Ron DeSantis drives more enemies before him, the Biden Administration keeps doubling down on tranny madness, Batgirl dies for DC’s sins, and the most “Ewww” inducing headline of the year. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Construction projects are undertaken within a legal and regulatory system that presents persistent, costly obstacles, while projects are being overseen by agencies who lack the resources and in some cases even the expertise to manage them.
Sepulveda’s numerous lawsuits and stakeholder conflicts are an example of a phenomenon that can be traced back to the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1969. NEPA mandates developers to provide environmental impact statements before they can obtain the permits necessary for construction on huge swathes of infrastructure.
Shortly following the passage of NEPA, California’s then-governor Ronald Reagan signed the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) into law, which required additional environmental impact analysis. Unlike NEPA, it requires adopting all feasible measures to mitigate these impacts. Interest groups wield CEQA and NEPA like weapons. One study found that 85 percent of CEQA lawsuits were filed by groups with no history of environmental advocacy. The NIMBY attitude of these groups has crippled the ability of California to build anything. As California Governor Gavin Newsom succinctly put it, “NIMBYism is destroying the state.”
It is also destroying the U.S.’s ability to build nationally. The economist Eli Dourado reported in The New York Times that “per-mile spending on the Interstate System of Highways tripled between the 1960’s and 1980’s.” This directly correlates with the passage of NEPA. If anything, the problem has gotten worse over time. Projects receiving funding through the $837 billion stimulus plan passed by Congress in the aftermath of the financial crises were subject to over 192,000 NEPA reviews.
The NEPA/CEQA process incentivizes the public agencies to seek what is often termed a “bulletproof” environmental compliance document to head off future legal challenges. This takes time, with the average EIS taking 4.5 years to complete. Some have taken longer than a decade. A cottage industry of consultants is devoted to completing these documents, earning themselves millions in fees.
The NEPA consultants are just one of the numerous types of consultants that benefit from the way we build. Most infrastructure in the U.S. is built through a huge number of state and local agencies: for example, there are 51,000 community water systems alone in the U.S. This decentralized structure makes it much more difficult to develop the depth of expertise needed to manage the complexities posed by megaprojects. Often, the multiple public agencies that are involved with projects also have overlapping authorities, creating bureaucratic delays and slowing decision making.
The expertise problem is compounded by the fact that agencies are often staffed with a workforce of people either just at the beginning of their careers or near the end of them. Those at the beginning tend to leave if they are ambitious, which leaves senior positions in the hands of agency lifers. Because of this dynamic, and the fact that it is not economically feasible to have the wide range of expertise needed in-house, public agencies employ engineering consulting firms. These firms fill a valuable niche. If you are building a complex project—say, a long-span bridge or a desalination plant—you want advice from someone who has designed and built dozens of them. The problem arises when you become too dependent on such advice.
The High-Speed Rail project was undermined by such a failure. At its peak, the agency responsible for the project, the California High-Speed Rail Authority, had fewer than 30 permanent employees managing the $105 billion project. Instead of hiring staff, the Authority relied heavily on outside consultants. These consultants were well paid, with the primary consultant compensation for HSR at $427,000 per engineer, compared with the Authority’s in-house cost of $131,000 per engineer. This structure creates a principal-agent problem where they are incentivized to maximize their billable hours. As a California State Auditor assessment of the project noted, consultants “may not always have the state’s best interest as their primary motivation.”
This lack of in-house institutional expertise leads to bad decision-making. Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor at Oxford University who has written extensively about megaprojects summarized the problem when asked about California’s HSR project: “If you depend on consultants to know what you are doing then you are in real trouble…a good balance is where the owners are not outsourcing all the knowledge. A bad balance guarantees a bad outcome.”
The pitfalls of this lack of balance appeared before large parts of the project began. In 2014, Dragados, the contractor for a 63-mile section of the HSR, proposed radical design changes that they projected could save $300 million. The fact that Dragados’s bid was $500 million lower than its competitors and that it rested upon a design concept that had not been thoroughly vetted should have caused alarm. As a senior engineer who worked on the original environmental compliance document for HSR and reviewed the concepts told the Los Angeles Times, “it is mind-boggling they would entertain some of the things that Dragados proposed.”
Dragados’s approach may have been driven by the fact it didn’t have the experience of its competitors; it had never built a rail project in the U.S. before and needed an edge to be selected. It was a measured risk because it knew there were ways to limit its financial exposure if its design ideas didn’t work. A Los Angeles Times investigation of the project in 2021 found Dragados had issued 273 change orders for additional payment and had completed less than 50 percent of its planned work four years after its section was supposed to be complete. Its design ideas had been almost completely abandoned as unworkable and Dragados’s section of the work was $800 million over budget.
The principal-agent problem arises with union construction labor as well. Skilled union workers, such as electricians and carpenters, make solid hourly wages, but their pay really explodes with overtime. A 2011 study by the Real Estate Board of New York found that some union crane operators made up to $500,000 a year in pay. Union contracts mandate unnecessary positions as well, to the benefit of its members. The same study found 50 workers in unnecessary positions such as relief crane operators on the World Trade Center Project, including 14 unproductive employees making $400,000 a year at the project.
Similar statistics can be found on other projects; an investigation into the costs of the East Side Access rail project in New York, which cost nearly $3.5 billion for each new mile of track, found that only 700 of the 900 workers being paid on the project were needed. A TBM, which is largely run automatically and typically staffed with under 10 people, ostensibly had 25 or 26 people working on it. Because you can’t drill without a TBM, and you can’t build a high-rise without a crane operator, these union workers have inordinate power.
A common retort to the claim that union labor drives up costs is that other countries, especially in Europe, have both high union participation and lower project costs. But it is widely recognized in the industry that unions increase project labor costs by 20 to 25 percent on average in the U.S.
The fundamental problem isn’t unions per se, but rather the way that unions operate within parts of the U.S. system. The Netherlands has strong unions, but the Port of Rotterdam has been automated to an extent that has proven impossible in the U.S. due to union resistance. As the president of the International Longshoremen’s Association, Harold Dagget, recently put it, his union will “fight tooth and nail” against further automation in the U.S. Any attempt at real construction innovation runs into similar barriers at every level of the system. There are too many layers of permission needed to innovate, including groups whose interests run counter to innovation.
Innovation in physical work ultimately means substituting or complementing labor through technology to improve productivity. If your pay depends on overtime, you want inefficiency. The average dockworker at the Port of Los Angeles makes over $100,000 a year, largely due to overtime. The majority of foremen and managers earn more than $200,000, and the mariners who guide ships in and out of the port average nearly $450,000.
The result is that innovation is inhibited by both labor resistance and a decentralized government bureaucracy that has neither the incentives nor the capability of driving real change. Perhaps it should not be shocking that U.S. construction productivity has fallen by half since the 1960s according to research conducted by the consulting firm McKinsey.
In San Francisco, Soros-funded DA Chesa Boudin has seen a flood of departures from his office due to his criminal justice reform policies.
Boudin campaigned on a platform to end mass incarceration, eliminate cash bail, and vowed to create a panel to review sentencing and potential wrongful convictions. Following his election in November 2019, Boudin announced he would deemphasize the prosecution of drug cases, so-called quality-of-life cases, and property offenses.
