The Catastrophic War On Poverty

Fifty years ago, Lyndon Johnson launched the so-called "War on Poverty," and that anniversary has brought forth a number of recent assessments from both left and right.

I do make a practice of calling out government failures of many sorts, and certainly there are plenty to keep a person busy.  But could there possibly be anything approaching the catastrophe of the War on Poverty?  For example, just a few days ago I pointed to the substantial number of deaths resulting from the government's automobile mileage standards, and from delayed approvals of new drugs.  But still, most people are able to find and buy a satisfactory automobile; and many new drugs do eventually get through the pipeline and improve people's lives.  Government involvement in education has driven up the cost of college and burdened large numbers of young people with outrageous debt; but still, large numbers of young people do manage to get good educations and move on to productive lives.  Similar things can be said about government involvement in other areas, from agriculture to health care to energy --  everywhere the government's involvement has been a major negative, but somehow most individuals manage to get around the obstructions and muddle through.

And then we come to the War on Poverty.  The government declared the War in 1964.   Here is some rhetoric from Johnson's 1964 State of the Union message:

[O]ur joint federal-local effort must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists—in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks or in migrant worker camps, on Indian Reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas.  Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.

In the same year the government adopted a definition of "poverty" that makes poverty status turn on a particular level of annual cash income for a given family size.  Thus, by the government's own definition, "poverty" is purely a cash problem.  The government has then proceeded to spend fifteen or twenty or more (depending on how you count) trillions of dollars in a supposed effort to fix the "poverty," a number that is a multiple (approximately triple) of the amount that by the government's own definition would inherently completely end this purely cash problem.  And what has occurred?  The number of people in "poverty," as defined and measured by the government, has almost doubled.  It is an almost unimaginable disaster.

If you don't know that the number of people in "poverty" has almost doubled, it is probably because the government normally publishes its "poverty" statistics as a rate, that is, the percentage of the population that finds itself in "poverty" at any given time.  The figure you may have seen is the Census Bureau's "poverty rate," currently running at around 15+%.  Wikipedia has a helpful chart of Census Bureau "poverty" numbers from 1959 to present.  When they came up with the "poverty" definition in 1964, one of the first things they did was calculate what had happened to "poverty" as defined in the years immediately before.  And they calculated that the "poverty rate" had just gone down from about 22% in 1959 to about 15% in 1964.  With the start of supposed War, the previous rapid decline in the poverty rate abruptly ended.  Since 1964 the reported rate has drifted down to as low as about 11% at times, but right now is very near the same 15% where it was on the day the War began.  That's bad enough.  But the missing piece, of course, is that the population of the country has increased from about 192 million in 1964 to almost 320 million today.  And thus has the number of people "in poverty" gone from about 27 million in 1964 to about 47 million today.

And yet anti-poverty spending is currently running about $1 trillion per year if you count all expenditures at federal, state and local levels.  If you think about it, it's almost impossible to conceive of how you could spend that much money only to see the number of people in poverty double.  If you just passed the money out as cash, by the very definition the poverty would be cured; indeed, it would only take about a third of the money.   Instead, the main strategy is to pass out in-kind handouts -- public housing, food stamps, other nutrition programs, clothing programs, energy assistance, Medicaid -- and count none of it in the measure of "poverty."  And thus we get the worst of all possible worlds.  For an expenditure of double or triple what would be needed to end the poverty, we place the "beneficiary" population in the insulting and demeaning position of being able to consume only what their government overlords allow.  Would you rather have a smaller apartment and buy a car?  Too bad.  As a healthy twenty-something, would you rather forgo the lavish Medicaid health benefits and take a trip to California?  Tough luck.  A trillion dollars later -- and another trillion every year, year after year -- the supposed beneficiaries feel like they are still poor, and with good reason. 

Is it possible to defend the government's record on this issue?  I would say it can't be done with a straight face, but incredibly numerous leftists have used this 50th anniversary occasion to try.  For an example, check out this remarkable article by Dylan Matthews from January 8 in the Washington Post, titled "Everything you need to know about the war on poverty."  To show that the government anti-poverty programs are somehow working, Matthews first declares the government's own cash-income measure "completely meaningless."  This of course is the measure that the government has used to sell the gullible public on the anti-poverty spending in the first place.   Then Matthews shifts over to discussing something called the "supplemental" poverty measure (SPM), never mentioning that that is a new gizmo just come up with by the Obama administration in November 2012 to blunt criticism of the previous poverty measure, or that the SPM purports to measure "poverty" not as absolute deprivation, but rather as relatively low income, such that no amount of increased income for the poor can ever reduce the rate to near zero.  (Check out this article from Mickey Kaus at the Daily Caller on November 16, 2012 titled "MSM falls for "New coke" poverty con.")   Under the new measure, according to Matthews, "when you take government intervention into account, poverty is down considerably from 1967 to 2012, from 26 percent to 16 percent."  Fifty years and twenty trillion dollars, and with the poverty rate up from the 15% starting point no matter which way we count, let's just move the goal posts to wherever we like and declare success! 

