by | BLOG
My utility provider, Con Edison, recently announced yet another increase in utility prices and many of my neighbors are incensed. According to their website, “New York City residential customers may see an 11% increase in summer bills due to higher delivery charges. For the same reason, Westchester residential customers may see a 12% increase.” This is on top of continuous increases over the past few years.
But their anger is misplaced. Instead of blaming Con Ed, they should be outraged at the state and local legislators who have irrationally pushed wind and solar projects to the detriment of the utility consumer.
NY residents have been subjected to the closure of nuclear power plants, the closure of extraordinarily efficient, natural gas plants, and the construction of extraordinary, wasteful, wind, and solar projects. Several of these have monumentally failed — but these huge financial losses are now built into our utility cost base!
It is now commonly understood that the wind and solar projects that have been imposed upon us in recent years will have virtually no effect on the climate. But what it has done is add tens of millions of dollars of increased wasted costs that are now built into our utility cost base for the consumer to bear through increased prices, like the ones announced by Con Ed last week.
The most distressing part about this is not what our government has done to us, but that the media, the newspapers, and mostly the elected officials absolutely ignore this reality.
As a tax accountant, a significant portion of my work is now moving people out of New York, because of huge living costs as well as huge taxes. I myself expect to be leaving New York, mostly for these reasons. For a constituency that’s supposed to be intelligent, it is extraordinarily disappointing that we continue to elect these people. We should all be ashamed.
by | BLOG
Phil Gramm and John Early do a great job refuting the persistent concept of a gender pay gap in the Wall Street Journal. Whatever gap exists doesn’t stem from gender discrimination but rather from job choices.
The pay gap as published is calculated each year by dividing the average full-time, year-round pay for women by the average full-time, year-round pay for men. But, as the authors point out, “that comparison is misleading because full-time, year-round work is defined so broadly.” Comparing a lumberjack working 70 hours/week with defined hours earning $100,000/year with a secretary working 35 hours/week with flexible hours earning $50,000/year would calculate as a 50% pay gap. This number borders on meaningless.
Women often opt for different career paths based on flexibility or risk. Some prioritize family over maximizing income. Adjusting for factors like education and job risk narrows the gap. Women’s experience and child-rearing further affect their earning power. Fewer women graduate in high-earning fields. Men take riskier jobs, leading to higher wages but also more danger and less job satisfaction.
It’s no longer likely that a company is going to pay a woman 16% less pay for virtually the same work and get away with it. If that was truly the case, it would logically conclude that businesses would hire as many women as possible in order to minimize the cost of labor and maximize potential profits. But that’s just not happening.
The last time I wrote about “the Gap,” during the Obama administration, it was 23%. Now it’s 16%. Men’s evolving roles at home and preference for job flexibility, and women seeking the tougher jobs, have narrowed the pay gap. Understanding these nuances helps to explain wage disparities in terms of extenuating factors — and not gender.
by | BLOG
It has been widely written that the criminal charges against Hunter Biden, with respect to his tax evasion, were severely hampered because the IRS let the statute of limitations lapse. But it is clear to anybody that’s ever worked with the IRS that this is blatant coverup. It’s hard to know exactly what happened, but the fact remains that the IRS never lets the statute of limitations lapse.
Indeed, when the IRS has an open case, the most important element of that case, always, is the statute of limitations. It is normal IRS procedure to insist that the taxpayer agree to extend the statute when there is still six months to go. If the taxpayer refuses, the IRS issues a Notice of Deficiency for the largest amount it can imagine, preventing the statute from expiring. Taxpayers therefore NEVER refuse.
In 40 years of practice, and in discussions with other tax practitioners, no one has ever heard of a case where the statute of limitations actually lapsed. Anybody who has worked with any IRS agents will tell you that they will confirm that they have never heard of the statute of limitations lapsing — especially with a different level of supervisor’s attention to the statute.
As if this was not incredulous enough, the statute of limitations never expires in the case of tax fraud. Though the statute is normally three years from the date of the filing of return, and six years if income on the tax return was understated by 25% (certainly the case with Hunter Biden), this period is extended indefinitely if tax fraud is involved (also almost certainly the case with Hunter).
