The Old Ball and Chain

Hillary Clinton made a speech in India in which she said some things that apparently she was too timid to say here in the US of A.  One thing she said was about white women:

…we don’t do well with married, white women. And part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.

Because white women who don’t toe the line and vote for Clinton (or now, presumably, for the Progressive-Democratic Party candidate, whomever she might be in whatever race) just can’t think for themselves, they’re just the medieval-esque property of their lord and master husband.  Or of their male child if they don’t have a proper life with a husband.

It’s plain why she didn’t dare say such a thing in Texas, or middle Oklahoma, or farmland Iowa, or anywhere else but the West Coast and the northeast.  Or in Tennessee.  Even Missouri, where a Progressive-Democrat Senator proclaimed her offense from Clinton’s spew.  Or in Wasilla, AK.

At least Clinton didn’t go after all the ditzy blondes that didn’t vote her way.

Oh, wait….

A Telling Remark

It also emphasizes the magnitude of the Republican failure with the party’s choice for Senate candidate in last December’s Alabama special election.

In a Wall Street Journal piece centered on the intra-party fighting the Senate Progressive-Democrats are having over a banking bill that would release smaller banks from Dodd-Frank’s onerous requirements, Senator Doug Jones (D, AL), who won that special election, let slip this in response to criticism from Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) over his support for that banking bill:

I don’t really worry about things like that. I do what I think is best for me[.]

What’s best for Jones.  Not what’s best for his constituents and employers, the citizens of Alabama.

Hmm….

Because, Tax

In a further demonstration that the Progressive-Democratic Party knows only how to tax and to raise taxes, there’s this.

Senate Democrats on Wednesday proposed repealing major pieces of the just-passed tax law, in a plan that would raise taxes on corporations, estates, and high-income households to pay for $1 trillion in new infrastructure spending.

And the Progressive-Democrats actually are touting this for the mid-term elections this fall.  It’s not your money, after all, it’s Big Governments, and Progressive-Democrats Know Better how your money should be spent.

Can’t possibly pay for the infrastructure by cutting spending somewhere else.  Mm, mm.

That today’s Republican Party can’t figure out how to cut spending somewhere else (House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R, WI) Social Security and Medicare reforms come to mind) just compounds the problem, it in no way excuses the Progressive-Democrats’ failure.

Buybacks and Tax Cuts

Who benefits most and what was the value of the Trump administration’s tax cuts, if all that companies are going to do with their tax cut related income boost is use it to buy back shares?  This seems actually confusing to some folks on the Left.

Here are some of the happy totals.  Share buybacks have run to some $200 billion in the last three months.  Moreover,

Of the companies in the S&P 500, about 44% have said they plan to reinvest some portion of their tax gains into capital expenditures or wages, while 28% said they would use them to increase shareholder returns, Morgan Stanley found in an analysis of earnings transcripts. Its own analysts expect companies to spend about 43% of their savings on buybacks and dividends, and 30% on capital expenditures and labor.

Progressive-Democrats are making the argument that the buybacks benefit only the 1%.  Certainly, stockholders—those owners of the company—who choose to accept a buyback deal are better off: they get something of value to them that they didn’t have before, which is more cash in their pocket.

Progressive-Democrats actually think the money stops there.  Or so they imply.

It doesn’t.  The money doesn’t disappear under a rich man’s mattress; he didn’t get rich doing that.  No, the tax reduction money that goes to capital expenditures improves production efficiency, which lowers costs to the consumer, which raises demand for the product, which increases pressure to hire more workers to make more product.

Money spent on buybacks and dividends (another bugaboo of the Left—how dare a company return any of its money to its owners) is money received by the company’s owners, who include not only the stinking rich but ordinary folks like you and me, either as investors ourselves or as beneficiaries of company pension plans or as holders of 401(k)s and IRAs.  That money received by us, including the Evil Rich among us, then gets spent.  That’s increased consumer demand, which increases pressure to hire more workers.  Even the buyback and dividend money that goes into those retirement accounts gets spent—we’re all going to retire someday, and if we die, our heirs will spend the money.

It stretches credulity to believe that folks as undeniably brilliant as Progressive-Democrats hold themselves out to be don’t understand this.

But, hey—votes.

Big Government and Responsibility

The Progressive-Democratic Party-run States and the Republican-run States are demonstrating what they think of the intelligence and capability of ordinary American citizens.

The roughly half of states controlled by Republicans are therefore moving aggressively to roll back the law widely known as Obamacare, while the smaller number of Democratic states are working to bolster it.

One party does not believe that Americans in a free market, here for health care and for health care coverage plans, are capable of making sound decisions.  They need Big Government to think and act for them.  The other party believes the opposite: the ordinary man is fully capable of thinking for himself and doesn’t need Big Government to tell him what to do.

Oh, and that other party also believes in free markets and the associated competition that brings down overall prices and increases the range of options available.  That other party also believes that the greater range of options facilitates the decision-making of the ordinary man.  The one party believes the range of options only confuses the ordinary man and so—single payer for limited choices.