by | ARTICLES, BLOG, Israel
Front Page Magazine put together a nice list of twelve things you can do to support Israel. I’m reprinting it here below and encourage you to do some of the things on the list.
[1] Be informed – Learn the history of the conflict. Do background reading. Good places to start include: “The Clash of Civilizations and Remaking of World Order” (1996) by Samuel P. Huntington, “The Case for Israel” (2004) by Alan Dershowitz and “Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs” (2008) by Robert Spencer.
[2] Follow news of the war – reliable sources include The Washington Times (especially its commentary pages), FOX News, The Wall Street Journal (editorial pages), The New York Post and websites like Frontpage Mag.
[3] Put up an “I support Israel” yard sign — weather-resistant vinyl with metal frame, around $15 to $20, plus shipping.
[4] Wear an Israel lapel pin — Available for under $10.
[5] Go to a rally — Check with your closest Israeli consulate, synagogue or local Jewish Community Relations Council for dates and locations near you.
[6] Donate to Magen David Adom – Israel’s emergency medical services. They’re needed more than ever now. You can donate HERE.
[7] Plant a tree in Israel – Through the Jewish National Fund, for only $18 each.
[8] Become an Internet warrior – When you find a particularly useful news story, commentary or website, pass it on to your contact list.
[9] Write letters to the editor of your local newspaper – in response to a news story, editorial or commentary. You can find out how at the paper’s website. Remember, letters in support are as important as letters in opposition.
[10] Support pro-Israel groups – like Students United for Israel, Christians United for Israel Zionist Organization of America and American for a Safe Israel.
[11] Contact your local state legislators – requesting that your state legislature pass a resolution supporting Israel and denouncing Hamas terrorism. They might get help drafting from the American Legislative Exchange Council.
[12] Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, ELECTIONS, NEWS
Over at the Wall Street Journal, columnist Andy Kessler came up with a list of what he dubbed “15 Ways to Win a Presidential Primary.” Essentially, Kessler eschews style for content as a winning strategy for the crowded Republican primary field. Here is Kessler’s 15 point fix-it plan:
TSA reform
Tackle prescription drug pricing
End hidden fees
End the post office monopoly
Aviation and air-traffic control reform
End the public school monopoly
Offer a 20 year plan for school modernization
End housing price controls
End price fixing
End geographic monopolies
End train subsidies
Outlaw ethanol use
Tighten the border
Put expiration dates on legislation
Nix public-sector collective bargaining
This list is a good start, but I can also think of a few of my own, such as ending the capital gains tax and reforming estate taxes. What are some action items you would like to see?
by | ARTICLES, SCOTUS
Gorsuch does a good job pointing out some of the logical flaws in Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in the Colorado website cake. The WSJ’s Notable and Quotable gives a fine excerpt, which I have included below, plus a link to the full opinion.
“From Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion in 303 Creative v. Elenis, decided June 30:
It is difficult to read the dissent [by Justice Sonia Sotomayor] and conclude we are looking at the same case. . . . The dissent claims that Colorado wishes to regulate Ms. Smith’s “conduct,” not her speech. Forget Colorado’s stipulation that Ms. Smith’s activities are “expressive,” and the Tenth Circuit’s conclusion that the State seeks to compel “pure speech.” The dissent chides us for deciding a pre-enforcement challenge. But it ignores the Tenth Circuit’s finding that Ms. Smith faces a credible threat of sanctions unless she conforms her views to the State’s. The dissent suggests (over and over again) that any burden on speech here is “incidental.” All despite the Tenth Circuit’s finding that Colorado intends to force Ms. Smith to convey a message she does not believe with the “very purpose” of “[e]liminating . . . ideas.” . . .
In some places, the dissent gets so turned around about the facts that it opens fire on its own position. For instance: While stressing that a Colorado company cannot refuse “the full and equal enjoyment of [its] services” based on a customer’s protected status, the dissent assures us that a company selling creative services “to the public” does have a right “to decide what messages to include or not to include.” But if that is true, what are we even debating?”
by | ARTICLES, SCOTUS
The Wall Street Journal published their “Notable & Quotable: “Thomas vs. Jackson” on July 1, 2023. Clarence Thomas takes apart fellow Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, observing that her “contrary, myopic world view based on individuals’ skin color to the total exclusion of their personal choices is nothing short of racial determinism.” It’s brilliant. You can read it in full below:
“From Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, decided June 29 (citations omitted):
Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson uses her broad observations about statistical relationships between race and select measures of health, wealth, and well-being to label all blacks as victims. Her desire to do so is unfathomable to me. I cannot deny the great accomplishments of black Americans, including those who succeeded despite long odds.
