My Descent Into Abject Poverty; Or, How To Have Enough Money To Be "Poor"

If you read some of the usual propaganda about the plight of the elderly poor in New York City, it will bring a tear to your eye.  Or, at least, that's the intent.  For example, City Comptroller Scott Stringer is just out (March 21) with a big report titled "Aging With Dignity: A Blueprint for Serving NYC's Growing Senior Population."   We learn that some 20.0% of New York City seniors (over 65 years old) lived "below 100 percent of poverty" in 2015; and another 10.3% lived "between 100 and 149 percent of poverty."  In the housing category, things get even worse.  Some 38.8% of seniors who own their homes in New York City are said to be "rent-burdened" (funny term for homeowners) in the sense of spending more than 30% of their income on housing cost.  Among renters, a whopping 59.7% are said to be "rent-burdened."  The source for these numbers is given as the American Community Survey, i.e., the U.S. Census Bureau data that are the source for the usual reports about the "poverty rate," as well as other things like claims about "income inequality."

For something even more heart-rending, try this 2015 piece from CityLimits.org, titled "Aging in New York City: City Wrestles with Poverty Among Seniors."  Excerpts:

“The percentage of seniors living in poverty is staggering, ” says NYC Department for the Aging Commissioner Donna Corrado. “Too many older New Yorkers make difficult choices about purchasing food, medicine and paying their rent.” . . . .  How seniors can make ends meet is a question the whole country is grappling with. . . .  Although national poverty rates for seniors declined from 12.8 percent to 9.5 percent from 1990 to 2012, in New York City, the poverty rate among older adults increased by 15 percent during that period, rising from 16.5 percent to 19.1 percent, according to DFTA. 

Of course, all this talk about "poverty" and lack of "income" derives from the Census Bureau data.  Regular readers of this site will recognize that these Census statistics on "poverty" are completely arbitrary and fake.  For a few useful prior posts, try here and here.  The best way of looking at them is that they are just a big scam to gin up hugely inflated numbers of people claimed to be in "poverty," in order to play on the sympathies of the taxpayers and get support for increased funding for "anti-poverty" programs, none of which ever raise a single person out of "poverty" as defined.  The key sleight-of-hand is defining "poverty" solely in terms of current-year "cash income" -- a category that in many instances has little or no relationship to the amount of resources a person or family may have available to spend.  Since most people live mostly off their income most of the time, you can easily come to think of "income" as a good proxy for living standards; and thus, you become easy to deceive.  The fact is that, while "income" may be a useful proxy for living standard in many cases, there are many other cases where "income" is not a good proxy at all for living standard.  For an obvious large category, think college students.  Retirees are another large category, but the reasons may not be so obvious to you.

Anyway, over the past weekend I got a draft of my 2016 tax returns from my accountant (don't worry, we got an extension).  Of course, it was a big, fat pile of paper, some 96 pages of draft returns -- 78 for the IRS and another 18 for New York State/City.  (What, you thought this "poverty" thing was simple?)  The shocking news was right near the front, on the second page of the 1040:  based on our "income" as reported, by Census Bureau definitions, Mrs. MC and I lived "in poverty" during 2016.

How could this possibly be?  Wasn't the Manhattan Contrarian a high-income partner of a big law firm just a few short years ago?  How is it possible to fall so far, so fast?

First, disabuse yourself of the idea that this has anything whatsoever to do with living standard.  In fact, our living standard has not changed one bit.  We live in the same place.  We eat the same food.  (Manhattan restaurants!)  Sometimes we travel.  We pay all the bills.  We give substantial amounts to charity.  One of our daughters had a wedding -- in Manhattan -- during 2016.

So what's the secret?  In our case, the overall picture is a little complex, but one big thing stands out:  We have enough money that we can afford to be "poor"! 

Does that somehow seem not to make sense?  Then you haven't been paying attention.  Poverty, or non-poverty, by official definitions, turns on one and only one thing, which is current-year "cash income."  If you consider how this works for retired people, you will quickly realize that the people who saved more, who have more available to spend, and who in any real sense are better off, are actually more likely to turn up as "in poverty" than the people who saved less.  Think it through.  Suppose you have retired and you didn't save much, or maybe you did save some, but only in the form of tax-advantaged retirement savings, like 401(k) or IRA plans.  You are basically out of money, except for the retirement plans (if any).  You need something to live on.  The first thing you will do is start collecting your Social Security.  That counts as "income"!  If you worked most of your life regularly at a middle class or better job, that income alone could well be sufficient to raise you out of "poverty."  Or, if you have 401(k)s or IRAs, you can start drawing on them.  In most cases, that's "income" too!  Again, if you are trying to maintain your prior standard of living without other savings, you will need to withdraw sufficient funds from these plans that you will probably get lifted out of "poverty."

