Tag Archives: politics

Another Progressive-Democrat Gives Another Part of the Game Away

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Laura Saunders, in her Friday Wall Street Journal column concerning the Roth IRAs, the rich and deplorable, and us average Americans, has a striking quote from Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D, OR).

Saunders was writing about how efforts to lay punitive limits and punitive taxes on the Roth IRAs of the super wealthy can only have deleterious effects on the rest of us.

Here’s Wyden’s statement on the matter:

IRAs were designed to provide retirement security to middle-class families, not allow mega-millionaires and billionaires to avoid paying taxes[.]

Wyden has two beefs here. One is his progressive view that the wealthy don’t deserve to be under the same law as the rest of us Americans; the success of the wealthy must be called out and that success denied them—because the rich are the piñata of government disfavored groups of Americans.

The other is that business about avoiding paying taxes. Never mind that the rich and deplorable—and the merely rich—already pay the vast bulk of the taxes the Federal government collects, while the bottom half of income earners pay close to nothing in taxes, and the very bottom—including those who don’t have any job-related income—get tax payments from the rest of us. The amount the rich pay isn’t enough for Progressive-Democrats. More is better.

All of it is better, yet.

I Dissent

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…from the dissenter.

The Supreme Court ruled that Arizona’s voter law is entirely legitimate. That law, you’ll remember, among other things limited who is allowed to return early voting ballots for another person—banned ballot harvesting—and barred counting ballots cast in the wrong precinct.

Among the reasons for upholding Arizona’s law is this:

The court rejected the idea that showing that a state law disproportionately affects minority voters is enough to prove a violation of the law.

Writing in dissent (it was a 6-3 majority), Justice Elena Kagan claimed in part

What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute [the 56-yr-old Voting Rights Act] designed to bring about “the end of discrimination in voting.” I respectfully dissent[.]

The irony in Kagan’s dissent is breathtaking in its depth. She complains of damaging the “end of discrimination in voting” even as the Arizona law treats all voters equally rather than giving special treatment to some. Reducing special treatment somehow increases discrimination.

The rejection of the concept that disproportionality is by itself, regardless of whether it’s a mere side effect, discriminatory also represents a great reduction in special treatment for particular groups—but this, too, is somehow an increase in discrimination in Kagan’s world view.

Two Serious Errors

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These particular two have occurred in the just concluded (sort of) Progressive-Democratic Party primary election for Party’s nominee for Mayor of New York City.

The first error is this: more than 920,000 votes were counted in that primary election, out of some 800,000 votes cast in person—and the count does not yet include 124,000+ absentee ballots cast.

But votes counted included 135,000 test votes—votes used to check procedures in and to practice for the ranked choice vote counting that would be used in the “live” election. Those test votes were supposed to have been purged before the actual live election and not counted in the results.

How does that happen, exactly? Most likely, it’s from the sloppiness and outright incompetence of the city’s Board of elections persons.

The second error is more of a failure and is even more serious, and it goes to the heart of ranked choice voting.

[V]oters…list their top five candidates in order. Since no candidate was the first choice of more than 50% of voters, a computer on Tuesday tabulated ballots in a series of rounds that worked like instant run-offs.
In each round, the candidate in last place was eliminated. Votes cast for that person were then redistributed to the surviving candidates, based on whoever voters put next on their ranking list. That process repeated until only two candidates were left.

A computerized process that uses cast and in-hand ballots to resolve the question from the bottom up. Computerized should take a few hours (I’m being pessimistic here; we’re long past the days of card-punch UNIVACs—and if you don’t recognize what those are, that’s my point) to complete.

However.

The final result is not expected until mid-July.

Wait—the Progressive-Democrats’ primary election was held ‘way back on 22 June. It’ll take weeks, not hours, for the computers to run this process to completion?

How does that work, exactly?

I see two factors in play here that could slow the computerized process. One is that all the absentee ballots have yet(!) to be included. Why weren’t they included in the count from the start? Because they weren’t available at the start. A State law enacted just last year allows absentee ballots arriving as late as a week after primary day to be counted, so long as they’re postmarked by primary day.

Another is that the test ballots weren’t marked in any serious way, so they have to be hand-identified and hand-removed from the pile of ballots cast.

Wow.

Compelling Interest and Racism

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors correctly decry President Joe Biden’s (D) race-based “equity” programs and diktats as taking our nation back to an ugly past.

By equity, Mr Biden means preferences for some racial groups over others to achieve equal outcomes.

And

Mr Biden sells his agenda as taking America into the future. But allocating government funds or privileges by race is a step back to an uglier past. … If applied on the scale Mr Biden hopes, America would become a nation of groups competing for racial spoils and defined outcomes rather than seeking equal opportunity for everyone.

The editors added this near the end of their piece, and here I demur from them.

Strict scrutiny requires that the government have a compelling interest for discriminating by race, and that it must use the least restrictive means to achieve that interest. If less restrictive ways can achieve the same purpose, the policy fails.

There shouldn’t be any strict scrutiny on such matters; the policies should fail on their face. There’s nothing in the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protections clause that permits Government-determined “compelling interest” to override our Constitution [emphasis added].

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

All of that plainly applies to our Federal government every bit as much as it does to each of the governments of the several States.

The Strict Scrutiny standard, as applied here, has been unconstitutional from the start and was an earlier Supreme Court attempt to duck its responsibility in applying our Constitution rather than seeking out excuses and methodologies for getting outside of it.

Government’s compelling interest is to defend and uphold our Constitution.

Full stop.

Repealing SALT

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John Tamny, FreedomWorks’ Center for Economic Freedom Director, wants the SALT deduction cap repealed, and he thinks all Republicans should agree with him.

Among the several Tamny rationalizations for why Republicans should leap at the chance to repeal SALT is this gem.

Repealing the SALT cap might not restore that vision [convolutedly, of limited government], but it would direct money away from Washington and toward states and localities.

No. A better way, the only truly effective way and the only legitimate way, to direct money away from Washington and toward states and localities is to end altogether the interstate transfer of taxpayer monies.

The money us citizens allocate to our various government jurisdictional levels are best left within those jurisdictions entirely. Taxes allocated to our central government should be exclusively for the Constitutional purposes of paying the national debt, funding a defense establishment adequate to defeating external threats, and seeing to our nation’s general Welfare as enumerated in Art I, Sect 8. Those taxes allocated to our respective States and lower jurisdictions are best left within those jurisdictions, subject to the requirements and specifications the citizens of each State set for their State.

The only legitimate interstate transfer of tax dollars is in response to a declaration of a regional or national emergency.