Let 421-a Die! -- Part II

Here in New York, the epicenter of serious progressivism, after a century or so of government-supported housing programs (rent control, public housing, and "affordable" housing initiatives of every stripe) we still seem to have the most expensive housing in the country.  The most recent concept for getting so-called "affordable" housing built is to offer developers tax incentives in the form of reduced real estate taxes on their development, in return for construction of the units.  The particular program goes by the name "421-a," after a section number of the applicable statute.  Somehow, the right to hand out the tax abatements belongs to the State of New York, even though the lost real estate taxes are a cost to the City of New York.  The idea that such a tax incentive program could make the people better off is highly analogous to the idea that you can raise yourself up off the ground if only you pull hard enough on your bootstraps.  But, of course, the difference is that the right tax incentive program can conceal vast opportunities for graft.

This 421-a program has been around for well over 40 years, since the early 70s.  It has been designed to expire regularly -- resulting in a perfect opportunity every few years for the pols to hit up the developers for a new round of contributions to keep the gravy train running.  Remarkably, late last year, the program actually did expire without being renewed.  Then it got an interim extension until June, but again was not renewed.  It has now been out of business for about four months.

Back in June, when the program had just expired without any immediate prospect of renewal, I had a post strongly advocating that this was a perfect opportunity to let this corrupt program expire.  My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggested that this program cost a ridiculous $1 million or so for each so-called "affordable" housing unit created.  My post in addition pointed out that New York's Community Service Society had also done a study of how much 421-a cost the taxpayers per affordable housing unit created, and they also came up with a figure of around $1 million per apartment.  With average per unit housing costs in this country running well less than one-third of that, there is no way that this program can be justified.

But of course, this is New York; so the latest news is that 421-a is back!  The New York Times gives a rundown in Thursday's edition, headlined "Cuomo Strikes Deal to Revive Affordable Housing Program."   A fair summary is that the reason for the stall has been that a new special interest group has wanted to get in on the graft, and was in a position to block any deal until it got its payoff.  The new graft recipient is New York's construction unions.

The Times describes a supposed negotiation that has been taking place as to the renewal of the program between and among Governor Cuomo, representatives of the developers, and the unions:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has forged a deal with developers and union construction officials to revive a program designed to create apartments for poor and working-class New Yorkers. . . .  Details of the new deal were hashed out by state officials; members of the Real Estate Board of New York, the industry’s powerful lobbying arm; and union officials. 

But wait -- in this "deal" the developers and unions are to get handouts in the form of abatements of New York City real estate taxes for the developers and minimum wage levels for the unions.  Those on the paying end of the deal are the rest of the New York City real estate taxpayers who don't get any abatements.  Who represented them in the negotiations?  You guessed it -- nobody.  So in effect this is three hangers-on dividing up a pile of someone else's money.  

And what is the "deal" that has been "negotiated"?  In summary, developers get greatly increased property tax abatements over previous levels, and the unions get an agreement from developers that there will be minimum wages on these construction sites of $60 per hour for large projects in Manhattan, and $45 per hour for projects in Brooklyn and Queens within a mile of the waterfront:  

Under the new deal, builders would get the special tax benefits for a longer period — a 100 percent tax abatement for 35 years. . . .   The deal sets a pay schedule for developers who get the tax breaks in prime areas. In Manhattan below 96th Street, they would have to pay an average $60 an hour in wages and benefits for workers on buildings of 300 or more units.  On the fast-growing waterfront in Brooklyn and Queens, the average would have to be $45 an hour on buildings of 300 or more units.

The newly-proposed 35 year tax abatement will be up from a range of about 15-20 years under the prior version of the program.  In short, they are proposing to roughly double the taxpayer cost per subsidized "affordable" apartment.  If the old cost was around $1 million per apartment, the new cost will be more like $2 million per apartment.  Some of the extra money will end up in the pockets of developers, but much will be siphoned off by the construction unions, who will now be guaranteed wages of up to $60 per hour.