But suppose instead that you saved some substantial amount of money not in the form of tax-advantaged 401(k) or IRA plans.  Spending this money is one hundred percent not "income."  It just doesn't count, period.  Meanwhile, there are very good reasons not to collect Social Security until you reach the age of 70, and not to withdraw from 401(k)s and IRAs until you reach the age of 70.  First of all, those things count as "income," and you have to pay taxes on income.  Duh!  Why would you volunteer to pay income tax when you don't have to pay any tax?  Second, both Social Security and tax-advantaged retirement assets continue to grow through age 70 as long as you don't use them.  If you can hold off on collecting your Social Security benefit for the five years from age 65 to 70, the monthly amount will grow by some 40%.  This is not a difficult decision.  You just need to have enough money set aside to avoid drawing on the sources that count as "income."  Or, to put it another way, you need to be rich enough to be poor!

Now that you have absorbed this information, go back and re-read those heart-rending tales from the beginning of this post.  For example, did you feel sorry for those "rent-burdened" elderly New Yorkers who spend "more than 30% of their income" on housing cost.  Well, Mrs. MC and I spent more like 500% of our (completely arbitrary) 2016 "income" on housing cost.  Please, don't feel sorry for us.  And then there's that sham about the "poor" elderly New Yorkers "mak[ing] difficult choices about purchasing food, medicine, and paying their rent."  There are undoubtedly elderly New Yorkers in this situation, but the idea that the supposed 20% "poverty" rate is a real measure of their numbers is ridiculous and insulting.  

Without doubt, somewhere in the 20.0% of elderly New Yorkers who are counted as "in poverty" in the official statistics, there are numerous instances of real hardship.  But how many?  Is it most of the 20%, or half, or maybe only a tenth or less?  Unfortunately, there is no way to tell from the official numbers.  That failing is completely intentional, and gives advocates infinite room for fraudulent use of the statistics, as illustrated in the examples at the beginning of this post.  

Finally, consider that subset of "poor" elderly New Yorkers who live in Manhattan.  In a post back in 2013, I asked whether it was even possible to live in Manhattan and be in real "poverty."  After all, there is literally no place to live in Manhattan where the market rent alone does not exceed the official poverty level for the number of people living there.  Therefore, if you live in Manhattan, by definition, the resources -- whether your own, or handouts from the government, or from someone else -- that are spent in a year to support you, exceed the so-called "federal poverty level."  In at least tens of thousands of cases of people deemed "in poverty" by the Census statistics, those spent resources are large multiples of the federal poverty level.  Many "poor" families in Manhattan receive government benefits that cost the taxpayers well into the six figures.  This is particularly true of families that live in public or "affordable" housing, which by itself, in prime areas of Manhattan, is worth $50,000 and up in annual taxpayer subsidy.  So the following statement is assuredly true:  to the extent that there are elderly "poor" people in Manhattan who suffer real hardship -- in the sense of having to "make difficult choices about purchasing food, medicine, and paying their rent" or struggling to "make ends meet" -- that is one hundred percent a consequence of the poor design and implementation of the existing government handout programs.  How our government can spend $50,000 in a year to support a family in subsidized housing in Manhattan, and another $40,000 per year to provide Medicaid for that family, and still more for free phones and EITC and other assistance, and still leave that family in "poverty" and without enough cash to "purchase medicine" or "make ends meet," is completely beyond me.        

OK, enough of this for now -- I have to go apply for food stamps!

Have A Good Laugh At The Expense Of New York Progressives

Probably, you got a good laugh when Barack Obama said, back in 2010, "I do think at a certain point you've made enough money."  Of course you knew that when he said "you," he meant you, and definitely not him.  Or maybe you didn't realize it was a joke until just a couple of months ago in February, when the bidding for his next book went up above $60 million.  Or possibly, you still didn't realize it was a joke until it was revealed that he is going to be paid $400,000 by Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald for giving one speech.  Or, maybe it's just that he forgot to put a figure on how much money is "enough."  Maybe it's now up to around $100 million?  Something tells me that it will always be a little more than whatever he has at the moment.

