Will Pope Francis Join The Reprehensible Campaign To Keep The Poor Poor?

If you think for a few moments about the incentives facing the many so-called "anti-poverty" agencies and bureaucrats out there, you will quickly realize that the last thing they would ever want would be a big reduction of the population living in poverty.  "Do you mean that the problem is solved?  Then they may not need me any more!  In fact, what we need is to grow this place so that I can hire five people to work for me and get a promotion!"  The population in poverty must remain high in order to justify more and yet more spending, growing bureaucracies, and increased pay and promotions for the bureaucrats.

In the U.S. this perverse game plays out largely in the maneuvering to define "poverty" so that the metric doesn't count any of the government anti-poverty spending and can't ever go down no matter what the government does.  That's bad enough.  But at least in the U.S. some of the "anti-poverty" money is actually spent on the intended beneficiaries, albeit mostly in counter-productive ways.  In the international arena, the game is yet far more reprehensible and sinister.  Here we're not talking about the soft American-style poverty of public housing and food stamps, but, in many cases, real grinding poverty -- hunger, disease, carrying your water home on your back, no electricity, no heat, no light, no air conditioning, no automobiles, no internet, etc.  Surely, you would say, it can't be that the international bureaucrats actively seek to keep people in this type of poverty.

Wrong.  The U.N. aid game is filled with examples of intentional infliction of extreme poverty upon subject populations.  Today, let's just consider the single most egregious example of that, namely the U.N. campaign for "climate justice."  Oh, and did I mention that there is an intense effort going on right now to get Pope Francis and the Catholic Church to back this reprehensible campaign?

I have previously written here about the U.N.'s "climate justice" campaign, where I called it a "looking glass" world, where the U.N. advocates for exactly the opposite of what would make any sense if the goal was to enable the poor to escape poverty.  We have a situation where hundreds of millions of people are in real poverty, meaning that they lack sufficient food, electricity, heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer, lighting at night, automobiles, refrigeration, mechanized agriculture, clean water, the internet, and on and on and on.  All of these things result in large part from insufficient access to energy, and the cheaper and more reliable the energy the more quickly and plentifully the missing items can be had.  Meanwhile predictions that global temperatures would rapidly rise as mankind burned more fossil fuels have been disproved by a period now approaching 20 years where atmospheric CO2 has increased but temperatures have not, not even by a little bit.  And in this situation the U.N. of course advocates that the greatest crisis facing less developed countries is "climate change" caused by CO2 from fossil fuels.  The U.N.'s proposed solution is that the developed countries must send lots of money to the governments (and elites) in less developed countries, while also preventing the poor in less developed countries from getting access to cheap energy from fossil fuels.  In other words, the official U.N. program is that money is to go to the rich people in poor countries while the poor are kept in their grinding poverty and are intentionally prevented from getting out.

And in the past several months there has been a huge push to try to get Pope Francis to sign on to this disgusting and immoral campaign.  Back in January, Kishore Jayabalan of the Acton Institute reported on the efforts of activists within the Vatican to get an encyclical issued on environmental issues, and particularly signing on to the "climate justice" campaign:

I (very reluctantly) worked on these issues at the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace for five years, so I have some insight into how Vatican officials tend to think about the environment. . . .  General indifference to environmental issues among clerics may mean that more strident activists may get their way simply because they are more committed to their cause. In my work at the Vatican and travels around the world attending Catholic conferences on the environment, I heard countless calls from activists for a papal encyclical on the environment, so the news of such a document must warm the hearts of my former fellow conferees.

A draft papal encyclical has been making the rounds for months.  In late April the Vatican held a climate conference, featuring U.N. advocates including Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.  No voices from the non-climate-alarmist camp were invited.  However, the Heartland Institute got wind of the event and sent a delegation to hold counter-events in Rome at the same time.  The Heartland delegation included both people of science (like former NASA engineer Hal Doiron and Tom Sheahen of SEPP) and people of religion (like Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Coalition).  Here is a report from Heartland on its activities.  Heartland describes the focus of its press conference on April 27 as "why the Pope should not put his moral authority behind the U.N.'s climate work."

The globe is not dangerously warming, and the poor of the world should not be kept in poverty in service to that myth.

