DEMOCRATS IN DECLINE

DEMOCRATS IN DECLINE

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION,DEMOCRATS

The great under-reported story of this year’s election cycle is the ongoing decline of the Democratic Party. We have written many times about the fact that at the state and local levels, the Republicans have become dominant. The GOP controls two-thirds of state legislative bodies and 60% of the nation’s governorships, not to mention both houses of Congress. To some extent, Republican ascendancy has been obscured by the fact that the Democrats control the presidency. But their hold on that office is weakening rapidly.

This is reflected in the enthusiasm gap. Republicans are fired up and anxious to retake the White House. Democrats, battered and depressed after seven years of a failed Obama administration, are inclined to stay home. The numbers are unequivocal, as Michael Barone points out:

I’m not the only one who has noticed that Democratic caucus and primary turnout so far has been down as compared to 2008 and that Republican caucus and primary turnout has been up as compared to either 2012 or 2008. …

The results of the South Carolina Democratic primary Saturday confirm the trend. Total turnout was 370,000, down 30 percent from 2008’s 532,000 ….

Many commentators have noticed that blacks constituted a higher percentage of South Carolina Democratic voters this year, 65 percent according to the exit poll, than they did in 2008, 55 percent. But this represents not a surge of blacks into the electorate, but rather the fact that black turnout declined by only 18 percent, whereas white turnout fell nearly in half, by 44 percent.

That is a stunning number. The white Democrat is an endangered species, unless he is a hedge fund manager, Silicon Valley magnate or public sector union member. It is bizarre for a major political party in a two-party system, as opposed to a fragmented parliamentary arrangement, to scorn the votes of a majority of the population. I doubt whether it has ever happened before. But the Democrats have made it clear that non-rich, non-public sector whites are unwelcome in their party. Formerly Democratic white voters have gotten the hint.

Clinton and Sanders both got significantly fewer white votes than Clinton or Edwards got in 2008. It is as if many South Carolina whites, with an ancestral attachment to the Democratic party, have decided to secede from it. White turnout in South Carolina’s Republican primary was 707,000, compared to 129,000 in the Democratic primary.

As Barone properly notes, those turnout figures relate in part to the fact that there was a competitive race on the Republican side, but not the Democratic. But the result is the same in state after state: historic turnouts in the Republican primary, declining numbers of voters showing up on the Democratic side.

This isn’t surprising: how much enthusiasm can a party engender, when it can’t come up with a single plausible candidate less than 68 years old? But the rot, I think, goes deeper than that. The Democrats aren’t just out of candidates, they are out of ideas. Republicans are on the brink of a golden opportunity, if they don’t do something supremely stupid.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/02/democrats-in-decline.php

Auerbach & Gale: The Deteriorating Fiscal Outlook

Auerbach & Gale:  The Deteriorating Fiscal Outlook

By Paul Caron

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Alan J. Auerbach (UC-Berkeley) & William G. Gale (Tax Policy Center), Once More Unto the Breach: The Deteriorating Fiscal Outlook:

After worsening sharply during the Great Recession, the long-term fiscal outlook generally improved through 2015, due to a combination of legislative acts and lower projected growth of health care spending. The same factors and the slow but steady economic recovery helped reduce short-term deficits over that period, as well.

Over the past year, though, the medium- and long-term fiscal outlooks have deteriorated. Part of this is due to legislative changes, part to changes in economic and technical factors, and a small part to changes in assumptions. This deterioration has happened without much fanfare and, even with a fall in projected interest rates working in the other direction, the estimated changes are large.

Our estimates of various fiscal measures from last September and now are summarized in Table 1. Under current policy, we project the debt-GDP ratio to be 91 percent in 2025, up from a projection of 81 percent made last September and compared to the current-year value of 75.6 percent. The projected debt-GDP ratio in 2040 has increased to 152 percent of GDP, compared to 120 percent last Fall. Our estimates of the fiscal gap —the spending or tax changes needed to bring about a fiscal balance—have also increased. The fiscal gaps through 2040 have risen by about 1.0-1.5 percent of GDP, depending on various assumptions. The permanent fiscal gap has risen by similar amounts.

Howard Gleckman (TaxVox), Auerbach and Gale Find the U.S. Is Heading For a Fiscal Danger Zone

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2016/02/auerbach-galethe-deteriorating-fiscal-outlook.html

Justice Scalia and Climate Change

Justice Scalia and Climate Change

The states should stop work on the EPA’a climate agenda.

By Thomas J. Pyle 

One of Justice Antonin Scalia’s last official acts may be among the most important of his distinguished career. Last week, he joined with four other justices to halt implementation of President Obama’s new carbon regulation for so long as it is under legal review — an unprecedented move to stay an unprecedented federal overreach into states’ energy decisions.

