Taxing the Rich

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Washington State is at it.

Washington state multibillionaires would pay a wealth tax under a proposal that got a public hearing before the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
Senate Bill 5426 would impose a 1% tax on intangible financial property such as stocks, and bonds, futures contracts, and publicly traded options. The first $1 billion of assessed wealth would be exempt from the tax, which “equals one percent multiplied by a resident’s taxable worldwide wealth.”

Leave aside questions of the legitimacy of taxing an American citizen’s foreign-held wealth, intangible or otherwise. The bill’s sponsor, State Senator Sam Hunt (D, Olympia) has given the larger game away.

This is a great attempt to bring fairness to our tax structure which is pretty upside down with the lower income paying 17% of their income in taxes and the upper 1% paying 1% or less[.]

That is pretty upside down.

Another solution would be to lower the tax rates on those with the lower income. However, that would involve lowering tax rates rather than increasing them, and lowering tax rates is completely inconceivable to Progressive-Democrats.

Update: Some have interpreted my “lower the tax rates on those with the lower income to mean lowering income tax rates. Washington has no income tax, only sales taxes (State and local), business taxes, and property taxes. Sales and property taxes are highly regressive and hit the lower income folks the hardest, the former directly through taking a far higher per centage of their income and the latter through driving up the cost of housing, whether owning or renting.

Lowering business taxes (eliminating them, I say) would foster job growth, which would benefit the lower- and no-income folks the most.

Government-Funded Pre-K Schooling

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Vanderbilt University has a longitudinal study of the effects of such a program on children’s academic success through the 6th grade.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University have been running a long-term study on Tennessee’s state pre-K program, following 2,990 low-income children. The program was oversubscribed, so researchers followed applicants who ended up in a program versus those who were turned away. This means all the children had parents motivated to sign them up for pre-K, which makes for a statistically appropriate control group.

The researchers found, in sum,

[C]hildren randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade.
…
A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention.

In a spate of academic integrity, the researchers also wrote,

…no distinctive characteristics of the Tennessee program have yet been identified that are a likely explanation for the disappointing findings.

The Wall Street Journal offered one possible explanation:

One theory worth a hearing is that these programs expose children to more rigid academic settings before it is developmentally appropriate.

I offer another possibility, one that is not at odds with the WSJ‘s. It may be that the parents of children who got into the Pre-K program, thinking their children’s future is secured, relaxed their close and constant oversight of their children’s schooling, performance, execution of homework, and so on relative to that of the parents whose children didn’t get in. That parental oversight and supervision also is a Critical Item in children’s academic performance, especially in those first years of school.

Either possibility, especially in combination with the study’s outcome, suggests that, particularly from the Federal level, government funding of grade school programs is at best a waste of taxpayer money.

The study itself can be found behind this paywall.

Ted Cruz is Correct

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Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) has decried the criteria by which President Joe Biden (D) says he’ll select his Supreme Court nominee. Biden has said that his primary criteria for his nominee are that she be black and that she be a woman. Any criterion resembling actual qualification for the office is far down his list, if one is on his list at all. Cruz began with this:

The far Left doesn’t care about the individual, they will pigeonhole you, & they will discriminate based on race.

He continued:

He’s [Biden is] saying to 94% of Americans, “I don’t give a damn about you. You are ineligible.” And he’s also saying, it’s actually an insult to black women[.] If you came and said, “I’m going to put the best jurist on the court” and he looked at a number of people and ended up nominating a black woman he could credibly say, “OK, I’m nominating the person who is most qualified.” He’s not even pretending to say that. He’s saying, “If you’re a white guy, tough luck. If you’re a white woman, tough luck. You don’t qualify.”

The Biden insult to which Cruz referred is Biden saying to women, to blacks, and especially in the present context, to black women and to black women jurists that he thinks they’re not independently capable. They need special handling from Government in order to advance. They need their Liberal White Savior to ride to their rescue.

Tokenism has no place anywhere in America. That includes having no place in our courts and particularly having no place on our Supreme Court.

Biden-Harris Administration’s Level of Preparedness for its Afghanistan Withdrawal

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How prepared was Biden-Harris? What is an outcome of that level of preparedness?

…a news outlet said it obtained leaked notes from the White House Situation Room that showed “just how unprepared” it was to evacuate Afghan nationals who assisted Americans during the conflict.

Per AXIOS, the news outlet in question:

  • Hours before the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan’s capital on August 15, 2021, senior Biden administration officials were still discussing and assigning basic actions involved in a mass civilian evacuation.
  • …they’d just decided they needed to notify local Afghan staff “to begin to register their interest in relocation to the United States….”
  • …they were still determining which countries could serve as transit points for evacuees.

Biden-Harris, though, is disputing all of that. The Spokesperson for his National Security Council, Emily Horne, insists,

While we’re not going to comment on leaked internal documents, cherry-picked notes from one meeting do not reflect the months of work that were already underway[.]

Wow. I’m not sure I’d want to insist that the debacle of Biden-Harris’…departure…from Afghanistan was carried out in accordance with carefully developed, long-time prior planning.

If that’s the quality of Biden-Harris planning, it’s no wonder that Russian President Vladimir Putin is just weeks away from invading and conquering Ukraine, and People’s Republic of China’s President Xi Jinping isn’t far behind in his plan to invade and conquer the Republic of China. Those Presidents are playing chess while our President is playing Chutes and Ladders.

Lindsey Graham is Mistaken

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Senator Lindsey Graham (R, SC) is a supporter of President Joe Biden’s (D) Supreme Court nominee—so long as the selection is South Carolina US District Judge Michelle Childs. It’s typical for a Senator to support nominations for high office when those nominations come from the Senator’s State.

It’s also useful, all other things being equal, for Senators of either Party to support the nominations of a President of either party on the theory that a President should be able to have his own team in place (my argument here, not Graham’s).

Graham’s rationale, though, is badly mistaken, and the mistake of his rationale impacts that “team” concept, as well.

Graham supports Biden’s impending nomination of a black woman for Supreme Court Justice (which, in Biden’s own and often repeated terms, puts actual qualification for the Court deeply secondary, if that’s a consideration at all) centers on this:

Put me in the camp of making sure the court and other institutions look like America.

And, as paraphrased by Just the News:

Graham added that Republicans have made a “real effort” to “recruit women and people of color to make the party look more like America.”

Looking like America, though, is a political matter. Political questions are entirely appropriate for political parties, political questions are entirely appropriate to the political branches of our government, where we American citizens can, and do, choose who will represent us—achieving tautologically a representation reflective of America.

However, it is not the role or purpose of our courts, epitomized by our Supreme Court, to “look like America.” Our courts—most especially our Supreme Court, which is the court of last resort for most cases—must reflect, must act within, must apply as they are written, the clauses of our Constitution, our Constitution as a whole, and the statutes before them in specific cases. Looking like America is irrelevant to that duty.

Nor are our courts—most especially the Supreme Court—part of the President’s team. Our courts consist of judges and Justices possessed of lifetime appointments. That’s by design, explicitly to inure those folks from politics, per se, to separate them from, among other things, this or that political team.

What looks like America, from the independent courts’ perspective, already is embodied in our Constitution and its clauses and in those statutes. It would be wrong for our courts to attempt to adjust that perspective, and it would be wrong for politicians to attempt to alter the courts so as to adjust that perspective.