Things Are Not Necessarily What They Seem

In human affairs, people do not necessarily say what they mean, and things are not necessarily what they seem to be at first impression.  Here are three things that are related by these measures; see if you agree.

The Shoeless Homeless Guy

It started with a story in the NY Post on November 29:  A kindly New York cop came upon a shoeless homeless guy in Times Square on a cold night, and went and bought the guy a pair of warm boots with his own money.  A tourist took a picture of the gift and the picture and the story then went viral. 

A few days later, the story wasn't quite what it had seemed at first impression.  Here's a report from the Daily News of December 3.  The homeless guy, Jeffrey Hillman, wasn't homeless at all.  He lives in the Bronx in an apartment paid for by Federal Section 8 vouchers.  He also had a rather substantial income from two founts of government benefits, Veterans' Benefits and Social Security Disability.  And then, just a few days after the generous gift of the shoes, he emerged back in Times Square in bare feet again! 

So what is actually going on here?  I can't rule out the possibility that he is just  completely deranged, but there is rather obvious alternative hypothesis, which is that the begging is a lot more lucrative with bare feet.  If that hypothesis is correct, then the gift of the shoes, and the publicizing of the gift, are not a kindness at all.  Instead, they are a mortal threat to the poor man's source of discretionary income.  Well, maybe people will forget soon enough and he can go back to his regular gig.

The People's Daily Gets Taken In By The Onion

The Weekly Standard (and others) have been having a great time with the story:  The satirical newspaper The Onion runs a ridiculous article naming North Korean dictator Kim Jong Eun the "Sexiest Man Alive."  The story is picked up the the People's Daily, official organ of the Chinese Communist Party, and reported with complete credulity, including no less than 55 pages of photographs.

What conclusion to draw?  Here is the take of the Scrapbook at the Weekly Standard:

[T]he editors of the People’s Daily Online read English and must surely have seen the Onion’s Sexiest Man Alive feature fully in context with other Onion features. And yet they seem to have taken it entirely at face value, and seen it not for the obvious joke that it is but a rare Western compliment to the dictator of a Chinese client state.

I don't think so.  I think it is very difficult for us in the West to comprehend what it is like to live in a world where no one is allowed to speak their mind.  But let's try to imagine.  To work at the People's Daily, you must always present the facade that you believe everything about the Party Line and all words out of your mouth must evidence that belief.  Everyone knows that the Party Line is ridiculous in a thousand respects, but no one must ever give the slightest hint of what they are thinking.  If they give such a hint, they are immediately gone.  Their career totally depends on maintaining the facade.

The line people who selected the article from the Onion to highlight were sharp and knew English well.  I think they knew exactly what they were doing, and were playing a clever prank on their superiors and/or their censors., who are likely to be humorless people with a weak grasp of English.  In a world where the line people must mouth pieties all day and never crack a smile, they would now burst into a fit of giggling as soon as they had a moment outside the eyes of their watchers.

But, you protest, this couldn't be right because they wouldn't take the risk that the major media in the West would catch them and subject the Party to ridicule.  Perhaps, but now imagine the goings on in the People's Daily news room after the Weekly Standard article.  Everyone must pretend not to know about it!  They all must go about their business as if nothing has happened and not say a word or, God forbid, crack a smile.  For the superiors or censors to criticize the line people who created the article would be to admit that they themselves were idiots and subjected the Party to ridicule.  Won't happen.  And the superiors and censors are highly enough placed and have enough clout to maintain their own position; except, of course, if they admit that they subjected the Party to ridicule, in which case they are gone.

They do understand our satire, but can't admit it.  But we do not understand theirs.  I do not necessarily think it's a flaw on our part to not understand what it must be like living under thought control, but we need to make the effort.

The Federal Bar Council Lunch

On the day before Thanksgiving the Federal Bar Council held its annual lunch at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel grand ballroom.  In attendance (along with myself and several colleagues as well as many private practitioners) were the large majority of Federal judges in the area, and most current and former Unites States Attorneys and Assistant U.S. Attorneys.  These are the best and the brightest of the legal community, a who's who of well-known names.

