Wednesday, September 28, 2016
Hillary insults white people
American whites have been kicked in the teeth so often by the Left that there has been little reaction to this so far. Hillary thinks she can persuade white people not to be racist, thus assuming that they are. She is blaming a shooting of a black man by a panicky female cop (who happens to be white. Black cops also shoot and kill troublesome black men) on white people generally. It's an extraordinary generalization of exactly the sort that the Left are always warning us against. For instance, no matter what individual Muslims do, you can't say anything about Muslims generally. She is an utter racist. Race, race, race. That's all the Left talk about. It's the Left who are the ultimate racists
On Tuesday's episode of "The Steve Harvey Morning Show," Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton stated:
"This horrible shooting again. How many times do we have to see this in our country?...And maybe I can, by speaking directly to white people, say, ‘Look, this is not who we are’…We have got to do everything possible to improve policing, to go right at implicit bias"
She was referring to the police shooting of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Ok.—a recent killing of a black man by the hands of police that has caused widespread outrage.
Clinton, who recently criticized Donald Trump for jumping to conclusions regarding the NYC bombing, saying, “I think it’s also wiser to wait until you have information before making conclusions, because we are just in the beginning stages of trying to determine what happened,” seems to have chosen a different method when discussing the possibility of police officers making fatal mistakes.
This is not the first time Clinton has deemed white people responsible for the deaths of black men by police. In an interview with CNN back in July, Clinton discussed the Dallas shooting of five police officers saying, “I’m going to be talking to white people, we’re the ones who have to start listening to the legitimate cries coming from our African-American fellow citizens.”
At the 107th NAACP convention this year, she stated, “We white Americans need to do a better job of listening when African-Americans talk about the seen and unseen barriers you face every day. We need to recognize our privilege and practice humility, rather than assume our experiences are everyone’s experiences.”
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Media decide that Trump is a racist
At least eight times Monday on CNN, various anchors and correspondents made the claim that Donald Trump called for racial profiling. The problem is, he didn’t. Starting at the 4:00 hour all the way through early Tuesday morning, CNN journalists added the term “racial” to Trump’s comments on profiling to combat terrorism, even devoting entire segments to discussing his statement he never actually said.
This isn’t the first time CNN has selectively subtracted or added to what someone said in their reports in order to skew their stories.
Starting on The Lead with Jake Tapper, correspondent Sara Murray stated Trump made an “apparent suggestion” for racial profiling on Fox and Friends Monday morning.
MURRAY: But offering few specifics, beyond his apparent suggestion that the U.S. should begin racial profiling.
But here’s what he actually said:
TRUMP: Our police are amazing, our local police, they know who a lot of these people are. They're afraid to do anything about it because they don't want to be accused of profiling. But Israel has done an unbelievable job. And they will profile. They profile. They see somebody that's suspicious, they will profile. They see somebody that's suspicious, they will profile and they will take that person in. They will check out. Do we have a choice? Look what's going on. Do we really have a choice?
Again on The Situation Room, anchor Wolf Blitzer made the same assumption:
BLITZER: Donald Trump this morning said police are simply afraid to go after people in cases like this because they're afraid of being accused of racial profiling. Is that a serious concern among law enforcement?
In a report, Sara Murray also repeated that Trump “suggested” racial profiling:
MURRAY: The G.O.P. nominee suggesting that the U.S. should instate, racial profiling.
Even after Trump came on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor to repeat a similar statement on profiling, again without using the word “racial,” CNN continued to hammer home their message. Erin Burnett Outfront was the worst example on CNN, where the host devoted nearly the whole hour to discussing Trump’s “racial profiling” comments that he never actually said.
Burnett began the show by stating twice, “Donald Trump defending a call for racial profiling” with a chyron that read, “Trump Says ‘Racial Profiling’ Will Stop Terror.”
Burnett then brought on two guests to discuss Trump’s comments, prefacing several questions with the loaded expression.
