Tag Archives: politics

Misunderstanding

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It’s surprising that so many so-called journalists misunderstand, but it’s a widespread failure, and it includes too many economists, as well. For good or ill, there is a loophole in the 2018 tax law that’s providing windfalls for American companies.

The loophole is a mismatch of critical dates between that law’s Section 245A and Section 78. The former lets US companies bring home their foreign profits without paying US taxes, with an effective date of 1 January 2018; the latter was intended to prevent inappropriate tax breaks in the old international tax system, with an effective date of 31 December 2017. Those 24 hours are a loophole far beyond the size of a single day. Three companies, for instance, are claiming—and one has already won in court—tax refunds:

[Varian Medical Systems won its case for] $150 million in deductions. The electronics manufacturer Kyocera and the food distributor Sysco have similar court cases pending, each involving more than $100 million in deductions.

Others are putting together their own refund filings that, in their aggregate will be worth several tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars more.

The misunderstanding is not about the Congressional gridlock blocking reconciliation of those two dates, as the writer of the Wall Street Journal article went on about, even though she got it right in her lede.

That [loophole] is now allowing big companies to save tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that otherwise would have gone to the government.

The misunderstanding—an understanding which goes to the core of our tax system and its and its constitutionally mandated purpose—is this:

The Varian case highlights how gridlock in Congress can cost the public….

No. Leaving money in the hands of our private economy, or returning money to those hands, is not a cost to the public—we American citizens and our enterprises are that public—but a benefit to the public, to us. Leaving the money or refunding it does reduce the amount of money accruing to Government, but that also could be a benefit to the public by restricting the money available to government to misspend. That latter, though, puts the onus on us in the public to elect politicians who will honor that restriction by not borrowing to spend more than government takes in and by not raising taxes to match excess spending.

Then there’s this:

A recent ruling by the Supreme Court will put more emphasis on the literal text of laws….

Literal text of the laws: the text of a law is what Congress intended the law to say, else Congress would have passed a different law saying something different.

And that’s as it should be, since the American system of governance restricts legislation to Congress and judicial action to the limits of those laws’ text. Judge Emin Toro, writing in his ruling on the Varian case, was quite clear on this:

Congress “spoke clearly” when it selected the mismatched effective dates. “Appeals to policy and Congress’s overarching purpose cannot overcome these choices[.]”

Activist judges—and that’s the only kind that presumes to legislate from the bench, that presumes to Know Better than the rest of us what a law should be—are broadly held as Truth Sayers by the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party. These unelected representatives judges writing law rather than ruling within it are the bane of American liberty.

“Honest Mistake”

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That’s the claim Maryland’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Wes Moore is making about his false claim of have earned a Bronze Star which he put on his application for a White House fellowship 18 years ago. At 27 years old, when he made his claim, Moore was old enough to know better. Somewhat older when he was discharged, he was still old enough to know better.

Moore’s claimed sequence of events:

While serving overseas with the Army, I was encouraged to fill out an application for the White House Fellowship by my deputy brigade commander. In fact, he helped me edit it before I sent it in.
At the time, he had recommended me for the Bronze Star. He told me to include the Bronze Star award on my application after confirming with two other senior-level officers that they had also signed off on the commendation.

So far, no problem. He was acting on his commander’s suggestion based on the award being recommended.

However.

Moore said he was “disappointed to learn” that he hadn’t received the Bronze Star towards the end of his deployment.
“But I was ready to begin the next phase of my life, because the reward for service is never an award—it’s the opportunity to give back to your country. When I returned home, I was focused on helping my fellow veterans, a mission I continue to advance as governor,” he said.
“Still, I sincerely wish I had gone back to correct the note on my application. It was an honest mistake, and I regret not making that correction….”

That last is his lie, and it’s indicative of his stolen valor. He knew by the end of his deployment—his own words—that the recommendation for his being awarded the Bronze Star had been turned down. He knew, further, that medal recommendations often are turned down. His pious-sounding words of serving others being its own reward are given the lie by those words of his immediately following.

That level of military decoration is not something any service member forgets about. He chose to not bother to correct his fellowship application after he knew the recommendation for his Bronze Star had been turned down.

Moore knew better, and he knows better. It would have been easy enough to check at the end of his deployment—which he hadn’t needed to do; he already knew: his own words, again. At the very least, his DD214, which every serviceman is issued upon discharge or retirement, lists all the awards and decorations—medals—that the service member received. He chose not to correct his “error” until it became public.

Alongside Minnesota’s Progressive-Democrat Governor and Progressive-Democratic Party Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz’ stolen valor regarding his own lied-about retirement rank, this stolen valor behavior, this insult to our nation’s military personnel, both current and discharged/retired and those who’ve actually been in combat, been wounded or maimed, been killed defending our nation, is what Party does.

Kamala Harris’ Tax Policies

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And misallocation of those tax collections. Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris wants to raise taxes on Americans and our corporations by some $5 trillion over the next decade and cut other taxes by more than $4 trillion. Or so she claims, especially regarding the latter. The former can be taken as gospel; raising taxes, especially on those Evil Rich Americans, is what Party does.

Under her plan, taxes would go up sharply on some high-income households, and top marginal tax rates would reach their highest point since 1986. The wealthiest investors and company founders would encounter sizable s that they don’t face under current law.

That capital-gains tax bill is made the more sizable by her plan to tax capital gains that haven’t been realized—i.e., gains that don’t exist.

