians to hack the election" completely absurd.  You may believe that meme, and time will tell.  But in the end, the only place where the President is really accountable is to the electorate in the next election.   

Socialism, Fantasy And Reality

Over in Congress, Republicans are gradually getting their act together on rolling back Obamacare, at least in part.  That of course has brought out a torrent of hysterical reaction from the progressive punditocracy.  To these people it seems just glaringly obvious that there is a moral imperative to provide "healthcare for all" through some kind of government handout or coercion.  After all, we all know that socialized provision of goods and services works flawlessly, and the government has an infinite pile of free money to pass out.  We do know those things, don't we?

On Monday, the New York Times op-ed page had no fewer than three pieces on the subject of Republican healthcare proposals by the in-house columnists, each more hysterical than the next.  Not meaning to give the likes of Krugman a pass on this one, but let me focus on the piece by Charles Blow, titled "Republican Death Wish."   Excerpt:

The A.C.A. had made a basic societal deal: The young, healthy and rich would subsidize access to insurance for the older, sicker and poorer. But this demanded that the former gave a damn about the latter, that people genuinely believed that saving lives was more important than saving money, that we weren’t living some Darwinian Hunger Games of health care where health and wealth march in lockstep. . . .  Let’s cut to the quick: Access to affordable health care keeps people alive and healthy and keeps families solvent. Take that away, and people get sick, run up enormous, crippling debt and in the worst cases, die. It is really that simple.

"Access to affordable healthcare" keeps people "alive and healthy."  This is one of those things that is just so blindingly obvious that it has to be true.  So what is the actual evidence?

• There's that big randomized trial out of Oregon in 2013 that found, after two years, that there were "no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes" between those with access to Medicaid and not.  A follow up study after five years showed that the same results persisted.
• The big selling point of Soviet communism was supposedly the free universal access to health care.  In the early years, life expectance under communism did increase -- but then, it also increased in the capitalist countries that had nothing like free universal health care at the time.  By the end of the Soviet Union in the late 80s, that country was facing what was by then called a "health crisis," accompanied by dramatically lower life expectancy, particularly for men, than in the capitalist countries without the free universal health care.  This study from the British Medical Journal in 1988 shows male life expectancy in the late-stage Soviet Union as only 65 years.  Wait, doesn't "access to affordable healthcare" keep people "alive and healthy"?  Maybe not so much.  And by the way, in post-communism Russia, life expectancy has not recovered.

And then, can we please look at what is going on down there in Venezuela.  Free universal health care was the core promise of Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian revolution.  For the latest, check out, for example, from Fox News on April 7, "Venezuela's health crisis nearing catastrophe, government pleads for help":

Triple digit inflation and a decaying socialist economic model have left medications ranging from simple anti-inflammatory drugs to chemotherapy medication out of reach for most Venezuelans. Patients are asked to bring their own. . . .  [M]any other ills afflict the Venezuelan public health system. According to the most recent National Survey of Hospitals, 97 percent of services provided by hospitals are faulty, 75 percent of hospitals suffer from scarcity of medical supplies, and 63 percent reported problems with their water system.  The children are the most affected by the sanitary crisis. According to confidential data gathered by the Ministry of Health leaked to the press, last year 11,000 Venezuelan babies died within their first year if life.

It goes on and on from there, in great and depressing detail.  The promise of "access to affordable healthcare for all" proved to be false -- without a vibrant private economy, the government couldn't deliver.  Well, but at least the people in Venezuela aren't starving.  Actually, as you probably already know, they are.  The Wall Street Journal reports on May 5 that "[t]hree in four Venezuelans said they had lost weight last year, an average of 19 pounds."  The causes include "nationalization of farms as well as price and currency controls."  

The claim that "access to affordable healthcare" keeps people "alive and healthy" turns entirely on the assumption that the socialized costs of the "affordable healthcare" do not degrade economic performance and leave the people poorer.  In other words, to believe the claim, you have to believe in the infinite pile of free money that the government can spend without cost to the people.

What Is Seen And What Is Not Seen, Climate Edition

In 1850 the famous French economist Fréderic Bastiat wrote a short essay titled "What Is Seen And What Is Not Seen."  The essay discusses what has come to be known as the "broken windows fallacy," that is, the idea that breaking windows really makes the world better off because of all the work that is generated for people to repair the windows.  Bastiat points out that the work to repair the windows may be "seen," but because the money gets diverted to that project, plenty of other things that might have been done -- and made someone better off -- remain undone.  Those things are the "unseen."  Overall the welfare of the people has been reduced.