Of Course The VA Hospital System Is Failing

Some time ago I had occasion to represent a movie studio for a number of years, and in that context I came to learn of something in that business that they called the "fifteen picture rule."  The rule held that it was difficult if not impossible for one studio successfully to produce more than about fifteen pictures per year.  Many had tried, only to meet with failure for one reason or another -- either they just couldn't meet their production goals, or they would find themselves producing a lot of expensive flops.  The rule was really a reflection of the limits on the time and attention of the top management talent needed to put together all the pieces that it takes to make a major movie.    When the Japanese electronics giant Sony wanted to enter the Hollywood film business in a big way, it tried to get around the rule by buying two studios, Columbia and Tri-Star, thus having two management teams.    Although they made more than fifteen pictures, they still were not a success at it.

Well, if a major movie is about a $100 million project, and the federal government is about a $3.5 trillion per year project, then we can think of the federal government as having undertaken to make the equivalent of about 35,000 movies per year with one top management team.  What is the chance that this can work out well?  Actually it's worse than that, because the chief executive of a movie business devotes nearly all of his time to the business of making movies, whereas the chief executive of the federal government starts out devoting half or more of his time to politics rather than operations -- speeches, fund raisers, press conferences.  Then there's meeting with foreign leaders and being commander in chief of the armed forces.  In the best of circumstances, how much time do the President and his top team have to devote to the actual operations of the domestic programs of the government?  And finally, add to this mix having a guy as CEO who has never shown the slightest interest in the domestic operations side of the job.

Actual socialist governments that try to take on the job of running a whole economy deal with the fifteen picture limitation by devoting their limited time and attention to the things they deem most important.  Inevitably that turns out to be the military and some form of secret police or palace guard to prevent revolutions and coups.  No time left to figure out how to make housing or food?  Too bad, the people can starve.  Think Cuba or North Korea for a current example.  In the old Soviet Union they had enough talent at least for a while to run a top-flight military, secret police (KGB), and a premier Olympic sports program.  That's about where they ran out of focus.  In the United States, with a huge capitalist system (thousands of independently-operating top management teams) we can generate a vast gusher of tax revenue for the government.  With that they can accomplish the task of mindlessly passing the money around, but no way can they  successfully run thousands of programs.

So now we have a massive VA healthcare bureaucracy in the classic government mode, where nobody at the top has any time to ride herd on them and there is no possibility of outsize rewards for anyone for making sure that the job gets done right.  What could possibly go wrong? James Taranto at Best of the Web has the following from vox.com:

According to internal emails later acquired by CNN, VA managers in Phoenix created a secret wait list in an attempt to hide that 1,400 to 1,600 sick veterans were forced to wait months to see a doctor. Even worse, top-level management supposedly knew of and defended the practice.  Besides the secret list, the Phoenix VA hospital already provided a different, official wait list to DC that allowed VA higher-ups to verify that patients are being treated in a timely manner (within 14 to 30 days).  But Phoenix's secret wait list supposedly avoided federal oversight with an elaborate scheme in which officials shredded evidence that some patients were taking months to be seen. What's worse, if someone died while waiting for an appointment due to the secret wait list, Phoenix officials would allegedly discard the name as if the fatal error never happened.

And that, it appears, is just the tip of the iceberg.  Taranto notes that the American Legion is tracking "issues with scheduling practices" in up to 18 states.  I'll confidently predict that by the time this is over it will be 50.  And do you think for a minute that our government's top management is doing any better job getting real performance out of the Department of Agriculture, or Education, or Energy, or HHS, or Labor, or Commerce?  All of these are out-of-sight out-of-mind at the moment.  And thus we give the bureaucracy $1 trillion per year to spend to alleviate poverty without making a dent in poverty.