Anyway, if you enjoy the humor of progressives having one rule for you and another for themselves, then you will get an even better laugh from the lead article from the Metropolitan Section of today's New York Times, headline "Family by Family, How School Segregation Still Happens."   

This is the story of the schools in Manhattan's Community School District 3, the district that covers what we here call the Upper West Side.  District 3 stretches from West 59th Street all the way up to West 122nd Street.  This is the home turf for the smuggest of smug gentry progressivism.  It's where the likes of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan trace their roots.  In the recent presidential election, it gave well upwards of 90% of its votes to the losing candidate.  This neighborhood is ground zero for the belief that enough government spending and regulations and coercion, if only given a chance, can achieve perfect justice and fairness in human affairs.

The territory of Community School District 3 is ethnically diverse, but the races are not distributed uniformly.  The southern part of the district is heavily white -- and very wealthy.  Once you get past about 96th Street, it becomes more ethnically mixed.  Beyond 110th Street (excepting Morningside Heights, home of Columbia University) is Harlem, mostly black and Hispanic, although now rapidly gentrifying.  Census data are not reported for the exact same boundaries as the school district, but demographic data at Wikipedia here have the portion of the school district from 59th Street to 110th Street as over two-thirds (67.4%) white, 7.6% Asian, 15% Hispanic, and only 7.6% African American.

Even though the northern part of this district is gentrifying, it still turns out that the schools in the district are heavily segregated, with those in the northern part heavily black and Hispanic, and the whites concentrated in the schools in the southern part.  As you will not be surprised to learn, these gentry progressive whites, with very few exceptions, will play every trick in the book to keep their kids from having to go to school with the blacks and Hispanics.  First, there is the attrition that comes from the wealthiest whites sending their kids to private schools.  The Times article gives the percentage of white kids in the district schools as "over a third" -- way less than their percentage of the population.  But even that is not the crux of the matter.  The crux, to which most of the article is devoted, is the games the white parents of public school children play to keep their kids out of the heavily black and Hispanic schools at the northern end of the district.

Thus we meet Elana Shneyer and Adam Kaufman, who live on West 109th Street, just "a few hundred feet" from P.S. 165, one of those heavily black and Hispanic places.  That's where their kid will go if they don't pull some other maneuvers.  Next thing you know they are entering their kid into a lottery to get into the "Manhattan School for Children," on West 93rd Street. And of course, that's where he ends up.  Here's how Ms. Shneyer justifies her decision to herself:

“There’s a coherent vision for the school,” Mr. Kaufman said. “You can see that articulated through small and large decisions that are enacted through the school, and that really appealed to me.” 

Or take the case of Scott Seamon:

Scott Seamon, a lawyer who works in finance, lives in the area served by P.S. 145 and has twin boys who will start kindergarten in 2018. Given the school’s test scores, he said, “I feel like it would almost be malpractice to send my kids to school there, while the schools in the 70s and 80s have like a 70 percent passage rate.”

Multiply these anecdotes by a few thousand, and this is how you end up with close to 100% segregated schools.  This in a neighborhood where literally everyone talks, talks, talks endlessly about their "commitment to diversity."

I don't have much comment, other than that it's fun to watch how progressivism actually works on the ground.

Another Subject Where The "Science" Just Doesn't Stand Up

If you've read some of my posts lately on the subject of climate "science," you may have come to the conclusion that there is some kind of highly unusual mass hysteria going on there.  It seems that people have convinced themselves that the subject of anthropogenic climate change is really important, even existential.  We must "save the planet"!  This is something way too important to let the sideline quibbles of some congenital deniers get in the way of the moral crusade to rescue earth and humanity.  Along the way, the multitudes have managed to lose track of the question of whether the available empirical evidence supports or refutes the hypothesis at hand -- in other words, they have lost track of the "science."

But is this situation really unique, or even unusual?  Or are there other prominent examples in "science" of groupthink getting up such a huge momentum, and of so many livelihoods and careers becoming dependent on a prevailing paradigm, that it becomes impossible for any amount of adverse evidence to stop the train?

Our friends at Maggie's Farm remind us of another big example, with a post yesterday titled "Dietary fat and settled science."    The main subject is what is known as the diet-heart hypothesis, that is, the idea that a high fat diet causes heart disease.  Excerpt:

The low saturated fat craze was triggered by a 1950 study by Ancel Keys, a study which is now generally accepted as fraudulent. It spurred many further studies over the years but, as yet, there is no proven causal relationship between dietary fat and cardiovascular disease.  In fact, there are very high saturated fat cultures (Eskimos, Masai) with very low cardiovascular disease rates. 

