The Times Shows That Public Housing Perpetuates Poverty

One of the hallmarks of the Manhattan mentality is the inability to draw the most obvious inferences from the facts in front of your eyes.  I have often accused Manhattan groupthinkers of flat refusal to get outside their cushy homes and offices and walk around town, thinking that if they actually walked around and observed things they could not help but draw the obvious conclusions.  Well, it's really too much to ask them to walk around, but how about putting a chart of data in front of their eyes?  No, that won't work either:  it seems that even if data on what's going on are collected and presented in a very clear fashion, a Manhattan groupthinker will continue to grasp tightly to his preconceptions in the face of the evidence.

A great example of this phenomenon appeared in yesterday's Sunday New York Times, where the Metropolitan Section had a front-page article titled "In Chelsea, A Great Wealth Divide."  The article contains a map of income data for the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.  I have copied it below.  I apologize that not all of the text from the original has come over in my copying.  (You can see the original at the link.)

Here's what you need to know to understand the map.  The map covers an area of the southwest part of Manhattan Island, from approximately West 12th Street at the south, to West 35th Street at the north, and from Avenue of the Americas (6th Avenue) on the east to the Hudson River on the west.  The farthest south street that goes straight across the map is West 13th Street.  The colors indicate median income by block, as of 2013.  Pink means median income below $30,000; gray means median income between $30,000 and $100,000; and blue means median income above $100,000.  The little circles indicate recent home sales above $1 million.

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Median income by block in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, 2013.  Pink = under $30,000; blue = over $100,000; gray = between the two. 
 

So what are those pink areas plunked in right next to the blue?  You guessed it -- they are the low income public housing.  Well, not quite exactly, but very close.  They've actually drawn in the footprints of the public housing buildings.  The more northerly pink area contains the Elliott-Chelsea Houses, and the more southerly holds the Robert Fulton Houses.  You can see that the Fulton Houses extend two blocks beyond the southern pink area to 19th Street, into two blocks with expensive new condos on their western portion, causing those blocks to turn gray.  The two pink blocks south of the Fulton Houses are very commercial, and I'm not sure anybody actually lives there.  One of them is a shopping center/office building called the Chelsea Market.  (OK, there are a few anomalies on this map.  The block containing the full-block New York headquarters of Google appears in gray.  I don't think anybody lives in that block either.  The same goes for the block containing the full-block Macy's department store on 34th Street, which appears in blue.)

So what conclusions can we draw from this?  Let's start with the trivial -- that the rich and the poor live right next to each other in Chelsea.  Yes, at the New York Times they can figure that one out, calling this the "great wealth divide."  But how about a few things almost as obvious?

• Does living next to rich people help the poor rise up from poverty?  The idea that living next to the rich helps the poor rise up from poverty is the underlying concept of the current big push from HUD to get wealthy communities around the country to accept more public housing.  I covered that recently here.  There couldn't be a more compelling demonstration that it doesn't work than this map.  What say you, New York Times? :

Today’s Chelsea, the swath west of Avenue of the Americas between 14th and 34th Streets, could be the poster neighborhood for what Mayor Bill de Blasio calls the tale of two cities. While the average household income in Chelsea has climbed exponentially, the income at Elliot Houses, the housing project where Ms. Waters lives, has remained more or less steady.   

If the income of those in public housing remains "steady"  for several decades while the income of increasingly affluent people right next door "climbs exponentially," isn't it one hundred percent obvious that living next door to the affluent is not helping the poor to rise from poverty?  So why not draw that obvious conclusion?  But they won't.

• Does subsidized public housing perpetuate poverty?  Just look at the map, for heaven's sake!  There's literally nobody left in this area at poverty-level income except those in public housing, but their income has remained "steady" (at poverty levels) for decades.  This neighborhood is loaded with thousands of the highest-paying jobs in the country.  They have the New York headquarters of Google right across the street from the Fulton Houses.  Here's the closest the Times comes to addressing this subject:

But jobs for local residents have not materialized to the extent expected, residents and local officials said. “When you have some of the best known, best paying companies in the United States located in Chelsea,” said Councilman Johnson, “it’d be ideal to try to get young people who are from low-income families to offer paid internships, job training and jobs to get them involved so they could stay in the neighborhood they grew up in.”          

They just have a mentality that the people who live in the projects are life-long charity cases with no ability to act for themselves, and "we" must help "them" with handouts, whether that be the housing or the jobs or whatever.

Anyway, the Times manages to get through it's whole long article without ever mentioning the painfully obvious role of the public housing itself in perpetuating the poverty in the midst of plenty.  But a reader looking at their chart would literally have to be in a coma to miss that.

What Is The U.S. Government's Best Kept Secret?

