The Welfare State Aggressively Advertises To Expand Itself

The phrase often used to describe the welfare state is the "safety net," ​a term with connotations of small numbers of people otherwise in grave danger of harm.  Then we find out that the number of people on food stamps (aka SNAP) has close to doubled over the last four years and now is around 48 million, costing close to $80 billion per year.  How did it get so big so fast, and is the term "safety net" really a fair description of its current status?

Over at the Washington Post a guy named Eli Saslow appears to be undertaking a project to report on the implications of the food stamp explosion in the real world.  On March 16 he had a big report on food stamps in Woonsocket, Rhode Island; and on April  23 another big report from Florida.

Saslow clearly comes at this with a view that all ​food stamps are good and more food stamps are better.  Still, there's a lot to be learned from reading his articles.

First, I found them by a Google search of "food stamps Washington Post."  ​ I guess that determines what ads you get.  At the top of my version of the Rhode Island article we have:

Government Assisted Phone

Get a Free Phone & Monthly Plan.  See if You Qualify for One Today!​

www.assurancewireless.com​

And then down at the bottom of page 1:​

Apply For SSI/Disability

Get SSI & Social Security Benefits Free Consults & Help With Your App

Apply.SSDisabilityApplication.com​

Click that last link and you go not to a government site, but rather to ​the site of a firm called Myler Disability, "Social Security Disability Advocates."

Also, many more such ads scattered through these multi-page articles.​

But let's look at the articles themselves.​  In Florida we follow around a woman named Dillie Nerios, employed by "a local food bank that is funded in part by the state" of Florida.  Her job: to recruit "at least" 150 seniors each month onto the food stamp rolls.  Is it working?  "Nowhere had the SNAP program grown as it has in Florida, where enrollment had risen from 1.45 million people in 2008 to 3.35 million last year."

To help enroll more seniors, the government has published an outreach guide that blends compassion with sales techniques, generating some protests in Congress. The guide teaches recruiters how to “overcome the word ‘no,’ ” suggesting answers for likely hesitations.

Nerios spends a lot of time with a couple named Lonnie, 60, and wife Celeste, who seem to have lost most of their savings in a failed business venture a couple of years ago.  They are eligible for food stamps, but clearly reluctant to take them.  Dillie tries everything to get them signed up.  Saslow meanwhile tries everything to get your sympathy for the effort, including describing the small mobile home where L&C live, and Lonnie's lack of success in getting jobs in the last few years.  Then, even as he's trying to pull on your heartstrings, Saslow basically gives away the game:

They decorated the walls of the mobile home with memories of a different life: photos of Lonnie in his old New Jersey police officer uniform, or in Germany for a manufacturing job that paid $25 an hour, or on vacation in their old pop-up camper.

An "old New Jersey police officer uniform"?  You mean this poor, poor guy has one of those New Jersey police pensions?​  For anybody who follows any news at all, New Jersey police pensions have to be one of the biggest scandals out there.  In this article we never learn how big Lonnie's pension is, or whether he is one of the notorious New Jersey "double dippers."  But hey Eli, an article trying to drum up sympathy for the poor condition of a retired New Jersey policeman who must be entitled to a pension, and doesn't even mention the pension or how big it is?  This is really preposterous!  By the way, Lonnie and Celeste also have five grown working kids.  Any chance that one of them could pitch in before the parents become wards of the taxpayers?

You are probably asking, how can Lonnie and Celeste even be eligible for food stamps if he has one of those New Jersey police pensions?  The answer is that most pensions are not counted for food stamp eligibility.​  Again, we can't know the details if Eli won't ask the most basic questions here.  Oh, and by the way, equity value of home (unlimited in amount) is also not counted in food stamp eligibility, and same for value of a first car (this one varies some state by state).  Don't let being a millionaire slow you down!

​The articles are also completely permeated with the economic fallacy that passing around free money is a good thing for the economy.   As in, for example, "food-stamp enrollment has become a means of economic growth, bringing almost $6 billion each year into the state.  The money helps to sustain communities, grocery stores and food producers."  So I guess the government should just pay everyone to sit around and do nothing -- that will make us all rich! 

​I appreciate the Washington Post at least shining something of a light on what is going on out there.  But really, in its worldview and total acceptance of the most ridiculous economic fallacies, this series is an embarrassment.

