MMN Editor

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California’s political leaders continually replay the following scenario: Identify a serious problem. Propose massive new government spending programs to address the identified problem. Spend the money without much tracking or oversight. Declare great progress, even though such progress is impossible to find. Ignore oversight reports explaining that the money has been poorly spent or has yielded few results. Rinse and repeat.
It’s frustrating living in a state that measures success by how much public money is spent — rather than by the progress the spending has made in reducing problems, but here we are. This is a constant theme when it comes to the state’s education programs. The state continually spends more money, then calls for even more spending when test scores provide bleak results. It continually ramps up spending to address climate change, then calls for even more money as the state misses its air-quality goals. Myriad examples abound.
The latest involves mental health funding and homelessness. In March 2024, California voters approved — at the behest of the governor and Legislature — a $6.4 billion bond to fund such programs to address the state’s homelessness crisis. It sounds sensible. The vast majority of California’s homeless population suffers from mental health and addiction issues. Getting people treatment is a reasonable step toward getting them off the streets.
“California does not have enough places where people can get this care and treatment. This shortage means that many people wait for care or do not receive care at the right type of place. To address the shortage, places for treatment in California would need to be able to see over 10,000 more people at any one time than is possible today,” according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. 
Opponents raised the right points: Such programs are better funded by the general fund rather than using debt spending. The bond ties the hands of counties by reallocating existing resources and local programs tend to be most effective. The measure incentivizes institutionalization and was rushed through the Legislature, per the League of Women Voters.
Nevertheless, voters approved Proposition 1 by the slimmest margins, so that’s life in a democracy. The main question, for the purpose of this essay: Has the bond provided — or is it on track to provide — the promised number of treatment beds? According to Gov. Gavin Newsom, the answer is a resounding yes. 
“Proposition 1 is doing exactly what we promised it would do: transforming California’s behavioral health system,” according to a March 11 statement from the governor’s office. “In just two years, we didn’t just meet our goal of creating 6,800 treatment beds; we exceeded it. That means we’re finally closing the gap that’s left too many communities without the care they need.”
Yet a March 12 report from CalMatters came to a starkly different and less encouraging conclusion: “None of the projects expected in 2025 under … Newsom’s mental-health ballot measure have opened.” The administration boasted that 10 of the first 124 projects would be done last year, but the publication found that nine of them were delayed and another one was cancelled. What about those 6,800-plus beds that Newsom touted? “[T]hose projects, though they have now been funded, have yet to come to fruition,” per the publication.
That last line says it all: Funding projects is not the same metric as building them and making them operational. There are plenty of plausible excuses, of course. But I’m not persuaded. State and local bonds often fall short of their promises, with officials blaming inflation and other economic conditions. There’s always some unexpected variable that poses challenges to construction projects. Typically, however, public officials typically overpromise results to gain political support, then move on to other pipedreams after the bonds fail to deliver the desired results.
A 2024 CalMatters report looked at the 2018 “No Place Like Home” bond measure to provide homeless housing: “Voters who read the Yes campaign’s description of the measure that November saw a bold promise: 20,000 new units of permanent supportive housing. More than five years later, the state has completed just 1,797 No Place Like Home units.” The numbers have gone up since then, but it’s always wise to take any initiative’s promises with a grain of salt.
In January, the governor touted a major drop in the homeless population, which sounds like good news. But his numbers might be as shaky as his Proposition 1 numbers: “[T]he official counting process is so limited — searching for the unhoused on a single day in January — it is a dubious data point at best. Its only value is to compare current bad numbers to previous and equally bad totals,” argued Tom Philp in a Sacramento Bee column following Newsom’s announcement.
Whether or not his numbers were right or wrong, at least Newsom was commenting on outcomes — e.g., the number of homeless people — rather than the state government’s usual fixation on programs and spending.
The state still embraces a counterproductive “housing first“ approach that prioritizes the construction of permanent housing for homeless people, rather than providing them with the mental health and addictions services they need to get their lives on a sustainable path. So I’d like to see these mental health programs succeed, as they offer an obvious solution. But if history is a guide, there’s no sense having much optimism that the state government can come close to delivering on its promises.
Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.
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I try to be fair to people I disagree with. Emmanuel Saez — the famous UC Berkeley economist who’s considered an architect of California’s proposed billionaire wealth tax — is someone I read carefully, even when I find his income-inequality work unconvincing. So, when I say that his arguments for the wealth tax are not just biased or misleading but egregiously wrong, I’m not being careless. I mean it.
In a recent debate at Stanford University, Saez offered his central justification (apart from, you know, “billionaires are unfairly rich”): California’s hospitals need it because the federal government cut Medicaid through last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
As Economic Policy Innovation Center researchers have repeatedly documented, under the Biden administration, Medicaid spending expanded by almost 60 percent, going from roughly $409 billion before the pandemic to $656 billion by 2025. Using the most recent Congressional Budget Office numbers reflecting the OBBB — the supposed instrument of destruction — these researchers now project Medicaid spending to reach $905 billion in 2034. Calling a 38 percent increase between 2024 and 2034 a “cut” is not an honest argument.
California’s hospital funding crisis has nothing to do with whether the state adds a billionaire tax. It’s driven by a third-party payment system in which roughly 90 cents of every American health care dollar is paid by someone other than the patient, removing incentives to discipline costs or question whether services are even worth their price.
Then there’s a financing structure that rewards expanding the program and punishes restraint. The federal government also happens to cover 90 cents of every dollar spent by states on Affordable Care Act expansion enrollees (including able-bodied adults without dependents). That gives states an irresistible incentive to grow the program, but it doesn’t provide funding at a level that covers the cost of care.
California’s leaders have taken the bait, expanded Medi-Cal aggressively and covered populations well beyond the traditional needy Medicaid population. Eager to achieve universal coverage, the state eliminated its asset test, enabling middle-class retirees to qualify for a program designed for the poor. Eligibility was phased in for undocumented immigrants over the last decade. Unfortunately, the program has no comparable mechanism to fund what it has promised.
The financial consequences of its growth are now impossible to ignore. Last year, California was $6.2 billion over its Medi-Cal budget. One government report places the cost of covering immigrants without legal status alone as a $10 billion drain from the General Fund — double what the state initially estimated.
Advocates for more Medicaid respond by saying the cost overruns prove the program is working and more people are covered. It’s also evidence of a system that will continue to deteriorate fast. Hospitals that are serving growing numbers of Medi-Cal patients and covering the gap between what the program pays and what the care costs will face the same cost pressures after the tax is implemented.
So, what did the OBBB actually cut from Medicaid? It closed a financing shell game that states like California had been running for years: taxing Medicaid insurers, reimbursing them for what they paid, and pocketing the federal match based on inflated figures. California alone extracted $19 billion in federal money over three years while contributing essentially nothing of its own. It used those funds, in part, to cover the enrollee extension that’s now blowing a hole in its budget. Taxpayers should be furious.
It’s become clear that the revenue math being used by Saez and the wealth-tax crowd is wrong too.
Stanford’s Joshua Rauh and several coauthors find that the California wealth tax’s projected revenue is a fantasy. Supporters advertised $100 billion in collections. Building on sound analysis as opposed to wishful thinking, Rauh’s team saw billionaires already leaving and, as a result, other future tax revenues disintegrating. By driving high earners out permanently, the most likely “net present value” of the wealth tax is negative $24.7 billion.
Whether politicians and voters want to admit it or not, the real problem is still spending. California’s revenue has surged by 55 percent since 2019, but Sacramento has expanded state spending commitments by 68 percent. It patched budget deficits in three consecutive years ($27 billion, $55 billion, and $15 billion) not by fixing the underlying problem but by drawing down reserves and applying onetime fixes. The Legislative Analyst’s Office now projects a fourth consecutive deficit, this time reaching nearly $18 billion in 2026-27 and growing to $35 billion annually by 2027-28. Medi-Cal alone will hit an all-time high, taking $49 billion from the General Fund.
The wealth tax will not save the hospitals. It will not fix Medi-Cal. It will accelerate the departure of a taxpayer base California is already dangerously dependent on. Real fiscal problems require honesty. Contrary to what you are told by eminent economists, this wealth tax isn’t one.
Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. To find out more about Veronique de Rugy and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

