Argentina Is Joined In The Supreme Court By The Coalition Of Weasels

Another year, and the ever-entertaining country of Argentina finds itself back in the U.S. Supreme Court, trying to get the court to hear its appeal of injunctions that would force it to pay its debts.  A couple of days ago a group of friendly countries came in to support Argentina's position with amicus briefs.  These countries address the critically important question of the day: how many reasons can we think of why a country that gets tired of paying its debts should be able to walk away?  Call these countries the "Coalition of Weasels."  So far it's Brazil, Mexico (!) and France (!!!). 

OK, I shouldn't be so surprised about France.   They are well on the way to adopting the official Latin American model of economic success.  Government spending is well over 50% of GDP.  A socialist government pretends that infinite spending can be paid for by the tooth fairy.  Last year they lost their AAA rating.  Moody's rates them Aa1 "with negative outlook."  Yes, even France has reason to prepare the ground for the day it wants to default.

The overriding theme of the three briefs is how terribly important it is for a country in crisis to be able to walk away from debt.   Mexico:  "The injunctions will inevitably have a negative impact on future sovereign debt restructurings and risk destabilizing the international monetary system."  I like that one about "risks destabilizing the international monetary system."  How would that work, exactly?  Nobody knows, but it sounds really scary.  Then here we have France:

If upheld, the injunctive remedy affirmed by the Court of Appeals on the basis of this ill-founded interpretation threatens significant global harm to various public and private interests.  It also would disrupt the established practice of orderly sovereign debt restructurings, in which France has acquired extensive experience as an active participant in the Paris Club.  In particular, the injunctive remedy threatens to upset the complex balance of interests between sovereign debtors and their creditors, sovereign lenders, bank lenders and bondholders that is generally achieved in a voluntary and orderly restructuring.

Never mentioned is that the "crisis" in Argentina actually consists of nothing more than that the politicians would rather spend money on various forms of vote buying than on paying their debts.   They don't have to pay for any wars.  (The Falklands war was way back in 1982.)  They haven't had any natural disasters to speak of.  Whatever crisis they have is completely of their own making, born of incompetent economic policy and waste.  Argentina is famous for an economy dominated by crony capitalism and subsidies.  Inflation is rampant -- they admit to 10.9% for 2013, but everybody knows that's fake.  The real number is more like at least 50%, according to a February article in The Economist here.   That gives a great opportunity for the old official exchange rate game, where you let your friends buy or sell dollars at a fake rate, hiding massive payoffs.  And then you hand out subsidies for everything.  How about energy subsidies for everyone!  Argentina has been deep into that one, although just in the last few days it has had to start cutting the subsidies because it is running out of foreign exchange to buy the stuff.  But don't worry, the Economy Minister promises that they will continue with the destructive economic policies:

Economy Minister Axel Kicillof says the populist government is sticking with its model of transferring wealth to help the poor and stimulate the economy.

Of course, in an official exchange rate regime, the actual primary wealth transfer is not to the poor at all, but rather to the well-connected friends of the government.  But if they say often enough that they are "helping the poor," maybe someone will believe it.

What's remarkable is that the countries that actually bite the bullet and pay their debts are the ones that are successful.  The United States literally got its start by figuring out how to pay off the defaulted Revolutionary War debt at par, even though much of it had been bought up cheaply by speculators.  Alexander Hamilton's First Report on the Public Credit of 1790 - proposing to pay the debt at par - was his first big act as Treasury Secretary.  From Wikipedia's description:

Monied speculators, alerted that Congress, under the new Constitution, might provide for payment at face value for certificates, sought to buy up devalued securities for profit and investment.Concerns arose over the fact that many certificates – almost three-quarters of them - had been exchanged for well below par during periods of inflation, some as low as 10 cents on the dollar, but selling at 20-25% at the time the Report was debated.

Funny thing was, somehow paying off that debt didn't "destabilize the international monetary system."  Nor did it keep the United States economy from taking off.  In fact, if debt payments squeeze out the possibility of massive payments for crony capitalism, energy subsidies, and the like, they may be the best thing that can happen to an economy.  Don't tell Brazil, Mexico and France.

UPDATE March 28, 2014:  Many thanks to Instapundit for the link!

I should mention that the single worst thing about being a partner of a large international law firm is having to pay income taxes, not small in amount, to the government of France.  Sacre bleu!

We're Even Against Chumley's!