Our table was on the balcony, and as I sat looking out over that large room of a couple of thousand people, I was wondering, has any one of them actually ever spoken out against the drug war?  Many may question the orthodoxy in their own mind, but you'll never find it out by talking to them, because fealty to the drug war is the only way to get a job in the U.S. Attorney's office or on the Federal bench.  So every one of them conforms.  I guess they view it as a small price to pay for the lucrative career advancement.  It's not as bad as working for the People's Daily, but also not so entirely different.

Does Anyone On The Left Realize That The Jig Is Up?

Today Roll Call and TPM report (via PowerLine) that a large coalition of left-of-center groups is planning a meeting on December 10 in Washington to advance a strategy to weaken or eliminate the filibuster in the Senate. The groups in question include various labor unions (Communications Workers of America, United Auto Workers), environmental groups (Sierra Club, Greenpeace), anti-poverty campaigners (NAACP), and so forth. Presumably the concept is that with less ability of the Republicans to obstruct legislation in the Senate, these groups will be better able to move their legislative agendas toward enactment.

Well, what are the legislative agendas of these organizations? It takes minimal searching to figure out that the agendas in question come, in the aggregate, to some combination of (1) use Federal spending to fix the people's problems, (2) use Federal coercion and subsidies to make the environment perfect, and (3) use Federal coercion to enhance the power of labor unions.

As just a few examples, here we have the AFL-CIO blog criticizing the Romney-Ryan proposed budget that would "cut nutrition assistance, early childhood education and job training and end Medicare as we know it." Here is an editorial from the recent issue of the NAACP's magazine urging a vote for Obama because of the issues of "Social Security, health care, college affordability" - presumably seeking to preserve and enhance Federal funding for all of the above. Here we have the Sierra Club's web site "Goals" page, setting forth goals of "Beyond Coal," "Beyond Oil," and "Beyond Natural Gas." So they must be in favor of nuclear? No, they're against that too. Well, that pretty much eliminates all the options that don't require Federal subsidy, but no problem, there's an infinite supply of that. Meanwhile, the latest "climate" talks continue in Doha, Qatar, with the leading proposal to "save the planet" being that the developed countries commit to an annual transfer of $60 billion to the undeveloped countries. How exactly will that save the planet? It doesn't matter. Just keep drawing on the infinite credit card.

What is the thought process? One hypothesis is that they've seen the (fake) Federal deficit numbers of about $1 trillion per year, and they've seen Obama's proposal to raise $1.5 trillion by tax rate increases on the high earners, and they think that represents a solution because they haven't figured out that the $1.5 trillion number is a ten-year number and therefore does not represent a solution to the problem but barely a dent. Is there another hypothesis? Maybe just that Federal capacity to borrow, spend and print money is infinite. Plenty of other sovereigns in the past have fallen into that delusion.

And by the way the real deficit number if you include a reasonable accrual for all the insurance obligations of the government is more like $8 - 10 trillion per year, and you couldn't raise that by seizing all the income of all the high earners and the entire middle class as well.

The jig is up. When are they going to figure it out? (Same question applies to the Republicans, who should be saying this every day.)

More Focus On The State/Local Income Tax Deduction

E.J. McMahon in today's New York Post adds his name to the list of those beginning to realize just what the elimination of the state/local income tax deduction would mean for New York.

Deduction curbs would hit New York harder than any state because,
thanks to their heavy state and local taxes, New York’s highest-income taxpayers
claim higher deductions than their counterparts elsewhere.

How about a few numbers:

As of 2010, New Yorkers earning $1 million or more generated 14 percent of
the entire nation’s federal individual income taxes in that bracket, according
to IRS data. So, 14 percent of any tax rate increase targeted solely at these
top earners would come from New York. . . .

