An Example Of The Destruction In The "Reconciliation" Bill: Public Housing Bailout

/
An Example Of The Destruction In The "Reconciliation" Bill: Public Housing Bailout

  • Even this late in the process, it’s still impossible for a mere member of the public to find out in much detail what all may be buried in the massive “budget reconciliation” bill now making its way through Congress. And the whole thing may yet get stopped, or substantially reduced, by the unexpected good sense of a couple of Democratic Senators (or even just one).

  • Nevertheless, there is enough general information about what is planned by the bill’s proponents to give us some insights into the economic wreckage that could be coming if these people get their way.

  • Among things included within the bruited $3.5 trillion price tag (undoubtedly way understated), you likely are aware of at least some of the largest components. Included are things like large expansions of child tax credits, pre-K education subsidies, childcare subsidies, Obamacare expansion, Medicare expansion, subsidies and tax credits for useless “green” energy projects, and on and on and on.

  • But for today I’m going to focus on just one of the many vast spending expansions, namely the proposed $80 billion for bailing out public housing.

Read More

Can There Be Any Doubt That Hillary Was Behind The Trump/Russia Collusion Hoax?

/
Can There Be Any Doubt That Hillary Was Behind The Trump/Russia Collusion Hoax?

  • I feel that I should comment on the indictment of lawyer Michael Sussman by Special Counsel John Durham while the issue is still current. Very likely you have already read extensively about Durham’s indictment of Sussman, which came down on September 16. Sussman was one of the lawyers, although not the head lawyer, at the firm of Perkins Coie, who worked for the DNC and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign in 2016.

  • This indictment is another instance by which we are learning step by step how the Democratic powers and their press side-kicks, through strict control of a “narrative,” think that they can get a critical mass of the American people to believe literally anything, no matter how preposterous. And to a remarkable extent, they are right.

  • From mid-2016 to mid-2019, we had about three years of non-stop Russia! Russia! Russia! obsession from the Democratic Party and its media adjunct. The stories advancing the narrative numbered in the thousands, and ultimately turned into nothing when Special Counsel Robert Mueller finally issued his report at the end of that period.

  • But how did this whole thing get going and continued for such a long period of time?

Read More

The "Safety Net": The Goal Should Be To Minimize The Number Of People Depending On It

/

  • This post is about a situation where the correct public policy approach should be obvious to everyone, but the perverse incentives of government as usual push in exactly the wrong direction.

  • The issue is how many people should receive benefits, and in what amounts, from government “safety net” programs. From all I can find, there appears to be near-universal support for at least some level of government “safety net” for the poor. After all, no one wants to see fellow citizens starving for lack of food, or dying for lack of medical attention to a curable health condition, and so forth. And can we really count on private charity to fully provide for all the situations of genuine need among the population?

  • Thus the result: Although the details vary greatly, every country with an advanced economy has an extensive system of “need”-based distributions of benefits to those designated as needy. But how many and which people should receive benefits, and how much?

  • In practice, the number of beneficiaries and level of generosity of a social safety net are inherently unstable.

Read More

China Seems Determined To Destroy The Things That Have Made It Relatively Successful

/

  • Is China in the process of “winning” the battle for the future of the world? Certainly, Xi Jinping thinks so. So does everyone else in China if you believe what they say. (But then, nobody in China is allowed to dissent on this point, so in truth you don’t really know what they think and you have no way to find out.).

  • Zillions of statism-loving American journalists and pundits also think that China, through its tightly-state-and-party-controlled crony capitalist model, represents the wave of the future. As a prominent example, there was the unforgettable Tom Friedman of the New York Times back in 2009:

  • “[W]hen [a country] is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can . . . have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”

  • Or, to consider something from a pundit on the right, there was David Goldman of PJ Media writing in March 2021 in a piece titled “Why China Is Winning.” Goldman’s answer, in a word, was “meritocracy.”

  • But in several pieces over the years, I have offered a different perspective

Read More

Renewable Energy Crunch Comes To The UK

/
Renewable Energy Crunch Comes To The UK

  • Anybody who looks with a critical eye at the madcap push toward increasing amounts of intermittent renewable electricity generation in the U.S. and Europe quickly realizes that eventually this has to hit a wall. But when will the crunch come?

  • Theoretically, with 100% fossil fuel backup you can keep an electricity system of majority renewables functioning indefinitely, albeit with consumers bearing the unnecessary costs of two fully redundant generating systems. But then politicians pledge to reduce and then eliminate the fossil fuel backup, and by dates that are rapidly approaching. Backup plants get closed and decommissioned. For how much longer can this really keep going?

  • I have written about this subject several times (for example here in June 2020, and here in July 2021); but, not wanting to sound like the boy who cried wolf, I don’t just keep harping on it every day. Better to wait for the inevitable crunch to actually hit somewhere.

  • In just the past few days, an early version of the crunch has begun to hit the UK

Read More

Checking In With The "Smart" People At Harvard

/
Checking In With The "Smart" People At Harvard

  • Are the “smart” people really very smart? That is, do the people who score at the top on standardized tests and then turn up at the fancy universities actually have a superior level of reasoning and rationality that they can apply to solving the problems of the world? Or are they instead just trapped in the same sorts of groupthink and mass irrationality as everyone else?

  • Well, let’s consider the latest information coming out of Harvard University.

  • Harvard — you can’t get any “smarter” than that. This is America’s premier institution of higher learning. You don’t get to go there unless you are at the very top of the top of intelligence. And the people who run the place have to be even smarter still. If you want to see what “smart” really is, this is where to look.

  • About a week ago Harvard President Larry Bacow decided it was time to send out one of those occasional missives addressed to all “Members of the Harvard Community.”

Read More