Daily Archives: 5 July 2021

Another Progressive-Democrat Gives Another Part of the Game Away

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Laura Saunders, in her Friday Wall Street Journal column concerning the Roth IRAs, the rich and deplorable, and us average Americans, has a striking quote from Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D, OR).

Saunders was writing about how efforts to lay punitive limits and punitive taxes on the Roth IRAs of the super wealthy can only have deleterious effects on the rest of us.

Here’s Wyden’s statement on the matter:

IRAs were designed to provide retirement security to middle-class families, not allow mega-millionaires and billionaires to avoid paying taxes[.]

Wyden has two beefs here. One is his progressive view that the wealthy don’t deserve to be under the same law as the rest of us Americans; the success of the wealthy must be called out and that success denied them—because the rich are the piñata of government disfavored groups of Americans.

The other is that business about avoiding paying taxes. Never mind that the rich and deplorable—and the merely rich—already pay the vast bulk of the taxes the Federal government collects, while the bottom half of income earners pay close to nothing in taxes, and the very bottom—including those who don’t have any job-related income—get tax payments from the rest of us. The amount the rich pay isn’t enough for Progressive-Democrats. More is better.

All of it is better, yet.

I Dissent

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…from the dissenter.

The Supreme Court ruled that Arizona’s voter law is entirely legitimate. That law, you’ll remember, among other things limited who is allowed to return early voting ballots for another person—banned ballot harvesting—and barred counting ballots cast in the wrong precinct.

Among the reasons for upholding Arizona’s law is this:

The court rejected the idea that showing that a state law disproportionately affects minority voters is enough to prove a violation of the law.

Writing in dissent (it was a 6-3 majority), Justice Elena Kagan claimed in part

What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute [the 56-yr-old Voting Rights Act] designed to bring about “the end of discrimination in voting.” I respectfully dissent[.]

The irony in Kagan’s dissent is breathtaking in its depth. She complains of damaging the “end of discrimination in voting” even as the Arizona law treats all voters equally rather than giving special treatment to some. Reducing special treatment somehow increases discrimination.

The rejection of the concept that disproportionality is by itself, regardless of whether it’s a mere side effect, discriminatory also represents a great reduction in special treatment for particular groups—but this, too, is somehow an increase in discrimination in Kagan’s world view.