What Is The Biggest Corruption In Politics Today?

Over the past few years, this blog has discussed the prosecutions of numerous prominent politicians accused of corruption.  Those have included Joe Bruno (former Majority Leader of New York State Senate), Sheldon Silver (former Speaker of New York State Assembly), Bob McDonnell (former Governor of Virginia), Dean Skelos (another former Majority Leader of New York State Senate), and Bob Menendez (current Senator from New Jersey).  In each case the question was, how can you tell when one of them has crossed the line from normal constituent service for friends and donors and into corruption?  You will note that the first four of these individuals were all convicted at trial, but all four then had their convictions reversed or vacated by appellate courts.  Bruno was actually acquitted on re-trial.  The original Menendez trial is ongoing at the present time.

One of the remarkable things about each of these cases has been that the amounts of money involved in the alleged corruption have not been particularly large.  The linchpin of the Bruno case was alleged forgiveness of an $80,000 debt for an (allegedly worthless) racehorse.  That case also involved a few hundred thousand dollars in allegedly mischaracterized "consulting fees."  The McDonnell case involved about $175,000 in personal gifts, allegedly as quid pro quo for setting up meetings with officials of the Virginia state university system.  Skelos had allegedly leaned on supporters to provide "no-show" employment to his son, in total amount of about $220,000.  With Menendez, we get up to about $600,000 in contributions to super-PACs supporting his campaign, plus some private jet travel and stays at resorts.  Silver's case is the only one of the bunch that breaks the million dollar barrier, with about $4-5 million of "referral" fees for asbestos injury cases going to the former Speaker.

Of course, with all of these convictions reversed or vacated, it's not clear that any of these people committed actual crimes.  You could get the impression that all of these prosecutions are just to divert your attention away from the really big corruption that is occurring right under everybody's noses and never prosecuted.  Surely, if the whole game of politics is "inherently corrupt" as the Manhattan Contrarian contends, and with the federal and state governments passing out trillions of dollars per year to favored interests, there must be far bigger corruptions than these paltry hundreds of thousands of dollars (or maybe single-digit millions)!  

What is your nomination for a really significant corruption?  Note that there is no requirement for an actual prosecution, or even an investigation, for a nominee to be considered.  Indeed, for a given corruption to get really, really big, it is almost a given that either the perpetrators will be too big for the prosecutors to take them on, or that the whole scheme must have received a legal blessing of some kind.

I know what you're thinking -- the Clinton Foundation!  Now we're on the scale at least an order of magnitude or so bigger than any of the instances mentioned above.  That Foundation raised some $2 billion over the period 2001 - 2016, during most of which time Hillary was either a sitting U.S. Senator, and/or known to be about to run for President, and/or Secretary of State, and/or known to be about to run for President again.  Even if you assume that all of the allegedly "charitable" work of the Foundation was legitimate (an assumption that has been challenged in many quarters), that still leaves many tens of millions of dollars that went to cover the Clintons' travel and hotel expenses, and expenses for assistants and a full staff of campaign-in-waiting, all somehow declared exempt from the strictures that apply to gifts to government officials and outside of the limits on campaign contributions.  And the donations were tax deductible!  It's obvious that many to most of the contributors had some kinds of interests before the U.S. government for which they were hoping for or expecting favorable treatment.  You can't tell what all the interests are from reviewing bare lists of contributors, but some of the connections have been widely reported.  For example, we have Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra, who had purchased a bunch of uranium assets and wanted to sell them to the Russians, which he did in a series of transactions from 2009 - 13 (basically Hillary's tenure as Secretary of State).  Giustra donated over $60 million to the Clinton Foundation, significant portions of it during Hillary's tenure at State.  Or there's the country of Qatar, which seems to have made a fairly regular $1 million annual donation, including while Hillary was Secretary of State.  There are plenty of other examples.

That is a very excellent example of a very large unprosecuted corruption.  But I have an even bigger and better one:  the forced contributions by public employees to their unions that are then used for the political and electoral support of the Democratic Party.  This particular corruption takes place under what I called above a "legal blessing," in this case a Supreme Court decision from 1977 called Abood, where the Supremes upheld forced deduction from public employee salaries of moneys that are then used for political advocacy of various sorts, almost always on behalf of Democrats and/or issues supported by Democrats.

