Trump Voters And The Magical Belief In Government Action

After violent protests forced the cancelation of a Trump rally in Chicago on Friday night, I listened for about half an hour to Trump being interviewed on the subject by Sean Hannity.  Much of the discussion was about the illiberality of the "liberal" left, but some considerable percentage of the time was also devoted, after a fashion, to issues of economic policy.  I say "after a fashion" because, as usual with Trump, there were no specifics.  Instead, given the opportunity, with all the time in the world, to lay out anything he wanted about economic policy, what Trump did was repeat, over and over, the same line:  "We're going to bring the jobs home."  By my count, he uttered that line at least half a dozen times in the half hour, and that was the beginning and the end of what he had to say about economic policy.

Well, what does that even mean?  What is the thing that supposedly Trump is going to do that will "bring the jobs home"?  Certainly, he did not mention anything in this interview.  In previous interviews, I have heard him go as far as to say that we are "losing" in international trade to countries including China and Mexico, and that he can fix that by doing better "deals" than our current incumbents.  But the better "deal" consists of what, exactly?  

Unfortunately, I think that many or most Trump voters actually believe that we are somehow "losing" in the arena of international trade, and that there is something a President can do to change that.  On a similar note, the Obama voters believed that their man could "stop the rise of the oceans" and "heal the planet."  Is there really much difference?

How would you measure whether we are "losing" to another country in international trade?  Me, I would start with per capita GDP.  That statistic would basically tell you which country's workers have the higher-value jobs, and by how much.  So how does the U.S. stack up against China and Mexico in per capita GDP?  Here is a chart compiled by Wikipedia that includes per capita GDP numbers for all the countries of the world from three sources -- the IMF, the World Bank, and the UN.  All three are pretty close for these purposes, so I'll use the IMF numbers (which come from 2015; the others are for 2014).  And the answer is:  US per capita GDP for 2015 is $55,904; Mexico is $9,592; and China is $8,280.  Whoa!  That's saying that people in the U.S., on average, are close to six times as productive as Mexicans, and almost seven times as productive as Chinese.  I would submit that any rational person would conclude that we are killing them in the international economic competition.  Indeed, it's not remotely close.  (And by the way, did you know that even after the tremendous economic growth in China in the last two decades, Mexico is still the wealthier country by a considerable margin?  It pays to look at the statistics.)

Are these jobs that are one-sixth or one-seventh as productive as our jobs the ones that Trump plans to "bring home"?  Another way of looking at that is that Mexican and Chinese jobs are not productive enough to support a wage as high as the U.S. minimum wage for any but a tiny percentage of their workers.  How could it possibly be a good thing to bring those jobs here?

When he has been asked to specify the jobs that he thinks should be done in the U.S., Trump has sometimes referred to automobile assembly line jobs that have gone to Mexico, or computer assembly that is now done largely in China.  These of course are about the lowest-value jobs in the automobile and technology sectors today.  Think about what goes into a car or a computer today, and you immediately realize that there are zillions of much higher value jobs that the rational country would greatly prefer to have.  Which is a better job, designing the new sensors that will keep cars from crashing into each other, or snapping the same two pieces together on an assembly line two hundred times a day every day of the year?  Creating a new computer chip to maximize gas mileage, or screwing on door handles all day long?  I say, good luck to the Mexicans and Chinese with those rote assembly jobs.  Within our lifetimes, they will mostly be done by robots. 

I have a fundamentally different diagnosis from Trump as to the basic economic problem of the U.S.  The problem is not that good jobs are moving abroad as we "lose" to other countries.  The problem is that our own job-creation machine is not working at the pace that it should.  And that, in turn, has little to nothing to do with international trade policy, and everything to do with what I have called the "war against the economy" being waged by our government domestically.  In that article in August 2015 I listed a few of the intentional efforts of our government to suppress economic activity:

[M]assive wasteful spending and debt accumulation; artificially suppressing cheap and reliable energy in favor of subsidizing expensive and unreliable energy; overregulation and endless phony prosecutions directed against anyone who dares to make too much money in a financial business; forcing people to overpay for wasteful health insurance (Obamacare); big tax increases; and more.

