The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part V

Scientific fraud has been all over the news this past week.  The latest example is an article titled "When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality," by  Michael LaCour and Donald Green, that appeared in Science back in December.  The LaCour/Green article reported on a study in which it was claimed that people's attitudes toward gay marriage were significantly changed following discussions of about 20 minutes in length with door-to-door canvassers.  When the article came out, it created a mini media sensation, with discussion in outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Economist, and others.  Really, it's just remarkable how all BS radar gets turned off when a new study reports what the right people want to hear.

The unraveling began on May 19 when a critique of LaCour/Green titled "Irregularities in LaCour (2014)" appeared on the website of Stanford University, written by David Broockman and others. Trying to replicate and extend LaCour's results, Broockman and his co-authors uncovered serious irregularities in the LaCour data.  They presented the information to Green, who then asked that the article be retracted.  LaCour claims to stand by his data, but -- oops -- it has been deleted.  And thus this past week we are treated to long philosophical essays on scientific fraud from the likes of NYT and WSJ.

I have to admit that in the world of scientific frauds, this is a pretty good one.  Then again, compared to the Big One, this is pretty small time.  By the Big One, I am of course referring to the world temperature data tampering fraud, by which 50 and 100 year old temperature records are systematically altered to make them cooler, thus exaggerating the extent of warming and keeping the "global warming" narrative going.  Anything new on that one this week?

As a matter of fact, there is.  On Thursday June 4, Science came out with an article by Thomas Karl and multiple co-authors titled "Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus."   Yes, it's the same Science that also published the discredited LaCour article.  This article is an attempt to deal with the now-famous global warming "pause" or "hiatus," in which world temperatures, as measured by multiple data sets including the highly accurate satellites, have refused to increase for a period now exceeding 18 years, in the face of predictions of disaster coming out of the UN IPCC and others.  Tom Karl, for those who don't recognize the name, is a high-ranking bureaucrat at NOAA and a serious global warming alarmist.  Here's the abstract of the article from Science:

Much study has been devoted to the possible causes of an apparent decrease in the upward trend of global surface temperatures since 1998, a phenomenon that has been dubbed the global warming “hiatus.” Here we present an updated global surface temperature analysis that reveals that global trends are higher than reported by the IPCC, especially in recent decades, and that the central estimate for the rate of warming during the first 15 years of the 21st century is at least as great as the last half of the 20th century. These results do not support the notion of a “slowdown” in the increase of global surface temperature.

You see, we have just "updated" the "global surface temperature analysis."  No big deal in that.  And of course the updating "reveals" that temperatures are increasing faster than anyone thought!

Needless to say, the New York Times immediately picked up the story and reported it as fed to them by Karl, without any critical thinking of any kind.  The article on June 4 is by climate-activist-masquerading-as-reporter Justin Gillis, and titled  "Global Warming 'Hiatus' Challenged By NOAA Research."   Excerpt:

Scientists have long labored to explain what appeared to be a slowdown in global warming that began at the start of this century as, at the same time, heat-trapping emissions of carbon dioxide were soaring. The slowdown, sometimes inaccurately described as a halt or hiatus, became a major talking point for people critical of climate science.  Now, new research suggests the whole thing may have been based on incorrect data.  When adjustments are made to compensate for recently discovered problems in the way global temperatures were measured, the slowdown largely disappears, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared in a scientific paper published Thursday.

So, Tom and Justin, can you kindly explain how you have managed to make temperatures of the past get cooler in order to make it appear that there is a warming trend where none previously existed in multiple data sets?  The problem they have is that now lots of credible scientists are immediately all over their work, and before the week was out everybody who follows this knew how the trend got altered.  By the end of the week we had  "A First Look at ‘Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus’ by Karl et al., Science 4 June 2015," by Ross McKitrick;  "Has NOAA ‘busted’ the pause in global warming?" by Judith Curry; "@NOAA ‘s desperate new paper: Is there no global warming ‘hiatus’ after all?" by Patrick Michaels, Richard Lindzen and Paul Knappenberger; and "Reports of the death of the global warming pause are greatly exaggerated," from the Global Warming Policy Foundation.  The last is the least technical, so I'll quote from their list of obvious points:

* The authors have produced adjustments that are at odds with all other surface temperature datasets, as well as those compiled via satellite.

* They do not include any data from the Argo array that is the world’s best coherent data set on ocean temperatures.

* Adjustments are largely to sea surface temperatures (SST) and appear to align ship measurements of SST with night marine air temperature (NMAT) estimates, which have their own data bias problems.