Does your cholesterol level matter? Other than in familial hypercholesterolemia, probably not. So why check them on your every-3 year physical exams?  Medical advice is conservative, slow to change, and fearful of being wrong so too-often adopts the precautionary principle. Thus when articles like this one comes out: Popular belief that saturated fat clogs up arteries is a myth, experts say, there is always pushback like "Don't tell people that, they'll get confused."

All the links there are eminently worth following.  But, as the text indicates, the third of them raises an additional question -- one perhaps even more important than that of a link between diet and heart disease -- which is the question of whether cholesterol in the blood is an important causative factor in heart disease.  Even if a high fat diet is ruled out as a causative factor in heart disease, it could still be possible that high cholesterol in the blood -- brought on by factors other than a high fat diet -- could be the driving factor in heart disease.  And remember, it is cholesterol in the blood, measured at your periodic check-up at your doctor's office, that is going to end you up with a prescription for one of those "statin" pills, once a day for life, if your "numbers" are not in some officially-determined appropriate range.  This article at PRWeb puts the annual U.S./Europe/Japan statin market at $12+ billion.  And about 15 million Americans take the daily dose. 

Following that third Maggie's Farm link, via an intermediate step, will take you to an editorial just a couple of days ago in something called the British Sports Medicine Journal, by Aveem Malhotra and other authors, titled "Saturated fat does not clog the arteries: coronary heart disease is a chronic inflammatory condition, the risk of which can be effectively reduced from healthy lifestyle interventions."  This article directly discusses the state of the evidence as to whether high cholesterol in the blood is really a causative factor for heart disease.  Excerpt:

Decades of emphasis on the primacy of lowering plasma cholesterol, as if this was an end in itself and driving a market of ‘proven to lower cholesterol’ and ‘low-fat’ foods and medications, has been misguided. Selective reporting may partly explain this misconception. Reanalysis of unpublished data from the Sydney Diet Heart Study and the Minnesota coronary experiment reveal replacing saturated fat with linoleic acid containing vegetable oils increased mortality risk despite significant reductions in LDL and total cholesterol (TC).

And then there's this, of particular interest to those, like yours truly, who find themselves over the age of 60:

And in those over 60 years, a recent systematic review concluded that LDL cholesterol is not associated with cardiovascular disease and is inversely associated with all-cause mortality.8

LDL cholesterol is "not associated with cardiovascular disease"?  It "is inversely associated with all-cause mortality"?  What??????  Following that footnote 8 will take you to a 2016 article by Uve Ravnskov and others in the British Medical Journal titled "Lack of an association or an inverse association between low-density-lipoprotein cholesterol and mortality in the elderly: a systematic review."  To be fair, Ravnskov has long been known as a doubter of the cholesterol/heart disease hypothesis.  The study is a review of substantial amounts of literature.  Here is the conclusion:

Our review provides the first comprehensive analysis of the literature about the association between LDL-C and mortality in the elderly. [Wait -- Am I "elderly"?]  Since the main goal of prevention of disease is prolongation of life, all-cause mortality is the most important outcome, and is also the most easily defined outcome and least subject to bias. The cholesterol hypothesis predicts that LDL-C will be associated with increased all-cause and CV mortality. Our review has shown either a lack of an association or an inverse association between LDL-C and both all-cause and CV mortality. The cholesterol hypothesis seems to be in conflict with most of Bradford Hill’s criteria for causation, because of its lack of consistency, biological gradient and coherence.    

Needless to say, the Malhotra editorial has produced some push back from the usual establishment figures (what Dr. Joy Bliss at MF characterizes as "Don't tell people that, they'll get confused.")  If you are interested in reading a sampling, here is a roundup from The Guardian.  Here's my comment:  If cholesterol in the blood really were the key causative factor in heart disease, you would see a strong positive relationship between the two in every study, and a strong beneficial effect from anything that succeeded in lowering the cholesterol.  These relationships are not there.  But way too many people have their lives invested in this theory for the train to be stopped any time soon.  

And What Is The Scientific Basis For Imposing Energy Poverty On The Masses?