This so-called "deal" is now subject to approval by the state legislature (although, remarkably, not by any City body).  We will see who among New York progressives is capable of doing the simple math that establishes that this program is a gigantic waste of taxpayer funds.  In the past, even the usually-sensible Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute has been lured into supporting 421-a (albeit with modifications, and not the newly-proposed super-ripoff that has just come out).

As an interesting aside, a very unexpected person came out last week against 421-a renewal.  It was Eliot Spitzer!  Spitzer spoke on Tuesday, November 8, at the annual lunch of the Young Men's and Women's Real Estate Association.  As reported in The Real Deal, he spoke out strongly against renewal of the program:

“I’m here to tell you that 421a doesn’t work,” Spitzer  told the members of the Young Men’s and Women’s Real Estate Association at their monthly luncheon. “421a, in its current incarnation, is not going to solve the problem.”  Spitzer said his real estate firm did a back-of-the-envelope calculation on the program, and found it costs taxpayers $375,000 for each affordable unit. When the city’s mandatory inclusionary housing (MIH) program is factored in, he said, the number jumps to more than $1 million.

Looks like he came up with about the same figure per apartment as yours truly and the Community Service Society.  Except that two days later, our genius governor gave away the store and upped the cost to more like $2 million per apartment.

And now that Hillary has failed to win the presidency, they are saying that Cuomo is one of the leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.  Lord help us. 

UPDATE, November 14:  To prove that the progressive tooth-fairy-economics bug sooner or later infects nearly everyone in New York, the normally sensible New York Post this morning has an editorial endorsing Governor Cuomo's new 421-a deal.  Headline is "Hope for City Housing":

The city needs this done, and Cuomo has a duty to finish cleaning up the mess. . . .  Inaction is unacceptable. . . .  

The Post praises Cuomo for negotiating the unions down from their prior even-more-outrageous average wage demands (the number $65 per hour had been reported).  OK, but the idea that nobody will ever build less-than-luxury housing in New York City without subsidies is just false.  The problem is that, once you have subsidies, they get baked into the price of land, and then nobody can build without subsidies.  Let the subsidies go away for a couple of years, and the price of land will decline, and construction will resume.  The Post should have listened to their own columnist Kyle Smith, who wrote an op-ed on this subject back in August, headlined "Why Cuomo wants you to pay unions to build luxury housing":

New York state taxpayers have just become an unlikely participant in Gov. Cuomo’s gonzo scheme to solve a dispute between billionaire real-estate developers on the one hand and $65-an-hour construction workers on the other. The two sides couldn’t come to an agreement, so Cuomo is making you fork over the difference.  That’s right: If Cuomo’s harebrained scheme passes, you’ll be paying to help construct mostly luxury New York City apartments for other, rich people to live in.  I use colorful language because New York state, like every other government on earth, goes out of its way to use boring bureaucratic terminology to lull you to sleep so it can cheat you.

Why No One Pays Any Attention To The New York Times Any More

I will be far from the first to note that the biggest loser of the recent election has to be the liberal media, led by its flagship outlet the New York Times.  The Times went all in for Hillary, sometimes running as many as four anti-Trump front page stories in a single issue.  

Before this election the term "bias" was commonly used to describe the political coverage of the Times and other liberal media, and some even continued to use that term this cycle; but this time, the word "bias" was not an accurate description of what was occurring at the Times.  The word "bias" would connote coverage that is somewhat slanted despite an effort at balance.  For the Times and many others in this cycle, it was not a question of mere slant, and there was no effort at balance.  The Times explicitly functioned as an arm of the Clinton campaign.  By the way, in my view they are completely entitled to do that if they want.  The problem was that their idea of how to maximize their help for Hillary was to combine smug and supercilious contempt for their opponent and his supporters with a completely fake pretense of objectivity.  Was anybody fooled?  Very few, I would think.  The overall effect of the Times's efforts was almost certainly to help Trump rather than hurt him.