* The extent of the largest SST adjustment made over the hiatus period, supposedly to reflect  a continuing change in ship observations (from buckets to engine intake thermometers) is not justified by any evidence as to the magnitude of the appropriate adjustment, which appears to be far smaller.

And by the way guys, how about the data from the satellites?  Anyway, for Karl, Gillis, et al., it's all very simple:  pick one data set that you like, even though everyone knows it has big gaps and inaccuracies, and adjust all other and better data to that one to fit your narrative.  The President will be proud!

And in other climate-related news, President Obama wanted to talk to famed environmental documentary-maker Richard Attenborough, so on the spur of the moment he had Attenborough flown over from London to "chat" about climate change.  According to this report at Slate, Attenborough said he was "baffled" about why the President wanted to talk to him.  And don't worry, the carbon footprint of that trans-Atlantic roundtrip doesn't count, because it was for Obama.  Also, by the way, the carbon footprint of that flight was teensy compared to the one laid down by John Kerry.  That's the guy who has declared global warming to be the biggest security risk to the United States, bigger than Iran and ISIS.  After breaking his leg riding his bicycle in France, Kerry was flown home from Geneva.  Here's a picture of the plane he flew home in -- a C17.  Hey, it's smaller than a 747!

Denny Hastert: Can You Top This Phony Prosecution?

The game of "Can you top this?" in the world of phony prosecutions continues with the indictment of former House Speaker Denny Hastert at the behest of prosecutors in the Northern District of Illinois.  Here's the indictment.  I like the lead line of today's Washington Post story by Janell Ross:

In journalism, there's a time-worn saying: It's not the crime but the coverup that gets them every time.

OK, Janell, but is it a crime to cover up something that is not itself a crime?  Can you explain why?

Seems like Hastert was being blackmailed over some alleged misconduct dating from a time 30 or so years ago when he was a high school wrestling coach.  He was paying the blackmailer in cash, and withdrew the money in multiple increments from several banks each month, each withdrawal under $10,000.

Now as far as I know, blackmailing someone is a crime, but paying blackmail is not.  So what has Hastert been indicted for?  There are two charges in the indictment.  One is for the crime of "structuring."  The other is for lying to the FBI.

You haven't heard of "structuring"?  You may have heard that if you deposit or withdraw an amount of $10,000 in a bank they are required to file something called a "currency transaction report" and report you to the government.  Of course people caught on to that, and started dividing up their deposits into amounts under $10,000.  So in 1986 Congress in its wisdom made a crime out of intentionally dividing up your deposits to avoid reporting to the government.  It's 31 U.S.C. Section 5324.

This is all part of the government's crackdown on what it calls "money laundering."  I have previously referred to this as "the most insidious area of government regulation."  Supposedly the idea is to catch drug dealers and terrorists -- or at least that's how it's sold to the gullible public -- but money laundering regulation is completely useless in dealing with those things.  An article by Charles Kenny in Bloomberg News back in February could not identify one single terrorism prosecution that had come out of anti-money laundering regulation.  I can't find one either.  And if anti-money laundering regulation was of any use against drug kingpins, then why hasn't the drug war been won instead of lost?  Kenny cites a recent study by Levi, Reuter and Halliday for the IMF that finds "no demonstration of [the] benefits" of AML regulation.  Nada, zip, zilch.

By the way, the administrative bureaucracies at banks to deal with this AML stuff cost tens of billions of dollars per year in the aggregate.  And no matter how much they spend, the banks have no practical way of cracking down on money laundering.  It's obvious to everyone that literally all drug money finds its way somehow into the banking system, and in a world where almost all deposits and withdrawals involve no human interaction, the possibilities for identifying which ones are "drug money" are just about nil.  But the feds endlessly torture banks for supposedly not having sufficient "controls" to stop the money laundering.  Just today the Wall Street Journal front page has a story that Citigroup plans to close its Banamex subsidiary because of government allegations that its money laundering "controls" are weak.  Believe me, the Mexican drug lords will still figure out a way to move their money.

