Hooray! U.S. Supreme Court backs Christian baker who rebuffed gay couple

But how deplorable that it needed SCOTUS for the plain language of the constitution to be implemented.  What a disgrace the State courts are!

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday handed a victory on narrow grounds to a Colorado baker who refused based on his Christian beliefs to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, stopping short of setting a major precedent allowing people to claim religious exemptions from anti-discrimination laws.

The justices, in a 7-2 decision, said the Colorado Civil Rights Commission showed an impermissible hostility toward religion when it found that baker Jack Phillips violated the state's anti-discrimination law by rebuffing gay couple David Mullins and Charlie Craig in 2012. The state law bars businesses from refusing service based on race, sex, marital status or sexual orientation.

The court concluded that the commission violated Phillips' religious rights under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.

But the justices did not issue a definitive ruling on the circumstances under which people can seek exemptions from anti-discrimination laws based on religion. The decision also did not address important claims raised in the case including whether baking a cake is a kind of expressive act protected by the Constitution's free speech guarantee.

Two of the court's four liberals, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, joined the five conservative justices in the ruling authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who also wrote the landmark 2015 decision legalizing gay marriage nationwide.

The baker case became a cultural flashpoint in the United States, underscoring the tensions between gay rights proponents and conservative Christians.

Both sides claimed a measure of victory. The couple's supporters noted that the ruling embraced the importance of gay rights and made it clear that businesses open to the public must serve everyone. The baker's lawyers said the ruling emphasized that the government must respect religious beliefs.

"Our society has come to the recognition that gay persons and gay couples cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth," Kennedy wrote.

But Kennedy said the state commission's hostility toward religion "was inconsistent with the First Amendment's guarantee that our laws be applied in a manner that is neutral toward religion."

In one exchange at a 2014 hearing before the commission cited by Kennedy, former commissioner Diann Rice said that "freedom of religion, and religion, has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the Holocaust."

Kennedy said the commission ruled the opposite way in three cases brought against bakers in which the business owners refused to bake cakes containing messages that demeaned gay people or same-sex marriage.

Republican President Donald Trump's administration, which intervened in the case in support of Phillips, welcomed the ruling. "The First Amendment prohibits governments from discriminating against citizens on the basis of religious beliefs," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement.

The decision made it clear that even if the court ultimately rules in a future case that bakers or other businesses that sell creative products such as florists and wedding photographers can avoid punishment under anti-discrimination laws, most businesses open to the public would have no such defense.

Kennedy wrote that any ruling in favor of creative professionals must be "sufficiently constrained, lest all purveyors of goods and services who object to gay marriages for moral and religious reasons in effect be allowed to put up signs saying 'no goods or services will be sold if they will be used for gay marriages,' something that would impose a serious stigma on gay persons."

Of the 50 states, 21 including Colorado have anti-discrimination laws protecting gay people.

The case marked a test for Kennedy, who has authored significant rulings that advanced gay rights but also is a strong advocate for free speech rights and religious freedom.

"The outcome of cases like this in other circumstances must await further elaboration in the courts, all in the context of recognizing that these disputes must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market," Kennedy wrote.

Mullins and Craig were planning their wedding in Massachusetts in 2012 and wanted the cake for a reception in Colorado, where gay marriage was not yet legal. During a brief encounter at Phillips' Masterpiece Cakeshop in the Denver suburb of Lakewood, the baker politely but firmly refused, leaving the couple distraught. [The poor petals!]

They filed a successful complaint with the state commission, the first step in the six-year-old legal battle. State courts sided with the couple, prompting Phillips to appeal to the top U.S. court.

"Today's decision means our fight against discrimination and unfair treatment will continue," the couple, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. "We have always believed that in America, you should not be turned away from a business open to the public because of who you are."

Mullins and Craig said Phillips was using his Christian faith as pretext for unlawful discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Phillips and others like him who believe that gay marriage is inconsistent with their Christian beliefs have said they should not be required to effectively endorse the practice.

"Government hostility toward people of faith has no place in our society, yet the state of Colorado was openly antagonistic toward Jack's religious beliefs about marriage. The court was right to condemn that," said lawyer Kristen Waggoner of the conservative Christian group Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents Phillips.

Phillips himself was not available for comment.

The litigation, along with similar cases around the country, is part of a conservative Christian backlash to the Supreme Court's gay marriage ruling.

The court will soon have the opportunity to signal its approach to handling similar cases. The justices on Thursday are set to consider whether to hear an appeal filed by a flower shop owner in Washington state who refused to create an arrangement to celebrate a gay wedding based on her Christian beliefs.

SOURCE 

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Globalization is political poison

Martin Hutchinson

Since 1991, globalization has been touted as the solution to all the world’s problems, that will pull emerging markets out of poverty while making rich countries more efficient and competitive. Yet in the last few years, public opinion has soured on it; whenever new measures of globalization are proposed, voters oppose them vehemently. There are good reasons for this.

The simple optimism of Thomas Friedman’s 2005 “The World is Flat” suggested that over time, modern communications would iron out the political differences and economic inequalities between societies, making a harmonious world that was both more equal and richer. Even back then, it was clear that low-skill workers in rich countries would suffer relatively, but it was believed that global growth would be sufficiently rapid to handle the problem. After all, if the best brains of China and India were now able to play a role in driving innovation, surely innovation must speed up enormously from its previous level, with corresponding benefit to global productivity and growth rates.

This has not happened, mainly because the world’s governors have added several other policies into the mix that have nothing to do with classical Ricardian liberalism, the motive-force behind globalization. These policies have turned the fairly marginal benefits available from globalization into gigantic costs, at least as far as the majority of rich countries’ populations is concerned.

The most damaging policy error that globalist governments have made is to over-regulate, using new international bodies to impose regulations from which businesses can’t escape. Before regulation was global, companies that wanted cheap labor or which had an unpleasant manufacturing process could simply locate in an emerging market whose inhabitants would be glad of the jobs. Now that is no longer possible; global environmentalist and labor regulators, and their NGO enforcers chase all over the world, harassing businesses wherever they operate. Only anti-globalist “rogue regimes” are exempt, one reason why popular support for such regimes is growing.

Over-regulation, whether environmental or otherwise, has a doubly damaging effect on the victims of globalization. It slows overall global growth, so that the benefits of globalization may no longer be sufficient to protect the loving standards of the low-skilled in wealth countries. Further, regulations are generally differential in their application, so rich country manufacturers can escape some of the more foolish domestic regulations by relocating manufacturing to the Third World – thereby hollowing out the good blue-collar jobs that the rich country labor force needs.

A second downside of globalization is crony capitalism. In a non-globalized world, companies from all over the world compete, and have competitive advantages only in their own countries. However, as the world globalizes, the major multinationals can buy up or drive out local competitors. Once this happens, the multinationals’ innovation and resulting productivity growth is slowed by their gigantic behemoth size and inefficiency. However, as governments have grown larger and regulations more complex, the multinationals have been able to ally with host governments all over the world to draft regulations that favor them and keep out upstart competitors. Even in the high-tech sector, the symbiotic relationship of Facebook and Google, not with their domestic regulators but with EU regulators, is able to ensure that their global oligopoly is preserved for all time, and not subject to erosion by pesky new competitors. Again, globalization makes cronyism inevitable, and with cronyism comes bloated bureaucracy and sluggish innovation.

A third accompaniment of globalization has been ultra-low interest rates, already set below the optimum level by Fed chairman Alan Greenspan in 1995 and lowered further worldwide with each economic hiccup. On a global scale, these have narrowed the capital cost differential between rich and poor countries, artificially speeding the relocation of rich county industries, since new factories can be erected artificially cheaply in emerging markets. Then, within economies, these low interest rates have encouraged tsunamis of misdirected investment, whether on companies that should have been allowed to die or on over-priced real estate. Millennials now cannot afford urban housing; ultra-low interest rates, in many cases negative in real terms, have driven house prices to artificial and unsustainable levels. By misdirecting capital, low interest rates have also lowered productivity growth, the only means by which living standards can be improved. In general, low interest rates have enriched those with connections, at the expense of everybody else; with globalization, there has been no escape from them.

A moderate amount of high-skill immigration is necessary in a globalized world; you must attract the skills that are not available locally. However, globalization’s proponents have widened this to include massive low-skill immigration, whether on guest-worker contracts or simply illegal, as well as endless floods of refugees. This kind of immigration lowers domestic wages and strains welfare systems, depressing living standards (and indeed quality of life) throughout the economy.

Finally, globalization has been accompanied by a bloating of government spending worldwide. To some extent, governments bloat spending because they can. If interest rates are ultra-low, even negative in real terms, there is no incentive to stop wasting money on boondoggles that may attract votes. However, apart from the unsustainability of most current budget deficits, by bloating government, resources are diverted from their most productive uses to the utterly unproductive public sector. Thereby, real productivity (which may differ from that in GDP accounting, which takes all government activity as beneficial) is once again caused to decline.

In Third World countries also, where controls on corruption are feeble, bloated government spending attracts the “best and brightest” into the public sector, where dodgy money can be made most quickly – the Malaysian 1MDB mess, aided and abetted by Goldman Sachs, is a prime example of this, which should now be punished to the fullest extent of available law. However, allowing democratic change to punish government malfeasance is not a sufficient solution to this problem; it will merely cause the crony globalist governments to rig the political system, as the EU is attempting to do in Italy and elsewhere, to prevent that change from happening.