Yes, I'm old enough to remember when governments thought it was a big part of their responsibility to enhance the well-being of the people.  In the area of energy, that meant pursuing policies that would lead to lower prices and greater availability for things like electricity and gasoline.  Crazy, eh?  But then everything got turned on its head.  In 2009 we got a President who, shortly after taking office (March 18, 2009), promised "Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket."   And he clearly thought that that was a good idea, even a moral imperative.  Henceforth we will use the force of government to pursue the intentional impoverishment of the people!  When Congress declined to act on the "cap and trade" plan, Obama then proceeded via executive actions and regulations with efforts designed to increase the cost and decrease the availability of energy -- things like the Clean Power Plan, refusing to grant permits to pipelines, hobbling the coal industry, and so forth.

And thus we come to the big demonstrations by the Obama/Democratic/progressive factions this past weekend that I have called the March for Poverty.  But, to be fair to them, they called their demonstrations the "March for Science."  If you have read yesterday's post, you will know that I think that "science" is a process of challenging hypotheses, rather than a body of fixed and  unchallengeable established knowledge.  Is there any sense in which the people asserting a moral necessity of "saving the planet" through impoverishment of the people can legitimately claim the mantle of "science"?

It's not particularly easy to pin down everything that the march itself might have stood for, given the profusion of groups and spokespersons associated with it.  So, to get a handle on the deep thinking behind the legal end of the climate movement, I thought to listen in today to a webinar put on by the Harvard Law School Open Lecture Series, featuring Professor Jody Freeman.  She's the Director of the Harvard Law School Environment Law and Policy Program, and previously worked for the Obama administration, among other things in designing the (failed) cap and trade legislation.  She's the Zeke Emanuel Obama's climate regulations!

I'll bet you think that a Harvard-sponsored webinar on environmental policy would be conducted at a high and sophisticated level, so high indeed that humble you probably couldn't even understand it.  Don't be silly!  This program was really an insult to the intelligence of any listener who knew anything at all about the subject matter.  From all you could tell, poor Ms. Freeman was completely uninformed about the state of the science that underlies all Obama-era climate and energy regulation, in particular EPA's Endangerment Finding.  (The alternative hypotheses, no better for Ms. Freeman, is that she was being intentionally deceptive.)  Although she did not address the EF directly in her prepared remarks, in a Q&A portion Ms. Freeman got a specific question as to the state of the science underlying the EF, and the prospects for its being revoked.  Her answer was that the EF will be very hard to impossible to revoke, because the "science" is "extremely strong" and the underlying evidence "overwhelming."  The one source she mentioned for her confidence was the IPCC (whose latest report dates from 2013).  Of course, she completely failed to address the major challenges to the EF that are out there and well-known to everybody familiar with the issues.

So, what is the latest on the actual, real science?  The answer is that the EF has been totally invalidated by the accumulation of empirical real-world evidence.  Many readers here may be familiar with my post from last September, "The 'Science' Underlying Climate Alarmism Turns Up Missing."   There, I reported on the issuance of a major Research Report from Wallace, Christy and D'Aleo asserting that, using basic statistical techniques applied to empirical evidence, they had invalidated each of the three "lines of evidence" on which EPA claimed to base its EF.  And now, just yesterday, it so happens that Wallace, Christy and D'Aleo have released a new, updated and expanded version of the Research Report.  Here is a link to the Report itself.  Michael Bastasch at the Daily Caller was the first to report on the story, headline "New Study Calls EPA’s Labeling Of CO2 A Pollutant ‘Totally False.'"  Excerpt:

A new study published by seasoned researchers takes aim at the heart of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority to issue regulations to curb carbon dioxide emissions.  The study claims to have “proven that it is all but certain that EPA’s basic claim that CO2 is a pollutant is totally false,” according to a press statement put out by Drs. Jim Wallace, John Christy and Joe D’Aleo.  Wallace, Christy and D’Aleo — a statistician, a climatologist and meteorologist, respectively — released a study claiming to invalidate EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding, which allowed the agency to regulate CO2 as a pollutant.  “This research failed to find that the steadily rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 14 temperature data sets that were analyzed,” the authors say in the release for the second edition of their peer-reviewed work.  “Moreover, these research results clearly demonstrate that once the solar, volcanic and oceanic activity, that is, natural factor, impacts on temperature data are accounted for, there is no ‘record setting’ warming to be concerned about,” the researchers say. “In fact, there is no natural factor adjusted warming at all.”
 