There is a friendly, sustainable, biodegradable right wing that believes conservatism means preserving everything. A Right that treats order, peace, and tranquility as supreme goods. A Right that hates conflict. We should read Chesterton’s Orthodoxy more often: “All conservatism is based on the idea that if you leave things as they are, you leave them as they are. But you do not.” “If you leave something alone, you leave it to a torrent of change,” the Londoner adds. “If you leave a white post alone, it will soon become a black post. If you really want it to stay white, you must keep repainting it; that is, you must always be having a revolution. In short, if you want the old white post, you must have a new white post.”
This is the kind of Right that was outraged when Donald Trump stood up to the UN, complained about NATO’s ineffectiveness, or walked out of the WHO — an institution that, in this century, has come to embody the discrediting of globalist bodies and the exhaustion of a formula that may once have worked in a different time and place. It’s not that this Right disagreed with Trump’s criticisms; it’s that it saw it as reckless to antagonize America’s longtime partners. Like in certain broken relationships, it’s easier to pretend everything is fine than to stand up and admit the harshest truth: the love is gone.
A few months have been enough to vindicate Trump and expose the inertia of this Right: Which allies are truly willing to do anything to defend American interests? The Strait of Hormuz is full of friendly eyes looking the other way.
Every time Trump presses his European allies, I’m reminded of myself showing up to math class, again and again, without having done my homework. I was the fastest guy in the world at making excuses. What I didn’t know was that my teacher was writing them all down — and that a few months later he would call me into his office and show me the page, an endless list of evasions I had piled up to avoid doing the work. In truth, that page was a work of art. My teacher didn’t see it that way, and he failed me. Then again, you don’t expect a math teacher to reward improvisation; as far as I understand it, math is the opposite of improvisation.
They say that the first time someone deceives you, it’s their fault; the second time, it’s yours. It may not sound very conservative to sever ties with nations you once fought alongside, but more important than sounding conservative is not looking like a fool to someone who has been deceiving you for far too long. I write this with a mix of frustration and resignation, but there is no reason to trust Europe’s governments as long as their voters keep making the same choices. Weak governments; Christian Democrats terrified of being called fascists; Social Democrats obsessed with raising taxes and covering the landscape with solar farms; and establishment parties whose chief mission is to block emerging New Right movements from competing on a level playing field. The result: revolving governments, erratic policies, and agreements that aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. American conservatives have two options: close their eyes and pretend everything is fine while they fight alone for everyone’s interests, or raise a finger and ask, “What the hell is going on here?” Sometimes it’s better to be alone than in bad company.
Returning to Chesterton, conservatism means changing everything that is wrong and preserving everything that is right. Fail to do that — out of cowardice, stupidity, or betrayal — and you end up proving P. J. O’Rourke’s old line: “Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass from your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work—and then they get elected and prove it.”
After all, throughout the centuries, those who fought against far-left revolutions didn’t call themselves “conservative, peace-loving, eco-friendly, dialogue-oriented moderates.” No. They called themselves counterrevolutionaries. Why do you think that was?
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Pope Leo XIV has been issuing frequent prayers for peace in the Middle East. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Popes pray for peace. If the presiding pope isn’t pleading for peace, then he’s failing in a basic papal duty. The pope is known as the Vicar of Christ, and it was Jesus Christ who was the Prince of Peace.
That said, amid his calls for “ceaseless dialogues of peace,” a recent statement by Leo made quite a splash, and rightly so.
