Category Archives: politics

The Left’s Mantra

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And I offer an equally oft-repeated alternative.

The Left wants to ever more heavily tax the rich, and their Progressive-Democratic Party politicians can’t conceive of any taxing or spending alternative. Conservatives want to lower taxes and cut government spending. A current example of the former is playing out in California.

Federal cuts to the state’s Medicaid program will leave its health system short of billions of dollars. A California healthcare union wants an emergency, one-time 5% levy on the wealth of any resident worth over $1 billion to plug the hole.

Those Federal cuts are a small and rare spending cut victory. Raising taxes on the rich (for those who truly think that 5% tax is a one-off, I might have some beachfront property north of Santa Fe that might interest you) is the only answer Progressive-Democrats and rent-seeking union managers can think of.

The Wall Street Journal‘s news writer is cut from the same cloth. She opened her piece with this:

The risk is that the US economy becomes increasingly dependent on a narrow group of very rich households, whose spending is tied to the performance of the stock market. This could mean the entire economy pays a steep price in the next market correction.

It’s inconceivable to the denizens of the Left that alternatives exist. There are two—closely intertwined—that come readily to mind. In no particular order, they are cutting tax rates and cutting government spending.

Don’t just willy-nilly do allegedly targeted tax cuts, instead, lower the tax rates on the bottom 80% of us tax payers to the level paid by the top 20%. An easy, but all too difficult politically, way to do this is simply to reform our tax code to charge a single low flat rate on all income regardless of source—a rate in the range of 10%-15% on the sum of an individual’s income from all sources. Of course, that would include the market value of stock options on the date of an award’s vesting and other such moves to transfer income from W-2 forms into other venues. That guarantees all of us are paying the same rates and it eliminates the news writer’s plaint: that claimed dependency of the government on tax revenue from the rich.

The other component of the intertwining is to reduce government spending. Exercise true fiscal discipline, and spend taxpayers’ money only on those things truly, critically needed; stop spending on the nice-to-have goodies.

A wealth gap will still exist, but that’s neither good nor bad in itself. The gap—especially under the more equitable tax regime—is, and would be, the result of differences in luck, work ethic, and innate talent. The increased economic mobility that would obtain also would have folks on the lower rungs moving up the economic ladder as their fortune, ethic, and talent have it, and folks on the upper rungs moving down as their fortune, ethic, and talent have it.

Trumpian Tariffs, Who Pays Them, And So What?

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The Federal Reserve now is saying that us Americans are paying 90% of the tariffs put in place by President Donald Trump (R).

In an analysis on the [Federal Reserve] bank’s website, four researchers write that last year “nearly 90 percent of the tariffs’ economic burden fell on US firms and consumers.”
They reach that conclusion by examining import data, to see whether foreign suppliers cut their prices in response to Mr Trump’s added tariff costs. Over the first eight months of 2025, “94 percent of the tariff incidence was borne by the US,” the analysis says, meaning “a 10 percent tariff caused only a 0.6 percentage point decline in foreign export prices.”

Say that’s accurate—and, frankly, I have no reason to dispute it—it seems that the tariffs’ impact on the prices us American consumers face has been effected already, that impact is minimal inflation, and that inflation seems to be coming under control. That’s the case even as individual items—furniture, for instance—do seem to have ongoing price increases that are more closely related to tariff rates.

Overall, that leaves other causes also impacting inflation at least as much, if not more, than tariffs: supply chains dependent on distant foreign nations with the attendant shipping costs, those shipping costs themselves dependent on container rates and fuel costs, and especially our dependency on critical items like rare earth ores and refined rare earths that are controlled by an enemy nation that already is squeezing our economy with greatly reduced and heavily controlled exports to us. Even those rising furniture prices are, in addition to tariffs, strongly impacted by Canadian charges for exporting timber to the US—which costs impact house construction costs as well as costs for the furniture to put into them.

Missed in the Discussion?

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The People’s Republic of China has a “national team” of investors who work at the government’s behest to maintain a measure of stability in the PRC’s stock market.

The group is known by market players as the “national team,” and it functions as a market stabilization fund. It has been a fixture in the Chinese stock market for more than a decade, usually buying exchange-traded funds, and was widely noted when it intervened to prop up prices during a 2015 crash. After Trump announced his “liberation day” tariffs in April 2025, triggering a global stock selloff, the national team stepped in to relieve the pain as a buyer of index funds.

On the other hand,

The CSI 300 benchmark, which tracks shares listed in both Shanghai and Shenzhen, has risen more than 20% over the past year, despite the April dip. Last month, trading volume across mainland Chinese stock exchanges reached a record high.
…
“Substantial yet well-paced selling by the national team is curbing—but not killing—the positive market momentum,” analysts at Morgan Stanley said in a note earlier this month.

