More On The "Morality" Of Throwing Money At The Problem Of Homelessness

/

After reading the comments to my post on Friday about the upcoming voter initiative in San Francisco to cure “homelessness” by throwing lots more money at the problem, it occurred to me that there were several more points that I should have made.

Here is a quote that comes near the end of Mr. Benioff’s New York Times piece:

It’s also time to put to rest the claim that more generous support for the homeless will only attract more homeless people to our community. The city’s own analysis found “no research” that expanding homeless services increases homelessness. An overwhelming majority of homeless people in San Francisco are from San Francisco. They are our neighbors and they desperately need our help.

Interesting. I don’t know if it rises to the level of “research,” but did San Francisco’s genius analysts look at the data from New York City, where since 2013 annual city spending on services for the homeless has soared from about $1 billion to well over $2 billion, and the number of people counted as “homeless” has gone from about 43,000 to about 76,000? Other cities that have greatly increased spending on services to the homeless, only to see the number of people counted as homeless skyrocket, include Los Angeles and Seattle. Cause and effect? I can’t even think of how, after looking at the data from New York, Los Angeles and Seattle, you could say with a straight face that “no research” supports the proposition that expanding homeless services increases homelessness. I guess that theoretically somebody could always make the argument that without all the extra spending the number of homeless people would have been even higher; but at some point such a contention becomes completely preposterous. . . .

Read More

The Morality Of Our Progressive Elite

/

Have you heard of Marc Benioff? He’s one of those tech billionaires out in San Francisco. After becoming the youngest vice-president of Oracle back in the early 1990s, he went on to found Salesforce.com, where he continues to serve as Chairman and co-CEO. Today, Salesforce has a market cap of over $100 billion, and Bloomberg puts Benioff’s personal net worth at over $6 billion. Not quite Bezos or Zuckerberg territory, but still impressive. Benioff clearly deserves credit for starting and building a very successful business. Like many others of the tech elite, he also exemplifies the progressive world view and sense of morality.

Yesterday Benioff put that all on display in a big op-ed in the New York Times, headlined “The Social Responsibility of Business.” The immediate reason for the op-ed is to advocate for something called Proposition C, which will appear on the ballot in San Francisco on November 6. Proposition C will impose a gross receipts tax — one half of one percent on revenues in excess of $50 million — on large businesses in San Francisco. The purpose is to raise revenue to combat the explosion of “homelessness” in that city. The projection is that the annual revenue from this tax will be in the range of $300 million per year.

Benioff pitches his case in terms of basic human morality. With human suffering all around us, businesses must now stand up and take “social responsibility”!

Back . . . in the 1980s, I was taught . . . that the business of business is business. . . . [But t]he business of business is no longer merely business. Our obligation is not just to increase profits for shareholders. We must also hold ourselves accountable to a broader set of stakeholders: to our customers, our employees, the environment and the communities in which we work and live. It’s time for the wealthiest businesses and business owners to step up and give back to the most vulnerable among us.

Yes, it is the classic statement of the morality of our progressive elite: There is an important human need that must be addressed, and therefore “we” must “hold ourselves accountable” and “step up” and “give back” in the form of a tax.

Am I the only one who sees a problem with this? Here’s my problem, Marc. . . .

Read More

They're Freaking Out Down On Manhattan's Lower East Side Waterfront

/
They're Freaking Out Down On Manhattan's Lower East Side Waterfront

One of the important functions of this blog is to keep you hicks in the hinterlands up to date on what’s going on here in Manhattan. And by the way, don’t try to figure out what’s going on in Manhattan by reading the New York Times. They have more or less given up on the topic of local news, unless maybe it relates to some avant garde art show.

So consider one of those slices of Manhattan where no one who works for the Times editorial departments has ever ventured, namely the approximately three miles of waterfront on the Lower East Side, from the Manhattan Bridge up to East 14th Street, occupied almost continuously by low income New York City Housing Authority “projects,” totaling about 100 buildings in that stretch. When they put these buildings here in the 1930s through 1970s this was a recently-abandoned shipping area, thought to be of no value — a perfect place to warehouse the poor, out of sight, out of mind.

