Let me try my hand at prophecy: About Mr. Trump's Emergency declaration

Prophecy is a mug's game.  Something like 95% of prophecies don't turn out.  But there is a class of prophecy that does turn out: Prophecies based on a correct understanding of natural phenomena.  The big challenge there is "correct".  Warmists think that CO2 warms the earth. But that is demonstrably not correct.  There is no synchrony between the two. But prophesying the position of the earth  relative to the other planets at any one time can be done with great accuracy because we do have a very good and correct knowledge of orbital dynamics.

And in principle, the same applies with regard to all other natural phenomena, including what people do.  The social sciences exist because people think they can see regularities in human behaviour and once you have a regularity, accurate prophecy should be possible.  And in economics that definitely happens.  If you restrict the supply of something, its price will go up, for instance.  It always does. 

But when you get into the other social sciences prophecy is rarely possible.  My academic background is principally in psychology and the only sound generalization from human psychology that I know of that has much in the way of real-life application is the generalization that your educational success will be almost entirely a product of your IQ.

But as well as my background in psychology, I also have a substantial background in sociology and economics.  I taught in a sociology school for a number of years and I am also a former high School economics teacher. So it would seem possible that a combination  of three social science disciplines might occasionally enable accurate prophecies.  And I have repeatedly found that it does. What I think will happen or should happen in the world of politics often does end up actually happening.  I am a pretty good knowledge-based prophet.

So far I have never put one of  my prophecies into writing so perhaps it is now time that I did.  I may be hilariously wrong but I can handle that.  And what I want to prophecy is quite daring.  I want to forecast both the verdicts and the reasoning of both the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of the United States.  And I dare to do that without having any formal knowledge of law or any legal qualifications.  So I am setting myself a very difficult task indeed. I am setting myself up for a fall but it will be fun if nothing else

I refer to the Emergency Declaration that President Trump is using to fund his wall. It generally takes a while for matters to come up before a court but it should fairly quickly come before the 9th Circus.  I anticipate that there will be 4 arguments put to the court in favour of the declaration:

1). The courts have no jurisdiction over how the Commander in chief discharges his duties.  It is for the commander to command and he, not the courts, has the final word about that. So he can therefore use military resources to build a wall. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers carries out many tasks without explicit congressional authority and a wall is just another example of that.

There are some legal restrictions on what the commander can do with the military but none mention wall building.  And even the restrictions that do exist are customarily applied only lightly.  Many wars have been initiated without the authority of Congress, for instance

2). Since passage of the National Emergencies Act in 1976, every U.S. President has declared multiple national emergencies, so Trump is not doing anything out of line. And  123 enumerated powers are invoked by an executive declaration with no Congressional input. This should actually be the core issue in the case and will no doubt be  examined in great detail so I will say no further about that approach.  The sudden arrival of whole caravans of illegals could well be held to be an emergency requiring extra powers.

3). Reallocating funds away from their original purpose is routine so again Trump is well within precedent.  He could do his intended reallocation of funds even WITHOUT an Emergency declaration.  To deny him that customary right would greatly hobble all future administrations and cast into legal limbo many past funding arrangements.  That is surely not to be done lightly.

4). Government by regulation is already well established.  Mr Obama used his "pen and phone" to circumvent Congress on some quite major matters -- notably the creation of DACA immigrants. Trump is simply trying to ENFORCE the law by using regulatory powers.  Obama explicitly CREATED a whole class of new law with no Congressional authority.  The courts have so far upheld the authority of the DACA declaration so it should be merely consistent to uphold Trump's much less innovative declaration.

This argument, by the way, is a complete answer to the idiocy of Rand Paul, who says he will vote against the emergency declaration in the Senate because he fears what a future Democrat president will do with the precedent.  He forgets that the precedent has already been set -- by Obama -- and that Trump's declaration sets no new precedent. Rand Paul is doing a classical act of trying to close the door after the horse has escaped.

So I am pretty sure that at least one of those arguments will ultimately prevail.  There is even a possibility that one will prevail at the 9th Circuit level.  Let me go out on a limb and prophecy that the 9th Circuit with find the emergency declaration improper but will allow that Trump is nonetheless entitled to build his wall using recycled funds because recycling funds has strong precedent.  If that is the verdict, the matter will probably not go to SCOTUS.  If it does go to SCOTUS, they will probably use that reasoning too.

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Medicare for All Would ‘Result in Care for None,’ Doctor-Turned-Lawmaker Says

A congressman from Maryland who is also a physician says Medicare for All would end up depriving Americans of health care, rather than make it more accessible.