A recent amicus brief filed in the Supreme Court by the Competitive Enterprise Institute details some of the extent of the use of forced contributions for political advocacy by one public employee union, AFSCME.  Matters for which forced dues were used included:  advocacy for the Hillary Clinton campaign, against right-to-work legislation, for gun control, for higher public infrastructure spending, for higher public spending on education, for paid family and sick leave, against private contracting of municipal services, for a higher minimum wage, for gun control, for D.C. statehood, and on and on.

What is the total annual value of the legally enforced annual contributions, all going to one side of the political divide?  I can't find a recent and definitive analysis.  But this analysis from the Wall Street Journal from 2012 (may be behind pay wall) puts the total of union cash plus in-kind political contributions in the range of $600 million to $800 million per year.  That includes both public and private sector unions.  Since the public sector unions are about half of the total membership, that would put the public sector piece at around $300 million to $400 million per year.  It makes the Clinton Foundation look small time.  And it has undoubtedly gone up since 2012.

You may know that the Supreme Court just accepted cert in a case called Janus that promises to revisit the rule of Abood.   The betting is that Abood is highly likely to be overruled.  However, here's the incredible piece:  the four "liberal" justices (Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, Sotomayor) are virtually assured to vote to keep Abood in place.  In a case (Friedrichs) raising the same issue that reached the Supreme Court earlier this year, after the death of Justice Scalia, the result was a four-to-four affirmance of the Ninth Circuit, with the four "liberals" all unable to recognize that this was an extreme example of corruption.  For them, momentary partisan advantage for the Democratic Party appears to be more important than the integrity of our democracy. 

Political Corruption 102: The Case Of Robert Menendez

Now that you have educated yourself on the law of political corruption via yesterday's post, try applying your newfound knowledge to a currently-pending case -- that of Robert Menendez.  We'll call this course Political Corruption 102.

Robert Menendez is the sitting Democratic Senator from the state of New Jersey.  In April 2015 he was indicted by the federal prosecutors in New Jersey on multiple counts of bribery in relation to his dealings with one Salomon Melgen, a wealthy eye doctor from Florida.  It is relevant to know that in April of this year, according to the Washington Post, Melgen was convicted by a Florida jury for stealing up to $105 million from the Medicare program.  Menendez's trial on his own charges is currently underway at the federal courthouse in beautiful downtown Newark, New Jersey.  

I'm completely prepared to agree that this Menendez guy is as corrupt a pol as ever strode the corridors of the Capitol.  But that doesn't necessarily make his conduct a federal crime.  The amounts of money that Melgen sent the way of Menendez certainly make Dean Skelos look small time by comparison; and in return Menendez seems to have devoted endless hours of his own time and that of his staff working to get the federal bureaucracy to do Melgen's bidding.  So -- criminal or not criminal?  

The same Washington Post article linked above summarizes the particulars of the quid and the quo that allegedly constitute the Melgen/Menendez bribery.  Here's the quid:

• Menendez took 19 free rides on Melgen's private jets to luxury resorts around the world, sometimes bringing guests.
• Melgen made more than $600,000 in campaign donations to super PACs to get Menendez reelected in 2012.

And the quo:

• Menendez helped three of Melgen's foreign-born girlfriends get visas to visit the United States.
• Over a period of four years, Menendez held several meetings with U.S. health officials to help Melgen settle an $8.9 million Medicare payment dispute, at one point asking then-Senate majority leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) to help out.
• As Melgen was emailing Menendez's staff in April and May 2012, promising to donate to Menendez's campaign, prosecutors allege Menendez reached out to top State Department officials to urge them to enforce a port-security contract with the Dominican Republic that would benefit Melgen's company.

The obvious problem here is that the things that Menendez was trying to accomplish for Melgen were not things that Menendez could do on his own authority.  Rather, all Menendez could do was to try to get the bureaucracy to help his friend.  So he arranged meetings and held conversations.  Maybe even lots of meetings and lots of conversations.  Maybe he even yelled at some of the bureaucrats.  So?  

