Monthly Archives: April 2018

Tax Cuts, Deficits, and Economic Growth

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The hype is that the tax cuts enacted at the end of last year will lead to trillion dollar Federal government deficits.

On the other hand, there’s this bit about economic growth in the CBO’s report that also carried that deficit forecast [emphasis in the original].

  • Last June, the CBO said GDP growth for 2018 would be just 2%. Now it figures growth will be 3.3%—a significant upward revision. It also boosted its forecast for 2019 from a meager 1.5% to a respectable 2.4%.
  • [T]he CBO now expects GDP to be $6.1 trillion bigger by 2027 than it did before the tax cuts.
  • before accounting for economic growth, the tax cuts Trump signed into law late last year would cut federal revenues by $1.69 trillion from 2018-2027.
    But it goes on to say that higher rate of GDP growth will produce $1.1 trillion in new revenues. In other words, 65% of the tax cuts are paid for by extra economic growth.
  • CBO now expects GDP to be $6.1 trillion bigger by 2027 than it did before the tax cuts.

Blame tax cuts for deficits?  No, Federal government deficits are caused by the Federal government spending more than it takes in from its various revenue sources, of which taxes are a prominent part.  And there’s still no concrete justification for the spending levels, just glittering generalities.  And every special interest has an especially sparkling generality to justify its spending.

Here’s some tax cut-created spending reduction (because of economic growth and the resulting increased prosperity of some of our poorer friends, not because of any Congressional courage in doing outright cutting):

[F]aster growth will also reduce federal entitlement spending keyed to the economy—unemployment insurance, food stamps, welfare and the like—by $150 billion, the CBO says.

But increasing prosperity isn’t a proper topic for hyping.

 

ht/ Powerline

Taxing vs Spending

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In a Wall Street Journal piece about Tennessee’s required closure of failing bridges problem, a Leake County Democrat supervisor, Joe Andy Helton, had this:

…he was frustrated by politicians being afraid to raise taxes—even to pay for basic services like roads and bridges.

“There’s only but one way to fix things on the local, state or federal level and that’s taxes,” he said.

Of course. Reallocating spending is utterly inconceivable to him.

The two bridges in Helton’s county that must be closed until repaired would cost, at most, a bit over a half-million dollars, together.  That’s not pocket money for a rural county like Leake, but it’s not that much, either.  County and State spending could be (re)directed toward the repairs.

This is a local failure of performance, but rising taxes and no spending responsibility nationally are what we can expect if Progressive-Democratic Party politicians like this one gain the majority in the House this fall.

Independent Monitor

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Recall Special Counselor Robert Mueller’s raid on President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen’s offices and seizure of Cohen’s records, especially targeting communications between Cohen, the lawyer, and Trump, the client.

Cohen went in to Federal court Friday to try to get the subpoena under which the raid was conducted revoked and the confiscated materials returned.  Some discussion surrounding the events centers on the alleged ability of special monitors—a “taint team”—doing the sorting so as to isolate the privileged communications from the rest of the material sought under the warrant.  Furthermore, this team would, supposedly, conduct its sort before Mueller’s team has gone into the material they seized.

I’ll elide the blatant conflict of interest here centered on the taint team’s members being, at bottom, colleagues of the those who ran the raid and of Mueller: they’re FBI agents and DoJ lawyers.

I’m interested in a larger question that’s not being addressed.  Say Cohen wins his case and the subpoena is quashed and the seized materials returned to him in toto.  On what basis do we conclude that Mueller’s team hasn’t already copied all of those seized materials and separated the copies from the originals?  That by itself, incidentally, would be a good practice with legitimately confiscated materials; reviewing the copies would ensure against accidentally damaging the originals and thereby destroying their legal provenance (as well as their utility for their rightful owners).  On what basis do we conclude that, on Cohen’s victory, those copies would be returned, also?  On what basis do we conclude that Mueller’s team isn’t already reading and evaluating those copies of the seized materials?

Leaks

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Recall Special Counselor Robert Mueller’s unconscionable raid on the offices of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, a raid that confiscated, among other things, communications between Trump and his lawyer that, heretofore, were privileged communications that no prosecutor or court could access.

The press is reporting that Mr Cohen is being investigated for possible bank fraud and campaign-finance violations in connection to his $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels (née Stephanie Clifford)….

To the extent the press is reporting accurately, the leaked purpose of this investigation can only have come from Mueller’s “investigation” (Cohen himself has said only that the raid was done with courtesy and professionalism by the FBI soldiers on the ground), and these reports are just further examples of Mueller’s careful leaks of the most salacious details of his claimed investigation.

The leaks also are a further illustration of the dishonesty of Mueller’s doings.  These leaks demonstrate how far Mueller has strayed from—if, indeed, he’s even still pursuing—Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s claimed purpose for his special counsel, which was to investigate possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian interests. At this point, too, Mueller’s only purpose in leaking things about an alleged relationship with an aging pornographic movie starlet can only be to keep the smear alive in the NLMSM during the midterm election campaign season.

It’s not politically useful for Trump to fire or to cause the firing of Mueller, but he does need to push the pace of Mueller’s “investigation,” and so do honest Republicans in Congress, in order to bring this sorry charade to a close.  Mueller has indicated he wants to write a report.  Let him, push him to do so, and let a candid American citizenry see what an empty puddle of nothing on which he’s wasted so much of their tax money.

We Don’t Get Silicon Valley

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That’s what Facebook MFWCI Mark Zuckerberg said in Tuesday’s hearing in front of the Senate.  On the other hand,

Senator Gary Peters (D, MI) asked whether Facebook is using the microphones of users’ phones to listen in to what they are doing and saying—a charge the company has denied repeatedly in recent months.

And given the level of integrity Facebook managers have shown over the years, of course we should believe their denials. Right.  Never mind that that’s an easily done exploit that hackers have done on and off (pardon the pun) for years.  Right along with playing untoward games with the video cameras on our laptops.

Here’s the kicker, though, from that Senate hearing:

Mark Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley had one for Congress: Why don’t you get us?

The Senators’ questions often were ignorant, but that’s all they were: borne of an ignorance that’s easily corrected. Zuckerberg’s question, to the extent it’s accurately paraphrased and attributed, is a deeply cynical one that carefully misdirects the emphasis, borne as the question is from Silicon Valley’s deeply Leftist ideology—a slant Zuckerberg freely acknowledged a couple of times.

The more accurate question, the more serious question, is why doesn’t Silicon Valley get Americans?