Under his watch, vehicle break-ins increased 100-750% in parts of the city between 2020 and 2021, with the number of reported vehicle thefts reaching 1,891 in May 2021—more than double the 923 reported in May 2020.
San Francisco also recorded one of the largest increases in burglaries among major cities last year, with a jump of 47 percent—a trend that has continued this year. Fatal and nonfatal shootings in the first six months of this year were up more than 100 percent from the year-earlier period, increasing to 119 from 58, the city’s police chief said at a July press conference.
More than 700 people died of drug overdoses in 2021 in the city, a record that is likely to be surpassed this year, according to the chief medical examiner.
Rudy Giuliani – the former Mayor of New York City whose claim to fame was a massive reduction in crime (and who’s traded barbs with Soros in the past), isn’t letting the billionaire off the hook.
“If there is one single person responsible for the record increases in murder and violence in America’s cities it’s George Soros,” Giuliani said in a Monday tweet.
“Major contributor to BLM, Antifa, Democrat Party, Biden, Harris and 40 or so pro Criminal DAs. The blood is on his hands,” he added.
Assistant State’s Attorney James Murphy described an understaffed office in turmoil in his email to colleagues, saying, “I cannot continue to work for an Administration I no longer respect.”
“I would love to continue to fight for the victims of crime and to continue to stand with each of you, especially in the face of the overwhelming crime that is crippling our communities,” Murphy wrote. “However, I can no longer work for this Administration. I have zero confidence in their leadership.”
Murphy, who could not be reached directly for comment, zeroed in on many of the issues that have made Foxx a target of opponents who argue she’s gone easy on some accused of violent crimes, as carjackings and gun violence have risen in the Chicago area.
Murphy wrote that he first started thinking about leaving the office early in 2021 with Foxx’s involvement in the passage of the SAFE-T Act, a wide-ranging law that aims to reform the state’s approach to criminal justice, including by narrowing the definition of who can be charged with first-degree murder.
DeSantis has suspended State Attorney Andrew Warren for ‘picking and choosing which laws to enforce based on his personal agenda,’ and has appointed Susan Lopez as his replacement during the suspension.
Warren, who had served the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit, has most recently refused to follow state policy criminalizing abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade – and repeatedly refused to enforce laws cracking down on child sex-change surgeries, according to DeSantis.
The liberal state attorney also declined to prosecute 67 protesters arrested in George Floyd demonstrations, and said in 2017 that he would only pursue the death penalty “in the very worst cases,” and not where “mental illness played a role.”
“We are suspending Soros-backed 13th circuit state attorney Andrew Warren for neglecting his duties as he pledges not to uphold the laws of the state,” DeSantis’ office said in a statement, per Fox News.
Update: DeSantis sent state police to physically remove Warren from his office, “with access only to retrieve his personal belongings, and (ii) to ensure that no files, papers, documents, notes, records, computers, or removable storage media are removed from the Office of the State Attorney…”
PayPal has reportedly unfrozen Moms for Liberty’s account funds after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his state would crack down on woke banking.
Payment platform PayPal allowed grassroots, anti-woke education group Moms for Liberty to access its funds after DeSantis’s new initiative against woke banking, Florida’s Voice reported. Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich reportedly told Florida’s Voice that her organization had been using PayPal for more than a year before the platform censored the group.
Descovich reportedly said that many Moms for Liberty donors give monthly and automatically through PayPal. The payment processor not only stopped these donor payments but froze $4,500 belonging to Moms for Liberty, and prohibited any transfer of the money out of the account, according to Florida’s Voice. PayPal subsequently reversed its block by unfreezing the funds.
PayPal notified Descovich that Moms for Liberty’s accounts were initially frozen during DeSantis’s July 15 speech at the Moms for Liberty National Summit, according to Florida’s Voice. The funds were unfrozen after DeSantis announced his initiative against woke banking.
The world is facing serious food and energy shortages as an outgrowth of the war in Ukraine and supply-chain shortages. Farmers are working to solve these problems, but we need help from the federal government if we are going to have any chance of success.
That’s why national corn grower leaders recently called on the Biden administration to address regulatory overreach.
That call comes after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently revised its atrazine registration, a move that could restrict access to a critical crop protection tool that has been well tested and shown to be safe for use. Farmers fear that new requirements will impose arduous new restrictions and mitigation measures on the herbicide, limiting how much of the product they use.
The atrazine decision comes on the heels of a development involving the herbicide glyphosate. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a case decided by a lower court from California, leaving in place a ruling that supports the claim that glyphosate use causes cancer – even as the EPA has repeatedly affirmed that the widely sold and well-studied herbicide is not carcinogenic.
The Supreme Court’s decision came after the solicitor general in the Biden administration submitted an amicus brief advising the court against hearing the case.
As a result, the door is now open for states to create a patchwork of regulations governing herbicide use, which will increase costs as manufacturers must now jump through hoops in every state, on top of making compliance difficult for the users of these products.
Farmers in Iowa and across the country have also experienced major fertilizer price hikes and shortages over the last year, thanks in part to steps taken by the U.S. International Trade Commission to impose tariffs on fertilizers. Thankfully, ITC recently voted against adding tariffs on nitrogen fertilizers. But tariffs on phosphorous fertilizers from Morocco remain in place, driving up input prices for growers.
Speaking of foolish regulations that can contribute to famine, new “debarbonization” shipping rules could do just that.
A new report found that more than 75% of ships will not meet the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) new Environmental social and corporate governance (ESG) index aimed at decarbonizing the industry. This means that many ship owners will be forced to slow ships down to reduce emissions but doing so could deepen the global food and energy crisis by reducing available ship capacity.
“IMO decarbonization targets will cause ships to slow down delaying food shipments and people will starve,” a global security analyst told gCaptain. “How many people will die as a result of the IMO’s ESG efforts is unknown at this time. I don’t think most shipowners even understand the severity of the EEXI threat but it could be millions of lives.”
“Ships have to attain EEXI approval once in a lifetime, by the first periodical survey in 2023 at the latest.” The certification is currently voluntary, but banks and insurers may force ships to comply or be cut off. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
Russo-Ukrainian War update: “Ukraine takes out Russian ammunition railway connecting Kherson to Crimea.” I keep seeing rumors of a big Ukranian counteroffensive to retake Kherson, but it seems like it’s slow to make much headway.
In 2016, the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services issued a rule that would have forced doctors across the country to assist in transitioning patients out of their biological sex, regardless of a provider’s medical opinion or conscience objections.
“A provider specializing in gynecological services that previously declined to provide a medically necessary hysterectomy for a transgender man,” for example, “would have to revise its policy to provide the procedure for transgender individuals in the same manner it provides the procedure for other individuals.”
The rule left no room for religious physicians or institutions to breathe, instead menacing them with draconian fines, were they not to toe the controversial new line.
In stepped the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which swiftly secured a preliminary injunction in federal court that stopped the rule from going into effect, on the grounds that it violated the Administrative Procedure Act, and likely violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It was a decision later confirmed in 2019, and made permanent by a 2021 ruling.