Nor do Justice Jackson’s statistics . . . prove anything. Of course, none of those statistics are capable of drawing a direct causal link between race—rather than socioeconomic status or any other factor—and individual outcomes. So Justice Jackson supplies the link herself: the legacy of slavery and the nature of inherited wealth. This, she claims, locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste. Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood. . . .
Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments. What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them. And their race is not to blame for everything—good or bad—that happens in their lives. A contrary, myopic world view based on individuals’ skin color to the total exclusion of their personal choices is nothing short of racial determinism.
Justice Jackson then builds from her faulty premise to call for action, arguing that courts should defer to “experts” and allow institutions to discriminate on the basis of race. Make no mistake: Her dissent is not a vanguard of the innocent and helpless. It is instead a call to empower privileged elites, who will “tell us [what] is required to level the playing field” among castes and classifications that they alone can divine. Then, after siloing us all into racial castes and pitting those castes against each other, the dissent somehow believes that we will be able—at some undefined point—to “march forward together” into some utopian vision. Social movements that invoke these sorts of rallying cries, historically, have ended disastrously.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, ECONOMY, NEWS
Robert Poole, Director of Transportation Policy over at the Reason Foundation, does as decent job laying out “the case for changing the way air traffic control is provided in the United States.” He points out that many major countries have changed the way air traffic control systems are funded in recent years, and the United States should consider adopting some form of their models. This is a thoughtful piece and well worth the read. I have included it below as well as his full pdf report.
“This report provides an overview of the case for changing the way air traffic control is provided in the United States. While this country still has the world’s largest air traffic control system, it is no longer the world’s most advanced. Over the past three decades, more than 60 developed countries have converted their air traffic control systems from tax-funded government agencies to some form of public utility. These countries include Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
This idea has been proposed many times in the United States, dating back to the 1970s. The Clinton administration made several large-scale attempts that led to only minor reforms in how the Federal Aviation Administration operates the air traffic control system. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) attempted funding reform during the George W. Bush administration but was unsuccessful.
Research papers and several book-length studies find that the utility model, in which the air traffic control provider is paid directly by its customers and is able to issue long-term revenue bonds for large-scale facility and equipment modernization, works better than tax-supported systems operated as government agencies.
A much larger effort began during the Obama administration and continued in the Trump administration, driven largely by the business community and various aviation stakeholder groups. It led to the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee twice approving enabling legislation for an air traffic control utility corporation, but neither bill reached the House floor.
Recent air traffic problems—the NOTAM fiasco, a spate of close-call runway incursions, and FAA’s inability to implement digital/remote control towers as air traffic control utilities in other countries are doing—have raised new interest in air traffic control reform in this year when FAA must be reauthorized by Congress.
The 2018 defeat appeared to foreclose further attempts at creating a U.S. air traffic control utility for the duration of the five-year FAA reauthorization period. With so many topics on its agenda and very limited floor time, any stand-alone air traffic control bill apart from the next FAA reauthorization bill would have been highly unlikely.
The 2013–2018 air traffic control reform effort garnered much greater support than any previous effort. Openly supporting the bill were all the major passenger and cargo airlines, controllers’ union Nair traffic controlA, unions representing pilots and flight attendants, six former U.S. Department of Transportation secretaries, all three former chief operating officers of the Air Traffic Organization, 13 former senior Clinton administration officials, transportation experts from a long list of noted think tanks, taxpayer and consumer groups, and the editorial boards of many leading newspapers,including the Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, Orlando Sentinel, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and USA Today.
Unfortunately, there was never a real, substantive debate on the case for an air traffic control utility corporation. Instead, a propaganda war largely bankrolled by business jet organization the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) made untrue allegations and stepped up its opposition efforts after the bill had been revised to reflect legitimate concerns of general aviation, small airports, and rural America. Thus, while the United States retains the world’s largest air traffic control system, it also remains an outlier as:
- The only developed country that is not charging airspace users for air traffic control services;
- One of the few that still has not separated safety regulation from air traffic control service provision; and,
- A major nation whose air traffic control provider still has difficulty developing and implementing new technology and procedures in a timely and cost-effective manner.
Nevertheless, the debate has moved significantly in the direction of corporatization. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was widely assumed that the provision of air traffic control services was inherently governmental, since this service was provided by national governments in nearly all countries during those decades. The idea of separating aviation safety regulation from the provision of air traffic control services was unheard of.
Today, the inherent conflict of interest in having the same agency do both is recognized by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and has become non-standard in practice world wide.
