A Few Issues For Progressives To Think About

On its first full day in office, the new Trump administration was greeted with the "Million Woman March," said to have been attended by far more than a million people if you include all of its multiple venues.  But what were they all marching for?  Clearly, they were against everything Trump; but beyond that, If there was an explicit positive policy agenda, they weren't saying much about it.  What I can find are quotes of what some of the speakers said, most of which sound like rather vacuous of platitudes.  For example, there's this from Madonna:

“The revolution starts here,” she told the crowd as thousands of marchers began heading toward the White House. “The fight for the right to be free, to be who we are, to be equal. Let’s march together through this darkness.” 

Well, all right then!  Perhaps it would have been more straightforward if they had just hired Professor Flagstaff (Grouch Marx) from the movie Horsefeathers as their spokesperson to comment on the incoming Trump administration:

I don't know what they have to say/ It makes no difference anyway/ Whatever it is, I'm against it!

To figure out what was actually being promoted here, we'll have to look elsewhere.  Most if not all of the marchers either characterize themselves as "progressives," or would at least agree that by joining this march they were allying themselves with the progressive movement.  Certainly, the list of organizations calling themselves "partners" of the march is a who's who of the progressive establishment.  The problem for the progressive movement, in my view, is that it has steered itself into multiple dead ends, yet offers an agenda of proposals consisting of nothing but more of the same.  In large part, that's why we got Trump.  

So, to all you progressives and fellow travelers who see before you years of implacable opposition to anything and everything Trump, I would suggest that you think about some of the more important of those dead ends into which progressivism has steered itself.  Do these things really constitute the alternative agenda that you support?

Education.  Somehow, it has become a key feature of the progressive movement to oppose educational choice for poor and low-income children and their families.  Actually, it's not "somehow" -- we all know the reason why.  It's because the teachers' unions have immense resources by reason of dues checkoffs from their members who teach in government schools, and that money is the number one source of funds for supporting the progressive movement.  And thus we found last week ultra-progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren at a confirmation hearing doing her best to somehow head off the nomination of school choice advocate Betsy DeVos for Education Secretary.

Is there anyone in politics more sanctimonious than Senator Warren?  Sanctimony is the demeanor that you put on when you claim to occupy the moral high ground; but when you don't occupy the moral high ground, sanctimony just looks ridiculous.  Here are some statistics on New York City charter and public schools reported in the Daily News last August:

Test scores released by the state Friday show 94% of Success Academy students passed the 2016 math exam and 82% passed the reading exam. . . .  By comparison, 38% of students in traditional public schools met state reading standards this year, up from 30.4% in 2015. And 36.4% of city kids passed math tests in 2016, up from 35.2% in 2015.

Isn't anybody in the progressive movement embarrassed by the pathetic performance of the "traditional" schools in our cities?  Of course, here in New York Success Academies is constantly blocked from expanding because of opposition from the teachers' union and the de Blasio administration.  And there among the sponsors of the Million Woman March we find, for example, the American Federation of Teachers (teachers union for, among other places, New York City), and the Alliance for Quality Education (an AFT-backed front group).  Marchers:  Did you realize that you were allying yourselves with these despicable people?

Poverty.  The progressive answer to poverty is government-funded "anti-poverty" programs.  At the beginning of the War on Poverty in 1965, there were no "anti-poverty" programs, and there were about 28 million people said to be in "poverty" in the United States by the government's official measure.  Today, governments at all levels spend about $1 trillion per year on "anti-poverty" programs, and there are about 43 million people said to be in "poverty" by the same government official measure.  OK, progressives, after more than 50 years of abject failure, it is time to take some ownership of this.     

