Quote Of The Day, Hillary Edition

Way back at the beginning of this endless campaign, in April 2015, I had a post titled "What Does Hillary Stand For?"  My inspiration for the post began when I went to Hillary Clinton's then-new campaign website, looking for specific policy proposals, and found next to nothing -- other than the vaguest of platitudes, like "I want to be your champion."  (Egads!  How can I avoid having this numbskull as my "champion"?)  A further inspiration for the post was that both the Wall Street Journal and the Economist had just run editorials asking the exact same question, with both coming up equally empty handed.

Anyway, my conclusion was, at least on the domestic front, you don't really need specific proposals from Hillary to know what she stands for.  Don't expect any actual vision from her.  She just stands for the absolutely conventional thinking of the unthinking left -- more money out of the infinite taxpayer fountain to fund my friends and cronies to create every new program they can think of and to fix every known human problem.  Of course it will work this time!  Here's how I put it in that post:

We know that she is the very most conventional of left-wing thinkers.  We know that she has no interest whatsoever in rocking the government gravy boat.  We know that she deeply believes in the main project of the Left, which is to bring social justice and equality to the world through government action and crony capitalism.   

Fast forward a year and a half, and Hillary's website has at least a few specifics, very much along the lines that I foresaw.  But she mostly avoids talking about policy specifics, let alone any concept of vision for the country.  When I see parts of her campaign events on the news, in every case she is not engaged in promoting her own policy proposals, but rather is trying to scare her potential supporters about Donald Trump, while avoiding discussion of any actual issues in the election.

Which brings me to the quote of the day.  Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal has a column today, headline "Hillary Becomes the Unsafe Hand," with the theme that various aspects of the email/national security controversy make Hillary far the more risky choice in this election.  And then we come our quote of the day, on Hillary's "vision" for the country:

With Mrs. Clinton, as with Mr. Obama, a voter naturally struggles to understand what the overarching vision is. There isn’t one. They exist to deliver the wish-list of Democratic lobby groups for more power over the people of the United States. Period.

Too bad I wasn't the first to come up with that pithy turn of phrase.  Anyway, if you're wondering why there is near total unanimity among the government-funded and government-cradled sectors of the economy (federal and state government workers, teachers, academia, crony capitalists, unions) in favor of Hillary, that's all you need to know.  

A Couple Of Thoughts On The Latest Clinton Revelations

(1)  Deep in Friday's Wall Street Journal, at page C3, we find that New York State regulators are "intensifying" their investigation of entities related to one Howard Dvorkin.  The headline is "Dvorkin-Related Probes Intensify."  Mr. Dvorkin is known as an advocate for consumer debt relief, and as "founder and former president" of a nonprofit entity called Consolidated Credit Counseling Services.  He also has stakes in various for-profit businesses.  Here's the gist of the nature of the investigation:  

"The New York State Department of Financial Services is investigating whether Consolidated Credit is directing business to for-profit companies owned by Mr. Dvorkin, the agency said in response to an open-records request by the Journal.  'We suspect that personnel at CCCS, a not-for-profit entity, are steering business to for-profit companies' run by people connected to Consolidated, an attorney for the New York state regulator said." 

What -- do you mean there's something wrong with using personnel paid by your not-for-profit entity to steer business to your for-profit activities?  Somebody better tell the Clintons.

Meanwhile, no word on whether the New York DFS or any other regulator is investigating the Clinton Foundation for any such conduct.  Of course, with the latest revelations, you don't really need to do any actual investigating.  You could just read the now-famous 2011 Doug Band memo to lawyers at Simpson Thacher, helpfully available at the Washington Post website here.  In the memo, Band identifies himself as "the primary fundraiser for the Foundation for the past 11 years."  During the same period, Band also worked diligently on behalf of the for-profit activities of what we now refer to as Bill Clinton, Inc.  From the memo:

[W]e have dedicated ourselves to helping the President secure and engage in for-profit activities -- including speeches, books, and advisory service engagements.  In that context, we have in effect served as agents, lawyers, managers, and implementers to secure speaking, business and advisory service deals. . . .   [W]e have personally helped to secure [more than $50 million in for-profit activity] for President Clinton to date.

