Monthly Archives: March 2022

Senator Rick Scott Has a Plan

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No, in this article, I’m not referring to his 11 Point Plan to Rescue America; I’m writing about his urging American businesses to divest themselves of their investments and other business connections inside the People’s Republic of China.

Earlier this month, I wrote an open letter to American business leaders with a simple message: it’s time to cut ties with and decouple our supply chains from Communist China to realign US business with American values.

He went on.

We need a strategic economic decoupling from Communist China—that includes ending investment and partnerships with companies controlled by the CCP. This is something I have been calling for over a year. While decoupling must begin now, we know it’s not a process that will be completed overnight. Supply chains must readjust and be removed from the grasp of the Chinese Communist Party.

Scott is absolutely right. The PRC is an enemy nation, and business—any economic—ties with the nation are fraught with danger, not only for the individual business—the intellectual property and technology thefts Scott references—but for our national security—those intellectual property and technology thefts along with defense and diplomacy-related espionage and technology thefts. Every nation carries out such espionage, but that espionage by the PRC is strongly facilitated by the nature of the business ties PRC laws impose on companies doing business in, or with businesses in, the PRC.

What needs to be understood here, though, and I’m not sure even Scott fully understands the matter, is that every business in the PRC is under the thumb of the Communist Party of China. The PRC’s 2017 National Intelligence Law makes them so: every PRC company must answer all of that nation’s intelligence community requests for information regarding the company’s internal affairs, the company’s business dealings with other businesses, and the company’s information gleaned from its customers, whether individual or business. And if the company doesn’t have that information, it’s required to try to get it.

Empty Words

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Russian President Vladimir Putin, through one of his representatives, is claiming to be reducing military activity in the vicinity of Kyiv and Chernihiv because “peace talks” are making progress. Chernihiv is on Russia’s secondary invasion corridor aimed at Kyiv, on the east side of the Dnieper River. Putin’s Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Formin:

Due to the fact that negotiations on the preparation of an agreement on the neutrality and non-nuclear status of Ukraine, as well as on the provision of security guarantees to Ukraine, are moving into practice, taking into account the principles discussed during today’s meeting, by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation in order to increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations and achieving the ultimate goal of agreeing on the signing of the above agreement, a decision was made to radically, at times, reduce military activity in the Kiev and Chernihiv direction.

Sure. What Putin, through Formin, is ignoring is the fact that Russian ground activity on those axes has largely stalled, and the Ukrainian military has been achieving some success at pushing the Russians back a ways and regaining control of/liberating from Russian occupation some villages along those axes. It’s also the case that Russia, already having stopped and dug in defensively, may simply be pausing to refit, refresh, and deliver combat loss replacements before renewing its assault.

[P]rovision of security guarantees to Ukraine? On what basis can Putin be trusted with any of this? Recall his invasion of Ukraine’s Donbas and Crimea and his occupation of a significant fraction of the former and all of the latter, in abrogation of his Budapest Memorandum commitment. Recall his continuation of that in the face of his Minsk Accord “commitment” and his pretended negotiation of Minsk II. Recall his claim that the Donbas actually consisted of two newly sovereign nations and are not part of Ukraine.

Nothing Putin says can be trusted. And he is ignoring the terms Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has offered through Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia:

…their key demands included guarantees for Ukraine’s security from the US, the UK, France, Turkey, Germany, Canada, Poland, and Israel. “This is the system we would like to build the future of Ukraine on[.]”
…
“We want an international mechanism of security guarantees where guarantor countries will act in a similar way to NATO’s article number five[.]”

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak added [as cited by The Wall Street Journal at the link just above] that the arrangement would be subject to a referendum of the Ukrainian people, as well as the approval of the guarantor countries.

Notice that. Zelenskyy wants security guarantees secured by countries not aligned, even tangentially, with Russia. And he will not accept a deal before Russia has left Ukraine.

Zelenskyy has a very good understanding of Putin’s trustworthiness and of the uselessness of anything Putin says.

Despite that recognized untrustworthiness, and in a major concession,

Mr Podolyak said that Ukraine had offered Russia a 15-year period of negotiations on the status of Crimea, which Russia annexed by force in 2014.

This shouldn’t even be a matter of discussion. Crimea is Ukrainian. Full stop.

