Tax, Tax, Tax

The Progressive-Democrats want more.  It’s almost like an OPM addiction.

Now they’ve proposed the Wall Street Tax Act of 2019, which is intended to charge traders and investors a price for the privilege (apparently) of investing in economic products.  Their bill would

impose a tax on the purchase of most securities—including stocks and bonds—and on transactions involving derivatives. The tax would be about 0.1% of the value of the security or 0.1% of all payments made under the terms of a derivative contract.

Because Progressive-Democrats just can’t get enough of our money.

And this from Senator Brian Schatz (D, HI) who intends to introduce a similar bill in the Senate, citing the need to discourage “risky, volume-based trading.”

Because Progressive-Democrats Know Better than us petty citizens how to invest or trade.

Cutting spending, on the other hand, is utterly inconceivable to Progressive-Democrats.  After all, they also know how to spend our money better than we do.

Never Worked…Doesn’t

In Great Britain, unemployment is the lowest it’s been in over four decades, and employment is commensurately high.  But that’s a misleading datum.

[A]n astonishing 3.6 million adults have never been paid for work, official figures from the Office for National Statistics show.

That’s 10% of the (chronologically) adult population in Great Britain.  Of the “young adult” demographic—those in the 16-24 age range—a truly astonishing 71% have never worked for pay.  Not a single hour.

The British economy isn’t in the doldrums over Brexit or no-deal Brexit.  Not at all.

Guild Monopolies

They live on in France, especially in the medical profession.

It seems that Thomas Mesnier, a La République En Marche! National Assemblyman, has committed the unpardonable sin of proposing that pharmacies(!—not even establishments like grocery stores) be allowed to sell over-the-counter medicines without the buyer first consulting a doctor and getting a prescription.  The medications Mesnier has proposed be salable without prescription include such dangerous drugs as paracetamol (the French version of acetaminophen), ibuprofen, non-codeine-containing cough medicines, cold medicines, allergy medicines, and the like.

The horror.

Here’s Guild Master National Order of Physicians President, Patrick Bouet:

We are not improving the health system by taking skills away from physicians and giving them to professionals who do not have their training. There comes a time when things have to stop.

No, what improves the health system is no longer wasting time and resources of guild members doctors on minor ailments that half the developed world considers their citizens smart enough and capable enough to deal with on their own, including purchasing minor medicaments for those minor ailments.  What improves the health system is leaving those otherwise wasted time and resources free to deal with the truly sick.  What improves the health system is no longer wasting time and money of those citizens—directly or through tax dollars—on consulting doctors in order to get access to minor medicaments for minor ailments.

What improves the useless sense of self-importance is the reservation of such trivial decisions to doctors.

Work…Works

Sam Adolphsen, Foundation for Government Accountability’s Vice President of Executive Affairs, writing for Fox Business, commented on that in a piece about Medicaid’s work requirement in Arkansas—about which Progressive-Democrats in Congress are in an uproar.

Those Progressive-Democrats have complained that work requirements

“threaten[]” Americans…work [is] a “restrictive condition.”

These politicians of the Left ignore two things. One is the trivial one: no one is forcing anyone to work; the only “restriction” is that, in order to get any of Arkansas’ OPM, recipients must go to work in Arkansas or make a good faith effort to do so.

The other thing is the critical item in the affair.

Since the requirement was implemented, thousands of adults have left the welfare program.

…when people go back to work after work requirements are implemented, their incomes double or triple in just a year or two.

And this fallout from that second thing:

Getting these able-bodied adults back to work also frees up resources for the truly needy—the very people that the Medicaid program was designed to help.

It also increases Arkansas’ tax collections that go to the State’s Medicaid program.

Here’s where Adolphsen missed the mark, though.  He wrote

Why are Democrats so against work?

It’s an indication of how out of touch these progressive leaders are with everyday Americans.

No, Progressive-Democrats are the smartest kids on the block—just ask them.  They know what they’re doing with their objections to imposing a measure of personal responsibility on welfare recipients, personal responsibility that brings with it personal prosperity.

Those folks getting work and raising their standard of living aren’t actual human beings; they’re just votes spilling out of the Progressive-Democrats’ welfare box.

Metaphors R’nt Us

President Donald Trump, speaking about the dangers of fentanyl and the risks of open borders letting stuff like this (among other things and thugs) pour in, said,

A little tiny spoonful can wipe out a state. It’s hard to believe. It can wipe out an entire state, a spoonful of this stuff[.]

The Associated Press will have none of this.  They “corrected” him:

A teaspoon of illegally made fentanyl could conceivably kill 3,000 people, by one measure. The state with the smallest population, Wyoming, has about 578,000 people. It would take close to 200 teaspoons to kill a population of that size.

Ooh. 200 teaspoons is a skosh over 4 cups (excuse my imprecision).  A drop in the ocean of fentanyl flooding our cities.

It couldn’t possibly be that Trump was speaking metaphorically.  Nope, can’t be that.

It couldn’t possibly be that Trump was exaggerating to emphasize a point.  Nope, not that either.

Buncha petty quibblers, AP is.