The socialist delusion just will not die.  Even as the VA scandal breaks, Vermont plows forward with its in-the-works "socialism in one state" single payer health care scheme.  Here is a gushing, glowing write-up yesterday from MSNBC.  The word "bold" appears at least half a dozen times.  They're sure this will work because they hired a really, really smart "Harvard economist" (William Hsiao) to design it.  And with one central payer, the administrative savings alone will be huge!  

[Hsaio's] team found that if doctors and hospitals could submit claims to one central payer instead of dozens, the administrative savings alone would cut health care costs by 7% over 10 years. 

Well, Professor Hsaio, with no private property North Korea has done away with the enormous expense of having lawyers like me to define property and contract rights.   Why haven't those administrative savings brought it prosperity?

Perhaps the people from MSNBC should read Michael Totten's piece in the current City Journal, describing the Cuba existing today just outside its tiny bubble zones reserved for tourists.  It's not just that the buildings are falling down and there is nothing to eat.  Here's Totten's description of where Cuba's once touted health care has gotten to:

As for the free health care, patients have to bring their own medicine, their own bedsheets, and even their own iodine to the hospital. Most of these items are available only on the illegal black market, moreover, and must be paid for in hard currency—and sometimes they’re not available at all. Cuba has sent so many doctors abroad—especially to Venezuela, in exchange for oil—that the island is now facing a personnel shortage. “I don’t want to say there are no doctors left,” says an American man who married a Cuban woman and has been back dozens of times, “but the island is now almost empty." 

The Latest In New York's Rent Regulation Follies

In the never-ceasing quest of the New York progressive to achieve perfect economic fairness between and among all people, one of the prime policy tools is the so-called "affordable housing"  program.  The required article of faith is that the government can make housing plentiful and "affordable" to all by decreeing that it be so.   Eighty or so years into the game and with the most expensive housing prices in the country to show for it, the faith remains unshaken.  In fact, Mayor de Blasio if anything is leading a revival.

But of course, as usual with these things, nobody thought about the unintended consequences.  Lately, this has been getting humorous.

Because of the way the "affordable housing" programs have been set up, it turns out that over time there are more and more instances of people living in the same building, and in very comparable apartments, yet paying wildly different rents, sometimes one a multiple of another.   A rent regulation system that initially applied to entire buildings has become subject since the 90s to gradual deregulations that proceed one apartment at a time; and new "affordable housing" requirements put about 20% "affordable" apartments into many new buildings that otherwise are priced at the top of the market.

Add to this mix that today in Manhattan we have rather a super-heated apartment rental market, in substantial part the result of the shortage caused by rent regulation, affordability requirements, and restrictions on development.  Ordinary one-bedroom apartments in most neighborhoods rent for at least $3500 per month, two-bedrooms for $5000 per month, and apartments with anything special can go for substantial premiums above that.  The landlords and developers have noticed that they can get the premiums by installing so-called "amenities," often using space that previously went empty, like the basement and the roof.  Popular amenities include gyms, children's party areas, and roof gardens.

And now -- I know you'll be shocked -- it has started to be noticed that many landlords and condo associations who install the amenities make them available to the market rate tenants, but not to the rent-regulated and "affordable" tenants in the same building.   Grumblings about this have been around for several months, but got a big play this past Sunday on the front page of the Real Estate Section of the New York Times, in an article titled "What's Next, a Bouncer?", subtitle: "Rent-Regulated Tenants Excluded From Amenities." 

The article is mainly a series of quotes from rent regulated tenants complaining of being treated like "second class citizens."  It won't surprise you to learn that the tenants and buildings in question are not scattered around the city, but rather all but one are on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  This is ground zero of political correctness and gentry progressivism, and also squarely within the New York 10 Congressional District, justly famous for combining the most efforts in the country to combat income inequality with the highest income inequality of all districts.   The buildings at issue include the Windermere at West End Avenue and 92nd, Stonehenge Village at Central Park West and 96th, 230 Riverside Drive, 40 Riverside Boulevard, and so forth.  In a neighborhood where you will be very hard pressed to find any apartment with a bedroom renting for under $3000 per month, the rents of two of these people are given as $1250 and $1107; a third is described as "rent-controlled," a special program with different rules where the rent (not given) is likely to be under $1000 per month.  

