February 03, 2020

More Government Spending Does Not Buy Results In Education Or Poverty Reduction

February 03, 2020/ Francis Menton

Here in New York, we love to feel good about ourselves for our compassion for the less well off. Yes, we pay higher taxes than they do in other places, but for that we get a much higher level of social services to lift up the poor and the downtrodden. Or at least, that’s the narrative.
I first covered this subject back in the very early days of this blog, on November 13, 2012, in a post titled “Why New York City Is A High Tax Jurisdiction.” That post pointed out that in fact the differential in public spending (and therefore taxes) between New York City and other jurisdictions could be found almost entirely in three things, none of which provided any measurable improvements in life quality to the poor and the downtrodden.
Somehow, in seven plus intervening years, almost no one seems to be paying attention to how New York just throws money away to achieve worse results than those achieved elsewhere for half the money. But over the weekend, the New York Post made an exception, publishing an op-ed by a guy named Ryan Fazio titled “NY and CA spend billions more in taxes than TX and FL — and get worse results.” Fazio updates many of the statistics that I had collected for the 2012 post.
Let’s focus on spending for K-12 education and for anti-poverty programs.

January 30, 2020

Two Reasons Why Continuing A Little With Impeachment Might Not Be Such A Bad Thing

January 30, 2020/ Francis Menton

As of this writing it looks like the impeachment farce in the Senate may end as early as tomorrow. The Democrats’ “more witnesses” gambit appears to be fizzling out — although that is not a certainty until the vote is taken. I suppose that ending this thing is for the better.
However, I do have a couple of reasons why having it continue for at least a little while longer may not be so bad.
The first is that there is an obvious witness for the President’s side to call, someone whose testimony could be the first real “bombshell” in this whole matter. No, it is not Joe or Hunter Biden.
Who is the person that the President can call who is most analogous to these star witnesses for the Democrats? . . .

January 28, 2020

January 28, 2020/ Francis Menton

Who runs the federal government of the United States? Is it the elected President and members of Congress? Or is it a permanent bureaucracy committed to expansion of its own size and power, together with a critical mass (potentially well less than a majority) of sympathetic federal judges who can be called upon as necessary to strike down any disfavored policy initiative from the elected branches?
Or, in an even more cynical formulation, is it that the elected officeholders can run policy when they are Democrats, but when Republicans are elected the bureaucrats get to rule with the assistance of select members of the judiciary?
To view the dynamics of this process at work, there is perhaps no more striking example than what has occurred on the question of the extent to which the U.S. can exclude immigrants on the ground that they are likely to become “public charges.”
We last visited this subject back in October 2019, in a post titled “Maneuvering To Force The U.S. To Accept Immigrants Who Will Become Public Charges.” This post is a sequel to that one. . . .

January 26, 2020

January 26, 2020/ Francis Menton

It was back in July 2017 that we last visited the subject of the federal criminal prosecution for corruption against former New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. The occasion was the reversal at that time by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals of Silver’s conviction on all seven of the counts on which he had been found guilty.
Did that mean that Shelly was off the hook? Not so fast. The prosecutors elected to re-try Silver on all seven counts, subject to more restrictive jury instructions. In May 2018 Silver was again convicted on all seven counts. His appeal of the new conviction reached decision in the Second Circuit last Tuesday, January 21. This time, the court again vacated the conviction as to three of the counts, but affirmed on the other four. Here is a link to the Second Circuit’s January 21 Opinion.
This Opinion represents another step in the ongoing struggle of the courts to define criminal public corruption in a way that makes it possible to distinguish the criminal from the non-criminal politicians. That task turns out to be harder than you might expect.
This Opinion gives us the occasion to reflect once again, not only on the inherent corruption of the entire political sphere, but also on the question of where the conduct of Joe and Hunter Biden might come out under the most recently announced legal test. . . .

January 22, 2020

January 22, 2020/ Francis Menton

I’m old enough to remember the press coverage of Ronald Reagan as President. It was not as uniformly and aggressively hostile as the current coverage of President Trump, but close. The gist was that this guy was a bumbling fool who didn’t understand anything about either foreign or domestic policy.
The Soviet Union collapsed, and the economy soared.
I thought that Reagan was quite intelligent; but another possibility is that you don’t need to be all that intelligent to do a good job as President. All you need to do is to replace the progressive program of utopian fantasies and wishful thinking with a small dose of reality and common sense.
The alternative view is that the success of any action by Trump that deviates from the consensus of the smart people can only be due to dumb luck. For an exposition of that view, check out this piece by Tom McTague in the Atlantic on January 17 . . . .

January 18, 2020

January 18, 2020/ Francis Menton

Among the many important initiatives of this website has been holding the competition for the Award for “Stupidest Litigation in the Country.”
To many readers, the very first nominee for the Stupidest Litigation Award has always been the clear leading contender to win it. That nomination, made in December 2017, went to the litigation titled Kelsey Cascadia Rose Juliana v. United States. This is the case where a group of adolescents in the Pacific Northwest have sought an injunction to require the federal government to decree an end to all use of fossil fuels, in order to “save the planet.” Really, it’s hard to top that one for Stupid.
But just because a particular litigation is the leading contender for the Stupidest Litigation Award does not mean that no judge will grant victory to the plaintiffs. After all, the whole idea behind each of these Stupid Litigations is to offer some judge a thinly-veiled rationale to become a hero in the progressive movement by taking self-government away from the people and turning control over to the bureaucrats and experts.
Which is why it is significant that yesterday, a three-judge panel of the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Juliana case dismissed.