Tag Archives: law

Are They Not Working Americans?

Posted on by
Reply

The news writers in The Wall Street Journal note, correctly, that

IRAs and workplace retirement accounts were created to help working Americans save for old age by providing tax incentives for doing so.

Then they spent more than 2,700 words decrying some who have had more success at that than others, as though those with that success do not deserve that success while claiming that such success is a mark of dysfunction of those IRAs and workplace retirement accounts and the associated incentives.

But how did these successful ones achieve the growth of their retirement-oriented accounts? One example:

Gregory Baszucki’s [IRA] holds at least $68 million—and possibly a whole lot more.
Baszucki, 61 years old, is one of hundreds of people who bought stakes in promising startups when the shares were worth peanuts, stashing them in retirement accounts and watching their values balloon to eight figures or more. What they are getting, essentially, is the mother of all tax breaks.

That’s wrong how, exactly? Baszucki did what he was encouraged to do by financial planning experts and by Government through its design of the retirement savings programs. He stashed away some stock shares in his IRA so their value could grow tax deferred, or tax free if he put them in a Roth IRA, th latter which is designed explicitly to allow retirement savers to set aside already taxed monies to grow and be free of taxes on withdrawal. What these news writers carefully ignore is the broadly chancy—extremely so—nature of startups: most of them fail. Baszucki could easily have lost all of his stakes in their entirety. That he has been better than most of us in choosing startups for his investment money, or luckier, is an outcome to be celebrated by the rest of us and an outcome which we all can achieve with our own skill and/or luck.

And this from the article:

Those entrepreneurs and their financial backers are increasingly using that strategy to pile up giant retirement-account balances, all subsidized by US taxpayers….

This is plain wrong, to the point of deliberately offered disinformation. Of course none of that is subsidized by taxpayers. The government simply isn’t getting the tax revenue from those giant retirement-account balances; no one else is paying in that revenue in the place of those account holders.

Steven Rosenthal, a retired tax lawyer lately of the Tax Policy Center:

We aren’t talking about saving enough for your needs in retirement. This isn’t keeping you off the dole in old age. This is yacht financing or dynasty building.

And

Senator Ron Wyden (D, OR) and Congressman Richard Neal (D, MA) plan to introduce a bill this week that would require annual withdrawals from accounts over $10 million for individuals of any age. The planned legislation stemmed in part from long-running concerns that some investors might circumvent annual contribution limits on retirement accounts by undervaluing shares in companies that aren’t public, “thus substantially increasing their tax benefits,” the Government Accountability Office wrote in 2014.
“This is an egregious loophole we’ve got to close,” Wyden said. “Congress created tax-advantaged retirement accounts to help more Americans save for a dignified retirement, not to help the ultrawealthy dodge taxes on insider deals and build titanic fortunes.”

The Progressive-Democrats’ position less obtusely stated: “Give us the damn money, already. It’s not yours, it’s Government’s.”

This is the arrogance of those presuming to determine what the needs of others are; this is the resentment of those who don’t have presuming to determine the legitimacy of the wants of those who do have. And dynasty building? There’s something wrong with parents looking to leave their children better off than they are? To these resentful ones, yes: success must be capped, and the children must be knee-capped of their inheritances.

Are the Baszuckis of our nation not working Americans? Of course they are. This is nothing more than a naked drive to punish those who have been more successful than others by taking away their success and redistributing it to those favored by Know Betters. It’s what the Progressive-Democratic Party wants; it’s what the Democratic Socialist of America party, a core constituent of the Progressive-Democratic Party has as its explicit goal; and it’s what the fundamentally mendacious press is pushing.

A fundamental question that Know Betters and Redistributionists must answer is this: what’s their limiting principle defining how much success is too much? What’s the basis for their claimed principle—should they have the integrity to name one?

No point in waiting for an answer. It’s a an amorphous, generalized claim born nakedly of covetousness, it’s wrong, and it’s anti-American.

“Harassment of the Press”

Posted on by
Reply

In their house editorial, the worthies of The Wall Street Journal let loose this remark regarding the leak of President Donald Trump’s (R) decision, on the advice of his Secret Service, to change his Air Force One ride out of Turkey to Great Britain:

Notably, the Justice Department has subpoenaed New York Times writers who reported the story to disclose their sources. That’s harassment against the press that won’t make the US safer.

This is the self-serving preciousness of our routinely mendacious press. The information the NYT‘s news writers received for their story was illegally transferred by a leaker who leaked classified information to those writers.

It isn’t harassment of the press to demand that pressmen reveal the sources of their illegally transferred and illegally received by them goods. Anyone but a pressman convicted of receiving stolen goods would be jailed for the felony. The august press guildsmen cannot even be charged under current practice.

