The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part VI

It's been over a month since I wrote an update on "The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time," so it's time to check in on it again.  For those not following this, the fraud in question is the world temperature data tampering fraud, by which the keepers of historical world temperature records adjust temperatures in earlier years downwards in order to create or enhance warming trends and support the narrative of catastrophic global warming.  The principal perpetrators of the fraud are U.S. government employees in the agency known as NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).

Readers of the previous articles know that NOAA has been caught red-handed over and over adjusting earlier temperatures downward.  They uniformly provide no explanation beyond something like "our homogenization algorithm is working appropriately," refuse to give any details, and expunge the earlier raw data to make it as hard as possible for anyone to prove the fraud.  My previous articles are here, here, here, here and here.

Numerous examples of NOAA's pervasive and unexplained adjustments have been published on websites including ICECAP, RealScience, NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat, WattsUpWithThat and others.  And numerous independent researchers have done a lot to thwart NOAA's data deletion efforts by archiving earlier versions of the data.  You can't follow this issue at all without knowing that there are very credible and thoroughly demonstrated instances of pervasive data tampering by NOAA.  You also can't follow this issue at all without knowing that there are several other independent data sets, most notably the two satellite data sets of UAH and RSS covering the period 1979 to present, that do not show the warming that the NOAA data shows.

And yet, with this background, NOAA keeps putting out press releases, more or less monthly, trumpeting alleged new high temperature records, and supposed "news" outlets pick up the releases and put out stories with one scary headline after another, never mentioning that other data sets do not show the same records or warming, and never mentioning that serious and thoroughly-proved allegations of data tampering have been made against NOAA and never refuted.

Not meaning to pick specifically on Bloomberg News, but their website front page has made a point for several months of having a global warming scare headline up there at nearly all times.  For example, today there is "World Breaks Temperature Records As Climate Summit Nears."  ("Global land and sea surface temperatures from January through June were 1.53 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average, the highest since recordings started in 1880, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a report.")  Yesterday it was "Monster El Nino Makes Record Hot Year Look Inevitable."  ("This has been the hottest start to a year by far, according to data released today by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.")  Or try June 18, "This Year Is Headed For The Hottest On Record, By A Long Shot."   ("Last month was the hottest May on record, and the past five months were the warmest start to a year on record, according to new data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.")  Or April 17: "Global Temperature Records Just Got Crushed Again."  ("March was the hottest month on record, and the past three months were the warmest start to a year on record, according to new data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.")  Notice that every time the source is specifically NOAA, without any mention of other data sets that do not show the same thing, nor any mention of the well-established allegations of data tampering against NOAA.  Pathetic.

Believe me, Bloomberg is not the only one.  To give just a couple of examples, here is NBC News from yesterday, "Another Month, Another Global Heat Record Broken."  ("Off-the-charts heat is "getting to be a monthly thing," said Jessica Blunden, a climate scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. June was the fourth month of 2015 that set a record, she said.")  Or the New York Times from March 18, "Winter Sets Global Heat Record Despite US East's Big Chill."  ("Federal [NOAA] records show that this winter and the first two months of 2015 were the hottest on record globally, with a chilly U.S. East sticking out like a cold thumb in a toastier world.")  Always NOAA and only NOAA.  Never any mention of other data sets or what they show.  Never any mention of known NOAA data tampering.

A website called NoTricksZone has a good roundup  today comparing the latest NOAA data showing supposed "records" with data from the other independent (and also more accurate) satellite data sets.  It's just as you'd expect:

NOAA claims that the global surface temperature reached a new all-time record high with an anomaly +0.88°C – the warmest since recordkeeping began in 1880!  However measurements taken by satellite Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) show that although June 2015 indeed was a warm month at +0.39°C, it was only the 4th warmest June ever, and more than 30 other earlier months have seen greater positive anomalies [in records going back to 1979]  Satellite data (revised) [also data going back to 1979] taken by the University of Alabama in Huntsville UAH show that the June 2015 temperature anomaly was +0.31°C, a warm month but not the hottest June ever as three other June months were as warm or warmer.  Moreover plots of the RSS and UAH data continue to show that global temperatures have been flat for now close to 20 years.

