In Germany, Reality Is Triumphing Over Political Posturing On Climate

Germany -- that's the place where there really is a 100% consensus on the need for immediate action to solve the supposed "climate crisis."  It's the land of the "Energiewende" -- the forced transition to the use of intermittent renewables like wind and solar to generate electricity.  It's the place where -- as I noted in this post back in September -- no major political party has dissented on the need to act on the "climate" issue.  It's the place that has happily driven its usage of renewables to generate electricity up to about 30% of the supply, and therefore its cost of residential electricity up to more than triple the average U.S. price.  It's a place where anyone questioning the so-called "science" underlying the warming scare can expect to be greeted with derision and scorn.  And yet, somehow reality still seems to be intruding.

Over the weekend, the talks among political parties in Germany to form a coalition government collapsed.  As of now, nobody seems to know what is going to happen next.  And -- even though there is little overt dissent on the virtue of reducing carbon emissions -- it seems like the ever-more-evident costs of this "climate" program are starting to drive events.

Just to set the table, let me remind readers about the state of the political playing field on this issue in Germany and the rest of Europe and other major countries.  A good background article is this one from Dana Nuccitelli in the Guardian from October 2015, "The Republican Party Stands Alone in Climate Denial."   The article summarizes some work from Norwegian political scientist Sondre Båtstrand, analyzing the positions on this issue of all conservative political parties from countries including the USA, UK, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Germany.  The conclusion:

[Båtstrand] found that the US Republican Party stands alone in its rejection of the need to tackle climate change and efforts to become the party of climate supervillains. 

That's not the only example of over-the-top rhetoric in the piece.  For example, Nuccitelli quotes Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine on the position of then-candidate Jeb Bush on this issue:

In any other democracy in the world, a Jeb Bush would be an isolated loon, operating outside the major parties, perhaps carrying on at conferences with fellow cranks, but having no prospects of seeing his vision carried out in government.

In Germany, a political party needs to get 5% of the vote in an election to get any seats in the Bundestag.  As an indication of how correct Båtstrand was, in the previous (2013) election, the only party that could remotely be considered a climate dissenter, AfD, got only 4.7% and no seats.  Another party, FDP -- a free market classic liberal party and not really climate dissenters, but legitimately concerned about the costs of "climate" policies -- got 4.8% and also no seats.

In the recent elections in September, those two parties suddenly got, between them, 23.3% of the vote and 24.6% of the seats.  And suddenly Angela Merkel needs one or both of them to form a coalition government.  Oh, and she also needs the Green Party.  How is that playing out?  An impasse!  Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation reports this morning:

Most remarkable: Germany’s failed and increasingly unpopular climate policies are at the core of the crisis. It also signals the collapse of Germany’s decade-old climate consensus.  While the Green Party demanded the immediate shut-down of 10-20 of Germany’s 180 coal power plants, the Liberal Party (FDP) stood by its manifesto promise of  a radical reform of the Energiewende, advocating the end to subsidies for renewable energy.

Experts at the Federal Ministry of Economics had warned participants at the exploratory coalition talks that Germany will miss its legally binding 2020 climate targets by a mile and that trying to achieve its 2030 goals would risk the economic prosperity of the country.  The Ministry also  warned that any attempt to force a radical reduction of CO2 emissions “by 2020 would only be possible by partial de-industrialisation of Germany.”

Climate business as usual is no longer an option for the Liberals [aka FDP]. The party fears that a fast exit from coal-fired power generation, as demanded by the Greens, would result in severe social, economic and political problems. A continuation of radical climate policies would affect Germany’s main coal regions, not least in Eastern Germany where the right-wing protest party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) had gained significant support in the federal elections in September.

So, if you were to go around the streets of the major cities of Germany and take an opinion survey, you will find very close to one hundred percent agreement on the need to "take action" on climate change immediately.  But what?  Does this mean that we will be putting thousands of coal miners out of a job, and more thousands of utility workers at coal plants out of a job, and driving the cost of electricity from three times the U.S. average to five times or maybe ten, and making our electric grid not work right any more, and by the way also "partially de-industrializing" Germany?  Wait, you didn't tell us about those things!