That’s not all. Counting commuters from other states who are taxed by Albany
on wages and bonuses earned here, New York’s tax base accounted for 30 percent
of all the deductions for state and local taxes claimed by Americans earning $1
million or more as of 2010.

Whew! And we are less than 7% of the nation's population.

So is Senator Schumer going to get out front cynically protecting the highest-earning New Yorkers from this onrushing train even as he pretends to attack "the rich"? He has been uncharacteristically quiet lately, but I find this from a summary of a speech he gave back in October:

He suggested that it is important to protect some tax expenditures, such as
those for college education, retirement savings, mortgage interest, charitable
deductions, and state and local tax deductions.

Very clever there, Chuck, the way you bury the mention of the big money.

The second highest income tax state, California, will be with us on this one. Between the two of us, we're almost up to 20% of the population. You would think that the other 80% of the United States, if they are paying even the slightest attention, will catch on to us on this one. On the other hand, by the evidence of the voting patterns of the 18-29 year olds, it is difficult to underestimate the ease with which voters can be fooled on matters of money.

New York Leads The Way To Economic Suicide

Most of the states in the northeastern U.S. were founded by one or another group of religious dissenters, but not New York.  From its first days as a Dutch colony (New Amsterdam), New York was a commercial and trading city, where the denizens' first and foremost purpose was making money.

Today it seems that we hate the making of money, and our focus has become to punish it.  In other cities, they recognize that they have a limited number of wealth creators.  Most cities with a large and dominant employer or factory just don't systematically persecute that employer until it gives up and leaves.

In New York, our equivalent of the large and dominant factory is our main home town industry, the financial industry.   This industry creates vast amounts of wealth and pays far more than its proportionate share of taxes.  Most any city in the world would kill to have our financial industry.

So, needless to say, the way for a politician to get ahead in New York is to run against the financial industry.  Think Eliot Spitzer.  During his tenure as Attorney General (2003 - 06) he came up with a prosecution against essentially every major bank in New York.  Can anybody even remember the basis for the charges?  (Doesn't matter, but the main one was that having investment banking and research in the same institution led to biased research reports, or something like that.)  The banks paid over $1 billion of protection money.  Lots of press conferences!  Lots of headlines!  Next thing you know, Spitzer was elected governor.  Now his successor is trying the same strategy.  We'll see if it works.

Of course there is more than one way to attempt economic suicide, and in New York, caught up in  the trendy ideologies of the day, we're willing to try them all.  Joel Kotkin has a post today at New Geography called "The Blue-State Suicide Pact."  As readers here know, I have focused some on the state/local income tax deduction currently up for cut-back or elimination, and the disproportionate effect that that change would have on New York and the other deep blue states like California, New Jersey and Connecticut.  Kotkin takes a broader view, and looks at a wider swath of the proposed changes.  One by one they disproportionately affect the blue states, because disproportionately those states are where the highest concentrations of high earners live.

The people whose wallets will be drained in the new war on “the rich” are high-earning, but hardly plutocratic professionals like engineers, doctors, lawyers, small business owners and the like. Once seen as the bastion of the middle class, and exemplars of upward mobility, these people are emerging as the modern day “kulaks,” the affluent peasants ruthlessly targeted by Stalin in the early 1930s.

And who is leading the charge for these changes?  Why, the heavily Democratic congressional delegations of the main blue states:  New York, California, Connecticut, New Jersey, Illinois.

Consider the main tax changes on the table:

(1) Raise top marginal rates.  That hits mainly the highest income people, disproportionately concentrated in the deep blue states.

(2) Restrict home mortgage interest deduction.  The highest housing prices are in the big cities in the deep blue states:  New York, LA, San Francisco and vicinity.

(3) Restrict or eliminate the state/local income tax deduction.  Well over half of the value of this deduction goes to just New York and California, and within those states, to residents of the heavily Democratic major cities, New York, LA, San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

Why do we bring this upon ourselves?  I guess we need to do penance for our sins.  I can't think of any other reason.

