Tag Archives: politics

A Tax False Premise

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A letter writer in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section offered an alternative to the provider tax so many States assess. The provider tax is a tax States levy on hospitals that, in the depths of the scam, the States use to get a larger allocation of Federal fund transfers into their Medicaid programs, which then reimburse those hospitals for their provider tax remittances to the State.

The letter writer suggests

If states collected taxes from other sources, channeled the revenue into their Medicaid programs and continued to provide the same services, they would be entitled to the same federal matching as they are today. Nothing would need to change.

The false premise from which this letter writer proceeds is this: the need for those tax dollars in the first place is not at all established. On the contrary: Medicaid is a State-run program and its payouts are entirely controlled by that State. As such, each State’s Medicaid program should be funded entirely and exclusively by the citizens of that State. There is no need for the Federal government to transfer the tax remittals of the citizens of any other State (much less all of them) to any State for its Medicaid program.

Indeed, were each State to retain those tax dollars rather than sending them to the Federal government, the citizens of each State would be better able to fund their State’s Medicaid program.

No, It Won’t

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This time, it’s an op-ed writer in The Wall Street Journal who is making misleading claims. In his piece regarding the likelihood of wealth flight from a Zohran Mamdani-run New York City, their subheadline reads

The state will lose wealthy taxpayers, and the federal government will have to cough up more aid.

The opinion-writer ties the weal of our nation to the weal of New York, and the article fails utterly on the false premise of a necessary Federal bailout.

No, the Federal government will not have to cough up more aid. New York’s political machinations, including its drumbeat attacks on successful Americans and on businesses domiciled there, would be coming to a head under a socialist Mamdani city administration, and that outcome is solely that New York State’s responsibility.

The good citizens of States running from Maine through New Jersey, Illinois, Texas, Wyoming, Nevada, on to California, Alaska, and Hawaii have absolutely no obligation to bail out a fiscally and regulatorily irresponsible New York City or State. The Federal government has no business forcing the rest of the nation’s citizens to do so.

The other side of the matter: only if New York—city and State—are left to stew in their own fetid spending, taxing, and regulation messes will either have any chance of mending its ways. In that way, the weal of the nation is impacted by the weal of New York State: a healthy State, not dependent of Federal funding, would be an unalloyed good for our nation.

Shocked

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I’m shocked, shocked, to find that diplomacy is going on in here. The lede and a subsequent paragraph expose the matter.

President Trump’s threat for a 50% tariff on Brazilian imports expanded his use of punitive duties over matters that have nothing to do with trade, breaking with more than a half-century of global economic precedent.
…
It is one of the latest…example of Trump using tariffs as a cudgel for political priorities outside of trade.

And

The president is betting the threat of reducing access to the American consumer will force nations to capitulate on his political priorities.

Other examples:

  • tariffs on Colombia over repatriation flights for migrants back to that country
  • steep duties on Canada, Mexico, and China over their role in the fentanyl trade
  • tariffs on countries that buy oil from Venezuela
  • threat of tariffs to attempt to secure more military spending from Asian nations such as Japan and South Korea.

The news writers at the link noted this bit of history:

Although often controversial and sometimes volatile, such as when the Smoot-Hawley Act hiked U.S. tariffs in 1930, tariffs have generally been motivated by economic or domestic political goals.

There is no more important domestic goal than national security, which necessarily is centered on the global stage.

Ricardo was right as far as he went, in that nations should specialize in those goods and services they do best and import other goods and services from other nations that the importer does poorly. But that’s pure economics. It ignores the diplomacy aspects of international trade—using exports of those specialized goods and services and imports of other goods and services as tools with which to influence other nations’ behavior across a range of milieus.

That foreign policy influence centers on matters of national security, of which domestic economics is a critical, but not sole factor. Other, equally critical, factors include providing opportunities for domestic producers to do better in those weak areas. Specialization, after all, is not the same as producing only those items with no thought to expanding into other areas for specialization.

International trade as diplomacy also includes limiting enemy nations’ access to those goods and services that a nation Ricardo-specializes in that are important to enemy nations’ own foreign adventurism, as well as limiting domestic market access by enemy nations as a means of weakening their economies and so their ability to mount those foreign adventures.

The WSJ‘s editors tacitly understand this, though they don’t seem to have made their understanding overt, even to themselves.

The US will need to mount a united front with allies to confront Beijing’s predatory practices and ensure the world isn’t dependent on China. One idea is a critical minerals alliance.

This is explicitly the use of international trade in its foreign policy/national security role and as a way to counter the People’s Republic of China’s own use of international trade to further its own foreign policy aspirations.

The news writers appear surprised find that an American President understands that international trade, and all of its tools, have very little to do with economics and very much to do with foreign policy. Sadly, they’re not alone. It would behoove all guild members to review their high school economics class notes.

Still Another Reason

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This time, another reason to eliminate the Federal government’s Star Chamber that is its FISA Court. The reason is in the lede:

The nation’s spy court has quietly approved a Justice Department request to review information tied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants that targeted former Trump campaign associate Carter Page as FBI Director Kash Patel seeks to hand over more Russiagate evidence to Congress.

The timeline of this…approval:

  • 6 June: DoJ filed its request with the FISA court
  • 17 June: FISA approved the request
  • 7 July: FISA made its approval public

That’s entirely too slow. DoJ—and the FBI—had their own copies of what they’d filed with FISA (didn’t they?); they had their own approval authority for the documents they owned. Aside from that, FISA has had its own copies of those filings, along with records of its deliberations of the related matters being considered with those filings for all these years. The judges on that court must have known that this day would come; of course, responsible and rational persons that they are, they’d already worked out at least the outlines of how they would respond. Taking 11 days to review that outline and to act on it is sloth. Taking an additional three weeks to make public their decision is irresponsible secrecy for the sake of secrecy.

That’s secondary, though. Coming ahead of that, and so obviating any need to consider any of that, is this: this court, as long as it’s going to operate entirely in secret, should have no say about the progress of an FBI or a DoJ investigation or about those agencies’ dispositions of materials associated with those investigations. To the extent our courts should be involved in such decisions, that should be the role, solely, of our public Article III courts, each of which is fully capable of handling classified information.

Where Have We Heard This Before?

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The Wall Street Journal editors opined regarding the Progressive-Democratic Party’s “abundance” campaign in contrast with Party’s New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s campaign of paucity:

…higher taxes on the rich, greater income redistribution, and expanding government control over private business—or, as he put it in 2021, “seizing the means of production.”

Then they wrote this:

Despite the tension between the two camps, both believe government should re-engineer the economy and society to their desired liberal ends.

They seem surprised by this. But. But, but, but. Progressive-Democratic Party leaders have sung this song before, and we’ve heard Party’s singing.

Then-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Barack Obama, on the eve of his election bragged that he was just days away from fundamentally transforming America. In his first address to Congress, the then-Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden announced his intention to fundamentally transform our national economy.

Mamdani should come as no surprise at all, and New Yorkers would be well to heed this and elect accordingly.