UPDATE:  Thinking about this post since I wrote it yesterday, my question is, is it possible that Lonnie came away from his tour as a NJ policeman with no pension?  I don't think so.  Saslow is trying to pull on our heartstrings.  If Lonnie had no pension, there is no way that he would have omitted that fact.  And there is much in the article to indicate that Lonnie must have some source of income, since he clearly spends money (fixing up his mobile home, for example) and Saslow emphasizes repeatedly that all jobs have fallen through.  No, Lonnie has a pension -- and NJ police pensions are known to be some of the most lucrative -- and Saslow is intentionally omitting that fact to deceive the readers.  Not good.​

The Mayoral Candidates Compete On Ways To Impoverish The City

Time to check in on the race for mayor again.  Last night there was a forum for the mayoral candidates at Cooper Union, sponsored by the League of Conservation Voters.  Subject: environmental sustainability.  ​

Could there be a more perfect topic to bring forth the New York conventional ignorance?  Of course the audience consisted mainly of environmental activists, all the more to encourage ridiculous statements from ​politicians striving to say what the listeners want to hear.

I have come across two reports on the forum, one from the New York Times City Room blog here, and the other from ​The Atlantic Cities here.  According to Sarah Goodyear of Atlantic Cities, the candidates "confidently advanced a series of proposals that would have seemed overly ambitious or even silly just a few years back."  Believe me, the proposals are just as silly today.

Let's start with the frontrunner, ​City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.  She started by agreeing that "reducing the city's carbon emission 80% by 2050 is 'where we have to go.'"  That's rather dramatic!  By the time we're done heating our houses, will we still be allowed to have electricity?  You're probably thinking, she must be in favor of nuclear power, because that's the only possible place that we can get all that power without carbon emissions?  Nope.  From the Times: "One candidate, Christine C. Quinn . . . was the only contender to express support for closing the Indian Point nuclear power plant, which supplies much of New York City's electricity."  ("Much of" our electricity would be up to 30% according to Wikipedia.)

We want to be moving toward cleaner, safer energy, she said to cheers from those in attendance at the forum, which was sponsored by Cooper Union and the New York League of Conservation Voters. Ms. Quinn suggested pursuing geothermal energy alternatives, like heat pumps that harness the Earth’s natural energy, to compensate for the loss of the plant.

​So now you must be asking, is it really possible that a credible candidate for mayor of our largest city can be proposing to eliminate essentially all of our sources of electricity for this huge and complex economy and replace them with a source that is a multiple as expensive and hasn't been proven workable at all on this kind of scale?  Yes, she is the frontrunner.

Let's get a smattering of proposals from the other guys.  There's this from our Public Advocate:​

Public advocate Bill DeBlasio called for aggressive financing structures to retrofit aging buildings to make them more energy-efficient.

I strongly suspect that de Blasio doesn't even know what "aggressive financing structures" he is talking about.  Does he really propose to exhaust New York City's borrowing capacity in giveaways to private landlords, leaving nothing for the water system, sewers, streets, subways, etc.?  Well, how about this from former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, ​running for the Independence Party

Former Bronx borough president Adolfo Carrión, running as an independent [sic - he's running for the Independence Party, not the same thing] said New York should be exploring vertical farming.

You know, Adolfo, there's a reason why farmers grow food out in the country where land is cheap instead of in the most expensive possible place, on the roofs of buildings.​

Overall, you just can't help getting the impression that these people think that energy comes from the tooth fairy and all efforts to wipe out cheap and workable energy and replace it with expensive and unworkable energy are completely cost free.​

Are the Republicans any better?  ​Not really.

Both Mr. Lhota and Mr. Catsimatidis sought to distance themselves from the national Republican Party, saying they believed that making alternative energy a priority would create jobs.

Yikes.  Using public money to subsidize high cost production of a good and to drive away low cost production that the market would provide without subsidy?  That's called "wealth destruction."  But here in New York City even Republicans are not allowed to say that.​

And finally, the moderator (Jim Lehrer) asked all nine candidates at the forum if they "believe" that global warming is man-made.  Eight of nine hands went up.  Congratulations to John Catsimatidis on being willing to buck the conventional ignorance on at least this one point.

