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Posted on 09/02/2026 5:20:34 AM PDT by MtnClimber
A couple of weeks ago, law professor Jonathan Turley devoted one of his columns to this seeming anomaly — that the Left somehow gains from its own failures. The headline of his column was “The worse it gets, the better it is: American leftism is thriving on its own failures.”
The theme of the piece is that the failure of a policy of the Left is never admitted to be a failure, but rather is only seen as a reason that the taxpayers haven’t yet devoted sufficient resources to the issue, and therefore the answer is to double down and spend yet more money on the failed policy. Turley provides several examples of the phenomenon, in the areas of immigration, health care, public education and housing. My reaction is, I’m glad that someone besides myself is finally noticing. However, Turley has barely scratched the surface, and indeed omits to mention some of the very biggest examples.
I don’t mean to fault Turley for the examples he has selected, which are good ones. But really, how about the poverty scam? This one is not a policy failure of mere billions of dollars, or even hundreds of billions; it now runs into the trillions per year. I have covered this subject repeatedly over the years. (Two examples are here and here.). The gist is that the government spends these huge sums — now over $2 trillion per year if you include federal, state, and local spending — supposedly to fight and cure poverty, and yet somehow the measured rate of poverty never goes down significantly. And then the persistence of poverty is used as the argument why the spending must be increased yet again in the next cycle. From my October 2018 piece at the link:
[D]espite spending a large multiple of what ought to be sufficient to end measured “poverty” once and for all, instead the government publishes poverty statistics that indicate that poverty has not decreased at all. Where did all the money go?
In the case of the poverty scam, there is a particular trick used by advocates, which is that increased funding provided by the taxpayers mostly comes in the form of “in-kind” distributions or tax benefits (e.g., food stamps, housing vouchers, Medicaid, EITC, etc.) which then are specifically omitted from the calculation of the poverty statistics. Despite being handed distributions worth tens of thousands of dollars each, the poor are still poor, and always will be!
And then there is the vast area of failed housing policy. Turley covers one aspect, which is the plan of Mayor Mamdani of New York to further tighten New York’s failed and counter-productive rent regulation regime:
With Mamdani promising rent controls, landlords are predictably raising rents. Rent costs have reached their highest level ever under Mamdani, with the average apartment now costing $4,965 per month — and $6,655 per month in Manhattan. So Mamdani can now push for even more significant regulations and rent controls by pointing to the rise in housing costs in an endless loop. As rent control inevitably constrains supply and prices for market-rate apartments skyrocket, he can call for even greater controls.
All of that is valid. But it only scratches the surface of how the Left has parlayed failed housing policy into ever larger and larger taxpayer funding that will not and can not ever solve the perceived problem. As a couple of additional examples, consider first my October 2018 piece titled “At NYCHA, Spectacular Failure — Or Is It Spectacular Success?” That piece reported on the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) getting sued by the Feds for failure to provide “decent, safe and sanitary” conditions to the residents of its projects, Exhibit A being pervasive presence of lead-based paint. No sooner did the Feds file a complaint than NYCHA settled the case, with the settlement providing that New York City taxpayers would put up an additional $4 billion to remedy the conditions identified in this particular suit. All of the money would be going, of course, to and through the very bureaucracy that had just committed the failure. More generally, NYCHA has in recent years come out demanding amounts in the range of $80 billion in total to essentially provide full capital renewal for its approximately 170,000 apartments. The size of the demand would seem to indicate that NYCHA has completely defaulted over decades in keeping its main capital systems (like windows, heat systems, roofs, plumbing, electrical) in good condition. Obviously, they now need an $80 billion reward for their failure.
And second in the housing category, consider the conduct of the “homelessness” lobby. The title of my September 2, 2023 piece was “The Whole Idea Behind Homeless Advocacy Is To Not Solve The Problem.” That piece focused particularly on San Francisco, where endless additions to annual funding budgets were only accompanied by increases in the number of people reported in the “homeless” category. (The same is of course true in all the big blue cities, whether it be New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, or wherever.) In my 2023 piece, I quoted from someone named Sanjana Friedman, writing in Pirate Wires, who had finally noticed:
The hardest thing you’ll ever have to comprehend in terms of San Francisco’s government is the city’s leaders aren’t incompetent. This is what they want. . . . Once acquainted with the basic facts of the crisis, including the incredible sum of money dedicated to solving the problem, the average San Franciscan concludes the city must be run by morons. . . . Even with supportive services, the numbers don’t add up. This is because the average person assumes the small cabal of activists who run the city’s bloated homeless industrial complex want to temporarily shelter and rehabilitate the homeless. They do not.
