Category: national politics & policies

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election law ideological culture national politics & policies partisanship

Cheating with Democracy

Republican, elections, voting, democracy

They’re cheating, she says.

Kamala Harris insists that the Trump administration and Republicans across the union are “cheating with all this redistricting that they are doing.

“They are cheating,” she goes on, “by changing polling locations so that our elders who are used to voting at the elementary school down the street may go there on Election Day and find out it is no longer a polling place.

“They are cheating by purging voter rolls,” and . . . well, she breathlessly moves on, explaining why leaders like her have to remind people that “not only must you regislur [sic] to vote, but you must check your registration status to make sure you haven’t been purged from the rolls!”

Well, it is a good idea to check your registration status every now and then.

But the assumptions undergirding these charges, which she made on the 22nd in front of the Detroit NAACP, is that the evil Republicans are trying to disenfranchise American blacks by such horrific and unheard of practices as redistricting, by altering polling locations, and by scouring the official lists of voters for people who have moved without informing officials, for those who are ineligible because of lack of citizenship, and for the inconvenient lack of existence.

A democracy cannot run well without careful attention to all three of these things. 

What’s happened with redistricting is that the Democrats have used race — illegally — as an excuse to concentrate blacks, and recently Republicans have re-instituted non-race-based standards for districting. 

Changing polling places always occurs, every election year, and the biggest changes in this regard have been in the eight states (and D.C.) that have established mail-in only voting. Talk about a change of polling places!

And then there is the purging of voter rolls of non-citizen, non-resident, and non-existent voters! Who could complain about that?

Only unserious people. Like Democrats. Like Kamala Harris.

And those who seek to game elections.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Coda: “That’s how I feel about this moment,” concluded Harris, “I feel about this moment like this.”

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Accountability fraud national politics & policies

Who’s Against Fraud?

Obamacare, fraud, corruption, healthcare

While one might assume that the most enthusiastic proponents of extending the federal government’s assistance programs would also be the most ardent fraud hunters — since fraud weakens the system they promote — one would be wrong. When individual assistance and healthcare fraud actually receive effective scrutiny, socialists and progressives can reliably found among the chief protesters.

This is something to watch for, especially in light of what Vice President J. D. Vance announced yesterday — that the federal government has removed hundreds of thousands of Obamacare enrollments created for people who either do not meet eligibility requirements or . . . don’t exist. 

“The action, initiated by the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud,” explains The Epoch Times, “targets 760,000 accounts and will save taxpayers an estimated $2.2 billion, according to federal officials.”

“We had a system in this country that rewarded brokers,” said the vice president, “that made people rich for enrolling fake people in programs that are meant to ensure that our fellow citizens have healthcare. This was a scandal.”

How did the task force determine ineligibility? These were the red flags: no payments received; no claims made. 

Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, shared the stage with Vance, saying that lax enforcement allowed brokers to enroll people sans income verification or even Social Security numbers.

Which is why the administration also removed hundreds of brokers and agents likely to have “knowingly enrolled people who did not qualify or did not exist,” The Epoch Times clarifies. 

Also imposed was a “six-month moratorium on the enrollment of new brokers.”

Obamacare seems to have had incentives for fraud built in. It’s a pity but perhaps not surprising that the advocates of such systems cannot be counted on to police those systems.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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deficits and debt folly national politics & policies

Minus the Five Grand

Trump, $5000, bribe, National Debt

“If the Republicans win, you win with us, and you get $5,000,” President Donald Trump promised last week before assembled Republicans at the party’s midterm convention as well as a national television audience. “It will be called the Trump dividend.”

The cost of making good on his pledge, bribe, deal? A cool $1.3 trillion.

I don’t believe Mr. Trump has that much money.

“Because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000,” intoned the president. “Very much like a successful company will do a cash distribution to its shareholders.”

Dividends are paid out of profits; this operation known as the federal government doesn’t turn a profit. Instead, it’s running past $40 trillion in debt.

Can we afford to go trillions further into the red? Or pay more in taxes for this additional trillion-dollar-plus giveaway?

As if trying to outdo the president in folly, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick declared “we’re going to deliver” but “not from taxpayer money,” detailing several precarious plans . . . to come up with less than half the needed dough.

On Fox News, Bret Baier brought the vice president into the conversation. J. D. Vance described the current deficit budget in terms of revenue — there is “an extraordinary amount of revenue,” he said — as if the revenue that is not extraordinary enough to cover all current spending is somehow enough to spend $1.3 trillion more without additional debt. 

Eric Boehm at Reason says the $5,000 bribe shows that MAGA has run out of ideas.

In an election year when Democrats are featuring wannabe communists, why are Republicans demonstrating a similar lack of sanity?

I think the American voter might be more persuaded by even the smallest dose of common sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies subsidy tax policy

The New Hollywood?

Hollywood, entertainment, Washington DC, democracy, subsidy, tax break

It may be the president’s goofiest idea yet.

