Please Take Note: Argentina Has Defaulted

Having covered many times the Perils-of-Pauline saga of the Argentina debt crisis (for example, here, here and here), it is appropriate to take note that Argentina has now officially defaulted on is so-called "exchange bonds."   Holders of the exchange debt were supposed to receive a payment on July 30, and Argentina deposited the money with Bank of New York Mellon, but orders of a federal judge in Manhattan prevented BNYM from distributing the money to the bondholders unless Argentina also paid holdout creditors from previous issuances, which Argentina was not willing to do.  On July 30 Standard & Poor's announced that Argentina had defaulted; and subsequently the International Swaps and Derivatives Association declared that Argentina's failure to pay had activated the credit default swaps on Argentine debt.  See New York Times Dealbook summary here.  That's about as official as it gets.

A roundup here from Fact Check Argentina notes that Argentina continues to maintain that it has not defaulted.  Their theory is that the deposit with BNYM ought to be good enough, even if the bondholders didn't get the money.  Obviously, S&P and ISDA are not buying it.  Meanwhile Fact Check Argentina notes that the latest tactic of Argentina's lawyers from Cleary is to blame the court-appointed mediator, Dan Pollack, for failing to achieve a settlement.  Without knowing who offered what, it's hard for me to lay blame, but I will note that Pollack is a very respected guy in this business.

The whole saga of the bonds is of course a great distraction from what is happening in the underlying Argentine economy, where every kind of bad policy (crony capitalism on steroids, wild monetary expansion, exploding inflation, high trade barriers, subsidies for many basic services) continues to wreak havoc.  Here's a roundup from the Economist on June 27.  It seems that Argentina's economy has entered recession, based on 4Q 2013 and 1Q 2014 economic shrinkage -- in other words, that had already occurred well before the bond default. 

Many of Argentina’s problems are familiar. Inflation has plagued Argentina for much of the past decade; it still grew by an average of 5.6% from 2005-2013. Exchange and trade controls have long made it hard to get hold of primary materials, stifling production. But whereas in the past Argentina could maintain growth by propping up the peso and consumers’ purchasing power, falling foreign-exchange reserves mean it can no longer afford to do so.

Is the bond default even a negative for Argentina's economy?  If it is, it's a very small part of the problem.  Indeed, if it has the effect of imposing even a little discipline on the populist vote-buying culture of Argentina's political class, it might even do some good.

Which Are We For, Hospitals Or Condos?

Readers who have thought that the official position of the New York Progressive is to support hospitals and oppose condos have been in for a couple of recent surprises.  Is there a unifying principle?

As to just where you may have gotten the idea that a right-thinking Progressive should support hospitals and oppose condos, perhaps it was from the de Blasio campaign.  If your memory is short, check out the photos at this post from last August, showing de Blasio campaigning with Susan Sarandon here in the West Village in opposition to the new condo development under construction on the former site of our local hospital, St. Vincent's.  The signs read "Save Our Hospitals" and "Hands Off Our Hospitals." 

Meanwhile, out in Brooklyn, at least four hospitals remain in some stage of death throes.  Long Island College Hospital either has or has not finally done a deal to turn into a glorified emergency room and have the rest of the site developed into housing.  Interfaith just survived death with a last minute infusion from the State to enable it to exit bankruptcy (for the moment).  And at least two other hospitals are reported to be in serious financial trouble.  So perhaps we should all be relieved that Methodist Hospital in upscale Park Slope is proposing a substantial expansion to bring its facility up to top modern standards.

Not so fast!  On Wednesday July 30 an organization called Preserve Park Slope filed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the zoning change that would enable the hospital to expand.  Here's a link to their website.  The basis for the suit:

“The process to secure approval of these variances has been conducted with complete disregard to key elements of the law, including proper environmental review and recognition of the 2003 re-zoning of the area,” said Andrea Stewart, a member of Preserve Park Slope and a petitioner in the lawsuit.

And as to opposing condos, I wouldn't be so sure of that one either.  New York has seen two great periods of the creation of top-end multi-family owner-occupied housing.  One is right now, and the previous one was a few generations ago in the 1920s.  Of course all right-thinking people are horrified by the current wave of wildly priced high end construction.  But how about those from the previous period, now known as the grandes dames of Park Avenue, West End Avenue, and Riverside Drive, among others?