NoTricksZone then has the following comment from meteorologist Joe d'Aleo:

“The problem is that the same staff responsible for creating the reports about the climate . . . and running some of the greenhouse models that project the scary scenarios . . .  are also responsible for the databases that validate the forecasts. . . .  There is a lot of control available for modelers to predict a desired result, and data source inconsistencies allow NOAA to be creative – and the result is a hybrid of data and models (with their adjustments like TOA, infilling and homogenization) to show whatever the puppet-masters in government require. It may be that some really believe in their science and work hard to mine the data, achieving a form of bias confirmation. In other cases it is ideologically or politically driven or a matter of job security.”

Also at NoTricksZone from a couple of weeks ago (July 7) is the latest discovery of yet another example of widespread NOAA data tampering.  A guy named Michael Brakey is an energy consultant in Maine, and for his job had reason to archive older temperatures to keep track of how his home efficiency solutions were working.  To his amazement, on repeated visits to NOAA's website to collect data, he found that older temperatures had been systematically altered downward:

In early 2015, I revisited the NOAA website and updated my HDD [heating degree day] and cooling degree-day (CDD) data for a local television presentation. Here I was shocked to discover that NOAA had not only rewritten Maine climate history for a second time in the last 18 months, but with all the tinkering they also screwed up southern interior Maine averages.

There's lots more detail at the link, including additional discovery of massive data tampering with archived temperatures in Ohio and Tennessee.  The tampering is always in the same direction -- earlier temperatures get cooler, thus enhancing warming trends, and making the latest data look like a "record."

Brakey asked NOAA to explain, and got this:

“…improvements in the dataset, and brings our value much more in line with what was observed at the time. The new method used stations in neighboring Canada to inform estimates for data-sparse areas within Maine (a great improvement).”

Replacing actual, observed temperatures in Maine with observations from "neighboring Canada" supposedly brings the value "more in line with what was observed at the time"?  It couldn't be more preposterous.  Bloomberg, NBC, New York Times, and the rest of you: do you realize the extent to which you are getting scammed?  Or are you part of the scam?  It's just beyond belief.

Lower West Side Of Manhattan Versus Lower East Side

Even readers who have never been any where near New York probably know that Manhattan is a long skinny island running roughly North to South, coming to a V-shaped point at the Southern tip known as the Battery.  Lower Manhattan then has two distinct waterfront districts, one running up the Lower West Side, and the other running up the Lower East Side.  In Manhattan's heyday as a port, both the Lower East Side and Lower West Side waterfronts were lined with piers.  The first couple of blocks inland were devoted to uses related to the port:  warehouses, factories, freight-handling facilities, and low-rent housing for sailors and dock workers.

Today the port has long since disappeared.  As I have said multiple times on this blog, there is no longer any active freight pier in Manhattan, and there hasn't been for decades.  Both the Lower East Side and Lower West Side waterfront districts have been redeveloped in the years since the port went away.  But the two districts have taken completely different paths to redevelopment.  On the Lower East Side, governments at all levels (federal, state and local) followed a socialist model of government redevelopment, building dozens of government-owned "projects" that line the waterfront for almost three miles.  On the Lower West Side, the government mostly left things alone.  Today, the Lower West Side waterfront has become some of the most valuable real estate in the world.  And the Lower East Side?  I would say that it is an unmitigated disaster.  It's not just that the buildings are hideous, although they are.  But it's also that what should be equally valuable real estate is instead completely valueless, and the people who live there are considered "poor" even as they occupy what would be multi-million dollar apartments in any rational world.  Am I wrong?  You be the judge!

The port had gone into serious decline at least by the time of the Great Depression in the 1930s.  By the 1950s, large portions had been abandoned, and the abandonment was complete by the 1970s.  When I moved to Greenwich Village in the mid-1970s, the local waterfront (West Side) was lined with abandoned piers, while the first couple of blocks inland featured lots of underused factories and warehouses, mixed with a few early residential conversions.  Here is a 1978 picture looking across the decrepit Charles Street pier and toward the Bethune Street pier, which had just suffered a collapse:

Looking across Charles Street pier toward Bethune Street pier after 1978 collapse
 

On the Lower West Side, with a couple of notable exceptions (West Village Houses, Westbeth), the various governments left the situation alone to lie fallow.  Not so on the Lower East Side.  There the governments (federal, state, and local were all involved) leapt into action to fill the vacuum with the trendy thing of the day, which was low income public housing.  Beginning in the late 1930s, and continuing into the 1960s, they took the stretch of waterfront from the Battery to East 14th Street -- about 3 miles in total -- and filled about 80% of it with "the projects."