What could actually help our economy take off?  How about stopping the suppression of cheap energy?  How about recognizing our financial sector as the crown jewel of our economy and ending the demonization of it?  In a simple summary, how about basic encouragement of productive economic activity instead of intentional demonization and suppression?  But instead we have Trump proposing better "trade deals" with China and Mexico.  Meaning what?  Tariffs?  Quotas?  How are things like that going to help?  

Lack Of Understanding Or Respect For The First Amendment

Lots of people pay lip service to the First Amendment, and its importance to our democracy.  But how many people actually understand it, let alone have any respect for it?  And lack of understanding and respect for the First Amendment are particularly prevalent among those in positions of power and authority.  Hey, what fun is power and authority if you can't shut up your critics?

One of my favorite Stalinist corners of the federal bureaucracy has long been the FDA, where they somehow think they have the absolute right to determine what can and cannot be said in this country about any substance that might ever cross human lips.  First Amendment?  What's that?  The FDA first won my award for "Top federal effort to suppress free speech" back in 1999, for its long-running efforts to ban so-called off-label marketing of pharmaceuticals.  Sixteen years and several tens of billions of phony fines collected from pharmaceutical companies for constitutionally-protected conduct later, the FDA was continuing to march forward undeterred in its campaign to ban off-label marketing, when suddenly last August it found itself enjoined from enforcing those restrictions against a company called Amarin.  Amarin had sued in federal court seeking the injunction by asserting that the FDA could not point to anything false or misleading in its proposed marketing campaign; and a judge in the Southern District of New York (Engelmayer) agreed and issued the injunction.

At the time the FDA vowed to appeal, but yesterday comes news that they have backed down and settled with Amarin.  Do you think that was decent of them?  My take is the opposite:  They were facing near certain crushing defeat in the Second Circuit; and by settling now they will continue to take the (outrageous and preposterous) position that their off-label marketing restrictions are still viable, and to attempt to continue to enforce those restrictions against others.  From the Times article linked above:

The agency on Tuesday downplayed the implications of the deal. In a statement, it said that the settlement applied only to the Amarin case and that its position on whether companies have a constitutional right to provide truthful information about off-label uses had not changed.

Well, that's how much respect and understanding the FDA has for the First Amendment.  How about some others quoted in the Times article?  For example, there is Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein:

Leaving such decisions to a judge, not the F.D.A., concerned Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, a former principal deputy commissioner at the F.D.A. who is now an associate dean at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.  “The courts are at the precipice of taking over a fundamental F.D.A. function of calling balls and strikes in the drug market about what’s truthful and not misleading,” Dr. Sharfstein said.

Got that?  According to ex-FDA "principal deputy commissioner" Sharfstein, it's a "fundamental function" of an executive agency of the government (here the FDA) to decide what you can and cannot say.  And the courts just have no business meddling!  Really, did this guy (or anybody else who now or ever has worked for the FDA) even go to high school?

Meanwhile, in the same category, there's another important case on off-label marketing that I haven't yet mentioned here.  Justice has been prosecuting a guy named Howard Root, CEO of a company called Vascular Solutions, Inc., for supposed off-label marketing of a device called Vari-Lase for the treatment of varicose veins.  Root took his case to trial, with the full support of his company and his board, and in February a federal jury in San Antonio, Texas acquitted him of all charges.  A lawyer named Kevin Riach notes the significant aspect of the trial:

Notably, the trial court instructed the jury at the opening and close of trial that truthful off-label promotion is not a crime because such speech is protected by the First Amendment. This instruction marks the first time that the First Amendment protection for truthful off-label speech has been adopted by a court outside the Second Circuit, and it is a significant blow to the government’s ability to prosecute companies for off-label promotion. The court’s instructions are likely to be cited by other companies facing False Claims Act and criminal liability for off-label promotion in future cases.