On August 4, however, Becket attorney Luke Goodrich, who has been working on the case since the Obama-era rule was first issued, will march back into the courtroom, having been dragged back in by the Biden administration and Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra.
“They say that our lawsuit was only about the 2016 rule. . . . They say, ‘well, all you were challenging was the 2016 rule, and you won that, but now we’re using a different rule or a different rationale for imposing the same requirement on you, and so you have to file a new lawsuit,’” explained Goodrich.
Under the Biden administration’s theory, the Affordable Care Act provides the administration with “all the authority” it needs “to punish groups that don’t perform gender transitions and abortions,” Goodrich told National Review. The 2016 rule also included language that Becket alleges would force religious institutions to perform abortions.
Remember how Republicans said ObamaCare would endanger religious liberty and the MSM dismissed their concerns? Just like “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”
According to Goodrich, “the merits are completely resolved and haven’t been appealed; the fight on appeal is about the scope of relief.” He described an effort to work around a losing legal argument by burdening religious objectors and opening up new fronts of battle.
“They want religious organizations to have to play Whac-A-Mole every time the government violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and they want a ruling that will leave them free to keep violating religious liberty every time they shuffle the same legal requirement from one volume of the Federal Register to another,” he said.
That strategy is observable in the proposal of yet another, even broader rule — modeled after the 2016 one — issued by Becerra, who has made his political brand on waging one ruthless culture war after another.
As attorney general of California, Becerra sought to punish independent journalists who exposed Planned Parenthood’s sale of fetal remains harvested during abortions. The Los Angeles Times editorial board described his decision to charge those involved with felonies “disturbing,” and the progressive Mother Jones called it “chilling.”
He also happily enforced a plainly unconstitutional California statute requiring pro-life crisis pregnancy centers to provide pro-abortion materials to patrons, and, as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, voted against legislation that would allow providers not to perform abortions without fear of government reprisal.
Has Tranny Madness peaked in the UK? There, the Rugby Football Union and Rugby Football League just banned men from playing women’s rugby. In other news, there’s evidently women’s rugby.
“What’s the worst performing stock in the Dow Jones Industrial Average so far this year? Disney.”
The Mickey Mouse company, headquartered in Burbank, has lost about 35% of its value this year versus a nearly 15% loss for the broader index. As a result, tens of millions of Americans who hold Disney stock either directly or indirectly as part of passive index funds have seen their finances take a hit at the worst possible time as inflation spirals out of control.
Disney’s poor financial performance is a product of its own making. In recent months, the company has aggressively waded into controversial cultural issues such as gender identity, making it clear it is putting politics over its shareholders and customers. Disney is a prime example of the threat posed to shareholders and the broader economy of “woke” capitalism. Its story should serve as a cautionary tale for other companies looking to follow in its footsteps.
Disney has all but admitted it’s leveraging its prized position as a top children’s content creator to push a divisive cultural agenda. In March, Disney’s president of content told employees the company plans to have at least 50% of its regular characters come from “underrepresented groups.” Another top producer boasted about Disney’s “not-at-all-secret gay agenda,” including “adding queerness” to children’s programming. Yet another senior executive promised that Disney would implement a “tracker” to ensure programs contain enough “canonical trans characters.”
We’re getting a look at what this woke agenda looks like in practice. An upcoming episode of Disney’s new children’s show “Baymax!” features a transgender man buying menstrual pads. “I always get the ones with wings,” says the “man” wearing a shirt with the transgender flag. Disney is also abolishing the words “boys” and “girls” at its theme parks.
“BLM Activist Shaun King Used Donor Funds To Buy $40k Thoroughbred Show Dog.” That’s infuriating. Not that premagrifter Talcum X siphoned BLM money into his own pockets. That part’s hilarious and predictable. No, that he spent forty grand on a dog when they are so many shelter dogs who need a home.
A pretty good list of the 95 Best Action Movies Ever. Has all the stuff you would expect to be on there (Die Hard, Hard-Boiled, The French Connection, etc.), plus a good bit of Jackie Chan, Sorcerer, Safety Last, Hot Fuzz, and even Andy Sedaris’ hilarious low-budget breastsplotation “classic” Hard Ticket To Hawaii.
And, oh yeah, the Critical Drinker is there. “Warner Brothers may be the first domino to fall, but something tells me they won’t be the last. And when other companies realize that you can safely drop THE MESSAGE and the people peddling it…well, the next year or two could turn out to be very interesting.”
The Biden Recession picks up downhill speed, liberals are spending $160 million to seize control of elections, Biden wants to starve your children until you accept transgenderism, and another Soros-backed DA gets the heave-ho from voters. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
GDP shrunk by .9% in Q2, making the Biden recession official, no matter how much Biden Administration officials and their Democratic Media Complex toadies attempt to spin it otherwise.
Two big money liberal operations, ready to spend $80 million each, are trying to determine who controls elections and how in the years ahead.
“The overall objective of the political left is to change the way you conduct overall elections,” Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, which advocates clean elections, told The Daily Signal.
One of the two liberal groups, Run for Something, is a political action committee founded by a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer. In the spring, Run for Something established its Clerk Work project with the goal of electing clerks, election supervisors, registrars, recorders, and other local officials charged with running elections.
The PAC says it will promote thousands of election administrators in the years ahead. But for 2022, it reports endorsing 11 candidates competing in races in California, Colorado, Illinois, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
Local election clerks generally are empowered to interpret and enforce state election regulations. They often have discretion on matters such as whether to count absentee ballots that come in after Election Day, how strictly to enforce voter ID or signature-matching requirements, and how closely poll watchers may monitor the ballot counting on Election Day.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, county-level election officials are elected in 22 states. In 10 states, elected officials appoint members to a local board of elections. Another 18 states divide election administration duties between two or more offices.
In any case, donating to specific candidates to oversee elections could directly or indirectly affect who holds these positions.
Some practices of local election administrators also could be guided by another $80 million effort by the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a coalition of mostly left-leaning organizations financed in part by Big Tech executives to train local officials in running elections.
Snead and other critics say they see parallels between Run for Something and efforts to elect liberal prosecutors financed by liberal hedge fund manager George Soros. They also see strong similarities between the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s election administration grants in the 2020 election cycle.
“What we shouldn’t lose track of is they are playing the long game,” Snead said. “They are going to look for every possible way to impact elections, and they can make substantial changes in the long run through this kind of program that they wouldn’t have been able to make in 2020.”
When Soros-backed socialist son of convicted terrorists Chesa Boudin was recalled as San Francisco DA, the writing was on the wall. “Decarceration” is a disaster for everyone . . . except criminals.
Now another Soros-backed “decarceration” state’s attorney has lost her reelection bid. It’s not clear if the multiple crimes for which Marilyn Mosby has been charged are the impetus for Baltimore’s voters deciding it’s time to move on or if it’s the shocking crime rates in the city as a result of her radical anti-law and order agenda. Maybe both.
Mosby rose to national attention in the wake of the Freddie Gray riots and for her hyper-politicized botching of the prosecution in those cases.
Fox News reports:
Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby lost her reelection bid to defense attorney Ivan Bates in the Democratic primary after she was indicted by a grand jury on federal charges alleging that she used coronavirus hardship as a reason to take money out of her city retirement account.
