Monthly Archives: April 2018

Messaging and the Midterms

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Here’s a bit about income taxes, via Laura Saunders in Friday’s Wall Street Journal.

For 2018, households in the top 20% will have income of about $150,000 or more and 52% of total income, about the same as in 2017. But they will pay about 87% of income taxes, up from about 84% last year.

And

[T]he lower 60% of households, who have income up to about $86,000, receive about 27% of income. As a group, this tier will pay no net federal income tax in 2018 vs. 2% of it last year.

And this:

…the top 1% will pay for 43% of income tax, up from 38% in 2017.

So much for tax cuts being for the benefit of the rich.

Here’s another bit about who pays and who benefits:

[I]ncome includes earnings from wages and investments plus untaxed amounts, such as from health coverage. These additions nearly double the income of people in the lowest tier and add about 20% for those in the highest tier.

Republicans are shockingly silent about this in their respective local press outlets.  If they don’t start getting these messages out to their constituents early and often, each mid-term candidate needs to fire his communications director and replace him with someone who knows how to talk to local folks.

“It is not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the oath.”*

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From Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars:

In France during the 1920s, teachers’ unions had all but banned patriotic references to French victories (which were regarded as “bellicose” and “a danger for the organization of peace”) and removed books that considered battles such as Verdun as anything other than a tragedy that affected both sides equally.

Sound familiar?

How about this:

Of the Anschluss, Germany’s forced annexation of Austria, Chancellor Franz von Papen later concluded, “not only had there been no armed conflict, but no foreign power had seen fit to intervene.  They adopted the same passive attitude as they had shown toward the reintroduction of conscription in Germany and the reoccupation of the Rhineland.  The result was that Hitler became impervious to the advice of all those who wished him to exercise moderation in his foreign policy.”

 

*Extra points for naming the speaker of the quote.  No search engines, no Wikipedia; although consulting your print libraries is allowed.  Graduates of the Hillsdale collection of schools should know this from memory.

A Simple Solution to the US-PRC Trade Dispute?

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More like a simplistic one.  Martin Feldstein, ex-Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Ronald Reagan, has one, summarized by the headline and subhead in his Wall Street Journal op-ed:

How to Make Trade Peace With China
A mutual promise to abide by the WTO’s intellectual property rules would solve much of the problem.

Feldstein is…naive. By his own acknowledgment later in his piece, the PRC routinely violates WTO rules–and international court rulings, lately seen by the PRC’s refusal to abide by a Hague ruling against them regarding the Spratly Islands. The PRC will promise to abide by the WTO’s intellectual property rules?

The PRC government’s word is worthless.

Trump Not a Target?

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It seems that Special Counselor Robert Mueller has told President Donald Trump’s lawyers that Trump is not a criminal target of Mueller’s “investigation;” Trump is merely a subject of it.

While WaPo has based its story on sources that may or may not exist (“three people familiar with the discussions;” we don’t get to know who they are, we don’t even know if “three” is accurate), let’s take the story as accurate, arguendo.  Some of Trump’s advisors think Mueller’s remarks are just an attempt to bait Trump into sitting for a Mueller interrogation.

There’s another aspect to this, though.  Keep in mind that it’s entirely legal for a government agent—policemen, FBI agents, a special counselor—to lie to their investigatees, even as it’s a crime for the lie to go the other way around.

There’s no reason to take Mueller’s claim seriously.  Or perhaps Trump and his lawyers should: apart from being a bait attempt, it could be an attempt to sandbag Trump or anyone associated with him into getting careless.  The same perjury trap some of Trump’s lawyers worry about being the purpose of a Mueller interrogation of Trump could be in play here, too.

Abuse of the Special Counsel Function

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It turns out that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein authorized—in a secret memo, yet—Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Paul Manafort, Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s sometime campaign manager, regarding Manafort’s work for the Ukrainian government.

To the extent what Manafort did is a crime—Mueller has indicted him on charges of

conspiring against the US, conspiring to commit money laundering, acting as an unregistered foreign agent, and making false statements. A subsequent indictment…alleges he committed tax and bank fraud.

and Manafort has both denied the accusations and formally pled not guilty—his actions would not be out of the ordinary, and they don’t warrant a special counsel’s investigation.

If DoJ had legitimate interest in Manafort’s actions, DoJ would investigate with the FBI and/or other, established and regular, police forces.  The fact that these accusations are further alleged to have occurred in Ukraine is not relevant to such run-of-the-mill crimes.