Category Archives: politics

Quick Thought on Tax Reform

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The Progressive-Democrats won a majority in the House, and the Republicans look like they’re going to expand their majority in the Senate.  That looks like legislative paralysis in the next Congress.

However.

The next Congress won’t be sworn in until 3 January 2019.  That gives two months for the present Congress, with Republican majorities in both houses, to get some remaining stuff done.

Top on that list in my august view is tax reform.  This Congress needs to move to make permanent the individual income tax cuts that otherwise will expire in 2025.  Get it done now, before the Progressive-Democrats, with their gridlock, take sufficient office to block the reform.

A Government Personnel Shakeup

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This one in the Republic of Korea.  RoK President Moon Jae-in has removed many of his economic cabinet members because the RoK’s economy has continued to stagnate.

So far, the government’s prescribed medicine—big increases in public-sector hiring and the minimum wage—hasn’t proved an elixir.

What a surprise—government crowding out the private sector, competing with the private sector for labor, demanding that workers be paid more than their work is worth isn’t economically stimulative.

Unfortunately, Moon is only changing personnel; he’s not correcting policy. Here’s Lee Sang-jae, Eugene Investment & Securities macroeconomy analyst:

Mr Moon’s policy will stay on course and hardly change, just with a second line of its original architects at the helm[.]

Jail Works

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Liberal shenanigans in New York during the week before this week’s midterm elections:

Laura Ebert, an economics professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz, was charged with misdemeanor larceny for stealing signs supporting Republican candidates….

She’s making excuses and spinning her misbehavior.

Ebert said she was caught in a moment of weakness and high emotion and meant no harm to McGovern nor did she know she lived there.
“I have family I love that support Trump, so I was after the sign, not the person.  I have apologized and feel bad, but clearly the GOP is putting a big deal [of] spin on this.”

Caught up in the emotion of the moment?  Republicans are doing the spinning?  This is typical Liberal excuse making and blame shifting.  This woman is a professor at a college.  She’s a highly intelligent, well-educated, fully rational woman; she knew full well what she was doing at the time she did it.  She knew what she was doing when she formulated her plan and stopped her pickup to do the theft.

She apologized.  Nonsense; her words are empty rhetoric.  She spoke from the heart at the time she did her stealing.  Her “apology,” now, is solely because she’s in trouble and hoping to get out of it. Will she argue at her court date next week that had Willie Sutton only apologized, he should have been excused?

This looks like a Class A misdemeanor under New York law, for which the maximum penalty is a $1,000 fine and a year in jail.  That works, for someone as talented and rational as a college professor, a woman who plainly knows better.

CNN Strikes Again

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That’s fairly literal, this time.  CNN‘s “star” reporter on the White House beat, Jim Acosta, struck a White House intern who was trying to do her job.  Since then, CNN has denied—and it’s actually serious about it—that the strike ever occurred.

“She [White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders] provided fraudulent accusations and cited an incident that never happened,” CNN said.

The blow was delivered during a presser President Donald Trump was holding and near the end of a contentious exchange between Trump and Acosta.  During such pressers and as a normal part of presser procedure, reporters wishing to ask questions are called on by the President and handed a microphone so that the President, all the other reporters in the room, and especially all of us in TV-land watching can hear the reporter’s question.  The intern, as was her job, had approached Acosta to take the microphone that had been handed him on being called on so that, his turn having ended, she could pass it to the next reporter, that person having just been called on.

Acosta refused to give up the microphone, and when the intern tried to grab it anyway, he chopped down on her arm with his free hand.  That’s clear in the video Fox News has included in its piece (the link above) on the incident.  The intern’s approach and Acosta’s hitting her begins at about 0:22 of the video.

That video clearly shows Acosta striking the intern as she tried to do her job. Not a hard blow, certainly, but Acosta striking the woman at all is unacceptable. Bad as that is, though, CNN‘s pride in and open lie about Acosta’s misbehavior is worse—CNN seems to be validating its reporters getting physical with anyone who gets in their way, including others trying to do their job.