If you really want to get your blood boiling, troll around a little for some articles on what "anti-money laundering" prosecutions are actually about.  The answer is, this is how the predatory government steals money from hard-working small business people under the color of the law.  Here's an article from Radley Balko in the Washington Post in 2014 reporting on a few cases that have gotten some notoriety:  a young immigrant woman from Russia who wanted to make a down payment on a house and had difficulty getting money wired from her bank account in Russia so she withdrew cash in several increments from ATMs and deposited the money in her U.S. account; one seasonal produce market in Frederick, Maryland, and another one in Maryland on the Eastern Shore; a small grocery store in Fraser, Michigan.  Or check out this story about the small Mexican restaurant in Iowa that had its entire bank account seized by the feds.  And so forth.  In each case the government steals the money first and then puts you through endless and expensive legal process to get it back.  Their game plan is to "settle" for keeping most but maybe not quite all of the money for themselves, while you, if you are lucky, just barely survive being put out of business.

In none of these cases was there any allegation by the government that the activity that earned the money was in any way illegal.  Could it really be that "structuring" is a crime even if both your source and use of the money are completely legal?  Absolutely, or at least that's the government's position.

So sorry, Denny, but the fact that you were using the money for a legal purpose is not going to help you.  And in fact, I might even have had some sympathy for you myself, except for one small thing:  although you weren't in Congress when the "structuring" thing was initially passed in 1986, you were there for several increments to the criminal money laundering regime, including that you were the Speaker in 2001 when the USA PATRIOT Act hugely expanded the whole thing.  Do you mean it never occurred to you that they wouldn't ever catch a single terrorist with this regime and instead would turn their guns on you?  Too bad, my friend.

The other "crime" that Hastert is charged with is "lying to the FBI."  (18 U.S.C. 1001)  Again, does it surprise you that that is a crime?  Here they have all these elaborate rituals of making people raise their right hand and administering oaths and calling people before grand juries.  You fully understand that lying after you have gone through all of that is a crime, known as perjury.  But if they skip all the ritual it's still a crime?  Yup.  In fact, a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it is that the ritual is all just a trick to con people into thinking it's not a crime to lie when you are not under oath.

UPDATED, June 15, 2015.  Previous version incorrectly stated that Hastert was in Congress when the "structuring" law was originally enacted.  It was enacted in 1986; he entered Congress in 1987.

Climate Theater Of The Absurd

Everything about the "climate change" political circus is completely absurd.  There's a big climate confab coming up at the end of the year in Paris, and lots of unproductive parasites are looking to that event as their last best chance to solidify a permanent life sinecure for themselves in some U.N. bureaucracy before a critical mass of the general public catches on to the scam.  Right now it may only be May, but the drumbeat of climate scares is getting louder every day.  So today I'm just going to put a few recent developments next to each other, and you can try to figure out for yourself how any sane person thinks that any of this makes sense.

First up is President Obama's commencement address at the Coast Guard Academy last week.  It was classic global warming evangelism.  Global warming is a terrible and immediate crisis.  The U.S. is to be committed to rapid reduction of "carbon pollution," and to revamping its electric power industry without any concern about costs.  A few choice excerpts:

As men and women in uniform, you know that it can be just as important, if not more important, to prevent threats before they can cause catastrophic harm.  And only way -- the only way -- the world is going to prevent the worst effects of climate change is to slow down the warming of the planet. . . .  So, going forward, I’ve committed to doubling the pace at which we cut carbon pollution.  And that means we all have to step up.  And it will not be easy.  It will require sacrifice, and the politics will be tough.  But there is no other way. . . .  We have to move ahead with standards to cut the amount of carbon pollution in our power plants.

Seems like the word still hasn't gotten to Obama that we've just gone through more than 18 years of no global warming whatsoever.   And turning our gaze for the moment from predictions of a disastrous future to the immediate past, we find that the government has just reported revised numbers for Q1 2015 GDP, and the result is -- shrinkage of 0.7%.  As reported today at Breitbart, reason number one given for the decline by Council of Economic Advisers Chair Jason Furman was -- you guessed it -- "harsh winter weather."  Where had I just gotten the idea that warming was bad and cooling must be better?  Is that no longer operative?

So we're on to Paris for a grand global deal to "cut emissions" and save the world.  Has anybody checked in with India on that?  Here's what recent Indian Minister of Environment and Forests (2009 - 2011) has to say about that (quoted in the Guardian on May 27):

The idea that India can set targets in Paris is completely ridiculous and unrealistic. It will not happen. This is a difficult concept for eco-fundamentalists, and I say this as a guy who is considered in India to be very green. Copenhagen failed because of climate evangelism. I was sitting for days with Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, Angela Merkel, Barack Obama and Sarkozy. It was absolutely bizarre. It failed because of an excess of evangelical zeal, of which Brown was the chief proponent. Even with the most aggressive strategy on nuclear, wind, hydro and solar, coal will still provide 55% of electricity consumption by 2030, which means coal consumption will be 2.5 or three times higher than at present.     

