Somehow Perfect Justice And Fairness Keep Eluding Our Grasp

Down in Venezuela a claimed majority of the population for some 16 years has bought into the line, sometimes going under the name of "socialism," that perfect justice and fairness between and among people could be achieved by the government ordering that it be so.  As payback for their foolishness, the Venezuelans have been rewarded with near complete loss of freedom and rights, plummeting GDP, sinking incomes, soaring real poverty, empty stores, endless waits in lines, plus a dictator's daughter who has stolen $4 billion from the people, and a former treasury secretary who somehow has over $11 billion is Swiss bank accounts.  With the recent election, the Venezuelans may now finally begin to extricate themselves from their self-inflicted predicament.  Then again, this was only a legislative election, and the ruling overlords who have been empowered by the "socialist" revolution are not about to give up their power easily. 

Here in New York City, our local political grandees thankfully don't have many of the powers that enabled the Venezuelan kleptocrats to wreak such complete economic destruction, like control over the currency, sway over the banks, and ownership of major businesses and oil reserves.  But New York's rulers do have the same mentality that perfect fairness and justice can be achieved by government order.  I've previously reported, for example here, on how that plays out in the "affordable housing" arena.  For today's lesson, let's consider the question of preventing people from learning who has a criminal record.

Perhaps you haven't been following this issue, but there has been a big push among "progressives" in recent years for something called "Ban the Box" legislation, that is, new laws that place restrictions on the ability of employers to ask an applicant about his or her criminal record.  The stated rationale of the legislation is to make sure that people with criminal records have a "fair chance" to work.  Hey, who could be against "fairness"?  For an example of one of many organizations advocating for this sort of legislation, see the website of the National Employment Law Project here.  Here is NELP's description of what one such law requires:

Under the Fair Chance Act, it is illegal to ask about criminal history on job applications and during initial job interviews. Only after a job offer is made may employers ask about criminal convictions and—with the applicant’s permission—run a background check. After reviewing the applicant’s conviction history, employers may withdraw the job offer only if the candidate’s criminal record is directly related to the job or if hiring the individual would pose an unreasonable risk.      

As you probably have guessed by now, uber-progressive New York City is in the forefront of the "Ban the Box" movement, and indeed the "Fair Chance Act" cited in the excerpt is New York City's brand new legislation, that took effect on October 27.  The law gives no direct answer to the question of whether this guy's five convictions for armed robbery are or are not "directly related" to the job he has applied for in your company's IT department.  What do you think?  What do you think the New York City "Human Rights" enforcers think?

Meanwhile, in other news that nobody but me seems to think is related, the New York City Department of Investigation came out with a report yesterday addressing the question of why it is that the crime rate in New York City Housing Authority projects is around four times the crime rate in the remainder of the City.  I can't seem to get the report itself to download, but there is a long article about it in today's New York Times, page A33 of the print edition.  And what is the principal reason given for the disparity?  You guessed it:  failure to identify the people who have criminal records and to exclude them from the projects.

In a report released on Tuesday, the Investigation Department found that, without explanation, the police in 2011 stopped sending reports about crime on public housing property to the Housing Authority as required under a 1996 agreement between the two agencies. In recent years, they found, the Police Department also frequently neglected to inform housing officials when its residents were arrested on accusations of serious offenses, hampering efforts to remove them from public housing apartments. . . .  Specifically, the agency has not effectively enforced an existing policy to exclude criminal offenders from apartments permanently, allowing those accused of crimes such as gun possession and drug dealing to continue living in public housing.

But wait -- shouldn't people with criminal records have a "fair chance" to live in subsidized public housing?  The DOI Report seems to dwell specifically on the case of one Tyrone Howard, who fatally shot a police officer on October 20.  Seems that Mr. Howard lived in one of the projects.  Here's an excellent question:  would Mr. Howard have been any less likely to kill a cop if he had lived somewhere else other than a NYCHA project?