Is there actually anybody today who could still possibly believe that a government "anti-poverty" program, no matter how expensive, is ever going to raise a single person out of poverty?  But the progressive movement continues blindly to promote aggressive expansion of the same failed programs.  At this post back in 2013 I reported on the aggressive efforts of the Obama administration to promote the expansion of the food stamp program, which resulted in the number of recipients exploding from about 28 million to 48 million during a time of supposed economic recovery.  Of course, nobody was removed from poverty.  Similar federal and state efforts, many as part of Obamacare implementation, vastly expanded participation in Medicaid.  After years of rapid expansion of these means-tested programs, people were then supposedly surprised to discover that the reported income and assets of the lowest income people had been driven down.  Of course the poor had become poorer -- they had to, to qualify for the progressive programs!

Crime control.  According to FBI statistics here, the average murder rate in the United States as of 2015 was just under 5 per 100,000.  But a not-insubstantial group of big cities has a murder rate that is a large multiple of the national rate.  The leader is St. Louis, where the murder rate is near 60 per 100,000, some 12 times the national norm.  In Detroit, the rate is 44; in Baltimore, 50; in New Orleans, 42; in Chicago, about 30.  Other cities with drastically high murder rates include Cleveland, Oakland, Memphis, Milwaukee, and Newark.  Do you notice anything that these cities have in common?  They have all had mayors from the Democratic Party stretching back as far as human memory can stretch.

But what about New York, you ask?  Its murder rate is only about 4 per 100,000 -- actually below the national norm.  Yes, but when Democratic Mayor Dinkins left office at the end of 1993, the murder rate was close to 25 per 100,000.  We then had 20 years of Republican mayors (Giuliani and Bloomberg), during which the rate declined from 25 to 4, where it remains today.  The difference represents something like 40,000 people just in New York, most of them black, who are alive today, but would not have been under the prior regime.

I frankly do not know what is the "secret sauce" of the Republican mayors and their police commissioners that has brought the murder rate down so drastically in New York.  I do know that the carnage in the high-murder cities is completely unacceptable.  And I do not understand how "progressives" can be willing to associate themselves with the people who continue to run these cities.

Climate change.  Look again at that list of "partners" of the Women's March, and you will find most if not all of the major environmentalist promoters of climate alarmism:  Greenpeace, Sierra Club, 350.org, etc., etc.  Whatever you might think of the hypothesis that human emissions of greenhouse gases might cause catastrophic global warming, there can be no disputing that the solution proposed by these environmental groups is to increase the price and decrease the availability of energy in a way that is guaranteed to keep the poor poor.  I first pointed out the perverse nature of the concept of "climate injustice" in an article back in 2013 titled "The Looking Glass World Of Climate Injustice."    Whether it is a highly-regressive carbon tax or intermittent wind and solar energy sources that will increase the cost of electricity by five or more times, everything proposed by progressives to ameliorate their perceived climate crisis will be a disaster for poor and low income people.  

So, marchers, these are the people and policies with which you have just associated yourselves.  Are you sure that you don't want to think about this a little?  Could a Trump administration really be worse?

Welcome To The Trump Administration

Readers here will remember that I was often critical of Donald Trump during the campaign (see, for example, here and here).  However, I have no doubt that he will do far better by the American people than his opponent would have.  Admittedly, this is a very low bar.  So I wish to welcome the new President and his team, and wish them the very best in governing the country over the next four years.

There are certainly many who disagree with me, but I have been growing increasingly optimistic over the past several weeks as cabinet nominees and plans for the new administration have been announced.  To me, the most important subject is the overall level of government spending and regulation.  Less is better, more is worse.

After George W. Bush's election in 2000, I was modestly optimistic that he would start to attack the ongoing autopilot growth of useless government spending and programs and regulations that were becoming an increasing drag on the American economy.  I say "modestly optimistic" because there were also reasons at the time to be pessimistic about "W," particularly his expressed desire to be known as the "education President" (why is education a proper function of the federal government at all?) and his use of the label "compassionate conservative."  What kind of delusional Republican buys into the idea that giving a growing bureaucracy oodles of taxpayer money to pass around constitutes "compassion"? 