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A Distant gleam of freedom
MARTIN HUTCHINSON
Donald Trump’s tax plan, revealed at the Economic Club of New York on September 15, does not add up, as most Presidential candidates’ tax plans don’t. Still, it did contain one provision that is fiscally insignificant but economically enormous: by capping all tax deductions at $100,000 for single filers, $200,000 for married couples, without exceptions, it went a long way to eliminate the charitable tax deduction scam. Removing that, and thereby shrinking the nonprofit sector, would be a gigantic blow for economic freedom second only to abolishing the Fed.
By capping tax deductions, even at such a high level, Trump has taken an ax to the most egregious feature of the U.S. tax system, by which billionaires often pay less tax than their secretaries. Warren Buffett has whined about this anomaly, with the implication that the solution is the left’s favorite panacea of higher tax rates. Of course, that would merely allow the lobbyists to insert yet more loopholes into the U.S. tax system, increasing the power of politicians to allocate resources and removing the U.S, economy even further from anything resembling a free market.
There are three major tax allowances that would be capped by Trump’s proposal. Of these, the home mortgage interest deduction is least affected, because of today’s ultra-low mortgage interest rates. $100,000 in mortgage interest would only be incurred on a $3 million mortgage, at today’s interest rate of 3.3%. Of course, there are people with mortgages larger than this, though the limitation of home mortgage interest to the first house makes their number relatively small. Mostly, the cap would affect mortgages in ultra-high cost areas such as Manhattan, San Francisco and Silicon Valley, perhaps knocking the top off the excessively bubbly real estate markets in those areas.
Trump’s cap on tax allowances would also affect the state and local tax deduction. Here an individual with an income of a bare $1 million living in Westchester County, who would not be in the top New York state tax bracket, would run up $100,000 in tax deductions from state tax of about $68,000 plus about $32,000 in local real estate taxes on his $1.2 million home. The limit thus catches a much broader swathe of the upper middle class, especially those in high-tax states like New York, New Jersey or California.
However, the tax deduction most seriously affected by Trump’s cap on allowances would be that for charitable donations. This is the favorite tax-avoidance strategy of the super-rich; by giving vast sums of money to charities, whether genuine or phony like the Clinton Foundation, they end up paying minuscule amounts of tax. Indeed, as the Congressional Budget Office showed in 2013, by far the greatest beneficiaries of the charitable tax deduction are the top 1%, who benefit by about 1.4% of their income, compared to a 0.7% of income benefit to even the next richest group, between the top and the fifth percentile of the income distribution. Capping this tax deduction would remove the largest current loophole from the current U.S. tax system.
Trump’s proposal would cap the sum of the deductions at $200,000 for a married couple; it would therefore severely limit the tax deductibility of charitable donations for wealthy people who had already used up much of their allowance in mortgage and state/local income tax deductions.
As we are beginning to see from accounts of the Clinton Foundation, tax-deductible gifts to “charity” may be used to generate benefits elsewhere, often much larger than the gift itself. This is clearly a scam of the first order; not only is the Federal budget being deprived of much-needed revenue, but costs are often also imposed on government through favors to the charitable donor.
Even when “charities” are not abusive political slush funds like the Clinton Foundation, the charitable tax deduction is highly damaging. For one thing; it redistributes from the poor to the rich. When a hedge fund executive deducts $1,000 for the cost of a charity dinner to boost his tawdry social life and make new contacts, there is $396 less at the federal and maybe $80 at the state level that is no longer available for necessary programs, at least some of which benefit the worse off. Given the expenses, legitimate and illegitimate, incurred by charities, even if their activities benefit the poor, the inefficiency of the charitable tax deduction may well be net damaging to the interests of the poor and especially to the working poor.
However, in reality most charitable giving does not benefit the poor. There have been few studies of this important question, but one by Indiana University in 2005 suggested that only 31% of charitable donations go to the poor, with 69% going to the non-poor. Religion, elite colleges and the arts are especial non-poor beneficiaries.