The Associated Press called the race in favor of Ivan Bates, a defense attorney, on Friday night. Bates is a former prosecutor in Baltimore who served from 1996 to 2002 before becoming a defense attorney.
Mosby, a Democrat, directed her office to stop prosecuting offenses such as drug possession, prostitution, urinating in public, and more during the coronavirus pandemic in an attempt to stop the virus from spreading in jails and prisons.
In May, the Biden administration announced that any school that participates in the federal school lunch program (which is run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service) must allow students to use bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers and play on the sports teams aligning with their gender identity if they want access to funds for the program — effectively holding money meant for ensuring student nutrition in exchange for compliance on radical leftist gender ideology.
Now, twenty-two Republican attorneys general are fighting back by suing the U.S. Department of Agriculture over that new guidance.
“We all know the Biden administration is dead-set on imposing an extreme left-wing agenda on Americans nationwide,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said. “But they’ve reached a new level of shamelessness with this ploy of holding up food assistance for low-income kids unless schools do the Left’s bidding.”
According to the Washington Times, nearly 30 million students take advantage of the National School Lunch Program at about 100,000 public and non-profit private schools and residential childcare institutions. The Biden administration policy was seen as a direct assault on the 18 states with existing laws barring male athletes from participating in female sports.
The lawsuit argues that the Biden administration (again) violated the Administrative Procedures Act by issuing regulations without going through the rulemaking process and that Bostock v. Clayton, the 2020 Supreme Court’s 2020 decision on employment discrimination, doesn’t apply to Title IX as the Biden administration claimed when they announced the guidance.
“This case is, yet again, about a federal agency trying to change law, which is Congress’ exclusive prerogative,” Tennessee Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III said. “The USDA simply does not have that authority. We have successfully challenged the Biden Administration’s other attempts to rewrite law and we will challenge this as well.”
The House on Thursday passed the bipartisan Chips and Science Act, which aims to increase domestic production of computer chips to allow the U.S. to become more competitive against China in the global technology market.
The bill passed the House in a 243-187 vote one day after passing the Senate in a 64-33 vote. The legislation now heads to the desk of President Joe Biden.
Biden called the passage of the bill on Thursday “exactly what we need to be doing to grow our economy right now.”
“Today, the House passed a bill that will make cars cheaper, appliances cheaper, and computers cheaper,” Biden said. “It will lower the costs of every day goods. And, it will create high-paying manufacturing jobs across the country and strengthen U.S. leadership in the industries of the future at the same time.”
Twenty-four Republicans voted to pass the measure, despite Republican leadership making a last minute push to discourage GOP lawmakers from supporting the bill. GOP leaders sought to keep the bill from passing after news broke on Wednesday that Senator Joe Manchin (D., W. Va.) had reached a deal with Democratic leaders on a nearly half-a-trillion dollar spending package targeting energy and climate, health care, and increased taxes on the wealthy.
Snip.
The measure includes $39 billion to “build, expand, or modernize domestic facilities and equipment” for semiconductors, $2 billion to specifically manufacture semiconductors and $11 billion for Department of Commerce research and development.
“Research and development” is no doubt going to be a rich conduit of graft to Democratic Party cronies having nothing to do with semiconductors.
For reference, $29 billion is probably just enough to build two state-of-the-art 300mm chip fabrication plants.
As I’ve argued before, the reasoning behind the bill is specious and it won’t result in a single new chip being fabbed in the next two years.
The most recent stats I can find show that the United States has some 47% of the semiconductor market. We (and Taiwan, and South Korea) are kicking China’s ass in semiconductors.
The chips China make are generally either: A.) Cheap, or B.) intended for their internal market. No one sends cutting edge chips to be fabbed in China because they don’t have the tech to do it and everyone know they’ll steal your designs and crank out knock-offs on the sly whenever possible. China’s semiconductor industry is mostly smoke and mirrors all the way down.
Semiconductor subsidies have all the hallmarks of a classic Washington boondoggle: The wrong action at the wrong time for the wrong problem.
Second, the shortage wasn’t the result of a “chip shortage,” it was the result of “a lack of available foundry wafer starts.” Automakers cancelled their orders for display drivers when it looked like Flu Manchu lockdowns were going to depress the economy for a while, and were caught off-guard by the V-shaped recovery under Trump, and got sent to the back of the line to get their product fabbed after they changed their mind. Remember, just about all foundries are running flat-out 24/7/365, pausing only to switch to different chips for different customers. There’s no slack in the system, and those wafer starts are already spoken for (and possibly paid for) by other customers well in advance. Just as nine woman can’t give birth to a fully grown baby in one month, you can’t just “make chips quicker” in an existing fab.
Third, remember that cutting edge semiconductor fabs are hideously expensive. Moore’s second law states that the cost of a new, cutting edge semiconductor plant doubles every four years. Samsung’s planned fab in Taylor, Texas is going to cost $17 billion.
Fourth, nothing about these subsidies will address the real problem with American semiconductors, which is that the overwhelming majority of cutting edge chip designs have to flow through TSMC fabs in Taiwan. What will solve that problem is TSMC opening a state-of-the art fab in Arizona in 2024. No amount of U.S. taxpayer money will make that already-under-construction fab start producing chips any quicker.
Could these subsidies boost American semiconductor manufacturing 2-3 years from now? Possibly. Knowing the cycling nature of the industry and the tendency of government subsidies to backfire, new/upgraded fab lines might come online just as the industry is experiencing a glut.
But the real key to restoring America to the cutting edge of semiconductor manufacturing is the already-in-progress inshoring of cutting edge foreign owned fabs from Samsung and TSMC, and having American semiconductor manufacturers like Intel and GlobalFoundries master sub-10nm chip fabrication processes, something they have heretofore been unable to do. (Intel is closer, having been on the cutting edge until they lost their way, while GlobalFoundries stopped all development on their 7nm node because they couldn’t find a way to make the investment pay off.)
Throwing buckets of budget-busting borrowed taxpayer money around isn’t going to make any of those things happen any faster.
Paying people not to work makes them worse off, Democrats sleepwalk toward disaster, another would-be assassin of a Republican congressman walks away without bail, more Democratic judicial officials who refuse to obey the law, and a disturbing number of pedophiles in our school systems. Welcome to a special Saturday LinkSwarm!
The “experts” didn’t expect it to turn out this way. An experiment conducted by Harvard University and University of Exeter social scientists found no-strings-attached handouts harmed low-income recipients rather than help them.
Funded by an anonymous nonprofit, the study centered on an experiment in which 2,073 low-income people were randomly selected to receive a single, unconditional cash transfer of either $500 or $2,000. Another 3,170 low-income study subjects received no money from the study.
The experiment was conducted from July 2020 to May 2021. On average, the subjects were earning roughly $950 a month while receiving another $530 in food stamps and other government benefits. A little over half were unemployed and 80% had children.
Over a 15-week period, participants were periodically surveyed about their financial, physical and mental health. Across a wide range of financial and non-financial attributes, researchers found no positive effects on those who received free money — but plenty of negative ones.
