Monthly Archives: April 2022

Illegal Aliens and Endangered Plant Species

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Now President Joe Biden (D) is trying to block border enforcement by using his Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service to declare the prostrate milkweed to be an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act. In conjunction with this, he’s moving to declare some acreage along the border between two Texas counties and Mexico as “critical habitat” for the plant.

All of that is a naked move to try to prevent Texas from building a border wall using Texas resources, so that Biden-Harris can continue to flood our nation with illegal aliens (who aren’t required to be vaccinated against the Wuhan Virus, even though legitimate travelers and returnees to our nation are so required. See nearby).

This time, though, the Biden-Harris cynicism, though, can be used against him.

If he truly is concerned about the welfare of the prostrate milkweed, then Biden-Harris must take concrete steps to close those stretches of the border in order to keep the illegal aliens from trampling the plants as they come across.

Duplicity

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DHS continues to require legitimate travelers to our nation and legitimate returnees at the end of their overseas travels to prove their vaccination status against the Wuhan Virus as a condition for their entry.

[T]ravelers entering the US through legal ports of entry will continue to be forced to show proof of vaccination….

But that doesn’t apply to those entering our nation illegally. The illegal aliens get a free pass in to go with their existing free midnight flights to the interior destinations of their choice.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement continues to “apply CDC guidance through its Pandemic Response Requirements,” under which “ICE cannot mandate individuals in detention consent to be vaccinated,” according to the agency.

Who says crime doesn’t pay? It plainly does when Progressive-Democrats are running the show.

Local Control vs Federal Funding

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Tennessee’s General Assembly is considering a bill that would indemnify teachers and all other employees of public schools and local education agencies against civil liability or “adverse job actions” if they refer to a student by pronouns consistent with his biological sex rather than by his preferred gender pronouns. The General Assembly’s Fiscal Review Committee noted that the bill

could violate Title IX and would put at risk the state’s federal funding, which for the current school year is more than $5 billion.

That’s the important aspect of this bill, and it has much broader implications for all State-level legislative actions. The $5 billion might seem like a lot of money for a State, but it pales against the long-term cost outcomes of a State accepting any Federal funds under any guise: the more money a State accepts from the Federal government, the more control over its own internal affairs the State surrenders to the Federal government.

The Feds are acting entirely legitimately when they attach strings to the money they provide the States, or to any non-State entity. Anyone providing money to anyone or anything else naturally gets to specify the manner and purpose for which the money is to be used. It’s the existence of those strings, not what they require, that should give States pause in the decision to accept any of the Federal government’s money.

In the end, States that want to retain control of their own intra-State affairs should reject Federal funds transfers—and join with other States in efforts across the legal spectrum to end Federal transfers of State tax remissions to other States altogether except in the event of an emergency declaration. Nor should any exceptions to the bar be allowed: once carve-outs are begun, in very short order, the bar will be so exception-ridden as to cease to exist in any meaningful form.

Trump is Wrong

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Former President Donald Trump (R) wants Ukraine and Russia to negotiate an agreement in their war before it is too late.

He warned that if the countries fail to soon reach a peace agreement, “there will be nothing left but death, destruction, and carnage.”

On this, Trump couldn’t be more wrong. There already is death, destruction, and carnage, all inflicted by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s barbarian army wherever it has occupied parts of Ukraine—it’s only necessary to see the butchery of civilians and civilian hospitals, residential neighborhoods, the bodies left lying in the streets of Russian occupied towns around Kyiv, like Bucha, and the occupied parts of Mariupol; and the ongoing carnage as the barbarian continues to target civilians, particularly including women and children, in cities like Kharkhiv, Chernihiv, Mariupol (still), and on and on in southern Ukraine and in the Donbas; and the barbarian’s explicit efforts to raze to the ground major Ukrainian cities like Mariupol and Chernihiv and Kharkhiv; and the barbarian’s agreeing to civilian evacuation corridors and train runs, only to then specifically attack those corridors and trains as soon as they are filled with evacuating civilians.

Trump went on:

The solution can never be as good as it would have been before the shooting started, but there is a solution, and it should be figured out now—not later—when everyone will be DEAD!

On this, Trump is correct, but not in the way he envisions. With only a little exaggeration about the “everyone,” many more Ukrainians will die if Putin succeeds in his effort to conquer Ukraine—see, for instance, his capture and exile into the Russian interior of some 40,000 civilians in what’s left of the barbarian-occupied parts of Mariupol.

There is, indeed, a solution, and it would be, in many ways, better than before the shooting started, even if in other ways, it would not be—cannot be—as good.

That solution is to apply the only negotiation possible between Ukraine and Russia: Putin’s agreement to remove his barbarian army from all of Ukraine, along with Putin’s payment of (not merely agreement to pay) reparations for the death and destruction he’s inflicted.

The former would be an improvement, since it would be a restoration of Ukrainian territory to Ukraine and an acknowledgment of Ukraine’s existence as a separate, independent nation and of its associated national sovereignty. The latter would be a necessary item but the deaths can never be restored, and the destruction will take years to rebuild—years that are lost to the status quo ante bellum Ukraine forever.

Corporate Tax Rate Cuts

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…must lead to Federal government tax revenue reductions. Or so Progressive-Democrats claim. Say it ain’t so, Joe. President Joe Biden (D) won’t say it, though, so I will. It ain’t so, as this table from The Wall Street Journal illustrates.

When you leave money in the hands of private economy operators—individual or corporate—they do productive things with their money. That productivity leads to more R&D, more innovation, more physical capital improvement, physical capital expansion, wage increases, more jobs (which represent the mothers of all wage increases, for many, from zero wage to an actual paycheck), the latter two leading to human capital improvement, which leads to greater private economy demand for goods and services, which leads to greater production of those goods and services, expanding the economic virtuous circle.

In comparison, Government merely redistributes from one operator—individual or corporate—to another its collected revenues, producing very little. Even the redistributions to noneconomic operators—individuals on welfare, for instance—the resulting production has less value than the transferred funds. The recipients of those redistributions have very small demand increases from the redistributions since they start out with small demands: they’re unemployed or employed only in low-wage, low-value jobs, and all those redistribution payments do is trap those folks in those two statuses.

All of that is even before any discussion of any need for the tax revenues Big Government Progressive-Democrats claim exists.