Donald Trump: 'I'm a Nationalist'

His initial hesitancy in using that term is understandable.  In one sense it can mean a desire to make your country rule other countries -- but it can also mean nothing more than an appreciation of your own country's special characteristics and a desire to promote and restore them.  Trump is clearly in the latter camp.

The Left want to destroy everything that is unique and good about America.  As Obama said to immense cheers from his followers ten years ago, they want to "fundamentally transform" America.  The present hysterical hostility to Trump is hostility to what he stands for:  America and ordinary Americans.  Under Obama they had made a start on destroying much that was American, only to have that snatched away from them by Trump


Washington: US President Donald Trump has declared he's a "nationalist" at a campaign rally on as he appealed to Texas Republicans to re-elect Senator Ted Cruz and help the party keep control of Congress.

Trump ran for president as a nationalist, declaring he would place "America first" in his policies. But he has previously declined to label himself, even telling the Wall Street Journal in an April 2017 interview, "hey, I'm a nationalist and a globalist. I'm both."

At the time, some members of his administration were considered globalists by their critics, including former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn.

Trump's declaration on Monday, US time, came as he criticised Democrats, associating them with "corrupt, power-hungry globalists".

"You know what a globalist is, right?" Trump asked his audience. "A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly not caring about our country so much. And you know what? We can't have that.

"You know, they have a word - it sort of became old-fashioned - it's called nationalist. And I say, really, we're not supposed to use that word.

"You know what I am? I'm a nationalist, OK - I'm a nationalist,' the President said. 'Use that word."

SOURCE

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Military Poll a Morale Victory for Trump
   
Under Barack Obama, the biggest threat to our military might have been the policies of the man in charge of it. From the toppling of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to the rollout of open transgenderism, most service members couldn’t wait to get back to the business of warfighting. In 2016, they got their wish. After eight long years, the new commander-in-chief went to work, rescuing our troops from the radical grip of the Obama years. “I want a very, very strong military,” Donald Trump said. And he is proving it.

It wasn’t easy restoring a sense of pride to a military devastated by two terms of social engineering. But this president didn’t wilt under the pressure. He walked right into the fire and did what was right — whether the issue was the budget, sexuality, faith, gender, or draft-related. Now, almost two years into upending the policies of Obama, Trump’s troops are showing their gratitude. About 44 percent of active-duty troops have a favorable view of the commander-in chief — nine points higher than Obama’s top mark.

Of course, the headlines will be misleading. Even the reporters at the Military Times, who conducted the poll, say the president’s support is “fading.” But barely. Unlike Barack Obama, who watched his approval rating fall through basement — barely cracking 15 percent when he left office — Donald Trump is only 2.8 points off his 46.1 percent mark from inauguration day. That’s almost within the statistical margin of error. Obama’s support, on the other hand, almost completely evaporated, dropping 25 points between 2009 and 2015.

When it comes to Trump’s actual policies, the numbers are night and day. “Troops surveyed continue to give high marks to the president for his handling of military issues specifically,” the survey points out. “More than 60 percent said they believe the military is in better shape now than it was under President Barack Obama, and nearly the same number have a favorable view of his handling of the military.” Only 13 percent think Obama’s military was in better shape than Trump’s. That shouldn’t be surprising. Instead of dismantling the military like the last administration, this president is focused on rebuilding it. And when he does, it’s with an eye on their mission — not his.

“Trump has done some things to win the hearts of the military, whether it has been the budget or just avoiding a foreign policy catastrophe,” said political science professor Peter Feaver. “And he has talked about the importance of the military, making it a focus of his campaign and presidency.” Some of the men and women interviewed agreed. “[Trump’s] definitely improving the readiness of the military and giving us the resources we need to get the mission done, not hamstringing us by cutting our budget,” said Staff Sgt. Kyle Overholser, an airman stationed in Arizona.

And while officers trail in their enthusiasm of Trump, even their favorability ratings have jumped 10 points — from 31 percent a year ago to 41 percent now. In the enlisted ranks, there’s always been a more positive opinion of the president than negative. Gender seems to be the only real divide. Female troops (who made up just 11 percent of the respondents) are much less supportive of this White House than their male counterparts.

Thanks to President Trump, the military is finally fighting something other than the culture wars. And honestly, that’s the difference between his administration and Obama’s. This president uses our troops to advance America’s interests — not his own. And our service members aren’t the only appreciative ones!

SOURCE

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Voices of Reason — and Unreason

Susan Collins put on a clinic in thoroughness and justice
   
What did the Kavanaugh controversy tell us about our historical moment? It underscored what we already know, that America is politically and culturally divided and that activists and the two parties don’t just disagree with but dislike and distrust each other. We know also the Supreme Court has come to be seen not only as a constitutional (and inevitably political) body but as a cultural body. It follows cultural currents, moods, assumptions. It has frequently brushed past the concept of democratic modesty to make decisions that would most peacefully be left to the people, at the ballot box, after national debate. So citizens will experience the court as having great power over their lives, and nominations to the court will inevitably draw passion. And this was a fifth conservative seat on a nine-person court.

But the Kavanaugh hearings had some new elements. There were no boundaries on inquiry, no bowing to the idea of a private self. Accusations were made about the wording of captions under yearbook photos. The Senate showed a decline in public standards of decorum. A significant number of senators no longer even pretend to have class or imitate fairness. The screaming from the first seconds of the first hearings, the coordinated interruptions, the insistent rudeness and accusatory tones — none of it looked like the workings of the ordered democracy that has been the envy of the world.

Two Republican senators this week wrote to me with a sound of mourning. One found it “amazing” and “terrifying” that “seemingly, and without very much thought, nearly half the United States Senate has abandoned the presumption of innocence in this country, all to achieve a political goal.” The other cited “a truly disturbing result: One of the great political parties abandoning the Constitutionally-based traditions of due process and presumption of innocence.”

At the very least, Senate Democrats overplayed their hand.

My bias in cases of sexual abuse and assault, and it is a bias, is in favor of the woman. I give her words greater weight because I have not in my personal experience seen women lie about such allegations, and I know the reasons they have, in the past, kept silent. If you know your biases and are serious, you will try to be fair — not to overcorrect but to maintain standards. On Sept. 16, the day the charges made by Christine Blasey Ford appeared in the Washington Post, I was certain that more witnesses and information would come forward. We would see where justice lay. The great virtue of the #MeToo movement is that the whole phenomenon was broken open by numbers and patterns — numbers of victims, patterns of behavior, and the deep reporting that uncovered both. In this case great reporters tried to nail down Ms. Ford’s story. But they did not succeed. The New Yorker story that followed was dramatic but unpersuasive, a hand grenade whose pin could not be pulled. The final allegation, about rape-train parties and spiked punch, was not in the least credible.

It was Ms. Ford’s story that was compelling, but in need of support or corroboration. It did not come.

It was a woman who redeemed the situation, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. In her remarks announcing her vote, she showed a wholly unusual respect for the American people, and for the Senate itself, by actually explaining her thinking. Under intense pressure, her remarks were not about her emotions. She weighed the evidence, in contrast, say, to Sen. Cory Booker, who attempted to derail the hearings from the start and along the way compared himself to Spartacus. Though Spartacus was a hero, not a malignant buffoon.

Ms. Collins noted that she had voted in favor of justices nominated by George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. She considers qualifications, not party. She reviewed Brett Kavanaugh’s 12-year judicial record, including more than 300 opinions, speeches and law-review articles; she met with Judge Kavanaugh for more than two hours, and spoke with him again for an hour by phone with more questions.

She judged him centrist in his views and well within the mainstream of judicial thought. He believes, he told her, the idea of precedent is not only a practice or tradition but a tenet rooted in the Constitution.

As to Ms. Ford’s charges, since the confirmation process is not a trial, the rules are more elastic. “But certain fundamentally legal principles about due process, the presumption of innocence, and fairness do bear on my thinking, and I cannot abandon them.”

“We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.” She called the gang-rape charge an “outlandish allegation” with no credible evidence.

At this point it was understood the Democrats had gone too far.

It is believable, said Ms. Collins, that Ms. Ford is a survivor of sexual assault and that the trauma “has upended her life.” But the four witnesses she named could not corroborate her account. None had any recollection of the party; her lifelong friend said under penalty of felony that she neither remembers such an event nor even knows Brett Kavanaugh.

Ms. Collins said she has been “alarmed and disturbed” by those who suggest that unless Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination was rejected, the Senate would somehow be condoning sexual assault: “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

The atmosphere surrounding the nomination has been “politically charged” and reached “fever pitch” even before the Ford and other charges. It has been challenging to separate fact from fiction. But a decision must be made. Judge Kavanaugh’s record has been called one of “an exemplary public servant, judge, teacher, coach, husband, and father.” Her hope is he “will work to lessen the divisions in the Supreme Court so that we have far fewer 5-4 decisions and so that public confidence in our judiciary and our highest court is restored.”

And so, she said, she would vote to confirm.

It was a master class in what a friend called “old-style thoroughness combined with a feeling for justice.”

A word on the destructive theatrics we now see gripping parts of the Democratic Party. The howling and screeching that interrupted the hearings and the voting, the people who clawed on the door of the court, the ones who chased senators through the halls and screamed at them in elevators, who surrounded and harassed one at dinner with his wife, who disrupted and brought an air of chaos, who attempted to thwart democratic processes so that the people could not listen and make their judgments:

Do you know how that sounded to normal people, Republican and Democratic and unaffiliated? It sounded demonic. It didn’t sound like “the resistance” or #MeToo. It sounded like the shrieking in the background of an old audiotape of an exorcism.

Democratic leaders should stand up to the screamers. They haven’t, because they’re afraid of them. But things like this spread and deepen. Stand up to your base. It’s leading you nowhere good. And you know it.

