Sometimes your eyes can trick you.
TM Lutas
A US sanctions bleg
The US maintains a list of individuals and organizations it sanctions under various programs here. Does anyone out there independently keep track of these individuals/groups and why they’ve been placed on the list?
A short reminder about New York City municipal takeovers
The New York City Subways were largely built by private enterprise and had private owners. Rides were $0.05. The private owners of the various systems couldn’t keep offering service for that low a price and were discussing raising the fares.
The city took over the multiple private systems in 1940. The stated reason was in order to save the nickel fare. They did, for seven whole years. They then doubled it to $0.10. The current fare is $2.75 a ride, an inflation of 5,500% from the takeover date of 1940. Annualized over the 79 years that’s 5.2%. Average inflation has been 3.72% over that period of time.
Mayor Bill DeBlasio just proposed looking into taking over the regional electric company, ConEd which serves the city and Westchester County. His stated reason is to reduce the number of service failures.
Note: as I wrote in the comments, I asked for someone to check my math. The numbers were recalculated and the verbiage edited. I’ve never thought it was important but I’m not an economist. I’m also not an alumnus of the University of Chicago. I was invited on this blog many years ago as someone “at heart” and have been contributing ever since. The University of Chicago is not responsible for me and I’m not responsible for it.
Fixing the border facility crisis
It’s useful to review how to fix conditions of overcrowding in a facility. There are two fixes available.
1. You build more capacity
2. You increase training and oversight of the personnel running the facilities if they’re not behaving adequately
Both of these fixes require more money allocated by Congress. It helps when the Executive requests more funding but Congress doesn’t require it.
Go look at the legislative history. President Trump asked for more funds, Congress turned him down. It wasn’t his own party that denied him, it was the Democratic delegation that was against relief.
President Trump sought to work around the restrictions by declaring an emergency and using military construction money. It was left wing advocates who went to court to fight Trump, preventing him from building more facilities.
The left wing solution is to cause so much suffering so that our hearts break and we stop enforcing the law.
That’s cruel. It’s cruel on purpose.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez alleges misbehavior by camp personnel. She is one of a small select group, just 535 people strong who could directly improve the situation by introducing legislation that would force improvements in behavior. She has yet to introduce any.
The Congresswoman is a prominent part of the cruelty agenda.
In a normal country, hard questions would be asked by the mainstream media of those who have recently been part of this cruelty agenda.
A US political thought experiment
Resolved: The US needs at least two political parties that can reliably be trusted to hold power without driving the US constitutional settlement into a ditch and risk civil war.
Query: What are the names of the two (or more) parties?
You’d think that this would be an easy thought experiment. What do you think is the percentage of the US population who couldn’t readily name two parties they fundamentally trust? Has that number been going up or down over the past decade?