Yesterday's New York Times reported on the progress of the trial.  On Thursday a guy named Todd Robinson was on the stand.  Robinson is the current U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala, but in 2012 worked for the Ambassador to the Dominican Republic, and was the point person on discussions about the port security contract that was of interest to Melgen.  From the Times:

The government’s questions framed Mr. Menendez’s actions as not merely acts of friendship, or typical work on behalf of constituents, as defense lawyers have argued. Instead, they seemed carefully calibrated to show that the meetings and conversations the senator arranged were “official acts,” the bar that the United States Supreme Court has recently established must be met for actions by elected officials to rise to the level of corruption.

So what if anything takes this case beyond the mere setting up of meetings that has been determined by the Supreme Court as not being enough to constitute bribery?  From the Times's account of Robinson's testimony:

Mr. Menendez warned that he would convene a Senate hearing, Mr. Robinson testified, if the State Department did not help Dr. Melgen resolve a contract dispute between the Dominican government and Dr. Melgen’s company.  “The senator noted displeasure very clearly with the current state of affairs and threatened to hold a hearing on the matter if we don’t meet his deadline,” a State Department official wrote in an email to Mr. Robinson. . . .  Mr. Robinson added, “It was not likely to be a friendly hearing, because you have the word threat in the email.”

Nothing in the Times report indicates whether any such hearing was ever held, or whether the State Department ever actually did what Menendez asked them to do on behalf of Melgen.  It's a fair bet that if either of those two things had occurred, the prosecutors would be emphasizing those facts.

So it looks like the case comes down to whether the prosecutors can get friendly witnesses to characterize the setting up of meetings and the holding of conversations in semantic terms that make these things seem like something really serious.  He didn't just set up a meeting, he "threatened to hold a hearing"!  But what is the "official act" that Menendez did on his own authority?  We're still waiting to find out.  And what distinguishes his conduct from that of every other member of Congress?  

At least this trial is an eye opener in revealing how the pols actually allocate their time.  Do you think they spend their days deeply engaged in the project to create perfect justice and fairness in human affairs?  Actually, we find out that their priority number one is trying to get the bureaucracy to do favors for the big contributors.  Surprise!  

The Skelos Reversal: How Do You Tell The Corrupt Politician From The Non-Corrupt?

I first dabbled in commenting on the Dean Skelos prosecution within days after the first criminal complaint was issued against him back in May 2015.  In that first post on the subject, I characterized the charges against Skelos as "remarkably thin."  However, a jury convicted him.  Three days ago the Second Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the conviction.  (That link is to a news article from New York Magazine. The opinion itself is available on the court's PACER system, to which you probably do not have access.)  The vacatur of the conviction does not preclude re-trial.  

For non-New Yorkers who don't recognize the name, Skelos was -- up until he was charged with corruption -- the (Republican) Majority Leader of the New York State Senate.  If it somehow surprises you that the State Senate in this bluest of blue states is (and long has been) controlled by the Republicans, you will start to get an idea of why it might have been a priority for the Democrats to get rid of Skelos.  Skelos's prosecutor was Preet Bharara, whose job, prior to being named by Barack Obama to be U.S. Attorney for the SDNY, was counsel to Chuck Schumer.  

Was the Skelos prosecution just nothing more than the most naked of naked politics?  You can be the judge.  In that May 2015 post I compared the allegations in the criminal complaint against Skelos to some of the well-known facts as to Hillary Clinton -- facts in which Bharara could not have been less interested.  For example:

Seems that Skelos managed to get his son a consulting gig that paid about $200K over four years, $50K or so a year.  Chelsea Clinton somehow got a $600K per year job at NBC News -- a job that even loyal Clinton supporter New York Magazine called "fake."  Of course, nobody took the trouble to tape every phone conversation that Bill or Hillary may have had with NBC or affiliates over the last several years to see if there was any "pressure."     