SOURCE

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Top 3% of U.S. Taxpayers Paid Majority of Income Taxes in 2016

Individual income taxes are the federal government’s single biggest revenue source. In fiscal year 2018, which ended Sept. 30, the individual income tax is expected to bring in roughly $1.7 trillion, or about half of all federal revenues, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Bloomberg looked into the 2016 individual returns data in detail for some additional insights:

The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent).

The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of total individual income taxes.

Top 3% of U.S. Taxpayers Paid Majority of Income Taxes in 2016
In other words, the bottom 50 percent paid 3 percent. Which small percentile of tax payers also paid 3 percent or more? You might have guessed it. It is the top 0.001%, or about 1,400 taxpayers. That group alone paid 3.25 percent of all income taxes.

The individual income tax system is designed to be progressive – those with higher incomes pay at higher rates.

SOURCE

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Global Competitiveness Report: U.S. is World’s Most Competitive Economy, Closest to ‘Ideal State’

The United States has the most competitive economy in the world, according to the 2018 Global Competitiveness Report published by the World Economic Forum.

“The United States is the closest economy to the frontier, the ideal state, where a country would obtain the perfect score on every component of the index,” the report reads.

The United States obtained a competitiveness score of 85.6% on the scale of zero to 100, which places it in the top spot among 140 countries, states the report.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. has not reached the No. 1 spot “since 2008,” when “the financial crisis stalled output and triggered a global economic slowdown.”

Singapore occupies the No. 2 spot (83.5%), followed by Germany in third place (82.8%).

The report “assesses the competitiveness landscape of 140 economies” and “provides insight into the drivers of economic growth in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

The new Global Competitive Index (GCI) 4.0, which is featured in the document, includes 98 indicators that are grouped into “12 pillars of competitiveness.” The pillars are “Institutions, Infrastructure, ICT adoption; Macroeconomic stability; Health; Skills; Product market; Labour market; Financial system; Market size; Business dynamism; and Innovation capability.”

Among these pillars, the U.S. ranks the highest in three, including Labour market, Financial system and Business dynamism. It ranks second in Market size and Innovation capability, and third in Skills and Product market.

Despite the U.S.’s glowing competitiveness score, however, the report pointed out that there is still “room for improvement.”

“With a competitiveness score of 85.6, it is 14 points away from the frontier mark of 100, implying that even the top-ranked economy among the 140 has room for improvement.”

Some areas of improvement include Health, in which the U.S. scored 47th, as well as Homicide rate (92), Complexity of tariffs (108) and Imports % of GDP (136).

The median competitiveness score of all 140 countries is only 60.0%, according to the report. Chad, with 35.5%, holds the lowest spot.

According to the report, the GCI 4.0 weighs pillars “equally rather than according to a country’s current stage of development. In essence, the index offers each economy a level playing field to determine its path to growth.”

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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JAMAL KHASHOGGI: The terrorist truth behind the media lies

In high school, Jamal Khashoggi had a good friend. His name was Osama bin Laden.

“We were hoping to establish an Islamic state anywhere,” Khashoggi reminisced about their time together in the Muslim Brotherhood. “We believed that the first one would lead to another, and that would have a domino effect which could reverse the history of mankind.”

The friendship endured with Jamal Khashoggi following Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan. Khashoggi credited Adel Batterjee, listed at one time as one of “the world’s foremost terrorist financiers” by the Treasury Department, with bringing him to Afghanistan to report on the fighting.

The media calls Khashoggi a journalist, but his writings from 80s Afghanistan read as Jihadist propaganda with titles like, "Arab Mujahadeen in Afghanistan II: Exemplifies the Unity of Islamic Ummah".

And when Osama bin Laden set up Al Qaeda, he called Khashoggi with the details.

After Afghanistan, Jamal Khashoggi went to work as a media adviser for former Saudi intel boss, Prince Turki bin Faisal, alleged to have links to Al Qaeda. Those allegations came from, among others,  Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged twentieth hijacker.

When the other 19 hijackers perpetrated the attacks of September 11, Khashoggi wrote that the Saudis would not “give in” to American “demands” for “unconditional condemnation” and “total cooperation”.

"Saudis tend to link the ugliness of what happened in New York and Washington with what has happened and continues to happen in Palestine. It is time that the United States comes to understand the effect of its foreign policy and the consequences of that policy," he declared.

"A Muslim cannot be happy with the suffering of others. Even if this suffering is that of Americans who neglected the suffering of Palestinians for half a century."

That’s the real Khashoggi, a cynical and manipulative apologist for Islamic terrorism, not the mythical martyred dissident whose disappearance the media has spent the worst part of a week raving about.

Jamal Khashoggi was not a moderate. Some describe him as the leader of the Saudi Muslim Brotherhood. The Islamist network admires Hitler and seeks to impose Islamic law around the world. Nor was he a supporter of freedom of the press. In one of his Al Jazeera appearances, he complained that the Saudi government was allowing some journalists to report positively on Israel.

His final project, DAWN or Democracy for the Arab World Now was meant to aid Islamists. According to Azzam Al-Tamimi, an old Muslim Brotherhood ally aiding Jamal, "The Muslim Brothers and Islamists were the biggest victims of the foiled Arab spring." Al-Tamimi has endorsed suicide bombings.

But unlike Osama bin Laden, Khashoggi did not use the Muslim Brotherhood as a gateway drug to the pure and uncut violence of Al Qaeda or ISIS. He was still betting on a political takeover. As he recently put it, “Democracy and political Islam go together.”

Khashoggi went on making the case for the Islamic state of the Muslim Brotherhood. He went on making that case even as the Saudis decided that the Brotherhood had become too dangerous.

Like his old friend, Jamal Khashoggi went into exile in a friendly Islamist country. Osama bin Laden found refuge in Pakistan and Khashoggi ended up in Turkey. The Khashoggi family had originated from Turkey. And Turkey was swiftly becoming the leading Sunni Islamist power in the region. Living in Turkey put Khashoggi at the intersection of the Turkish-Qatari backers of the Brotherhood and the Western media.

His disappearance has touched off fury and anger from the Islamist regime that harbored him. And it has also set off an unprecedented firestorm of rage and grief by the American media which adored him.

Media spin describes Khashoggi as a dissident. And he certainly was that. But so was Osama bin Laden.

What Khashoggi wasn’t, was a moderate. No more so than the Muslim Brotherhood. He wasn’t a proponent of human rights, but of Islamic rule. He could be found on Al Jazeera, Qatar’s Jihadist propaganda network, bemoaning Saudi opposition to the Brotherhood and its friendliness to Israel.

"Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman should get rid of his complex against the Muslim Brotherhood and stop treating them as the enemy or a threat to Saudi Arabia," he complained, and urged the Saudis to fight Israel instead.

 Jamal Khashoggi’s career of spouting Muslim Brotherhood propaganda for his new Turkish and Qatari masters came to an end in a curious way. Before Khashoggi allegedly entered the Saudi embassy, from which Turkey claims that he disappeared, he told his Turkish fiancé to call Yasin Aktay if he didn’t return.

Yasin Aktay is the Turkish equivalent of Obama’s Ben Rhodes, and served as the AKP Islamist ruling party’s spokesman. Why call one of the regime’s top propagandists instead of the police?

Before the summer coup of 2016, Turkey was said to have 50,000 political prisoners. Many of them were members of the country’s oppressed Kurdish minority which is deprived of its most basic civil rights. These include even the use of their own language. Doing so can carry a prison sentence.

In that terrible summer, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s Islamic tyrant, finished securing his absolute hold on power with the coup as his Reichstag fire. The alleged coup became a blank check for the mass arrest and torture of countless thousands of political prisoners. Amnesty International estimated that 50,000 had been detained. The UN listed a figure as high as 180,000. They included 300 journalists.

Lawyers described clients being brought to them covered in blood.

Erdogan went after professors, judges, law enforcement, the military and the last remnants of a free press. A Human Rights Watch report documented electric shocks, beatings with truncheons and rubber hoses, and rape by Erdogan’s Islamic thugs. Heads were banged against walls. Men were forced to kneel on burning hot asphalt. Medical reports showed skull fractures, damage to testicles and dehydration.

The media didn’t show any of the hysterical outrage at these crimes that it has over the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi. The media cares more about Khashoggi, a former media mouthpiece of the Saudi regime before it turned on his Muslim Brotherhood brothers, than about 300 Turkish reporters.

It’s not hypocrisy, it’s consistency.

Erdogan and Khashoggi are both militant Islamic activists. And their opponents, the victims of Erdogan’s Reichstag fire and the new Saudi king, had fallen afoul of them for being insufficiently militantly Islamist.

The media will always take the side of Islamists over non-Islamists. That’s why it bleeds for Khashoggi.

There was a reason why Jamal Khashoggi felt so comfortable in Turkey, while actual journalists in the country were terrified of being locked up, tortured and disappeared. If that was the fate that befell Khashoggi, it was a commonplace one in Turkey. And it may have been carried out by his own Turkish allies who decided that their Saudi subversive had more value as a false flag martyr than a house guest.

The media’s disproportionate outrage over Khashoggi has nothing to do with human rights. If it did, the media would have been just as outraged at the arrests and torture of tens of thousands in Turkey.

It’s not. And it won’t be.

And the politicians shrilly urging that we punish the Saudis never thought about curtailing arms sales to Turkey. Many of the same politicians were unhappy when President Trump used economic pressure on Erdogan in an effort to free American hostages, like Pastor Andrew Brunson, being held by Turkey.

This is about Islam.

The struggle between Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the one hand, and Turkey, Qatar and Iran on the other, is the next stage of the Arab Spring. And, from Yemen to Turkey, the media has made no secret of being on the Islamist side. Its outrage over Khashoggi, like its claims of a human rights crisis over the Saudi bombings in Yemen, are not journalism, they’re the political spin of the Islamist axis.

