Tag Archives: political parties

Question for the Future

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My wife put it to me re the Progressive-Democratic Party: Stipulate arguendo that Trump is reelected (regardless of the [Progressive-Democrats’] nominee). Who’s their bench for 4 years from now? Amy? Pete? ?????

It’s true enough, there is no next generation in Party; they’re going to have to skip one to get to anyone even remotely viable.  Who do they have?

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D, MN) is all they have in their next generation, but she’s a one-hoss shay that’s starting to fall apart.

Pete Buttigieg would seem to be the front-runner in that skipped-to generation, but he’s just not capable. Too many demographics don’t trust him: black voters because he’s been worthless, even counterproductive, in his own small city; veterans because he’s bragged too much about his soft tour in Afghanistan (as such tours go), spending his free time on roof tops smoking and getting into his laptop instead of looking for ways to further his unit’s mission; moderates of any stripe because his economic and social safety net ideas are destructive of the things that actually would support the least among us.

Robert Francis O’Rourke is in the mix—and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden has promised to make him the head of a Gun Confiscation program in a Biden administration. And he is born to it.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) will be old enough for 2024 and beyond elections, but she won’t be mature enough. Her social welfare, climate, and economic ideas are just plain crazy.

Ro Khanna (D, CA) will happily parrot the Party line, including the new Party-centric position of free stuff for everyone, and that’s certainly sufficient to qualify him for Party standard bearer. He virtue signals with the best of them, too, but none of that is enough for anything serious. And he doesn’t have the fire in the belly required to go past the safety of his California district.

I tend to favor an Ocasio-Cortez-O’Rourke ticket, though: their ideas need to be dragged out into the open and clearly, sharply debated as the only way to put those foolishnesses to rest.

(Double) Standards of Protection for Government Officials

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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) threatened two Supreme Court Justices if they didn’t rule his way on a Louisiana law requiring doctors to have hospital admission privileges as a prerequisite to doing abortions. (The case actually has little to do with abortions; it concerns whether third parties—doctors here—can sue on behalf of others, especially when those others have suffered no harm from the matter.)

Schumer stood on the steps the Supreme Court building in front of a noisy protest crowd and, pointing back at the Supreme Court building, said [the quote below starts at about 0:45],

I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.

The lack of “Justice” honorific might seem merely rude on Schumer’s part, but he omitted it to emphasize the directness and seriousness of his threat. The smirk on his face as he took in the crowd’s noisy approval illustrates the matter, too.

Schumer, of course, denied through his spokesman (apparently he didn’t have the courage to speak directly), that he was threatening the Justices, insisting that he was talking political retribution for Republican politicians. The video at the link demonstrates the lie of that. Schumer, in one paragraph of his speech was clearly addressing—facing, pointing at, calling by name—two Justices. It wasn’t until the next paragraph that he addressed—facing his crowd, no pointing, no Republican addressed by name (not even his chiefest opponent, the Senate Majority Leader so instrumental in getting those Justices confirmed)—Republican politicians.

On the floor of the Senate Thursday, Schumer doubled down on his threat. First, he lied about making a threat; his words weren’t intended that way, he claimed. He’s from Brooklyn and Brooklynites speak in strong language, he said—as if being his habit makes it all right. Then he tried to downplay his words by insisting that Republicans are creating the situation with their politics and with their “manufactured outrage” over Schumer’s remarks.

Then Schumer, still on the floor of the Senate at the end of his doubling down, refused even to apologize to the Justices. He just yielded back his time.

The Wall Street Journal, in its op-ed on the matter, mentioned President Donald Trump’s call for Justice recusal in emphasis of the seriousness of Schumer’s escalation of the Left’s political rhetoric:

Mr Trump recently tweeted that liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor should recuse themselves on cases involving his Administration.

It’s much more than this, though.  Trump didn’t threaten Ginsburg and Sotomayor, individually or together, if they didn’t comply. Not tacitly, especially not as nakedly as Schumer threatened Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

The Secret Service gets after folks who threaten Presidents. Don’t Justices—on the same government hierarchical level as Presidents—deserve the same protection? Apparently not, when it’s a Progressive-Democrat who makes the threat.

A Post-Super Tuesday Thought

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With Progressive-Democratic Party Primaries and Caucuses mostly complete (California is still…counting…its ballots, and I’m ignoring Iowa’s pseudo-caucus entirely) through last Tuesday, some results have become more or less apparent.

Joe Biden has won or leads in (as I write, Maine remains too close to call) 11 States, and Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) has won 5 States.  There’s nothing to be gleaned from any geographical spread in these States; there remain 34, scattered about the countryside, in which Party contests are yet to be held.

