March 13, 2020

New York's Self-Inflicted Green Energy Crunch, Temporarily Postponed

March 13, 2020/ Francis Menton

The fundamental nature of the “green energy” game is that politicians make ridiculous and impossible promises without any idea how the promises will be fulfilled. Since the promises are ridiculous and impossible, sooner or later the crunch will hit — but how?
Maybe the promised goals will be missed by wide margins; or maybe the price of energy to the people will multiply by some huge factor like 10 or 20; or maybe the people will be denied needed energy altogether; or it could be some combination of all three. But sooner or later, it will happen.
Here’s what we don’t know: When will the crunch hit? And where will it hit first?
You can’t go too far wrong betting on New York as the first place for the crunch to hit. . . .

March 11, 2020

Joe Biden? -- You Must Be Kidding

March 11, 2020/ Francis Menton

Back in October, after looking some into the Hunter Biden/Burisma situation, and watching a few clips of Joe Biden on the campaign trail, I offered the following insightful prognostication:
I’m sorry to say that I don’t think Joe Biden is going to last much longer in this presidential contest.
That shows you what I know about these things.
The particular context there was a couple of posts I had just researched and written on the Ukraine affair, titled “The Bidens: Stone Cold Crooked” and “The Bidens: Stone Cold Crooked (2).” My conclusion in the two posts was that there was a lay-down case of corruption against Joe Biden in the Burisma situation, and I couldn’t even see what his defense would be. Yes, Joe could try saying “Sure I got my son $3 million in Ukraine by leveraging foreign aid money put up by U.S. taxpayers, but my motives were pure because I was also getting a corrupt prosecutor fired.” But why would or should anyone buy that line, when Joe could have told his son to get off the board before getting the prosecutor fired? . . .

March 08, 2020

March 08, 2020/ Francis Menton

You could find yourself asking that question about the pile of newsprint that resembles the New York Times more or less any day; but the rag with the New York Times banner on top that got delivered to me yesterday really leaves me scratching my head.
Is this real, or did someone swipe the actual paper out of my mail slot early in the morning and substitute the parody edition? Judging from the physical item before me, I would go with parody.
But then I discover that all of the dubious articles can be found on the nytimes.com website. Could the devious parodists have hacked the website as well?
Let’s consider first the section of the paper headed “New York.”

March 05, 2020

March 05, 2020/ Francis Menton

If you haven’t heard of Eric Greitens, it’s either because you don’t live in Missouri or you haven’t been paying attention to the Manhattan Contrarian posts on politicized phony prosecutions. Prior MC posts dealing with Mr. Greitens’s situation appeared first on April 12, 2018, and then a couple of weeks ago on February 18, 2020. Today there is a piece by Christine Dolan and John Solomon at Just the News, with new facts that are truly unbelievable.
The subject of the April 2018 post was a collection of weak and/or completely phony prosecutions brought by Democratic prosecutors against Republican officeholders in politically swing situations, where the investigation or potential conviction had a likelihood to drive the Republican from office and thereby potentially move significant power to the Democrats.

I was clear to say in that post, and I repeat here, that I do not contend that Republicans are pure on this issue; however, despite considerable looking, I have not been able to come up with a single example of a comparable situation with potential to swing political power from one party to the other where it was a Republican prosecutor pursuing a Democratic officeholder.
But let’s get to Greitens. . . .

March 04, 2020

March 04, 2020/ Francis Menton

Before leaving my current round of posts on New York City real estate issues, it occurs to me to make some fun of one of the funniest policy issues in that arena, namely the question of “fairness” of the property tax system.
New York has a crazy patchwork of laws and rules for who pays how much property tax. Those laws and rules have arisen from a long history of the usual attempts to create perfect fairness and justice in the system.
For today’s purposes, here’s what’s important: When trying to create a perfectly “fair” property tax system, there are two main goals which are, unfortunately, completely inconsistent. Goal one is that in a “fair” system, properties of equal value “should” be taxed at equal amounts. Really, who could disagree with that? But goal number two is that in a “fair” system, people of modest incomes “should” not be driven from their homes by rapidly accelerating property tax bills.
If you think about these two”fairness” goals for a moment, you will quickly realize that they cannot both be achieved at the same time. The more you strive to achieve one of them, the farther you get from the other. . . . .

March 02, 2020

March 02, 2020/ Francis Menton

Here in Manhattan, it is an article of unshakable religious faith that conjuring “affordable housing” into existence, through some magic recipe of taxpayer subsidies and coercion, is a fundamental responsibility of government.
And then you have the tiny handful of dissenters, like myself.
It was way back in January 2013 that I called government-coerced “affordable housing” the “most expensive possible way to help the smallest number of people.” A few months after that (in September 2013) I officially nominated “affordable housing” in Manhattan as “the worst possible public policy.”
In the intervening seven or so years, it has only become more and more obvious that I was right. . . . Is anyone starting to get the picture?
The answer is no.