The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part VIII

In a prior piece in this series (Part V), I reported back on June 7 on an article that had just come out in Science titled "Possible Artifacts Of Data Biases In The Recent Global Surface Warming Hiatus."  The article was written by a team of government scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), led by one Thomas R. Karl.  Readers here will recognize the name of Mr. Karl as one of the foremost global warming zealots living on the taxpayer dime.

Although the Karl article itself is behind a paywall at Science, its issuance was accompanied by a lengthy press release from NOAA summarizing it and touting its conclusions.  The idea behind the article was explicitly to refute the growing chorus pointing to a near-twenty-year "pause" or "hiatus" in the rise global temperatures as undermining the narrative of a coming catastrophic global warming.  Mr. Karl stated that purpose in this quote in the press release:

"Adding in the last two years of global surface temperature data and other improvements in the quality of the observed record provide evidence that contradict the notion of a hiatus in recent global warming trends," said Thomas R. Karl, L.H.D., Director, NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information.       

But despite Mr. Karl arguing that the data in this article supported such a broad conclusion, many things about the article were literally bizarre.  Most notably, neither the article nor the press release so much as mentioned the main source of the data that establish the "pause," namely the NASA satellite data as processed by UAH and RSS.  (Do they think we don't know about that data?  The UAH data are here.)  Then there was the fact that the article dealt only with a tiny portion of the surface temperature record, namely sea surface temperatures in the Arctic.  And then, within just a few days after the article came out on June 4, numerous critics had pointed out other gigantic flaws, like the facts that the "new" data included "homogenization" based on extraneous data that would clearly bias the results toward increasing any warming trend, such as using nearby land temperatures to fill in gaps in temperatures over the water at times when the water has ice on the surface.  Read more about these flaws here.  From a critique by Michaels, Lindzen and Knappenberger reproduced at that link:

The treatment of the buoy sea-surface temperature (SST) data was guaranteed to put a warming trend in recent data. They were adjusted upwards 0.12°C to make them “homogeneous” with the longer-running temperature records taken from engine intake channels in marine vessels. As has been acknowledged by numerous scientists, the engine intake data are clearly contaminated by heat conduction from the structure, and they were never intended for scientific use. On the other hand, environmental monitoring is the specific purpose for the buoys. Adjusting good data upwards to match bad data seems questionable, and the fact that the buoy network becomes increasingly dense in the last two decades means that this adjustment must put a warming trend in the data.  The extension of high-latitude arctic land data over the Arctic Ocean is also questionable.   Much of the Arctic Ocean is ice-covered even in high summer, so that the surface temperature must remain near freezing. Extending land data out into the ocean will obviously induce substantially exaggerated temperatures.  

Read that and lots more at the link, and you come away with the conclusion that this study was completely preposterous.  On the other hand, it can well be explained by its timing:  it came out just as EPA was getting ready to issue its so-called Clean Power Plan, otherwise known as the complete takeover of the energy sector of the economy and the forced closure of all power plants that burn coal; as well as a few months before the big planned climate meetings in Paris in December where our government would like to commit us to forced reductions in fossil fuel usage and a "skyrocketing" of the cost of our energy.

Anyway, now for the latest.  It seems that the House Science Committee, chaired by Lamar Smith of Texas, subpoenaed NOAA for data and communications relating to the Karl article.  Yesterday, the Hill reported that NOAA is refusing to comply with the subpoena, claiming some kind of "confidentiality" of scientific communications.

The federal government's chief climate research agency is refusing to give House Republicans the detailed information they want on a controversial study on climate change.  Citing confidentiality concerns and the integrity of the scientific process, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said it won't give Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) the research documents he subpoenaed.               

This is not any kind of "confidentiality" that I've ever heard of.  Confidentiality as against Congress as to things funded by the taxpayers?  Huh?  At the Global Warming Policy Foundation they ask "Why is NOAA withholding climate documents from Congress?" and whether this is "the next Climategate?"  The editorial at Investors Business Daily is headed "Did Federal Agency Commit Climate Fraud?  Sure Looks Like It."  Excerpt:

The American people have every right to be suspicious when NOAA alters data to get the politically correct results they want and then refuses to reveal how those decisions were made," [Congressman] Smith said this week.  We agree. For too long, global warming proponents, both inside and outside government, have tried to halt debate over their extreme conclusions and data manipulation, all in the name of "science." Looks political to us.  Taxpayers pay for this research, which is being used to justify massive new federal spending and regulation. They deserve to know what NOAA and other federal agencies are doing -- and whether they're being honest or serving an unspoken extreme political agenda.   

