Tag Archives: responsibilities

The Party Wants No Deal

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The Progressive-Democrats in Congress don’t want a deal, neither on the budget nor on DACA.  They want the Federal government shut down so they can blame the Republicans for it during this fall’s elections.  They also want to keep the DACA situation and immigration in general alive as a debating question for those same elections.

Democrats said Mr Trump’s dismissal of “shithole countries” in Africa in a closed meeting last week with lawmakers positioned him as the person who upset the negotiations.

Notice that.  The Progressive-Democrats are doing two things here: masquerading a claim of certain words being spoken as a fact that those words were spoken, and then using those words as an excuse to refuse to deal on DACA rather than actually dealing on DACA.

That the Progressive-Democrats do not want a DACA deal at all is illustrated by a third thing to notice, a matter that’s being carefully ignored by both those Progressive-Democrats and the NLMSM.  Such words spoken publicly would be damaging to our national reputation; on that we’re all agreed.  What’s ignored is that, having been said in that closed meeting (if they were said), no one outside the meeting would know about them and no damage would be done—but for a meeting participant (Senator Dick Durbin (D, IL) comes to mind) running screaming to the press as soon as the meeting broke up to bruit about those words.  This is a deliberate move to blow up any DACA negotiations.

Nor is a DACA agreement needed in the current budget debate.  President Donald Trump’s rescission of ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) DHS memorandum gave Congress, where such a matter belongs, until next March to enact a DACA program legislatively, or explicitly decline to do so, before Trump’s rescission takes effect.  The lack of urgency is further well-known to the Progressive-Democrats: a Federal judge has blocked Trump’s order.  Demanding a DACA deal in the current budget debate is simply a mechanism to block a budget deal.

Too, the Progressive-Democratic Party must come before children.  That Party is more important than children is demonstrated by two outcomes of the Progressive-Democrats’ obstructionism.  The DACA children will get nothing from any government shutdown.  The Progressive-Democrats’ rejection of a budget deal also will reject the CHIP program, whose funding is renewed for six years, in the deal on offer.  Millions of children will be denied access to health insurance.

Remember that in the coming elections.

Poverty and Concern for the Rich

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Recall the Progressive-Democratic Party-controlled legislature with their Progressive-Democrat governor who run things in California.  In response to the just-passed tax reform bill’s capping of state and local tax deductions on the Federal income tax form at $10,000, these worthies have introduced a bill that would create a State-run “charity” foundation into which California citizens could make “donations” and receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit that they could then apply to their SALT requirements that exceed those $10,000.

Never mind that, as The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board pointed out last Friday,

According to IRS data, California’s 71,000 taxpayers with million-dollar incomes deducted on average $462,500 in 2015 compared to $6,940 for individuals making between $50,000 and $100,000. Few California middle-class taxpayers will be harmed by the $10,000 deduction cap since the standard deduction has doubled to $12,000.

Kevin De León, President Pro Tempore of the California State Senate, and the Progressive-Democrat who introduced the bill, knows this full well.  These worthies are interested in protecting their rich buddies and donors.

Couple this with what the Los Angeles Times published last Sunday.  Twenty per cent of California residents are poor according to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which considers the cost of housing, food, utilities, and clothing.  The Measure, importantly, also includes noncash government assistance in its income measure.  This 20% poverty rate is the highest rate in our nation.  It gets worse:

California recipients of state aid receive a disproportionately large share of it in no-strings-attached cash disbursements. It’s as though welfare reform passed California by, leaving a dependency trap in place.

But think about that in conjunction with the California progressive elite’s protection of their rich buds.  It’s not “as though welfare reform passed California by,” it has been by design that those elites created that dependency trap.  That’s how they get the votes—the poor have far more votes than their wealthy friends—and with those votes the elites can stay in power, exchanging favors and money with their wealthy associates.

Of course, the LAT laid most of this travesty for the poor part of the balance off on an exploding social-services community with its 883,000 full-time-equivalent state and local employees (as of 2014).  But who hires and provides the payroll and other budgets for these folks?  Yewbetcha.

A Test

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Recall the false alarm about an inbound ICBM that a functionary of the Hawaii State government apparatus triggered last weekend.  I’m not interested, here, in how the false alarm got triggered in the first place, or why it took so long—38 minutes—to send out a false alarm notice, or why the State apparently chose to not even consider sending out an All Clear notice and figure out the false alarm aspects later.  There’s another question that seems to be getting ignored.

The mistaken alarm presented the citizens of the State and all of the State and local jurisdictions with a live, real-world, 38-minute test of the citizens’ and all of the State and local jurisdictions’ training to date and real-world responses to the situation of an inbound missile.  There was little more than citizen panic for those 38 minutes and little visible response by any jurisdiction within the State to help its citizens get to shelters or even to prepare or open any extant shelters.

At every level of responsibility within Hawaii, the State failed miserably its Operational Readiness Inspection.  What will Hawaii do about that?

Projection

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Kentucky has decided to take advantage of new Federal Medicaid rules and add a work requirement to those receiving Medicaid payments in order for them to be eligible for continued payments.  Recipients in the typical working age range of 19-64 must do 80 hours—two weeks—of what the State terms “community engagement.”  There are, of course, exceptions for those who cannot work.

As Kentucky’s governor Matt Bevin (R) noted in his tweet about his decision to approve the new rule,

There is dignity associated with earning the value of something that you receive. The vast majority of men and women, able-bodied men and women … they want the dignity associated with being able to earn and have engagement.

Progressive-Democrats are in an uproar over the requirement that people actually work in order to receive government largesse.

Congressman John Yarmuth [D, KY] call[ed] it a “dangerous and irresponsible” decision that will lead to the “financial ruin” for thousands of families that reside in Kentucky.

Of course.  Just like adding a work requirement in the Federal government’s reform of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (later replaced by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which continued the work requirement—until then-President Barack Obama (D) waived the work requirement) dangerously and irresponsibly led to financial ruin for all those hundreds of thousands of families.  Oh, wait—that actually led to the adults in those families not only going to work, but to those families’ increased prosperity, since their earned income was greater than their AFDC/TANF payments.

The Progressive-Democrat is projecting.

 

*The waiver led to an explosion of families on TANF and their increased poverty, thus providing an actual experiment on the outcome of a work requirement.

Censorship

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Three Leftist parties in Germany want to change—to “strengthen”—the nation’s online hate speech law: the Free Democratic Party, the Green Party, and the Left Party.  (FDP claims to be a libertarian-leaning, classical liberal party, but with this move, it exposes itself as being Modern Liberal.)

The current law requires social media companies to police themselves regarding posts someone—anyone—flags as offensive.  This is too much free speech, however.

[FDP General Secretary Nicola] Beer said Germany needed a law similar to the one the FDP proposed before Christmas that would give an “appropriately endowed authority” the right to enforce the rule of law online rather than give private companies the right to determine the illegality of flagged content.

“Appropriately endowed.”  Government, or a government sanctioned and guided facility, will “determine the illegality” of the speech.  Because Government Knows Better.

This is the Europe our own Left wants us to emulate.  This is the censorship college and university management, professors, and snowflakes want us to implement.

This is part of the Big Government that the Progressive-Democratic Party wants to inflict on us as part of their general Government intrusion into private lives push.