The answer is, notwithstanding occupation by the super-rich, these now-iconic condos (and co-ops) must be preserved!  Indeed, after a long campaign by landmarking activists, the blocks of upper Park Avenue from 79th Street to 91st Street were just designated as a landmark district in April.  Other sections between 62nd Street and 79th Street were already landmarked, so the new designation means that almost the entire stretch of Park Avenue between the midtown office district and the emergence of the railroad viaduct from its tunnel at 95th Street is now landmarked.

So what is the unifying principle?  Forget the whole hospital/condo thing; that is just incidental to the NIMBYism of the moment.  I suggest this, from my "About" page:

[T]he current built environment is optimal and all attempts to change it in any way must be opposed at all costs.

Why Is Haiti So Poor?

I would suggest that any discussion of how to alleviate world poverty, or for that matter "income inequality," needs to begin by looking at actual countries out there to see what works and doesn't.  Granted, it's not possible to do a controlled laboratory-type experiment in the field of economic policy.  On the other hand, 190 or so countries all trying somewhat different things can generate a lot of data.

So there we have Haiti, sitting just a few hundred miles southeast of Miami, and it's about as dirt poor as you can get.  Here is a Wikipedia site that aggregates per capita GDP data for all countries of the world for 2013 from the IMF, the World Bank, and the CIA.  Note that, particularly for smaller and poorer countries, the numbers can differ substantially from one source to another.  But Haiti is right near the bottom no matter which source you choose:  $1315 according to the IMF; $1703 per the World Bank; and $1300 per the CIA.  (By comparison, the U.S. is at approximately $53,000 in per capita GDP in all three rankings.)  And, what's more, there have been no recent improvements in the Haitian economy, and there are few prospects for improvement in the immediate future.  Surely there is something those Haitians could sell to the United States to make some money!  How is it even possible for them to maintain this level of poverty?

Perhaps, influenced by the terrible post-colonial history of sub-Saharan Africa, you are thinking of a hypothesis that Haiti is poor because all black-dominated countries are poor.  Well, as Einstein famously said (actually, this may be apocryphal, but the quote is widely attributed to him), "a single experiment can prove me wrong."  In the case of the hypothesis that all black-dominated countries are poor, there are multiple counterexamples that prove it wrong.  Number one is Bermuda (55% black), which is at the very top of the income distribution of countries, ranking way ahead of the United States in the CIA ranking (at $86,000) and just behind the U.S. per the World Bank (at $53,030).  At about 85% black population, we have the Bahamas (IMF - $32,036; WB - $23,102; CIA - $32,000) -- this country is right on the tail of places like France, Japan and the UK.  Even among countries that, like Haiti, are well above 90% black in ethnic mix, we have Botswana (IMF - $16,377; World Bank - $15,675; CIA - $16,400) and Barbados ($25,181 - IMF; $15,566 - WB; $25,100 - CIA).  These countries are solidly middle-income, and are considerably wealthier than, for example, Mexico and China.  So no, black-dominated countries are not inherently poor.

As hypothesis number 2, there is the theory that Haiti is poor because it is being exploited by the evil rich capitalist countries.  According to data here from Wikipedia, Haiti's exports in 2012 were $801 million -- around [$80] per person in a country of about 10 million people, which is rather pitiful.  It seems that the rest of the world is just staying away, perhaps because Haiti doesn't have much to sell -- but it's hard to call that "exploitation."  By comparison, close neighbor Barbados, with a population of only about 250,000, had 2012 exports of almost $500 million -- about 25 times Haiti's level on a per capita basis.  Yet it is a middle income country.  Somehow the evil exploiters are failing to keep Barbados down.  My own view would be that trade makes you rich, not the reverse, but I'm just trying to consider all the hypotheses here.