In a papal audience with priests and seminarians — that is, confessors and future confessors — the pope invited Christians who bear responsibility for war to make a serious examination of conscience. “One might ask,” proffered Leo, “do those Christians who bear serious responsibility in armed conflicts have the humility and courage to make a serious examination of conscience and to go to confession?” 
The pope’s remarks dealt with the Catholic sacrament of Confession/Reconciliation, a requirement of faithful Catholics, one of their seven core sacraments. In Confession/Reconciliation, penitents undergo an examination of conscience to consider where, when, and how they are falling short of living a Christian, moral life. A Christian with warmaking abilities should undergo such an examination with the utmost care.
“The dynamic of unity with God, with the Church, and within ourselves is a presupposition for peace among peoples,” said Leo. “Only a reconciled person is capable of living in an unarmed and disarming way!”
I’ve been asked about this quote a lot lately, given the release of my new biography on Pope Leo. Some of the questioners interpret the American pontiff’s plea as a not-so-veiled nudge to Catholic policymakers in the Trump administration. One surmises that this would include Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who Leo actually met with on his very first day on the job after his formal installation last May 19. The meeting of the three was very friendly, warm, impressive. The three Americans, none of whom could have imagined being where they were at the Vatican a year earlier, really hit it off.
Catholic policymakers aside, Leo’s exhortation applies to all men and women of faith, especially right now, during Lent. And especially so if the individual is a policymaker who can affect decisions of foreign policy, national security, and war. Lent is a penitential time for all Christians. Or at least it should be.
That said, this specific message from Leo carries extra weight with this particular pope for two reasons:
First, his very first word as pope was “peace.” When he stepped onto the Loggia overlooking St. Peter’s Square on May 8, 2025, after being announced as the next head of the Roman Catholic Church, a pensive Robert Francis Prevost — now Leo XIV — composed himself to speak, prayerfully folded his hands under his chin, and said in Italian: “La pace sia con tutti voi!” Translation: “Peace be with all of you!”
The throng below, which had been stunned into silence by the choice of this unknown American as pope, roared its approval. This was a good greeting. They understood.
Indeed, the new pope proceeded to explain the Scriptural meaning of those words: “Dear brothers and sisters, these are the first words spoken by the risen Christ, the Good Shepherd who laid down his life for God’s flock. I would like this greeting of peace to resound in your hearts, in your families, among all people, wherever they may be, in every nation and throughout the world. Peace be with you!”
As Christ had done with the Apostles some 2,000 years earlier, Leo XIV twice repeated the greeting to the faithful, “Peace be with you.” Overall, his opening statement echoed the word “peace” 10 times. It’s a word that has reigned throughout his pontificate, whether praying for an end to war between Russia and Ukraine or the latest blowups in the Middle East. It has been a theme of his papacy.
Another theme established by Leo on the Loggia that May 8 is worth underscoring right now given the war with Iran. In his opening remarks, the new American pontiff described himself as a “son of Augustine.” He has since quoted the 4th–5th century saint more than any other figure, with the exception of Jesus Christ. As the onetime head of the Augustinian order, this pope knows an enormous amount about Saint Augustine (354–430). And of course, Augustine is known as, among other things, the author of “just war” doctrine, which has been a go-to guide for theologians and many politicians and diplomats for centuries. For public officials, whether presidents or prime ministers or kings, whether vice presidents or secretaries of state, who seek to determine whether a decision to go to war is morally just, Augustine’s guidelines have been the standard for 1,600 years.
And they should remain so today, in 2026. Pope Leo XIV is urging policymakers to consider whether the war they wage is just — is it moral? Is it acceptable?
Those questions should be the highest priority as they pause to examine their consciences this Lenten season. These men have in their hands the power to kill — to wipe out the lives of human beings. That’s an awful burden. It should not be dispatched lightly and without the most serious moral consideration. 
The pope is right to remind them.
