The Boundless Progressive Faith That More Money Will Solve The Problem This Time

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By now you very likely know that the voters of San Francisco have just approved a new business tax designed to raise $300 million per year to finally deliver the coup de grace to the problem of homelessness. In approving this measure, the San Franciscans were undeterred by the abject failure of places like New York, Los Angeles and Seattle to reduce “homelessness,” let alone eliminate it, through comparable massive spending increases. Indeed, all of those places have seen “homelessness” soar right along with the spending supposedly designed to have the opposite effect.

Readers here know well about the pervasive issue of government spending worsening the social problems it was supposedly going to fix. See, e.g., “poverty.” There are enough examples out there to fill this blog and many others. For today, let’s take a look at the fascinating subject of public schools, with a focus on those here in New York City.

Perhaps you recall the wave of teachers’ strikes that swept through Republican-led states earlier this year, including West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky. The claim was that the schools needed additional “resources” to properly educate the kids. In each case the legislators backed down and upped the spending. Of course, most of the money went to the teachers to continue doing exactly what they were doing before (although somewhat higher pay was not necessarily inappropriate in these states). We’ll have to wait to see whether any evidence emerges that the spending increases lead to improved educational results.

But in the meantime, it should be extremely enlightening to see whether the highest spending states achieve superior results in return for their efforts. . . .

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What Does It Mean That There Is "No Evidence" To Support An Accusation?

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A frequent assertion with respect to the accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was that there was “no evidence” to support them. But this assertion was never right. Sworn testimony of an accuser is evidence. That evidence might not be credible without at least some corroboration, but it is still evidence. Being a trial lawyer by trade, I know a thing or two about this subject.

A more accurate statement in the context of the Kavanaugh accusations would have been that there was no “corroborating evidence.” Accusations of rape or sexual assault, at least ones made reasonably contemporaneous with the conduct complained of, typically come with substantial corroborating evidence. First and foremost would be DNA of the accused retrieved from the accuser. Other examples might be bruises or other injuries to the accuser; a crime scene matching the accuser’s version of the events; witnesses who can place the accused at the scene even if they didn’t witness any wrongdoing; and so forth. Even in the case of a thirty-year-old accusation, an accuser with a credible claim could potentially come up with at least some material corroborating evidence, such as a definitive location for the event that matches her description of what occurred, or a corroborating witness who could say that she was there and why she was there or how she got there or how she got home.

Now there are accusations of vote fraud in Florida, particularly involving Broward and Palm Beach Counties. A frequent response has been that there is “no evidence” of vote fraud. For example, at Vox: “There’s no evidence of voter fraud in Florida.”; or at the Guardian: “State elections and law enforcement officials say they have seen no evidence suggesting such allegations [of vote fraud] are true.”; or at NPR: “As Florida Races Narrow, Trump And Scott Spread Claims Of Fraud Without Evidence.”

Well, is there anything that counts as “evidence” of vote fraud occurring in Broward (or Palm Beach) Counties? Definitely. How about these things: . . .

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A Few Comments On The Election

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You have undoubtedly read much already about the election results. I’ll stick to just a few points you may not have seen, starting with some from my own home jurisdiction.

  • If you think that voting where you live can be demoralizing, imagine being a voter in Manhattan and, even worse, Greenwich Village.

  • We had five judgeships up for election (in New York, judges at the trial court level are elected). Not a single one drew opposition from any political party, most particularly the Republicans. The one and only option was the Democrat. I’m offended by voting for somebody who is running unopposed in a supposedly democratic election, so I did not cast a vote for any of these people. After I left, I realized that I should have done what I did last time, which was to write in the name of my dog. My daughter wrote in the name of her one month old son.

  • Also not drawing an opponent from the Republican Party were our incumbent State Senator and State Assemblyperson. Like the judicial candidates, our State Senator had no opposition of any kind.

  • In a bizarre twist, our State Assemblyperson, one Deborah Glick, did draw an opponent, but not a Republican. The opponent was someone you may have heard of, the actress Cynthia Nixon, running on the ballot line of one of our phony New York political parties called the “Working Families Party” (basically a tool of the unions that represent the municipal workforce). Now, how does this come about? The answer is, it comes about through the legal arcana of New York ballot access rules. Nixon — who, when not playing some character on Sex and the City, has had a gig as spokesperson for the New York City teachers union and/or one of its surrogates — early on was given the “Working Families” ballot line in the gubernatorial race. Then Nixon also ran against incumbent Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic Party primary. Cuomo beat her. Then Cuomo wanted to get her out of the race for governor, so she wouldn’t draw votes away from him, just in case the Republican candidate for governor put up a real fight and the governor’s race got tight. Nixon was willing to play along, but it turns out that it’s not so easy to get out of a line on a New York ballot once you have been officially nominated by some party. After some agonizing, the WFP and Nixon decided that the only option that would work legally would be for them to nominate Nixon for some other race in the same election. So where could they put her where she wouldn’t cause too much trouble? The chosen race was the race for the Greenwich Village State Assembly seat. And thus we had Nixon running on the WFP line in our district as Glick’s opponent. On Monday, the day before the election, I got a robocall from the recorded voice of Nixon, urging me to vote for Glick. I voted for Nixon just to be ornery. Nixon got about 18% of the vote.