Titled by the administration the “Clean Power Plan,” the regulation would be one of the costliest ever, dramatically increasing electricity prices across the nation — all while producing essentially zero climate benefits, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s own models.

Thanks to Justice Scalia and the four other justices who voted with him, Americans won the first battle against this reckless plan. But the fight is far from over. Even though the Supreme Court is not expected to issue a final ruling until at least 2017, the EPA is essentially flouting the stay order and encouraging states to continue developing their plans.

State officials — governors, legislators, regulatory agencies, public-utilities commissions, and utilities themselves — should reject the EPA’s offers of assistance. In fact, they should be issuing stop-work orders to prevent the regulation’s implementation until the courts have completed a full review. 

That’s especially necessary with a regulation as harmful and unlawful as this one, which would force a dramatic shift in electricity generation over a period of just 15 years. NERA Economic Consulting predicts compliance costs of up to $39 billion per year during the regulation’s implementation. Most of this burden would fall on families through higher electricity bills and higher prices on the products they use each and every day. In fact, NERA estimates the regulation would hike energy bills in each of the 47 states subject to the regulation. Annual electricity price increases would reach as high as double digits across 41 states, with residents of 28 states facing yearly cost increases greater than 20 percent.

Thanks to the Supreme Court’s stay, however, states can halt developing implementation plans at no risk to taxpayers. As EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy testified to Congress after the Court issued its stay, “Nothing is going to be implemented while the stay is in place.” In the unlikely event the regulation is eventually upheld, legal experts believe any new compliance deadline before mid-2018 would be extremely unlikely. 

In other words, there is simply no reason for states to make any decisions until these legal challenges are resolved. Acting now on a mandate that is anything but clean from a legal perspective risks irreversible changes to state electricity grids, burdening future generations with higher costs and harming American families, especially the poor.

This is not mere speculation. It’s exactly what happened with another recent EPA regulation: the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS).

Last June, the Supreme Court held that the EPA violated the Clean Air Act by refusing to consider the cost of such a sweeping mandate before it was issued. And no wonder: According to the EPA’s own internal estimates, utilities will pay $9.6 billion in annual compliance costs, with much of those costs being passed on to businesses and families through higher electricity rates.

Yet by the time the Court ruled on the regulation’s merits, it was too little, too late. Without a stay in place, and fearing substantial noncompliance penalties if the regulation was upheld, states and utilities began implementing the regulation while it was still being litigated in court. In other words, although the EPA lost the battle, it won the war through attrition, which the agency acknowledged. By the time the Supreme Court ruled in June, the MATS regulation had already shut down 61,000 megawatts of coal-powered electricity generation — enough to power 15.5 million homes.

Protecting their constituents from such needless harm by stopping work on the carbon mandate is exactly what state officials should do in this case. Governor Scott Walker (R., Wisc.) issued an executive order to that effect this week, while the Kansas State Senate took similar action the week before. Other state lawmakers should follow suit.

EPA supporters have argued that Justice Scalia’s death — which may shift the Court’s 5 to 4 conservative majority to a 5 to 4 liberal one — makes it more likely that the regulation will be upheld. Therefore, they argue, state officials should continue planning as if it will go into effect.

Not so fast. In the first place, Justice Scalia’s replacement may not be sworn in until next year. In the second place, the 29-state lawsuit has strong bipartisan support. Even Laurence Tribe, the esteemed Harvard Law School professor who taught constitutional law to President Obama, testified before Congress last year that the regulation is akin to “burning the Constitution of the United States.” Such broad, bipartisan opposition may yet give the other justices reason to reconsider.

The Supreme Court’s extremely rare decision to stay this carbon regulation speaks volumes about its legal viability — and Justice Scalia’s passing does nothing to change that. President Obama has spent seven years putting his agenda above the limits of his power, pushing the boundaries of the Constitution in the process. Now the Constitution is proving to be our best defense.

— Thomas J. Pyle is the president of the American Energy Alliance.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/431830/print

SHOULD DEMOCRATS BE TERRIFIED BY DONALD TRUMP?

SHOULD DEMOCRATS BE TERRIFIED BY DONALD TRUMP?

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, DONALD TRUMP, HILLARY CLINTON

Last week, Matthew Continetti, writing in the Washington Free Beacon, offered seven reasons why “Democrats should be terrified by Donald Trump.” Continetti’s seven reasons are:

1. Hillary Clinton’s lead over Donald Trump in the polls is quite small.

2. Trump’s positions are popular.

3. Trump will have months to find and occupy the political center.

4. Clinton is a terrible presidential candidate.

5. The country wants change.

6. Michael Bloomberg’s entry into the race would help Trump.

7. Global chaos helps Trump.

All of these propositions are defensible and most of them strike me as true. Although I don’t believe they add up to the conclusion that Democrats should be terrified of Trump, they do suggest that Trump has a realistic shot at defeating Clinton.

