Tag Archives: politics

On Aid to Ukraine

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Even in Reluctant Germany, the government’s loyal opposition and a number of incumbent officials are calling for Germany to get out of the way and send tanks to Ukraine so that nation can further, and more rapidly, exploit their current battlefield gains and continue driving the barbarian back out.

But. But, but, but.

“We are simply not going to be the first to send Western-made tanks…” a senior German government official said.

I’m reminded of two lines. One is by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, as he channels Sallah: Russians. Very dangerous. You go first.

The other might be by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, sort of channeling Conan: Crush our enemies, see them driven before us, and listen to the lamentation of the women. Except that Zelenskyy is quite a bit more gentile than that, and he’d eschew the lamentation part. That’s what the barbarian from the east does. Zelenskyy, instead, would listen to the cheers of the women.

Inflation? What Inflation?

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President Joe Biden (D) and his White House spokesmen have been bragging about what a strong economy we have.

Even CNN waved the BS flag at that. Here’s how strong our economy really is.

The Labor Department on Tuesday reported its consumer-price index rose 8.3% in August from the same month a year ago [albeit down slightly from the prior two months’ year-on-year inflation]

And

[C]ore CPI, which excludes often volatile energy and food prices, increased 6.3% in August from a year earlier, up markedly from the 5.9% rate in both June and July

And

Food prices continued to climb sharply this past month, rising 0.8% in August from July, as did those for new vehicles leapt 0.8%. Prices also rose last month for medical care, education, electricity, and natural gas

Inflation in energy cost is especially troublesome. That’s the price of heating and cooling our homes, our places of business, our schools, how we power our industrial facilities. The impact on our health and finances from that exacerbates our demand for/need for medical care.

That inflation is made the worse by the growth in wages that’s been occurring since inflation took off with Biden’s ascension to office (if not since his election). Wage growth had been at half the rate of inflation, meaning us Americans’ income actually had been shrinking relative to the prices we face. But last month, despite that 8.3%/6.3% inflation, our wages grew…not at all.

Median household income was essentially unchanged last year on an inflation-adjusted basis….

Our wage dollar buys ever less in the Biden version of a strong economy.

Biden and his Progressive-Democratic Party are either wholly unaware of the real economy us average Americans face, or they’re blatantly lying about the situation.

Meanwhile, they partied on the White House lawn the day those numbers were released, celebrating this wonderful news.

Remember their obliviousness or their dishonesty this fall.

The IRS as Political Tool

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It’s not the tax collection agency it’s made out to be. We all recall, for instance, the IRS’ Lois Lerner-run Exempt Organizations Unit targeting Conservative tax-exempt organizations, slow-walking or outright denying those organizations tax-exempt status purely for political reasons, without consideration of how well they met statutory criteria for the status.

It’s also been well-publicized that the IRS has been funded for next year to hire 87,000 agents for the ostensible purpose of increasing audits of the Evil Rich, and the agency is buying ammunition and hiring agents who are willing to use lethal force in the course of their “duties.”

This is not unique to the Progressive-Democrat administrations of ex-President Barack Obama and current President Joe Biden. As far back as Lyndon Johnson’s (D) and Richard Nixon’s (R) administrations, the IRS was used to interfere with government-disapproved organizations and citizens.

Today’s IRS is just as bad across a range of…matters.

  • The IRS has disproportionately audited poorer Americans in recent years
  • IRS auditing of wealthier Americans has been declining
  • Nonpartisan projections have found increased audits under the Biden plan will heavily impact middle- and working-class Americans
  • IRS customer service has been declining, and was rated “horrendous” by its own internal watchdog
  • IRS employees have egregiously leaked or failed to protect the privacy of taxpayers’ data
  • Amid backlogs and leaks, IRS paid tax relief to dead taxpayer, prisoners on death row

The solution to this isn’t more legislation for the IRS to ignore, with or without the tacit approval of the administration then in power. IRS history and current behavior means the agency needs to be vastly shrunk.

But shrinking the IRS would be difficult as a practical matter with the current byzantine and heavily biased against some economic strata Federal tax code. IRS size and performance, then, is an argument for greatly simplifying our tax code.

Eliminate the business revenue-centric taxes. Businesses don’t pay much of those taxes, anyway; their customers pay the taxes in the form of higher prices and reduced innovation rates, and business employees and potential employees pay the taxes in the form of slower wage increases and lessened hirings.

Eliminate the personal income tax as currently constructed and have only a single, flat tax rate charged on all income from any source. Do away with subsidies, credits, exemptions, social engineering gerrymandering altogether. The new 1040 could be reduced to the current taxpayer identifying information, a line for totting up all income and reporting the total, a line for calculating the [10%] tax on that total as the total tax due, and a line for the taxpayer’s [sic] signature.

That could fit on a postcard, but with the personally identifying and income data present, I wouldn’t recommend anything less than a sealed envelope. Such a tax regime, though, would allow an IRS-like function to exist with about 14 employees (I exaggerate, but not by much).

Tough to be a political tool with that reduced function and personnel complement, too.

Biden’s Humane Border Policy

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President Joe Biden (D) says his No Southern Border Policy is very humane.

Here’s an example of how humane his policy is. Eagle Pass Fire Department Chief Manuel Mello III:

There are so many bodies being recovered that the morticians are asking for assistance. I had never seen so many drownings like we’re seeing right now.
We do a body recovery daily….

And this, summarizing Mello:

When Mello joined the fire department over 25 years ago, there would be only 12 body recoveries a year. Now, there are about 30 a month, he said.

That’s an aggregation of tragedies like this one, which Mello also described:

We had a three-month-old baby, we had a three-year-old baby brother that passed away. The uncle was trying to cross, he fell into a deep hole in the river, let go of the babies.
The babies drowned[.]

Mello offered a solution:

I would like to see the federal government jump in and help out in whatever way they can. If they could at least stop this migration, that would be awesome.

But the Feds—President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Progressive-Democrats all—refuse to come to the border and see for themselves. Biden won’t even come near it, and the closest Mayorkas and Harris have ever been are visits to border control facilities set well back from the border. Neither of them deigned join patrols actually down on the border, join river patrols on the Rio Grande.

Why would anyone expect politicians such as these ever to take these tragedies seriously? The illegal aliens aren’t even human beings as far as these persons are concerned. Illegal aliens are just tools to be wielded for personal and Party political gain.

That’s “humane” in Party’s Newspeak dictionary.

Xenophobia and Racism

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That’s how Progressive-Democratic Party politicians describe Conservatives’ and Republicans’ efforts to control our southern border and earlier to prevent the massive influx of illegal aliens and now to stop the flood that’s happening.

It’s racist to try to prevent all those illegal aliens from entering because so many of them happen to brown-skinned.

It’s xenophobic to try to stop all those illegal aliens from entering because all of them are…foreigners.

Now DC Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) has declared an emergency over illegal aliens being transferred from the southern border to the city of which she’s mayor. All 10,000 of them, so far, compared to the millions flooding across our southern border.

Bowser claims her move is to enable DC to set up an Office of Migrant Services to better serve the influx of illegal aliens. The office, though, looks more like a considered effort to keep the illegal aliens carefully segregated from the residents of the city. The mayor of a sanctuary city objects to even those few brown-skinned foreigners coming into her city, and she wants them kept apart.

It’s not just Bowser, though. The mayor of another sanctuary city, Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot (D), also objects to brown-skinned foreigners coming into her city. She’s ejecting them from Chicago and kicking them to surrounding suburbs.

Go figure.