Anyway, now that the election is over, don't expect them to have learned anything from the disaster.  (Isn't the fundamental characteristic of the progressive the complete inability to learn from experience?)  Almost certainly, the ham-handed one-sidedness of their coverage will only get worse as they struggle to deal with the reality of a Trump presidency.  Indeed, I already have my first good example.

In Friday's edition, the lead editorial has the headline "Denounce the Hate, Mr. Trump."   Supposedly the reason for the editorial is the outpouring of "bigotry and hatred" that the Times perceives as coming from Trump's supporters in the aftermath of the election:

[Y]ou [should] immediately and unequivocally repudiate the outpouring of racist, sexist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic and homophobic insults, threats and attacks being associated with your name.   

Funny, but I've been reading and viewing lots about riots and violence from Trump opponents, but I hadn't seen anything at all about this so-called "outpouring" of offensive conduct from Trump supporters.  So, New York Times, can you kindly provide us with at least an example or two of these post-election "racist, sexist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic and homophobic insults, threats and attacks" for which you claim Trump supporters bear responsibility?  They give two.  Here they are:

Explicit expressions of bigotry and hatred by Trump supporters . . .  have become even more intense since his election. On a department-store window in Philadelphia, vandals spray-painted “Sieg Heil 2016” and Mr. Trump’s name written with a swastika. In a Minnesota high-school bathroom, vandals scrawled the Trump campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” and next to it, “Go back to Africa.”

But wait -- what is the evidence that either of these acts was committed by a Trump supporter?  The Times gives no evidence whatsoever.  Moreover, these are exactly the kind of acts that Trump's opponents have been engaging in throughout the campaign in the effort to discredit him.  The famous Project Veritas videos that came out during the campaign caught Democratic Party and Clinton campaign operatives at the highest levels planning and coordinating dirty tricks to make it appear falsely that Trumps supporters were racists and bigots.  I can't say I know who did either of the particular acts mentioned in the Times editorial; nor would I say that Trump had no racists or other bad people among his supporters.  But really, given what we know, what is the chance that these acts cited by the Times were done by a Trump opponent as opposed to a Trump supporter?  Anybody who has been following this would put those odds at somewhere around 98 or 99% that Trump opponents were responsible.  But in the total absence of any evidence, the Times would pin these acts on Trump supporters -- and in sneering terms that would seek to make being a Trump supporter morally unacceptable ("expressions of bigotry and hatred by Trump supporters").  Is it any wonder that Trump supporters of good faith look on the New York Times with revulsion?  

Meanwhile, several days after the election, while one guy seems to have put an offensive allegedly-pro-Trump message on a Philadelphia store window, and another guy the same in a Minnesota bathroom, tens of thousands of Trump opponents continue their violent riots in cities including Los Angeles, Oakland, Portland, and even in New York City outside Trump's home.  As the riots have continued for days, there have been numerous reports of injuries, arrests, and extensive property damage, not to mention racist statements.  What does this editorial have to say about that?  It doesn't mention the subject.  Well, how about in the rest of this edition of the paper -- surely they have a news article or two about these widespread riots and the conduct of the rioters?  Actually, in this entire November 11 issue of the Times, there is not one single mention of these ongoing riots, whether in news, editorial, or even letters to the editor.  And how about the call to Hillary Clinton to denounce those rioting on her behalf?  Can't find that either.

Wow.  It's not just that we're getting fake and baseless accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., etc., from these guys.  It's that they systematically suppress any information that doesn't support their narrative of the moment.  You can't even find out from them what's going on out there in the world.  Is it any wonder that no one is paying attention any more?

Are Republicans Facing A Coming Demographic Disaster?

A recurring theme of progressive writers is that Republicans are facing a coming demographic disaster because whites are an inevitably shrinking part of the American electorate.  Sure Trump just eked out a victory by winning the white vote by a 21% margin.  But, according to numbers here from Pew, he lost Hispanics by 36 points and blacks by 80 points.  Those groups, particularly Hispanics, are growing as a percent of the electorate, while whites are shrinking.  Thus, it's only a matter of time until the demographic tide swamps the Republicans and brings the Democrats into permanent control.