I invite readers to submit proposed answers to the above question.  As recently as some months ago I might have thought the best answer was the classified "TOP SECRET" information of the State and Defense Departments; but we have more recently learned that much of that information turns up on "please hack me" private servers of the top officials.  Another good candidate until recently might have been the personal information submitted by taxpayers on their returns; but again, it seems that those secrets have been rather poorly kept.

So a better candidate for "best kept secret" would be in the category where the government just avoids collecting the relevant information because they suspect that the answer if known would be too embarrassing to the official party line.  Therefore consider as a candidate for "best kept secret" the statistics for the number and percent of people in the U.S. without health insurance, the so-called "uninsured."

Do you remember when the greatest crisis facing the United States was the "crisis of the uninsured"?  That would be back during the GW Bush administration, when you couldn't go through a week's worth of the output of any "mainstream" media publication without finding at least one heartrending story about the sufferings of those without medical insurance.  Today, such stories have almost completely disappeared.  Can you remember the last time you saw one?

Undoubtedly, you may be thinking, that must be because Obamacare fixed the crisis.  Not only did we get lots of new subsidies and a huge Medicaid expansion, but we got the "employer mandate" and the "individual mandate."  Today, it has become literally illegal not to have medical insurance.  Therefore, everybody has it.  Right?  Or alternatively, could it be that the numbers of uninsured have not changed much at all and you don't read about it because the government doesn't collect the information and the press just isn't interested while their guy is in the White House?

If you go to look for the information as to the currently-uninsured, you will find that definitive numbers are impossible to find.  Wait a minute -- Can't the government just go to each insurance company as of a certain day and get the number that each is insuring on that day, then add their own numbers for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries on that day, subtract from the total population, and give us the answer?  I sure don't know any reason why the government can't do that.  But as far as I can find, they don't.

Instead what happens is that some private companies (e.g., Gallup) do surveys where they ask people whether they have insurance or not.  Within the government, as far as I can find, the CDC has done a similar survey (why is this part of their mission?), and that's it.  There's no information at all coming from the obviously definitive source of the insurance companies.  As to the population surveys, whether by the private companies or the CDC, the data are reported in inconsistent and confusing ways that make it as difficult as possible to tell how much effect Obamacare has had on the size of the uninsured population.  And the CDC study is obviously wildly spinning like a top to make Obamacare seem as much as possible at least a little success.

But even without definitive numbers, there is enough data available that you immediately realize that once you get past the new handouts of "free" coverage in the law (i.e., the Medicaid expansion and the requirement that children up to 26 be covered by their parents' policies) the effect of Obamacare has been exceedingly minimal.  Here is a private but very pro-Obamacare site called Obamacare Facts that at least puts some of the numbers in semi-usable form.  Some highlights:

• According to the US Census Bureau, before the ACA in 2009 about 48.6 million or 15.7% of the population was uninsured. A 2015 study by the CDC using Census data showed the total uninsured rate as 9.2% and the uninsured rate for the 18 – 64 demographic as 13%.         

OK, 15.7% of the population to 9.2% sounds like a substantial decline in the uninsured population -- it would be around 20 million people.  But how much of that consists of simply handing out new completely free coverage to the non-poor in the form of Medicaid and CHIP expansion?  Again from Obamacare Facts:

• 10.8 million more enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP since Oct 2013 (estimated at 11.7 million as of May 2015). Not all who enrolled were ineligible before the ACA, but instead enrolled due to the woodworking effect (increased awareness under the ACA leading to more sign ups).  

That 10.8 million would be more than half of the increase in the "insured."  As to the so-called "woodworking" effect, it's up to us to guess whether that is substantial or not.  It's not clear to me that it makes a whole lot of difference to anybody whether they are insured or not if you have the right to sign up any time you feel like it for free care (including up to two months retroactive!).

And then there's the other free category, the under 26-year-olds who got to stay on their parents' coverage.  How many of those?

• It’s estimated by HHS that 5.7 million young adults (aged 19-25) stayed on a parent’s plan until age 26. That is 2.3 million who stayed on their parents plan from 2010 to 2013 with an estimated 3.4 million gaining coverage from 2013 to 2015.     

Put the last two categories together, and you have 16.5 million -- leaving only about 4 million people as having gained coverage from the entire rest of the law.  OK, it's a few more if you believe in the "woodworking" theory.  Do you mean that all that stuff about individual mandate, employer mandate, everybody must have coverage, tax penalties,  government exchanges, gold, silver and bronze plans, subsidies up to 400% of poverty level, "risk corridor" giveaways to insurance companies to get them to participate, newly-created co-ops, two thousand pages of statute, etc., etc., only led to less than two percent of the population agreeing to add health insurance where it would cost them even one dime of their own money?

