Monthly Archives: July 2025

This, too, Has a Fix

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The lede intimates the problem:

Dual-earning married couples are estimated to face a loss of $18,100 in annual benefits in seven years without the passage of some sort of entitlement reform, according to a new study.

And this:

“At the same time, those retirees might experience reduced access to health care due to an 11% cut in Medicare Hospital Insurance payments. The cuts would grow over time as scheduled benefits continue to outpace dedicated revenues,” the analysis [by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget] also read.

Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott has proposed legislation to address this:

…create a “Budget Point of Order” and require a two-thirds vote against any legislation that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) “determines would create a “Budget Point of Order” and require a two-thirds vote against any legislation that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) “determines would reduce or cut existing Medicare and Social Security benefits.”

But that would only increase costs to all of us in the form of steadily rising taxes. After all, any tax bill that didn’t raise taxes sufficiently to suit CBO would be claimed by it to reduce or cut those benefits and so would require that supermajority vote.

No, the better solution is to entirely privatize Social Security and to return responsibility for Medicare entirely to the States under their respective Medicaid programs.

Social Security could be privatized entirely for those currently younger than 50 years—or under 40 years if the longer transition period would be more politically palatable. Continue to require folks to pay those Social Security taxes, but the money would go into retirement accounts strictly for the benefit of the taxpayer and his future retirement, instead of being sent right back out for the current benefit of existing retirees. This would give the taxpayer/future retiree skin in his own game, and I guarantee you that this individual would do a lot better job of managing his retirement money than the government has been doing—especially with the government confronted as it is with both a dwindling supply of employed persons paying the taxes to produce current payouts and an increasing post-retirement life span. The transition would be deucedly expensive for the government (all of us taxpayers), but that expense is only going to explode if nothing else is done.

On the other hand, Medicare conversion doesn’t need so long a transition, and it would produce immediate savings for the Federal budget—its real budget, not the fictional one that pretends Social Security and Medicare aren’t part of government expenditures. For this conversion, it’s a simple matter of converting the Medicare transfer to each State to a Year Zero block grant solely to the State’s Medicaid program. Then each year over the next 10, reduce the size of the block grant by 10% of the Year Zero amount and reduce each worker’s Medicare part of his payroll tax and his employer’s contribution to that payroll tax by 10% of that Year Zero tax collection. At the end of those 10 years, the Federal government would be out of the States’ health coverage business, the States would have their responsibility for and control over their own programs wholly restored, and each worker and employer would be out from under that portion of the payroll tax.

Distortions by Progressive-Democrats

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The latest are illustrated by two graphs from The Wall Street Journal. The graphs illustrate the impact on us taxpayers—rich and poor—of the recently passed tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The first shows in dollar terms the impact of the tax cuts.

Progressive-Democratic Party politicians favor this graph because it emphasizes dollars while ignoring both their importance to the taxpayer relative to his income and it ignores the percentage of income received by each taxpayer and the percentage of the tax burden paid by each taxpayer—which for the rich is a larger percentage than their percentage share of income earned.

The second illustrates the changes in percentage terms, which demonstrate the importance of those dollars to taxpayers’ incomes.

Overall, the tax cuts become more important as income level drops from the wealthiest to the poorest. Those with increasingly lower incomes receive increasingly higher tax reductions relative to their incomes, with the poorest getting the greatest relative reductions. The Evil Rich—the top 20% of income earners—get far smaller relative tax drops, with the Evilest Rich—those heinous top 1% of income earners—getting the smallest relative drop.

And that’s entirely appropriate since they start out with the largest tax burden, one that’s much larger even than their relative share of income. This is a detail that Progressive-Democrats actively ignore in their distortionate descriptions of the bill.

Their Plan, Our Necessary Response

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The headline and subheadline of the editorial lay it out succinctly:

China’s No-Exit Plan for Foreigners
Beijing is blocking two more Americans from leaving the country which is part of a pattern.

Then the lede:

Chinese President Xi Jinping has been eager to lure American companies to invest in China, but you wouldn’t know it from Beijing’s latest actions. China is preventing American citizens, including a Commerce Department employee and a Wells Fargo banker, from leaving the country.

This is naked hostage-taking, and the only way to stop it is to counter it decisively, deeply, and broadly. That doesn’t mean if the PRC takes an American hostage, we take 10, nor does it mean if the PRC brings a knife to the matter, we bring a gun and all our friends with guns. It may come to that—tit-for-tat is far worse and more expensive than drastic and rapid escalation—but it’s not useful in the present context.

What is necessary is for Americans to stop traveling to the PRC under any circumstance—not to visit, not for tourism, not on business. This would be made more effective, and safer for business employees, if American businesses stopped doing business inside the PRC completely. Along those lines, our State Department should issue a Level 4 Travel Advisory—Do Not Travel—on travel to the PRC. The specific risks to travel are included with this level of advisory, and SecState should be explicit: there is an unacceptable risk of the American traveler being kidnapped by the PRC government and barred from leaving. It may be true, and it seems to be so for the two kidnap victims above, that the victims are free to roam about the PRC, but that just means they’re in a shabbily gilded cage.

