Category: national politics & policies

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national politics & policies partisanship tax policy

Billionaires Backed Better

billionaire, Democrat, taxes

It’s a cliché of politics that the Republican Party is The Party of the Rich while the Democrats serve the Poor and Downtrodden.

But were that true, why so many Democratic billionaires?

And why is President Biden’s Build Back Better legislation offering the top income quintile a tax cut worth billions and billions?

At issue is a “$285 billion tax cut that would almost exclusively benefit high-income households over the next five years,” write Alyssa Fowers and Simon Ducroquet in the pages of The Washington Post. “The measure would allow households to increase their deduction from state and local taxes from $10,000 to $80,000 through 2026, and then impose a new deduction cap through 2031.”

“It’s the second-most expensive item” — when figured in budgeting terms, not merely in outlays.

True to form, Democrats promise that it would raise revenue, actually — eventually. In time-honored procrastination fashion, the legislation jiggers with the deduction cap over time, decreasing the cap in the future. A typical (and easy to re-jigger) politicians’ ploy.

What this is all about is subsidizing the rich in high-tax “blue states” — politically protecting Democrats in California and New York, to name the most obvious two, allowing them to pretend to “soak the rich” and “help the poor,” and decreasing the incentive in those states for the rich to leave for lower-tax environments, like Texas and Florida.

Arguably, these “SALT” caps are the worst sort of tax break possible, since they are regional (affecting different states differently) and even partisan. Not to mention regressive.

Instead of “Build Back Better,” the Biden plan should be dubbed the “Failed State Bailout.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

The Senatorial Suppressor

Elizabeth Warren, censorship, 1st Amendment, free speech

The brazenness of governmental assaults on freedom of speech continues apace.

In addition to “aggressive IRS scrutiny” of conservative groups, using campaign finance regulations to suppress speech, and FBI raids on homes of perpetrators of journalism, we are seeing government officials openly demand that private firms suppress speech.

In September, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote a letter to Amazon chastising it for promoting books that contradict the government line about matters pandemical.

One target of Warren’s finger-wagging is The Truth About COVID-19: Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal by Joseph Mercola and Ronnie Cummins.

I don’t know how cogent it is. I’m willing to let the authors make their case.

Not Senator Warren.

In her public letter, she rebukes Amazon for being “unwilling or unable to modify its business practices to prevent the sale of falsehoods . . . .” That’s a lot of book-warehouse-burning implicitly rationalized. How many classics of Western civilization contain falsehoods? Not to mention the I Ching.

Now the authors and publisher of The Truth About COVID-19 have sued Warren for acting to violate the First Amendment by proxy. Their filing cites a 1963 Supreme Court ruling that politicians violate the First Amendment when telling booksellers that selling certain books may be “unlawful.” Exactly what Warren does in her letter.

As that Court put it, “people do not lightly disregard public officers’ veiled threats.” 

Let’s hope that today’s Supreme Court recognizes the same reality.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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judiciary national politics & policies too much government

Emergency Effrontery

Joe Biden, Covid, Vaccines

The ruling was hardly shocking. Most constitutional scholars expected it, I think. That being said, the whole business is . . . shocking.

I refer to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals coming down hard against the Biden Administration’s vaccine mandate.

Say those words, “vaccine mandate,” reflecting on how it was “enacted” — not by act of Congress — and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s tortured justification for forcing private companies seems doomed.

At least if the Constitution retains any of its meaning.

“The stay,” explains Reason editor Jacob Sullum, “which the court issued on Friday evening, says OSHA shall ‘take no steps to implement or enforce the Mandate until further court order.’ It is officially a preliminary pause ‘pending adequate judicial review of the petitioners’ underlying motions for a permanent injunction.’ But the court left little doubt that it would grant those motions, saying ‘petitioners’ challenges to the Mandate show a great likelihood of success on the merits.’”

The administration’s desperate shoehorning of OSHA’s statutory ability to concoct an “emergency temporary standard” (ETS) is an act of effrontery. 

Sullum, in his detailed coverage, shows just how extraordinary and inapt the reliance upon the ETS is. The COVID-19 crisis cannot justify the mandate through the legal mechanism chosen. It is fairly obvious that, as the court put it, Biden’s decree “grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority.”

