In Government, Failure Is The Route To Success

For today, I'll stop harping on the fraud by which the "poverty" rate is kept intentionally high in order to sell the gullible public on yet more "anti-poverty" spending, and turn to another example of the same phenomenon.

If you had been around Manhattan for the last week in the run-up to the election, you would have seen that most of the campaign literature being distributed for local races stressed the same theme, which was the supposed need for more "resources" for our beleaguered public schools.  All of this literature came from Democratic candidates, substantially funded by the teachers union and other public employee unions.  In the case of my own household, although we had Republican candidates running for State Senate and State Assembly in our district (in most elections we don't), we did not receive a single piece of campaign literature from the Republican candidates -- they were that badly funded.

As just one example, consider the campaign of Rebecca Seawright, the Democratic candidate in the one semi-competitive race in Manhattan, previously covered by me in the article entitled "Can A Republican Win A Political Office In Manhattan?"  (Ms. Seawright ended up winning the race 65/32 over her Republican opponent.)  Here is an excerpt from her website giving her position on education funding:

As the mother of two public school kids and PTA mom, Rebecca has personally experienced the fallout from overcrowding in our city’s schools. . . .    Long-term, we need to invest in renovating existing schools as well as constructing new ones.  But as we set aside the space and money to build, we need to find a way to address the needs of our neighborhood’s children now, even if that means being a little creative.

In literally no campaign discussion that I can find was it mentioned that in New York we spend nearly double the national average per pupil on K-12 education.   I'll bet that not one voter in one hundred knows that fact. 

Meanwhile, for all that money, large numbers of the public schools are failing.  In an editorial this morning, the New York Post has some of the numbers:

At 371 schools, 90 percent of the kids — 90 percent! — aren’t making the grade. Altogether, that’s 143,000 students whose futures are at stake.

Prior Mayor Mike Bloomberg, to his credit, had a plan to deal with the failing schools by imposing some accountability:  he closed large numbers of them, while opening new ones with new management teams, and also encouraging a substantial expansion of charter schools outside the stifling union control. 

Now we have de Blasio.  His idea?  The failing schools just need some more money!  On Monday (November 3) de Blasio announced a new program -- called his "School Renewal Program" -- for additional spending on the worst public schools.  From Monday's New York Times: 

The new program will designate 94 of the city’s most troubled schools, including the Coalition School, as Renewal Schools based on a list of criteria including low four-year graduation rates for high schools and poor test scores for middle and elementary schools. Students at those schools will receive an extra hour of instructional time each day, teachers will have extra professional training, and the schools will be encouraged to offer summer school. The schools will also be given additional resources, with $150 million spread over two years, about $39 million for this school year and $111 million in the next.

Yes, it is the very worst failures among all the schools that are getting rewarded by the new gusher of money.  Seems like the idea is, if you just give the same incompetent people more money to do the exact same thing that they have been doing so far, they will magically overcome their failure.

The Post heaps completely appropriate scorn on the plan, calling it the "Teacher Protection Program."

Under this program, the city’s 94 worst schools will be shielded from any serious accountability for three years (and probably longer) while their students remain trapped without any real hope of escape.  After that, the program hints vaguely at possible changes. But the smart money holds that by then Team de Blasio will have brand new excuses to keep the failing schools going — and the kids inside trapped.

Well, if I were a principal of one of the second-hundred worst schools, I know the lesson I would learn from this:  If I can only fail the kids a little worse next year, I can get myself a few extra million too! 

Meanwhile, the voters keep getting tricked year after year into supporting the idea that if only the schools had a little more money they'd be fixed.  If only say 20% of us could learn that our schools already get double the national average, we could at least try to end this insanity.

Manhattan Election Roundup

Yesterday, there was a big Republican "wave" election.  You undoubtedly know that the Republicans took control of the U.S. Senate, made gains in the House, and took many governorships, even in very "blue" states like Massachusetts, Illinois and Maryland.  Here in New York, you may also know that the Republicans took control of the New York State Senate, which is something of an accomplishment in this very blue state.  