Global Warming Update

I love the global warming issue because even as the cause becomes more and more ridiculous, the advocates just double down again and again.  When you think they should be looking to climb down gracefully and hope nobody would remember to associate their names with this scam, instead they become ever louder and more extreme and more shrill in their demands.  The end game is going to take a long time, and be a lot of fun.

​On March 8 one Shaun Marcott, a new Ph.D. at Oregon State University, and other authors, published in Science a new reconstruction of temperatures over the last 11,300 years.  The reconstruction was based largely on cores from undersea sediments, and showed a strong 20th century uptick, thus appearing to vindicate, at least in part, the famous and discredited "Hockey Stick" graph of Michael Mann et al.  The article promptly got a lot of publicity.

It took Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.org just over a week to completely demolish the article, in a series of posts from March 13 to March 19.  By March 31 Marcott et al. had posted a "FAQ" about their article at realclimate.org, admitting that the 20th century portion of their reconstruction "is not statistically robust [and] cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes."

Meanwhile, the real news in the field of climate is the refusal, now for over 15 years, of global temperatures to increase, even as atmospheric CO2 continues to soar.​  The data are easily available, for example here from the UAH satellite temperature series.  Sooner or later somebody has to notice.  Well, for example, the Economist magazine, long a group thinker of global warming alarmism, is starting to notice, and published  a long article in the March 30 edition beginning the attempt at graceful climb down.

[A]s an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before.

​And at the Financial Post in Canada, long skeptical environmental columnist Lawrence Solomon writes on April 13 to welcome to the ranks of the skeptics, along with the Economist,  Die Zeit of Germany and its top (and very green) columnist Harald Martenstein.

But in a world badly in need of the humor coming from people making fools of themselves, the super-environmentalist Bill McKibben of Middlebury College in Vermont and of the web site 350.org obliges by choosing this time to launch a massive campaign to get university endowments to divest from investment in fossil fuel companies.​  McKibben is the non-scientist former writer for the New Yorker who chooses to make a career lecturing everybody else on how they are destroying the planet by using fossil fuels.  He doesn't know a thing about the subject matter, but he must have some personal charisma or something, because it is remarkable how many in the environmental movement are completely willing to follow him over the cliff of the global warming scam and take the whole movement with them. 

According to the Yale Daily News here, McKibben's divestment campaign "has spread to 252 college campuses, including most of the Ivy League" as of February 8.  Vassar is one of the colleges most deeply in the grip of the hysteria, and you really need to read some of the stuff to understand the powerful religious fervor of these people.  From the February 27 Vassar Miscellany News, by Gabe Dunsmith and Erin Boss: 

​Divestment from fossil fuels promises to bring about a people-powered transition to a sustainable world.  Though the atrocities of fossil fuel may seem far from our campus, Vassar's endowment, like that of so many other institutions, is invested in corporate conglomerates like BP, Exxon, and Halliburton. . . .  Perhaps most importantly, divestment is a fight for justice. It brings Vassar students one step closer to the communities that the fossil fuel industry decimates. . . .  After all, the brunt of the climate crisis will be felt in communities that are already silenced and oppressed.

You mean you didn't know that the landowners of northern Pennsylvania were "silenced and oppressed" by the fracking boom?  Of course, the kids who write this stuff have never gone more than a day or two in their lives without electricity, they fly and drive wherever they want, they have plenty of heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer, and computers and smartphones and everything else you can think of.  I wonder how many of them are prepared to give all that up.  My bet is zero.  You may think you have to be smart to get into these fancy schools, but not really very smart.

Could Anthony Weiner Really Be A Credible Candidate For Mayor Of New York?

Do you remember Anthony Weiner?  For New Yorkers, he's hard to forget.  He was the high-flying recently-married Congressman from a Brooklyn/Queens district who self-destructed ​spectacularly in the Spring of 2011 when he accidentally posted on a site accessible to his social media "followers" a picture of his crotch intended only to be tweeted to a young unmarried female college student from Seattle.  After initially digging his hole deeper for a few days by denying he was the tweeter, he ended up resigning about a month after the initial revelation.  Now, you would think, there is a guy who is never coming back in politics.

Not so fast!  Last week via an article in the New York Times Magazine, Weiner floated his name as a potential candidate for Mayor, in an election coming up this November.  According to this morning's New York Post, an initial poll shows him running a relatively strong second in a field of five.​  Could this guy possibly be a credible candidate?