  • Our Congressional district, NY-10, is represented by one of the most thoroughly embarrassing people in the Congress, 71-year-old Jerrold Nadler. He ran again, this time for his 14th term. Sometimes, Nadler also draws no opponent; but this time the Republicans put up an energetic young woman named Naomi Levin. Ms. Levin put some real effort into raising some money, putting together an organization, and getting out there every day to campaign. For her efforts, she got about 18% of the vote. Since the Democrats allocate committee chairmanships strictly by seniority, Nadler looks to be in line to be the next head of the House Judiciary Committee. At least he doesn’t have any say in confirming judges; but he would be in charge of initiating impeachment proceedings against the President, or maybe Judge Kavanaugh, should the Democrats decide to go that route. If you want some good entertainment for this afternoon, read this piece at The Federalist yesterday by Mollie Hemingway, reporting on a series of phone calls had by Nadler yesterday while traveling on the Acela train from New York to Washington. Apparently, somebody sitting next to Nadler took the opportunity to record him talking on his cell phone, and passed the information on to Hemingway. Basically, Nadler was discussing strategy for going “all-in” on Russia (really!), and for the upcoming impeachment investigations of Trump and Kavanaugh. Bring it on! In more than 25 years in Congress, Nadler has never accomplished a single thing of note, unless you count voting for every proposed tax increase and spending increase, and every proposed new “program,” as some kind of accomplishment. Our district is of the wealthiest in the country, has the greatest suite of progressive policies and handouts of any place in the country, and, to show for all of that, has the highest measured income inequality of all 435 Congressional districts. You would think that at some point there would be some embarrassment, but I doubt that one voter in 100 in our district knows these facts.

  • There were state-wide races for Governor, Attorney General, and Comptroller. The Democrats ran embarrassing lightweights for Comptroller and Attorney General, and Andrew Cuomo for his third-term as Governor. The Republicans put up quality candidates for all of these races, but none of them got as much as 40% of the vote.

  • In the U.S. Senate race, Kirsten Gillibrand got about two-thirds of the vote against a Republican opponent named Chele Farley. I guess the rest of you guys out there are now going to have to deal with listening to this airhead Gillibrand pretending to run for President for the next couple of years.

  • In one of the great anomalies of national politics, the Republicans have been holding on to a slight majority of a few seats, or even just one seat, in the New York State Senate, for many years. This is the year in which the Democrats finally flipped at least six seats (and possibly a few more) to take strong control of the body. The State Senate under Republican control has served as a bulwark against many terrible public policies which the Democrat-controlled Assembly has long been advancing. Principal among these have been various proposed tax increases and, even worse, a re-institution of strong universal rent controls that have otherwise been diminishing since some Republican-led reforms in the 1990s. Are Democrats really going to go all in to destroy New York’s housing market with a new round of rent controls? I would hope that they have enough grown-ups around at this point to stop that, but you really can’t go too far wrong betting on their abject stupidity.

  • Moving away from my own home turf, I note that indicted Congressman Chris Collins from far upstate (his heavily Republican district is between Rochester and Buffalo) seems to have narrowly won his race. I’m not in favor of electing crooks, but it was probably the right thing for Collins to stay in the race. First of all, it’s just an indictment — not clear that he did anything wrong; and further, if he had just dropped out, the seat would have gone to the Democrat by default. Now, he can resign, and there will be a special election, which with high likelihood will go to the Republican in this very red district.

  • To be distinguished from the Collins situation is that of Senator Bob Menendez, from just across the river in New Jersey. Menendez has been thoroughly established as a crook, and unanimously excoriated by the Senate Ethics Committee, including its Democratic members. Menendez won by about 10 points. As far as I know, he plans to serve out the new six year term, and maybe even run yet again. New Jersey deserves him.

