Does Anybody Actually Think That Obamacare Can Work?

As the implementation deadlines for Obamacare approach, a debate rages as to whether it will prove to be a boon or a train wreck.  If you have actually looked at the text of the law (available here) you will have seen that there are hundreds of provisions that are so complicated that it is just beyond human capability to do this.  But today I want to look at one aspect of the law that in my view shows a complete lack of comprehension of how the world works.

In its quest to achieve perfect social justice, the Affordable Care Act at multiple points defines eligibility for various benefits and subsidies in terms of where a person's household income ranks relative to the "poverty line."  

For example, Section 1331 defines the eligibility for the expansion of Medicaid in the states.  According to Section 1331(e)(1), here's who qualifies:

In this section, the term ‘‘eligible individual" means . . . an individual . . .

(B) whose household income exceeds 133 percent but does not exceed 200 percent of the poverty line for the size of the family involved, or, in the case of an alien lawfully present in the United States, whose income is not greater than 133 percent of the poverty line for the size of the family involved but who is not eligible for the Medicaid program under title XIX of the Social Security Act by reason of such alien status.

And then they're supposed to figure that out by asking the IRS.

Well here's the problem: how is the IRS supposed to know?  The IRS maybe has your tax return as of last December 31.  Of course many people at or near "poverty" didn't file a tax return for last year at all.   But assume you did.  You could have had 8 changes in your life since then that affect your "poverty" status.  You could have gotten a job, or lost one.  You could have gotten married, or divorced.  You could have had a kid, or twins, or had a kid move away.

Consider me back in my law school days.  January to May -- no job, no income, living apart from parents, subsisting off a scholarship (doesn't count for measure of "poverty") and savings from last summer's job (also doesn't count for the measure of "poverty").  Poverty!  I'm eligible!  June to August -- summer job.  Suddenly I'm back in the so-called "second quintile" of the income distribution.  September to December -- back into "poverty"!  The IRS knows nothing about all of this as it is occurring.  Or consider the many, many casual and construction workers in the world, who work for a few days or weeks, then get laid off, then work for another few days or weeks, and so on through the year.  They can go in and out of "poverty," (or 133 to 200 percent of "poverty") by the Census Bureau definition easily ten times in a year.

So is your "poverty" status for this law to be determined from last year's tax return no matter what has happened since?  That's not at all how the Census Bureau determines "poverty" in their surveys -- they look at your (self-reported) status on the date of the survey.  Suppose you lost your high-paying job six months ago and you are now making just enough to get you into that 133 to 200 percent of poverty category.  Does it count or not? And exactly how is the IRS supposed to have any relevant information on this?

The dummies who make these laws have an image of the world where everybody works through the year at a level-salary job that determines their ongoing and unchanging status in life.  The fact is that the world doesn't work that way, and basically that's why we have "poverty" (Census Bureau definition) in the first place.

Needless to say, I'm putting my bets on "train wreck."  But then, what kind of train wreck?   There's the kind where they actually try to do it honestly.  Of course, that kind is impossible, so no, it won't be that.  And then there's the dishonest kind, where you just take people's word on eligibility, and then never check again as they leave poverty status (maybe permanently or maybe to go in and out ten times a year).  Over time the program turns into a massive fraud where maybe a third of the population is getting improper subsidies.  That's certainly the approach being taken with food stamps.  It's also the approach that makes the government grow as fast as possible and add as many dependents as possible right now.    It's not sustainable and will contribute greatly to the huge crash some years out, but why should today's politicians care about that?

What Is The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time?

Being a fan of scientific fraud and of human depravity generally, I can come up with lots of nominations in this category.  If you'd like to be reminded of some of the great ones that you have undoubtedly read about at some time or other,  here is a Top Six list from Cracked, and here is a Top Ten list from Listverse.  They definitely have some memorable ones, from Jan Hendrik Schon, the rising star at Bell Labs who faked results for some twelve papers published in Science and Nature around the year 2000; to the fake "Tasaday" primitive tribe promoted by a Philippine government minister named Elizalde in the 1970s;  to the archeological "discoveries" (planted) of Shinichi Fujimura in Japan in the 1980s; to Ranjit Chandra, who published studies on nutritional allergies of infants, blessing the baby formula products of Nestle and J&J (the studies were never conducted); etc., etc.  One of the greatest frauds, making both lists, is the "Piltdown Man" missing link hoax of Charles Dawson in 1912.

