On The Prevalence Of "Extreme Poverty" In The United States

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The World Bank has a definition of “extreme poverty,” which, in their formulation, means “living on less than $1.90 per day.” I have no idea how they picked the figure of $1.90 for the cutoff, but that certainly is a very low figure. Parsing the definition a little, notice that they use the term “living on” as the standard, rather than saying, for example, that a person has less than $1.90 per day in “income.” As you will see, the difference is significant. Anyway, the WB in its most recent (April 2019) report on this subject gives a figure of about 10% of the world’s population, or 736 million people, as “living on” resources below that very low $1.90 per day level per capita. That actually represents a large decline in the percent of people in this “extreme poverty” condition over the past couple of decades; but it still comes to a very large number of people. Whether that 10% figure is accurate or even substantially exaggerated, I have no doubt that there are still many, many people in the world who have less than $1.90 per day in resources to “live on,” and who therefore live in what could only be called deep, grinding poverty.

But the question for today is, is there any substantial number of people in the United States who live in conditions meeting this World Bank test of “extreme poverty”? And if so, how could that be, and how could such a thing be allowed to persist? Some call this the most important question out there in the field of poverty studies.

Driving this debate has been a pair of well-known researchers who have for many years been making a career pushing large numbers as being the supposed count of those in the U.S. in this “deep poverty” condition. The researchers are sociologist Kathryn Edin of Princeton and social policy guru Luke Shaefer of the University of Michigan. In 2015, Edin and Shaefer published a book titled “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.” The $2.00 per day was an arbitrary rounding up of the World Bank’s equally arbitrary $1.90 per day “extreme poverty” cutoff, although besides doing that rounding the authors also switched the definition of the measurement metric from “living on” that amount or less, to having “cash income” of that amount or less. The book famously came up with a figure of some 1.2 million households with children in the United States, and 3.6 million households total, supposedly meeting the test of having cash income less than the $2 per day per capita figure.

You will not be surprised that Edin and Shaefer’s 2015 book drew excited praise — and a notable dearth of skepticism — from the usual progressive suspects. (Example — William Junius Wilson in the New York Times: “This essential book is a call to action, and one hopes it will accomplish what Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” achieved in the 1960s — arousing both the nation’s consciousness and conscience about the plight of a growing number of invisible citizens.”) Less excited was the Manhattan Contrarian, who, in a post on May 26, 2016, had this to say:

This book is completely preposterous. . . .

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Will The Democratic Candidates Ever Notice That The Climate Change Thing Is Over?

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Maybe the impetus was the California Democratic Convention that took place this past weekend, or maybe it is the upcoming first presidential debate later this month, but it certainly seems that the score-plus of Democratic presidential candidates have entered a bidding war of ever-more-extravagant campaign proposals. And in no field is this more true than in the field of what they call “climate change,” aka spending vast sums of taxpayer and ratepayer money in the futile effort to restrict fossil fuels and promote alternative and useless methods of energy production like wind and solar.

As noted here just last week, minor candidate Governor Jay Inslee of the state of Washington got the ball rolling, trying to grab this issue as his own by “making climate change the center of his campaign” and declaring a series of pie-in-the-sky goals like: “Reach 100% zero emissions in new light- and medium-duty vehicles and all buses, achieve 100% zero-carbon pollution from all new commercial and residential buildings; and set a national 100% Clean Electricity Standard, requiring 100% carbon-neutral power by 2030 .” Well, you can’t expect the other candidates just to take that kind of thing lying down. Here are some of the bids from competing candidates:

  • At berniesanders.com, the program to “combat climate change” includes such things as “[p]ass a Green New Deal,” “[b]an fracking and new fossil fuel infrastructure and keep oil, gas, and coal in the ground . . . .,” and “[e]nd exports of coal, natural gas, and crude oil.” . . .

Meanwhile, out in the rest of the world, they continue to laugh at this spectacle. Just last week, Bloomberg reported on efforts by the Chinese government to get their miners to reduce the price of coal so that the price of electricity can drop and more coal-based electricity can be consumed: . . .

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Global Warming: Is There Anything It Can't Do?

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Global Warming: Is There Anything It Can't Do?

The general interest newsmagazines of the world have been in serious decline for years. Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report — what ever happened to them? Although all of them still exist in some form, they are all shadows of their former selves.

But then there is The Economist of London. These people put out what at least looks on the surface to be a serious print edition every week. They devote real resources to gathering news from around the world. If you want to find out what’s going on in, say, Argentina or the Congo or Uganda, this is one of the few places that you can find it. But can you trust anything they say?

I’ve been a long-time subscriber to The Economist, and had long regarded them as relatively sensible, generally less infected by leftist groupthink than most mainstream sources. But then, a few years ago — I can’t pinpoint the exact date — they made what appears to be a corporate-level decision to go all in for global warming alarm. Henceforth, every issue would contain one or several global warming stories, always with the slant of trying to scare the readership about the allegedly terrible crisis at hand.

Since then, it’s been a steady downhill slide. But how low can this go? In the issue of May 25-31, 2019, we seem to have hit bottom, with an editorial headlined “How to think about global warming and war.” Yes, they have now descended to attempting to blame all world warfare and strife on the universal bogeyman of “global warming.” . . .