To answer that question, you need first a recognition of the importance of the Democratic party nomination, and second an understanding of the various buffoons who are the other candidates for that nomination.​  Given that the Republican candidate has defeated the Democrat for mayor in all of the last five elections spanning 20 years, you would think that the Democratic nomination cannot be all that important.  But you would be wrong.  The Democratic nominee will undoubtedly be the strong favorite, no matter how loony.   Democrats have a voter registration advantage over Republicans of about 6 to 1.  Mike Bloomberg has managed to hang on for three terms under the Republican banner, but by spending vast sums of personal money and with increasingly narrow margins of victory.  No Republican candidate will come remotely close to raising the sums that Bloomberg has spent of his own money to get elected.  And on top of that, he's not a real Republican in his policies.  So at best any Republican candidate will start out as a serious underdog.

Now let's consider briefly the Democratic alternatives.  I wrote about current city Comptroller John Liu a few days ago here.  ​Although as Comptroller he is in charge of the pension plans for the city workforce, from all indications he has no clue that there are multi billions of annual dollars of increase in required pension contributions baked into the current system and ready to explode upon us.  Instead of telling us his solution to that problem, he proposes a collection of new non-starter spending programs, all to be financed with tax increases on a handful of "the rich" who just got hit with big increases at both the Federal and State levels.  No amount of arithmetic can make his numbers add up, but hey, he's only the Comptroller, so what can you expect him to know about numbers?  Also, he's the darling of the city worker unions, although he hasn't yet been endorsed in this cycle by their political arm, the Working Families Party.  Oh, and did I mention that his former campaign treasurer is about to start a Federal trial for corruption?

​Well, how about Christine Quinn, Speaker of the City Council and representative from the trendy precincts of Greenwich Village -- my own councilwoman!  She's the current frontrunner in the polls, and thought to be allied with Bloomberg.  Many think she is at least somewhat saner than the typical Democratic NYC pol, who believes that more government spending is the answer to absolutely every problem.  Well, but her signature issue is vast expansion of "permanently affordable housing," otherwise known as lifetime subsidies to non-poor people and the least cost-effective expenditure of public funds ever devised.  No mention from her campaign that I can find of recognition of the pension problem or any proposed solution.  Since she is a Manhattanite, we think we can expect her to be not quite so overtly on the take as her colleagues from the outer boroughs.  Oh but wait, let's check out this from yesterday's Wall Street Journal.  It seems that as Speaker of the City Council Quinn has total personal discretion over some $17 million of funds known as "member items," and that she has requested in each of the past three years that $100,000 of such funds be directed to an outfit called the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development specifically to "advocate" for Quinn's signature issue, permanently affordable housing.   Directing public funds to lobbyists to lobby for your pet campaign issues -- that takes a little chutzpah!  In her favor, I guess we have to admit that she didn't just pocket the money personally (well, maybe we shouldn't be too quick to jump to that conclusion). 

Deeper down in the polls we have Bill de Blasio, current Public Advocate (citywide elected office with no responsibilities that anyone can name).  This fellow is a true member of the Loony Left, desperately trying to run to the left of everyone else on every issue, and to get the endorsements of the city worker unions.  ​He has never seen a tax increase or a spending program that he would not support.

Are you starting to see why Weiner might actually be preferable to the alternatives?​  Spending most of his career in Washington (he was an aide to Schumer before running for Congress), there is every reason to think that he is far less in debt to the city worker unions than the other candidates. 

And did I mention that every one of the labor contracts for the city workers has expired.  Some blame Bloomberg for not negotiating new contracts, but I don't -- there is no way the unions will do a deal with Bloomberg, when the alternative is to wait until after an election where it is entirely likely that their support will have put the winner in office.​

Yikes, Weiner may be our best hope.  Amazing but true.​

The Dopes At The IMF Continue Their Advocacy For Bigger Government

Yesterday in Washington, the IMF held a web press conference to announce the release of its April 2013 World Economic Outlook.  The transcript of the event is here.  The Wall Street Journal report is here.​

Could there possibly be a more destructive force in world economic policy than the IMF?  Tell me I'm wrong, but I assert that their main purpose in life is to promote economic fallacy in the effort to provide legitimacy to big governments and high government spending around the world.​  The principal tool in their arsenal right now is the use of terms like "austerity," "stimulus," and "fiscal consolidation" as descriptors of the main alternatives in economic policy.  These terms are hugely misleading and lead to precisely the wrong result every time.