The media has reported every claim of victimhood by the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar’s Al Jazeera propaganda arm, while giving as little attention as possible to the victims of Muslim Brotherhood church bombings. Its coverage of Israel has been little more than terrorist propaganda since Osama was in diapers. Its coverage of the Khashoggi case is every bit as dishonest as its slanted attacks on the Saudi embargo of Qatar, as its propaganda about the wars in Yemen and Libya, and just as devoid of context.

The Khashoggi case demands context.

Before the media and the politicians who listen to it drag the United States into a conflict with Saudi Arabia over a Muslim Brotherhood activist based on the word of an enemy country still holding Americans hostage, we deserve the context.

And we deserve the truth.

The media wants the Saudis to answer questions about Jamal Khashoggi. But maybe the media should be forced to answer why the Washington Post was working with a Muslim Brotherhood propagandist?

The real mystery isn’t Khashoggi’s disappearance. It’s why Republicans aren’t asking those questions.

The media’s relationship with Khashoggi is far more damning than anything the Saudis might have done to him. And the media should be held accountable for its relationship with Osama bin Laden’s old friend.

SOURCE 

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Ben Carson Takes on High Housing Costs

When Ben Carson was appointed the nation’s 17th secretary of housing and urban development, there were ample reasons to doubt his qualifications, and the first few months of his time in office were largely dominated by missteps and misstatements, including a mini-scandal over a $31,000 dining table, which seemed to validate his critics.

But since then, Carson has quietly pushed a number of policy initiatives that could cement his legacy as one of Trump’s most consequential cabinet members. If successful, Carson’s efforts could be some of the biggest boosts for the poor and disadvantaged to come out of Washington in quite some time.

Carson has not hesitated to challenge many of his department’s sacred cows. He’s called for the elimination of Community Development Block Grants, long known as a source of both corruption and political patronage, and he’s been willing to slash some of the bureaucratic red tape that has long afflicted HUD. He’s also shown a willingness to adjust rents in public housing in an effort to control the department’s ballooning expenditures.

But Carson’s most important initiative — and the one that holds the most promise — is his full-frontal assault on zoning and land-use ordinances that deprive the poor of affordable housing.

Born largely out of racism (Baltimore’s zoning laws, for instance, explicitly prohibited anyone from buying a house or renting on a block where more than half the residents were of a different race), zoning has evolved into a tool for wealthy property owners to protect their property values at the expense of the poor and minorities. It is a simple question of supply and demand: By restricting the supply of new housing, zoning and land-use regulations drive up the cost of housing and rents beyond the reach of many poor Americans. Studies show that such regulations add as much as 20 percent to the cost of a home in Baltimore, Boston, and Washington, 30 percent in Los Angeles and Oakland, and an astounding 50 percent or more in cities such as San Francisco, New York, and San Jose.

Is it any wonder that the poor have trouble finding affordable housing?

The traditional response to this regulation-driven increase in housing costs has been to simply chase rising costs with higher subsidies. That is the approach currently championed by California senator and probable 2020 presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who has sponsored legislation that would provide a tax credit to subsidize rents for families earning as much as $125,000 per year whose housing costs exceed 30 percent of their income.

But instead of pursuing this costly policy that mostly redounds to the benefit of landlords, Carson has decided to go directly after the source of the problem. Specifically, he has let it be known that he intends to link federal housing funds to local officials’ willingness to reduce regulations that restrict affordable housing. He wants to ensure that if mayors and governors continue to pander to wealthy special interests by enacting barriers to housing construction, Washington will no longer bail them out.

The high cost of housing is an important factor in trapping millions of Americans in poverty. On average, Americans in the lowest third of incomes spend more than 40 percent of their income on housing, a number that rises to more than 50 percent for renters. In addition, high housing costs can prevent geographic mobility, making it all but impossible for the poor to move to areas with less crime, more jobs, and better schools. Zoning also continues to be an important factor in reinforcing American racial segregation.

Carson aims to change this state of affairs for the better. “We’ve been looking for ways that we can remove some of the restrictions nationally and some of these zoning ordinances nationally so that we can, in fact, build more affordable housing,” he has said. “Because we have the capacity to do it; we just have to be able to get out of our own way.”

If he’s able to make good on that potential, Carson will strike a powerful blow on behalf of the poor and vulnerable. And in that case, his critics might be forced to admit that they severely underestimated him.

SOURCE 

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Pelosi calls border wall ‘immoral’ — while protecting her Napa vineyard with one

Self-proclaimed future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is laying out her priorities for after Democrats’ assumed victory in the midterms, and she’s made it clear there’s “nothing” that will persuade her to approve President Trump’s promised border wall.

Erecting a big beautiful wall along the nation’s southern border to stop the steady flood of illegal immigrants and drugs is “immoral, expensive, ineffective, not something that people do between countries,” Pelosi said in response to a question at Harvard’s Institute of Politics on Tuesday, according to The Harvard Gazette.

“In any event it happens to be like a manhood issue for the president,” she said, “and it’s wrong and I’m not interested in that.”

A wall to protect the nation from illegal and dangerous intruders – “immoral,” not interested. But wall to protect Pelosi’s posh Napa Valley vineyard, that’s totally different. The Trump-supporting duo Diamond and Silk exposed Pelosi’s hypocritical position on immigration in the hilarious and timely documentary “Dummycrats,” which premiered in Washington, D.C. this week.



In the movie, presented by The American Mirror, the sisters from North Carolina explain how Democrats often say one thing, they do whatever they want. The flick features Pelosi, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama denouncing a border wall, while highlighting the fences, guard shacks and brick barriers that separate the unwashed masses from their mega-mansions and lavish properties.

Diamond and Silk also take to the streets of Pelosi’s San Francisco district to document the impact of her brand of progressive politics: illegal plastic straws but free plastic drug needles, resources for illegal immigrants amid an epidemic of homeless citizens, and streets littered with garbage, used needles and human feces.

The girls “talk about what’s happening right now in these communities,” Diamond told The Epoch Times. “People living in tents, people defecating on the streets. That’s a problem that’s got to be solved.”

Diamond and Silk’s message is simple: “We are holding Congress accountable. Long gone are the days when you can walk in poor come out rich.

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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The party of Antifa fascists?

Do we really want these intolerant, violent mobs and their representatives running America?

Paul Driessen

Who are the “Antifa” mobs? What are they doing to our country? How long will we tolerate them?

The Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings were their latest excuse for tantrums and intolerance. Dismissing fairness, propriety and due process, they screamed that mere allegations of misconduct were enough to bar him from the Supreme Court, despite no corroborating evidence or witnesses.

Vicious harassment of senators and White House officials in restaurants, streets, grocery stores, and Senate offices and elevators was matched by ambush tactics and despicable behavior by Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats. If Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings were “an electronic lynching,” those hearings were an electronic assault on a respected jurist, his wife and young daughters.

When Kavanaugh fought back, the same Senators and their media friends said he “lacked the proper temperament” to be on the Court. (Apparently, he should have just tried to enjoy the experience.)

The fact is, Democrats and their allies had said in lockstep and from the outset that they intended to keep any Trump nominee off our highest court. The Women’s March mistakenly released a statement saying it opposed the “nomination of XX” to the Court. (They forgot to fill in the blank.) They view the Court as their supreme state and national legislature: it’s far easier to get 5 votes than 5 million or 50 million.

In reality, this ongoing attempted rule by mob (with Portland, Oregon a prime example) goes back to the 2016 elections that put Donald Trump in the White House. The mobs weren’t just disappointed that Hillary Clinton had not won. They were enraged. And they’ve remained so ever since.

In fact, their furor goes back even further – to mounds of excrement they left behind in North Dakota, for instance, where they tried to block the Dakota Access Pipeline, by burning and bombing bridges, threatening local residents and killing cattle. One “peaceful protester” tried to shoot a deputy sheriff.

In another example, they enlisted state attorneys general, universities, wealthy leftwing foundations and private law firms (on a contingency fee basis) to bring RICO and other actions against scientists and think tanks that voice skepticism about “cataclysmic manmade climate change.” On college campuses they have banned, disinvited, mobbed, harassed or just plain screamed over 300 conservative speakers into silence. Being a Republican or wearing a Trump MAGA hat can get you beaten, or worse.

They forget President Obama’s dictum: “Elections have consequences.” One is the President’s right to nominate Federal judges. But from their perspective, “consequences” must never apply when they lose – and the Electoral College must be abolished when it works as our Founding Fathers intended: to keep populous urban areas from dominating presidential elections and imposing a tyranny of the majority. (The fact that 85% of all US counties voted for Donald Trump illustrates this principle in action.)

In most of these cases, “they” are the Antifa mobs. Antifa being short for “anti-fascist.” Don’t be conned.

The Antifa mobs are fascists! And they have become the ski-masked thug wing of the Democratic Party.

They (and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kyrsten Sinema, Andrew Gillum, Bernie Sanders and other favored candidates) certainly espouse socialism as their vehicle for wealth redistribution. However, in almost every other respect, their philosophies and actions reflect fascism, which is generally defined as:

A political system in which an authoritarian government does not own businesses and industries, but strictly regulates and controls their actions, output and rights – while forcibly controlling and suppressing citizens and their thought and speech via stringent laws, intimidation and even violence.

Sadly, the Democratic Party is slipping further into these tendencies, becoming ever more closely aligned with these radicals. It relies on Antifa thugs to “rally the base,” intimidate and abuse Republican voters and candidates, and get Democrat (and “undocumented”) voters to the polls. Like too many in the “mainstream” news media, Democrats refuse to condemn the mob behavior – and say it’s wrong to even call them mobs. They’re just concerned citizens, peaceably assembling and seeking redress of their grievances. Right. (Hint: You don’t like being called fascist mobs? Stop behaving like fascist mobs.)