I'm actually hoping that Chancellor Merkel does a deal with the Greens and maybe the SDP, and continues down her road of green folly.  The real world needs some concrete examples of actual disaster to teach us a lesson in reality.  

The Administrative State Under Siege; Or, How Much Things Can Change In Three Years

When I began this blog in 2012, one of the things I had been pondering for years was the extent to which much to most of the operation of the U.S. federal government ran directly counter to the Constitution.  Every federal officer, on taking office, swore to uphold the Constitution; and then from day one proceeded to ignore it completely.  Good friends of mine would go into jobs where everything they and everyone around them did was obviously unconstitutional, and yet nobody would so much as mention the issue.  It was taboo -- like in The Emperor's New Clothes.  Without going into detail, the three biggest issues then and now were (1) the combining of powers into agencies that would enact, and also enforce, and also adjudicate regulations (directly contrary to the Constitution's separation of powers into three branches of government); (2) agencies enacting regulations with the force of law on their own say so (contrary to the Constitution's requirement that all laws be passed by both houses of Congress and presented to the President for signature); and (3) many agencies claiming to be "independent" of the President (contrary to the Constitution's vesting all "executive power" in the President).

I'm not saying I'm the only one who had noticed these things at the time, and I should definitely mention Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court and Professor Gary Lawson of BU Law School as examples of canaries in the coal mine.  But very, very few were paying attention, and certainly nobody in the Obama administration.  Left-leaning law professors had nothing but scorn for anyone daring to raise these issues, certainly including Clarence Thomas.

I trace the beginning of a shift to the publication in 2014 of the book "Is Administrative Law Unlawful?" by Philip Hamburger, Professor at Columbia Law School.  That was just over three years ago.  Hamburger raised all of the three issues I identify above, and plenty more, and pulled no punches in characterizing these things as unconstitutional and illegitimate.  Hamburger's book started to get some buzz in esoteric legal circles, but not much outside.

On March 9, 2015, two cases came down from the Supreme Court that contained significant concurring opinions raising these same issues from Justices Alito and Thomas.  I covered those opinions in a post on March 25, 2015.  Most significant was the Thomas concurrence in the case called Association of American Railoads, which included the following passage:

We have held that the Constitution categorically forbids Congress to delegate its legislative power to any other body . . . but it has become increasingly clear to me that the test we have applied to distinguish legislative from executive power largely abdicates our duty to enforce that prohibition. . . .  I would return to the original understanding of the federal legislative power and require that the Federal Government create generally applicable rules of private conduct only through the constitutionally prescribed legislative process.

Uh oh.  Right about the same time, progressive icon Professor Larry Tribe of Harvard Law School filed a comment on behalf of none other than Peabody Coal opposing EPA's Clean Power Plan on grounds that it violated the so-called and never-enforced "non-delegation doctrine."  Now, this was a serious apostasy.  It's one thing if a few conservative kooks spout crazy theories, but progressive icons must not step out of line.  The forces of orthodoxy enforcement promptly swung into action.  On March 26, 2015, an op-ed appeared in the New York Times by then recent ex-Dean of NYU Law Ricky Revesz, announcing that he and Tribe's Harvard colleagues Jody Freeman and Richard Lazarus had determined that "no one would take [these arguments] seriously" except for their association with Tribe's name.  In other words, shut up Tribe, if you ever again want to be invited to the right cocktail parties.

Which brings me up to the present.  For the past three days I have been attending the annual convention of the Federalist Society in Washington, which is just now wrapping up.  The theme of the convention has been "Administrative Agencies and the Regulatory State."  I hate to break it to Revesz, Freeman, et al., but suddenly lots of people are taking these issues very seriously indeed.