And there's nothing like an acquittal to finally give a wrongly-accused defendant the ability to open up and unload against the outrageous and oppressive government.  From a statement by Root after the verdict:

"The company and I are vindicated by today's verdict, but outraged by the obscene legal process we were forced to endure," Root said in a statement. "There is simply no excuse for abusive and dishonest conduct in any U.S. governmental agency, much less in the Department of Justice and our law enforcement agencies."

All I can say is, he was still a lot nicer than I would have been.

Anyway, the FDA is not giving up on this, but gradually the fissures are opening.

Destructive Government Activity Just Keeps Advancing

There are two fundamental political narratives out there.  In one narrative, hard working people create wealth by engaging in economic activity.  Ultimately everyone benefits from the economic activity, although some benefit more than others, and only a few become extremely rich.  The main role of the government in the economic sphere is to create conditions to incentivize the economic activity so that wealth can be created.  In the other narrative, wealth somehow pre-exists as a fact of nature.  Maybe it comes from the tooth fairy.  Because the wealth pre-exists, there is no need for government to create a good environment for economic activity; rather, its role is to pass the wealth around equitably, so that everyone can lead comfortable and stress-free lives.  But somehow a nefarious class of billionaires, or maybe it's the "hoarders and speculators," has seized most of the wealth for itself.  

Of course the government policies implied by Narrative I and Narrative II are diametrically opposite.  For a recent extreme case of the implementation of Narrative II-style policies, we can look to Venezuela.  For almost two decades since the late 90s, the government has engaged in vast and expanding redistributions, accompanied by punishment of the entrepreneurial class.  Nearly 20 years in, the Central Bank reported that the economy shrunk by 7% last year (almost certainly far underestimated), and annual inflation is in the multiple hundreds of percents.  What is the cause of this ongoing disaster?  According to Venezuelan President Maduro (in his State of the Union speech in January), destructive government policy has nothing to do with it; instead, it's the wealthy speculators:

Addressing the causes of the economic emergency afflicting the country, Maduro derided the Venezuelan private sector for having carried out “an investment strike” of national industry and refusing to cooperate with the government. He blamed private companies for participating in speculative pricing, causing mass devaluation to the country’s national currency. 

Fortunately, nobody in the U.S. would be that dumb.  Just kidding!  The rhetoric of Bernie Sanders is more or less indistinguishable from Maduro's in the diagnosis of the causes of economic malaise, and in proposed cures.  Here is Sanders on his website:

The reality is that for the past 40 years, Wall Street and the billionaire class has rigged the rules to redistribute wealth and income to the wealthiest and most powerful people of this country.  This campaign is sending a message to the billionaire class: “you can’t have it all.”

And yes, in Sanders world, all that wealth was just pre-existing natural bounty that was stolen by these greedy people.  So, as noted here a few days ago, since 2012 average gasoline prices in this country have declined from around $4 per gallon to well under $2.  That is attributable largely, if not entirely, to the revolution in oil and and gas extraction known as "fracking."  Somehow, that revolution happened so fast that President Obama and his regulatory minions were unable to stop it.  But Sanders?  Asked at Sunday's Democratic debate in Flint, Michigan whether he "supports fracking," Sanders answered bluntly, "No, I do not support fracking."  Don't worry, when President Sanders bans fracking and the price of gas goes back to $4 (and then on to $5 and $6), it will be the fault of the "billionaire class," or perhaps of the "hoarders and speculators." (Does poor Bernie even realize that traditional oil companies like Exxon and Chevron -- and their investors and executives -- would be making a lot more money right now if fracking had not happened?)

And in case you think that a President Hillary would be significantly different in her fundamental views, she answered the same question at the same Sunday debate.  The answer (reported in today's Wall Street Journal) was longer and weasely-er, but basically says that she would ban fracking to the maximum extent she could get away with:

“You know, I don’t support it [fracking] when any locality or any state is against it, number one. I don’t support it when the release of methane or contamination of water is present. I don’t support it—number three—unless we can require that anybody who fracks has to tell us exactly what chemicals they are using.  So by the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place. And I think that’s the best approach, because right now, there are places where fracking is going on that are not sufficiently regulated.”

