Category: Update

“David Becker, who funneled millions of ‘Zuckbucks’ into the 2020 election, is super certain that former President Donald Trump will raise concerns about noncitizens voting in the 2024 election,” writes Logan Washburn at The Federalist. “And he’s even more certain he doesn’t want you paying attention when it happens.”

Washburn argues this is a strategy. “Becker claimed those with election integrity concerns about noncitizen voting — potentially a widespread issue entering November — are simply setting the stage for Trump to blame an election loss on noncitizens voting for Kamala Harris.”

But is it “simply”? Is the concern with non-​citizens voting only an excuse for a Trump loss?

Readers of Common Sense with Paul Jacob are more than familiar with the reality of Democrat politicians and activists pushing for (and allowing) non-​citizens to vote, and know the arguments against such a practice.

Could hyper-​partisans like Becker have more on their minds?

You have to admit, though, that merely asking the question makes people’s heads hurt. Getting noncitizens in America to vote is bad itself, but accusing those interested in it only as preparing an excuse could itself be a cover-​up-​in advance for … an illegal election strategy? Or a way to focus on last time’s election rigging and gaming, but not this time? (Meaning, of course, not “a steal,” exactly, more like “underhandedly tilting.”)

Democrats’ fear of excuse making last month, when the article in The Federalist ran, and this month, when Donald Trump has leaped ahead in the polls, casts very different light on all such talk.

We might call the game “smug-​upmanship,” where participants in a debate “fact-​check” their opponents in the most smug way, pretending they have “the facts” on their side when, in reality, the facts are uncertain, filled with errors, or merely lies. In cases where the facts are dubious at best, the element of smugness helps. It’s a form of self-​consciousness and ‑confidence. And when someone, in debate, exudes so much confidence in a fact or argument, and — during the course of the debate — you cannot readily demonstrate the opposite as true, it’s easy to be bowled over.

On July 30, in “Crime’s Ups and Downs,” Paul Jacob considered what became the Democrats’ smuggest fact-​check of the year, the “fact” that the violent crime rate has gone down, not up. Trump said it was up. The FBI said it was down. End of debate?

Jacob Sullum at Reason repeated the Democrats’ take on “the facts,” blaming Trump for crime rising, briefly, on his watch. But Paul Jacob saw a few problems:

Crime spiked in the “Summer of Love” as a result of the mass protests against George Floyd’s death, the left’s demands to “defund the police,” and the climate of approved (“mostly peaceful”) violent riot. Trump’s enemies caused all this. Much of it may have been fueled by pandemic anxieties, but there was another factor: the Democrats’ anarcho-​tyranny push to pry Trump out of office in annus horribilis 2020.

Since then crime, which is usually under-​reported, now appears to be increasingly under-​reported for systemic reasons. Some crimes, such as theft, have been demoted in the law books, allowing theft to run rampant in several major American cities — not just San Francisco — thereby disallowing the uptick in crime to even hit the stats.

What if bad data is the consequence of such policy? 

Meaning the perception of an increase in crime is true … at least in some places.

Paul Jacob, “Crime’s Ups and Downs,” July 30, 2024.

Well, now the stats have been revised. 

John R. Lott, Jr., argues in his Real Clear Investigations exposé “Stealth Edit: FBI Quietly Revises Violent Crime Stats,” that the initial report of 2.1 percent drop in crime in 2022 depended entirely on under-​reporting by cities of actual crimes — and the FBI not adequately figuring for the lack of data. And then not telling us even as it has later accounted for the actual data:

[T]he FBI has quietly revised those numbers, releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5%. The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.

The Bureau — which has been at the center of partisan storms — made no mention of these revisions in its September 2024 press release. 

RCI discovered the change through a cryptic reference on the FBI website that states: “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” But there is no mention that the numbers increased. One only sees the change by downloading the FBI’s new crime data and comparing it to the file released last year.

John R. Lott, Jr., “Stealth Edit: FBI Quietly Revises Violent Crime Stats,” Real Clear Investigations, October 16, 2024.

The FBI may have merely erred in its initial report — though that’s unlikely — but it lied in the correction, failing to disclose the magnitude of the original error. The correction was a cover-up.

The Democrats, for their part, engaged in typical smug rhetoric.

And Reason got the chance to stick it, once again, to Donald Trump. 

But this seems clear: anyone with a nose for how governments lie, routinely and in partisan fashion, should have caught at least a whiff of this.

You might think that if they wish to provide for secure elections, you’d set up security systems, including poll-​watchers and other election inspectors, sticking rigorously to every last quantum of punctilio towards the law.

You might think that if they wish to rig and game elections, they wouldn’t be sloppy on election security, trying hard to appear to seek election integrity.