For an example of a piece advancing this narrative, here is an article from the Washington Post by Chris Cillizza from this past April, title "The Coming Republican Demographic Disaster."  Cillizza quotes from David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report as follows:

In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 56 percent of all white voters and won election in a 44-state landslide. In 2012, GOP nominee Mitt Romney carried 59 percent of all white voters yet lost decisively. What happened? African Americans, Latinos, Asians and other non-whites — all overwhelmingly Democratic-leaning groups — rose from 12 percent of voters in 1980 to 28 percent in 2012.

Sounds bad for the Republicans, right?  Not so fast.  For a guy my age (65), what seems odd about this narrative is the lumping of all "whites" into one ethnic group for purposes of analyzing voting results.  When I was younger, Hispanics were a much smaller percentage of the electorate, and blacks somewhat smaller.  And yet somehow Democrats controlled both houses of Congress solidly from the time of my birth until the Republicans finally took the Senate for a few years while Reagan was President; and then the Democrats went back into full control of both houses until the 1994 election.  In those days, Democrats also controlled way more state legislatures and governorships than Republicans; today it's the reverse.

What are we missing?  What we're missing is that back in the 50s through 80s "whites" were not thought to be one monolithic voting bloc.  In ethnic terms, some whites were the descendants of those who had come earlier, sometimes known as the WASPs.  And then separately you had the recent immigrants and their immediate descendants -- the Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans (Poles, Slavs), Greeks, Jews.  The latter groups were largely working class, and were the base of the Democratic Party at the time, before there were such large numbers of Hispanics.  

With Trump's election, what we have seen is the completion of the overwhelming movement of the "ethnic" whites over to the Republicans.  As many have noted over the past few weeks, such whites as are left in the Democratic Party are not the working class, but the elites.  Among these "elite" whites, there are plenty of Irish, Italians, etc., who have moved up over time; but definitely those groups are proportionally under-represented, while WASPs and, especially, Jews, are over-represented.  

My point is only that that there is no reason to believe that ethnic groups are fixed in their political loyalties.  The Republicans have in fact continually grown as a percent of the electorate in my lifetime, even as their previous ethnic base has shrunk, precisely by appealing to new ethnic groups that previously aligned with the Democrats.  There is no reason that this process cannot continue with new ethnic groups.  All of Hispanics, African Americans, and Asian Americans are likely to move up economically over time, and to gradually see their interest as more aligned with small government and entrepreneurial opportunity than with big government and handouts.

I see the coming race for political ascendancy between the major parties not in terms of relative sizes of ethnic groups with pre-determined voting patterns, but rather as a race between the growth of the state-dependent sector of society and the private sector.  Democrat elites want to grow the state-dependent sector because those who are dependent on the state tend to vote for the continuation of state handouts and growth of state programs, which means they vote for the Democratic Party.  Thus we see things like Obamacare, the huge Medicaid expansion, the takeover of the energy sector, and so forth.  Democrats seek to keep Hispanics, African Americans and Asian Americans, or as many of them as possible, in the state-dependent sector.  If they can do it, maybe the current ethnic voting patterns will continue and be perpetuated.  But if large numbers of these ethnic groups start to escape the state-dependent sector, and start to view themselves as the suckers who pay for everything and get nothing in return, then you will see the same thing happen with them as has just happened with the white working class.

Do you doubt that people in the state-dependent sector vote overwhelmingly for Democrats?  Take a look at the margin by which Hillary won the District of Columbia:  93/4, or an 89% margin.  That's whites, blacks, and all other ethnic groups.  Look at county-by-county maps of Maryland and Virginia, and you will find that both are solidly Republican states except for the DC suburbs (and, in the case of Maryland, Baltimore) where everybody or close to everybody lives off the government.  That is far the more important factor than ethnicity.              

