Tag Archives: government

Two Short Steps

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The IRS has moved to cancel its “experimental” Direct File program. This is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s…exceedingly pleasurable fantasy…of the IRS online platform that lets filers prepare their taxes for free and submit them through the state.

Aside from the program’s cost ($138 per tax return, which is more than many tax software sellers charge) the editors of The Wall Street Journal noted,

The bigger problem with the program is its threat to the norm of taxpayer autonomy. The push to cut out the tax “middle man,” meaning private services, would have resulted in millions of filers letting the IRS make both the first and final determination of their tax liability and connect to their checking accounts.

Notice that: the IRS gets to connect to our private checking accounts. With Direct File, that’s a deeper connection than simply allowing the IRS to direct deposit a refund. With Direct File, the IRS has been able to extract the tax due from a tax payer’s bank account.

With the cancelation of Direct File, us tax payers, us average Americans, avoided a two-step sequence of events. The first step would have been making Direct File no longer a trial being tested in 24 of our nation’s States, but instead rolling it out nation-wide.

The second step would have been mandating Direct File for all of us.

It wouldn’t have stopped there, though. It wouldn’t be even a short step, more like a small shuffle, after that to alter Direct File to have employers “Direct File” all employees’ pay checks to the IRS instead of sending them to the employees. With that, the IRS would extract the taxes it deemed appropriate and remit to the putative employee the remainder—the amount the IRS would deem appropriate for each tax payer to have.

We dodged a terrible pas-de-deux—that dance for the two performers of tax payer and Government—for the time being, but the Progressive-Democratic Party will return to power eventually, and dangerously sooner than us average Americans want.

What Will She Do with that Intelligence?

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Mexico’s President Claudia Scheinbaum doesn’t want to deal with Mexico’s cartels (mostly drug, but they’re into sex- and child-trafficking, also, and a few other…industries) violently. Her predecessor also swore off hard-style confrontations, insisting on dealing with them with hugs. Scheinbaum wants to increase intelligence efforts in dealing with them, even including a willingness to receive intelligence from the US government. But no more help than that.

Sheinbaum said her government had accepted the US offer for help in obtaining information and intelligence, but she rejected US intervention in Mexico’s affairs. “Intervention isn’t justice,” she said.

That “intervention” was an offer to assist—not to do for or to do instead—Mexico in dealing with the cartels kinetically, which is to say, violently.

Last week, Carlos Manzo, the anti-cartel mayor of Uruapan, the largest city in the state of Michoachan, the state immediately west of Mexico City, was hugged several times, fatally so, by the cartels. Even so,

[Sheinbaum] pledged to continue with her policy of strengthening Mexico’s National Guard, concentrating on the use of police intelligence to take down violent criminals while addressing the social causes of crime.
Sheinbaum criticized political opponents who she said were taking advantage of Manzo’s killing to attack the government, and said she had ordered an investigation into the surge in antigovernment posts on social media.

When those violent criminals and/or their cartel supporters resist being “taken down?” Will she continue to answer their violence with her own hugs? So far, her response is limited to inflicting lawfare violence on those impudent enough to criticize her government’s handling of the cartels. Why not hug them, too, instead?

Scheinbaum apparently has no serious use for that intelligence, American or her own nation’s.

This is what a failing narco- and trafficking-centric nation looks like.

Monetary Misconception

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Judy Shelton, a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, has this one. She wants the Federal government to issue a gold-backed bond would strike a blow for sound money.

Mr Trump has criticized currency manipulation in global trade relations. Challenging other nations to emulate the US [gold-backed bond] by guaranteeing some portion of their sovereign debt in gold would demonstrate America’s vision for stable money as the proper foundation for fair trade.

This is naïve. “Other countries” will continue to manipulate their currencies, just as they do now; this move only would add a new tool for manipulation—varying the value of the metal backing their own debt instrument(s).

Governments have been debasing their metal backed currencies ever since money was invented, doing so by shaving coins minted in the metal; by replacing some of the money-backing metal with other, cheaper metals; outright announcing a differing, lower values for a unit of the metal.