What they want is still more homelessness. More homelessness means bigger budgets, bigger staffs, bigger status. More homelessness means that the executives of the NGOs that contract with the cities to deal with the problem can get paid bigger salaries and can sit comfortably in offices and send minions out into the streets to have contact with the actual clients.
The ultimate question is, is there any policy area involving the personal problems of the people where a government spending solution proposed by the Left has actually been implemented and then solved the problem, such that the funding can then be reduced or eliminated? If that exists anywhere, I don’t know of it. Perhaps a reader can provide an example, but I doubt it.
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Manhattan Contrarian ping
For the criminal, nothing succeeds like your demise or death.
Termites attacking the structural integrity of the body politic. These parasites have no constructive vision of their own. Their only mission is to make life miserable for others, for some poorly defined “sins” against an equally poorly defined cohort of “the people”.
No compromise with this set of beliefs is possible, because they keep changing the objectives and goals.
One way to know that poverty is pretty much ELIMINATED is the lack of news articles about starving kids, or starving adults, for that matter. Think about it, the media would have a FIELD DAY with anyone “legitimately starving” as that would increase the pressure to spend even more on this solved problem.
By “legitimately starving”, I’m referring to drugs/alcohol/mental illness, or being a College-Educated Woman - all of which interferes with the ability of a person to think logically enough to access the HUGE amount of services available. The cases we do hear about involving children always result in arrests, meaning the kids find much better homes.
Food is cheap, VERY CHEAP, in this country, compared to money available for these basket cases (very cheap food is also crappy, but there are some very cheap and very healthy foods that cost next to nothing too, but I talk enough about that in threads).
It’s called bread and circuses. Keep the voting parasites happy and they’ll vote for you. Success isn’t the measure they base their votes on.
The left normalizes all the evil and stupid things they desire to become reality. They run a freak like Talirico knowing he won’t win, but his schtick as a “religious” man, who talks like the far-left wacko he is, is a jumping off point for the next freak they run. It’s how we went from gays wanting to be left alone to grown men be acceptable in little girl bathrooms. It’s how New York city ended up with Mandani.
The left normalizes all the evil and stupid things they desire to become reality
They are useful today because they help to bring down society, so the new order can be built.
And they will be shocked to find out when that happens, their usefulness will be over, and they find themselves first against the wall.
From an earlier FR post today—
“””Wearable Patch Could Deliver Automatic Aid During a Fentanyl Overdose”””
Yup let’s make it fool proof for people to keep ingesting fentanyl.
Next great idea will be to create a fentanyl injection system that keeps the addict perpetually high without overdosing.
I think by now its clear: The Democrats look at every social problem as an opportunity to launder money and increase their power.
If you ever wondered: Who hires all those college graduates with “worthless” degrees? The answer is: Non-profits & NGOs.
The left treats the homeless as performance artists who should be subsidized.
Good enough reasons to never vote democrat. I don’t think I ever have & hopefully never will unless things straighten out,which seems highly unlikely at the present.
The commies were toast after Horizontal’s crushing defeat. From one year ago -
The Democrats’ Message Is Broken. These Strategists Have a Few Fixes.
https://newrepublic.com/article/197655/democratic-party-midterm-response-media
.
If you define “Extreme Poverty” as the bottom 1% of the population; then you will always have 1% living in extreme poverty.
The problem with the left repeatedly trying the same failed ideas over and over again - yes, the definition of insanity - is that they refuse to learn from the past - and learn basic economics.
The hard lessons of the failed old Soviet Union, and up to 66 million dead, should have put any notions about Communism to rest.
Commies like Mamdani somehow think they are above the laws of economics and this time, with the right people, their communist policies will work.
What is unfortunate is that so many innocent people are taken down with the system.
US is the only country where poor people are obese!
Starving people are by definition slim.
Imagine the Auschwitz pictures. THOSE people were really, unquestionably, starving!
Contrast it the line of overweight people in the USA waiting for free food!
Does Turley still vote Dem?
I wish it weren't so, but it is.
“The worse, the better.”
__ Vladimir Ilyich
“drink deep or taste not the pierian spring”
Was the philosophy of my high school teachers.
A half-hearted attempt to attack the opposing football line is failure.
A mixed capitalist-socialist economy is the failure of socialism.
Across many topics it was all the same.
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