Wednesday, November 04, 2020



Daylight Saving Time (DST) ends at 2:00 am Sunday, November 1, and most Americans will again suffer the consequences

The consequences are not limited to the time and trouble of moving the hands of analog clocks back one hour in the fall, only to be forced to move them forward again in March when DST returns.

The annual rituals of “falling back” and “springing forward” impose very real costs on the economy and stress the human body physiologically, both worrisome during normal times but even more so in the midst of a pandemic to which governments have responded with draconian lockdowns that have crippled business operations, thrown millions out of work and forced many people to avoid or delay routine medical care.

What’s the big deal? Why should we worry about losing just an hour of sleep in the spring, only to gain it back in the fall?

The time regime under which people live and work does not affect the number of hours of daily sunlight, which depend mainly on the season of the year and latitude (distance from the earth’s equator).

In the Northern Hemisphere, days lengthen in summer and shorten in winter no matter whether DST or standard time is in effect.

DST apparently shifts an hour of sunlight to later in the day, and standard time claws that hour back.

Since schedules for work and other daily activities do not adjust for most people, they experience the equivalent of jet lag without traveling to another time zone. Their body clocks (circadian rhythms) are jolted two times a year.

The jolt reduces productivity on the job for days after the time changes in either direction. Heart attacks and strokes spike. Traffic accidents increase, especially in the spring when drivers have lost an hour of sleep.

In the fall, more carnage undoubtedly occurs as people adjust imperfectly to commuting home in the dark; pedestrians (even in crosswalks) and bicyclists wearing dark clothing especially are at risk of being hit by inattentive motorists. The effects tend to be more severe in “vulnerable populations.“

The economic and healthcare costs of time traveling every year are not offset by any material benefits.

The energy savings once claimed to be associated with DST typically are small, at least since air conditioning became widespread. The reverse likely is true: DST results in more energy consumption.

Sure, it’s nice to push dusk back an hour at the end of the day during warm weather, but why force everyone to put up with a one size fits all policy?

The Uniform Time Act of 1966, as amended, sets the dates on which DST begins and ends; in the United States “standard time” is now confined to just over four months every year.

The law permits the several states to remain on (or revert to) standard time year-round unilaterally but does not allow any state to adopt DST for 12 months of the year. Some states, like Florida, Oregon and Washington, want to do that. (Oregon’s law becomes effective only if California also adopts year-round DST.)

As a matter of fact, 34 of the 50 states want to make DST permanent. Such action requires congressional approval. Physiologists, on the other hand, would opt for standard time year-round.

In March 2020, the European Union voted to end biennial time changes for good, providing for one final adjustment next year, either in March or October, allowing its 28 member countries (minus Britain) to choose DST or standard time permanently.

Eighty-four percent of Europeans supported scrapping mandatory springing forward and falling back. Perhaps memories of Britain’s double summertime, which moved clocks forward by two hours during the Second World War, remain fresh.

It’s time for Congress to respond to popular demands for ending the tyranny of government time by allowing states to choose the time regime under which people want to live permanently, stopping the nonsense of twice-yearly assaults on our economic and bodily well-being.

Should Government Build and Finance Affordable Housing?

Government affordable housing policy can be separated between “demand-side” and “supply-side” solutions. I have described for Catalyst the demand-side ones—such as rent control policies that aim to suppress prices, or Section 8 vouchers that aim to boost spending power—and why they are problematic.

Here I will describe supply-side ones, which, per their name, are an effort to boost housing supply, rather than fiddling with the demand equation. I find similar problems with supply-side solutions, and will unpack two of the more prominent ones over the last century—public housing and low-income housing tax credits (LIHTC).

Public Housing

Public housing became mainstream in the U.S. during and after the Great Depression, when the federal government passed several bills to construct it for the working- and middle-classes. The means to build the housing were extreme, as the bills allocated hundreds of billions in today’s dollars to tear down functioning old neighborhoods, via “urban renewal,” creating space for new towers. But the ends didn’t turn out well. Projects that were thought to be great innovations of their day became notorious within years. By 1972, St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe complex was already being torn down, and by the 1990s the federal government made demolition of these projects mainstream.