Second, the importance of a self-supporting utility model for air traffic control is now widely understood and in operation in more than 60 countries. Prior to the emergence of air traffic control utilities beginning in 1987, most governments already charged air traffic control fees, mostly in accord with ICAO charging principles, but the revenues went into the national government’s coffers, to be allocated to whatever purposes the national legislative body decided upon.
The move toward self-supporting air traffic control utilities has created a worthwhile customer/provider relationship that replaces the air traffic control provider’s dependence on politically determined funding. The self-supporting model also permits the issuance of revenue bonds to finance long-lived capital modernization efforts, which was not possible prior to self- support, since the air traffic control user fee revenues belonged to the national government, not the air traffic control provider.
Third, we have seen empirical evidence of a changed organizational culture in many of the ATC corporations. They are generally able to hire and retain experienced managers, engineers, and software experts, thereby regaining control of technology development from aerospace companies on whom they were formerly overly dependent. This is leading to reductions in overhead costs, more cost-effective technology improvements, and increases in productivity.
Governance is still a work in progress, with many of the government corporations being dependent on one or two government shareholders. By contrast, the stakeholder board concept has proved workable and effective for more than two decades at Nav Canada, the world’s second-largest air traffic control provider and widely considered one of the best. A governing board representing all the principal aviation stakeholders gives the air traffic control provider a governance model much like the user cooperative model well-known in the rural utilities sector in the United States. It is a model that may offer governance improvements to many air traffic control providers currently organized as government corporations.
To sum up, the world of air traffic control has changed markedly in the decades since the corporatization of Airways New Zealand in 1987. The United States is the last major country that stands apart from this reform. It is conceivable that the growing track record of self-supporting air traffic control corporations will lead to some version of this model being adopted in the United States within the next decade.”
Get the report here
by | ARTICLES, IRS, TAXES
IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel published a letter yesterday in which he suggested that there may be racial bias in the selection of tax returns for audit. In fact, he stressed that, “while there is a need for further research, our initial findings support the conclusion that Black taxpayers may be audited at higher rates than would be expected given their share of the population.” This is far and away the most ridiculous nonsense to come out of the IRS in a while and Commissioner Werfel is either economically ignorant or intentionally misleading.
IRS audits have nothing to do about being black or white; even the IRS itself says they do not know the race of the taxpayer when selecting returns for audit and there is no place on a tax form to denote race when submitting a return to the IRS. Therefore there can be no bias in the algorithm, which is a sophisticated analysis designed to show where taxpayer error occurs.
The problem Mr. Werfel apparently is alluding to relates to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Congress made the EITC calculations very complicated but also too easy to cheat. It is simply the case that low income taxpayers claiming the EITC statistically have a large error rate, running upwards of 50% per year, which leaves the IRS no alternative but to inquire further via the audit process. Furthermore, improper refunds involving EITC easily amount to billions each year. So those claiming the EITC are either making mistakes or are scamming the system. But whichever it is, it is the EITC calculation on the tax returns of low-income people that triggers the algorithm, not race whatsoever.
Commissioner Werfle is a moron. By even hinting that there is racial disparity in the audit system (that can’t even consider race a factor, mind you) shows a mind-boggling level of incompetence and stupidity. How can a person this woefully inept be in charge of the IRS?
by | ARTICLES, BIDEN, BLOG, SOCIAL SECURITY
President Biden is cutting Social Security by 23% for every single recipient across the board. This is the inevitable effect of his continued demand that there will be no entitlement reform. This should terrify absolutely everyone. Within the next 8-10 years, when the Social Security trust fund is depleted, Social Security recipients will look at their bank account and see that their benefits have been slashed. This is a mathematical fact.
President Biden is lying to each and every last one of us, by denying the inevitability of his idiotic refusal to make any meaningful changes to fix Social Security. Currently, the Social Security Administration (SSA) estimates that of the over 46 million Americans receiving Social Security retirement benefits… 21% of married couples and 45% of single persons rely on Social Security for 90% or more of their income. That number is only going to continue rising as life expectancy rises and more people begin to rely on social security. You should be angry; President Biden’s actions will cause significant harm to every American.
by | ARTICLES, SOCIAL SECURITY
Social Security was supposed to be a program where people paid in, and growth of their funds over time resulted in a reasonable pension. Instead, by giving people more than entitled, it stole money from new people contributing to the system. By continuing this overpaying, it forces the younger people to get a smaller and smaller return on their contributions, even now negative, and even that will be reduced more when the system goes bankrupt in a few years. By not fixing the system now, it continues to pillage the newer entrants. Yet Democrats argue, in their absolute ignorance, that reducing the future growth is cutting benefits, while in reality is restoring the money to the people who have been pillaged.