On Thursday night they had the big annual dinner.  The speaker was new Justice Neil Gorsuch.  About 2200 people were in attendance.  Gorsuch talked about the just-published 2017 Supreme Court Foreword from the Harvard Law Review.  He said that the article had coined a new and rather awkward term, "anti-administrativist," to describe the growing movement of those who think that much about the modern administrative state is unconstitutional.  It was clear that Gorsuch was happy to include himself in the category.

Many readers who don't follow constitutional law closely may not understand the significance of the annual Harvard Law Review Supreme Court Foreword.  It is undoubtedly the premier annual law review article.  The Who's Who of the law professoriate compete to get their articles into this spot.  All the Con Law profs read it.  It generally runs around 100 pages, and this year's is no exception.  The author is Gillian Metzger of Columbia Law School.  And the title is "The Administrative State Under Siege."

So, in the course of less than three years, the official position of the cognoscenti has gone from "no one will take this seriously" to "the Administrative State is under siege."  That was rather quick!

Metzger's 100 page article is way too long to quote here.  Suffice it to say that the gist of the article is that having the agencies adopt and also enforce and also adjudicate regulations just has to be constitutional because it's necessary, and the government is just too big and its meddling in our lives is too important to do this any other way.  If Professor Metzger had read her colleague Hamburger's book, she would know that these arguments were well-known to our framers and were explicitly rejected.  In any event, this massive article is a far cry from the condescending dismissal of the Thomas/Hamburger position that was tried in 2015.  They are now putting on the full court defense.

On Friday afternoon at the convention, the big speech was by Don McGahn, the new White House counsel.  McGahn is the main legal advisor to the President, and also leads the forces looking for judicial nominees for President Trump.    Here is a line I wrote down from McGahn's speech:  "Justice Thomas's opinions [on the constitutionality of the administrative state in cases including Association of American Railroads] are the driving intellectual force of the Trump administration."  He discussed a long list of Thomas opinions - concurrences and dissents - where Thomas has laid out in great detail his reasoning on the unconstitutionality of the main aspects of the administrative state.

On Saturday afternoon there was a big panel that featured both Lawson and Hamburger, going through their arguments in detail.  There was no appearance from Justice Thomas this year, but his intellectual contributions permeated the conference.

Just three years ago the progressive legal elite thought that anti-constitutional governance by unaccountable bureaucrats (themselves) was secure for the long term, and that powerful counter arguments of the black justice could be condescendingly dismissed as things that "no one would take seriously."  Now suddenly they are taking this very seriously.  They are right to.

The Climate Alarmists Definitely Don't Believe Their Own Propaganda

Is man-caused climate change a crisis that requires immediate action to reduce and eliminate carbon emissions to save the planet?  Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has a frequently-repeated phrase that he uses on this subject, which is "I'll believe that it's a crisis when the people who claim it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis."

Plenty of people have pointed to extreme examples of the "do as I say, not as I do" syndrome in the climate wars.  Twenty-three thousand people (23,000!!!!) jet off to Bonn to cook up schemes to force others to fly less.  Al Gore has a 10,000+ square foot house that uses more than 20 times the amount of energy as the average American home -- and that's just one of his multiple houses!  And so forth.  But just because these people behave this way does not necessarily mean that they don't believe their own propaganda; it may just mean that they believe that the burden of sacrifice needs to be on you rather than on themselves.  But are there some of their actions that go further and prove that they really know that it's all bullshit?

Because it's hard to get people too worked up over the idea that the temperature might rise a couple of degrees -- or even three! -- the big scare story always tends to revert to sea level rise.  Antarctica is going to melt and we're all going to drown!!  Or something like that.  An article from the Guardian a few days ago (November 3) is typical of the genre:

Hundreds of millions of urban dwellers around the world face their cities being inundated by rising seawaters if latest UN warnings that the world is on course for 3C of global warming come true, according to a Guardian data analysis.