Sullum quotes another judge’s concurring opinion to the effect that even a congressionally legislated mandate would be controversial, constitutionally.

But breathe easy: Nancy Pelosi’s and Chuck Schumer’s Congress has no interest in creating a rational and constitutional response to the crisis.

And our Congress? Well, it doesn’t exist.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

One Against the Mandate?

Daily Wire, law suit, Covid, vaccines, mandates

“President Biden, the federal government, social media, and the establishment media have conspired to rob Americans of their freedoms in the name of public health,” declares Jeremy Boreing, co-CEO of The Daily Wire. “They have broken faith with the American people through conflicting messaging, false information, and by suppressing data and perspectives with which they disagree.”

Quoted by Alex Swoyer in The Washington Examiner, Boreing is explaining why his company — best known for its platforming (as we say these days) of commentators Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh, but also for its burgeoning news service and mini-entertainment empire — will not comply with “the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for private employers.”

It is “suing in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, the company announced Thursday,” Swoyer reports.

Though we’ve been hearing about these “requirements” for over a month, they were published by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) just yesterday. Folks at The Daily Wire had been talking up their challenge ever since Biden first dropped his bomb, and had their legal response ready.

OSHA’s mandate, Swoyer explains, “directs large companies to require employees to get vaccinated by Jan. 4, or else pay for them to get tested weekly,” and also requires those tested-but-unvaccinated employees “to wear a face mask.”

Note that the tests for the coronavirus are not reliable, tests for antibodies are not even mentioned (and also not reliable), and face mask utility has not been demonstrated to anything approaching certainty, as I’ve discussed.

Grounds for challenge are legion.

Other affected companies should join The Daily Wire with parallel lawsuits, or at least amicus briefs.

The president’s mandate must not stand. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom international affairs national politics & policies

Taiwan in Two Words

Taipei, Taiwan, China, freedom

“Two words from Taiwan’s leader threaten to upend U.S.-China ties,” headlined The Japan Times’ story.

Weeks ago, China’s totalitarian leader Xi Jinping mentioned his itch for peaceful “reunification” with Taiwan.* Or else. No pause in his warplanes crossing into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, nor withdrawal of the continual threat of military invasion. 

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen offered that the two countries were “not subordinate” to each other — which deeply hurt Xi’s feelings because . . . well, his Chinazis have their hearts set on subordinating Taiwan. In fact, the only thing preventing that deadly, freedom-suffocating Sino-subordination is the united weight — military and economic — of allied countries.

Japan, for instance. And the European Union, too — which just voted to deepen ties to Taiwan, ignoring Beijing’s demand to shun the island nation. 

At a CNN “town hall” last week, President Joe Biden vowed the U.S. would defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack. Diplomatic folk tried to walk that back to “strategic ambiguity,” but billions of Asians heard him say it.  

“To whom does Taiwan belong?” asked Pat Buchanan earlier this year, in a column trudging through 70 years of weaselly-worded communiqués and diplomatic understandings.

But comedian John Oliver counters that “people who aren’t Taiwanese making decisions for Taiwan is a bit f***ing played out, historically.”

“So maybe the best thing we can do is move past talking about Taiwan like it’s some kind of poker chip in a never-ending game of us versus them,” he concluded on his HBO show Last Week Tonight. “Because the fact is Taiwan is not a plucky bulwark against the Red Menace, nor is it some island-sized Viagra to rejuvenate the Chinese nation. Taiwan is 23 million people who, in the face of considerable odds, have built a free democratic society and very much deserve the right to decide their own future in any way that they deem fit.”

Let’s call it: Not subordinate.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Since Taiwan has never been a part of the People’s Republic of China, there can be no prefix “re” in the threatened unification — by missiles and machine guns. 

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insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

Settled Science

Rand Paul, Anthony Fauci, covid, gain of function

Remember the blow-up last summer between Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Dr. Anthony Fauci over gain-of-function research? 

Paul charged that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had supported such research in China. “Senator Paul,” Fauci fired back, “you don’t know what you are talking about, quite frankly.”

“Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared to be channeling the frustration of millions of Americans when he spoke those words during an invective-laden, made-for-Twitter Senate hearing on July 20,” imagined Katherine Eban recently in Vanity Fair. “You didn’t have to be a Democrat to be fed up with all the xenophobic finger-pointing and outright disinformation, coming mainly from the right. . . .”*

Nevertheless, Ms. Eban added, “Paul might have been onto something.”

Might? 

Last week, the NIH sent a letter to Congress admitting that its grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, laundered through the infamous EcoHealth Alliance, resulted in research that even the NIH acknowledges was gain-of-function. 

Sen. Paul knew what he was talking about; Dr. Fauci did not.

NIH was quick to defend Fauci, arguing the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President was in the dark last summer about the controversial research because EcoHealth Alliance was two years late in reporting. For its part, EcoHealth Alliance “appeared to contradict that claim,” telling Vanity Fair, “These data were reported . . . in April 2018.”

“Given all of the sensitivity about this work,” Stanford University microbiologist Dr. David Relman remarked to Vanity Fair, “it’s difficult to understand why NIH and EcoHealth have still not explained a number of irregularities with the reporting on this grant.”

Is it?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Eban concluded her sentence with this clause: “up to and including the claim that COVID-19 was a bioweapon cooked up in a lab.” Her assertion that “the right” was calling COVID a “bioweapon” is a canard designed to prematurely halt any inquiry into even the possibility. When Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) simply said there needed to be an investigation of the Wuhan lab, he was fiercely attacked by big media and the lab leak theory was suppressed on Facebook and Google. 

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national politics & policies social media

Low Fares. Something to Hide.

Southwest Airlines, Covid, vaccination, labor

“Southwest Airlines crews are walking out and so are FAA air traffic controllers,” Buzz Patterson tweeted on Sunday. “This is just the beginning.” 

Buzz’s running for a House seat in California’s Seventh District. But I saw the tweet as quoted on Facebook by Erin Leigh, who wrote “Exactly what needs to happen. Over 1800 Southwest flights have been canceled in the last 48 hrs . . . employees from other airlines are joining as well as Amtrak.” And she concluded with “Mandates have consequences!!”

But what really caught my attention was Facebook’s warning: “Independent fact-checkers say this information has no basis in fact.”

Really? None?

You see, much of what was tweeted and Facebooked was definitely true: Southwest Airline pilots and other workers have walked out. And though the airline and the union provide the silliest rationales for the mass cancellations as cover — including blaming non-existent bad weather — it seems pretty obvious this is tied to the vaccine mandates. Tucker Carlson is nearly alone in covering this angle of the story — bemoans The Guardian — while the rest of corporate media relays the “nothing to see here” official spin (or “media blackout”).

Meanwhile, Facebook promotes its guardian of truth, “Lead Stories” — but its “fact-check” was entirely about the Amtrak shutdowns!!

Candidate Patterson didn’t mention Amtrak. And Ms. Leigh noted Amtrak almost as an afterthought. 

And then, up on my screen, came Facebook’s altered image of the initial tweet, with “Regular Delay” super-imposed.

The Facebook post was mostly about airline business.

And while Amtrak officials and mouthpieces for the Transport Workers Union of America assure us that it’s all very regular . . . the jab mandate is in place, and labor . . . dislocations . . . are one consequence.

Our regularly scheduled re-scheduling will be re-explained by history.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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deficits and debt folly national politics & policies responsibility

Biden Blames Business

inflation, cash, money, fire

Inflation’s up, and President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., thinks he knows why.

Economist Bruce Yandle, famed for his “Bootleggers and Baptists” theory of regulation, reports in Reason that the aging president blamed “the country’s three largest meatpackers” for contributing to July’s CPI rate of 5.4 percent, and the fuel industry for its part in August’s 5.3 percent annualized rate. 

Profiteering!

I’ve always wondered how anyone can get away with this tired old accusation. Businesspeople aim to profit at all times and in every place. Profit is why they go into business. Are they making too much inflation-adjusted profit during an inflationary period but not when inflation is low? Seems unlikely.

