Highlights From The 9th International Conference On Climate Change

So I'm just returned back here to Manhattan from the 9th International Conference On Climate Change, put on by the Heartland Institute in Las Vegas over the past three days.  It was a very impressive program, and Heartland deserves great credit for the tremendous organizational effort, let alone raising the money to mount the event.

Two things stand out as remarkable about this conference.  First, there was the high quality and great expertise of the presenters.  To a person, they were serious people making serious points.  And second, there was the fact that not one single scientist from the alarmist camp showed up to defend his or her position before this highly informed skeptical audience.  The second is really the more remarkable.  The event sponsors from Heartland stated repeatedly that they had invited numerous scientists from the alarmist side of the debate, but not one had agreed to show up.

Here's why I find that second fact so remarkable.  Being in the litigation business, I have had the chance to spend a lot of time thinking about how it is that juries of lay people get entrusted to decide disputes over complex matters about which they have little knowledge and no expertise.   But in fact this process of decision by lay people, if very imperfect, works remarkably well.  And here is the view I've come to: A lay person with no knowledge about a complex subject can get a very good idea of who's closer to right by asking himself one simple question -- Which side has the better answers to the other side's best points?   That proposition can then be extended outside the courtroom to arguments generally, including arguments about public policy.  The side that won't or can't answer the other side's best points, or that refuses to show up for debate, is demonstrating that its position has serious problems, even without saying anything.  If the answers were clear and obviously correct, someone would show up and give them.  So when one side refuses to do that, it is conceding that it has lost.

Another organization that I am associated with, the Federalist Society, long ago recognized the importance of being willing to go head to head with the very best that the other side has to offer, at least if you want your own ideas to advance and ultimately prevail in the public sphere.  For those who don't know much about it, the Federalist Society was founded in the 1980s with the idea of getting a hearing in the public sphere for conservative and libertarian legal thought.  From the beginning, the model of the Federalist Society has been to host debates where prominent speakers from the liberal or statist side are always given their full say.  For what I would say are obvious reasons, the Federalist Society, through its model of open and robust debate, has been remarkably successful in its goal of advancing conservative and libertarian legal thought. 

The alarmist climate science community has adopted exactly the opposite strategy.  Indeed that community has not been shy about using every method available to enforce strict orthodoxy and avoid debate.  Here is a small roundup I wrote in March.  Some of the techniques used by the climate community have included getting important media outlets to refuse to publish any work of dissenters, using positions as peer reviewers at prominent science journals to prevent publication of dissenting articles, bringing libel suits against dissenters, threatening criminal prosecution against dissenters, and launching ad hominem attacks against those who don't toe the line.  Well, I guess it's no surprise that anyone hoping to be in with this crowd would not show up at a conference put on by dissenters -- the orthodoxy-enforcers will end your career in a heartbeat.

The Heartland's conference website, linked above, has streaming video of all the presentations.  To highlight just a few of the more important points:

• Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace and now apostate, gave a keynote address on the morning of July 8.  Among the illustrations used in his talk were charts showing the lack of correlation of atmospheric CO2 with measured temperatures (1) on geologic time scales (600 million years), where periods of CO2 concentrations many times higher than today have also had ice ages,  (2) during the thermometer era of about 1880 to present, where the first run-up from about 1910 to 1940 preceded the extensive use of fossil fuels, and (3) for the last approximately 18 years, when temperatures have flatlined while CO2 continues to increase.
• On the morning of July 8, a panel on Climate Change and the Hydrosphere addressed the influences of ocean on the climate.  Speakers included William Gray, William Kininmonth and Roy Spencer.  A point that was implicit in all the presentations was finally stated explicitly in the question and answer period:  If world temperatures (as measured by the highly accurate satellites) have remained flat for the last 18 years, and if you believe that CO2 exerts a strong warming influence on temperatures, and if CO2 has increased substantially during that period, then don't you have to concede that there is some natural, non-anthropogenic force that is sufficient to completely offset the warming effect of the CO2? 
• Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute gave the luncheon keynote address on July 8.  He reviewed the tremendous corrupting influence resulting from the fact that one source, government, provides essentially all funding for climate science research, while at the same time having its own agenda of expanding its own power.  In a situation where all climate models that predicted large warming over the last 18 years have now been falsified by observational data, he called upon climate scientists to reject the hypotheses represented by these models, as a matter of basic scientific ethics.
• In a panel later in the day on July 8, the blogger Tony Heller (nom de blog Steven Goddard) presented some of his data showing adjustments of the observation record from land-based thermometers being adjusted by the government in recent years to lower earlier temperatures and raise more recent ones.