It is not seen that, since our citizen has spent six francs for one thing [repairing the window], he will not be able to spend them for another. It is not seen that if he had not had a windowpane to replace, he would have replaced, for example, his worn-out shoes or added another book to his library. In brief, he would have put his six francs to some use or other for which he will not now have them. 

Over in the world of climate reporting, what is seen is the constant drumbeat of articles about the "hottest" day/month/year ever.  You have seen lots of those over the past year.  Quick, now, when was the last one?  Unless you follow this closely, you very likely won't know.  And, can you think of seeing any recent article revealing that some recent period was not the hottest day/month/year/whatever?  Neither can I.  That's the "unseen."  You can be forgiven for coming away with the impression that things just keep getting hotter and hotter.

For considerations of brevity, I'll leave out the first half of last year, and start in July.  The New York Times headline on July 9 was "Record High Temperatures in the First Six Months of the Year."   (Accompanied by a picture of a house engulfed in flames, of course.)

The average temperature across the contiguous United States for the first six months of this year has been the warmest on record — and by a considerable sum — dating back to 1895, according to a monthly report released Monday by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.

Then, on August 8, it was this:  "What Cornfields Show, Data Now Confirm: July Set Mark as U.S.'s Hottest Month."   Of course, they are explicit in making sure you know to draw the conclusion that the succession of "hottest" months proves the underlying trend toward catastrophe:

It may come as little surprise to the nation’s corn farmers or resort operators, but the official statistics are in: July was the hottest month in the lower 48 states since the government began keeping temperature records in 1895. . . .  “This clearly shows a longer-term warming trend in the U.S., not just one really hot month,” Mr. Crouch [climatologist at NCDC] said.

And, on September 12, "August Ties July for Hottest Month on Record."  

It just keeps getting hotter.  August has tied July for the distinction of being the hottest month since record-keeping began in 1880, NASA said in a news release on Monday.

Notice that this series of articles was in turn driven by a comparable series of press releases issued by the government propagandists.

And then, when were the next articles?  October, November, December?  Try to find them.  On January 18, we get "Earth Sets a Temperature Record for the Third Straight Year":  

Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016, trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014.

OK, but was there anything that happened to temperatures toward the end of the year that you'd like to tell us about?  Nothing that you can find here.

And then, somehow, all these press releases and follow-on articles just disappeared.  Any guesses as to what might be happening?  Perhaps we should just go and check in on the satellite temperature data set over this period:

Aha!  The global lower atmosphere temperature has dropped a full .56 deg C (that's almost exactly one full degree F) since its peak in February 2016.  Do you think that any of these people would have the common decency to openly admit that fact and discuss it honestly?  Don't kid yourself.

The Blob Goes After Ben Carson

Of all the federal agencies that ought to have their budgets zeroed out, HUD should be the first.  There is no bureaucracy in the "anti-poverty" business that does more than HUD to take people perfectly capable of self-sufficiency and intentionally turn them into lifelong government dependents.  And, in the "bang for the buck" category, no other bureaucracy could possibly outdo HUD for futility.  No housing grant, subsidy or other initiative counts for as much as a penny in the income of any recipient.  Therefore, if somebody was poor before receiving an HUD grant or subsidy, it is one hundred percent assured that that person will still be poor after climbing on to the gravy train.  There is no known metric under which HUD's "bang for the buck" could ever get above zero.  If you count trapping millions of able-bodied people into dependency, HUD is hugely destructive.

At the same time, running HUD "programs" is the perfect bureaucratic sinecure.  Virtually nobody ever escapes HUD's web.  Once you are into subsidized housing, why would you ever go back to paying full price for your home?  So the bureaucrats have a permanent lifelong clientele ready to advocate at the drop of a hat for continuation and increase in budgets.  And if the bureaucrats fail in their job of maintaining the buildings properly (as of course they will), they have a ready-made source of self-inflicted heart-rending stories to use to get their budget increased.  The whole thing is a cancer.

Into this disaster has now stepped new HUD Secretary Ben Carson.  He has expressed many times his desire to reduce the dependency that it is HUD's core mission to increase.  But can he actually accomplish anything?  The preliminary Trump budget outline has proposed cutting HUD funding by about $6 billion -- about 12% of the total.  Not nearly enough, but a start.  In the couple of months since his confirmation, Carson has gone out around the country on some kind of a "listening tour," visiting places like Dallas, Miami, Detroit and Ohio.  Reading articles about the tour, it seems that it has turned mostly into an opportunity for recipients of HUD handouts to make their pitches for increased -- or at least, continued -- funding.  Or, to put it another way, Carson is getting swarmed by the Blob.