"Ridiculous," "unrealistic," and "bizarre," and sorry, we're about to triple our coal consumption whether you like it or not -- yes, Barack, that's what India thinks of your "climate" plans for them.  And by the way, this guy was part of the previous government over there that was considerably more left wing than the new guys.

Here's a Bloomberg News write-up from May 22 on India's coal plans over just the next few years:

India thinks of coal right primarily as a poverty-fighting tool. It's the most vocal and influential champion of the fuel these days now that China's industrial hangover has begun. . . .  Indian coal demand could jump 42 percent, or 300 million metric tons, by 2020, and India is expected to add 124 gigawatts of electricity capacity in that time, according to Bloomberg Industries. In just two years, it may surpass China as the largest importer of seaborne coal.

Shall we check in on Germany?  There the government supposedly has a plan to reduce carbon emissions some 40% (from 1990 levels) by 2020.  They're nowhere near that, and have figured out that the only way to get there is to close many coal plants and much of the coal mining industry.  Oops!  All of a sudden the labor unions are catching on that they are the targets.  Die Welt had a report on May 25 titled, "German Government in Crisis Over Escalating Cost of Climate Policy."    They have lots of pictures of big union-led demonstrations back in April.  The Economics Minister has plans for taxes on coal and coal plants to achieve the goal, but here's the response of Armin Laschet of the Christian Democratic party:

Affected power plants would be threatened by a "wave of decommissioning and structural upheaval in the regions lignite mining area and in eastern Germany would be the result." The plan threatens "tens of thousands of jobs" in the energy and heavy industries.

Surely there's a 7-year-old around here somewhere to point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes?

The New York Times Comments On De Blasio's Public Housing Plan

At the time I wrote yesterday's post, I had not noticed that the New York Times' lead editorial of the day was about the exact same subject, Mayor de Blasio's plan for dealing with the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA).  The Times' title, "To Save New York's Public Housing," really tells you all you need to know.  As usual their way of looking at the world is just completely opposite to mine.

In essence, the Times' take is that "saving" NYCHA is a sacred duty and that de Blasio is bravely undertaking this heroic task.

Of all the monumental tasks that Mr. de Blasio has set for his administration, none may be more important than saving the New York City Housing Authority.

Needless to say, they completely steer clear of adding up the costs.  They never ask whether this could possibly make any sense compared to other things that could be done for the money, including ways of providing the same amount of housing for a fraction the cost.  And, God forbid, they certainly do not remotely consider ways of actually removing the beleaguered residents from the lifetime poverty trap in which NYCHA imprisons them.  Oh, and somehow they seem to have completely missed the fact that the big dollars of de Blasio's "rescue" plan consist of transferring large amount of costs off NYCHA's books and hiding them elsewhere in New York City's accounts.

Then I came to this one line that I thought I could agree with:

Its apartments are high-rise, brick-and-mortar insults to the very idea of a city committed to equality and dignity for the working class and poor.

Yes! thought I.  But then I realized that they meant by that the exact opposite of what I thought they meant.  I at first thought they meant that it's an insult to the idea of a city committed to equality and dignity for the working class and poor to imprison them in grim and hideous poverty traps where the only way they can collect on their supposed "good fortune" of a highly illiquid lifetime gift of deeply subsidized housing is to remain poor, show minimal measurable income, and live off government handouts.  But the next lines show that the Times has something very different in mind:

But only when tenants begin to see significant repairs made, with visible improvements in their living spaces and surroundings, and tangibly more competent and responsive management, will it be possible to say the mayor’s ambitious plan is on the right track.

So the Times thinks that if only the City taxpayers spend a few more billions on "significant repairs" and "visible improvements in their living spaces and surroundings" then NYCHA will no longer be an "insult" to "equality and dignity for the working class and poor."

