The Beacon Island wind-tower project “has fallen months behind schedule and doubled in price even before construction begins,” notes the Empire Center’s James E. Hanley. Expect more of such “major cost overruns as officials try to radically transform the state economy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions” per New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. Indeed, “the iron law of megaprojects is that they come in over budget, over time, over and over.” Hmm: “Implementing the CLCPA is expected to cost around $300 billion,” but if those costs double they’ll outweigh the supposed benefits, for “a loss of $6,500 to $13,000 for every resident of New York.”

The idea “that NATO enlargement was primarily responsible” for “the Russo-Ukrainian War,” pushed most prominently by political scientist John Mearsheimer, “is dead wrong on so many counts that arguing against it” is like telling “members of the Flat Earth Society that they might be out of step with reality,” argues Alexander J. Motyl at The Hill. “The notion that the West was going to ‘push NATO eastward’ had absolutely no basis in reality.” Indeed, “the fact that Sweden’s and Finland’s choice to join NATO has elicited no Russian saber-rattling shows that the problem wasn’t NATO enlargement; it is Ukraine, which, in Putin’s mind, has no right to exist.” Plus, “piles of evidence” show “Putin has had expansionist designs from his first days in office.”

“Why would a legislature give away its own core authority?” asks William Yeatman at Reason, as the Supreme Court considers Congress’ decision to let the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau operate with “a blank check”: For funding it “simply takes what it wants from the Federal Reserve.” This follows decades when “Congress has abandoned meaningful engagement with the federal bureaucracy,” as it means “by avoiding hard decisions, lawmakers can evade political accountability.” Yet the Framers warned: “A supine Congress undermines the separation of powers, which is a crucial bulwark for liberty.” Fact is, “Congress must rediscover its ambition, period. A good place to start would be for lawmakers to proactively retake the power of the purse from the CFPB.”

Americans “outraged” by the decline in public safety just had “a good week,” cheers Commentary’s Abe Greenwald. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who pushed to cut police funding and oversaw “a 25-year high” in homicides, was voted out. And President Biden endorsed a GOP resolution to overturn a pro-criminal DC bill. It’s part of a “counter-revolution pushing back” on the “radical” 2020 drive to relax law enforcement. First, “low-profile defund advocates in cities such as Seattle and Buffalo were defeated at the ballot box,” while others like San Francisco Mayor London Breed shifted to anti-crime rhetoric. Then, in June, San Francisco recalled its lawless DA Chesa Boudin. “Going forward, Democrats will take the wrong side of the public-safety issue at their own political peril.”

Despairing humanities professors might envy her classes “at a men’s maximum-security prison,” writes Brooke Allen in The Wall Street Journal: The men are “highly motivated and hard-working,” some “would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies.” And “they have retained their attention spans, while those of modern college students have been destroyed by their dependence on smartphones.” But “If prison inmates . . . can pay close attention for a couple of hours, put aside their political and personal differences, support one another’s academic efforts, write eloquent essays without the aid of technology and get through a school year without cheating, is it too much to ask university students to do the same? Or ask professors to try to create an atmosphere where these habits can prevail?”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board