Then, somewhere along the line, somebody got the idea that a waterfront condo in Manhattan might be a desirable place to live. . . .

Read More

Climate Change: Hysteria And Reality

/

In case you haven’t noticed, it becomes more and more obvious with each passing day that the governments of the world are not going to accede to the demands of the UN, of left-wing pundits, and of academia to ban fossil fuels, collectivize their economies, and send us all back to the stone age in the quest to fend off the bogeyman of “climate change.” Some politicians may mouth platitudes, and some may not, but in the end, no government is going to halt the build-out of functioning electricity systems, shut down their industries and impoverish their people.

Maybe that explains why, even as it becomes perfectly clear that this ain’t happening, the ravings of climate change activists become ever more hysterical. Some of the most highly-credentialed people you can think of seem to have completely lost their minds and descended into wild shrieking. Are these people “smart”? In their own minds, yes; and maybe also in the minds of the people at super-fancy universities that awarded them advanced degrees and prestigious professorships. Consider a couple of recent obvious examples: . . .

Read More

How The New York Times And Washington Post Do "Poverty"

/

My post this past Sunday took note of a prominent Wall Street Journal op-ed last week that drove home some points that I have been making here for a few years about the measurement and incidence of “poverty” in the U.S. Most important is the systematic exclusion of some $1.2 trillion of government redistributions, $500 million of private charity, and as much as $2 trillion of underground economy from the incomes of lower income people when “poverty” is measured and reported. Since these three categories, in the aggregate, come to a large multiple of the amount that ought to be sufficient to eliminate all poverty under the government’s definition, I have long asserted that the government “poverty” data are systematically fraudulent, misleading, and useless for their intended purpose. . . .

Into this mix on September 12 the Census Bureau dropped its newly-released data on poverty for the year 2017. Admittedly that release does not itself contain the definitions and lists of exclusions that you need to understand how useless and deceptive this is. For that you’ll have to go on a hunt through the Census website; or, alternatively, read the Manhattan Contrarian or the Wall Street Journal op-eds, or maybe this big study from John Early for the Cato Institute. But again, if you are going to report on this subject, there is no excuse for not knowing this basic information.

So shall we take a look at how the New York Times and Washington Post reported on the Census release? In the New York Times, the big story by Glen Thrush, headlined “U.S. Recovery Eludes Many Living Below Poverty Level, Census Suggests,” appeared on September 13. The Washington Post ran an op-ed by Jared Bernstein on September 12 headlined “New census data show gains to low- and middle-income families but stalled progress on health coverage.” . . . .

Read More

Something The President And Congress Should Pay Attention To: Student Loans

/

One of the very first government-created disasters that I wrote about on this blog was the student loan mess. The blog opened for business on November 6, 2012; and already on November 29, 2012 I had a post titled “Out Of Control Student Loans.” That post noted that, from a beginning in 1966, the federally-guaranteed student loan program had just reached a milestone of $1 trillion of student loan debt outstanding, with no signs of an end to the ongoing increase in outstanding balances. Also, at that time, the so-called “delinquency” rate for student loan borrowers had just suddenly soared from about 8.5% to 11% within less than a year. And, the post pointed out, the 11% delinquency rate was in fact quite deceptive, because very large numbers of borrowers — about half — are in some kind of deferral or forbearance status at any given moment, which leads them not to be counted as “delinquent,” even though they are out of school and not paying anything. That meant that if delinquencies had been measured as a percentage of borrowers expected to be paying, rather than as a percentage of all borrowers, the delinquency rate would have suddenly doubled to more like 22%. The post concluded: “Get ready to lose half or so of the trillion.”

Could things possibly have gotten even worse since then? Of course! After all, this is a pile of free federal money there for the taking. Who is going to pass it up? As long as nobody is really paying much attention, this problem will just continue to explode out of control. And really, what with the “civility” crisis, the Elizabeth Warren Cherokee scam, the Kavanaugh confirmation, the midterm elections, and whatever, who has time to pay attention to a mere trillion dollar problem?

Which is exactly why the problem continues to grow. . . .

Read More