But I'll bet the question at the top of all of your minds is, how did the Republicans do in Manhattan?  I know I teased your curiosity about this subject with an article two weeks ago titled "Can A Republican Win A Political Office In Manhattan?"  If you read that article, you know that going into the election every single elected official at any level whose district covers any part of Manhattan was a Democrat.  Well, rest easy:  that has not changed.  But what's even more remarkable is how, even in this year where Republicans were cleaning up literally everywhere else, their existence is barely noticed here in Manhattan.  So I've put together a little compilation of the election results to show you just how lopsided this is.  The data come from the New York State Board of Elections.  When districts overlap into parts of Brooklyn and Queens, I've included just the data for the Manhattan part of the district.

U.S. Congress

District 7 (Lower East Side): Dem 78%; Rep 9.5%; Con 2%; Blank 10.4% (Blank beat the Republican!)

District 10 (my district): Dem 85%; Con 8%; Blank 7% (No Republican candidate!)

District 12 (East Side): Dem 76%; Rep 21%; Blank 3% (Good showing!)

District 13 (Uptown/Harlem): Dem 75%; Green 11%; Blank 14% (No Rep or Con candidate!)

State Senate

District 26 (Downtown): Dem 79%; Rep 14%; Blank 7% (Republican beats blank!)

District 27 (my district): Dem 80%; Rep 13%; Blank 6% (We had a Republican candidate!)

District 28 (East Side): Dem 72%; Rep 26%; Blank 3% (Good showing!)

District 29 (Spanish Harlem): Dem 78%; Rep 15%; Blank 8% (In Bronx portion, Rep got 4%)

District 30 (Harlem): Dem 88%; Rep 4%; Blank 8% (Once again, blank beats Rep!)

District 31 (Uptown): Dem 76%; Blank 23% (No Republican challenger!)

State Assembly:

District 65 (Lower East): Dem 76%; Rep 16%; Blank 7% (Not bad against the Speaker!)

District 66 (my district!): Dem 75%; Rep 12%; Progressive 7% (Rep beat Progressive!)

District 74 (Midtown East): Dem 79%; Rep 14%; Blank 7%

District 73 (Upper East): Dem 65%; Rep 29%; Blank 4%

District 75 (Midtown West): Dem 82%; Rep 13%; Blank 5%

District 67 (Upper West): Dem 85%; Blank 14% (No Republican candidate!)

District 69 (Upper West): Dem 79%; Blank 20% (No Republican candidate!)

District 68 (East Harlem): Dem 83%; Rep 8%; Blank 9% (Blank beats Republican again!)

District 70 (Central Harlem): Dem 88%; Rep 3%; Blank 8% (Blank beats Rep again!)

District 71 (Far Uptown): Dem 80%; Rep 6%; Blank 14% (Blank beats Rep yet again!)

District 72 (Even Farther Uptown): Dem 76%; Rep 7%; Blank 17% (See a pattern?)

District 76 (Way Upper East): Dem 65%; Rep 32%; Blank 3%

You can see that I saved the best for last.  The 76th Assembly District is the one I wrote up in that article two weeks ago asking if it was possible for a Republican to win any office in Manhattan.  That district covers some of the area where a Republican last held office on this island, over a decade ago.  The candidate, David Garland, was excellent, and the Democratic opponent was completely inexperienced and uninformed on the issues.  Well, Garland did break 30%, the only Republican in Manhattan to do that this year.

To summarize the rest of this embarrassing list, of 22 total races, the Republicans ran no candidate in five; in six others "blank" (meaning, the voter did not vote in this race) beat the Republican candidate.  Those 11 races are fully half the total.  Only one Republican in any race (Garland) broke 30%, and only three others broke 20%.  All of those were on the East Side.  On the West Side and Downtown, Republicans generally ran in the teens; in Harlem and far Uptown, under 10%.

