Monthly Archives: November 2016

Tax Cuts and Deficits

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal had a piece earlier in the week that focused on Republicans’ dismay over President-Elect Donald Trump’s tax cut plans, his infrastructure spending plans, and the deficits that would seem to result from the two.

However.

Once again, the pundit takes tax cuts (and individual spending items) in isolation. Of course, he knows better: broad spending cuts must accompany tax cuts—and isolated spending items—even dynamically, in order to achieve budget surpluses and so reductions in our debt.

The last two times Republicans reclaimed the White House from Democrats—in 1981 and 2001—they also successfully pushed for large tax cuts. Deficits nonetheless rose during their administrations.

This happened because both times Republicans accepted Democrat promises to support spending cuts “later,” and both times Democrats welched on their promises. Since Democrats cannot be trusted, the Republicans this time around will have to cut taxes and spending while arranging spending increases on particular items without Democrat “help.”  And they have the numbers to do that, including without Democrat involvement at all, since all those worthies are interested in is their knee-jerk obstruction of all things not Democrat.

There’s Speculation and There’s Speculation

Posted on by
Reply

Kansas has a law that requires voters to prove they’re citizens—and so eligible to vote—before they’re allowed actually to vote.  A Federal trial judge issued an injunction barring enforcement of the law, and the 10th Circuit Appeals Court upheld the injunction.

After Kansas had shown that in a single county,

eleven noncitizens successfully registered to vote; and after it went into effect another fourteen were prevented from registering. These 25 cases are just the tip of the iceberg in Sedgwick County[,]

Judge Jerome Holmes, for the 10th Circuit, wrote

[W]e reject as based on conjecture Secretary Kobach’s invitation to consider as “just the tip of the iceberg” the twenty-five cases in Sedgwick County of aliens registering or attempting to register. The assertion that the “number of aliens on the voter rolls is likely to be in the hundreds, if not thousands” is pure speculation….

On the other side of the equation is the near certainty that without the preliminary injunction over 18,000 US citizens in Kansas will be disenfranchised for purposes of the 2016 federal elections….

Never mind that Holmes’ near certainty is pure speculation.  (I won’t go into the fact that folks wishing to vote in an election being run by a State also must be citizens of that State in order to be eligible to vote, not merely mythically generalized “US citizens”—a fact the 10th Circuit should be embarrassed that Holmes appears not to know.)

Nonsense

Posted on by
Reply

The Left never seems to run out of it.  This time their foolishness runs to their disapproval of the No Shave November campaign for calling attention to male health questions ranging from prostate cancer to men’s suicide rates.  They object because…well, just because.

Next they’ll be claiming that focusing on men’s health is heteronormative male chauvinism and exclusionary.

Oh, wait—they already are.  Seb Starcevic, of the Sydney Daily Telegraph:

It’s disappointing that what could’ve served as a much-needed dialogue about the many ways in which men, trans men included, can express their masculinity without resorting to chauvinist caricatures is in danger of devolving into at best a pissing contest between bros about who can grow the most facial hair to prove their manliness and at worst an implicit endorsement of 1950s-style gender norms, complete with transphobia.

And Jacob Brogan and Christina Cauterucci in Slate:

Above all else, Movember [No Shave November—yeah, I know] irritates me because it’s not so much about cancer awareness as it is about masculinity awareness. It starts from the assumption that men are somehow uniquely imperiled—threatened by all these horrible diseases….

Of course, there’s nothing at all unique about prostate cancer—women, too, are starting to be victimized by an epidemic of it….

Nah.  Charity, support for less fortunate, cannot be done in any way but that in which these Precious Ones personally approve.

All they’re capable of thinking about is themselves.

I Disagree, Mildly

Posted on by
Reply

…with Walter Russell Mead, who wrote of Fidel Castro’s death in American Interest.

In some ways, Fidel has to be accounted a success.  …  He wanted to assert Cuban independence of the United States; Cuba not only sided with the USSR in the Cold War, but it intervened against US interests in wars in Angola, Ethiopia and the Middle East.

That’s not independence, though.  Castro tied Cuba irrevocably to the US by basing his actions on their relation to the US’ activities, as those examples illustrate.  Indeed, by being a “symbol of resistance to US power and to capitalist order,” he cemented Cuba’s dependency: he did not create Cuba as a symbol of anything related to Cuban independent behavior—a Cuban model of socialism, for instance, or a Cuban font of socialist revolution support, as Che Guevara made himself (not his own movement) into.

On the contrary, Castro demonstrated his long-term failure, as Mead showed in the rest of his article.  Castro’s only success was in his ability to impose and then maintain his rank and rancorous dictatorship for as long as he did.  And even in this he had American aid at critical moments, from Jack Kennedy’s waffling over invading Cuba during a nascent Castro…administration…to Barack Obama’s open support for the Castro regime in the latter stages of both administrations.

The Courts Get Another One Right

Posted on by
Reply

This case involves how much Federal control over land deeded by the Feds to a State the Feds retain when they make the deed.  In the particular case, the Feds, ‘way back in 1949, deeded land to Ohio (in particular, the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District) subject to the criteria that the land had to be used for flood control, conservation, and recreation.  Lately, Ohio began allowing fracking under the land.

“Environmentalists” objected and sued to try to force the land back into Federal hands.  The relevant Federal district court dismissed the suit, and it wound up in the Sixth Circuit.  The Sixth waived the BS Flag at the suit.  Although much of the Court’s ruling was based on a technicality (the suit was brought as a violation of the False Claims Act perpetrated by Ohio for allowing the fracking; the Court demurred), there is another reason to applaud the outcome.

In ruling that there was no violation of the FCA, the Court also said in part,

neither the relators’ [the “environmentalists”] complaint nor their proposed amended complaint includes facts that show how MWCD would have known that the fracking leases violated the deed restrictions or how MWCD “act[ed] in deliberate ignorance” or in “reckless disregard” of that fact.

Indeed, fracking occurs well underground and so well away from any activities related to flood control, conservation, and recreation, which are surface or near-surface activities.  Thus, since fracking does not interfere with or otherwise impact such activities, it cannot violate deed restrictions that involve strictly those activities.

This was just a naked attempt by these relators to prevent us from getting cheap energy out of the deep earth cheaply.

The Sixth Circuit’s ruling can be seen here.

 

h/t Institute for Justice