Monthly Archives: July 2020

A Churchman is Heard From

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Priests for Life National Director Fr Frank Pavone, late of the Trump campaign organization, is speaking out, against a misleading fraction of the press and the Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden campaign platform. At the request of the Vatican, Pavone resigned from several campaign advisory boards.

I see headline after headline, article after article, by Catholic outlets that have given zero coverage to my years-long advocacy of the President, but now want to make it look like I’m distancing myself from him or reducing my commitment to his re-election. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

No, he’s not distancing himself [paraphrased by Church Militant].

As if we are supposed to distance ourselves from the most pro-life president in history and instead embrace Biden who wants no restrictions on abortion and wants us to pay for it. … As if we are to back away from the president who is supporting the freedom of the Church more than the bishops are, and instead embrace Biden who wants to restore the [Health and Human Services] mandate which various dioceses, Priests for Life, the Little Sisters and numerous others fought all the way to the Supreme Court. … As if we are to back away from the president who defends America and instead embrace the Biden-Sanders vision of socialism. … As if we are supposed to distance ourselves from President Trump, who advocates for the rights of students to pray in school and speak their mind on campus and the rights of parents to send their children to Catholic schools or any other school of their choice, and [who] does countless other things that benefit the Church and our security and prosperity as Americans.

He went on.

It is a moral obligation for me and for all of us in the Church—clergy and laity alike—to point out the moral corruption of the Democrat platform. I will sacrifice my life before failing to do that[.]

Double Standards

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A Twitter representative illustrates.

Notice that. Even after the moderator’s clarification of Ostrovsky’s question, Twitter considers Iran’s head mullah Khamenei routinely calling for the destruction of Israel entirely acceptable “for conversation,” but Trump’s often rude remarks on Twitter worthy of warnings if not outright censorship and removal.

But @Jack doesn’t want to impact politics or political speech. And @Jack is an honorable man; so are they all, all of Twitter honorable men.

Aside: Arsen Ostrovsky is, among other things, Executive Director of The Israeli-Jewish Congress, an Israeli-based NGO.

The NFL’s Failure

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The National Football League has decided the nonsense of social justice messaging—carefully unbalanced messaging, even—is more important than playing football.

The NFL reportedly unveiled on Monday its social justice plans for Week 1 of the upcoming season, which includes optional decals players can place on their helmet and messages that could be placed in each end zone.
Players who opt to wear the decal will be given a list of names or they can choose a “victim of systematic racism who is not on that list,” NFL executive Anna Isaacson told teams

But no decals of Audie Murphy or William Carney. No messages like Blue Lives Matter or All Lives Matter in the end zones.

And the NFL’s policy of allowing players to disrespect—to denigrate—our nation’s anthem, our nation’s flag, to insult the generations of Americans who have fought, been maimed, died defending those symbols of our great nation—that continues unchanged.

The NFL has lost me.

The Biden Tax Plan

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden thinks American businesses don’t pay enough taxes into Government’s coffers.

“Vice President Biden has been clear that it’s absolutely unacceptable for some of the biggest companies in America, like Amazon, to pay next to nothing in taxes,” Michael Gwin, a campaign spokesman, said.

This is a carefully misleading claim that Biden is making through his spokesman. Some of the biggest companies in America actually pay billions of dollars in taxes for all that each of those companies pay a net amount of close to zero. That, though, is an outcome of our byzantine tax code that lets companies—big and small; although it’s the biggest that are able to make the most of it—balance a tax bite here with a subsidy, write-off, credit, or what-have-you there in order to achieve low/zero overall liability while paying those individual billions.

Biden knows this full well. It is, after all, his Senate and his Obama-Biden administration (and far too many Republican Senates and administrations) that have set up our present tax system.

That aside, though, the real, underlying, problem is that business taxes hurt consumers and our economic performance, and higher taxes would damage us and our economy even more.

Nevertheless, Biden wants to eliminate those tax breaks and impose higher rates. And more: Biden wants to

impose a 15% minimum tax on profits reported to investors….

That alone would raise somewhere between $166 billion and $400 billion over the next 10 years. Another way to look at it is that this minimum tax would take between $166 billion and $400 billion out of our companies’ treasuries and consumers’ pockets over the next 10 years.

Money taken from a business reduces its ability to fund R&D, market research, improve physical plant, and pay workers more or pay more workers.

Compliance with business tax requirements is an additional cost imposed on each business, not naturally by market imperatives, but artificially by Government fiat—that tax code.

In the end, businesses don’t pay those taxes or compliance costs anyway. We taxpayers pay for the offsets—money out of our pockets—and we customer/consumers pay the taxes not completely covered by the myriad offsets, as well as those compliance costs, in the form of the higher prices businesses charge.

Even a simple Just Gimme the Damn Money tax code that Progressive-Democrats seem so badly to want would only reduce compliance costs (maybe—they’d demand their own proofs of compliance and of revenue). It would not reduce the money taken out of businesses’—or consumers’—pockets.

Progressive-Democrats and Economic Recovery

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Progressive-Democrats don’t seem to care about economic recovery, only about using the current Wuhan Virus situation and the economic dislocation the virus has spurred for their own political power gain.

This is made plain by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) in an interview she gave to CBS News‘ Face the Nation Sunday.

…what we will not support is the following. What they’re saying to essential workers, you have to go to work because you’re essential. We’ve place no responsibility on your employer to make that workplace safe and if you get sick, you have no recourse because we’ve given your employer protection.

This is completely disingenuous. There already exist a plethora of labor law making employers explicitly liable for the existence of workplace negligence as well as any injuries resulting from that negligence. There already is responsibility on your employer to make that workplace safe.

There’s also this exchange between FTN‘s Margaret Brennan and Pelosi regarding the Federal addendum to unemployment insurance payments:

MARGARET BRENNAN: Well- but specifically on what has just expired, that- that boost of $600 to federal unemployment. Republicans and the White House are saying that they want to keep some money going, but bring it down to about 70 percent of prior wages. Is that something you can accept?
SPEAKER PELOSI: Well, let me just say this. The reason we had $600 was its simplicity.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Right.
SPEAKER PELOSI: And figuring out 70 percent of somebody’s wages. People don’t all make a salary. Maybe they do. They make wages and they sometimes have it vary. So why don’t we just keep it simple? Unemployment benefits and the- the enhancement, which is so essential right now and that’s really where we are starting and–

Seventy per cent of somebody’s wages might be a little bit more complex than a flat rate, but the arithmetic is something any third grader can do. And we have these neat, new machines—the technology for which was first developed almost 100 years ago and constantly, rapidly improved since—even the Federal government has them, computers, that can do the mass calculations and record keeping necessary.

No, this is just an excuse to justify another piece of Progressive-Democrat obstructionism.

And this:

MARGARET BRENNAN: Will you stay in session until a deal is negotiated?
SPEAKER PELOSI: We can’t go home without it.

After months of hiding out in their several basements instead of convening to conduct the nation’s business—which the Senate has been doing all along, in person, in the Senate chambers. Pelosi is just cynically virtue-signaling with that.

Pelosi and the Progressive-Democrats she leads are simply raising all of this obstruction because they do not want serious support for our economy, for getting businesses back into production, workers back to work, consumers back to spending and saving, our economy back to thriving.

Economic chaos works for the Left. Prosperity works for everyone else.