Meanwhile, from today's headlines, Citibank announced another 11,000 layoffs (not all in New York).  Their total of employees is down from 375,000 in 2007 to 262,000 today.  Not direct cause and effect, but constant persecution can't be good for them.

The Second Circuit Stands Up For Free Speech

In a victory that has been decades in coming, the Second Circuit has reversed a conviction of a pharmaceutical salesman for promoting so-called "off-label" uses of an FDA approved drug.  The opinion is available at this link via the Washington Legal Foundation, which has done important work in this area.

I have been incredulous for many years that the FDA thinks it has the right to restrict the truthful statements of pharmaceutical companies about their products after the drugs have been specifically approved as to safety and effectiveness.  Under extremely dubious statutory authority (read the Second Circuit opinion to find out how dubious) the FDA goes after drug marketers not just civilly, but criminally, for daring to inform doctors about uses of the drugs, often derived from published medical literature.

Here's a link to an article I wrote in 1999, "Top Ten Federal Government Efforts To Suppress Free Speech," identifying the FDA's off-label marketing restrictions as the number one such effort, and charitably describing the FDA as "the most Stalinist of Federal agencies."  Same has been true ever since.

The off-label marketing restrictions are probably the most lucrative government shake-down of the private sector out there.  Years ago the prosecutors figured out that, despite the obvious First Amendment problems and pitifully weak legal theories involved with the off-label marketing campaign, the pharmaceutical companies could not risk a conviction, and would cave every time for big bucks.  Here's a Bloomberg News article from 2009 listing one gigantic settlement after another:  $430 million from Pfizer in 2004, $1.19 billion from Pfizer in 2009, other settlements from Eli Lilly and Bristol-Myers Squibb totaling multiple billions.

This time they got a poor individual in their cross-hairs; but an individual can sometimes be in a position to suffer the conviction and take the appeal.

Hard to tell from the Second Circuit's opinion if they have actually put an end to the entire program.  They go off on narrower grounds than they might have.  Shouldn't there be some penalty on the prosecutors for bringing these types of cases?  Perhaps at least a remedial course on the First Amendment?

The Climate Campaign Hits A Dead End. Now What?

Justin Gillis and John Broder of the New York Times -- both veteran climate campaigners -- report yesterday on the matter of carbon dioxide and the ongoing climate conference of nearly 200 nations going on in Doha, Qatar.  The article is filled with the usual scare lines.  ("Further increases in carbon dioxide are likely to have a profound effect on climate, scientists say, leading to higher seas and greater coastal flooding, more intense weather disasters like droughts and heat waves, and an extreme acidification of the ocean.")  But the article appears on page A-6 of the print edition, and on the bottom at that.  Does it seem that no one is paying attention any more?

The climate campaign has hit a dead end.  After throwing enormous resources for decades into the  campaign, the forces of environmentalism have driven into a blind alley, undoubtedly doing serious damage to the movement along the way.

Let's analyze what has happened. 

At its start in the 1980s the climate campaign seemed to be the perfect focus for the environmental movement.  World temperatures showed at least some level of increase over the previous century, There was a plausible physical hypothesis to attribute the increase in temperatures to carbon dioxide emissions from human use of fossil fuel energy, and using that hypothesis to project future temperatures led to predictions of extreme warming and climate disaster.  The obvious solution was to decrease carbon emissions into the atmosphere, but the entire economies of the developed countries ran on fossil fuel energy.  Among big fossil fuel users, the United States was by far number one, with Europe not too far behind.   How to decrease carbon emissions?  The U.N. got into the act with the Kyoto Protocol, a so-called "cap and trade" scheme, administered by the U.N., whereby the developed countries would be forced to buy limited amounts of carbon permits from the third world to keep their economies going.  By the mid-90s it was all falling into place:  looming restrictions on the developed countries for the sin of wealth; vast new powers to the U.N.; enormous transfers of wealth via the U.N. from the developed to the undeveloped countries; and, along the way, saving the planet.  Every environmental organization fell in line behind the campaign, not to mention loads of other big-government-loving groups.

