Author Archives: eehines

Why It’s Useless…

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…to look for, much less work toward, bipartisanship with the Progressive-Democratic Party. Party is spending millions on an ad campaign targeted at a number of Republican Congressmen that centers on Party’s claim that

Last week, Republicans betrayed the American people—breaking their promise and paving the way to strip millions of men, women, and children of their health insurance[.]

Of course, this is a straight up lie by Party. While the Republican caucus is working overtime to find the billions to trillion-and-a-half dollars to cut in order to balance the tax reductions on offer, not a single red cent from Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security is included in those cuts or potential cuts. Indeed,

GOP lawmakers have consistently pointed out that Medicaid and other federal aid programs are not mentioned in the text of their framework for that legislation.

Beyond that, President Donald Trump (R) has made it clear that he will not accept cuts whatsoever to any of those programs, full stop.

But since Party has no alternative solutions to offer—they don’t even accept that a problem exists, so married and consummatory are they to their taxing and spending Big Government ideology—all it has is knee-jerk opposition (House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) is already bragging that not a single Party member will work with Republicans on the current budget outline or on any subsequent allocation bill) and outright lies.

That dishonesty and automatic, unthinking, opposition makes it a wasted enterprise to try to seek bipartisanship or any form of compromise with the party that emphasizes opposition in its loyal opposition role.

When it comes to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY), in particular, nothing that he says or writes can be relied upon, including any “and” and “the.”

“Austerity”

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I do not think this means what some news writers think it means. In a Wall Street Journal article, the news writer used the term this way:

A budget deficit contributes…by injecting more demand into the economy via spending than it subtracts via taxes.
…
But deliberately shrinking the budget deficit, via fiscal austerity, or expanding it, via fiscal stimulus….

What he’s talking about here is reducing government spending as austerity. Government spending is one component of the overall spending that is the demand component of GDP; the other component of demand at the GDP level is consumption spending by us citizens. But reducing government spending, while reducing that overall component of demand, isn’t austerity. That reduction simply reduces the level of competition between government on the one hand and us citizens and our private enterprises on the other hand for the same goods and services. That reduction in the government’s side of that competition at the very least reduces upward pressure on the price we citizens and our businesses face for those same goods and services, even eliminates pricing pressure in some areas, and in some few areas, allows prices to fall.

That’s not austerity, that’s an early step in prosperity.

The news writer again misused the term:

Fiscal austerity does the job with much less collateral damage than tariffs. Inflation goes down instead of up. Trading partners don’t retaliate. There’s no special-interest lobbying or corrosive uncertainty over who gets hit with tariffs for how long.
Austerity’s main drawback is that it slows growth.

Reducing government spending isn’t the only path to private prosperity, and done by itself can be decidedly reductive of that. Taxes directly take money away from both us citizens and our private enterprises. Some taxation is necessary for our government to do the things we hire it to do—pay our national debt, see to a defense capability adequate to the threats we face, and satisfy our nation’s general welfare in the ways delineated in our Constitution. Leaving taxes alone—or raising them—whether in isolation or in order to fund spending unrelated to those three purposes takes money away from us and our businesses that we’re better situated to allocate to our actual needs and wants.

Those taxes are the source of austerity inflicted on us by government. Reducing those taxes to the more minimal level needed to satisfy those three Constitutional requirements reduces austerity far more directly than reducing spending: every dollar left in our and our businesses’ pocketbooks and not taken by government is a dollar we can allocate more efficiently than government is capable of doing.

Reducing government spending—the news writer’s definition of austerity—actually indirectly facilitates prosperity if not actually increases it, and reducing taxation—not addressed at all by the news writer—directly increases prosperity by reducing real austerity, the taking of money from private coffers and putting it in government coffers. Doing both in concert with each other—that’s the far opposite of austerity.

Progressive-Democratic Party Version of Free Speech

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A Conservative legislator in Maine spoke against boys competing in girls’ sports, and she posted the image of the State’s Class B girls high school pole vault champion—a boy competing against girls and who as a boy competing against boys the prior year who could do no better than fifth.

Maine’s Progressive-Democratic Party legislators promptly voted 75-70 to censure the Conservative, Congresswoman Laurel Libby (R, 90th District). Nor does Maine do an ordinary censure: under the Maine constitution, by censuring Libby, they have denied her any right to speak on the Maine House of Representatives floor, or even to vote on any legislation before the Maine House. As the WSJ editors noted, that also denies her constituents any representation, disenfranchising them.