As usual, the mainstream media are paying no attention whatsoever.  How long are they going to be willing to cover for this fraud? 

Catching Up With The Manhattan Contrarian -- Nail Salon Scare Edition

Back on May 7 and 8, the New York Times came out with one of those big two-article exposes, running around 7000 words.  The author was Sarah Maslin Nir.  This series claimed that the nail salon industry in New York was grossly and systematically underpaying its workers and, moreover, poisoning them with dangerous chemicals.  The two Times articles are here and here.

The Manhattan Contrarian was on the story just a few days later, on May 13.  I called the Times series a "scam" and "journalistic drivel."  I was highly critical of numerous commenters (including NBC, Jezebel, and even Rich Lowry of National Review) who had inexplicably swallowed the Times's obviously false reporting without critical analysis.  Admittedly, I did not go out and re-report the Times's story.  The bases for my conclusions were three things: (1) my own knowledge of what you have to pay to hire people in Manhattan, (2) the indisputable fact that people are not stupid, and (3) the systematic omission from the Times series of any mention of the tips earned by the workers, which were obviously a major part of their compensation.

Of course, meanwhile nobody paid attention to me and everybody paid attention to the New York Times.  Our governor Andrew Cuomo promptly bought into the Times's story, sicced the labor regulators on the salon industry, and imposed new "bonding" requirements on salon owners to secure their obligation to pay wages.  Numerous salons went out of business.

Well, now an enterprising guy named Jim Epstein at Reason Hit & Run has actually gone out and re-reported the story.  It looks like he is planning a three part series, with the first part available here.  They are a little late getting to this, but on the other hand I credit them with having done a lot of work.  And yes, it's as bad as I predicted.  Nir systematically misquoted people, took evidence out of context, and mistranslated things from the Chinese or Korean.  Pretty much everything about her story was false.  By all means you should read the whole thing, but I'll give you a few examples:

• To support a statement that the "vast majority" of manicure workers earn less than the minimum wage, Nir interviewed Sangho Lee, President of the Korean-American Nail Salon Association, and paraphrases him as follows:  "[Lee] declined a request to address issues of underpayment. So many owners do not pay minimum wage, he said, that he believed answering any questions would hurt the industry."  Lee, who speaks limited English, tells Epstein that what he told Nir was:  "I told her that even though 80 to 90 percent of the industry pays much more than the minimum wage, it would inappropriate for me to say anything negative about the industry as the president of the leading industry association."  
• Nir specifically discussed wages at a salon on the East Side of Manhattan called Iris Nails, where Nir claimed that wages for starting workers were "$30 and $40 a day."  Epstein interviews the owner of the salon, Alex Park, a Korean immigrant, who provided the following very different information:  "He estimates that his lowest-level employees earn about $180 a day, including tips, and his most experienced employees can earn as much as $400 per day including tips and commission."  
• Epstein goes deeply into Nir's ridiculous omission of the whole subject of tips.  Sample: "Nir’s report doesn’t discuss gratuities. In fact, nowhere does the Times coverage attempt to gauge average daily tips in the industry or what workers actually take home in total compensation.  This is like writing a 7,000-word piece on what waiters make for a living but focusing only on base compensation."  Epstein quotes Aiming Feng, an accountant specializing in the nail salon industry, as saying that, at least during certain seasons, tips in the nail salon industry can exceed base compensation.  Of course, that was already obvious to everyone who thought about it.

You get the picture.  Do you actually trust anything that comes out of the New York Times?  Meanwhile, yesterday there was a big protest at the Times building here in midtown by salon owners and workers demanding that the Times retract and correct the series.  Signs read "Apology Now.  Fire Nir!" and "Shame On You New York Times, Your Lies Kill Our Shops."  At the Times, they seem to think that their false "exposes" have no real world consequences.

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.