So how many people total have actually signed up via these state and federal exchanges?  For that, turn to the New York Times, which carried an article titled "Little Growth Predicted On Health Exchanges" in the October 15 issue.  I'll bet you missed it -- it was on page A20.

About 9.9 million people had coverage through the federal and state insurance exchanges at the end of June, and administration officials predict that the enrollment will decline to 9.1 million by the end of this year.      

That 9.1 million would be about 3% of the population, but of course some of them replaced lost employer coverage, so give the government credit for around a 2% increment in the "covered" population -- although most of those with some level of government subsidy.  But isn't this just the beginning?  Won't Obamacare continue to expand until everybody is covered?  Here's why they saved this story for page A20:

After an elaborate analysis of demographic data, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services, said that 10 million people were expected to have marketplace coverage at the end of next year, up only about 100,000 from recent levels and millions short of earlier projections. . . .   The Congressional Budget Office predicted in March that enrollment through the exchanges would reach 11 million this year and 21 million in 2016.

Oops!  A projected more-than-doubling by the end of 2016 of those insured through the exchanges, from 9 million to 21 million has just been turned into a projected increase of 100,000.  So, Ms. Burwell, how are you going to spin this one?

Because of gains in coverage in the last two years, Ms. Burwell said, there are fewer uninsured Americans, and “they are a little harder to reach.”   

Good understatement, Sylvia!  I'd say we're talking about around 30 million or so people left, and it looks like the prospects for moving that number down any further via the Obamacare Rube Goldberg mechanism are about zero.  If 48 million uninsured was a desperate crisis, what now?

In the New York Post on Monday, Betsey McCaughey posits that those people who just won't sign up are largely the healthy young, and that the Obamacare "death spiral" has begun.  Of course, it will take a long time for this to play out, maybe 20 years, at enormous cost to the taxpayers.  (The Weekly Standard projects the ten-year cost of Obamacare at $2 trillion.)  But I can't see how McCaughey is wrong.

No wonder the government isn't going out of its way to collect data on this subject.  Hey, down in Venezuela they have stopped collecting data on GDP and inflation.  That's how they prove that socialism works.

Do They Understand That Their Tax Increases Do Not Apply To The Billionaires?

The standard promise of the progressive politician is that he/she will increase taxes on the "millionaires and billionaires" so that they will pay their "fair share."  Certainly, this promise was central to the de Blasio playbook when he ran for mayor two years ago.  Today a form of this promise is front and center for Bernie Sanders ("[Bernie Sanders demands] that the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share in taxes.") and for Hillary Clinton ("Hillary supports . . . enacting the 'Buffett Rule' that ensures that no millionaire pays a lower effective tax rate than their [sic] secretary.")  Typically in practice this promise translates into raising the marginal income tax rate on taxable income above a certain level, say $250,000.

Now, if you understand some basics about how the income tax system works, you immediately know that these proposals are next-to-completely irrelevant to the actual mega-billionaires.  But the proposals surface so often (indeed, the raising of marginal rates on top taxable incomes has been the central feature of the tax increase programs of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as Andrew Cuomo here in New York and Jerry Brown in California, and of many others elsewhere) that eventually you realize that most people just don't understand how this works, and the politicians are cynically playing off the ignorance of the low-information voters.

I do think that the readership here is fairly well informed; but again, the ignorance on this subject seems so pervasive that a serious corrective is in order.  So it's time for the Manhattan Contrarian to perform a basic public service and explain how the mega-billionaires became mega-billionaires without paying any meaningful income tax on the billions as they were accumulated.  And further, to explain that the reason that the accumulation of these billions has not been taxed is that it is next to impossible as a practical matter to levy a tax on the most typical form of major wealth accumulation.

The simple answer to the conundrum is "unrealized capital gains."  I'll use the abbreviation "UCG."  When you get paid a salary, you owe tax every time you get a paycheck.  But when you own an asset -- like stock in a company -- you only owe tax when you sell the asset for a gain.  If you hold on to the asset for forty years without selling it, you owe no tax, even if the asset has gone from being worth $1 to being worth $10 billion.  All you have is UCG.  Indeed, even if the asset has gone from being worth $1 to $10 billion, you have incurred no taxable income, because you have not sold the asset.