And the Research Report is just one -- although perhaps the most important -- of many demonstrations of the invalidity of the EF.  In his testimony before Congress on March 29, John Christy (one of the authors of the Research Report) also pointed, for example, to the fact that after some thirty years of collecting temperature data, the level of temperatures measured by satellites and weather balloons falls far below the level predicted by the IPCC climate models.

In actual science, when there is a credible demonstration that a hypothesis has been falsified, it becomes incumbent upon the proponents of the hypothesis either to explain or distinguish the claimed falsification, or to abandon the hypothesis.  When the "ether" hypothesis was falsified by the Michelson/Morley experiment, it was rather quickly abandoned.  But then, the "ether" hypothesis was not invested with particular political baggage.  By contrast, when Galileo expounded on the Copernican heliocentric view of the universe, that was viewed as a challenge to his authority and prestige by Pope Urban VIII, who had Galileo tried and imprisoned.  Fortunately the facts, and the scientific method, won out in the end.  Does anybody today have a good word to say for Urban VIII?

The scientific method will also win out in the end in the matter of the current climate hysteria.  It will not help the climate hysterics that they have attempted to claim the label of "science," when in fact they have no idea even what science is.  And, unfortunately, "the end" may not come all that quickly, and many, many people stand to be impoverished by the craziness in the meantime.

Comments On The March For Poverty

Today's quiz has just one question.

Science is:

(a) A body of knowledge that has been established and now may no longer be challenged.

(b) A process by which all that passes for human knowledge is always subject to challenge.

This is not a difficult quiz.  At one point in my life I would have thought that 90 or more percent of people who had attended high school would have gotten the right answer.  Even though it's a huge number of years ago, I can actually remember being taught about how lonely dissenters Copernicus and Galileo overturned the "consensus" of a geocentric universe through close observation of the heavens; and about how two guys, Michelson and Morley, with one experiment, overturned the "consensus" ("WAY more than 97%") of a background "ether" that mediated the transmission of light in the universe.  Indeed, the history of science -- real science -- is a history of outlying skeptics overturning the accepted "consensus" on one subject after another.  (Stomach ulcers are caused by stress and anxiety?  Wrong!  The continents don't move?  Wrong!  Dietary fat causes heart disease?  Wrong!)  Don't they teach these things to high school students any more?    

Over the past weekend we have just been treated to a march of maybe a couple of hundred thousand people in several hundred cities, calling itself the "March for Science," where all the marchers unanimously seem to have thought that answer (a) above was the right one.  OK, lots of people don't retain very well what they learn in high school.  But hundreds of thousands of seemingly educated people unanimously getting such a simple thing completely wrong?  Even more incredibly, it appears that many thousands of the marchers were people who work in fields that are somehow "scientific," and who call themselves "scientists" by profession.  As John Stossel comments in a post titled "Earth Day Dopes,"  "The alarmists claim they’re marching for 'science,' but they’re really marching for a left-wing religion."  It's obvious, but how is it possible that not a one of them can see it?

I would be inclined to just let the stupid fanatics have their delusions, except for one thing: somehow, this particular religion seems to call, as its route to salvation, for sacrifice of the world's poor at its altar.  Three recent articles provide a roundup:

From Paul Driessen today at the Global Warming Policy Foundation, "Welcome To Green Energy Poverty Week."  Excerpt:

[F]olks who actually care about poor, minority, elderly, working class and developing country families [have] again designated April 17-23 as Green Energy Poverty Week.

For industrialized nations, “green energy poverty” refers to households in which 10% or more of family incomes is spent on natural gas and electricity costs – due to policies that compel utilities to provide ever increasing amounts of expensive, less affordable, politically preferred “green” energy. It’s a regressive tax that disproportionately affects low and fixed income families which have little money to spend beyond energy, food, clothing, rent and other basic needs. Every energy price increase hammers them harder.

Beyond our borders, the concept underscores the lot of families that enjoy none of the living standards we take for granted. They have no electricity or get it a few hours a week at random times, burn wood and dung for cooking and heating, and spend hours every day collecting fuel and hauling filthy water from miles away. Corrupt, incompetent governments and constant pressure from callous environmentalist pressure groups in rich countries perpetuate the misery, joblessness, disease, starvation and early death.