Maybe this is the government doing a slow pump-and-dump, which is one way to make money (not legally in most western nations), maybe not. In any event, it’s also textbook investing: buy low and sell high. Either way, this is making a lot of money for the PRC government, which in turn provides serious money for subsidizing its cost of goods production and for offsetting the effects of foreign (mostly US) tariffs on PRC exports. More the former, most likely, since the PRC has been able to increase its exports to Europe and South America, to their economic dependency peril.

Pending Republican Failure

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And it’s from the same old story of Republican failure. The backdrop is this:

Job growth trounced expectations. The unemployment rate fell. Wages grew.

And inflation is down, those rising wages are catching up with inflated prices, our border is secure, eleven of twelve budget allocations passed, with only a Progressive-Democrat Party-blocked DHS bill remaining as Party pushes for another (partial, this time) of their government shutdowns.

President Donald Trump (R) is rightly touting all of these successes and more (even though he’d benefit from bragging less and focusing on those successes for our national weal more). Congressional Republicans and candidates for Congress, though, are failing miserably in their own communication responsibilities.

Some of the more nationally known Congressmen are on the national and cable talk show hustings, but it isn’t enough just for those few to give interview to network and cable news outlets.

There’s more to this than that, too. It’s an utter lack of understanding, swaddled as they are in their cloisters, of each of the Congressmen’s and candidates’ need especially to talk to—and with—their constituents in their districts, not just the few to the nation at large. In the case of Senators, whose constituents are State-wide, and it includes the need to talk to voters in Progressive-Democrat enclaves as well as to their own.

It’s also the need to be specific—no glittering generalities, no obfuscating or question-dodging speechifying. Republicans need to discuss the specifics of their policies and policy goals, and they need to explain to their constituents in concrete terms how their policies will help them in particular. No generalizing about national-level benefits. How their policies and goals would help their constituents with their grocery bills, fueling up their cars, reducing their utility bills in real terms. And then tie those real terms to the nominal costs that are what comes out of their constituents’ pocketbooks.

That, though, takes courage. Being specific would bring on a host of Leftist and Party criticism, as we’re already seeing with the objections to the newly House-passed SAVE Act, which would go a long way toward ensuring only American citizens could vote in American national elections. It would be easy enough to demonstrate the foolishness of those policy specifics criticisms, just as it would be easy enough to demonstrate not only the foolishness, but the outright racist nature, of Party’s objections to SAVE—if Republicans only had the necessary courage and the willingness to do the work.

The needed work: Republican Congressmen and candidates need to stop wasting time on national television and get out into their districts and into Progressive-Democratic Party candidates’ base areas and hold town halls and meet in diners and recreation centers directly with their constituents. They need to write op-eds in their districts’ local news outlets, give interviews on local television and radio stations.

Each of these Congressmen have Congressional staffs, and they have offices scattered around their districts; these staffers can assist them with getting the interviews, drafting their op-eds, etc. Candidates have fewer staff outlets, but they have some, and these could help. It isn’t enough to just throw up a policy statement or a news release on their respective Web sites and call it a day. Those are necessary, but stopping there is just lazy when it isn’t cowardice.

In the end, too, those moves will make it much easier for their staffers and volunteers as they mount their get-out-the-vote efforts, which is especially critical regarding low propensity voters and unenthusiastic Republican voters.

[W]inning candidates motivate base supporters to turn out in off-year elections. That’s no easy task for a GOP coalition that relies on infrequent voters and unreliable partisans.

If Republicans fail at these specifics, they’ll deserve to lose their elections. And our nation will lose badly.

Stop Wasting Time Talking

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This is about more than just dealing with Iran, although that’s the proximate subject.

The Pentagon has told a second aircraft carrier strike group to prepare to deploy to the Middle East as the US military readies for a potential attack on Iran, according to three US officials.
President Trump said Tuesday that he was weighing sending a second carrier to the Middle East to prepare for military action if negotiations with Iran failed. The order to deploy could be issued in a matter of hours, one of the officials said.

And

Trump said in a social-media post following the meeting that he preferred to make a deal with Iran.

That last could certainly lead to more harmonious outcomes than dealing sanction or kinetic outcomes, but the there is a more optimal way for achieving that harmony.

That better way is for President Donald Trump (R)—all Presidents in all dealings with enemy nations—to set a hard, nearby deadline for reaching agreement, upon which if no agreement is reached, kinetic options and/or hard sanctions would begin and on a large scale. Two things are important at this point, though: the deadline must be set to a timeframe that’s achievable and not used merely as an ultimatum, and if the deadline is reached with no agreement, the sanctions/kinetics must never be pinpricks but must immediately be large enough to force the outcome originally sought.

“Talks are making substantial progress” can certainly be an accurate claim, but they must never be an excuse to delay or to reset farther out in time the hard deadline for agreement.

The first time or two this is tested by an enemy nation should end in sanctions and kinetics, but after that, with the empirical evidence, other talks with other nations are much more likely to proceed apace and with no stalling by the other side, as is Iran’s diplomatic doctrine, which that nation is operating within today.