Band was well-paid for his fundraising for the Foundation during this time period.  And how much was Band paid by Bubba to bring in the $50 mil?  Answer: nada:

Neither Justin nor I are separately compensated for these [for-profit] activities [on behalf of Bill Clinton].

But don't worry, the fundraising on behalf of Bill was completely "[i]ndependent of our fundraising and decision-making activities on behalf of the Foundation."  Sure, Doug.  You worked day and night to bring in $50 mil of paid work for Bill and didn't get a dollar from it for yourself.  Any chance I could get you to work for me on those terms?

(2) On Friday we learned that the FBI has reopened its criminal investigation into matters related to Clinton emails.  Madame Hillary promptly took to the microphones to demand that the Bureau "release all the information it has" about her private email server.  From Fox News on Friday:

"We’ve heard these rumors, we don’t know what to believe," Clinton told reporters during a brief news conference in Iowa Friday evening. "And I’m sure there will be even more rumors. That’s why it is incumbent upon the FBI to tell us what they’re talking about."

Good diversion, Hillary.  But the problem is, we know that the FBI is duty-bound not to disclose what it knows in an ongoing investigation.  So, your demand was fake.  On the other hand, there is someone who works for you and who knows what is on Huma's computer, and on Anthony's, and who is not subject to the FBI's duty to keep its ongoing investigations confidential.  That person is -- Huma!  So, Hillary, when will we see you publicly instructing Huma to tell us everything she knows about what is on her or Anthony's computers?  I'm not holding my breath waiting for this.      

What To Do About The Obamacare Death Spiral?

It was back in January 2015 that I first wrote about the phenomenon of the socialist death spiral.  (Not that I was the first person ever to notice this phenomenon.)  The basic idea is that, in a private property/free exchange system (aka "capitalism"), people apply their ingenuity to get ahead, leading to constantly increasing productivity, and every year the economy grows some; but in a world of government giveaways based on demonstrated need, many people apply their ingenuity to appear needy, thus productivity starts to decline, and then faster, and you enter an economic death spiral.  The Soviet Union is the classic case.  Today it's happening in Venezuela.

And it doesn't have to be the whole economy.  The New York City Housing Authority sits on some of the most valuable real estate in the world.  But with socialist-model public ownership, the rents fail to cover operating expenses, there is nothing for property taxes, capital needs go unmet, and the buildings deteriorate.  The need for subsidies goes up every year, already in many cases $50,000 and even $100,000 annually per family, even as the residents live out their lives in deepening poverty.  Higher and higher costs pay for a situation that only gets worse.  The socialist death spiral!

And then, my friends, there is Obamacare.  "To each according to his needs."  Don't worry, this time it's going to work!  We'll "bend the cost curve" downward!  (By what hubris do government functionaries think that they have an ability to do such a thing?)  In this post back in April I reported on new so-called "short term plans" by which healthy people were avoiding all the Obamacare mandates and leaving the federal exchanges to deal with the sickest of the sick.  Why wouldn't they?  And of course the most recent news is that the next round of premium increases will be well into the double digits in most places -- for that small number of suckers who actually pay the full freight.  The New York Times has a roundup last month that projects average increases of 11% even for people who are "savvy" shoppers and make optimal changes to get the cheapest plans.  Of course, that doesn't apply if you are "needy" and can qualify for a government subsidy: 

Most current customers will be insulated from the full increases. To help people afford insurance, the law offers sliding-scale subsidies to people earning less than 400 percent of the federal poverty level, which at $11,880 for a single person means just under $48,000 to qualify.

These things move slowly, but all the classic trappings of an incipient death spiral are here.