Notes On The Election Results

Reviewing the election result maps from last night, one thing stands out above all others: the ongoing polarization of the electorate between the Democratic coasts and the Republican flyover regions.  Here is a chart from the New York Times of results by state, including the percents of the vote won by each candidate.

In the deep blue states on the coasts, it is notable that Hillary Clinton ran up very large margins.  In a number of cases those margins were even greater than the large margins by which Obama beat McCain in 2008 and/or Romney in 2012, even though Hillary well underperformed Obama nationally.  For example, in giant California, Obama beat McCain in 2008 by 61/37 (24 points) and Romney in 2012 by 60/37 (23 points).   Last night Clinton beat Trump in California by 62/33, a full 29 points.  In Massachusetts, Obama beat McCain by 26 points (62/36) in 2008, and beat Romney by 23 points (61/38) in 2012; Hillary beat Trump in Massachusetts by 27 points (61/34). 

In New York, although Hillary's margin was not as big as those of Obama in 2008 and 2012, she still trounced Trump by a full 21 points, 59/38 -- and New York really is Trump's home state, rather than his adopted state-of-convenience.  Here in Manhattan, I can report that all conversations over the last year about the election with someone who doesn't know your politics in advance have started with the presumption that of course you support Hillary and find Trump to be a buffoon.  And the closer you get to the pinnacles of elite Manhattan, the less dissent there is from the progressive political orthodoxy.

But boy is it different out in the middle of the country.  It's not just that the middle of the country is basically red.  It's that there's a massive trend of formerly blue or purple states moving toward red and then deep red.  Consider a few examples:

Arkansas.  Arkansas was the last of the deep South states to finally break from once solid Democratic control.  It's legislature flipped from Democratic control to Republican only in 2012, after being in Democratic hands since Reconstruction.  It has had two Democratic governors since Bill Clinton left office in 1992, and one of them, Jim Beebe, served into 2015.  Not to mention that Hillary Clinton was the First Lady of Arkansas from 1983 to 1992.  Last night she lost Arkansas by 26 points, 60/34.

West Virginia.  In my lifetime, West Virginia has been one of the most reliably Democratic states.  For example, West Virginia did not have a Republican U.S. Senator all the way from the 1950s until the election of current Senator Shelley Capito in 2014.  The other Senator, Joe Manchin remains a Democrat even today.  In Presidential elections, West Virginia has been reliably Democratic since the 1930s, with the scattered exceptions of the Eisenhower (1956), Nixon (1972) and Reagan (1984) landslides; but then it started to vote steadily Republican in the Presidential races in 2000.  Then, of course, there's Obama's "War on Coal," and Hillary's war on coal miners.  Yesterday Trump won West Virginia by 42 points, 69/27.  Whew! 

Missouri.  Missouri has been the classic swing state for as long as human memory goes back.  Its voters voted for the winning Presidential candidate, whether Democrat or Republican, in every election from 1904 to 2004, with only one exception (1956).  They called Missouri the "bellwether," because it was thought that you would know how the race would finish once Missouri had come in.  Well, no more.  Obama lost Missouri in both 2008 and 2012.  In this election, Missouri was never in question.  Trump won it by 19 points, 57/38.

Minnesota.  As of this writing, it looks like Hillary has finally squeaked out a win in Minnesota, by two points, 47/45.  It was one of the last states to be called.  But this was never supposed to be remotely close.  Minnesota has been literally the most reliable Democratic state since FDR first got elected in 1932, breaking ranks only in the 1952 and 56 Eisenhower elections and Nixon's 1972 landslide.  In 1984 Minnesota had the distinction of being the only state to award electoral votes to Democrat Walter Mondale in Reagan's second-term landslide.  Late polls in this election had Clinton up by from 6 to 11 points.  Oops!

Obviously, comparable stories could be told for several more states, such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. 

Now, what is the explanation for these dramatic ongoing shifts?  One piece may be that many voters in these states engage in magical thinking that the government can somehow "bring the jobs back" by some kind of trade deals or tariffs -- not so different from the progressive's magical thinking that all human problems can be solved by government spending.  Another piece may be that these voters mostly have formed the perfectly sensible view that many new jobs would emerge in their states if only the Obama "War Against the Economy" could be ended.  