Today, all of those projects are still there, one after the other:  Smith Houses, Vladeck Houses, Baruch Houses, Wald Houses, Riis Houses, and I'm sure I've missed some.  All are of the brutalist "towers-in-a-park" style, totally without ornamentation of any kind.  If there is anyone alive who actually finds these things attractive, I have never met the person.  I'll give you a couple of pictures for flavor, but don't feel that you are missing anything because I have not provided a picture of every project.  They all look exactly the same.  This is one of the Baruch Houses from the waterfront side:

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Do you like those big stretches of blank wall in what could be somebody's waterfront view?  Hey, this is the government at work!  Here's a picture of Riis Houses from the inland side:

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On a Google Maps view of this area, I count just under 100 of these buildings in the projects lining the Lower East Side waterfront.  At an average of about 200 apartments per building, that would be around 20,000 apartments.  The value of these 20,000 or so apartments is precisely zero dollars and zero cents.  Nobody can sell them and nobody can buy them.  Tens of thousands of people who live in them are officially designated as poor, despite living in waterfront apartments on what ought to be some of the most valuable real estate in the world.  And did I mention that the rents in these buildings only cover about a third of their operating costs?  And that they have billions of dollars of deferred maintenance waiting to be done with no money to pay for it?  Yes, it is classic socialism.

How valuable could this real estate be in a private enterprise model?  We can get a very good idea by looking at the Lower West Side, which, one would think, would be highly comparable in every way.  But the governments took a different tack, and that has made all the difference.

Over on the Lower West Side, when the governments mostly didn't try to do anything, not much happened for decades.  In the early 90s the state government announced the intention to clear out the abandoned piers and build a park that would include some rebuilt piers plus the narrow strip of land about 100 feet wide along the water.  Construction of the park began in the late 90s and has continued since -- it's still not done.

Here is a relatively recent (2014) view of the Greenwich Village waterfront.  At Bethune Street, they removed the pier shed and nothing remains but a field of piles.  The Charles Street (shorter) and Christopher Street (longer) piers have been redeveloped into recreational green space.

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Construction of new privately-financed housing did not really get going until around 2000, but is now really reaching its peak.  I'll give you some examples of the buildings that have gone up, or soon will go up, on the Lower West Side waterfront, and of their values.  Among the first top-end buildings to get built were twin towers designed by Richard Meier at 173 and 176 Perry Street.  They were under construction in 2001 when the much taller twin towers of the World Trade Center fell.   A third building, just across the street at 165 Charles Street, designed by the same architect, was added in 2005.  These three buildings replaced (1) a vacant lot, (2) a one-story metal garage, and (3) the "Pathfinder" book warehouse, long known as the storage place for communist tracts.  The three Meier buildings appear in about  the center of the picture above.  Here is a view of them from across some water:

Left to right, 173 Perry Street, 176 Perry Street, 165 Charles Street, Greenwich Village, New York City
 

 In 165 Charles Street, a 4500 square foot penthouse is currently listed for $40 million, close to $10,000 per square foot.  A 2500 sq.ft. three-bedroom asks $9.75 million. 

Just to the North at 400 West 12th Street is a building built in 2009 designed by architect Robert A.M. Stern.  It has the name "Superior Ink" because it replaced a prior abandoned ink factory by that name.

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400 West 12th Street, the "Superior Ink" Building, Greenwich Village, New York City
 

A 1400 sq.ft. two-bedroom apartment in this building is on the market for $5.5 million, almost $4000 per square foot.  That apartment doesn't even face the water!

Farther South, below Canal Street, multiple waterfront buildings are currently either under construction or about to begin construction.  Just today, the most recent entry had renderings posted on the YIMBY website.  This one is to be built at the corner of Vestry Street.  Robert A.M. Stern is again involved as architect, this time along with Ismael Leyva.

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Rendering of future 70 Vestry Street, Tribeca, New York City
 

Without doubt the developers will be expecting to achieve values comparable to their now-established companions on the Lower West Side waterfront, namely $3000 per square foot or more.

When you compare the Lower East Side to the Lower West Side, it is clear that government policy has intentionally destroyed tens of billions of dollars of real estate value.  Worse, it has trapped tens of thousands of families in poverty even as they receive an annual gift from the taxpayers of at least $100,000 per family as measured by the rental value of comparable real estate.  Actually the $100,000 per family assumes a value of about $2000 per square foot, well below the $3000 to $4000 per square foot that is becoming standard on the Lower West Side.  So maybe the annual taxpayer gift to each family in the projects is as much as $150,000 to $200,000.  Only to see the families trapped in "poverty" and their buildings crumbling.  It is almost impossible to conceive of such a huge disaster.