But going through these lists also makes clear that none of these frauds comes close to the big one going on right now, which is the world temperature data tampering fraud.  This is the fraud by which U.S. government agencies "adjust" temperatures of the past downward in order to make it seem like more recent years are warmer, and thus support the global warming narrative.  Now you are going to say, that seems completely ridiculous, they couldn't possibly get away with it, and nobody in their right mind would try such a thing.  Well, I'll just give you some evidence, and you decide. 

The latest news comes from Joe D'Aleo of the ICECAP website, who reports on a new online tool available from NCDC.  That's the National Climatic Data Center of Asheville, NC -- a Federal agency, part of NOAA, in turn part of the Commerce Department.  NCDC is headed by Tom Karl, a serious global warming zealot.  NOAA has been until recently headed by Jane Lubchenco, another serious global warming zealot.  The new tool enables plotting temperature data for cities, states, or regions.  So D'Aleo tried plotting the data for New York's Central Park for July, going back to 1885.  Meanwhile he happened to know that the National Weather Service (another part of NOAA) had archived data for Central Park for the same time period, so he took the archived NWS data and the new NCDC data and plotted them on the same graph.  Result:

Enlarged version.   Hmmmm.  In the new version, the warm years of the 1930s have magically become cooler, thus making the most recent years much warmer by comparison.

D'Aleo then calculated the differences between the previous raw data and the new adjusted data.  Here is that chart: 

Enlarged version.   Hmmmm again.  From 1995 to present, the raw and adjusted temperatures are about the same, but before 1995 the temperatures are "adjusted" downward by between 0.5 and 1.5 deg C all the way back to the beginning of the century.    What's going on here?  And the amazing thing is, they don't say.

OK, you're thinking, this is some kind of strange anomaly, not a great fraud.  Well, you need to get a little deeper into the subject.  The main keeper of the official temperature records of the U.S. is a part of NASA called GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies), headed for decades by the recently (April 2013) retired James Hansen, another serious global warming zealot.  GISS puts out charts of U.S. temperatures plotted on an annual basis.  The funny thing is, those charts have changed over time.  Here we have the 1999 and 2011 GISS versions of U.S. temperatures:

Enlarged version.  In 1999 the 1930s were much warmer than 1998, but by 2011, 1998 had become much warmer than the 1930s.  How could that possibly be?  Lots and lots of people have noticed this, and have tried to get an explanation, but none is forthcoming.  

Meanwhile, is there any significance to this?  Well, just to take a small example, in his 2012 State of the Union speech, President Obama, latched on to the recently adjusted NASA data to proclaim:  

For the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change.  Now, it’s true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is, the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods – all are now more frequent and more intense.

In the speech, Obama specifically cited to the recently adjusted NASA data.  You can easily see by looking at the charts that the business of the "12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15" was completely created by the unexplained NASA adjustments that occurred in 2011.  Before the adjustments, many of the hottest years were in the 1930s. 

Again, is it just an anomaly or quirk, or is there some kind of systematic fraud going on?  A guy named Steven Goddard runs a web site called Real Science.  He makes a cottage industry out of keeping track of archived temperature data and reporting on when the government-paid global warming activists adjust the old data downward.  Input the word "tampering" into his search function, and you come up with literally dozens of examples where Goddard has identified earlier temperatures being adjusted downward to make the present appear warmer by comparison.  The culprits are almost always NCDC and NASA/GISS, although every once in a while the WMO gets in on the act.   