The article comes with plenty of photoshopped pictures of your favorite city deep under water.  Here's one of the South Beach area of Miami:

OK then, undoubtedly the progressive climate-alarm-believing elite would situate themselves well away from the dangerous coastlines at some respectable higher elevation.  Actually, not at all.  The progressive and supposedly climate-alarm-believing elite clusters itself just as close along the coastlines as it can get:  New York, LA, San Francisco, Seattle.  In New York and San Francisco particularly, favored perches of the alarmists line up right along the waterfront.  Tenants of my own office building -- no more than about 30 feet above mean high tide in downtown Manhattan -- include Vox Media.  Or consider the Goldman Sachs headquarters, just a couple of hundred feet inland, and barely elevated abov the sea:

I guess that tells you what the smart money thinks.  Would they really have put a billion dollar building there if they thought there was anything to this sea level rise thing?

Or consider the case of nuclear power.  If carbon emissions really were a huge existential crisis, there is exactly one way to replace the energy we currently get from fossil fuels with energy that is sufficiently abundant and reliable, and reasonable enough in cost, to be a real way to power a modern economy for the entire world.  That is nuclear.  (By the way, I'm not saying that I am a fan of nuclear power.  As far as I'm concerned, we should take what the market provides without government meddling and subsidies, and likely that is almost entirely fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.  But what I am saying is that if climate alarmists think that it is absolutely essential to de-carbonize the world economy, then there is only one way to do that without destroying it, and that is widespread adoption of nuclear power.)

Undoubtedly then, the people who are really concerned with climate crisis should be advocating loudly for expansion of nuclear power to replace fossil fuels.  Funny, but you literally can't find that.  Yes, there are a few examples of lonely individuals out there making this point, but literally no example from any major environmental organization.  For instance:  

Natural Resources Defense Council?  "Expanding nuclear power is not a sound strategy for diversifying America’s energy portfolio and reducing global warming pollution." 

Sierra Club?  "Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer.  The Sierra Club remains unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy."

Greenpeace?  "Greenpeace got its start protesting nuclear weapons testing back in 1971. We’ve been fighting against nuclear weapons and nuclear power ever since."

Union of Concerned Scientists?  "Current security standards are inadequate to defend nuclear plants against terrorist attacks."

You could go on with this as long as you want.

So what's going on here?  There is no way to avoid the conclusion that the biggest promoters of the climate scare don't actually believe their own propaganda.  But there are several other reasonable hypotheses for why they continue.  For the environmental groups, the reasonable hypothesis is that scaremongering and alarmism are the sine qua non of fundraising.  The leaders of the environmental groups themselves know, because they have to, that intermittent renewable energy sources like wind and solar cannot meaningfully de-carbonize the world economy.  But the halting advance of those non-workable energy sources means no imminent solutions and therefore a never-ending crisis that can keep career-long sinecures going.

And then there are the U.N. and its collection of scores of "developing" nations playing on the guilt and gullibility of first world bureaucratic elites.  Consider this article from yesterday's Indian Express, reporting on the ongoing U.N. climate conference in Bonn, title "The COP Ritual: Frustration Shows Up As Bonn Climate Summit Is Deadlocked Again."  What's to "deadlock" over, guys?  I thought we all agreed that emitting CO2 is a crisis and we just all have to get together and eliminate that?  How wrong you are!  Excerpt:

Developing countries are demanding money in addition to the $100 billion developed nations have promised to provide every year from 2020. . . .   Developing countries . . . have been demanding the setting up of mechanisms through which they can access financial help in the event of destruction caused by extreme weather events. This financial help needs to be in addition to the US$ 100 billion that the developed countries are obligated to provide every year from 2020 to help developing countries deal with climate change.  One of the options being discussed is to raise money through taxes on fossil fuel industry. 

Or to put it slightly differently, this was always all about graft, which was mostly to be paid by the United States, until it wised up and walked away.  No wonder things are now "deadlocked"!  Of course, transferring $100 billion a year from the U.S. and a bunch of EU suckers over to some third-world dictators was never going to do anything to "save the planet."  But nobody ever really believed that bullshit anyway.   