But Biden’s looking into it! “There’s lots of evidence that gas prices should be going down,” the prez claimed, “but they haven’t.”

What evidence? Biden presented none. 

After throwing so much money into the economy to “stimulate” it after the big hit commerce has taken from state-perpetrated lockdowns, what could we expect but rising prices? “Inflation is always and everywhere,” a great economist has said, “a monetary phenomenon.”

Bruce Yandle is on that same page. Referring to Mr. Biden’s bizarre blame game, Yandle suggested that maybe — just maybe — Biden “should look inside the halls of the West Wing.”

Specifically at all the spending, like the current “$3.5 trillion spending package.” The puppet masters pulling Biden’s strings must, Yandle asserts, “be aware that calling for more spending to calm inflation is like pouring gasoline on an already smoldering fire.”

The real problem is “too much printing-press money” backing deficit spending.

Blaming excess profits? A distraction.

A big lie.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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incumbents national politics & policies term limits

The Age of Octogenarians

Senator Chuck Grassley

As someone who fervently hopes to some day reach the age of 88 — and still actively contribute — I have only heartfelt well-wishes for Chuck Grassley, the senior U.S. Senator from Iowa.

Grassley celebrated his birthday earlier this month. Then, last week, after 59 consecutive years in elected office (six in the U.S. House, 41 years thus far in the Senate, along with 12 prior in the state legislature), the Republican incumbent announced he will be seeking re-election to the U.S. Senate next year.

At 88, Mr. Grassley isn’t the oldest Senator — Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is three months his elder, and U.S. Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) owns the title of Oldest Octogenarian in Congress, born 13 days before Feinstein back in 1933. 

We all remember Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC) turning 100 while supposedly still “serving” in the Senate. That wasn’t pretty. 

Grassley, on the other hand, appears in great shape, both mentally and physically — doing 22 push-ups before cameras and a crowd at a recent event.

He would be only 95 years old when completing that full term. And he is very likely to be reelected.

“Grassley has proved to be the most reliable vote-getter in Iowa for the entirety of his four decades in the Senate,” The Washington Post informed, concluding: “Grassley’s candidacy effectively then takes Iowa off the board as a competitive race.”

I have no problem with Sen. Grassley’s age. I do have a problem with the power of incumbency, a system that allows one man to wield power for decades and leaves our elections so much less competitive.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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deficits and debt folly national politics & policies

Catastrophic! Calamity! The Debt

U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Penn.)

“Once again, the stability of the U.S. financial system is at risk,” warned CNN State of the Union host Jake Tapper, “thanks to political brinksmanship in Congress.

“If lawmakers do not act, the federal government will shut down this week. And, next month, the Treasury secretary says, the U.S. will not be able to pay its bills . . . which . . . could be catastrophic for the U.S. economy.”

Incredulous, Tapper further bemoaned, “that has not convinced a single Republican lawmaker to get on board to raise the debt ceiling.”

But he made the mistake of inviting retiring U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) on the Sunday program.*

“[O]n combining the debt ceiling increase or suspension with the continuing operations of the government,” Toomey declared his vote is NO. 

“And there is no calamity that’s going to happen, Jake.”

Toomey explained that “after Republicans vote no, Chuck Schumer is going to do what he could have done months ago, what he could have done weeks ago, what he could do tomorrow, and that is, he will amend the budget resolution so that Democrats can pass the debt ceiling all by themselves.”

Noting that Democrats were “in the midst of an absolutely unprecedented, very damaging spending spree on a scale that we have never seen,” Toomey emphatically refused to “authorize the borrowing to help pay for it.”

Over the weekend, a Washington Post editorial attacked Republicans for being “unwilling to lift a finger to avoid financial calamity,” while excusing Democrats. 

“For their part,” The Post justified, “Democrats . . . want the same political cover they gave Republicans during Mr. Trump’s presidency by raising the debt limit in a bipartisan fashion.”

The nation’s newspaper of record in full-throated advocacy of political cover.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Sen. Toomey has been a stalwart term limits supporter in Congress. He leaves having kept a pledge to serve only six years in the House, left the Congress for six years before winning a Senate seat and now stepping down after two terms in the U.S. Senate.

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