As of the late-April climate conference, the word was that the encyclical would be coming out in June.  But on May 13 came word from the Vatican that the encyclical was being postponed and would be revised.  Here is a report from Radical Catholic via Climate Depot. 

According to Vaticanist Sandro Magister, Pope Francis has decided to postpone the publication of his long-awaited encyclical on the environment. The reason, according to Magister, is that the Pope realized that the document in its current state had no chance of receiving the approval of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith under the leadership of Cardinal Gerhard Müller.

So there was some last-minute push-back within Vatican circles, and now we have at least a temporary reprieve.  But this fight is by no means over.  The Radical Catholic report has many details on the ongoing efforts of activists within the Vatican to get an encyclical to their liking.

It's easy to understand the U.N.'s motivation for the "climate justice" campaign:  it's just great cover to get a big pile of money to send to their client strongmen and dictators, while they all enhance their collective power and control; and meanwhile keeping the poverty population up is always good when you go back for the next round of money.  But the Pope?  Surely he should care at least a little about the immorality of keeping the poor poor, shouldn't he? 

The Latest Scam From The New York Times

If you read this blog you know that I think you can't trust anything that is printed in the New York Times.  But last week they hit a new low with back-to-back long articles on Thursday and Friday about supposed exploitation of workers in the nail salon industry.  The articles are "The Price of Nails" from May 7 and "Perfect Nails, Poisoned Workers" from May 8, both under the by-line of Sarah Maslin Nir.

These stories have "gone viral" as they say.  Commentary on them is everywhere.  And literally everyone has fallen for the scam.  Of course the Times Editorial Board chimed in Monday with a clarion call for "Justice for Nail Salon Workers."   Of course Governor Cuomo immediately announced emergency state measures to protect the nail salon workers.  Of course the likes of Time ("exploitation . . . severely underpaid"), and NBC News ("underpaid . . . physical and verbal abuse"), and Jezebel ("appalling working conditions"), etc., etc., etc., parroted the Times story without a hint of critical thinking.

Much more surprising is that some who would normally show at least a little skepticism toward the propaganda coming out of Pravda seem to have bit on this hook.  For example, libertarian law professor Richard Epstein, while providing a theoretical defense of the industry's practices in a lengthy article at the Hoover Institution journal, still begins his article by saying that the Times "describes in painful and accurate detail the trials and tribulations in the manicurist trade in New York City and elsewhere."   What possible basis could he have for thinking that the Times reporting is "accurate"? -- certainly not their past record on reporting stories such as these.  Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, had an op-ed in yesterday's New York Post in which he called the stories of the nail salon workers "heart-wrenching."

What I can't understand is why everybody gives the Times total credit for accuracy in reporting on the pay and working conditions of these workers.  Can anybody ask the simple question of whether this can possibly be true?  I haven't found it.  So let me do it:  Can any of this possibly be true?  The answer is no.

I'll focus on what is reported as to the pay of the workers.  Here's what the Times reports:

Tucked in her pocket was $100 in carefully folded bills for another expense: the fee the salon owner charges each new employee for her job. The deal was the same as it is for beginning manicurists in almost any salon in the New York area. She would work for no wages, subsisting on meager tips, until her boss decided she was skillful enough to merit a wage.  It would take nearly three months before her boss paid her. Thirty dollars a day.

$100 fee to get a non-paying job; after three months of no pay, $30 per day; and nothing to subsist on but "meager" tips (no dollar amount specified).  Do you believe it?  Here's my problem with it.  I live in Manhattan, I regularly use the services of service people and I know lots of other people who do too.  And in a general way, I know what the market is.  And I know that the market starts at $15 per hour, and if you have someone who's any good and you want to keep them for more than a few months, you'll very quickly have to go to $20, and then up from there.

Don't believe me?  The obvious kinds of jobs available to young women in the country illegally and with limited English language skills are nannies and housekeepers.  Kindly google the subject of jobs for such people in Manhattan and you will see that I am correct:  lots of postings for jobs at $15 per hour (but not below), and with experience or more than one kid to watch it can easily be $20; and even substantially more for larger numbers of kids and/or difficult hours.  And by the way, do you think you can hire an attractive young Asian woman for those prices?  Forget it!

