Monthly Archives: May 2019

A Foolish Proposal

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Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has one.  She’s

proposing that large employers pay women on an equal basis with their male counterparts or face government fines, seeking a sweeping shift in the way the nation addresses pay inequity.

She wants to impose a 1% tax on “large” companies’ profit for every 1% disparity in pay.  The size of the disparity is an open question, though.  The favorite number of the Progressive-Democrats is that women are paid in the neighborhood of 70-75 cents for each dollar a man is paid for the same work; although the number Harris bandied was 80 cents.  That would make the Harris Payroll Tax run 20% or 25%-30% of profit.  The more valid, empirically derived number, though, puts that disparity between 0 and 7 cents less for the woman than the man, with a heavy lean toward the 7.  This more accurate number actually presumes to correct for time in the workforce, experience level on the job in question, and so on.

Beyond that, the Harris Payroll Tax is just plain bad finance.  Companies—small as well as large—pay Social Security and Medicare taxes on the wage they pay, and those same companies tie perks like health coverage, paid time off, bonuses, etc to the wage they pay.  An increase in wage would carry with it those added payroll costs.

It’d be cheaper for the companies to pay the Harris Payroll Tax than it would to raise the wage paid the woman.

Further, Harris would

put the burden on companies to demonstrate that they are not engaging in pay discrimination.

Because, typical of today’s Progressive-Democrats, we’re all guilty until proven innocent.  Especially when it’s difficult even to define the crime.

Trade Deals

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The Progressive-Democratic Party has once again shown us its meld.

“It used to be Congress versus the administration; now it feels like the administration is at least coming around to the Republican point of view” on trade, a Democratic congressional aide said, adding that “it’s going to be hard for them to work with Democrats in a productive way.”

Never mind the Progressive-Democrats’ refusal to work with the White House or Republicans in a productive way.  “A productive way” means, as it always has, doing it the Progressive-Democrats’ way.

Take the present case.  The US, Mexico, and Canada have agreed to lift the metals and other tariffs the three had imposed on each other—per Progressive-Democrat demands.

It’s not enough.  Progressive-Democrats want to renegotiate the deal altogether because the labor parts of the agreement don’t suit them.  Never mind, here, that the agreement effectively mandates significant pay raises for Mexican workers.  Never mind, either, that the rules are supported by American unions.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) and her cronies want to scuttle the Trumpian deal altogether.

It’ll never be enough.  It’s not just hard, it’s nearly impossible, to work with Progressive-Democrats in any productive way.

An Ill-Informed Candidate

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On Fox News‘ Claremont, New Hampshire town hall with Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg Sunday, Buttigieg had this to say about abolishing our Electoral College.

“States don’t vote, people vote.  …if we’re going to call ourselves a democracy,” the US should move to a popular vote system.

When the moderator, Chris Wallace, asked further about that, particularly comparing the voice of small States like New Hampshire with large States like California, Buttigieg gave an unresponsive answer about how New Hampshire wouldn’t be harmed by abolishing the Electoral College because New Hampshire is one of the first-to-vote-in-primaries States.

There are so many things wrong with Buttigieg’s remarks; here are a couple biggies.

We don’t call ourselves a democracy.  We don’t call ourselves that because we are not a democracy; we are a republican democracy consisting of a federation of States.  As a republican democracy, States do, indeed, vote, doing so alongside citizens (not just “people”), and that’s by design.  The Great Compromise in the final agreement on our Constitution was the creation of the Senate as a separate house in our Congress, which body would give equal representation to the States as States—the two Senators per State structure.

This was intended to produce a number of outcomes.  Two of these were a guarantee that our nation’s member States all would be on an equal level among each other within our central, federal government; large population States would not dominate small population States.  Thus, we would not be a popular democracy with its inevitable devolution through a tyranny of a majority into mob rule.  We would, instead, be a republican democracy with greater protections for and balance of the rights of the minority along with the rights of the majority.

Associated with that is the Electoral College, which functionally extends the protection of small States from domination by large States to the election of our President and Vice President.  States are allocated a number of Electors equaling the sum of the number of Representatives a State has, which is based on that State’s population, and its two Senators.  Thus, States vote as States for these candidates alongside the citizens, with the citizens represented, in addition to their individual votes, a second time, indirectly through their State’s Electors.

Within that, Buttigieg’s facile answer that New Hampshire wouldn’t be harmed because it’s an early primary voter ignored similarly small States like New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and others—none of whom are early voters.  Rather, his answer was (how to put this delicately) dismayingly ignorant.

Anyone who paid attention in eight grade Civics knows all of this.  A man so ignorant of the structure of our republican democracy and the reasons for that structure simply is unqualified for the office of President.

The Supremes, Liberals, and Abortion

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The Liberal, Living Constitution, wing of the Supreme Court is up in arms over losing a case with precedential implications.  The proximate case concerned Franchise Tax Board v Hyatt, in which the Supreme Court overturned a 40-year-old precedent that held that States are not required to grant legal immunity to other States in interstate lawsuits.  I won’t go into that because that’s not the crux of the matter.

Instead, that Liberal wing, led by Justice Stephen Breyer, objected to the precedent reversal not on its merits or on the merits of precedent overturning/preservation, but on the premise that overturning this precedent would lead to overturning the abortion ban restrictions in Roe v Wade.

[L]iberal Justices warn that conservatives by overturning Hall will “encourage litigants to seek to overrule other cases.”

This actually is an unqualified Good. Error should be corrected whenever it’s discovered.

That Liberal wing bellyached further:

It is far more dangerous to overrule a decision only because five members of a later Court come to agree with earlier dissenters on a difficult legal question[.]

This makes no sense, though. It took only five members of the prior Court to make the mistake in the first place, for all that other members might have agreed with it.

And the NLMSM weighed in, showing the Liberal wing’s worries about abortion.

“Clarence Thomas Just Showed How Supreme Court Would Overturn Roe v Wade,” declared one columnist. [Jay Michaelson of the Daily Beast]

This, though, is just another bit of Liberal disingenuosity. Roe is technologically-based. The circumstances under which States are permitted to regulate abortion to the extent of banning them are based on viability of the baby, which the Roe Court suggested began around the third trimester. Modern medical technology makes babies viable much earlier, and so abortions can be restricted much earlier—wholly within Roe.

Though I wouldn’t mind the question coming to court so that the technological aspect can be better emphasized.

Trade Wars are Taxing

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Indeed, they are, and the one the People’s Republic of China has been inflicting on us for years is especially so.  For the duration of the PRC’s economic war—of which its trade “war” is just one campaign—they’ve been conducting cyber espionage, stealing our intellectual property, extorting technology transfer as a condition of doing business inside the PRC, demanding government-approved backdoors into our companies’ core software as another condition of doing business there, even poisoning the powdered milk, pet food, and plywood they sell to us.

I sympathize with Farmer Blake Hurst and his fellows, but the sad fact is that no war is bloodless for either side, and often the winner suffers, in the near term, the greatest damage and casualties.  Beyond that simple fact, too, is this: the damage done Hurst, et al., is done by the PRC with its assault on our economy, it is not done by our resisting that assault.

So I ask: what’s the alternative? What would Hurst—and Progressive-Democrat naysayers (of which Hurst is not at all one)—have us do instead?

What if we lose this economic war?  How well does anyone think it would work out for us were the PRC to win and so to dominate?  What does anyone see as the benefit of a dominant PRC dictating terms to us?  Demanding not the transfer of our factories to them, but the transfer of our intellectual property and our technology to them?