Category Archives: politics

Rent Control vs Market Competition

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Here’s an example of the failure of no competition in affordable housing, this one in St Paul, MN. The residents of St Paul last November voted to cap rent increases at 3% per year, forever, with no exceptions.

Mercatus Center [Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Urbanity project] Salim Furth compared St Paul building permits in the five months after passage of rent control with the average of the same months in the three years prior [i.e., immediately preceding the Wuhan Virus situation onset]. By that metric, St Paul’s multifamily permitting is…down 55%.

And

City data shows St Paul’s building permit revenue from January to May 2022 was $3.699 million, down from an average of $4.176 million from 2018 to 2021.

The claimed purpose was to protect affordable housing availability.

However.

St Paul’s rent control creates an incentive for developers to build luxury apartments to recoup their construction costs. But builders are also opting to leave St Paul. Citing rent control, investors recently paused development on the 3,800-unit Highland Bridge project. Its builders would have set aside 20% of units for affordable housing, with 10% going to those earning 30% or less of area median income.

The only ones who wouldn’t have predicted this outcome, who don’t understand its inevitability, are those who can’t stand the thought of individuals or private businesses making their own decisions, or free markets making their own aggregated decisions, independently of the limits and requirements set by Know Betters.

A Thought on Money-Follow-the-Child Programs

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A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Sunday Letters had one.

Quoting Toni Jennings, retired teacher and former Florida Lieutenant Governor, Dave Trabert, Kansas Policy Institute CEO, wrote

The more competition we had in education, the better off we became. So, I for one believe that competition is good. But you will hear those who say, “Oh no, you’re making the public schools compete with others.” Well, those children are going to have to go out and compete with others in the workaday world.

Absolutely, and those public schools are not only failing those children, they’re defrauding those children’s parents, whose tax money is paying for those schools.

Here’s another thought, this one from me, flowing from this bit in Trabert’s letter:

The 2021 ACT results show that 31% of white students are college-ready in English, reading, math, and science, while only 14% of Hispanic students and 6% of black students met that standard. Achievement gaps are getting worse….

Even if that achievement gap didn’t exist, and those minority children also were at that 31% rate, the rate is unacceptably bad and illustrates the magnitude of the failure of our public schools.

We need vastly more competition in our K-12 system, not less, in order to both eliminate that achievement gap and to bring the college-ready rate up to acceptable levels. That means the Federal government must butt out of the business [sic] or be butted out by the States rejecting Federal funds; it means that State and local education funding must follow the child not the institution; and it means that State and local jurisdictions must stop, or be stopped from, using their regulatory powers to obstruct the opening of charter and voucher schools or of the nascent homeschooling pod alternative.

What Apology?

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First Lady and Edith Bolling President of the United States, Jill Biden, likened Hispanics to (breakfast) tacos. When I was growing up, that was an extremely serious and ugly ethnic slur, and I don’t think it’s gotten any gentler since.

In response to the hue and cry about the slur—and not before, mind you—Biden is being reported by the New York Post as apologizing for her insult.

But Biden isn’t apologizing, actually. Instead, her Press Secretary, Michael LaRosa, tweeted some words in her name:

The First Lady apologizes that her words conveyed anything but pure admiration and love for the Latino community[.]

The First Bigot doesn’t even have the courage, much less the morality, to “apologize” herself, choosing instead to cower behind another.

Regarding “apology” in those euphemism quotes: it’s not even an apology. The surrogate mumbled apologies for the outcome of Biden’s bigotry—words conveyed anything but—but there’s not a syllable of apology for Biden’s bigotry. Not even from the man she was ducking down behind.

This is disgusting.

Scofflaw Blue States

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And guess who gets to pick up the tab. You get three, and the first two don’t count. Here are the scofflaws:

At least four Democratic-led states with budget surpluses this year have chosen not to fully repay the federal government for money borrowed to fund unemployment benefits, a move that will impose increased charges on businesses to help make up the difference.
California, Connecticut, Illinois, and New York have directed surplus funds to social programs and taxpayer rebates, among other causes, leaving unpaid debts to the federal government ranging from tens of millions of dollars to more than $15 billion.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party at the State level treating loans as grants. Of course, that’s entirely consistent with Party’s attitude toward student loans, so we shouldn’t be surprised.

Ken Pokalsky, Business Council of New York State Vice President:

We’re going to be at elevated levels of taxes for a decade[.]

Yep.

No Quick Fixes

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Some of you may have noticed that the “media industry”—newspapers and broadcast/cable news outlets—is losing credibility.

Only 16% of Americans said they have a “great deal or quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers in 2022, a 5% drop [or maybe, a 5 per centage point drop] compared to the 2021 findings, according to Gallup. It was the lowest number to give those answers since Gallup started asking about newspapers in 1973.
Television news has Americans even more concerned in 2022, as a dismal 11% told Gallup they have a “great deal or quite a lot” of confidence in the industry. This is down 5% […] from the 16% who were confident in TV news last year, a record-low total.

Joe Concha on the matter:

They can improve the situation by not injecting so much opinion into what should be straight reporting. And also by not automatically and blatantly taking a side on big issues such as the recent abortion ruling, or serving at the pleasure of one major political party like we saw by calling Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Instead, you might see some trust resorted, but it’s a hard bell to unring

Ben Smith, co-founder of Semafor, a global news company that is expected to launch later this year:

We’re hoping that a commitment to transparency and openness to a range of views can help close that gap over time[.]

Hope isn’t much of a solution, here, not when it’s too late even for Concha’s solution: the same crop of dishonest journalists and media outlet editors and publishers would still be in place.

No, the required solution must include—must begin with—a significant fraction, a strong majority, of journalists must be terminated, and all of the media outlet managers and their deputies, and and all of the editors and their deputies, must be terminated, their ties to media “news” outlets completely severed. These are the ones proximately responsible for the distortions and outright lies they write, the editorial decisions they make to publish those stories and to minimize others or to spike them altogether. These are the ones that engage in rewriting their past stories rather than leaving them intact and publishing corrections to them. The incumbents can never be trusted, no matter the bodice-ripping mea culpas that might spill from their lips or pens.

It will take a considerable amount of time to accomplish—the firings needn’t take any time at all, but finding replacements—both capable of reporting and honest enough to do it objectively will take time.