So what is it with these nail salon workers?  Can they really be this stupid?  You can believe that if you choose, but no, people are not this stupid.  I'm sorry, but these young women work in the nail salon industry because the jobs are substantially better than the alternatives of nanny and housekeeper that pay $15 and up.  Some of that may be that it's easier work, but a lot of it is that the pay is also better.  How is that possible?  The answer is tips.

Go through this whole endless May 7 Times article, and try to find any quantification of how much money these workers make in tips.  You won't find it.  There is the one statement that the tips are "meager," but after that it's all about the "pay" and the "wage."  Didn't they even ask any of these people how much they make in tips, let alone try to find out how much top people can make in tips?  Really, this is insulting to our intelligence.  Actually, I have no doubt that they are very aware of how much is made in tips in this industry, and they are intentionally suppressing it because as soon as that information is out the whole story goes poof.  It's completely obvious to anyone who thinks about it that experienced and skilled people in this business can make several hundred dollars a day.  Which would you rather do:  make $50,000 or even $60,000 in a quiet air-conditioned nail salon, or $40,000 lugging a vacuum around somebody's house while you try to watch a kid at the same time?

And if I might take this one step farther:  Where did the New York Times get this story from?  If you've read enough of these expose stories from Pravda with even a mildly inquisitive mind, you have figured out that such stories are fed to them by activists with some agenda.  Also, those activists typically want to be quoted somewhere in the story (since the idea is to promote themselves and their agenda) but don't want to be fingered as the source of the story.  So go through this article with that in mind, and you will find this:

“You can be assured, if you go to a place with rock-bottom prices, that chances are the workers’ wages are being stolen,” said Nicole Hallett, a lecturer at Yale Law School who has worked on wage theft cases in salons. “The costs are borne by the low-wage workers who are doing your nails.”

It's an ambitious young litigation lawyer from Yale Law School with a bunch of contingency-fee cases pending against struggling small businesses.  Any surprise there?  Those businesses will never be able to prove how much their workers made in tips, so Nicole is confident that she has them on the ropes.  And with the Times story bringing in the New York State government on her side, now it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

So a couple of years from now Nicole will be richer by a few mil, and a few dozen (or a few hundred) small struggling nail salon owners, who maybe could have hoped to make one to two hundred thousand dollars in a good year, will now be broke and out of business.  Oh, and a few thousand young nail salon workers will have to get jobs doing something else.  The something else is by definition worse from their perspective than what they are currently doing, or they would already be doing it.  Congratulations New York Times!  And congratulations also to all of its readers who bought into this journalistic drivel.

Illinois's Pension Reform Goes Down In Flames

On Friday the Supreme Court of Illinois unanimously declared unconstitutional, under the Illinois State Constitution, the 2014 pension reform law by which Illinois's legislature had sought to bring the state's pension costs under control.  The whole exercise represents a major lost opportunity for Illinois, and for the cause of state pension reform generally.  

The decision of the Illinois Supreme Court is here.  The basis of the decision is that the attempted reform, embodied in a statute called Public Act 98-599 (effective 2014), violated Article XIII, Section 5 of the Illinois Constitution that reads:

Membership in any pension or retirement system of the State . . . shall be an enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired.  

In the face of that provision, the Illinois legislature enacted a statute that reduced the pension annuities that state employees could earn over the course of their careers, without making explicit that pensions already earned as of the date of the statute were protected.  It's not possible to know how the court would have come out if the legislature had explicitly protected all pensions already earned.  Perhaps this court would have come out the same way, particularly given the level of anger and hostility evident in its opinion.  But if the legislature had taken the route of explicitly protecting all pension earned to date, they would have had a powerful, and ultimately correct,  argument that what they were doing did not violate the constitutional provision.  Even if they had lost this case, they would have had a more than good shot of prevailing in the long run.  Now, it's back to the drawing board.

As enacted, this statute appears to reduce both pensions earned before its effective date and also subsequent accruals.  Here is a list from the Supreme Court opinion of some of the changes:

First, it delays, by up to five years, when members under the age of 46 are eligible to begin receiving their retirement annuities. . . .  Second, with certain exceptions and qualifications, it caps the maximum salary that may be considered when calculating the amount of a member’s retirement annuity. . . .  Third, it jettisons the current provisions under which retirees receive flat 3% annual increases to their annuities and replaces them with a system under which annual annuity increases are determined according to a variable formula and are limited. . . .