Consider the top ten list of mega-billionaires from the Forbes 400 that I named in Sunday's post: Gates, Buffett, Ellison, Bezos, C. Koch, D. Koch, Zuckerberg, Bloomberg, Jim Walton, Page.  With the exception of Walton (who mainly inherited his wealth), all of these people have made their big money the same way, namely in the form of UCG, by owning some or all of a company and not selling while the company increased hugely in value.  For those who don't know, the companies are Microsoft (Gates), Berkshire Hathaway (Buffett), Amazon (Bezos), Koch Industries (the Kochs), Facebook (Zuckerberg), Bloomberg LLP (Bloomberg) and Google (Page).  Again, the mere increase in value is not a taxable event.  And thus these people have become mega-billionaires while paying little to no tax.  (The "little" would apply to whatever salary they paid themselves, to any dividends the company may have paid along the way, and to any voluntary sales of shares of the company's stock that the owner may have made.  Relative to the vast increases in the values of these companies over the years, the amounts of the taxable salaries and dividends are relatively trivial.  As an example, Warren Buffett is famously paid a salary of $100,000 by Berkshire Hathaway.  Forbes gives his net worth as $62 billion.)

So, if you are of the progressive persuasion, you are undoubtedly thinking, obviously we need to tax UCG!  Well, unfortunately, there are very good reasons that UCG are not taxed.  Attempting to tax UCG would be a nightmare for millions of taxpayers, and also a nightmare for the IRS to try to administer, if indeed they could administer such a tax at all.  First, taxing UCG poses a huge collection problem, because most of the assets out there that increase in value are illiquid and don't provide the owners with any means of paying the tax unless and until they are sold.  When you get paid a salary or sell an asset, by definition you have cash to pay the tax, and the taxman takes the occasion to swoop in and collect.  But UCG more often than not are not associated with any available cash.  Far and away most of the untaxed UCG out there are in the form of residential real estate.  Are you really going to ask every homeowner to pay a tax every year on how much the value of his house increased?  Most people just aren't going to have that money unless they sell the house.  So are you going to force hundreds of thousands and even millions of people to sell their houses every year just because the value went up?  Second, how do you know how much the value went up if the asset was not sold?  Does everybody now need to get their house appraised every year?  How about the car(s)? How about the art?  The baseball card collection?  Third, sometimes values go up and sometimes values go down.  If your $500,000 house went to $600,000, and you paid a $20,000 tax on that, what happens the next year when the value goes back down to $500,000?  Do you get the $20,000 back?

Sensible people considering these challenges have long realized that taxing UCG is just not a practical option.  The realization is so pervasive that the whole subject of taxing UCG is never mentioned, at least not explicitly, when the subject of getting the "millionaires and billionaires" to pay their "fair share" is discussed.  Perhaps taxing UCG may be part of what Bernie Sanders is referring to when he talks about getting rid of "loopholes," but I doubt it.  Really, it's not accurate to refer to non-taxation of UCG as a "loophole"; more accurately, this is just a basic feature of how our income tax system works, and of how it has to work as a practical matter.

But then, if UCG are to continue to go untaxed, then no matter how much tax rates get increased on "taxable income," people are going to continue to be able to accumulate billions of dollars of fortunes without paying any meaningful amount in tax during the period of accumulation.  The Buffett Rule?  That's like the magician's trick, diverting your attention from the real issue.  According to Hillary's website linked above, the Rule supposedly "ensures that no millionaire pays a lower effective tax rate than their [sic] secretary."  Pay attention to that term "effective tax rate."  UCG are not income!   Therefore, presence or absence of UCG has no effect on "effective tax rate."

Now you must wonder, do Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton understand this issue?  I'm quite sure that Hillary understands it, and realizes perfectly that her core supporters are not going to be meaningfully touched by her proposed tax increases.  Bernie?  Sorry, but I think he has no clue.

Are Hundreds Of New Billionaires A Problem Or An Opportunity?

Back in the day, as they say, Europe developed a system of noble families and inherited wealth. The seventeenth Duke of Lancaster inherited his estates from the sixteenth Duke, who inherited his from the fifteenth, and so forth back into the bowels of history.  The nobility was rightly viewed as a "class" that commoners had no hope of cracking into.  But go through the Forbes 400 today, and perhaps the most remarkable thing you'll find is the scarcity of inherited wealth.  Overwhelmingly these people have made the wealth in the current generation.  Of the top ten (Gates, Buffett, Ellison, Bezos, C. Koch, D. Koch, Zuckerberg, Bloomberg, Jim Walton, Page), seven literally made all of their money from scratch, and only one (Walton) is mainly living off the inheritance.  And what the heck has happened to the scions of the great wealth of just a couple of generations ago?  Where are the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys, the Carnegies, the Morgans, the Fords?

Clearly America is in the midst of creating a round of new fortunes, the direct consequence of large numbers of highly successful new businesses.    So question:  Is this a huge problem that must be fixed by the government?  Or should it instead be seen as a big opportunity for the rest of us?

