A Brookings Institution study made headlines in January when it found that Boston has the worst income inequality of any major American city. In doing so, the study obscured the far more punishing reality of Massachusetts cities outside Boston, which have seen far less economic growth and today resemble the worst-hit parts of Rhode Island more than they do Greater Boston.
Springfield ranked 64th for income inequality in that Brookings study. It fared better than Boston because its anemic economic growth means there is little difference in how the bottom and top earners have fared. The city is less unequal than Boston because it faces increasingly concentrated poverty.
I thought my capacity for shock at judicial activism was exhausted, but an April 8 decision by a federal judge to allow a group of children to sue the federal government to stop climate change literally caused me to burst out laughing. The Left, of course, is giddy.
Plaintiffs' complaint – all 100 pages of it – and related pleadings contain the usual litany of climate change alarmists' dire predictions of catastrophe if the planet warms a little – including allegations that climate change will affect their right to vote and ability to bear children (seriously). They pair those warnings with attacks on the U.S. government for allowing fossil fuel production and consumption to increase.