For a few weeks, people who received the extra money spent more than the control group — $182 a week for the people who received $500, and $574 a week for the ones given $2,000.
The additional spending didn’t bolster their financial health. The handout recipients reported the same rate of overdraft fees, late-payment charges and cash advances as did those who didn’t receive the extra money. And it was all downhill from there. The handout recipients reported:
Less earned income
Less job satisfaction
Lower work performance
More financial stress
Less liquidity
Worse sleep
Worse physical health
More anxiety
More loneliness
The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley writes:
“It’s no surprise that people who received a large percentage of their monthly income for doing nothing were less motivated to work and less satisfied with their work.
Earning a paycheck can give workers a sense of personal agency that encourages them to make better financial and health decisions. Receiving a handout may do the opposite.”
The editors of The Economist beg the Democratic Party’s leaders to “wake up” to the fact that they’re about to get demolished in the upcoming midterms. Politico reports that, “The gubernatorial race in Pennsylvania has begun to look more competitive than either party expected.” The Economist blames the loud voices of the hard-left fringe, and warns that Democrats must “moderate, or die.” But this is just about the least likely moment for centrist Democrats to launch a new fight against the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez types, and Democrats won’t have that fight until a midterm thrashing forces them to — and even then, Democrats may well choose to learn the wrong, but more comforting lessons, from a sweeping defeat.
The editors of The Economist, sensing an impending midterm blowout and the ensuing empowerment of a Trump-friendly GOP, beg the Democratic Party’s leaders to distance themselves from their fringe elements:
Fringe and sometimes dotty ideas have crept into Democratic rhetoric, peaking in the feverish summer of 2020 with a movement to “defund the police”, abolish immigration enforcement, shun capitalism, relabel women as birthing people and inject “anti-racism” into the classroom.
Snip.
First, out of all the possible times for the leaders of the party and its centrist members to embrace a fight with their hard-left grassroots, four months before Election Day is perhaps the worst time. Right now, Democrats desperately need progressives — the Bernie Bros, the Squad fans, and your crazy Aunt Edna with the Ruth Bader Ginsburg prayer candles — to turn out in November; they’re disappointed enough with Joe Biden already. The future of Senators Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, and Mark Kelly of Arizona depends upon frustrated and impatient progressives in those states.
Second, rebuking the fringe Left is going to be difficult, and few people embrace difficult change until they hit bottom. Nobody likes admitting that they got something wrong, and nobody in politics wants to admit that their approach didn’t work — until after they’ve paid a high price at the ballot box.
The disappointing results of 2020 were clearly not enough. Shortly after the election, Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia seethed about her party’s left wing: “Tuesday was a failure, it was not a success. . . . If we don’t mean defund the police, we shouldn’t say that. . . . And we need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. Because while people think it doesn’t matter, it does matter, and we lost good members because of that. If we are classifying Tuesday as a success from a congressional standpoint, we will get f***ing torn apart in 2022.”
Do the Democrats seem more centrist and results-focused now than they did in 2020?
Democrats can’t rebuke their social justice warrior radicals because the shock-troops of that “fringe” has taken control of vast swathes of the party machinery. The SJW faction is willing to endure electoral disaster as along as it lets them sieze full control of the party machinery and thus all the spigots party patronage.
How bad is it? Ruy Teixeira, whose “emerging Democratic majority” thesis is is so central to Democratic administrations refusing to enforce border controls, is leaving the Center for American Progress because it’s gotten too radical.
Ruy Teixeira, a prominent scholar at the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress (CAP), is leaving his job for a conservative organization because of liberals’ obsession with race, gender and other identity issues, according to Politico.
The obsession with identity politics at CAP made it difficult for him to do work involving class and economics, he told the outlet, so he’s leaving for the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. Left-leaning think tanks have given in to demands of junior staffers and made it difficult for scholars to discuss crime, immigration and other issues beyond a narrow set of default assumptions, according to Teixeira.
The culture within left-leaning organizations “sends me running screaming from the left,” Teixeira told Politico. “It’s just cloud cuckoo land … the fact that nobody is willing to call bullshit, it just freaks me out.”
Attack a Republican congressman? Enjoy your Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card. “A 43-year-old man [David G. Jakubonis] accused of attacking Representative Lee Zeldin (R., N.Y.) with a sharp object at a campaign stop in upstate New York on Thursday evening was charged with a felony and released from custody just hours after his arrest, police said…Jakubonis was charged with attempted assault in the second degree and was released on his own recognizance.”
The groomer plague is not your imagination. “At least 181 K-12 teachers, principals, and staff have been arrested for child sex crimes in the United States so far this year.”
“Self-Proclaimed Socialist Judge in Harris County Facing Removal by Judicial Conduct Commission. Judge Franklin Bynum allegedly ordered the sheriff not to collect DNA samples required by law and repeatedly dismissed domestic and family violence cases for no probable cause.”
Cost of living index for cities worldwide. Weirdly, Austin is still pretty affordable in relation to purchasing power compared to most of the world. Also weirdly, New York City is the index city…
Gascón’s prosecutors sued him so they could “charge repeat offenders to the fullest extent of the law.” The DA wants to appeal in front of the California Supreme Court:
In June, the Second Appellate District Court upheld portions of a lower court’s injunction that said Gascón cannot refuse to charge three-strike cases, which can dramatically increase prison sentences for some of the most serious repeat offenders.
Gascón is hoping to have the court’s order overturned, arguing that it is “draconian,” creates “a dangerous precedent” and amounts to “taking the charging decision out of a prosecutor’s hands.”
“The district attorney overstates his authority,” the Second Appellate District ruling reads. “He is an elected official who must comply with the law, not a sovereign with absolute, unreviewable discretion.”
Don’t the peasants know that laws are for the little people?
Good. “San Francisco’s New DA Goes On Firing Spree After Voters Recall Soros-Backed Predecessor…”The new district attorney in San Francisco fired at least 15 employees from the prosecutor’s office after her left-wing predecessor Chesa Boudin was recalled last month.
“Charlene Carter, a flight attendant who had worked at Southwest Airlines for 20 years but was fired in 2017 because she had publicly opposed the use of her union dues to fund pro-abortion protests, has now won a $5.1 million lawsuit against both Southwest and her union.” Good. Coerced speech violates the First Amendment. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
Beto O’Rourke gets a $1 million donation from George Soros. Well, at least that’s $1 million that won’t go toward burning down small businesses and defunding the police. Also, remember how Democrats are always saying they want to get money out of politics? They never mean it.
In an attempt to subvert the Supreme Court’s clear directions in the Bruen decision, California’s gun grabbing Democrats have actually made their case weaker through their own arguments. Armed Scholar Anthony Miranda:
Some takeaways:
“The state of California just backed themselves into a major corner in the California ‘assault weapons’ ban case, Miller v Bonta.”
California “requested that the Ninth Circuit vacate Judge [Roger] Benitez’s ruling and remand the case back down to him for him to have to completely rehear the case all over again from square one. This was the State of California’s effort to stall this case out as long as possible because that’s really one of the only cards they have left.”
“[Firearms Policy Coalition] just obliterated all the State of California’s arguments in their reply, and they completely trapped the State of California with their own words.”