In theory, globalization should enable poor countries to grow rich, while rich countries also benefit and innovation proceeds at a wildly accelerated pace – that’s what the Ricardian textbooks say. In practice, over-regulation, cronyism, artificially low interest rates, excessive immigration and government bloat have made globalization increasingly damaging to the living standards of ordinary people in both rich and poor countries. That damage to living standards is growing further day by day as the poorly controlled globalist economic system becomes more corrupt and inefficient.

To win an election, therefore, just get your opponents to advocate a thoroughly globalist, international platform (or, within the EU, EU-integration, which comes to the same thing). The voters have seen through the follies of globalization and will duly reward the party that opposes it most vehemently.

SOURCE 

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Roseanne and the double standard

Who knew we would look back at Roseanne Barr's crotch-grabbing massacre of the national anthem in 1990 and see a mere flesh wound on her career? She embarrassed herself, mocking America in front of America, but her hit show rolled along.

But one egregiously racist tweet destroyed the "Roseanne" reboot of 2018 in a Hollywood minute. Tweeting that former Barack Obama top aide Valerie Jarrett is a mixture of the Muslim Brotherhood and "Planet of the Apes" put an abrupt end to the top broadcast television program of the year.

ABC made the right decision — and the obvious business decision. You cannot compare blacks to monkeys. That is an old, dehumanizing trope. It is viciously mean-spirited to compare President Donald Trump to an orangutan, as many leftists have. But that is a mockery of one man's hair and intelligence, not the rhetorical equivalent of a burning cross.

In retrospect, everyone said ABC should have known this was going to happen. Barr has always been a loose cannon, and her politics have zigzagged from running on the presidential ticket of the nutty-left Green Party all the way over to backing Trump. But the network thrived with the original formula of "Roseanne," and it saw a win-win with a reboot: The show's old audience would tune in, and ABC could sell itself as reaching out to the red states after mysteriously dumping Tim Allen's hit show. The ratings were terrific. Then Roseanne drove the reboot over a cliff.

Dehumanizing tropes about black people don't always destroy careers ... when the black is a Republican. For example, Pat Oliphant didn't stop being the most widely syndicated political cartoonist in the world after he drew then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as a parrot with large lips sitting on then-President George W. Bush's hand in 2008.

This was a trend. Christian Science Monitor cartoonist Jeff Danziger drew a barefoot Rice in a rocking chair saying, "I knows all about aluminum tubes! (Correction) I don't know nuthin' about aluminum tubes ..." In the radical fever swamps, cartoonist Ted Rall drew one with Rice saying, "I was Bush's beard! His house n——!" And a black male character replies, "Now hand over your hair straightener." He is wearing a T-shirt that says, "You're not white, stupid."

Even as "Roseanne" is canceled, let's not congratulate Disney CEO Bob Iger as the King of Televised Civility. This is the same company that dragged its feet for weeks after ABC co-host Joy Behar insulted millions on "The View" when she cracked that Christians like Vice President Mike Pence who act like "Jesus talks to you" have a "mental illness." We protested until Behar apologized on air, and she has since compared Trump to an orangutan, because it's just another day in the Resistance.

Days before the Barr debacle, Disney-owned ESPN rehired Keith Olbermann, fresh off a series of unhinged Trump-hating videos for GQ magazine and a book titled "Trump Is F—-ing Crazy (This Is Not a Joke)." He's also vicious on Twitter, like this tweet to the president and former Sheriff Joe Arpaio: "You and @Potus can go f—- yourselves, you racist Nazi f—-s!" In another tweet, he lectured Republicans with emphasis: "This is the creature you have unleashed

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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DEMOCRATS CAN’T CONTROL THEIR EXTREMISM

The party car has no brakes

On May 10th, Tom Steyer was shouted down at his own town hall for pointing out that President Trump hasn’t actually killed millions of people.

Steyer was in Cedar Rapids on the road with his Need to Impeach tour. The billionaire had come to Iowa to boost his political standing by going further to the extreme than the Democrat leadership. Rep. Pelosi, Rep. Schiff and other top Dems had been warning against impeachment messaging. Steyer embraced it.

But hating Trump, like every other leftist extreme viewpoint, has no actual stopping point.

A woman in the audience asked, “What's the difference between him and Hitler?” "Hitler ended up killing millions and millions of people," the leftist billionaire noted in his reply. "Mr. Trump has shown a disregard for our law... but he hasn’t killed millions of people."

And the audience swiftly shouted him down for stating the obvious.

The trouble with trying to outleft the left is that there’s always someone more extreme than you are. Even if you want to impeach Trump, you’ll be deemed a sellout for not calling for his assassination.

It’s not enough to compare Trump to Hitler, as Steyer did, you have to insist he’s every bit as bad as Adolf.

The scene in Cedar Rapids was the inevitable outcome of building politics around hating one man as hard as possible. The transformation of the Democrats into the anti-Trump party means that if he really wanted to get a wall built tomorrow, all he would have to do is come out against it this afternoon.

Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum pleaded, “Liberals Really Shouldn’t Be Defending MS-13 Just Because Donald Trump Doesn’t Like Them.” But tell that to Nancy Pelosi. If Trump hates MS-13, the left will learn to love it, even if it never heard of it before, and draw on all the old rationalizations of terrorism (there’s a moderate MS-13 wing, innocent immigrants get caught up in the hunt for MS-13, dehumanizing people is dangerous) to rationalize its reflexive antipathy. If Jared and Ivanka show up in Jerusalem, the left will learn to love Hamas. The left’s response to North Korea shifts with Trump. When Trump negotiates, the left hates the Norks, when he threatens them, it’s come on down Kim Jong-un.

It’s not a cult of personality, but a cult of anti-personality. The Democrats feverishly worship whatever they imagine the antithesis of Trump to be at any given time. Even if it’s a violent murder and rape gang.

But it’s not just a case of, “Whatever Trump’s for, I’m against it.”

Bernie’s socialism was controversial in the ’16 primaries. In ’18, most of his ideas have been embraced by his prospective ’20 rivals. His people are rising within the DNC.

Hillary Clinton didn’t just kill off her crooked political dynasty. Her defeat also killed triangulation.

What’s the point of waiting around for decades, playing the long game, moving to the middle, trying to avoid taking a controversial stand or uttering an uncensored thought, only to lose twice?

No Dem wants to be the next Hillary Clinton. They want to be the next Obama or Bernie.

The Overton window isn’t just open, it’s broken. There are few ideas that can’t be put forward anymore. Especially on the left. In tribal politics, moderation isn’t a virtue, it’s a vice.

That’s the problem.

The lack of boundaries is liberating. But everyone has boundaries. Even the guy with a Need to Impeach tour. He just has no way to set them anymore. Or point out that Trump isn’t literally Hitler.

Neither does the rest of his political movement.

You’re either an extremist or a sellout. And there’s always someone crazier out there to cry sellout.

Free health care, college education and jobs have already been done. Bernie ran on free college and healthcare. Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris are already all over free jobs.

What’s next? How do you out-Bernie him in 2020? Free homes, free cars and free drugs?

Socialism works until you run out of other people’s money. But at this rate, the Dems will run out of other people’s ideas even before they even manage to run out of other people’s money.

And then the 2024 Dems will run on straight Communism.

Extremism in hating Trump is no vice, among the Dems, and no virtue is greater than loving socialism.

The first casualties of campaign finance reform were the moderates. The power shifted from local districts to big national donors with massive organizations. Goodbye Bill and Bob in Pennsylvania, hello George Soros and the other SPECTRE board members of the Democracy Alliance. Crowdsourced platforms like ActBlue allowed San Francisco donors to pour big money into local red state races.

And the most passionate and committed Dem donors weren’t moderates, but extremists. National single issue lobbies consolidated into a coordinated campaign to push pro-life and pro-gun Dems out of the party. The progressive political machine manufactured passion candidates who were unqualified extremists. Mostly the machine lost. But it won big when a Chicago lefty took the White House.

As the Democrats head into the midterm elections, some in the leadership are trying to moderate their tone. But why bother? Extremism pays. Just look at the cash flowing to key #resistance politicians.

When Rosie O’Donnell got into trouble for illegally over-sized campaign contributions, she claimed that she donates money ActBlue to help her cope. “My anxiety is quelled by donating to those opposing trump, his agenda — especially at night — when most of these were placed.”

She’s not alone. There’s a river of blue state money pouring into local; elections. The cult of anti-personality that the Democrats have built around Trump has been a financial windfall for the left. The Democrats hold fewer elected seats, but their holders are more likely to be politically correct. It wasn’t a defeat for the left. But a successful purification of a political party by what was an extremist faction.

The descent of the Democrats into extremism allowed Republicans to achieve a nearly unprecedented electoral dominance. As the Democrats tightened their grip on urban minority blocs and suburban bedroom communities, the South and the Midwest slipped through their fingers. But instead of moderating their tone, they consolidated control over the media and unelected officials.

The eavesdropping on Trump officials and the resulting Mueller investigation are the result.

If the Democrats succeed in reversing the results of the 2016 election by engineering a coup through the DOJ and the media, elections will cease to matter. And that will eliminate any final check on the left’s political extremism. That is what the investigations tearing apart America are really about.

The social consensus is gone. Instead the left manufactured its own social consensus on values and used the entertainment industry and the educational system to indoctrinate each generation anew. The political consensus was swept out on a tide of cash. And the electrical consensus is under siege by a movement that is trying to make elections in America as irrelevant as they already are in California.

And the Democrats are going as crazy nationally, as they did in California.