Taboos So Powerful That They Completely Prevent Addressing The Issues

The big thing at Yale University this past week has been the issuance of the ultimate definitive report on the secular religion of the academia of today, "diversity, equity and inclusion" or "DEI."  (Funny name for the new religion.  In the old religion, the same word used to mean "of God.")  The Report is titled "Leadership in the Face of Change:  A Report From the Alumni Task Force on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion."  It seems to have been sent as an e-blast to all alumni -- otherwise, why would I have gotten one?

As you probably know, Yale, along with most other elite universities, adopted more or less explicit racial admission quotas way back in the 1960s.  OK, they never explicitly say that these are fixed quotas as far as I can find, but somehow the numbers for various ethnic groups seem to come out right around the same percent every year.  For blacks that figure is about 10%.  And yet, on a campus completely obsessed with issues of race and inclusion, something doesn't seem to be working. For example, there was that huge blow-up at Yale in October 2015, ostensibly over "safe spaces" and Halloween costumes.  But what exactly is the underlying problem?  The DEI Report clearly believes that these are the world's most important issues, but yet it is entirely lacking in specifics as to any causes.  The best they can come up with is a claim that there has been a "lack of focus" -- on the very issues as to which Yale has for decades been demonstrably not only focused, but obsessed:

Yale has long championed its commitment to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion, to building a faculty and student body that respect the multicultural reality of the world around us and a community where everyone feels valued and welcomed. But while these beliefs are laudable, they have not always translated into meaningful and lasting policy and action. In late 2015, students of color and their allies voiced their frustration that inequity on campus and a lack of focus by the administration on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) meant the university was falling far short of its ideals. 

If you somehow think that "lack of focus" explanation is less than plausible, you are not alone.  But in this Report, that nostrum is taken as gospel, and all recommendations for what to do next flow from it.  And the recommendations do flow, and flow, and flow.  Like:  

• Commit to becoming a leader in DEI in the eld of higher education!
• Engage young alumni and alumni of color!
• Promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in all levels of AYA leadership!
• Build a bridge between current and future alumni in tackling DEI issues!
• Build infrastructure to continue to champion and implement DEI work!

Etc., etc., etc.  Funny, but there doesn't seem to be anything in that list that they weren't already doing and talking about endlessly for the last 50 years.  Might there perhaps be a few things about this subject that they are just not mentioning?

To get an answer to that last question, you'll just have to go somewhere that is not under the spell of the current academic taboos.  This Report is completely under the spell of the taboos, such that nothing that anyone might ever find remotely sensitive or discomforting can be mentioned, no matter how obvious the fact and no matter how important it might be to understanding the problem at hand.  

For example, could it be that by implementing a fixed quota of 10% blacks, Yale ends up with large numbers of blacks who find it difficult or impossible to compete academically with their classmates?  That's a question that must not be asked!  In an article in the current City Journal titled "Are We All Unconscious Racists?" , not focused specifically on Yale, Heather Mac Donald collects some relevant statistics on SAT scores:

From 1996 to 2015, the average difference between the mean black score on the math SAT and the mean white score was 0.92 standard deviation, reports a February 2017 Brookings Institution study. The average black score on the math SAT was 428 in 2015; the average white score was 534, and the average Asian score was 598. The racial gaps were particularly great at the tails of the distribution. Among top scorers—those scoring between 750 and 800—60 percent were Asian, 33 percent were white, and 2 percent were black. At the lowest end—scores between 300 and 350—6 percent were Asian, 21 percent were white, and 35 percent were black.

If every elite university wants to get about 10% blacks, and also wants to get all or nearly all of its students from the group scoring between 750 and 800 on the SATs, you can see how this is not going to work.  Somehow, four-fifths or so of the blacks at each institution are going to have to come from lower-performing groups, and therefore be highly likely to underperform.  The obvious consequence of the 10% quota is that the bottom of every class is going to be consist mostly of such candidates.  Once you realize that, is it any wonder that the supposed beneficiaries here turn out to be unhappy about the situation into which they have been thrown?

