An Adjacent Issue

A group wants to paint the message “Black Pre-Born Lives Matter” on a street outside a Planned Parenthood site near Capitol Hill in DC. The city’s government has refused to issue the necessary permit, and police arrested two folks who tried just to chalk the message rather than paint it. The group now has sued in Federal court over the refusal and subsequent prevention of painting; the suit reads, in pertinent part,

Your original decision to paint “Black Lives Matter” on the street is government speech. However, your decision to allow protestors to paint “Defund the Police” opened the streets up as a public forum. You are not permitted to discriminate on the basis of viewpoint in making determinations relating to public assemblies in public fora[.]

That raises the adjacent issue. Government speech wants citizen speech in answer, also, or what’s a First Amendment for?

Rule By Law

Rather than Rule of Law, which is how we do things here.

The men and women of the government of the People’s Republic of China change the nation’s laws whenever convenient to their personal aims and whenever convenient to their personal power. This is how those men and women have acted, have preserved their power, since the beginning of the days of Chinese emperors.

Two current examples: their enactment in 2017 of an intelligence cooperation law that requires all PRC companies, whether state-owned or “private,” to cooperate with any intelligence community request for information, including about any company affiliate or customer wherever in the world that affiliate or customer might be.

There’s also the just-enacted law that permits the PRC government to remove—outside of the courts—anyone in the Hong Kong governance apparatus of whom the emperor’s men the men and women of the PRC government might decide to disapprove.

Now we come to the Progressive-Democratic men and women of the Wisconsin State government.

At a special meeting that lasted more than five hours, [Progressive-]Democrats on the state elections commission sought to change recount guidelines after the Trump 2020 Campaign filed a petition to review the state’s votes in Dane and Milwaukee counties.

Existing State law on the matter had become inconvenient to those Progressive-Democrats, so—time to change the rules. As Reince Priebus noted,

The Trump campaign sent the Wis Election Comm. $3 mil and filed its petition for a recount. Then the WEC immediately called a special meeting to change certain recount rules that deal with the issues brought up in the petition? You can’t make this up!

Here are Progressive-Democrats in action.

Tax Breaks

In particular, child tax credits and their proposed expansion, but the principle below applies across the board.

…pair the expansion of the child tax credit with extensions of expiring business-tax provisions, some of which have Democratic support.

Pairing in order to get the credit passed, one being a bell for the other’s whistle.  Refundable credits, too, so those who don’t pay much, if any, income tax can get their own taste. Here’s Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s offer on the credit:

…a temporary expansion of the child tax credit that would bump the $2,000-per-child credit to $3,000 for most children and to $3,600 for those under age 6. He would expand the credit to include 17-year-olds and allow monthly payments, so families wouldn’t need to wait for lump sums at tax-filing time.
Mr Biden’s proposal would cost more than $100 billion a year.

Leave aside the fact that refundability is spending increase, not taxing cut.

Here’s a better idea: lower income tax rates (permanently) across the board, for both businesses and individuals.

Leaving all that money in the private economy, which is to say in the hands of the businesses and individuals who are earning the money, pays far more benefits far more quickly, running from the folks more efficiently spending their money than can any government spend it for them through businesses having more—again, of their own—money for capital improvement, product/service development, R&D, wages, hiring.

All that increased economic activity—real activity, not the fiction of government spending as economic activity—is what will help families with children. And if Government—or rather the politicians populating Government—take the additional step of not singling out particularly favored groups of Americans for special treatment, that increased economic activity will particularly help minority families, who are the ones most needful of access to that increasing prosperity.

Clinton-2 vs Obama-3

That’s the hope expressed by Phil Gramm and Mike Solon in their Tuesday op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

By electing a divided government, Americans may get what they appear to want: a Biden first term that’s more like Bill Clinton’s second term than a third term for Barack Obama.

That is in no way a done deal. The current situation is not at all comparable to the Clinton situation. Biden’s handlers have no inclination whatsoever to move off their far-left ideology, much less the far-left policies they intend for enacting that ideology.

Nor have they any willingness to compromise, as Ocasio-Cortez has made blatantly clear.

The best we can hope for is a Republican-majority Senate and enough party unity to say “No” for four years.

‘Course a gridlocked government isn’t a bad thing.