Tag Archives: culture

Disingenuous

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The press is at it again, this time on the subject of death estate taxes. In a WSJ article centered on the House-passed reconciliation bill and the parallel (on the subject of estate taxes) Senate Finance Committee-passed proposal, the news writer wrote

The estate tax cuts are a boon for the richest….

as she blithely parroted the talking-point criticism of the Leftist Samantha Jacoby, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities‘ Deputy Director of Federal Tax Policy:

They went out of their way to expand tax cuts for the wealthy on a permanent basis, but some new tax cuts for modest income people are temporary[.]

Both, beyond the bit about temporary tax cuts, are nakedly disingenuous.

A person’s estate is much more than just cash and stocks and bonds. Those estates include mom-and-pop businesses that have grown to modest levels of valuation, exceeding the current and expiring threshold of $14 million, the proposed threshold of $15 million, and especially the $7.14 million threshold that would resume were nothing done.

Those businesses’ values do not exist as money or as stocks and bonds that can easily be sold to raise the money with which to pay the tax bite. Those businesses, which are almost the entirety of a decedent’s estate, exist as operations with inventories, employees, sales prospects. And they would have to be sold by the decedent’s heirs in order to raise the cash necessary to pay the Federal government, utterly destroying that estate. That there are far more such mom-and-pops at risk than there are Evil Rich Folks who would benefit as a side effect of the proposed threshold increase is of no interest to the Left and its Progressive-Democratic Party politicians.

These Big Government persons have defined what is Government’s due (rather than the people’s due), and they are demanding it. Never mind how many average American heirs would be hurt or ruined by the demand.

For Whom Does He Work

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For whom do they work, come to that? “He” is Dr Marty Makary, the FDA Commissioner. “They” are the bureaucrats of the FDA.

[C]hanges are coming so swiftly, and often without input from career scientists, that Makary faces declining staff morale threatening to stymie his efforts. He must also contend with the administration’s staff cuts at the FDA….

Career scientists—that’s the press’ euphemism for entrenched bureaucrats who happen to have medical or science degrees.

Lowering employee morale, as opposed to bureaucrats’ morale, is an important problem. It is, however, most optimally solved by either or both of two items:

  1. the bureaucrats figure out that they’re not the ones in charge, they must work within an operational hierarchy and either follow the instructions of those placed above them or resign their positions
  2. the remaining bureaucrats and those newly hired, the latter whom lack the habits of entrenchment, get actually productive and do their jobs more efficiently, which can be facilitated by astute use of AI
  3. That last, of course, requires that Makary implements AI as a tool and not as a decision maker itself

Regarding the opening question, “he,” Makary, works for the HHS Secretary, who in turn works for the President, who works for us American citizens. Makary, thus, works through his chain of command for us average Americans and for our benefit, not that of those bureaucrats. Neither the FDA nor government at large are jobs welfare programs; the incumbents are there for our weal, not their own benefit.

I’m not too worried about the morale of entrenched bureaucrats. I’m concerned about their actual performance of their duties.

California’s Problem

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Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed into law a resolution rescinding the Biden administration’s EPA’s last-minute waiver for California to mandate more stringent rules for gasoline and battery cars than the Federal government’s—and that EPA’s—rules. That Biden EPA waiver allowed California to mandate only battery cars to be sold in California; average Americans who also are citizens of California would be required to buy battery cars after 2035 if they wanted another car, whether they wanted a battery car or not. The interstate market for transportation vehicles being what it is, that would have been tantamount to a requirement for all of us average Americans all across our nation to buy only battery cars after 2035.

Hours later, California’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom led a lawsuit against the Trump administration asking a Federal court to find the waiver rescission…unconstitutional.

Newsom called it “the latest illegal action by a president who is a wholly-owned subsidiary of big polluters.”

Newsom’s Progressive-Democrat State AG Rob Bonta:

We will continue to fiercely defend ourselves from this lawless federal overreach[.]

How dare our elected representatives act against the wishes of California? That’s illegal.

It’s plainly unlawful for Congress to pass a national law of which the State of California disapproves.

Newsom and his syndicate bleat about an allegedly lawless Trump administration. The real lawlessness, though, is Newsom’s claim that a waiver granted by a government agency cannot be rescinded by the elected representatives of the United States, the Congress and the President.

That’s lawlessness, and it’s instructive of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s use of a Newspeak Dictionary to cloak their claims. This is what we can look forward to the moment the Progressive-Democratic Party returns to power.

Maybe Don’t Count the Chickens Just Yet

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Celebratory paeans abound. The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are typical.

a decapitation. Nearly the entire top echelon of Iran’s army and Revolutionary Guard has been killed, and the longer Iran takes to regroup the more of its ballistic-missile and nuclear programs it loses.

And

The Middle East war Iran started is becoming an historic defeat.

There are these two especially:

The subheadline:

We don’t know exactly how successful the raid was, but the era of diplomatic nonproliferation is over.

Or not. Because, in part, this:

We don’t know yet how successful the Israeli raids were. Getting past the blast doors and shock-wave buffers at the underground Fordow enrichment site would have been no easy feat. Ensuring that the 100-yard-deep Pickaxe Mountain plant doesn’t come online will require continuous surveillance and perhaps further raids on quick notice.

Getting into those facilities would seem to require bigger bombs than Israel’s fighters can carry over those distances, even with aerial refueling. Smuggled in drones would be too small for the task, unless and until holes were blown in those blast doors and shock-wave buffers big enough for a nearby controller to fly them in through.

The next opinion writer giddily claimed that it’s Morning in Jerusalem. The Israeli raids do take the nation far along towards the dawn of a new day (to extend that overused metaphor), but it’s far too soon to claim that the sun is up. Contradictorily, this opinion writer even acknowledged as much in the body of his piece.

How things will end is unclear….

The current battle likely is an historic defeat for Iran, but the war is not at all lost as far as the Iranian government is concerned. The lesson the Carthaginians learned too late and to their everlasting chagrin, Israel must learn much more quickly to preempt a similar chagrin. Iran isn’t dead yet, so they haven’t lost yet. As Adrian Goldsworthy wrote in his The Fall of Carthage,

The Romans expected a war to end in total victory or their own annihilation…. This attitude prevented the Romans from losing the war and ultimately allowed them to win it.

The ayatollahs running Iran also will refuse to accept defeat or even to acknowledge it. Israel, and the West, need to be fully aware of that. As Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former President of Iran, said,

If one day, he [Rafsanjani] said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons]—on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.

This is the price the ayatollahs are willing to pay: Iran’s annihilation for Israel’s total annihilation.

There is much too much optimism for this early in the game. As a great American philosopher once said, “it’s not over until the fat lady sings.” The fat ladies of the Iranian mullahs haven’t sung, are not singing, and will not ever sing.