Our Yale DEI Report gives us no information on the relative SATs of black students admitted to Yale.  Nor does it give us any information on the academic performance while at Yale of the admitted blacks.  Nor does it give us any information on how many blacks major in "hard" subjects like math and science, versus medium subjects like history and English, versus dubious subjects like the "studies" departments.  Nor does it give us any information on the post-graduation success of black graduates in the job marketplace.  Nor can I find such data anywhere else.  Yale has these data.  It's just that the data are considered too sensitive for our delicate eyes.  The taboo on mentioning or discussing such things is complete.

But the problem is that you need to understand the issues before you can address them.  The fifty or so members of the committees who put this Report together were clearly way too "polite" to ask for anything that might make anyone uncomfortable.  OK, so go ahead and believe that what you identify as the problem of "diversity, equity and inclusion" can be solved by "committing to becoming a leader in DEI" and "building bridges between current and future alumni" and such.  Another fifty years of this, and nothing will have changed.

Can Intervention By The Rational Stop A Pseudoscientific Scare Backed By Big Money?

Let's say that a big pseudoscientific scare comes to be backed by big money.  And by big money, I generally mean government money.  Government money, when it gets behind something, will almost always easily be a multiple of whatever private sources can come up with, even from very wealthy people.  As the government money gushes forth, careers and livelihoods come to depend on the continuation of the flow.  At some point the cause becomes nearly impossible to stop.  But can rationality ever prevail over the corruption of government-funded pseudoscience?

Much of the coverage of pseudoscience at this site has focused on two topics, climate change and the high fat diet.  In the case of climate change, we are talking about really, really big government money -- tens of billions of dollars per year, supporting thousands of careers of pseudoscientists.  Even a newly-elected President adamantly opposed to the scam has so far managed to slow down the flow of money only a little.  In the case of the high fat diet -- subject to multi-decadal government-funded attack campaign -- the news that the evidence has disproved any association of fat in the diet with heart disease has still failed to reach my supermarket, where the shelves continue to be filled with products proclaiming themselves "low fat" and "heart healthy."  These things aren't fading away any time soon.

But now consider the case of glyphosate, the key chemical ingredient in Roundup weedkiller.  Glyphosate has been around for a long time (since the 1970s), and is extremely useful in agriculture -- which means that millions have had long-term exposure to it.  Trial lawyers have been drooling for decades over the idea that they might be able to come up with some kind of association of glyphosate with some kind of cancer or other.  They have had the problem that the actual evidence keeps turning up adverse.  For example, there is the U.S. Agricultural Health Study, by which the U.S. government has tracked about 89,000 farmers and their wives since 1993, reporting after 23 years in 2016 that it had found “no association between glyphosate exposure and all cancer incidence or most of the specific cancer subtypes we evaluated, including NHL [non-Hodgkins lymphoma]. . .”  Do you think that would be the end of the matter?

There's more than one place to go to get your government money.  In the matter of glyphosate, an activist named Christopher Portier, who was employed by the Environmental Defense Fund, took his case to the UN, in the form of a part of the World Health Organization called the International Agency for Research on Cancer, or IARC.  In 2014 IARC set up a working group to advise on the risk of glyphosate, and appointed Portier the technical advisor to the group.  In 2015 IARC issued its report.  Conclusion:  Glyphosate was reclassified as a "probably carcinogen":

Limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans for non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The evidence in humans is from studies of exposures, mostly agricultural, in the USA, Canada, and Sweden published since 2001. In addition, there is convincing evidence that glyphosate also can cause cancer in laboratory animals.

The EU promptly moved toward a ban on the stuff, and trial lawyers began to salivate uncontrollably.  But this one got some early and strong push back, starting in April 2016 with this article by Brit Matt Ridley and this one from Jon Entine and David Zaruk.

Now, just a couple of weeks ago, comes an article from Kate Kelland at Reuters, headline "In glyphosate review, WHO cancer agency edited out 'non-carcinogenic' findings."   Get ready:

Reuters found 10 significant changes that were made between the draft chapter on animal studies and the published version of IARC’s glyphosate assessment. In each case, a negative conclusion about glyphosate leading to tumours was either deleted or replaced with a neutral or positive one. . . .  Reuters contacted 16 scientists who served in the IARC expert working group that conducted the weedkiller review to ask them about the edits and deletions. Most did not respond; five said they could not answer questions about the draft; none was willing or able to say who made the changes, or why or when they were made.   