His Monday brainstorm was for the federal government to get into the movie business. In a Truth Social post, Mr. Trump floated the notion of creating a “Federal Production Incentive to create Entertainment Jobs in America.” So this isn’t exactly a socialist proposal — where the government would seize the means of production and go about making movies — it’s a subsidy proposal: tax breaks; to “benefit ALL of America.”

Trump posts as if he has worked the math out, where the booty the government loses in direct taxation “will be made up tenfold by the money pouring into the Treasury’s coffers.”

A familiar rationale. But does it work? Do tax credits incentivize producers so much that taxes downstream of the productions make up for all the bother and paperwork?

Well, no need for theory. States already have such programs.

Tosin Akintola, in his Reason article — “State Film Subsidies Lose Money. Trump Wants To Try the Idea Nationally.” — found that “the film and TV industry in eight states returned between 3 cents and 31 cents for every dollar.” 

Entertainment projects do not create that many jobs.

We used to talk about the states as “laboratories of democracy,” by which we meant “laboratories for policy.”

The point isn’t to take the failed experiments and run them at the federal level, hoping for something different.

Sure, Hollywood is lame. But don’t make Washington the new entertainment capital of the world. It’s doing bad enough as the capital of more serious business.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Hollywood, entertainment, Washington DC, democracy, subsidy, tax break

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deficits and debt national politics & policies

The Forty-Trillionth

public debt, Congress, Trump, war

When Grover Cleveland — arguably the United States’ last non-“progressive” president — won his second term after a one-term hiccup named Benjamin Harrison, list makers and ordinal number enthusiasts faced a challenge: was Cleveland to be called the union’s 22nd president, or the 22nd and 24th president?

The two-term presidents before him had all served their terms consecutively, but we spoke of each four-year term in office as the presidents’ respective first and second administrations. Historians and archivists chose the clunky 22nd/24th double listing for Cleveland, which brings us to the current president, formerly the 45th and now the 47th.

One presidency was just not enough for Donald Trump.

But what will he be remembered as? It is possible that his tombstone will have a forty-something on it, but the “th” may very well stand for “trillionth” — for under his watch the public debt of the federal government rolled over on Wednesday, past $40 trillion.

I remember when people held signs up emblazoned with “No Trillion Dollar Debt!” How “forty years ago” is that?

There’s an old law of liberty: people out of power demand freedom, people in power demand more power. Trump sounded more libertarian when running for office, and he seems to conform to a very old corollary of the law: politicians running for office protest debt, politicians in office add to it.

FDR is the grand example, yet it is Trump who may come to be identified with it.

“The unprecedented [sic] $40 trillion figure highlights competing administration priorities,” declares The Seattle Times, “from boosting the defense spending that the U.S. relies on to carry out President Donald Trump’s almost-6-month-old Iran war to lowering the cost of gas and groceries.”

Isn’t this mere Trump-bashing? For while Trump may someday receive the blame, in truth it belongs to both parties and almost all politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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ideological culture national politics & policies

Awake to Evasion 1.0

AOC, woke 1

There are people who still debate the term “woke.” From the beginning, defenders of woke judgments, discourse, and activism claimed it was “just good manners”; others said it didn’t exist, a mere figment of “right-wing paranoia.” 

Truth is, it was a new, trendy term used to replace “social justice” and the peculiar bent and activism methods of “social justice warriors,” after “SJW” became fodder for ridicule by collegiate leftism’s opponents.

Now, more than a few Democrats are trying to distance themselves not only from the rising tide of know-nothing communism but also the woke style itself, which increasing numbers of Americans have come to loathe. The bellwether in this is U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.).

What she and her comrades said in the time of the COVID lockdowns was “not rhetoric that we would use today,” she told an ABC This Week interviewer. But she insists that the extremist/radical positions of her fellow Democratic Socialists (she’s still a member of the New York chapter) were “useful.”

Nevertheless, her apologetics for defunding the police and other crazytown nonsense was not what went viral. It was her repeating of a local politician’s statement to the effect that “Woke 1.0 was crazy” that dominated commentary.

Ha ha ha, it was a confusing time; we can move on, seems to be her takeaway.

But she herself was a big part of the madness, says Robby Soave — and so says your memory. “No one,” declares Soave, “should accept these conversions at face value.”

Of course they aren’t even conversions. They are evasions and spin. AOC is a politician, and no more honest about her past positions than she is her ignorance of economics, political philosophy, and especially . . .

Common Sense.

Of which This Is. (I’m Paul Jacob.)

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election law national politics & policies Voting

A Plan to Fix Our Elections

Jimmy Carter, voter ID, fraud, elections, democracy

I wasn’t the biggest fan of the late former President Jimmy Carter. But his plan for voter ID has my vote.

I refer to the idea he defended in 2005, viewable in a video clip that’s been making the rounds lately.

The clip is from a C-SPAN broadcast of a hearing about federal election reform focusing on the Carter-Baker Commission Final Report. This report was the product of years of investigating how to fix problems in the U.S. election system highlighted by the nerve-racking Bush-Gore presidential contest in 2000.

In addition to voter ID, the report advocates other efforts to combat fraud, including auditable paper backups of electronic votes.