I've written a few times about the remarkable phenomenon that Greenwich Villagers are against everything.  For example, see here.   At least, we're officially against everything new, and everything that seems to represent change, however slight.  In the most recent twist, it seems that we're even against Chumley's. I

If you haven't heard of it, Chumley's was/is probably the most famous bar in Greenwich Village.  It opened in the 1920s, during prohibition, as a speakeasy.  Thus, no signs, and a secret back entrance.  After prohibition ended, the owners decided to keep the speakeasy atmosphere going.  You could feel that you were really "in the know" if you knew about Chumley's.

Here's an exterior picture of the old, pre-2007 Chumley's. 

86 Bedford Street, home of Chumley's, pre-2007

The building was an early style for the neighborhood, dating from about 1820 -30.  No way would you have guessed there was a famous bar in there.  That door was not the entrance.  To enter, you had to go around the corner onto Barrow Street, past the building you can see at the right in the picture above, and there you would find this unmarked alley:

Alleyway on Barrow Street leading to Chumley's.  Click to enlarge.

That alley led to a small courtyard, not really visible from the street, where was found a door that went into the back of the Chumley's building.  Again though, no sign: 

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Courtyard entrance to Chumley'

The bar was famous for its association with literary figures -- Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Mailer.  Of course, it was a poorly kept secret.  In fact, undoubtedly it got a little touristy in its later days. 

But then tragedy struck.  In 2007 the building suffered a partial collapse, and the bar was forced to close.  They tore the building down completely, and they've been rebuilding it in a very slow process ever since.  Today, seven years later, it seems that it's about ready to reopen.  Here's the new building, looking very much like the old building:

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New 86 Bedford Street

So what is the official Greenwich Village reaction to the upcoming reopening of Chumley's?  Why, of course, we're against it!  It seems that a coalition of about 50 neighbors has filed suit to have Chumley's liquor license revoked so that it cannot reopen.  Here's a report from Grub Street in February:

A group of approximately 50 neighbors filed a lawsuit in Manhattan State Supreme Court yesterday, asking the state to revoke the liquor license at the famous speakeasy and Greenwich Village institution, which has been closed since a partial wall collapse in 2007 threatened the integrity of the building. "Bar-Free Bedford" claims that shortly before its emergency closure, Chumley's was operating not as a highbrow bar with deep literary roots, as it's often claimed in guidebooks, but as "a major destination for tourists, undergraduates and bar-hopping bridge-and-tunnel partygoers."

Mind you, this is smack in the middle of the square mile with undoubtedly the most bars and restaurants of any square mile in the entire United States.  For example, exactly two doors down we have a building with the address 12 Grove Street.  You might recognize it as the building that was used for the exterior shots to represent the home of Rachel, Monica, Joey, Chandler, et al. on the TV series Friends.  Yes, there is a restaurant/bar in this building.

The restaurant may have been there for decades, but pity these poor people if they should close it and then try to reopen.  Hey, this is Greenwich Village!

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The "Friends" Building, 12 Grove Street, corner Bedford, Greenwich Village

UPDATE March 31, 2014:  And how about Google?  The new word in the neighborhood is that Google has a plan for something new, a retail store, taking a cue from the huge success of Apple with this idea.  I'll bet you would say that any neighborhood in the country would be ecstatic to be chosen by Google for the site of its first retail store.  But then you don't understand us.

Our local newspaper The Villager first reported in its March 20 edition that Google was looking to lease space at 131 Greene Street, just half a block south of the official boundary of Greenwich Village in a neighborhood called Soho, and very close to one of the Apple stores at the corner of Prince and Greene Streets.  The Villager quotes a top retail broker, Faith Hope Consolo, to the effect that Greene Street is the hot street to be on these days:  "There are different streets that are in vogue, that have become hot, and it's just now that Greene St. has become the street in Soho."

It took just a week for the forces Against Everything to get their act together.  In the March 27 edition of The Villager we have Community Board 2 member Bo Riccobono quoted as follows:

It’s a very bad idea.  It will bring hordes of people to this quiet street with low-traffic, high-end stores. Google should be on Broadway, West Broadway or Lafayette St. on a corner near a subway.

View Larger Map">Here's a link to a picture of the street from Google maps streetview.  Yes, the street is lined with retail stores.  You can see the existing Apple store at the very left of the picture.