Over at ClimateScepticism, Paul Matthews -- whose interests in pseudoscience also extend beyond the climate scam -- went to check some of the citations in Kelland's work.  Here is an example: 

The IARC report says that a study (JMPR 2006), found that haemangiosarcoma increased significantly in male mice [that were exposed to glyphosate]:

In the second feeding study, there was a significant positive trend in the incidence of haemangiosarcoma in male CD-1 mice.

But if you look at the original study, it says

There were no statistically significant increases in the incidence of any tumours, either benign and malignant, in either sex when compared with the control groups.

Check it out for yourself by searching both documents for that big word.

Matthews' post also contains a series of links to other coverage of this issue, for example this more recent lengthy article from Ridley.  Meanwhile, the EU continues to consider whether to ban glyphosate.

Looks to me like rationality could win this one.  A vote by some European regulatory body or other is likely to take place in December.  On the other hand, the government money backing the attack on glyphosate was chump change compared to the high fat diet, or to the kingpin of them all, the climate change scam.     

Election Roundup: Thank God For The Lazy And Dumb

You have to be well over 40 today to have much personal memory of the Reagan presidency.  But if you do, we will recall the constant denigration of the man from the media and press as lazy and dumb.  He came from rural Illinois, went to a college (Eureka College) that no one important had ever heard of, tended to lay off work around 5 in the afternoon, and knew nothing of sophisticated economics or public policy!  Yuck!  Yet the economy boomed.  (As lazy and dumb as he was, Reagan somehow managed to focus on less regulation and lower taxes.  Maybe that had something to do with it.  Or maybe it was mostly that he just didn't do too much damage.)  Meanwhile, the scintillatingly brilliant Barack Obama (Columbia College!  Harvard Law School!  Constitutional law professor!  Obvious genius!) conducted for eight years what I have called the "War Against The Economy."  Somehow the economy was stuck in the doldrums for the whole time.

Which brings me to the results of the elections yesterday.  In our local area, we got Bill de Blasio re-elected as Mayor.  We also got two other city-wide officials re-elected:  Scott Stringer as Comptroller and Letitia James as something called Public Advocate.  At least those drew opposition from the Republican Party, but the Republicans didn't come close.  The Republican candidate for Mayor, Nicole Malliotakis, got about 28% of the vote.  In Manhattan, a guy named Cyrus Vance (if you're old enough you will recognize the name from that of his dad, Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State) got re-elected as DA with no opposition of any kind.  My local (Greenwich Village) City Councilperson, Corey Johnson, also got no Republican opposition, although there was a candidate from something called the "Eco Justice" party.  

For those last two races, if you didn't want to vote for these guys, one alternative was to leave that line on the ballot blank; but there was also a space at the right to fill in the name of a write-in candidate.  In both cases, I wrote in James Menton.  That's my dog.

De Blasio is about as crazed a progressive as you could find anywhere.  He famously took his honeymoon in Cuba during Castro's heyday, and during the late 80s worked for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua building the socialist utopia.  So four more years of this guy will be a disaster for New York City, right?  The New York Post put it this way last night:

Mayor de Blasio cruised to re-election Tuesday — and now New Yorkers are stuck with him for another four years.

The situation is not good, but it could be a lot worse.  The saving grace of de Blasio is that he takes lazy and dumb to extremes rarely before seen in such exalted political office. He's famous for getting up late, detouring to his gym in deep Brooklyn before heading back toward work, and arriving at his office some time around noon.  And then taking a nap in the afternoon.  If he were smart and energetic, he could do a lot of damage.  As it is, City government cruises along mostly on autopilot.  