Without explicit protection of pre-enactment accruals, the state was left in the position of having to argue that it could use its police powers to override pension contracts -- in the face of a specific constitutional provision protecting the pension contracts (not to mention a provision in the federal Constitution barring states from impairing rights under contracts).  Here is the state's brief in the Supreme Court.  I can't say I'm surprised that the Supreme Court did not buy the state's argument, which would essentially mean that the state could ignore the clear constitutional provision by the simple of expedient of declaring some kind of "emergency" whenever it wants to spend the money on something else.  Moreover, the court seems to have been particularly offended by the fact that the statute exempted judge's pensions from the reforms.  Although the legislators may have thought that they would buy the judge's support by the exemption, the judges were smart enough to realize that if they upheld the reforms for everyone else, then the reforms could be extended to judges the next day.

So Illinois is now in the position of having to start over in the face of a hostile and skeptical Supreme Court.  Worst is that the distinction between pensions accrued-to-date and future accruals was never clearly presented in this case.  Not explicitly protecting already-accrued pension benefits was a huge mistake by the Illinois legislature.  That omission took away from the state the potential winning argument and also led to sloppy language in the Supreme Court's opinion that may suggest that the constitutional provision protects future accruals. For example, here is a quote from page 20 of the opinion:

Accordingly, once an individual begins work and becomes a member of a public retirement system, any subsequent changes to the Pension Code that would diminish the benefits conferred by membership in the retirement system cannot be applied to that individual.   

But is it really the case that the Illinois constitutional provision (and comparable provisions in many other states including New York) means that an employee who begins work for as little as one day at age 25 is then entitled to have his pension accruals continue at an undiminished rate for an entire career of 40 years or more, even if those accruals are at a completely unsustainable level for the state and its taxpayers?  The obvious flaw in this logic is that the obligation to pay for pension accruals based on future service does not yet exist, and the state has not committed itself to make such an obligation come into existence.   The constitutional provision protecting pensions does not give an employee a constitutional right to have his job. Therefore, he can be fired, or can quit, before earning additional pension benefits.  So a reduction limited to future accruals does not "diminish or impair" anything to which the employee has an existing contractual right.       

Where does Illinois go from here?  The Supreme Court's opinion does not actually direct the legislature what to do, and only enjoins implementation of the statute previously enacted.  But the court seems to think that the legislature will now only have one option, which is to fully fund the pensions under existing accrual rules, raising taxes to the extent necessary to do so.  I see several other options:

1. The legislature can do what it should have done in the first place, and enact a new statute explicitly protecting prior pension accruals while reducing future accruals.  Without doubt the same cast of characters will challenge such a new statute.  But the new statute will make the court focus this time on the distinction between past and future accruals and either allow the future reduction or take the extreme and ridiculous position that one day of work for the State of Illinois brings with it a lifetime entitlement to a given pension scheme.
2. The state could start systematically getting rid of (laying off) senior employees with unsustainable pension accruals and replacing them with new employees with much reduced pension promises (or perhaps, defined contribution plans).  Will the Illinois Supreme Court then hold that employees have a constitutional right to their jobs, even if the constitution has no such provision and the senior employees with unreduceable pension accrual obligations cost double or more the cost of replacements?
3. Or then there's the option that seems to be the choice of New Jersey: just stop putting money into the pension plans and see what happens.  The Supreme Court can declare a statute unconstitutional, as it has done here, without too much stress; but it is quite another thing for a court to order a legislature to appropriate money.  It is likely (but not certain) that the court will pull back before taking that step.  According to the Supreme Court opinion, the state pension plans at issue are currently about 41% funded.  And that's with the stock market at record levels!    With no additional contributions, one good stock market crash could have these pension plans bouncing checks within as little as ten years.  Bring it on!

Or Illinois can do what the court wants and raise taxes greatly to try to rescue these badly underfunded plans.  That course would risk putting Illinois into accelerating economic decline relative to its neighboring states.  And Illinois is already the economic laggard in its Midwestern neighborhood.  I say, try one of # 1, 2 or 3.