And there was lots more.  I highly recommend to all to view as much of the material from this conference as you have time for.  For anyone on the alarmist side of the debate, I ask you, what are the answers to any of these points?

What's The Right Answer For New Jersey's Public Pensions?

Most of the "blue" states, and a few of the "red" ones, have unsustainable defined benefit pension plans for public employees; but the problem has been well hidden from the voters by the politicians who put these things in place.  By the time the problem gets fully recognized, the hole is really deep.  And don't expect any help from the public employee unions in getting out of the hole -- they will gladly bankrupt their state to fight for the last penny for the pensions.  Hey, that's their job.

The recent stock market run-up has temporarily rescued many of these plans from immediate crisis, so the issue has somewhat receded from the news.  But not in New Jersey, home of some of the worst problems.  There the pension issue has been at the heart of the recent budget battle between Republican Governor Christie and a Democrat-controlled legislature.

While New Jersey's plight may not be the worst among the states (Illinois and California come to mind), its situation is pretty bad.  Here is a roundup of the official asset and funding status of New Jersey's various plans from the website ballotpedia.  It seems that New Jersey governors and legislators have several times adopted the expedient of skipping required pension contributions in order to close what otherwise would be budget deficits.  Recently, only 32% of the 2010 payment was made. This is a very good way to get your pension plan into a death spiral.  The status per most recent official numbers is 64.54% of obligations funded, leaving $47.2 billion of unfunded liabilities.  This against a total state annual budget of $32.5 billion.

If you are interested in inter-state comparisons, ballotpedia cites data from Moody's as ranking New Jersey 4th worst among the states in the ratio of unfunded pension liabilities to annual state revenue (137.2%) and 8th worst in the ratio of unfunded pension liabilities to state GDP (13.0%).  Of course, that's if you believe the official numbers for pension liabilities, using discount rates of about 8%.  A group called State Budget Solutions (SBS) has helpfully done a recalculation of New Jersey's liabilities at a very conservative interest rate of 3.2%, and they come up with unfunded liabilities for New Jersey of $171.7 billion (cited in the ballotpedia article).  That would make the unfunded liabilities a good 5.3 times annual state revenue, and the funded ratio of the plans more like 32%.

Christie put through what was labeled as a big pension reform in 2011, described here in a Wall Street Journal article by Josh Dawsey and Heather Haddon on July 1.  Under that reform supposedly the state was going to contribute around $2.25 billion per year to gradually catch up.   Well, according to SBS here, Christie's just-signed budget includes only $691 million for the pensions.  According to Christie, revenue came in below projections, and there just isn't enough money for the pension catch up funding.

Needless to say, the public employee unions are up in arms.  They promptly filed a suit and sought an injunction, but a state judge has already given preliminary approval to Christie to do what he is doing.  The solution offered by the unions and by prominent Democrats in the state legislature has been to raise the tax rate on high earners yet again.  The legislature passed that, but Christie vetoed it.

But the question is, what is the right answer here for New Jersey?  The Democrat/union proposal of higher taxes may work for one year, but New Jersey is highly likely to be in a pension death spiral situation already.  Unless the stock market performs miracles, the supposedly required pension contributions will keep increasing year after year, probably faster than the economy can hope to keep up.  In this kind of situation, can you increase the taxes on the same people year after year and expect them to stick around?

