March 23, 2023

Trying To Head Off New York's Total Self-Destruction

March 23, 2023/ Francis Menton

It’s budget time in Albany. In recent years, the custom has come to be that most if not all important policy issues for the year get considered as part of the annual budget, even if they aren’t germane to that subject. So everything is on the table.
The Governor and Legislature, both in control of progressive Democrats, are competing to see who can come up with the most destructive proposals to add to the mix. The basic mind-set of all the elected officials is that if only we raise enough tax money and spend it on enough handouts to favored constituencies, we can shortly achieve nirvana and utopia.
There is exactly one conservative-side think tank in New York State, known as the Empire Center, that makes a systematic effort to put forth a contrary agenda. The Empire Center is just out with a big Report called Next New York, with a series of chapters setting out counter-proposals in the major policy areas: public safety, K-12 education, Medicaid and healthcare, energy, transportation and transit, housing, and so forth. Today the Empire Center held a conference, which I attended, in connection with the release of the Report.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll try to cover several of the subjects from the Report. For today, I’ll start with my favorite, energy policy.

March 20, 2023

A Brief Look At The Priorities Of SVB And Credit Suisse

March 20, 2023/ Francis Menton

Over the weekend of March 11-12, Silicon Valley Bank got taken over by federal regulators. SVB was the 16th largest bank in the U.S., with total assets of over $200 billion. Depositors were withdrawing their deposits at a rapid pace, and the bank was quickly running out of liquidity to meet the demands.
And then over this most recent weekend, it was Credit Suisse, suddenly forced by Swiss regulators into a shotgun wedding with its larger Swiss rival UBS. CS was a much older and larger player than SVB, founded in 1856, with over $500 billion of assets (down from over $800 billion as recently as 2021), and some 50,000 employees to SVB’s 8,500.
Both institutions fell victim to some combination of the usual financial risks that are endemic to the banking business. But if you had looked at the information they were putting out as recently as a month ago, you would have had to conclude that their corporate focus was entirely on the latest political fads that have little to nothing to do with the real risks facing them.

March 18, 2023

March 18, 2023/ Francis Menton

Every place that tries increasing the percentage of electricity generation that comes from wind and sun then experiences rapidly rising consumer electricity costs.
The reasons why this happens are not complicated. Even at relatively low levels of wind and solar penetration, backup fossil fuel or other generation cannot be closed, so consumers must pay for two duplicate generation systems. At higher levels of wind/solar penetration, things like overbuilding, curtailment, and hugely expensive grid-scale energy storage come into play.
In my post of February 8, 2023, I asked “Could anybody possibly be stupid enough to believe the line that wind and solar generators can provide reliable electricity to consumers that is cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels?”
And yet it is an endlessly-repeated mantra of wind/solar advocates that generating electricity from those sources is “cheaper” than generating the same electricity from fossil fuel sources like coal and natural gas.
In this post I will make a proposal for a way to definitively expose the falsity of the claims that wind and solar are “cheaper” than fossil fuels for electricity generation.

March 15, 2023

March 15, 2023/ Francis Menton

The race is on to see who hits the green energy wall of impossibility first. California, Germany and the UK (the “Poseurs”) might seem to have leapt early into the lead positions. But New York is now making a strong sprint to catch and surpass them, so it can be the first to splatter its citizens’ flesh and blood all over the impenetrable barricade.
The Poseurs accumulate vast green progressive virtue credits for ridiculous promises, but their promises all have dates so far in the future that today’s politicians will be long gone when the crash detonates.
Who has sufficiently pure cult adherence to set firm green energy deadlines with real consequences in the here and now? That task has fallen to the true climate heroes here in New York City.

March 12, 2023

March 12, 2023/ Francis Menton

I’m old enough to remember the German post-World War II “economic miracle.” (Their term was “Wirtschaftswunder.”).
After more than ten years of government direction of the economy under the Nazis, followed by the devastation of the war, Germany after 1945, under economics minister Ludwig Erhard, adopted the model of low taxes and light regulation.
The economy boomed for decades on end.
But Germany then gradually turned away from Erhard’s prescriptions. Today Germany is twenty or so years into the most aggressive green energy “transition” of any country with a large economy, with the government firmly in charge of picking the winners and losers in the energy sector.

March 09, 2023

March 09, 2023/ Francis Menton

A recurring theme here is the utter failure of progressive government social service spending programs to ever make a dent in, let alone solve, the problems they have been created to address.
Whatever the problems may be — poverty, food insecurity, housing, etc., etc. — once massive government spending programs to “solve” them are put in place, the problems never show significant improvement, and more often than not get worse, at least according to official measures, the longer the programs continue and the more is spent.
An extreme case of this phenomenon is the problem of “homelessness” in California.