So what is the take of the New York Times on this?  It's not too hard to guess.  From a May 26 editorial, commenting on Mayor de Blasio's new plan to "save" the New York City Housing Authority:

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.

OK then, let's throw away a few more tens of billions in our unending striving to keep the poor poor!

In Case You Thought The Chinese Know What They're Doing

A few years ago (September 2009), with China's economy apparently leaping from success to success, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrote a famous column singing the praises of the supposedly enlightened authoritarianism of China's leaders.  Excerpt:

[W]hen [one-party autocracy] is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can . . . have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. 

Well, who would the mere Manhattan Contrarian be to quibble with the state-directed capital allocation choices of these enlightened geniuses?  Of Friedman's list of investments favored by the Chinese autocrats (electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power), my bet is that only two, energy efficiency and nuclear power, will actually add to the people's wealth in the end, versus subtracting.  Maybe these guys have a perfect crystal ball.  If so, they would be the only people in the world who do.  More likely they are committing the well-being of their citizens and taxpayers to vast investments in risky projects, most of which will fail spectacularly.  Time will tell.

But if you are one of those people who think that the Chinese autocrats might actually know what they are doing, you really need to take a look at what they are doing today.  It seems that about a month ago the Chinese stock markets started to go into sharp decline.  After peaks in mid-June, within a few weeks the two main indices had fallen by about 30% (Shanghai) and 50% (Shenzhen).  In the past week or so there has been talk of various measures by the government to support stock prices.  And now today they announce a fund of some 3 trillion yuan ($483 billion) to buy stocks to keep the prices up.  From Bloomberg News this morning:

China has created what amounts to a state-run margin trader with $483 billion of firepower, its latest effort to end a stock-market rout that threatens to drag down economic growth and erode confidence in President Xi Jinping’s government.  China Securities Finance Corp. can access as much as 3 trillion yuan of borrowed funds from sources including the central bank and commercial lenders, according to people familiar with the matter. The money may be used to buy shares and provide liquidity to brokerages, the people said, asking not to be named because the information wasn’t public.

To give some perspective, the entire GDP of China is about $9 trillion (if you believe their numbers), which would make this new stock-buying fund more than 5% of annual GDP.   

Is there any level on which this makes any sense?  A July 6 article in Fortune gives the P/E ratio of the Shanghai market as 23 and of the Shenzhen market as about 50 -- and that's after most of the recent declines had already happened.  By contrast, the current P/E of the Dow Jones Industrial average is under 17, while the P/E of the S&P 500 is about 21.   So even after the recent declines, the Shanghai and Shenzhen markets remain substantially overvalued on general world standards.  Here's the take of Minxin Pei (of Claremont McKenna College), the author of the Fortune article:

Chinese leaders tend to view economic issues from a purely political perspective. Unsurprisingly, the performance of the stock market has been made a barometer of the popularity of the current regime. The head of China Security Regulatory Commission not too long ago called the soaring market “a reform bull market,” suggesting that investors were giving a vote of confidence in the leadership’s promised reform programs. A plunging market would imply a loss of confidence and falling popularity of the current leadership—an intolerable prospect.

So, to protect their political image and narrative, the great leaders of China are in the process of transferring some 5% of GDP from their taxpayers and citizens into the pockets of stock market speculators, in a completely futile effort to prop up stock prices that with a high likelihood are destined to fall no matter what.  Yup, that makes a lot of sense.

But Pei points out that this is just the latest of multiple examples of the Chinese leaders opting to commit the government fisc to shoring up markets on the brink of collapse.  Other recent examples in China have occurred in the real estate market and in the market for local government debt:

In addressing the real estate market bubble, Beijing has opted to keep insolvent developers alive by forcing their lenders to roll over the loans. Consequently, the glut of unsold inventory hangs over the real estate sector. Because there is such an excess in the supply of housing, it is unlikely that those zombie real estate developers will return to life and pay their creditors in full.

Beijing has used a similar recipe for shoring up its debt-laden local governments. After the bond market rejected Beijing’s plan to float the debt issued by local governments earlier this year, Chinese leaders simply ordered state-owned banks to buy such debt, adding assets of dubious quality to their balance sheet.