Combine these two figures together, and you have a remarkable result. On average, of a $1,000 charitable donation by a taxpayer in the top bracket, $476 is returned to him in deductions from his taxes, $690 goes to the non-poor and only $310 goes to the poor. In other words, charitable giving is on balance reducing the funds available for the poor, by $166 per $1,000 in this example. This is a truly disgraceful result, and illustrates the iniquity of the charitable tax deduction, even without considering the charities that are outright scams.
The charitable deduction costs the Federal budget directly about $60 billion per annum, a figure that is almost certainly an underestimate, because as in the case of the Harvard endowment, money given to charity is often invested in tax-free funds that earn returns that also escape the tax net. A more complete figure can be calculated from The NonProfit Times estimate that the tax-exempt sector “contributed” $887 billion to the U.S. economy in 2012, 5.4% of Gross Domestic Product. That is all money allocated by the murky though processes of charities, and thus not available for the truly productive private sector; in itself it represents a major drain on the U.S. economy and the current anemic productivity growth therein.
Tax that $887 billion at an average rate of 40%, including income taxes, sales taxes and excise duties, and you will generate over $350 billion per annum to the fiscal balance, more than half even the current swollen budget deficit. And, as I said, the economy will be more productive, the poor will be better off, and the Clintons will be deprived of their principal source of funding. A win all round, it appears to me.
If Trump is elected, state and local governments of high-tax badly run states like New York, New Jersey and California will raise all kinds of hell to get themselves exempted from his deductions cap, because forcing rich residents to pay the full costs of the states’ fiscal profligacy would drive the last of their long-suffering residents to more civilized locations. There will also be attempts by the realtors’ lobby to remove the cap altogether or exempt home mortgage interest, although in this case only a modest percentage of their income comes from residences with such huge mortgages, so the squawking will be muted.
However, the lobbying from the states and the realtors will be as nothing compared to the massive and revolting PR campaign that will be waged by the charity lobby. Pictures of starving and diseased children will be all over the airwaves. K Street will see new records of activity, as Washington’s swollen armies of lobbyists swing into action, with the charities calling in past favors, so the farm lobbyists, the Pentagon lobbyists, Hollywood’s copyright lobbyists and Silicon Valley’s patent lobbyists lend their efforts to block Trump’s proposed legislation, or at least exempt charities from it. Money will pour into the coffers of every Congressman prepared to sell his soul for just one more betrayal of the people who elected him. The battle will long and vicious, and with allies like the feeble Speaker Paul Ryan and the Republican Congressional corruptocrats it is most unlikely that Trump will win.
But the battle is worth fighting. Of all possible tax reforms to revive the U.S. economy and return prosperity to the American people, that to de-fund the charitable Leviathan, divert its resources to more productive uses and make the rich pay their fair share of taxes is the most important.
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Voter Fraud Far From ‘Myth,’ Panel Asserts
The Obama administration opposes states verifying citizenship status of registered voters. Inquiries into voter fraud are typically met with derision from both government and the media—and in at least one instance with prosecution. Prosecutors don’t prioritize voter fraud, while convictions only garner light sentences.
These are among the voter fraud problems facing the United States, experts noted this week, even as prominent voices on the left say such fraud is a myth.
The left’s opposition to voter integrity laws or even inquiry can be simply explained, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said.
“Why on earth would you not want to make sure that only citizens are registered and voting?” Fitton, author of “Clean House: Exposing Our Government’s Secrets and Lies,” said at a forum at The Heritage Foundation Tuesday. “That to me shows that the Obama administration and the left generally, which is behind this, wants to be able to steal elections if necessary. To me, that’s a crisis.”
“The percentages of non-citizens in the United States are approaching nearly 15 percent now,” said Fitton, president of Judicial Watch. “So it’s a numbers game. A certain number of those citizens — a certain number of those residents, both legally were present and illegally present, are going to register to vote.”
A 2014 study by Old Dominion University found that 6.4 percent of all noncitizens voted in the 2008 election and 2.2 percent voted in the 2010 midterm elections. The study concludes this likely put Minnesota Sen. Al Franken, a Democrat, over the top in the race in his 312-vote statewide victory over Republican Norm Coleman in 2008.