And then it all went terribly wrong.  We'll take it in steps.

Step 1.  The United States Senate declined to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.  China, India and other third world countries with growth potential were smart enough to see what was coming and got themselves excused.

Step 2.  China's economy took off.  India's also started growing dramatically, as did some others like Mexico and Brazil.  China started going on a coal-power binge, building a new coal power plant every week or so.  By about 2005, China passed the U.S. as the number one carbon emitter.

Step 3.  Natural gas "fracking" hit the U.S.  Gas became cheaper relative to coal in the U.S.  Natural gas emits less carbon per unit of energy produced than does coal.  Next thing you know, U.S. emissions started dropping, although the U.S. had never agreed to the Kyoto wealth transfers.  By 2010, the IEA had China's carbon emissions 35% above those of the U.S., and the gap continues to widen.

Step 4.  Around about 1998, temperatures (as measured by the only trustworthy source - satellites) stopped increasing.  Since then, even as worldwide carbon emissions have soared, temperatures have been essentially flat, and the 1998 peak has not been exceeded for over 14 years.  But the hypothesized carbon-temperature physical mechanism should work without any delay of that magnitude.  Suddenly the carbon-temperature link was not so obvious. 

Step 5.  Skeptics raised numerous questions about the supposed certainty of the carbon-temperature link.  Could feedbacks be negative?  Could other mechanisms, such as the sun or ocean currents, have the dominant role in climate forcings?  With every year that the hiatus in temperature increases has continued, the seeming confidence of the climateers has become more and more dubious.

Step 6.  Environmentalists touted new "renewable" energy sources to replace the fossil fuels.  Turns out that all of them need endless subsidies, and, even with subsidies, none of them work.  Because much of the time the wind does not blow or the sun does not shine, an entire network of backup fossil fuel plants is required.  Result: more than double the cost for the same power!

Step 7.  As temperatures refused to rise, the guardians of the surface (i.e., non-satellite) temperature data, all of whom are committed climate campaigners (e.g., James Hansen of NASA GISS here in Manhattan), began to cook the data to prove their case.  A release of e-mails in 2009 showed the climate campaigners working together to exclude dissenting views from the published literature.  And a small army of volunteers with access to the internet arose to keep the temperature czars honest.  Prominent among these volunteers have been Stephen McIntyre of climateaudit, Anthony Watts of wattsupwiththat, Steven Goddard of stevengoddard.wordpress, and Jeff Id (Condon) of the Air Vent.   To give just one example, Goddard embarked on a program to compare U.S. raw temperature data to "adjusted" data as put out by U.S. government agencies.  Result: the so-called "adjustments" uniformly lower older temperatures and raise newer ones to create a record of warming when the underlying data show cooling.  All efforts to get explanations from the temperature czars are met only with silence.  Informed members of the public are rightly suspicious of fraud. 

Which brings us to the current Doha conference.  Seems like no meaningful agreement will be reached.   Well, consider how the ground has shifted.  Twenty years ago the climate campaign looked like sure-thing science and the perfect vehicle to enhance the power of the U.N., punish the U.S. for its success, and transfer wealth from the first world to the third.  Now the climate campaigners keep talking as if some evidence supports their case, but it gets less convincing all the time.   Moreover, to get anywhere with their cause they must  somehow convince China to give up on industrialization and keep its coal in the ground -- not happening.  And is China to be a payor in the big wealth transfer? -- also not happening. 

And most important:  there are still several billion people in this world who lack electricity and automobiles and would like them.  Can they have them or not?  To continue the climate campaign the environmental movement must admit that its goal is to keep the poor poor.

Lots of voices over the past few weeks have blamed Hurricane Sandy on supposed global warming.  Have they noticed that this game is over?