I submit that if you should find yourself in a Ponzi scheme, the best thing that can happen is to have it crash as quickly as possible.  And the biggest mistake you can make is to keep feeding it as you dig deeper and deeper into a hole from which you can never get out.  This would imply that it is actually a sensible strategy to quit making the pension contributions, thereby accelerating the crash.  The crash will come when there is still a large productive economy in New Jersey, and as the crash approaches, the public employees will be forced to the negotiating table to accept retirement contributions at a sustainable level.  Defined contribution plans anyone?  

What Is The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time? -- Part II

Just under a year ago, on July 19, 2013, I asked the question, What Is The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time?   After going through a number of candidates (e.g., the Tasaday, Piltdown Man) I concluded:

[G]oing 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.

The world temperature data tampering fraud is the fraud whereby the official U.S. government guardians of temperature data, namely NOAA/NCDC and NASA/GISS, systematically adjust older temperatures down and newer temperatures up in order to introduce spurious warming trends into the data and thereby support the narrative that "global warming" is occurring.

Some people who are following and reporting on this story are still avoiding the use of the word "fraud."  I am not.  

When I wrote the July 2013 post, this story was still struggling for attention.  A very energetic guy who blogs at Real Science under the name Steven Goddard (actual name: Tony Heller) was writing post after post comparing recent temperature data on government websites to previous versions, and noting example after example of downward adjustments of the past and upward adjustments of the more recent data.  However, some had criticized his work for occasional inaccuracies or errors.  Joseph D'Aleo of the icecap.us website had also entered the fray with several examples of unexplained adjustments.  But otherwise the story has been largely quiet in the intervening year.

That all ended a couple of weeks ago.  Over a period of a few days, several wide circulation sites, and even a television news show, featured some of Goddard's work.  It had lead position on Drudge for a day.  Steve Doocy of Fox and Friends had a segment based on Goddard's work where he stated "NASA scientists fudged the numbers to make 1998 the hottest year to overstate the extent of global warming."  Other sources picking up the story included the Telegraph, Breitbart, and realclearpolitics.

Next, politifact decided to weigh in.  They went to the usual suspects of the "mainstream" climate community, including the director of NASA/GISS, Gavin Schmidt.  These usual suspects engaged in the usual obfuscatory handwaving, attributing various of the adjustments to seemingly legitimate things like station moves and changes in the time of day at which thermometers are read.  Politifact fell for it, rating Doocy's Fox News piece "pants on fire."

But by this time the story was getting so much play that lots of people were starting to pay attention.  A guy named Paul Homewood of the website notalotofpeopleknowthat was intrigued enough to pick one station at random in Texas and do a deep dive into the data. His resulting post on June 26 is titled "Massive Temperature Adjustments at Luling, Texas."  His conclusion:

[T]he adjustments have added an astonishing 1.35C to the annual temperature for 2013.  Note also that I have included the same figures for 1934, which show that the adjustment has reduced temperatures that year by 0.91C.  So, the net effect of the adjustments between 1934 and 2013 has been to add 2.26C of warming.

Then Joe D'Aleo weighed in with some data from Maine.  In 2013 he had downloaded NCDC annual temperature data for Maine.  Then NOAA earlier this year announced a transition to a new so-called CLIMDIV version of its USHCN data for Maine, so D'Aleo downloaded that for comparison to the version he had downloaded last year.  How did the two compare?  While the old data showed no warming in a record going all the way back to 1895, suddenly there was a large warming trend.  And where did it come from?

The new CLIMDIV data was supposed to resolve issues with recent station moves, transition to airport, to new MMTS technology and UHI and siting issues with improvements late in the record, we were very surprised to see the biggest changes to the early data set.  1913 went from the warmest year in the record to the middle of the pack with a cooling of close to 5F!.