“The Medicare for All plan that was announced a couple of weeks ago by my Democrat colleagues, over 100 of them, really will result in care for none. That’s the bottom line,”  Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., an anesthesiologist by profession, said Wednesday at Conversations with Conservatives, a monthly press question-and-answer session hosted by The Heritage Foundation. 

“You can’t offer ‘free’ care to everyone and expect anything but rationing to be the result,” said the six-term lawmaker. “The costs are huge. We already have a trillion-dollar deficit in the federal government spending. To add more to it will result in rationing.”

Medicare for All—specifically, the plan from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.—comes with a price tag estimated at $32.6 trillion over 10 years.

Among other things, Sanders’ plan would “prohibit ordinary Americans from purchasing any alternative health coverage, except for items such as ‘cosmetic surgery’ or health services that government officials decide are not ‘medically necessary,’ according to a recent commentary from Bob Moffit, a senior fellow in domestic policy studies at The Heritage Foundation.

The Maryland lawmaker says socialized health care is not the answer to rising health care costs and limited insurance options.

“When you dissect this plan, piece by piece, including the elimination of all private insurance, not even socialized medicine in England has that … so, we go well beyond the socialized medical schemes of Europe in the Medicare for All plan,” Harris said. “It is just going to be a nonstarter.”

Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., who owned his own dental practice prior to serving in Congress, joined Harris and Rep. Scott DesJarlais, R-Tenn., at the Conversations with Conservatives event, said more effort needs to be placed on making the free market work in health care.

“It is amazing what actually happens when you lower premiums, lower drug prices, lower doctor and hospital visits, and it empowers people to create new ideas,” Gosar said. “Making a market-driven solution is actually beneficial.”

DesJarlais, a physician by profession now in his fifth term in Congress, said Medicare for All would only make the ability to receive health care more of a problem.

“Access is the big thing. There just is not enough to go around,” he said.

“And when you consider that Medicare for All would eliminate what over half the country realizes now in an employer-based plan, most people, despite all the horrors we have heard about Obamacare, which is really bad, get their insurance through their employer,” DesJarlais added. “So, it would change that and eliminate private insurance altogether, and so people would be left with what the government tells them they can have.”

Harris said the importance of patient care needs to be restored as part of health care reform.

“When I was trained, almost 40 years ago, the bottom line is the relationship between the patient and her doctor was the most important,” he said. “That was it. Fast-forward to now. You got an insurance company in the room. You got a government bureaucrat in the room. You have a pharmacy benefits manager in the room. You got all these outside parties that are now involved in that relationship.

“We have got to come full cycle and restore it to the primacy of a patient,” Harris said.

SOURCE 

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New Tax Proposal Could Devastate Americans’ Retirement Accounts

A new tax proposal in Congress aims to stick it to the rich. But if passed, it could devastate the U.S. financial system and ruin the value of ordinary Americans’ retirement accounts.

The proposal, introduced by a team of Democrats in the House and Senate, would assess a penalty each time someone sells a stock, bond, or other financial instrument. It would tax each of the roughly 10 billion U.S. equity market trades each year, among other transactions.

The goal, presumably, is to hit the rich. But the stock market is not just a tool for the wealthy.

Some of the largest shareholders and beneficiaries of our modern financial system are pension funds for public-sector employees and private retirement account holders. Firefighters, teachers, university endowments, and private retirement savings all benefit from sophisticated equity markets. Many employers issue short-term debt to cover payroll and young start-ups sell securities to fund their growth.

The stock market may seem opaque to the average American, but they still benefit from it through new jobs, advances in productivity, and increases in retirement and other invested savings.   

This proposal would handicap markets for U.S. saving and investment. It would levy a tax of 0.1 percent on the value of every stock, bond, and derivative transaction in the U.S. or made by a U.S. resident.

Depending on the purveyor you listen to, this new tax could make the stock market fairer and less volatile. The tax would stop the dreaded practice of high-frequency trading, whereby large volumes of trades are made quickly by algorithm. Its backers also project that it would raise a sizable chunk of revenue that purportedly would be paid by the “rich.”

But a financial transactions tax fails to meet each of these goals. It would increase rather than decrease market volatility; it would hurt digital traders, who benefit the market; it would not raise as much revenue as projected; and the tax would ultimately be paid by American savers through lower investment returns and fewer economic opportunities. 

