Author Archives: eehines

It Needn’t End the Investigations

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The lede amply summarizes the intrinsic dishonesty of the Biden family syndicate:

Joe Biden began his presidency with a series of lies about his son Hunter’s business dealings: the laptop was Russian disinformation, the family didn’t get China money, and the future president never consorted with influence-seeking associates.
And he is ending his tenure in the White House with a stunning broken pledge.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R, KY) seems to be giving up on the matter.

It’s unfortunate that, rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability

Now is not the time to quit, though, especially not now with Joe Biden’s penchant for lying laid so bare.

Even if there can be no criminal liability attached to any investigation outcomes, the investigations still need to run to prompt, thorough completions and their results published. Biden’s pardon—a President’s pardon—is constitutionally provided, but for limited purpose:

…Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

That leaves open the possibility of civil consequences.

At the very least, there would be accountability in the public’s eye via publicity-driven retribution for the Biden syndicate and for those Progressive-Democratic Party politicians who supported the syndicate or who participated in the several coverups.

The Cynicism of Mistake

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Some folks are lobbying President-elect Donald Trump (R) to trade importing Venezuelan oil for getting fewer Venezuelan illegal aliens across our southern border.

American oil executives and bond investors are urging President-elect Donald Trump to abandon his first-term policy of maximum pressure on Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and instead strike a deal: more oil for fewer migrants.

Their rationalization:

They say making a deal with Maduro would cut migration and help temper US energy prices.

This isn’t naïve, nor is it ignorant. These folks know better than that. This is their cynicism.

The deal won’t cut the flow of illegal aliens from Venezuela; no deal made with Maduro can be trusted. He’s already demonstrated his level of integrity with his repeated welching on his promises to his own people.

Nor is it necessary to import Venezuelan oil to temper US energy prices. We have plenty of oil, and natural gas and coal, with which to do that, and Trump’s moves to cut the excess out of the regulations limiting our domestic production is all that’s necessary.

There is this:

An agreement would also help check adversaries such as China and Russia.

Dealing with Maduro isn’t necessary for that, either, though. A more active foreign and trade policy involving Latin America as a whole (and involving Africa) would do that. American administrations of both parties just need to stop taking those to large, resource-rich parts of the planet for granted. Our enemies do not take them for granted, to our detriment.

“Pay Their Fair Share”

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Once again, I challenge all those Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, including but not limited to (in no particular order), Senator Elizabeth Warren (MA); soon-to-be-ex-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY); former Senator (DE), Vice President, and soon-to-be-former President Joe Biden; former Senator (CA) and soon-to-be-former Vice President Kamala Harris (D); Senator Martin Heinrich (NM); and Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury (NM) to identify, specifically, what is the fair share of income taxes that the rich should pay—hard dollar amount, or tax rate, or percent of income, or…. Cynically, all they’re willing to say is their feelz: pay up and pay more; it’s not “fair,” otherwise.

Here, though, in concrete terms, is the situation with that especially evil bunch of Americans, those in the top 1% of income-tax filers:

  • 22.4% of the country’s total reported earnings
  • share of income taxes paid 40.4%
  • average federal tax rate of 26.1%

Here is what the smaller people pay in the way of income taxes:

  • • bottom 10%: no taxes
  • second income decile: -4.8%–yes, negative, due to all the refundable tax credits they get
  • third income decile: 2.8%

Back to the top:

  • top decile—which includes those 1%-ers: 27%
  • especially evil top 0.1% earners: 33.5%

This graph shows the trend from 2001 to 2022:

Of course, those Party politicians know all of this; they being so much smarter than us poor, ignorant average Americans, and all. It’s a measure of their dishonesty and of their contempt for us that they foist their cynical class divisiveness on us. It’s also an indication of what their natural limit and purpose on taxing is: their limit is all of it from their definition of rich, who aren’t all that numerous; their purpose is to give it to enough of the rest of us to buy enough votes to stay in power.

It hasn’t worked yet, but the rest of us need to remain vigilant and active, lest the outcome of last month’s elections become just a one-off bump in Party’s march. A warning of that is given by the outcome in the House of Representatives elections, where not enough Progressive-Democrats were tossed.

Erroneous Analysis

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John Cogan, a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has one. In his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed regarding a suggestion for fiscal federalism in government spending—an otherwise sound idea for leaving State and local projects to be funded solely by the States and local jurisdictions doing the projects—he had this:

My analysis of federal budget data shows that the chronic federal budget deficits since the 1950s are due to the federal government’s failure to raise tax revenues required to finance its spending on state and local activities.

No. The chronic federal budget deficits have been caused by the Federal government nationalizing the spending on those State and local activities, not by any failure to raise taxes to pay for spending that ought not to have been done in the first place.

It’s not too late to go back to the restraints that federalism places on government spending, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that that federalism never should have been abandoned in the first place. That’s how we have a chance to learn the lessons of that error, rather than repeating it in future.

Let Them Eat Cake

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No, wait. That was somebody else. What John Kerry said, in his fevered update to an almost as out of touch queen’s offer, was

Africans without electricity must select “the right kinds of electricity[.]”

Because they have the same freedom of choice and the same level of wealth as those French sans-culottes.

In America you have a right to be stupid, indeed.