So, to get to the $64,000 question, what do our presidential candidates plan to do about this?  Hillary has some so-called "detailed proposals."  Actually, they all consist of exactly the same thing:  transfer more and yet more of the taxpayer money to paper over the problem and pretend that this is all free.  Here is her site on the issue.  It's too long to put it all here, but here are the first five:

• Defend and expand the Affordable Care Act, which covers 20 million people. Hillary will stand up to Republican-led attacks on this landmark law—and build on its success to bring the promise of affordable health care to more people and make a “public option” possible. She will also support letting people over 55 years old buy into Medicare.
• Bring down out-of-pocket costs like copays and deductibles. American families are being squeezed by rising out-of-pocket health care costs. Hillary believes that workers should share in slower growth of national health care spending through lower costs.
• Reduce the cost of prescription drugs. Prescription drug spending accelerated from 2.5 percent in 2013 to 12.6 percent in 2014. It’s no wonder that almost three-quarters of Americans believe prescription drug costs are unreasonable. Hillary believes we need to demand lower drug costs for hardworking families and seniors. Read more here. 
• Protect consumers from unjustified prescription drug price increases from companies that market long-standing, life-saving treatments and face little or no competition. Hillary’s plan includes new enforcement tools that make drug alternatives available and increase competition, broaden emergency access to high-quality treatments from developed countries with strong safety standards, and hold drug companies accountable for unjustified price increases with new penalties. Read more here.
• Fight for health insurance for the lowest-income Americans in every state by incentivizing states to expand Medicaid—and make enrollment through Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act easier.

Don't worry, it's all infinite free money.  Of course she gives no idea of how much it will cost, or whether that is of any concern. 

So, instead of Obamacare being in a death spiral, we'll put the burden on the general taxpayer, and put the whole government in a death spiral.  It will just move more slowly and last longer. 

Donald Trump?  He says he will "repeal and replace" Obamacare.  I haven't found any specifics, but hey, it's a start.  

The Worst Presidential Election Ever

Unlike with the first two of this year's debates, last night I didn't have something better to do, so I actually watched a good chunk of the debate.  And of course, my reward was to be reminded over and over again why this is the worst presidential election ever.  

I could comment on many things, but let me narrow the focus.  There's not much point in paying attention to anything the candidates say about how they will deal with foreign affairs or foreign powers, because whatever they say now, it will all become inoperative in the specifics of any situation that might arise.  And who really cares about the name calling and character attacks?  If you follow the news at all, you are not going to learn anything new about their respective bad characters from what they say about each other.  

But I do care about domestic economic policy, and what candidates say on that subject can be a rather good predictor of what they will do, or at least try to do, once in office.  So my ears perked up around the middle of the debate when moderator Chris Wallace said he was going to "move on to the next topic," namely "the economy," and asked each candidate to "please explain to me why you believe your plan will create more jobs and growth for this country and your opponent's plan will not."  The exchange that followed really encapsulated the awfulness of the whole thing for me.  The candidate's answers are a little long for this blog post, so I will edit them for space, while attempting to capture the essence.

Hillary went first, and proceeded to lay out a vision where all improvement in human economic condition comes from additional government spending, rules, and programs, all to be paid for by taxes and yet more taxes on the successful.  She didn't put it in exactly those terms, but the idea that private economic activity is the source of wealth and needs to be allowed to flourish doesn't seem ever to have occurred to her.  Here is the somewhat edited version:

I want us to have the biggest jobs program since World War II. Jobs in infrastructure and advanced manufacturing. I think we can compete with high wage countries and I believe we should. New jobs in clean energy. Not only to fight climate change, which is a serious problem but to create new opportunities and new businesses. I want us to do more to help small business, that’s where two-thirds of the new jobs are going to come from. I want to us raise the national minimum wage because people who work full time should not still be in poverty. And I sure do want to make sure women get equal pay for the work we do. I feel strongly that we have to have an education system that starts with preschool and goes through college. That’s why I want more technical education and community colleges, real apprenticeships to prepare young peel for the jobs of the future. I want to make college debt-free and for families making less than $125,000, you will not get a tuition bill from a public college or a university. . . .  [W]e are going to have the wealthy pay their fair share. We're going to have corporations make a contribution greater than they are now to our country. That is a plan that has been analyzed by independent experts which said that it could produce 10 million new jobs.     