Aside from that, there is nothing in our Constitution, especially in our First Amendment, that contains any reference, any hint, of journalist-source confidentiality. The journalist is not a doctor or a priest, neither is the source a patient or supplicant.

At bottom, whether a journalist should or should not be put on trial for receiving stolen goods, there is no threat to press freedom from requiring a journalist to provide the name of his source when that source has potentially committed a crime by an illegal transfer.

Chatrie v United States and Follow-on

Posted on by
Reply

The Supreme Court ruled in Chatrie that police gatherings of Google location histories constituted a search and so must be subject to 4th Amendment strictures. From that, we get parents pushing back against K-12 school districts conducting surveillance of students’ parents, explicitly to gather [a]ccess license plate data and develop pattern of life information.

One of those tracking packages, Thomson Reuters CLEAR, explicitly brags about the software’s ability to collect and provide to school managers residency verification, address validation, license plate verification, all with a view to [u]nderstand who owns and lives at the address provided and other related locations and to develop pattern of life information. The purveyors of this PRC-esque surveillance package also brag that school managers can [e]asily connect information about people, businesses, assets, affiliations, and other vital content.

All of that without the parents’ prior knowledge or permission and without any court sanction of the surveillance.

That such invasions of average Americans’ privacy is being done by school system managers is one more reason they need their reins jerked up short.

Eroding Foundational Checks and Balances

Posted on by
Reply

Greg Ip is worried that the checks and balances built into our Federal government by our Constitution are rapidly eroding due to President Donald Trump’s (R) unilateral actions. He’s badly mistaken. The erosion began long ago, and it accelerated starting in 2008. Trump has been resisting the erosion, for all the discomfort he’s causing a Leftist press too used to and too comfortable with that washing away.

FDR then tried to pack the Supreme Court; his own party revolted.

Ip ignored the rest of that story and its impact. Roosevelt didn’t get the additional Justices he wanted, but by 1943, he’d succeeded in getting appointed to the Court 8 Justices of his choice ou of the 9 comprising the Court. Our nation has been paying the price of that ever since, from Wickard which increased Federal economic power at the direct expense of the States, through Kelo, which increased Federal power at the direct expense of individual citizens and our property rights, and Chevron deference, which increased the power of Executive Branch agencies at the direct expense of both Congress and the President.

Shortly after taking office, he [Trump] fired the Democratic members of several independent agencies, including the FTC, effectively transforming them into executive departments.

On the contrary, this was Trump executing his constitutional authority as the head of the Executive Branch, and exercising his control over all of the Agencies and Departments of the Executive Branch. The Supreme Court, only recently restored to a body that adheres to what our Constitution actually says rather than what a Liberal, Roosevelt-esque-dominated Court want it to say, acknowledged that constitutional authority. The erosion here is from Congress, with its creation of an “independent” Federal Trade Commission in 1914 and subsequent further “independent” Agency creations. These creations were Congress’ unconstitutional attempt to create a fourth Branch of government by masquerading these creations as part of the Executive Branch.

The Supreme Court also took a step toward restoring Constitutional order in our Federal government by—finally—eliminating the knee-jerk deference to those so-called independent Agencies, and others properly constituted as subordinate to the President, when it rescinded that misbegotten Chevron deference and emphasized the importance of and constitutional requirement that Congress do its own legislative work, work it cannot pass off to those Agencies.

Regarding Trump’s unilaterality in particular, in one sense, he’s only following the examples set by ex-President Barack Obama (D), who infamously bragged about—and used—his pen and telephone to ignore or override Congress, and ex-President Joe Biden (D) who ignored so many of our nation’s laws in his attempt to virtually erase our southern border.

That unilaterality also is being reined in by a constitution-supporting and -applying Court. Trump can fire those Agency personnel. His unilateral application of taxing, via tariffs, has been severely curtailed. His efforts to cancel already-committed Federal grants have been successfully blocked.

Other of his unilateral actions, though, actually are moves back toward Constitutional order. His moves to greatly reduce Department of Education employment and to closely circumscribe DoEd authorities are aimed at getting rid of the Department altogether. This would be entirely appropriate, since the Department is a relatively recent Congressional creation done at the direct expense of the States, taking as it does, control over the education of our nation’s children away from the States, and in many ways away from the parents, and centralizing that control within the Federal government.

The erosion of our government’s checks and balances has been vast, but it’s not only due to a President overstepping his authorities or deliberately ignoring his duties. It’s also been due to Congress shirking its legislative duties and to a Court ignoring its own duties. At present, though, it appears as though the erosion is being slowed, and an increasing move back toward order is in progress.

