Category Archives: politics

Corporate Taxes

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The US has one of, if not the, highest tax rate on businesses in the world, at 35%.  As a result, our internationally operating businesses book their profits in their overseas jurisdictions and leave those profits there.  This much is well known.

Republicans want to lower the corporate-tax rate and let companies bring future global profits home without paying US taxes on top of foreign taxes. They are searching for a way to do that without giving companies an incentive to move more operations and profits to countries with far lower taxes.

Or so they say.

Republicans seem to be moving toward gerrymandering our corporate tax law even further, with the claimed goal of encouraging our businesses to repatriate their overseas profits.

As part of that overhaul, Republicans want to exempt foreign corporate income from US taxes to a large extent.  …  The 35% rate would come down and the minimum rate would be set below the new U.S. corporate tax rate.

The rationale for such a “minimum tax?”

A minimum tax would act as a “safety net” against companies trying to pay little or no tax on some foreign income, said Ed Kleinbard, a tax law professor at the University of Southern California.

On the other hand,

The countries that use tax systems Republicans want to emulate allow their home companies to bring back cash with little or no tax. They use a variety of rules to prevent companies from seeking to pay less tax by moving operations or profits abroad, but generally don’t have minimum taxes on active foreign profits.

But this misses the point.

And

The original House GOP plan to address foreign profits and prevent erosion of the US corporate-tax base was border adjustment….

This misses a separate point.

The first point: lower our corporate tax rate to the lowest in the world.  The Trump administration’s proposal of a 15% rate or House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R, WI) proposal of 20% would come close to that (only Ireland’s 12.5% rate would remain lower).  Or eliminate corporate income taxes altogether, say I; a business’ tax bill is paid, in the large main, by the business’ customers anyway in the form of higher prices—and the final customer is the American consumer, who would benefit from lower prices.

Either of these would not only disincentivise our businesses from leaving their profits overseas, they would reverse the flow: foreign businesses would flock to set up shop in the US because of the tax advantages they’d obtain—the same advantages that currently encourage our businesses to set up “over there.”

The second point: it isn’t the government’s money; there is no legitimate “corporate-tax base” to erode.  There wouldn’t even be a drop in revenue to the Federal government: the ensuing flourishing economy would generate more revenue for the government than any revenue reduction from lowering or eliminating the corporate income tax.

And: it isn’t gerrymandering to simplify and lower the corporate tax rate, nor is it gerrymandering eliminate the tax rate altogether.  There isn’t any need to play games when so simple a solution is, or should be, so easily implemented.

Another Cynical Mueller Leak

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Special counsel Robert Mueller is examining what role, if any, former national security adviser Mike Flynn may have played in a private effort to obtain Hillary Clinton’s emails from Russian hackers, according to people familiar with the matter.

It’s becoming increasingly crystalline that, whatever purpose Special Counsel Robert Mueller has in his “investigation,” it’s a dishonest one.  That’s the only reason that occurs to me for his careful string of “leaks” to the public, of which this is only the latest.

Investigators working for Mr Mueller have been conducting interviews and collecting information as they seek to determine whether Mr Flynn was involved in Mr Smith’s effort, and if his son, Michael G Flynn, and the consulting firm Flynn Intel Group had a role, the people said.

There’s just no reason for these leaks to be occurring, and they could not be, in their number or in the length of the ongoing stream of them, without Mueller’s active approval.

And this especially potentially damaging leak:

US officials with knowledge of the intelligence said investigators also have examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr Flynn via an intermediary.

While it’s easy enough for thinking persons to speculate that such intelligence agency reports exist, the fact of their existence is likely classified.  While it’s easy enough, also, for thinking persons to draw conclusions of their own consistent with what these leaked intel reports appear to claim, the reports’ contents and conclusions, even in general terms, likely are classified, also.  How is this sort of information being leaked?  Why is Mueller allowing it?

Peter Carr, a spokesperson for the special counsel, declined to comment.

Of course he did.  If Mueller or any of his team spoke on the record, they’d be unable to release as much “information” regarding this ongoing investigation.

My New Book Is Out

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Titled A Conservative’s View of the Conduct of Just Wars, it’s available in Kindle format here.  It presents this Conservative’s view of the proper conduct of a just war: when it’s appropriate to join one, how it should be fought once joined (regardless of how or why it was joined), and importantly, what should be done with the nation that unjustly attacked.

Since St Augustine of Hippo’s exegeses of the early 5th century, Western thinkers have attempted to define Just War in their recognition that war is a part of the human condition. Through this, they hoped to limit the onset and scope of war and its damage to those innocently caught in it.

Many Just War theories center on the idea that human lives are God’s to take. Thus, war as a human endeavor begins inherently immoral and unjust, and it’s the war fighters’ responsibility to make the case that their war—this war, this time—is just and then to fight it justly.  My argument proceeds from that point.

Unfortunately, Just War arguments generally stop short of war’s true completion. The war is entered, it’s fought, it’s won or lost. But then…what? Just War theories until very recently haven’t asked that question, much less essayed an answer.