A number of problems caused public housing to fail. One is that it was racially-segregated. Another was that it was poorly-designed, following the towers-in-a-park fad that created dead space and harbored crime. But the main problem was that it was government-run, subjecting it to poor outcomes.

One tenet of classical liberal economics is public choice theory. It posits that government bureaucracies don’t perform well because they are not incentivized to do so. Unlike private firms, there isn’t a unifying goal (profit) that encourages bureaucracies to act efficiently. There are instead competing actors who pursue their own interests, often at the expense of the whole. Public choice theory, rather than supporting the notion of the selfless, idealistic public servant, attributes common human traits to these workers, like the pursuit of money and power. But because civil servants aren’t subject to the corrections of the private sector—and because agencies themselves are not results-oriented—they grow infused with corruption, patronage and inertia.

I will go more into public choice theory in a later article about government transit, because it explains many failures there. But it also explains the flaws of public housing. When HUD took control of the Chicago Housing Authority in 1995, for example, it described an agency that, despite receiving $350 million in annual federal funds, couldn’t maintain its buildings, ensure safety, or explain its millions in missing pension funds. That is because no one in the agency was set to lose financially due to those failures.

Nowadays, NYCHA still makes headlines for its severe under-maintenance of New York City public housing. The popular excuse is “underfunding,” but it has more to do with labor rules that protect entrenched unions. This prevents the agency from conducting open procurements, causing high construction costs and low service quality.

These public choice flaws have been common for decades within PHAs, and are predictable. That doesn’t mean public housing is always bad—it is, after all, still housing. But its track record should throw cold water on the renewed optimism among urbanists for “decommodifying” housing and making more of it “public” or “social.” Even if the model adequately houses some people, it is still suboptimal relative to the money spent.

LIHTC

Due to public housing’s flaws, the federal government privatized affordable housing. In 1986, congress authorized LIHTC, a tax credit that’s given to qualified developers, who then sell the credits to financial institutions looking to reduce their tax burdens. Developers use that money to underwrite housing projects, with the stipulation that some units remain affordable. LIHTC is an $8 billion subsidy underwriting 107,000 units, making it America’s largest affordable housing finance source.

LIHTC’s perceived benefit is that by enlisting private or nonprofit entities to run housing, it creates incentives for good quality. I can verify from experience that LIHTC accomplishes this.

One magazine I write for, Tax Credit Advisor, specializes in covering LIHTC projects. I have visited many projects and seen how well-maintained they are. Low-income units are often placed in upscale projects and locations, and are fairly indistinguishable from market-rate housing.

But this has actually fed my criticism of LIHTC. The policy produces affordable housing in the most expensive way possible, sticking units in nice neighborhoods and building them to an unnecessarily high standard. LIHTC also follows the flawed premise that affordable housing must be newly-built, whereas in a natural market process, a city’s older housing stock is what is more likely to be affordable. Many of the stories about overly-expensive affordable housing—such as the $500k+ units throughout California—involve LIHTC financing. This prevents the money from stretching further and helping more people.

LIHTC instead helps interest groups, causing the same public choice problems as government-run housing. As different critical reports have shown, developers overstate their project costs to win more allocation, syndicators lop off money from the credits by serving as middle men, and lawyers benefit from the program’s complexity. This is all money that, again, cannot be used for housing.

“LIHTC is producing fewer new units of housing each year while costing taxpayers 50 percent more in tax credit dollars—even after accounting for increasing construction costs,” wrote NPR in 2017.

For these reasons, governments should not be in the business of creating new housing, either through public processes or public-private ones like LIHTC. It is not their comparative advantage, nor something they do in a cheap and scalable manner.