Why opportunity, you ask?  It's an opportunity because wealth isn't any fun unless you spend it.  What are these guys going to do with their billions -- make a gigantic pile of dollar bills and sit in the middle of it throwing the money up in the air and shouting "whee"?  Wrong.  They want stuff!  And services!  And if you can figure out the kind of stuff and services they want, you can sell it to them and share in the abundance.  Lord knows this is exactly the game plan of big law firms, who can do very well for themselves (thank you) by getting some of the new billionaires as clients.  Then there are the purveyors of an infinite variety of luxury goods, and the people who build the $100 million condos, and the wealth managers, and on and on.  And thus the wealth gradually gets circulated around the society through voluntary transactions.

Or alternatively, you can get angry and jealous and demand that the government take the money away from the newly wealthy right now and create and expand lots of redistributionist programs.  Bernie Sanders!  (And Clinton and O'Malley aren't far behind.)

Of course, in Greenwich Village, the prevailing attitude is the anger and jealousy.  In the latest issue of one of our local papers, Westview News, the lead article goes by the title "Bernie Sanders Can Be Elected President.  Amazing!"  The author is Arthur Schwartz, perhaps best known for his stint as general counsel of ACORN just before that organization collapsed in scandal.  Schwartz is entranced by the Sanders agenda:

Bernie Sanders’ remarkable campaign continues to shed the most light on issues and offer the country the most hope. . . .  He says: break up the big banks. He says “cancel all student debt.” He says to give all new parents twelve weeks of paid leave, and he wants a single payer health care system, not one enriching insurance companies.             

It's classic Greenwich Village progressivism.  You might think that Greenwich Village, barely over a mile from Wall Street, would be the home of many of those evil bankers.  And indeed it is the home of more than a few of them, but they are a minority.  And this is a minority that is mostly delusional in thinking that the "evil bankers" that Sanders, Schwartz, et al., are talking about must be somebody other than themselves.  But anyway, most of the people in the Village are not in the top one percent of the income distribution, but rather in percents 2, 3 and 4.  Those are the percents where are found the journalists, the writers, the academics, the teachers, the therapists, the "healing professions."  This is the perfect audience for the play to anger and jealousy.

George Will in today's Washington Post argues that Bernie Sanders just doesn't understand economic equality.  While Sanders rails about income inequality, Will argues, the programs that he stands for actually bring about regressive redistribution and the worsening of inequality:

First, the entitlement state exists primarily to transfer wealth regressively, from the working-age population to the retired elderly who, after a lifetime of accumulation, are the wealthiest age cohort. Second, big, regulatory government inherently exacerbates inequality because it inevitably serves the strong — those sufficiently educated, affluent, articulate and confident to influence the administrative state’s myriad redistributive actions.          

And sure enough, when you look at the Sanders program, it turns out to be mostly about enhancing regressive redistribution, that is, redistribution from the relatively poor to the relatively rich.  Single payer healthcare?  We already have free healthcare for the poor (Medicaid) so this must be entirely about government payment on behalf of the non-poor and rich.  Free college tuition?  That will go largely to the top half of the income distribution.  Enhance social security?  That will only worsen the current regressiveness of transfers from the poor/young to the rich/old.

So how can we understand the mentality of those who rail against the rich and against income inequality while in fact advocating a program of regressive redistribution and that will only worsen the lot of the actual poor?  I'm not sure it's possible to understand this completely, but it at least starts to make sense if you see it as the program of percents 2, 3 and 4 to take out their anger on percent one -- while, of course, taking care of themselves.

Well, percents 2, 3 and 4, you should be careful what you wish for.  In the coming worldwide redistribution, you will suddenly all find yourselves deep into worldwide percent number one. 

When The Official Narrative Trumps The Facts

It seems that the world is full these days of examples of official -- some might say "politically correct" -- narrative trumping the truth.  And thus when certain facts seem to be established beyond any possible ability to deny them any more, many people continue proclaiming exactly the opposite as the truth.  Having spent a career in the trial business, I'm fully aware of the slippery nature of the truth, and indeed that at some level it is actually impossible to establish the absolute truth of any particular facts.  I mean, how do we really know that somebody didn't come through in our sleep last night and transplant everybody's brain with a new brain having new memories?  As that example illustrates, at some point the possibilities for continuing to argue "not so" become so implausible that you would think no one would continue to soldier on.

But not only are there plenty of examples where the advocates of alternative reality don't give up, there are many cases where the alternative reality achieves broad acceptance right in the face of the overwhelming evidence against it.  Now here's what's odd:  In every good example of this phenomenon that I can come up with, the evidence-trumping narrative is somehow an icon of the Left, drawing support from widespread acceptance among certain circles of journalists, academics, Manhattanites, Hollywood stars and moguls, and other cool left-leaners.  I'm going to lay out a few examples here.  If anyone can give me an example of a right-side narrative that has achieved comparable widespread acceptance despite overwhelming evidence against it, I'll be very interested to hear about it.  But I really can't think of one, despite some effort.