What’s interesting in these results is the margin of victory by each candidate.

Biden’s margin of victory averaged 17%, and Sanders’ averaged 18%. (Fun with statistics: taking out margins less than double-digits, and Biden’s margin of victory jumps to 25%, while Sanders’ moves to 20%—his lone single-digit margin was 9%.)

Seventeen and eighteen per cent, and that’s with five or six serious candidates on the ballots. I include Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D, HI), who’s serious and articulate in her positions, even though she has no chance at the nomination.  Pete Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar (D, MN) got serious numbers of votes even though they folded to pressure from the Party Elites and quit in favor of endorsing Biden: their quitting came too late to be removed from any Super Tuesday ballots. What if Biden and Sanders had been going head-to-head with their votes not diluted by these other candidates?

Biden’s and Sanders’ margins of victory indicate that the Progressive-Democratic Party is every bit as bitterly divided on ideological grounds as Party has made our nation.

Look now for a brokered convention, and watch carefully the antics and shenanigans Michael Bloomberg pulls in Milwaukee. He’s dropped out and endorsed Biden, and he still has tons of uncommitted cash money for his horse-trading and deal-making. Is he now the Veep candidate?

Note:  My claims are based on votes cast, not delegate counts, and they’re taken from Fox News’ estimates as of Wednesday morning.  While the vote totals are incomplete as I write, they’re very nearly so, and so they’re highly indicative of the final outcome for these States.

Paying Their Fair Share

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Progressive-Democrats, including their Presidential candidates, are fond of saying the Evil Rich aren’t paying their fair share in taxes; they should pay more.  Those same Progressive-Democrats also carefully decline to say what that fair share should be, other than their “more.”

Here’s a graph of what those Evil Rich do pay, compared with the income those same Evil Rich earn, courtesy of the Center of the American Experiment:

Notice that. That’s even after those Evil Rich have taken all the adjustments to their top line income that our tax code allows them to take, including the Progressive-Democrats’ much disliked preferential tax treatment for capital gains and interest income.

The graph shows the rates for the top 50%.  The top 10% pays a skosh over 70% of all income taxes paid Uncle Sugar, while earning only a bit under 48% of the private sector’s income.

Ninety per cent, seventy per cent—in what way are these not the Evil Rich’s fair share, much less more than their fair share?  Especially compared to those bottom 50% who earn a bit over 10% of the private sector’s income, but pay only 3%?

The Progressive-Democrats won’t say. The only conclusion is that they consider the fair share to be “all of it.”

The Right Answer

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Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) is outraged. Outraged, he says.

It is outrageous that the wealthiest corporate executives in America get unlimited, special tax privileges on hundreds of millions of dollars in savings, while ordinary workers can only get tax deferment of up to $19,500 on their 401(k)s[.]

Of course, the (Democratic) Socialist’s answer is to raise taxes on those executives’ savings, their executive retirement and deferred compensation accounts.  He wants to “sharply curb” the tax benefits associated with those accounts. Because, after all, there comes a time when they’ve made enough money. And they didn’t earn that money, anyway; they had help.

Never mind that however earned, it’s certainly not Government’s money; it’s still the earner’s money. Never mind that Government has no business dictating to any of the citizens who employ it how much “enough” is.

Never mind, either, that yeah, they did earn the money. They took the risks—exacerbated by excessive Government regulation—they put in the time and sweat. And the help they had—their employees, not Government—were well paid. Even the low/no skill minimum wage worker was well paid for the value of his work—those, that is, who were able to stay employed or to find work in the first place after Government minimum wage diktats priced them out of low/no skill required jobs.

No, the right answer does not include capping the success of the most successful or increasing the tax bite on those most successful.  Success isn’t capped just on the Evil Rich, though.  The success on all of us is capped: that tax deferment limit doesn’t only apply to our 401(k)s; there are even more draconian caps on our 403(b)s, our Traditional IRAs, our Roth IRAs.  Those caps are not the right answer, either; they’re part of the same error.

Capping success, though, is all this (Democratic) Socialist and his Progressive-Democratic Party confreres know to do.

The right answer, the non-socialist answer, the free market capitalist answer, is to stop capping success.  Leave off the attempts to confiscate the proceeds of executive success and eliminate the caps on the tax deferability of the contributions the rest of us make to our savings and retirement accounts. The money in those accounts and the money we could contribute additionally, were those caps eliminated, also is not Government’s money. It’s ours.

And so is our success.

Full stop.