Be that as it may, the DOI does seem to be admitting rather forcefully that a criminal record may have a lot to do with the likelihood of someone committing more crimes of a similar sort in the future.  Should anyone tell Mayor de Blasio and the City Council?  Something tells me that the effort to compel perfect fairness through the "Fair Chance Act" is not going to end well. 

When The Narrative Proves Wrong, The Story Will Just Fade Away

As the clothes-less would-be emperors of the world meet in Paris to try to impose mandatory energy restrictions on everyone else's life, the big news is the latest effort to silence the handful of little kids who would point out the pooh-bahs' obvious nakedness.  The Washington Times reports on a demand from an environmentalist group SumOfUs to deny press credentials to any who don't toe the official climate line:

The climate-change group SumOfUs submitted a formal complaint Monday to U.N. conference organizers “asking for notorious climate denying groups to be denied accreditation to the Paris climate talks,” according to a press release.    

So at least as of today, they still think they can keep everybody from laughing at President Obama, Pope Francis, Bernie Sanders, Al Gore, et al., by shutting the little kids up.  But, as I have predicted, when this whole thing dies, as it inevitably will, none of those who promoted it for decades will ever admit they were wrong or be called to account.  The whole subject will just quietly fade away as if it had never existed and it will never be spoken of again in polite company.  That's how it works with these heavily-promoted narratives when they just prove to be so embarrassingly wrong that they can't be mentioned any more.

For another example of the same phenomenon, consider the campaign against the belt-tightening fiscal regime by governments that goes by the name of "austerity."  "Austerity" is that muddled pseudo-Keynesian term favored by the likes of Paul Krugman and the IMF in their campaign to stop any cuts to government spending.   By one count Krugman has written over eighty articles since the financial crisis attacking anyone who dares to advocate cutting government spending as an economic policy for any country.  Back in 2012, the IMF weighed in on the effort to maintain all government spending everywhere without any cuts with a report claiming that "austerity" was causing massive "economic damage."

But when was the last time you saw one of these anti-"austerity" articles?  The most recent one I can find by Krugman is from September.  They just get fewer and fewer and gradually disappear.  So what happened to that narrative?

Let's compare a couple of examples of spending cutters versus blowout spenders.  First, the UK.  Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal titled "How Britain Got Its Mojo Back."    It seems like the newly-re-elected Tory government plans to continue the program of spending cuts that got it re-elected.  According to Trading Economics here, UK public spending as a percent of GDP has come down from 49.7% of GDP in 2009 all the way to 44.4% in 2014, a cut of more than 5%.  Osborne says that there is lots more to come:

Over four years, [our economic plan] will eliminate our budget deficit and deliver a surplus, putting Britain in its strongest fiscal position for almost half a century.  Total public spending will fall to 36.4% of national income . . . .  With the exception of demobilization after world wars, this will be the biggest reduction in government consumption in Britain for a century—and the biggest in any G-7 economy for at least 50 years.     

And how has that been playing out in GDP?  Again from Trading Economics, we find an annual GDP growth rate of 2.3% in the year to September 30, 2015, 2.9% for the prior year, and 2.1% for the year to 9/30/13.  Not gangbusters, but very respectable by European standards.  Compare it to most recent reported annual growth (same source) of 0.3% for France and 0.1% for Germany.

And now for the world champion of blow-out government spending -- Venezuela!  Its economy is a total shambles.  They have literally destroyed everything.  Bill Neuman at the New York Times has been doing a very respectable job on reporting on the impossible economic conditions and empty stores.  From an article on October 18:

The eagerness to dump bolívars or avoid them completely shows the extent to which Venezuelans have lost faith in their economy and in the ability of their government to fix the mess.  A year ago, $1 bought about 100 bolívars on the black market. These days, it often fetches more than 700 bolívars, a sign of how thoroughly domestic confidence in the economy has crashed. 