The charts at issue here are the very government charts that are used to support efforts to transform our energy economy and reallocate literally trillions of dollars of wealth and income.  The allegations of data tampering are not frivolous -- they are supported by clear prima facie evidence.  If there were a reasonable explanation, the government should have come out with it a long time ago.  As far as I'm concerned, the case for fraud has been proved.  There isn't any scientific fraud that I know of that comes remotely close. 

The Endless Supply Of Fake Scares And Statistical Scams

Back in May I wrote about the mortal blow suffered by the anti-salt campaign when the Institute of Medicine decided to do a real study and apply some actual statistical analysis to the results.    Turns out that there is no evidence at all that a low salt diet is good for you, and some that it might even be bad.  Meanwhile, a long list of power hungry busy-bodies -- the Federal Departments of Agriculture and HHS, the WHO, the American Heart Association, Mayor Bloomberg -- got exposed for trying to use a plausible hypothesis and some fake math to seize a little more control over your life.  I'm still waiting for any of them to apologize.

Well, salt is of course just one example.  If you start looking around, there is an endless supply of these fake scares and statistical scams.  And the essential ingredients are always the same:  a plausible hypothesis, little or no evidence, fake math, and power-hungry busy-bodies looking to get more control over your life.   In looking at these things, it doesn't matter if you don't know much math and never took statistics, because there is only one thing that you need to know to tell the real from the fake:  Relative Risk of less than 3 is meaningless.  If the Relative Risk is more than 3, they will tell you, because this will universally and immediately be recognized as a significant result.  If they aren't trumpeting a Relative Risk of over 3, then they don't have it and the whole thing is a scam.  It's easy!

Let's take a couple of examples for today.  First, the low fat diet.  The idea that we need to reduce fat in the diet is by this point so completely ingrained in our culture that it is second nature.  You can't go to the supermarket without seeing dozens of low fat and reduced fat items, all playing off the multi-decade browbeating of the consumer into believing that lowering fat will improve heart health and help keep weight under control.  The anti-dietary fat campaign is everywhere!  And certainly, it starts from a seemingly plausible hypothesis -- "fat" makes you "fat"!  Get it?  Now go to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans put out by the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion of the Department of Agriculture.   This is the Official Word of the Federal Government -- surely they know what they are talking about!  Click the link for Chapter 3 - Foods and Food Components to Reduce.  You will find that the first four pages of that chapter are about the need to reduce salt in your diet (uh-oh!), immediately followed by the next three pages on the need to reduce fats.  The section on fats is filled with seemingly authoritative statements like this one:

A strong body of evidence indicates that higher intake of most dietary saturated fatty acids is associated with higher levels of blood total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. Higher total and LDL cholesterol levels are risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

A "strong body of evidence" you say?  Can you please tell us the Relative Risk?  Of course not.  Actually, I have read three full-length books on this subject, and if there's one thing that's clear it's that the attempt to demonstrate a link between dietary fat and cardiovascular disease has yielded zero, zilch and nothing.  They're making it up.

Actually it's worse than that.   Starting in 1993 the government actually commissioned and paid for one of those massive studies specifically intended to gather evidence on whether there were any health benefits to a low fat diet.  It was called the Women's Health Initiative Dietary Modification Trial, and it enlisted almost 50,000 women between the ages of 50 and 79.  This was one of those randomized studies -- 19,541 assigned to follow a low fat diet, and 29,294 assigned to continue the usual diet.  The results were reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2006.  Here is a summary report on the study from the Harvard School of Public Health.  And the results?

The results . . . showed no benefits for a low-fat diet. Women assigned to this eating strategy did not appear to gain protection against breast cancer, colorectal cancer, or cardiovascular disease. And after eight years, their weights were generally the same as those of women following their usual diets.

So, kindly explain why the Dietary Guidelines, most recently issued in 2010, continue to contain the advice to reduce fats?  The answer is that these people do not give up power willingly, and do not apologize for being wrong, even spectacularly wrong.  All I can say is, I hope you aren't wasting your time trying to reduce the fat in your diet.  Let's have a steak for dinner! 

