by | ARTICLES, CONSTITUTION, ELECTIONS, FREEDOM, OBAMA, POLITICS, TAXES
Jay Cost is one of my favorite writers these days, blending history and analysis in a straightforward tone. Here’s his take on why Clinton lost:
“Political coalitions are tricky things to manage in the United States. Ours is a country of more than 320 million people but only two major political parties—so each side’s voting bloc tends to be unstable at the margins, where national elections are actually won and lost. It is hard to build a winning coalition, harder still to maintain it during the laborious process of governing, and hardest of all to hand it off to a designated successor. It takes a politician of the highest caliber—a Roosevelt, a Reagan—to accomplish all this.
As last week’s results clearly demonstrated, Barack Obama is not cut from such an Augustan cloth. The political coalition he built in 2008 burst apart in spectacular fashion. His successor will not be Hillary Clinton, his secretary of state, but Donald Trump, the man who accused him of being a foreigner.
No lame duck president has ever had to suffer such ignominy. If Obama were to quietly steal out of town on January 20, as John Adams and John Quincy Adams did upon their defeats, nobody could blame him. Even so, Obama’s coalition fell apart because he failed utterly to maintain it during his tenure.
For eight years, we have heard stories about Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant.” Single women, millennials, Latinos and Asians, gays and lesbians, and so on, drove Obama to a fantastic electoral victory in 2008 and would power the Democrats for a generation—or more—to come.
While these blocs were integral to Obama’s triumph in 2008, there were other, more humdrum factions as well—the typical ones that every Democratic politician, be he as cool as Obama or as boring as John Kerry, has to win over. The suburban women of Florida’s I-4 corridor. The blue-collar workers in Dubuque and Erie. The African Americans in Detroit and Milwaukee, who are always counted on to deliver an enormous haul for the party. These voters are not the stuff of highfalutin’ think pieces for liberal magazines, but they were nevertheless an essential part of Obama’s victory.
They abandoned his successor last week. Not altogether, of course—but enough to serve the Democrats a shocking defeat.
There had been warning signs from virtually the start of Obama’s tenure. He won a smashing victory in 2008 by sweeping the traditional swing states and adding new ones to the list—Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. But voters in all these states signaled at some point over the last seven years that their loyalty was not unconditional. Starting with Bob McDonnell’s whopping victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race in 2009, then Scott Brown’s surprise Senate triumph in Massachusetts, and finally to the Tea Party wave of 2010—it was evident by the halfway point of Obama’s first term that personal affection for him did not necessarily translate to support for his policies or other Democrats. Then came 2012, in which the president was reelected with 3.6 million fewer votes than he received four years prior. The admonition was repeated in 2014, when the Republican wave that hit the House of Representatives in 2010 wiped the Democrats out of their Senate majority.
Obama’s response to these electoral setbacks was to pretend they did not happen. Again and again, he stubbornly refused to change course. When he lost his filibuster-proof Senate majority in 2010, he passed an unfinished version of Obamacare through the budget reconciliation process. When he and House speaker John Boehner were on the cusp of striking a grand bargain on taxes and entitlements in the summer of 2011, he insisted on additional tax hikes at the last minute, skunking the deal. When he won a narrow victory in 2012, he called for extensive gun control legislation, framing the debate in Manichean terms that alienated those Midwestern voters who had the gall to support him and the NRA simultaneously. When the Democrats lost the Senate in 2014, he enacted immigration reform through executive fiat and brokered a highly unpopular deal with Iran.
Last but not least, he handed off leadership of his party to Hillary Clinton. Weighed down by personal and professional issues, she was his opposite in almost every way. During the Democratic primary battle of 2008, she had been a useful foil for Obama, illustrating his point that it was time for a new approach to governance. Now, she was the heir apparent—as if his voters would not care either way. Turns out they did.
Much of the blame for last week’s defeat obviously belongs to Clinton, who was a terrible candidate. But one cannot overlook Obama’s responsibility in this epic debacle. He blessed Clinton’s candidacy early in the cycle, despite the fact that she was under investigation by the FBI. And for years prior, he had acted as though he could do as he wished and retain the loyalty of his voters.