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Anti-Trump voices on the left, and some anti-war voices on the right, are already calling the Iran War a “quagmire”— after less than three weeks of fighting. Whether you opposed or supported the U.S.–Israeli war against Iran when it was launched on Feb. 28, 2026, to contend that it has descended into a quagmire after 18 days of mostly overwhelming U.S. and Israeli military success betrays advanced stages of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Ironically, some of these same voices — intellectuals like William Kristol and Robert Kagan — served as cheerleaders for the Iraq War, an actual quagmire that they supported year after year despite its seemingly endless nature. 
In a remarkably short time period, U.S. and Israeli forces have achieved air supremacy over Iranian skies, decimated the Iranian navy, destroyed upwards of 70 percent of Iran’s missile launchers, killed many of Iran’s top political and military leaders, impeded Iran’s ability to support its regional proxies, and further set back Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Militarily, America and Israel are clearly winning this war. But after only 18 days, the critics are asking what is the end game. Is it regime change? Unconditional surrender? A situation where Iran’s threat to the U.S. and its allies is virtually eliminated? 
Those questions are important, but a bit premature for a war that is less than three weeks old. Perhaps we are experiencing what I will call the “Iraq Syndrome,” which like the Vietnam Syndrome of years ago raises its ugly head every time U.S. forces go into battle. For years after the end of the war in Southeast Asia, politicians and opinion-makers would react to talk of potential U.S. military action with the cry “No More Vietnams,” which acted as a self-deterrent to U.S. presidents who thought about using military force to achieve geopolitical goals. 
In the 1980s and 1990s, some astute geopolitical thinkers like Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell provided guidance to escape from the Vietnam Syndrome. The so-called Weinberger Doctrine resulted from a speech the Defense Secretary delivered at the National Press Club on Nov. 28, 1984. The United States, he said, should only commit forces to combat when the situation involved a vital national interest, the commitment of sufficient forces to achieve victory, the establishment of clear military and political objectives, reasonable assurance of support from Congress and the American people, and war is the last resort. 
In 1992, Gen. Colin Powell added a codicil to the Weinberger Doctrine. The “Powell Doctrine” counseled that before committing military forces the objective had to be clearly defined, military force must be able to achieve the political objectives, the benefits of using force must outweigh the costs, the war’s consequences must be well thought out, and war should be waged as a last resort. Together, the Weinberger and Powell doctrines sought to banish the ghost of Vietnam and end the Vietnam Syndrome. 
The Weinberger-Powell Doctrine is a prudent guide to the use of force to attain our geopolitical objectives. President Trump seemed to follow its guidance when he ordered the attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure last summer. The attack achieved its limited purposes, and Trump ended it in 12 days. The current war has broader military and political objectives. Many of the military objectives have been, or are close to being, achieved. The political objective of bringing about a less threatening Iran is moving forward, but wars — all wars — are full of surprises. As Clausewitz taught, nothing in war ever goes as planned because of “friction.” Most military plans do not survive contact with the enemy. The renowned strategist Edward Luttwak calls this phenomenon the “paradoxical logic of strategy.” 
Nothing about this war right now — after 18 days — resembles a quagmire, and to say otherwise is simply to ignore what has been achieved thus far. The lessons of the Iraq War are indeed useful. Had our leaders then adhered to the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine that costly, endless war could have been avoided or at least been far more limited in its objectives. President Trump, Secretary of War Hegseth, and our military leaders would benefit from revisiting the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, which can serve as an antidote to the Iraq War Syndrome.
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Over the weekend, one of recent memory’s worst human beings dropped dead, and we can’t summon up much regret over his passing.