But it didn't take me long to lose my optimism.  In those days, some friends of mine knew a guy with a mid-level job in the White House, and from time to time this guy would come to New York and have dinner with us.  We got a chance to ask him some questions about what was going on in D.C.  And on the three or four occasions when this occurred, my question was always essentially the same:  "When are you guys going to start cutting spending and programs?"  The answer was always something like, "You know that we could never get something like that through Congress.  And besides, there are so many other pressing priorities right now, so we just can't spend our political capital on that."

In W's defense, there was more than nothing to what this guy was telling us.  Even though Congress was controlled for much of his eight years by Republicans, the situation was very different from today.  In the Senate, the margin of the majority was mostly extremely narrow (the Senate was actually 50-50 from 2001-2003, although VP Cheney could theoretically break a tie if every Republican held the line and there was no filibuster), and the filibuster was more widely usable than it is now.  In the House, the Republicans under Hastert were a very different crowd from today's bunch.  Mostly they regarded being in the majority as only an opportunity to give some of the money to their own friends, rather than the other side's friends.  And then, of course, there was 9/11, followed by the Iraq War, to provide plenty of distraction.  Bottom line:  In W's eight years, nobody ever focused on cutting spending or regulation, not even a little.

So will Trump actually go for major reductions in any spending, programs or regulations.  It remains to be seen, but the early indications are very strong:

• Multiple sources have reported in the weeks leading up to the inauguration that Trump is planning cuts of up to 20% in federal employee headcount in at least some areas.  Washington Examiner on January 17:  "Insiders said that the spending reductions in some departments could go as high as 10 percent and staff cuts to 20 percent, numbers that would rock Washington if he follows through."   Fox News had the same story on the same day, again attributing it to those mysterious "insiders."
• How about cutting regulation?  Trump has repeated since the election his campaign promise to require the bureaucracy to rescind two regulations for every new one.  That was reported, among other places, in the Washington Post here on November 21.
• And some other things to make the job of federal bureaucrat far less cushy.  From the same Washington Post article:  "Hiring freezes, an end to automatic raises, a green light to fire poor performers, a ban on union business on the government’s dime and less generous pensions — these are the contours of the blueprint emerging under Republican control of Washington in January."

I'll believe it when I see it, but it sure sounds like a good start.

How Much Spending Will It Take To End "Homelessness"?

Bill de Blasio, when he ran for Mayor of New York in 2013, made "homelessness" one of his big issues.  Prior Mayor Bloomberg had had what City Limits here described as an "incredibly ambitious" program to tackle homelessness; but somehow after twelve years in office and dramatically increased spending, homelessness had only increased.  In December 2013, after his election and on the eve of taking office, de Blasio was quoted by Think Progress on the subject of homelessness as saying, “We are simply not going to allow this kind of reality to continue.”

On taking office in 2014, de Blasio immediately started implementation of all the policies on homelessness that the progressive advocates had been advocating for years:  more funding, more shelters, more permanent "affordable" housing.  He even appointed as Commissioner of the Human Resources Administration one Steven Banks, formerly of the Legal Aid Society, and the lead advocate for years of the forces demanding more government money as the solution to the homelessness problem.

On November 20, 2016, Josh Dawsey in the Wall Street Journal had an article summarizing, after nearly three years, how de Blasio's efforts were doing at solving homelessness.  The headline is "New York City's Homeless Spending Surges to $1.6 Billion":  

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has increased spending on homeless services by about 60% since he took office nearly three years ago, reaching a historic $1.6 billion this year.  At the same time, the population in city shelters is up by nearly 20%, raising questions about whether the spending has been effective in combating homelessness. Last week, more than 60,650 people, including about 23,800 children, slept in a city shelter.