But here's what I think is a big and under appreciated piece of the explanation:  The voters in these states have a deep revulsion for the smug elites in places like Washington and New York, who purport to run their lives and impose taxes and regulations on them and have no idea about their struggles.  In this revulsion, the red state voters are absolutely right.  

Will "Trumpism" Split Or Transform The Republican Party?

I'm writing this before any meaningful election results are in.  My view is that there is no likely good result from today's election.  We are probably in for four years of pain, not to mention any longer term damage that might be inflicted by one of these flawed candidates.  The best result we can hope for will be keeping the execrable Schumer from becoming Majority Leader of the Senate.    

But this is as good a time as any to look forward on a few issues.  

Number one is the future of the Republican Party.  Many have predicted that the rise of Trumpism will mean the demise of the Republican Party, particularly that it will splinter into two or more pieces.  I don't buy it.  The party will likely evolve some, but even there, my prediction is, not much.  Here's why.  Our system of popular election of the President essentially forces us into a two-major-party system.  In a parliamentary system like they have in most European countries, multiple minor parties can elect a few deputies each; and then, if no major party gets a full majority in the parliament, the major parties must go shopping to buy minor party support.  The result is that minor parties frequently can demand policy concessions or cabinet positions, and can end up with influence in running the government well beyond the numbers of their supporters.  This gives the minor parties an ongoing reason for existence; and then, sometimes, one of them will start growing until it overtakes one of the formerly major parties.  In the U.S., by contrast, the President, once elected, has the full executive authority, and doesn't need ongoing support from anybody outside his party.  Minor parties who can't hope to elect a President have zero influence on the running of the government.  To be a party that can elect a President, you need to be a broad-based coalition that aspires to 50+% support of the entire population.  By the very math of the situation, it's highly unlikely to have more than two of those at any one time.  Yes, in a year when a minor-party candidate gets some traction (think Ross Perot in 1992 or 1996), you can become President with support perhaps in the low 40s of percent.  Still, a party that actually aspires to elect Presidents regularly must be constantly working to build that 50% coalition.  If the Republicans break into two or three pieces, now no one of the pieces will have more than about 25 - 30% support.  If that happens, the Republicans will be in the wilderness essentially forever until they figure out how to re-coalesce.  The forces pushing them back together would be almost irresistible.  I literally can't imagine that it wouldn't happen. 

But how about Trump's big issues of trade and immigration?  If anything defines "Trumpism," it is his positions on these two issues.  Will the Republican Party be transformed by adopting those positions, or some variant of them?  Again, I don't buy it, except maybe a little around the edges.  Sorry, Donald, but your positions represent dead ends for the country and indeed for your most fervent supporters.  You have run further with these issues than their previous champions, like Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan; but these issues will fade away again, as they have in the past, because they are dead ends.

Trade.  If there is one major theme of this blog, it is that the fundamental driving principle of the progressive left -- which is the idea that all human problems can be solved with more government spending -- is a delusion that can't possibly work.  Here's something else in the same delusional category:  the idea that some form of trade protectionism, or "better trade deals," or punishment of American companies for having foreign affiliates, can prevent the internationalization of the world economy and thereby "bring the jobs back."  

Yes, a not small number of Americans have lost jobs in manufacturing when foreign producers figure out how to produce and deliver the same products for less.  The government cannot solve this problem with trade restrictions.  Indeed, there is no solution to the problem other than the creation of new private companies and new jobs for the displaced workers.  Trying to solve the problem with tariffs or import quotas is a total dead end for the American economy and even particularly for the blue collar workers who seem to be Trump's strongest supporters.  Tariffs act as a regressive tax that hits lower-middle-income workers the hardest.  Meanwhile, a tariff only postpones the inevitable:  sooner or later every factory will be put out of business by some form of competition, which could just as well be domestic as foreign.  And if tariffs are high enough to cut off American producers from the best international technologies and supply chains, then we get a second-rate American economy.  Today, our economy is the world's strongest, and our wages the world's highest, precisely because we are constantly exposed to the best that the world has to throw at us.