Andrew Follett Saturday at The Daily Caller links to a post from a site called Money Supermarket, ranking the countries of the world based on their "human impact on the environment."  Follett's post is titled "World's Greenest People Live in Ridiculously Poor Authoritarian Regimes."  So, Money Supermarket, which countries of the world are the "greenest" in terms of their low impact on the environment?  Yes, it's Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Zambia.  They get, respectively, 99.87%, 99.43% and 99.71% of their energy from what MS calls "green energy" (which I presume means all or almost all animal dung, since I don't think they have much in the way of windmills or solar panels).  And by the way, the energy consumption per capita per year in these countries is, respectively, 8.90, 1.75, and 10.64 BTU.  (For comparison, annual per capita U.S. BTU consumption is given as 312.78.)  Way to go, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Zambia!  Your virtue is unsurpassed!  Follett troubles to point out a slight downside:  "The average person living in Mozambique earned $511.47 a year in 2015, which was 4 percent of the global average."  Without doubt, to the extent there is any electricity in these countries, it all goes to the strongman and his close associates living in their palaces.  For the masses, there is no electricity, no transportation other than walking, no heat when it's cold or air conditioning when it's hot, and you plow your field by dragging a manual plow behind an ox.  And in a bad year for crops, you starve.  Do our "science" marchers know that this is what they are seeking?

And finally, from NoTricksZone on March 3, discussing wealthy Germany:

The DPA German press agency reported yesterday on the rapidly spreading energy poverty now engulfing the country.  The main driver is Germany’s skyrocketing electricity prices – primarily due to the legally mandatory feeding-in of wind and solar power. Currently regular household consumers are paying nearly 30 cents a kilowatt-hour – almost three times the rate paid in the USA.  Many households are no longer able to afford electricity and are seeing themselves catapulted back to the 19th century. According to t-online.de here, “More than 330,000 households in Germany have seen their electricity cut off over the past year alone.” . . .  According to Bulling-Schröter: “Energy poverty in Germany is a silent catastrophe for millions of people, especially in the cold and dark winter months.”

So, time for an official re-naming.  It wasn't the March for "Science."  It was the "March for Poverty."  The March to keep those already poor trapped in enduring life-long poverty, and to throw millions more of those just outside of poverty back in.

And how about the state of the "science" behind this evil and immoral cause?  That will be the subject of tomorrow's post.

The Two Bills: Clinton And O'Reilly

Over the past few weeks, starting with the New York Times on April 1, there has been a well-coordinated effort to take down Bill O'Reilly.  That effort has now succeeded.  

It is not my purpose to defend O'Reilly.  From my perspective, TV hosts come and go.  I admit to having been a relatively frequent viewer of O'Reilly's program.  Compared to other hosts, he has a pretty good sense of humor, and is relatively entertaining.  He's also a blow-hard, but aren't they all?  I did not find him to be particularly conservative, let alone libertarian, although he did have at least some skepticism about unchecked government power -- which cannot be said of his competitors at CNN and MSNBC.  Maybe I would agree with his point of view about 40% of the time; but that's 40% more than I would agree with the point of view of his competitors.

But what is to me most interesting about the O'Reilly story is the comparison of the accusations made against him to those made against the other Bill, Clinton.  Or to put it another way, there is no comparison.  Now, I don't know whether any or all of the accusations against either man are true.  Except that, in the case of Clinton, one of the very most serious allegations (Lewinsky) was proved rather definitively; not so as to O'Reilly, who apparently denies everything.  But assume for these purposes that all of the accusations in both cases are true.  For one Bill (O'Reilly), these are accusations of failed jokes, allegedly inappropriate looks, allegedly condescending remarks, and, in the most recent case that brought matters to a head, an invitation to a hotel room which was declined and not pursued further.  For the other Bill (Clinton), it is accusations of rape, blatantly improper sexual contact including with a young intern and a babysitter, numerous instances of forcible contact and groping, and attempted seduction.

And yet the same voices that are raised so stridently against O'Reilly have never have raised a peep against Clinton, even up to this day.  No amount of accusations against Clinton make so much as a dent in his reputation.  He's a liberal icon!  It's almost as if this really has nothing to do with standing up for maltreated women, and only has to do with bringing down our enemies and supporting our friends.