The argument that Trump has no realistic shot is based on several considerations. First, many simply refuse to accept the idea that America would elect as president someone as brutally nasty and ignorant about policy as Donald Trump. I have trouble believing this myself. But intuitive disbelief, though a respectable grounds for holding an opinion, is an insufficient basis for ruling out the opposite view.

Second, many say that Trump will be an easy target for Clinton and her mainstream media allies. They will pummel him for his business practices (as Mitt Romney was pummeled) and for his insulting remarks about women and Hispanics (as happened with Romney, but this time with far more basis in fact).

There’s no doubt that the pounding will occur and it may end up sinking Trump. But unlike Romney, who scarcely fought back, Trump will counter by attacking Clinton’s record ofcorruption, dishonesty, and possible criminality. And Trump will be far better positioned than Clinton to tie the corruption he cites to the political culture Americans are so disillusioned with, and the possible criminality to national security concerns.

Third, many point to polls showing that well over a majority of Americans view Trump unfavorably — a larger percentage than the considerable portion that views Clinton this way. Trump’s numbers are, indeed, problematic. Yet, polls also show him running only slightly behind Hillary. And just today, for whatever they are worth, there are suggestionsthat Trump might beat Clinton in New York.

How can we reconcile these poll results? The answer may be that many of those who view Trump unfavorably are Republicans like me who, if push comes to shove, might well vote for Trump in a two-way race against Clinton. By contrast, few Democrats disapprove of Clinton, so that the overwhelming portion of those who do disapprove of her are highly unlikely to vote for her nonetheless.

Continetti’s article doesn’t deal with the question of whether conservative Republicans should be terrified of Donald Trump. I believe we should, at a minimum, be alarmed. But not primarily because of concerns over whether he is electable.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/02/should-democrats-be-terrified-by-donald-trump.php

Sanders, Clinton, and Their Job-Killing Agendas

Sanders, Clinton, and Their Job-Killing Agendas

Liberals’ policies harm the workers they claim to love.

By Michael Tanner 

You can’t love employees but hate employers, as Senator Angus King of Maine once said.

This fact has been obscured by the circus that has become the Republican nominating process, but on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have been running one of the most anti-business election campaigns of any major party in modern history. In fact, hardly a day goes by without the Democratic candidates offering another idea that seems almost perversely designed to kill jobs.

Start with a simple economic fact. Businesses cannot — at least for long — operate at a loss. That means, among other things, as Greg Mankiw, chairman of the economics department at Harvard, points out, that “the wage a worker earns, measured in units of output, equals the amount of output the worker can produce.” In non-economist speak, you can’t pay more for a worker than the value that worker provides. Pay, in this case, means the full cost of employing that worker: wages, insurance, training, retirement benefits, and so on.

But both Clinton and Sanders seem determined to order businesses to do exactly that. For instance, Clinton has called for raising the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour — a hike of more than 60 percent over the current federal level — while supporting state and local efforts to go even further. Recently, she came out in support of efforts in Los Angeles and New York State to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Of course, that’s not enough for Sanders. He wants the federal government to impose a $15-an-hour minimum across the board.

And it doesn’t stop there. Sanders would also require businesses to provide twelve weeks of paid family leave, two weeks minimum of vacation, and at least five days of paid sick leave per year. Clinton has also called for paid sick leave and some type of paid family leave. Both candidates also back the Obama administration’s push to expand the number of workers who would qualify for overtime pay. And both would even have the federal government involve itself in how businesses schedule work hours, demanding fixed schedules and limiting the ability of employers to change shifts or reschedule employees.

Maybe all this is a secret plan to support the robot industry. After all, even President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers recently reported that the jobs most susceptible to being replaced by automation are concentrated at the low end of the wage scale — precisely those jobs that would be adversely affected by a mandated increase in labor costs.

Remember “card check,” the union organizing gimmick that the administration unsuccessfully pushed during Obama’s first term? Both Clinton and Sanders were, unsurprisingly, co-sponsors of the legislation in Congress, and both still back it today. Both have also said they would take other steps to increase the clout of organized labor.

In case any businesses manage to survive this onslaught of new mandates, both Sanders and Clinton want to hit them with new taxes. Clinton, who once said, “Don’t let anyone tell you that businesses create jobs,” has been vague about exactly what business taxes she would impose, though she continually calls for businesses and the wealthy to pay their “fair share.” She supports legislation to tax U.S. corporations on their foreign earnings and impose an “exit tax” on businesses that shift operations overseas. She would also limit deductions for retirement accounts and impose a 4 percent surtax on high incomes in a way that might fall on many limited partnerships and Subchapter S corporations.