He was wrong. Clinton dramatically underperformed with the white working-class in the Midwest. She did not receive sufficient margins from African Americans in the Rust Belt or the South. And though she had the noxious Trump as her opponent, she failed to make up for these setbacks with swing voters in places like suburban Charlotte or Philadelphia. Nor did she make many inroads with traditional GOP constituencies in Milwaukee and Grand Rapids, who had been turned off by the bombastic Republican in the primaries. Even the Latino vote disappointed, leaving Florida out of reach and Colorado surprisingly close. Only the Harry Reid “machine” in Nevada functioned as expected.
When Obama leaves the White House in two months, the Republican party will hold more public offices than at any point since the Great Depression. The president’s greatest political ambition will therefore go unrealized: He is not the 21st century’s Ronald Reagan; he is its Woodrow Wilson.
The 28th president was quite a bit like Obama, a cerebral type with unceasing confidence in his superior intellect and moral purity. But Wilson’s ambition to recast society in his own image outstripped his political acumen. Elected in a landslide in 1912, he only narrowly squeaked by in 1916. Four years later, his would-be successor lost to Warren Harding, one of the most unspectacular specimens ever to occupy the Oval Office. Wilson tarnished the reputation of progressivism so badly that the GOP would enjoy complete control over the government for the ensuing decade. It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt—a pragmatic man who lacked Wilson’s scholarly disposition but had an intuitive grasp of what the people expected of him—who would become modern liberalism’s hero.
Maybe some Democrat down the line will re-create Obama’s coalition and reshape it in a durable way. After all, Obama was on to something back in 2008. There are common interests among working-class whites in the Midwest, college kids, minority voters, and suburban women. Democrats have thought for a decade that this coalition was waiting to emerge. Not so, but a gifted politician could unite that group and build a coalition for the long haul. Such a leader would have to be more like FDR or Reagan than like Wilson—or Obama.”
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, POLITICS
My good friend Don Boudreaux recently wondered aloud about the possibility of a Trump presidency, where he writes,
“I can understand and appreciate why some people believe that Donald Trump would be a less-dangerous president than would Hillary Clinton. (Although I no longer hold that view, I once did. And I concede that my current reckoning of the relative risks might be mistaken.) But I cannot understand why any sensible person believes that a Pres. Trump would serve any good purpose (beyond a Pres. Trump preventing there being a Pres. H. Clinton). I cannot understand why any sensible person thinks that a Pres. Trump will diminish rent-seeking and otherwise make the U.S. government less hostile than it currently is to Americans’ freedoms and prosperity.
Pres. Trump’s politically incorrect harrumphing and mad verbal ejaculations will no doubt give heartburn to “Progressive” academics with offices on the Charles and to “Progressive” editorialists with offices in Manhattan. But so what? Is a man such as Trump – a man so ignorant of civics, so boastfully boorish, so openly contemptuous of the rule of law, so flamingly ignorant of economics, so nastily bullying, so full of nativist fallacies, so fond of (and skilled at) rousing the rabble, and so megalomaniacal – likely to be someone who does positive good does not do great harm? Uh-uh.”
On the other hand, one could argue that the most important reason to vote for Trump is a chance to not screw up the Supreme Court for generations.
If Hillary wins and brings a Democrat Congress, we are in a Socialist regulatory state. If Trump wins, with a Republican Congress, the Congress will not pass any of his agenda.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, ECONOMY, ELECTIONS, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, POLITICS, TAXES
After nearly 8 years of listening to Obama talk incessantly about the need for the wealthy to “pay their fair share,” Hillary Clinton has picked up the mantle in her new tax proposal unveiled this week.
Clinton spoke about the need for “an additional 4 percent tax on people making more than $5 million per year, calling the tax a “fair share surcharge.” It is reminiscent of the failed “Buffet Rule” proposal put forth by Obama a few years back.