Now how about example 2 for today -- "environmental tobacco smoke," aka ETS, aka second-hand smoke.  Surely we all know that that stuff is dangerous.  The EPA has told us so!

I should start by mentioning that I am no fan of tobacco smoke, and I found the days of thick tobacco smoke in bars, restaurants, airplanes, and offices quite unpleasant.  The evidence that smoking is harmful to health of the smoker is strong.  That of course gives the zealots their plausible hypothesis that second-hand smoke must also be harmful to health.  But is there real evidence that ETS is harmful to health?   

The answer is, not that I can find.    Go to the basic EPA page for the public on this subject, and what you get is mumbo jumbo authoritative statements just like in the Dietary Guidelines.  "Exposure to secondhand smoke can cause asthma in children who have not previously exhibited symptoms."  "Infants and children younger than 6 who are regularly exposed to secondhand smoke are at increased risk of lower respiratory track [sic!] infections."  But no evidence.  There is a link to a 2006 Surgeon General report.  That report, it turns out, does contain long lists dozens of studies of subjects exposed to ETS and their development of certain medical conditions.  And they do have a column in their charts to report Relative Risk.  And for the large, large majority of the studies the result in that column is "NR" - no result.   And for the rest of the dozens of studies, the results are almost universally a RR of well under 2.  I managed to find one such study with a RR of just over 3 and a total of 29 subjects.

Frankly, this is insulting to our intelligence.  

Unfortunately, an awful lot of what you think you know is one sort or another of fake scare or statistical scam. 

The Smartest Government Is Not Very Smart

On Monday President Obama made a speech about "smart government," saying he was going to make the government "smarter, quicker and more responsive" by urging the cabinet to adopt all the latest new technology, or something like that.  The speech has rightly come in for a lot of ridicule.   See, for example, Jonah Goldberg at Town Hall here, or an IBD editorial here, or William McGurn in the New York Post here.

The fact is that it is not within the possibilities of government to be smart the way that markets are smart.   McGurn has it pretty close: 

[T]he problem with government is not that it lacks smart people. The problem with government is that it doesn’t have the incentives to get the best out of smart people — and never will.

Good point, but actually it's a lot worse than that.  On this subject, if you have never read the classic essay I, Pencil by the economist Leonard Read, you really should.  It's not long.  

Read's thesis is often stated as "nobody knows how to make a pencil."  And if you think about it, you will realize that, as seemingly simple as is a pencil, you have no idea how to make one from scratch, and neither does anybody else - even the people in the pencil business.  Imagine yourself in a hunter-gatherer society, and someone hands you a basic number 2 pencil and asks you to make another one.  If you are the smartest person in the world, and have your whole lifetime to try, you will barely have begun what you need to accomplish.  For starters, you need to learn how to make iron, and then axes and saws, to chop down and carve up trees.  (Try chopping down a tree some time with a stone ax.  After about a week of backbreaking work, with luck you have one large log.  Now, how are you going to cut it up into lots of little cylindrical pre-pencils using your stone tools?)  The fact is, the smartest person in the world will die a long, long time before figuring out how to make a pencil.  And what incentive is going to cause a next generation to continue the work?

Now, please, consider the problem of making a computer.  The fact is that no amount of mere "smartness" can accomplish the job.  Even collaboration among hundreds or thousands of "smart" people won't get anywhere.  The only way that these jobs get done is through thousands upon thousands of sequential inventions incentivized through the miracle of market exchange.

But our President thinks he can successfully reconfigure the use of energy, and the entire healthcare industry, because he is "smart" and he has a bunch of "smart" people working for him.   Well, the job of producing the best energy or the best healthcare for a $15 trillion economy is a lot harder than making a pencil.  What I can't get over is the hubris of their thinking that they can outdo in a short period of time what millions of people sharing information through markets have been able to do.