So kindly, Dr. Schmidt, can you explain exactly how a change to the time of day at which temperatures are read has now made 1913 5F cooler in Maine than it was previously?

On June 28 the highly respected Judith Curry of Georgia Tech weighed in with a post titled Skeptical of skeptics: is Steve Goddard right?  I have previously noted that Curry, once a member of the climate science in crowd, has become increasingly unaccepting of the unscientific antics of the climate science community.   Her conclusion after reviewing Goddard, Homewood and others:  

I infer from this that there seems to be a real problem with the USHCN data set, or at least with some of the stations. . . .  As far as I can tell, NOAA has not responded to Goddard’s allegations. Now, with Homewood’s explanation/clarification, NOAA really needs to respond.

On June 29, there was a lengthy post by Anthony Watts of wattsupwiththat, titled NOAA's temperature control knob for the past, the present, and maybe the future - July 1936 now hottest month again.  Anthony did some looking at yet more data, and every place you look the story comes up the same.  For example, Anthony asked a guy named Bruce at Sunshine Hours to gather data on Kansas and plot it on some maps, which then appear in Anthony's post.  Example of the results:

Bruce also plotted some other maps of Kansas, for July 1936, and for July 2012. Note how in July 1936 the Tmax temperature are almost all adjusted cooler, and in 2012, most all Tmax temperatures are adjusted warmer.

Go to Anthony's post for the maps with station by station data.  Anthony then asks:  Whatever happened to just using actual measured data?  There is no justification for this. 

But at the end of his post, Anthony continues to give these people the benefit of the doubt:

I don’t believe this is case where somebody purposely has their hand on a control knob for temperature data, I think all of this is nothing more than artifacts of a convoluted methodology and typical bureaucratic blundering. As I’ve always said, never attribute malice to what can be explained by simple incompetence.

Sorry, but I'm not buying it.  Here are my problems:  (1) Adjustments to the raw data are everywhere, and literally all of them make the past cooler and the present warmer.  (2) There are literally tens of billions of dollars at stake in having a record of increasing temperatures.  Every scientist working in the "climate science" area is dependent on continuation of government science funding in this area totaling as much as $10 billion per year.  Then there are additional massive subsidies for things like green energy.  (3) They won't release all the underlying calculations and computer code behind the adjustments.  My conclusion: There is nothing innocent about this.  This is the IRS deleted emails scandal multiplied by a factor of 100.

Politifact put a series of questions about this to NCDC and Watts has also posted their response here.  The heart:  "our algorithm is working as designed."  No backup, no code, no detailed justification of each change.  And good luck trying to get that.

Repeat:  The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.

Free Speech For Me, But Not For Thee

If you haven't been following it, you should make yourself aware of the current effort going on in the Senate to amend the First Amendment to give governments (federal and state) the complete right to suppress the political speech of outsiders and challengers seeking to oust incumbents and change the status quo.   The proponents wouldn't put it in quite those terms, but I think that is a fair description.  Here is a summary dated June 2 of what is going on from Hans von Spakovsky and Elizabeth Slattery on the Heritage Foundation website.

An effort is underway in the Senate to amend the Constitution to restrict free speech by allowing Congress to limit fundraising and spending on political speech. A constitutional amendment proposed by Senator Tom Udall (D–NM) would grant Congress the power to regulate the raising and spending of money in elections. Supporters of this amendment claim that restricting the amount of money that may be spent on political speech and activity is not the same as limiting speech, even though “virtually every means of communicating ideas in today’s mass society requires the expenditure of money.”

Text of the proposed amendment, introduced by Senator Udall in May, would give governments the ability to limit the spending of their challengers right down to zero if they so desire.  They would have unfettered authority to set limits on:

(1) the amount of contributions to candidates for nomination for election to, or for election to, Federal [and State] office; and

(2) the amount of funds that may be spent by, in support of, or in opposition to such candidates.

