Author Archives: eehines

A Thought on SALT Deductions

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New York Republican Congressman John Tamny had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal early last week in which he advocated enthusiastically for raising the ceiling on the deduction of State and Local Taxes from Federal income taxes. That deduction currently is capped at $10,000, and Tamny worries that that works a hardship on his constituents, since despite their high incomes, those folks aren’t really all that rich. New York’s high taxes and prices already work to reduce those folks’ relative wealth.

A WSJ reader responded in WSJ‘s Sunday Letters section.

The five New York Republicans in Congress take a page from the Democratic playbook to defend changing the SALT cap (Letters, Aug. 15), “especially since New York continues to be a donor state, paying more in federal taxes than it receives from Washington.”
When did that become the objective? They make it sound like the role of the federal government is to redistribute all funds in a fair and equitable manner. Sorry guys, we send our tax dollars to Washington to pay for essential services like national defense, not to have it parceled out again to the states in equal portions.

It’s true enough that Tamny and his fellow New York Republican Congressmen (all Congressmen, come to that) have to represent his—their—constituents first, and even as Federal Congressmen, our nation second. But as Federal Congressmen, they do have to represent all of us at some stage.

That tension makes the Congressional Tamnys’ collective and individual jobs hard, but if they wanted cushy jobs, they should have taken positions as mattress demonstrators.

That’s not all. Another Letter writer disagreed with Tamny in a different direction.

The New York lawmakers’ argument bears considerable similarities to Mayor Eric Adams’s demands for federal assistance to take care of the illegal immigrants his city invited. Talk about moral hazard. Both amount to pleas from politicians for federal relief from the consequences of their own state or local governments’ policies and, as such, should be summarily denied.

What the letter writers said is spot on, and their words carry national, and moral, weight.

Inflation

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The learned Emeritus Profess (Roanoke College) Robert Stauffer, in his Sunday letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section objects to the inclusion of “owner equivalent rent” (OER) in standard inflation measures on the grounds that “real” inflation is much lower than it’s represented to be, and this exclusion would make the measures more reasonable. (Oh, and no one pays that rent anyway.)

Stauffer’s beef is irrelevant.

Stauffer worries about OER, but he studiously ignores energy and food, whose inflation numbers are excised from those standard measures to leave so-called core inflation on the rationalization that food and energy pricing is so volatile.

However, real consumers, us ordinary Americans, pay actual dollars for that food and energy, and the prices we pay keep on going up, however variably from time to time, and those price increases, smoothed over a few periods, remain higher than “core” inflation, and especially so regarding Stauffer’s “corrected” inflation.

“GOP Presidential Candidates Need to Talk About China”

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That’s the headline of Congressman Mike Gallagher’s (R, WI) op-ed in Monday’s Wall Street Journal concerning today’s Republican Presidential Primary debate among the eight candidates who qualified for the show.

I agree, although I disagree with the depth of his emphasis on the People’s Republic of China—Vladimir Putin’s barbaric Russia is nearly as great a threat as is the PRC, much more proximately so, geographically, vis-à-vis Europe, and through them in terms of global power, to us. Notwithstanding, the PRC is a more proximate threat against us, and against our friends and allies elsewhere around the Pacific.

I do have a couple of other caveats, though, particularly in connection with what GOP Presidential Candidates need to talk about.

First, what the candidates talk about on any particular debate will be heavily driven by what the debates’ moderators ask them. In past debate fora, each debate has centered on one or two specific subjects, and this season’s sequence should be no different. I anticipate debates centered on our economy, our border, and on foreign policy. There will be other debates on other subjects, too; although when the field is winnowed to just a few candidates (less than five, perhaps), I’d like to see our economy and foreign policy revisited for more in-depth questioning and debate responses. I’m not holding my breath on the latter, though.

