Monthly Archives: December 2017

Bannon, the Republican Party, and Candidates

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Gerald Seib is on the right track in his piece in The Wall Street Journal, but he’s wide of the mark.

Tuesday’s Senate race in Alabama represented an attempt by the president and Mr [Steve] Bannon, his foremost political strategist, to show that they weren’t only in control of the party but could use their rebellious, antiestablishment message to drive their new version of the GOP to victory.

Yes and no.  No, because as Seib seems to have forgotten, President Donald Trump pushed for the temporary (and establishment) incumbent, Luther Strange, in the Republican primary because Strange was the candidate he thought would win the runoff.  Trump only late in the runoff openly backed Moore when if became apparent that Moore was going to lose to Jones.

He’s right about Bannon, though:

Mr Bannon’s pledge to field and fund nationalist, rabble-rousing Republicans to challenge a whole series of Republican senators up for re-election next year

That comment was about how much Republicans need worry about Bannon in the coming primaries and general elections, but that’s what Bannon has been doing all along: putting up rabble-rousers who fit his claimed brand of conservatism without regard to whether these persons actually could win a general election.

As with Roy Moore and the candidates he backed in last month’s Virginia contests, Bannon carefully chooses ideological purity, his purity, over electability.  Of course he knew what the results of that would be.  Bannon is doing the Progressive-Democratic Party’s dirty work; he’s not at all pushing for Conservatism in our Congress.

In the end, the thing hinges on practical politics, on what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) has said many times: it’s necessary to nominate candidates that actually can win elections.  If the candidate loses his election contest, it doesn’t matter how pure or impure his conservatism or his character.  He won’t have a voice in the legislature.  And neither will conservatism.

There’s an additional lesson here that the Republican Party and its candidates need to learn and act on, starting right damn now.  The Alabama runoff emphasized what the Progressive-Democratic Party did during last year’s general election and what they did sub rosa all through their guy’s Presidency: character assassination and smear works as a tactic.  With Jones’ win, the Republican Party needs to be ready to handle smears that will be generated against all of their candidates—every single one of them—in 2018 and 2020 and beyond.

Disappearing Insurance

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First it was health insurance, dysfunctional as it was, being replaced by the health coverage plan welfare program known as Obamacare.  Now auto insurance is under attack.

New York financial regulators have banned the use of education and occupation as factors in setting auto-insurance premiums….

Never mind that these are useful, if imperfect by themselves, correlates with driving skill and so of insurance risk. The companies accepting the risk transfer by selling a policy don’t get to know that information, they don’t get to assess the level of risk being accepted.  They can’t charge an accurate premium.  That hurts the driver as much or more than it does the insurer.

When insurers are not allowed to learn all the factors that go into the level of risk an insuree is seeking to transfer to an insurer, the policy being agreed ceases to be insurance.  New York’s auto “insurance” program isn’t yet approaching State welfare status, but it is ceasing to be insurance.

The Complexity of the Fed’s Interest Rate Angst

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A Wall Street Journal piece on how Amazon (and online comparison shopping in general) is making life difficult for the Federal Reserve had this remark early on:

Web-driven comparison shopping complicates Fed decisions on how much and how fast to raise interest rates.

No, it doesn’t. Only the bureaucrats at the Fed and reporters in the NLMSM think this is complicated. The Fed wants inflation stable at 2%. The Fed knows that interest rates—the cost of money—are inherently inflationary. The Fed knows what benchmark rates historically are consistent with 2% inflation.

The Fed should set its benchmark rates at those levels consistent with 2% inflation, and then it should sit down and be quiet. Neither its bureaucrats nor its inherently bureaucratic political appointees need to manufacture busywork by artificially complexifying a simple function in order to preserve their jobs. Reporters don’t need to complexify this matter, either; their interns can find lots of other things about which they can write.

Easy peasy.

Wrong or Incompetent?

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Howard Kurtz had a piece up this week decrying the NLMSM’s performance with its “reporting.”

With one blunder after another over the last 10 days, the press is on a losing streak that is starting to take a toll on its collective credibility.

In two cases of…error…the pseudo-reporters got dates critically wrong.  One involved a claim, confirmed by two other “news” outlets, that Donald Trump, Jr, had received a decryption key to some collusion-related, Wikileaks-held emails prior to their release.

But the collusion allegation collapsed when it turned out the email was actually sent 10 days later, when the hacked DNC material had already been made public.

Another outlet suspended its star reporter (notice that: they didn’t fire him) over another missed date.

His original report said Trump had ordered Mike Flynn to make contact with the Russians during the campaign, which suggests collusion. But Trump actually directed Flynn to do so during the transition, as president-elect, when such diplomatic outreach would be routine….

Both of those instances relied on carefully anonymous sources, and in both of those cases the imitation reporters knew through their own sources that those dates were at best suspect and likely wrong.

The press’ losing streak is “starting to take a toll on its collective credibility?”  No, the press has had no credibility for a very long time; the current losing streak is only corroborating that.

Kurtz’ problem in assessing all of this is that he’s a man who knows no other business than what passes for modern journalism.  He’s been steeped in an industry that used have a simple, fundamental requirement: that the use of anonymous sources had to have, in the same article, corroboration by at least two on-the-record sources.  Instead, Kurtz’ business has made the conscious decision to walk away from that standard and, instead, to rely solely on carefully unidentified, deliberately anonymous sources.  As a result, we readers cannot assess the reliability of the sources and so of the articles; we cannot even determine whether those sources exist or the claims made are just manufactured rumors.

Wrong or incompetent, Trump asks in one of his ubiquitous tweets.  I say dishonest.  And Kurtz, raised as he’s been in a whorehouse, knows no other and is unable to see either the amorality or the dishonesty of his fellow residents.

Of Course They Are

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Universities and businesses are objecting to losing the tax-exempt status of tuition assistance, tuition that the universities receive in exchange for pretending to educate our youth and that businesses provide as an employment perk.  The House version of the tax bills currently in the offing eliminates this exemption status.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co, Starbucks Corp, and others say offering tax-free tuition assistance makes it easier for them to keep and train employees.

Schools say they could lose thousands of students if the tuition program is taxed. The nation’s economic development would be stunted if employees shy away from pricey training programs, they say.

Both groups are being disingenuous.  If everyone loses the exemption, no business gains an advantage, and so there is no hit to competition in keeping and training employees.  The businesses just have to make their decisions in this arena based on what’s truly good for the business and not on what works based on Government involvement—those taxes.

The schools won’t lose much either, other than students for whom college isn’t the best choice, anyway.  If their training programs are pricey, too, well, the answer to that is both obvious and wholly within the purview and capability of the schools to effect.  The exemption of tuition assistance from taxation, after all, is nothing but a subsidy, and so it contributes to inflating the price (not the cost) of the programs involved.

Tuition assistance is income; of course it should be taxed, as should all income regardless of source.  The questions here are whether income will be taxed at a low rate—as it should be—and whether our tax code, including tuition assistance being exempt, should be used for social engineering—as it should not be.