“You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about,” Hillary Clinton said recently. So instead of civil debates we’re to have civil war over whose vision and agenda will rule? Is there something wrong, antiquated or “threatening” about debating issues?

Former Attorney General Eric Holder said, when Republicans “go low” with their rhetoric, “we kick them.” Rep. Maxine Waters (R-CA) incites Antifa mobs by ranting, “If you see anybody from the Trump Administration in a restaurant, in a department store, tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Now on top of the speech codes, trigger warnings, boycotts, censorship, groupthink and identity politics, Google, Facebook and Twitter control and restrict access to conservative views; crowd funding sites prevent conservative groups from raising money; and the Obama IRS prevented Tea Party groups from getting the tax status needed to operate. When all that fails, we’re supposed to tolerate mobs and riots.

On campuses, LGBTQ diversity is virtuous. Diversity of viewpoints or political affiliation is intolerable. Some say Republicans want to control what you do in your bedroom. But Democrats want to control everything you do anywhere outside your bedroom. And Antifa mobs will keep you quiet and in line.

Antifa thugs fire-bombed a North Carolina Republican office and trashed another one in New York City, where they left a note that said, “This is just the beginning.”Others knocked a 71-year-old female congressional staffer unconscious! It even reached the point where a rabid Bernie Sanders supporter tried to gun down Republican legislators and staffers who were practicing for a charity baseball event.

Indeed, death on a large scale, to serve state or other “higher interests,” is another aspect of fascism. We see that with millions of people dying every year in Africa and Asia, because pressure groups deny them access to energy, insect control, water purification, agricultural and other modern technologies, in the name of protecting the environment from dangerous climate change, chemicals and biotechnology.

There are crazy ironies, too. Google helps the Chinese Communist Government prevent its citizens from accessing “forbidden” knowledge and ideas – but then claims helping the US Defense Department with Cloud computing or artificial intelligence surveillance would “violate its principles.”

Around many neighborhoods, signs proclaim “Hate has no home here,” in multiple languages, with an American flag heart logo reminiscent of the Obama campaign logo – in liberals’ yards. The signs are part of a project that “promotes just and inclusive communities.” Trump supporters need not apply.

Democrats appear to be depending on all of this to counter a possible “red wave” – and regain control of the House of Representatives and maybe even the Senate. If they succeed even with just the House, Democrat congressional committees will investigate, interrogate and try to impeach Trump, Kavanaugh and other officials. They will impede and obstruct everything the Trump Administration tries to do.

They’ll also try to abolish ICE, block the Wall, pack the Supreme Court, ban guns, bash Israel – and replace the fossil fuels that provide 80% of our energy with “100% renewable energy” that is so expensive and unreliable it will bring our industries, economy and nation to its knees, while blanketing rural and habitat land, damaging people’s health and property rights, and butchering birds and bats by the millions.

Our rebounding energy, employment, economy, markets and living standards would get rolled back.

Victorious Democrats would also end congressional investigations into the Hillary-Deep State-DNC-Russian-Clinton Foundation collusion and corruption. All the players in these massive, sordid affairs will be deemed “too big to jail” – and too closely tied to the Democratic Party to be investigated further.

Some say the Antifa-Schumer-Pelosi-Clinton-Holder-Waters strategy will backfire. I hope that happens, because it would be disastrous if these people run Congress, America and our lives. But I won’t bank on it.

If you’re worried too (and you should be), get inspired and involved. Above all, VOTE! Vote to preserve our democratic Republic, our freedoms, our booming economy, reliable and affordable energy for all Americans – and equal justice for all, based on the presumption of innocence until proven guilty.

Via email

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The Democrats are wrong about tax cuts and deregulation

By Geoff Diehl (R) Mass. State rep.

In December 2017, Senator Elizabeth Warren teamed up with Bernie Sanders to complain in The New York Times that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, then on its way to being passed by Congress, would be “an enormous tax giveaway to the wealthy.” In a subsequent interview on CNBC, Warren opined that the act gave “$1.5 trillion away to the richest Americans and the biggest corporations, and let everybody else pick up the crumbs.”

But if she delved into the economics of the legislation and addressed how it would benefit her constituents, she would find that the act has significantly helped the Massachusetts economy. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, about 80 percent of the Commonwealth’s taxpayers will receive a tax cut, helping people all across the board and creating a surplus of $1.2 billion in revenue for the state.

The key provision of the Tax Cuts Act is the reduction in the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. Never mind that the idea of reducing the US corporate tax rate, previously the highest in the world, has long had bipartisan support. And never mind that support for cutting the rate is based on data from the Tax Foundation showing that a lower tax rate would spur GDP growth, investment, and job creation.

In the short time since the passage of the act, we already have evidence of its effectiveness in promoting economic growth. US real GDP growth in the second quarter of 2018 was 83 percent greater than it was in the second quarter of 2016, the last year of the previous administration. The growth of real private fixed investment was 129 percent greater. The unemployment rate fell from 5.0 percent in September 2016 to 3.7 percent in September 2018

The Tax Cuts Act is not the only action to come out of Washington that has spurred the economy. There have been 74 recent steps to eliminate burdensome regulations that have played their own role in hindering the economy. It is worth delving further into the effects of the Tax Cuts Act, though, in order to grasp the class-warfare mindset that characterizes our senior senator.

The US economy grew 4.1 percent during the second quarter, a healthy clip that suggests the recovery may be accelerating.

Mainstream economic theory argues that a reduction in the corporate tax rate will incentivize corporations to invest and create jobs. The only question is how much investment and how many jobs. Using its peer-reviewed US Economic Model, the Beacon Hill Institute, a Massachusetts think tank, has found that the Tax Cuts Act will, by the end of 2018, have caused real US GDP to rise by $547 billion and private investment by $179 billion. It will have added 2.9 million new jobs to the US workforce. Massachusetts alone will have added 29,000 new jobs, $3.2 billion in private investment, and $6.7 billion in disposable income by the end of the year. Both the Tax Foundation and the Joint Committee on Taxation of the US Congress have likewise found positive effects on the economy.

For many Democrats, however, none of this matters. Corporations are just pots of money to be redistributed from self-interested shareholders to their own preferred social classes. They can’t grasp the idea that when shareholders are allowed to keep more of their profits, they will want to invest in plant, equipment, and job creation.

To avoid going back to a stagnant economy of no wage increases, no job growth, and high unemployment and underemployment, policies need to be evaluated by how they will affect Massachusetts industry and jobs. By decreasing regulations and taxes, we will continue to encourage entrepreneurs and small businesses, which create three out of every four new jobs in the Commonwealth.

To roll back the 2017 tax cuts and to reintroduce the regulations that have recently been lifted by the federal government would threaten to return the nation — and the state — to the economic doldrums that beset the Obama administration.

But we want to go forward, not backward. Congress needs to make the individual tax cuts in the Tax Cuts Act permanent and act on their many more proposed deregulatory measures that need to be undertaken if we are to keep the economy humming. It is necessary to expand the policies that have led the nation and the state to its current wave of prosperity and build toward the future rather than obstruct.

SOURCE 

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Go Figure: Federal Revenues Hit All-Time Highs Under Trump Tax Cuts

The Laffer curve agan

Critics of the Trump tax cuts said they would blow a hole in the deficit. Yet individual income taxes climbed 6% in the just-ended fiscal year 2018, as the economy grew faster and created more jobs than expected.

The Treasury Department reported this week that individual income tax collections for FY 2018 totaled $1.7 trillion. That's up $14 billion from fiscal 2017, and an all-time high. And that's despite the fact that individual income tax rates got a significant cut this year as part of President Donald Trump's tax reform plan.

Income Taxes After Trump Tax Cuts

True, the first three months of the fiscal year were before the tax cuts kicked in. But if you limit the accounting to this calendar year, individual income tax revenues are up by 5% through September.

Other major sources of revenue climbed as well, as the overall economy revived. FICA tax collections rose by more than 3%. Excise taxes jumped 13%.

The only category that was down? Corporate income taxes, which dropped by 31%. Overall, federal revenues came in slightly higher in FY 2018 — up 0.5%.

Spending, on the other hand, was $127 billion higher in fiscal 2018. As a result, deficits for 2018 climbed $113 billion.

Let's compare these results with Obama's last full fiscal year in office, 2016.

Individual income tax revenues went up by a mere 0.3%, Treasury data show. Fiscal 2016 also saw a 13% drop in corporate income taxes. FICA tax collections climbed by less than 1%. Excise tax collections dropped almost 3%.

Overall revenues increased by 0.5% — about the same as this year. The deficit? It climbed by $148 billion.

So, in other words, the government did better on revenues and deficits in the year after Trump's tax cuts went into effect than it did in Obama's last year in office.

Trump Tax Cuts To Blame For Deficit?
To this, critics say, yes, but revenues would have climbed faster had it not been for the tax cuts, because the economy was booming in 2018, unlike in 2016.

Not necessarily.

Yes, the economy was booming in fiscal 2018. But it probably wouldn't have been booming without the tax cuts. Had Trump not succeeded in getting his pro-growth tax cuts across the finish line, it's possible we'd have seen a year like Obama's last one. A sluggish economy, barely increasing federal revenues, and a large increase in deficits.

Does that mean Trump's tax cuts are fully "paying for themselves"? We wouldn't make that argument. But the faster economic growth is clearly offsetting at least some of their costs — which is precisely what backers said would happen.

What is unmistakable from the data, however, is that the Trump tax cuts are not entirely, or even mostly, responsible for the increase in the deficit. Blame for that rests squarely with spendthrifts in Congress — on both sides of the aisle — who refuse to bring federal spending under control.

So, the question is: Would it have been better to have kept taxes high, and sacrificed economic, job and wage gains we've been enjoying, so that the government could have collected a little bit more in taxes?

