Truss’ Tax Cut “Fiasco”

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UK Prime Minister Liz Truss withdrew her plan to reduce the Brits’ top tax bracket from 45% on annual incomes above £150,000 (roughly $169,000) to 40% amid a panicky self-serving outcry from the liberal Labourites and too many entrenched pseudo-conservatives among the Tories. The rest of her tax reduction and energy subsidy package seems to remain intact.

In the scheme of things politics, though, it seems to me that withdrawing that top tier tax cut is a small price to pay in order to get the rest of the tax cuts to pass. And it may be (though I frankly doubt it) that Truss deliberately overbid her tax cut package in order to allow herself be talked down a little bit to get to a package that could pass after her concession but that could not pass had she made her bid from the jump without the cut from 45%.

Regardless, the biggest error, and one that no one in Socialist Great Britain is decrying, is that enormous energy subsidy to businesses and households, ostensibly to help them pay for skyrocketing energy costs. Sure, the subsidy is supposed to be sunsetted after two years, but most of us know how well sunsetting works with subsidies.

Instead, the subsidies will serve only to maintain the current sky high energy prices to the end users and to consumers in all economic strata, all of whom must buy food, and housing, and transportation—all of which depend on energy.

The smarter way to reduce those energy costs would have been to push further deregulation of British domestic fossil fuel energy production and delivery. Truss is moving to allow fracking to resume, but that’s only a start.

Another Reason…

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…to stop doing business with the People’s Republic of China—especially, stopping exporting American natural gas to that nation.

The Biden administration has been busily selling American, that is, domestically produced, liquified natural gas to the People’s Republic of China. LNG his administration sells there, mind you, isn’t LNG he can sell to the gas-strapped nations of Europe and Asia.

Selling energy to an enemy nation is bad enough, and it’s worse when those sales come in preference to sales of the same energy to our friends and allies.

The worst, though, is selling our energy to that enemy nation—the PRC—only to have that nation resell our energy to our friends and allies—the gas-strapped nations of Europe and Asia—at a steep profit for itself.

[PRC] companies that signed long-term contracts to buy US liquefied natural gas are selling the excess and making hundreds of millions of dollars per cargo. Buyers include Europe, Japan and South Korea.

For instance:

[The PRC]’s ENN Natural Gas Co is expected to profit from this trade when it sends the LNG tanker Diamond Gas Victoria to pick up a cargo of gas from Cheniere Energy Inc’s plant at Sabine Pass, LA, on the Gulf Coast on October 18, according to three industry sources.
Instead of dispatching the tanker to [the PRC]’s east coast, the vessel is scheduled to deliver LNG to Europe, they said. ENN is estimated to make a profit of between $110 million and $130 million on this one cargo shipment, analysts said, basing their calculations on market pricing data.

It’s true enough that the PRC’s resales to Europe and Asia are a drop in the ocean compared to those nations’ natural gas needs, but these are sales, and profits, that would be better done as a result of our directly selling our liquified natural gas to Europe and Asia, and at a lower cost, if only from cutting out the middle man. And from cutting out an enemy nation.

A Simple Enough Solution

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And straightforward, too.

Nike thinks it has supply chain and marketing problems with its shoe manufacturing.

Nike Inc’s quarterly results highlight how some US brands have too much inventory at home and in markets like China, where the companies have placed big financial bets.
The sneaker giant on Thursday said revenue from China in the August quarter fell 16% to $1.65 billion, citing Covid-19 lockdowns in different cities hurting store traffic.

The People’s Republic of China represented some 13% of sales and 29% of earnings for Nike in its quarter ending last August.

Nike offered a number of excuses for its problems, including the PRC’s Wuhan Virus-related lockdowns, a heat wave in the PRC that the PRC claimed affected energy production, and inflation.

These are, though, just excuses. Nike’s problem—and it’s a political and a moral one, also—is that it does business inside the PRC.

These problems wouldn’t exist if the company moved is manufacturing facilities out of the PRC. Neither Vietnam nor Japan nor Australia have lockdown or heat wave/energy problems affecting manufactury (Australia has made significant progress since its wind storm shut down its wind-power energy production in a western state a couple years ago).

Neither would Nike have a PRC-related inflation related problem with its PRC inventory or sales if it didn’t do business in the PRC.

Nike wouldn’t have any sort of supply chain problem, or delivery problem, were it to make its products in the US.

Nike would solve its political and moral problems (did company managers have the grace to recognize that these problems are real) if it had no business dealings of any sort with the PRC so long as that nation continues its genocidal behavior vis-à-vis the Uighurs.

Redrawing Districts

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The Supreme Court is hearing a case, Merrill v Milligan, that concerns whether Congressional districts will be drawn in accordance with census outcomes concerning the distribution of American citizens in a State, or whether they will (continue to) be drawn to favor race in a State.

Alabama, the State in question in Merrill, redrew its Congressional districts as a result of the 2020 census outcome and kept substantially the same districts with substantially the same population distributions as the prior district map, making tweaks at district boundaries to account for minor population moves. The plaintiffs in the case, though,

argue the map should be redrawn so that Alabama has two majority-Black districts instead of just one….

Alabama, on the other hand, is arguing

that should the lawsuit prevail, the state will be forced into an unconstitutional practice of prioritizing race in creating election rules….

Alabama also would be forced to violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which explicitly bars (re)districting on the basis of race. There is only one legitimately correct outcome to this case, and it favors Alabama. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has the right of it, having written in other venues that Section 2 of the VRA, the center of the present case, has

involved the federal courts, and indeed the Nation, in the enterprise of systematically dividing the country into electoral districts along racial lines—an enterprise of segregating the races into political homelands that amounts, in truth, to nothing short of a system of political apartheid.

Absolutely. Under law, all American citizens are equal. All American voters are the same: we’re Americans. There are no white Americans and black Americans and Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans—under law there are only American Americans.

Requiring us to be set apart by race in our interactions with our government is nothing but racism written into our laws. And that’s contrary to our Constitution, which is supreme over Congressional statutes like the VRA and its Section 2. Here’s the relevant clause of our 1st Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting…the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Voting is at the core of assembly, and it’s at the center of redressing our grievances with Government: it’s where we come together to fire those Government persons with whom we are most dissatisfied and to hire replacements for them.

It’s time for the Court to rule, decisively, in favor of drawing Congressional district boundaries according to the distribution of American voters, and to stop drawing them to favor one group of Americans while disfavoring other groups of Americans.

Based on What Evidence?

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Acting Archivist of the United States Debra Steidel Wall claims the National Archives hasn’t received all the presidential records that were supposed to be turned over at the end of the Trump administration. She wrote this to House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D, NY) in all seriousness:

While there is no easy way to establish absolute accountability, we do know that we do not have custody of everything we should[.]

And

Specifically, Mr. Ferriero informed you in his February 18, 2022, letter that NARA [National Archives & Records Administration] has identified that some White House staff conducted official business using non-official electronic messaging accounts that were not copied or forwarded into their official electronic messaging accounts, as required by section 2209 of the PRA [Presidential Records Act]. NARA has been able to obtain such records from a number of former officials and will continue to pursue the return of similar types of Presidential records from former officials.

Since Wall has succeeded in tracking down “missing” records of messaging accounts by tracking down the messages’ recipients, on what basis does she claim there are further such accounts—or is she simply…assuming?

In the end, if she doesn’t know, by her own statement, how does she know? Or is Wall just another Party acolyte making politically convenient allegations without any substantiation at all?

Wall’s letter can be read here.