The Founding Fathers rebelled against a mad king notorious for talking to trees. But old George was replaced with a tyranny of leftists who, unlike him, may not shake hands with trees, but do hug them.

Madness is the privilege of absolute power. When there is no one to challenge their right to rule, governments go mad. North Korea’s insane Marxist madhouse is a typical example. The Democrats have been set free to indulge in the extremes of madness with none of the political consequences. The media won’t hold them accountable and, if they have their way, the voters won’t be allowed to either.

The Democrat car, environmentally correct, painted bright red and full of the exact right number of minority drivers, is racing for the cliff. It has no brakes and no one in the cars wants to use them anyway.

SOURCE 

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Chick-fil-A Mocks the Lefty Myth About Wage Stagnation

“As the owner, I’m looking at it big picture and long term.” Those are the words of Eric Mason, owner of a Chick-fil-A in Sacramento, CA.

Mason was talking about his employees and sales. He believes successful restaurants are an effect of happy, well-paid workers.  That’s why he’s offering his employees wage increases that would boost their pay from $12-13/hr. to $17-18/hr.

That Mason is raising worker pay well beyond California’s minimum wage is a reminder that pundits on the left are flying blind when they emote about stagnant wages.  They could learn a lot from Mason. Mason sees very clearly what they don’t: low-wage workers are incredibly expensive.

They are because they’re not very productive.  As is frequently said, you get what you pay for.  Low-wage workers don’t need to perform very well simply because they’re not being compensated for it.  Mason wants his business to boom, which means he wants his employees to feel well rewarded.  Quoted in the Washington Post about his decision to boost employee compensation, Mason said “[W]hat that [pay well above the minimum wage] does for the business is provide consistency, someone that has relationships with our guests, and it’s going to be building a long-term culture.”

“Long term culture” is crucial here.  Mason’s point is that employee turnover is very costly.  Not only is it time consuming to train workers who will soon depart, it’s also bad for the business.  People patronize restaurants for all sorts of reasons.  Consistency in terms of food and service, and a welcoming atmosphere plainly factor.  Each quality is more likely to be found in restaurants that retain their employees for the long term.

The above speaks loudly to how expensive it is to underpay.  To do so, as in to presume to exploit, is to drive away the workers who are capable of mastering the menu, creating a “long term culture,” and who will know many customers by name and order.

Mason’s insight is as old as profit is.  Henry Ford understood long ago what Mason does now.  Poorly paid workers are a business-sapping burden. Ford didn’t give his employees raises so that they would buy Ford cars; rather he offered them impressive raises because annual turnover of over 300% was limiting his ability to profit.  Low wages were costing Ford’s eponymous company a great deal.  Mason wants to avoid the high cost of short-changing his employees. 

Mason’s actions belie the popular lefty belief that businesses thrive by paying their workers as little as possible.  He’s a wise owner for sure, but can those who think businesses grow through exploitation really believe that Mason’s view about compensation is a minority one? More realistically, well-run corporations of varying shapes and sizes well understand that businesses succeed thanks to the people who show up for work each day.  Successful owners and CEOs understand that parsimony is not the path to profits.

Profitable businesses get that way by overpaying.  Does anyone remember General Electric’s nickname when it was the premiere U.S. blue chip in the late 1990s? “Generous Electric” employees were exceedingly well compensated, and then it was said about Time Warner around the same time that it retained its workers with “golden handcuffs.” So fearful was it of losing its human capital to Silicon Valley upstarts, Goldman Sachs handed out generous stock bonuses during the original internet boom. More modernly, readers need only consider Amazon.  It’s one of the five most valuable companies in the world.  Not surprisingly, the pay at Amazon is very impressive.  Anyone who doubts this need only consider the feverish competition among North American cities for the Seattle giant’s second HQ.

Are the previous examples too large and too corporate?  Too coastal, or too outlier? Too college-degree focused? If so, fine.  Consider the plumbing industry.  In a front page Wall Street Journal story from last week, it was reported that Ft. Collins-based Neuworks Mechanical is offering plumbers “on-site tap flows with craft beer”, roasted espresso, a smoker for brisket lunches, and next up, a yoga studio. A plumbing company in St. Paul offers arcade games and a “quiet room,” while another plumbing outfit unearthed by the Journal provides its workers with massages and spa treatments.

Which brings us to the myth about stagnant pay in the U.S.  Really? If pay were stagnant, does anyone think businesses would be paying so much and offering so much in order to win and retain workers? No doubt some owners and CEOs are quite simply enlightened and realize that a happy work force means happy customers, but to some degree this bidding war for workers is the result of a scramble for talent among all businesses. 

Stagnant pay presumes a lack of economic growth, and a dearth of successful businesses.  Except that that U.S. has had some of the greatest growth since the early 1980s, and it houses a majority of the world’s most valuable companies.  In an economy reliant on people, it’s only natural that the people staffing U.S. businesses are being paid more and more, and being compensated in ways that are more and more creative.  So impressive is compensation in the U.S. that even fast food businesses must pay up to compete.  Indeed, as the Chick-fil-A story reminds us, it’s not just Starbucks that is going out of its way to retain workers with pay and perks.

So while many on the left surely want the best for workers, far too many labor under the false illusion that businesses strive to minimize employee costs.  Not at all.  They can’t afford to. They strive to overpay because a failure to retain employees is the path to decline.

SOURCE 

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TSA and Border Patrol stole his life savings but never charged him with a crime

His American dream was helping his family in Albania. It ended when he walked through security at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.

A U.S. citizen for more than a decade, Rustem Kazazi was flying back to Europe to help his Albanian family repair their home and maybe even to buy a little beach house somewhere along the Adriatic Sea. He placed $58,100 into three clearly marked envelopes, then packed the money away in his carry-on luggage.

It was 13 years of his life savings – and the federal government took every penny.

TSA employees discovered the cash, and agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized it. But first they strip-searched Kazazi and interrogated the 64-year-old without a translator as he covered himself with a towel.

That was in October. Kazazi still hasn’t been convicted (or charged!) of any crime, and CBP didn’t offer any explanation for a month. But thanks to a law enforcement procedure called civil asset forfeiture, CBP also hasn’t given Kazazi his savings back. The federal government finally came up with an explanation: they suspected he was “involved in a smuggling/drug trafficking/money laundering operation.”

The large sum wasn’t for anything nefarious explained Kazazi, a former Albanian police office. “The crime in Albania is much worse than it is here,” he told the Washington Post. “Other people that have made large withdrawals [from Albanian banks] have had people intercept them and take their money.” Plus, hard U.S. currency is worth more.

And because traveling with that kind of cash isn’t a crime, the Kazazi family has filed suit against the federal government.

“You have the right to travel with cash in America, even when you’re flying internationally,” said Wesley Hottot, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, which represents the Kazazis in the lawsuit. “But again, we’re encountering a situation where law enforcement sees somebody with legal cash, assumes they must have done something criminal, and they just take the money. It is disturbing how little respect federal agents show for the civil rights of American citizens.”

Those federal agents aren’t an anomaly. It’s not just a bad apple here and a rotten one there. Civil asset forfeiture is the preferred policy of the nation’s top cop.

"I love that program," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said at a law enforcement conference last September. "We had so much fun doing that, taking drug dealers' money and passing it out to people trying to put drug dealers in jail. What's wrong with that?"

Turns out, a lot is wrong with the 1980s-era policy. Police aren’t just nabbing drug money. Around the country, law enforcement are taking cash, cars, and real-estate without ever charging victims with a crime. To seize property, the police only need to suspect it is connected to criminal activity. Afterwards, even clearly innocent citizens like Kazazi have no recourse except a lawsuit.

“This family’s case, like so many others, shows why civil forfeiture must end,” explained IJ attorney Johanna Talcott. “The Kazazis did nothing wrong and were never charged with a crime, but the government still won’t return their money all these months later. This kind of abuse is far too common because civil forfeiture is an inherently abusive process that will always have disastrous effects on innocent people. Enough is enough.”

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Record Wage Increases, Record-Low Unemployment

A good economy is bad for Democrats, and today brings more good economic news.

As we noted last month, a good economy is bad for Democrats. And we got another load of good economic news this morning, regardless of Leftmedia spin.

First up, The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman writes, “The number of small companies raising wages hit a record high in the U.S. this month. That’s according to the latest National Federation of Independent Business employment survey. … A full 35% of owners of small firms report increasing labor compensation, the highest percentage since NFIB started asking about it in 1986.” That trend could get even better, as Freeman notes that “businesses are ramping up spending on the tools that make their workers more productive and therefore able to command higher wages.”

Much of the wage increases are due to a tighter labor market. Employers added 223,000 jobs in May, which was higher than media expectations but not quite as surprising for those of us not blinded by Trump Derangement Syndrome. Headline unemployment dropped to 3.8%, the lowest since 2000. Black unemployment dropped to a new record low of 5.9%. And The Washington Post reports, “Many economists predict it will fall even further this year, potentially dropping to 3.5 percent, which would be the lowest rate since 1969.” It might have physically hurt that poor Post reporter to note such good news under Donald Trump.

Nancy Pelosi called Republican tax cuts “Armageddon” before dismissing them as “crumbs.” Back here in reality, the American economy is enjoying the fruit of good policy, brought to you without a single Democrat vote.

SOURCE

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BOOM: Black Unemployment Hits All-Time Low Just Like President Trump Promised

The American people as a whole were in for a treat on Friday with the latest economic numbers. According to The Daily Caller:

The numbers reveal that the U.S. economy is booming and many key indicators of economic health are trending in the right direction. According to the Labor Department, the unemployment rate is 3.8 percent, the lowest in nearly two decades.