SOURCE 

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Evangelical leader: Not worth risking ties with Saudi Arabia over missing journalist

Robertson is diplomatically naive.  Any sanctions are likely to be symbolical and hence innocuous -- e.g. temporarily barring members of the administration from visiting Saudi

A prominent evangelical leader told viewers to “cool down the tempers of those who are screaming blood for the Saudis” and not risk a $100 billion arms deal over the apparent death of Saudi-born journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Appearing on Christian television show "The 700 Club," Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, said America’s relationship with Saudi Arabia is too important to risk.

“These people are key allies,” Robertson said Monday on the show, first reported by Right Wing Watch. “I don’t think on this issue we need pull sanctions and get tough. I just think it’s a mistake.”

More HERE 

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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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We are watching the evolution of the Democratic Party into an explicitly Fascist party

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi endorsed "collateral damage" against Americans who do not share the views of the Democratic Party during an interview over the weekend with left-wing New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

Pelosi made the remarks on Sunday in New York City at an event hosted by the 92nd Street Y where she spoke about the Democratic Party's agenda.

"We have to have total clarity about what we do when it comes to everything — a woman’s right to choose, gay marriage ... whether it’s about immigration, whether it’s about gun safety, whether it’s about climate ..." Pelosi said. "I think that we owe the American people to be there for them, for their financial security, respecting the dignity and worth of every person in our country, and if there’s some collateral damage for some others who do not share our view, well, so be it, but it shouldn't be our original purpose."

Pelosi's inflammatory language comes as political tensions across the U.S. have turned violent in recent months with much of the violence coming from the political Left.

The most significant act of political violence to take place over the last 18 months happened on June 14, 2017, when a Democratic terrorist opened fire on Republican lawmakers at a baseball practice in Virginia.

The perpetrator, who was a Bernie Sanders supporter and an MSNBC fan, reportedly screamed "this is for healthcare" as he fired upon Republican lawmakers, nearly killing Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA).

The Democratic Party has increasingly used inflammatory and violent language to motivate their base, with recent examples coming from Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Democrat Eric Holder, and two-time failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Waters called for attacks against members of the Trump administration in June while at a rally, saying, "Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up and if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere."

Booker encouraged left-wing activists to "get up in the face" of some members of Congress in July, which came just a couple of days after he said supporters of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh were "complicit in evil."

Former Attorney General Eric Holder said earlier this month that when Republicans go low, Democrats "kick them."

Clinton said in an interview with CNN this month that Democrats can't be civil with members of the Republican Party because Republicans disagree with the agenda of the Democratic Party.

"You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about," Clinton said. "That's why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that's when civility can start again. But until then, the only thing that the Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength."

SOURCE 

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Leftist Violence Natural Outgrowth of Authoritarian Ideology

David Limbaugh
   
What do you make of the leftist violence and anarchy all over the country lately? Is it just random and unrepresentative of the Democratic Party and the left as a whole? Or does it logically follow from what the left has become?

In Portland, Oregon, in June, a leftist mob surrounded a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office, barricading the exits and blocking the driveway. “Guards” patrolled the doors, trapping biohazard cleanup crew workers inside in stifling heat and with infernal odors. The agitators carried signs calling ICE employees Nazis and white supremacists. The Portland Police Bureau denied assistance to federal officers pleading for help.

Mob members followed one ICE officer as he picked up his daughter from summer camp, and some also showed up at his house. Protesters went to another officer’s home with flyers showing his picture and name and accusing him of being part of the Gestapo.

Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler, also police commissioner, ordered the police not to intervene in these assaults. “I do not want the @PortlandPolice to be engaged or sucked into a conflict,” tweeted Wheeler, “particularly from a federal agency that I believe is on the wrong track.”

In an equally despicable incident, the Portland mayor refused to respond to antifa’s blocking traffic and harassing bystanders. These leftists took to the streets to protest the death of Patrick Kimmons, who was fatally shot by police.

Leftists assaulted two GOP candidates in Minnesota. A man punched state Rep. Sarah Anderson in the arm when she objected to his destroying Republican yard signs. Shane Mekeland, a candidate for the Minnesota House, sustained a serious concussion when sucker-punched at a restaurant while speaking with constituents. Meanwhile, the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party suspended its communications staffer William Davis for jokingly posting on Facebook that Democrats should “bring (Republicans) to the guillotines” after the midterm elections.

Shrieking leftists pawed at the Supreme Court building as Brett Kavanaugh was being confirmed. Leftists spit on Sen. Lindsey Graham in the Senate hall over his support for Kavanaugh. A Democratic operative for a George Soros-funded group was arrested for battery against a Nevada GOP candidate’s female campaign manager.

Democratic politicians and the leftist media are using increasingly hostile rhetoric. Sen. Tim Kaine said liberals must “fight in the courts, fight in the streets” and “fight at the ballot box.” MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski called for invoking the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump from office, claiming he “is not fit to lead” because he is “going to do something crazy in five minutes, one hour, tonight or tomorrow.”

Barack Obama’s first attorney general, Eric Holder, said that he disagreed when Michelle Obama said, “When they go low, we go high.” Holder said, “When they go low, we kick them.” Hillary Clinton said, “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.”

We can dismiss these and scores of other orchestrated incidents as merely anecdotal or as no worse than what the political right is doing, but I honestly don’t believe there is equal mania on each side of the political aisle — and there’s a reason for that.

It seems there is a logical connection between the left’s ideology and its authoritarian, intolerant and violent behavior. There are passionate advocates on both sides of the political divide, each fervently believing in their respective views, but the modern political left is much less respectful of the Constitution, the rule of law and democratic processes. For far too many leftists, the end justifies the means, so they are willing to suspend due process and change the rules when they don’t prevail at the ballot box.

Just consider their use of government agencies to prevent Donald Trump’s election and emasculate his power once he was elected, their rumblings about restructuring the Supreme Court if they regain power, their stated intention to abolish the Electoral College, their plan to impeach Trump because they can’t stand him — irrespective of whether he has actually committed an impeachable offense — their threats to impeach Justice Kavanaugh after they couldn’t block his confirmation through the constitutionally established process of advice and consent, their use of judicial activism to achieve policy results through court “super-legislatures” that they can’t achieve through the democratically elected branches, their opposition to voter ID laws, their desire for open borders, and their use of executive orders and overreaching administrative rulings to achieve results they can’t achieve through the proper legal channels.

Leftists, being largely secular, invest their faith in government, which partially explains their inability to accept the failures of their policies to achieve the results they claim they want (socialism) and their sometimes even abandoning the pursuit of those results. For example, they are often concerned with employing some nebulous form of fairness even when it means spreading economic misery across the board.

The left’s moral preening, virtue signaling and sermonizing are natural outgrowths of its quasi-spiritual, unshakable faith in its failed utopian policies. Leftists invested enormous hope in Obama’s agenda, but it yielded only economic stagnation and an America in decline. Their faith-based incredulity manifests itself in their taking credit for Trump’s economy — even after their leader himself, former President Obama, predicted that the dreadful economic malaise over which he presided was to be a permanent phenomenon in America.

The sad reality is that Democrats have no solutions anymore and thus are reduced to crass, divisive identity politics — pitting minorities against white people, women against men, and poor against rich. No matter what they say, there is no satisfying them; they traffic in agitating racial, gender and economic warfare, and it’s devastating to the national fabric. This explains why they demonize Kanye West and any other black person who dares to stray from the prescribed liberal dogma.

The left’s increasing violent episodes and rhetoric give us a taste of what Democrats would be like if they regained majority power. If that happens, they will engage full-bore in the kind of lawless authoritarian behavior they falsely accuse President Trump of committing.

There are wonderful rank-and-file Democrats throughout the nation, but the extremists are in firm control of the party, and until that changes, we have to fight as intensely as they do and soundly defeat them at the ballot box.

SOURCE 

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Georgia Democrats Cry Racism to Mask Voter Fraud

Demo gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams floods the system with bogus voter registrations.

In news even less surprising than Democrat Sen. Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren’s DNA test showing she is 99.9% white, the Georgia Democrat Party is using accusations of racism and voter suppression as a smokescreen to hide their own efforts at voter fraud.

Georgia’s Democrat/Socialist gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has filed a lawsuit claiming Georgia’s Secretary of State (and Republican gubernatorial candidate) Brian Kemp has disenfranchised 53,000 mostly minority voters by flagging their voter applications pending verification under Georgia’s so-called “Exact Match” law.

Where to begin?

First, and most importantly, the law does not prevent anyone from voting. Democrats claim that a simple spelling discrepancy is enough to prevent a voter from casting a ballot, but that is a blatant lie. In fact, the phrase “exact match” appears nowhere in the law.

Georgia law (HB 268) requires the voter registration application address to match the address on file with the Department of Driver Services. If there is a discrepancy, the voter has 26 months to provide the necessary documentation to correct the error and, in the meantime, the voter may still cast a provisional ballot. If the voter information can be verified, the ballot is counted. None of the 53,000 applications in question are removed from the voter rolls. They are put in a category designated “pending” until the identity of the voter is definitively determined.

Democrats point to the 35,000 voter applications that were rejected by Kemp’s office from 2013-2016, which sounds like a lot until one realizes that represents just 0.5% of Georgia registered voters. (For reference, that’s higher than the amount of Cherokee blood in Warren’s veins.)

In reality, the purpose of the lawsuit is two-fold. Primarily, the goal is to push through as many fraudulent voter applications as possible, hoping Secretary Kemp will bow to political pressure and violate the law in allowing ballots of unverified voters to be cast (almost exclusively for Democrats). If that fails, then Democrats have established a narrative by which they can claim the election was stolen, minority voters were disenfranchised, and Kemp’s election is illegitimate.

Last week while speaking to supporters in the Democrat stronghold of Clayton County, Abrams revealed her true intentions when she spoke of the coming “blue wave” she believes will restore Democrats to power.