Now, might I suggest hypothesis number 3, which is that endemic corruption and the absence of the rule of law make it nearly impossible to invest in or trade with Haiti.  Let's just look at a few pieces of data:

•   In an International Finance Corporation project in 2012 called Doing Business, Haiti was ranked 187 out of 189 countries surveyed in terms of ease of starting a business.
• How about tourist hotels?  Lots and lots of international capital is available to build them, and most every Caribbean country has used that capital as a source of good jobs for the people.  Trip Advisor here lists some 47 tourist hotels in Haiti.  Does that sound like a lot?  They list 102 in Barbados -- and Barbados has only one-fortieth the population!  So Barbados has more than 80 times the number of tourist hotels per capita.
• According to Atlas Media here, Haiti's main exports, such as they are, are t-shirts, knit sweaters, other garments, and scrap iron.  Notable for all of those is that these are things that do not require an expensive factory to make.  Or to put it another way, nobody but nobody builds an expensive factory in Haiti.  Why not?  The labor is really cheap -- couldn't you make a lot of money?  The simple answer is, you could make a lot of money if the government wouldn't steal it.   QED -- If you make a big investment, nobody trusts the government not to steal it.  The nice term for that is "absence of the rule of law." 
• According to the Center for Global Development here (2012), the so-called "formal sector" of the Haitian economy accounts for only 10% of employment.  That's another amazing statistic, which says that the large majority of all business activity is essentially hiding from the government.
• Transparency International in 2008 ranked Haiti the 4th most corrupt country in the world.

And finally, let us consider foreign aid.  Haiti is perhaps the all-time champ of foreign aid.  If foreign aid worked to raise a country up out of poverty, then Haiti would be a rich country.  The Center for Global Development (no enemies of foreign aid) here has a history of foreign aid in Haiti, including the statistic that by 1970 "foreign assistance was 70% of the Haitian national treasury revenues" and proceeded to increase from there: "aid levels rose to $35.5 million in 1975."  And "by 1991, Haiti received $380 million from abroad."  And so on.  But the aid thing really exploded after the big earthquake in January 2010.  A compilation here has the total of gifts and pledges to Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake at $9,337.8 million.  That's about the equivalent of a full year's GDP for Haiti!  But the title of this report from Foreign Policy In Focus in January says it all:  Haiti: billions in Aid, Pennies in Progress since Earthquake.  You really need to read the whole thing to see how one government-imposed obstacle after another has kept Haiti from moving forward.  

Barbados?  They basically don't get any foreign aid.

UPDATE August 8:  A reader points out that $800 million of exports for 10 million people is $80 per person, not $800 as in an earlier version.  It has been corrected.

The Campaign To Preserve Obamacare Turns To Fraud

In the previous post I relied on my own memory of the extensive public debate in 2009/10 for the proposition that the limitation of the Obamacare subsidies to policies purchased on exchanges  created by a state was a very intentional feature designed to coerce the states into creating exchanges.  Today, various web denizens have been going out and doing some homework as to exactly who said what when. 

My favorite comes from Jonathan Gruber.  For those who don't know him, he is a professor at MIT who is often described as the "architect" of Obamacare (and, for that matter, also of Romneycare in Massachusetts before that).   Gruber is known for having worked closely with the White House in coming up with the structure of Obamacare, and then moving over to work with the Congressional staff to come up with the language.  Gruber gave a speech on January 18, 2012 describing how the Obamacare structure works to coerce states to set up exchanges.  Here's some video from the speech:

Here's the key quote:

I think what’s important to remember politically about this, is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an Exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits. But your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you’re essentially saying to your citizens, you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country. I hope that’s a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these Exchanges, and that they’ll do it. But you know, once again, the politics can get ugly around this.

Others have additional video of Gruber at other times making similar statements to the same effect.  Well, that was then and this is now.  Earlier this week on MSNBC, now striving for a favorable decision in the D.C. Circuit Halbig case, Gruber said of the limitation of subsidies to state-created exchanges:

It is unambiguous this is a typo. Literally every single person involved in the crafting of this law has said that it's a typo, that they had no intention of excluding the federal states.