Leaders of the Senate effort include majority leader Harry Reid and my own senator, the odious Chuck Schumer.  Von Spakovsky quotes Reid justifying the proposal on the basis that “the flood of special interest money…is one of the greatest threats our system of government has ever faced.”  Or here's the quote from Schumer: “It’s time for Congress to act—to reassert its role and protect the right of all Americans…without the risk of [laws] being eviscerated by a conservative Supreme Court.”

You might say that this effort is not going anywhere -- it will never get a two-thirds vote in the Senate, nor will it even come to a vote in the House. 

But meanwhile over at the U.S. Supreme Court a bare majority of five justices has the power to make the First Amendment into what Reid and Schumer want it to be just by deciding the next case.  And four of those votes -- the four so-called "liberal" justices -- are already on the court.  To judge from the dissents in recent cases, the four so-called "liberal" justices fully support the proposition that all expenditures supporting speech challenging the status quo are subject to limitation or even elimination at the behest of incumbents because such expenditures threaten corruption.   At the same time the same "liberal" justices see no issue of corruption in the government requiring the citizenry to turn their money over to those who then support the continuation and expansion of the power of the incumbents.

Am I being harsh in describing the mindset of our "liberal" justices?  You decide.  The Udall/Reid/Schumer amendment is specifically a response to the Supreme Court's 5-4 opinion, four "liberals" dissenting, in the Citizens United case in 2010.  The bare majority in that case upheld the right to unlimited independent expenditures by corporations and unions in the context of political elections.  Then we have today's 5-4 decision, four "liberals" again dissenting, in Harris v. Quinn, holding that Illinois could not force home health care workers to pay dues to the SEIU that would then be used to support the political campaigns of Democrats.  Ask yourself:  Which of these two cases involves a more direct and clear threat of rank corruption?

The endless and turgid 90 page dissent in Citizens United was written by now-retired Justice Stevens.  You get to the meat of it somewhere around page 68, where he raises what he believes to be a serious concern that independent expenditures by corporate entities are likely to be corrupting to candidates:

The insight that even technically independent expenditures can be corrupting in much the same way as direct contributions is bolstered by our decision last year in Caperton. . . . In Caperton, then, we accepted the premise that, at least in some circumstances, independent expenditures on candidate elections will raise an intolerable specter of quid pro quo corruption.

Far be it from me to say there is no potential for corruption in literally any aspect of the political process.  But I also think that fair-minded people would recognize that the big money independent spenders, whether the likes of the Kochs on the right or Soros and Steyer on the left, are in this for core reasons of ideology, and not to buy favors for their personal businesses.  Compare that to the SEIU, which is very much in the political game to get the government to compel people to become members against their will and pay dues they don't want to pay.  In the Harris case the government of Illinois directed that some of its money paid to health care workers be paid on to the SEIU, which then kept most of the money for itself and funneled a percentage of the money back into the campaigns of the Democrats who controlled the legislature.  Now read the dissent, this time written by new Justice Kagan, and see if you can find even a mention of the potential for corruption in that. 

These opinions are so long and complicated that no normally sane member of the body politic can actually understand them, even if you have the time to try.  But may I suggest that there is no making sense of them if you take at face value the assertion that the real concern is corruption of the candidates.  If that were the real concern, it would be front and center in the Harris case, and instead it is nowhere to be found.  But there is a unifying principle of the "liberal" approach, unstated but obvious, and that is this:  If we like the speech, then it should not be limited, even if the government is compelling someone to make it against his will; and if we don't like it, then the government must have the power to limit it, which of course it will then exercise.  And which speech do we like and dislike?  Simple:  We like speech that advocates maintenance of the status quo and the ongoing growth and expansion of government; and we don't like speech that opposes any aspect of the government or its ongoing expansion.

While Justice Stevens and other so-called liberals regularly railed against the potential corruption engendered by independent political expenditures, they seem to have no concern whatsoever about the government's ongoing enterprise to promote its own expansion with the use of taxpayer funds.  Would they really allow it to become illegal for anyone to push back? 

