Monthly Archives: January 2019

In the Liberal Stock

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Neomi Rao is in one, now that she’s a nominee for the DC Circuit Court.  She’s currently serving as the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administer, which means she’s already been vetted by the Senate—bipartisanly.  The Senate already knows who she is and what her abilities and qualifications are.

Well, never mind.  It seems, according to BuzzFeed—you remember the purveyors of a Cohen false news story so dishonest that even Mueller had to go public with the BS flag—Rao “wrote inflammatory op-eds in college.”  The horror.

Here’s an example of that inflammatory writing:

It has always seemed self-evident to me that even if I drank a lot, I would still be responsible for my actions.  A man who rapes a drunk girl should be prosecuted. At the same time, a good way to avoid a potential date rape is to stay reasonably sober.

Victim blaming?  Rational people wouldn’t think so, but….

The Progressive-Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee actually are taking Buzzfeed seriously.  The idiocy.

As The Wall Street Journal put it in their editorial at the first link above, none of that

is relevant to how she might rule as a 45-year-old judge with adult life experience.

The WSJ misunderstands, though.  Rao’s not the life experience of a wise Latina, so it’s irrelevant.  The intervening years don’t exist.

And that’s a tool wielded by those Progressive-Democrats and their NLMSM arm in their efforts to smear another conservative jurist.

Germany’s Cost of Going “Green”

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Germany is moving decisively to eliminate coal-fired plants as a source for its economy’s energy.

Germany has already banned nuclear power, which was a singularly stupid thing to do—that source of energy already had no CO2 emissions. Nevertheless, the destruction of that industry already is ongoingly expensive.

Merkel’s decision in 2011 to dump nuclear energy by 2022 and to accelerate the build-out of renewable sources such as wind and solar power is already costing them €27 billion [$31.8 billion] each year in the form of a renewable-energy tax.

Despite that, Germany’s Commission on Growth, Structural Change and Employment has laid out the requirement, and the Merkel government seems willing to take it up.

[T]he coal commission advised the government to pay around €50 billion [$57 billion] to the three regions hit by the shutdown of lignite mines to make sure new jobs are created. It also recommended that the government should pay €32 billion [$36.5 billon] to compensate consumers and business for higher electricity prices [annually] and an unspecified amount to indemnify coal power plant operators for the lost value of their assets.

That’s just the inner bound of the cost of “green.”  With black coal mining already shut down—at a cost of €240 billion ($273.7 billion)—this will put coal-fired energy plants out of business.  It’s not just the immediate coal-based energy industry that will suffer.

Biblis, in the Hesse State, used to have a nuclear power plant.  The closure of that plant cost the city 50% of its corporate tax base.  That cascades up the political jurisdiction hierarchy and across the nation.  The increased cost of energy also is hammering German industries that are users, not producers, of energy.

Manufacturing companies, from chemicals maker BASF to carbon fiber producer SGL Carbon, have shifted investments abroad, where energy costs are often a fraction of Germany’s.

Consumers have to pay the higher energy prices, too, and that’s money they can’t spend on other goods and services—which hurts producers of those other goods and services.  All of that is lost revenue for Government, and it’s lost jobs and German prosperity.

What’s the value of changing energy sources if the energy becomes prohibitively expensive and so stunts economic growth and development?

Some Tax Data

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These are via the Tax Foundation and are from 2016, which happens to be the last year of the Obama administration and so represent the culmination of Obama’s tax policies.

  • The share of income earned by the top 1% of taxpayers rose to 20.6% in 2014. Their share of federal individual income taxes also rose, to 39.5%.
  • In 2014, the top 50% of all taxpayers paid 97.3% of all individual income taxes while the bottom 50% paid the remaining 2.7%.
  • The top 1% paid a greater share of individual income taxes (39.5%) than the bottom 90% combined (29.1%).
  • The top 1% of taxpayers paid a 27.1% individual income tax rate, which is more than seven times higher than taxpayers in the bottom 50% (3.5%).

Progressive-Democrats argue, and they’re actually serious, that this isn’t enough.  The rich still aren’t paying “their fair share.”  Cynically, those same Progressive-Democrats refuse to say how much, or what per cent, is the rich’s fair share, beyond saying, “More, more, more.”

Progressive-Democrats’ only principle, when it comes to OPM, is Gimme, Gimme, Gimme.  They have no limiting principle.

It’ll be interesting to see how those data compare with the data for 2019, the first year of the Republicans’ tax cuts and reform.

Sound Familiar?

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Sadanand Dhume led off his Wall Street Journal op-ed last week with this:

Seven decades after the country first embraced caste-based quotas in education and government jobs, they have become permanent entitlements that cement social divisions, encourage mediocrity and poison political discourse.

Segregationist identity politics. This is the preferred ideology of the Progressive-Democratic Party, also.  No less a light than Senator Kamala Harris (D, CA) led off her campaign for President saying she would center her campaign on her potential to be our first black woman President, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D, NY) insists it’s time for a woman to be President (she’s a young mom, you see).  And San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro (D) wants to be our first Hispanic President.

Notice the pattern here: none of these Progressive-Democrats want to be President of the United States.  Every single one of them want to be the first [ethnic/race/gender-of-choice] President of an identity politics-divided United States.

The Indian example is what we can look forward to if the party of identity politics ideology gets a member elected.

Increase Spending, Taxes?

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Americans seem to favor that, according to a Fox News poll released last Thursday and discussed on Fox Business Online.

[T]here is broad support for increasing taxes on the wealthiest families. Voters support tax increases on families making over $10 million annually by a 46-point margin (70% favor-24% oppose), and support a hike on those making over $1 million by 36 points (65-29%).
There is less support for a broader tax increase: 44% favor raising rates on those with income over $250,000, and a small minority, 13%, approves of an increase on all Americans.

What would have been interesting, though, and which Fox News chose not to do, would have been to break those preferences out by age group (the poll had only two categories: under/over 45), by income level (again, the poll only had two categories: under/over $50k), by income taxes actually paid in the prior year, and by welfare payments/tax credits received in the prior year.

Trends in those categories might seem too obvious to bother collecting data for, and trends indicated in the last two categories would have been skewed by willingness of respondents to divulge that information, but until data actually are collected, that “obvious” can only be speculative.

The poll itself can be seen here.