The $1.6 billion includes all direct spending on services to the homeless, which is more than just the shelters.  According to Dawsey, in addition to spending about $1 billion per year on the shelters, there are these additional categories:

$350 million a year on rent for those who they believe could become homeless or are leaving shelters. . . .  $79 million annually on street outreach, $62 million on legal services—up 10 fold from Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael Bloomberg—and $190 million on shelter security, up by $90 million. 

And yet somehow the numbers of homeless people just keep increasing:

When Mr. de Blasio took office in 2014, the city shelter system had a budget of about $1 billion and a population of about 50,700. . . .  Last week, more than 60,650 people, including about 23,800 children, slept in a city shelter.

And the $1.6 billion does not include plenty of other spending supposedly to solve the problem of homelessness, most notably subsidies to existing low-income housing and additional subsidies in the form of tax breaks for new "affordable" housing.  For example, the New York City Housing Authority alone absorbs about $2.5 billion of subsidies from federal and state governments every year.   

Funny how this works, isn't it?  It kind of reminds you of the results of government efforts to solve the problem of poverty:  When the War on Poverty began in 1966, the government's "poverty rate" was about 15%.  Then government spending to combat poverty began, and by the 2010s had been ramped up to some $1 trillion per year.  Yet somehow, by 2014, the poverty rate was still 14.8%.  (The government did report a drop in the poverty rate by 1.2% in 2015, to 13.6%, but that change was the result of a change in methodology engineered to assist Hillary's campaign, as discussed by me here.)  Meanwhile, the population of the country nearly doubled between 1966 and 2015, such that the number of people said to be in "poverty" had increased from under 30 million in the mid-1960s to over 43 million, despite the huge amount of spending.

It's as if these people have no idea that a gusher of government spending attracts people who try to get in on the handouts by defining themselves into the right categories.

But don't worry, Commissioner Banks is sure that the spending is actually working (without all the spending, the problem would have been a lot worse!), and moreover the next round of increased spending is going to turn everything around and solve the problem once and for all!

“The [shelter] population is significantly lower than it would have been had the administration not took the actions it took,” Mr. Banks said. “The additional investments are going to bend the curve back in the other direction.”

Sure, Steve.  

A Dose Of Renewable Energy Realism, Part II

In the campaign to jettison fossil fuels as the main source of our energy and replace them with so-called "renewables," a notable feature is the lack of discussion of the costs and practicalities of trying to make intermittent sources like wind and solar work to run a 24/7/365 electricity grid.  Is there any problem here that deserves consideration?  In Tuesday's post I noted that in my home state of New York we are about to try to replace our big Indian Point nuclear power plant with mostly wind-generated power.  Actually, we already have wind turbines with approximately the same "capacity" as Indian Point, but unfortunately over the course of a full year they only generate about one-quarter as much electricity as Indian Point.  Still, can't that problem be solved just by buying four times as many wind turbines?  It may be a little pricey, but is there any reason why that won't work?

In a publication called Energy Post on January 10, prominent German economist Heiner Flassbeck has a piece that addresses this question.  The headline is "The End of the Energiewende?"   Of course the problem is that the wind turbines don't just run steadily and predictably at one-quarter of capacity; rather, they swing wildly and unpredictably back and forth between generating at near 100% of capacity and generating almost nothing.  The "almost nothing" mode can persist for days or even weeks.  In Germany under a program called Energiewende ("energy transition"), in effect since 2010, they have been pushing to raise the percentage of energy they obtain from wind and solar, and have gotten the percent of their electricity supply from those sources all the way up to 31%.  But Flassbeck now looks at what just occurred during the month of December 2016:

This winter could go down in history as the event that proved the German energy transition to be unsubstantiated and incapable of becoming a success story. Electricity from wind and solar generation has been catastrophically low for several weeks. December brought new declines. A persistent winter high-pressure system with dense fog throughout Central Europe has been sufficient to unmask the fairy tale of a successful energy transition. . . .  