The best affordable housing strategy is to allow broad market liberalization, so private developers can build enough housing to meet local demand. In U.S. metros that do this, older housing stock, often in decent locations, has in fact “filtered down” and become affordable. If some families still can’t afford housing under a liberalized model, Section 8 vouchers can fill those gaps and be used to rent the older housing. But using socialized models to finance and build new affordable units has been a public choice problem, riddled with waste, corruption, and mismanagement.

The Blue-Collar Billionaire

Donald Trump is all that stands between We the People and an increasingly intolerant world.

Perhaps you’ve noticed: The world ain’t what it used to be — at least not for folks of a particular political persuasion.

There was a time not too long ago when we on the Right could proudly support our president even while the other side dismissed him as a “B” actor, a warmonger, and an “amiable dunce.” More recently, we could confess to having thrown a lever for Chimpy Bush Hitler and still be accepted in polite company. Today, however, try telling folks outside your circle of friends that you voted for the Orange Guy. And that you’re voting for him again this year.

Free speech and populism used to be popular among Democrats. Theirs was the party of blue-collar America, after all. Macomb County’s “Reagan Democrats” were, in fact, Democrats. Republicans? They lived in Grosse Pointe and in the tony northern suburbs, while the Democrats lived downriver. These Republicans thought “business casual” meant leaving the diamond cufflinks in the dresser drawer, and their elected representatives used Queensbury Rules to fend off a sucker-punching press.

Since then, the parties have done a switcheroo. Not a fake one, like the Democrats say happened in the Civil Rights ‘60s, but a real one with real consequences. The culture and the counterculture have switched sides, and there’s no denying it. Democrats are now the elites, the paternalists, the Chardonnay-sippers, the theater-goers, the media darlings, the foundation favorites, the advanced-degree types, and the party preferred by Wall Street. Republicans, on the other hand, have welcomed in the workers, the grinders, the hog butchers, the middle-managers, the guys and gals in the field and on the shop floor. The Republican Party is diverse, but the common thread is Patriotism. We love our country, and we don’t apologize for it.

We’re okay with this rearrangement, too, because we know we’re riling up the right people. As our Thomas Gallatin noted recently, “Hillary Clinton once again reminded everyone why she was such an odious and unlikeable candidate. In comments resembling her infamous ’basket of deplorables‘ slander from 2016, Clinton went low, accusing most elected Republicans of being 'cowards’ and ‘spineless enablers’ of President Donald Trump. ‘Most Republicans are going to want to close the page,’ she asserted without evidence while robotically botching the metaphor. She added, ‘They want to see him gone as much as we do, but they can’t say it publicly.’”

Suffice it to say: We want to be taking fire from the likes of Hillary Clinton. When she calls us deplorables, we take it as a compliment.

A vote for Donald Trump is thus a vote for the resistance. However quietly or noisily, when we support the president, we become dissidents, revolutionaries, anti-establishment types. Even if you’re disinclined to grab a torch or a pitchfork, there’s something inside you that’s looking around and wondering how we got to this awful state of affairs; something inside you that feels like a young John McEnroe at stodgy old Wimbledon. Joe Biden for president? You cannot be serious!

As National Review’s Rich Lowry put it in a piece perfectly titled “The Only Middle Finger Available”: “Besides the occasional dissenting academic and brave business owner or ordinary citizen, Trump is, for better or worse, the foremost symbol of resistance to the overwhelming woke cultural tide that has swept along the media, academia, corporate America, Hollywood, professional sports, the big foundations, and almost everything in between.”

Yes, you’re now part of the counterculture. And the old counterculture of the ‘60s has become today’s de facto culture. Think about it: The free speech movement began among long-haired college kids in the mid-1960s, and now free speech (along with freedom of religion and freedom of the press) is under withering assault by those same people more than a half-century later. In a way, the revolution has come full circle.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Donald Trump is leading this revolution, and were it not for us, he’d be all alone. Okay, he’d still have the NRA and the cops and the state of Israel, but who else? Never in our nation’s history has an American president had so many powerful forces so resolutely arrayed against him: Big Tech, the media, Hollywood, the schools, the colleges and universities, the foundations, the increasingly woke large corporations, and the list goes on.