Giving additional benefits to retirees is really the opposite of what we should do. Those who reach 67 need to be strongly encouraged to continue to work. It is not realistic – in fact, it is not possible – for an average person to accumulate sufficient retirement benefits during a working life of, say, from 22-67, to be able to receive retirement pay from 67 to 90 or more.
Our Social Security System is bankrupt. In fact, there is not enough money in the entire world for the United States to make good on its entitlement promises to its present and future retirees.
We need to be including in our current budget the amounts we are promising to pay in the future. The promises that we’ve made in the past — what we are paying out today — are not a part of this year’s costs; these are old liabilities and are part of our already existing debt. The US debt is currently $31 Trillion. When the real social security debt is added, the true National Debt becomes at least $70 trillion.
It is clear that these promised benefits have zero chance of ever actually being paid. And the longer our legislators allow this fraud to continue, the worse it will be for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, BUSINESS, ECONOMY
Though the head of JP Morgan Chase feels that the economy is still doing okay, he foresees a recession in 6-9 months. This is due in part to “the impact of runaway inflation, interest rates going up more than expected, the unknown effects of quantitative tightening and Russia’s war in Ukraine.” He further implored that the Fed “waited too long and did too little” as inflation increased to its highest rate in 40 years. Though they are aggressively raising rates now to curb inflation, raising them too much too fast can also cause problems. The Fed is widely expected to raise the rate another 3/4 point at its next meeting in a few weeks.
by | ARTICLES, BIDEN, BLOG, ECONOMY
What is happening, as demonstrated by the Census, is that the government largess is taking some people out of poverty, but it is having an even greater and more dangerously perverse effect. It’s making people overall worse economically and preventing them from moving up to the middle class while expanding the lower levels and destroying a generation of minorities. Biden is the poster child for the very people he’s supposed to be helping and he’s made it worse for them. This article in the WSJ, “How Welfare Left Americans Poorer” explains the terrible and true cost of transfer payments. I have reproduced it below.
The Census Bureau released its 2021 income report Tuesday, and the political spin is that unprecedented pandemic transfer payments lifted millions out of poverty. It’s more accurate to say that most Americans are worse off than before the pandemic owing in part to . . . unprecedented transfer payments.
Lifting government lockdowns last year should have caused millions of Americans to return to work and raised average incomes. That didn’t happen. Real median pre-tax household income fell $402 last year to $70,784 and was $2,024 lower than in 2019. The total number of workers didn’t budge between 2020 and 2021.
Millions of Americans whose hours were cut during lockdowns did return to full-time work, but many laid-off Americans stayed home. The number of full-time, year-round workers increased by 11.1 million last year, but their real median earnings declined 4.1%.
Rising prices (see nearby) may have reduced the incentive to work as the purchasing power of paychecks declined. But the Census report also underscores the outsize effects of the March 2021 $1.9 trillion spending bill, which helped drive the “supplemental” poverty measure (which accounts for transfer payments) to a record low even though the official poverty rate didn’t improve.
The $300 a week unemployment benefit boost finally lapsed last September, but transfer payments on the whole grew last year. These included the $3,600 child tax credit; $1,400 payments for each adult and child; food stamps averaging about $230 a person a month; expanded Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium subsidies, and more.
The ACA subsidy enhancement, in particular, has enabled pre-Medicare age Americans to retire early. Adding up all of last year’s government largesse, a lower-income family with two young children would have received nearly $24,000 in “free” cash, which doesn’t even include the cost of government health coverage.
We’ve written about how a March 2020 law restricts states from ending Medicaid for people no longer financially eligible as long as the national pandemic emergency is in effect. The same law suspended food stamp work requirements and raised benefits. When leisure pays as much as work, fewer work.
Democrats highlight the Census Bureau’s finding that 1.1 million fewer Americans were without health insurance last year than in 2020. But the bigger story was the shift from private to government health coverage. The number of people with private plans fell by 1.5 million while enrollment in Medicaid increased by 3.2 million and Medicare by 1.7 million.
This underscores warnings that Medicaid and ACA subsidy expansions might induce small employers to drop coverage, especially as they have to pay more to attract workers. Medicaid spending has increased by about a third during the pandemic and amounted to $33,000 last year for each new Medicaid enrollee.
Government had to support struggling Americans when government shut down the economy in 2020. But Democrats used Covid to expand the welfare state long after the crisis has passed. Americans are paying for it via inflation that has eroded their incomes.
Real median post-tax income including transfer payments declined last year by 1% for all households, 2.9% for those without children and 4.2% for seniors. Most Americans are worse off than they would have been had that $1.9 trillion bill never passed.
