Category Archives: politics

It’s a Feature, Not a Defect

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In the race for Artificial Intelligence dominance—which isn’t necessarily existential, but it comes close—the US has a slight global lead, the People’s Republic of China is close behind, and the European Union is…not participating.

The EU Artificial Intelligence Act, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the Data Act, and the Cyber Resilience Act, among others, impose stringent and duplicative regulations that stifle innovation, drive up compliance costs, delay product launches, restrict access to data, and expose companies to billions in fines.
Before AI systems are even put on the market, the AI Act alone requires predeployment risk assessments and mitigation systems, high-quality data sets, detailed logs, documentation of system functionality, and human oversight.

All this is done in the name of what the EU thinks of as safety—protect the environment, transparency for the sake of transparency, protect the consumer from…something, protect…. It’s being done, too, with careful deliberation and full knowledge of the consequences, both of being right and of being wrong.

The EU has chosen, and it has long done so in a broad reach of milieus, what it views as safety over what it views as freedom—here, to innovate. As someone once more or less noted some years ago, those who choose safety at the expense of freedom will have neither. And from that, they will lose security.

This is the EU opting out of the contest, hoping that the winner will remember the EU with fondness and a willingness to share. Which is no security at all.

Taxes

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Progressive-Democrats’ limiting factors for Evil Rich’s fair share and for how high to raise taxes are converging to: all of it. Pay everything you have.

Here’s an enumeration of what they’re demanding currently, courtesy of the WSJ‘s editors:

  • California: Service Employees International Union affiliate is seeking to qualify a referendum for the November ballot to impose a 5% wealth tax on residents with more than $1 billion in net worth. This includes stocks, illiquid stakes in private companies, artwork, patents, and family trusts.
    The tax would even be levied on illusory assets. Silicon Valley investors who own super-voting shares in a company would be taxed on their voting rights, rather than the value of their shares. A startup founder could be required to pay tax on the 25% of voting rights he controls even if he only owns 5% of shares.
  • Washington: Democrats have passed a 9.9% income tax on millionaires, despite a state constitutional ban on a graduated income tax.
    [I]n 2022…Democrats enacted a 7% tax on capital gains exceeding $250,000…[l]ast year they raised the rate to 9.9% on capital gains over $1 million. Now they’re extending the 9.9% tax to all forms of income.
  • New York: Albany…Assembly wants to raise the top state-and-local income-tax rate to 15.9% from 14.8%, and the Senate to 15.3%. Democrats also want to raise the state top corporate tax rate and let New York City raise its rate. That would make the top business tax rate nearly 20% in New York City.
    New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani…wants to increase the estate tax to 50% from 16% and impose a two percentage-point city tax surcharge on incomes over $1 million. That would raise the top individual rate in the city to 16.8%. If Democrats in Albany don’t deliver, he’s threatening an across-the-board 9.5% property tax hike.
  • Rhode Island: [Progressive-]Democratic Governor Dan McKee is pushing a 3% surtax on income over $1 million, which would raise the state’s top rate to 8.99%.
  • Virginia: One bill would impose a 3.8% tax on investment income of taxpayers making more than $500,000, which would raise the top rate to 9.55%. Another bill would create two new individual top tax brackets of 8% (starting at $600,000) and 10% (more than $1 million).
  • Congress: Maryland [Progressive-Democrat] Senator Chris Van Hollen wants to add three new tax brackets on high earners, which would raise the top federal rate by 12 percentage points to 49%. New Jersey [Progressive-Democrat] Senator Cory Booker is proposing to raise the current 35% tax bracket (starting at $256,226 for individuals) to 41% and the 37% bracket ($640,601) to 43%.
    …
    This [also] is a gigantic tax increase on small businesses that pay taxes at the individual rate—$1.01 trillion over 10 years for the Booker proposal, according to the Tax Foundation.

This, and much more—dangerously more—is what we can look forward to when the Progressive-Democrats resume their reign over our republic.

How Onerous

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Florida, in addition to requiring in-state unions to hold periodic recertification elections, is about to enact a bill that would require at least 50% of the members of government unions to show up in person to vote, with a majority of those voting “aye” to achieve recertification. I can hear the union squalls here in Texas.

South Florida [Progressive-]Democratic Senator Shevrin Jones said the bill would be “unions’ nail in the coffin.” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said the bill is “designed to decimate our Florida locals and their contracts” because it “effectively forces” elections where “you have to turn out 50% of your entire bargaining unit or you lose your contract.”

50%! The horror. If it’s really that difficult to find that much union support—a quarter of the membership plus one—among its members, there’s a hint there regarding the utility of unions in the minds of their members.

Union managers should take this and run. The bills could have required a majority of union members to vote “aye” in a recertification election, rather than just that puny minority to get recertification.

Tradeoffs

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Wisconsin’s Republican Senator Ron Johnson wants the present Republican-majority Senate to do away with the filibuster altogether on the argument that the Democrats (read: Progressive-Democrats) are going to do that anyway when they return to power. On the latter part, Johnson is correct, and when the Progressive-Democrats do that, it’ll be the death of our republican democracy and the birth of the tyranny of popular democracy.

Johnson made this argument, though, and on this he is wrong.

I’ll admit that the 60-vote cloture threshold has prevented many bad bills from becoming law, and that without it bad bills would become law more easily. But it also prevents good bills from getting passed.

That’s an excellent tradeoff, Johnson’s worries notwithstanding. Passing bad bills is far more destructive to our nation’s economy and to our national security than is not passing good bills. The latter can be tried again in politically short order; the former will take years just to undo the damage.

A legislature that gets nothing at all done is a far more successful legislature than one that passes even one bad statute. As a man said earlier in our national history, that government is best which governs least.

Contra Johnson, the Senate should eschew abusing us with bad laws because Senators think they have to pass something—anything—in order to earn their pay votes. Keep the filibuster.

Gerrymandering

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Polls are increasingly showing that Americans oppose gerrymandering based on political partisanship; a Rasmussen poll illustrates.

Overall, 86% of likely US voters considered it a “problem” when states draw congressional district lines to favor one party over the other, including 61% who deemed it a “very serious problem.”

Americans hold that for good reason. Here’s what our Constitution has to say on Congressional representation:

Article I, Section 2: The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative….

There’s nothing in there about setting up districts according to political partisanship or for any other reason.

Additionally, here’s what the 14th Amendment says:

Article 1: No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

There’s nothing in there that authorizes a State to treat any of its citizens differently from any other of its citizens based on individual political holdings. That last clause makes the matter crystalline. Equal protection means exactly that. The Supreme Court has held as much, quite explicitly, in its speech and religion rulings. Congressional districts and the American privilege of voting are no different.

The only real way to stop gerrymandering is to divide a State into square districts of substantially equal populations, with district boundaries differing from straight lines only when the district abuts a neighboring State.

Some might argue, taking this argument a step further, that such strict district-drawing would favor urban area citizens over rural in terms of their collective power in government. That may be, but that isn’t the here and now; that’s a case better debated—politically, not in our courts—in two or three generations. Our courts aren’t in the business of speculation, only in adjudicating based on the text of our Constitution today.