Well, New York Times, I've got news for you.  After those next few billions of taxpayer cash go down the rat hole of NYCHA, these will still be the same grim and hideous buildings.  And even if the roof no longer leaks, the residents will still be in the same insulting and demeaning position of having to live the life provided to them by their overlords and masters with no ability to improve themselves unless they walk away from their multi-million dollar unsalable in-kind "gift".  They won't have any more ability to move to a different apartment that better suits their needs, because they only won this one place in the lottery.  They won't be able to sell it, rent it, borrow against it, or monetize any part of it to improve their lives.  The fundamental "insult" to the "equality and dignity of the working class and poor" is not a leaky roof or a broken window.  It's being trapped by handouts into a life of dependency on the government.  

de Blasio Public Housing Report Reveals The Disastrous State Of NYCHA

I've written much about the crazy New York policy of forcing the building of "affordable" housing on some of the most expensive real estate in the world.  Not far behind that on the crazy list is so-called low-income public housing, exemplified here by the massive and hideous "projects" run by the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA.  In New York City the grim NYCHA projects contain some 180,000 apartments, warehousing in excess of 400,000 people, most of them in a state of near-permanent poverty.

Toward the end of his tenure in office, former Mayor Mike Bloomberg came out with a proposal to raise money for NYCHA by selling development rights on unused NYCHA land to developers who could then put up some market rate housing and make money.  That proposal brought cries of outrage from NYCHA residents (e.g., "It will block our views!"), let alone opposition from incoming "progressive" Mayor de Blasio, and basically de Blasio dropped the proposal when he took office.  We didn't hear anything more on the subject until last week, when de Blasio came out with his own plan for dealing with NYCHA, a 117 page Report called NextGeneration NYCHA.

Probably to no one's surprise, de Blasio's main thrust here is to somehow maintain the status quo at all costs. (The projects are "an asset that must be protected" says the Report at page 21.)  But the Report actually does provide one valuable service, which is to compile in one place data on NYCHA finances that reveal what a total disaster it is.  At page 32 we learn that the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has been providing two-thirds, or about $2 billion, of NYCHA’s annual $3 billion operating budget. That means that NYCHA’s rent collections provide only about one-third of the operating budget, and, of course, nothing at all toward capital projects or property taxes.  But lately HUD has been cutting back on its subsidies to NYCHA, leading to operating shortfalls "in recent years ranging between $53 million and $170 million." (page 22) As a result, NYCHA’s cash operating reserves have plummeted, from a peak of around $800 million in 2007 to just $179 million at the time of the Report. (page 32) That is only enough cash for four weeks’ operations – rather dangerously low for an entity that is hemorrhaging cash.

And that’s only the start of the picture of an accelerating financial collapse. The historical operating deficits pale in comparison with those projected for the immediate future if nothing is done: "Projected operating deficits moving forward surpass $100 million in 2016, $200 million by 2020, and increase to $425 million by 2025." (page 32) The total projected operating deficit for just the next ten years is $2.5 billion (page 8) -- and that's after sucking $2 billion or so per year out of HUD, which in any reasonable world would also be counted as part of the operating deficit.  And then there’s the backlog of capital projects, estimated here at an astonishing $16.9 billion (page 6), or around $100,000 per apartment. In the past those have also largely been provided from (yet additional) federal funding, but now that has been cut back significantly, with no indication that the big annual blank check will ever return.

A fair summary is that NYCHA is in the final stages of a socialist death spiral.  Billions of dollars of annual losses have up to now been hidden with the annual $2 billion check from the big "free money" account of the federal government.  Now that that is diminishing the losses are turning up as an escalating cash hemorrhage on NYCHA's own books.  What to do?

As to proposed solutions in this Report, some attention in the press has focused on de Blasio's partial revival of the Bloomberg idea of building market rate buildings on vacant NYCHA sites.  But if you read the Report, you learn that the amount of that is so small, and the associated "affordable housing" impositions are so large, that little money can be found there.  Instead, the big money to rescue NYCHA -- well in excess of $200 million per year -- is to come from transferring expenses off NYCHA's books and on to the City's taxpayers generally, thus burying and hiding the expenses in larger accounts so that nobody can any longer figure out how desperate NYCHA's situation really is.  For example:

• Although NYCHA pays no property taxes, until recently it has paid an annual "PILOT" (payment in lieu of taxes) of $30 million or so to cover specific services like garbage pick-up and senior citizen centers.  That will now be waived.
• Prior to 1995 NYCHA provided for security through its own police force.  Then that force was merged with the NYPD, and since 1995 NYCHA has made a payment for the specific police services that provide security to its projects.  It is estimated here that that would have been about $70 million per year going forward.  It will now be waived.
• The Report proposes to "shrink[ NYCHA's] central office workforce by nearly 1,000 through attrition and integrat[e] some operations and positions within NYCHA into other City agencies" -- a naked concealment of expenses properly allocated to NYCHA in bigger accounts in the City budget.  This one supposedly "saves" $90 million per year -- big money.
• And then there's another $37 million per year from a new payment that the City will make to NYCHA in return for NYCHA's providing services to formerly "homeless" people.  Previously NYCHA was not paid for this.

