Monthly Archives: March 2020

The Right Answer

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) is outraged. Outraged, he says.

It is outrageous that the wealthiest corporate executives in America get unlimited, special tax privileges on hundreds of millions of dollars in savings, while ordinary workers can only get tax deferment of up to $19,500 on their 401(k)s[.]

Of course, the (Democratic) Socialist’s answer is to raise taxes on those executives’ savings, their executive retirement and deferred compensation accounts.  He wants to “sharply curb” the tax benefits associated with those accounts. Because, after all, there comes a time when they’ve made enough money. And they didn’t earn that money, anyway; they had help.

Never mind that however earned, it’s certainly not Government’s money; it’s still the earner’s money. Never mind that Government has no business dictating to any of the citizens who employ it how much “enough” is.

Never mind, either, that yeah, they did earn the money. They took the risks—exacerbated by excessive Government regulation—they put in the time and sweat. And the help they had—their employees, not Government—were well paid. Even the low/no skill minimum wage worker was well paid for the value of his work—those, that is, who were able to stay employed or to find work in the first place after Government minimum wage diktats priced them out of low/no skill required jobs.

No, the right answer does not include capping the success of the most successful or increasing the tax bite on those most successful.  Success isn’t capped just on the Evil Rich, though.  The success on all of us is capped: that tax deferment limit doesn’t only apply to our 401(k)s; there are even more draconian caps on our 403(b)s, our Traditional IRAs, our Roth IRAs.  Those caps are not the right answer, either; they’re part of the same error.

Capping success, though, is all this (Democratic) Socialist and his Progressive-Democratic Party confreres know to do.

The right answer, the non-socialist answer, the free market capitalist answer, is to stop capping success.  Leave off the attempts to confiscate the proceeds of executive success and eliminate the caps on the tax deferability of the contributions the rest of us make to our savings and retirement accounts. The money in those accounts and the money we could contribute additionally, were those caps eliminated, also is not Government’s money. It’s ours.

And so is our success.

Full stop.

Campaigning Against a Burgeoning Economy

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In an op-ed in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, Alan Blinder outlined several lines of attack that Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates could campaign against our present burgeoning economy (the stock market dislocation notwithstanding, as even Blinder acknowledges is irrelevant).

Here is just one of Blinder’s several…misconceptions:

[S]he [Judy Shelton] argued in these pages last September that the Fed should “pursue a more coordinated relationship with both Congress and the president.” Oh my.

Well, of course the Federal Reserve Bank, the Congress, and the President should coordinate so as to not be working at cross purposes. Coordination in no way puts the Fed’s independence at risk.

Beyond that, no President is capable of threatening the Fed’s independence. That independence is statutorily mandated, it’s not a creation of any Executive Order.

Oh my, indeed.

Read the whole piece, at the link, to see the rest of Blinder’s foolishnesses.

An Immigration Case and Legislation

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The Supreme Court is heard oral arguments on US v Sineneng-Smith last Tuesday. The case involves the convictions of a woman mail fraud and inducing illegal immigration. The woman billed illegal immigrants $6,800 to file paperwork for an expired pathway to legal residence.  Two of her victims has also testified that, but for the woman’s efforts and billings, they would have left the US otherwise.  That last formed the basis of the woman’s conviction of inducing illegal immigration.

The 9th Circuit struck the second conviction, holding the law unconstitutionally overbroad in violation of the First Amendment.

In the course of those oral arguments, came this item of primary interest, at least to me:

Justice Stephen Breyer noodled the idea of narrowing the law so “it is limited to solicitation of a crime.”

That may or may not be a useful thing to do, but it’s for the political branches of our Federal government to legislate, not for the judicial branch. Leave it to a…liberal…Justice to think it’s OK to modify a law from the bench.