Meanwhile, the government has stopped publishing any economic statistics at all.  But the IMF projects that the Venezuela economy will shrink by a full 10% in 2015.  Oh, and that's with the usual fraudulent IMF GDP accounting that counts government spending in GDP at 100 cents on the dollar.  A more realistic view of the one-year shrinkage of the Venezuelan economy would be 15 - 20%.  I guess all that government "stimulus" spending didn't work out too well.

Meanwhile, in the all-time champion of low government spending, Singapore (government spending less than 20% of GDP) the per capita GDP has now comfortably passed that of the U.S., and the gap continues to widen.  Same in Switzerland (government spending about 33% of GDP).  I'm not saying we won't ever see another one of these anti-austerity rants, but it's fewer and fewer.  They're just fading away.  Global warming will too. 

Science, Non-Science, Anti-Science, And Scientific Fraud

In the climate change arena, everybody's favorite tactic is to accuse the other guy of being unscientific, or even "anti-science."  As one of many, here is Salon calling "climate deniers" an "anti-science movement."  How do you tell who is following the methodology of science, and who (if anyone) is "anti-science"?

Actually, I think the answer to that one should be easy and not subject to much dispute.  Let me lay it out.

Science is a method.  Here are the fundamentals of the method:

• Someone puts forth a falsifiable hypothesis.  Non-falsifiable hypotheses are not part of the scientific method.
• The falsifiable hypothesis is tested against data, either from observation or experiment.
• If data from observation or experiment are consistent with the falsifiable hypothesis, then the hypothesis survives to be tested by additional observation or experiment.  However, there is no such thing as definitive and final proof of a scientific hypothesis.  No matter how much consistent evidence may be accumulated, it is always possible that further evidence may emerge that may invalidate the hypothesis.
• If any data emerge that are inconsistent with the hypothesis, then the hypothesis is wrong and must be rejected.  Period.

As far as I know, that's really all there is to it.  I think I learned these things in junior high school, although it's so long ago that my memory is hazy.  People who think I have any of the principles wrong should please point out my error, if any.  I wonder: do they still teach these basics of the scientific method in junior high or high school? 

Now, who is a scientist?  I would say that a scientist is someone who works in accordance with the scientific method.  That means that s/he (1) puts forth falsifiable hypotheses for testing, (2) is willing to take on any and all challengers to her/his hypothesis, and (3) is prepared to reject any hypothesis when data emerge that are inconsistent.  Another approach is that a scientist is anyone who has a science degree from some institution and/or works in a lab.  In my view, people fitting that definition may call themselves scientists, but they may or may not be actual scientists in the sense of practicing the scientific method.  Or they may practice the scientific method sometimes and pontificate on things they know nothing about at other times. 

I'm now going to apply these simple principles to my recent article titled "The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part IX" and some of the comments.  As you will see, I think the fundamental problem with much of the press and many of the critical commenters is that they have just lost track of what the scientific method is.

Start with the statement in the CNN article that "the Earth is warming."  As discussed in my post, the truth of that statement entirely depends on who gets to pick the start point against which temperature change is measured.  If the proponent of the statement gets to pick the start point, then the statement is non-falsifiable.  It's classic non-science.  But how about CNN's statement that "scientists who study climate are overwhelmingly in agreement"?  So?  The invocation of "scientists" doesn't make a non-falsifiable hypothesis into science.  They may practice science in some respects in their life, but agreeing with this proposition has nothing to do with it.

So what is the falsifiable hypothesis of the climate alarmist movement?  Funny thing is, I look hard to find it, and I can't.  It's funny because I would think that if they want to claim the mantle of science that would know that you need to have a falsifiable hypothesis that is standing the test of time, or serious people are going to know that you are not dealing in science and are not going to take you seriously.  But in the absence of such a hypothesis from those proclaiming the crisis, let me try to state one for them:  CO2 in the atmosphere, via the greenhouse effect, is the main driver of global average surface temperature (GAST), and if atmospheric CO2 continues to increase at the rate implied by current level of fossil fuel consumption, that will drive GAST increases of 0.2 to 0.5 deg C per decade through the 21st century, irrespective of any countervailing climate forces such as ocean, sun, or clouds.   I'm willing to accept any and all other statements of the falsifiable catastrophic global warming (CGW) hypothesis for purposes of what follows.