And then there is Trump's concept of "better trade deals."  I have no idea what he is even talking about there.  By a "better trade deal," does he mean a deal that makes foreign products more expensive for Americans to buy?  How exactly is that "better"?  Even to state it that way shows how crazy it is.  In fact, existing trade deals like NAFTA or the pending TPP have essentially nothing to do with setting the terms of trade.  (Those are set by private agreements between buyers and sellers.)  The trade deals do lower tariffs, which makes foreign products cheaper for Americans to buy.  Sorry, but that's a good thing for Americans.  Going forward, the Republican Party is going to have to decide whether it wants to be in favor of making the things that Americans buy cheaper or more expensive.  There's only one right way to go.  Besides, the Democrats -- because of their ties to unions and crony capitalists, let alone environmentalists -- are already the party in favor of making the things Americans buy more expensive.  

My prediction is that, even if Trump becomes President, his trade agenda will largely fade away.  OK, TPP may die (although it also might get approved in the lame duck session of the Senate).  But I can't imagine a major general tariff increase getting approved by Congress, let alone the repudiation of NAFTA, which is deeply baked into our economy at this point.  Most likely if Trump is elected:  Trump makes a few proposals, they sit in Congress without action, and then everybody moves on to other things.  If Hillary gets elected, TPP likely also gets stalled, but she is more likely to revive it a year or two down the road.  Probably, she gets some modifications and re-submits it.  Her best hope to get it approved will be in the next Congress.  Of course, that's because there will be more Republicans then.

Immigration.  The immigration issue is subject to far more complexities and ambiguities than the trade issue.  With trade, while there are clearly some losers among American workers, trade overall is a huge net plus for the American economy.  With immigration, it's much less clear.  And also, the political divide over immigration is so stark that the chances for a meaningful reform that actually improves things are not good.  As I have written before, as bad as our immigration system is, almost any reform that might get passed is likely to make things worse.

Meanwhile, how big a problem is immigration?  Many sources have reported that net illegal immigration has been negative for many years, basically since the big recession.  Here is a report on the subject from Pew.  There just aren't that many poor Mexicans looking to get into the U.S. any more.  Of course, the biggest factor contributing to the waning of the illegal immigration problem with Mexico has been -- you guessed it -- NAFTA!  And anyway, for all the talk of the problem of illegal immigration, somehow nobody seems to mention that the big numbers are in legal immigration.  The Pew report just cited has a figure for illegal immigrants in the U.S. in 2015 of 11.1 million.  According to migrationsource.org here, the number of legal immigrants in the U.S. exceeds 40 million, almost half of whom are already citizens.  And new legal immigrants continue to arrive in the U.S. at a rate of about 1 million per year.  One could debate whether that number is too high -- or, maybe, too low.  I haven't really heard much if any debate over that subject.  Have you?  And nobody really says that the U.S. should dramatically lower that number, let alone cut it off entirely.  After all, we are a nation of immigrants.  In my view, given that it's just not possible to take in everybody in the troubled world, a smart reform would be seeking to get the highest quality and best educated immigrants we can find to fill our limited quotas.  As sensible as that would be, I don't think that the Democrats would agree to it.  To put it cynically, they want to import people who will become dependent on government.  So the law will likely not change.  

That means that the difference between the candidates going forward will be in the enforcement of existing law, rather than the likelihood of any new laws.  Hillary is on record (at fundraisers, or course, not campaign rallies) as being in favor of open borders, at least within the Americas.  That really means that she represents no change from the intentionally lax enforcement regime of Obama. Trump promises stricter enforcement and a wall.  OK, but net illegal immigration is already negative.  In a Trump administration, I would expect immigration to fade as an issue, as would trade.  There are far more important things to focus on.  The pain will be in other areas, and on other issues, of which there are plenty.