You might look at these people and say, they have really lucked out in life.  Each is getting several thousand dollars a month in free housing value, courtesy of some combination of the taxpayers, their landlord and their neighbors.  They are entitled to stay and keep that deal until they die.  Shouldn't they be counting their blessings?  Well, you don't understand the exquisite sense of entitlement of the Upper West Sider.  Here is the rent-controlled Ms. Sarah Denby:

"It’s ridiculous to have a gym here that I can’t use,” said Sarah Denby, who lives in a rent-controlled one-bedroom with her husband, Walter Brotman, a building resident for 60 years. “At one point I got so mad: I can store the bike in the bike room but I can’t have a key. I have to return it right away or the doormen freak out. They absolutely flip out. They just besiege me."

Oh, did we forget to mention that her building (230 Riverside Drive, which is a condominium) has 24-hour doormen, an amenity that costs her neighbors at least about $250,000 per year, none of which could possibly be covered by her rent?  Market one-bedroom rentals are currently available in the building at $3100 and $3300. 

You'll be glad to know that the local politicians have sprung into action to correct these terrible injustices.  Bills have been proposed in both the City Council and State Legislature to penalize landlords who provide less than equal access to amenities to the rent-regulated and "affordable" tenants.  Sponsors include Council members Mark Levine and Corey Johnson, and Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal.  But here's my question to you esteemed lawmakers:  If access to these gyms and gardens and storage areas is to be opened up to the "second class citizens" of New York, why only to the likes of Ms. Denby, who already is getting a $2000+ per month gift of discount housing courtesy of the taxpayers and her neighbors?  Why not also to all the less fortunate hardworking citizens who have no access to the rent-controlled apartments and live in relatively cheap but remote market rate units in deep Brooklyn and the Bronx?  In any kind of "fair" world, aren't those people equally or even more entitled than Ms. Denby to access to the gym at 230 Riverside Drive?

And while we're on the subject of the rent regulation follies, here is a report from yesterday's New York Law Journal on a decision handed down Monday from the Manhattan Housing Court by Judge Sabrina Kraus in a case called RSP 86 Property v. Sylvester.    It seems that the landlord decided to try to evict Mr. Sylvester from his rent-regulated apartment on 86th Street using one of the difficult-to-implement grounds, namely a claim that the apartment was not Mr. Sylvester's "primary residence."  The court denied the application, finding that the 89-year-old Mr. Sylvester had lived in his 900-square-foot, $1090 per month apartment (market rent would be $3500 - $4000) for some 45 years, had been registered to vote there all that time, received mail there, and "has deep roots in Manhattan."  Are you sympathetic?  Other facts mentioned are that he "spends most of his time" "wintering" at a condo in Florida and "summering" in East Hampton.  Also, that his "cars" are registered in Manhattan.  Now, I know that Jerry Seinfeld has multiple cars in Manhattan, but not a lot of other people, including many quite wealthy people, can afford that kind of luxury.

We keep thinking that we can achieve perfect fairness by government decree, but somehow the harder we try the farther we seem to be from the goal. 

Government Motors' Killing Of 13 Is A Small Part Of The Problem

A few days ago General Motors agreed to pay a $35 million fine to the U.S. Department of Transportation as a result of alleged "ignition switch defects" that are claimed to have caused 13 deaths and 42 crashes.  Expect numerous other regulators and prosecutors to pile on in coming weeks and months.

Well, US DOT, who owned GM when all these deaths were occurring?  In substantial part, that would of course be the U.S. government.  Agents of the same U.S. government then waited a barely respectable 5 months or so after the government sold its final stake in December 2013 to announce this settlement.  But didn't the problem occur on the watch of the U.S. government itself?

A long article by Bill Vlasic in the New York Times on May 17 traces the timeline of the story, and essentially accuses GM's in-house legal department of a long-running cover-up.  It's the usual Times narrative of the greedy corporation hiding safety problems to avoid having to pay settlements all while the innocent die.  According to Mr. Vlasic, GM had a "wall of secrecy on the switches," ultimately cracked by a combination of lawyers for injured plaintiffs and brave government investigators.  Somehow Vlasic manages to write the whole long article without once mentioning that the government was the largest owner of GM during most of the time in question, and even the majority owner of GM during some of the time in question.

Here's the timeline:  In approximately 2006 GM made some major changes to the ignition switches in its Chevy Cobalts -- changes that may have caused the problem.  It then conducted a series of investigations of the switches from that time through and including 2013, but according to Vlasic maintained its "wall of secrecy" during the whole stretch.  Meanwhile, in July 2009, as a result of the GM bankruptcy, the government came to own some 61% of it.  That stake was reduced to about 26% in 2010, 19% in 2012, and ultimately to zero in December 2013. 

