Quick Jots: May 2023

Durham Report
#donaldtrump #media
The Durham Report was released, in a wholesale rebuke of the FBI and its mishandling of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation. Its conclusion was that the FBI had insufficient evidence to even open a file on the case. It also rebukes its heavy reliance on the long-ago discredited Steele Dossier that the Clinton campaign released. The report reveals that key FBI agents (though then-president Barack Obama was) on this case were not apprised of Russian intelligence alleging that the Clinton campaign was seeking to connect Trump to Russia to distract from her email scandal. Though this intelligence was unverified, multiple agents said this would have made them much more skeptical of the Steele Dossier. Additionally, it was interesting to see so many FBI agents were able to just decide not to cooperate with a criminal investigation, a privilege not shared by many in the country. In the end, the report didn't really have much teeth in bringing people to justice. Two people were charged and cleared in court while one other pled guilty with no real punishment brought about. One could say this shows that the report lacked substance. But it is accurate on many accounts, particularly the underlying case, which at this point, nobody is really refuting. This means that the FBI pursued a case they should not have been pursuing, which in turn means they were illegally wiretapping people in a presidential administration/campaign. This then, seems to point more toward the FBI having far too much power. It's one thing if the FBI does this to all presidents, but this appears to be much more targeted for political or other "deep state" strategic reasons.

Norway goes hard on wealth tax; rich people go hard on individual secession
#scandinavia #taxes
Norway, one of the Nordic countries that still has a wealth tax, decided to up it from 0.85 to 1.1 percent. The wealth tax hasn't generated nearly as much revenue as they thought it would, so naturally, if you're a bureaucrat, think that the tax should go up without examining why it doesn't generate much revenue. As it turns out, rich people don't like having to give up property just for owning property. More "super-rich" have left the country in 2022 than the previous 13 years combined. This number is expected to increase in 2023. Strangely, it seems like when you steal people's money, they tend to not want to hang out with you.

State Farm GTFO of California
#california #economics
The insurance company State Farm is now no longer taking on new properties in California. In the press release, of three reasons, they list growing catastrophe exposure and a challenging reinsurance market. The catastrophe exposure likely points to the extreme wildfires in California that have ravaged the state thanks to the state's complete negligence toward wildfire mitigation. Reinsurance, insurance to cover insurance company payouts, cannot be factored into prices, according to California's insurance regulatory body. Reinsurance costs have been rising dramatically and since there is no way to pay for it with higher premiums, it makes less and less sense for them to stay engaged in this market.  Additionally, California insurance regulations do not allow insurance companies to factor in the costs of assessments for FAIR plans, a state insurance policy for those that own uninsurable properties. As FAIR plans are already in debt (State-run insurance for uninsurable properties is fiscally unsound?? Say it ain't so!), the exodus of insurance companies would cause more stress on FAIR plans, which would require higher assessments on remaining insurance companies. What was that political term from 2009...death spiral? Yes. Death spiral.

Andrew Heaton interviews a city planner
#architecture
Andrew Heaton, Sim City enthusiast, interviewed Alain Bertaud, a city planner that worked at many major cities across the globe. He interestingly makes good sense on much that he talked about, something I find horribly lacking from city planners I have to deal with. He blasted the profession today and how city planners focus on all the wrong things, like the fenestration of a building rather than trying to create supporting infrastructure for buildings. If they want to be an architect, then they should have studied architecture, not urban planning. He continued to blast city planners for having this idea that they know how cities should lay out and try to utilize zoning to force people into their ideal city layout when oftentimes, people don't want to live the way the planners want them to live. Instead of thinking about how to mold society into their planned infrastructure, he argues, the infrastructure should be molded to how people live. This seems like it should be common sense, but such is the state of the average city planner. One of the interesting things he said was that open space by quantity does not necessarily improve the quality of life, but rather its design. He gives examples of poor cities with swaths of undesirable open space and contrasts them with examples of great cities with less open space, but well-designed. This should be drilled into the heads of some cities locally that require a certain percentage of developments to be maintained as permanent open space. Another interesting thing was that while historical preservation is good, it must be noted that quality historical preservation requires gentrification, as historical preservation requires higher prices to maintain and creates a higher demand in the area. This is something that should be brought up to the NIMBYs in San Francisco who want both everything to be historical and nothing to be gentrified, so we can watch their heads explode. 

League of Cities
#housingcrisis
Although I am a residential architect, I don't get too into the weeds of what is going on behind the scenes of the political backdrop of housing. I am just now finding out about this League of Cities and how it uses my tax dollars to spend it on things that I know will increase the cost of my living. Housing policy is a strange animal. I am generally for decentralization, but in housing policy, the local governments are far more tyrannical than state governments and it seems like the local governments have an outsized lobbying group to continually push for more expensive housing. How aggravating.

Social housing Vienna
#housingcrisis
Much has been made about housing in Vienna lately, but as usual, lots of people get the causes wrong. The leftward media claim that 80 percent of people in Vienna qualify for public housing and they pay relatively little of their post-tax income on housing (a fifth, compared with nearly a third in the United States). The natural conclusion for the intellectually lazy at Slate is to have the government build all the housing, forgetting that we underwent that disaster in the 1970s already. As it turns out, two-thirds of housing in Vienna are private, market-rate housing and these units are only marginally more expensive relative to income. Rates of construction overall are just higher in Vienna than in many high-cost cities in the United States. Interestingly, those that choose to live in social housing have slightly higher incomes than those that choose market-provided housing. By contrast, as Reason points out, nearly half of all constructed residences in New York City last year were subsidized housing. And yet, it's New York City that has sky-high housing costs, not Vienna.