Tag Archives: political parties

Banking Reform

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The Senate has passed a bill that greatly diminishes Dodd-Frank’s interference with our banking industry by easing the regulatory burden on financial institutions lesser than the half-dozen or so that have been (mistakenly, IMNSHO) designated systemically important.

There’s concern about the willingness of the Progressive-Democrats who voted for it (including voting to get it past cloture) to vote for it again were it to come back from the House changed in any way.  Republican Senators, as a result, want the House to pass the bill as it is, without alteration or delay.

Many in the House, and The Wall Street Journal, whose op-ed prompted this post, demur and want more reforms added.

Republican Senators’ concerns about the timidity of the Progressive-Democrats and their willingness to vote favorably again is valid, though, and the House altering the bill and forcing that second vote in the Senate is unnecessarily risky. It might cost the entire bill.

Another path is for the House to take the bird in hand and pass it, preserving the partial reforms. Then they should pass their own bill containing the remaining items of interest. At that point Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) and his banking committee Senators should force a vote on the House bill, putting all the Progressive-Democrat Senators on the voting record as favoring or disfavoring banking reform.  In an election year.

The Old Ball and Chain

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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

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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

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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

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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.