So the government was the largest beneficiary of the cover-up, and sold out just before the problem came to light.  How exactly does it get to maintain its status as some kind of innocent bystander, let alone have its investigators claim to be brave sleuths bringing wrongdoers to justice? 

The real news, of course, is that these 13 deaths are a very, very small part of the government killing large numbers of people and getting a free pass from all concerned.  And no, I'm not talking about military campaigns.  Consider, for example:

• Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, or CAFE.  Since 1975 the government has set ever-increasing levels of mpg fuel economy that car manufacturers must achieve.  The current standard for cars is an average of around 30 mpg.  The way to achieve that standard is to make your cars somewhat smaller and somewhat lighter -- in other words, more dangerous when someone gets in an accident.  J.R. Dunn at the American Thinker in 2011 summarized studies from the likes of the Harvard School of Public Health, the Brookings Institution, USA Today, and the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration, which showed a range of estimates from about 41,600 to 124,800 excess deaths over a thirty-five year period (1975-2010) resulting from the CAFE standards.  Suddenly the 13 ignition-switch deaths at Government Motors pale into insignificance.  So what's our next move?  Why, of course, to increase the CAFE standards to an average of 54 mpg.  This increase was announced by President Obama in August 2012 and is already in place and scheduled to take effect by 2025.  Hundreds of thousands will die, but don't worry, this will help us to "address global climate change."
• The FDA.  The mission of the FDA is supposedly to make sure that our drugs are "safe and effective."  In practice, they are obsessed with the idea that even one person might die from taking an approved drug, and don't care one whit how many hundreds of thousands of people die while waiting year after year for an approval to come.  According to this report from the Independence Institute, prior to 1962 statutory revisions giving the FDA increased authority, the average time from filing to approval of a new drug was 7 months; more recently it has been around eight years.  Various studies estimate the number of deaths due to this "drug lag" in the hundreds of thousands -- a huge multiple of the number that may have been saved by keeping unsafe drugs off the market.  As just one example, tens of thousands of deaths have been attributed to the FDA's multi-year delay in the 1970s and 80s in the approval of "beta blockers" to prevent second heart attacks.  And then there is the FDA jihad against "off label" marketing -- that is, selling a drug that has been approved as both safe and effective for treatment of a condition that was not the condition for which the FDA approved it.  There is no legitimate health reason to restrict off-label marketing; this is about putting a higher priority on preserving the privileges of the regulators than on the lives and health of the people. 

To come up with other examples of the government killing large numbers of people, you only have to think about it for a few minutes.  How about the current VA scandal, where vets were put on waiting lists and kept there without treatment until they expired?  Or the government's promotion of the "low fat" diet over several decades, now starting to be recognized as a major cause of obesity.  Or the collateral damage of the drug war.  The government's current campaign to take cheap energy and electricity away from the poor hasn't gotten too far yet, but has the potential to kill many hundreds of thousands, if not millions.  So overall, while I'm a little upset that the government is getting a free pass on the 13 GM deaths, that's really the smallest part of this problem.

New York: Will We Get A More Real Budget?

In an article several days ago, "Not A Good Week For New York -- But It Could Have Been Worse," I looked at de Blasio's newly released budget and the new teachers contract, and noted that the two didn't seem to add up.  Where were the retroactive raises being hidden?

[U]nder any honest accounting, if you committed to that today, wouldn't you have to accrue the whole liability today even though you won't be paying for years? . . .  So where are you hiding these pay increases, including the retroactive ones?

Turns out that new Comptroller Scott Stringer had the same questions.  The New York Times reports the story today, "High-Power Tug of War Over Teachers' Deal," buried rather deeply at page A23. 

 [C]ity [C]omptroller, Scott M. Stringer['s] . . . team . . . discovered basic accounting problems with the deal.  In a series of extraordinary weekend meetings that started with an evening summit at Gracie Mansion, Mr. de Blasio and his senior aides pushed back at Mr. Stringer’s critique, . . . arguing that their deal was in compliance with standard accounting principles.  But Mr. Stringer insisted the administration had violated those principles, which have governed city finances since the 1970s, by spreading out the liabilities for certain back wages over several years, rather than booking the costs up front.