Now here is a comment yesterday from someone named bas:

You can't start at an outlier (1998) and then proclaim a trend.  

Here's your problem bas: I'm not "proclaiming a trend."  I'm asking if the evidence is consistent or inconsistent with the hypothesis.  If you want it to be science, your hypothesis needs to be able to deal with all the data.  This is not like the East German figure skating judge in the old days at the Olympics.  If it's to be science, then you can't cherry-pick the data you like and ignore the data you don't like (by declaring them to be an "outliers", or otherwise).  I would call that "anti-science."  We have here a glaring data point in 1998, and another less glaring one in 2010, that are inconsistent with the hypothesis.  If CO2 and its greenhouse effect drive global temperature over and above all other forces, and atmospheric CO2 went from about 360 ppm in 1998 to over 400 today, then how could GAST have gone down?  The trend since 1979 is indeed consistent with your hypothesis.  Great.  But the fundamental principle of the scientific method is, all data consistent with the hypothesis just leave it to survive for another day, while any evidence inconsistent with the hypothesis invalidate the hypothesis. 

Then there's this from a guy calling him/herself factsRfacts:

I love it when the Francis Menton writes about facts and then he cannot even read the chart he himself provided. Now if you would be looking at that chart from a business point of view, then I assure you every businessman would tell you that the overall development is going up.

Funny how it's now the "business point of view."  OK, but how about the scientific method?  If you want to keep the hypothesis alive, you're going to have to modify it to explain how CO2 could have gone up for 18 years while temperatures did not.  Otherwise, it's dead.  Science can be cruel.  And the modifications to the hypothesis to make it explain the decline since 1998 are not going to be easy.  You will have to admit that some force, somewhere, can overwhelm the effect of anthropogenic atmospheric CO2.  OK, what is it?  Is it anthropogenic or natural?  If you can't say, how do you know that anthropogenic CO2 has any effect whatsoever on GAST?

And now you will understand why the guardians of the global thermometer temperature records are so desperate to alter those records to show warming.  Altering data -- that's what I call "scientific fraud."  But then we have the satellites, with data processed by two independent sources and showing virtually identical results for the past 36 years.  They haven't figured out how to alter that -- yet.

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part IX

Perhaps you are wondering if the world truly has gone mad, or if it only seems that way.  If so, take a look at the climate confab that has just gotten under way in Paris.  Yes, the world truly has gone mad.

Time Magazine puts the number of attendees at 40,000.  Holy cow!  That's 40,000 people, every one of them on the taxpayer dime of some country or other, and every one of them dedicated to the proposition that you must be forced to use less energy and/or have your price of energy jacked up until you can't afford it any more.  It's to save the planet!  And all of those 40,000 taxpayer-funded people are also dedicated to suppressing any dissent to climate orthodoxy in order to preserve their own salaries and careers.  And yet all of them somehow fly to Paris on planes burning massive amounts of fossil fuel, not noticing any contradiction between how they demand you live your life and how they live theirs.