In Hillary's case, I think you can be sure that she realizes full well that the banning of fracking would enrich the incumbent interests in oil and gas.  That's the donor class!

Meanwhile, redistributionist Narrative II-style policies have brought us places like Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis and Chicago.  In New York, we don't have the vast vacant zones any more (after 20 years of Republican mayors), but we do have the massive public housing projects that make it such that the wealthiest county in the country (Manhattan) has a poverty rate far above the norm.  

And of course, what's going on now in New York is an expansion to the commitment to subsidized housing for low income people -- otherwise known as the creation of permanent poverty traps.  The Wall Street Journal in its Greater New York section reports on the political back-and-forth over Mayor de Blasio's plan to re-zone a big low income neighborhood in Brooklyn in a way that would increase allowable density while also increasing requirements for "affordable" units.  This being New York, the controversy is over how deeply-discounted we are going to require the "affordable" units to be.  The de Blasio administration "has offered" to require developers to provide units that are "affordable" to families making "about $31,000 for a family of three."  But of course "housing advocates" want even greater subsidies and deeper discounts for families of even lower incomes.  We are determined to double down on the New York City Housing Authority crisis! 

What is it again that we're talking about on the Republican side?  Trade wars with Mexico and China?

Progressive Policies Increase Income Inequality

If you take just a little time to understand how income inequality is measured, and how government redistribution programs work, it will be immediately obvious to you that increasing the redistribution programs will cause measured income inequality to increase, not decrease.  The biggest reason is that means-tested in-kind redistributions (think public housing, food stamps, Medicaid, Obamacare subsidies) present a tremendous incentive to reduce or stop work in order to qualify, and then are not counted as income to the recipient.  Another reason is that lots more than you might think of the redistributions (Social Security is by far the biggest example) go to people who are not poor.  And don't forget the destructive effects of the minimum wage (kids in multi-earner middle class families get a raise while poor blacks are rendered unemployable).

Last July I wrote an article for the City Journal pointing out this obvious fact (title: "What Causes Income Inequality? Progressive Policies Do.")  I followed that up with a post on August 3 on this blog ("Do Progressive Policies Cause Income Inequality?")  Those articles got some play at the time, but the small eclat quickly faded.  Certainly, my analysis did not cause any notable progressives (think President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Bill de Blasio) to rethink their advocacy of more subsidized medical care, more subsidized housing, more subsidized nutrition programs, a higher minimum wage, and the like, even as they rail against income inequality.

This weekend the Wall Street Journal has published a long op-ed by Lawrence Lindsey covering the same subject and making many of the same points.  Title: "How Progressives Drive Income Inequality."    Most notable in Lindsey's article is his collection of data on how the explosion of handout spending under Obama has been accompanied by substantially increasing income inequality.  Here are Lindsey's data on increases in handouts, first since 1968, and then in the seven Obama years:

In 1968, government transfer payments totaled $53 billion or roughly 7% of personal income. By 2014, these had climbed to $2.5 trillion—about 17% of personal income. . . .  Transfer payments under Mr. Obama increased by $560 billion. By contrast private-sector wages and salaries grew by $1.1 trillion. So for every $2 in extra wages, about $1 was paid out in extra transfer payments—lowering the relative reward to work. Forty-five million people received food stamps in mid-2015, an increase of 46% since the end of 2008. Similarly, 71.6 million individuals were enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, an increase of 13.3 million since October 2013.

So those vast increases in government handout programs should have resulted in at least some notable decrease in income inequality, right?  Of course, it's the opposite -- as anybody who pays any attention to this issue would already have known.  Lindsey discusses the government's three measures of income inequality: the Gini index, the mean log deviation of income, and the Theil index.  What has happened to those during the vast increase in redistributions since 1968?

Despite the redistribution of a sixth of all income [by 2014], inequality measured by all three of the Census Bureau’s indexes is far higher today than in 1968.

And how does Obama's record on income inequality compare to that of his predecessor, GW Bush?