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What's The Potential Bipartisan Compromise On "Climate" Policy?

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What's The Potential Bipartisan Compromise On "Climate" Policy?

Many bemoan how our political culture has become increasingly and perhaps irretrievably polarized in recent years. Seemingly all of Washington consists of nothing but two sides endlessly screaming at each other. What happened to what once were the regular outbreaks of “bipartisanship”? Can’t these people work together any more to “get things done”?

For myself, I’ve never been much of a fan of “bipartisanship” or “getting things done” in Washington. Almost always, these are euphemisms for adding to the government’s budget and to counter-productive programs, albeit a little more slowly than the Democrats would have liked. How about getting less done in Washington, and letting the states, or the people individually, take care of these things?

But suppose you are a fan of the growth of government and its spending as the route to solve all the big problems of the world. Then the “climate change” mantra may well seem to you like a godsend. Here is a catch-all slogan that can be used to advocate for most or all of your major goals, while bringing to the mix a claim of moral necessity and urgency that many people, especially young people, find politically irresistible. Do you want to have the government take a more active role in maintaining and improving the environment? How about a more active role to make industry or agriculture or transportation more “sustainable”? How about to thwart capitalism and bring about a more just and fair society organized on a socialist model? How about to redistribute income from rich to poor? Make it all about “climate change.” Now you’re not just playing to envy and using taxpayer dollars to buy votes. You’re fighting to “save the planet”! The moral high ground is yours. . . .

But there is a fundamental problem here in trying to reach any kind of half-way compromise on an emissions reduction program intended to affect the climate. The problem is that the whole concept of affecting the world’s climate through attempted emissions reductions quite obviously doesn’t make any sense at all except on the very grandest of scales. Halfway (or ten percent of the way) measures are completely useless. . . .

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More Excitement In The Air In New York: Rent Regulation To Be Expanded And Tightened

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A couple of months ago I wrote about the excitement in the air in New York City as the newly elected state legislature, with large progressive Democrat majorities in both houses for the first time in many years, looked set to pass a “pied-à-terre” tax for New York City on high value condos owned by non-residents. Finally, we were going to get even with those evil out-of-town mega-billionaires for their sin of coming to our city and spending their money. The idea was that the state legislature would authorize the City to impose special real estate tax surcharges thought sufficient to raise some $650 million per year from just 5400 super-wealthy people who owned very-high-value residences. That would be some $120,000 per year from each one of them. Take that, billionaires! One guy — a hedge funder from Chicago named Ken Griffin, who had just bought an apartment on “billionaire’s row” for $263 million — was theoretically going to get socked for about $10 million per year.

And then, as quickly as it had arisen, the excitement dissipated. Somebody noticed that the high end condo market in Manhattan was already in sharp decline. This tax threatened to kill it off completely, along with the jobs of the people building and selling the apartments. Meanwhile, the tax looked to be relatively easy to evade, as by a mega-billionaire subleasing his apartment and staying in a big hotel suite. The originally-$650 billion estimated annual tax take started to drop like a stone. Today, the pied-à-terre tax idea seems to have died, although with the legislature still in session anything could happen.

But suddenly a new excitement is rising up. A key progressive agenda item, tighter and stricter rent regulation, long blocked by the formerly Republican-controlled state Senate, now looks set to sail through before the legislature winds up in June. Finally, we will be able to achieve perfect justice and fairness in rental housing prices, through the magic of government command and control. . . .

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How Corrupt Is The New York "Affordable Housing" Game?

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How Corrupt Is The New York "Affordable Housing" Game?

In New York City we have a dizzying array of taxpayer-subsidized “affordable housing” schemes: low income public housing; mixed income public housing; “limited equity” co-ops; the so-called “Mitchell-Lama” program; 80/20 and 70/30 “inclusionary zoning” requirements; and plenty more. Something around 1 million people live in one type or another of these subsidized projects. That would be about 1 person out of eight in the City.

The whole idea with these schemes is that each resident pays substantially less than what would be the market rent for the same unit. After all, by hypothesis, we have a “crisis” of housing cost, where market rate apartments are priced too high for many people to afford. Therefore, we need politicians to provide taxpayer-financed subsidies to create a large tier of the “affordable” apartments. The actual rents for each “affordable" apartment are then determined by a political rather than a market process. In the case of the low-income projects, the rent is set as 30% of the tenant’s income, meaning that a tenant with no income could pay as little as nothing in rent, even when the apartment is in a desirable location. Other apartments in different programs first have a rent set, and then are allocated to people whose income has been determined to be appropriate for that rent. Sometimes these politically-determined rents might be relatively close to a market rent for a comparable apartment in the same area; but other times the “affordable” apartments are located in desirable areas, and the local market rent for a comparable apartment could exceed the “affordable” rent by a factor of five, ten, or even more. Such disparities occur, for example, in desirable Manhattan neighborhoods, as well as in waterfront areas in Manhattan and also Brooklyn.

So we have large numbers of apartments that would have market rents of perhaps $3000 up to even $10,000 per month, going for perhaps $500 to $1500. Of course, long waiting lists develop for these subsidized apartments. Some designated political gatekeeper gets to decide who gets the next apartment when it becomes available. Now, what is the chance that such a process can proceed for years and decades without pervasive corruption? . . .

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