The important question is, by what criteria can you tell which of these and other actions by politicians is corrupt and which is not?  In the May 2015 post (and elsewhere) I have expressed the view that politics is inherently corrupt; but our legislators and prosecutors and judges seem to be of the view that they have some system or criteria to tell the difference between the corrupt and honest pols.  Today, let's look at the background and the result of the Skelos case, and see what guidance we can get.

My conclusion is, the federal law of political corruption provides no meaningful basis for making a useful distinction between what conduct of politicians is corrupt and what is not.  This hands completely unacceptable discretion to prosecutors to use the laws to get rid of whichever politician they don't like.

As readers of my previous posts know, the current state of the law in this area derives from prior efforts of the U.S. Supreme Court to put some boundaries on the ridiculously vague anti-corruption statutes enacted by Congress.  The most ridiculously vague of the statutes is the so-called "honest services fraud" provision, 18 U.S.C. Section 1346, which makes it a criminal fraud to "deprive another of the intangible right of honest services."   Kindly advise what you think that might mean.  Needless to say, Skelos was prosecuted under that statute (among others).  I would say that that statute should have been declared void for vagueness by the Supreme Court when it got a chance, but in the 2010 Skilling case, instead of doing that, the Supremes saved the statute by saying that it survived as long as the allegations amounted to "bribery" or a "kickback."  And thus there was imported into the "honest services fraud" statute the requirements of the federal bribery statute, including that the quo granted by the politician for the quid from the briber be some "official act."

Is it getting any clearer?  Next, in the 2014 prosecution of Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia, the alleged "official acts" proved by the prosecutors consisted of the setting up of a series of meetings with state bureaucrats.  (And after the meetings, the bureaucrats never did what McDonnell's benefactor wanted them to do!)  Good enough?  McDonnell was convicted, and his conviction affirmed by the Fourth Circuit, but the Supremes reversed unanimously.  The opinion by Chief Justice Roberts was definitive that merely setting up meetings was not enough to be an "official act" and thus to prove a bribe.  That opinion came down in April 2016 -- after Skelos had been convicted, and while his case was on appeal.

Back to the Skelos case.  Although McDonnell had reached the Supremes, and was in the process of briefing, when the Skelos trial took place, the prosecutors in their usual hubris assumed that affirmance was a sure thing, and thus many of the supposed "official acts" that they proved as to Skelos consisted of setting up meetings.  The prosecutors asked for and got a jury instruction that defined "official act" as "any act taken under color of official authority," without an exclusion for setting up meetings -- basically an almost identical instruction to the one found erroneous in McDonnell.  And the Skelos prosecutor proceeded to argue to the jury specifically that setting up meetings did constitute "official acts."  ("So the defense wants you to think that things like setting up meetings or making calls about a few thousand dollars don’t really count as official actions. It’s just wrong. Flat wrong.”)  Oops!  And thus was the conviction doomed.

But, after vacating the conviction, the Skelos court then takes up the question of whether he can be re-tried.  That issue turns on whether there is sufficient evidence to prove a bribe even after exclusion of the setting up of meetings as being the "official acts."  The court finds that there is sufficient evidence to justify re-trial.  The remaining alleged "official acts" are in two categories:

1. Voting on a statute, allegedly in a way favorable to the interest of the briber.  The court quotes from its own prior decision in a case called Rosen for the proposition that legislative votes, even routine ones, can be sufficient to constitute the quid pro quo for a bribery case.  ("Payments to State legislators may constitute bribes even if the legislator’s resulting actions are otherwise ‘routine’—such as voting in a certain manner or supporting grants to certain businesses. . . . ")  It appears that the particular vote in question in this case was Skelos's vote on the periodic renewal of New York City's rent regulation regime.  
2. "Using influence" to obtain approval of a measure by another legislature of which Skelos was not a member.  The particular issue here is that Skelos was trying to get his son a job with an environmental consulting firm, and that firm wanted a contract with the government of Nassau County, which contract required (and got) approval from the Nassau County legislature.  Skelos was not a member of the Nassau County legislature, and did not vote on the matter.  The Second Circuit states:  "Using one’s influence as a high ranking state official to push through county legislation and to bestow a county-issued contract are indisputably formal exercises of governmental power constituting official acts under McDonnell." 