Alger Hiss.  I'll start with a truly classic example of the genre, one that is native to my Greenwich Village home.  One of my daughters attended a high school in lower Manhattan called the Friends Seminary.  A couple of years behind her at that school was a kid named Jacob Hiss.  Turns out that Jacob was Alger's grandson.  Around the time my daughter was a senior (2007), the school invited Jacob's father Tony, an alum of the school and Alger's son, to give a talk on the Hiss case.  (Apparently Friends was the Hiss family school.)  Of course the talk was all about why Alger was innocent and had been framed.  And in this context I came to learn that the official Greenwich Village belief is indeed that Alger was framed.  Even as late as 2007!  I haven't checked around recently, but I have little doubt that most Villagers today who remember anything about this case will still believe that Hiss was framed.  After all, he was one of us -- Village resident, supporter of high-minded progressive causes, graduate of Harvard Law School.  (Wait a minute -- now we're getting a little too close for comfort!)

But what about the evidence?  Hiss was a high-ranking State Department official who was accused in the late 40s by a guy named Whittaker Chambers of having been a co-member of a Soviet cell in the 30s and early 40s, and of having passed State Department secrets to Soviet agents.  Hiss strenuously denied it, including in testimony before Congress.  It was all just "he said, she said" until Chambers came up with some papers that he claimed Hiss had given him for transmission to the Russkies.  The papers had been retyped on a manual typewriter of the day.  The FBI got hold of a Hiss family typewriter and established that every quirk of that device was reflected in the retyped documents produced by Chambers.  At that point the Hiss story became that the FBI had elaborately created a "forged typewriter" to mimic the physical characteristics of the Hiss typewriter.

Now, I above all others am prepared to believe just about anything about the FBI; and this was the J. Edgar Hoover FBI of the late 40s, which I'm prepared to believe was even worse than today's edition.  But, really?  Based largely on the typewriter evidence, Hiss was convicted of perjury for his testimony before Congress denying his involvement in Soviet spying.

Then in the 90s lots of information got released from former Soviet archives, and many who have reviewed decrypted communications have concluded that a certain agent identified as "Ales" could only be Hiss.  A Commission on government secrecy in the late 90s chaired by then-Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan concluded that the case for complicity of Hiss was "settled".

Anyway, for those with any interest in this case, here is a website called the Alger HIss Story, maintained by a long-time colleague of Alger, and continuing to soldier on with making the case for Alger's innocence.  And yes, the "forged typewriter" bit is a key element of the defense.

Dan Rather/Memogate.   And now we have opening today in theaters a movie called "Truth."  As with the Hiss story, to believe the narrative peddled in "Truth" you need to believe completely implausible things about how certain documents were created.  And yet it seems that formerly respected newsman Dan Rather, his producer Mary Mapes, actor Robert Redford, director and screenwriter James Vanderbilt, and zillions more of the leftist persuasion, are more than prepared to go with the narrative over the evidence.

Some brief background:  In September 2004, two months before the Bush-Kerry presidential election, the CBS news show 60 Minutes II ran a story touting some newly discovered documents as establishing that then-President Bush, while serving in the Texas Air National Guard in the early 70s, basically went AWOL by failing to show up for a required physical exam because he was working on someone's Senate campaign in Alabama, and then exerted pressure from above on his commanding officer to avoid a bad report.  The story was produced by CBS producer Mary Mapes and presented on air by Dan Rather.  It rapidly fell apart.  It seems that the documents, supposedly generated by Bush's commanding officer Jerry Killian in the early 70s, bore none of the physical characteristics of documents generated on typewriters of the day, and instead appeared to have been generated by a 2003 version of Microsoft Word.  For example, 70s typewriters gave all letters equal amounts of space, whereas Word gave more space to a "w" than to an "l"; and Word would automatically superscript the "th" in 5th, something that is very tricky to do on one of those old typewriters.  Here is Megan McArdle of Bloomberg, rehashing the story on July 15:

The documents that backed this story up were probably forgeries.  Now, I say "probably," because I can't exclude the very remote possibility that in the early 1970s Bush's commanding officer, for reasons lost to history, decided to type up these memos himself (even though his wife said he couldn't type) rather than getting his secretary to do it.  I can't prove that he never got his hands on a rather exotic typewriter instead of using the ones that were in his office, spent some time working on it with a soldering gun, and managed to coincidentally produce a document that looked exactly like what you would get if you opened up Microsoft Word 2003 and started typing.

You quickly get the picture of how completely implausible this would be.  To the credit of CBS, Rather and Mapes were quickly dispatched.  You would think that those two would have quietly gone into another line of work and hoped nobody remembered this embarrassment, but no.  Mapes strenuously asserted in multiple interviews that it had never been "proved" that the documents were forgeries, and then in 2005 came out with a book, "Truth and Duty," presenting her side of the case (with herself of course in the role of heroine standing up to the corrupt President Bush).  Ten years on, it's now a movie.