Climate Change And The Need To Suppress Dissent

My first recollection of use of the term "politically correct" was way back about 1970.  I was in college.  The strong connotation of the term was enforced orthodoxy.  If you wanted to be in with the in crowd, the price was toeing the party line on all important matters of politics.  The ostracism of comrades who dissented was rapid and harsh.   The university (this was Yale) made noises about being open to all opinions, but God forbid a speaker from the administration should show up to defend, for example, the Vietnam War -- he would be shouted down, if not pelted with rotten eggs.  (Recall that Nixon was the President.) 

Things may actually be somewhat better for free speech on campuses today, at least to the extent that conservatives and libertarians are sometimes allowed to speak.  (Is it only because the current President is himself politically correct?  Good question.)  But if anything, the enforcement of orthodoxy on those seeking access to the secret handshake has become even more overt and forceful.  And in no area more so than climate change.

Over at the Federalist, Ross Kaminsky has an excellent roundup yesterday of efforts of the Left to suppress dissent.  The article ranges widely over many areas -- the IRS/Tea Party scandal, efforts of Senators (led by Schumer of course) to revive the "Fairness Doctrine" to disadvantage Fox News, the FCC's proposal to put monitors in news rooms, etc.  Not meaning to minimize those, but each is a fairly discrete initiative of small number of despicable government actors.  

But then Kaminsky moves to the subject of climate change, where the efforts to suppress dissent are pervasivie and seem to come from everywhere -- government, academia, the media, web sites, you name it.  And Kaminsky doesn't even mention many of the worst examples.  If you haven't been following this subject, seeing it put together in one place really opens your eyes.  I'll take Kaminsky's list and add a few of my own:

• Kaminsky quotes Brian Stelter of CNN as recently arguing that skeptics of global warming alarmism should not be given equal time.   Not mentioned are the similar late-2013 announcements of the LA Times and Reddit that they would not publish any views of climate skeptics.
• Kaminsky cites the "Climategate" email disclosures of 2009, revealing leading orthodox climate scientists maneuvering to get themselves into the position of peer reviewer of any papers authored by those questioning the orthodoxy so that they can then have the papers rejected for publication.
• Again not mentioned is that leading web sites of the climate orthodoxy (e.g., realclimate.org, climateprogress.org) flatly refuse to accept comments or questions from anyone who even slightly questions the orthodoxy.
• Kaminsky describes the libel lawsuits brought by leader-of-climate-science-orthodoxy Michael Mann against the likes of National Review, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Mark Steyn, seeking to use the financial pressure of litigation to silence those dissenting voices. 
• Finally, Kaminsky refers to the widely-circulated article last week from a guy named Lawrence Torcello of Rochester Institute of Technology, calling for criminal prosecution of climate dissenters.  Says Professor Torcello, "We have good reason to consider the funding of climate denial to be criminally and morally negligent."  By the way, Professor Torcello's field is philosophy, not science of any sort, let alone climate science. 
• Not mentioned is that Torcello is just one in a long line of climate crazies in high places calling for criminal action against dissenters.  For example, Canada's most prominent environmentalist David Suzuki has repeatedly called for criminal prosecution against dissenters, most recently against no less than Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.  Pseudo-science blogger Greg Laden has long called for criminal action against anyone who disagrees with him on climate issues.  Or check out this UK website called Bring Climate Criminals to Justice.  And those are just the tip of the iceberg.

Well, I think it's a pretty good principle of life that those seeking to suppress the other side of the argument have a good sense that in a fair debate they are going to lose. 

Meanwhile, in what I regard as the most important aspect of the debate, a few people other than myself are starting to notice that trying to save the climate by banning fossil fuels means consigning the poor to perpetual poverty.   For my article from February on Climate Policy And Keeping The Poor Poor, see here.  Well, just last week prominent, and generally sensible, climate blogger Roger Pielke, Jr. came out with an article for the Breakthrough Institute titled Keeping the Poor Poor:  Against Anti-Growth Environmentalism.  The dissent-suppressors had better get to work quickly on this one, because as soon as people are allowed to think about this and realize the monstrous consequences of the climate campaign, the jig will really be up.

UPDATE March 21, 2014: It seems that one of the best examples of climate orthodoxy enforcement was unfolding yesterday even as I was writing the above post.  And the example involves none other than Roger Pielke, Jr.