Here's the message of Manhattan to Republicans: You may hold the majority of both houses of Congress, the large majority of the governorships and state legislatures, but here in Manhattan we find you so creepy that even if we can't stand our Democratic candidate we would rather leave our ballot blank than vote for you.   After all, we're a lot smarter and cooler than you are.  So smart and cool, in fact, that we don't even notice that we have the highest taxes and the biggest collection of progressive programs of any place in the country and all that we have to show for it is poverty way above the national average and the highest income inequality anywhere!

The Climate Scam, Fading Away

I have previously predicted that when the global warming climate scam finally dies, none of the perpetrators will ever be called to admit they were wrong.  It's just that nobody will mention the subject any more.  It will be like it never happened.  What used to be news every day in mainstream outlets will just quietly disappear.  In the most likely scenario, leaders of the climate apocalypse movement like Al Gore will just move on to some other end-of-days scare.

Actually, much of this is already happening.  On Sunday, the UN's IPCC announced the release of the latest of its climate reports, the so-called Fifth Assessment Report, of AR5.  Did you notice?  It's definitely getting lots less play than these things once got, even as they ramp up the scare rhetoric to higher and higher levels.  Look at them desperately trying to get somebody's attention.  For example:

Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems. Limiting climate change would require substantial and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions which, together with adaptation, can limit climate change risks.

Turn to the usual mouthpiece to broadcast these scares, the New York Times, and what do you find?  Yesterday's article has been relegated to page A8!  Just a tiny reference on page A1.  No charts, no pictures.  (In the on-line version there is the usual scam picture of power plant cooling towers giving off steam, as if that has something to do with global warming.)  Yes, the title tries to be frightening: "U.N. Panel Issues Its Starkest Warning Yet on Global Warming."  Yes, it's written by the usual enviro activist Justin Gillis.  Yes, it has some of the usual ridiculous scare lines:

Failure to reduce emissions, the group of scientists and other experts found, could threaten society with food shortages, refugee crises, the flooding of major cities and entire island nations, mass extinction of plants and animals, and a climate so drastically altered it might become dangerous for people to work or play outside during the hottest times of the year.

But relegated to A8?  What's going on here?

Actually, it's not too hard to figure that out.  The election is today.  And if you're following this at all, you know that the Democrats are taking some notable hits specifically tied to the administration's war on coal and other fossil fuels.  Number one coal state West Virginia, as recently as a decade ago the most reliably Democratic of states, has been turned completely red.  The Republican candidate (Capito), running for the seat held by Democrat Jay Rockefeller for 30 years, is up by 22 points in the most recent CBS/NYT/YouGov poll.  Previously West Virginia hadn't had a Republican Senator since the 50s; and now all of a sudden the seat is lock Republican and not even remotely competitive. 

And how about Kentucky?  The Dems seemed to have an attractive candidate in Alison Grimes, while Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was vulnerable as out-of-touch with constituents.  Well, Kentucky is a big coal state too.  Grimes has tried to claim she is "independent," but plenty of voters are smart enough to figure out that if you vote for Harry Reid as majority leader, you are voting to continue the war on coal.  The most recent polls have McConnell up by 8 and 9 points.

And West Virginia and Kentucky are just the start.  Multiple other swing states are under attack by the administration in its war on fossil fuels.  Pennsylvania is a mostly blue state today, but increasingly important in producing fossil-fuel energy.  Ohio is the archetypical swing state, not small in the energy business, and very much at risk of becoming more and more red.   Where West Virginia has 5 electoral votes and Kentucky 8, Ohio has 18 and Pennsylvania 20.  Without a doubt, the Times is paying attention to this stuff.

