Daily Archives: 24 August 2023

Mistake

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Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo (D) is headed to the People’s Republic of China at the end of this month, ostensibly in an effort to stabilize rocky US-PRC relations.

The long-expected visit is aimed at deepening communications with Beijing, the department said.

And

Raimondo will be the latest administration official to visit China since President Biden met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Group of 20 meeting in Indonesia last year.

This is a serious foreign policy mistake. The PRC is, as some pundits euphemize, an adversary. I’ll be blunt: the PRC is an enemy nation.

In addition to that, we already know where PRC President Xi Jinping stands—he wants to replace us as the world’s leader, with the outcome that he can dominate us. Xi already knows where President Joe Biden (D) and his Executive Branch cronies stand—Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, for instance, in her remarks at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies:

When necessary, we will take narrowly targeted actions.
…
As we take these actions, let me be clear: these national security actions are not designed for us to gain a competitive economic advantage, or stifle China’s economic and technological modernization.

This is Yellen telling Xi that we might finger wag, but we don’t really mean it.

Biden, by his actions from as far from the PRC as Ukraine, where he’s slow walking delivery, even approval, of the weapons systems that nation needs for outright victory in the war Putin has inflicted out of fear of upsetting Putin too much, to as near to the PRC as the South China Sea, where he has meekly acquiesced to the continued occupation of other nations’ islands and waters by the PRC out of fear of upsetting Xi too much, has made clear that Yellen’s meekness is his own.

The United States doesn’t want conflict with the PRC, and we’ll go to great lengths to avoid it. This is backwards.

Xi doesn’t care one way or the other about conflict with us; he wants to be the sole hegemon in the world, and he’ll go to great lengths to achieve it.

There’s a parable that’s a propos. The mouse says to the owl that its ways are wrong. The owl thinks the mouse is lunch.

No. On the matter of improving relations (including trade, but mostly politically/diplomatically) let Xi and others of his government come to us. They know where we are, and they have our phone numbers. Let the Facts be submitted to a candid world regarding Xi’s and others of his government’s level of interest in improving relations with us.

A Thought on SALT Deductions

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New York Republican Congressman John Tamny had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal early last week in which he advocated enthusiastically for raising the ceiling on the deduction of State and Local Taxes from Federal income taxes. That deduction currently is capped at $10,000, and Tamny worries that that works a hardship on his constituents, since despite their high incomes, those folks aren’t really all that rich. New York’s high taxes and prices already work to reduce those folks’ relative wealth.

A WSJ reader responded in WSJ‘s Sunday Letters section.

The five New York Republicans in Congress take a page from the Democratic playbook to defend changing the SALT cap (Letters, Aug. 15), “especially since New York continues to be a donor state, paying more in federal taxes than it receives from Washington.”
When did that become the objective? They make it sound like the role of the federal government is to redistribute all funds in a fair and equitable manner. Sorry guys, we send our tax dollars to Washington to pay for essential services like national defense, not to have it parceled out again to the states in equal portions.

It’s true enough that Tamny and his fellow New York Republican Congressmen (all Congressmen, come to that) have to represent his—their—constituents first, and even as Federal Congressmen, our nation second. But as Federal Congressmen, they do have to represent all of us at some stage.

That tension makes the Congressional Tamnys’ collective and individual jobs hard, but if they wanted cushy jobs, they should have taken positions as mattress demonstrators.

That’s not all. Another Letter writer disagreed with Tamny in a different direction.

The New York lawmakers’ argument bears considerable similarities to Mayor Eric Adams’s demands for federal assistance to take care of the illegal immigrants his city invited. Talk about moral hazard. Both amount to pleas from politicians for federal relief from the consequences of their own state or local governments’ policies and, as such, should be summarily denied.

What the letter writers said is spot on, and their words carry national, and moral, weight.