Author Archives: eehines

The Second Best Way

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors have a way to get us average Americans to save more for our retirements, proposed at the end of its worry (justified) about unintended consequences associated with President Donald Trump’s (R) retirement saving program for our lowest income citizens.

The best way to get Americans to save more for retirement is by bringing down inflation and growing real wages.

The second best way, though, and one with more immediate effect, is to eliminate the contribution caps on our existing retirement programs–401(k), Traditional IRA, and Roth IRA. These are purely arbitrary limits with no fiscal meaning. They were set in order to get Progressive-Democrat buy-in and so actual passage. The limits were demanded by Party in order to cap the more successful and deny them the retirement capacity their greater success otherwise would have facilitated.

It’s time to be done with that.

Removing American Troops from Germany

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President Donald Trump (R) has said that he’s going to withdraw 5,000 American soldiers from Germany and that he’s contemplating withdrawing many more. Those many more include, potentially, troops stationed in Spain and Italy. Progressive-Democrats and too many Republicans are upset over the move, but they’re both premature and too narrow in their focus.

The withdrawal itself is no big deal from a US security perspective. What matters is where Trump puts the troops he’s going to withdraw. It would be a net gain in security for us and for (eastern) Europe were those troops taken out of Germany (and Spain and Italy) redeployed into Poland and the Baltic States. Other useful redeployment locaitons would include Slovakia, Hungary, or (back into) Romania, even Moldova.

On the other hand, pulling them back to the US would be a serious mistake.

Couldn’t Possibly Be

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It seems that more than 3 million folks once getting “Federal food aid” have stopped getting that aid. This is due, primarily, to tighter work requirement restrictions:

Under the new rules, able-bodied adults aged 18 to 64 without children under 14 must work, volunteer or participate in approved job-training programs for at least 80 hours a month. The previous age limit for work requirements was 54, and allowed exemptions for adults with children under 18.

Naturally, the Left is engaging in its manufactured angst over this.

Colleen Heflin, a professor at Syracuse University who studies food insecurity, said larger state drops like Arizona’s were “beyond anything we’ve ever seen.” Heflin said she was concerned it would result in vulnerable Americans not getting enough to eat.
“These large state drops in SNAP caseloads represent a fundamental restructuring of the food-assistance safety net,” she said. “We should expect to see a surge in food insecurity and its related negative consequences at new levels.”

Of course. The large drop couldn’t possibly be an indication of the bloat in the program and the number of ineligible folks taking the aid “beyond anything we’ve ever seen.”

And there’s Bruce Meyer, a University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy Professor, who accidentally let that cat out of the Leftists’ bag:

Most of the people who are getting food stamps are needy. When you’re cutting that many people, you’re probably cutting into some people who really do need the benefits.

It certainly should be “most,” and it should be far more than just that. Only cutting “some” who really need the benefits is a strong indicator of the amount of bloat that’s been present.

The Rogue United Nations

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opened their Friday editorial with this:

[Y]ou can always count on the United Nations to rehabilitate a rogue. So it did on Monday by granting the Islamic Republic [of Iran] a leadership role at a conference on nuclear nonproliferation.
You can’t make this up, and with the UN you never need to.

 The leadership role?

The global body chose Iran as one of the 34 vice presidents to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

I’ll elide the idiocy of a committee so large and so bloated with feel-good title inflation as to have 34(!) vice presidents.

The larger matter is this. While the editors are correct to characterize Iran as a rogue nation, they’ve missed the beam in their own eye: the UN is, itself, a rogue entity, no longer serving to work toward/preserve peace and comity among nations as it was—however naively—created to do. Instead, it routinely gives high level voice to the very kind of political entities it was intended to corral.

In the end, the only reason to continue the expense of providing facilities in New York City for the UN’s headquarters is the wisdom of the old adage of keeping one’s enemies closer.

Louisiana Primary Elections

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Louisiana’s Republican Governor Jeff Landry has canceled the State’s upcoming primary elections in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v Callais, which struck down Louisiana’s Congressional district map as unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered. A Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Congress, Lindsay Garcia, and voter Eugene Collins (whose presence appears to be nothing more than a device to give Garcia standing to sue) has sued to stop the cancelation.

They also called on refraining “from disenfranchising any qualified Louisiana voter or de-listing any qualified candidate in any contest on the May 16, 2026 or June 27, 2026 ballot.”
“It cannot conduct a primary under a remedial map that does not yet exist, in a remedial proceeding that has not yet begun, before a court that does not yet have jurisdiction,” the suit reads.

Far more importantly, though, the State cannot conduct a primary under a map that is unconstitutional and so unusable. No voter is disenfranchised by canceling the present elections; they would, however, be wholly disenfranchised by their voting based on an illegal district map. Nor are any existing candidates delisted, except by being left to campaign in an illegally drawn district via an erroneously listed ballot.

None of the candidates of any of the parties know, at present, who their constituents are, and even more important, none of Louisiana’s voters know, today, who their prospective Representatives might be. The ones cannot campaign effectively, and the others cannot vote effectively.

It’s necessary that the State’s primary elections be held in abeyance until a usable district map is put in place. Once the new map is in place, all of the existing candidates, along with any new candidates who might appear, will remain eligible and listed on the ballots—just on the correct ballots. All of the voters will know the legal district in which they’ll vote, and they’ll know who their prospective Representatives will be.

The Progressive-Democrat’s suit is without merit and should be dismissed promptly as the apparen stall effort that it is.