Though I have tried to pursue this matter and get an answer from people involved, I have up to this point not been successful. But I do want the public to know that there is some serious cover-up going on with the current Hunter Biden IRS tax situation.
by | BLOG, BUSINESS, ECONOMY
Don Boudreaux is one of the authors of Cafe Hayek, a fantastic, long-running newsletter on economics. If you aren’t reading it, you should. Below is his short and marvelous analogy, “Trade is a Technology.” I have reproduced it below.
“You ask: “What is the shortest best way to prove the case for trade freedom?”
I’m afraid that no such proof is possible. Ultimately the decision to support or oppose free trade rests on a value judgment. That free trade is the best, or even an acceptable, policy cannot be established in the same way that we can establish the truth of the Pythagorean theorem. There are, however, arguments to be made that reveal surprising, attractive powers of free trade – arguments that, when presented amicably, are effective in opening people’s eyes to important and beautiful aspects of trade. I encourage you to read carefully Frédéric Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms; in it you’ll find unmatched brilliance at exposing fallacies that infect the case for protectionism. Read also Russell Roberts’s The Choice, Doug Irwin’s Free Trade Under Fire, Dan Griswold’s Mad About Trade, and Pierre Lemieux’s What’s Wrong With Protectionism?
But let me offer one argument for trade that satisfies at least your criterion for ‘short.’ It’s this: trade is a technology that enables human beings to transform almost anything into almost anything else. You produce whatever you choose to produce and then exchange that output for whatever it is you wish to acquire. You can today produce outputs different from those that you produced yesterday and still acquire today the same things that you acquired yesterday. Or you can produce today the same things that you produced yesterday, yet transform those outputs today into things different from those that you acquired yesterday.
Trade truly is a marvelous technology! If trade were an actual, physical machine it would be hailed as one of the greatest inventions of all time. And so when government restricts your ability to transform what you produce into outputs produced by foreigners, government artificially restricts the operation of this technology. Protectionism is akin to sabotaging a machine. (In fact, at work here are real machines: cargo ships, which are effectively sabotaged by protectionism.) We recognize that such sabotage is destructive when done to the likes of factories, tractors, trucks, and computers. We should recognize also that it’s destructive when done to trade.”
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
by | BLOG, EDUCATION, FREEDOM, Israel
“Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life…I will not condemn Palestinian resistance.” These are the words of former NYU Law Student Bar Association President Ryna Workman, issued via the association’s email list to as many as 2,000 students. The loss of life Workman so callously attributes to Israel was caused by Hamas terrorists who killed approximately 1,300 people and took hundreds more captive; these are conservative estimates. The attack occurred on Simchat Torah (October 7th), a Jewish holiday during the festival known as Sukkot, and marked the deadliest attack on Israel since 1973.
Let me be clear: Workman is a symptom of a larger disease. Workman is one person; the more damning and horrifying aspect of NYU is that she felt comfortable enough to blast it publicly, openly endorsing heinous acts. What was the response of the student body? 41% of them either approved of or applauded her position and vitriol. Sickening.
Workman believes that Hamas are freedom fighters who should be commended and encouraged in their senseless acts of brutality. Fathi Hamad, a senior member of Gaza’s Islamist rulers Hamas, said “…Seven million Palestinians outside, enough warming up, you have Jews with you in every place. You should attack every Jew possible in all the world and kill them.” Hamas seeks the utter destruction and eradication of the Jewish people. That is crystal clear, and these are the people that Ryan Workman, who was placed in a position of authority and prestige by her peers, idolizes.
Ryna Workman is utterly reprehensible, but perhaps the most damning is the NYU student body. Thirty-six percent voted that Workman should remain in office despite her outrageous claims. The evening of Workman’s anti-Semitic email blast, a vote of no confidence was initiated by a student-led petition. Per student affairs, each student received a voting link tied to their netID. A voting link was sent to 2,070 law students, and 1,176 votes were recorded. Seven hundred and seven students (60%) voted that the SBA President, Ryna Workman, should not remain in office. Four hundred and twenty-eight students (36%) voted that she should remain in office, and 41 (3%) abstained. It is utterly terrifying that 40% of law students attending what was once a prestigious bastion of higher education could find nothing wrong with some blatant cruelty and openly side with kidnappers, rapists, and murderers. Four hundred and twenty-eight “highly educated” men and women openly endorsed it, and 41 could care less.