But in Detroit, Michigan, a court has sided with the Republican National Committee, and other aggrieved parties, who had sued the city in August, “alleging that it violated state law that requires election officials to hire an equal number of poll workers on both sides of the political aisle,” according to The Epoch Times. “The city, the lawsuit alleges, hired seven times as many Democrats as Republicans, which the RNC said decreases public trust in elections.”

According to the complaint, the Republican Party nominated 675 election inspectors; however, the city only appointed 52 for the primary election.

The city hired up to 250 Republicans who weren’t nominated by the RNC, leaving a ratio of seven Democrats to one Republican inspector, which the RNC said was “not even close to equal.”

In comparison, the city hired more than 2,300 election inspectors from the Democratic Party. 

“This uneven distribution of poll workers not only breaches state law but also undermines the integrity and fairness of the electoral process,” the RNC said in the August press release. “Our lawsuit demands that Detroit appoint more Republican inspectors.”

Matt McGregor, “Michigan Republicans Win Election Integrity Lawsuit Over Number of Poll Workers,” The Epoch Times (October 12, 2024).

After losing the lawsuit, the city responded with the usual blather.

In “Trump Vows to End Double Taxation for Overseas Americans,” Tom Ozimek begums by focusing on that title idea, promising to end double taxation on expatriates and encouraging expatriates to vote. But before the reader of The Epoch Times can reflect on foundational notions linking taxation and representation, the article moves to more interesting territory: tariff hikes. 

While Trump has not released a detailed tax plan as part of his campaign for the White House, he has floated some tax policy proposals, including extending the expiring 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) changes, exempting tips and overtime pay from tax, and leaning heavily into tariffs to support U.S. manufacturing.

The “leaning heavily into tariffs” program is one of the 45th President’s oldest obsessions, and it is always worth remembering that tariffs are a form of taxation. Harder to remember, but always important, are the lessons of classical political economy, which explained that a tariff is not a tax that “foreigners” pay: as economists put it, the incidence of the tax shifts onto the consumers residing within the “protected” boundaries of the state imposing the tariff. Basically, a tariff is a tax that consumers pay. No wonder such taxes are promoted by a few affected producers and laborers in the industry so protected, on the understandable rationale that tariffs effectively transfer wealth from the general mass of consumers to specific sets of producers.

Thus they work by the same political logic that most government interventions do, by focusing on the beneficiaries of the policies (a concentrated few) and taking attention away from those who bear the burden of the policies (the dispersed many).

At the Detroit event, the former president took aim at Chinese auto manufacturers building auto plants in Mexico with plans to export those vehicles to the United States.

“I will impose whatever tariffs are required, 100 percent, 200 percent 1,000 percent,” he said. “They are not going to sell any cars into the United States with those plants.”

It is pure demagoguery. But effective, especially if you fall for the encouragement of empathy for the concentrated (and much-​ballyhooed) batch of beneficiaries while giving no thought to all the consumers harmed.

Back in August, John Stossel had this to say about the Democratic candidate for the presidency:

Who is @KamalaHarris

She won’t do interviews with reporters now that she’s running for President. But she has a LONG track record. I dig through it here:

The real Kamala Harris is a big spender. The biggest!

And the context of her demands for increased spending is this: a $35.6 trillion debt.

For the latest debt numbers, click here.

On Wednesday, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas made headlines by saying that the federal government did not have enough funds to meet emergency needs through the hurricane season, which does not end with Helene.

Despite his careful wording, which acknowledged that it was the full hurricane season that was in doubt, but enough funds were on hand for the Helene disaster, Thursday’s assurances by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has the funds needed for ‘immediate response and recovery’ in the wake of Hurricane Helene’” were taken as a clarification. It was not. It was a mere restatement of Mayorkas’ initial point:

“We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have,” Mayorkas said. “We are expecting another hurricane hitting. We do not have the funds. FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season.”

President Joe Biden said Wednesday, Oct. 2, during a briefing that it will cost billions to recover from the storm and that Congress must ensure states have adequate resources. The funding shortage has led to outrage among Republicans.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott responded on X.

“This is easy.
“Mayorkas and FEMA — immediately stop spending money on illegal immigration resettlement and redirect those funds to areas hit by the hurricane.
“Put Americans first.”

Karah Rucker, “FEMA’s spending on hurricane disasters and migrants crisis under scrutiny,” Straight Arrow News, October 4, 2024.

Governor Abbott’s point was headlined with startling clarity by the editors of the New York Post: “Sorry, hurricane victims: Harris-​Biden already spent your relief funds on migrants.” Those editors also restated a point Paul Jacob made earlier last week: “But don’t expect any of this to rise to the PR disaster that Hurricane Katrina proved for the George W. Bush administration: Too much of the media is running interference for Harris ahead of Election Day.”