That’s small change, of course, for Sanders. As part of his health-care plan, for instance, he would impose a 6.2 percent payroll tax on employers, which would cost them at least $630 billion per year. Yes, that is per year. Sanders also wants a 0.2 percent employer payroll tax (matched by employees) to fund a family- and medical-leave trust fund. This is on top of his call to subject earnings above $250,000 to Social Security payroll taxes. Hiring workers under a Sanders administration would be really, really expensive.

Beyond payroll taxes, Sanders would eliminate several tax breaks for oil, gas, and coal companies, among others. He would also end the deferral of income from foreign subsidiaries and would change several tax rules to curb corporate inversions (the relocating of a corporation’s legal domicile to a lower-tax country), while limiting use of the foreign tax credit.

And none of this counts the tax increases that both Bernie and Hillary want to impose on the high earners who manage or invest in businesses. And it doesn’t consider how the trade barriers favored by both the Democratic candidates (and Donald Trump) would drive up the cost of parts and materials that American businesses rely on.

Big business, small business, or medium-sized business, the Democrats just plain don’t like you. Unless, of course, you are a business that is important to a key voting constituency, in which case they have a subsidy for you.

According to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, Hillary’s plans would lower GDP by 1 percent — at a time when we have been stuck in slow growth for years — reduce wages by nearly 1 percent, and lead to roughly 300,000 fewer full-time-equivalent jobs. And that’s the good news. Bernie’s plans would reduce GDP by a whopping 9.5 percent, reduce wages by 4.3 percent, and result in nearly 6 million fewer jobs. That’s Venezuelan territory.

According to a new AP poll released this week, an astounding 81 percent of voters put jobs at the top of their list of priorities. The Democrats’ anti-job agenda presents a tremendous opportunity for whoever the eventual Republican nominee turns out to be. But taking advantage of this opportunity will require the GOP to get serious, stop the gratuitous name-calling, scapegoating of ethnic groups, and other juvenile antics, and begin talking about real issues.

If it does not, we may look back at our current moribund economy as the good old days.

— Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis. You can follow him on Twitter @mtannercato, or on his blog, TannerOnPolicy.com.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431888/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-dangerous-economic-policies

The Costs of Abandoning Messy Wars

The Costs of Abandoning Messy Wars

By Victor Davis Hanson — February 25, 2016

The United States has targeted a lot of rogues and their regimes in recent decades: Moammar Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, Manuel Noriega, and the Taliban.

As a general rule over the last 100 years, any time the U.S. has bombed or intervened and then abruptly left the targeted country, chaos has followed. But when America has followed up its use of force with unpopular peacekeeping, sometimes American interventions have led to something better.

The belated entry of the United States into World War I saved the sinking Allied cause in 1917. Yet after the November 1918 armistice, the United States abruptly went home, washed its hands of Europe’s perennial squabbling, and disarmed. A far bloodier World War II followed just two decades later.

It may have been wise or foolish for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to have intervened in Vietnam in 1963–1964 to try to save the beleaguered non-Communist south. But after ten years of hard fighting and a costly stalemate, it was nihilistic for America to abandon a viable South Vietnam to invading Communist North Vietnam. Re-education camps, mass executions, and boat people followed — along with more than 40 years of Communist oppression.

The current presidential candidates are refighting the Iraq war of 2003. Yet the critical question 13 years later is not so much whether the United States should or should not have removed the genocidal Saddam Hussein, but whether our costly efforts at reconstruction ever offered any hope of a stable Iraq.

RELATED: Iraq: The Real Story

By 2011, Iraq certainly seemed viable. Only a few dozen American peacekeepers were killed in Iraq in 2011 — a total comparable to the number of U.S. soldiers who die in accidents in an average month.

The complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops in December 2011 abruptly turned what President Obama had dubbed a “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant” Iraq — and what Vice President Joe Biden had called one of the administration’s “greatest achievements” — into a nightmarish wasteland.

RELATED: Looking Back at Iraq

Hillary Clinton bragged of the 2011 airstrikes in Libya and the eventual death of Qaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died.”

But destroying Qaddafi’s forces from the air and then abandoning Libya to terrorists and criminals only created an Islamic State recruiting ground. The Benghazi disaster was the nearly inevitable result of washing our hands of the disorder that we had helped to create.

In contrast, when the United States did not pack up and go home after its messy wars, our unpopular interventions often helped make life far better for all involved — and the U.S. and its allies more secure.

The United States inherited a mess in the Philippines in 1899 after the defeat of imperial Spain in the Spanish-American war. But after more than a decade of bloody counterinsurgency fighting, America finally birthed a Philippine national government that was given its independence after World War II.