Workman went on to double down on her previous statements by appearing before ABC News and refusing to condemn the murder and kidnapping of civilians, and the use of sexual violence and the separation and torture of children. Workman has been removed from her office and had a job offer from Winston & Strawn revoked over the message, but that is not enough. Everyone that endorsed her via their votes should also face consequences. These men and women are not fit to serve in a court of law. Evil is alive and flourishing within the American higher education and judicial systems.
by | BLOG, GOVERNMENT, Israel
The White House has taken a fairly strong stand in its support of Israel since the start of the Hamas war, so it is particularly loathsome that it has not done the same with the onslaught of dissent from within the bureaucracy. The Agency for International Development, the State Department, and nearly 40 other agencies with more than 1500 staff members and political appointees have written letters and memos critical of Biden’s position.
Of course, civil servants have the right to say what they want, but the White House also has a duty to respond — especially when the protests are with regard to current policy and the vast majority of dissenters are anonymous. Instead, it was milquetoast and extolled “listening” to the complainants as well encouraging “feedback and ideas.”
What the White House should have done was rebuke the letter writers for their ignorant views. The utter lack of a firm response is a prime example of the cause of antisemitism today. These idiotic and counterfactual views are allowed to go unrebutted, not only among the government but also (as shown particularly in recent weeks) rampantly on college campuses as well. Such timidness encourages many students and others in the academic community to think that maybe there is some substance to what these ignorant antisemitic protestors say. No one is calling for speech to be stifled, but what needs to happen is a pushback. In other words, “you can say what you think, but know that you are actually incorrect because of x, y, and z.” That is how you actually stop antisemitism instead of aiding and abetting it!
Instead we get “organizing forums” and “candid conversations” which just result in more of the same: counterfactual information continuing to be shared — under the guise of tolerance, mind you — without any correction whatsoever. This is unacceptable and it further undermines the US position on Israel. If the White House is unwilling to defend Israel internally to a bunch of unelected bureaucrats with no policy power, what assurances do we have that it will continue to stand strong with Israel among those who actually do craft policy across the world?
by | BLOG, EDUCATION, Israel
A Jewish Canadian professor shares anguish over the plight of the people of Israel, but more importantly — of the students’ inabilities to understand and analyze the history and context of the current war. I have reposted it in full, as it is an open letter widely being circulated across social media in the last day or so:
“Dear Students,
I have spent the last 25 years showing you the beauty of all of the literary, cultural, philosophical, and artistic heights of the human spirit over the course of human history. Teaching you has been the most wonderful and satisfying of callings. I never wanted to do anything other than meet with you, discuss ideas with you, discover and rediscover human insights, truths, and wonders. I never regretted my career path, never hated my job, and never doubted my legacy. I felt privileged and honoured to show you how to analyse, to think critically, to weigh evidence, and to understand people and ideas, contexts and complexity, deeply and thoroughly. I thought my work was helping to make the world a better, more humane, more thoughtful place.
You have broken my heart. No: shattered it, irreparably. I don’t know how I will ever set foot in a classroom again. I don’t know how I will ever see you the same way. I know now that I was deluding myself that I ever had any impact, would ever leave any positive legacy, that my work ever made any difference.
I watch you all on social media, in the streets and the quads, marching in solidarity with a movement that seeks only to wipe me out. To exterminate me, my children, my parents, my entire family and community. I know, some of you think you’re trying to help the oppressed. You think that my kind is the white colonialist racist kind that you hate.
But I thought I taught you how to evaluate arguments. I thought I taught you the importance of understanding context, both historical and rhetorical. I thought that I taught you that the world did not operate according to dichotomies, like black and white, oppressor and oppressed, villain and victim. I thought I taught you about complexity, about judgment, and to examine your sources and not to take anyone’s statements at face value.
Zionism is the Jewish right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland. Israel is that ancestral homeland. Jews are the indigenous peoples of that land; not the only indigenous peoples of that land, to be sure. But Israel is the only land to which we are indigenous. After 2000 years of longing, the result of the Holocaust – a Nazi movement which sought to ethnically cleanse the world of Jews by systematically exterminating us – was that the international community granted us a sliver of that ancestral homeland.