The other caveat is on those discussions of foreign policy. The moderators will ask their questions, but the candidates should speak with great specificity—what would each one do in concrete, measurable terms (no generalities), and why would each do those things in particular (again, no generalities)—regarding Russia and the PRC, not only the PRC. And each candidate should show the courage, and the speaking skill, to talk through the moderators’ interruptions, ignoring the moderators when they do that.

Of course, none of that prevents the candidates from talking about the PRC in any venue outside an RNC debate, also. They will, though, still be operating within the need to remain focused, and in any particular speech talk only about one or two (maybe three) major points regarding the PRC.

Republican candidates, and the Republican ultimately nominated, do to talk, firmly, about a number of other subjects, also, outside any debate venue: the state of our economy with its high and rising interest rates and still high overall inflation, the high and rising food and energy costs to American consumers, the Progressive-Democratic Party’s naked war on our hydrocarbon energy production and resulting dependence on foreign sources, our chaotic (to the extent it exists anymore at all) southern border.

When the candidates talk about “the swamp” and about runaway regulation, they need to talk in specific terms how they well eliminate specific members and agencies of the swamp and how, specifically, they’ll reduce the number of regulations—and which ones they’ll eliminate. And how hard they’ll push for legislation, rather than an Executive Order, to achieve something like an earlier EO requiring for every regulation an agency or Department proposes, it must remove and rescind two existing regulations.

A Military Exercise

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The United States, Japan, and Australia are conducting joint naval exercises in the South China Sea this week. The core of the flotilla conducting the exercise is the American aircraft carrier USS America, Japan’s helicopter carrier JS Izumo, and Australia’s helicopter carrier HMAS Canberra.

President Joe Biden (D) had a joint statement released from Camp David, where the leaders of US, Japan, and the Republic of Korea were meeting last week that said, in part,

We strongly oppose any unilateral attempts to change the status quo in the waters of the Indo-Pacific. In particular, we steadfastly oppose the militarization of reclaimed features; the dangerous use of coast guard and maritime militia vessels; and coercive activities. In addition, we are concerned about illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. We reiterate our firm commitment to international law, including the freedom of navigation and overflight, as reflected in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

It’s about time we’re conducting joint exercises in the South China Sea.

It’s also time to do more: conduct frequent—weekly, perhaps—combat ship sailings, along with civilian commercial sailings, through the Taiwan Strait, and sail combat flotillas as close in as navigably safe and militarily secure as possible to the South China Sea islands that the PRC has seized and militarized. Conduct routine combat aircraft low overflight of those islands. Provide naval escort to the Philippine resupply missions to the Philippines’ establishment at the Second Thomas Shoal.

It would be useful, too, to get the RoK and the Republic of the Philippines involved in such naval exercise, along with Vietnam.

There also needs to be joint air and land exercises on the island of Taiwan and the Japanese chain of small islands stretching away to the east from northeastern Taiwan (and naval anti-landing exercises on those small islands). These exercises should involve American, the Republic of China, Japanese, RoK, and Australian forces.

Firing a Teacher

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A Cobb County Georgia elementary school teacher was terminated by the school’s school board for reading a book centered on gender identity to her fifth-grade students. The book feature[d] a nonbinary character and challenge[d] the concept that there are only two genders. Such books are barred from elementary school instruction under Georgia’s Divisive Concepts Law that prohibits teachers from using controversial topics in their instruction. The school district also argued that the teacher, with her reading, violated three district policies.

The firing came after an investigative three-person tribunal had sided with the teacher, recommending that she keep her job. Of course, the teacher and her lawyer are crying politics over the firing. The lawyer, Craig Goodmark:

The board came in, and in an act of what can only be construed an act of politics over policy fired [the teacher].

Oh, wait. Even with recommending her retention,

the tribunal decided that she violated just two of the three policies the district says she broke.

Well, that’s all right, then. Two violations are OK; we’ll think about three violations.

No, it seems to this poor, dumb Texan that it was the tribunal that’s playing politics.