The mean log deviation increased 37% more under Mr. Obama than under President George W. Bush, although when this statistic was released, Mr. Obama had only six years as president compared with Mr. Bush’s eight. The Gini index rose more than three times as much under Mr. Obama than under Mr. Bush. The Theil index increased sharply during the Obama administration, while it fell slightly under Bush 43.

Of the various factors contributing to these results, Lindsey doesn't get much into the one that I think is the biggest, namely the fact that the value of the handouts is not counted as income to the recipients.  (The big handout increases during Obama's tenure have been in Obamacare/Medicaid and food stamps.)  But he does spend some time on the strong disincentives to work caused by the increasing handouts, as well as on the inability of tax increases on high earners to have much if any effect on income inequality.  He points to research from the Hamilton Project and the Urban Institute showing that phase out of government handouts can have an effect equivalent to a marginal tax rate of 50 to 80% for a low income family considering having a second earner get a job.  And he points to a recent study from Brookings that concluded that enacting Bernie Sanders's proposal to increase the top federal marginal income tax rate from 39.6% to 50% would only lower the Gini coefficient by 0.003.

I would think that this issue would be a huge negative for a Clinton or a Sanders in the election; but so far it has been getting next to no attention.  And then, of course, you have the staunch refusal of their core supporters to accept any evidence from the real world.  For example, we have this from a commenter on Lindsey's piece named Skye Priestley:

Mr. Lindsey’s ideas, while somewhat intriguing, are clearly driven by the same inflated mythology that the owners of capital spread so incessantly through every media outlet they can get their grubby hands on: capitalism is the holy calf, and we should all cower lest it be besmirched. I propose an alternate explanation for the fact that income inequality has increased despite the policies of recent liberal administrations designed to combat it. Our nation is increasingly divided by class, and therefore increasingly vulnerable to the concentrating effects of inherited wealth and influence. It is not that redistributionist policies are not effective, but rather that cultural changes have made wealth concentration easy faster than policy changes have made it hard.

It's just that we haven't done enough income redistribution yet!  We have to double down!  Mr. Priestley seems completely unaware that the principal government redistribution programs do not subtract income from high earners, nor do they add income to low earners, as these things are measured.  I would ask Mr. Priestley to consider the main Bernie Sanders proposals of free health care for all and free college for all.  How exactly are these going to decrease income inequality?  But don't worry, Mr. Priestley will not do this exercise. 

Getting Out And Looking Around In Philadelphia

I frequently note here that a key feature of the official New York mentality is the refusal to get out in the City and look around to observe the consequences of the progressive policies that are so universally accepted.  Those who the progressive policies are supposed to help instead find themselves sapped of their spirit and trapped in a life of government-supported poverty.  In Manhattan, housing projects that are warehouses for the permanent poor exist right adjacent to some of the most expensive apartments in the country; yet somehow progressives can't or won't see them.

At least here in New York the long-term post-war decline got turned around during 20 years of Republican mayors (1994-2013), and we have almost entirely put behind us the days of rampant arson and endless vacant lots.  Today, they are even building new private market-rate apartments in the South Bronx!  But the same cannot be said for many of the "basket case" cities that have lived with fifty or even eighty years of continuous progressive government and expanding handouts.  Such cities include paragons of flyover country, like Detroit, Cleveland and St. Louis; but no self-respecting New Yorker would ever go to one of those places to observe it.  Then there are some cities that seem at first blush to have their act together, particularly if you just go to the downtown tourist districts; but if you then look around even a little you find that some third or even half of the city is crumbling and/or vacant.  Fairly speaking, these cities are also basket cases.  Chicago and Philadelphia come to mind.

One of my sisters lives in Philadelphia.  Her neighborhood is a part of Center City just off the main drag and between City Hall and Independence Hall.  The area couldn't be more charming.  There are many historic houses (hers was built in 1834), and plenty of chic stores, cafes, and art galleries.  But to get there you take the Amtrak train through North Philadelphia.  You will go through a vast swath of that district, far larger than Center City, that looks like Dresden after the blitz.  Endless abandoned homes and factories, remaining homes crumbling and looking like they're about to fall down, and enormous formerly-inhabited vacant districts.

