Category Archives: ethics

Progressive-Democrat Controls over Individuals’ Lives

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Here are some of those controls that are buried deep within the bowels of the so-called infrastructure bill just rammed through the senate.

mandate for vehicle manufactures to install “drunk and impaired driving prevention technology” as a standard feature inside of new vehicles

Because all of us are simply too grindingly stupid to make our own decisions about drinking and driving. This is amply proven by the one or two among us who are so stupid, so we all must pay the price.

create a vehicle miles traveled system for taxing drivers based on their annual vehicle mileage is hidden away in the bill’s section 13002, entitled “National motor vehicle per-mile user fee pilot”

This also will create an opening for tracking where we go and who/what we visit in addition to tracking how we travel to get there.

grants select cabinet secretaries the authority to fully fund select infrastructure projects with taxpayer dollars by waiving cost-sharing rules

Just gimme the damned dollars and quit asking pesky questions. We Know Better. Never mind that the need for any of these dollars has yet to be established beyond yelling “Infrastructure,” as though that settles the science.

If these controls really were any good, and if average Americans really did take them seriously, Progressive-Democrats would offer them in separate stand-alone bills for public debate and scrutiny.

More important to the Progressive-Democrats, though, is that these policies vastly increase their surveillance state. Even waiving cost-sharing expands surveillance, since the Secretaries designated The Precious Ones will need to identify whose costs are going to be “saved” and who will be called upon to pick up the cost slack.

Tax Gaps

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And tax gaps.

Congressman Kevin Brady (R, TX) and Senator Mike Crapo (R, ID) are properly concerned about the gap between taxes collected by the IRS and taxes actually owed by Americans and our businesses.

Their concerns are entirely valid, but they’re secondary.

When asked where Brady would prioritize reforms within the IRS, he told FOX Business he would like to see the agency do better with the resources it has, including smarter auditing and better information gathering to target and win cases against taxpayers.
Secondly, he said he would like to see funds put toward customer service initiatives.

That’s all to the very important good. However, none of that will occur until a far more important reform, a far wider tax gap, is corrected: the replacement of all IRS bureaucrats, from IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig on down into middle management. Those bureaucrats think they’re a government unto themselves and not at all responsible to Congress or even the Executive Branch.

Look no further than Rettig’s own refusal to answer the questions Crapo has asked—

In a letter sent to Rettig in May, Crapo asked for clarification as to where the figure came from before Congress began making policy decisions based on it.
His office told FOX Business at the end of last month that it had still not gotten a satisfactory response….

—and to the behavior of Lois Lerner and the lack of action regarding her miscreancies.

That’s the tax gap that cries out for closing.

Rent Collections Moratorium

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Recall earlier this summer when the CDC’s interminable ban on landlords collecting the rent payments due them came before the Supreme Court.

Recall, further, the 5-4 ruling that upheld the ban, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh rationalizing his vote to uphold by saying that he’d be a fifth vote to bar the ban beyond the end of July—because the ban was due to expire then, anyway—absent Congress’ specific authorization by passing a law allowing a rent collection moratorium. He averred the CDC had no authority to issue a moratorium on its own authority.

Then the moratorium expired last weekend, and the House recessed with no action taken on the matter.

Now President Joe Biden (D) has instructed his CDC to figure out how to extend the moratorium, and the CDC has done so—into early October.

Biden and the CDC have played Kavanaugh for a chump.

It’ll be interesting to see what the Justice’s excuse will be this time for upholding the “moratorium” in the event the matter comes back to the Supreme Court.

“Voting System ‘Under Assault'”

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So says President Joe Biden (D). He also says protecting it was the “single most important thing to do.”

The single most important thing that we have to do is we have to protect the voting system, protect the sacred right to vote. It’s under assault in ways that I haven’t seen in my entire career.

He’s right.

That assault, however, comes directly from his own Party’s attempt to nationalize how elections are run in each of the several States—in deliberate, cynical contravention of what our Constitution says–and from Progressive-Democrats’ lies about what’s actually in the election reform laws.

Here’s Article I, Section 4, on the matter of who sets the rules for elections:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Chusing Senators.

The Congress cannot write its own laws regarding how States shall run elections in their jurisdictions. Congress can only modify State laws, and then only to ensure compliance with the rest of our Constitution, vis., our Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. Further, in order to modify a State law, that State law must exist. If Congress writes the Federal law, there will be no State law extant to be modified.

The other part of Biden’s and the Progressive-Democratic Party’s assault on our voting system rests on the fundamental dishonesty of their claims about what the States are doing.

Georgia, for instance, lengthened the weekend hours of early voting and added a Sunday to that early voting period. This is somehow suppressive of the vote, the Progressive-Democrats claim, and they want the expanded hours rescinded.

Georgia also legalized, standardized, and ensured the security of ballot drop boxes—drop boxes which did not exist prior to the Wuhan Virus-impacted 2020 election and whose creation for that election were illegal, having been created by the Georgia Secretary of State and not Georgia’s legislature. This legalizing and regularizing also, Progressive-Democrats dishonestly claim, are supposed to suppress voting, and they must be blocked.

Arizona’s proposed election reform laws would, among other things, prohibit mass mailing of absentee ballots, requiring instead each voter to explicitly request one, a move which would reduce the opportunity of fraud and enhance the safety of actually cast ballots. No, the Progressive-Democrats say; they want those fraud opportunities.

Progressive-Democrat lies about Texas’ moves are similarly broad. The proposed bills expand early voting hours, standardize procedures across counties, require the objectivity of some sort of voter ID with absentee ballots rather than the by-guess-and-by-golly of signature matching, and bar ballot harvesting. These improvements to vote integrity and ballot access are unacceptable to the Progressive-Democrats; they want here, too, their opportunity for fraud preserved.

And on top of all this, Texas’ House Progressive-Democrats, in the name of supporting the vote, have absconded from the legislature and departed the State explicitly to suppress voting on those bill proposals.

All of these expansions of voter access and of vote integrity are just Jim Crow on steroids, Biden says. Go figure.

Not a Bad Gig

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Who needs work when Uncle Sugar will take care of you?

Under emergency response legislation, the federal government expanded eligibility for unemployment benefits, extended the number of weeks, and gave bonuses to state unemployment benefits. The expansion will sunset in September, but congressional Democrats have pressed President Biden for an extension.

The current state of affairs according to a report by Alli Fick, a Senior Research Fellow with the Foundation for Government Accountability, is this:

An individual can receive nearly $3,700 a month—or more than $44,000 a year—by staying at home. On top of tax credits, food stamps, and state unemployment benefits, an individual can receive an additional $1,300 per month with the $300 weekly unemployment bonus.

It’s not a bad gig, and nearly anyone can get it. All courtesy of virtue-signaling politicians of both parties.

It can get worse, too. Progressive-Democrats are pushing the trap of free income—universal basic income.