Author Archives: eehines

There’s a Difference

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The House of Representatives Judiciary Committee held a hearing concerning the crimes committed by illegal immigrants inside the US as a result of the open border maintained by the current administration.

Progressive-Democrats are trying to deny that fact.

Congressman Jerry Nadler (D, NY) said crimes were committed by illegal immigrants during the Trump administration but he [Chairman Jim Jordan (R, OH)] doesn’t blame Trump for them.

Former President Donald (R)] Trump was actively trying to close the border; one of the outcomes of that was a reduction—by a lot—in the number of illegal aliens coming across our border and the resulting vastly lower numbers of illegal alien crimes committed in the US compared with what the Biden-Harris administration is allowing today by holding our border open.

Nadler knows that full well.

What’s Not Being Discussed

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Minority, particularly black, enrollment is flat to down in many of our more selective colleges and universities since the Supreme Court ruled in Students For Fair Admissions, Inc v President And Fellows Of Harvard College that colleges and universities no longer could use race as a factor in their admission selections.

Leaders of those institutions, a group that includes Washington University in St Louis and some Ivy League schools, are now trying to figure out why their numbers shook out the way they did. … They also say previous growth didn’t come at the cost of academic talent.

That last is an especially interesting claim, since those Leaders provided no data to support their claim, or at least the article’s author did not quote their data or provide any from her own digging.

I have two questions that bear on the matter. One is what are the minority-enrolled normalized majors of black admittees before the ruling compared with the majors after the ruling? What are the majors at graduation before and after the ruling? The latter will be the more dispositive datum since students change their majors, often more than once, over the course of their studies.

My other question is what is the normalized graduation rate before the Court’s ruling compared with after the ruling.

Since this is the first academic year after the ruling, it’s too soon to answer those questions. That, by itself, demonstrates the disingenuousness of those institution leaders: they have no data with which to compare, and so they have no data on which to base their claim “no cost of academic talent.” The questions still need to be asked, and the data collected, so substantiated assessments can be substituted for vapor claims.

Also not being discussed—it is a larger topic—is what, if anything, should be done about any enrollment disparities, assuming disparity is defined as enrollment percentages not well approximating population percentages. That answer, I claim, is independent of whether racist enrollment selection criteria are allowed or not. The answer, instead, centers on making available to all children opportunities for education and entry into the world post education. That, in turn, demands those opportunity availabilities must begin before kindergarten; extend through K-12 schooling, whether home schooling, public schools, voucher schools, or charter schools according to parent choices; and on through trade schools, community colleges, and colleges/universities according to parent and student choices.

That actual equality of opportunity will make those enrollment numbers look more like our population numbers.

Internal Contradiction

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Or a tacit admission. Vermont’s Independent Senator Bernie Sanders is making one or the other, or maybe both. And so is Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris, through her studied silence.

Kristen Welker, of NBC‘s “Meet the Press,” put a question to Sanders:

She [Harris] has previously supported Medicare-For-All, now she does not. She’s previously supported a ban on fracking, now she does not. These, senator, are ideas that you have campaigned on. Do you think she is abandoning her progressive ideals?

Sanders’ answer:

No, I don’t think she’s abandoning her ideals. I think she’s trying to be pragmatic and doing what she thinks is right in order to win the election.

Harris, then, is for the things she’s now publicly deviating from or is publicly silent on, contradicting herself. Or, she’s hiding her true positions from us American voters because she knows we disapprove of them and would vote her down if we knew where she stood. That’s her admission that her policy preferences are failures.

Either way, count on Harris to push those progressive policies, inflict them on us to our and our nation’s severe detriment, if she’s elected this fall, or at any other Presidential election cycle.

What She Said Then, What She Says Now

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News outlet writers are starting to object, however mildly, to Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ reluctance to do interviews and news conferences. Harris did do the one interview recently, with a friendly interviewer and while accompanied by her Comfort Running Mate, but that’s it. The press does have a beef about her apparent fear of sitting for unscripted interviews with objective interviewers—and doing them frequently and alone—and to have unscripted, free-wheeling news conferences of some duration and frequency where she wouldn’t know the questions in advance.

The press, though, couches their objections in the premise that without these interviews and news conferences, they won’t know what her platform is or what policies she intends to push were she elected.

Those of us outside the press, us less credulous average Americans, do know what her platform and policies are—Harris has told us quite clearly over the last several years, right up to mid-2024 when she supplanted Joe Biden as Party’s candidate.

Here is her platform made manifest, from what she has said and what she’s saying now, even if her remarks today are scattered about, and her remarks yesterday are being busily ignored by those same news outlet writers.

What She Said Then What She Says Now
There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking. I made that clear on the debate stage in 2020 that I would not ban fracking, as vice president I did not ban fracking, as president I will not ban fracking
“an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal”
And: once pledged to close all privately-run immigration detention centers “on day one” during her first presidential campaign		 Harris’ campaign manager: “I think at this point, you know, the policies that are, you know, having a real impact on ensuring that we have security and order at our border are policies that will continue”
January 2017 criticized t Obama’s refusal to veto a UN Security Council resolution on Israeli settlements. Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters.
I also expressed with the prime minister my serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza…the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third, or fourth time.  We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies [not set at the feet of Hamas].
What She Said Then What She Still Says
Tax each stock and bond trade
Roll back 2017 tax cuts
Raise capital gains tax rates at the same rates as ordinary income		 Raise corporate taxes
Tax unrealized capital gains
4% “income-based premium” on households making more than $100,000 annually to pay for her version of “Medicare for All”
$10 trillion in public and private spending over 10 years to create millions of jobs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions		 Expand child tax credit and Earned Income Tax Credit, to be paid for by “there’s a great return on investment.”
Spending $25,000 via “tax credit” to cover the down payment costs for “first-time home buyers”

Do we believe her when she was saying what she believed, or do we believe her foxhole conversions of convenience today? I suggest, on the other hand, that where her positions today are substantially of those from yesterday, we certainly can take her at her word, and these are part of her clearly stated platform, also.

Here’s a Thought

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The article opens with this subheadline and lede:

There might be better ways to help low-income families than vastly expanding the child tax credit
The child tax credit is one of the few government entitlements that both political parties want to make more generous.

The problem with the child tax credit, though, is that rewards folks for not working—the credit is fully refundable, meaning that families get the full handout credit even if their income is lower than the credit.

My thought is this: switch to a low, flat income tax rate regardless of the source of income. That will leave more money in the hands of all American citizens—more than just the credit’s value—it’ll leave that money in our hands throughout the year, instead of our having to struggle through all twelve of the months of the current year, plus tax time, in order to get the money back in the following year (only a fraction of the credit is handed out in installments).

And it’ll encourage getting more work, or at the least reduce the government’s handout-induced discouragement of work, by leaving that erstwhile tax money in the hands of folks who work and pay taxes. Further, that erstwhile tax money already is coordinated [sic] with income; there’s no need to play games with indexing.

The problem with that, though, is strictly political. The move directly challenges the Progressive-Democratic Party’s addiction to constantly raising taxes. The move also would greatly reduce Party’s ability to curry favor and buy votes with credits and circuses’ handouts.