A Party Platform

Kimberly Strassel had an interesting column (when has she ever not?) in her Thursday Wall Street Journal, centered on the divisions within the Progressive-Democratic Party. What especially drew my attention, though, was the question with which she closed her piece.

Does the common Democratic desire to beat Mr Trump overcome all that [all those venues of division]?

The very existence of the question illuminates another Progressive-Democratic Party problem: it has no serious policy on which to run (another attempt to take over the private economy—Medicare for All? Really?); all it has is a platform of “Beat Trump.” Shouting about beating an opponent rather than proposing new, restorative policies or touting existing, successful policies is, I suggest, no path to gaining a position from which to expand on existing, successful policies or enact new, restorative policies.

And: what will Party do for an encore in 2024?

“I Have Seen Dictatorships”

Ex-US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, says so. And she insisted, in her op-ed, that she and her colleagues had no obligations to her bosses:

When civil servants in the current administration saw senior officials taking actions they considered deeply wrong in regard to the nation of Ukraine, they refused to take part.

They, and she, also refused to resign. All of them simply presumed to disobedience and to a veto authority over their bosses’ instructions.

She went on:

We need to stand up for our values, defend our institutions, participate in civil society and support a free press.

Indeed. But in order for Yovanovitch and her fellows to do so, they need to consider the Progressive-Democrat mirror into which they stare, and to think about the Progressive-Democratic Party’s communications arm, our NLMSM masquerading itself as an independent press, for which Yovanovitch is writing her… apologia pro vita sua.

And this cri de coeur:

I have seen dictatorships around the world….

I suppose that, for a woman so timid she’s intimidated by an unfavorable job performance review, any government might look like a dictatorship.

The Snub

Much is being made (still!) about President Donald Trump’s seeming snub of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) offered handshake as Trump handed up copies of his SOTU speech to the Vice President of the United States/President of the Senate Mike Pence and to Pelosi. Ample video shows Pelosi accepting the copy of his speech with her right hand, then switching hands in order to offer her right hand to shake and Trump turning away to begin his speech without taking the handshake.

There are three possibilities for this.

One is that Trump did, indeed, snub Pelosi.

Another is that Pence did not offer his hand, which the videos also clearly show, and Trump was not looking for or expecting any offered handshake.

Another is that Trump was only handing up the copies and, as the videos show, was turning back to his podium to begin his speech when Pelosi offered her hand: whether mentally focused on the beginning of his speech or merely insufficiently observant, he didn’t see the hand, just as he didn’t see the hand not offered by Pence.

Which possibility an observer focuses on—especially to the exclusion of the others—says volumes about the observer, and it says not a syllable about the event itself.

Taxes

It seems Amazon isn’t paying enough corporate taxes to suit Progressive-Democrats.

In its annual regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jeff Bezos’ sprawling e-commerce empire said it paid $162 million in federal income taxes on $13.3 billion of US pre-tax income, an effective tax rate of 1.2%. It deferred more than $914 million in taxes.

All perfectly legal, too, yet the hue and cry is loud. Matthew Gardner, Senior Fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, for instance:

This means that instead of avoiding 100 percent of its income tax liability, Amazon appears to have avoided only 94 percent of its tax bill last year[.]

Not at all.  Amazon, unless Gardner is going to allege actual tax fraud, paid 100% of its actual tax liability, after accounting for all of the credits, deductions, and other loopholes our byzantine tax code allows corporations.  Amazon just didn’t pay its “fair share,” whatever carefully nebulous sum that amounts to.

The hue and cry is accurate, though not in the way the Left would have us believe.  As someone almost said once, the fault is not in our corporatoins, but in our tax code.

Everything Amazon did was legal, and it would have been an abuse of the company’s fiduciary duty to its owners not to take advantage of the opportunities—Amazon’s tax bill and overall tax rate are an illustration of the failures of a tax code that has all of those vasty loopholes, gaps, deductions, credits, etc.

A single low, flat tax rate that treats all income identically, regardless of source, and that has no loopholes, gaps, deductions, credits, etc, would do wonders for our economy, increase the revenues ultimately remitted to Government, and enhance both private citizens’ and Government’s (in that order) ability to see to the least among us.

Mind you, that low, flat tax rate should be applicable only to personal income. Corporations should be assessed no income tax at all; they don’t pay those taxes anyway, not even that 1.2%: their customers, ultimately us individual persons, do in the form of higher prices.

Bipartisanship and Unity

…Progressive-Democrat style.

The leader of the Progressive-Democratic Party in the House—formally and having regained it from a claque of freshman Representatives—demonstrated her willingness to work with Republicans at the beginning and at the end of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech.

At the beginning, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) walked away from the traditional and protocol introduction of the President of the United States

Members of Congress, I have the high privilege and distinct honor of presenting to you the President of the United States.

She abbreviated her office’s introduction to

Members of Congress, the president of the United States.

Then, at the end, she tore up his speech and made a spectacle of it.

This is how Party intends to work with Republicans and with Americans in general who have a different view of things.