For those new to the Manhattan Contrarian, here is my view of the basic issue:​

Here is really everything you need to know about economic policy:  large private sector, small state sector, successful economy;  small private sector, large state sector, unsuccessful economy.

The IMF's Keynes-based terminology entirely muddles the relevant concepts to make the bad policies appear marginally superior to a fake straw man, thus to support larger government.  What is "austerity," sometimes also known as "fiscal consolidation"?  It is some combination of cuts to government spending -- good policy -- with tax increases -- bad policy.  Since the tax increases almost always exceed the cuts to spending, the combination represented by "austerity" is very likely to be a negative.  The IMF uses that fact to make a fallacious argument in favor of bad policy -- increased government spending -- over good policy -- cuts to government spending.

Don't believe me?  Here they are yesterday.  According to the WSJ report:​

​Seeking to keep a fragile global recovery on track, the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday called on countries that can afford it—including the U.S. and Britain—to slow the pace of their austerity measures.  The fund warned that "overly strong" belt-tightening in the U.S. will slow growth this year.  Across-the-board government spending cuts, known as the sequester, were the "wrong way" to shrink the budget deficit, it said in its semiannual report on economic growth.

Or check out a few choice quotes from the IMF's Chief Economist, M. Olivier Blanchard (that's Blahn-SHAR -- he's a frog):​

The growth figure for the United States for 2013 may not seem that high. Indeed, it is insufficient to make a large dent in a still very high unemployment rate, but it comes in the face of very strong, indeed an overly strong, fiscal consolidation of about 1.8 percent of GDP.

"Overly strong fiscal consolidation" = "Don't you dare try to cut government spending!"  They will never, ever admit that tax increases are the problem and cuts to government spending are the solution.  In fact, it is a required feature of their style manual that they must never, ever use any term that breaks "austerity" or "fiscal consolidation" down into the two components parts of government spending cuts on the one hand and increased taxes on the other.  Here is Blanchard's comparable remark as to France: ​

France's growth is forecast to be slightly negative in 2013, reflecting a combination of fiscal consolidation, poor export performance, and increasingly, so, low confidence.

I like that "growth slightly negative" bit -- are they allowed to use the word "shrinkage"?  Now what exactly does so-called "fiscal consolidation" look like in France?  Can they mention that spending by the French government is a stunning 56% of GDP?  Possibly, could that be part of the problem?  (Federal/State/Local combined spending in the U.S. is around 40% +/- of GDP.)  Are they actually planning to shrink the 56% even by a little?  Time here describes the proposed fiscal plan of the Hollande government as "combin[ing] cuts [with] targeted stimulus spending and increased taxes."   So on the spending side it's just a complete bait and switch -- some goes down and some goes up, and the government never shrinks by one iota.  And can they even breathe a word that the threatened 75% tax rate on high earners might have something to do with the problem?​

We can never be reminded too often that when the policy of massive spending cuts without tax increases has been tried, it has set off an economic boom.  If you have not read Dave Henderson's Hoover Institution piece on the post-World War II spending cuts (well over 50%) in the U.S. and ensuing boom, you must.​  And don't forget the classic 1943 quote from delusional uber-Keynesianist Paul Samuelson:

The final conclusion to be drawn from our experience at the end of the last war is inescapable—were the war to end suddenly within the next 6 months, were we again planning to wind up our war effort in the greatest haste, to demobilize our armed forces, to liquidate price controls, to shift from astronomical deficits to even the large deficits of the thirties—then there would be ushered in the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.

All those government actions he warned against ("wind up our war effort in the greatest haste, demobilize our armed forces, . . . liquidate price controls, . . . shift from astronomical deficits to even the large deficits of the thirties") actually happened, except of course for the deficits part -- they actually went to surplus in 1947, 1948 and 1949.  But of course, the "greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced" didn't happen at all.  Instead, there was a boom.  Oh, and Samuelson went on to make millions selling his Keynesian claptrap textbook to a couple of generations of credulous college students.