With multiple videos of himself saying exactly the opposite of what he is saying now, you would think that this guy would be too embarrassed to show his face in public.  Instead he's taking the offensive.   Of course, he is uttering these bare-faced lies to give some cover to the courts in the hope that they will endorse hundreds of billions of dollars of taxes and spending not approved by the Congress.  And also to fool those of the people who were not paying attention back in 2009.  Some might call this "fraud."   Elsewhere in the MSNBC transcript, Gruber now calls the reading of the statute that the subsidies are only available on the state-created exchanges "criminal" and "insane."  Silly me -- I had somehow thought that even when a statute contains an obvious typo (like referring to the year 3015 instead of 2015) that they still need to send a correction bill back through Congress and get it passed to fix the thing.   Don't they enact a "technical corrections" bill a few months after every complicated new tax law goes into effect?

So are the courts really going to rule in the end that the statute says exactly the opposite of what we all know it says and thereby give the IRS the ability without Congressional authorization to impose hundreds of billions of dollars of taxing and spending on the economy?  So far, every Democrat-appointed judge to rule on the matter says that's how it works.

In case you aren't reading the stuff, I've collected a couple of examples of the statist thinking on why it's OK to do away with our republican form of government in favor of rule by the whim of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.    For example, here is Andy Koppelman in the New Republic:

If the argument is ultimately accepted by the Supreme Court, then about 4.5 million low- and middle-income workers in those states who are already receiving assistance from Obamacare will abruptly lose their benefits—not because they did anything wrong, but because this destruction furthers the political war. Their personal disasters are not unintended side effects of the litigation, but the very goal that the challengers are seeking.

Or here is Tim Jost blogging at the American Constitution Society (a little irony in the name there?) site:

Should the plaintiffs ultimately win, millions of Americans will lose their premium assistance and probably their health insurance. The individual health insurance markets may collapse in several states. This is mean-spirited litigation, intended to deny health insurance to those who Congress intended to help. It is to be hoped that in the end the courts will interpret the law as it was meant to be interpreted, and uphold the IRS rule. 

So in this world view, the most important value is that favored members of the elite get to pass out  taxpayer-funded "benefits" to those officially designated as poor and downtrodden.  The bureaucrats get to decide how much money they get to pass around and how much taxes to impose, with Congress cut out of the loop.  Having "low and middle income workers" "lose their benefits" leads to "personal disasters," and seeking such a result is "mean-spirited."  There's no particular room here for any value to be placed on our Constitution or on maintaining our republican form of government.  And do these people see any problem in having the IRS -- formerly thought to be a "non-political" agency -- lead the charge on this hyper-partisan attempt to rescue a failing statute not supported by one single Republican?  Not that I have seen.

The incredible thing is that 36 states continue to resist a statutory structure that had been thought to be so coercive that they would be forced to crumble immediately.  More than a few able-bodied Americans find the whole idea of the government paying for their health care to be insulting and demeaning.  I sure do.  

Obamacare And The Demise Of The Constitution

The first I learned about the U.S. Constitution was back in high school in the 60s, where in addition to getting introduced to the document itself we read some excerpts from the Federalist Papers.  I'm pretty sure we read Madison's very famous Federalist 45, from which the money quote is:

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected.

In my high school, nobody mentioned that during the New Deal the federal government had slipped free of the bonds of this tedious limited powers thing, largely (but not entirely) through a Supreme Court case called Wickard v. Filburn.   I figured that out when I got around to learning constitutional law in a semi-serious way in law school eight or so years later.  I say "figured it out" because it was never put quite that way in Larry Tribe's con law class.  Hey, of course the Constitution has had to be adapted to the modern world; now can we please move on to 43 cases applying footnote 4 of Carolene Products?  Funny, Madison et al. somehow thought this limited powers thing was pretty important.  How old fashioned!

Well, even without limited powers, we do still have the bedrock principle that to be binding on the people a law must be passed by both houses of Congress and either signed by the President or passed by two-thirds majorities of both houses over his veto.  Or has that principle also been declared inoperative?  Actually, that principle has been under severe attack as well, again going back to the New Deal.  First it was the profusion of "agencies," some of them not even answerable to the President (try to find that one in the Constitution), and then the even greater profusion of statutes turning over more and more authority to one or another agency to add to the laws by creating "regulations."  But really only in the last few years has it become the fashion for Congress to pass multi-thousand page statutes taking over vast swaths of the economy, and where the statutes despite their length omit most of the operative provisions and delegate the task of coming up with those to unelected agency bureaucrats.  Dodd-Frank and Obamacare are the two archetypes.