Well, start with number one.  Every single state legislator raises campaign contributions from dozens or hundreds of contributors, and every single state legislator casts dozens or hundreds of votes in the legislature, large numbers of which votes are favorable in some way to some campaign contributor.  The same of course also applies to members of the federal Congress.  If that's all it takes to make a bribe, then definitely every state legislator and every Congressperson is guilty.

And that's a huge problem.  It's a huge problem because if the statutes and case law make no practically useful distinction between corrupt pols and all the other pols, then it inevitably falls to the prosecutors to pick on whatever politician they don't like or want to get rid of, with the assurance that the evidence to prove the "crime" can always be found.  Will prosecutors then abuse this power to get rid of the particularly annoying leading politicians of the opposing political party?  Of course they will.

And as to number two:  It's "indisputably" an "official act" to "push through" (what does that mean?) legislation in a legislature of which you are not a member and in which you have no vote?  Really, Second Circuit?

The current (interim) U.S. Attorney for the SDNY has made a perfunctory statement that he intends to re-try the case.  I tend not to believe the office will carry through on that, particularly if President Trump ever makes an appointment to the office.

Meanwhile, the important lesson here is that the federal law of political corruption absolutely makes no useful distinction that enables you to tell which are the corrupt and which are the non-corrupt politicians.  Or that enables politicians to figure out how to conduct themselves in a way that will not get themselves prosecuted.  Maybe there is no way to draft statutes to make those distinctions in a useful way.  The fact is that politics is inherently corrupt.  The only meaningful way to address the problem is smaller government.

The Cruel, Heartless Expansion Of Medicaid Under Obamacare

You have undoubtedly noticed that the official Democratic talking point about any and all efforts to repeal or even modify Obamacare is that this is "cruel."  OK, sometimes it's "heartless."  Or maybe "a human tragedy."  You are taking away "healthcare" from the people and leaving them to suffer in the streets!  People will die!!!!

Just to warm you up for this post, here is a small roundup:

• Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), commenting on the Graham-Cassidy bill on September 20:  "We are on the precipice of one of the most cruel and outrageous legislative acts in recent history."
• Washington Post, July 20, commenting on the then-current Republican "repeal only" plan:  "CBO again confirms the cruelty of GOP’s ‘repeal-only’ plan."
• The New Republic, March 14, commenting on another earlier version of Obamacare repeal/replace known as the American Health Care Act:  "[T]he incredible cruelty of the Republican legislation didn’t become clear until Monday, when the Congressional Budget Office . . . estimated it would undo nearly all of the coverage gains we’ve seen under the Affordable Care Act, creating human tragedy on a scale far greater than even pessimistic analysts imagined.
• New York Magazine, September 5:  "[Trump's position on immigration] contains the same mix of cruelty and desperate incompetence as his position on repealing Obamacare."

Etc., etc., etc., etc.  I mean, isn't it completely obvious that people who have "healthcare" are going to have superior health outcomes to those who don't?

Well, some things that seem like they obviously must be true turn out not to be true at all.  I have linked many times to the famous randomized study from Oregon published in the NEJM in 2013 that spectacularly failed to demonstrate any health gains from putting people on Medicaid.  Then in a post from March of this year, I went through the then-just-published neighborhood-by-neighborhood health data for New York City for 2015 to examine whether those neighborhoods with very high Medicaid participation rates had better or worse health outcomes than the other neighborhoods in the City.  Uniformly and without exception, the high-Medicaid-participation neighborhoods had worse health outcomes, and by large amounts, and on every metric considered.  

And finally, in a post in August of this year, I noted that the full implementation of Obamacare in 2015 and 2016, instead of being accompanied by an increase in life expectancy, had been accompanied by a decrease in life expectancy.  How could that have happened?  I asked:

Could it be because expanded Medicaid is paying for opioids for the vulnerable?  That's a very reasonable hypothesis, although there are not yet enough data to prove it.