In addition to those steps, our government needs to make those hostages our hostages against PRC good behavior: do nothing diplomatically or economically with the PRC until all of our citizens are back on US soil, safe and healthy. Rescind the PRC’s Most Favored Nation status and impose tariffs of at least 500% on all goods and services originating from the PRC, regardless of the path those things take in getting to the US, again until all of our citizens are back on US soil, safe and healthy.

Accelerate arming the Republic of China, the Republic of Korea, and Japan. Actively and overtly—with the presence of US Navy and Air Force assets—assist the Philippines in its defense of its island possessions in the South China Sea, including physically blocking PLAN ships from impeding Philippine shipping. Deem PLAN ship refusal to give way, maintaining a collision course as an attack on our ship or the Philippine ship, and fire on and sink the PLAN attacker. Work defense arrangements with Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia.

The more Xi and his minions object, the more rapidly we should push these moves.

Hostage takers deserve no profit; they do deserve to lose drastically.

California’s Disdain for our 2nd Amendment

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The 9th Circuit(!) has ruled that California’s demand for background checks (and associated delays in obtaining) as a precondition for citizens of that State buying ammunition is unconstitutional.

Naturally, California’s Progressive-Democrat Governor, Gavin Newsom, is up in arms over that ruling:

Strong gun laws save lives—and today’s decision is a slap in the face to the progress California has made in recent years to keep its communities safer from gun violence. Californians voted to require background checks on ammunition and their voices should matter.

It’s a well-deserved slap in the face, though; in response to Newsom’s administration’s and State legislature’s own slap in the face of American citizens. What Newsom and his fellow Party syndicate members carefully ignore is that we already have a strong gun law—the strongest—in the form of our 2nd Amendment. Writing for the 9th Circuit, Circuit Judge Sandra Ikuta tacitly reminded Newsom, et al., of this:

By subjecting Californians to background checks for all ammunition purchases, California’s ammunition background check regime infringes on the fundamental right to keep and bear arms[.]

She expanded on that [citations omitted]:

…a person who wants to keep an operable firearm must necessarily acquire ammunition. Because the right to keep and bear arms includes the right to keep operable arms, rules on ammunition acquisition implicate the plain text of the Second Amendment if they meaningfully constrain the right to keep operable arms.
We conclude that California’s ammunition background check meaningfully constrains the right to keep operable arms.

The 9th‘s ruling was on Rhode v Bonta, and it can be read here.

It’s a Start

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This time, it’s a start on cleaning up the bigotry sewage and ideological indoctrination that’s polluting our colleges and universities. Columbia University, of antisemitic bigotry and pro-terrorist/Hamas infamy, has agreed to pay the Trump administration $200 million along with an additional $21 million to EEOC to settle the latter’s investigations. Now,

[t]he administration is in talks with several universities, including Cornell, Duke, Northwestern, and Brown, the person familiar with the talks said, though it sees striking a deal with Harvard, America’s oldest university, as a key target.

The deal:

The Columbia agreement prohibits programs that promote “unlawful efforts to achieve race-based outcomes” in student admissions and faculty hiring. It calls for the appointment of a senior vice provost to review programs in the department that houses Middle Eastern studies. It also appoints new faculty members in Jewish studies, economics, and political science to “contribute to a robust and intellectually diverse academic environment.”
The deal [provides for] a “resolution monitor,” who has been jointly selected by Columbia and the government, and paid for by the school, will keep tabs on Columbia’s compliance.

This is a good step with Columbia, and I hope the administration succeeds with those additional institutions, along with so many others, also. On the other hand, Michael Roth, Wesleyan University President, is already distorting what’s going on.

We’re in a world now where the government can say to all these schools, “Hey, we’re serious, you’re going to have to pay the piper to get along with the most powerful organization in the world. Which is the federal government.

It’s not at all a matter of “getting along” with the Federal government. It’s a matter of, if the institution wants Federal money—us average Americans‘ tax dollars—money the Federal government has no obligation to provide and which the institution has no intrinsic right to get, the institution must leave off its bigotry and support for terrorism, and it must stop discriminating in hiring and teaching based on political stance in addition to the discriminations that already are illegal. If Roth is going to insist on pretending to not understand that, his behavior should drive up the cost to Wesleyan.

There are two more step that are necessary, though. Each of those institutions first must admit, explicitly, to its bigotry, pro-terrorist support, and naked indoctrination of its students. Second, each of those institutions must identify the concretely measurable and publicly accessible steps it’s taking to correct those failures and its hard, unchanging schedule for completing those steps.