Tag Archives: political parties

Budgets and Austerity

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The Italian coalition government (interesting in its own right, consisting as it does as a teaming up of the far left 5 Star Movement and the far right Liga) has decided to increase government spending and decrease taxes.  This has been projected to produce a 2.4% budget deficit.  For a government already badly in debt, this deficit isn’t good.

Cutting taxes has been decried by others as being the cause of such deficits and debts.  Spending cuts cannot be allowed, say the same folks, because that would be an austere measure.

They’re wrong.

Cutting taxes leaves more money in the hands of the citizenry, the folks best positioned and best suited to make decisions concerning how their money should be used.

Cutting spending—a necessary measure to stay within the taxes collected—far from being an austerity measure, would enable Italy’s economy to burgeon. Getting the government out of competition with the citizens and businesses of the Italian economy for that economy’s resources will reduce price pressure, and it will leave those resources more available to the private actors, who will use those resources more efficiently than any government can achieve.

Italy’s move to cut taxes and increase spending is a half measure.  Spending needs to be cut to fit within the revenue the taxes will produce. Make no mistake on a related matter, too: the burgeoning economy will produce a net increase in revenue to the Italian government.

Be Like Europe

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Instapundit has some data concerning what that would mean for us.  Citing the Foundation for Economic Education:

Most European countries (including Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium) if they joined the US, would rank among the poorest one-third of US states on a per-capita GDP basis, and the UK, France, Japan and New Zealand would all rank among America’s very poorest states, below No. 47 West Virginia, and not too far above No. 50 Mississippi. Countries like Italy, S. Korea, Spain, Portugal and Greece would each rank below Mississippi as the poorest states in the country.

From FEE, here’s a table of our 50 States and a list of EU nations—along with other wealthy nations, like New Zealand, Japan, and the Republic of Korea (and the People’s Republic of China)—and how those nations compare with our States.

Yes, indeed, this is the Europe that the Progressive-Democrats and their Socialist hero Bernie Sanders are so anxious for us to emulate.  Remember this this fall.

Hatred’s Failure—and Success

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Shelby Steele had an op-ed in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal that discussed the reasons for today’s Left being consumed with hate.  He was generally correct until the end of his piece.

And then there is the failure of virtually every program the left has ever espoused—welfare, public housing, school busing, affirmative action, diversity programs, and so on.

I was with Mr Steele until this point. Far from failures, however, these programs have been the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party’s greatest successes.  These are how the Left and the Party have kept blacks—and far too many women—trapped in the Party-built welfare cages, trapped in perpetual victimhood.

This victimhood is and always has been the font of the Left’s political power.  Keep in mind, after all, that it was the Progressive-Democrat Woodrow Wilson who resegregated the Federal government after Republicans had spent the post-Civil War years working to bring blacks into the governing fold.  It was the Progressive-Democrats who insisted that blacks needed the protection of segregation because they were inherently incapable of competing.  It’s the Progressive-Democrats who built on that segregationist “protection” with their soft bigotry of low expectations in making race and gender necessary deciding criteria for admission to any of their welfare programs—even to higher education.  It’s the Progressive-Democrats who built the welfare cliff into their programs in order to keep welfare recipients trapped in dependency on the largesse of those same Progressive-Democrats.

Ignorant Voters

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Recall the erstwhile tax on job creation that the Seattle city government passed a while back, and then repealed.  The tax would have charged businesses making more than $20 million in annual revenue a per employee tax of $275.  Although, in response to business and public outcry, the city repealed the tax a couple months later, the commentary of the tax’s chief supporter is illuminating.  Seattle City Councilwoman Lorena González, the lead proponent of the jobs tax:

Sadly the policy is right.  Our timing, however, was off. It’ll occur but we need to socialize people to what we’ve done, what we could do, the need and the real lack of resources.
A replacement may be in the cards but not now. We need to get rid of this albatross and then quietly work to figure out what takes its place. I’m thinking this is a November 2019 strategy.

Yep.  Business owners are just being greedy when they object to being taxed for hiring people. Those people are just too ignorant to understand that having their jobs taxed out from under them is good for them; they need to be socialized.

And the Progressive-Democrats on the Seattle City Council now will work secretively to slip this…tax…by the city under cover of a noisy city election.

Feinstein’s Weapons Distortion

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Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) isn’t only dissembling in the course of her Progressive-Democratic Party’s shambles-making of the Judge Kavanaugh Supreme Court Justice confirmation process.  She’s dissembling regarding our right to keep and bear Arms, also.  Using the hoo-raw the Party created during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings (she’s the Ranking Democrat on that committee), she had this comment in the lead up to a question she had for Kavanaugh:

I’m talking about your statement on “common use.”  Assault weapons are not in common use.

There are two cynical distortions in that claim.  One is her “assault weapons” nonsense.  There are no assault weapons available to civilians in the United States.  Assault weapons are weapons capable of fully automatic fire (some of which can be possessed, but not borne, by collectors under very narrow circumstances) and heavy weapons—antitank weapons, crew-served fully automatic weapons, and the like.  Feinstein is carefully conflating the term “assault weapons” with semi-automatic rifles, which most assuredly are in common use in our nation, as she tries to emotionalize a completely rational matter with her scary term.

The other is her business about common use.  Here’s the 2nd Amendment in its entirety:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

There’s nothing in there about common use.  The Supreme Court has ruled on the need for common use, but this flies in the face of that Amendment on two grounds: one is the Court’s manufactured standard—it’s law-making from its bench—of commonness of use.  The other flies in the face of history and of the environment in which We the People ratified our Amendment: a significant fraction of the cannons used by our side during our Revolutionary War were privately owned.  Plainly, given their expense in obtaining, maintaining, and operating, they were possessed only by the wealthy—they were not in “common use.”  The Court’s ruling simply wants reversal so as to bring the matter back in line with our Constitution.

That second point might be a bit obscure, but the first is blindingly obvious.  Even to a Progressive-Democrat.