Fair Share

CPA Jay Starkman asked a question in his Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed. His piece centered on the President Joe Biden (D) tax hikes and expansions. Starkman noted that as recently as 2018—after the Trump tax cuts—the top 5% of American taxpayers still paid 60.3% of all the income taxes paid that year while the bottom 50% paid just 3% of the total.

Thus, his question:

How much higher than 60% will satisfy calls for the rich to pay their “fair share”?

With the Progressive-Democrats’ refusal to say what a “fair share” is, or who should pay it other than their carefully nebulous “the rich”, the answer to the question is obvious: all of it.

As that hero of the Progressive-Democratic Party, John Nance Garner said: We have got to confiscate wealth.

A Question

I have one of those.

Vice President Kamala Harris (D), along with her Co-President President Joe Biden, have made much of the need to study root causes of the illegal alien surge and crisis at our southern border. In line with that, Harris planned—for weeks—a trip to the Northern Triangle of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador in order to learn straight from the source those root causes.

So off Harris went, earlier this month, on her much ballyhooed visit, first to Guatemala, then with a stopover in Mexico on her return trip.

If Harris truly was interested in learning those root causes, though, why did she not head a few miles further south into the Northern Triangle and visit Honduras and El Salvador? Why were those two nations omitted from her itinerary?

Maybe Harris isn’t so dumb: maybe she expected the reaction she got from Guatemala’s President Alejandro Giammattei and the Guatemalan people, and she didn’t want to get the same reaction, especially publicly, from Honduras’ President Juan Orlando and the Honduran people and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele and the Salvadoran people.

Bipartisan Negotiations Progressive-Democratic Party Style

There is a bipartisan group of Senators who are close to agreement on a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill. Set aside, for the moment, whether the bill is good or bad. Consider, first, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D, NY) and his Socialist colleague Bernie Sanders’ (I, VT) position and planned move regarding that bill.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Budget Chairman Bernie Sanders have started the process of adding elements of Biden’s agenda to a large-scale budget reconciliation bill, regardless of the outcome of ongoing bipartisan negotiations on infrastructure.
Schumer has said the reconciliation bill will include the parts of Biden’s $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan and $1.8 trillion American Families Plan that are not included in a potential bipartisan agreement on infrastructure spending.

The bipartisan negotiation is a sham, a decoy, an attempt at a shiny object. The Progressive-Democrats in that group are fully aware of this, and they’re enthusiastic participants in the distraction.

This is what Republicans and Conservatives have to deal with.

The Manchin Alternative

Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) claims he never liked HR1, even though he voted for cloture on the Senate Progressive-Democrats’ effort bring that Federal election deform law to the Senate floor for party-line passage.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors rightly called out his sham of a compromise, to be substituted for that HR1…nonsense.

I’ve picked out just a couple of the items in Manchin’s offering to illustrate the sham. The first is a repeat example of Manchin’s personal fundamental dishonesty.

The [compromise’s] preamble insists that any voting bill “must be the result of both Democrats and Republicans coming together.”

We’ve already seen how worthless Manchin’s word is. On that “coming together” bit, in particular, Manchin late last fall piously intoned, often, that he would support no bill that didn’t have input from “his friends across the aisle.” Then he voted, twice, for a unilaterally done reconciliation bill that spent nearly $2 trillion of our taxpayer money.

“ban partisan gerrymandering and use computer models.”

Here is an example of Party’s intrinsic dishonesty, and that of the DC politicians in general, for generations and across parties.

The only legitimate way to get rid of gerrymandering, and computers would be helpful here, but they’re far from critical, is to subdivide each State into rectangular districts of substantially equal numbers of citizens, and with no regard to geography other than State borders.

After all, in the eyes of our Constitution, there are no black voters or brown voters or Asian voters or white voters. There are no male voters or female voters. There are only American voters.

Illegal Voting

An Illinois Progressive-Democrat wants to legalize it. Celina Villanueva (D-Chicago) is sponsoring a bill that would let illegal immigrants vote in school board elections.

The proposal could require the State Board of Education to create an affidavit helping non-citizens register for school board elections.
“For too long, these families have been systematically excluded from participating in our democracy even at the most basic level,” Villanueva said.

There are two key items here. One is that non-citizens are not part of our democracy, they are guests here, and so it’s entirely correct that they should have no say in how we citizens choose to govern ourselves. If they wish to become citizens, we should welcome them with open arms.

The other key is that illegal immigrants aren’t even here legally; they’re not guests, they’re interlopers.

That should be obvious even to a Progressive-Democrat.