Here is a chart from Flassbeck's piece showing German electricity demand through the first half of the month of December, against the sources of the electricity that supplied that demand.  Among the sources, solar, on-shore wind, and off-shore wind are broken out separately:

As you can see, at some times wind and solar sources supplied as much as half or more of the demand for electricity, but at other times they supplied almost nothing.  Flassbeck:

The data compiled by Agora Energiewende on the individual types of electricity generation have recorded the appalling results for sun and wind at the beginning of December and from the 12th to 14th. . . .  Of power demand totaling 69.0 gigawatts (GW) at 3 pm on the 12th, for instance, just 0.7 GW was provided by solar energy, 1.0 by onshore wind power and 0.4 offshore. At noontime on the 14th of December, 70 GW were consumed, with 4 GW solar, 1 GW onshore and somewhat over 0.3 offshore wind. The Agora graphs make apparent that such wide-ranging doldrums may persist for several days.

By the way, according to charts at Wikipedia, Germany has about 40,000 MW of installed solar "capacity" as of 2015, and another about 44,000 MW of installed wind "capacity" as of the same year.  Thus, if only the sun had shone and the wind had blown both at full strength on December 12 and 14, those facilities would have been more than sufficient to supply 100% of German's demand of 69,000 MW on the 12th and 70,000 MW on the 14th.  But instead Germany got only about 3% of the electricity it needed from these sources on the 12th and 7% on the 14th.  If you wanted to get all of Germany's electricity from wind and solar on the 14th, you would have needed about 15 times as much "capacity" as the demand; and on the afternoon of the 12th, you would have needed 35 times as much "capacity" as the demand.

Hence what Flassbeck calls the "futility" of trying to solve the intermittency problem of wind and solar power by just trying to build more capacity.  Even in a country as large as Germany and with one hundred times as much capacity as usage, you could still have a completely calm night where the power goes out.  To have a full solution to the intermittency problem, and to make your system work 24/7/365 with full reliability, you will need not just massive excess capacity of wind and solar facilities, but also some combination of other expensive features, such as fossil fuel backup, storage capacity, and/or transmission capacity to bring in power from somewhere where the wind is blowing.  Germany continues to have the 100% fossil fuel backup.  They also have residential electricity rates about triple the American average.  Really, what good are all those wind turbines and solar arrays if you can't get rid of a single fossil fuel burning power plant?    

Andrew Cuomo: The Progressives' Next Best Hope?

The country has just dodged the bullet of Hillary Clinton as President; the Trump inauguration hasn't even happened yet; and already the forces of progressivism are looking for their next best hope.  Yet all of the prominent names that come immediately to mind look like they'll be ready for the old folks home by 2020, if not well before:  Bernie Sanders (75 now/79 in 2020); Joe Biden (74/78); Elizabeth Warren (a "kid" at 69/73); or Hillary herself (also 69/73).  Surely there must be someone younger!

Thankfully the New York Times today is ready with the answer to progressive prayers in a front page article headlined "Andrew Cuomo Raises His Profile, Stirring Talk of a 2020 Run."   By the lights of Pravda, it's hard to think of a better guy than New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to take charge of the country in the next cycle.  First, of course, he's the very face of youth: he just turned 59 in December, which means he'll still be clinging to 62 at the time of the next election.  Plus, he checks literally every box that the progressive pooh-bahs want to see checked: he's a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, deeply steeped in the New York groupthink; he gets all of his news from Pravda itself; he has never had an opinion on any subject of significance not in perfect alignment with Pravda's editorial page; he deeply believes that the taxpayer money is free and that all human problems can be solved with some more government spending; and, he is a scion of Democratic Party aristocracy, as son of ex-governor Mario and once married to a Kennedy.  How much to be preferred are the known quantities from the dynastic families rather than those tiresome outsiders!  Surely, Cuomo is the perfect candidate!  (The Times article does note that Cuomo himself has not encouraged talk of his candidacy in 2020.  But come on, that's what they all do!)