President Harry Truman’s intervention to save South Korea from North Korean aggression quickly turned into a quagmire. Communist China soon launched a massive invasion into the Korean peninsula. By 1953 — at a cost of roughly 35,000 American lives, about eight times more U.S. fatalities than in Iraq — America had at least saved a viable South Korea.

President Eisenhower, facing re-election in 1956, resisted calls to pull American peacekeepers from the Demilitarized Zone and quit the detested “Truman’s war.”

More than 60 years after the U.S. saved South Korea, thousands of American peacekeepers still help protect a democratic and successful south from a nightmarish, totalitarian, and nuclear north.

Some 60 million people died in World War II, a global war that the United States did not start and did not enter until 1941. Yet American power helped defeat the Axis aggressors.

Unlike the aftermath of World War I, the United States stayed on to help rebuild war-torn Europe and Asia after World War II. The Marshall Plan, the NATO alliance, the defeat of Soviet Union in the Cold War, the foundations of the later European Union, and Asian economic dynamism all followed — along with some 70 years of relative peace.

In 1999, President Clinton convinced the NATO alliance to bomb Serbia’s genocidal Slobodan Milosevic out of power and stop the mass killing in the Balkans. After Milosevic’s removal, only the presence of American-led NATO peacekeepers on the ground prevented another round of mass murder.

Donald Trump has rightly reminded us during his campaign that Americans are sick and tired of costly overseas interventions. But what Trump forgets is that too often the world does not always enjoy a clear choice between good and bad, wise and stupid. Often the dilemma is the terrible choice between ignoring mass murderer, as in Rwanda or Syria; bombing and leaving utter chaos, as in Libya; and removing monsters, then enduring the long ordeal of trying to leave something better, as in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The choices are all awful. But the idea that America can bomb a rogue regime, leave, and expect something better is pure fantasy.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2016 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431843/iraq-war-tough-choices

Donald Trump Turned Down 94.4 Percent of American Job Applicants, Applied for Hundreds of ‘H’ Visas Instead

Donald Trump Turned Down 94.4 Percent of American Job Applicants, Applied for Hundreds of ‘H’ Visas Instead

By Charles C. W. Cooke 

Surprise! Donald Trump is a rank hypocrite on immigration. Per the New York Times:

Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach describes itself as “one of the most highly regarded private clubs in the world,” and it is not just the very-well-to-do who want to get in.
Since 2010, nearly 300 United States residents have applied or been referred for jobs as waiters, waitresses, cooks and housekeepers there. But according to federal records, only 17 have been hired.
In all but a handful of cases, Mar-a-Lago sought to fill the jobs with hundreds of foreign guest workers from Romania and other countries.
In his quest for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr. Trump has stoked his crowds by promising to bring back jobs that have been snatched by illegal immigrants or outsourced by corporations, and voters worried about immigration have been his strongest backers.
But he has also pursued more than 500 visas for foreign workers at Mar-a-Lago since 2010, according to the United States Department of Labor, while hundreds of domestic applicants failed to get the same jobs.

Or, put another way, Trump has deliberately chosen to hire foreign workers to fill those jobs that “Americans just won’t do.” 17 out of 300? That’s 5.6 percent. 17 out of 500? That’s 3.4 percent. Bad!

So what’s Trump’s excuse? That’s he’s a businessman and that these are the realities on the ground? That, I’m afraid, won’t wash. When Disney behaved like this, there was a loud and sustained outcry from . . . well, no less than Donald Trump himself. In an interview withBreitbart, Trump argued that Disney should be forced to rehire any Americans it had overlooked or replaced. Trump also said this:

If I am President, I will not issue any H-1B visas to companies that replace American workers and my Department of Justice will pursue action against them.

And he offered this critique of expanding the “H” program:

It would allow any company in America to replace any worker with cheaper foreign labor. It legalizes job theft. It gives companies the legal right to pass over Americans, displace Americans, or directly replace Americans for good-paying middle class jobs.

This attitude is is a popular one among Trump’s supporters. Indeed, Breitbart’s emissary to the Trump campaign, Matthew Boyle, has argued that “what Disney did — with the help of the U.S. government’s lax H1B immigration and visa policies — was awful.” Moreover, he haspraised Trump for supposedly standing against it:

This is perhaps one of the most under-discussed issues in the 2016 GOP presidential primary election. Frontrunner Donald Trump’s immigration reform plan details exactly how he would fix this problem if he’s elected president.
He wants to “increase” the “prevailing wage for H-1Bs,” one subsection of his plan lays out.
Trump also wants a “requirement to hire American workers first.”

