The New York City PreK-12 Education Budget: New York Times Versus Reality

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  • If you wonder why people in New York City seem to have a terribly warped view of reality, look no farther than the New York Times. The Times is where all the seemingly well-educated and sophisticated upper income New Yorkers get their “news.”

  • Consider, for example, the question of education funding for PreK-12 schools. If you know anything about that subject, even if you don’t know any details, you know that the New York City public schools are far and away the most lavishly funded in the country. How they can spend so much money and fail to achieve even mediocre results for the students is a shame and a disgrace.

  • Of course, the New York Times has an entirely different take.

  • So let’s compare the New York Times’s view of New York City education funding with some reality.

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Annals Of Crazy Climate Litigation: Held v. Montana

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  • Out in the real world, use of fossil fuels continues to grow, and will with 100% certainty continue to do so. In places like India and Africa, people are just getting their first taste of things like cars, computers, and air conditioning. They are not going to turn back.

  • Meanwhile in the fantasy world of the climate cult, it’s only a matter of enough government decrees, subsidies, and maybe a few court orders, and the whole functioning and inexpensive fossil-fuel-based energy system will suddenly be replaced by something yet to be invented.

  • In the court order department, various pie-in-the-sky lawsuits seek to find a judge willing to take the big leap and order the end to fossil fuels. Hey, why not? In 2015 a group of adolescents in Oregon (orchestrated by an environmental zealot group called Our Children’s Trust) brought a case called Kelsey Cascadia Rose Juliana, et al. v. United States, seeking to get a federal judge to decree the end to all use of fossil fuels. In 2017 that case earned a Manhattan Contrarian nomination as the “stupidest litigation in the country.” After two trips to the Ninth Circuit and one to the Supreme Court, that case now finds itself back in the Oregon District Court, where the Biden/Garland Justice Department is once again trying to block it on grounds of justiciability. Even Biden and Garland aren’t this crazy.

  • Yet even as the Juliana case continues to languish, another very similar case has leapt ahead of it, and has gotten the coveted first sweeping anti-fossil-fuels court order. The case is Held, et al. v. Montana.

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Are There Any Democrats Left Who Are Not Fully On Board With The Agenda Of The Radical Left?

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  • A phenomenon of politics on the Left as practiced today is that new and ever more radical orthodoxies continually pop up and demand adherence from all members of the faith.

  • No longer is the common agenda just a simple commitment to more government spending to enhance perceived justice and fairness in society. Instead, a list of new demands for government actions grows ever longer and more extreme.

  • Many long-time Democrats of my acquaintance consider themselves political moderates, although generally supportive of government efforts to uplift the poor through spending and programs. But the internal councils of the Democrats are now dominated by radicals demanding complete loyalty to the full agenda.

  • Thus the question is, if you vote for any Democrat for public office, do you inevitably get someone who will go along with every single element of the most radical agenda of the Left?

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Understanding Crime In America -- The Phenomenon Of Concentration

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  • Readers here frequently express some combination of amazement or sympathy to me about my living in Manhattan.

  • The news is filled with reports of spiking crime in our major cities, most especially in New York. Am I not in constant danger? How do I dare to go outside, particularly at night?

  • What rural and suburban readers may be missing is an understanding of the extent to which serious and violent crime is concentrated in a handful of quite small areas.

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Trying To Head Off New York's Total Self-Destruction

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Trying To Head Off New York's Total Self-Destruction

  • It’s budget time in Albany. In recent years, the custom has come to be that most if not all important policy issues for the year get considered as part of the annual budget, even if they aren’t germane to that subject. So everything is on the table.

  • The Governor and Legislature, both in control of progressive Democrats, are competing to see who can come up with the most destructive proposals to add to the mix. The basic mind-set of all the elected officials is that if only we raise enough tax money and spend it on enough handouts to favored constituencies, we can shortly achieve nirvana and utopia.

  • There is exactly one conservative-side think tank in New York State, known as the Empire Center, that makes a systematic effort to put forth a contrary agenda. The Empire Center is just out with a big Report called Next New York, with a series of chapters setting out counter-proposals in the major policy areas: public safety, K-12 education, Medicaid and healthcare, energy, transportation and transit, housing, and so forth. Today the Empire Center held a conference, which I attended, in connection with the release of the Report.

  • Over the next few weeks, I’ll try to cover several of the subjects from the Report. For today, I’ll start with my favorite, energy policy.

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A Proposal For Exposing The True Costs Of Getting Electricity From Wind And Sun

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  • Every place that tries increasing the percentage of electricity generation that comes from wind and sun then experiences rapidly rising consumer electricity costs.

  • The reasons why this happens are not complicated. Even at relatively low levels of wind and solar penetration, backup fossil fuel or other generation cannot be closed, so consumers must pay for two duplicate generation systems. At higher levels of wind/solar penetration, things like overbuilding, curtailment, and hugely expensive grid-scale energy storage come into play.

  • In my post of February 8, 2023, I asked “Could anybody possibly be stupid enough to believe the line that wind and solar generators can provide reliable electricity to consumers that is cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels?”

  • And yet it is an endlessly-repeated mantra of wind/solar advocates that generating electricity from those sources is “cheaper” than generating the same electricity from fossil fuel sources like coal and natural gas.

  • In this post I will make a proposal for a way to definitively expose the falsity of the claims that wind and solar are “cheaper” than fossil fuels for electricity generation.

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