So far the infinite credit card seems to be succeeding at covering over all the problems.  The official measures of GDP continue to show big increases.  They count new real estate developments at 100 cents on the dollar in GDP, even as the developments sit totally empty.

You can cover it over just so long, and then when it falls apart, it happens all at once.  And no, they don't have any idea what they are doing.  They've had a run of good luck, but it won't last forever.  

The Ongoing Quest For Perfect Fairness And Justice, Fair Housing Edition

If you are a progressive, then you believe that perfect fairness and justice in human affairs can be achieved by empowering neutral, apolitical government "experts" to impose just the right recipe of handouts plus millions of pages of rules and regulations.  And Presto! all becomes utopia.  Or at least we'll die trying.  Of course a few cranks like the Manhattan Contrarian keep pointing out that the places that adopt the biggest collection of these progressive policies somehow seem to have the very highest income inequality measures of anywhere in the country.  Well, it can't be our fault.  It must be that it would have been even worse if we hadn't tried these programs.

So how do some of these efforts play out in the real world?  A Supreme Court case from the just-released end-of-term collection gives us a glimpse into the attempt to achieve perfect fairness and justice through housing subsidies and "fair housing" policy.  The case is called Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc.

It seems that the federal government made available to the Texas housing agency certain tax credits to be used to incentivize development of subsidized housing for low income people.  The Texas housing agency allocated most of these credits to developments in low-income neighborhoods, using the logic that building in those places was less expensive, and so more units could be built than if the credits were allocated to developments in more expensive areas.  Naturally this practice got the agency sued by the activists from Inclusive Communities Project, who alleged that allocating the credits to low income areas discriminated against minorities by reason of having a "disparate impact" of further concentrating them in poor areas where their chances of getting ahead in life would be limited.   The legal question for the Supremes was whether such "disparate impact" claims are cognizable as illegal discrimination, or if not whether the case should be dismissed.

The Supremes held that the claim is legally cognizable.  Beyond that, the Court just remanded back to the court below, so it remains to be seen whether the plaintiffs can prove the disparate impact claim, and if they can, what remedy might be ordered.  As in nearly every case these days involving a liberal/conservative ideological divide, the four "liberal" justices voted as a bloc.  In this case they got Justice Kennedy to go along for a 5-4 majority.  The remaining four conservatives dissented, with Thomas and Alito writing separately.

Most of the case, and of Thomas's dissent, is about whether the language of the statute can support a claim based only on "disparate impact," absent any assertion or proof of discriminatory intent.  Suffice it to say that the language of the statute in question (Fair Housing Act) would seem to preclude finding discrimination without intent.  However, we all now know (not just from this case) that the new cardinal rule of statutory interpretation is that no matter what a statute might say in its mere words, it means what a majority of the Harvard Law School faculty and New York Times editorial board think it ought to mean in furtherance of the creation of the progressive utopia.  So no problem, the intent requirement can be done away with.

But Justice Alito goes farther in his dissent, and asks the question of where the progressive project is actually going with this one:

The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (the Department) has only so many tax credits to distribute. If it gives credits for housing in lower income areas, many families—including many minority families—will obtain better housing. . . .  But if the Department gives credits for housing in higher income areas, some of those families will be able to afford to move into more desirable neighborhoods. . . .  Either path, however, might trigger a disparate-impact suit.

This is not mere speculation. Here, one respondent has sued the Department for not allocating enough credits to higher income areas. See Brief for Respondent Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., 23. But another respondent argues that giving credits to wealthy neighborhoods violates "the moral imperative to improve the substandard and inadequate affordable housing in many of our inner cities." Reply Brief for Respondent Frazier Revitalization Inc. 1. This latter argument has special force because a city can build more housing where property is least expensive, thus benefiting more people. In fact, federal law often favors projects that revitalize low-income communities. See ante, at 2.

No matter what the Department decides, one of these respondents will be able to bring a disparate-impact case. And if the Department opts to compromise by dividing the credits, both respondents might be able to sue. Congress surely did not mean to put local governments in such a position.

Me?  I say, it's outrageous that the Texas housing agency would provide housing to low income people in Texas at all.  What a backwater!  Each low income person from Texas should have a penthouse on Park Avenue here in Manhattan!  What -- why is that a problem?  Doesn't the government have an infinite credit card? 

Does Hillary Clinton Have Any Understanding Of How An Economy Creates Wealth?