So I thought that Manhattan Contrarian readers, particularly those from places remote from New York, might be interested in exactly what initiatives our governor has been talking up lately to "raise his profile."  Two big ones have been featured in the headlines in the opening days of the new year:  (1) a "free college for the middle class" plan, and (2) a plan to close our local nuclear power plant, Indian Point.  I'll consider them one at a time.

Free college.  Cuomo canceled the traditional year-opening "State of the State" speech this year, in favor of a series of speeches to be given at locations around the state.  The first of the speeches was a week ago, January 3, at LaGuardia Community College in Queens.  Here is a picture of Cuomo delivering that speech:

And as you can see, "tuition-free college for New York's middle class" was the big proposal in this speech.  Yes, that is none other than "Mr. Free College" himself, Senator Bernie Sanders, who showed up to sit at Cuomo's side during the speech.  (The other guy is former New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate -- and current CUNY Board Chair -- Bill Thompson.)  Here's a blurb on the proposal from Cuomo's official website:

Under this groundbreaking proposal, more than 940,000 middle class families and individuals making up to $125,000 per year would qualify to attend college tuition-free at all public universities in New York State. The Excelsior Scholarship program will ensure that students statewide, regardless of their socio-economic status, have the opportunity to receive a quality education and gain the skills they need to succeed in our global economy.

But, you ask, doesn't New York already have extensive programs in place to pay for college for its lower-income citizens?  Yes, it does.  The two big ones are the "Tuition Assistance Program" (TAP) and the "Get on Your Feet Loan Forgiveness" program.  Between the two of those, they basically pay the full tuition and then some for any New York resident going to a state or city college and with a family income up to about $80,000.  This web site has a handy calculator to tell you how much TAP you are entitled to based on your family income and the amount of annual tuition at your school.  For example, I put in a family income of $60,000 and tuition at your school of $6000, and I get an estimated TAP award of $5500.  $6000 is the approximate amount of annual tuition at the schools in the State University of New York system.  If in addition you took out some loans (for example, to pay room and board), the loan forgiveness program would be on top of the TAP. 

In other words, the new program has next to nothing, if not nothing, to do with providing assistance to the poor, the near-poor, or even those at the middle of the income distribution, all of whom already have their college costs at state colleges covered by pre-existing programs.  (According to the Department of Numbers here, median household income for New York State was $60,850 for 2015, the most recent year available.)  Instead this program is directed to those in the household income range of $80,000 to $125,000, which in very round numbers covers about the 65th to the 85th percentiles of the income distribution. 

Now, let us ask, how can it possibly make sense to engage in an income redistribution scheme where the recipients of the largesse are well into the upper third to upper fifth of the income distribution?  Aren't the people in that income range the very ones who bear most of the brunt of carrying the cost of government?  The answer is that it doesn't make any sense, and of course the people who think they will be "benefiting" from this government distribution of "free money" are precisely the ones who will be paying -- but with the usual vigorish raked off by the bureaucrats who handle the redistribution.  Well, we all knew that the fundamental characteristic of the progressive is inability to do basic arithmetic.  In the case of Bernie's core supporters of college students, they somehow think of themselves as just poor kids with no income.  Wait until they get that first job, and see the tax bite.  They'll be paying about double, if not more, for the "free" college.  By the time they figure it out, it will be way too late to undo this.

Closing Indian Point.   Indian Point is a large nuclear power plant, located on the banks of the Hudson River about 30 miles north of the New York City line (or about 40 miles north of midtown Manhattan).  It was built in the late 1960s.  It produces about a quarter to a third of the electricity used in New York City.  One of Cuomo's campaign pledges when he was first elected was to close Indian Point, and he has been whipping that horse ever since.  Yesterday he finally announced the imminent achievement of his goal, in the form of an agreement with the plant's operator, Entergy, to close it within four years.  