In short, California was still trying to argue that the two-step approach to exercising Second Amendment would be upheld on appeal despite the fact that the Supreme Court had explicitly bitch-slapped the two-step approach into oblivion.
California also falsely announced that in striking down the two-step approach, the Supreme Court had created a new legal framework, when in fact they had merely explicitly affirmed the existing framework of Heller.
The district court “found that California’s ban on modern firearms was not one of the presumptively lawful measures that was identified in Heller, and also found that the ban on modern firearms has no historical pedigree.”
To whit: “Prior to the 1990s, there was no national history of banning weapons because they were equipped with features like pistol grips, collapsible stocks, flash hiders, flare launchers or barrel shrouds.”
“Benitez ultimately found that those arguments were exactly the type that the Supreme Court and Heller broadly caution courts against when deciding whether analogous regulations were long-standing. Something that was put in place or didn’t pop up until the 1930s or the 1940s or 50s doesn’t actually align with the historical pedigree that the supreme
court commands that courts must look at.”
California “acts as if Judge Benitez did not consider text as informed by history, when in fact he actually did in his original ruling. Also, all the harm California claims that will be suffered if the state is lifted has also been found 100% illegitimate prior by Benitez himself.”
It would be nice if the citizens of California could enjoy the Second Amendment rights enjoyed by American citizens in the overwhelming majority of the other 49 states…
After intense backlash from local bodega workers and city tabloids, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg on Tuesday dropped all charges against bodega clerk Jose Alba, who was allegedly acting in self-defense when he fatally stabbed a man who was attacking him.
The liberal DA’s decision comes after weeks of criticism of Bragg’s decision to send the 61-year-old to Riker’s Island and charge him with second-degree murder in the death of 35-year-old Austin Simon. Bragg first requested Alba’s bail be set at $500,000 before it was lowered to $50,000 in response to criticism from the community. He was later released on a $5,000 bail bond.
Snip.
Bragg’s office said Tuesday that “a homicide case against Alba could not be proven at trial beyond a reasonable doubt” after further investigation, according to the New York Times.
This is obviously the correct decision, but this was obviously justifiable self-defense from the very beginning, and that didn’t keep Soros-backed DA Alvin Bragg from charging Alba with murder in the first place. Indeed, chances are good that if it weren’t not for widespread outcry from other politicians (like Mayor Eric Adams), it’s quite possible that Alba would still be languishing in Riker’s Island awaiting trial.
The Defund The Police wing of the Democratic Party won’t give up their war on legal self-defense without a lot more fights.
Enough links have filtered into the semiconductor bucket to be worth doing a roundup. This one touches on China and the corruption of our political elites.
The congressional Democrats’ attempt to throw money at the problem is going nowhere fast.
The Biden administration is laser-focused on sending Ukraine billions of dollars in weapons, including the latest round of anti-ship systems, artillery rockets, and rounds of 105 mm ammo for howitzer cannons that it has entirely lost focus on reshoring efforts to boost semiconductor production Stateside.
Multiple manufacturers of semiconductor wafers have announced plans for new multi-billion dollar factories across the U.S. but are contingent on Congress allocating funds to aid in building facilities under the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act.
Congress passed the CHIPS Act in January 2021 as part of last year’s National Defense Authorization Act, which proposed $52 billion in funding for increasing the domestic capacity of chip production, though the House and Senate have come to a standstill over disagreements on certain parts of the bill that have sparked so much uncertainty among companies set to build new factories.
In a letter on June 15, dozens of technology executives from IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Analog Devices, Micron, Amazon, and Alphabet called on Congress to move quickly on the CHIPS Act. They wrote, “the rest of the world is not waiting for the U.S. to act,” and funding for new chip factories must be achieved immediately.
Taiwan’s GlobalWafers announced a new $5 billion factory in the U.S. on Monday, but contingent on subsidies from the federal government.
“This investment that they’re making is contingent upon Congress passing the CHIPS Act. The [GlobalWafers] CEO told me that herself, and they reiterated that today,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told CNBC, the same day GlobalWafers announced its development plan.
Notes:
IBM doesn’t own any fabs any more, having sold them all to GlobalFoundries.
Intel runs a huge number of very profitable fabs (troubles with their sub-10nm process yields notwithstanding) and doesn’t need federal subsidies.
Microsoft doesn’t own any fabs and is deeply unlikely to build any; their flagship Xbox Series X uses a custom AMD Zen 2 fabbed by TSMC as its CPU.
Analog Devices is an Integrated Device Manufacturer that owns several fabs with pretty old technology; they don’t have any 300mm fabs. They closed a small fab in Milpitas they got from their acquisition of Linear Technology last year. Designing analog chips is its own black art, and not everything that applies to shrinking digital circuits applies to the analog realm.
Amazon has no fabs and probably won’t be building any, but they do have a chip design division to support Amazon Web Services, and recently designed a cloud computing chip. They work closely with AMD (fabbed at TSMC), Intel (own their own fabs) and Nvidia (another fabless design house that also gets their chips fabbed at TSMC).
Alphabet AKA Google has no fabs and probably won’t be building any, though they do have a lot of AI chip design work going on.
GlobalWafers isn’t a semiconductor manufacturer, it’s a silicon wafer manufacturer. Making such wafers (the substrates upon which semiconductor fabrication depends) has its own challenges, but they are several orders less difficult than cutting edge chip fabrication. Maybe I’m quite far out of the loop, but I’m deeply suspicious that GlobalWafers planned wafer plant in Sherman, Texas will cost $5 billion. That’s a relatively piddling sum for a new semiconductor fab, but extremely expensive for a wafer factory. This makes me suspect a subsidy grab is afoot.
So of the companies mentioned, Intel could suck up government funding to build a fab they were going to build anyway, I’m sure Analog Devices would build a fab with government money, but chances of them running an under 10nm process in said theoretical fab is extremely slim, none of the other mentioned copies are going to build a fab, and none of that government money is going to alleviate the main problem that the overwhelming majority of cutting edge chip designs have to flow through TSMC fabs in Taiwan. What will solve that problem is TSMC opening a state-of-the art fab in Arizona in 2024. No amount of U.S. taxpayer money will make that already-under-construction fab start producing chips any quicker.
$250 billion in taxpayer subsidies wouldn’t get you a single additional wafer start this year, and probably would accomplish little more than channeling money to politically connected firms and sticky pockets in a state (New York) that no one wants to build fabs in any more because of high costs, high taxes and union rule requirements.
So who expects to earn immediate gains from the taxpayers subsidizing semiconductors? Would you believe Nancy Pelosi?
I bet you would.
This past week it hit the terminal that House Speaker Pelosi was doing a little portfolio re-jiggering, including exercising $8 million of call options in Nvidia and selling Apple and Visa calls. The data was per CongressTrading.com and was reported on by Bloomberg.
The Nvidia LEAPS were bought June 3, 2021 with $100 strikes, set to expire June 17, 2022 and the position appeared to be disclosed on Thursday morning for the first time. $8 million trades seem a little odd for members of Congress to begin with, but who are we to judge?
But then, what did Speaker Pelosi do just hours after disclosing the trade, on Friday?