And yet, by Trump’s own logic, the H-2B program that he so heavily used is even more egregious than the H-1Bs system that Disney took advantage of. Why? Well, because unlike H-1Bs — which can in theory be used to recruit skilled workers — H-2Bs are aimed directly at thebottom of the economic ladder. Here’s the Times again:

“You almost have them as indentured servants,” said Danny Fontenot, director of the hospitality program at Palm Beach State College. “And they affect everyone else’s wages. You can make a lot of money by never having to give your employees raises.”
Greg Schell, a lawyer in Palm Beach County who has helped foreign guest workers sue employers over labor violations, said companies frequently made little effort to find local employees before applying for visas.
“I have seen no demonstrated need to import guest workers for the hospitality industry,” Mr. Schell said. “Employers who want to find American workers find them.”

And clearly, Trump didn’t want to find them. Which means that, in his own words, he is guilty of gaming the system to “replace any worker with cheaper foreign labor”; he is guilty of “job theft”; and he is guilty of indulging the “legal right to pass over Americans, displace Americans, or directly replace Americans for good-paying middle class jobs.”

Slamming Disney for its use of H-1Bs, Matthew Boyle also proposed that the “scandal doesn’t seem to be going away, and only appears to be intensifying as the electoral season progresses.” What, one wonders, must Boyle then think of Trump? If we are to judge a man by his actions and not by his rhetoric — as I’m told we should — then Trump comes up short, no? When 300 hardworking Americans tried to land a job at his resort, Trump kicked them to the curb and applied instead for 500 “H” visas.

It’s “election season” now, so I await the extensive Breitbart denunciation with bated, skeptical breath. In the meantime, the good people of America should realize that they’re being duped by a bad man who doesn’t give a hoot about anybody other than himself.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/431908/donald-trump-immigration-hypocrite-who-ignores-american-workers

The Status Quo City

The Status Quo City

Celebrated for its openness, San Francisco has a hard time with change.

PHOTO BY VJERAN PAVIC

It’s natural to be unsettled by change, but residents of San Francisco take resistance to change to absurd levels. In 1958, Gavin Elster—the shipping magnate played by Tom Helmore in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo—expressed San Francisco’s deeply engrained ambivalence to change well: “The things that spell San Francisco to me are disappearing fast.” A recent letter to the editor in the San Francisco Chronicle shared the typical modern lament: “Has San Francisco’s economic growth truly made it a more interesting place to live? Or just a place with more shiny but soulless places to spend money?”

Every day, similar hyperbole appears in the press, in social media, and in conversations: San Francisco is becoming a “hollow city” catering to highly paid tech workers. Most job growth has been in the Silicon Valley suburbs an hour or so south, and the “Google buses” ferrying young professionals up and down the peninsula have become symbols of an invasion. Contemporary San Franciscans resent them the way earlier locals resented the influx of Chinese in the 1870s and the gays and lesbians in the 1970s. This time around, it’s the young and well-paid newcomers who threaten the status quo, not the poor or marginalized. We hear that these people aren’t like us, they don’t share our values, and they should go back where they came from.

Paradoxically, in a city famed for new ideas, resistance to change is a cherished San Francisco value. The city’s population is less than one tenth that of New York, yet the San Francisco planning department processes three times more applications than Gotham’s planning commission. That’s because public review—with generous opportunities to appeal—is a cherished sport here. For example, any exterior building alteration to a structure more than 50 years old requires historic review by the city—a process that can easily take a year. Environmental review of a proposal to install bicycle lanes took three years. When a proposal for a cluster of office and residential towers downtown—without any residential displacement and with 40 percent of the housing to be permanently affordable—came before the planning commission recently, protesters chanting “genocide” shut the hearing down.

San Franciscans have easy access to the ballot by petition. In November, residents voted on five initiatives addressing the changing city, including Airbnb regulation, protections for “legacy” shops, and an 18-month shut down of private housing development in the Mission District. This love of process over action shows just how intractable the city’s growing pains are. The city’s political leaders have few real solutions to San Francisco’s real problems, so instead we San Franciscans lash out at symbols: tech workers and the buses that take them to their jobs; chain stores; and fancy new restaurants. By these lights, New York seems more comfortable as a city of ambition. The idea of San Francisco as a place that attracts young people interested in working hard and making money is fairly new. Even in the Gold Rush days, one sought one’s fortune scattered by a streambed, not in the city. In San Francisco, hustle is unbecoming.

New York and San Francisco are both paying the price of gentrification and revival. People get pushed out, or crowded, or have long commutes. But the two cities are different in key ways. In San Francisco, if you want a walkable neighborhood with cafes and bakeries and the amenities that Jane Jacobs championed, you have few choices. San Francisco doesn’t have the equivalent of a Cobble Hill, a Jackson Heights, or a Hoboken, and lacks the reliable, regional public transit system that would make longer commutes bearable. The San Francisco Metro and the regional BART system combined have just 104 miles of track. New York’s subways run 842 miles, not to mention the PATH system, Metro North, New Jersey Transit, and Long Island Railroad that funnel workers into and out of the central city. While San Francisco is a cultural and economic heavyweight, it’s a relatively small city: 850,000 residents within 49 square miles, with water on three sides. Here, the shifts seem tectonic. They feel like an earthquake.