Abrams declared, “The blue wave is African-American. It is white. It is Latino. It is Asian-Pacific Islander. … It is made up of those who’ve been told that they are not worthy of being here. It is comprised of those who are documented and undocumented [emphasis added].” When contacted by The Washington Free Beacon and questioned about what role she believes “undocumented immigrants” (read: “illegal aliens”) will play in the election, Abrams refused to respond.

The most infuriating aspect of all this is the media’s complicity in perpetuating the lies, and its refusal to acknowledge that this whole fiasco was engineered by Abrams.

The flood of questionable voter applications are the result of efforts by the New Georgia Project (NGP), a nonprofit founded in 2014 by none other than Abrams, with the stated goal of registering minority voters in Georgia.

Abrams’s organization has been the subject of intense criticism since its founding, including from leaders in her own party, who have pointed to her $175,000 salary, the complete lack of transparency by Abrams, and NGP’s history of submitting “fraudulent and invalid voter registration applications to the Secretary of State.”

In 2014, the leftist rag Slate wrote about NGP, documenting, as described by Georgia State Rep. Bert Reeves, the “sloppy, questionable, and invalid voter applications” routinely submitted to the Georgia secretary of state’s office. Even Creative Loafing, a local lefty newspaper in Atlanta, questioned the validity of Abrams’s accusations against Kemp, warning that the voter applications may have been manufactured by Abrams’s group in order to justify the millions of dollars she took from NGP’s donors.

When challenged on her habit of submitting inaccurate and fraudulent applications, Abrams smugly responded that Georgia’s election law only “requires that we turn in all application forms we collect, regardless of concerns over validity. It’s the job of the secretary of state to determine the status of the applications. We do not get to make the decisions about whether or not a form is valid or not.”

In other words, Abrams’s organization flooded Secretary of State Kemp’s office with tens of thousands of inaccurate and fraudulent voter applications, knowing full well it would take significant time and resources to review and verify the applications, and then she screams racism and voter suppression when the bogus applications are flagged as “pending” until verified.

Of course, there is a long history of Democrats engaging in voter fraud and then fighting any effort to investigate or put in place measures that would catch fraud. Though Democrats always claim voter fraud is almost nonexistent and therefore should not be addressed, the reality is that election fraud is rampant among Democrats.

Ironically, despite even the leftist ACLU and the just as leftist Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Georgia’s largest newspaper) trying to correct the intentional deception lest it damage Democrats’ chances, Abrams persists with the claim of disenfranchisement of minority voters by Kemp’s office.

How fitting it would be if Abrams lost a close race because she convinced her own voters that their votes wouldn’t count.

SOURCE 

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Another great sign for the economy: Job openings hit an all-time high in August

Job openings hit 7.14 million in August, notching a record for a survey that began in December 2000, according to the Labor Department.

Job openings hit a record in August, indicating companies could face more inflationary pressures ahead with a tight labor market.

The vacancies level hit 7.14 million for the month, according to the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, a report Federal Reserve officials watch closely for clues about where employment stands.

The total number of hires also reached a record of 5.78 million.

Openings dwarfed the total level of workers looking for jobs, which stood at 6.23 million for that month and fell to 5.96 million in September, recent Labor Department statistics show. The JOLTS survey, as it is known, lags the government's nonfarm payrolls count by a month. The survey began in December 2000.

Economists have been watching JOLTS closely as in indicator of when worker wages might start catching up with the acceleration in employment and the rapid decline in unemployment. The headline jobless rate for September was 3.7 percent, its lowest level in 49 years.

Workers continued to show confidence in the jobs market, evidenced by a quits rate that edged just a shade lower from July to 3.58 million. The rate, which counts those who voluntarily left positions, jumped 12.7 percent from August 2017.

"The fact that record numbers of workers are voluntarily quitting their jobs suggests that they are finding substantially better opportunities elsewhere in the economy," said Julia Pollak, labor economist at online employment marketplace ZipRecruiter.

Wages have been moving higher over the past year but still haven't broken out of the post-recession range. Average hourly earnings rose about 2.9 percent in August and 2.8 percent in September.

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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Boy, 11, hacks voting website, changes results in 10 minutes at Las Vegas convention

This year's highlight of the DEFCON hacker conference was the voting village. The event created nearly real scenarios where people hacked into voting machines, changed results and hacked into replicas of state voting websites.

The event culminated in a group of kids, ages eight to 16 hacking into and changing election results on a replica of a state voting website. Emmett Brewer, 11, hacked the site in less than 10 minutes. An eight-year-old girl also did it, in 15 minutes.

Jake Braun, Executive Director of Cyber Policy initiative at the University of Chicago said he doesn't understand why people are not taking the threat against our elections seriously. Braun is also the co-founder of the Voting Village at DEFCON.

"[President] Trump's czar of cyber security was there, and he said, 'I'm glad you guys are doing this because we know our adversaries are doing this same thing.'"

When the children broke into the election websites, they were able to change party names, candidate names and change vote tallies. One hacker changed the name of a candidate to 'Bob da Builder' and gave him 12 billion votes.

Braun said since the 2016 elections, Congress has done nothing to safeguard our election process.

"[The Voting Village] is something we need to be working on every day of every year, not just once a year for a few days at a conference."

To protect elections, Braun said polling places need to first be using paper ballots. Second, he said there needs to be a way to monitor websites to see if they have been hacked. Braun also said the country needs to be investing around $5 billion to safeguard voting systems if elections going to be using them.

While the Voting Village highlighted a lot of problems, Braun said it also highlighted an encouraging future.

"When you walk around DEFCON it's very male-dominated, but almost half of the kid hackers were girls. I hope it's a sign the future of our industry is changing for the better."

The National Association of Secretaries of State disagreed with the findings from DEFCON's Voting Village. We are also concerned that creating “mock” election office networks and voter registration databases for participants to defend and/or hack is also unrealistic. It would be extremely difficult to replicate these systems since many states utilize unique networks and custom-built databases with new and updated security protocols. The NASS also said it would be willing to work with civic-minded hackers on the problem.

SOURCE 

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Dem Operative Arrested in Nevada After Assaulting Female GOP Staffer

The Minnesota Democratic Party has suspended a spokesman for calling for violence against Republicans even as two GOP candidates have been assaulted in suspected politically motivated attacks.

The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party has suspended communications staffer William Davis for one week without pay after making a Facebook post joking that Democrats would "bring [Republicans] to the guillotine" on Nov. 7, the day after the midterm elections.

Minnesota Republican Party chairman Jennifer Carnahan said the suspension was not enough, calling for his immediate firing in the aftermath of separate attacks against Republican candidates. She said she has been subjected to numerous death threats during her tenure as the state party leader and that death threats are no laughing matter.

"The overt hatred and violence that has become prevalent from many Democrats towards Republicans in recent times is unlawful, unacceptable, and downright scary," she said in an email. "Yes, we have free speech and the right to peacefully assemble, but these words and actions by the left have gone too far. … He should have been terminated immediately."

DFL officials did not respond to request for comment.

The suspension came days after Minnesota state representative Sarah Anderson was punched in the arm after spotting a man destroying Republican yard signs. She said the attack left her scared, and her attacker only desisted when she fled to her car and threw it in reverse.

"It was just insane. He was charging at me, saying, ‘Why don't you go kill yourself?'" Anderson told the Washington Free Beacon. "To have someone physically coming after you and attacking you is just disheartening."

The Plymouth Police Department investigation into Rep. Anderson's alleged assault remains ongoing. A spokeswoman confirmed the department had identified a suspect, but declined further comment.

Anderson was not the only GOP candidate attacked. First-time state representative candidate Shane Mekeland suffered a concussion after getting sucker punched while speaking with constituents at a restaurant in Benton County. Mekeland told the Free Beacon he has suffered memory loss—forgetting Rep. Anderson's name at one point in the interview—and doctors tell him he will have a four-to-six week recovery time ahead of him. He said he was cold cocked while sitting at a high top table at a local eatery and hit his head on the floor.

"I was so overtaken by surprise and shock and if this is the new norm, this is not what I signed up for," he said.

Benton County Sheriff Troy Heck told the Free Beacon that his department has interviewed the alleged assailant. Investigators are awaiting medical records about the extent of Mekeland's injuries before referring the case to the local district attorney's office. He expects those results to come in the next week.

Mekeland said he was disappointed that he had not seen Democrats condemn the attack against him, but was floored to see the party take such a light approach to Davis's comments. "He's a political staffer so you'd think if anybody should know boundaries, I think that'd be it," he said.

Anderson was equally harsh about the DFL's response, calling it "incredibly irresponsible."

"This is exactly what incites people to violence. … It's why you have somebody who goes and attacks me on Sunday just because we have different political beliefs," she said.

The alleged assaults have both candidates weighing changes in their approach to campaigning in closing days of the race. Mekeland was unable to leave the house to knock on doors due to his sensitivity to sunlight on Tuesday. He said he and his volunteers will only travel in pairs for the rest of the campaign to ensure they are not alone during such visits, which will limit the ground they cover. Anderson said she has gotten offers from her husband and other volunteers to escort her around the district. She pledged to keep knocking on doors until Election Day.

"I refuse to be bullied and intimidated," she said. "You can’t let this stop you from reaching out and talking to voters."

SOURCE 

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A Revolution Is Under Way in America

By Tucker Carlson 

The aftermath of the 2016 election is recognizable to any parent who has argued with a child. Everything’s fine until the kid loses interest in what you think. Once it becomes clear the child really doesn’t care about your stupid rules, you lose it and start screaming. The less control you have, the more hysterical you become.

Dying regimes are the same way. They get more repressive as they fade. As their power ebbs, rulers lash out against dissent and disobedience. Deposed Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu barked orders at his guards as they led him to the firing squad.