So will "Trumpism" transform the Republican Party?  Not likely.

UPDATE, November 9:  In Trump's short victory speech late last night, suddenly the issues he's talking about are infrastructure spending and "taking care of our vets."  What happened to trade and immigration?  That was fast!  Meanwhile, with solid Republican control of both houses of Congress, I really should be more optimistic than indicated at the beginning of this post.  Hey, will they actually roll back some of Obama's War Against the Economy?  It's entirely possible that that could give the economy a real boost.

The Election: #nevertrump versus #neverhillary

Really, it's very difficult to find anything good to say about this election.  But I'll try.

Somewhere even before the candidates were finally chosen, the hashtags #nevertrump and #neverhillary appeared on social media.  The hashtags are headings to collect in one place the writings of people who refuse to support the candidate in question, and who advocate that others should do the same.  But if you take a look at the discussions aggregated under the two hashtags, you quickly realize that the two represent very different phenomena.

First, the #nevertrump phenomenon.  It very substantially consists of Republicans and conservatives, including prominent ones, who find either Mr. Trump's character, or his positions on certain issues, or both, to be disqualifying from the Presidency.  The Hill back in August published a long list of over one hundred prominent Republicans who had stated a "never Trump" position.  The list included presidential candidates (Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush), numerous Senators and Congressmen, Governors, top-ranking pundits (e.g., columnist George Will, editors Bill Kristol and Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard), major Republican donors (e.g., Paul Singer of Elliott Management), and others.

One might agree or disagree with these people on whether their position constitutes a good political tactic that would lead to a superior outcome for the country.  (After all, the most likely result of many Republicans repudiating Trump will be the election of Hillary.)  But clearly these are serious people who are genuinely concerned about getting the best outcome for the country and its people.

And #neverhillary?  Almost everything you can find about that phenomenon consists of Trump supporters advocating that people should not support the Democratic candidate.  How about the reciprocal of #nevertrump?  Is there such a thing as a group of prominent Democrats -- or even one prominent Democrat -- publicly saying that they just can't support Mrs. Clinton?  If there is, I can't find it.  Back on August 29, Marc Thiessen wrote a column in the Washington Post asking "Where Are The #NeverHillary Democrats?" and noting that he couldn't find any.  The intervening two months haven't caused any to turn up.

Now, that's rather remarkable.  I mean, as bad as Trump's flaws are, are Hillary's any less so?  Compromising national security to that your emails will be inaccessible to FOIA requests -- emails that will then reveal the workings of the pay-to-play Clinton Foundation?  Destroying documents after the Congressional subpoena has been served?  (No client I ever had would have survived in his or her job after doing that.)  Using a "foundation" to support a personal lifestyle of private planes and top hotels, let alone to arrange tens of millions of dollars of supposedly "independent" personal income from donors with a clear interest in influencing a Secretary of State/soon-to-be presidential candidate?  And not one prominent Democrat is sufficiently troubled by any of it to publicly proclaim an inability to support this person?  

It does turn out that there is at least one group of Democrats in the #neverhillary camp.  Of course, this is the unreconstructed Bernie supporters.  Here is a letter from a Harvard freshman to that group of #neverhillary Democrats.  It seems that most of the people in this group are young "millennials," and probably their biggest issue is ballooning college debt and Bernie's promise of free college for all.  Perhaps in their minds they have convinced themselves that in advocating for this issue they are looking out for the good of the country and its people.  A more honest way of looking at it is that they just want to get in on the infinite pile of free government handout money before it all gets handed out to somebody else.

Well, from this we learn something.  After all, Hillary has no particular political vision that anyone can perceive.  What she stands for is continuation and ongoing growth of all government spending and support with taxpayer money of all Democratic lobby groups.  So what we learn is that, for the left-leaning voters in general and all prominent Democrats in particular, far and away the over-riding value is protecting the continuation of the government gravy train for themselves and their crowd.  OK, it's demoralizing.  But if this election has accomplished on useful thing, it is to make that conclusion abundantly clear.