This is an economic program truly worthy of a Venezuela or a North Korea, and couldn't be more destructive on many levels.  A government "jobs program" is going to create zillions of jobs in "advanced manufacturing"?  Can anybody give a single example where any government has succeeded at such an endeavor?  Indeed, this is exactly what New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is in the midst of failing at spectacularly.  And there will be lots of jobs in "clean energy," to create "new opportunities and new businesses"!  Sure!  Dozens more Solyndras!  How ignorant do you have to be not to know that so-called "clean energy" jobs only exist by reason of massive government subsidies, which tells you that they destroy rather than create wealth, and that the so-called "opportunities" can only exist for Hillary's politically-connected cronies like the "FOBs" and the donors to the Clinton Foundation.  And then we'll price all poor kids completely out of the job market with a greatly increased minimum wage!  And then, deep into unsustainable and exploding deficits resulting from out-of-control entitlements and the new Obamacare program, let's create another huge new entitlement of free college!  It can all be paid for by having the "wealthy pay their fair share."  Does she have any idea that much of this money to be taken from the wealthy was going to be invested in businesses and now won't be?  But don't worry, "independent experts" (who? Paul Krugman?) tell her that this world of massively increased spending and programs and taxes will "produce 10 million new jobs"! 

Really, Hillary could not possibly have handed Trump a better opportunity to rip her to shreds.  But it was not to be.  To be fair to him, he did start out OK with a couple of sentences about her destructive plans for big tax increases:

[H]er plan is going to raise taxes and even double your taxes. Her tax plan is a disaster. . . .  We will have a massive, massive tax increase under Hillary Clinton's plan. 

But from there it was immediately off into irrelevancies.  I'll make Japan and Germany and South Korea and Saudi Arabia pay us for their defense!  We have "horrible" trade deals (NAFTA) and I'll do better ones!  We'll bring our jobs back!  That's about it.  Here's the (somewhat edited) transcript:

[W]hen I said Japan and Germany and I'm not just singling them out. But South Korea, these are very rich countries. Saudi Arabia. Nothing but money. We protect Saudi Arabia. Why aren't they paying? . . .  We're protecting people. They have to pay up. And I'm a big fan of NATO but they have to pay up. She comes out and says “we love our allies. We think our allies are great.” Well, it is awfully hard to get them to pay up when you have somebody saying we think how great they are. We have to tell Japan in a very nice way, we have to tell Germany, all of these countries, South Korea. We have to say, you have to help us out. . . .  So my plan, we’re going to negotiate trade deals. We’re going to have a lot of free trade. More free trade than we have right now. But we have horrible deals. Our jobs are being taken out by the deal that her husband signed. NAFTA. One of the worst deals ever. The jobs are being sucked out of our economy. You look at the places I just left. You go to Pennsylvania, you go to Ohio, you go to Florida, you go to any of them. You go to upstate New York. Our jobs have fled to Mexico and other places. We're bringing our jobs back. I'm going to renegotiate NAFTA. . . .  We're going to cut business taxes massively. They're going to start hiring people we're going to bring the $2.5 trillion that’s offshore back into the country. We are going to start the engine rolling again because right now, our country is dying.

OK, at the very end he did work in that bit about tax cuts for businesses, which is not a trivial point.  But other than that, he basically veered off on tangents and forgot to mention what his economic plan is or why it is superior to Hillary's government-only vision.

The phrase "It's the economy, stupid" is generally given more credit than anything else for getting Bill Clinton elected in 1992.  Today, it's still "the economy, stupid," and we continue to live with a way sub-par economy afflicted by too high taxes, too much spending, and too many regulations.  We have before our very eyes the living cases of Venezuela, not to mention Cuba and North Korea, to teach us what happens to an economy when the government takes everything over.  And we have the entire European Union to show us that when the government gets up to 50% of the economy and above everything goes into stagnation.  But the Republican candidate seems unable to articulate the optimistic free market small government vision.

It's a good thing there aren't any more debates.   

Why Do They Use Those Private Email Accounts?

In my rather limited law practice these days, one of the things I am doing is helping the Energy & Environment Legal Institute in its cases against New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman seeking disclosure of public records information as to his communications with other AGs and environmental activists relating to his supposed investigation of ExxonMobil.  Today we got his response in one of the cases.  The response contains a paragraph that will give you some insights into how this FOIA game works, and also why people like Hillary Clinton like to use private email accounts and servers.