Our leaders understood Donald Trump’s election as a direct challenge to their power. They’ve been fretting about his authoritarian tendencies ever since. Because they lack self-awareness, they don’t perceive this as projection. They can’t see that they’re actually talking about themselves.

Let’s say you were an authoritarian who sought to weaken American democracy. How would you go about doing that? You’d probably start by trying to control what people say and think. If citizens dissented from the mandated orthodoxy, or dared to consider unauthorized ideas, then you’d hurt them. You’d shame them on social media. You’d shout them down in public. You’d get them fired from their jobs. You’d make sure everyone was afraid to disagree with you.

After that, you’d work to disarm the population: You’d take away their guns. That way, they would be entirely dependent on you for safety, not to mention unable to resist your plans for them. Then, just to make sure you’d quelled all opposition, you’d systematically target any institution that might oppose or put brakes on your power. You’d be especially concerned about churches, the family and independent businesses. You’d be sure to undermine and crush those, using laws and relentless propaganda.

If, despite all this, election results still didn’t go your way, you’d use an unelected bureaucracy to neuter any leader you hadn’t handpicked yourself. But you’d be shaken by an election like that. You’d resolve never to allow one again. To make sure of that, you’d work tirelessly to replace the old and ungrateful population with a new and more obedient one. That’s what you’d do.

Sound familiar? For all of his many faults, Trump isn’t doing any of that. Our ruling class is.

It’s probably a fruitless exercise on their part. The status quo is over. A revolution is on the way.

Hopefully, it’ll be the kind of low-grade revolution where everybody learns something and nobody gets hurt. But it will be wrenching either way, because revolutions always are. This used to be a placid country. It’s not anymore, and won’t be for a while.

What went wrong?

The disaster began when almost everyone in power joined the same team. You used to hear debates between Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, on issues that mattered to the rest of the country. That’s over. Our public debates are mostly symbolic. They are sideshows designed to divert attention from the fact that those who make the essential decisions, about the economy and the government and war, have reached consensus on the fundamentals. They agree with each other.

They just don’t agree with the population they govern.

Left and right are no longer meaningful categories in America. The rift is between those who benefit from the status quo and those who don’t. That’s rarely acknowledged in public, which is convenient for those who are benefiting. The people in charge are free to pursue policies that are disconnected from the public good but that have, not coincidentally, made them richer, more powerful and much more self-satisfied.

But not more impressive. Our leaders are fools, unaware that they are captains of a sinking ship.

SOURCE 

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Jeff Sessions rips federal judges over anti-Trump bias

Attorney General Jeff Sessions unleashed a blistering assault on federal judges Monday, saying anti-Trump bias has led some to abandon their role as legal referees and become “political actors” erecting roadblocks to the president’s policies.

In unusually stark language, Mr. Sessions suggested judges could soon face “calls for their replacement” if they don’t cool it.

He blasted one judge who called the president’s policy toward illegal immigrants “heartless,” and said another judge put “the inner workings of a Cabinet secretary’s mind” on trial to pave a path to block the government from asking about citizenship on the 2020 census.

“Once we go down this road in American government, there is no turning back,” Mr. Sessions said in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation. “We are seeing it in case after case. When a hot-button policy issue ends up in litigation, judges are starting to believe their role is to examine the entire process that led to the policy decision — to redo the entire political debate in their courtrooms.

Just ahead of the speech Mr. Sessions told The Washington Times that he saw anti-Trump resistance at play in some of the judges’ moves.

“I have to say I think some of it is,” he said. “I regret saying that, but I’m afraid it’s true in some of these cases and if so, it’s very wrong.”

He added that unfair intervention from judges has left the administration in legal tangles, forcing the president to fight senseless and distracting cases.

“He has monumental responsibilities and no court without serious cause should interrupt the function of government. It takes untold hours and time to deal with these things. It slows up multiple agencies of government,” the attorney general told The Times.

Judges have been divided in their approach to Mr. Trump.

Some have delved into his Twitter account or looked back at statements he made during the campaign, citing them as evidence that justifies halting policy decisions made by Cabinet secretaries elsewhere in government.

Others, including a majority of justices on the Supreme Court in this year’s ruling upholding the president’s travel limits, looked chiefly at the policies themselves, saying that’s the crux of their judiciary’s role in the government overall.

In that case the majority in the 5-4 ruling said Mr. Trump was on firm national security grounds. The dissenters disagreed, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor saying the president overstepped security powers and illegally targeted Muslims.

Mr. Sessions didn’t mention that case, but most of the ones he did single out Monday stemmed from immigration-related fights.

He chided one judge who earlier this month issued an injunction blocking Homeland Security from phasing out special Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of migrants from El Salvador, Haiti and elsewhere.

Federal law says the Homeland Security secretary’s TPS decisions cannot be reviewed by courts, but the judge ruled he was reviewing the process by which the secretary reached the decision, not the decision itself.

One crux of his decision was Mr. Trump’s reported use of an insult to describe El Salvador and some African countries during a closed-door immigration meeting earlier this year, which U.S. District Judge Edward M. Chen, an Obama appointee, said showed “animus” that could have poisoned the administration’s entire decision-making process.

In his speech Monday, Mr. Sessions also criticized U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis, who last year during a hearing told a Justice Department he couldn’t defend a policy “that is so heartless.”

Mr. Sessions criticized the judge at the time, telling him to stick to rulings on the law, not to opine about his political beliefs. The judge fired back, saying Mr. Sessions seemed “to think the courts cannot have an opinion.”

The attorney general replied Monday evening that “of course a judge can have political and policy opinions. But they should decide legal questions based on the law and the facts — not their policy preferences.”

Mr. Sessions said that when Congress fails to act, that is a decision. And courts cannot step in to do what Congress has decided not to do.

He called that “judicial encroachment,” and said it has become so bad that judges are trying to rehash the full decision-making of administrative actors in their courtrooms.

As part of that, judges are increasingly allowing intrusive legal “discovery” — the process of delving into records and decision-making to let judges review not just the final decision, but the way it was made.

Mr. Sessions said demanding handwritten notes from Cabinet secretaries or, in a case now before the Supreme Court, ordering the Commerce secretary to be deposed in the Census citizenship question case, goes too far.

“The Census question — which has appeared in one form or another on the Census for over a hundred years — is either legal or illegal,” the attorney general said. “The words on the page don’t have a motive; they are either permitted or they are not. But the judge has decided to hold a trial over the inner workings of a Cabinet secretary’s mind.”

He said it would be the equivalent of forcing judges to reveal their conversations with their law clerks when they were deciding what to write in their opinions, or forcing members of Congress to divulge their discussions with their staffers.

“Subjecting the executive branch to this kind of discovery is unacceptable. We intend to fight this and we intend to win,” Mr. Sessions said.

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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Is Elizabeth Warren an 'Honest Injun'? 



As Elizabeth Warren lays the groundwork for her long-denied 2020 presidential bid, she’s out — again — with another defense of her claimed “Cherokee ancestry,” this time with a contrived DNA test. Clearly, she would like to get her “Fauxcahontas” lie out of the way before 2020.

We’ve previously called out her “identity” issue, but now, according to her fanboys at The Boston Globe, “Warren has released a DNA test that provides ‘strong evidence’ she had a Native American in her family tree dating back 6 to 10 generations.” By the end of the day, the Globe issued this correction: “Due to a math error, a story about Elizabeth Warren misstated the ancestry percentage of a potential 10th generation relative. It should be 1/1,024.”

Furthermore, buried in the report is this gem: “To make up for the dearth of Native American DNA, [Stanford University professor Carlos D. Bustamante] used samples from Mexico, Peru, and Colombia to stand in for Native American.” Nevertheless, to tell the difference, “Bustamante said he can tease out the markers that these South Americans would have in common with Native Americans on the North American continent.” So she’s definitely at least 1/1,024 Mexican, Peruvian, or Colombian. Or something.

Vindication? Hardly. “By that measure,” observes Matt Walsh, “almost everyone in America is a minority.” In fact, most white Americans have twice that much “native” DNA.

Recall Donald Trump’s challenge to Warren: “I will give $1 million to your favorite charity … if you take the test and it shows you’re an Indian.” Fact is, by Warren’s definition of “Native American,” it is highly probable that Trump has more native ancestry than she does.

Our friend Michelle Malkin suggests, “1/1024 ‘Native American’ indirectly derived from South American genetic markers is ‘proof’ of Native heritage? 1/1024 of $1 million = $976.56. President Trump should donate that amount in Monopoly money, which is as genuine as Warren’s claim.” We suggest he donate it directly to her campaign, and we recommend this old Cher song, “Half Breed,” as Warren’s campaign theme song!

Brazenly, Warren is now calling on Trump to pay up: “Remember saying on that you’d give $1M to a charity of my choice if my DNA showed Native American ancestry? Please send the check to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.”

Actually, Trump said if “the test … shows you’re an Indian.” We will defer to the Cherokee Nation elders for their opinion on that.

On behalf of the Cherokee Nation, its Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin protested: “Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong. It … dishonors legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven. Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.”

Trump responded, “Now Cherokee Nation denies her DNA test… Even they don’t want her.”

As partial penance for her shameful lie, it is Warren who should send a check to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.

So, Warren thought this charade would lay her disputed claim to rest? On her promotion of the DNA report as “proof” of her native ancestry, conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey observed, “This is like spiking the ball after scoring a touchdown in the other team’s end zone.” It’s a permanent stain on her campaign.

More important than Warren’s pitifully weak ancestry “proof” remains the primary question about how she used this faux ancestral claim at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. She declared herself to be Native American at both institutions and fooled them, so, in keeping with her elitist arrogance, she is certain she can fool her Democrat constituents!

Clearly, among her genetic markers is a significant one for lying. Warren is a wealthy, disingenuous socialist, and that’s about as un-American as it gets.