So how's the "smart" government doing?  It's just a question of which ridiculous illustration you want to pick.  Jonah Goldberg picks this one: 

Marvin Horne [is]a farmer who owes the federal government $650,000 in fines. Why?  He failed to comply with the Department of Agriculture's national raisin reserve program, created by the Truman administration, which even liberal Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan dubbed "just the world's most outdated law." The program stockpiles raisins in case of an emergency. Such emergencies -- if they ever existed -- ceased being a problem after World War II. It's no surprise, alas, that government programs are as hard to fire as the employees working for them.

Well, that's a pretty good example, but really not hard to top.  One of my favorites is the so-called "Strategic Petroleum Reserve."  Here's the idea:  pump lots of oil out of the ground at great expense, ship it a long way at great expense, and then pump it back into the ground at great expense.  And presto, you have a "Strategic Petroleum Reserve."  Now, why would it not have sufficed to just buy the rights to an undeveloped oil field and leave the oil in place?  Because, dear man, we are way, way too "smart" for that!  

But of course I'm talking about small, small beer.  The current big money is in Obamacare.  Hubris on steroids!  At her new website, Megan McArdle has three posts on the ongoing unraveling of Obamacare, here, here and here.  I just can't get over the idea that "smart" people believe that all imperfections in an area covering some 18% of the economy, over $2.5 trillion per year, can be fixed a some "smart" people coming up with a 1000 page law and some other "smart" people coming up with many more thousands of pages of regulations, that no one can really ever read or understand, trying to micro-manage everyone's behavior.         

Yes, It Does Matter If The New York City Comptroller Is An Odious Human Being

So serial sexter Anthony Weiner is in the race for mayor of New York, and it gradually develops that, despite past conduct that would seemingly be completely disqualifying,  he is actually a credible candidate against a field of people who seem to have no idea what the job of mayor is about.  If Weiner's conduct is not disqualifying, then I guess nothing is.  On Sunday, Eliot Spitzer joined the race for New York City Comptroller.

The problem with Spitzer is that his sexual escapades are far and away the least significant instances of his disqualifying conduct.  The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both ran editorials on Monday reviewing some of the Spitzer history, and John Podhoretz weighed in today in the New York Post.  It's good to be reminded of this stuff. 

The Times editorial at first seems scathing, until you read the others and realize that as usual the Times has missed most everything important.  Here is the key section of the Times editorial:

Desperately needed reforms were thwarted, opportunities lost — and it was more than a sexual scandal that made Mr. Spitzer’s truncated governorship an exceptional debacle in a capital city that is debacle central. It was that he saw himself as a “steamroller” instead of a leader, that he stoked alienation and resentment in his allies as well as his adversaries, the opposite of what a competent politician should do.

And then there's this howler: 

This was the man who built a solid record and shiny reputation as a hard-charging attorney general.

So you need to turn to the Journal to be reminded of how truly awful this man was, and it didn't begin when he became governor.  Starting with his time as AG, the Journal reminds us that Spitzer:

• Held a press conference announcing that he was going to indict AIG and its CEO Maurice Greenberg, then never did it but used the threat to force Greenberg out of the company.  After Greenberg's departure AIG risk management went off the rails, leading to massive losses in the mortgage derivative markets, a government bailout, and loss of more than $100 billion of shareholder value.  In my view, there is nothing unfair in blaming Spitzer for that debacle.
  
• When John Whitehead (former Goldman Sachs CEO and senior State Department official) published an op-ed standing up for Greenberg, Spitzer called Whitehead and said "I will be coming after you.  You will pay the price.  This is only the beginning and you will pay dearly for what you have done."
  
• Spitzer brought a case against former NYSE head Dick Grasso seeking return of Grasso's lump sum pension payout of $138 million.  The case ended in complete victory for Grasso in the courts and a debacle for the NYAG.
  
• Spitzer forced a management decapitation at Marsh & McLennan that again led to massive loss of shareholder value.  He also began a criminal prosecution against senior insurance brokerage executives at Marsh.  After a 10 month trial, the executives were acquitted on all but one charge.  Then, well after sentencing, it came to light that the NY AG's office had withheld some 700,000 documents from production, which the judge found would have been "invaluable" to the defense.  These disclosures led to vacation of all the convictions.
  