In our case, the requesting entities were very alert to the private email game, and therefore they specifically requested that private email accounts be searched for requested documents.  But the New York AG's office simply ignored that specific request, and said they were just not going to do it.  Here is the response of the New York AG on that issue:

Although the Request had specified that it sought communications of Attorney General Schneiderman "using either his official or non-official email and text messaging accounts (e.g., Gmail, private cell phone as well as State-provided accounts)," the OAG does not search personal accounts of its employees in the ordinary course of fulfilling the nearly three thousand FOIL requests it expects to receive in 2016 . . . , unless the Records Access Officer has reason to believe that a personal account includes responsive records that are not also on the OAG's network. . . .  Here, the Records Access Officer had no reason to believe that the Attorney General's personal email account was the exclusive custodian of any potentially responsive OAG records.  All OAG employees, including the Attorney General, have been instructed to refrain from using personal accounts for OAG business. . . .  

(This is from page 5-6 of the AG's Memorandum of Law in Opposition to Petitioner's Article 78 Proceeding.  The document is publicly available from the court's website, but unfortunately you need an account and a password to get access.  If you have such an account, the case number is 101181/2016.)

A couple of things there are of interest.  First, they say that they don't search for private emails, even though specifically requested, unless they "ha[ve] reason to believe that a personal account includes responsive records . . . ."  Well, did they take the trouble to ask?  And the answer is, they completely fail to address that obvious question.   What's your guess as to the answer? 

And then there's that great line "All OAG employees, including the Attorney General, have been instructed to refrain from using personal accounts for OAG business . . . ."  Great!  Oh wait -- weren't all State Department employees, including the Secretary of State, instructed to refrain from using personal accounts for official business?  Of course they were!  But then, we know that at least if you rank high enough, even when caught red-handed you will not be punished for ignoring that instruction -- not even a slap on the wrist.

And just in case you don't recall from earlier this year, here is an article from the Daily Caller back in March on the systematic use by officials at EPA of private emails in their communications with environmental lobbyists.  That scandal was broken largely through persistent FOIA requests from the same Energy & Environment Legal Institute (although I did not represent them in those matters.)  Daily Caller quotes E&E Executive Director Craig Richardson as follows:

EPA has essentially outsourced it’s rule-making function to ‘green’ activists and rent-seeking lobbies hell-bent on destroying traditional energy sources in an effort to replace [them] with renewables, an industry that their wealthy benefactors are already making a killing at the taxpayer and ratepayer expense,” Richardson said.

How our government works.  And the public is not to be allowed to find out about it.  Lovely, isn't it?

Fraudulent Advocacy For Government Growth

I have already had two posts (here and here) on the preposterous new Census report on incomes and poverty released two weeks ago.  And then yesterday the New York Times has again given the lead position in its print edition (upper right hand corner of the front page) to a story substantially relying on figures from this same Census report.  I'll give you all three tiers of headlines:  "WITH PAY RISING, MILLIONS CLIMB OUT OF POVERTY / ECONOMIC TIPPING POINT / More and Better Jobs -- Blacks and Hispanics Gain the Most."  That's certainly good news for Hillary on the day of the first presidential debate!  And just in case you don't think that this Census report is planned as the linchpin of Hillary's campaign on issues relating to the economy, I remind you that some of its key "findings" were front and center in her personally-signed op-ed in Pravda on September 21 ("My Plan For Helping America's Poor").  

So is there any reality to the numbers in this Report, or is it all just a scam put out by the government and regurgitated by Pravda to put their collective thumb on the scale of the election?

The answer as to the government is that it is clearly a scam.  With Pravda, as usual, you are left scratching your head as to whether they are part of the fraud, or have been taken in by the government's fraud.  I'll let you decide that -- not that either alternative is good for them.

How do we know that this is a scam as respects the government?  Easy -- we just compare what they say to what we can prove that they know.  What they say is the list of principal statistics appearing at the top of the Summary in the Report:

• Real median household income increased 5.2 percent between 2014 and 2015.1 This is the first annual increase in median house- hold income since 2007.

• The number of full-time, year- round workers increased by 2.4 million in 2015.

• The official poverty rate decreased by 1.2 percentage points between 2014 and 2015.

• The number of people in poverty fell by 3.5 million between 2014 and 2015. 