223,000 jobs were created and the May increase in payroll was bullish, surprising economists, according to NPR.  However, the most historic data points seem to be centered around black unemployment. The unemployment rate for African-Americans plunged to 5.9 percent in May. That is a record low. Interestingly, the gap between white ad black unemployment has shrunk to the smallest since these numbers have been recorded. The white unemployment (3.5%) and black unemployment (5.9%) is the smallest gap since the release of these numbers, beginning in the early 1970s.

SOURCE 

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Trump Puts an End to Taxpayer Subsidies for Unions

Government employee unions have enjoyed an absolute boondoggle in recent years, receiving hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds. But the boon could soon be over thanks to a new executive order from President Donald Trump.

Last Friday, the president signed an executive order requiring that federal government employees who work full-time for the public employee unions at taxpayer expense spend at least 75 percent of their paid time on the government’s business. The administration estimates this will save taxpayers $100 million.

This measure is one of three executive orders the president signed on Friday. Those orders do not eliminate taxpayer subsidies for public employee unions altogether—that is Congress’ job—but they do end the taxpayer subsidy of travel for union business; mandate that unions be charged fair market value for rents of government office space; streamline the public employee appeals process so that bad apples can be fired more rapidly; and force taxpayer-funded union workers to spend at least three-quarters of their time doing the people’s business.

Most people are shocked to learn that taxpayers have been footing the bill for public employee union salaries, but they become incensed when they learn that in 2016, union employees were paid $177 million by the federal government, not counting office space and travel expenses.

A 2013 Freedom of Information Act request by Americans for Limited Government discovered that the Department of Veterans Affairs alone had over 250 employees working full time for unions in 2011. The Transportation Department had 35 employees on full-time “official time,” many of whom had salaries in excess of $170,000 per year.

And in 2012, when the IRS was busy playing politics by delaying and denying tea party group applications for nonprofit status, The Washington Times reported that more than 200 full-time IRS employees were engaged in nothing but union activity. The same report added that taxpayers picked up the bill for another $687,400 in union travel at the IRS alone.

It’s bad enough that the federal government spent between $150 and $200 million a year on union salaries and travel, but what’s worse is that this indirectly subsidized unions’ political activity. Because money is fungible, the money that public employee unions didn’t have to spend on personnel could then be turned around and spent on politics.

Public employee unions are among the biggest donors in politics, with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees ranked the 15th-largest contributor so far in 2018, according to OpenSecrets. And this group, in particular, has overwhelmingly favored Democrats over Republicans.

Of the $4,843,291 that this group has poured into politics this year, exactly $6,000 of it went to groups, causes, or politicians considered to be Republican or conservative. In 2016, it spent almost $16 million on politics with under $8,000 going to Republican or conservative groups. In that same election cycle, its political action committee could not find a single Republican to support, giving 100 percent of its money to Democrats.

This is just one case out of many. For years, taxpayers have subsidized public unions that pursue political activities and overwhelmingly donate to Democrats. Their donations are designed to grow government, and consequently, their own membership.

Public employee unions don’t even pretend to be anything but big government advocates. The president’s executive order forcing taxpayer-funded union employees to spend 75 percent of their time doing their federal job is a good first step in reigning in this far-left government funding stream.

Trump deserves kudos for recognizing the absurdity of taxpayer funding of the left, and in particular, he deserves credit for hiring people like Russ Vought and James Sherk for the Office of Management and Budget and White House staff, respectively, and Nathan Mehrens for the Labor Department.

By hiring people who have studied and understand how the current federal civil service system perpetuates the administrative state, Trump set himself up for success when it comes to dealing with the wash, rinse, repeat swamp cycle that the public employee unions perpetuate.

Recently, much of the discussion about public employee unions in politics has been focused upon the upcoming Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court decision, which could allow public employees at all levels of government to opt out of paying dues as a First Amendment right. But these new executive orders will have a much greater impact on the federal bureaucracy, since federal employees already have the right to not join the union.

This executive order will shift about $100 million in union employee costs back onto the unions. This will force them to prioritize which cases should be fought and which ones should be settled, injecting some rationality and perhaps greater speed into the federal government firing process.

Now, the president needs to take the next step: force the public employee unions to compete for their members through an opt-in process, where the employee would have to actively decide to be a member of the union rather than being assumed to be a member unless he or she fills out the proper paperwork.

If the president takes this next bold step, the public employee union stranglehold on the federal government will be broken, giving Congress a chance to pass full-blown civil service reform.

You can almost hear the swamp draining.

SOURCE 

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Fake News: Blaming Trump for Obama's Policy

In an apparent response to President Donald Trump's call to pressure Democrats into getting serious on securing the border — specifically conceding on funding for a border wall — leftists spread an image across social media of illegal alien children sleeping in an ICE detention cell. In a bit of poetic irony, Barack Obama's former speechwriter Jon Favreau also shared the image, declaring, "Look at these pictures. This is happening right now, and the only debate that matters is how we force our government to get these kids back to their families as fast as humanly possible." The glaring problem: The photograph was from an article published by The Arizona Republic in 2014. And who was president then?

Trump responded to the fake news, writing, "Democrats mistakenly tweet 2014 pictures from Obama's term showing children from the Border in steel cages. They thought it was recent pictures in order to make us look bad, but backfires. Dems must agree to Wall and new Border Protection for good of country... Bipartisan Bill!" The whole episode sounds a lot like the recent BIG Lie about Trump supposedly calling immigrants "animals," when he was specifically referring to the violent MS-13 gang.

Aside from this latest fake news episode, the controversy over separating illegal alien children from their parents is a result of current immigration law — law that Trump is calling on Congress to change. And while the law clearly isn't an ideal means of dealing with the often confusing situations that can arise, the responsibility must ultimately lie with those illegal alien parents who are knowingly breaking U.S. immigration law. Furthermore, fault also lies with Obama and his unconstitutional implementation of DACA, which only served to encourage more illegals to bring children with them, sometimes as cover.

In an effort to dissuade families from illegally immigrating, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently warned, "If you cross the border unlawfully ... then we will prosecute you... If you smuggle an illegal alien across the border, then we'll prosecute you. ... If you're smuggling a child, then we're going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law. If you don't want your child separated, then don't bring them across the border illegally. It's not our fault that somebody does that."

The truth is Trump has called for strong enforcement of the U.S. border, in part via building a wall, and has declared his desire to seek a legislative solution on DACA, both of which Democrats have resisted because they'd rather have a political wedge issue. Democrats are the ones most responsible for creating and exacerbating this problem by their continued campaign to intentionally undermine U.S. immigration law. So they can spare us their phony outrage.

SOURCE 

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Trump pardons Dinesh D'Souza — and might do the same for Rod Blagojevich and Martha Stewart

D'Souza's "offence" was to give $20,000 to a conservative politician's campaign fund

 In granting the fifth pardon of his presidency Thursday, President Trump showed that he's not afraid of political consequences of using his clemency power to correct what he perceives as unjust, politically motivated prosecutions.

On an Air Force One flight to Houston, Trump pardoned conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza for making illegal campaign contributions — and then said he is also considering presidential clemency for others, including former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich and lifestyle guru Martha Stewart.

He told reporters that Blagojevich's attempt to sell Barack Obama's former Senate seat after Obama became president was "a stupid thing to say" but not worth 18 years in prison. Blagojevich, a Democrat, appeared on Trump's reality television show Celebrity Apprentice in 2010.

Trump said a pardon of Stewart also crossed his mind. Stewart, the head of a publishing and television empire who hosted a spinoff of The Apprentice, was convicted of obstructing justice in an investigation into insider trading in 2004.

"I think to a certain extent, Martha Stewart was harshly and unfairly treated. And she used to be my biggest fan in the world — before I became a politician," Trump said. "But that’s OK. I don’t view it that way."

Trump said he called D'Souza, who is serving five years' probation for making illegal campaign contributions, to give him the news Wednesday night. "I’ve always felt he was very unfairly treated. And a lot of people did," he said. "What they did to him was horrible.”

Trump said no one asked him to pardon D'Souza, but D'Souza himself credited a social media campaign and the intervention of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas — a family friend — in bringing the case to Trump's attention

And although D'Souza's lawyers argued that he was selectively prosecuted because of his attacks on Obama, D'Souza himself backed off the claim at his sentencing.

"I'm sorry for what I did. I have never said otherwise," he said then. "I have never even said I am being selectively prosecuted. I feared that I was being."

D'Souza pleaded guilty of making "straw donations" in the names of others to support the candidacy of Republican New York Senate candidate Wendy Long, who lost to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in 2012. Those straw donations allowed him to give $20,000 in illegal contributions to the campaign, exceeding the $5,000 legal limit.

Those facts provide a parallel to the federal investigation into Trump's attorney, who may also face federal charges of exceeding campaign contribution limits and failing to disclose a $130,000 payoff to Stormy Daniels, a porn star who claims she had an extramarital relationship with Trump in 2006.

Rick Hasen, a University of California-Irvine law professor who specializes in election law, said the pardon sends "yet another signal to Michael Cohen and others about the possibility of a Trump pardon."

Sixteen months into his presidency, Trump has pardoned more people than any president since George H.W. Bush in 1989.

His pardons include former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, pardoned for contempt of court and former Bush White House aide Scooter Libby for lying to the FBI in a leak investigation.