  • And don’t forget Proposition C on the ballot in the city of San Francisco. That’s the one that will establish a new business tax to fund $300 million per year for additional initiatives and services to reduce homelessness. This Proposition was the subject of my post on October 26. I promise to check back in a year or so to see if homelessness has actually been reduced in San Francisco. The chances of that are about zero, but I will be the first to congratulate them if they succeed.

The Out-of-Control NY Attorney General's Office Takes on ExxonMobil

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Law enforcement is serious business.  We give prosecutors tremendous powers over the citizenry, including the powers to put people in jail and to impose enormous fines on businesses; and then we trust them to act with the highest levels of honesty and integrity and discretion to protect us from the bad guys while also upholding our civil rights.  Or at least, that is how you might think it ought to work.  

Then there is the New York Attorney General’s office.  Twenty years ago, that office began a long and accelerating downward spiral when Eliot Spitzer won the head job.  With Spitzer, bona fide law enforcement promptly took a back seat to pursuit of a new headline every day, preferably to be obtained by shaking down some disfavored financial institution under New York’s notorious Martin Act, which under vague language can be argued to authorize prosecution of every financial unfairness as criminal “fraud.”  After achieving multiple hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements from major institutions, Spitzer went on to become Governor, before resigning in disgrace in a prostitution scandal.  His success in the Martin Act shakedown game was not lost on his successors.

In 2011 the Attorney General job was won by Eric Schneiderman, another wealthy Manhattanite and a darling of the progressive left.  Schneiderman promptly upped the Martin Act shakedown game to become the primary focus of his office, devoting dozens of staffers to investigations of essentially every financial institution doing business in New York. Most of these investigations were for alleged misrepresentations to investors relating to the financial crisis that was already three years in the rearview mirror when Schneiderman assumed office, and involved wrongdoing, if any, that had already been thoroughly investigated and prosecuted (or not) by federal authorities.  So why waste precious law enforcement resources on such an effort?  Clearly, Schneiderman had other goals in mind, notably including not only headlines, but also protection money (“settlement”) payments from his targets, aggregating in the billions, that went not to the supposed investor victims of the alleged wrongdoing, but rather into slush funds controlled by Schneiderman himself that could be passed out to his progressive colleagues and supporters.

And now, why limit the Martin Act shakedown game to just financial institutions? In 2015, Schneiderman’s sights landed on the next obvious and perfect corporate target, Exxon Mobil --  home of tens of billions of dollars in annual cash flow ripe to be plundered, besides being vulnerable to having the catchphrase “climate change” attached to its name by reason of involvement in the oil business. . . .

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Two Alternative Approaches To Fundamental Economic Policy. Which One Works?

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The mid-term elections are upon us. Time to recognize once again that there are two alternative approaches to fundamental economic policy, and that one works while the other does not. For most of my life, both political parties opted to advance the approach that does not work. Today, that is much less true.

There can be many details and nuances to economic policy, but here I am talking only about the one big overriding fundamental issue, namely, which is better for economic success and prosperity: higher taxes and bigger government, or lower taxes and smaller government? They are opposites, and they can’t both be right. Today, the Republicans, and President Trump, whatever else you might think about him, are (mostly) advocates for lower taxes and smaller government. The Democrats are universally advocates for higher taxes and bigger government, although not all of them go to the same levels of extremism.

We’ve just been through a big real-world experiment to test the two competing theories. . . .

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No, Democrats Have Not Been "Forced" Into Complicity With Corruption

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You really have to feel sorry for the Democratic Party and its New Jersey supporters. If you believe today’s New York Times, they have been “forced” into complicity with some rather thoroughly-exposed and over-the-top political corruption. Now, how exactly does that work? Is somebody holding a gun to their heads? Of course not. The only issue here is that the Times — and apparently the national and local Democratic Party hierarchies as well — regard a reliable vote in the Senate for “our side” to be far more important than seeing the defeat even of a politician who has been proven to be on the take and corrupt to the core. How’s that for an uplifting political value system?

The article in today’s Times has the headline “Democrats in an All-Hands-on-Deck Scramble to Save Menendez in New Jersey.” The authors are Nick Corasanti and Jonathan Martin.

This involves the re-election campaign of incumbent Democratic New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez. Although the RealClearPolitics poll average today has Menendez ahead by 6.5 points, Republican candidate Bob Hugin has recently been claiming to have surged to a lead in his “internal polls.” Not sure that I believe those internal polls (pollsters have a way of telling client candidates what they want to hear), but the Pravda piece indicates that internal polls by the Democrats may be showing close to the same thing. (“In Washington, Democrats grew increasingly alarmed when in mid-October their own internal polling indicated that Mr. Menendez’s lead had fallen to only two points.”)

So what has been the reaction? . . .

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