You may have heard of a polling and numbers guru named Nate Silver.   Silver has gotten much favorable notice for his accurate predictions of recent elections, and has a recently-launched blog called fivethirtyeight.com.  Silver is also a favorite of the New York Times, which carries a subset of Silver's blog content on its site.   So Silver aspires to be in with the in crowd.  That can be dangerous. 

The Silver blog has a science section, and one of the bloggers in that section is the above-mentioned Pielke.  On Wednesday of this week, Pielke had a post titled Disasters Cost More Than Ever -- But Not Because of Climate Change.  That was definitely not politically correct!  Hasn't he heard that the whole idea behind "climate change" is to scare the public into supporting a bigger and more activist government?

The orthodoxy enforcers immediately came out in full force.  Judith Curry of Climate Etc. has a roundup.  You should read the whole thing.  In the big pile-on, we have Columbia Journalism Review here; theweek.com here ("FiveThirtyEight's science coverage stinks of sublimated ideology."); the official climate change orthodoxy enforcer Michael Mann here.  But Curry saves most of her space for a post by one Kiley Kroh at ClimateProgress, which Curry calls "probably the most reprehensible and contemptible smear job I have ever seen of a scientist."

If you read Kroh's post you will see that it is entirely about appeals to authority (e.g., Michael Mann is a "top climate scientist," John Holdren offers a "scientifically grounded explanation of how climate change is worsening western drought," etc.) and no actual presentation as to the merits of the argument.

Well, Silver, you have strayed.  Welcome to ostracism.  Curry's conclusion:

Well as recently as 5 years ago, I never thought I’d live to see the day when I am very grateful that I have tenure at a university, which provides my job with some protection against politically inconvenient scientific analyses.

Is The Number Of People Without Health Insurance A Crisis?

Having been around when GW Bush was President, and even immediately after the election of Obama, I clearly remember that the greatest crisis facing the country was the number of people without health insurance.  Or at least that was the official line.  There definitely was a constant drumbeat of reports from the great and the good, government and non-government advocacy groups, citing the number of people without health insurance and calling the situation a crisis.

As a couple of examples, consider this study from the University of Missouri's Center for Full Employment and Price Stability from 2007, title: An Introduction to the Health Care Crisis in America.  Or, for the official government version at the time immediately after Obama was elected and before Obamacare was passed, consider the report from the Institute of Medicine from February 2009 titled America's Uninsured Crisis: Consequences for Health and Health Care.  To help you remember the rhetoric of the time, here is the intro to that IOM study:

The growing number of uninsured Americans--totaling 45.7 million as of 2007--is taking a toll on the nation's health. One in five adults under age 65 and nearly one in ten children are uninsured. Uninsured individuals experience much more risk to their health than insured individuals. In its 2009 report America's Uninsured Crisis: Consequences for Health and Health Care, the Institute of Medicine points to a chasm between the health care needs of people without health insurance and access to effective health care services. This gap results in needless illness, suffering, and even death.

Well, that's rather over the top naked advocacy for government expansion from an organization supposed to be neutral policy advisers.  Of course the whole notion that lack of health insurance results in worse health outcomes has since been more or less completely debunked by, among other things, a large random study out of Oregon.  The IOM 2009 study didn't have those data or any other, but they don't let that kind of thing get in the way when they can utter phrases like "needless illness, suffering, and even death."

But anyway, here we are several years later and just short of four years since President Obama signed Obamacare into law, and you don't see much any more about the "crisis of the uninsured."  Well, the whole idea of Obamacare was to get everybody insured, so, you might be thinking, undoubtedly that must be what has happened.  Think again.

So let's just go and look up the latest government figures for the number of Americans without health insurance.  Well, try to do that and you'll find out that the government isn't putting out any figures on that just now.  Are you suspicious yet?

However, HHS Secretary Sibelius gave a press conference on Tuesday, and she talked about the number of uninsured.  Here's a report on the press conference at the Health Exchange web site.  Where did she get her numbers?  From a poll done by Gallup, and reported in the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index on Monday.  Yes, the number of uninsured was the greatest crisis facing America, and we enacted a government takeover of a sixth of the economy to fix it, and the government now can't be bothered to collect data as to whether the "crisis" is being solved or not.

According to Secretary Sibelius in the press conference, based on Gallup data, the percentage of uninsured has declined to 15.9% of the population in early 2014, down from 17.1% in the last quarter of 2013.  Sibelius credits the Affordable Care Act: "That didn't just happen on its own."  This was of course spun as a big achievement.  ABC News reported it as "Health Law Cited as US Uninsured Rate Drops."