It's only been a little more than a month since that post, but some data are starting to trickle in.  And sure enough, those data strongly suggest that large numbers of new Obamacare Medicaid recipients are using their "healthcare" to obtain and use (or maybe sell) opioid painkillers, with very bad follow-on health effects.  An op-ed by Allysia Finley in Monday's Wall Street Journal, "Does Medicaid Spur Opioid Abuse?", collects some facts and figures, which were originally put together by CDC at the request of Senator Ron Johnson (who lost a nephew to a heroin overdose).  Some particularly dramatic examples:

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that overdose deaths per capita rose twice as much on average between 2013 and 2015 in states that expanded Medicaid than those that didn’t—for example, 205% in North Dakota, which expanded Medicaid, vs. 18% in South Dakota, which didn’t. . . .  Between 2010 and 2013, overdose deaths rose by 28% in Ohio and 36% in Wisconsin. Between 2013 and 2015, they climbed 39% in Ohio, which expanded Medicaid, but only 2% in Wisconsin, which did not.

I wouldn't call it definitive proof yet, but all data I have seen so far indicate that a big use of expanded Medicaid has been to obtain prescription painkillers.  Some -- indeed, many -- of those prescriptions will inevitably be abused.

Of course there has been some push back.  Here is an example from the AP, August 31, "Medicaid fueling opioid epidemic? New theory is challenged.":

[U]niversity researchers say Medicaid seems to be doing the opposite of what conservatives allege.  “Medicaid is doing its job” by increasing treatment for opioid addiction, said Temple University economist Catherine Maclean, who recently published a paper on Medicaid expansion and drug treatment. “As more time passes, we may see a decline in overdoses in expansion states relative to nonexpansion states.”

Seems like Ms. Maclean has no data to support her position, but speculates with great confidence that the government program will end up having a positive effect since, I guess, all government programs must inevitably have positive effects because their proponents are such great experts and such good people and so well-meaning.  Right!

Or there's the theory that people do much better in life striving to make it on their own than they do by accepting government handouts.  Anyway, if deaths keep going up more in the Medicaid expansion states than the others, then which one is "cruel" -- Medicaid expansion or not?

The Government's Push For A Cashless Society Won't Go Away

As it previously did back in August 2016, the Wall Street Journal gives over the front page of a special section today to anti-cash crusader Kenneth Rogoff.  At least this time they also print a counter-point article, by a Wharton professor named James McAndrews.  Both artilcles are at this link (probably behind pay wall).

Rogoff's August 2016 effort was the subject of my post at the time, "There's Nothing More Frightening Than Rule By The 'Smart.'"   Rogoff -- MIT Economics Ph.D. 1980, former Chief Economist of the IMF, big time professor at Harvard -- is a perfect example of those people who think they are so smart that they should be allowed to re-design the world, while at the same time they are completely incapable of perceiving the downsides and unintended consequences of what they are proposing.  Among my comments from last year:

Naturally the visions of these geniuses are all variations of the same thing, namely some kind of government program to more closely monitor and/or control the people.  The geniuses know that there is no downside in such programs, first because the programs have been designed by themselves, and second because government programs are administered by all-knowing and perfect government functionaries, who are people like us and can always be trusted to do the right thing.

Getting rid of cash is another instance of government doubling down on failure.  It's like increasing penalties for drug crimes (this time we will stamp them out!) or adding yet one more in-kind distribution to fight poverty.  In the case of getting rid of cash, the previous effort was the law of "money laundering," which has undoubtedly been the single most abject and total failure of all government efforts to micro-manage the people.  (See "The Joke Of Criminalizing Money Laundering.")  Somehow, drug dealing, illegal gambling, and an entire $2 trillion per year underground economy continue to exist.  This will fix it!

Of course Rogoff leads off with the argument that getting rid of cash will reduce crime and tax evasion.  Well, that's open to debate -- and I would bet for the other side.  Then there's this next one, which he seems to think is an argument in favor of eliminating cash:

Another advantage of eliminating large bills would be the effect on monetary policy. The Federal Reserve should be able to implement negative nominal interest rates vastly more effectively in the absence of large bills, which could prove quite important as a stimulative tool in the next financial crisis.

That's right -- Rogoff, along with most other sophisticated monetary economists these days, has convinced himself that it's a good idea for a central bank to respond to a financial crisis by making it impossible for retirees to earn any return on savings unless they are willing to invest in equities.  Is there any actual evidence for this?  None that I know of.