I guess that's what the New York Times refers to as a "solid record and shiny reputation as a hard-charging attorney general."  And even the Journal leaves out Spitzer's shake-downs of the investment banking industry for the supposed sin of having securities analysis and investment banking under one roof.  And then we get to the worst one of all, when Spitzer was governor, using the state police to gather dirt on political opponents.  Really, this guy could not be topped. 

But, you ask, the office Spitzer is now running for is New York City Comptroller.  This is not a prosecutorial position, nor an executive position.  Maybe it doesn't matter if Spitzer is an odious human being? 

It does matter.  The main jobs of the Comptroller are two: (1) sole trustee of the five pension funds for City workers, and (2) conducting audits of the City's mayoral agencies.  Here are a couple of examples of what an ambitious, self-aggrandizing bad guy with those responsibilities can do.

The five City pension funds have assets in the range of $100+ billion.   They are very large shareholders in many publicly traded companies.  Now let's say that the stock of some publicly traded company drops suddenly.  Many plaintiffs' law firms will promptly bring complaints alleging that there has been a fraud.  Under the securities laws, the right to be the "lead plaintiff" in these cases goes to the shareholder who owns the largest number of shares bought during the class period.  The "lead plaintiff" then picks a law firm to be "lead counsel" and that firm gets the lion's share of the legal fees.  Some of these cases generate legal fees in the tens of millions of dollars, sometimes even over $100 million. 

The New York State pension funds are known for regularly claiming their position as "lead plaintiff," and the City pension funds have also played in this sandbox to some degree.  Why do they do it?  Because the plaintiffs' law firms make huge amounts of money off these cases, are deeply indebted to the government functionaries who can cause big pension funds to select them, and are thus fantastic sources of political contributions.  Alan Hevesi (former New York State Comptroller recently released from jail) perfected this game (although Hevesi went to jail for yet something else).  Also, great opportunity for headlines when a big case settles.  "SPITZER WINS $100 MILLION SETTLEMENT FOR PENSION FUNDS!!!!!!"

Well, you say, they are just vindicating their rights as shareholders and getting payments to which they are entitled.  What's wrong with that?  The answer is that nobody pays attention to the fact that the same pension funds are almost inevitably also on the paying ends of these settlements.   Here's how it works.  Suppose a class action alleges that because of wrongful disclosures all shareholders of Citigroup who bought stock during 2012 have been defrauded.  The NYC pension funds turn out to be the entity that bought the most Citigroup shares during 2012, and they become lead plaintiff.  But they also bought lots of shares in 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 and on back.  They are entirely likely to own many more shares of Citigroup bought outside the class period than in it.  Now Citigroup settles the case by putting up some hundreds of millions of dollars.  As shareholders who bought outside the class period and still own that stock, the pension funds are on the paying end of this.

Do the NYC pension funds receive more than they pay in such a settlement?  To figure that out, you need all the dates and amounts of stock that they bought and sold and what they still own.  Of course they don't disclose that information to the public, so nobody but them can tell.  Given that legal fees and expenses take at least around 25% of the settlements, and that the dates of stock purchases are substantially random, I find it hard to believe that the funds can be net gainers in most of these settlements.  I have never seen anyone make an actual calculation, and the information to do so is hidden.  This is a great area for big corruption.  No one is on to it.  Yes, this is a huge reason why a self-aggrandizing guy who recognizes no personal limits should not be New York City Comptroller.

And how about the audit function?  That gives a self-aggrandizing guy endless opportunities to get in the news and upstage the mayor.  Sometimes it's justified.  Would Comptroller Spitzer confine himself to issues of actual merit?  No chance. 

What Is The Left's Game Plan For Chicago?

In a post last November, I characterized Chicago as one of America's "basket case" cities.  OK, it's not nearly as bad as Cleveland or Detroit, and the tourist areas in the Loop and the North Side are in good shape.  But in places where very few tourists go there is an unfolding disaster on the South Side, not unlike Detroit, with population emptying out and large vacant areas.  Chicago's population per the census went from a peak of 3,620,962 in 1950 to 2,695,598 in 2010, a loss of over 25% in those 60 years.  In the 10 years from 2000 to 2010 Chicago continued to shrink, losing about 200,000, or around 7% of then remaining population.  This is not a minor problem.

