Those…1%-ers

Posted on 20 February 2019 by eehines

Those evil 1%-ers. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) hates them. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) hates them. Senator Cory Booker (D, NJ) hates them. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) hates them, even though she’s one of them. The list goes on and on and on of Progressive-Democrats and Modern Liberals in general who hate them.

Charlie Munger, Vice MFWIC of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway and 1%-er, thinks otherwise.

I think it’s really stupid for a state to drive the rich people out[.]
…
It’s been serious. Driving the rich people out is pretty dumb if you’re a state or a city.

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Border Crises

Posted on 20 February 2019 by eehines

There are two, and both of them are real. One is the caravans, organized by three Central American nations’ activists explicitly to overwhelm our southern border and border enforcers with illegal alien wannabes and faux asylum seekers (false because they’ve already been offered asylum—and job opportunities, to boot—by Mexico). Secreted among these seemingly innocuous ones (aside from their deliberate numbers) are drug smugglers, firearms smugglers, human traffickers, and outright thugs.

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Progressive-Democrats and Integrity

Posted on 19 February 2019 by eehines

In an interview on Bill Maher’s show, Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel had this to say about promises. The comment was in the context of Emanuel and Maher nattering on about Trump, but it’s plainly made as a universal principle.

Emanuel…believes Trump is using a national emergency declaration, not to enhance border security, but to deliver on his signature campaign promise.
“You have a faux constitutional crisis to basically cover a real campaign crisis,” he said, “This is all about the campaign. Some pledge he made.”

Some pledge he made. Because promises are made only to sway voters; they’re not actually meant to be kept.

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Argument by Non Sequitur

Posted on 19 February 2019 by eehines

Kentucky’s State House of Representatives passed, by a large margin (69-20) a bill that would outlaw most abortions, contingent on the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade.

If passed by the State’s Senate (expected) and signed by the Governor (also expected), it’ll have legal problems, though. Major ones will be what constitutes “overturning,” how an actual overturn would be discriminated from serious modification of Roe‘s ruling, and since Roe is medical technology oriented, a restatement of the threshold for viability.

Still, though, the arguments for and against the bill are instructive.

State Congressman James Tipton (R), speaking for the bill, put the matter starkly:

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Fines and Negotiations

Posted on 18 February 2019 by eehines

The FTC and Facebook seem to agree that Facebook messed up with the way it handles user personal and private data; now they’re dickering over the fine to be assessed.

It [that fine, rumored to be in the multiple billions of dollars] would be the largest fine the FTC has ever imposed on a technology company, although the two have yet to settle on the exact number….

What is there to negotiate, though? Assess the fine, and if Facebook wants to negotiate argue the matter, let it do so in open court in an appeal of the fine. That, unlike these kinds of “negotiations,” will occur in public, in front of customers and potential customers, with all that’s implied by the implications of pre-trial discovery results and public testimony.

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“Goosed” Paychecks

Posted on 18 February 2019 by eehines

Senator Ron Wyden (D, OR), Finance Committee Ranking Member, had this bit:

It looks like the Trump Treasury Department spent 2018, an election year, goosing people’s paychecks by under-withholding, and it should have been obvious that the bill would come due eventually[.]

Never mind that the IRS also warned taxpayers—and their employers—to carefully check their existing withholding arrangements, especially in this period of large changes to the tax code.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) was just as disingenuous:

Many Americans depend on their tax refund to pay bills and make ends meet….

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Truth and Truth

Posted on 17 February 2019 by eehines

A college basketball player at the University of Wisconsin has taken to sitting on the bench during the pregame national anthem playing. Her rationalization is this:

I’m going to speak up about things that are harming my culture and my people.

She certainly should speak against iniquities, but she needs to understand that her culture is American, and her people are her fellow Americans.

Full stop.

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You Need to Pay my Taxes

Posted on 16 February 2019 by eehines

No. No way in H E Double Toothpicks.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo [D] visited the White House on Tuesday to urge President Donald Trump to rethink a provision in the 2017 tax overhaul that Cuomo says is prompting a sharp decline in state revenues.
The Democratic governor met with the Republican president to discuss the $10,000 cap on the federal deduction for state and local taxes—known as SALT.
Cuomo said the cap is prompting wealthy residents to flee New York and contributing to a recent drop of more than $2 billion in tax receipts.

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More Government Intervention

Posted on 15 February 2019 by eehines

Shades of FDR, and a betrayal from the putative right of center. Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) wants Government to dictate to private enterprises what they must do with company profit.

The plan backed by Rubio encourages domestic investment by making full and immediate expensing permanent “as a way to discourage companies from pursuing share repurchases.”

Right move, wrong reason. Immediate expensing ought to be a permanent item in tax code reform on its own right. Delaying expensing or stringing it out is just another aspect of using our tax code for social engineering, which bastardizes our tax collections and distorts our market away from the most efficient use of our money—whether business money or personal. And that most efficient use might well include stock buybacks; that’s a business decision with which Government has no business interfering.

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Sexism Blocking Free Speech

Posted on 15 February 2019 by eehines

Now it’s Twitter that’s engaging in toxic (non)-speech, not the speech in the tweets themselves.

A Canadian blogger is having to sue Twitter over the latter’s blatant censorship of free speech because, apparently, she isn’t toeing the Twitter (or me also “movement”) sexual politics line.

Meghan Murphy, the founder of the blog Feminist Current, was locked out of her account last year when the company asked her to delete a tweet that said, “Men aren’t women,” CNET reported, citing the lawsuit. A second tweet said, “How are transwomen not men?” according to the suit.

This is evil?

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