De Blasio's campaign steered mostly free of issues.  As far as I could see, the two big things he emphasized were (1) protecting the high income New York taxpayers against federal tax increases, and then (2) socking those same people with a big increase in New York City taxes.  The first theme hit its peak in a big speech given by de Blasio just the day before the election, as reported by the New York Times:

For more than 10 minutes, Mr. de Blasio urged the audience to resist the Republican tax plan, which could do away with federal deductions for state and local taxes and in that way deliver a massive blow to the city and its taxpayers.  “President Trump’s tax plan takes dead aim at New York City,” he said. “It would undermine the success that we have achieved, and despite the hype, it would undermine the middle class in this city and, I would say, all over the country.”

And then there was the second theme, imposing a big tax increase of his own on the exact same people.  As the Post put it at the link above:

The mayor said he would push for a millionaire’s tax to help fix the city’s beleaguered subway system.

So, when the feds propose higher income taxes on New York's high earners, that's "delivering a massive blow to the city and its taxpayers" and "taking dead aim at New York City."  When he does it, it's social justice!  Like I said, this guy is not all that bright.

And what of the big promises from de Blasio's first campaign?  Those would be the promises to address income inequality and solve homelessness.  If you've been paying attention, you will already know that income inequality in New York did not improve at all in the last four years.  The two congressional districts covering the West and East sides of Manhattan -- one containing de Blasio's home and the other containing his office -- remain numbers one and three among the most-income-unequal districts in the country.   Meanwhile homelessness went up substantially even as spending on the issue about doubled.  Hey, it's only about another $1 billion or so per year -- barely a rounding error in the $80+ billion New York City budget.  Needless to say, these issues were not emphasized during the current campaign.

Across the river in New Jersey, it looks like they are not nearly so lucky.  They have elected a new governor from the Democratic Party, by the name of Phil Murphy.  The guy has not previously held elected office, so it remains to be seen, but he gives at least preliminary indications of being both smart and energetic.  Harvard College!  Wharton Business School!  A career at the high levels of Goldman Sachs!  And, he is a committed progressive!  New Jersey, you are in trouble.

I'll give just a couple of examples.  New Jersey's biggest problem is clearly its way-underfunded public employee pensions.  Although some might award the title to Illinois or California, New Jersey is in contention for the worst-funded public pension program, both as a percentage of liabilities and as a per capita burden on the state's taxpayers.  Current governor Christie has tried to negotiate to reduce the obligations, but, failing at that over union intransigence, has refused to fully fund the obligation.  Murphy says that he will fully fund the obligation.  Really, Phil?  According to this chart at Pension360, that will mean increasing contributions to the pension funds by something around $3 billion per year -- this in a state with an annual budget running about $32 billion per year.  In other words, increasing state spending by about 10% per year with no increase in services of any kind to the citizens.  He says he can do it by reducing fees paid to the money managers.  That will be at most a couple of hundred million per year.  Well, simple arithmetic never was the strong suit of these "smart" progressives.  Reality is going to come up and smack this guy in the face around about the first day he takes office.

Oh, his next big issue is making a public pension program available as an option to private employers.  In other words, doubling down on the single most glaring and disastrous failure of the government.

Smart!  Energetic!  Go for it, Phil!

UPDATE, November 9:  Yesterday, to celebrate his victory, Mayor de Blasio held a rare big press conference at City Hall.  The New York Times reports on the event in an article headlined, "Mayor Pledges to Create Fairest Big City in America."   As the headline indicates, he previewed that his big theme for the new term will be to create "fairness" in the City.  What exactly does that mean?  One thing is obvious: he is moving away from the prior themes of income inequality, poverty and homelessness -- things measured by metrics that keep getting worse on his watch -- and onto a new theme totally lacking any such potentially embarrassing metric.  It means whatever he wants it to mean!  

So how did the press conference go?  From the Times:

The news conference played out in much the way that similar events had during his first term. It started late: Mr. de Blasio arrived at City Hall after noon, after a visit to his gym, in Brooklyn. 

That's our Mayor!  I wouldn't say we're exactly safe for the next four years, but if de Blasio holds to form, the damage won't be too terrible.