She threw her weight behind a stalled $50 billion CHIPS PLUS bill that “would provide $52 billion in funding for semiconductor manufacturing grants and investment tax credits for the chip industry.”
We tend to discuss leading-edge nodes and the most advanced chips made using them, but there are thousands of chip designs developed years ago that are made using what are now mature process technologies that are still widely employed by the industry. On the execution side of matters, those chips still do their jobs as perfectly as the day the first chip was fabbed which is why product manufacturers keep building more and more using them. But on the manufacturing side of matters there’s a hard bottleneck to further growth: all of the capacity for old nodes that will ever be built has been built – and they won’t be building any more.
Not strictly true. Remember, Bosch just finished building a 65nm fab.
As a result, TSMC has recently begun strongly encouraging its customers on its oldest (and least dense) nodes to migrate some of their mature designs to its 28 nm-class process technologies.
Nowadays TSMC earns around 25% of its revenue by making hundreds of millions of chips using 40 nm and larger nodes. For other foundries, the share of revenue earned on mature process technologies is higher: UMC gets 80% of its revenue on 40 nm higher nodes, whereas 81.4% of SMIC’s revenue come from outdated processes.
That’s because UMC has fallen woefully far behind TSMC, and no one trusts them because they let Chinese spies walk out the door with other company’s IP. SMIC is on Mainland China, sucks even more, and is trusted even less.
Mature nodes are cheap, have high yields, and offer sufficient performance for simplistic devices like power management ICs (PMICs). But the cheap wafer prices for these nodes comes from the fact that they were once, long ago, leading-edge nodes themselves, and that their construction costs were paid off by the high prices that a cutting-edge process can fetch. Which is to say that there isn’t the profitability (or even the equipment) to build new capacity for such old nodes.
This is why TSMC’s plan to expand production capacity for mature and specialized nodes by 50% is focused on 28nm-capable fabs. As the final (viable) generation of TSMC’s classic, pre-FinFET manufacturing processes, 28nm is being positioned as the new sweet spot for producing simple, low-cost chips. And, in an effort to consolidate production of these chips around fewer and more widely available/expandable production lines, TSMC would like to get customers using old nodes on to the 28nm generation.
“We are not currently [expanding capacity for] the 40 nm node” said Kevin Zhang, senior vice president of business development at TSMC. “You build a fab, fab will not come online [until] two year or three years from now. So, you really need to think about where the future product is going, not where the product is today.”
This video asks whether China can produce their own chips:
Obviously, they already produce some of their own chips, but the video covers most of the issues China has with fabbing more complex chips that I’ve already discussed here and here. They’re still dependent on the same three leading fab companies (TSMC, Intel and Samsung) everyone else is for sub 10nm feature chips, and are overwhelmingly dependent on both foreign talent and foreign semiconductor equipment manufacturers like ASML and Applied Materials.
Speaking of TSMC and Intel, India would really like them to build fabs there. The problem is, despite a whole lot of technical talent there, it doesn’t have a terribly large domestic electronics manufacturing base.
The Biden Recession continues to wreck the pocketbooks of Americans, EU economies are sucking even worse than ours, more Bidens Behaving Badly, and unlimited abortion is not nearly as popular among the American public as it is among New York Times staffers.
Support for unlimited abortion is deeply unpopular:
New Harvard/Harris poll: Huge super-majority of Americans favor 15-week abortion bans in states. Women more likely than men to favor such restrictions; men more likely to support no limitations. Just 10% of respondents agree with federal Dems' 9-month-abortion radicalism: pic.twitter.com/wyOzUPg9uE
Democrats are just tired of Joe Biden and of having to explain away his poor performance. Since Biden was elected, the only thing that has gone right is that the Covid-19 pandemic effectively ended and the unemployment rate has remained low. Inflation is out of control, gas prices are at record highs, grocery bills are skyrocketing, the stock market is getting battered and people’s 401(k)s are shrinking, crime remains high, mass shootings keep bedeviling America’s public spaces, Russia’s invading Ukraine, there’s a global food and commodity crisis, and the Taliban is running Afghanistan and oppressing women again. Democrats are apoplectic that the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, a New York State gun law, and the EPA’s right to regulate carbon emissions without explicit approval from Congress. Parents are up in arms, the teachers’ unions look like callous fools who kept schools closed and harmed a generation of schoolchildren, and “abolish the police” looks like a suicidal public policy. Republicans notice that waves of illegal immigrants headed north shortly after Biden’s inauguration and haven’t stopped coming since.
You didn’t even mention the Social Justice insanity and all the transexual madness.
That New York Times poll found that 64 percent of Democrats want a different presidential nominee in 2024. Nobody’s willing to cover for this guy anymore; no one is inclined to avert their eyes when Biden or his wife blurts out something tone-deaf now.
There are some of us who would argue that Joe Biden has always been an insecure, abrasive, presumptuous, disingenuous, demagogic, insufferable blowhard who was largely protected by a cozy, all-too-friendly relationship with a press inclined to airbrush his glaring character faults, presenting him as a wacky neighbor or a kindly, ice-cream loving grandpa.
What we see now is what happens when much of the national media, the Democratic Party establishment, and liberal interest groups stop playing along with the narrative that Biden is a wiser, sharper, kinder, more energetic and sensitive man than he is. And the truth isn’t pretty.
Speaking of unwanted Bidens: “Hunter Biden could face prostitution charges for transporting hookers across state lines and disguising checks to them as payments for ‘medical services.'” I’ll believe Hunter Biden prosecution when I see it. Also, I’ve been treating the 4Chan “Hunter Biden iPhone leak” with a certain amount of skepticism. Certainly the Hunter laptop revelations were real, and Hunter is a big enough scumbag to do the the things alleged iPhone leak materials depict. But I try to be cautious about anything that fits too neatly into my preconceptions. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
“Left-Wing Nonprofit Scores $171.7 Million-$1 Billion Government Contract To Help Illegal Immigrants Avoid Authorities.”
A liberal non-profit group has been given a taxpayer-funded government contract worth at least $171.7 million — which could potentially reach just under $1 billion — for assisting illegal immigrant minors in avoiding capture or incarceration by U.S. Border Patrol and state officials.
The Department of the Interior was the awarding agency and “The Vera Institute of Justice,” based out of New York — which supports the “defund the police” movement and has lax views on immigration enforcement — was the beneficiary.
Thanks in part to a lack of zoning, Houston builds housing at nearly three times the per capita rate of cities like New York City and San Jose. It isn’t all just sprawl either: In 2019, Houston built roughly the same number of apartments as Los Angeles, despite the latter being nearly twice as large. This ongoing supernova of housing construction has helped to keep Houston one of the most affordable big cities in the U.S., offering new arrivals modest rents and accessible home prices even amid seemingly endless demand.
Houston is by no means a model for planning. Like every other Sun Belt city, it struggles with segregation and sprawl. Yet its continued success as one of America’s most affordable and prosperous cities reveals the workability—indeed, the desirability—of non-zoning. Houston is a profoundly weird place, resistant to seductive oversimplifications. But it provides insight into what comes after the arbitrary lines that have misshapen our cities—and how we might get there.