Result:  there will be a $725 million "adjustment" to the accounting for the deal, to bring the costs of the retroactive raises into the current fiscal year instead of spreading them over the years in which they are expected to be paid.  Here is the press release issued jointly by de Blasio and Stringer reflecting the agreement.  Key quote:

In order to ensure that the city’s financial accounting reflects a preferred approach, the Mayor and Comptroller have agreed that certain expenses now shown over the four-year plan will be presented as Fiscal Year 2014 costs.

That leaves two issues unaddressed by both the press release and the Times article:  (1) Is the current year budget going to be adjusted to put in this new expense?  and (2) What about all the other retroactive raises that de Blasio is about to agree to and thought he could put in out years where nobody would notice them?

The whole incident is extremely discouraging in showing de Blasio as totally willing to hide known expenditures in out years so that spending on political paybacks can be maximized in the current year.  I'll give the same advice to de Blasio today as I gave to new Newark mayor Baraka yesterday:

If you view the role of government as to spend as little as possible to accomplish its core functions, then Newark [New York} can resume a path to growth and success.  But if you regard the government's role as to spend as much as it can get away with to please and pay off the people who put you in power, then Newark's [or New York's] decline will continue and accelerate.

And meanwhile, among what may well be many other problems that I don't know about, it is clear that the pension projections in de Blasio's budget are wildly optimistic.  That has the effect of both deferring the problem and hiding it from public view.  Sadly, it is hard to see how we are not setting ourselves up for a period of decline. 

Newark Elects A Mayor

While New York enjoys the services of its new Mayor Bill de Blasio, just across the river in New Jersey, the largest city, Newark, elected a mayor yesterday.   It appears that Ras Baraka has prevailed over his opponent Shavar Jeffries.

I put Newark firmly in the category of the "basket case" cities.  Sitting right near the middle of one of the largest and most prosperous metropolitan areas in the world, Newark still has managed to find itself in a state of decline and financial crisis for decades.  The population, which peaked at 442,337 in 1930, was down to 277,140 in the most recent (2010) census.  Needless to say, if you are a basket case city, then somehow you are required to double down on the policies that have brought you decades of failure.  Newark is not an exception.

Some suggest there has been a modest recent renaissance in Newark under just-departed Mayor (now Senator) Cory Booker.  Steve Malanga of the Manhattan Institute analyzes that claim in a May 9 WSJ op-ed here.   He points out that the seeming progress of Booker's early years as mayor has largely been lost back in the more recent few years.  Murders declined from  over 100 down to 67 by 2008; but then they were back to 111 in 2013.  Unemployment fell from 9.4% when Booker became mayor to 7.4%, but now is back to 11.9%.  Newark's regression has occurred while New York has continued to prosper -- notably including areas heavily populated by African Americans that had previously suffered economically.  In Newark there are a few new office buildings downtown -- but even Detroit has that, and in the case of Newark it is hard to attribute new business arrivals to anything other than massive state giveaways to buy a few corporate relocations.  For example, according to nj.com here, Panasonic moved its North American headquarters to Newark in 2013 after New Jersey agreed to a $102 million "Urban Transit Hub" tax credit for the company.  For the $102 million, Panasonic pledged to create some 200 jobs over the next ten years -- that's almost $500,000 per job!

This race was nominally non-partisan, but no Republican would waste time trying to compete.  Jeffries was the moderate.  Baraka is most commonly described as a radical progressive.   Charles Upton Sahm in the Daily Beast on May 5 called him "a firebrand whose politics of racial resentment seem out of date many places in 21st-century America, but still resonates in Newark."  Sahm quotes an unnamed "prominent business owner" as saying "This guy is as radical as they come . . . .  He makes de Blasio look like Ronald Reagan."  Baraka's web site is rather short on specific policy proposals, but an idea of where he's coming from can be obtained from his past actions on the City Council.  For example, on his attitude toward charter schools, Sahm reports:

Thousands of children are on wait lists to get in charters and Baraka insists that he supports them as part of the overall system. But he introduced legislation in the city council in 2013 to place a moratorium on the opening of any new charters and voted against nine of 10 charter school lease agreements.

Needless to say, support of city unions, and particularly the Newark Teachers Union, was an important factor in the Baraka victory.

Well, I still wish Newark luck with this new guy.  But here's my advice to him.  If you view the role of government as to spend as little as possible to accomplish its core functions, then Newark can resume a path to growth and success.  But if you regard the government's role as to spend as much as it can get away with to please and pay off the people who put you in power, then Newark's decline will continue and accelerate.