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.

New Trick for Old Dogs

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The old dogs being, in this case, old(er) jet engines and more-or-less purpose-built jet engines.

There is a move afoot to convert commercial aircraft jet engines to produce electricity for AI-centered data centers. The conversion is relatively straightforward: replacing the fuel nozzles to utilize natural gas instead of jet fuel, and replacing the large fan on the front of the flight engine with a much smaller fan that is better suited for power generation.

FTAI has said it expects to be able to deliver about 100 turbines, or 2.5 gigawatts, a year. Boom Supersonic said its goal is to have 4GW of manufacturing capacity or more annually by 2030.

If jet engines can do this—and they can—they also can be used, or ganged together to be used, as electricity generators for localized needs other than AI centers in much the same way small modular reactors are planned for localized electricity needs.

One GW is enough electricity to power a city with a population of 1.8 million people. That works out to enough electricity for towns of 18,000 for each of FTAI’s turbines. They’ll gang together and scale for this, just as they will for AI centers, and just as SMRs will for either purpose.

Mistaken Emphasis

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A letter-writer from the Hudson Institute in The Wall Street Journal‘s Monday Letters section tried to make a case for Europe’s ability to defend itself against a Russian invasion based on Ukraine’s capability.

Despite Russian air superiority and numerical advantages, Ukrainian forces and local volunteers slowed, halted, and ultimately rolled back Russia’s assault on the capital. They did so because they were fighting for national survival, and, in many cases, defending their homes and families as the Russians advanced.

They did so, also, because Ukrainians, individually and as a population, didn’t hesitate to enter a stout defense–The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride. As the letter-writer misconstrued the wargame exercise, Germany did hesitate in the wargame, with fatal effects on the attempted defense against the Russian invasion.

Furthermore, that part about fighting for national survival as well as defending individuals’ homes and families does not obtain in Germany or France. Far too many of those nations’ citizens—including their younger generations and members (of all ages) of their major political parties—would rather not fight even to defend their nation.

Next, much of the reason Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine failed, despite apparent superiority in numbers and equipment, was its mistaken assumption that the invasion would be a walkover. Russia has learned the lesson of that failure, and it won’t underestimate the level of resistance capability of its next target, whether Germany’s and France’s reluctant citizens or the Baltics’ and Poland’s willing but small populations.

And this: the runup to WWI in the aftermath of an Archduke’s assassination was one of a race to mobilize and to achieve a mobilization level conducive to successful attack vs a level conducive to deterrence or to defeat of an attack. In that race, both sides proceeded from substantially equal baselines of military capability and mobilization ability. In the realization, the race ended in a substantial tie, and the German invasion of France, after initial gains of the sort that nearly always accrue to the first aggressor, was brought to a standstill.

That substantial mobilization capability equality does not obtain in today’s Europe.

Russia already has combat-hardened (even if of uncertain quality) troops, a war materiel production capacity already in place and growing, and force buildups occurring, low-key, in Belorussia and in Kaliningrad. The Baltic States and Poland, stipulate arguendo, have similar per capita capacities, but they’re already maxed out due to their small populations and limited, even operating at maximum output, industrial capacity. Behind those front line nations, though, Germany has no serious troop establishment and it cannot even field a combat-ready brigade of armor. Its industrial capacity is not capable of producing materiel in war deterring, much less fighting, much less at mobilizing rates before 2030. Italy and France are little better off.

In a mobilization race today, Russia wins. And that, coupled with the incapacity for defense that even the most dedicated nations have, means Russia wins the war, too.

An Idiotic Move

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It turns out that Hennepin County, MN, has some 3,000 persons on its registered voter rolls that are missing key identifying data, such as birthdates, names and addresses. Many of those incomplete records suggest a registered voter age of more than 100 years including many with birth years listed as 1900. According to Alpha News, though, that bogus birth year was just a placeholder, since Minnesota law did not require a birth date before 1983.

That’s just idiotic, though. It would have been simple enough to set the “placeholder” year to 1962, so those voters, for good or ill, could be adjudged old enough to vote, and then year by year to walk that placeholder year forward until 1983 and then freeze the placeholder to that year.

Even better, when that 1983 law required birth dates and the fields (month-day-year) created in the voter registration database, it would have been simple to fill in the birth date fields associated with the year 1900 with NA and then send requests to those voters for their birth dates—and then remove altogether those voters who did not respond within some reasonable period of time, say three months.

Whether 1900 was chosen out of laziness, incompetence, or an overt effort to masquerade the ineligible as eligible is anyone’s guess.

Leftist School Districts Child Abuse

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When the Supreme Court ruled in Mahoud et al v Taylor et al, that schools may not prevent parents, via any means at all, from opting their children out of school events, including lessons, involving LGBTQ-related themes, here are Leftist-run schools and their Progressive-Democrat politicians deliberately ignoring that ruling and denying parents precisely that option.

  • Suburban Boston’s Lexington Public Schools refused to show parents curricula in advance while demanding they identify specific lessons for opting out, and claimed books that simply promote “tolerance” are exempt, according to a “Catch-22” lawsuit.
  • California Attorney General Rob Bonta [D] convinced a federal appeals court [the activist judge-dominated 9th Circuit] that forcing school districts to actively mislead parents about their children’s gender identity was not covered by Mahmoud at all because it doesn’t involve “curricular decisions.”
  • Colorado’s Cherry Creek School District…us[ed] an old standby—lunch with a teacher—to discuss LGBTQ themes without parental approval.

It’s true that the Supreme Court ruling is a temporary injunction pending final adjudication of the underlying case as that case makes its way through the courts; however, it remains in effect, and from that it is the law of the land.

This is the lawlessness of the Left overlying their insistent child abuse with “sex” lessons far beyond their years and deliberately outside the children’s parents’ rights and obligations.