Progressive Economic Ignorance In New York

Keeping up with the economic ignorance of New York's "progressive" politicians is often a game of "can you top this?"  Every time you think it just can't get any stupider, it does.

For example, consider rent regulation.  In the aftermath of World War II New York City instituted a system of rent control on the price of all apartments in buildings more than minimal size, exempting new construction; and then in the early 1970s they applied a different system of rent regulation ("rent stabilization") to all the subsequently-constructed apartments, and to apartments that had previously exited the control system.  And thus when I moved to New York in the mid-70s we had the bizarre situation of a universally-recognized desperate shortage of housing and simultaneously almost no new construction in the private market.  Who could have foreseen that?  In the mid-1990s (with a Republican Mayor, Governor, and State Senate) we got modifications to the rent regulation laws that made it possible for owners to decontrol most apartments on vacancy.  This has led to a very, very gradual process by which the rent regulations have been phasing out.  And surprise! -- Lots of market construction is back.

So of course you can guess what is happening in the world of the "progressive" politicians.  Today Mayor de Blasio issued a press release calling for the elimination of essentially all provisions of the rent laws, most notably vacancy decontrol, that enable owners to remove apartments from the system.  Capital New York has the story.  Here's an excerpt from the Mayor's press release:

"This is a vital priority for New York City. Our working families and our neighborhoods are depending on stronger rent laws. Rent is the number one expense for New Yorkers. Unless we change the status quo, tens of thousands of hardworking families will be pushed out of their homes," de Blasio said in his release. "This has to be a city for everyone. It cannot just be a city of luxury apartments out of everyday New Yorkers’ reach."

So Bill, if this is such a great idea, why not just decree that all rents shall henceforth be zero?

And I'll bet you're thinking that that one cannot be topped.  But that just proves that you don't follow the news closely.  If you did, you would have seen that the New York City Council -- with the support of de Blasio of course -- a few days ago passed a resolution opposing the so-called "fast track" authority that President Obama is seeking from Congress to negotiate free trade deals with Asian countries.  Crain's New York Business has this story.  Why would New York City want to meddle in that one?  Here's the take of Crain's:

Labor unions and progressives like the mayor see only the local losses, as workers in foreign countries make the products that once were made in the U.S. -- eliminating millions of jobs here.

But here's the bizarre thing.  Manufacturing jobs started leaving New York long ago, and today they're almost all gone.  When I moved to New York in the 70s there were over a million manufacturing jobs in the City.  The number today is only about 75,000, and those are specialized things like "craft" breweries in Brooklyn.  It's hard even to try to understand how a new trade agreement with, say, the Philippines, is going to affect those jobs one way or the other.

But meanwhile, what is the main business of New York today?  It's what all those hundreds of thousands of office workers in Manhattan do.  A good summary is that they are engaged in the internationalization of the world economy.  Another way of putting it is that they work on choosing the best investments for money, which means allocating capital to the place where it can be most efficiently deployed, in a process where international boundaries are increasingly irrelevant.  This "investment business" broadly defined is much more than just what goes under the banner of "Wall Street," and includes substantially everything that the major banks, financial firms, private equity firms, hedge funds, asset managers, law firms, accounting firms, financial consultants, and lots of others, do.  And substantially all the rest of the New York economy -- from real estate to insurance to entertainment to travel and on and on -- lives off the fruits of the investment business that drives the whole enterprise.

The New York City Council and Mayor de Blasio would gladly hobble this gigantic economic engine in some kind of quixotic effort to "save" the pitiful remaining 75,000 manufacturing jobs.  Really, do they have any idea at all what they are doing?  Oh, I should mention that the support for the anti-fast track resolution in the City Council was unanimous.

UPDATE, May 6, 2015:   Indeed, they most assuredly have no idea whatsoever what they are doing.  Today Mayor de Blasio has announced new funds in his upcoming budget to provide services to manufacturing businesses, including training "to give workers the skills that industrial employers seek."  From Crain's New York Business today:

"Thriving industrial and manufacturing businesses that provide quality jobs for New Yorkers are vital to combating inequality and diversifying our economy," said Mayor Bill de Blasio in a statement provided to Crain's. "Businesses from furniture-makers in Sunset Park, to metal finishers in Crown Heights, to film studios in Greenpoint employ thousands of New Yorkers of all backgrounds in good-paying jobs. We're investing in the crucial services and the skilled talent our industrial and manufacturing businesses need to grow."