Trump also pardoned Kristian Saucier, a former Navy submariner whose conviction for mishandling classified information became a conservative cause because of its comparisons to Democratic Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.

And last week, Trump gave a rare posthumous pardon to Jack Johnson, the former heavyweight boxing champion convicted in 1913 of racially motivated charges related to his relationship with a white woman.

Like all of those cases, D'Souza did not apply for a pardon with the Office of the Pardon Attorney, the Justice Department unit that conducts investigations of pardon cases and sends recommendations to the president. Under Justice Department rules, D'Souza would be ineligible through that process because he's on probation.

Likewise, neither Blagojevich nor Stewart has applied for clemency.

The president's constitutional authority to pardon is not bound by those rules, so Trump has granted politically charged pardons though he denied 180 applications from people who applied through the Justice Department.

D'Souza, 57, is an Indian-born author and documentary filmmaker whose work has assailed Obama, Islam and multiculturalism. His most recent book is The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left.

Though he was spared prison time in the campaign-finance case, D'Souza's conviction put him under court supervision. He was required to undergo weekly counseling sessions and complete an eight-hour day of community service during every week of his five-year probation. That community service: teaching English to Spanish-speaking immigrants at Catholic parishes.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said Trump determined D'Souza was "fully worthy of this pardon." "Mr. D’Souza was, in the president’s opinion, a victim of selective prosecution for violations of campaign-finance laws," she said. "Mr. D’Souza accepted responsibility for his actions and also completed community service by teaching English to citizens and immigrants seeking citizenship."

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Trump and conspiracy theories

There is a layman's version here of the academic article below.  The article does not explicitly refer to Trump and his supporters but there can be no doubt about where the gun is aimed.  Basically, the article implies Trump voters are simpletons who explain everything by inventing conspiracies

Their basis for that is however a correlation and, as we all know, correlations don't prove causation.  So the authors are just theorizing about what is behind their findings.  But if they can theorize so can I and I see a rather different causal chain

For a start, tarring conservatives as  conspiracy theorists is a bit rich.  On some accounts up to a third of Democrat voters see the 9/11 attacks as a put-up job arranged by George Bush II.  That's some conspiracy!  And the biggest conspiracy theory of all -- antisemitism -- had its most notable protagonist in the socialist Hitler.  And to this day antisemitism is by far most common among Leftists -- particularly in Britain.

What the authors below found was that people who thought America had lost its way and was going downhill also tended to see conspiracy theories around them.  People who agreed with statements such as: "In this country, there is a 'real America' distinct from those who don't share the same values" and "America's greatest values are increasingly decaying from within" were more likely to agree with statements such as: "The media is the puppet of those in power" and "Nothing in politics or world affairs happens by accident or coincidence."

Note that the latter statement is straight Calvinism (See Ephesians 1:4,11) and is also believed by Muslims -- so calling it a conspiracy theory is defining conspiracy theories very widely.  Are all Presbyterians conspiracy theorists?  And it is not only Presbyterians who see the hand of God in their lives. Many Christians do.  One suspects that the authors below know nothing about religion in America.  The leading author hails from an academic bubble in California so that could well be.

And it is certainly clear that most of the media serves the Leftist elite.  They don't preach mainstream values.  So again "conspiracy" is very broadly defined.

And the authors regard all conspiracy theories as wrong.  But are they? Most such theories probably are but what if one is right occasionally?  Using the broad definition of conspiracy favored by the authors below, an elite consensus could be called a conspiracy.  And the  co-ordinated message of the Leftist elite in praise of all sorts of unnatural things -- such as homosexuality and abortion -- is certainly an elite consensus.

And it must look like a conspiracy to the man in the street -- and it is in one way: An attempt by a small and interconnected minority to bring about a major change in the circumstances of the majority.  Donald Trump's determination to disrupt that elite consensus won him power.

And the unanimous hostility of the establishment to Donald Trump during and after his election campaign could well be seen as a conspiracy -- co-ordinated action by an influential minority designed to take away the ordinary people's champion.

That is particularly so now that we know what Obama's FBI was up to.  There definitely was a quite unambiguous conspiracy there to defeat Trump.  So it is entirely reasonable to see conspiracies in America's deep state.  There WERE conspiracies there.  And that could obviously lead people to more readiness to accept conspiracy theories generally.  Conservatives do well to believe conspiracies given the realities of the day. Sadly, such a theory could well be right in today's world.

To summarize: The unanimous opposition to him among the elites led Donald Trump to suspect a conspiracy against him; He made that opposition to him (by the "swamp") a central part of his campaign; His followers saw the matter similarly and they have now been proven right.


The role of system identity threat in conspiracy theory endorsement

Christopher M. Federico et al.

Abstract

Conspiracy theories (CTs) about government officials and the institutions they represent are widespread, and span the ideological spectrum. In this study, we test hypotheses suggesting that system identity threat, or a perception that society's fundamental, defining values are under siege due to social change, will predict conspiracy thinking. Across two samples (N = 870, N = 2,702), we found that system identity threat is a strong predictor of a general tendency toward conspiracy thinking and endorsement of both ideological and non‐ideological CTs, even after accounting for numerous covariates. We also found that the relationship between system‐identity threat and conspiracy‐theory endorsement is mediated by conspiracy thinking. These results suggest that conspiracy‐theory endorsement may be a compensatory reaction to perceptions that society's essential character is changing.

SOURCE

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The Carnivores of Civil Liberties

Victor Davis Hanson
 
After a landslide loss in the 1972 presidential election, the Democratic Party was resuscitated the following year by the Watergate scandal. The destruction of the Nixon presidency powered the Democrats to make huge political gains in the 1974 elections.

Watergate also birthed (or perhaps rebirthed) modern investigative journalism. A young generation of maverick reporters supposedly alone had challenged the establishment in order to uncover the whole truth about abuses of power by the Nixon administration.

Liberalism rode high during the Watergate era. It had demanded that civil liberties be protected from the illegal or unconstitutional overreach of the Nixon-era FBI, CIA and other agencies. Liberals alleged that out-of-control officials had spied on U.S. citizens for political purposes and then tried to mask their wrongdoing under the cover of “national security” or institutional “professionalism.”

All those legacies are now eroding. The Democratic Party, the investigative media and liberalism itself are now weirdly on the side of the reactionary administrative state. They have either downplayed or excused Watergate-like abuses of power by the former Barack Obama administration.

Liberal journalists apparently have few concerns that the FBI apparently used at least one secret informant to gather information about the 2016 Trump campaign. Nor are they much bothered that members of the Obama national security team unmasked the names of U.S. citizens who had been improperly surveilled. Many of those names then were illegally leaked to the press.

Democrats seem indifferent to the fact that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign paid a foreign agent, Christopher Steele, to compile dirt on Republican candidate Donald Trump — largely by trafficking in unverified rumors from Russian interests. Obama administration officials leaked details from that dossier.

Civil libertarians appear unconcerned that the Department of Justice sought to deceive the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, getting it to grant warrants to allow the surveillance of U.S. citizens based on the suspect and politically motivated Steele dossier.

Few are upset that former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have lied under oath to Congress on matters pertaining to surveillance. Rather than being investigated by the media, both are now making frequent media appearances.

The FBI cannot remain credible when its former director, James Comey, leaks confidential memos about meetings with the president to the media — with the expressed intent of leveraging the appointment of a special counsel, Robert Mueller, who turned out to be a longtime friend of Comey’s.

Why have the former guardians of civil liberties flipped in the near half-century since Watergate?

One, both the media and the liberal establishment believed that the outsider Trump represented an existential danger to themselves and the nation at large — similar to the way operatives in the Nixon administration had felt about far-left presidential challenger George McGovern in 1972.

But this time around, liberals were not out of power as they were in 1972. Instead, they were the establishment. They held the reins of federal power under the Obama administration. And they chose to exercise it in a fashion similar to how Nixon’s team had in 1972.

Second, pollsters and the media were convinced that Hillary Clinton would be elected. As a result, members of the FBI, CIA and other federal bureaucracies apparently assumed that any extralegal efforts to stop the common menace Trump would be appreciated rather than punished by a soon-to-be President Clinton.

Three, those in the Obama administration, the Clinton campaign and the media formed an echo chamber. All convinced themselves that any means necessary to achieve the noble ends of precluding a Trump presidency were justified.

The danger of such groupthink continues; even now they are unaware of the impending bomb that is about to go off.

Public opinion has radically changed. A majority of Americans believe the Muller investigation is politically motivated, according to a CBS News poll.

The inspector general’s report on the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email scandal is soon due. It will likely detail violations of ethics and laws among Obama administration officials and may include criminal referrals.

Already, a few liberals and former Clinton supporters are warning the Left that it is on the wrong side of history and about to reverse the entire post-Watergate liberal tradition.

There is a reckoning on the horizon. It has nothing to do with Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Instead, the traditional, self-appointed watchdogs of government overreach have turned into the carnivores of civil liberties.

SOURCE

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The Mojo of Trumponomics

T.S. Eliot famously wrote that April is the cruelest month, but when it comes to America’s fiscal picture, nothing could be further from the truth about this past April. The latest government numbers confirm that last month was a blockbuster for growth, federal revenues, and deficit reduction.

One of the key principles of Trumponomics is that faster economic growth can help solve a multitude of other social and economic problems, from poverty to inner-city decline to lowering the national debt.

We’re not quite at a sustained elevated growth rate of 3 percent yet, but the latest economy snapshot tells us we are knocking on the door. The growth rate over the last four quarters came in at 2.9 percent, which was higher than any of the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency.