How did it get this way?  Illinois is a high tax state, but not in the league of New York and California.  (The Illinois Policy Institute puts Illinois in the top third of states for tax level.)  But Illinois' and Chicago's special problem is public worker pensions.  Not only do Illinois and Chicago have some of the most generous pension promises to their public workers, but they have systematically under-funded them, either by just skipping supposedly required annual payments, or even more crazy, by issuing bonds and then contributing the bonds as a supposed "asset" to the pension plans.  Why any business making a location decision would choose Chicago over, say, Indiana or Wisconsin, is something of a mystery, but then few make that mistake.   (Hey, I live in Manhattan, so there are a lot of mysteries out there!)

Here's an article from the New York Times last September describing the funding crisis of the Chicago teacher pensions.  At the time, Chicago had just come off a teachers' strike, where the mayor, Rahm Emanuel, had tried and failed to get some pension concessions, like increased teacher contributions to their own pensions.  The issue got postponed to the 2013 session of the state legislature, which then adjourned a few weeks ago without addressing it.  So here are a few key quotes from the Times article:

 The pension fund is about to hit a wall. . . .

“There’s a huge crisis,” said Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation, a nonpartisan research organization in Chicago that works on fiscal issues. “The problem does not get easier by waiting. The problem gets bigger, and starts to become an insurmountable obstacle.” . . .

[T]he State Legislature granted the Chicago school district a break from its pension contributions, starting in 1995. Since then, the city has never contributed the required amount; for many years it put in nothing. All the while, the teachers’ benefits kept building up.

And of course, Mayor Emanuel has now announced that some 54 schools are going to close permanently over the summer and not reopen with the new school year.  Well, the population has shrunk by 25% since most of the schools were built. 

Anyway, I know my solutions to these kinds of problems, which are that the government has to get some financial discipline, stop making promises it can't meet, and shrink; and if it can't, then Chicago is doomed to decline gradually and then faster in a death spiral until it disappears, like Detroit basically has. 

But you already knew my solutions.  What you want to know is, what does the Left propose?  And the good news is, The Nation -- the perfect place to turn to get the Official Position of the Official Left -- has a long article in the soon-to-come-out July 22 issue (available online) on this very subject.  The author is a guy named Rick Perlstein.  The title is "Chicago Rising!" -- yes, the exclamation point is theirs.

And as far as I can tell, the answer is:  PROTEST!!!! 

The progressive tribes have been gathering in Chicago with force, efficiency, creativity, trust and solidarity, building a bona fide, citywide protest culture. And it’s working.

Can't say I can figure out what he means when he says "It's working."  Exactly how is "protest" supposed to reverse the decline of the city and convince somebody who doesn't have to be there to show up and voluntarily pay tens of billions of dollars for the underfunded pensions?

And here's the best part:  the organization that Perlstein identifies as leading the protest movement is none other than -- The Teachers Union!  You really can't make this up.   Perlstein describes various marches led by the Teachers Union and its leader Karen Lewis, not only protesting the school closings but also those amorphous bogey-men of "austerity" and "privatization."

And while the radicalized CTU under the leadership of Karen Lewis has deservedly received much of the credit, the teachers union is just the current tip of the spear in a long and potentially transformative movement.

Well, I can understand the game plan of the Teachers Union.  They need the city to stay around just long enough for them to extract the last dime out of it, and at that point they got theirs and they don't really care if there is any city left.  But how do they manage to distract and confuse ordinary citizens into not noticing the pension disaster and thinking the unions have the city's best interests at heart?  If they can succeed at that, you really have to congratulate them.  And Perlstein and the Nation - what's your excuse?

There are basically two approaches for a government to deal with these situations.  Call them the Detroit approach and the Switzerland approach.  Go for it, Chicago!