Now, do you detect any hint there that the lion's share of these favorable year-over-year changes may have resulted from a methodological change rather from real increases in incomes or declines in poverty?  I've done my best to look through the Report itself to find some disclosure of that.  Admittedly, there are lots of links in the Report for those interested in learning more about the methodology, and life is not long enough for me to follow all of those.  Believe me, they are also relying on most to all journalists having constraints on their time that will prevent them from getting to the bottom of this.  But then there's John Crudele of the New York Post, who had an article on September 20 titled "Census income figures are a joke -- if not fraud."  Crudele's article then had a link to this 2015 Census paper describing the details of changes to methodology that they planned to implement fully in their next report on incomes and poverty.

So let's take a look at that paper.  This is what they know.  The paper's subject is proposed changes to methodology in the surveys that generate Census's main reports on income and poverty.  And why are they undertaking these changes?

Previous research shows the ASEC [Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey] suffers from misclassification of certain types of income, general underreporting of income, and historically under-reported enrollment in means-tested government programs (Meyer et al., 2009) 

Yes, the whole idea is to correct for prior "general underreporting of income."  And by the way, there's no doubt that there is massive underreporting of income on these surveys.  For starters, there's almost no chance that anybody gives them much if any honest information on underground economic activity, which is estimated at around 10% of the economy (and far more than that among those reported to be in the lower quintiles of the income distribution).  So what are they now going to do about it?  The answer is, they propose a modest re-design of the survey, with about half a dozen changes that include follow up questions for people who refuse to answer or leave blank the answers to questions about their income, and specific follow-up questions designed to elicit more information about income from retirement accounts and from government programs.  (By the way, even with those changes, it's abundantly clear that incomes are still massively underreported, but probably a little less so.)

Now, will all of those things make a quantitative difference?  Actually, as part of this paper, they report on results of a quantitive evaluation of giving the new and old surveys to a large sample to see what difference it makes.  And the answer?  It's in Table 1!  Using the new survey form causes reported "real median income" to increase by 3.0%.

Wait a minute!  Does this mean that they absolutely know that the supposed 5.2% increase in real median incomes reported in the most recent report is actually 2.2% in real change and 3.0% in methodology change?  That's sure the way that I read it.  Of course, the difference between 5.2% growth in incomes and 2.2% is the difference between robust growth on the one hand and barely-above-stagnation on the other.

And clearly the purpose of this game is to create an appearance that disastrous government programs that in fact keep incomes down and poverty up have now suddenly worked, just in time to elect Hillary.  Don't believe me?  Let's go back to the Pravda article from yesterday:  

Government programs — like Social Security, the earned-income tax credit and food stamps — have kept tens of millions from sinking into poverty year after year. But a main driver behind the impressive 1.2 percentage point decline in the poverty rate, the largest annual drop since 1999, was that the economy finally hit a tipping point after years of steady, if lukewarm, improvement. . . .  About 43 million Americans, more than 14 million of them children, are still officially classified as poor, and countless others up and down the income ladder remain worried about their families’ financial security. But the Census Bureau’s report found that 2015 was the first year since 2008, when the economic downturn began, that the poverty rate fell significantly and incomes for most American households rose. 

Really, is it even possible to be this appallingly ignorant?  If you know anything at all about government statistics on "poverty," you know that the earned-income tax credit and food stamps do not count in the measure of poverty.  With one hundred percent certainty, those two programs have not kept one single person out of poverty, at least as measured and reported by the Census Bureau.  Pravda thinks these programs have kept "tens of millions from sinking into poverty."  Good grief!

And then, of course, Pravda takes the methodological change to mean that suddenly "pay [is] rising" and "millions [are] climb[ing] out of poverty."  All fake.  The closest thing we have to a real number (not in this report) is that GDP rose in 2015 by 2.4%.  It's above total stagnation, but barely.

More generally, we can see that we have a bureaucracy that understands its core mission to be producing numbers that support the continuation of woefully failed government programs and the ongoing growth of useless bureaucracies to run those programs.  In the off years they produce wildly underreported income numbers and inflated poverty numbers to guilt the people into supporting bigger budgets to address the problems; and then in the election years they tweak the methodology in secret to generate numbers that falsely show some sudden progress against the problems so that the candidates known to support the bureaucracy can have talking points for their campaigns.  Is it any wonder that most Americans have complete disgust with their government?