Paul R. Ehrlich, an eminent ecologist and population scientist whose best-selling book, “The Population Bomb,” was celebrated as a prescient warning of a coming age of food shortages and famine but later criticized by conservatives and academic rivals for what they called its sky-is-falling rhetoric, died on Friday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 93.
His death, at a nursing facility in the retirement community where he lived, was caused by complications of cancer, his daughter, Lisa Marie Daniel, said.

That was how the New York Times’ obituary began. It would later characterize Ehrlich’s prognostications as “premature.”
Reason magazine did a bit better job of fleshing out Ehrlich’s legacy:

Paul Ehrlich, the leading false prophet of inevitable environmental doom and author of the infamous The Population Bomb, has died at age 93. Why infamous? Consider the prologue to the 1968 edition:
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate….We can no longer afford to merely treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out.
His solution? “We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail,” he argued.
Instead of a population collapse due to mass starvation, the world population grew from 3.5 billion in 1968 to 8.3 billion today. Instead of a substantial increase in the world death rate, it fell from 12 per 1,000 people in 1968 to 8 per 1,000 people in 2023. Farmers deploying modern tech have boosted the number of daily calories per person by more than a third since the 1960s. Consequently, rather than millions starving, the proportion of undernourished people in developing countries declined from 37 percent in 1969–71 to 8.2 percent in 2024. Global average life expectancy at birth rose from 57 years in 1968 to 73 years in 2023.
Nearly 60 years later, overpopulation fears have now been superseded in some quarters by depopulation worries. In over half of all countries where more than two-thirds of the world’s population lives, the fertility level is already below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman. The United Nations’ World Population Prospects 2024 report projects that the global population will likely peak at just over 10 billion at around 2080 and begin falling. More moderate scenarios projecting rapid economic development project that the world population could peak at 9.2 billion or so around the middle of this century and fall back to under 8 billion by 2100.
Communist China was one country that notoriously adopted compulsory population control measures limiting families to just one child. Current fertility trends suggest that China’s population will fall from 1.4 billion to less than half of that by 2100.
Ehrlich seemingly never encountered a prediction of doom that he failed to embrace. For example, he was all-in on the projections of imminent economic collapse from nonrenewable resource depletion as argued in the Club of Rome’s 1972 book The Limits to Growth. In fact, Ehrlich was so confident that he bet University of Maryland cornucopian economist Julian Simon that a $1,000 basket of five commodity metals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) selected by Ehrlich would increase in real prices between 1980 and 1990. If the combined inflation-adjusted prices rose above $1,000, Simon would pay the difference. If they fell below $1,000, Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference. In October 1990, Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07. The price of the basket of metals chosen by Ehrlich and his cohorts had fallen by more than 50 percent.
I don’t want to be so impolite as to say it was fitting that Ehrlich died of cancer, given that he characterized humanity as cancer. Rather, I’ll just note the irony.
The truth of the matter is that Paul Ehrlich was a crank and a charlatan whose credibility should never have been established in the first place, much less preserved for decades after all his most fundamental predictions and assessments proved themselves fabulously wrong. Particularly after his disastrous and disqualifying bet with Simon.
After all, here’s a quick rundown of some of Ehrlich’s other contentions:
• He said 65 million Americans would die of starvation or malnourishment in the 1970s, necessitating food rationing by 1980, and that the problem would get worse in the 1980s. By the end of the decade, childhood obesity began to surpass caloric deficits and food insecurity in America. Also, Ehrlich predicted Americans would face water rationing by 1974 and be “dying of thirst” by 1984, and that those born after WWII “wouldn’t live past 50.” None of that occurred; U.S. food and water supplies expanded, air/water quality improved dramatically, and life expectancy hit record highs (around 79 years).
• Ehrlich argued India “couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980” and in 1967 called for cutting off all food aid as “hopeless,” as India was beyond saving. Some eight million Indian women were sterilized as a response to the panic he stoked in that country. India’s population nevertheless more than doubled, and the “Green Revolution” brought on by high-yield crops and the introduction of fertilizers made the country not only self-sufficient but a net exporter of food. Per capita caloric intake has risen significantly in India with no nationwide famine since Ehrlich’s apocalyptic warblings.
• In  a 1971 speech given in Britain, Ehrlich said he would “take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000” because of environmental and social breakdown; alternatively, he said the U.K. would become “a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.” By 2000, Britain’s population was 59 million, so he was far off in that respect, and it was far more prosperous than it had been at the time of Ehrlich’s assessment.
• In a 1970 Earth Day speech, Ehrlich warned: “In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” Marine ecosystems have faced pressures, to be sure, due to a myriad of causes, mostly unrelated to anything Ehrlich presented, but nevertheless no mass extinction or coastal evacuations have happened on the scale he discussed. In fact, at least in America, coastal property is far more valuable now, and population distribution has skewed far more to coastal areas than was the case, for example, 100 years ago.
• He projected 200,000 Americans dying in a single year (e.g., 1973) from “smog disasters” in Los Angeles and New York, with hundreds of thousands more deaths from pollution overall. Air quality improved due to regulations and technology, and Ehrlich proved utterly, ridiculously wrong.
• When the first round of his doomsaying forecasts amounted to a complete swing and miss, Ehrlich doubled down. For example, Ehrlich repeatedly warned that rapid species loss — especially pollinators — would trigger widespread agricultural failure and human food/security collapse “in coming decades.” Yes, biodiversity loss is a real thing to an extent, but no there has been no global food system breakdown or mass human crisis that would prove out any part of Ehrlich’s prediction. Crop yields continuously rise through technology and adaptation, and pollinator challenges have been addressed locally without the predicted catastrophe.
• In 2008 interviews and subsequent statements into the 2010s and 2020s, Ehrlich continued prophesying an “unhappy increase in the death rate” and implied major die-offs or famines from ecological limits, while insisting the original Population Bomb warnings had understated the crisis. Except the global crude death rate declined from about 9 per 1,000 in the mid-1990s to around 7.5 per 1,000 by the early 2020s; hunger prevalence and famine deaths (outside conflict zones) fell further, contradicting the predicted upward trend.
• In his 2004 book One With Nineveh, Ehrlich argued that modern civilization faced the same fate as ancient empires (Sumer, Maya, etc.) due to overpopulation combined with consumption — predicting resource scarcity, famines, wars, and breakdown “soon” without radical policy changes. Well? We’re waiting.
Virtually nothing this man has said panned out. He has been wrong in every particular. And yet there is arguably no more influential academic as it relates to public policy than Paul Ehrlich.
Almost everything today’s Democrat Party pushes for derives from Ehrlich’s worldview. They’re fully engaged in trying to reslice the pie rather than growing it, they’re engaged in attempts at mass immigration rather than promoting domestic fertility as a means of keeping the welfare state going…
…Oh, and by the way, that’s more an Ehrlich initiative than you think.