Consider the case of our President.  He has called the so-called "climate crisis" "worse than the terrorist threat."   He has also just flown to Paris in Air Force One, and presumably plans to fly back the same way.  An Air Force One 747 consumes 5 gallons of fuel per mile.  It's 3855 air miles from Washington to Paris, 7710 round trip.  Did I mention that Air Force One is actually two planes?  They always keep a spare 747 within about a half-hour, just in case.  So make that 15,420 air miles at 5 gallons per mile.  A gallon translates to 21.1 pounds of CO2 emissions.  So our dear President is emitting some 1,625,000 pounds of CO2 just for his own flight over and back, more than 800 tons.  For comparison, the average American's annual carbon emissions are about 20 tons -- for everything you do for an entire year.  Just for the President, and just for this one flight over and back, he is emitting 40 years worth of your carbon consumption.  Add in the emissions of his massive entourage on this boondoggle, and it's a multiple of what you will emit in your entire lifetime.  Wired here calculates the total emission of all the attendees in attending the conference at 300,000 tons of CO2 -- several hundred times what you will emit in your entire life.  And these people purport to lecture you and restrict you by force on how much energy you can use?

But of course, everybody knows that solving the carbon "crisis" is critically important because "the Earth is warming."  We do know that, don't we?  Acknowledging that you agree that "the Earth is warming" is the main way that you prove to polite society today that you are not a complete fool, an idiot, a "denier," an anti-science crazy.  As summarized by CNN here in August:

According to multiple peer-reviewed scientific journals, scientists who study climate are overwhelmingly in agreement that the Earth is warming . . . .   An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- acknowledged by many experts as the scientific authority on climate change -- says in a major report [in 2013] that it's unequivocal that the climate is warming . . . .  

Of course, the last thing you'd want to do before agreeing that "the Earth is warming" would be to look at the data.  Well, maybe just a peek?  Here's the latest satellite temperature record from UAH, from the time they first put up the satellites in 1979 and going right up to yesterday:

It's rather obvious here that the warmest year was 1998, and indeed the peak was in early 1998.  That's almost 18 years ago!  What does it even mean to say that "the Earth is warming" when the best data show that the warmest time was 18 years ago?  The trend since 1998 is down, not up.  The trend since 1997 is completely flat. 

Candidate Ted Cruz was famously quoted by Time back in August as saying

"If you look at satellite data for the last 18 years, there's been zero recorded warming . . . .   The satellite says it ain't happening . . . I'm saying that data and facts don't support it."

For that heresy Cruz drew a response from billionaire and former Mayor Mike Bloomberg in a CNN interview on November 25.  Bloomberg referred to "right wing crazies" who reject mainstream climate science, and particularly said he was talking about Cruz:

You've got a guy like Ted Cruz . . .  and he says some of the stupidest things I've ever heard.

Yes, in the field of climate "science," pointing out that the data refute the hypothesis is now "crazy" and "the stupidest thing I've ever heard."  Who again is the unscientific one here?

But, you ask, what about those seemingly monthly press releases from NOAA and NASA, based on ground thermometers rather than satellites, that keep reporting that each successive month and year are "the hottest ever"?  Readers here know that this is what I have referred to as "The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time."  Read some previous articles in this series here.  As reported in those articles, numerous non-government-funded independent researchers have gone to check the raw archived temperature data from many stations against the current NOAA and NASA data bases that generate the reports of "hottest ever," and uniformly they find the same thing: early year data altered downward, and recent year data altered upward, in order to create a warming trend where otherwise none exists.  See, for example, Tony Heller's Real Science here, Paul Homewood's Not a Lot of People Know That, Joe D'Aleo's Icecap. 

Now for the latest on that.  In Germany, a retired geologist and data computation expert named Friederich Karl Ewert recently decided to follow the lead of Heller, Homewood, D'Aleo, et al., and try his hand at comparing archived raw temperature data from many weather stations to currently-reported temperatures from NASA.  Here is the result, reported on November 20 at No Tricks Zone:

From the publicly available data, Ewert made an unbelievable discovery: Between the years 2010 and 2012 the data measured since 1881 were altered so that they showed a significant warming, especially after 1950. […] A comparison of the data from 2010 with the data of 2012 shows that NASA-GISS had altered its own datasets so that especially after WWII a clear warming appears – although it never existed.    

