Tag Archives: politics

Wise Up?

Posted on by
Reply

That’s what Holman Jenkins says our press needs to do regarding Russian propaganda. The headline and subhead give the gist of his plea:

Media Needs to Wise Up about Russian Propaganda
If the press wants to be an antidote and not a tool, take a closer look at the motives at work.

On what basis does Jenkins think our press isn’t already wise and doing the things which dismay him so much on purpose? He even closed is missive with this [emphasis added]:

In our new era of active disinformation, the deliberate propaganda efforts of, say, the US government, deliberately transmitted by an unanalytical domestic press, will have an almost infinitely larger effect on public attitudes than anonymous dribblings governments secrete on the internet via social-media posts.

Our press knows full well what it is doing; it is already wised up—its support for any disinformation that’s convenient to its own narrative is deep and broad. And that includes focusing on Vladimir Putin’s election interferences, such as they are, as distractions from our press’ own far more massive election interferences (to which Jenkins does grudgingly allude) with its spiking of inconvenient stories and pushing convenient ones.

A Couple of Questions

Posted on by
Reply

Former President and Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump says he wants to “once again turn America into the manufacturing superpower of the world,” and that a couple of the ways he’d achieve that would be to reduce the corporate tax rate to 15% for those companies that make their products in the US and by applying tariffs on foreign-made goods.

One question concerns how strictly he’d apply that tax break criterion—or how strictly Congress would allow him to. Would making their products in the US include or exclude companies who assemble their products in the US, but do so from components or subassemblies that are imported? If implemented in some form, would the exclusion include components or subassemblies that are made in USMCA members Mexico and Canada?

The subassembly bit especially would impact the several car companies that assemble their vehicles in the US, but these are far from the only companies that do that. Which brings up another question: what about those international companies headquartered in other nations but that assemble/manufacture in US factories products for sale in the US. Would the 15% tax apply to the US component of those businesses? To the whole foreign-domiciled company?

How would the tariffs apply to the components imported for final product assembly? How would the tariffs apply to those foreign-headquartered companies that bring in components for final assembly in the US and sale in the US?

Answers need not block either of the two proposals, but they do need to be worked out.

The Good and the Bad

Posted on by
Reply

Chevron Corporation wants to keep operating in Venezuela. That’s not an unalloyed good thing for the US, independently of what would be good or bad for Chevron. Neither is it an unalloyed bad thing for the US, independently of what would be good or bad for Chevron.

The long and the short of these are these. The bad for the US is that Chevron’s oil production, and presumably sales, would provide revenue that a Maduro regime badly needs.

The good thing for the US is that Chevron’s oil production and putative sales would serve as an important impediment, albeit not a barrier, to the People’s Republic of China moving in and exploiting that oil for its own purposes.

It’s the balance between the two that’s hard to gauge.

The Professors Have a Thought

Posted on by
Reply

Charles Silver, Civil Procedure Professor at University of Texas Austin’s School of Law, and David Hyman, Professor of Health Law & Policy at Georgetown Law, have an idea on how to improve Medicare, and it doesn’t even include cutting Medicare or raising taxes. Here’s their straightforward solution:

Rather than pay providers, Congress should give Medicare money directly to enrollees, as it does with Social Security. The government should deposit each enrollee’s subsidy into a health savings account, letting seniors decide what they need and how much they are willing to pay. By reducing the government’s role, this reform would eliminate most forms of healthcare fraud, waste, and abuse immediately, saving hundreds of billions of dollars.
The reform would also significantly improve healthcare. When patients pay for it directly—as they do for cosmetic surgery, Lasik, over-the-counter medications, and other elective procedures not covered by insurance—things work well.

Such a move likely would increase the number and range of doctors available to seniors, also. Large numbers of doctors, for a variety of reasons, currently won’t take patients who are on Medicare. Among those reasons are Medicare’s reimbursements to doctors being so low that many doctors lose money on Medicare patients, and Medicare’s slow rate of payments. With patients paying their doctors directly, albeit with Medicare dollars, those doctors would be paid promptly and wouldn’t have to worry about taking a loss on the appointment.

Letting people be responsible for their own decisions. What a concept.

The professors’ thought is a very good one.

He’s Being Generous

Posted on by
Reply

In Gerard Baker’s Wall Street Journal op-ed, he called out Gwen Walz, ex-teacher and wife of Progressive-Democratic Party Vice Presidential candidate, for her “teacher voice” instruction to Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance in telling him to “mind your own business” on the subject of Vance’s remarks about traditional families.

Baker correctly noted that, further into her be quiet “teaching,” Walz distorted Vance’s position by emphatically suggesting, with no evidence to support her distortion, that Vance opposed nontraditional means of making babies, for instance fertility treatments. Then Baker added this:

[I]t was the “teacher voice” remark that I found instructive.
It unintentionally captured the Democratic idea of the polity they seek to lead and reshape. It spoke to how they view themselves—and us. They are the teachers, equipped with the knowledge and authority to direct their hapless charges. We are the students, naive and ill-informed, sometimes attentive but too often insubordinate, with minds that need to be shaped and disciplined.

I’ll be more straightforward and blunt: this is the contempt in which Progressive-Democratic Party politicians and the Left hold us average Americans. It continues and extends the contempt one of the founders of the modern progressive movement had toward us. In Herb Croly’s own words:

…the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

It’s time to put an end to Party’s contempt for us, it’s time to put an end to Party’s attempt to rule over us, and the opportunity for that is this November.