So given the evidence out there at this point could anyone possibly give this the time of day?  Here is the New York Times on October 14 reporting on a preview showing of the film that took place last week at the Museum of Modern Art -- literally one block from my office:

Last week, the former CBS News producer Mary Mapes was back on West 53rd Street at the Museum of Modern Art for the premiere of the movie “Truth.” Ms. Mapes, the author of the book that inspired this movie, got a Hollywood welcome from an adoring crowd and blew a kiss to the film’s director and screenwriter, James Vanderbilt. 

Yes, it was a "Hollywood welcome from an adoring crowd."  That bit of publicity was followed by the rave review for the film that appeared in yesterday's Pravda, calling it "a gripping, beautifully executed journalistic thriller about the events that ended Dan Rather’s career as a CBS anchorman . . . ."   The review studiously avoids taking any position on whether the 60 Minutes II story was true or the journalists performed their jobs with any semblance of competence, versus getting taken in by an obvious hoax that they failed to question because the story helped their side in the heat of a presidential campaign.  After all, of what relevance is it to a movie going by the title "Truth" whether the story it is peddling is true or not?  That's not what this is about at all!:

“Truth” doesn’t try to resolve mysteries that may never be solved or to drum up paranoia for the sake of extra heartbeats. But it still casts a pall of dread, an ominous sense that people in high places, whether in government or the news media, will stop at almost nothing to protect themselves and their interests. 

Sure.  I've got news for you, Pravda:  this one is not a mystery.  At PowerLine today, Scott Johnson also points out with serious understatement that "[Times reviewer] Holden’s thick clichés about people in high places apply perfectly to Mapes herself rather than to the putative villains of Mapes’s piece." 

I was planning to cover several more examples of this genre, including the cases of executed Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, as well as the "Hands Up Don't Shoot" narrative that came out of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.  But this is getting way too long.   So let me close with what is undoubtedly the most extraordinary case today of mass groupthink acceptance of a politically-correct narrative over seemingly definitive evidence disproving the narrative.  I am referring, of course, to global warming.

Global warming.  Those who follow this issue at all know that in 1979 the U.S. put up sophisticated satellites to measure global temperatures.  The satellites were intended to resolve many thorny issues arising out of trying to measure global temperature by scattered thermometers located at surface weather stations.  Those issues include that large parts of the earth's surface (e.g., oceans, poles, Amazonia, sub-Saharan Africa) have no or few weather stations, that stations move, that cities grow around stations, that instruments get changed, and so forth.  So from 1979 forward we have satellites that measure nearly everywhere in the world equally, with far greater accuracy than the prior thermometer networks, and with none of these old issues.  Two different and independent scientific groups, known as UAH and RSS, were retained to analyze and publish the satellite temperature data.  So now we would really know whether global warming was occurring or not.

The latest monthly report on the satellite data covering September came out at the beginning of this month.  The basic story of the satellite data is that during the first 18 years (1979 - 1997) they showed some warming, but since early 1997 -- a period of now 18 years and 8 months -- there has been no warming at all.  Zero, zilch, nada.  Here is the chart of the RSS temperatures since early 1997, with the calculated slope line going through the middle (from Watts Up With That here):

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It's important to note that the slope line shown is not some kind of estimate, but rather is calculated from the data points.  As indicated on the chart, these 224 months have seen a tremendous increase of human production of CO2, particularly with the growth of the economies of China and India, such that fully one-third of all human-produced CO2 has been in this period -- with no warming at all to show for it.

So what is the reaction over at the New York Times?  They actually had an editorial on this subject just last week (October 10), titled "Teaching The Truth About Climate Change," and  advocating that children as young as middle-school be taught that “human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature.”   

Misinformation about climate change is distressingly common in the United States — a 2014 Yale study found that 35 percent of Americans believe that global warming is caused mostly by natural phenomena rather than human activity, and 34 percent think there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether global warming is even happening. (In fact, an overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate change is here and that it is caused by humans.) One way to stop the spread of this misinformation is to teach children about climate change.     

Well then!  "An overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate change is here".  I guess that sure trumps the facts!  Time to teach all the pre-teens how to groupthink!

Will Proximity To The Rich Lift The Poor Out Of Poverty?

Back in June the genius bureaucrats at the Department of Housing and Urban Development moved to finalize their rule going by the Orwellian name of Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.  I covered that development here.