Surprise!  It's "unbelievable."  Actually not, if you've been following this issue at all.  According to my Google search here, the Ewert study has been reported at Breitbart, CNS, No Tricks Zone, Not a Lot of People Know That, Weasel Zippers, Hockey Schtick, Free Republic, The Federalist Papers,  and many others -- all of them conservative-oriented sources.  But somehow no mention at literally any so-called "mainstream" source: New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Bloomberg, etc., etc., etc.  If anybody can find a mention in any mainstream source, I'll be interested to know.  Have the facts really become this partisan?

So 40,000 people, all on government payroll, meet in Paris to seek to put over on the world's people a spending/control program of multi-trillions of dollars, all based on so-called "facts" that all are required to believe but are contradicted by the best available data.  Our primary media sources systematically suppress the data.  Yes, the world truly has gone mad.

How A New President Could Reduce The Poverty Rate By 90% In A First Term

Here's how: by simply directing the Census Bureau to produce an honest measure of poverty, as opposed to the obviously fake and deceptive measures that they currently produce.

In September the Census Bureau came out with its annual report on Income and Poverty in the United States, covering 2014.  The so-called "official poverty rate" was reported as 14.8%, allegedly representing some 46.7 million people living "below the poverty line."  The 14.8% rate actually was an increase from 2013's 14.5%, although the Report admits that the increase was not "statistically significant."

Still, with a trillion dollars or so of spending on anti-poverty programs at federal, state and local levels each year, and with an economic recovery (however feeble) now in its 6th year, how could the rate and number of people in poverty not be going down, and dramatically so? Instead, the number of people reported to be in poverty has increased since 2007 from about 37 million to 2014's 47 million, and the reported rate has increased over that period from about 12.5% to 2014's 14.8%.  On a longer time scale, the failure of poverty to yield to the extraordinary measures to end it is striking: a Census Bureau chart reproduced here shows that going all the way back to 1966 the official poverty rate started just above its most recent level and has never achieved any kind of downward breakthrough; the lowest recorded level was 11.1% in 1974.

The only way this is possible is that the government's "poverty rate" long since ceased to be a bona fide measure of physical deprivation, and instead became part of the ongoing efforts of the bureaucracy to grow the government in general and the anti-poverty programs in particular.  The bureaucrats well know that the best tool to advocate for more anti-poverty spending is a continued high poverty rate, while any dramatic decline in measured poverty would cause many to conclude that the poverty problem had been largely solved and the enormous funding could be cut.  And thus, as more and more anti-poverty programs and spending have been added to the system, definitions have been contrived to exclude the spending from the measure of "poverty," and surveys have been constructed to get answers that obviously omit large amounts of income and benefits received.

Meanwhile, politicians have shown little interest in devising a measure of poverty that meaningfully relates to physical deprivation.  Indeed, at the heights of cynicism, the Obama administration has backed an effort by a gaggle of bureaucratic gnomes to replace the official measure of poverty with a so-called "supplemental poverty measure" that is based on a standard of relative rather than absolute income.  In other words, the "supplemental measure" is explicitly designed to make defined "poverty" impervious to reduction no matter how much taxpayer money is spent to eliminate it.  Fortunately, the "supplemental measure" does not seem to have caught on much with the press or the public.  Meanwhile on the Republican side, the GW Bush administration did not pursue coming up with an honest "poverty" rate, nor is there much pressure to do so from right-side think tanks and pundits.  Perhaps Republicans just enjoy bashing the left with the obvious failure of their programs. 