SOURCE

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Lindsey Graham to take DNA test to find Native American roots: 'I think I can beat' Elizabeth Warren

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is ready to show up Sen. Elizabeth Warren, saying Tuesday he plans to take a DNA test to find out whether he has more Native American heritage than she does.

“I’m going to take a DNA test,” Graham told “Fox and Friends” on Tuesday. “I’ve been told my grandmother was part Cherokee Indian. It may all just be talk.”

SOURCE

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2017 tax law continues to bring benefits

Even before enactment, anticipation of passage spurred investments, jobs and growth

Mark Murphy

Not long ago, a dentist called seeking advice about investing in new equipment for her practice. Business had been strong, but she envisioned enhancing the customer experience and growing her practice even further. The experience will set her apart from many other dentists, allowing her to retain existing clients and attract new ones. New state of the art dental technology would allow her to jump-start the process.

The dentist is part of a wave. Across the country, small and mid-sized business owners, entrepreneurs and start-ups are primed to invest in and expand their businesses.

These new provisions in the tax law are a godsend to business owners. They’ve have been asking for this, they’ve been heard, been provided for and are now anxious to spend and invest.

My business consultancy has received a steady flow of calls from many such owners. While diverse in geography, size and focus, they are all eager and optimistic. And they are all inspired by one thing: the new federal tax law. Like the dentist, they are finding that the incentives created by the statute make reinvestment and expansion a smart move.

In the less than a year since it was passed, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is fast becoming one of the biggest incentives to US business growth in at least a decade. Unemployment has reached lows not seen in decades.

After a strong push from the Trump Administration, the law went into effect in December 2017. It includes several features designed to relieve tax burdens on businesses of all sizes. Of particular note, the corporate tax rate reduction has leveled the playing field for US-based companies when they compete with foreign based companies in the global economy. Lower taxes are passed to the consumer.

Another popular provision – affecting over three quarters of small companies – allows a 20% deduction for all pass-through businesses. Another much-heralded clause slashes the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent. Yet another allows businesses to deduct up to 100% of investments in new business equipment costs during the first year.

A broad range of business owners seek to take advantage of the new law. The head of a small technology company showed us a proposal to expand its marketing. A service company presented us questions about how it could expand by 25% in the next two years.

Our dentist wants to expand into vacant space in her building. This law is turbo-charging the entrepreneurial spirit of our business owner clients.

In each instance, the owners were able to key in on particular provisions of the new tax law that apply to their unique situations. Together with them, we have found ways to use the law to their advantage.

Just as important as particular features of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is the overwhelmingly positive climate it is helping to create. Owners who have felt shackled for years by a restive investment environment and too many taxes and regulations are now encouraged to pump more money into their businesses.

A good example is the Rabine Group, a collection of small constructions companies based in Illinois.  This year they have pledged to commit more resources to hiring, research and development, and expansion. They are also offering employees far bigger raises this year than in any of the previous eight years. All of these moves are a result of the new tax law, the owners have reported.

That spirit of optimism has already brought signs of vibrancy that the US economy has not seen in years. Business investment is set to rise by 7% this year, following a robust 5.3% increase in 2017, on the heels of timid, desultory growth the previous decade.

As businesses expand, so do their needs for new employees. More than 134,000 new jobs were added in September 2018, bringing an unemployment rate of 3.7 percent. The average hourly earnings gain is now 2.8% year over year. Retail sales are up, too; they are projected to reach 4.2% this year.

These gains are all inspired by the new tax breaks and reduced federal regulatory fervor. Tax cuts do pass down to many levels and spur spending. That’s a basic economics axiom.

Some say the new law favors major corporations over small business owners. That’s understandable. It’s a party line and core belief among some.

Indeed, thus far, the biggest tax savings resulting from the new law have been posted by the biggest US banks. In all, the six largest Wall Street banks – Bank of America, Citi Group, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and Morgan Stanley – have reported a total of nearly $5 billion in savings, according to their Second Quarter reports.

The new law has allowed the banks to cut their tax rates from as high as 31% to just 10 or 11 percent.

Large multinational corporations have slowed their borrowing, lessening the amount of debt they issue, according to the Wall Street Journal, using data from Goldman Sachs. The Fed analyzed share buybacks of non-financial firms with large cash holdings – and they have doubled, mimicking a similar tax holiday 15 years ago.

However, the strong gains posted by banks and other corporations actually mean everybody wins. The gains have contributed to a buoyant economic mood, which in turn is inspiring corporate employees and other consumers to spend more on their personal lives. Much or most of that spending has gone to small and medium-sized companies.

The corporate tax cut and gradual repatriation of trillions of dollars into the US economy has also helped mitigate fears that more jobs are going overseas. That is encouraging consumers to focus on retirement planning, invest in new cars or other goods – or in their companies – or take much-needed vacations. This too benefits smaller businesses.

Many businesses have undoubtedly not fully researched the ways the tax code can benefit them. As with any new statute, they need time and expert advice to understand the law’s fine print.

However, the smartest owners are moving quickly. Like the dentist, they have discovered that the time to take advantage of the new tax law is now, or at least as soon as they can grasp the new law’s opportunities, intricacies – and potential pitfalls for the unwary.

Via email

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When Health Policy Neglects Economic Principles, Patients Suffer

The healthcare sector of the U.S. economy is extraordinarily dynamic and complex, providing constant challenges for policymakers and regulators working to improve healthcare markets. However, recent research and policies suggest the greatest challenges for policymakers might be their misunderstanding of economic fundamentals.

Earlier this year, the Annals of Internal Medicine journal published a paper which found the prices increased for nearly 100 drugs while they were in a shortage between 2015 and 2016. The paper also notes these “price hikes” (price increases) were less severe in markets with comparatively more competitors (defined as more than three drug providers).

Although the authors consider these findings “mysterious,” they confidently offered policy recommendations to correct “the imbalance between supply and demand.” As they stated in their conclusion, “If manufacturers are observed using shortages to increase prices, public payers could set payment caps for drugs under storage and limit price increases.”

The situation described above, and the folly of its policy prescription, are no mysteries for anyone who understands basic economics.

A shortage occurs when there are too few goods available to satisfy too many consumers. Shortages dissipate when prices increase, motivating more production and less consumption. Competition among producers is an indispensable component of this process, working to provide more (and often better) goods to consumers.

Economic principles also teach us that “payment caps,” more commonly called price controls, do not resolve shortages. Instead, by keeping prices from rising, price controls remove the incentive for competing producers to supply more goods and for consumers to buy less.

For credible scholars to display such a blatant misunderstanding of economic principles is dumbfounding. And for such mistakes to be published in a peer-reviewed journal deemed “the most cited general internal medicine journal and one of the most influential journals in the world” is especially troublesome.

Unfortunately, misunderstandings of elementary economics also pervade contemporary health policymaking. EpiPens, which provide potentially life-saving treatment for patients with severe allergies, have been in a severe shortage in the United States since April. When children returned to school recently, parents struggled to send them back with much-needed emergency medicine, and pharmacies faced long backorders while trying to provide them.

In response, the Food and Drug Administration issued a statement asking pharmacies to extend expiry dates for EpiPens by four months. While this might lengthen periods between prescription refills, it will not lead to more EpiPens and does not address the primary cause of the shortage.

That cause is a lack of competition stemming from overregulation.

From 2011 to 2016, EpiPen’s manufacturer received three patents, granting it extended monopolist status and preventing competition from entering the market. Over roughly the same period, EpiPen prices increased about 500 percent. However, without competition stepping in to increase production, shortages persist.

Thankfully, around the same time, the FDA also approved a generic version of EpiPen. Introducing a generic competitor will increase EpiPen’s availability and reduce the shortage. However, the lack of competition and the current shortage are due to the FDA’s previous regulations. Most importantly, the consequences of these regulations are entirely predictable with only a minimal understanding of economics.

Determining effective health policy is incredibly difficult, and elementary mistakes cause widespread damage. However, understanding the origins of shortages, the role of competition in the market, and how prices guide resources to socially desirable uses to allocate resources are the backbone of doing any policy work. Recent events indicate an urgent need for researchers and policymakers to relearn the basics.

SOURCE

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Trump's North American Trade Triumph

For those on the left and right who were certain that President Donald Trump's presidency meant the end of global free trade ... think again. Though Trump's critics have dismissed the significance of the new Mexico and Canada trade deal, it's hard to deny that it is a welcome advance for the economy of the entire continent.

The pact will extend for years a (mostly) tariff-free North American trade zone. This was Ronald Reagan's vision nearly four decades ago — and that legacy can now live on for hopefully many years to come.

Here's just one example of the importance of this agreement. In the area of energy production, the integration of our economies and the freer flow of energy investment capital across our southern and northern borders means more pipelines, more LNG terminals, more oil refineries and more exploration. North America is poised to be the new Middle East for energy production for the next 50 years, with all the related economic advantages that confers on our region.

One of the most favorable outcomes of the new trade pact is the provision that locks in 10 years of patent protections for new pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines. While some critics are portraying this as a sell-out to the big drug companies, the opposite is true. Patent protections for drugs invented in America reduce costs for American consumers by forcing foreign countries to help pay for the research costs (about $1 billion for each new drug brought to market) and stop free riding on our innovation.

As University of Chicago professor Tomas J. Philipson puts it in a 2018 study on the drug industry: "There is no free lunch. If neither Americans nor foreigners pay for the R&D to develop new drugs, then soon nobody will receive new treatments."

One research team that found that price controls and inadequate patent protections will prevent the development of six new blockbuster drugs each year by 2020 and more than a dozen a year by 2050. No one can benefit from a drug to cure cancer, MS, Alzheimer's or epilepsy at any price if it hasn't been invented.

The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement will both save lives by accelerating medical research and reduce drug prices at home by ensuring that foreigners no longer enjoy medical innovation without paying their fair share.

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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