So why didn’t Houston adopt zoning like every other U.S. city? The answer comes down partly to process. Unique among major cities, Houston subjected zoning to a citywide vote. While most city councils had, historically, quietly adopted zoning after a few perfunctory public hearings, the Bayou City invited voters to decide on zoning in 1946, 1962, and 1993. Voters rejected it each time—a reality that calls into question the often-postulated popularity of zoning.
Zoning critics rightly dispensed with the comforting myths surrounding zoning—that its purpose was to merely rationalize land use—and zeroed in on its tendency to restrict new housing construction, limit access to opportunity, institutionalize segregation, and force growth outward. Far from being duped, Houston’s working-class residents exhibited a subtler understanding of the purposes of zoning than many contemporary planners and rejected it accordingly.
But the answer to why Houston remains unzoned also comes down to politics. Zoning proponents didn’t merely lose the referendums—they were also tactfully bought off by being allowed to have something resembling zoning in their immediate vicinity. Indeed, the dark little secret of non-zoning in Houston is that it depends on a system of land-use regulations known as deed restrictions, which empower certain communities—principally middle- and upper-class homeowners—to effectively “opt out” of non-zoning, writing their own land-use rules for their own neighborhoods. In exchange, Houston is able to protect the vast majority of the city from the types of arbitrary-use distinctions, density limits, and raucous public hearings that cause so much harm in every other U.S. city. That is to say, in exchange for respecting pockets of private land-use regulation, Houston is able to grow, adapt, and evolve like no other city.
Deed restrictions are private, voluntary agreements among property owners—typically the homeowners of a particular subdivision or neighborhood—regulating how they can and cannot use their land. These rules are literally tied to the deed, meaning that a property owner must agree to them as a condition of the sale. Since the failed 1962 zoning referendum, the city has enforced these agreements on behalf of the relevant parties, refusing to issue permits that run afoul of their provisions and bringing legal action against violators.
Is this system of publicly enforced deed restrictions “basically zoning,” as some might argue? On the one hand, deed restrictions—like zoning—demarcate specified areas subject to a distinct set of stricter land-use rules. Both zoning and deed restrictions in Houston are enforced by the government, principally with the aim of propping up home values and maintaining a certain quality of life. Many deed restrictions even have rules banning apartments and enforcing a strict two-and-a-half-story height limit.
Yet, the similarities end there, and Houston’s system of deed restrictions is a significant improvement over zoning. For starters, deed restrictions only cover an estimated quarter of the city, largely in areas with low-rise, detached, single-family housing. Industrial areas, commercial corridors, mixed-use and multifamily neighborhoods, urban vacant lots, and yet-to-be-developed greenfields are virtually never subject to their provisions. This means that roughly three-quarters of Houston—including its more dynamic sections—are largely free to grow without anything even resembling zoning holding them back.
Another key difference is that deed restrictions must be voluntarily opted in to. This serves to discipline deed restrictions in a way that is rarely true of zoning: If the rules are stricter than what prospective homebuyers might prefer, or not strict enough, or simply focus on the wrong concerns, this may translate into lower home values. This in turn nudges homeowners to think through the optimal form of land-use regulation to a degree that rarely happens with zoning.
After deciding to let drug-abusing transients use their restrooms, Starbucks is now closing 16 stores because of rising violence, and the fact that transients are shooting up in their restrooms. Golly, who could have possibly seen that coming?
Another Texas school superintendent has stepped down amid criticism from parents concerned about liberal indoctrination in their children’s classrooms.
At a special meeting Monday afternoon, Clear Creek Independent School District’s board of trustees accepted the retirement of Superintendent Eric Williams, effective in January 2023.
Conservative parents in the Houston-area district had complained that Williams, who started in early 2021, was subjecting their students to liberal ideologies he brought from his former job as superintendent of
Kevin Downey, Jr. does some good work on PJmedia, and I’ve linked to him in many a LinkSwarm, but this time he has crossed the line!
Not a picture of Kevin Downey, Jr.
In an otherwise righteous roasting of Jill Biden’s “Latinex” pandering speech comparing Hispanics to breakfast tacos, Downey says that Jill Biden referred to Latinos “as a grotesque breakfast that most Latinos would never eat.”
WRONG!
Not only is this a vile calumny against The National Breakfast Food of Texas, saying that “most Latinos would never eat” them is factually incorrect. Downey states that he’s engaged to a Puerto Rican and “calls New York City home,” and this is no doubt what has led him astray. Only in New York and New Jersey is a Puerto Rican the default Latino. In 47 other states (Cubans in Florida being the other exception), Mexican-Americans make up the biggest Hispanic ethnicity, and as a rule, Mexican Americans love breakfast tacos.
Every TexMex joint in central Texas that serves breakfast serves breakfast tacos. They’re the dominant breakfast food on food trucks serving construction sites. They’re found all across the state, as far east as El Paso, as far north as Texhoma, as far east as Texarkana, and as far south as Brownsville.
It’s entirely possible that all the breakfast tacos in New York City suck, just like the BBQ. But he owes the vast majority of breakfast-taco loving Hispanic Americans an apology.
Harris County, which has given us no end of corrupt and sketchy practices over the last few years, continues the trend of Democratic Party downplaying and trivializing threats against prominent Republicans, this time a man who threatened to kill senator Ted Cruz.
A Harris County criminal district court magistrate released a suspect who threatened to kill Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and other legislators on a personal bond that required no payment whatsoever.
According to charging documents on June 26, Isaac Ambe Nformangum, aged 22, allegedly called the senator’s Houston office regarding Republican opposition to legislation regarding elections. Nformangum accused Cruz and other Republicans of working to have voting rights repealed and then threatened violence.
A transcript of the phone call provided by investigators quotes Nformangum as saying, “Every last one of your Republican colleagues to have signed off on that platform is to be found and, is to be found and killed, be it by a bullet to the face or by the smashing of a brick in your skull. It is a civic duty of every American citizen or resident to see to it that every last one of your colleagues is to be killed. Killed. Be it by finding you in a public space or by trailing you to your very, by your very public homes.”
“You and every one of your colleagues is to be shot dead. Found and killed.”
Following an investigation conducted by Harris County sheriff’s deputies, the district attorney’s office filed charges against Nformangum of making a felony-level Terroristic Threat, and he was taken into custody on July 2.
Although the Harris County District Attorney’s Office (HCDAO) motioned for his bond to be set at $250,000, on July 3, magistrate Cheryl Harris Diggs for the 177th Criminal District Court ordered Nformangum released on a pre-trial personal bond of $2,500.
Under the conditions of pre-trial personal bonds, however, defendants may be released without posting bail or paying fees. The court coordinator for the 177th Court confirmed to The Texan that Nformangum did not have to pay anything for his release from the jail system.
As with rage against sitting Supreme Court justices, Democrats seem to have so little problem with threats against their political enemies that judges are willing to let those issuing felony threats to be let off with no more than a promise to behave themselves.
And liberals wonder why law-abiding citizens refuse to give up their guns.
Update: Reader LKB noticed a new addendum to the story: “On Tuesday, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office told the state Senate Committee on Finance that the U.S. Marshals have taken Nformangum into federal custody.”
Messing with Harris County judges is one thing, but messing with Raylan Givens is another…