The most infamous recent example of the latter was during our own Great Depression when then-President Franklin Roosevelt (D) seized all privately held gold and then promptly devalued the gold in US dollar terms.

All currency is fiat currency, whether it’s minted in the metal or it’s printed on paper formally backed by the metal (at a rate the issuing government has announced for the time being), or it’s printed on paper and allowed to float in the markets for goods and services—and currencies. That currency has the value, in legal terms, that government says it has from time to time.

Backing a bond with a precious metal has no material meaning. What makes a money sound is the stability of the issuing government; the economy it oversees with a light hand; and that government’s ability to protect its people from invasion, whether physical, economic, or political. Nothing else does.

More Whining and Bodice Ripping

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This time, it’s from a Wall Street Journal editor, Collin Levy.

President Donald Trump (R) is expanding the East Wing with a ballroom fit for its purpose—to entertain visiting numbers of national leaders, not just any dignitary, and to put on the welcome and entertainment that fits such large gatherings. The expansion is to replace convening those same large gatherings in a collection of tents out on the White House lawn. Levy objects, and she opened her cri de coeur with this:

It [the new ballroom] might have been be tacky, but the republic can withstand some nouveau riche architecture on federal property.

That’s typical journalistic arrogance; she’s masquerading her opinion as received fact. On the contrary, what’s tacky is entertaining foreign leaders outdoors in tents as though the White House lawn is home for trailer park trash.

She closed her tearful piece with this:

It [the White House] is a symbol of power, legacy, and national identity. Respect for the nation and all that it has built still matters. These aren’t trifles or overreactions. They are the foundations of the republic we built. That’s worth defending.

The White House as an edifice is, indeed, a symbol. The larger, more important symbols of our nation’s power, legacy, and national identity, though, are our respect for and rule of law, the integrity of our national borders, and our American culture centered on the idea of inalienable rights coming from our Creator, not any government, and of individual liberty along with liberty’s dual, individual responsibility. And that culture, ideal of law (including those borders), and culture are what the White House stands in symbol of.

Those symbols presently are threatened by domestic terrorism; politicians musing on and hoping for the murder of political opponents and their children; attempts at murdering a President by a Leftist; politicians’ threats of violence against Supreme Court Justices and attempts at murdering one of them; the actual murder by Leftists of a leading Conservative activist; and the divisive likening of political opponents to Hitler and fascism, followed by attempts at mass murder of Republican Congressmen.

Yet, all this WSJ editor can find—all she can think of—to worry about is a needed remodel and expansion of the White House’s East Wing, a modification that will add to the White House’s grandeur.

No, Congress Can’t Do That

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William Galston, in his last week’s Tuesday op-ed, expressed concern about the growing power (as opposed to authority) of American Presidents, and he proposed a solution.

[I]t [is] be up to Congress to write legal language defining clearly the limits of presidential power.

Even were the President to sign off on such legislation (or Congress to override his veto), anything more than a tweak to a Congressionally-enacted statute (viz., the Electoral Count Act tweak to which Galston referred) would be blatantly unconstitutional. (The ECA may itself be unconstitutional given how vague our Constitution is on the role and authorities of Electors and the sitting Vice President in counting Elector votes for President.)

Galston’s solution, which accrues power (as opposed to authority) to Congress, is every bit as dangerous (aside from its unconstitutionality) as accruing power to the Presidency. Galston’s move ignores the fact that not only did we rebel against a monarchical chief executive, we also wrote our Constitution to prevent the concept of Congressional (Parliamentary) Superiority from taking hold in our republican nation.

Our Constitution is quite clear on the matter, both in text and in that text’s construction of a Federal government whose powers (as well as authorities) are divided equally among the three branches of Legislature, Executive, and Judiciary. These are three branches equal in their powers and authorities. Congress cannot take it on itself to limit the power, or authority, of a rival branch.

If Congress is serious about reining in what it views as an overweening Executive, if it is not simply bleating virtuously in attempts to gain political points, it will propose the Constitutional amendment that tightens the reins and then convince the American citizens of at least 38 States to ratify its amendment.