And then there's West Philadelphia.  I can't say that I've ever been there.  But an enterprising blogger at a site called theburningplatform.com (I can't find his name) uses his forum to write one post after another about the disastrous state of a stretch of about a 30 blocks from 69th Street to 39th Street in West Philadelphia.  He says that he has written "dozens" of articles on this subject.  Here and here are a couple of recent ones.

Basically his observation is that, in this area, nobody repairs a building, and nobody starts a business.  And the unionized city workforce rarely touches any of the publicly-owned infrastructure, with the result that broken water mains and moon-crater-sized potholes are endemic.

I’ve now been navigating the crumbling ghetto of West Philly for the last ten years. I can without equivocation state I have not seen one new private business open its doors on Chestnut Street, in Mantua, or any other area I travel in West Philly during the entirety of those ten years. The existing businesses – nail and hair salons, fast food joints, bars, liquor stores, porn video outlets, smoke shops, car washes, more bars, and hysterically tax return offices (earned income tax credits) – haven’t invested a dime in keeping up their appearances. . . .  It appears there is an existential shortage of paint, hammers, garbage bags, wedding rings, and employed upstanding men taking responsibility for the children they father in West Philly. There is plenty of yellow crime scene tape, as West Philly accounts for a significant portion of Philadelphia’s 280 annual murders (up 13% in 2015). Houses originally well built in the 1950s and with some upkeep would still be fine homes, are in disrepair, with collapsing porches, dilapidated gutters and roofs, crumbling sidewalks, boarded up windows, and satellite dishes on every one.    

But can't the government fix things by spending some taxpayer money on "affordable housing"?  Our blogger reports on a new development built in the Mantua area since 2009 with federal "stimulus" funds:

And then there is the ongoing saga of the Section 8 gated estate called Mantua Square, a $28 million, 101 townhouse, 8 store front testimonial to Keynesian idiocy that sits in the middle of an Obama Keystone Zone. . . .  Mantua Square was one of Obama’s shovel ready projects funded by his $800 billion porkulus package in 2009. Every dime came from taxpayers. It was touted as a game changer for Mantua. We were told businesses would open in the 8 pre-built retail spaces and other businesses would follow. A glorious revitalization would materialize due to brilliant government apparatchiks spending your money. It is now 5 years later and not one storefront is occupied by a single business. Not one black entrepreneur has used their Philadelphia public school education to create a viable business and the jobs that would follow.

Could it be that people maintained in a lifetime of semi-comfortable poverty by government handouts just don't fix up buildings or start businesses?  What is the alternative explanation?

After sixty and more years of this, West Philadelphia sinks ever deeper into disrepair and despair.  Is it perhaps time to try something different?  Our blogger gives a figure of 98% of voters in this area who voted for Obama in 2012.  Could it really be that high?  Here's a write-up from philly.com from immediately after the 2012 election that appears to support this statistic.  Excerpt:

Take North Philadelphia's 28th Ward, third division, bounded by York, 24th, and 28th Streets and Susquehanna Avenue. . . .  In the entire 28th Ward, Romney received only 34 votes to Obama's 5,920.   

That's about in line with the 98% figure.  The philly.com reporters take a series of wards and divisions and try to track down the handful of people reported to be registered as Republicans.  One after another, when the people are found, they claim there must be some mistake.  We don't have any Republicans around here!

Here in New York, many of our formerly bad neighborhood are in the midst of a rejuvenation.  But is the rejuvenation the result of new efforts by the existing population, or does it stem from new residents moving in?  I'd like to think that at least some of it can be credited to the existing population; but I can't find much evidence of that.  If anyone could point me to some such evidence, I will appreciate it. 

New York Progressive Geniuses Express Their Views On Energy Policy

On my "About" page, I have this to say about the New York progressive's view of appropriate energy policy: [U]sage of energy is a human right, but all actual known methods of producing energy are environmentally unacceptable.  That mentality was on full display in an article in yesterday's New York Times by Lisa Foderaro, headlined "Concerns Over Pipeline Project at Indian Point."     

