Let ’em Burn?

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That’s what Bill McGurn and some others think as Progressive-Democrat-run cities suffer increasing rioting and looting and chaos while those same Progressive-Democrat mayors increasingly vociferously object to Federal law enforcement personnel presence and actions.

Opening with

Because President Trump believes such [foreign] concerns aren’t America’s business, he has been reluctant to involve US troops abroad. So it’s surprising that he now appears eager to intervene in the mostly Democratic-run American cities that have been wracked by chaos, shootings and destruction in the weeks since George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police.

Then, near his close:

There’s no doubt the president has both the responsibility and the authority to protect federal property, which is what DHS is doing in Portland. But Mr Trump would do well to narrow his rhetoric to make clear any federal intervention will be for this purpose and this purpose only—unless cities specifically ask for federal assistance.

Let the cities burn. Let the innocent burn in them alongside the thugs.  Don’t exercise any initiative.

Trump may not be responsible for the welfare and safety of a metaphorical 25 million Iraqis (as Colin Powell once suggested to President Bush the Younger), but he is responsible for the welfare and safety of 330 million Americans—all of us.

That includes the innocents whose lives are being destroyed and businesses razed—literally and through denial of access to customers—by rioters and looters in cities where Progressive-Democrat mayors, with the full backing of their Progressive-Democrat governors, have abrogated their responsibilities for the welfare and safety of the residents of those cities, the citizens of those States.

It might, in the short term, feel good to let the cities burn freely without Federal intervention, but it would also burn millions of innocent Americans, all to make a political point—which is what those mayors and governors are doing, to make a political point.

Then McGurn had this bit of excuse-making—it’s all the cities’ residents’ fault.

It’s difficult to argue that these leaders have done so without the consent of the governed. Whether it was Bill de Blasio running against the police in New York or Jenny Durkan offering her own progressive agenda in Seattle, they didn’t hide from voters what they stood for.

Those leaders were not elected unanimously, however. A significant minority voted against them or for the opposing candidates. We must protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority—that’s the basis of our federal republic structure of governance.

McGurn closed with this:

The chaos now consuming American cities has arisen on the watch of progressive politicians just like Mayor Wheeler, and they don’t deserve to be so easily let off the hook.

But the innocents don’t deserve to be hung on that hook along with the cities’ governing politician failures.

The misapprehension is widespread on the left, too. In response to a comment on McGurn’s article warning of the tyranny of the majority, one commenter asked, “[T]yranny of the majority? So who gets to rule?”

The answer would be obvious to anyone who’s actually had a jr high Civics class. No one gets to rule in the United States of America. Governing, though, is done by the majority—within the framework of respect for and protection of the wishes and rights of the minority.

Trump just needs to make the case directly to the people—around the nation and especially in those Progressive-Democrat-forsaken cities—bypassing the NLMSM gateway/filter/censor.

Update: Left out a couple key words that changed the meaning of my comment on McGurn’s excuse-making. Now corrected.

The Biden Fed

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden has a plan for the Federal Reserve system of banks. This bit jumped out at me in the article at the link that describes his plan.

[T]he policy blueprint Team Biden cooked up with Bernie Sanders’s economic advisers argues, “the Black unemployment rate is persistently higher than the national average, which is why Democrats support making racial equity part of the mandate of the Federal Reserve.”

Because blacks are fundamentally incapable of competing in America without special treatment. This is the soft bigotry of low expectations.

This is the overt bigotry of the Progressive-Democratic Party and of Joe Biden—If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black—made manifest.

Opening Schools—Two Schools of Thought

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California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has ordered all schools—private and public—not to open until his Omnipotent State declares it safe to do so. This seems at the behest of California’s teachers unions, which fear competition from private schools—and which are losing that competition, as they’ve been doing for some years.

Catholic school tuition, for instance, costs $1,000-$4,000 per student less than the union public schools, and they provide better education—academic, discipline, moral values. And they’re ready, willing, and anxious to open on schedule.

In contrast, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt (D) has sprung some of his discretionary education funds to cover school costs for families whose kids went to private schools last year, but for whom the Wuhan Virus situation has hammered their finances this year.

What’s really at stake? The virus risk to the kids in K-12 is vanishingly small: they’re simply unlikely to get infected, and among those who do, the severity of their infection very usually is slight.

