Imagine That

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Don’t take government money to do something good, thereby avoiding the government’s strings necessarily attached (as well as government’s strings that are attached unnecessarily), and be able to do the good thing at much less cost, including for the taxpayers providing the government’s fettered money.

By forgoing government assistance and the many regulations and requirements that come with it, SDS Capital Group said the [affordable housing] 49-unit apartment building it is financing in South Los Angeles will cost about $291,000 a unit to build.
The roughly 4,500 apartments for low-income people that have been built with funding from a $1.2 billion bond measure LA voters approved in 2016 have cost an average of $600,000 each.

It’s even worse in San Jose:

A recent report commissioned by the city of San Jose found affordable-housing projects that received tax credits cost an average of around $939,000 a unit to build there last year.

There are some naysayers:

Some affordable-housing veterans worry whether privately funded construction can scale quickly enough to match the scope of the homelessness problem and whether its backers will maintain their commitments to serve the needy.

That’s a problem for government to solve, not the private funders of affordable housing. It’s government regulations, both well-intended and done solely for political gain, and government strings dictating how government-provided funds must be spent that impact the scope of the “homeless problem.” Government regulations and strings create, in large part, the homeless numbers, including especially the duration of individual and individual family homelessness.

Another case of the advantage of letting a free market operate freely. Imagine that.

Inflation is Coming Down—So What?

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So what, indeed.

Shelter cost inflation slowed, to 0.4% in February from the previous month compared with a 0.6% pace in January. This reinforced suspicions that January’s high reading in that category was an anomaly. But apparel prices, a category that had been in deflation, jumped 0.6%.

There’s concern that inflation isn’t “slowing” enough to encourage the Federal Reserve to start cutting its benchmark interest rates, and that’s a two-edged sword.

It’s nice that inflation may finally be abating, but that’s for the future. Most of us live in the here and now; we have to deal with the present reality of the much higher prices for our necessities, much less for our wants, that Progressive-Democrat Joe Biden’s hugely inflationary policies have created. Those prices won’t come down in nominal terms, and they can’t come down in real terms until wages catch up with, and surpass, prices—which means that wage increases must surpass those price increases over a period of time.

That isn’t occurring at a rate that would ease the loss us Americans are experiencing in the grocery stores and in the homes we want to buy. That last, driven in large part by high interest rates, also is inhibiting our heretofore geographical mobility, and that in turn hurts our ability to earn more by changing jobs. We’re functionally denied that avenue for wage increases that surpass price increases.

As things over the last three years or so, wage increases were much less than those inflation-driven price increases for a couple of years, until last summer. At that point, wages increased slightly—and only slightly—faster than price increases over each of the next several months. Over the last couple of months, though, that trend appears to have reversed, with wage increases again being smaller than price increases as inflation has begun, slowly so far, to rise again. Indeed, over the longer term into the past,

[a]ccording to ECI [the Bureau of Labor Statists’ Employment Cost Index], inflation-adjusted wages have shrunk by 3.7% since the end of 2020. While real wages rose in response to falling energy prices late last year, they have been roughly flat since. Worse, the drop in real wages erased all gains made in the late 2010s. Real wages today stand at 2015 levels, meaning Americans’ paychecks don’t go any further now than they did eight years ago.

That two-edged sword shows up in this way. Higher interest rates help the stereotypical widows and orphans—and today’s retirees—who are living with fixed income sources facilitating their Social Security payments. Those fixed income sources benefit from higher interest rates, since that interest is the source of income for the debt- and dividend-paying instruments they hold.

Higher interest rates, though, hurt the overall economy in a couple of ways. One is the higher cost of the Federal government’s borrowing, including its rolling over of its existing debt. That higher cost means less money to spend on things the Federal government should be spending on (setting aside, for this post, the definition of what the government should spend on). Those higher rates also increase the cost of money to businesses, which leads to lower investment rates, less R&D, slower pay raises, and reduced hiring.