Also involved in the fade of the climate scam is that more and more people are realizing that putting the UN's plans into effect means consigning the poor to perpetual poverty.  Here's a great picture that recently appeared on Roy Spencer's web site:

Our President and his EPA (along with Gore, Kerry, and the UN) may be the last people on the planet to realize that the climate scam is over.  As the administration continues the war on fossil fuels, a number of states, most notably in New England, are at risk from blackouts if this proves to be a severe winter, a result of closure of coal power plants and inadequate gas pipeline capacity.  I don't wish you New Englanders ill, but you have cast the votes to put yourselves in this predicament.  Anyway, a couple of good blackouts in January, intentionally caused by stupid government policy, could go a long way to turning states like Maine and New Hampshire red too.  Let the games begin!

Halloween In Greenwich Village

Readers from outside New York may not be aware that Greenwich Village is ground zero for Halloween, certainly in New York and maybe in the universe.  The Gothamist website has a great collection of photos from the parade that took place in the neighborhood last Friday.  Here are a few examples:

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The illuminated building spire visible in the first picture under the skeleton's right hand is the new One World Trade Center.  It's just over a mile away, and can be seen from most everywhere in the neighborhood.  Its first tenant (Conde Nast, publisher of magazines including Vogue, Glamour and The New Yorker) moved in and opened for business on Monday November 3.

A few blocks away from the parade at our place, we had approximately 500 trick-or-treaters, requiring multiple emergency runs for more candy.  Many neighbors decorated their buildings to look appropriately spooky. 

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Overall, a great night to be in New York.

The New York Times Reviews Obamacare

Just a few weeks ago on September 30 I did a review of the current status of Obamacare, and now just last week the New York Times takes its own stab at the subject.  The Times' treatment, that appeared in the print version on October 27, was headlined "Is the Affordable Care Act Working?"  It consists of a small teaser on page A1, followed by two full interior pages of text, divided into seven articles, on pages A16 and A17.  Once again we illustrate that there are just two ways of looking at the world. 

In the Times, the first question they ask is "Has the percentage of uninsured people been reduced?"  Fair question, and it is indeed the issue on which Obamacare was sold to the public.  So the Times carefully cherry-picks some data to get the answer they want: "The Number of Americans Without Health Insurance Is Down by About 25 Percent."   Really?  They base that on what they call "five key surveys" recently taken, from Rand, Commonwealth Fund, Gallup, Urban Institute, and CDC.  Hmmm, only one of them is from the government, and that one is CDC rather than the Census.  What happened to the Census?  No mention here in the Times article that the Census has changed its methodology to make its numbers on percent uninsured no longer comparable to prior data.  Next, all five surveys only compare this year (2014) to last year (2013).  The CDC survey only shows the percent uninsured down from 20% to 18% -- that's only a 10% decline, not 25%.  In the four other surveys cited, the current percent uninsured is said to be 16%, 15%, 13% and 14%.  Should we dare to ask what the percent uninsured was back, say, just before Obamacare was passed, late in the GW Bush administration, or maybe back in the Clinton administration?  When  I researched those questions for the September 30 article, the answer (according to Census data) was that the percent uninsured was 15.4% in 2008, and 13.7% in 2000.  (When I attempt to confirm those numbers on the Census website today, I get a message that the data are "corrupted" and can't be displayed.  Should we be suspicious?)  The decline in uninsured from those numbers is little or nothing.  So is there an actual meaningful decline that can be attributed to Obamacare, or is this just the result of an improving economy, or is it the case of a store owner who conveniently raised his prices just prior to declaring a "sale"?  The Times doesn't choose to address that issue.

Well, assume that there has been a decline in the "uninsured" by something in the range of 10 - 25%.  How much of that represents people who are paying for it, and how much represents people who have newly been given "insurance" for free?  (Pardon my skepticism, but it's not clear to me why entitlement to free medical care qualifies as "insurance," other than that somebody wants to declare victory by having a statistic that the number of "uninsured" has gone down.)  It turns out again that the Times won't give us an answer to the question.  However, they give enough information to give strong reason to believe that most of the decline in "uninsured" comes from the Medicaid expansion. 