Watch Out For Rule By The "Smart"

A famous quote from William F. Buckley, Jr. is "I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University."  Boy did he have that one right.  The faculty of Harvard are genuinely "smart" in a simple sense of the term -- ability to solve a discrete problem, or a puzzle; ability to get a high score on an IQ test or an SAT test; ability to write a paper to get an A at Harvard.  How about judgment on big public policy questions?  Watch out!  What "smart" people also have is tremendous hubris that they have figured out everything important about the world, and that their solutions should then be imposed on everyone else through government power.

And thus we have something calling itself the Risky Business Coalition coming out this week with a big ad in the Wall Street Journal and a big report urging everyone -- not least the U.S. government through coercive means -- to take immediate and drastic action against fossil fuels to prevent "climate change."  Who are the people behind this?  The three co-chairs are seriously accomplished business people, self-made billionaires all, who undoubtedly meet any test of "smart" you could come up with:  former Mayor Mike Bloomberg; former Treasury Secretary and head of Goldman Sachs Hank Paulson; and Farallon Capital founder Tom Steyer.  As soon as you start looking at the details of this thing you realize how limited this category of "smart" is.  Bloomberg really was a pretty good mayor (given the alternatives), but he repeatedly showed himself completely subject to falling for every overhyped scientific fad without ever considering the underlying data.  (The anti-salt campaign anyone?  Trans-fats?)  Paulson was Treasury Secretary when the financial crisis hit and promptly got buffaloed into falling for every bailout request that anyone could think to make.  And Steyer?  Don't get me started.  And all three of these guys are serious private jet mega-users, who don't seem to have any comprehension that their behavior is exactly the opposite of what they want the government to force on everyone else.   Here is a Wall Street Journal compilation of several hundred trips made by Bloomberg's fleet of four private jets in just the four years from 2007 to 2010.  Did I mention that he is also a fan of private helicopters?

To someone like me who actually follows the data on this subject, the timing of this big initiative certainly seems odd.  Do these people, despite their undoubted brilliance and their many accomplishments, even know that temperatures have failed to rise for some 17 years now despite the ongoing increase of CO2 in the atmosphere?  Do they know that the models on which they and the government have relied to predict warming have been proved spectacularly wrong by the evidence of the real world? 

Or perhaps we should turn to the actual Harvard faculty to see where they are on this issue.  Those of you who did not have the honor of attending that august institution may not be aware that it is currently being consumed with the debate over whether the Harvard endowment should divest from all investments in fossil fuel companies.  Here's a roundup from the current issue of Harvard Magazine, with lots of links.  It would be hard to think of an institution with a bigger carbon footprint than Harvard, let alone the collective carbon footprint of its jet-setting faculty.  Back in April some 154 faculty members calling themselves "Harvard Faculty For Divestment" sent an open letter to the Harvard community calling for the divestment.  These signers are all undoubtedly really "smart," although if you look at the list you will find it remarkable how few scientists are on it, let alone scientists whose specialties have anything to do with climate.  The large majority are from the humanities.  But they just know that having the government force everyone but themselves to stop using fossil fuels is really, really important:

Our sense of urgency in signing this Letter cannot be overstated.  Humanity’s reliance on burning fossil fuels is leading to a marked warming of the Earth’s surface, a melting of ice the world over, a rise in sea levels, acidification of the oceans, and an extreme, wildly fluctuating, and unstable global climate.  These physical and chemical changes, some of which are expected to last hundreds, if not thousands, of years are already threatening the survival of countless species on all continents.  And because of their effects on food production, water availability, air pollution, and the emergence and spread of human infectious diseases, they pose unparalleled risks to human health and life.

Of course, not one of them indicates that he or she will cut his own carbon usage but one bit.  Nor will any one of them will support the use of some form of non-carbon-based energy that might actually work on a large scale, namely nuclear. 