Micromanaging

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A State government is reaching into the business decisions of private enterprise, presuming to dictate to State-domiciled businesses what their business decisions must be in an otherwise competitive labor market. Here’s Pennsylvania House of Representative Jennifer O’Mara (D, Delaware):

The Healthy Employee and Healthy Workplace Act will help Pennsylvania’s families by requiring employers to provide paid sick leave to their employees. Workers would be able to use paid sick leave to seek treatment for an illness or a family member’s illness, in addition to treatment related to domestic violence or sexual assault.

Elizabeth Stelle, director of policy analysis at the Commonwealth Foundation offers one reason this is a counterproductive, if not outright idiotic, idea.

The real question is how to help the small percentage of workers that don’t have this benefit. The answer is more flexibility, not more regulation. For example, the federal Working Families Flexibility Act would allow employers to give hourly workers the choice of accumulating “comp time” in lieu of overtime pay[.]

The Progressive-Democrat O’Mara and her cohorts don’t care about such trivia. For Progressive-Democrats, it’s not about individual choice—us average Americans are just too grindingly stupid to be trusted with making our own choices.

I offer another, more general objection, to the principle so plainly underlying O’Mara’s proposal. It’s about accruing personal and Party power in government and the ego trip of controlling other people’s lives and businesses.

There’s no need for this bill. That competitive labor market I mentioned will solve the matter. Just like “dental” and then health insurance became, in the competition for labor, a standard benefit and not a perk for the few.

Just like paid vacation became, in the competition for labor, a standard part of the worker’s pay package, and then grew from a few days to a week, to two weeks, and more. With accrual from year to year.

Just like paid sick leave became standard….

Now paid vacation and paid sick leave rapidly are becoming simply paid time off—adding the two original time blocks into a single time block with the same number of days that the two pay components separately had—with the worker no longer having to differentiate between the two because employers, if not Progressive-Democrats, trust their employees’ decisions.

They Haven’t Taken Enough

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…so they want more. And more. And….

President Biden made a renewed push on Monday to galvanize congressional Democrats to overhaul the nation’s tax code and dramatically raise rates on corporations and ultra-wealthy Americans.
… Under his proposal, taxes would rise by $2.5 trillion….

And

The higher taxes would largely be borne by Wall Street and the top sliver of US households, in the form of a steeper corporate rate, a modified wealth tax….

That raised corporate tax rate is, in part, a withdrawal of the corporate tax cuts of the Trump administration, a reduction that made our companies globally competitive and brought their investments back home as well as encouraged increased foreign company investment in our nation. It’s also a net increase in rates over what existed prior to the Trump cuts.

That wealth tax includes a

minimum 20% tax on the incomes of US households worth $100 million or more

along with a tax on unrealized capital gains—that’s the “worth more” part. Those unrealized gains aren’t even income, either, since the assets experiencing the growth isn’t income.

Withdrawing all that money from the private economy is money that won’t be, can’t be, committed to R&D, other innovation, production facility improvement, production facility construction, wage and benefit increases for employees, job creation for additional employees, and on and on and on.

President Joe Biden (D) said his budget demands ensure that

corporations and the very wealthy pay their fair share.

Pay our fair share? What, I ask, is our fair share? Biden and his Progressive-Democrat cronies answer, “All that you have.”

Even one of the founders of the modern Progressive Movement, TR Roosevelt, might demur from this bit of confiscation:

Our country, this great Republic, means nothing unless it means the triumph…in the long run, of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.

That is the essence of the American Dream, but Biden-Harris and his cronies want to cap our Dream and punish us American citizens for being successful.

Envy

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President Joe Biden’s (D) Success in the American Dream tax. That’s what he and his Progressive-Democratic Party cronies are about to propose and to try to inflict on us. A minimum tax of 20% on income, and on the increased value of non-income assets over the prior year—whether or not those assets were sold and actual income received from the sale.

Because success—making it especially big—in our nation without the “help” of Big Government is anathema to Progressive-Democrats. Such success goes against their mantra that us average Americans can’t be trusted with our own decisions; our own definitions of our needs, our wants, our charities (and how to support them); our own means of satisfying our responsibilities and living with our liberties.

No, our American Dream must be, and must be limited to, what Progressive-Democrats say it is for all of us, not what each of the 330 million of us individuals say it is for each of us individuals.

Oh, and this: Biden and his syndicate cronies don’t even have a use for the tax money, nor have they claimed a plausible one. They just want it. They’re jealous that others have more of it than they do.