Author Archives: eehines

Trump and Ukraine

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President Donald Trump (R) says he’s “not happy” with Russian President Vladimir Putin following the latest telecon between the two. Even, I don’t think he’s looking to stop his war. NSS.

Mr Putin added an exclamation point by hitting Kyiv with one of the biggest drone and missile attacks of the war the same night as his conversation with Mr Trump.

Putin has followed prior telecons with Trump with heavy drone and missile attacks against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure and residences.

Even so, Trump continues to dither regarding serious responses to Putin’s barbarism.

One possibility is that Trump is giving Putin every diplomatic opportunity to call off his barbaric invasion and war against Ukraine before Trump takes concrete action in Ukraine’s favor: serious sanctions against Russia and those persons, businesses, and nations that do business of any sort with Russia, coupled with unfettered arms deliveries to Ukraine in the amounts and times the UA says they need them.

That time is long past, though; Putin has responded militarily overtly negatively to those opportunities. It’s time to act.

The WSJ editors closed their piece with this:

Mr Putin thinks he can make President Trump look plaintive and weak, and then get away with it as Russia swallows Ukraine. If the Russian is right, much of the US deterrence benefit of the Iran strike will vanish.

That misstates the case. If Putin succeeds, all of our deterrence will disappear. And more: we’ll be actively inviting further moves by our enemies.

Yet More Disingenuousity

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This time, it’s at the State level of education. As usual, the sham bellyaching comes from the Left. In a Just the News piece regarding the slowdown in dismantling the US Department of Education related to DoEd wins in a variety of education and court milieus, we got this from Leslie Babinski, Research Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience in Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy:

We’re looking at 7.4 million students with disabilities who could potentially be impacted by changes with funding through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act[.]
There are 9.8 million students in rural schools who depend on federal support for bridge funding in communities with more limited local tax bases.

This is hysteria hyping in education. Funding needn’t be impacted at all by anything DoEd does, including being disbanded altogether. That includes those rural school students. Education is, by design and overwhelmingly correctly so, local. The Federal government has no business being involved except at a top level—through Title IX’s protection of girls and women in sports and the elimination of DEI bigotry from school curricula.

Local means local, and the top of local in our federal construction is the States. Students with disabilities need extra funding, no doubt, and rural schools with limited local tax funds available also need extra funding. That funding, though, should—must—come from the States. They have no excuse for leaning on [in both sense of that phrase] the Federal government for those tax dollars remitted to the Federal government from other States. States need to do—and all they need to do, regardless of how hard State government politicians think it is politically—is to reallocate their existing spending to better treat their own schools.

That folks like Babinski don’t think of things like this is why politically oriented experts who are not actual politicians cannot be taken seriously.

Politicians in the Federal and State governments, on the other hand, who claim that State level spending reallocations are too hard to do are doing nothing more than holding our children hostage against those politicians’ personal spending wishes. That’s as disgusting as it is immoral.

Environmentalists and Technology

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TL;DR, environmentalists don’t like technological improvements that don’t meet their climate funding industry’s approval. Typical of this is their objection to AI-centered data centers and those facilities’ demand for electricity. Especially typical is their hue and cry over the newly hated-by-the Left Elon Musk’s entry into the business with his Grok AI data center.

The facility [built in Memphis, TN] is partially powered by dozens of small natural-gas turbines—most of which are temporary. A relentless environmentalist campaign erupted, accusing the facility of polluting the skies over predominantly black neighborhoods. The city responded by conducting air quality tests, which showed no dangerous levels of pollutants.

The climatistas reject those test results because they refute—not merely contradict—the climatistas’ claims.

Denial isn’t a river in Egypt, but it does rhyme with climatistas’ dismissal of inconvenient truths.

Right On

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Cliff Asness and Michael Mendelson, of AQR Capital Management, wrote in the Saturday Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section decrying Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s statement that we “shouldn’t have billionaires.”

The money part of their letter, though, is their closer:

We are tempted to end by saying, with considerably more evidence than Mr Mamdani, that “we shouldn’t have socialists.” The country would be better off without such noxious and destructive ideas. But unlike him, we know we don’t get to decide who exists and who doesn’t.

Right on.

An Outline was Passed

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The House-Senate reconciliation bill has been passed. The bill contains a number of beneficial things and a number of suboptimal things, along with a couple of items that are no good at all (vis., a cut in real dollars on defense spending and an increase in deficit spending and so in national debt of highly dubious estimates, both in size and sign).

So now what?

President Donald Trump (R) offered to use his executive authority to limit spending beyond what’s in the Senate version of the bill, which is what the House passed last Thursday.

In the meetings, Russ Vought, Trump’s White House budget chief, also reassured lawmakers that the administration would use its authority to limit spending, according to people familiar with the conversations. Trump and his advisers have argued that Trump has the authority to refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress, a contention likely to be tested in court.

That’s nice, even if the courts uphold the specific actions (or most of them) Trump might take. At best though, these would be temporary measures, easily undone by a subsequent President.

Now what, then, are the 12 appropriations bills that the current crop of House Republicans have been promising to pass individually and on time for a couple of Congresses. The outline reconciliation bill represents ceilings on spending and tax rates, not floors, even though the Progressive-Democrats will howl that the levels are floors and so spending and tax rates still should go up.

The 12 appropriations bills are

  • Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies appropriations bill
  • Defense appropriations bill
  • Homeland Security appropriations bill
  • State Department and Foreign Operations appropriations bill
  • Interior and Environment appropriations bill
  • Legislative Branch appropriations bill
  • Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies appropriations bill
  • Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies appropriations bill
  • Energy and Water Development appropriations bill
  • Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies appropriations bill
  • Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies appropriations bill
  • Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill

These are where real spending and tax rate reductions (not formally part of appropriations, but easily enough included by amendment) can—and must this time—occur. Military construction needs to be focused on facilities for housing our soldiers and on bases—new or modified—for housing more of our weapons systems and for our new weapons systems as they come on line. The VA needs no spending increases, it even could stand spending cuts. I’ve argued for its elimination altogether, and this would be a good time to do that.

State, with its more focused foreign aid spending and more tightly controlled embassies and consulates, can absorb reduced spending. After that, all of the appropriations bills, save Defense and Homeland Security, should get 10% cuts in spending across the board. Defense needs, badly, a 10% increase in real terms, and Homeland Security, given the success of the Trump administration—so far—in resecuring our borders, needs a 5% (vice Defense’s 10%) increase.

With all of that, Congress—the House especially—would have some choices to make, any of which would be to the benefit of our nation: statutorily require the vast bulk of the resulting budget surplus go specifically to Treasury to pay down our national debt, further reduce individual and corporate income tax rates and make permanent the existing temporary tax reductions, or some combination of the two.

Congressmen in both houses need now to focus the energy they spent arguing over spending and tax rate maneuvers in the runup to passing the reconciliation bill on achieving real cuts in spending and tax rates via the appropriations bills. And they need to quit dithering about it this time. Pass the bills individually and on time—no more omnibus bills, no more continuing resolutions. Achievement of this would make arguing over the debt ceiling irrelevant by making the debt ceiling itself irrelevant.

Trump could exercise his executive authority in real, proven terms: announce that he’ll veto any omnibus bills and any continuing resolution, even if it means Congress shuts down the Federal government with its failure to perform. And then do so if Congress actually does fail and cause a shutdown.