Our counter-pointer Professor McAndrews makes some good points, but also seems to miss many important ones.  His main points are (1) 7.5% of U.S. households don't have bank accounts.  What about them?  (2) There is substantial legitimate non-criminal need for cash; and (3)
The bad guys will figure out ways around this, probably involving drawing legal businesses into criminal activity of helping them launder the revenue.  All good points that I don't mean to minimize.  Here are a few more that McAndrews doesn't mention, from least to most important:

• The power is out in Puerto Rico, and is likely to be out for a couple of months or more.  How are those credit cards working out for you?
• In a cashless world, everything you do is subject to monitoring by the government.  Indeed, under the Bank Secrecy Act and its incremental encrustations, the government can monitor all of your bank transactions, and all of your uses of credit cards, behind your back, and instruct your bank not to tell you that you are being monitored.  Is there any chance that a government might misuse such snooping powers against its political adversaries?  If you don't think so, then you have not been paying attention to what's going on.  E.g., from CNN, September 18, "US investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election…. The government snooping continued into early this year, including a period when Manafort was known to talk to President Donald Trump.”  Or see the Susan Rice "unmasking" scandal.  
• Cash provides a safety valve against ramping up taxation to a higher and higher percentage of GDP.  The more they can stamp out the escape to cash, the more leeway the government has to increase the current 35% of GDP or so annual tax take to more like 50% or 60% or even 70%.  It's to make a more perfect world!  Without a doubt, this is the main objective of the Rogoffs of the world, although they will never state it explicitly.  

The good news is that, despite a number of setbacks, Bitcoin seems to be gradually progressing toward greater acceptability.  It can't happen fast enough.  Meanwhile, you owe it to yourself and your country to use cash as much as possible.  It's part of the never-ending fight for freedom.   

Reasons For Optimism About Climate Hysteria

Large numbers of my friends and acquaintances are climate skeptics, and many of them spend a good deal of their time feeling down in the dumps about the subject.  Their reasoning goes something like this:  Here we have something that should immediately be identified as baloney by any thinking person.  And yet thousands and millions of people seem to have fallen for it.  And not just random people, but people seemingly among the elites of society -- academics and journalists and government bureaucrats.  Most of the media function as propaganda bullhorns to spread the idiocy.  The forces of hysteria have commandeered tens of billions of annual dollars of government funding to pay for their program and spread their message, drowning out and suppressing any opposition.  Their program calls for taking away everyone's freedom and impoverishing the populace with higher costs for energy.  And yet the program seems to be getting adopted everywhere!  

How could a sane person not get depressed about this?  Easy!  Over on the other side of this issue, we have a secret weapon.  The secret weapon is that the supposedly carbon-free energy sources -- or, at least, those supposedly carbon-free energy sources that are acceptable to environmentalists (meaning wind and solar and definitely not nuclear and hydro) -- don't work.  Even worse, wind and solar are not even carbon-free, because it takes large amounts of carbon-based energy to make the turbines or panels or whatever.  Put these two problems together, and governments that try to reduce their carbon emissions by heavily subsidizing wind and solar quickly hit a wall where energy prices for the masses soar through the roof even as the carbon emissions don't go down.  You won't find the New York Times or Washington Post reporting on this, but it's getting harder and harder not to notice.

Let's take a closer look at Germany, which has been the source of quite a bit of news on this subject in the past few days.  On first take Germany would seem more than any place else to be the biggest cause of your depression.  "Transitioning" from fossil fuel energy to wind and solar has been the signature issue for Chancellor Angela Merkel for more than a decade, and as of this moment she seems to be cruising to victory in the election coming up on Sunday.  But don't get the idea that it would make any difference if one of the other candidates or parties managed to defeat Merkel, because there is no political party in Germany of any size or consequence that offers dissent on the "climate change" issue.  The entire country has fallen into the mass hysteria!  (Has anything like that ever happened before in Germany?  Don't ask!)  Germany has moved aggressively to cut its carbon emissions, and was a leader in the 2015 Paris negotiations in making aggressive promises of emissions reductions and in strong-arming other countries, including the United States, to commit to aggressive reduction targets.  Germany is part of the EU commitment to 40% emissions reductions (from 1990 levels) by 2030, and in addition has its own internal goals of reaching the 40% reduction by 2020 (coming right up!) and 95% reduction by 2050.  Impressive!