But suppose we got a new President who decided to have the Census Bureau report honestly to the American people as to a real measure of actual poverty, that is, poverty in the sense that most people think of it, namely, physical deprivation.  By physical deprivation, I mean, clearly inadequate shelter, not enough to eat, insufficient clothes, or some combination of one or more of those three, plus lack of access to any government program to provide those things.  What could a new President do to move toward such a more honest measure of poverty?  As soon as you start to look into it, you realize that obvious modifications of the methodology in the direction of simple honesty could quickly reduce the reported rate of "poverty" by 90% or more.  For example:

• In an April 2, 2015 article in the New York Review of Books titled "The War on Poverty: Was It Lost?" Christopher Jencks of Harvard made what he called a "first approximation" of what would happen to the official poverty rate if just three adjustments were made: (1) counting in-kind benefits like housing and food assistance that currently are not counted, (2) counting the EITC, that currently is not counted, and (3) using the Commerce Department's Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) index, rather than the CPI, to measure inflation since 1964.  In round numbers, USDA's nutritional programs distribute about $110 billion per year; HUD's budget is about $50 billion per year (which way understates the aggregate value of housing assistance); and the EITC distributes about $61 billion per year.  Jencks concludes that counting housing and food assistance benefits would reduce the official poverty rate by 3.0%; that counting the EITC would reduce the rate by another 3.0%; and that making the inflation adjustment would reduce the rate by 3.7%.  Thus, making those three adjustments would reduce the poverty rate by almost 10%, to about 5%.  Jencks does not give details of his methodology, and his estimate for the reduction from counting the vast housing and nutrition programs seems ridiculously small to me.  But let's accept it as a first step.
• Next we have the fact that the poverty rate is calculated from a survey (the CPS) in which (according to Robert Doar in the Wall Street Journal on November 19) respondents are known to omit as much as half or more of the government benefits that they receive; and the Census Bureau, in tabulating the results, just takes the information provided by the respondents without any kind of follow up or double check.  Just counting unreported benefits received could easily knock another couple of points off the poverty rate.
• Dare I mention the underground economy?  Somehow the Census Bureau, Jencks, Doar and literally everybody else just leave it out when calculating a poverty rate.  Perhaps the most thorough scholarly treatment of the size of the underground economy is the Cebula/Feige study of 2011.  That study estimated the underground economy in the U.S. at $2 trillion per year, meaning that around 18% of all income goes unreported to the government.  Of course, not all of this money goes to those deemed to be in poverty, but clearly much of it does.  Please note that the total aggregate amount of income by which all people deemed to be in "poverty" by the Census Bureau fall short of the official poverty thresholds is only about $300 billion.  The underground economy exceeds this amount by a factor of almost seven, meaning that if only a seventh of the underground economy goes to those deemed "poor" there would be no poverty left -- and that's without considering any of the other adjustments discussed here. 
• And, believe it or not, there still are multiple big items that we haven't gotten to yet.  College scholarships and fellowships covering room and board are not counted in the current official measure of poverty.  Do you mean that living in the dorm and eating in the dining hall at Harvard counts as poverty?  They get away with this nonsense because in big towns like Boston the effect of counting well-off students as "poor" gets lost in the data; but then you look at a small affluent town like Ithaca, New York dominated by two colleges, and you find out that it has a reported official poverty rate exceeding 40%.  Ridiculous!  Another omitted category is loan proceeds, meaning, for example, that early retirees living off their home equity by means of a reverse mortgage are counted as "poor."  And finally there is what is likely the biggest category of all: support from family and relatives.  Yes, heiresses who take a year to travel the world on daddy's money are counted as "poor."  Hey, their income is zero.  They are living on less than a dollar a day!

I do not have an exact figure for where this would come out if all the adjustments are made.  But I can confidently assert that making appropriate adjustments to exclude from "poverty" those who are suffering no physical deprivation would reduce the reported "official rate" by 90% or more, that is, from close to 15% to more like 1.5% or less.  And, just as the Obama administration cooked up its "supplemental poverty measure" under a general Congressional authorization to study Census methodology, so could a new President us the same general authorization to put in place an honest measure of real poverty.

How Government Advancement Of "Fairness" Ends In Graft

Here in the capital of the progressive fantasy, the official groupthink holds that the fundamental duty of government is to promote fairness and equality through the exercise of government's coercive powers.  And now we have the simultaneous federal corruption trials of the ex-State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and the ex-State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos.   These trials provide insight into how the progressive fantasy plays out in the real world.  How it plays out is graft.