At the Atlantic, Todd Gitlin, a professor at Columbia, wrote an article back in April supportive of the position of the Harvard activist faculty.  Here is the response of the first commenter:

Shorter version of this article:  Harvard activists tell worldwide poor to shiver in the dark, peasants.

Economic Prospects For New York

Most every night I see one or more taxpayer-financed ads run by the state of New York boasting that "New York is open for business."   The ads tout Governor Cuomo's program of tax free zones for business expansion, and claim that New York "is ranked No. 2 in the nation in private sector job creation."  Could this really be true?  The New York Post has an editorial this morning expressing extreme skepticism.

I've spent quite a bit of time looking today, and I can't find anything like the statistics that my tax dollars are paying to put on the television every day to fool the voters.  At the Manhattan Institute's Empire Center E.J. McMahon claims that New York private sector job growth badly lagged the national average in 2013, and he links to statistics released on June 19 by the New York State Department of Labor to back him up -- which they certainly appear to do.   Total employment for New York State up by 1.4%; for the United States up by 2.1%.  New York City slightly beat the nation with growth of 2.3%, but all the suburban counties lagged (Nassau/Suffolk +1.5%; Putnam/Rockland/Westchester +0.6%) and upstate things ranged from pitiful growth to actual declines (Binghamton -0.7%; Elmira -1.2%; Glens Falls -0.7%; Ithaca -2.0%; Syracuse - 1.0%).

Meanwhile the U.S. Conference of Mayors is out with a study of growth prospects of all U.S. major metropolitan areas from 2013 to 2020.   Here is the press release.  This was picked up today by the Wall Street Journal among others.  The study is based on analysis by economic consulting firm IHS Global Insight.   They rank the 363 metro areas from projected fastest growing to slowest.  The ten fastest are mostly in low-tax Texas, Utah and Florida.  Of the ten slowest, five are in New York:  Binghamton, Utica/Rome, Kingston, Elmira and Buffalo/Niagara Falls.  Here is a chart:

They project New York City to grow at just about the average of all American metro areas, which is pitiful given the ever-increasing predominance of the largest cities around the world as the places where everyone wants to live.

Meanwhile, on Friday Mayor de Blasio and Speaker Mark-Viverito of the City Council held a press conference to announce a budget deal for the coming (July 1 - June 30) fiscal year.  Here is the New York Times Report.  I cant find any written documentation of this as yet.  The summary is that last year they spent about $70 billion; in his May plan, de Blasio proposed to spend about $73 billion; and now that the City Council has weighed in, it's going to be about $75 billion -- a 7+% rate of spending increase when the rate of inflation is thought to be under 2%.  The basic role of the City Council in this process is to add spending for various feel-good initiatives that may or may not do anything useful:  $6.25 million to provide free lunches for every middle school student! (Poor students already got free lunches; so this is for the rich ones?)  $6.2 million to hire 200 new administrative aids for the police department!  etc.  Here is the New York Times take:

Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council Speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, have announced an agreement on a $75 billion budget that Mr. de Blasio said signaled a more compassionate era for New York City, with investments in public housing, expanded prekindergarten programs and summer jobs for youths, but with no tax increases or major cuts.

With no documentation, they continue to hide the big numbers.  Where are the retroactive raises for the teachers?  Even after the efforts of Comptroller Scott Stringer to bring some honesty to this process, it appears that only about $700 million of some $4 billion of retroactive teacher raises will be accounted for in the current year.  The rest will be deferred and hidden in future years.  And then there is the issue that the pension projections are laughable.  Not a word on that that I can find.  Hiding major fiscal time bombs in a way that would be fraud if you did it is what de Blasio and the Times refer to as "compassionate."

So we have a ball and chain of huge future obligations to drag down our economic performance for decades to come.  But as of now, it's still well hidden by politicians who continue to play for today's headlines.