As Exhibit A of the Blob pushing back, here is a website called CarsonWatch, set up to advocate for keeping and/or increasing all HUD funding.  As Carson started his tour back in March, these guys put up a post oh-so-subtly titled "The Trump-Carson housing budget will push more Americans out on the street."  Excerpt:

At a time when millions of families are caught in a historic housing affordability crisis, the Trump-Carson budget for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) proposes $6.2 billion in cuts to vital programs that help everyday families have a place to call home. It also eliminates all grants to urban and rural communities that help spur job creation and economic development. These immoral cuts will exacerbate homelessness, racial and economic inequality, and fall hardest on our most vulnerable neighbors.

It's a good thing these guys don't ever trouble themselves to look up any numbers.  If they did, they might discover this:  New York City has a population of about 8.5 million, and is said to have over 60,000 "homeless," about one "homeless" person per 142 of population.  To pick another city that takes a different approach to public housing, Houston has a population of about 2.3 million, and is said to have a "homeless" population of about 5400.  But that's only about one "homeless" person per 425 of population, only about one-third of New York City's "homeless" rate.  Surely, then, to drive its numbers of "homeless" people down, Houston must have far more HUD-subsidized public housing per capita?  Wrong!  According to this  "cross-city" comparison from the NYU Furman Center, in New York City some 5.3% of all housing units are "public housing" (in this case, NYCHA), while in Houston the comparable percent is 0.4%.  Admittedly, the study is from 2008, but I doubt that those numbers have changed much since.  Could it really be that for all its extraordinary efforts to solve a "housing shortage" by building more and yet more HUD-subsidized housing, New York City only makes negative progress at getting people "off the street" and into housing?  Absolutely.  This is socialism, folks.  Look around at more of such easily-available statistics, and you will find that there is a strong positive correlation between amount of public housing and increased homelessness.  A cynic might conclude that extensive availability of subsidized housing incentivizes people to declare themselves "homeless" to jump the line to get in.

At various places along Carson's tour, it seems that the strategy has been to trot out one or another sympathetic or heart-rending case to try to stave off budget cuts.  For example, here is a New York Times article from Wednesday reporting on Carson's stop in Columbus, Ohio.  Excerpt:

On his second day in Columbus, Mr. Carson stopped by the apartment of Alzene Munnerlyn, an 87-year-old living in senior housing and using a voucher to pay part of her rent after she was priced out of her last apartment.

The Times doesn't choose to tell us if Ms. Munnerlyn has any children or grandchildren who might have helped.  In Dallas, the mayor chose to make a plea for relief from all the nitpicking regulations that HUD attaches to its grants.  But the reporter from the Dallas Observer was on to the diversion:  Dallas had just finished going through an HUD audit where hundreds of millions of dollars somehow turned up missing, only to be promptly forgiven by the Obama HUD:

You have to pause here and recognize that [Dallas Mayor] Rawlings is a Democrat who went to Washington and cut a deal with a democratic HUD secretary, Julian Castro, to get HUD to eat, kill, trash and deep-six its own four-year investigation showing that Dallas was sucking hundreds of millions of dollars out of HUD, lying about what it was doing with the money and then spending it in ways that violated federal law.

Yet, needless to say, the onslaught from the advocates has seemed to get Carson at least partially on the defensive.  From the Washington Post, April 3:

HUD Secretary Ben Carson said Monday that the Trump administration will seek to include housing funding in a yet-to-be unveiled infrastructure spending bill.  “The part that people are not hearing even though I’ve said it several times is that this administration considers housing a significant part of infrastructure in our country. And as such, the infrastructure bill that’s being worked on has a significant inclusion of housing in it,” Carson said at the National Low Income Housing Coalition conference in Washington.

So they are only talking about a budget cut of about $6 billion (out of about $50 billion), and then much or all of it is going to come back in through the back door in an "infrastructure" bill?  The Blob just never lets up.  Will Carson actually succeed in accomplishing anything in reining in HUD over the next several years?  The jury is out.  In the past, you could never go wrong by betting on the Blob.  I'm hoping it's at least a little different this time, but only because I'm a hopeless optimist.