Amending our Constitution

Posted on by
2

The Wall Street Journal asked a collection of elitists how our Constitution could be improved; those wonders proposed five Amendments. I’ll address a few here.

Term Limits: One elitist proposed hard term limits of fixed numbers of years for everyone—Congressmen and judges and Justices. After all, it’s good enough for Presidents. Term limits would be useful for the political parts of our Federal government, but not for the judiciary. Even the 18 year terms he proposed would leave the judges and Justices too vulnerable to the politics of the day, through more rapid appointments and forced retirements, and not sufficiently tied to what our Constitution actually says. The statutes that also come before the courts, and that those courts must apply according to what they actually say, provide enough political involvement as it is; there’s no need to accelerate that, no matter that this Elitist wants to reduce that.

On the other hand, We the People would benefit from term limits for our Congressmen, but hard numbers like six and two terms for Representatives and Senators would excessively limit our choices of whom we would select represent us. Apply, instead, the term limits our prior Articles of Confederation applied to their unicameral Congress with its one-year sessions. Article V of that document limited delegates to Congress to three terms in any six years. That’s straightforwardly modifiable to provide for our bicameral Congress, and it would not limit our choices for representation, only the frequency of those choices.

Leave the judiciary with its current lifetime appointment on their good behavior.

Electoral College: Get rid of it? The “logic” here is that Presidential campaigns are driven too much by the States with the largest Electoral College contingents, and the smaller States get overlooked altogether. Leave Presidential election outcomes to the popular vote, instead. And: modern communications technology cures all. Eliminating the College, though, wouldn’t protect the smaller States. College contingents are based solely on the combined numbers of Senators and Representatives each State has, and the numbers of Representatives is determined solely by population. The same States that supposedly dominate the Electoral College election would simply turn their focus to the larger cities of States, leaving out the smaller urban areas even in those large College-centric States. Nothing material would change.

Leave the Electoral College alone. The current system is not broken.

Rethink the First Amendment: The Evil Rich have too much influence in political speech, and they need to be limited. What about modern communications technology cures all, though? Doesn’t that give the little guy as much influence as the rich guy? Of course it does. The beef here centers on the amount of money any individual or business can contribute to any politician, but here this Elitist fails utterly: he doesn’t suggest any concrete solution, much less an Amendment. Nor can he: on what basis would he limit a rich man’s speech to bring him down to a poor man’s level of influence (no one has ever suggested plussing up a poor man’s speech). Hard dollar limits would restrict the rich man far more than the poor man. Percentage limits (percent of what wealth measure, exactly?) would still leave the rich man with far more supposed influence. And what to do about contributions to causes rather than particular candidates? In the end, what’s the limiting principle here, that prevents further limits on speech no matter how Very Good the reasons might seem for limiting further? This elitist offered none.

We can brook no such restrictions on our free speech rights and remain America. This elitist tacitly recognized this (even if he didn’t recognize it himself) with his concluding thought:

We must return to a reading of the Constitution that recognizes its fundamental democratic commitments.

But that’s a matter for the courts and for Congress to do. No Amendment is necessary, nor could one work. No Amendment will ever alter any reading of our Constitution. Men and women will still read into it (and out of it) what they will, guided by how they’re educated to read it.

Equal Gender Rights: This elitist based the entirety of her argument on the need to ratify—finally!—the Equal Rights Amendment. She wants to enumerate a specific right to political equality for gender in our Constitution, claiming that the 19th Amendment, which granted sufferage to women, doesn’t go far enough. She even cited early feminists’ support for ratifying the 14th Amendment as a pathway for gender equality, but she missed what that Amendment says in its first Article:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

All citizens means all citizens; it does not exclude some citizens, women or blacks or citizens of whatever sort. It’s hard to go farther than the blanket statement of equal rights and equal treatment under law that that Amendment requires.

The strength of our Constitution lies, in part, in its blanket statements of rights and limitations. Once we start carving out exceptions or codicils to those encompassing statements of rights and government limits, the process will rapidly escalate and those exceptions and codicils will expand our Constitution to hundreds of pages and hundreds of thousands of words that will include increasingly internally contradictory requirements. In relatively short order, our Constitution would come to resemble the very aspect that Munroe Smith wrote, some 140 years ago, about judicial precedent:

When the old rule is sufficiently worm-holed…a very slight reexamination will reduce it to dust, and a re-interpretation…will produce the rule that is desired.

When the old constitution is sufficiently worm-holed….

Be better if Wonders like these would leave off their Elitist blinders and look at our nation and our Constitution with objective eyes. Be even better if we ordinary Americans simply ignored technocrats and Know Betters altogether, and consigned them to their Ivory towers.