A financial transaction tax is not a new idea. The Congressional Budget Office regularly includes it in its yearly list of budget options. Its report notes, however, that the tax could “have a number of negative effects on the economy stemming from its effects on asset prices, the cost of capital for firms, and the frequency of trading.”

These concerns bear out in the real world, too. Evidence from France’s experiment with a transactions tax in 2012 shows that it lowers trading volumes and reduces market liquidity, which hurts market quality.

Fewer trades mean it is harder to buy and sell stock, and markets operate less efficiently. Inefficient markets hurt everyone. They translate into fewer new jobs and less productive investment. 

Italy also tried a transactions tax. There, it  increased market volatility. 

The transactions tax is designed to cut out short-term and speculative traders who trade for small gains by increasing cost of the trade. But without these participants, market prices are less accurate, leading to more frequent and larger price swings. This is borne out in a 2015 study that shows how the tax would indeed increase the likelihood of boom-bust cycles and exacerbate overall return volatility.

In addition, University of California, Berkeley professor Maria Coelho found that financial transactions taxes are “poor instruments” for fixing the market problems identified by advocates. 

As written, the bill is so expansive that it would likely tax short-term, non-exchange traded commercial paper that is used to cover short-term business obligations, like payroll. So a transactions tax could make paying workers more expensive.

The tax would also increase costs for small businesses and start-ups trying to raise funds. A start-up that sells $50 million in securities would now owe a $50,000 tax—not a trivial sum.

But most of all, the tax would hurt ordinary American savers.

In the United Kingdom, it was estimated in the 1980s that cutting the limited financial transactions tax rate “from 2 percent to 1 percent would have led to a 10 percent rise in share prices.” To the extent there is a transactions tax, stock values will fall.

A transactions tax would therefore decrease the stock of wealth for any American who has investments. Private retirement accounts and pension plans could be hurt the most.

Consider a retirement account: a $300,000 self-directed IRA equities portfolio turning over once every year. Just a 0.1 percent tax would result in additional costs of $300 annually. This may sound minimal, but a $300 annual investment growing at 7 percent amounts to more than $20,000 after 25 years.

Perhaps most fundamentally, the tax would impose its largest effective rate on marginal investments—those investments that just barely make a profit. These are the more common type of investments , even though high-return projects are also important.

For instance, under the proposed tax, a block of 1,000 shares of a $25 stock that is sold for $25.01 would face a 250 percent tax rate on the profit made from the sale. By design, these marginal investments are the type that would be most harmed by a transactions tax. The higher the tax rate, the larger the harm.

Despite claims that a new tax would have little effect, history shows that traders respond markedly to new transactions taxes. This means such proposals raise “significantly lower revenues than projected,” as Coelho found in Italy and France.

It is unlikely the new tax would raise anything close to the $777 billion over 10 years that proponents hope for.

It is clear that financial transactions taxes are a poorly designed policy for achieving their proponents’ stated goals. But even if it were the best way to raise revenue, we should question whether maximizing revenue is even a proper goal for governments to have as a matter of policy. 

The government class will always have an insatiable desire to tax and spend at ever higher levels, which means it will search for new and innovative ways to raise revenue. Governments, like most monopolies, are prone to waste and inefficiency.

A better course of action is for Washington to let people of all income levels keep more of the money they earn—to spend, save, and invest how they see fit for themselves, their family, and their local communities.

Washington already has plenty of ways to tax Americans—rich and poor alike. Adding a new tax to the financial system is not the way forward—especially when it will hurt American workers, students, and retirees the most.

SOURCE 

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Senate Delivers CRUSHING Blow To Democrat Agenda With 52-46 Vote

The Republican-controlled Senate confirmed another judge to serve a lifetime appointment on a prominent court, and Democrats are furious. The Senate voted 52-46 this week to confirm Eric Murphy to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The confirmation is significant because it gives President Donald Trump another young, conservative judge a lifetime appointment on a critical appeals court.

As noted by Bloomberg’s Sahil Kapur, this is the 90th judge Trump has successfully nominated since he took office two years ago.

“[Donald Trump] has now put 90 judges on the U.S. courts for lifetime-tenured jobs. Ninety. 54 district court judges, 34 circuit court judges, 2 Supreme Court justices,” Kapur wrote.

“These are young conservatives—mostly aged 40s or 50s, some 30s. They will shape the law for generations,” he added.

Soon after the confirmation vote, Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown — who many thought was running for president but announced he was staying in the Senate — attacked Murphy as being “far right” and “inexperienced.”

SOURCE 

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