It doesn't sound like much of a change to begin with.  And can we please go back and look up where the number of uninsured stood back when GW Bush was President and this was the greatest crisis facing the country?  Turns out that the percentage of uninsured was below where it is today for all eight years of the Bush presidency. Here are the official data from the Census Bureau.  No, I can't explain why the official Census Bureau data ends in 2009.  But the percentage of uninsured Americans according to these data ranges from 14.1% in 2001 to 15.4% in 2008.

Now maybe, although I haven't heard them say it, the official administration view is that it doesn't matter any more whether you have insurance, because after all now we have guaranteed issue and you can buy the insurance after you get sick.  If you think about that one, you'll realize that they really can't put it quite that way without admitting that the whole thing can't work.  Instead they are out on their ridiculous fraudulent promotion campaign to try to trick young people into signing up and overpaying.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post yesterday gives what is, from an administration supporter, a rather balanced picture of where Obamacare is today.   Milbank notes that the administration has said that it needed about 7 million sign ups by the end of March, of which about 40% or 2.7 million would have to be young adults in the 18-34 age range.  According to the recent announcements, the number of the young adult sign ups is 1.08 million.  That's not too close.  Milbank's take is that the "millennials have abandoned Obama."  In terms of how they vote, that remains to be seen.  But the idea that you could just order people to buy a way overpriced product and they would do it because they like you -- that was never going to happen. 

Paul Ryan's Poverty Report -- A Disappointment

Earlier this week the House Budget Committee, chaired by Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, came out with a report titled The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later.  The Report has generated a lot of commentary, on both left and right, most of it -- from both sides -- unfavorable.  I'll join the commenters from the right in giving a less than rave review.  There is much useful information in here, but overall a shortage of vision. 

But let's start with the useful information.  More than anything else, this Report is an attempt to catalog every federal anti-poverty program, what it does, how much it costs, and whether it works.  The count of programs is 92, and the count of annual federal spending is $799 billion.  Just looking at the vastness of the federal anti-poverty effort, together with the overlap, inconsistency, and multiple bureaucracies stepping on each others' toes, is something of an eye-opener.   The $799 billion of spending will not surprise readers of this blog.  In the Report, we slog through the programs one by one for almost 200 pages.  The discussion of each program includes a section called "Evidence" where, often, scholarly publications that have studied the program are cited.  Generally, the "evidence" of success or failure is either lacking completely or is cited to the effect that this program does not accomplish much.

Despite the large effort to compile this Report, there is good reason to think that it is not comprehensive.  For example, a section on Education and Job Training programs, starting at page 21 of the Report, identifies 24 such programs, at an annual cost of $94.4 billion in 2012.  Well, that's a start, but actually GAO identified 47 federal job training programs in 2011, which is why VP Biden was just designated in February to head a task force to rationalize the mess.

But the biggest problem with this Report is that its format is such as to make it a fairly easy target for left-wing critics, while at the same time missing the obvious points to which those critics have no answer.  Academics who study anti-poverty programs are virtually uniform in their political support of the programs, and thus trying to cite their work as evidence against the programs is fraught with problems.  Unsurprisingly, many of the academics whose work is cited as evidence of the ineffectiveness of these programs have spoken up to say that their work has been used inappropriately.  A publication called the Fiscal Times for a March 4 article contacted several academics whose work was cited, and all of those quoted criticized the Ryan Report for misusing their work.  (Of course, FT may have omitted citing others whose views were favorable to Ryan.)  Meanwhile other critics have piled on.  Official Manhattan Contrarian Worst Economics Writer Paul Krugman called the Ryan Report a "con job."

Ryan's committee should have saved the huge effort of compiling these data and stuck to the obvious.  The obvious is that "poverty," by official federal definition, is a monetary problem.  "Poverty" means less than about $6000 of "income" (varying somewhat by family size) for a person for a year.  And the population defined to be in "poverty" already has about half the income it would need to get across the thresholds.  By the official definition, approximately 45 million people in the United States are deemed to be "in poverty."  Do a little math and you reach the obvious conclusion that, by the official definition, "poverty" can be completely cured in the United States by the expenditure of about $150 billion per year.  And yet we are spending more than five times that, some $799 billion per year, only to have 45 million people still in "poverty."