Halfway through this current quarter, which began on April 1, the Atlanta Federal Reserve estimates growth at 4 percent. If that persists through the end of June, we will have reached an average growth rate of 3 percent under President Donald Trump.

Not bad, given that nearly every liberal critic trashed the president’s campaign forecast of 3 percent to 4 percent growth as an impossible dream.

Economists such as Larry Summers, Obama’s first chief economist, gloomily declared that we were mired in a new era of “secular stagnation” and that 3 percent growth was unachievable. Paul Krugman of The New York Times said it was more likely we would see flying cars than 3 percent to 4 percent growth.

Now for the even better news. We are already starting to see a fiscal dividend from Trump’s tax, energy, and pro-business policies. The Congressional Budget Office reports that tax revenues in April—by far the biggest month of the year for tax collections because of the April 15 filing deadline—totaled $515 billion, which was a robust 13 percent rise in receipts over last year.

MoneyWeek reports that the $218 billion monthly surplus (revenues over expenditures) this April was the largest ever, with the previous record being $180 billion in 2001. (April is always the one surplus month.)

Here’s the simple lesson: more growth, more tax revenue.

But there’s another lesson, and it is about how wrong the bean counters in Congress were who said this tax bill would “cost” the Treasury $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion in lost revenues over the next decade.

If the higher growth rate that Trump has already accomplished remains in place, then the impact will be well over $3 trillion of more revenue and thus lower debt levels over the decade. Putting people to work is the best way to balance the budget. Period.

Critics will dismiss the importance of these higher revenue collections by arguing that the new receipts are for 2017 tax payments, which don’t take account of the tax cut that passed in December. This ignores that some of the growth we have seen was a result of the anticipation of the tax cut. Moreover, the fact that the tax cuts are just sinking in means that we should get even higher growth rates for the next several years at least.

Alas, it is not all good news in the April surprise. The inexcusable omnibus spending bill increased federal spending by some $300 billion in 2018, and we are starting to feel the impact of that splurge. Federal outlays are up 8.7 percent in April. That’s unforgivable, given that Republicans run everything in Washington these days.

No one thought that Trump could ramp up the growth rate to 3 percent or that his policies would boost federal revenues. But he is doing just that—which is why all that the Democrats and the media want to talk about these days is Russia and Stormy Daniels.

SOURCE

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Google Says Republicans Are Socialists

A search listed the California Republican Party's ideology as "Nazism."

Less than a week before the California primaries, Google search lists the state’s Republican Party ideology as “Nazism.” Vice News reports, “In the ‘knowledge panel’ that provides easy access to information next to search results, Google was showing ‘Nazism’ as an ‘ideology’ of the party as of Thursday morning. The word ‘Nazism’ was hyperlinked to a secondary page that shows ‘Nazism’ alongside other ‘ideologies’ of California Republicans like ‘Conservatism,’ ‘Market liberalism,’ ‘Fiscal conservatism,’ and ‘Green conservatism.’”

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) blasted Google: “It is disgraceful that the world’s largest search engine has labeled millions of California Republicans as Nazis. This is just the latest incident in a disturbing trend to slander conservatives. These damaging actions must be held to account. The bias has to stop.” McCarthy is correct. The most recent example was Google’s silencing of pro-life ads before the Irish referendum on whether to legalize abortion. But don’t forget the tech giant’s firing of software engineer James Damore last year for his daring to question the company’s leftist dogma, or its use of the hate-mongering Southern Poverty Law Center to police YouTube.

Google responded with a “dog ate my homework” excuse, blaming the “mistake” on Wikipedia vandalism. In other words, “Oops, but it really wasn’t our fault. Can we move along now?”

But aside from Google’s convenient mistake, what may be more frustrating is the regular misrepresentation, even among conservatives, of Nazism as a far-right political movement. The fact is both Nazism and communism are extreme expressions that come out of the same leftist ideological camp of socialism. Both produce totalitarian forms of government that preach the “needs” of the collective over and against individual rights and Liberty. The primary difference between the two totalitarian ideologies is that of race-based nationalism versus collectivist globalism. The term “NAZI” itself was the German acronym for National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

By contrast, conservatism champions the protection of the rights and freedoms of the individual against the encroachment of the collective. Yet the Leftmedia has taken President Donald Trump’s populist message of America First (nationalism) and falsely linked it with racism in an effort to imply that Trump and all Republicans are fascist Nazis. Nothing could be further from reality, but in the age of identity politics, emotions rather than facts are what sell.

SOURCE

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Some sarcasm from Twitter

Trump is racist because...he's showing that a privileged rich white man can bring down unemployment among minorities in a way the guy before him couldn't

Horrifically, Trump will spend 8 years working to drive down unemployment and crime in black communities as a dogwhistle to racists

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Genetic Intelligence Tests Are Next to Worthless (?)

I take the title above from the title of a long and very readable article by Carl Zimmer, a NYT journalist.  You could almost predict the title from the fact that he is a NYT journalist.

But the article is extremely well done.  It is something of a triumph of the journalist's art. He explains the facts and issues of his subject beautifully.  I wish I could write as well.  We both try for lucidity and simplicity but he does by far the better job. That he is a journalist and that I am an academic shows. I never could get teddy bears into my writing.

The article is a long one so I am not even going to excerpt it.  Instead I am going  to offer what I hope is a fuller perspective on the matters he raises.  Put simply, he mistakes the major issue involved.

When we look at his title, we have to ask: "Worthless for What? His answer is that currently available genetic information is useless as a substitute for a normal IQ test.  He is absolutely right about that and his warning is well-taken.  People who claim to assess your IQ from your genetic profile are little better than quacks and their results are of no everyday use.

And the reason for that is that IQ appears to be just one aspect of your body's general good functioning.  The brain is just one organ of the body and if the body overall is functioning well the brain should be working pretty well too. And from the research with IQ tests we find an amazing range of good things that high IQ correlates with -- better health, longer life more harmonious marriages etc.  You name it, more or less. 

So that lies behind the fact that there are a LOT of influences on your IQ. They may be scattered anywhere in your body.  What IQ researchers have said for a long time is that IQ is "polygenetic".  It is the sum of a whole lot of little genetic influences.  Almost anything that influences your overall health could also influences your IQ.

At this stage I have to stress that I am talking about the "in general" case.  As elsewhere in life, there are exceptions to the general rule. There are healthy specimens who are as dumb as a brick (some Hollywood actors?) and there are other unfortunates such as Stephen Hawking and Carl Steinmetz where a brilliant brain inhabits a broken body.  Sometimes you need just one faulty gene to have a big influence on your bodily health.

And it is the general case that interests scientists.  They are not actually much interested in YOU.  They are only interested in what emerges from a study of people in general. So when they find some of the many influences on IQ in people's genes they see themselves as being on the right track in seeing IQ as mainly genetic.  And the advances are already exciting.  As each new study comes out, more and more of the genetic influences on IQ are being found.  Genetics generally is in its infancy and the genetics of IQ are no exception. 

And so far there has not been a single study looking at epigenetic influences on IQ.  Epigenetics are bits of your genetic profile which influence how other genes work.  They can even turn a gene "on" or "off".  So to expect that current studies could give us the whole genetics of IQ is very naive.  The fact that we have at this early stage already been able to detect some of the genetics involved is the interesting and exciting part. 

In other words the issue is not whether or not we can measure your IQ from your genes right now but rather whether we are on the right track towards that.  And from a scientific point of view we are doing amazingly well considering the huge difficulty of such research -- JR.

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Your father's Republican Party has vanished. His Democratic Party has, too

by Jeff Jacoby

ADDRESSING THE New York State Democratic convention last week, Joe Biden endorsed Governor Andrew Cuomo for reelection and delivered some blistering criticism of the party that controls Congress and the White House.

"This is not your father's Republican Party," declared the former vice president. With its "phony populism" and "fake nationalism," he said, the GOP is "sending a vision of America around the world that is distorted, that's damaging."

Biden is reportedly considering another run for president in 2020, so attacks on Republicans and their leader are to be expected. But he's not wrong: The GOP under Donald Trump manifestly isn't the Republican Party of a generation ago. The turn against free trade, the harshness on immigration, the rising admiration for Russia's ruler, the tolerance of debauchery and bad character in political leaders — today's Republicanism is indeed a far cry from that of Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.

But it isn't only the GOP that has changed so profoundly. So has the Democratic Party.

"We have to take a long look in the mirror and face the hard truth," Cuomo told the Democratic delegates in his convention speech. That truth, he said, is that Democrats lost the last presidential election "because we lost the connection with who we are and why the middle class and working families made the Democratic Party their home in the first place."

Cuomo's concern for middle- and working-class values may be genuine, or it may reflect the fact that he's facing a primary challenge from actress Cynthia Nixon, whose politics are skewed even more to the left than his. Either way, there's no denying that the Democratic Party today has far less sympathy for Main Street attitudes it used to embrace.

There was a time, for example, when self-described "pro-life liberals" were welcome in the Democrats' big tent. Democratic governors like Ella Grasso of Connecticut and Robert Casey of Pennsylvania firmly opposed abortion; as recently as 2009, dozens of House Democrats initially opposed the Affordable Care Act because it lacked restrictions on abortion funding. But no longer is there room in party councils for more than one position on the issue. Democratic Party chairman Tom Perez decreed last year that Democratic candidates must support a woman's right to choose. "That," he said, "is not negotiable."

Dissent is not permitted on other topics as well.

