Liberalism’s Summer of ’17

Liberals whine about being governed by Trump. Pity those governed by them.

Many of those now climbing over the Democrats’ blue walls were willing to live under the original liberal governance model that existed before 1960 because it recognized the legitimacy of private economic life. The wealthy agreed then to pay their “fair share.”

.. Defenders of the liberal model argue that cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles are changing into sophisticated, cosmopolitan hubs that attract a new class of young professionals who will restore urban America. Instead, many of these urban revivals are producing a phenomenon economists now call “racially concentrated areas of affluence,” or RCAAs.

An area gets RCAAed when the residents who pack themselves into it are mostly white people whose median incomes are unprecedentedly greater than the city’s poverty level. Some of the most RCAAed cities are liberal duchies like Boston, Baltimore, Chicago and Philadelphia.

Today, private economic life, especially that of the urban middle class, is no longer a partner in the liberal model. It’s merely a “revenue source” for a system whose patronage is open-ended welfare and largely uncapped public-employee pensions. I’d describe the liberal-progressive governing strategy as ruin and rule.

.. Not widely noticed is that liberalism’s claimed beneficiaries—black Americans—are also fleeing its failures. Demographers have documented significant black out-migration from New York, Michigan, California and Illinois into Florida, Georgia, Texas and North Carolina. North to south.

.. They are now asking the federal government, meaning taxpayers who live in parts of the U.S. not hostile to capitalism, to give them nearly $15 billion to replace the 100-year-old train tunnel beneath the Hudson River. Why should they? Why send money to a moribund, dysfunctional urban liberal politics that will never—as in, not ever—clean up its act or reform?

Maybe we need a new default solution to the urban crisis: Let internal migration redistribute the U.S. population away from liberalism’s smug but falling-apart plutonomies.

Is It So Bad if the World Gets a Little Hotter? Uh, Yeah.

If humanity burns through all its fossil fuel reserves, there is the potential to warm the planet by perhaps more than 10 degrees Celsius and raise sea levels by hundreds of feet.

This is a warming spike comparable in magnitude to that so far measured for the End-Permian mass extinction.

.. The last time it was 4 degrees warmer there was no ice at either pole and sea level was hundreds of feet higher than it is today.

.. in the coming centuries it’s not impossible that we might be headed back to the Eocene climate of 50 million years ago, when there were Alaskan palm trees and alligators splashed in the Arctic Circle.

.. “Lizards will be fine, birds will be fine,”

.. Huber says that, mass extinction or not, it’s our tenuous reliance on an aging and inadequate infrastructure—perhaps, most ominously, on power grids—coupled with the limits of human physiology that may well bring down our world.

.. “The problem is that humans can’t even handle a hot week today without the power grid failing on a regular basis,” he said, noting that the aging patchwork power grid in the United States is built with components that are allowed to languish for more than a century before being replaced.

.. By the year 2050, according to a 2014 MIT study, there will also be 5 billion people living in water-stressed areas.

.. “Thirty to fifty years from now, more or less, the water wars are going to start,” Huber said

.. “None of the economists are modeling what happens to a country’s GDP if 10 percent of the population is refugees sitting in refugee camps.

.. If people don’t have economic hope and they’re displaced, they tend to get mad and blow things up. It’s the kind of world in which the major institutions, including nations as a whole, have their existence threatened by mass migration.

.. Huber calculated their temperature thresholds using the so-called wet-bulb temperature, which basically measures how much you can cool off at a given temperature. If humidity is high, for instance, things like sweat and wind are less effective at cooling you down, and the wet-bulb temperature accounts for this.

.. Wet-bulb temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius or higher are lethal to humanity.

.. Above this limit, it is impossible for humans to dissipate the heat they generate indefinitely and they die of overheating in a matter of hours, no matter how hard they try to cool off.

.. 7 degrees Celsius of warming would begin to render large parts of the globe lethally hot to mammals.

.. truly huge swaths of the planet currently inhabited by humans would exceed 35 degrees Celsius wet-bulb temperatures and would have to be abandoned.

.. “In the near term—2050 or 2070—the Midwest United States is going to be one of the hardest hit,” said Huber. “There’s a plume of warm, moist air that heads up through the central interior of the US during just the right season, and man, is it hot and sticky. You just add a couple of degrees and it gets really hot and sticky.

.. the Hajj, which brings 2 million religious pilgrims to Mecca each year, will be a physically impossible religious obligation to fulfill due to the limits of heat stress in the region in just a few decades.

.. “You want to know how societies collapse?” Huber said.

“That’s how.”

If you work for Trump, it’s time to quit

You hate that people are shying away from administration jobs in droves: Just this week, in rapid succession, Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Trey Gowdy withdrew their names from consideration as replacements for former FBI Director James Comey, the guy your boss fired. Whatever department you’re in, it’s a safe bet that it’s a whispering graveyard of empty appointments and unfilled jobs.

.. after all, just a few days after taking office, he assured us, “I can be the most presidential person ever.”

.. You figured Trump would turn his political capital into big wins, and that his lack of interest in policy details would let you and your friends in Congress set the agenda. Sure, you knew you’d have to feed Trump’s ego and let him take a victory lap after every success, but you also thought you might claim a smidgen of credit for

  • a popular infrastructure bill,
  •  a big tax cut,
  • repeal of Obamacare
  • or a host of other “easy” lifts.

.. you’re really not doing much except playing defense and wondering which of your colleagues is leaking to The Washington Post.

.. If you’ve been ordained to appear on television as an administration surrogate, you know by now that your task isn’t to advocate for your agency or issue, but to lavish the president with praise.

.. You already know you can’t save the president because he doesn’t want to be saved. You already know there’s not another, better version of Trump getting ready to show up.

.. When this regime falls, do you want to be among those who said “not me,” or do you want to go out like a Baath Party generalissimo?

Sticking with Trump to the bitter end and pretending the unfolding chaos is just “fake news” won’t save your reputation as the walls close in.

.. Cutting ties with a man who is destructive to our values, profoundly divisive, contemptuous of the rule of law and incontrovertibly unfit to serve in the highest office in the land just might. Do it now.

Private Funding Is Key Challenge of Trump Infrastructure Plan

Effort reflects the difficulty of coming up with taxpayer dollars in era of constrained budgeting; administration has released few details

 President Donald Trump’s proposed infusion of funding for infrastructure turns on a critical question: how the administration will get private investors to put up most of the money.
.. Mr. Trump’s advisers say they can get private investors to flock to put up the capital for such projects by curtailing permitting requirements and regulations, and by offering incentives to states and cities to turn to the private sector for financing.
.. it plans to encourage cities and towns to raise fees—like roadway tolls or water-usage charges—that will provide the revenue streams for private-equity investors.
.. The municipal bond market remains a more attractive source of funding to many state and local officials needing funding for major projects, Ms. Crebo-Rediker said, and many local governments lack expertise in how to structure public-private partnership deals.
..finding money for projects isn’t the problem; it is the dearth of attractive investments.
.. Blackstone Group LP last month disclosed that Saudi Arabia has agreed to invest $20 billion in an infrastructure fund that the New York firm hopes will reach $40 billion and have spending power of as much as $100 billion once debt is added.
.. while the administration says it will devote $200 billion more to infrastructure over the coming 10 years, the department is also cutting funding to existing programs that support major projects.