I don't know that it would end the debate over "poverty," but that debate would certainly be fundamentally transformed by the simple device of converting about $150 billion per year out of the $799 billion into cash grants that are in a form that is allowed to count in the measure of "poverty."  Given the vast level of spending, there is absolutely no excuse for not spending the first dollars in a way to eliminate "poverty" as we have officially defined it.

Meanwhile, the Ryan Report continues substantially to buy in to the idea that everyone deemed to be "in poverty" by federal statistics must be somehow going through some real deprivation.  Only if you get all the way to the appendices at about page 200 do you find out that "consumption and income are not strongly correlated. . . .  [and] families in the bottom 20 percent often consume far more than their income."  But they make no attempt to draw out what this means -- namely that there are large numbers of clearly non-poor people included in the official "poverty" statistics, such as advanced-degree students with student loans and fellowships, 20-something slackers supported by their parents, and early retirees consuming savings.  When is someone going to look at those things to determine how distorted these official numbers are?  That would have been a far more valuable exercise than what Ryan's committee has produced.

How Is Raising The Minimum Wage Going To Help This Guy?

On Monday nights I have a somewhat longer subway ride home than other nights, and on an express train that goes several minutes between stops.  And thus last night I found myself one of the recipients of an unusually long request for money from a young man with a sad life story. 

Now, granted that you can't take everything that these guys say at face value.  Still, some things you can tell by observation.  For example, he was in his twenties, and he was not taking good care of himself.  The initial pitch was pretty standard fare ("I'm homeless and hungry and really need your help.")  But that pitch didn't garner a single contribution from what was a fairly full car.  So after going the length of the car and back with his cup, and with plenty of time to the next stop, he proceeded with a monologue about his life's travails -- how his mother had abandoned him at a young age, how he had been abused for years in the City's foster care system, how he had then been mistreated in the shelter system, and finally, how we had no idea how hard it was for him to get out here every night and work the subways to try to get some scratch.  

Of course, that last pitch didn't really support the immediate aim of getting contributions -- Even if somebody gave him a relatively large contribution, it would only mean that maybe he could take tomorrow off; it wouldn't mean that he could stop working the subways.  To achieve that, he would need a job.  And here's the problem:  This is a guy who, in his current state, is very, very difficult to employ.  I can say with high confidence that in the huge Manhattan business community of major employers -- banks, financial institutions, law firms, accounting firms, publishers, advertising agencies, and on and on -- there is no job for this guy.  Even McDonald's would be an extremely tough sell.  He needs a bottom-of-entry-level job where you learn that you have to show up and look presentable to get paid.  Maybe a bodega; maybe a delivery service; maybe laborer at a construction site.   His hope is that some small, struggling business that can't hire anybody better will take a big risk on him.

"Taking a risk" is really the key concept.  It's not about some abstract concept of marginal productivity exceeding his wage.  As an employer, this guy could very easily cost you money.  He is highly likely to have a history of drug use.  He could fail to show up on the day you have no one else; or he could steal from you; or he could fake an injury.  This guy needs to find someone willing to take those very real risks.  And that means being given the right to sell his labor cheaply enough to induce someone to do it.

This is exactly the guy who needs a way to find an exit out of his current poverty trap.  He needs to get started now in order to have any hope of moving up over time.  Now, how is raising the minimum wage going to help him?  It's just a fantasy to think that guys like this are suddenly going to make $10 or more per hour because the government has decreed that to be the wage that must be paid.   Such a decree will only keep this guy from ever getting on the first rung of the ladder.  The last thing that an owner of a bodega or a delivery service is going to risk is a Department of Labor investigation over minimum wage violations.  Just an investigation would quickly put such a business under.  The higher you raise the minimum wage, the more certain you make it that this guy is condemned to continuing his life of begging on the subways or the equivalent.  Drug dealing, anyone?

Meanwhile, the guy is getting plenty of other "help" from our City's many well-intentioned "helpers."  He admitted in the monologue to having received foster care and homeless shelter services.  Of course, those things came with "abuse" (he didn't say whether physical, psychological, sexual, or other; maybe all of the above).  And since he did not appear emaciated and was clearly together enough to ask for what he can have for the asking, it's hard to imagine that he does not receive food stamps and Medicaid.  Although he didn't put it in these words, the real takeaway of his monologue was that all those things just add up to a trap that leaves him abused and with begging on the subways as his best option to get any money to actually spend.

Of course, we are in the process of doubling down on the suite of policies that got this guy into his spot.