Monthly Archives: August 2016

Another Reason This Election Matters

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I wrote earlier about what a Clinton Supreme Court would look like.  President Barack Obama (D) already has largely succeeded in fundamentally altering our judicial system, an outcome obscured by the high profile battles fought over Supreme Court and DC Circuit Court nominations.

Obama has already appointed 329 judges to lifetime jobs, more than one third of the judiciary, and they’re already moving American jurisprudence in Obama’s direction. He got two left-leaning women onto the Court: Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic justice, and Elena Kagan, his former solicitor general. He also flipped the partisan balance of the nation’s 13 courts of appeals; when he took office, only one had a majority of Democratic appointees, and now nine do.

That’s borne fruit, too.

His appointees have already taken the progressive side in cases involving issues like gay marriage and transgender bathroom choices, as well as cases involving his own health reforms and carbon regulations.

Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says she intends to go even further.

Elections have consequences.  And the last two at the Presidential level already have had.

Well, Yeah

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Here’s Gene Sperling, Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s economic advisor, on Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s tax proposal.

If you look at how [Trump’s] tax code has been judged, almost 90% went to the top 1%. What he has doubled down on is this ‘15% solution’. That means that not only will the biggest companies pay 15%, but everybody who has any type of pass-through income. More than half of the 400 richest people in the U.S. have pass-through income[.]

And

Anybody who has any kind of business income, whether you’re a consultant, a lobbyist, a hedge fund manager, investment banker, or corporate lawyer, you would now pay 15%, lower than most middle-income families. The largest multi-national companies that people think have paid too little would pay 15%.

Never mind that Warren Buffet already, proudly, pays only a bit more than those 15% (and while he demands that everyone like him should pay more, he refuses to make a donation to the Treasury—insisting that his views be imposed on those who disagree).  Never mind, either, that with our current gerrymandered tax code, folks like those 400 are driven to the breaks and deductions that lower the investment income portion of their tax bill.

Leaving aside Sperling’s politically motivated exaggeration about those 90%, here are some actual facts.

The top 1% of Americans in income pay nearly 47% of US income taxes—even after adjusting for capital gains and other investment-related income.

The top 20% pay roughly 84%% of US income taxes.

The bottom 50% pay roughly 4% of US income taxes.

It’s obvious to anyone with a 3rd grade lesson in arithmetic that any across-the-board cut in taxes—or even any cut that merely lowers tax rates without materially affecting the tax brackets—is going to yield a bigger dollar cut for the better off.  Sperling surely has at least that level of training in arithmetic.

The Left always demands that the rich should pay their fair share, but the Left always refuses to say what that fair share is.  Except per Sperling the Left insists, tacitly, that 47% or even 84% isn’t it.

Arrogance and Hypocrisy

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I’ve been writing about the mendacious press recently.  Here’s an example of its self-important arrogance via Howard Kurtz of Fox News, and it’s at least as destructive of our nation as is its dishonesty and hypocrisy.

Liberal investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald recently told Slate that “the US media is essentially 100% united, vehemently, against Trump, and preventing him from being elected president”….

And Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times:

If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.

Yet

balance has been on vacation since Mr Trump stepped onto his golden Trump Tower escalator last year to announce his candidacy.

But, as Kurtz pointed out, if that’s the opinion, then by all means write it.  But write as opinion, don’t masquerade it as fact.  The latter is not just intellectually dishonest, it’s purely dishonest, and it stems from the unqualified self-importance, and unearned importance, of these pseudo-journalists.

Full stop.

Employment

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Employers added 255,000 jobs last month while wages for private-sector workers matched their strongest annual pace of growth in seven years. More Americans joined the labor force, keeping the jobless rate steady at 4.9%.

That’s part of the best two months of hiring all year.  This is all good news, right?

Not so much.

The increase in the labor force participation rate was only a tenth of a point to 62.8%, still the lowest rate in 40-ish years—two generations.

Over the course of the year, GDP rose by all of 1%–another historically low rate, one that’s typical of our economic performance these last eight years of Democrat economic policies by abnormally low for GDP growth rates coming out of recessions over the last 70-ish years.

Businesses continue to cut their own investment, now for the third straight quarter.  That’s future growth, future employment, and future productivity growth—and future competitiveness—that won’t occur.

Don’t be fooled, either, by the week’s and the recent months’ rise in the stock market.  The stock market and our underlying economy are tied together, but the ties are very loose: either the market will fall back to the tepid level of our economy, or the economy will perk up, finally.  But neither can be expected to occur any time soon or with any accuracy in timing prediction.

Press Hypocrisy

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I wrote a short time ago about the press’ dishonesty.  Here’s an example of its hypocrisy, in the form of a Boston Globe op-ed.

Throughout the piece, the paper decried personal attacks against the Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Supporters of Donald Trump, recently joined by elements of Bernie Sanders’ supporters in Philadelphia, insisted that Clinton be “locked up[,]”

they wrote.

The paper also made its obligatory attack on Israeli politics by decrying personal attacks on Yitzhak Rabin…20 years ago.

[Protestors] called Rabin a murderer and depicted him in a Nazi uniform.

Then back on our Presidential campaign, came the BG‘s bleat,

As the final 100 days tick away, it’s important to appreciate the possible consequences of this type of toxic discourse.

That was their tie-in of those personal attacks on Rabin those 20 years ago—so they could insinuate (without the moral or intellectual courage to say so outright) that the assassination of Rabin was the result of those personal political attacks and to imply a similar threat against our current candidates.

The BG, though, carefully ignored the character assassinations the Left was inflicting on Republican Party Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, followed by the assassination attempt on him—also in an incident wholly unrelated to campaign character assassinations.

The BG piece, in its high dudgeon and regardless of any supposed actual assassination attempt today, also carefully ignored the steady drumbeat of character assassinations the Democrats have carried out against Republicans—and more generally, other groups of Americans of whom Democrats disapprove—over the last eight years.  For instance,

  • Democrats’ repeated accusations of Republican Congressmen as being unpatriotic
  • Democrats’ decrying police as acting stupidly
  • Democrats’ accusations of Republicans as terrorists
  • Democrats’ accusations of Republicans as hostage-takers
  • Democrats’ slur of conservative Americans as nothing more than bitter, gun-toting, Bible-clingers in flyover country
  • Democrats’ IRS attacks against conservative non-profit organizations

And, with a breathtaking lack of self-awareness, the BG piece closed with this:

[W]e may need to ask again and again, “Have you no sense of decency?” And then, insist on it.

Not caring a whit that the question was asked by Tennessee then-Senate Republican candidate Rand Paul in response to a slur by his Democratic Party opponent Jack Conway.

The Boston Globe‘s example, sadly, is all too typical of the modern hypocritical American…press.