Even as I was writing yesterday's post about Bernie Sanders' destructive economic policy prescriptions, Madame Hillary was down in my neighborhood at the New School (Motto: "Where Marxists went when they fled from the Nazis") giving her own major address on economic issues.  Prior to this she's been more or less mum on this subject, but now we at least have something in writing to look at.  Does she have any idea what she is talking about?

As I said yesterday, Hillary definitely tries her best to stick to gauzy generalities, and to avoid specifics.  I will make life more fair!  You deserve to be paid more!  The greedy corporations and banks are taking all the money!  Still, there's plenty here to definitively prove that this woman has absolutely no idea how an economy creates wealth.  In fact, there's plenty here to conclude that she can't do basic arithmetic.

But before getting into the details of the speech, let me remind you of Hillary's prior big foray into economic policy.  I'm talking of course about her efforts as Secretary of State and then with the Clinton Foundation to provide aid intended to raise hundreds of thousands of Haitians out of poverty in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake.  Her signature initiative is the Caracol industrial park in Northern Haiti, supposedly to provide some 60,000 jobs.  Here is a link to the blurb on the Clinton Foundation website boasting about their role in the project.  Here is a picture of Hillary leading the photo op contingent at the official opening in 2012.

The project is a complete and unmitigated disaster.  Three years later, with at least $70 million committed by aid organizations, the project has been completely stalled by corruption and obstructionism of the Haiti government.  Here is a link to my prior coverage.  More generally, tens of billions in aid to Haiti have gone into a complete black hole, and the country is as poor as ever.  Don't you and Bill have some ownership of this?

Memo to Hillary: all wealth is created by the private sector in the presence of private property rights and the rule of law.  Does Hillary know this at all?  Well, her Foundation web site still touts her involvement in Caracol.  Draw your own conclusions.

Now to the speech.  Here's a transcript.  I'll take some key quotes and follow with pithy comments.

Wages need to rise to keep up with costs.  Paychecks need to grow.  Families who work hard and do their part deserve to get ahead and stay ahead.  The defining economic challenge of our time is clear:  We must raise incomes for hard-working Americans so they can afford a middle-class life.

"Wages need to rise"?  That's nice.  What exactly do you plan to do about it?  There's precisely one thing that will work, which is to create a good business climate and let the people get to work on creating their own wealth.  Is it possible that Hillary will stand back and not meddle?  "We must raise incomes for hard-working Americans . . . ."  She views it as the job of the government, "we," the great and the good, to provide for the unwashed.  How's that working out in Haiti?

And really there’s no excuse not to make greater investments in cleaner, renewable energy right now. Our economy obviously runs on energy. And the time has come to make America the world’s clean energy superpower.  I advocate that because these investments will create millions of jobs, save us money in the long run, and help us meet the threats of climate change.

Really, if you don't know that government subsidization of more expensive energy to replace cheaper energy is wealth destruction, how can you possibly even remotely be considered qualified to be President of the United States?  Have you noticed that both Australia and the UK have announced just within the past few days that they are getting out of subsidizing the wind power business because of the unjustifiable costs?  Do you know that California has managed to raise its electricity prices by about 30% over the rest of the U.S., and Germany to double the U.S. average, by forcing consumers to pay for these "renewable" energy schemes?  Think about this Hillary:  doubling electricity prices is the same thing as a huge wage cut for Americans.

And while we're talking about huge wage cuts, try this:

You know last year while I was at the hospital here in Manhattan waiting for little Charlotte to make her grand entrance, one of the nurses said, “Thank you for fighting for paid leave.” And we began to talk about it. She sees first-hand what it means for herself and her colleagues as well as for the working parents that she helps take care of. . . .  Fair pay and fair scheduling, paid family leave and earned sick days, child care are essential to our competitiveness and growth.  

Paid leave!  Fair scheduling! Earned sick days!  Child care!  Hillary, don't you know that all of those things are going to come straight out of wages?  These things are just totally inconsistent with the idea of encouraging employers to pay higher wages.  It's one or the other.  This is why I think that Hillary does not have the ability to do basic arithmetic.

Or is the plan to raise wages by a big government redistribution program?  Well, I have news for you on that one too:  In any massive government redistribution program that includes most everybody, the middle class is going to be on the paying end, not the receiving end.  Without hitting the middle class to pay, there's not enough money to make a big redistribution go.  Sorry.