Newsflash to Mayor and City Council:  Manufacturing is not coming back as a significant part of the New York City economy in this lifetime.  Granted, the on-budget part of what the Mayor proposes is a de minimus amount of money (about $1.5 million).  But it's also accompanied by more of the usual crony capitalist accoutrements, like land use restrictions to keep vast swaths of land in industrial use even though there are hardly any industrial users left.  And anyway, pure waste is pure waste.  If they can't tell this is pure waste, how can you have confidence in anything they do? 

Can The Government Fix Poverty? Part III

From the department of "Can they really be this stupid?" today comes exactly what you have known was coming since the rioting in Baltimore began:  a lead, front page article in the New York Times promoting the next gigantic government spending program that they promise is really, really, really going to fix the poverty this time.  The headline is "Change of Address Offers A Pathway Out of Poverty."  

Needless to say, there is no mention or recognition in this article of the current $1 trillion +/- of annual government anti-poverty spending in this country, all of which has brought us Baltimore, not to mention Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Buffalo, Camden, Newark, Bridgeport, Hartford, Memphis, and fifty or so more of same scattered around the country.  But this time it's going to be different!  Here's the "new" idea: The poverty is caused by people being trapped in bad neighborhoods.  If "we" just give "them" the help they need to move to better neighborhoods, suddenly their lives will shift upwards and all will be well.  How do we know that?  The Times breathlessly reports that "a large new study" is just out from Harvard professors Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren.  Here are the results:

Based on the earnings records of millions of families that moved with children, it finds that poor children who grow up in some cities and towns have sharply better odds of escaping poverty than similar poor children elsewhere.  

Wow!  It's based on "earnings records of millions of families"!  It's done by professors from Harvard!  It shows "sharply better odds" of escaping poverty!  Surely it must be right!

The Times goes out and asks a few questions to Chetty, and he immediately gives away the mindset at work:

“The data shows we can do something about upward mobility,” said Mr. Chetty. . . .  "Every extra year of childhood spent in a better neighborhood seems to matter.”

Who's the "we" there, Raj?  Undoubtedly it's the sinister alliance of government bureaucrats and Harvard professors who got us here in the first place.  It's the official "we" who know so much better than "they" do how to run "their" lives.  But don't worry, Professor Chetty "has presented the findings to members of the Obama administration, as well as to Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jeb Bush, both of whom have signaled that mobility will be central themes of their 2016 presidential campaigns."  Do you think that any one of those three has the critical thinking ability to ask an intelligent question about this?  Don't count on it.  Meanwhile, over at the Department of Housing and Urban Development this must sound like a fabulous new gravy train of additional funding.  Here's the reaction of the current Secretary:

In an interview Friday, Julián Castro, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said he was excited by the new data. Mr. Castro said his department had been planning to reallocate funding, so that some people moving to more expensive neighborhoods would receive larger vouchers. Currently, the value of vouchers tends to be constant across a metropolitan area.

So how could any moral person be against this?  Well, there's this from the opening paragraphs of the article:

In the wake of the Los Angeles riots more than 20 years ago, Congress created an anti-poverty experiment called Moving to Opportunity. It gave vouchers to help poor families move to better neighborhoods and awarded them on a random basis, so researchers could study the effects.  The results were deeply disappointing. Parents who received the vouchers did not seem to earn more in later years than otherwise similar adults, and children did not seem to do better in school. The program’s apparent failure has haunted social scientists and policy makers, making poverty seem all the more intractable.

In other words, the ideas of giving out housing vouchers to be used in "good" neighborhoods, or building "affordable housing" in "good" neighborhoods, are not "new" ideas for curing poverty at all. They are things that have already been tried and demonstrated to be total failures.  But don't the Chetty/Hendren data show that these things are going to work next time?  Absolutely not.  The Chetty/Hendren data are derived from people who moved from one place to another as part of their own striving to better their own lives.   Moving to Opportunity was the opposite -- a handout program.  These things are about as different as night and day.

