Monthly Archives: October 2017

Mao is Dead

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Long live Mao.

People’s Republic of China’s newly crowned Emperor and President-for-Life Xi Jinping has mounted his throne and is starting to exercise his power.

Under Mr Xi’s orders, mandatory political-study sessions emphasizing his speeches and policies were revived for all party members.

And

So was the Mao-era practice of members criticizing others and themselves.

Can we look forward to reeducation camps, too?  Maybe.  Here’s Xi on necessary fervor and “right thinking:”

We must continue to rid ourselves of any virus that erodes the party’s fabric[.]

And

Many government agencies and state-owned businesses require party members to attend study sessions at least once a month. Some officials organize weekly discussions, ask members to spend an hour a day on political self-study or arrange field trips to revolutionary landmarks.

And here’s an indication of the level of Orwellian micromanaging control over individuals that Xi expects the party to exercise:

Rank-and-file Communist Party members must take notes in standard-issue journals and submit them for review, as well as spend spare time studying for regular political discussions and quizzes.

We’re going to live in interesting times.  And so are the Chinese people on the mainland.

Centralizing Power

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China’s Communist Party granted President Xi Jinping authority on a par with Chairman Mao, revising its constitution to inscribe a political theory bearing Mr Xi’s name and endorse policies to make the nation a world power.

A weeklong party congress that ended Tuesday appeared to give Mr Xi unassailable power as he begins a second five-year term.

The move was unanimous, with not a single Party member out of 2,336 willing to vote no—an indication of Xi’s already present overweening power.

Adding to the significance of this power grab, only two other People’s Republic of China leaders have had their “thoughts” added to the nation’s constitution: Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, and both of these were dead before the CPC codified their “thoughts.”  Xi is alive and well and in a position to build on this move.

It seems as though the running dog is, indeed, the permanent leader of the pack.

A couple of questions come up in my pea brain: Will he get his own statute, too?  Does anyone in the Communist Party of China have the stones to ask Xi about his caldrons?

Obamacare Subsidies

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Recall that under Obamacare, health coverage plan providers are required to subsidize low-income Americans (who, under Obamacare, are required to buy the plans regardless of need for the plans on offer or ability to pay the vig for them) for their costs in buying those health coverage plans.  Recall further that the Obama administration paid those plan providers monies to reimburse them for those government-mandated subsidy payouts.  Recall also that Congress never appropriated any funds for the purpose of making those payments to the plan providers.  Finally, recall that a DC District court ruled those payments to the health plan providers illegal—because Congress had not appropriated any funds for the purpose.  Then the Trump administration ceased those payments to the health plan providers.

Oh, the hoo-rah from the Left.  Eighteen Progressive-Democrat-led States sued in Federal court (in San Francisco, California, after judge-shopping to find a suitably malleable court), centering their beef on how stopping the payments would set the Obamacare markets a-roil.  Never mind, now, how cynically irrelevant that plaint is to the actual case before the courts, which is whether the payments are legal, not whether they’re convenient.

Federal judge Vince Chhabria, of the Northern District of California, headquarted in San Fran, wound up ruling against the 18 States.  He also wrote,

And although you wouldn’t know it from reading the states’ papers in this lawsuit, the truth is that most state regulators have devised responses that give millions of lower-income people better health coverage options than they would otherwise have had

And he

cited an October press release by California’s health care marketplace, which said the premiums of nearly four of five consumers will stay the same or decrease after surcharges tied to the lost subsidies are factored in. The judge said dozens of other states also have accounted for the end of the subsidies.

And

One last point on the issue of confusion.  If the states are so concerned that people will be scared away from the exchanges by the thought of higher premiums, perhaps they should stop yelling about higher premiums. With open enrollment just days away, perhaps the states should focus instead on communicating the message that they have devised a response to the CSR payment termination that will prevent harm to the large majority of people while in fact allowing millions of lower-income people to get a better deal on health insurance in 2018.

Oops.  Just another bit of disingenuousity on the part of Progressive-Democrats as they try to keep honest Americans trapped in the Progressive-Democrat welfare cage.

Judge Chhabria’s ruling can be read here.

Mobile Encryption is a Huge Problem

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That’s the position of FBI Director Christopher Wray.

To put it mildly, this [mobile device encryption] is a huge, huge problem.  It impacts investigations across the board.

Certainly, consumer-done encryption of our communications devices can temporarily hinder investigations of the criminals who also use this encryption.  But as the FBI demonstrated regarding an encrypted cell phone involved in the San Bernardino terrorist attack, its initial claims notwithstanding, the encryption can be broken without the cooperation of the device’s owner.

Every tool can be misused.  The problem is not the misuse of the tool but government efforts to apply one-size-fits-all solutions to the misuse that end up harming all the rest of us more than the bad guys.

The FBI’s continued demand for a “government-mandated backdoor” that the government’s agents can use whenever they take a notion puts a premium on the encryption side of the question.  Think Government wouldn’t misbehave?  Ask anyone on the right about the behavior of the Obama administration.  Ask anyone on the left about the behavior of the Trump administration.

It’s always going to be an arms race between the good guys and the bad guys.  It’s a critical arms race, though, when it’s our own government that wants to pry into all of our private communications because a few of us are bad guys.

Federal Deductibility of State Taxes

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The current Republican Federal tax reform plan on offer, at least as described by the NLMSM, includes elimination of the deductibility of State taxes on our Federal tax returns.  Naturally, Progressive-Democrats object.  Here’s New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D), as a canonical example:

This is probably one of the most destructive policies to the state of New York I’ve heard proposed in 30 years[.]

What Cuomo and his ilk carefully ignore is that with significantly lower tax rates and a doubling of the standard deduction the value of a state tax deduction—even for high-tax States—is markedly lowered.  What they also carefully ignore is that it’s primarily their hated rich who use the deduction at all—most of the rest of us don’t incur enough expenses to be able to itemize our deductions, even (especially) medical expenses, which must exceed 10% of our AGI, anyway (and which threshold those same Progressive-Democrats want to preserve).

That doesn’t seem very destructive.

Guys like Congressman Peter King (R, NY), on the other hand, simply misunderstand the situation.  King insists, for example,

The deduction is essential for these people to get by.

His beef and that of his fellows in high-tax States, though, is with those State governments, not with the tax reform plan.  What’s essential is that those States’ usurious tax rates be lowered, so “these people” can get by with more of their own money left in their own pockets.  King and his fellows should be working to lower their States’ taxes, not preserve them.