And yet Trump goes on, too.

And one wonders: Why? What’s his angle? What’s his play? He certainly didn’t do it for the money. He’s already lost, what, a billion dollars by taking on the world’s toughest and most thankless job? Heck, he’s not even drawing a salary. Previous presidents could afford to sacrifice the short-term monetary shortfall because they knew they’d be able to make it up on the back end with book deals, speaking engagements, and the like. But the Trump brand is now toxic among the elites. What corporation would dare book him as a speaker or hold its client conference at one of his properties?

This is the thanks he’ll get for having led a rebellion against a government that’s gotten too big and too meddlesome and too oppressive, and against a culture that’s become downright hostile toward the very things that made this nation great.

Our tireless blue-collar president still has plenty of work to do.

The Assault on Religious Freedom During COVID-19

During the course of the COVID-19 crisis, an ongoing, and very legitimate, national debate has continued about the wisdom of lockdowns.

The decision to shut down social and commercial activity in the name of health is itself arbitrary. Then, the decision to decide what to shut down and what not to shut down, what activities are more essential than others, adds more arbitrariness.

These decisions reflect the values and priorities of those with power who are making them. In our increasingly secular society, this is posing enormous problems and challenges for religious freedom.

Earlier this year, Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley in Nevada failed in its attempt to get the Supreme Court to rein in Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak’s order that arbitrarily clamps down more severely on churches than on gambling casinos.

Nevada’s policy holds that restaurants, bars, casinos, and gyms can operate at 50% capacity, while houses of worship are limited to a maximum of 50 people regardless of their capacity.

In a 5-4 vote, the court refused injunctive relief for Calvary Chapel.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh got to the heart of the matter in his dissent.

“Nevada’s rules,” wrote Kavanaugh, “reflect an implicit judgement that for-profit assemblies are important and religious gatherings are less so; that moneymaking is more important than faith during the pandemic.”

But rather than the fight being over, it is continuing and picking up steam.

A few weeks ago, a federal district court judge ruled in favor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in its complaint against Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser’s executive order prohibiting religious gatherings of over 100 people, indoors or outdoors.

The church, in its complaint and request for relief, noted that the mayor herself appeared and spoke at an outdoor gathering of “tens of thousands of people” in downtown Washington.

A federal district court judge in Colorado has just ruled in favor of two local churches who filed a suit challenging the state’s rules requiring masks and limiting the size of indoor gatherings. The judge found that the rules for religious institutions were more severe than for secular ones and, therefore, unconstitutional.

However, a lawsuit filed by Orthodox Jews and Catholics in New York against Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s restrictions on indoor gatherings was met with less success, as a federal district court judge ruled in favor of the state.

Lockdowns present a formidable test and challenge to the country. Our Constitution, with its Bill of Rights, was formulated with the idea that a legal fence could be built to protect individual freedom from arbitrary violations.

One of America’s Founding Fathers, John Adams, used the phrase “a government of laws, not of men” to capture the idea that we should aspire to limit arbitrary power given to men.

But a government-mandated lockdown is all about giving politicians enormous arbitrary power.

America was founded by those seeking religious freedom. Recall the famous sermon in 1630 by Puritan John Winthrop, founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, one of the nation’s first colonies.

“For we must consider,” said Winthrop, “that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and by-word through the world.”

But the religion, and the freedom to practice it, that was most important to Winthrop and many of the founders of this country is least important to many people with political power making lockdown decisions today.

According to a 2015 Pew Research Center report, 36% of Americans attend religious services weekly.

Legal challenges must continue everywhere constitutional protections for religious freedom and equal treatment are being violated.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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