Shall we turn to her prescriptions for the financial industry?  Try this:

Too many of our financial institutions are too complex and too risky. . . .  We also have to go beyond Dodd-Frank. . . .  I will offer plans to rein in excessive risks on Wall Street. . . . 

I like that "go beyond Dodd-Frank."  Wasn't Dodd-Frank the "plan to rein in excessive risks on Wall Street"?  I have a copy of Dodd-Frank here on my desk, and it's about 2000 pages long.  You mean they left something out?  I'll bet you can't name it!  As far as I know, Dodd-Frank is the main driver behind all the little banks disappearing and our getting left with a handful of gigantic behemoths.  Since when can a community bank afford a compliance staff of 400 lawyers?  With your new crop of say 200,000 pages of regulations, they'll need 1000 lawyers per bank to try to comply.  That'll teach 'em!

I could go on.  As I said, it's mostly generalities, but there's plenty here to conclude that she has absolutely no idea what she's doing in this area.  But I guess we already knew that.  

The Socialist Delusion Is Alive And Well In The Democratic Party

If you look into world economic statistics even minimally, the first thing you notice is the remarkable correlation between economic freedom and economic success.  The Heritage Foundation puts out an annual ranking of all countries in the world by economic freedom.   The number of countries ranked is 178.  I'm sure there's plenty to question in their methodology, but it would just be quibbling.  There really isn't much to argue about over whether the likes of the likes of Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia and Switzerland belong at the top in economic freedom (or at least somewhere close) while Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea belong at the bottom.  Should Haiti really be ranked as high as 151?    That seems rather generous to me, but then there's not a lot of difference between number 150 and number 170.

And the more free the country, the greater the economic success.  The correlation is not perfect, of course.  But Singapore, Switzerland and Australia are now all ahead of the United States in GDP per capita in all rankings.  Meanwhile, Zimbabwe and Venezuela are collapsing, and for Cuba and North Korea, it's hard even to figure out if they have an economy at all.  Over at Econlib, economist Scott Sumner points out that every country except one with an IMF PPP per capita GDP over $25,000 has a Heritage Foundation economic freedom index in the top half of the 178 countries.  Can you guess the one?  It's Greece!  Greece is way down at number 130 in economic freedom.  The government meddles everywhere in the economy, and the labor markets are tied up in knots.  Sorry, but that $25,000 GDP per capita is very likely to prove to have been an illusion -- some combination of the spending of other people's money and fallacious counting of unproductive government spending at 100 cents on the dollar in GDP.  Greece's GDP is projected to decline by something like 7% this year.  Actually, that "decline" probably mostly results from correcting the previously-inflated measurement to something closer to the level the economy was at all along. 

And then there was the Soviet Union.  OK, its collapse was 24 years ago.  Have we all forgotten?

I ask because out there on the campaign trail, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is drawing big crowds and rising rapidly in the polls.  Jim Tankersley in today's Washington Post points out that Sanders not only embraces the term "socialist," but also has expressed complete willingness to give up economic growth in favor of income redistribution:

[Sanders is] saying that America’s leaders shouldn’t worry so much about economic growth if that growth serves to enrich only the wealthiest Americans.  “Our economic goals have to be redistributing a significant amount of [wealth] back from the top 1 percent,” Sanders said in a recent interview, even if that redistribution slows the economy overall.  “Unchecked growth – especially when 99 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent – is absurd,” he said.

The Sanders economic program calls for increased government spending and programs without any recognition of capacity or limits.

• Increase federal spending by $1 trillion to "support 13 million jobs"!
• Affordable child care!  Paid family leave!
• Expand Social Security!
• Expand Medicare and Medicaid!  (They're headed for a crash?  Raise taxes!)
• Government pays for all healthcare!
• $15 minimum wage!  (How has a high minimum wage worked out for Puerto Rico?)
• Free college for all!
• Protectionism to help retain manufacturing jobs!
• Higher taxes!  Still higher taxes!

Does the idea occur to Bernie or his followers that it is possible to kill the goose that laid the golden egg?  For those willing to look, there actually are examples of countries that fell back from relatively rich to lower middle income (Argentina, Greece), and from middle income back to poor (Venezuela).  And the route there is always the same.  It's the route advocated by Sanders.

And by the way, how different is the route advocated by Hillary Clinton?  As far as I can see, the difference between the two is that Sanders is willing to advocate specific proposals, while Hillary sticks to vague generalities.