Among the many evergreen statements on progressive orthodoxy that I make on my ABOUT page, this one is one of my favorites:

[U]sage of energy is a human right, but all actual known methods of producing energy are environmentally unacceptable. . . .

And boy, does that perfectly capture Andrew Cuomo's approach to energy policy!  I don't personally agree with implacable opposition to nuclear energy, but I suppose if someone is seriously worried about the risks, there would be a basis for principled opposition to energy from this source.  But then, where is the energy to come from?  Cuomo is firmly in the camp of insisting that anything that might possibly work is completely unacceptable.  He has totally bowed to the environmental lobby in opposing energy from fossil fuel sources (global warming!!!!), and in adopting the illusion that wind and solar can somehow supply a top-end 21st century metropolis like New York City with the 24/7/365 energy that it needs to operate.  Most famously, in 2014, after several years of dithering, Cuomo banned "fracking" for natural gas within the boundaries of New York State.  He cited "health risks."  Sure.

From the Manhattan Institute today, both Mark Mills and Robert Bryce have some fun ridiculing Cuomo's energy proposals.  Bryce's piece appears in the New York Post here.  Mills' piece appears in Forbes here.  Mills recounts Cuomo's steadfast opposition to all energy that actually works:

New York is apparently going to tilt full on at windmills. What else are we to think now that Governor Cuomo finally got his long hoped-for wish with last week’s announced shutdown of Indian Point? That nuke’s output equals nearly one-third of New York City’s demand. What will fill the gap so that buildings and computers stay lit in one of the world’s great cities after Indian Point goes dark in four short years?  We know what won’t happen. New York won’t build a new nuke, new coal plants, or more pipelines to carry natural gas from the verdant Pennsylvania Marcellus natural gas fields – much less from the energy-rich shale in upstate where fracking is banned.

Mills then goes into some of the obvious problems of trying to use intermittent sources of power like wind to run a city like New York that needs steady, constant, reliable electricity.  Can you just buy wind turbines of the same capacity as the nuclear plant?  It turns out that we already have that -- but the same "nameplate capacity" in wind turbines only generates one-quarter of the electricity as the nuclear plant, because the wind doesn't blow at full strength most of the time:

Data from the New York State grid operator shows that the “nameplate” capacity of all the state’s wind turbines combined is about the same as Indian Point. But that nuke actually produces 4-fold more electricity annually. . . .  So, replacing Indian Point requires increasing NY’s windfarm capacity at least 400 percent. 

But even with four times excess capacity, you still don't get the power when you need it.  How about some batteries!  Mills:

Consider again that Indian Point’s output is equal to one-third of NYC’s use: supplying that one-third for just one day with no wind (let’s hope it’s not calm all day, or for days) means storing one-third of NYC’s daily 145 million kWh of use, or about 50 million kWh in batteries. The world, meaning, mostly Asia, today manufactures batteries (for all purposes) that can store 35 million kWh. So, purchasing about 40 percent of the planet’s entire lithium battery output for the next four years—before Indian Point is slated to be shut—would just about fill the gap.

But can't we have three or even five calm days in a row?  I guess we'd better buy up the entire world production of batteries for the next four years!  And then, a few comments about the potential cost:

And the cost? At least $50 billion in battery systems. [Ed.: Make that $150 billion if you want to prepare for three calm days in a row.]  Maybe NYC could get a volume discount. Add this to the $12 billion for new wind turbines. . . .  Instead, you could build $2 billion worth of natural gas turbines to burn fracked gas to supply the needed power. Or you could provide a few hundred million dollars of incentives to keep Indian Point on line for a couple more decades.

Yup, this Andrew Cuomo guy is really the one for us in 2020!  Perhaps, can we send him for a remedial class in arithmetic in the mean time?

But if you think about it, won't any possible candidate that the Democrats come up with support these same policies?  Yes.  But at least they will also insist on keeping the poor kids trapped in failing schools in order to benefit the teachers union!