Of course, Party knows that, too. Party politicians claim that speaking and voting would be restored to Libby were she to apologize. But for what would she apologize? Having done nothing wrong, apologizing would both be dishonest intrinsically, and it would be cowardly appeasement.

Libby is made of sterner stuff, and she has said she will not apologize.

Those WSJ editors also posited a warning:

Democrats should be considering whether they really want to go down the road of regulating posts on social media.

But that’s what the Progressive-Democrats have been doing for some years already—see Twitter and Facebook during the first Trump administration and throughout the Biden administration.

This is the censorship which we can expect to be inflicted nation-wide if Party ever regains control over our nation. Speech is free when Party permits it.

“Gambling with World War III”

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President Donald Trump really screwed the pooch on this one. In a public Oval Office meeting with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump and his Vice President JD Vance ambushed Zelenskyy and blew up any hope of a peace that serves the Ukrainian people.

Trump repeatedly berated the Ukrainian leader as “not ready for peace,” for having “disrespected” the United States and for “gambling with World War III.”

No. It’s those who back down in the face of Putin’s threats who are gambling with WWIII. It is ex-President Joe Biden (D), too many European government managers, and now Trump who repeatedly accede to Putin’s demands lest he strike at them, thereby giving credence to his threats. Never mind that every time one of those politicians dipped a toe over a Putin red line—authorizing transfers of weapons to which Putin objected, authorizing attacks inside Russia, and so on—Putin…didn’t strike.

It’s Vance’s timidity in rejecting Zelenskyy’s offer for him to go to the Ukrainian front, to go to places like Bucha, Staryi Bykiv, Zabuchchya, Vorzel, the Kharkiv region, and I add, in no particular order, places like Bakhmut, Mariupol (surely Putin would let him in if there’s really nothing to see there), Odesa, Kakhovka Dam on the Dnieper River, Berdiansk (again Putin would let him visit—wouldn’t he?), and any of the plethora of hospitals, schools, apartment buildings that the barbarian has deliberately attacked. Vance hid behind the claim that such tours are just propaganda events. He could have, instead, agreed to the visits on condition that he go unannounced with no notice of any particular places, and on arrival he go wherever he chose to go on the spur of the moment, a stipulation to which Zelenskyy would have agreed readily. But no. Vance said no. Terrifying to have one’s world view challenged by facts. That’s gambling with WWIII.

Zelenskyy, however, has returned to his nation, where he routinely visits the front and the scenes of battle and of civilian carnage. And, unfortunately, he returned empty handed courtesy of the hysteria and timidity of Trump and Vance.

Which raises the question: with this steady backing away in front of Putin by Trump and by central and western Europe (yes, yes, Europe’s other nations natter on about supporting Ukraine, but so far only with words and a trickle of materiel), and so after Russia has gained control over the bulk of Europe from those backings away, when Putin threatens us if we don’t accede to his demands, what will Trump do then, with no nation left to support us? Will he surrender us to the barbarian, too, as he’s demanding Zelenskyy surrender his nation to the barbarian at the outset of this shameful chain? That, too, is Trump gambling with WWIII.

That’s OK

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What sort of officer does our military establishment really need?

If President Trump and Elon Musk are serious about efficiency at the Pentagon, they might start by reforming SkillBridge. The program began as a well-intentioned effort to reduce veteran unemployment but now pays promising officers to leave the military for careers in investment banking and consulting.

The article’s authors expanded on this:

Junior officers are most likely to separate from the military after five or 10 years, after they have fulfilled their service requirements but before they feel the pull of a generous pension that begins vesting after 20 years. By providing an off-ramp into high-paying corporate jobs during this critical window, SkillBridge gives motivated officers an incentive to leave when they might otherwise have stayed.

The authors’ concerns are, for the most part, valid: the junior officers involved in operations and operations support—loggies and transporters—are the ones on the line, in contact or near contact with the enemy forces, and they’re the ones making the real-time tactical decisions necessary to execute their units’ larger orders regarding that battle and the environment surrounding that battle. These are the ones our military most needs in this context.

The authors concerns, though, are overbroad. While our military branches need some money manager officers, they don’t necessarily need “consultant” officers. What they do need, far more and in sufficient numbers, is what they can least afford to lose: those warfighting and direct warfighting support officers.