May 14, 2026

The Homeless Industrial Complex Eats San Francisco For Lunch

May 14, 2026/ Francis Menton

It’s been a long time since I have done an update on the homelessness situation in San Francisco. The reason is that I have avoided the issue until sufficient evidence had accumulated to make the obvious conclusion completely definitive and undeniable.
It was all the way back in 2018 that some of San Francisco’s foremost do-gooders, led by billionaire Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, organized a referendum to implement a new payroll tax to raise the revenue to solve the homelessness problem once and for all.
The referendum was designed to raise some $300 million per year, on top of San Fran’s already generous homelessness spending. All of the new spending was to be dedicated to the task of ending the homelessness crisis.
On October 24, 2018 — just a few days before the referendum was scheduled to take place — Benioff got an op-ed published in the New York Times advocating for its passage. The gist of the op-ed was that it was time for San Francisco’s business community to step up and get this done.

May 12, 2026

New York Following Cuba's Strategy For Powering The Electrical Grid

May 12, 2026/ Francis Menton

Suppose that you are a large U.S. state with a dynamic modern economy. Here’s an idea for a strategy for powering your electrical grid: Intentionally disinvest in your functioning fossil fuel generation plants; fail to maintain them adequately, and let them age into obsolescence. Meanwhile, encourage and even subsidize the development of solar panels as a replacement. After all, solar power is cheaper!
Those who follow the policy of New York State with respect to our electrical grid will recognize this description as covering the essential elements of our strategy. In our case, the strategy was mainly enacted into law in 2019 via the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA).
In heading down this path, have we checked around to see what other states or countries have adopted this strategy, and how it has worked out? Just asking.

May 10, 2026

May 10, 2026/ Francis Menton

Among all the crazy ways that humanity is supposed to “save the planet” by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, offshore wind electricity generation has to be about the craziest. Between the expense of building and integrating the facilities and the intermittency of the output, the build-out of offshore wind infrastructure has threatened large and accelerating increases in consumer electricity bills.
Despite lack of any demonstration of feasibility or cost of running the grid on offshore wind, the Biden administration (with support from Congress) threw tens and hundreds of billions of taxpayer funds into the industry in the form of open-ended life-of-project tax credits.
The Trump administration came into office with a known hostility to offshore wind. However, its first efforts to shut down construction on these projects ran into a wall of judicial opposition. But rather than giving up, or embarking on years of appeals with uncertain outcomes, the administration has done some strategic thinking and come up with Plan B. This one looks to me like it will work.

May 08, 2026

May 08, 2026/ Francis Menton

Medicaid is the joint federal/state program that provides free medical care to the poor and near-poor in the U.S. Who could be against that?
A website called Statista collects data on various subjects of interest and presents them in useful charts. One subject is the total federal plus state spending on the Medicaid program by year since inception of the program back in the 1960s through the latest year of 2024. Here is that chart:
Looking at the chart, a few things leap out. One is rapid and unbroken growth year after year from the beginning up to the most recent year. Another is two particularly rapid periods of growth, first in the 1990s (Bill Clinton was President), and then again in the most recent period of 2020-2024.

May 06, 2026

May 06, 2026/ Francis Menton

Two articles from the New York Times in the past couple of days describe the widening divergence between the approaches taken by the U.S. and China on the subject of wind energy. I apologize that these pieces are behind the Times’s paywall, but remember that I subscribe there so that you don’t have to.
On Monday (May 4) the article was about the status of wind energy development in the U.S., with the headline “More Than 150 Wind Projects Stall as Pentagon Delays Reviews.”‍ ‍Tuesday’s (May 5) piece covered the same subject in China, headline “China’s Big Bet on Wind Power Is Paying Off.”‍ ‍
These articles once again illustrate the extent to which the U.S. and its people are uniquely blessed in the world.

May 04, 2026

May 04, 2026/ Francis Menton

On April 29, the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais. That’s the case where the Court held that the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create a second “majority-minority” Congressional district because “[t]he Constitution almost never permits a State to discriminate on the basis of race, and such discrimination triggers strict scrutiny.”
A “majority-minority” district is one that has been gerrymandered to include sufficient numbers of the designated minority group as to make it nearly certain that a member of that group will be elected to represent the district.
The case arose out of the redistricting process following the 2020 census. Louisiana initially came up with a map containing only a single such “majority-minority” district. Plaintiffs who claimed that their voting rights were being infringed challenged the map, and a District Court judge in Louisiana entered a preliminary injunction requiring Louisiana to create a second such district.
After the case went into what Justice Alito’s opinion describes as a “legal limbo,” Louisiana then adopted a new map with a second “majority-minority” district; but that map was then promptly challenged by another group of plaintiffs who claimed that their voting rights were being infringed. This second challenge then became the Callais case.
The left-wing press has gone into apoplexy over the Callais decision.