Plenty of solutions for San Francisco’s planning gridlock spring to mind. The challenges are not technical; they are merely a matter of political will. Most development projects should go forward if they comply with planning codes. The arduous, costly, and risky review and appeals processes should be streamlined. The California Environmental Quality Act should be amended so that it encourages smart growth rather than sprawl. Small infill projects should be exempted. But I’m not holding my breath for any of this. What is needed is a radical change in the local culture. San Francisco needs to learn to embrace change without fear and give up its love affair with process.

David Prowler (www.prowler.org) served as director of the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Economic Development and as a planningcommissioner. He lectures in the Stanford University Urban Studies Program.

http://www.city-journal.org/2016/cjc0219dp.html

The Paris climate deal won’t even dent global warming

By Bjorn Lomborg

Modal Trigger

Barack Obama speaks in Paris on Dec. 1, 2015.Photo: Getty Images

Two months after the Paris climate-treaty negotiations concluded with fanfare, the world is figuring out it was sold a lemon.

In December, global leaders patted each other on the back and declared a job well done. The treaty will come into force later this year after it has been signed by representatives of at least 55 nations representing 55 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions.

This will provide “a turning point for the world,” according to President Obama. “Our children and grandchildren will see that we did our duty,” says UK Prime Minister David Cameron.

Climate activists have been quick to declare success. This marks “the end of the era of fossil fuels,” said activist group 350.org. Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute, called the Paris agreement a “diplomatic triumph.”

A diplomatic triumph? More like a p.r. coup. The Paris Treaty is rich in rhetoric, but it’ll make little change in actual temperature rises.

Increasingly, that fact is being recognized, even by some of the biggest proponents of climate action.

Jim Hansen, a former NASA scientist and advisor to Al Gore who was the first to put global warming on the public radar in 1988, wasn’t fooled. “It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he said in December. “It’s just worthless words.”

And this month, 11 climate scientists signed a declaration stating that the Paris treaty is crippled by “deadly flaws.”

The problem with the deal is simple, and was obvious from before it was even signed. The Paris agreement talks a big game. It doesn’t just commit to capping the global temperature increase at the much-discussed level of 2°C above pre-industrial levels. It says that leaders commit to keeping the increase “well below 2°C,” with an effort to cap it at 1.5°C.

But this is all talk.

My own peer-reviewed research, published in the journal Global Policy, shows that all of the treaty’s 2016-2030 promises on cutting carbon-dioxide emissions will reduce temperatures by the year 2100 by just 0.05°C. Even if the promised emissions cuts continued unabated throughout the century, the Paris agreement would cut global temperature increases by just 0.17°C. Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reach a similar conclusion.

And that’s assuming countries actually live up to their promises: The treaty’s nonbinding.

This is reminiscent of another non-binding pact also signed in Paris. The Kellogg-Briand Pact was drafted in 1928 and signatories included the United Kingdom, United States, France, Germany, Japan and Italy. Leaders agreed to outlaw war. The treaty scored its architect, Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, a Nobel Peace Prize. But after barely a decade, global war broke out.

By the United Nations’ own reckoning, the treaty will only achieve less than 1 percent of the emission cuts needed to meet target temperatures. So instead, signatories point to the fact that beginning in 2020, countries will be asked to lay out more ambitious targets every five years. In other words, 99 percent of the problem is left for tomorrow’s leaders to deal with.

Paris won’t solve global warming. What will? In the Copenhagen Consensus on Climate project, 28 climate economists and a panel of experts including three Nobel laureates found that the best long-term climate strategy is to dramatically increase investment in green R&D, with every dollar spent on green R&D avoiding 100 times more climate change than money spent on inefficient wind and solar.

For 20 years, we’ve insisted on trying to solve climate change by mainly supporting solar and wind power. This approach puts the cart in front of the horse: Green technologies aren’t competitive yet. Instead of production subsidies, governments should focus on making renewable energy cheaper and competitive through research and development. Drive down prices through innovation, and everyone will switch.

And we need to acknowledge that much-maligned fracking must be a part of our shorter-term solution to climate change. Natural gas is far more environmentally friendly than coal. Gas emits less than half the CO2, and it emits much lower amounts of other pollutants.

Though it doesn’t provide the ultimate answer to global warming, shale gas is greener than the alternatives.

After the self-congratulatory party in Paris has come an awakening: This deal isn’t going to solve climate change. It’s time to focus on what will.

