June 10, 2025

Perhaps Rube Goldberg Can Fix The Woes Of the New York City Housing Authority

June 10, 2025/ Francis Menton

Over the years I have returned repeatedly to the subject of the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA.
Begun with great optimism prior to World War II, NYCHA expanded rapidly in the 1960s and 70s, until it housed around 500,000 people. The economic model was always pure unmodified socialism — the government owns everything, rents are tied to income (“to each according to his needs”), and any shortfalls in paying costs fall on the taxpayers. But after all, we will save oodles of money because there will be no profits for the evil developers. For a few of my prior posts, see here, here and here
The socialist economic model always lacked any mechanism to renew the capital investment in the buildings as they aged. After 2000, buildings were turning 30, 40 and even 50 years old.
Beginning in the 2010s, NYCHA started regularly announcing large sums of money that it claimed it needed urgently for major repairs to these buildings.

June 07, 2025

Defund The National Academy of Sciences!

June 07, 2025/ Francis Menton

Here’s an article you might find interesting from Science magazine on June 2. The headline is “National Academies, staggering from Trump cuts, on brink of dramatic downsizing.”
Science magazine is one of those formerly-prestigious “peer-reviewed” journals where for many decades you just had to get your research published in order to become someone in a scientific field. Somewhere along the way, Science turned from scientific inquiry to orthodoxy enforcement.
The National Academy of Sciences (“NAS,” and along with two fellow Academies of Engineering and Medicine sometimes called “NASEM”), meanwhile, is a federally-chartered but supposedly private entity set up to give “independent” scientific advice to the government. The Academies raise meaningful amounts of private funds, but in the most recent reported year (2023) got the substantial majority of their funding (over $200 million) via contracts from the feds. (See Treasurer’s Statement here.). As far as I can determine, the main business of the National Academies, and particularly of the NAS, is also orthodoxy enforcement.
The latest, from the June 2 Science article, is that the National Academy of Sciences “is navigating a tense situation as the organization faces unprecedented contract losses and layoffs.” The President of the NAS is named Marcia McNutt.

June 04, 2025

June 04, 2025/ Francis Menton

New York State has officially ordained the destruction of its electricity system and its economy with a mad dash to energy utopia, as prescribed by a 2019 statute called the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (Climate Act). The Climate Act mandates a completely unachievable 70% of electricity generation from “renewables” by 2030, with even more draconian mandates following in quick succession thereafter.
New York City has piled on with its own fantasy energy statute called Local Law 97, mandating, among other things, forced conversion to electric heat by 2030 of most residential buildings over 25,000 square feet.
A so-called “Scoping Plan” on how to do all this, issued by the State in 2022, contains no bona fide feasibility analysis, and equally no bona fide cost analysis.
Everybody with over a sixth-grade education who has taken any time to look at this knows that it can’t possibly work. The only question is how much destruction will befall us before the whole thing crashes to the ground.
Can anyone save New York from the coming self-inflicted climate and energy disaster?

June 02, 2025

June 02, 2025/ Francis Menton

Yesterday in Boulder, Colorado, a perpetrator sprayed a flammable liquid on a group of mostly elderly Jews protesting the continued holding of hostages in Gaza. Then he threw Molotov cocktails to set several of the demonstrators on fire. The New York Post reports here that 8 were injured, ranging in age from 52 to 88 years old.
Police arrested a man named named Mohamed Sabry Soliman, who was caught on video committing the acts. Oh, and also shouting slogans, including “They are killers! How many children you killed?” and “End Zionists.”
It quickly emerged that Soliman was an Egyptian illegally in the country. He had originally entered legally in 2022 on a tourist visa, but then overstayed. In 2023 he was granted a permit to work in the U.S. by the Biden administration. That expired in March 2025, after which he stayed on illegally.
Which raises the question, why was Soliman in the country in the first place?

May 30, 2025

May 30, 2025/ Francis Menton

In my last post a couple of days ago (May 28), I was critical of the blizzard of injunctions issued by the courts against seemingly every policy change that President Trump seeks to implement. I went so far as to call this the “opposite of democracy.”
But I also noted that there are instances where judicial restraints on the executive are legitimate, most notably where the statute on which the President relies to implement a sweeping policy does not in fact grant him the authority he claims. Thus, on finding a lack of grant of authority in the statutes cited, the Supreme Court had reined in President Biden when he sought to implement policies forgiving student loans and banning fossil fuel power plants.
I ended that article by asking whether President Trump’s actions with regard to imposition of tariffs may fall into the same category of overreach as Biden’s student loan and power plant gambits. I also noted that multiple law suits had already been brought challenging the legal basis for the tariffs unilaterally imposed by the President.

May 28, 2025

May 28, 2025/ Francis Menton

Now more than four months into President Trump’s second term, there have been dozens of District Court injunctions blocking policies that the new administration has sought to implement.
Deportations of gang members illegally in the U.S. back to El Salvador? Enjoined! Mass firings at USAID? Enjoined! Other mass firings at 22 other agencies and departments? Enjoined! Cancellation of funding of certain grants for Harvard? Enjoined! Ending of eligibility for Harvard to participate in foreign student visa program? Enjoined! Termination of federal funding for public schools maintaining DEI programs? Enjoined! Termination of security clearances for certain prominent law firms? Enjoined! And these are just examples among many more.
It seems that whatever new policy President Trump tries to implement, it will be enjoined within days by some left wing federal judge.
But before you get too outraged about the courts (and Democrat-appointed judges) blocking President Trump’s every move, let’s not forget about a few constraints that the courts imposed on prior President Biden.