Moderate liberal Joe Lieberman of Connecticut was a rising star in Democratic circles in the 1980s; by 2000 he was the party's candidate for vice president. But Lieberman strongly supported the Iraq war, a position that by 2006 made him persona non grata in Democrats' eyes. Lieberman's ostracism confirmed that the once-robust national-security wing of the Democratic Party — the home of Cold War hawks like Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy, and Scoop Jackson — was defunct. Democrats, the original party of peace through strength, became the party of disengagement and retreat.

Liberal Democrats in the 1960s believed in color-blindness — they agreed with Thurgood Marshall that "racial criteria are irrational, irrelevant, odious to our way of life." Liberal Democrats today insist on racial criteria, demanding rigid "diversity" in everything from workplace hiring to college admissions to the Academy Awards.

Your father's Democratic Party was an ardent defender of Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. No more: Liberal Democrats today, reports the Pew Research Center, are much less likely to support Israel than to support its Palestinian enemies.

Two decades ago, a popular president fought hard for a North American Free Trade Agreement, signed the Iraq Liberation Act, and kept his promise to "end welfare as we know it." He not only enacted a Balanced Budget Act, but produced four consecutive federal budget surpluses. He cut the top capital-gains tax rate from 28 percent to 20 percent. He led NATO in liberating Kosovo. He resisted same-sex marriage. He codified economic sanctions against Cuba.

Bill Clinton is still popular with Democrats. But in a party that has shifted sharply leftward, there's little room for the centrist positions he upheld as president.

Biden is right about the Trump GOP: It is decidedly not your father's Republican Party. And your father's Democratic Party? It too, alas, is a thing of the past.

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Don the Lemon is so unbalanced it is a wonder he can walk without falling over

Leftists can be as abusive and foul mouthed as they like but other must not step a foot out of line

During a segment on Tuesday night, Lemon began discussing news that ABC cancelled the hit show “Roseanne” after its star, Roseanne Barr, sent out a controversial tweet about Valerie Jarrett, a former top aide under President Barack Obama.

“Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj,” Barr wrote in a now deleted tweet about Jarrett. Barr has since apologized for her tweet.

As noted by Mediaite, Lemon tied Barr’s comments to Trump and his supporters, strongly implying that the president is responsible for fostering a culture in America that promotes bigotry and racism.

“We know what Donald Trump thinks. We know what Roseanne Barr thinks. It’s time for us to stop playing around with soft words by saying, ‘Oh, well they’re saying insensitive things.’ No, it’s racist! They’re exhibiting racist behavior. And far too many of our fellow American citizens agree with them. And feel emboldened to say out loud the things they wouldn’t have dared to say in public just a few years ago. In an America where racism happens every day, in our neighborhoods, in our workplaces, in our schools, in a Starbucks, in a park, at an Airbnb, what is America going to do about it?”

“We have to stop pretending that this president has nothing to do with it, that he’s not emboldening racists and racism and giving them a platform and making it okay.”

Lemon calling Trump and his supporters racist further confirms what many believe about CNN, but he also proved how biased and tone-deaf he is regarding media figures who have made disturbing comments on television.

Lemon and the media were no where to be found when ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel mocked First Lady Melania Trump’s accent.

What about when Fox News host Sean Hannity exposed Kimmel for being a pervert? Hannity tweeted out numerous videos of Kimmel from years ago, where he is asking women to feel his crotch, and even “joked” that one girl was underage.

Remember when ABC’s “The View” co-host Joy Behar said Christians have a mental illness?

How about MSNBC’s Joy Reid getting busted a second time in recent months for having dozens of bigoted, homophobic posts on her personal blog, The Reid Report, that slandered the LGBT community?

What about MSNBC “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski saying President Trump has a sexually transmitted disease?

None of those liberals were ever suspended or reprimanded and still have their jobs.

Lemon never condemned them for making those sick comments, yet he used an entire segment on Tuesday to label Trump and his supporters as racist over something Barr said.

This is just the latest example of CNN blaming Trump and smearing his supporters.

SOURCE 

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Horror!  CNN Brings in Deportee’s Wife, She Defends President Trump

Months after federal immigration agents deported a husband and father who had been in the U.S. since he was brought to the country illegally at the age of 10, his family is still desperate to be reunited.

Jorge Garcia’s case made national headlines in January after video surfaced of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers escorting him away from his sobbing wife and children.

Despite her grief, however, Garcia’s wife of 15 years does not blame the Trump administration. Cindy Garcia told CNN’s Brooke Baldwin this week that this situation was caused by a broken immigration system, not those tasked with upholding the laws as they are currently written.

“I am not upset at our government due to the fact that I am a U.S. citizen and that our laws come first,” she said. “Our laws are just broken and I can’t be mad at Trump for doing his job because that is his job to protect us, as U.S. citizens, from criminals.”

Garcia cited her family’s experience as a prime reason America should reform its immigration policy.

“The only thing is my husband was not a criminal and those are the laws that need to be fixed because they are broken,” she said. “For the people that are here, brought as children, doing the right thing and have never committed a crime, we need to fix a pathway to citizenship for them.”

On the other hand, she took a firm stance that “criminals that have come here illegally … need to go back.”

SOURCE 

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U.S. Back At No. 1 Competitiveness Ranking — Will Trump's Critics Ever Admit To Being Wrong?

Have Donald Trump's policies had a big impact on the U.S. economy and its competitiveness? The answer, we think, is an obvious yes. Now comes a new report, based mainly on "hard" data, that confirms that.

The report comes from the IMD Competitiveness Center in Switzerland. Each year it ranks countries by 256 different variables to come up with its global competitiveness rankings.

For 2018, there was a surprise: The U.S. leapt three places to take over the top spot in global competitiveness — just ahead of Hong Kong, Singapore, the Netherlands and Switzerland. That jump was based on its "strength in economic performance and infrastructure," ranking first in both areas.

That this is so shouldn't shock anyone with any knowledge of what's going on in the economy.

Since Trump took office, GDP growth has averaged 2.9%, up from 2% under President Obama. Unemployment now stands at 3.9%, and jobless rates for African-Americans, Asians and Hispanics are at or near all-time lows.

Inflation, at about 2%, remains under control. Business investment is surging, and a big reason for that is that corporate taxes are low, thanks to Trump's tax cuts.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to slash away at the thicket of regulations that strangles the U.S. economy, costing us collectively nearly $2 trillion a year. All of this has helped to fuel an economic renaissance of sorts. U.S. households are $7.1 trillion richer since Trump entered office, thanks to rising share prices and strong real estate markets.

Just to be clear, we're not citing this one report as a be-all and end-all for competitiveness or even for the fate of the economy. Nor are we in the forecasting business.

But others are, and among them have been some of Trump's fiercest critics. To read what they wrote and said, the U.S. returning to No. 1 in competitiveness wouldn't just be unlikely — it would be impossible.

Just last November, for instance, a blog post on the Economic Policy Institute's website informed us that "Republican tax plan will reduce American competitiveness." That was, to be kind, wide of the mark.

Similarly, the liberal Brookings Institution opined in March of last year that "Trump's 'America First' budget will leave the economy running behind." Didn't happen.

Going back even further, many economists and pundits were wrong — dead wrong — about Trumponomics. But to this day they can't bring themselves to admit it. Imprisoned by the illogic of their own liberal ideology, they all saw not just failure, but instant disaster. They still do.

3% Growth Is Possible

Trump might be on the verge of another big win over his critics in the media and economics profession.

Recall that when Trump promised 3% growth, he was roundly criticized and even ridiculed for what many claimed was pie-in-the-sky political hyperbole. Some even said such growth would be impossible.

But, as we noted, GDP growth has averaged 2.9% since Trump moved into the White House, just a hair under 3%. If the Atlanta Fed's GDP "Nowcast" — which uses current data to make up-to-date forecasts — is correct, 2018's second quarter could see growth of as much as 4%.

That would push average growth above 3% for Trump's term. If so, that would be yet another "crazy" idea that Trump had that turned out to be true.

While all those dire prognostications we mentioned proved false, the media continue to quote those who made them uncritically.

It seems that among the media and the Beltway and coastal elites, no distortion of Trump's many successes ever gets corrected — only repeated. And facts are never acknowledged — only ignored or distorted.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Proof of creation?

EXTENSIVE analysis of DNA barcodes across 100,000 species revealed a telltale sign showing that almost all animals on Earth emerged about the same time as humans.

WHO would have suspected that a handheld genetic test used to unmask sushi bars pawning off tilapia for tuna could deliver deep insights into evolution, including how new species emerge?

And who would have thought to trawl through five million of these gene snapshots — called “DNA barcodes” — collected from 100,000 animal species by hundreds of researchers around the world and deposited in the US government-run GenBank database?

That would be Mark Stoeckle from The Rockefeller University in New York and David Thaler at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who together published findings last week sure to jostle, if not overturn, more than one settled idea about how evolution unfolds.

It is textbook biology, for example, that species with large, far-flung populations — think ants, rats, humans — will become more genetically diverse over time.

But is that true?

“The answer is no,” said Stoeckle, lead author of the study, published in the journal Human Evolution.

For the planet’s 7.6 billion people, 500 million house sparrows, or 100,000 sandpipers, genetic diversity “is about the same,” he told AFP.

The study’s most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.

“This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could,” Thaler said.

That reaction is understandable: How does one explain the fact that 90 per cent of animal life, genetically speaking, is roughly the same age?

Was there some catastrophic event 200,000 years ago that nearly wiped the slate clean?

