Works for Me

Senator Chris Murphy (D, CT) has his gun control panties all knotted up because lots of county sheriffs have said they won’t enforce intrinsically unconstitutional gun control laws.

I think we have to have a conversation about whether we can continue to fund law enforcement in states where they are refusing to implement these gun laws[.]

I’ve addressed whether local and county jurisdictions should accept State funding for this or that purpose or whether they, instead, should decline the funds and free themselves from higher government’s controlling strings.

At the national level, Murphy’s terms are acceptable.

Child Tax Credit

And other tax credits. Scott Hodge was one of the developers of the Child Tax Credit more than 25 years ago, and today he thinks the idea—well intended as it was—turns out to be bad tax and social policy (did I hear a sotto voce “unintended consequences?”).

His Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed went into detail on how the child tax credit, along with the subsequent proliferation of tax credits, turned out to be heavily counterproductive, reducing family prosperity through reducing the number of workers—who are family members—in the work force and thereby reducing overall GDP.

But the kicker of his piece was his closer.

No wonder the IRS is dysfunctional—it’s not equipped to be a social-service agency.
The “put money in people’s pockets” approach of the child tax credit might have been good politics, but 25 years’ experience shows it was bad policy. The country needs a tax agenda that promotes growth and opportunity, not handouts and redistribution.

Indeed.

The best tax agenda for growth and opportunity promotion begins with taking our tax code, and so the IRS, out of the social engineering milieu altogether. Tax collections should be limited (at the Federal level at least; although State tax codes would benefit from similar changes) to the Constitutionally mandated purposes of pay[ing] the Debts and provid[ing] for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States. Keeping in mind, too, that the general Welfare of the United States is itself limited to the items enumerated in our Constitution’s Article I, Section 8.

That tax agenda concludes with enacting a tax code that eliminates business income taxes altogether (keeping in mind that it’s the business’ customers who pay the lion’s share of those taxes, anyway, in the form of higher prices, while the rest of us pay in the form of reduced innovation and fewer jobs). That adjustment needs to go along with setting a single flat tax rate on all personal income from any source, with no deductions, credits, subsidies, surcharges, or any of the other froo-froo currently extant in our existing byzantine and mendacious tax code.

But What is the Or Else?

President Joe Biden (D) is right, this time, and so are Congressional politicians (assuming they actually can get anything done on this), to move to block the coming railroad strike.

But. But, but, but.

What is the or else here? What enforcement mechanism can the government use to enforce its no-strike diktat against the railroad workers? Not against the unions, but against the rail workers?

It isn’t union leadership, after all, who have rejected the just-negotiated agreements, it’s the rank-and-file, the folks who actually do the work, who’ve rejected the agreement.

How would the government deal with the rail worker equivalent of the Blue Flu?

How would the government deal with another standard union tactic: working explicitly and exactly to the letter of the relevant regulations and the letter of the law about to be imposed on the railroad businesses and labor unions, with the result of a drastic slowdown in work performance?

How would the government deal with an overt strike, where the workers of one or more of the four unions explicitly walk off the job (and the workers of the other unions walk out in solidarity or at the least refuse to cross the picket lines)?

Mass arrests in the latter case? Where would the government find the replacement workers? The rail lines still would be shut down until those replacement workers could be found and hired, assuming anyone qualified actually would be interested.

Certainly, civil action with civil—financial—penalties could be taken, but how much will those matter if the union workers themselves have already determined they have nothing to lose? Their beef, after all, isn’t about higher wages, it’s about the quality of the work environment and work benefits, canonized by the number of sick days allowed.

I’ve seen no evidence that anyone in the Federal government is thinking about a response to the possibility the workers call government’s…bluff(?).