It seems that a company called Spectra Energy is in the process of expanding and enlarging a pipeline that carries natural gas across the Hudson River about 25 miles north of the New York City line.  That would mean that the pipeline hits the eastern shore of the Hudson right at the site of the Indian Point nuclear power plant -- a facility that itself provides about 25% of the electricity for New York City.  Needless to say, the combination of a greatly increased flow of "fracked" gas from parts west, together with the very existence of a nuclear plant in close proximity to the City (25 miles from the City line makes it about 40 miles from the main business district) has thrown the New York environmental activist community into a tizzy.

[A] construction project — the planned expansion of a natural gas pipeline across Indian Point property — is . . . putting the power plant in a harsh glare. Elected officials, residents and environmental activists have criticized the project, saying that a rupture of the pipeline could unleash a nuclear catastrophe.    

Of course the companies that own the power plant and the pipeline have attempted to allay concerns, such as by moving the pipeline several hundred feet farther from the power plant than the previous version.  But how far do you think those things are going with the activists?

Environmental activists from New York City and Westchester County are not mollified by those precautions. . . .  In recent months, activists have turned up the intensity of their protests against the pipeline expansion. Members of faith organizations and environmental groups held a vigil on Saturday outside the house in Mount Kisco, N.Y., that [Governor] Cuomo shares with his girlfriend, Sandra Lee. . . .  Activists have also held rallies and engaged in acts of civil disobedience. In November, nine people joined hands and blocked a road near a site where some of Spectra Energy’s construction equipment and vehicles were stored in Montrose, a hamlet in the town of Cortlandt, not far from Indian Point.    

So let's have a review of what sources of energy might be available, and which of those are acceptable to the environmental activist community.  First, here is information from the U.S. Energy Information Agency on New York energy consumption by type of fuel in 2013.  In round numbers, hydrocarbons of various sorts accounted for about 75% (natural gas, about 39%; oil and gasoline, about 34%; and coal, about 2%); nuclear was about 13%; hydro (largely Niagara Falls) about 7%; "biomass," about 3.5%; and all other "renewables," about 1.5%.

Hydrocarbons (coal, oil, natural gas)?  No way!  It's not just that the activists are protesting this one pipeline for passing too close to a nuclear plant.  Of course they are against all hydrocarbons always and everywhere because of Global Warming.  It's an endless war of attrition.  Foderero interviews one Patrick Robbins of something called the "Sane Energy Project":

Patrick Robbins, co-director of Sane Energy Project, . . .  contends that continued resistance to the pipeline project, despite the fact that it has the needed approvals, was not fruitless. Indeed, he and others are focused on the larger war against fossil fuels, more than any one battle.  “Every day you stop construction, it hurts their timetable,” he said, referring to Spectra Energy. “And it sends a message to other companies, investors and political officials that the landscape has changed on building these pipelines, and that it’s not going to be an easy fight for them.”

Well, that knocks out about three-quarters of current energy supplies.  Surely, then, nuclear must be OK?  Of course not!  Indeed, the article points out that the activists have gotten Governor Cuomo on board with a demand to deny new licenses to the Indian Point plants and force their closure:

Mr. Cuomo has been vociferous in his demand that federal regulators not relicense Indian Point. (The reactors’ licenses expired in 2013 and 2015, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is now considering their renewal.)

We've now declared 88% of our current supply to be unacceptable.  How about the biggest remaining piece, which is hydro (at about 7% of current supply)?  Forget it!  It's not covered in this article, but you should be aware that the New York Times has been in the forefront of the campaign to remove dams from rivers all over the northeast, so that they can return to their "wild" and "natural" state.  Here is an editorial from 2009 celebrating the removal of dams in Maine as a tremendous victory for the environment.  Doesn't that same logic apply to Niagara Falls?

We're down to biomass, wind and solar.  But isn't biomass just another form of burning carbon, except with lots more impurities (and thus real pollution) than refined hydrocarbons?  Besides, I wonder how many of the environmental activists are prepared to reduce their personal energy consumption by 95 to 98%.  None of them, I would wager.