But a few trends are clear. Most notably, Medicaid expansion really mattered. States that expanded their programs saw a substantially larger reduction in their uninsured population than states that did not expand.

Or to put it another way, if you give away free medical care, people will take it.  Surely, you didn't need this 2000 page law if that was all it was going to accomplish.

Moving on, the Times' next question is "Has insurance under the law been affordable?"  And the answer is, "For now, dire warnings that the law would cause premiums for most people to rise sharply have proved unfounded."  Read the article, though, and you quickly realize that the Times measures the costs and benefits of the law by looking only at prices faced by consumers and treating government money as completely free and not part of the equation.  There's no mention at all of how much the government is paying out for the exchange subsidies and Medicaid expansion.  But lots of people get benefits of cheaper coverage!

Eighty-five percent of those who signed up during the enrollment period qualified for federal subsidies to help pay premiums. For those who qualified for subsidies through the federal exchange, the subsidies lowered the cost by 76 percent on average, according to the Obama administration.

So, did the law actually make the insurance less expensive, or did it just hide the cost somewhere in your taxes where you can't see it and quantify it?  In this whole huge report on the ACA, there's no mention, as Bloomberg News found back in September, "that "federal spending on Obamacare and related legislation has far exceeded anyone's estimates (or imaginations)." 

Turning to the part of the market where people actually pay for their insurance, the Times finds a mixed bag:  some prices up, some down, some markets with lots of competition, some without, some additional coverages but some increased deductibles.  Oh, it's just all so complicated!  Or another way of looking at it is that it's not really complicated at all.  We know from the government's efforts in higher education what happens when the government puts lots of money in subsidies into a market in order to make it "affordable" for all.  It took about 30 years for the higher education business to gradually progress to a situation where almost nobody can afford college and an entire generation is crushed by a trillion dollars of outstanding debt.  Betting that a comparable fate will eventually happen with Obamacare is like betting that the sun will rise tomorrow in the East.  But the process does take many years to play out.

To summarize, despite great efforts to make this appear like a reasonable, carefully weighed evaluation, it's just the usual Times spin.  Thousands of pages of a massively complex government takeover of a sixth of the economy, and it boils down to, some more people (but not many more) have insurance because now the government pays most or all of the cost for them.  The large majority who previously were uninsured still are.  Before, it was a crisis.  Now it is not.  Why?  Because to point that out would be to jeopardize our guys' hold on power.

Is New York's Middle Class Really Dead?

Joel Kotkin is an insightful writer on topics relating to demographics, and he has written much that is very interesting and informative.  A few days ago he had a piece in the Daily News titled "RIP, NYC's middle class: Why families are being pushed away from the city."  There is a lot to like about this article, but I also think that on many issues Kotkin is being seriously misled by useless and often fraudulent government data.

The thesis here is that while the rich in New York are getting richer, the number of poor is actually increasing and the middle class is stagnating.

As the cost of living has skyrocketed while pay has stagnated except for those at the very top, New York has shifted from a place people go to make it to a place for those who already have it made, or whose families have.  And once here, the rich are indeed getting richer even as the rest of the city is barely holding on.

The problem here is that Kotkin is relying on government data.  It's hard to blame him for that, because it's all we have.  But you really can't try to draw many conclusions from this stuff, at least not without seriously accounting for the obvious inadequacies and outright fraud practiced by the government in compiling the numbers.  When it comes to income, poverty, and income inequality numbers, there is good reason to think that the government has pretty good information as to the top two quintiles (probably less so as to the top 1%), but in the bottom three quintiles there are huge problems, and it gets worse the lower you go.  By the time you get to the bottom quintile, the government numbers are almost completely fake, failing to take account of around a trillion dollars a year in government handouts and completely missing unknown hundreds of billions, or possibly trillions, of dollars of off-the-books and illegal income.

So here is Kotkin's key piece of data:

Between 1990 and 2010, the city’s 1% saw their median income shoot up from $452,415 to $716,625 in 2010 dollars, even as the bottom 60% hardly saw their incomes budge at all, according to a recent City University study.

