The More Public Money Gets Spent To Solve "Homelessness," The More Homelessness There Is

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  • San Francisco is the latest American city to try to solve the problem of “homelessness” by throwing more and yet more taxpayer cash at it. Should we check in on how it’s going?

  • You may recall that I last visited the issue of homelessness in San Francisco about a year ago, October 2018, in a post titled “The Morality Of Our Progressive Elite.” At that time, the number of “homeless” in San Francisco was estimated at about 7000, but there was an initiative on the November 2018 ballot, known as Proposition C, calling for a new payroll tax on large employers in San Francisco, intended to raise some $300 million per year to solve this homelessness problem once and for all.

  • On October 25, 2018, one Marc Benioff, co-CEO of Salesforce, had an op-ed in the New York Times supporting Proposition C. My post noted that Benioff was only too happy to advocate that others should be forced to spend hundreds of millions on this project through a new tax, while he himself offered to put up none of his own personal fortune, estimated at $6 billion, for the purpose.

  • So where are we now, a year later?

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Elizabeth Warren's Cruel Plan For "Environmental Justice"

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  • Elizabeth Warren wants to be known as the Democratic presidential candidate who has a “Plan” for everything. I count some 50 of these Plans here on her website.

  • [N]ow we can make that 51 Plans, because yesterday Warren came out with the latest and greatest of them all, titled “FIGHTING FOR JUSTICE AS WE COMBAT THE CLIMATE CRISIS.”

  • [According to Warren] we have a “crisis of environmental justice,” caused by racist people like you putting “profits before people” while the government “look[s] the other way.”

  • I have a different word to describe Warren’s Plan for Climate Justice. There’s nothing uplifting about my word. The word is “cruel.” Warren’s Plan is truly cruel to the poor and to the people in “frontline and fence line communities” (as Warren calls them). It is cruel because it points only toward greater dependency, which will mean worse health, and toward higher energy costs, which will mean further impoverishment.

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Is It Possible For The United States To Withdraw From Any Foreign Engagement?

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  • On Sunday the Trump administration announced plans to withdraw most or all U.S. troops from the Northeastern part of Syria. There are currently about a thousand U.S. troops in the area, working with allied Kurdish forces.

  • Within hours, the official talking point — that Trump was abandoning the Kurds to be slaughtered by Turkish forces, and thereby sending a dangerous message to all U.S. allies everywhere — had taken universal hold.

  • But wait a second. It’s a given that every single one of the various U.S. foreign engagements — whether it be Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Niger, or wherever — comes with allies on the ground in that jurisdiction.

  • What happens when the U.S. leaves? The answer will always be the same: Our former allies on the ground will be seen as having collaborated with the enemy. They will suffer the consequences.

  • So then, is it ever possible for the U.S. to withdraw from any foreign engagement? . . .

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The Bidens: "Stone Cold Crooked" (2)

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[Here’s the] Washington Post defense of Biden’s conduct with respect to Ukraine, that appeared September 27. It’s an unsigned editorial, headline “The Ukraine facts are clear. But does truth still matter?” As to the Bidens and Ukraine, here is the key quote:

“Mr. Trump has thrown up a smokescreen of denials, insults — and blatant lies. Over and over, he and his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, have repeated the easily disproved claim that Mr. Biden sought to have a Ukrainian prosecutor fired to protect his son. Senior Ukrainian officials, including one of Mr. Giuliani’s own sources, have publicly stated that the story is false; multiple media investigations have definitively debunked it.”

Recall that the issue we are examining here is whether Joe Biden had the corrupt motive of benefiting his son Hunter when he used the threat of withholding U.S. loan guarantees to force the firing of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin. The Post says that the allegation of Biden’s corruption is “easily disproved” because “senior Ukrainian officials” (unnamed) have “publicly stated that the story is false.”

And what is it that these “senior Ukrainian officials” have stated is false? . . .

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The Bidens: "Stone Cold Crooked"

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  • The phrase “stone cold crooked” was used on October 2 by President Trump to describe Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Watch the YouTube video here.

  • Meanwhile, in the Democratic-side press, almost all have been standing up for Joe Biden in the face of large profit-making ventures of his son and brother in countries where Biden as Vice President led U.S. diplomacy. Specifically as to Ukraine, the New York Times on October 5 called President Trump’s charges as to Biden’s misconduct “unfounded” and “wild.”

  • So which is it: Are Biden and his family “stone cold crooked,” or are such charges “unfounded” and “wild”?

  • This piece will look specifically at the facts regarding then-Vice President Joe Biden and the dealings of Hunter Biden in Ukraine.

  • My conclusion: the claim of “stone cold crooked” has been proved. . . .

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The Latest Icon Of The "Success" Of Socialism: Bolivia

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With the Democratic Party in the U.S. and the Labour Party in the UK having gone over fully into advocacy for good old-fashioned Socialism (with a capital S), we could use a real-life example of a self-proclaimed Socialist country that can claim at least a semblance of success.

Bernie Sanders likes to say that he is advocating for Socialism on the Scandinavian model, but he keeps getting rebuked by actual Scandinavian leaders and economists who deny that their model is actually Socialist at all. For example, there was Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, in a 2015 speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, “I know that some people in the U.S. associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

Or there was Swedish economist Johan Norberg, quoted in IBD in 2016 as to that country:

"In the 1950s, Sweden was already one of the world's richest countries, and back then, taxes were lower in Sweden than in the United States." It was only after that, says Norberg, "did we start expanding the government dramatically. And do you know what happened then? We started losing," says Norberg. "It all ended in a terrible crisis." [But] Norberg says the country has become "successful again, but only after a new reform period, with more deregulation and free trade than in other countries."

So where is a good Socialist to turn? Clearly, at this point Venezuela is best ignored. (The WSJ has a big front-page story today on the struggles of a young couple trying to flee Venezuela, along with about a full tenth of the population so far.) But fear not. The Nation has the answer. Bolivia! . . .

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