Tag Archives: politics

Don’t Mention Cutting Spending

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Don’t you dare. The newly proposed Australian budget contains some tax cuts here, some tax structural changes nearby, and some tax increases there.

The tax cuts and structural changes are small steps in the right direction. The tax increases, though, are rationalized in this way: Saul Eslake, ex-Chief Economist at Merrill Lynch in Australia is claiming, as paraphrased by the WSJ:

If the process of reform is to be extended from here, policy makers should consider increasing and/or broadening the country’s goods-and-services tax to repair the revenue side of the federal budget and help ease the significant tax burden faced by wage earners and companies[.]

“Repair the revenue side?” What’s to repair? It isn’t the government’s money; it belongs to the good citizens of Australia. Their government only takes the money away from them; any seeming shortfalls in collections are nothing less than more money in those citizens’ hands.

And this from Shane Oliver, AMP Ltd‘s Head of Investment Strategy and Chief Economist:

If you do one reform without looking at income tax, then you miss the bigger picture[.]

There are two things wrong with these criticisms. One is the utter lack of justification for the amount of money the government collects through its taxing regime, whether current or as proposed. That “need” is simply assumed as received wisdom. The other is the equally utter lack of consideration of government spending cuts. The supposed necessity of current (or increased) spending levels also is simply assumed as received wisdom, albeit the spending is occasionally weasel-wordedly justified by announced social need—but even that isn’t seriously justified, merely announced from on high.

If Australia—and others, including us—want serious, durable prosperity, it’s necessary to cut taxes and cut spending further. That’s not austerity, no matter how hysterically the Left generally proclaims it to be. Leaving more money in the hands of the citizens is not austerity being inflicted on them, it’s their prosperity being restored to them. And that’s the bigger picture that Oliver is missing.

British Local Elections

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The UK just concluded a round of local elections, and the wreckage was extensive for the nation’s two (now erstwhile) dominant political parties. Those local elections were wide ranging. Of the total number of local seats (of all types of “local”), 40% or 5,000 were up for grabs. Those 5,000 ran the local gamut:

Every level of government below the London parliament was up for grabs: the national assemblies in Scotland and Wales; the patronage-rich regional assemblies and mayoralties of the English provinces; the big-city, big-spending borough councils of London, Manchester, and Birmingham; and the hundreds of village and neighborhood wards.

The outcome was

  • Reform UK: additional 1,453 seats, control of 14 councils
  • Liberal Democrats: additional 155 seats
  • Greens: additional 441 seats, control of five councils
  • independents [sic]: additional 34 seats, now totaling 205
  • Conservatives: lost 563 seats, 6 of their 15 councils
  • Labour: lost 1,496 seats, 38 of their 66 councils
  • 64 councils now have no overall control

Some 3rd grade arithmetic. Reform UK’s 1460+ seats represent 29% of the seats up for grabs. That’s almost 12% of the total such seats.

If that momentum continues, it’ll likely be bye-bye to both Labour and Conservatives in ’29, which is the latest by which this British Government must call elections, a call that’s controlled by the majority party, so far, Labour. That deadline stands unless Labour can engineer a successful no-confidence vote against their current Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. That, though, would bring forward the demise of Labour and Conservatives both.

Would Labour dare? It’s already about to become irrelevant as its internal civil war over who will lead the party (much less be the government’s Prime Minister) is beginning to generate the party’s rapid unscheduled disassembly. Still, there is an upside to a successful no-confidence vote; the ensuing general election will drag the Conservatives into the dust bin with them. Labour, after all, would be loathe to see the Conservatives survive them.

Disingenuous Appeal

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The Virginia Attorney General, Progressive-Democrat Jay Jones, has appealed to the US Supreme Court his State’s Supreme Court ruling that the redistricting map that cut Virginia citizens’ Federal House of Representatives representation from six districts favoring Progressive-Democrats and five Republican-favoring districts to a split of ten Progressive-Democrat-favoring districts and one Republican-favoring. His rationalization is that the State Court’s ruling

deprived voters, candidates, and the commonwealth of their right to the lawfully enacted congressional districts[.]