According to a Clinton staffer, “This surcharge is a direct way to ensure that effective rates rise for taxpayers who are avoiding paying their fair share, and that the richest Americans pay an effective rate higher than middle-class families.”
The tax proposal is calculated to bring in $150 billion on revenue over a ten-year span. Nowhere does it calculate the cost of implementing such a plan, additional paperwork, hours spent on compliance and enforcement, and so forth. As a revenue raiser, it amounts to $15 billion a year for the federal government, pocket change really — something that could be more easily attained by cutting the size and scope of many federal budgets.
It’s not really about revenue anyway. It’s more about pandering to a segment of voters, vilifying the high income earners and stirring up class warfare. It was the one message that resonated most with Obama supporters in 2012; he continuously and intentionally railed against “millionaires and billionaires”, and talked about “the wealthy paying their fair share” in order to create a divide and separate that particular fiscal population from the rest of “mainstream America”. Hillary is merely following the leftist playbook and recycling stale ideas as her candidacy flounders.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, POLITICS, TAXES
Last month, Hillary Clinton revealed an idiotic idea in her tax plax that would yet again target American businesses. Clinton proposed creating an “exit tax” for companies that might try to merge with another foreign company. While that concept is ridiculous enough in and of itself, the writers at the Wall Street Journal, Richard Rubin and Lauren Meckler, were just as ridiculous.
Where in the article do they discuss the fact that we have the highest corporate tax rate in the world at 35%? And where do they discuss the fact that we are the only major country in the world that taxes companies both on their domestic and foreign earnings? Nowhere.
In the present environment, U.S. companies face enormous tax obstacles compared to foreign companies. The United States government lays claim to foreign-earned income and also forces them to pay higher tax rates than other foreign companies on the income they make in foreign countries — putting American companies at a severe disadvantage in the global economy.
We’ve created a system that tempts companies to move their HQ abroad or merge with other foreign companies in order to stay solvent and competitive, and now we want to threaten companies or erect more impediments to stop more American businesses from leaving our country? We should be incentivizing them to remain in the United States by lowering the corporate tax rate or remove the tax on foreign earnings! Our tax code and tax rates are simply not competitive anymore.
But Hillary Clinton doesn’t think that. And clearly, neither do the journalists at the WSJ. This article is just dripping with the suggestion that somehow, these companies OWE the government even more of their hard-earned money and/or are not legally or ethically paying their fair share. For instance: “The U.S. taxes companies on their world-wide earnings but allows them to claim foreign tax credits for profits earned abroad and defer U.S. taxes until they bring the money home. That system and the 35% marginal corporate tax rate encourage companies to earn money abroad in low-tax countries and leave it there. U.S. companies now have more than $2 trillion in stockpiled offshore profits that haven’t been fully taxed.” See the word choices? They set up the idea that companies are somehow acting underhandedly.
If that isn’t enough, look how the authors label the Tax Policy Center: “non-partisan.” Now, anyone even remotely interested in economics knows that the Tax Policy Center is decidedly left-leaning. To state otherwise and label it “non-partisan” is at best, naive, and at worst, duplicitous.
Let’s look at some more: “Clinton’s tax would apply to some transactions structured as foreign takeovers of U.S. companies aimed at getting around the rules.” No businesses are “getting around the rules!” Both foreign mergers and inversion are perfectly legal; there’s no loophole or deceptiveness in such business transactions. The only “rules” that businesses are “getting around” are the actual corporate tax laws that make doing business in America on a global scale so insufferable and unjust.
And finally: “The big attraction for companies has been accumulating future profits outside the U.S. tax net.” The US tax net is already enormous! The tax code is so discriminatory against our own American businesses, it makes it harder for our companies to compete and survive and thrive on an international basis. Yet Clinton wants to widen the net further with new taxes and put an even greater stranglehold on companies.
Businesses seek to sell a product and be competitive, not to comply with a draconian, exorbitant tax code. Businesses and investment capital are fleeing the United States in droves and the solution by Hillary Clinton is to tax them further. The fact that this obtuse proposal was backed and perpetuated by these writers at the Wall Street Journal is shameful.