Paul Ehrlich in 1970: “The FCC should see to it that large families are always treated in negative light on television.”
If that doesn’t work, then the government should “legislate the size of the family” and “throw you in jail if you have too many” kids.pic.twitter.com/646gThk9WC
— Shawn Regan (@Shawn_Regan) January 5, 2023

Ehrlich has been treated as eminent all over the West despite the buffoonery of his junk science.
Why?
It’s very simple — he gave academic cover to things that corrupt, misanthropic politicians wanted to do.
The Left throughout the West has despised the free market democratic society that modern America pioneered, for the simple reason that such a society devalues the pursuit of political power, and it can’t sell the alternative — particularly after the failure of communism in the 20th century. But with Ehrlich’s Manichean fantasies put forward as the warnings of a genius, they had something to sell.
Pride goeth before the fall, in other words.
You might think liberty works, but it’ll all go wrong. You’ll see. You’d better give us power over your lives and let us reslice that pie, or else we’ll all starve.
None of them ever believed any of this. Ehrlich was a useful idiot, a facile clown. He was the court jester of the anti-Western Left, and because of that he was given prominence and place to continue spouting lunacies, no matter how badly wrong his predictions went.
He was a selfish, misanthropic, utterly vain nincompoop whose contribution to science was to help to destroy it on the modern campus. And people even more evil than Ehrlich used him for completely unscientific purposes.
I won’t say it’s good that he’s dead, because the damage he did is already done — and it won’t go away with his death.
What I can say is this: It was never that we had too many people in the world, but that we had too many Paul Ehrlichs. Maybe we can begin getting a handle on that problem now.
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Teacher Who Resigned Over DEI Says “Ideological Takeover” Is Getting Worse