Let's look at some of the respective accusations.  BuzzFeed here has a roundup of accusations against O'Reilly.  Examples:

• From Caroline Heldman, a professor at Occidental University who was a frequent guest on O'Reilly's program from about 2008 - 2013:  "The first time I met him in person he said, 'when I was in college professors didn't look like you,'" she recalled. "He likes to stare at legs and breasts. He was belittling as well as flirtatious. . . .  He tried to rattle me and other female guests," she said. "He would say condescending things like, 'OK ladies, try and be smart today.'"
• From former Fox News employee Perquita Burgess (a black woman and not an on-air personality):  "One day he walks past my desk ... he walks past and says 'Hey, hot chocolate,'" Burgess said. "I didn’t respond. I was mortified ... I took that as a very plantational remark."
• From Wendy Walsh, a psychologist and former regular guest on the program (and source of the most recent accusations that brought the matter to a head):  Wendy Walsh claims the talk show host asked her to come to his hotel room and, when she declined, he retaliated by dropping her as a regular guest on his show and reneging on an alleged promise to help her land her own show on Fox News.  (Via PowerLine)
• From Jehmu Greene, another former regular guest on the program:  Greene, who was a regular Fox guest and later became a contributor, reported that in 2007, O’Reilly told her she should show more cleavage.
• The most serious allegations that I find come from a former regular guest named Juliet Huddy, and relate to events in 2011:  Juliet Huddy . . . said that Mr. O’Reilly pursued a sexual relationship with her in 2011, at a time he exerted significant influence over her career. When she rebuffed his advances, he tried to derail her career. . . .  [Huddy's allegations include] that Mr. O’Reilly had called Ms. Huddy repeatedly and that it sometimes sounded as if he was masturbating. He invited her to his house on Long Island, tried to kiss her, took her to dinner and the theater, and after asking her to return a key to his hotel room, appeared at the door in his boxer shorts, according to the letter.  (From an article in the New York Times, January 10, 2017.)

There are more, but that gives a good flavor.  The closest thing there to actual physical contact is Huddy's allegation that O'Reilly "tried to kiss" her.  There are no allegation of touching, nor of groping, nor of force, and certainly not of rape.  

Now consider Clinton.  You already know about Monica Lewinsky.  Here are a few others:

• Juanita Broaddrick:   "And then as he points over my shoulder, he grabs me and turns me to him. And that was a shock. And I tried to push him away. And I only weighed about 120 pounds at that time. He was a very large man. And I kept telling him, 'No. I don’t want this at all.'  And he grabbed me again, very forcefully. And started biting on my top lip. And this was extremely painful. I thought he was going to bite my lip off. And that’s when he pushed me back onto the bed."  It goes on from there.  (Via Breitbart)
• Kathleen Willey:  Willey was a volunteer in Clinton’s White House Social Office in the early 90s. She said she was sexually assaulted by then-President Clinton in the Oval Office when she allegedly went there to speak to him about a job. In her book, Target: Caught in the Crosshairs of Bill and Hillary Clinton, she says she was subjected to threats and extreme intimidation by goons purportedly hired by Hillary Clinton.  (Via The Daily Caller)
• Paula Jones:  “And he sat down really fast and he dropped his pants,” she recalled, after being escorted to the hotel room by an armed state trooper.  And he was fondling himself. And he asked me to kiss it. Now that is disgusting. And I said, ‘I am not that kind of girl.’”  (Via Breitbart)
• Here is a roundup of six other accusers (Eileen Wellstone, Carolyn Moffet, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Becky Brown, Helen Dowdy and Christy Zercher).  One of them (Gracen) is again an accusation of forcible rape, and several others involve extensive unwanted physical contact and groping.

Again, not meaning to stand up for O'Reilly, but clearly the accusations against Clinton are on an entirely different level.

What is the reaction of corporate America to these respective allegations?  Forbes here has a list of more than 50 national advertisers who dropped their support of O'Reilly's program just since April.  It's a who's who, from automobile manufacturers (Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Hyundai, Lexius) to Big Pharma (Pfizer, Sanofi, Lilly, GSK). to insurers (Allstate, Esurance, Pacific Life), and on and on.  For comparison, from ZeroHedge here we have a list of some $26.6 million of paid speeches given by Bill Clinton to major corporations over just a two-plus year period from January 2013 to May 2015.  All of the allegations against Clinton were well-known by that time.  Admittedly I don't find exact overlap with the O'Reilly droppers.  But Clinton's list of non-droppers is an even more prestigious who's who, starting with most of the big banks (Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JP Morgan, UBS, Deutsche Bank), software and tech companies (Oracle, Microsoft, SAP), insurers (Zurich, Standard Life), and so on.  What, there's no problem associating your name with this guy?

Sometimes the term "double standard" has been used to describe circumstances like these, but I don't think that term really comes close to a fair description.