Kotkin doesn't cite the specific City University study, but it's not too hard to find information from Census data strongly supporting the narrative of the supposed "stagnation" of New York's middle class.  For example, here is city-wide and neighborhood-by-neighborhood data compiled by WNYC from Census information on New York median household income.  According to this compilation, the median went down from $54,057 in 2007-09 to $50,711 in 2010-12 (adjusted for inflation).  That sounds rather bad!  (Although note that among a small number of neighborhoods where median income increased, by more than 5%, two are Central Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York's two most iconic African American neighborhoods.) 

But the question is, how much of the actual income of people in the bottom three quintiles is being captured by Census, and has the uncounted portion increased over time?  The two big categories of uncounted income are government in-kind handouts and off-the-books and illegal income.  The in-kind handout category has clearly soared over twenty years, and particularly during the Obama years.  Food stamp recipients nationwide have increased from about 30 million to almost 50 million just during the Obama years, meaning that there are now large numbers of recipients even in the second income quintile.  Medicaid has also greatly increased.  And now Obamacare is a whole new category of uncounted in-kind handout coming with its own big new incentives to minimize and/or hide at least some income in order to qualify for subsidies. 

How about that middle quintile, those just above and below the approximately $50,000 median?  There used to be lots of manufacturing jobs in New York that were the bread and butter for the people right around the middle.  Now there are hardly any manufacturing jobs.  Those manufacturing workers generally went to work at the same place for substantial companies every day, and their income was easily monitored by the government.  Today it's different.  For example, where I live, twenty years ago we had a huge rent-regulated housing stock in which no one had invested a dime in fifty years.  The buildings were declining and decaying.  The last 15 or so years have seen a very gradual phase out of rent regulation, together with a big run-up in housing values.  The result is that literally every second building has some kind of major construction or renovation job going on.  There are armies of people who work a few days or weeks on such jobs, often for small sub-contracting firms, before moving on to the next job.  Now, how much of that income does the Census Bureau capture?  In considering the answer to that question, take into account the tremendous incentives in today's handout society to show visible income below certain thresholds, whether it's to qualify for food stamps, or Medicaid, or Obamacare subsidies, or lots of other things.  

And that's just one example.  On the female side of the employment picture, the numbers of housekeepers and nannies are also vast.  Based on the market in my neighborhood, those jobs can pay around the median of the income distribution (and the median is for households that often include more than one worker).  Again, how much of that income is captured in the official numbers?  I only have anecdotal evidence, but frankly I think my anecdotal evidence is better in this instance than the Census data because the Census people completely know that they are missing large categories and they systematically report data missing those categories because they find it advantageous to support their agenda of advocating for more government spending.  Based on reports from my friends and acquaintances, well less than half of the income of nannies and housekeepers gets into official government information.  In fact, the government makes it literally punitive and almost impossible to be fully compliant in putting household workers on the books.  You must withhold federal, and state, and city, and FICA taxes; and you must pay workers compensation insurance, and unemployment insurance, and disability insurance.  And each of these must be paid to different entities and with different schedules and deadlines.  And once you're on their radar screen they audit you and torture you.  Or you can just pay cash.

Now if you ask the Census Bureau (which I did a few weeks ago) they will say that the recipients of their surveys are supposed to report all of this income, and don't worry, because we'll never tell the IRS about it.  Well, in the age of the Surveillance State, would you trust them to honor that promise?  You would be out of your mind.

People are not dumb.  Today, many are flocking to New York City to take jobs in the middle of the income distribution.  They would not be doing it if they saw no opportunity.  The fact is, it's the government numbers that are wrong.  I strongly suspect that the state of New York's middle class is just fine.  But every year, in the attempt to achieve perfect fairness, we put into place yet a few more incentives to minimize reported income.   So the numbers show stagnation or decline.  There is no reason to believe them.