In a recently released NY Post op-ed, teacher Dana Stangel-Plowe described why she publicly resigned from the Dwight-Englewood School in 2021 after witnessing what she calls an ideological takeover of K-12 education.

She writes that the shift began after faculty trainings on privilege and the hiring of a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) officer whose goal was to “transform” the school. According to the op-ed, DEI ideology soon spread through curriculum, faculty training, and student programming, with concepts like systemic oppression treated as unquestionable and some traditional authors labeled “dead white males” and removed from core coursework.

Stangel-Plowe argues the environment discouraged open debate, with students afraid to speak freely and teachers privately hesitant to challenge the new orthodoxy. After raising concerns internally without response, she resigned publicly.

The Post op-ed says that five years later, she says the trend has intensified nationwide, claiming ideological activism has spread through teacher training programs, unions, and curricula. She warns that politicized education undermines intellectual curiosity and civic learning, and urges educators and parents to confront the issue openly.

She also recounts what she describes as the social and professional fallout from her decision. After speaking out, she says she lost friendships and that even her children were excluded from some school community events. Despite the personal cost, she writes that the experience connected her with education reform advocates and parents across the country who share similar concerns about the direction of schools.

The op-ed further claims that activist groups and political organizers — including members associated with the Democratic Socialists of America — are increasingly influencing education through unions, curriculum partnerships, and political organizing.

Stangel-Plowe argues that schools should refocus on open inquiry and intellectual diversity rather than what she views as ideological instruction.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 03/18/2026 – 21:50

During a recent public appearance, New York’s Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul admitted that the state is in dire straits due to the fact that so many wealthy people have fled to other places. She is begging them to come back and help fund the state’s ‘generous’ welfare programs.
One of the main points of separating the country into states was to inspire competition. The idea was that states that delivered more for less would benefit from increased population and the tax dollars that went with it.
Hochul is admitting that New York is losing this race. Red states like Texas and Florida do not need to beg people to move there. People do it voluntarily because it’s a better deal for their hard work and tax dollars.
Politico reports:
A state budget fight over raising taxes on rich people and corporations is becoming a litmus test for how power is wielded in the Empire State’s capital — and pitting Gov. Kathy Hochul against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Democratic state lawmakers this week formally proposed tax hikes that Hochul does not want, but are central to the democratic socialist mayor’s costly agenda…
The governor on Wednesday told POLITICO she wants “a system in place where it’s not just taxing for the sake of taxing” and to avoid further erosion of New York’s wealthy tax base.
“I need people who are high net worth to support the generous social programs that we have in our state,” she said.
Watch the video below:

Kathy Hochul making a weak plea for wealthy people who have left New York (to red states like Florida) to come back to pay their high taxes to fund failing (unaccountable) social programs:
“I need people who are high net worth to support the generous social programs we have in… pic.twitter.com/7quhsFyWyn
— Matt Whitlock (@MattWhitlock) March 18, 2026

In other words, Kathy Hochul is already running out of other people’s money.
It’s the same thing we see happening to California. You can only tax people at an extremely high rate without delivering for so long. Eventually, people are going to pack up and move to a state that charges lower taxes and delivers more services and freedom.
Hochul’s biggest problem right now is NYC Mayor Mamdani. Just as she is begging people to return to the state, Mamdani is doing everything he can to raise taxes on people living in the city. That’s just going to drive more people away.
The post NY Governor Kathy Hochul Now Basically Begging Wealthy People Who Fled the State to Come Back and Help Fund Welfare Programs (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

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