You really can't trust a single word that the so-called "experts" say on these subjects.  ​

The Consequences Of Bad Economic Policy: Gradual Relative Decline

California's recent rounds of tax increases, particularly on incomes of high earners, have many predicting some kind of exodus or other rapid economic calamity.  See for example this article from the Orange County Register.  For better or worse, these economic forces work much more slowly than that.  We can get an idea how bad economic policies will play out from looking at the histories of places that have tried them.

Consider Venezuela.​   Short of North Korea, this is about as bad as economic policy can get.  A Heritage Foundation report out yesterday contains a litany of the bad ideas of the just-ended Chavez era:  doubling in size of the state sector over 13 years; government deficits increasing to 15% of GDP in the most recent period; rampant inflation accompanied by exchange controls, black markets for currency, and allocation of currency at official rates to government cronies; bureaucratic interference in the judicial system; subsidies to favored products (gasoline in this case); etc., etc.

​What have been the results?  in the real economy, bad.  "There are scarcities of nearly all staple food and fuel products. . . .   Venezuela faces the most severe food shortages in four years. . . .  [O]ver the past 10 years inflation in food and nonalcoholic beverages is 1,284%."  In official economic statistics, not nearly that bad, but still bad:  "Between 1999 and 2012, average annual per capita growth was just 1.1 percent. . . ."  That's from the IMF, which of course counts all government spending at 100 cents on the dollar in measuring GDP.  When wasteful government spending has just exploded, that methodology gives a wildly misleading picture of the real economy.  If you gave government spending an appropriate discount of 50% or more in calculating GDP, then almost certainly the correct number for Venezuela's GDP  "growth" over the last 13 years is negative, although Venezuelans are not told that.  And meanwhile, the Chavista candidate just won a new six year term, although very narrowly. 

Still, terms like "economic collapse" are very strong.  Even with the hugely counterproductive policies of the Chavez regime, what Venezuela has experienced is really a gradual decline, a slow slide into economic irrelevance.  By comparison to Venezuela, California's new high tax rates are only a pale imitation of the medley of disastrous policies pursued by the Chavistas.​

Similarly, consider the UK in the pre-Thatcher era.  As discussed by me a few days ago here and in the linked Wikipedia article, the policies of the preceding Labor governments included ​nationalization of most major industry, high government spending, special political status for labor unions, repeated Keynesian "stimulus" programs, and price controls (then known as "incomes policy").  According to a 2011 article in the Economist, the top marginal income tax rate in the UK pre-Thatcher was 83% (an additional tax on investment income could lead to a top rate of 98%!); Thatcher reduced the 83% to 40% between 1979 and 1988.  But even with those incredible rates for long periods in the 60s and 70s, it's not like everyone picked and left, or like the economy experienced sudden collapse.  Instead, they had what the Economist calls "the dawn of stagnation."  England became the "sick man of Europe," with a prolonged era of little-to-no economic growth (again, likely negative if government spending were accounted for reasonably in GDP instead of at 100 cents on the dollar). 

Or closer to home, consider New York.  It's hard to say that New York City is not doing rather well today, after 20 years of at least nominally Republican mayors.  Public safety is hugely improved over that time, and taxes have at least been kept somewhat under control.  But still, with a top income tax rate of near 13% (combining New York State and City rates), New York is being far outpaced in growth by lower tax jurisdictions.  People want to live in big, happening cities, and in other countries throughout the world, the main business capitals are booming relative to the rest of the country they are in (think any place from London to Shanghai to Bangalore to Moscow).   New York is holding its own, but it could be doing far better, if only it had just reasonably competitive economic and tax policy.  And upstate New York, saddled with the high taxes but lacking the allure of the big city, is in a slow death spiral.

​But here's the hardest thing to understand:  In places with bad economic policies, and suffering ongoing relative economic decline, somehow the grip of the political class gets tighter and tighter, and the possibilities of effecting change through the voting booth become less and less.  Those receiving state handouts come to perceive their well-being as coming from the handouts, even as nations or regions surrounding them achieve superior economic performance for all without the handouts.​  So New York and Chicago, and Detroit, and Philadelphia, and very likely now California go into gradual relative economic decline, and continue to decline for decades, but even as their decline becomes more and more obvious to anyone following the data the voters in these jurisdictions vote in higher and higher percentages for the continuation of the policies of high taxes and handouts that brought about the decline.   It's the political genius of Progressivism.