Tag Archives: politics

Kind of the Purpose

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The European Union’s antitrust bureaucrats demur from Apple’s seeming dominance in the no-contact payment market, and they may or may not have a case. They don’t, though, have one based on this sham argument from EU Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager, who also serves at the EU’s Executive Vice President of the European Commission for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age (because if the title is long enough the incumbent can be made to feel important enough):

Apple has built a closed ecosystem around its devices and its operating system. Apple controls the gates to this ecosystem, setting the rules of the game for anyone who wants to reach consumers using Apple devices.

That’s kind of the purpose of copyrights and patents—allowing the inventor or developer of the product to control its use. In addition to which, no one is required to use Apple products to do contactless paying—or even to make telephone calls.

Neither does Apple control the ecosystem of contactless paying—it only controls its own devices, which have a, not the, contactless paying capability.

Prolonging the Crisis on Purpose?

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First, we have Brett Velicovich, a former US Army intelligence and special operations soldier, warning us that

There is a political logistics jam somewhere for the flow of training devices like this [Javelin simulators] into Ukraine, and it’s making it so they are less effective in the field and in some cases even failing on the front lines when being fired.

That political holdup is within the Biden-Harris administration.

Then we get Samantha Power, United States Agency for International Development Administrator, saying openly in regard to the relationship between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Left’s push to convert us to “green” energy no matter the cost,

Never let a crisis go to waste[,]

and that [as cited by Fox News]

fertilizer shortages would provide farmers the opportunity to “hasten” their “transition” from fertilizer to more “natural” resources.

And we get Jennifer Granholm, Biden-Harris’ Energy Secretary who, not so long ago, thought the idea of bringing down the price of gasoline and oil was laugh-out-loud hilarious, saying much the same thing, urging Congress to [again as cited by Fox News]

use this crisis to pass “clean energy” legislation and to “wean off” fossil fuels.

This along with Biden-Harris himself still slow-walking (albeit at a lessening obstructive pace) transferring arms to Ukraine so that nation can defeat Russia’s invasion—all while studiously continuing to refuse to say that Ukraine can, and must, win the war Russia has inflicted.

Is being green is more important than being free and sovereign?

Hmm….

Disinformation

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…about his new Truth Division Disinformation Governance Board.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said “there’s no question” he could have more effectively communicated the purpose of his newly-created “disinformation” board….

Mayorkas also said that his

Disinformation Governance Board [is] to combat online disinformation….

Of course, it is. And it’s the Biden-Harris administration personnel and Mayorkas who will decide what is truth and what is fiction and who will dictate via that Truther Board what we American citizens will be permitted to hear, and it’s the Biden-Harris administration personnel and Mayorkas who will tell us how to evaluate what their Board allows to be passed.

And this from Mayorkas:

You know, an individual has the free speech right to spew anti-Semitic rhetoric. What they don’t have the right to do is take hostages in a synagogue, and that’s where we get involved.

That’s a cynically and dishonestly presented red herring. Those two items have little to do with each other, and we already have statutes on the books barring the latter, as well as barring the former from taking the form of inciting the latter. No Truther Board is needed except to push Government censorship.

Putting a woman well-known for her own disinformation-spreading enthusiasm and skill in charge of the Board makes plain the degree of censorship to which this agency’s actions are intended to reach.

Logistics

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Junior officers study tactics, so the military saw goes, while senior officers study strategy, and general officers study logistics.

Then there’s this.

Military spending is set to rise, with the Biden administration requesting $773 billion for the Pentagon’s next financial year, but the military is still running short of some weapons widely used in Ukraine.
Defense-company executives say they are ready to increase production of most weapons, but some experts say the Pentagon has only just begun issuing new contracts that would be required to replace some of the weaponry sent overseas.
“Industry really can’t do a lot until they have their contracts in hand,” said Bill Greenwalt, a former Pentagon official who managed the military’s industrial policy and is now a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “We are still in that limbo phase.”
The Pentagon has sent more than $3.7 billion worth of military goods from existing stockpiles to Ukraine since the February 24 invasion, from heavy artillery and tactical drones, to shoulder-fired Stingers and Javelins. But so far, the Pentagon has issued only one new contract, for Puma drones. A Pentagon official last week said the military was working to get others issued soon.

Apparently, no one in DoD, from SecDef Lloyd Austin—who used to be one of those general officers—on down, studies logistics.

A Small Tweak and a Large…Tweak

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In his Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, Travis Nix reminds us of this tidbit regarding IRS private letters that’s buried in President Joe Biden’s (D) latest budget proposal:

IRS private letter rulings—the agency’s written answers to individual taxpayers’ questions, which the IRS itself says cannot be relied on as precedent.

Here’s a small tweak: make the IRS stand by its rulings by making those rulings binding on the IRS, applicable to all taxpayers, and precedential. And require the IRS to answer the question that was asked—to issue its letter ruling—within 30 days of the question being asked, or failing to do so authorizes, as a matter of tax law, the questioner to answer the question (formally, via its tax return) in its own way.

Nix’ overall op-ed was centered on another item buried in that tax portion of the Biden-Harris budget: a lengthening of the time the IRS has to reach into the past to look at inadvertent tax errors in a taxpayer’s filing. The proposed time would be extended from three years into the past to six years.

However [emphasis added].

Since the IRS already has unlimited time to audit the returns of companies that seem to have deliberately omitted income they knew was taxable, the new regulation would largely target unknowing omissions that result from unclear regulations.

That brings me to a large tweak. The whole question could be entirely eliminated by rewriting our byzantine tax code to have no income tax at all on businesses and to have a single, low, flat individual income tax rate on all income regardless of source and with no subsidies, deductions, credits, or any other “adjustments.”

Such a code would allow individual tax filings to fit on the proverbial post card (but maybe stick it into an envelope for mailing, for privacy’s stake):

Line 1: How much income did you have this tax year? ______

Line 2: Insert income tax due ([10]% of Line 1):           ______