For The Left, Nothing Succeeds Like Failure

A couple of weeks ago, law professor Jonathan Turley devoted one of his columns to this seeming anomaly — that the Left somehow gains from its own failures. The headline of his column was “The worse it gets, the better it is: American leftism is thriving on its own failures.”

The theme of the piece is that the failure of a policy of the Left is never admitted to be a failure, but rather is only seen as a reason that the taxpayers haven’t yet devoted sufficient resources to the issue, and therefore the answer is to double down and spend yet more money on the failed policy. Turley provides several examples of the phenomenon, in the areas of immigration, health care, public education and housing. My reaction is, I’m glad that someone besides myself is finally noticing. However, Turley has barely scratched the surface, and indeed omits to mention some of the very biggest examples.

I don’t mean to fault Turley for the examples he has selected, which are good ones. But really, how about the poverty scam? This one is not a policy failure of mere billions of dollars, or even hundreds of billions; it now runs into the trillions per year. I have covered this subject repeatedly over the years. (Two examples are here and here.). The gist is that the government spends these huge sums — now over $2 trillion per year if you include federal, state, and local spending — supposedly to fight and cure poverty, and yet somehow the measured rate of poverty never goes down significantly. And then the persistence of poverty is used as the argument why the spending must be increased yet again in the next cycle. From my October 2018 piece at the link:

[D]espite spending a large multiple of what ought to be sufficient to end measured “poverty” once and for all, instead the government publishes poverty statistics that indicate that poverty has not decreased at all. Where did all the money go?

In the case of the poverty scam, there is a particular trick used by advocates, which is that increased funding provided by the taxpayers mostly comes in the form of “in-kind” distributions or tax benefits (e.g., food stamps, housing vouchers, Medicaid, EITC, etc.) which then are specifically omitted from the calculation of the poverty statistics. Despite being handed distributions worth tens of thousands of dollars each, the poor are still poor, and always will be!

And then there is the vast area of failed housing policy. Turley covers one aspect, which is the plan of Mayor Mamdani of New York to further tighten New York’s failed and counter-productive rent regulation regime:

With Mamdani promising rent controls, landlords are predictably raising rents. Rent costs have reached their highest level ever under Mamdani, with the average apartment now costing $4,965 per month — and $6,655 per month in Manhattan. So Mamdani can now push for even more significant regulations and rent controls by pointing to the rise in housing costs in an endless loop. As rent control inevitably constrains supply and prices for market-rate apartments skyrocket, he can call for even greater controls.

All of that is valid. But it only scratches the surface of how the Left has parlayed failed housing policy into ever larger and larger taxpayer funding that will not and can not ever solve the perceived problem. As a couple of additional examples, consider first my October 2018 piece titled “At NYCHA, Spectacular Failure — Or Is It Spectacular Success?” That piece reported on the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) getting sued by the Feds for failure to provide “decent, safe and sanitary” conditions to the residents of its projects, Exhibit A being pervasive presence of lead-based paint. No sooner did the Feds file a complaint than NYCHA settled the case, with the settlement providing that New York City taxpayers would put up an additional $4 billion to remedy the conditions identified in this particular suit. All of the money would be going, of course, to and through the very bureaucracy that had just committed the failure. More generally, NYCHA has in recent years come out demanding amounts in the range of $80 billion in total to essentially provide full capital renewal for its approximately 170,000 apartments. The size of the demand would seem to indicate that NYCHA has completely defaulted over decades in keeping its main capital systems (like windows, heat systems, roofs, plumbing, electrical) in good condition. Obviously, they now need an $80 billion reward for their failure.

And second in the housing category, consider the conduct of the “homelessness” lobby. The title of my September 2, 2023 piece was “The Whole Idea Behind Homeless Advocacy Is To Not Solve The Problem.” That piece focused particularly on San Francisco, where endless additions to annual funding budgets were only accompanied by increases in the number of people reported in the “homeless” category. (The same is of course true in all the big blue cities, whether it be New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, or wherever.) In my 2023 piece, I quoted from someone named Sanjana Friedman, writing in Pirate Wires, who had finally noticed:

The hardest thing you’ll ever have to comprehend in terms of San Francisco’s government is the city’s leaders aren’t incompetent. This is what they want. . . . Once acquainted with the basic facts of the crisis, including the incredible sum of money dedicated to solving the problem, the average San Franciscan concludes the city must be run by morons. . . . Even with supportive services, the numbers don’t add up. This is because the average person assumes the small cabal of activists who run the city’s bloated homeless industrial complex want to temporarily shelter and rehabilitate the homeless. They do not.

What they want is still more homelessness. More homelessness means bigger budgets, bigger staffs, bigger status. More homelessness means that the executives of the NGOs that contract with the cities to deal with the problem can get paid bigger salaries and can sit comfortably in offices and send minions out into the streets to have contact with the actual clients.

The ultimate question is, is there any policy area involving the personal problems of the people where a government spending solution proposed by the Left has actually been implemented and then solved the problem, such that the funding can then be reduced or eliminated? If that exists anywhere, I don’t know of it. Perhaps a reader can provide an example, but I doubt it.