Expanding Government for Freedom

That’s the Progressive-Democrats’ Orwellian claim about their HR1 bill, just passed on party lines.  It’s for the children, too.  If it saves just one life….  Here is some of what’s in the bill:

Mandates a nationalized system to publicly finance federal elections. It would allocate federal money to match certain small-dollar donations 6-to-1 and deposit those funds in campaign accounts.

We already can designate, on our tax returns, a donation to a Federal fund for Presidential campaigns; the monies to be divided equally between the political parties.  That’s been a complete failure over the years, with the amounts designated falling, and private money going directly to the parties, candidates, PACs, etc, expanding. The Progressive-Democrats’ answer is to “correct” that by forcing us to donate to political campaigns in even larger amounts, whether we want to or not.

Requires several classes of politically active organizations, including tax-exempt 501(c)(4) groups, to disclose donors who have given $10,000 or more during an election cycle.

Because anonymity is as anathema to Progressive-Democrats as it is critical to free speech and to liberty generally.

Changes the membership of the Federal Election Commission to five members, with the president’s party in the majority, from its current six members, evenly split between Democratic and Republican appointees.

Because balancing the membership also is anathema to Progressive-Democrats: they desperately need a purely partisan facility for overseeing our elections.

Fortunately, Republicans still have a majority in the Senate.

EU Should Make Concessions?

That’s British Minister Theresa May’s plea to Brussels.

…the decisions that the European Union makes over the next few days will have a big impact on the outcome of the [parliamentary] vote. …  [L]et’s not hold back. Let’s do what is necessary for MPs to back the deal on Tuesday.

The EU functionaries have been playing you for a fool for a year and a half. This is confirmed by the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier:

EU commits to give UK the option to exit the Single Customs Territory unilaterally….

Don’t beg, Prime Minister; aside from denigrating the British people, it won’t be effective.

Just take Great Britain out of the EU and into the sunlight of sovereignty on schedule, deal or no deal.

Does France Approve?

French Cardinal Philippe Barbarin was convicted in a French court of covering up the sex abuses of his priests.  The coverup? It wasn’t a one-off affair; Barbarin’s priest—Bernard Preynat—confessed to repeated abuses from the 1980s into the early 1990s.  That’s what Barbarin was so carefully hiding.

This court sentenced the Cardinal to a whole six-months.  Then the court suspended all of those months.

This implies that France doesn’t put much importance on child abuse, even sexual abuse of children.

The government’s action is an insulting slap on the wrist.

An Experiment in Progressivism

This one has the advantage of being live and current. The Progressive-Democratic Party has extended its control over the State of California.  The results accumulating from the several years of Progressive-Democratic dominance (now outright control) are these.  California has

  • the highest welfare numbers (a third of all Americans on welfare live in California)
  • the largest contingent of illegal immigrants
  • a burgeoning homeless population
  • onerous regulations on business and private property
  • mediocre public schools
  • high income taxes (the highest marginal rate is 13.3%) and sales taxes
  • a yawning gap between rich and poor
  • its own summer blend of expensive gasoline
  • bedraggled and crowded roads
  • a widely mocked high-speed rail boondoggle

Sadly, it doesn’t get any better than that for California.  Or for our United States if the Progressive-Democratic Party makes further gains in 2020 or beyond.

French Tax, Tax, Tax

Now the French have decided to add another tax on American multinationals—a 3% “digital-services” tax on companies that do “targeted advertising or run[] a digital marketplace,” a tax aimed in particularly at Alphabet’s Google and Amazon.com.

Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire:

These giants use your personal data and make a significant profit from it, without paying their fair share of tax[.]

This, though, is a conflation of two separate issues, cynically done in order to obfuscate the French government’s drive for ever higher taxes and never lower spending.  It may well be that “these giants” take advantage of personal data for the sake of profit.  Whether that particular profit should be taxed especially, though, is a tax matter, not a data use/abuse matter.  Especially coming, as it does, against the backdrop of the government’s men continuing to decline to say how much is companies’ (or rich folks’, come to that) fair share.