It was to be shared, partitioned into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Arabs rejected the partition and attacked the Jews when they declared the state of Israel in 1948. The Jews won. Arabs who remained in Israel became citizens with full rights and freedoms. 20% of Israel’s population today is Arab. They fight in the army, they are doctors, lawyers, members of Parliament and supreme court judges. There is no apartheid. Israel’s Jewish population consists of Jews from Arab lands, whose parents or grandparents were kicked out when the state of Israel was formed, and of descendants of refugees from Eastern Europe, Holocaust survivors who had no homes to return to. Some are more recent refugees from Europe, Russia, and the Americas who either returned to Israel for religious reasons or because the Jew-hatred in their communities grew too excessive and they decided to emigrate, to head for the one place in the world Jews can go if their neighbours or governments turn against them.
The West Bank and Gaza strip – along with refugee camps that still exist in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan — were the places that the Arab nations who attacked Israel at its founding told the Arabs living in Palestine (later to be known as Palestinians) to flee. It was supposed to be temporary, because the plan was to “push the Jews into the sea.” When the plan didn’t work out, all of these states refused to absorb the Palestinians. They wanted to keep them in camps because they still planned to annihilate Israel and the Jews that lived there and then the Palestinians could return. The West Bank was in Jordan and Gaza was in Egypt until 1967, when the Arab states tried again to push the Jews into the sea. Their failure this time ended with Israel capturing these territories.
When Israel tried to exchange land for peace and give Gaza back to Egypt, Egypt didn’t want it. And so the territories remained in Israel. In 2005 Israel pulled out of Gaza and left it to govern itself. Most of the West Bank is also self-governing, but not all because of the high number of suicide bombers and other threats to Israel’s existence fomenting there, so Israel hasn’t been able to fully remove itself. The current awful Israeli government has allowed religious fanatics, “settlers,” to build settlements there, which makes everything worse.
And you see what I did there? I criticized Israel’s government. I can do that, and still support the existence of a Jewish state in our ancestral homeland.
When you say “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” this is a call to ethnic cleansing of Jews from their homeland, from the only state in the entire Middle East that would look remotely familiar to you in terms of basic rights and freedoms and a democratic system if you were to visit the region. When Hamas supporters – like those who led you all in a rally on my home campus today – talk about Jews as “occupiers,” they don’t mean Gaza. They mean the whole state of Israel. They want Jews eradicated from the entire land. Hamas actually wants us gone from the whole world, as they have stated many times. Who are the Nazis now?
But here I am, teaching again. I can’t help myself. I wish that you cared what I had to say. I wish that some knowledge, some context, some understanding, could reach beyond the slogans and chants for my death that you are repeating mindlessly and endlessly as you march to the beat of hatred across the tattered remains of my broken soul.”
by | BLOG, Israel, OBAMA
“What Hamas did was horrific, and there is no justification for it. And what is also true is that the occupation, and what’s happening to Palestinians, is unbearable … And so, if you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth. And you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree.”
The above comments were given on a podcast called “Pod Save America” just a few days ago by Barack Obama. It’s absolutely disgusting that a former President of the United States could be so blatantly wrong -headed and antisemitic in the face of abject terrorism. While he initially condemned the Hamas atrocities, he then continued to make a ridiculous moral equivalence by suggesting that everyone involved was “complicit to some degree.” As if burning people alive, rape, and beheading can be morally equivalent to anything.
Everyone knows that the Palestinian’s conditions are unbearable; it’s abuse at the hands of Hamas and the PLO. Billions of dollars are siphoned off to their wealthy leaders and their rebel armies, and not used for the betterment of their own people! Yet Obama’s excuse of being “occupied” is clearly false and he knows it, since the Israelis left Gaza in 2005, even before Obama became President! Nor did he explain that Hamas was elected to lead Gaza in 2006 and has held no election since. This is the same Hamas that has long been designated a terror group by the US, the European Union, and the UK (though a UN resolution failed in 2018). Obama, being President from 2009 – 2017 fully knows this yet remained absolutely silent.
If anyone is complicit, it’s certainly Obama. Remember Obama’s Iranian deal freed up some $100 billion in funds to Iran, including an estimated $1.7 billion in cash payments. Those most certainly went to terrorist proxies such as Hezbollah and Houthi, the same rebels currently and directly assisting Hamas.
And as a Jew, I couldn’t be more ashamed that Jews voted approximately 78% for Obama. I thought we were smarter than that. Obama did an exceptional job bamboozling people that he wasn’t an antisemite while in office and he tried the same thing recently with regard to Hamas. He knows better. It’s truly reprehensible that Obama is actually that cowardly and prejudiced.