OK, that's the fantasy.  How about in the real world?  From Jamie Horgan in The American Interest, September 20, "Germany Will Miss Another Green Goal":

Berlin’s grand green energy transition is falling short of the lofty targets that inspired it. Earlier this month, the think tank Agora Energiewende released a report that projected Germany would fall well short of its goal to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—far shorter than was previously believed. Berlin had committed to cutting 40 percent of its GHG emissions by 2020 as compared to 1990 levels, but as that year looms large, the country has achieved a reduction of “just” 28 percent (a remarkable decrease, though nowhere close to the target), and it’s expected to only shave off another 2 or 3 percent over the next few years. Now, a new study from the BEE renewable energy group suggests that the country is going to fall short of its Brussels-set target of sourcing 18 percent of its energy production from renewables by 2020.

Good job to Horgan for publicizing this, but he's still getting taken in when he says that Germany's existing emissions reduction of 28% below 1990 levels is "a remarkable decrease."  No, it isn't.  That 1990 date was intentionally picked by Germany to scam the rest of the world.  1989 is the year the Berlin Wall fell.  Over the next decade and a half, the Germans shuttered essentially all of the inefficient Soviet-era heavy industry in East Germany.  Germany picked the 1990 start date so that it could take credit for those reductions that would have happened anyway and pretend that this had something to do with saving the planet.

Here is a chart of Germany's year-by-year greenhouse gas emissions changes since 1990.  Source: CleanEnergyWire.   

You will quickly see that Germany hit the emissions reduction wall around 2010.  Since then, its emissions have actually increased in 4 of the 7 years.  Multiply out the changes since 2009, and you will find that Germany's emissions at the end of 2016 were 99.79% of the level they had had at the end of 2009.  This, despite the fact that 2010 was the year they passed the so-called "Energiewende" law.  That's some "energy transition" -- 0.21% emissions reduction in seven years!

How could things be going so badly?  Among other things, Germany caved to environmentalists in deciding to eliminate nuclear power after the 2011 tsunami at Fukushima in Japan.  Nuclear power emits no CO2.  Wind and solar don't work, at least much of the time.  So, what's left?  Coal!  From Bloomberg News, September 21, "How Merkel’s Green Energy Policy Has Fueled Demand for Coal":

By 2030, the eastern German town of Poedelwitz will likely be razed to get at the rich veins of coal beneath its half-timbered houses. The reason: Chancellor Angela Merkel’s effort to steer Germany toward greener energy, which has unexpectedly meant booming demand for dirty coal. . . .  “This is unparalleled destruction of the environment,” says Jens Hausner, a farmer who has seen 17 of his 20 hectares consumed by digging equipment that looks like something out of a Mad Max movie. In a bit more than a decade, the hulking machines are expected to claw through the town’s 13th-century church and 40 or so remaining homes. 

 I like the part about "unexpectedly."  Can anybody in Germany do basic arithmetic?  Apparently not.  And what about the cost?

Germany has spent some 650 billion euros ($780 billion) on subsidies for green power in recent decades. But the country will at best get to 30 percent by 2020, according to Berlin climate researcher Agora Energiewende. Emission reductions “won’t be a near miss but a booming failure,” Agora researchers write. 

Even in a country with a GDP of almost $3.5 trillion per year, that $780 billion of "green" energy subsidies is real money.

Germany's stated goals of emissions reductions are just fantasies.  They will not be achieved, but meanwhile the prices that their people pay for electricity and gasoline and heating oil will soar.  (Germany's residential electricity prices are already about triple the U.S. average.)  Same for California, and New York, and anybody else who tries a comparable strategy.  As of now, you aren't reading much about the magnitude of the disaster, but it is truly a disaster.  The story can't be suppressed forever.  Be optimistic!