Time to Fire Flag Officers and Dismiss them from the Army

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The management of the US Military Academy—West Point—has decided the Academy’s mission no longer includes inculcating concepts patriotism, sacrifice, obligation, and honor in our future Army officers.

The US Military Academy at West Point removed the “Duty, Honor, Country” motto from its mission statement.

It’s bad enough that the managers at the top of the Department of Defense think proper pronouns, and equal outcomes regardless of merit, and skin color—wokeness—are more important than training our military men and women how to defend our nation, how to kill our enemies if they attack us. Now the managers of what used to be a premier military academy don’t even think officers satisfying their obligations, displaying and acting on precepts of honor, and putting our nation’s needs ahead of their personal convenience (or pronoun preference) needs to be trained at all.

Of course, those worthies do intend to maintain the phrase as a motto. Whoopty damn do.

And this from West Point spokesman Colonel Terence Kelly:

Duty Honor Country is West Point’s motto and the foundation of our culture as it has been since 1898. As we have done nine times in the past century, we have updated our mission statement to now include the Army Values, loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage.

Weasel words. “Duty, Honor, Country” are those values. If the academy [sic] managers truly meant those words, they’d keep the overarching phrase.

Four flags that come to mind as being ripe for relief and dismissal are US Military Academy Superintendent Lieutenant General Steven W Gilland, Dean Brigadier General Shane R Reeves, Commandant of Cadets Major General Lori L Robinson, and US Army Chief of Staff General Randy A George—the latter for allowing this to go through.

Home Defense and Property Rights Get a New Tool

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In Florida, at least.

The Florida Legislature unanimously passed a bill that would allow police to immediately remove squatters—a departure from the lengthy court cases required in most states.
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The legislation, which passed both chambers earlier this month, would allow police to remove squatters without a lease authorized by the property owner and adds criminal penalties. Landlords, under the current law, typically have to wade through a long and expensive legal process to remove squatters.

The bill now goes to Governor Ron DiSantis (R) for signature and final enactment.

If the Florida legislation becomes law, intentionally presenting a phony lease would be designated as a misdemeanor, and selling or leasing someone else’s property would be a felony, as would causing more than $1,000 in property damage.

This is a good move. Squatters of this sort are nothing other than criminals, slow-motion home invaders.

This Time I Disagree with Bjorn Lomborg

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But only a little bit. Lomborg (among other things, Copenhagen Consensus President), in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, writes absolutely correctly about the need for climatistas (my term, as is “doomsayers” below) to consider much more than their simple claim of climate change and the imminent destruction from their claimed change. Lomborg, though, concentrated on the economic destruction the doomsayers’ policies would inflict even as those worthies ignore technological advances that would mitigate their claims’ outcome, even were their claims in any way accurate.

Where I disagree is in the lack of discussion of the larger, and more important, context within which today’s alleged climate disaster is supposedly developing.

From the subheadline of Lomborg’s piece:

Climate policy needs to take into account the costs of draconian measures….

The doomsayers need to do more than that. They need to reconcile their claims of impending disaster with some facts that provide longer range context. Facts like Earth, 11k years after the last Ice Age, still is cooler than our planet’s geologic warming trend line (noisy as the data around the trend line are). Facts like there have been a number of epochs in our past where Earth was much warmer than it is now, and life was lush; there have been a number of epochs in our past where atmospheric CO2 was much higher than it is now, and life was lush; and those sets of epochs do not correlate with each other.

Some other facts: our climate changes do correlate, roughly, with orbital changes (small) and rotation axis precession (relatively dramatic). Beyond that, we’re about halfway through the current axial tilt from one direction to the opposite, and we tilt—our northern hemisphere, where most of the oceans are—toward the sun in winter and away from the sun in summer. How do the doomsayers plan to deal with the situation in a few thousand years (roughly equivalent to half the time that has passed since that last Ice Age, and a bit shorter than the time since we started our first civilizations) when our northern hemisphere tilts toward the sun in summer, away from the sun in winter, and the seasons get dramatically more extreme as a result?