At the current moment Silver's trial has completed presentation of evidence and closing arguments, and is in the hands of the jury.  At another courthouse literally next door, Skelos's trial is still in the evidence phase.  A fascinating aspect of the two trials is the common role played by New York real estate investor Leonard Litwin and his company, Glenwood Management. 

Glenwood is mainly in the business of owning and renting residential apartments.  Compared to the office and condominium markets, the residential rental business in New York is subject to far more government meddling.  To start with, we have rent regulation.  That's how we "preserve" "affordable" apartments to be sure that no "unfairness" occurs, such as that people like Mia Farrow and Bianca Jaggermight have to pay market rents for their multi-million dollar apartments.  Due to reforms enacted in the 90s under then Republican Governor George Pataki, the grip of rent regulation has loosened ever-so-slowly.  But rent regulation still covers about half of rental housing units in the City, or around 1 million units.  And progressive activists in the legislature are constantly agitating to tighten the regulations and re-impose them on the currently free-market units.  In addition, there are tax incentives for the construction of new rental units, particularly "affordable" ones, and those are set to lapse regularly.  Put it all together, and it's the perfect environment for pols to enrich themselves.

So there we have Glenwood, one of the largest rental owners and managers, a sitting duck for predatory government.  In today's market its holdings are worth billions, but that could be wiped out in short order by imposition of sufficiently onerous new rent regulations.  Do we really expect these guys to wade into these waters and then just wait for the crocodile to lunge?  Actually, we know that that's not how it works.  Still, the level of the protection money that the pols exact by explicit and implicit threats of predation is really quite stupefying.  Hedge Clippers here has a list of Glenwood political and related contributions in New York from 2008 to 2015.  As examples, Governor Cuomo's 2014 re-election campaign got $1,214,200; "Jobs for New York" (a real estate industry fund to support mostly City Council candidates) got $587,600; the NYS Senate Republican Campaign Committee got $450,000; the NYS Democratic Committee got $300,000; the Democratic 2014 AG candidate, Schneiderman, got $215,000, while the Comptroller candidate (DiNapoli) got $210,000; and so forth for dozens more on down the list.

Note that there is no particular ideology behind this.  Republicans get money for their Senate campaigns because they have mostly controlled that body.  Essentially, the contributions go to whoever Glenwood thinks will win.  That's who they need protection from!

Anyway, these numbers are public numbers for campaign contributions.  But the Silver and Skelos trials show how a pol can equally squeeze the sitting ducks for personal enrichment.  In Silver's case, he just suggested that Glenwood use his friend's law firm for its "tax certiorari" work.  ("Tax certiorari" means challenging annual real estate tax assessments.  That work for apartment buildings worth hundreds of millions of dollars can be very lucrative.)  Glenwood took his "suggestion."  Silver got one-third of the firm's fees as his "referral" payment, amounting to several hundred thousand from this source.  In the case of Skelos, the alleged personal enrichment via Glenwood is much smaller, consisting of one $20,000 "referral" fee going to his son Adam from a title insurance company.       

So what is the solution?  Plenty of commenters on this situation cheer on Preet Bharara and his prosecutors for exacting punishment for the alleged crimes.  But as I've noted multiple times, the line here between crime and non-crime is by no means clear; and indeed that is the essence of the defense of both Silver and Skelos.  Hey, our friends sent us some business!  So? 

Sorry, but the ongoing effort to achieve "fairness" and "equality" by government coercion is inherently corrupt and corrupting.  The most corrupt states are the ones that go farthest into the big spending "fairness" game (New York, New Jersey, Illinois).  There's probably no such thing as completely eliminating the problem, but the best way to minimize it is for governments to stop trying to achieve fairness or equality in human affairs.