The science is uncertain on how infectious the kids are when they are infected but asymptomatic. They appear not to be mutually infectious; the uncertainty is how infectious they are to the adults around them, the teachers, teacher aides (a relatively recent, and seeming featherbedding, addition to staff), administrators and staff, janitors. The data, though, are leaning increasingly in the direction of not very infectious.

There are occasional moves to stagger in-person schooling with half the students present some days, the other half the other days, at socially distanced desks, and with virtual schooling (a disastrous failure last spring, but maybe practice teaches) for the kids at home on those alternate days.

This is unnecessary. The kids are as safe from each other with the Wuhan Virus as they are with colds and flu. Bring them back.  All of them.

While the risks remain uncertain, it would be cumbersome but easily and straightforwardly doable to socially distance the teachers from the students in their classrooms. They spend a fair amount of their class time on the chalkboards at the front of the rooms, anyway. Or could easily go back to that.

Teachers unions holding out for deus ex cashina (I wish I’d thought of the term, but it’s the WSJ editors’) State and Federal interventions are acting in their petty interests rather than the interests of our children. Easier said than done, but these unions need to be decertified. Their selfish greed borders on child abuse.

Tax Misallocation

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The misallocation, this time, is not in the way our tax monies are being spent.

It’s in what our money is not being spent on in lieu of paying those taxes in the first place.

According to a 2018 Bureau of Labor Statistics survey—before the 2017 tax reform bill had been able to percolate into our economy in any serious way—we Americans spent more on the taxes Government exacts from us than we did on food, clothing, and health care combined.

That survey found the average American unit, which consists of both shared and single households, spent an average of $9,000 on federal income taxes last year. Americans also spent an average of $5,000 on social security, more than $2,000 on state and local taxes, and another $2,000 for property taxes.

That’s $3,000 more than we spent on those aggregated necessities.

Aside from a low, flat personal income tax without the exceptions froo-froo currently present, as suggested for corporate taxes (see nearby),  the next tax reform target needs to be on Social Security—whose Trust Fund will be exhausted in a few years, leaving the stark choice of raising payroll taxes (or increasing taxation from other sources) to cover the shortfall, or lowering the payouts to fit within the existing (payroll) tax structure—a roughly 30% reduction in payout for each recipient.

That reform, as I’ve written before, needs to be an elimination of the payroll tax altogether—more wage money left in the hands of the earner, which is especially important for those earning the lowest wages—and privatizing both Social Security and Medicare, and making the payouts for the future benefit of the saver and his family rather than immediate payout to utter strangers. That will leave the saver responsible for his own money and, with his skin on the line, he’ll do a far better job of managing those monies than even the most well-intentioned collection of government bureaucrats ever can.

Oh, yeah: privatization also would eliminate the employer’s payroll tax bite, leaving him more money for R&D, marketing,…

Byzantine Taxing

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Many companies, sitting on billions of dollars of tax credits, want to be able to cash them in promptly.

For example:

Duke has been unable to use all the corporate-research and renewable-energy credits it accumulated because it has been using accelerated tax deductions for capital investments to lower its taxable income, said Dwight Jacobs, the company’s chief accounting officer. That bumped it up against tax-code rules that limit tax credits, leaving $1.8 billion in unused credits on Duke’s books. Under the proposal, the company could get that within months instead of years.
The proposal “would give us more cash today and that would cause us to avoid borrowing money that we would otherwise have to borrow,” said Mr Jacobs.

And

Under the tax code, companies can claim credits for activities encouraged by the government. Among the largest are credits for conducting corporate research, funding low-income housing, and producing renewable energy….
Unlike deductions, which lower taxable income, credits reduce a company’s tax bill directly. But there are limits. Companies can generally offset only 75% of the taxes they owe by using credits. Any leftover credits can be used for one previous year or up to 20 years in the future.

Sound complicated? That’s the point. This isn’t a matter of helping out Duke, et al., with a particular section of the tax code. This is a matter of a too-complicated tax code.

We need, badly, to simplify it. A single, low rate, with no deductions, subsidies, credits, or other froo-froo would be suitably simple.

Better, would be eliminating corporate taxes altogether. In the end, the taxes a business pays are just costs passed on to customers in the form of higher prices; the taxed business doesn’t itself pay very much of its tax liability.

Either move would be doubly beneficial: more money left in the company’s coffers for R&D, marketing, capital improvement, jobs, wage increases from the reduced/eliminated taxes. More money also would be left in the company’s coffers for R&D, marketing,… from the reduced/eliminated tax compliance costs.

And all of that adds up to lowered prices for the company’s customers.