Her claim to not have any tax increases on households making under $400,000 is shown to be a sham promise by her decision to ignore the effect her corporate tax increase to 28% and her increase in the diktated [sic] minimum corporate tax to 21% would have on middle-income workers and shareholders. The impact includes that tax on phantom capital gains that Harris wants to impose on us middle class workers who own shares of companies in our own, however miniscule, portfolios.

Left unanswered, so far, is what Harris intends to do with those tax revenues. Her silence here stands against the backdrop of the Biden-Harris administration’s years long cuts, in real terms, to funding for our defense establishment, leaving us the weakest we’ve been in decades at the moment of greatest national security danger we’ve faced in decades.

This tax policy also is one of the reasons Harris floated her price controls proposal—to try to distract us from the policies she’s serious about slipping past, a squirrel maneuver which a compliant press is actively aiding her with its concentration on price control proposals while minimizing coverage of the rest of her ideas.

Parenting is Hazardous to One’s Health?

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That’s what the United States Surgeon General says. His solution?

[Surgeon General Vivek] Murthy prescribes a mix of institutional actions such as child income-tax credits and workplace management training on one hand, and individual action such as seeking more mindfulness and self-care on the other.

Sure. The typical progressive mix of throw money at the problem along with feel good self-care claptrap. Nothing about taking care of the children directly. Nothing about local community involvement, and no, I’m not talking about it taking a village nonsense. I’m talking about misdiagnosing the problem because the Progressive-Democrat Surgeon General bureaucrat possessed of a medical degree has missed the underlying problem altogether.

It’s not the powerlessness of parents, nor is it their loneliness; although, the latter does play a part.

Parents have nearly complete power over their children except in some jurisdictions where government asserts itself as the sole possessor of children, whether through public schools locking parents out of their children’s education or emotional problems or directly by locking parents out of the government’s decisions regarding children’s sexual health. “Nearly complete” because parental power does not extend to abusing children. That’s the short and simple of parental power.

Now, the loneliness aspect. The loneliness of parents isn’t from being a parent, it’s from lack of community in the local neighborhood. The folks in too many neighborhoods don’t interact with each other, so they don’t know each other, so they’re in no position to support each other. Yes, yes, both parents work in a double potful of those cases. So what?

I grew up in a household where both my parents worked. At the same time, I grew up in a neighborhood where most households had both parents working. In those days, though, there weren’t backyard fences for individual privacy in the neighborhood. Instead, all those backyards, and front yards, too, functionally ganged together as one large playground for the neighborhood kids to play together, sometimes with ad hoc games, sometimes with less informal games: croquet courts, football (yes, we played tackle), sometimes out into the streets for baseball. The noise of children having fun was loud and common, from toddlers more closely watched by the various parents through high schoolers playing those football and baseball games, and soccer today—and where basketball hoops were set up in driveways, those games, too.

The parents interacted among each other, too. They all knew each other, and they all looked after all the kids, emphasizing their own, to be sure, but all of them. They even had each other’s kids over for snacks or a dinner.

We’ve lost that capacity now, with those ubiquitous fences isolating the back yards, and the children and adults, from each other. We’ve lost that capacity now, too, with today’s adults—parents—more self-centered, me-time demanding, and less community oriented. Today’s neighborhoods are eerily silent of kids playing outdoors.

That sense of community is much harder to achieve in many inner city (and a growing number of outer city) neighborhoods, but that’s not the loss of community among parents and families, it’s the destruction of community through two mechanisms. One is the crime rate. Too many city, county, and State governments reduce, or leave already inadequate, funding for policing the neighborhoods and don’t prosecute criminals that the police do catch. Crime expansion makes the neighborhoods unsafe for parents or children to go outdoors, for adults interact, and for children play with each other.

Community: gangs fill a lot of that—children need their own sense of community, and gangs, however dysfunctionally or crime-oriented fill a lot of that. Those gangs are potentiated, too, by the lack of policing in the neighborhoods.

The other aspect is the lack of effort in or facilities for encouraging newly arrived immigrants to assimilate into American culture. Instead, the newly arrived immigrants hold themselves apart, keeping themselves and their children apart. And they become old immigrants, establishing themselves in their own small (or large) enclaves, into which further newly arrived immigrants of the same culture go to live, and to stay apart.

Lose the loneliness by tearing down those fences; throwing the kids outside to play, without their electronics; talking to the neighbors; get adequate numbers of beat cops in the neighborhoods; prosecute crimes—especially by the gang members. Take concrete, measurable steps to get immigrants assimilated rather than held apart.

Don’t Only Blame Gensler

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors have their panties in a twist over SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s imposing $393 million in fines on 26 companies that fail[ed] to track employee “off-channel” [personal] communications.

It’s certainly true that Gensler badly overstepped his bounds with those fines. The SEC, and no one in it, has any authority to surveil or to require surveillance of private company’s private employees’ personal communications. Gensler and his SEC should be swatted down—hard—in court for that excess.

However.

A major part of the blame for this overstep belongs on the management teams of those 26 companies. Those worthies demonstrated deeply disgusting cowardice when they meekly acceded to the fines. They’ve done a disservice to the companies of which they’re in charge, they’ve betrayed their shareholders, and they’re right next door to betraying the fiscal duties those managers have to their companies’ shareholders. Their meekness serves only to expose their companies to further government overreach, and it exposes their employees to further unwarranted (in both senses) surveillance by an overreaching government.

That betrayal vastly outweighs any financial “savings” from agreeing to pay the SEC fines…because it’s less costly than resisting in court. And it interferes with that necessary swatting-down, an interference that potentiates the likelihood of those future costs.