And so we have Congress in passing Obamacare putting in provisions designed to bludgeon the states into participating by making spending subsidies available and imposing taxes for non-compliance only in those states that cooperated by setting up their own insurance exchanges.  That was followed by 36 of the 50 declining to do it and daring the federal government to step in.  And in the next move the IRS declared by regulation that it could impose the taxes and disburse the spending on its own as a supposed "interpretation" of the statute.   This is now taxing and spending amounting to some hundreds of billions of dollars over short time periods, trillions if you go a little longer. 

In saying that the provisions of Obamacare were "designed to bludgeon the states into participating," I am mindful of the proposition that attributing an "intent" to Congress is a perilous thing, and I am also mindful of the limitations of statutory history.  On the other hand, I was around for this one.  Obamacare was the number one subject of the public discourse in this country in the year plus period up to its passage, and right in the middle of that discussion was the question of how Congress would attempt to make reluctant red states go along.  Newspapers, opinion journals and web sites were filled with discussions of this topic.  Surely, it is not possible for anyone alive then to claim to have forgotten.

Reading the dissent of Judge Edwards in the D.C. Circuit, I would summarize his position as "the IRS can do whatever it takes to make this statute work." 

Appellants’ proffered construction of the statute would
permit States to exempt many people from the individual
mandate and thereby thwart a central element of the ACA. As
Appellants’ amici candidly acknowledge, if subsidies are
unavailable to taxpayers in States with HHS-created
Exchanges, “the structure of the ACA will crumble.” Scott
Pruitt, ObamaCare’s Next Legal Challenge, WALL ST. J.,
Dec. 1, 2013. It is inconceivable that Congress intended to
give States the power to cause the ACA to “crumble.”

So according to Judge Edwards, the IRS can impose hundreds of billions of dollars of taxing and spending on the people when those things were never voted by the Congress, on the ground that the IRS has broad discretion to implement its view of how to make the statute work better.  If this is right, then I guess Congress could have just passed a statute saying "Congress hereby declares that there shall be affordable health insurance available to all; IRS to implement."  And with that, the IRS can impose whatever taxes and spending it wants without further authorization.

Here's the most discouraging thing of all:  It appears that how a judge regards the constitutionality of these IRS actions is a completely partisan thing.  In the two Obamacare decisions that came out yesterday (D.C. Circuit here and 4th Circuit here), the four judges appointed by Democratic presidents all voted to uphold the IRS actions, while the two judges appointed by Republicans (both in the D.C. Circuit) held that the IRS had exceeded its authority.  Will that perfect partisan divide continue?

Again, it's two visions of how the world should work.  If your vision is that the world should be run by unelected, neutral "experts" who can impose perfect fairness in human interactions by writing enough regulations, then I guess you think what the IRS did is just fine.  If you think that the functioning of our republic through the mechanisms spelled out in the constitution has great importance, then you will have a very different view.

LIRR Unions Gradually Putting The Railroad Out Of Business

Last week the big news was that the Long Island Railroad workers were going to begin a strike over the weekend.  Then, as reported everywhere in the press, at the last minute Governor Cuomo swept in and "brought the two sides together."   A deal was reached.  Monday morning the trains were running, with a new deal, including raises of 17% over 6 1/2 years.  This deal bridged the gap between previous offers of 17% over 7 years from the railroad, and 17% over 6 years from the union.  What statesmanship!

As usual, all the reporting was about the drama of the threatened strike and the relief of the settlement.  Here's an example from Andrew Tangel in the Wall Street Journal on July 17:

"Everybody seems to have won something, and the governor won the most because he brought about the settlement," said Ken Margolies, who teaches labor relations at the Worker Institute at Cornell University.  Riders were relieved.  "I'm very happy," said Jerry Noble, 61, a sales representative from Suffolk County and a LIRR commuter who said he would have had to drive to Queens and then take a subway to work if a strike had shut down the railroad.  It wasn't immediately clear how much the agreement might cost the MTA in added labor expenses.