Bjorn Lomborg directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center.

http://nypost.com/2016/02/22/the-paris-climate-deal-wont-even-dent-global-warming/

Don's Tuesday Column

            THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   3/01/2016

  Whose ox or judge is gored?

I explained last week why and how the judiciary, particularly the U.S. Supreme Court, has become, over several decades, a crucial tool in the partisan efforts of both liberals and conservatives to secure legislative accomplishments and cultural victories. In the last 100 years or so, judges and the judiciary have never been beyond the realm of governing and politics. Under FDR, the legislation enacted and the measures taken by the executive and regulatory branches were unprecedented for that time and, not unlike the current administration, subject to litigation and judicial restraint.

When the Supreme Court decided to rein in what was widely believed to be overreach by Roosevelt, he tried increasing the number of justices, or “court packing,” for the crass purpose of creating a majority to rubber stamp his policies. Having gone too far, Roosevelt backed off that maneuver but continued to rely on the drawn-out legal process to forge ahead in the assurance that, by the time adverse rulings were handed down, his policies would be ingrained in the targeted sectors.

Industries, forced to accede to mandates, were reluctant to shed the mandates when found unconstitutional, as they had internalized them in their practices. Collusion over prices, for instance, continued; profitability was selectively secured; competition was squelched.

In similar fashion, Obama’s Energy Department expected to force states to comply with CO2 restrictions while the Clean Air Act provisions were litigated, forcing states and industries to accept the status quo even after it was ruled illegal by the court. He was shut down before Scalia died; that demonstrates the supremacy of the judiciary over Obama’s policies.

So, beyond the reasons for such entrenched fights over judges, particularly on the Supreme Court, the whole question of boundaries for fairness in those fights is now front and center. Writers, commenters and politicians on the left assert something to the effect that the Senate’s role is to be a respectful enabler for, and approver of, President Obama’s choice of nominee. Funny how that is the opposite of what some of those same folks said when the president’s name was Bush or Reagan.

First, there are some perhaps intentionally confusing misstatements on the issue. An extreme (extremely ignorant, that is) comment was that the President “appoints Superior [sic] Court Justices, no matter what party they belong to. That is what the Constitution says. Obama was voted in by the majority and the majority wants Obama to pick the next Judge.” A columnist wistfully asked “Would it not be refreshing if (upon Obama appointing a nominee) Congress replied ‘Sure’…we will consider it…as you are rightly empowered to do so.”

Sometimes I think that if liberals didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all. A cartoon on this page summed up a hypocritical, fallacious story line by the left. It inserted Donald Trump’s “delay, delay, delay…until a new President is elected” admonition into the “advise and consent” clause. The actual sentence, Article II, Section 2, second paragraph: “and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint…Judges of the supreme Court…”

That probably translates to liberals, based on past and present words and deeds, as “Democrat Presidents get their nominees without delay or obstruction—advice is not needed and consent is presumed and expected.” News media, with some exceptions, act as stenographers and cheerleaders for Obama against those conniving, obstructionist, manipulating Republicans. Or, when the president is a Republican, they provide cover for the loyal, sincere, principled opposition by Democrats who only want to protect the nation from cold-hearted fanatics being nominated by Republicans.

Normal open-minded citizens will undoubtedly see through this to realize that there are big issues at stake, as I have pointed out, and that if the Senate, or its Judiciary committee, do nothing—hold no hearings or votes—that is part (or withholding) of the “consent” of the Senate.

Republicans have every right to stonewall Obama’s court appointees in this election year. I know because the New York Times said so in a 1987 (not even an election year) editorial on why the Senate was correct to reject Robert Bork: “The President’s (Reagan’s) supporters insist vehemently that, having won the 1984 election, he has every right to try to change the Court’s direction. Yes, but the Democrats won the 1986 election, regaining control of the Senate, and they have every right to resist.”

They said, “right to resist,” Trump says “delay, delay, delay” and Hugh Hewitt has started a wildly popular twitter hashtag: #NoHearingsNoVotes. The other Republican candidates all insist the Scalia chair belongs to the next president—let Dems campaign on their vision for an anti-Scalia judge—and voters will decide.

Obama filibustered Bush nominee Samuel Alito, not because Alito was unqualified but simply to oppose a conservative philosophy. Now he wants us to ignore the fact that he will only appoint a replacement that he’s sure will join the philosophically liberal Supreme Court wing. Democrat Senator Schumer (then): “…we should not confirm any Bush nominee to the Supreme Court accept in extraordinary circumstances” (Surprise—none occurred!). Democrat Harry Reid (then): “Nowhere in that document (U.S. Constitution) does it say the Senate has a duty to give presidential nominees a vote. (It says) with the advice and consent of the Senate. That’s very different than saying that every nominee receives a vote.” I, for once, agree with Harry Reid!