And the best part is, nobody will ever be able to find a line item in the City budget that reveals how much of these expenses properly should be allocated to NYCHA.  They'll just be part of the Sanitation budget, or the Police budget, or the Homeless Services budget, or something else.  So we can all pretend that all is well at NYCHA, at least until its losses (as measured by current accounting) exceed the new $200+ million per year worth of slush funds, which is not projected to happen until some time after 2020.  Will de Blasio even still be around?  We'll worry about it then!

Here's the bad news:  socialist death spirals only get worse.  Maybe the crash can be put off a long time, but not forever.  For an actual solution to the NYCHA crisis that, in addition, offers the benefit of helping to lift many or most of the residents out of poverty, see my proposal to give away the housing to the residents.

The Main Business Of The Government Is Promoting Its Own Growth

On Monday May 18 the New York Times had an article on government self-promotion that has gotten at least some attention.  The article is "Critics Hear E.P.A.'s Voice in 'Public Comments,'" by Eric Lipton and Coral Davenport.

Seems that EPA administrator Gina McCarthy recently testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on the subject of some new regulations relating to drinking water.  To demonstrate to the Committee how popular the regulations are, McCarthy cited some one million or so public comments, nearly 90% of which, she claimed, supported the rule:

“We have received over one million comments, and 87.1 percent of those comments we have counted so far — we are only missing 4,000 — are supportive of this rule,” Ms. McCarthy told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in March. “Let me repeat: 87.1 percent of those one-plus million are supportive of this rule.”

But it turns out that the supposedly supportive comments were in response to a social media lobbying campaign orchestrated by EPA itself:

Late last year, the E.P.A. sponsored a drive on Facebook and Twitter to promote its proposed clean water rule in conjunction with the Sierra Club. At the same time, Organizing for Action, a grass-roots group with deep ties to Mr. Obama, was also pushing the rule. They urged the public to flood the agency with positive comments to counter opposition from farming and industry groups.

Anything wrong with that?  It's just the latest example of a federal government with trillions of dollars of annual taxpayer money to play with, using the money for goal number one, which is promoting the ongoing growth in size and power of the federal government itself.  How can ordinary citizens possibly amass resources to push back in any meaningful way?  Over at Powerline, Steven Hayward cites this latest government abuse as one more example in what he calls "The Crisis Of The Administrative State."

[T]oday’s administrative state—the increasingly independent fourth branch of government—has transformed government into its own special interest faction, lobbying itself on behalf of itself—increasingly in partisan ways.

Good job New York Times and Steven Hayward.  But the problem I have is that this latest EPA gambit is just the tip of the iceberg, and there is very little systematic attention paid to the vast scope of government self-promotion in all areas.  As soon as you start looking at this, you start realizing how pervasive and revolting the whole enterprise is.  I have previously covered this, for example, here, here, here and here.  Examples are literally everywhere:

• The aggressive campaign during the Obama administration to grow the number of food stamp recipients, including sending government representatives out as door-to-door salespeople to sign up new dependents, resulting in a doubling of food stamp expenditures and near-doubling of the number of recipients to approximately 46 million during a time of supposed economic recovery.
• The campaign to sign up recipients for Obamacare, reported by the Associated Press to have cost $684 million annually.
• The Department of Agriculture's fake "food insecurity" surveys, designed so that no amount of food aid will ever be found to reduce food insecurity, and thus to support endless promotion of the growth of the Department of Agriculture.
• The Census Bureau's fake "poverty" statistics, again carefully designed so that no amount of government spending can ever make the number of people in "poverty" go down, and thus to support advocacy for more and yet more spending.
• The outrageous convention that government spending on goods and services, no matter how wasteful, is counted at 100 cents on the dollar in the GDP, thus making it falsely appear that any cuts to even the most wasteful government spending reduce GDP.
• The vast distribution of money by the Federal Reserve to housing and other community activists who in turn lobby the government for more spending on their pet projects.  A 2014 article by Charles Calomiris, cited at the link, estimated this spending at $850 billion in the period 1992 - 2006.

It would be easy to go on all day with this.  But I would like to remind readers that we once had a President who thought that shrinking the government was a good idea, and who actually forbade members of his administration from advocating for growing their budgets.  That President was Calvin Coolidge.