The Times, Chetty, Hendren, et al., are just incapable of understanding that the results that people are able to achieve through their own efforts and striving cannot be duplicated with government handouts.  Striving gets you upwardly mobile suburbs and gentrifying urban neighborhoods.  Handouts get you Baltimore.  No amount of experience, no number of failed programs, will ever enable them to understand this. 

And really, forget about Move to Opportunity -- can't the Times look under its own nose?  Manhattan is the wealthiest county in the country.  It has a far higher density of high-paying jobs than any place else.  So if you were going to move poor people somewhere to enable them to better their lives, Manhattan would be far and away the best place, right?  Well, we've built over 50,000 units of public housing in Manhattan, housing about 150,000 people -- about 10% of the population of the island.  And the result?  The poverty rate in NYCHA projects is 51.3%, according to data they sent me last week.

Can The Government Fix Poverty? -- Part II

In yesterday's article I pointed out that due to its high levels of poverty the city of Baltimore gets far more than its pro rata share of government programs and handouts supposedly to fix the poverty, and we can see the disastrous results.  Given the obvious failure of the trillions of dollars of spending to date, I asked: Could it really be that anyone here thinks that the next round of "programs" and handouts is going to work?

Today the New York Times chimes in on the subject with an editorial, two op-eds, and five letters to the editor.  Most of it is just a liberal guilt-fest, but it's still worth examining the mind-set of the people who caused this horror.  Most illustrative is the op-ed by Michael Eric Dyson.  Here's an excerpt:

Without a brick tossed or a building burning, we are hardly confronting the hopelessness of the future for these young people. The unemployment rate in the community where Mr. Gray lived is over 50 percent; the high school student absence rate hovers at 49.3 percent; and life expectancy tops out at 68.8 years, according to analysis by prison reform nonprofits. These statistics are a small glimpse of the radical inequality that blankets poor black Baltimore. It’s no wonder that black Baltimore erupted in social fury.

OK, the high school student absence rate hovers at 49.3%.  How did it get there?  Baltimore of course follows the Democrat model of government-monopoly unionized public schools.  According to figures compiled by the Baltimore Sun in 2013, Baltimore in 2011 ranked second among the nation's 100 largest school districts in per student spending.  (Number one being New York City of course!)  So what's the answer?  Well, we know the answer of the Baltimore Teachers Union:  Still more government money for the schools!  Here's a link describing their big rally in March to lobby the legislature for more money.

Life expectancy tops out at 68.8 years?  I thought we had free government medical care, otherwise known as Medicaid, for all the poor and near-poor.  That's well over $400 billion of annual government spending in this country, almost $8 billion in Maryland.  We just doubled down on Medicaid with a massive expansion under Obamacare.  Are you now saying that it doesn't work?

And then there's what Mr. Dyson calls the "unemployment rate," which is not what the Labor Department calls the unemployment rate, but rather a rate of idleness among people completely detached from the world of jobs.  Well, the government gave the people welfare, and food stamps, and public housing, and free medical care, and now we find that a lot of the young men just don't work any more.  Didn't anybody stop for a minute to think that this might happen?

New York Times and Mr. Dyson, it's time to take ownership of this.  All of your "solutions" have been adopted at enormous cost, and they have just made the problem worse.  Do you really still think that more of same can possibly work?

Here's the fundamental problem:  All of your guilt always leads to advocacy that "we" must help "them" with some kind of program or handout.  Inherent in that thought is that "they" are not capable of taking care of themselves -- the bigotry of low expectations.  Well, I can say with 100% certainty that more programs and more handouts will cost still more money and still will lead to more idleness and more hopelessness.

So is it possible to turn this around?  Absolutely.  There's exactly one way.  Real businesses must be attracted to Baltimore to provide real jobs.  This cannot be done by handouts to business and crony capitalism.  It must be done be creating a bona fide good investment climate.  That means crime under control, lower taxes and lower government spending, and fostering a belief among members of the business community that the government will not turn on you after you commit your investors' money.  In New York, with 20 years of Republican and Independent mayors from 1994 to 2013, we made huge strides in re-establishing a good investment climate, and the economy roared back.  Baltimore can do it too.  But it's the exact opposite of the approach they have taken to date.  Oh, and riots sure aren't going to help.