“Pay Their Fair Share”

Once again, I challenge all those Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, including but not limited to (in no particular order), Senator Elizabeth Warren (MA); soon-to-be-ex-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY); former Senator (DE), Vice President, and soon-to-be-former President Joe Biden; former Senator (CA) and soon-to-be-former Vice President Kamala Harris (D); Senator Martin Heinrich (NM); and Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury (NM) to identify, specifically, what is the fair share of income taxes that the rich should pay—hard dollar amount, or tax rate, or percent of income, or…. Cynically, all they’re willing to say is their feelz: pay up and pay more; it’s not “fair,” otherwise.

Here, though, in concrete terms, is the situation with that especially evil bunch of Americans, those in the top 1% of income-tax filers:

  • 22.4% of the country’s total reported earnings
  • share of income taxes paid 40.4%
  • average federal tax rate of 26.1%

Here is what the smaller people pay in the way of income taxes:

  • • bottom 10%: no taxes
  • second income decile: -4.8%–yes, negative, due to all the refundable tax credits they get
  • third income decile: 2.8%

Back to the top:

  • top decile—which includes those 1%-ers: 27%
  • especially evil top 0.1% earners: 33.5%

This graph shows the trend from 2001 to 2022:

Of course, those Party politicians know all of this; they being so much smarter than us poor, ignorant average Americans, and all. It’s a measure of their dishonesty and of their contempt for us that they foist their cynical class divisiveness on us. It’s also an indication of what their natural limit and purpose on taxing is: their limit is all of it from their definition of rich, who aren’t all that numerous; their purpose is to give it to enough of the rest of us to buy enough votes to stay in power.

It hasn’t worked yet, but the rest of us need to remain vigilant and active, lest the outcome of last month’s elections become just a one-off bump in Party’s march. A warning of that is given by the outcome in the House of Representatives elections, where not enough Progressive-Democrats were tossed.

Erroneous Analysis

John Cogan, a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has one. In his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed regarding a suggestion for fiscal federalism in government spending—an otherwise sound idea for leaving State and local projects to be funded solely by the States and local jurisdictions doing the projects—he had this:

My analysis of federal budget data shows that the chronic federal budget deficits since the 1950s are due to the federal government’s failure to raise tax revenues required to finance its spending on state and local activities.

No. The chronic federal budget deficits have been caused by the Federal government nationalizing the spending on those State and local activities, not by any failure to raise taxes to pay for spending that ought not to have been done in the first place.

It’s not too late to go back to the restraints that federalism places on government spending, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that that federalism never should have been abandoned in the first place. That’s how we have a chance to learn the lessons of that error, rather than repeating it in future.

Let Them Eat Cake

No, wait. That was somebody else. What John Kerry said, in his fevered update to an almost as out of touch queen’s offer, was

Africans without electricity must select “the right kinds of electricity[.]”

Because they have the same freedom of choice and the same level of wealth as those French sans-culottes.

In America you have a right to be stupid, indeed.

It’s Worse Than That

Seth Jones, President of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Defense and Security Department, is worried about our ability to deter war with the People’s Republic of China.

[M]y colleagues and I led members of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party in a simulation of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The goal was to understand how the US defense industrial base would perform in a protracted war with China and to assess the implications for deterrence. The results weren’t reassuring.
The simulation began with a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan in 2026. Both sides suffered heavy losses, but the US defense industrial base was severely stressed. The US military spent its entire inventory of Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles by the end of the first week and ran out of Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range missiles after a month.

Running out of critical ammunition in the middle of a war means we no longer even can fight that war. With the PRC well aware of that likelihood, Jones is correct that we’re losing our ability to deter the PRC.

It’s much worse than that, though, and it’s surprising that Jones didn’t take the next step in his analysis. Such a military strait means we’re losing our ability to defeat a PRC attack, and unlike Japan after its devastating attack on us at the outset of our participation in WWII, the PRC has the wherewithal and the will to follow up its initial attack(s), win outright the war—proximately over the Republic of China, but really a proxy war against us—and impose its will on us.

“Intractable Problem”

That’s how the news writers at The Wall Street Journal characterized Mexico’s drug and illegal alien trafficking (and sex trafficking, I add) cartel problem. Their lede:

President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to slap a 25% tariff on Mexico’s goods unless it stops fentanyl trafficking and illegal migration risks setting the trade partners on a collision course over an intractable challenge for both countries.

Set aside, for this post, the fact that it isn’t “illegal migration;” it’s illegal alien trafficking. Those folks ceased to be migrants the moment they entered Mexico illegally under Mexican law, and those who skipped Mexico enroute to illegally entering our nation ceased to be migrants at the moment of their illegal entry here.

The news writers added this:

Ahead of the new trade negotiations, Mexico’s greatest weakness has been its historic inability to confront the powerful drug gangs that control about a third of the country. Mexico has had success stopping immigration over the past year, but ending drug smuggling might be an impossible ask, in part because of strong demand in the US.

This is just silly. Mexico’s greatest weakness has not been its historic inability to confront the drug cartels; the greatest weakness is its conscious decision to not confront the drug and trafficking cartels, it’s timidity in taking on the cartels and destroying them.

Then there’s the writers’ victim-blaming sewage: it’s the addict’s fault that he’s addicted. True, no one stuck a gun in any American’s ear and forced him to take the drugs. Too often, too, the addiction results from taking seemingly innocuous drugs that have been laced with the addictor for the explicit purpose of creating the addiction and so the market. But once addicted, the only truly effective way to break the addiction and bring it under that individual’s control is through withdrawal—and that is achieved by cutting off the supply.

That brings me back to the cartels and the Mexican government’s decision to accept them as a fact of Mexican life and of Mexican governance power. It’s straightforward enough, although difficult, to reverse that decision. Cut off the supply by sealing Mexico’s northern border against the cartels and by blocking the importation of drug precursors (vis., from the People’s Republic of China), and by destroying the cartels and their drug labs.

The problem is not intractable; that’s just a chicken’s copout. Hard, certainly, very much so. But hard means possible. All that’s necessary is for the men and women of the Mexican government to have the courage and the integrity to end their collaborationist relationships with the cartels and lead an effective, and necessarily deadly for cartel membership, campaign against them. And to seal their southern border and their ports against “migrants” along with sealing their northern border with us, instead of holding the doors open for the continued flow of drugs and illegal aliens into our nation—doors held open at the behest of those so-favored cartels.

Certainly that’ll be expensive for the Mexican government to do, but it’ll only become even more expensive for Mexican citizens as the government lets the nation continue to sag into a failed, gang-run geographical area. That’s a terrible price for a government to choose to inflict on its people.