In the clip, Carter says that we should “have some form of photo ID required, photo ID. . . . [It would include] some very careful constraints to prevent abuse. For instance, these photo ID cards will be free.

“There’ll be a wide distribution of them. The states will be required to go around the state to issue these photo ID cards to as many people as possible, which would be a good system just for recruiting new voters. This will be very important. And so this will be, I think, a move forward in getting more people to vote. It will not restrict people from voting. It’ll be uniformly applied throughout the country. And it will be nondiscriminatory.”

Too bad Carter didn’t live to see universal implementation of the ID requirement that he proposed. It’s something we desperately need.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability media and media people national politics & policies

Fauci’s the Focal Point

Dr. Fauci, Anthony Fauci, covid, science, research

Senator Rand Paul “has it in” for Fauci — said Dr. Anthony Fauci at last week’s Senate hearing. 

The former director of the NIAID and former Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden made it sound like the Kentucky senator was trying to put him in prison. But what Dr. Paul asked of Dr. Fauci was an apology — not jail-time.

Why, though?

“If we don’t want this to happen again, him acknowledging that he was wrong to fund this research will be a word of caution and warning to the next generation of people to come through,” the senator told Mark Halperin. “And the debate will have ultimately been won on ‘gain of function.’

“The danger of it.”

The point, Rand Paul says, is to stop the madness of this type of research.

Earlier in the interview he had noted that scientists had warned that the results at the Wuhan Institute of Virology should not be published. It would be a blueprint, or recipe, for a never-ending biological warfare by terrorists.

The whole interview is worth listening to. Mark Halperin does what so few journalists do when confronting a contentious issue: formulate each question in epistemically sound terms, for clarity. “Is that an established fact in your mind, or do you need to know more?” 

Here are some responses from Sen. Paul:

  • Fauci was a long-time supporter and financer of gain-of-function research: fact.
  • Fauci “was aware that they [the Wuhan researchers] were doing gain-of-function research” but Fauci would quibble over semantics, about the exactitudes of what qualifies as such: fact. (Fauci’s being evasive.)
  • Fauci funded that research: “without question” a fact.
  • Fauci lied about the wet market origin theory: fact.

There’s more. Let’s praise a journalist for asking clear questions and a politician for giving clear answers.

Especially about the coronavirus origin.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture national politics & policies political economy

Trump-Approved Profits

Donald Trump, oil, prices, inflation, redistribution, socialism

Occasionally, President Trump takes an anti-capitalist rhetorical turn. He apparently supposes his unleashing of an Inner Mamdani will help him through a political rough patch. 

Or perhaps he is just momentarily confused.

The president recently asserted that oil companies are making too much money right now and “ought to give back” some of it to the public. This, although “I’m a big free enterprise guy.”

But oil companies don’t owe buyers anything more than the oil they supply. Nor, when prices are low, do buyers owe oil companies or gas stations more money than what they pay.

In markets, a sudden big drop in supply of a good — like oil, shipments of which might be blocked by wars in the Middle East — tends to lead to higher prices.

Companies unable to ship or sell the good lose money. If demand remains the same or increases, prices for the part of the supply still available go up. Which means more profits and more money to expand production and distribution.

Consumers of oil should want its producers to be as successful as possible. That’s just reason, common sense. High profits encourage and fund more digging, refining, and distribution, and attract more competition — ultimately increasing supply to reduce prices. 

Whenever supply of an urgently needed good takes a hit, producers should be as free as possible to deal with the problem and to enjoy the rewards of dealing with it successfully. Any big free enterprise guy should be able to understand this. 

You too, Mr. President.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment Fifth Amendment rights insider corruption national politics & policies

Fauci Can’t Lie

Anthony Fauci, Congress, Covid, 5th Amendment

Is there any crime for which Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden, will be prosecuted?

The multi-millionaire former “public servant” received a full and unconditional pardon “FOR ANY OFFENSES against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in . . .” 

Courtesy of Mr. Biden — or his auto-pen.

“Biden backdated the pardon to 2014, a date nearly six years before the first cases of SARS-CoV-2 emerged,” Newsweek reported a year and a half ago.

Why? Come on, man! Because it “shields Fauci from allegations tied to U.S.-funded gain-of-function research in addition to his work during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

So, Fauci is immune from prosecution for 

  1. a decade’s worth of skirting U.S. domestic restrictions, to fund gang-of-function research at the lab in Wuhan, China; 
  2. for each and every lie he told Senator Rand Paul and others in Congress; and 
  3. for any other fraud — such as using his federal employees to solicit more than a million dollars in cash prizes for him personally.

So when Fauci — formerly known as “the Science” — asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times before Congress (NBC says 106), refusing to answer questions about his past role as a government official, it was illegitimate. Because on those matters, he cannot be incriminated.

“No person,” reads the amendment, “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” There can be no criminal case brought for his past lies.

But the problem for Dr. Fauci is that he can be prosecuted for telling those lies again to Congress. Like at yesterday’s hearing. 

Past lies? You’re pardoned, Doc. 

But Fauci cannot repeat his lies. That would be a new crime. 

And since he wants those falsehoods to stand, he will not speak.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Previously on Common Sense:

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