“The left generally, which is behind this, wants to be able to steal elections if necessary,” says @TomFitton.
In the past, opponents have argued that ID requirements hurt minority participation. Meanwhile, studies have found minority voting has increased after voter ID was implemented.
“If you think your vote is going to be stolen, especially in urban areas where you have political machines controlling the voting process or the perception that they control the voting process, you may not bother to vote,” Fitton said. “But, if you think your vote will be counted, of course you’re going to be more likely to turn out.”
Some recent cases cited by the panelists demonstrate the reality of voter fraud.
In August, in St. Louis, a court ordered a do-over in a Democratic primary for a Missouri state legislative seats after finding absentee voter fraud.
Last year in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a state legislator was convicted of voter fraud and given a suspended sentence.
Still, some commentators contend there is no voter fraud problem in the United States. For example, this week a New York Times editorial called voter fraud a “myth” and “fake”:
As study after study has shown, there is virtually no voter fraud anywhere in the country. The most comprehensive investigation to date found that out of one billion votes cast in all American elections between 2000 and 2014, there were 31 possible cases of impersonation fraud. Other violations—like absentee ballot fraud, multiple voting and registration fraud—are also exceedingly rare. So why do so many people continue to believe this falsehood?
Credit for this mass deception goes to Republican lawmakers, who have for years pushed a fake story about voter fraud, and thus the necessity of voter ID laws, in an effort to reduce voting among specific groups of Democratic-leaning voters.
However, it was in New York City where the city’s Department of Investigation (DOI) determined the city’s Board of Elections (BOE) was doing a poor job of preventing ineligible voters from voting. During the 2013 mayor’s race, 63 city investigators went to polling places impersonating someone who was either dead, moved outside the city, or was in jail. Of those, 61 were cleared to vote. The department’s report stated:
The 60 investigators, among other investigative activities, conducted quality assurance surveys of voters at poll sites throughout the five boroughs, logging complaints from 596 of 1,438 voters relating to subjects such as ballot readability, poll workers, and poll site locations. DOI’s operations also revealed that there are names of ineligible voters (e.g. felons and people no longer City residents), and deceased voters, on the BOE voter rolls, some for periods of up to four years.
Accordingly, DOI investigators posing as a number of those ineligible or deceased individuals, were permitted to obtain, mark, and submit ballots in the scanners or in the lever voting booths in 61 cases, with no challenge or question by BOE poll workers. Investigators were turned away in 2 other cases. No votes were cast for any actual candidate or on any proposal during the course of the DOI operation.
Interestingly, the result was not to demand more accountability from the city’s Board of Elections. Rather, the New York City Council voted to prosecute the investigators for impersonating voters, said John Fund, a National Review columnist, previously with The Wall Street Journal, during the panel.
Progressive critics reference the rarity of voter fraud prosecutions as evidence of a “myth.” Fund said it is actually because such cases can be politically disadvantageous to elected district attorneys.
“Most prosecutors run for election. Most prosecutors want to have higher election,” Fund said. “The last thing you want to do is take on voter fraud cases which are highly politicized and infuriate half the people in your community on partisan basis. Judges require incredible standards of proof and often the sentences of the few people who are convicted of voter fraud are community service.”
Maintaining clean voter rolls from ineligible voters is also important and required by law, said Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow with The Heritage Foundation. And New York isn’t the only place with a problem. In Indiana, 16 counties had more registered voters than voting-age adults based on U.S. Census Bureau data, he said.
The National Voter Registration Act of 1993, better known as the “Motor Voter Law” allows people to register to vote when they get their driver’s license law. But it also requires local governments to maintain clean voter rolls, which the federal government can enforce. The Obama administration has never enforced this provision, von Spakovsky said at the forum.
“There has been a war being waged against election integrity for the past decade,” von Spakovsky said. “The leader in this has been the U.S. Justice Department. Instead of making sure every voter can vote and that no one’s vote is stolen through fraud, they have been on the other side of that, waging war against any efforts to prove election integrity.”
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