This is a cynical misreading of the State Supreme Court ruling, and it’s Jones’ attempt to deprive voters, candidates, and the commonwealth of their right to elect the candidates of their choice, from a correct list of candidates campaigning in legitimate districts.

The State’s Supreme Court pointed out in so many words what the disenfranchisement caused by the struck map was:

The General Assembly voted for the first time to propose the constitutional amendment to the electorate on October 31, 2025. By that date, over 1.3 million votes had been cast in the general election, which was approximately 40% of the total vote for that election cycle.

Jay and his fellow Progressive-Democrats are attempting to disenfranchise those 40% of the voters who had no chance to consider the redistricting map before they voted.

Here are Progressive-Democrats refusing to accept their own Court’s decision, a decision the US Supreme Court should uphold by refusing to accept the appeal. That refusal, if it comes and were it also to be explained, should stem from two factors. One is that the State’s Supreme Court Justices know the State’s Constitution better than the US Supreme Court Justices and so the latter should defer to the former on this matter. The other is that, as the State’s Court ruling emphasized, the deprivation was by the State’s legislature through its disregard of their own constitution.

Mindset

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The problem is laid out early in the Wall Street Journal article:

Republicans are playing defense in Ohio and a growing number of other red states….

No. Republicans should not be playing defense anywhere, but especially not in the so-called battleground constituencies. That’s a purely reactive mindset and behavior, and it meekly surrenders the initiative to the Progressive-Democrats.

Republican candidates should be out among their constituents and among heretofore Progressive-Democrat Party constituencies and among areas where voters are typically undecided or are uncommitted to one party or the other. They should be talking about their own policies in concrete, measurable terms, and they should be talking similarly about their particular Progressive-Democrat opponent’s policies, where that one has any, and about the utter lack of policy beyond Never Trump ideology where that Progressive-Democrat candidate has nothing else on offer. In talking about those two sets of policies or about policy vs Never Trump, Republicans should be emphasizing both those differences and the failures of those Progressive-Democrat positions.

In particular, Ohio Republican Senate candidate Jon Husted should be talking about his specific policy successes and comparing those to what Progressive-Democrat candidate Sherrod Brown has on offer—a prior three-term record of progressive taxing and spending with nothing accomplished for the benefit of Ohio’s workers, steelworkers included. Just money taken out of Ohio citizens’ pockets and wasted.

But that’s not enough by itself. Mid-term elections are characterized by Progressive-Democratic Party voters coming out in droves while Republican voters sit on their couches in the supposed comfort of their homes. Republican candidates need to be encouraging those voters to get out and vote. They can best do this by explicitly and repeatedly urging them to go vote and by showing how their own policies best support the needs and wants of those voters.

There’s more required, though. Those Republican voters need actually to bestir themselves to vote. They shouldn’t be waiting to be told; they should be acting on their own initiative. Republican voters need to understand that every decision to not bother to vote is an active decision to favor the Progressive-Democrat candidate with their non-vote.

In the end, Republicans need to be forcing Progressive-Democrat candidates to react to their initiatives, always and everywhere. If they don’t, they’ll lose this election in both houses of Congress, the Presidential election in ’28, and for elections to come for generations.

An Additional Reason

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors took notice of President Donald Trump’s (R) waiver of the Jones Act, which mandates sea shipments of goods between American ports be done by American-built, -owned, and -crewed ships. The waiver has been a resounding success during the disruptions of the Iran war and Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. From this, the editors suggested that

if the Trump Administration thinks its waiver is helping oil supply during the Hormuz crisis, why not make that success permanent by repealing the Jones Act?

That’s an excellent suggestion, and it’s bolstered by a much more cogent rationale, as well, peripherally touched on by the editors. The purpose of the Jones Act when it was enacted was to stimulate American shipbuilding. It’s only necessary to observe Trump’s lately effort to push a hard acceleration in building dual use cargo ships to both expand our commercial shipping fleet in competition with the People’s Republic of China’s burgeoning commercial fleets and to facilitate the Navy’s ability to move supplies, equipment, and reinforcements around the world into combat areas. In all those years since this law was passed, there has been zero growth in our shipbuilding capability.

It’s past time to rescind the Jones Act.