To understand the answer, one has to understand DNA barcoding. Animals have two kinds of DNA.

The one we are most familiar with, nuclear DNA, is passed down in most animals by male and female parents and contains the genetic blueprint for each individual.

The genome — made up of DNA — is constructed with four types of molecules arranged in pairs. In humans, there are three billion of these pairs, grouped into about 20,000 genes.

But all animals also have DNA in their mitochondria, which are the tiny structures inside each cell that convert energy from food into a form that cells can use.

Mitochondria contain 37 genes, and one of them, known as COI, is used to do DNA barcoding.

Unlike the genes in nuclear DNA, which can differ greatly from species to species, all animals have the same set of mitochondrial DNA, providing a common basis for comparison.

Mitochondrial DNA is also a lot simpler, and cheaper, to isolate. Around 2002, Canadian molecular biologist Paul Hebert — who coined the term “DNA barcode” — figured out a way to identify species by analysing the COI gene.

“The mitochondrial sequence has proved perfect for this all-animal approach because it has just the right balance of two conflicting properties,” said Thaler.

On the one hand, the COI gene sequence is similar across all animals, making it easy to pick out and compare.

On the other hand, these mitochondrial snippets are different enough to be able to distinguish between each species.

“It coincides almost perfectly with species designations made by specialist experts in each animal domain,” Thaler said.

In analysing the barcodes across 100,000 species, the researchers found a telltale sign showing that almost all the animals emerged about the same time as humans.

What they saw was a lack of variation in so-called “neutral” mutations, which are the slight changes in DNA across generations that neither help nor hurt an individual’s chances of survival.

In other words, they were irrelevant in terms of the natural and sexual drivers of evolution.

How similar or not these “neutral” mutations are to each other is like tree rings — they reveal the approximate age of a species.

Which brings us back to our question: why did the overwhelming majority of species in existence today emerge at about the same time?

Environmental trauma is one possibility, explained Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University.

“Viruses, ice ages, successful new competitors, loss of prey — all these may cause periods when the population of an animal drops sharply,” he told AFP, commenting on the study.

“In these periods, it is easier for a genetic innovation to sweep the population and contribute to the emergence of a new species.” But the last true mass extinction event was 65.5 million years ago when a likely asteroid strike wiped out land-bound dinosaurs and half of all species on Earth. This means a population “bottleneck” is only a partial explanation at best.

“The simplest interpretation is that life is always evolving,” said Stoeckle. “It is more likely that — at all times in evolution — the animals alive at that point arose relatively recently.” In this view, a species only lasts a certain amount of time before it either evolves into something new or goes extinct.

And yet — another unexpected finding from the study — species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there’s nothing much in between.

“If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies,” said Thaler. “They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space.” The absence of “in-between” species is something that also perplexed Darwin, he said.

SOURCE

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How Trump Can Dismantle Obamacare Without Congress

After more than eight years of promising to end Obamacare, Republicans in Congress—despite having control of both the House and Senate—have failed to stop this disastrous health care law. But thanks to an important provision Republicans included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act when they passed the law in December 2017, the Trump administration may soon have an opportunity to end Obamacare without Congress, which might force Republican congressmen to finally get their act together and pass health care legislation that would empower states and local governments and free health care markets from costly federal government mandates.

 As I have previously noted in several articles on the subject, including in a May 14 article for Townhall, a very strong argument can be made that Obamacare will soon no longer be constitutional. The short explanation is that in the 2012 decision upholding the legality of the Obamacare individual mandate, Chief Justice John Roberts cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate on the basis that the penalty imposed for not having “qualifying” health insurance is not a fine, penalty, or fee, but rather a tax. Since Congress has the power to tax, Roberts reasoned, it has the power to impose the individual mandate.

 When Congress and the Trump administration passed their tax reform legislation in December, they lowered the Obamacare penalty to $0 (effective January 1, 2019), eliminating any possibility of the fine being considered a “tax.” They did not, however, eliminate the mandate to purchase health insurance (because they couldn’t under the congressional rules used to pass the tax reform law). Without the so-called “tax” tied to the mandate, the foundation of Roberts’ argument will completely disappear when the penalty is removed.

This argument, which was also made recently in a lawsuit filed in federal court by 20 states and several other plaintiffs, creates the opportunity for the Trump administration to end Obamacare without Congress having to pass a law. But how?

In other articles, I noted the Trump administration would need to officially declare that the law will no longer be constitutional when the tax is eliminated in January 2019, but as I’ve been instructed recently by former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, that’s only partially correct.

In addition to declaring that the Trump administration will not recognize the constitutionality of the law, it would need to settle the lawsuit with those plaintiffs alleging the individual mandate is no longer constitutional. By settling the lawsuit and effectively acknowledging the plaintiffs’ argument is correct, Obamacare could be dismantled without Congress’s approval. With a settlement, it would be legally difficult, if not impossible, for Obamacare to be eliminated because the Trump administration has a duty to enforce existing federal law.

Some of you might be wondering why the entire Obamacare law might be tossed out if only the individual mandate is determined to be unconstitutional. The answer is that in previous Supreme Court cases, the Court has determined that when a particularly important provision of a law is deemed unconstitutional, the entire law should be struck down. The primary reason for this is that the Court’s job is not to create or alter legislation; that power, at the federal level, belongs to Congress alone.

Former Justice Antonin Scalia explained in the dissent he authored in the 2012 case that there is a two-part guide for determining whether one or more provisions ruled to be unconstitutional ought to compel the Supreme Court to strike down an entire law. As Scalia noted in the second part of the guide, the one most relevant for the current situation, “even if the remaining provisions can operate as Congress designed them to operate, the Court must determine if Congress would have enacted them standing alone and without the unconstitutional portion. If Congress would not, those provisions, too, must be invalidated.”

It’s extremely unlikely Congress would have passed Obamacare in 2010 had the individual mandate been removed from the law, because, as Congress noted in the ACA itself, the individual mandate is an “essential” part of the Obamacare scheme and “the absence of the requirement would undercut Federal regulation of the health insurance market.”

Obamacare is not constitutional, and the Trump administration has the power to end Obamacare on its own. For the sake of the country’s failing health insurance market, let’s hope it acts by settling the lawsuit challenging Obamacare and declaring the law to be what it always was: an illegal act by the federal government to force people to buy a product millions of families can’t even afford to use.

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What the Left Gets Wrong About Stock Buybacks

If you look around, the economy is growing faster than most economists predicted just last year.

Layoffs are rare and employers are hiring. New claims for unemployment benefits are close to a 48-year low, and unemployment is at an 18-year low. If you haven’t noticed, “help wanted” signs seem to be going up all over the place.

Tax reform, which passed last year, has only contributed positively to these economic trends. Those who want to detract from the successes of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act look for stories like a recent Harley-Davidson plant closing and large stock buybacks.

Even a historically strong economy hasn’t been able to rescue the motorcycle company from four years of declining sales.

Despite all the good news, some keep hammering corporate stock buybacks as evidence that the tax cuts aren’t working. So, let’s look at the reality of stock buybacks.

When businesses don’t have suitable investment options for all their profits, they give part of them back to their investors so that those individuals can instead reinvest in other, more profitable endeavors.

Harley-Davidson is a prescient example of stock buybacks. By transferring just shy of $700 million back to shareholders, those investors are now able to redirect that money to other investments that have a more promising future.

Those new investments will also need workers to build, design, and manufacture whatever the future demands.

If instead, Harley-Davidson poured more money into a U.S. market that did not want to buy its bikes, the investment would still not sustain long-term jobs. Instead, it would just prolong the company’s decline and ultimately everyone—including the employees—would be worse off.

The former director of the Congressional Budget Office, Doug Holtz-Eakin, summed up the economics of stock buybacks. “Stock buybacks do not make shareholders richer,” he said. “A stock buyback is simply the exchange of valuable stock for the same value in cash.”

Business Investment Raises Wages

The 2017 tax reform lowered the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. The lower tax rate makes investing in the U.S. more attractive. The tax law also further lowers the cost of business investments through expensing.

In the first quarter of 2018, investment increased by more than 21 percent among companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index, compared with the same quarter in 2017.

Investment is often slow in the first quarter of the year, so most observers predict strong business investment will continue.

More business investment in new buildings and equipment means that Americans will be more productive, revenues will increase, and businesses will want to hire more workers and will pay higher wages to find good talent.

“In a dynamic, competitive economy, the relationship between companies and their employees is symbiotic, not antagonistic,” explains Kevin Hassett, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. That is exactly what we are seeing.

A Healthy Stock Market Benefits the Middle Class 

The popular narrative that only the rich benefit when the stock market and businesses are doing well is based on a mistaken view of stock ownership that may have been true in the 19th century, but certainly isn’t true today.

When businesses increase in value or pay dividends, shareholders—the owners of those businesses—share in the benefits.

In the U.S., shareholders are ordinary people, with more than half of all families owning stock, directly or indirectly. You likely own pieces of businesses in your private retirement savings account, through your company’s pension fund, and your kids’ college savings accounts.

The rate of stock ownership is increasing, with some of the biggest gains coming from lower-income households. The value of asset holdings in investment accounts has also for low-income Americans, compared with those with higher incomes.

The notion that only the wealthy benefit when businesses return profits to their investors is simply wrong.

All in all, stock buybacks are a common market function and a signal of a healthy economy. They may be an easy target to vilify, but we should base our attitude toward them on sound economic thinking and appreciate the broader context of a healthy economy.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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