As I reported, the idea behind HUD's AFFH Rule is that HUD itself cannot possibly be responsible for keeping the poor poor by imprisoning them in poverty traps known as "housing projects," because after all the bureaucrats at HUD are perfect and all-knowing government experts.  Therefore it must be that rich communities are responsible for keeping the poor poor by putting in place exclusionary practices to prevent subsidized HUD housing from coming to their communities and thereby keeping the poor out.  If only the poor had the opportunity to live in the same towns with the rich and successful, the "barriers to access" to good jobs and higher incomes would dissolve and the poor would rapidly rise up.  Or something like that.  So by the AFFH Rule we the expert genius bureaucrats are going to fix poverty by requiring every wealthy community in the country to accept a minimum amount of some form of public or subsidized housing!  An article in The Hill on June 11 quoted an HUD spokeswoman on the AFFH Rule as follows:

“HUD is working with communities across the country to fulfill the promise of equal opportunity for all,” a HUD spokeswoman said. “The proposed policy seeks to break down barriers to access to opportunity in communities supported by HUD funds.”      

Well, that was in June.  Now it is October.  Has all that been declared inoperative?  You be the judge.

It seems that here in New York we have a situation that is much the opposite of rich communities excluding the poor.  Here, in a rapidly moving process known as "gentrification," large numbers of prosperous young people have been settling in what were formerly very poor neighborhoods, often neighborhoods dominated by the HUD-subsidized low-income projects of the New York City Housing Authority.  The Daily News reports on Monday October 12.   A study has recently been released by a firm called Abt Associates, in association with the Furman Center for Real Estate at NYU.  The trend:

The study found that in the past, NYCHA developments used to be mostly located in areas with persistent poverty. Due to real estate trends most now sit in either "increasing income” or “high income” neighborhoods. Those are neighborhoods where the average income is greater than the city's median income of $51,865.      

The Abt/Furman study covers three NYCHA projects and their surrounding neighborhoods: Sedgwick Houses in Morris Heights (Bronx), Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City (Queens), and Elliott-Chelsea Houses in Chelsea (Manhattan).  The News correctly describes these three neighborhoods today as "stubbornly poor" (Morris Heights), "rapidly gentrifying" (Long Island City), and "playground of the rich" (Chelsea).  OK, that last one may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.

So lots of upscale people -- even "rich" people in the case of Chelsea -- have been moving in right next door to these huge warehouses for the poor.  Shouldn't that mean that the barriers that have so far kept the poor poor have now been broken?  Now the poor are so close to the rich that they can literally rub elbows.  By HUD's theory, this has to be a great thing.  Right????  Wrong!

Actually, according to this study, everything about living in proximity to the rich makes things worse for the poor.  The article goes on and on, but I'll give you a good sampling:

"The study confirms what those in public housing have seen with their own eyes: gentrification offers a lavish living to a privileged few while leaving NYCHA residents behind with nothing more than a remnant of their former purchasing power," said Councilman Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx), who chairs the public housing committee. . . .   

The study noted there was also no guarantee that the upscale gentrifiers would send their kids to the often lousy public schools in the area NYCHA residents' children attend or even buy milk at the local bodega.  Newcomers "may opt to send their children to private schools and support new grocery stores that may include only expensive fare, out of the financial reach of NYCHA residents," the report read.

The most extreme version of this unhappy dynamic emerged at Queensbridge Houses, where hundreds of new upscale condos have sprung up a few blocks south in the last decade, bringing in new amenities like improved streets and fresh produce.  Residents there "felt that these improvements were meant to benefit new condo owners, often called the "runners and bikers" in the neighborhood, “rather than NYCHA residents."  They noted "disparities" between the quality of housing and groceries nearest NYCHA versus the condos farther south. They "felt that condo residents — and not NYCHA residents — are the impetus for and primary beneficiaries of the changes."  Queensbridge tenants and staff at job placement centers in the neighborhood "did not feel that the changes to the neighborhood's economic landscape, such as new hotels and corporate headquarters, have translated into increased local opportunities for NYCHA residents."

At the Chelsea Houses in Manhattan, tenants often felt that the gold rush caused by the influx of luxury condos and art galleries into the neighborhood starting some 20 years ago has passed them by entirely.     

Let me know if you can think of any reason why all these same considerations would not apply in the case of HUD's grand AFFH plan to move large numbers of poor people into rich communities.  However, there's no word so far that HUD is backing off its plan.

Might I gently suggest that the failure of subsidized public housing everywhere it is tried is not an issue of modest failures in proper execution of the mission, but rather arises from the fundamental flaw of the "to each according to his need" socialist model.  HUD's business is creating poverty traps to keep the poor in poverty.  HUD-subsidized apartments will still be poverty traps wherever they are located, not because of some mythical "barriers" that may or may not exist in some places but not others, but rather because of the poisonous incentives of the subsidized housing itself that cause people to stop striving in order to keep their housing subsidy.