And as usual, they miss everything important.  The big story about the LIRR is the pitifully low productivity of its labor.   Farebox revenue pays only about 35% of operating costs per MTA 2013 data here, and undoubtedly that ratio is about to go down with the new contract.  This is a considerably lower ratio than even on the New York MTA's other main entities, the New York City subway and the Metro-North railroad.  Why?  I can't find any real information about this in any major press stories.  But then there's a site called The Long Island Railroad Today, run by a guy named Patrick O'Hara.   There, they actually do some real digging.

Back in April, and also last October,  O'Hara did in-depth stories on some of the LIRR work rules and how they affect the operations and costs of the railroad.  You really need to read some of this stuff to believe it.  I suggest reading both articles in full.  Here are some excerpts from the October article:

"Co-mingling" is probably one of the most blatant ones.  As per a rule that has been on the books since the 1960's, if an engineer operates both diesel and electric equipment during the same shift, he or she is entitled to an entire extra day's pay.  So if an engineer that starts out on an electric run moves a diesel, even for a couple of feet, they get an entire extra day's worth of pay.  As you might imagine, the penalty pay resulting from this rule can be pretty staggering at times when the railroad is recovering from service disruptions or when a piece of equipment malfunctions.  . . .

Another example of these union work rules is a rule that has been on the books since 1924 and involves a crew doing something outside their normal assignment.  If an engineer operates a train that is other than his or her regularly assigned train, then that engineer can get an additional straight-time hour of pay for every hour spent operating that train. . . .

"Rule 24," that racked up an immense amount of overtime for a handful of mechanics at the Richmond Hill facility, and only the Richmond Hill facility, stipulates that the LIRR is required to fill all vacant work slots at the LIRR's main diesel facility regardless of weather or not the manpower is actually needed.  This archaic rule means that if an employee were to be away on vacation or out sick, the LIRR would have to get someone else to fill his place, even if that person would have to be paid overtime.  There have been multiple instances where mechanics have worked shifts as long as 32 hours straight (all the while getting time and a half or double time for their troubles) all because the spots had to be filled.  This rule netted several mechanics who work at "Rich Man's Hill"  almost three times their base salary.

These articles go on and on about this stuff.  So did the new contract achieve any meaningful reforms in these rules?  Here is O'Hara's comment from his latest article on July 17:

With this contract, however, there was no mention of any changes whatsoever in things like work rules or overtime practices, so the MTA has missed a big opportunity to make the LIRR more streamlined and efficient.

How could they possibly have let this opportunity slip by?  To be fair to them, it looks like their position was completely undermined by a mediation panel appointed by President Obama that, unbelievably, took labor's side on all the work rule issues.  From a Long Island source called Anton News on January 9:

President Obama’s three appointees sided, big-time, with the LIRR’s unions, when releasing its 51-page, non-binding report on the LIRR’s ongoing labor dispute. . . .  The LIRR management team’s bid to get the presidential panel to endorse any of its proposed work-rule changes also went nowhere, such as those governing staffing requirements at Richmond Hill, or ones that would make it easier to reassign LIRR track workers to undertake bridge and building maintenance.

I would rate this as total incompetence on the part of Obama and Cuomo. 

Meanwhile, in other LIRR news, work continues on the big project to bring Long Island trains into Grand Central Terminal.   When they really got started on this project back in 2008, the budget was $7.2 billion and the projected completion date was February 2015.  In the latest report (April 2014) the budget is $9.3 billion and for revenue service dates they give a range of September 2021 to September 2023.  That's right, after six years of work, and all the tunneling long since finished, they are actually farther away from completion than they were the day they started.

At The Atlantic here, Benjamin Kabak comments on the ridiculously high costs of building new rail transportation infrastructure in New York.  Our costs are double and triple the costs of building comparable facilities in European and Asian cities.  Again, the problem is ridiculously low labor productivity, driven by work rules.

If these were private businesses, they would be out of business by now.  As public entities, they continue operating, but for how long?  Not too much longer, if the likes of Cuomo continue to play for today's headlines and ignore the productivity problem.