Is that all there is, though? Is a conflict over just because the enemy has been utterly defeated or a peace treaty signed? No, the conflict simply slides into a post-war recovery effort by the victor which may or may not include the loser.

In truth, peace by itself cannot be a just end of war; mere restoration of quietude is not a proper goal of victory. Nor can mere victory be the goal of war. True victory, victory in a just war must entail the restoration or creation of justice and freedom—of both, since neither can exist without the other.

Given justice in entering the war, the defender then must fight to a conclusion that not only redresses the wrong inflicted by the war’s attacker but also maximizes the probability that the aggressor will not—cannot—aggress again for a reasonably foreseeable future. Notice the implication: this requires the defender to fight to total, unconditioned victory.

This is an Example

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…what the Left wants to destroy; surprisingly, it from HuffPost.  The money excerpt is via Grim’s Hall.

Senator William Mahone was one of the most maligned political leaders in post-Civil War America. He was also one of the most capable. Compared to the Roman traitor Cataline (by Virginia Democrats), to Moses (by African American congressman John Mercer Langston), and to Napoleon (by himself), Mahone organized and led the most successful interracial political alliance in the post-emancipation South. Mahone’s Readjuster Party, an independent coalition of black and white Republicans and white Democrats that was named for its policy of downwardly “readjusting” Virginia’s state debt, governed the state from 1879 to 1883.

During this period, a Readjuster governor occupied the statehouse, two Readjusters represented Virginia in the United States Senate, and Readjusters represented six of Virginia’s ten congressional districts. Under Mahone’s leadership, his coalition controlled the state legislature and the courts, and held and distributed the state’s many coveted federal offices. A black-majority party, the Readjusters legitimated and promoted African American citizenship and political power by supporting black suffrage, office-holding, and jury service. To a degree previously unseen in Virginia, and unmatched anywhere else in the nineteenth-century South, the Readjusters became an institutional force for the protection and advancement of black rights and interests….

The Readjusters lost power in 1883 through a Democratic campaign of violence, electoral fraud, and appeals to white solidarity. While Democrats suppressed progressive politics in the state, other groups of elite white Virginians worked fast to eradicate the memory of Virginia’s experiment in interracial democracy.

All because Mahone also was a slaveholder, and oh, by the way, a secessionist.  Secessionist.  The Civil War was about the legitimacy of slavery, to be sure.  It was, though, also very much about States’ rights under the 10th Amendment, particularly the right to leave the Union, to go out from a government with which it no longer could agree in any material form.

This is a critical part of our history that has been very nearly purged from our schools and our national story by the Left; this is what the Left hopes to achieve by its drive to purge the Confederate flag and monuments to the South’s Civil War luminaries—good and bad—from the remainder of our history and our national story.

No mind.  Mahone’s slaveholder status must be the only consideration.  The good he did after the war for blacks—nearly all ex-slaves—and for his Virginia must be ignored.  That good doesn’t matter. Nor does the good done by those Evil Ones Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, even George Washington—they were slaveholders.  That they birthed a nation dedicated to all men being equal, the concept of self-rule by personally responsible citizens, even the freedom to engage in…purging…our national story just doesn’t matter.  That’s a trivium.

The VA Fails Again

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This time it’s the Marion, IL, Veterans Administration clinic.

In 1971 Kirby Williams went to Vietnam as a US Army draftee and worked as a finance clerk. In 2010 he went to a Veterans Affairs clinic in southern Illinois where a radiologist took a scan of his kidneys.

Unfortunately, the radiologist missed a 2- to 3-centimeter mass in one of his kidneys, and by last December that mass had grown to between 7 and 8 centimeters. Now the 66-year-old has, at most, two to five years to live.

Williams isn’t the only victim.

Within weeks…of starting at the VA [in March of 2016!], he [Dr L Anthony Leskosky, a board-certified radiologist] noticed patients previously diagnosed as healthy had radiology scans from years prior documenting grave conditions. These conditions, such as cancers, aortic aneurysms, bleeding ulcers and obstructions in their small bowel and colon—if left untreated—could cause patients tremendous pain or even premature death.

“In radiology, we compare current scans to old studies, so I was pulling up the last two years of the scans. That’s when I noticed the radiologists had called their previous exams ‘normal,’ but I would see a mass on the older scans, and then on my scan, I would see the mass had enlarged, and in some cases become a spreading cancer. Usually that is not survivable,” Leskosky said.

As many as four to five times a day, Leskosky said, he found serious errors in prior readings….

Leskosky whistleblew on this and too many other such incompetencies, and the VA’s answer was to fire him rather than correct the problem.

That’s damning enough, but read the whole article.

President Donald Trump touts improvements in the VA, and there have been some.  However, they’re too little, too small, and too late, and the VA’s destructiveness continues.  The Veterans Administration must be disbanded and its budget sent to our veterans as vouchers with which they can seek medical care with doctors of their choosing at medical facilities of their choosing.  And get actual treatment.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.