by | BLOG, GOVERNMENT, Israel
The White House has taken a fairly strong stand in its support of Israel since the start of the Hamas war, so it is particularly loathsome that it has not done the same with the onslaught of dissent from within the bureaucracy. The Agency for International Development, the State Department, and nearly 40 other agencies with more than 1500 staff members and political appointees have written letters and memos critical of Biden’s position.
Of course, civil servants have the right to say what they want, but the White House also has a duty to respond — especially when the protests are with regard to current policy and the vast majority of dissenters are anonymous. Instead, it was milquetoast and extolled “listening” to the complainants as well encouraging “feedback and ideas.”
What the White House should have done was rebuke the letter writers for their ignorant views. The utter lack of a firm response is a prime example of the cause of antisemitism today. These idiotic and counterfactual views are allowed to go unrebutted, not only among the government but also (as shown particularly in recent weeks) rampantly on college campuses as well. Such timidness encourages many students and others in the academic community to think that maybe there is some substance to what these ignorant antisemitic protestors say. No one is calling for speech to be stifled, but what needs to happen is a pushback. In other words, “you can say what you think, but know that you are actually incorrect because of x, y, and z.” That is how you actually stop antisemitism instead of aiding and abetting it!
Instead we get “organizing forums” and “candid conversations” which just result in more of the same: counterfactual information continuing to be shared — under the guise of tolerance, mind you — without any correction whatsoever. This is unacceptable and it further undermines the US position on Israel. If the White House is unwilling to defend Israel internally to a bunch of unelected bureaucrats with no policy power, what assurances do we have that it will continue to stand strong with Israel among those who actually do craft policy across the world?
by | BLOG, ECONOMY, GOVERNMENT
The news coming out of the science world regarding the breakthrough in fusion is exciting. The ability to have a sustaining clean energy source has been a part of science research for at least the last 60 years. But missed in the discussion is its true importance – that the movements towards wind and solar energy (“wse”) are just a waste.
The drawbacks and costs of using wse to produce low carbon energy are well known. They are expensive, unreliable, and environmentally damaging (using toxic metals, huge amounts of space, etc). Use of wse will diminish global economies by trillions of dollars hurting poor people and countries most of all. And in the end, even under the most austere de-carbonization policies, the effects on actual temperature reduction will only be a fraction of a degree.
But we have been told that in order to have any chance of saving the planet by reducing CO2, , we must go in this direction. In other words, if climate change is an existential threat, there’s nothing else we can do — we have to do it or else the world will be destroyed. Right?
Wrong. How stupid are we all going to feel if we spend the next decades destroying economies worldwide through unsound green policies only to discover that cold fusion (or some other non carbon energy source) made those policies just useless!
At the start of the twentieth century. New York City thought it was going to be destroyed by horse manure. Indeed, in 1898, the first international urban-planning conference took place in the city. It only lasted three days instead of ten, because no one in attendance could come up with a viable solution to the massive, growing amount of horse manure that was produced in the city. At the time, roughly 100,000 horses created 2.5 million pounds per day of manure. NYC was not the only city facing such a problem. Just a few years earlier, the Time of London carried an article in which its author forecasted that in “50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure.”
But the manure problem was solved not by efficient waste removal policies – it was solved by the automobile. No one anticipated that the cure for the manure was not horse-related; it was a new invention. All the time and energy spent fixing the manure problem was all for naught.
Perhaps it’s not worth going through all this green policy, expending trillions of dollars and upending economies, if in 10-15 years we have cold fusion or another non-carbon energy source. Human ingenuity has always been the source of the solutions. Fossil fuels itself was the solution to inefficient energy sources of its day. Wouldn’t it be that much more rational to spend money on new energy sources instead of wse? Bjorn Lomborg, among many others, have been advocating this for years.
Nuclear fusion, the combining of hydrogen atoms to produce tremendous amounts of clean energy, is the real solution for the green movement.
by | BIDEN, BLOG, GOVERNMENT
The Jones Act, as you know, requires that all cargo shipped between U.S. ports be carried by U.S.-built, U.S.-crewed, U.S.-owned ships. It makes any business involving shipping between Puerto Rico and the mainland impossible, thereby currently impeding the recovery effort from Hurricane Ian. Ships with supplies and fuel are ready to aid the people of Puerto Rico — if only they could dock there.
The Jones Act puts an unnecessary burden on our U.S territories; exempting Puerto Rico from this provision would provide disaster relief. Repealing the Jones Act permanently would actually give Puerto Rico a much-needed burst of commerce and lower the cost of living. As it is now, the Jones Act limits international competition for imports and creates higher taxes on basic necessities such as energy and food.
At the very least, President Biden should provide a temporary waiver of the Jones Act but the right thing to do in the long run would be to retire it completely.
by | BIDEN, BLOG, COVID, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT
How can Biden get away with saying the pandemic is over, at the very same time his attorney wrote the legal opinion that debt forgiveness was constitutional because of the COVID State of Emergency? He is trying to play both sides.
On 60 Minutes this past Sunday, President Biden declared that “The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with Covid.” He furthered this assertion by reiterating “the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing.”
Since Biden says it’s over, then it’s time for the enduring COVID State of Emergency to be over. But that poses a problem for him. With that, any additional COVID funding should also cease. He needs to declare the pandemic over right before midterms to show that he and the Democrats have been successful in something since he took office. But he is simultaneously hanging on to the enduring COVID State of Emergency and using that to justify his unconstitutional student loan forgiveness scheme.
Biden is a criminal liar and simply cannot have it both ways.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, ECONOMY, GOVERNMENT
Phill Gramm and John Early do a nice job laying out the misnomer that income inequality is the problem. This concept of inequality really became a selling point during the Obama administration when the Democrats consistently implored that “millionaires and billionaires” should “pay their fair share.” But the simple fact remains that income inequality isn’t the actual problem with the economy. The problem lies in the fact that, due to the massive amount of government transfer payments, the bottom 60% of income earners have seen their income equalized to the point of nearly attaining the same amount of income of Americans who receive none. The result of this phenomenon is that the labor participation rate among the bottom quintile has fallen sharply to 36% (through 2017, the latest year for statistics), which is what is truly disastrous for the economy. (What’s more, this article doesn’t even begin to touch the ever-worsening labor participation/economic situation due to COVID policies and extra government transfers.) The article from the Wall Street Journal is reprinted below. It is a strong read about the concepts of income inequality and equality.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the most dramatic and consequential change in the distribution of income in America in the past half-century isn’t rising income inequality but the extraordinary growth in income equality among the bottom 60% of household earners.
Real government transfer payments to the bottom 20% of household earners surged by 269% between 1967 and 2017, while middle-income households saw their real earnings after taxes rise by only 154% during the same period. That has largely equalized the income of the bottom 60% of Americans. This government-created equality has caused the labor-force participation rate to collapse among working-age people in low-income households and unleashed a populist realignment that is unraveling the coalition that has dominated American politics since the 1930s.
On these pages, we have debunked the myth that income inequality is extreme and growing on a secular basis by showing that the Census Bureau measure of income fails to include two-thirds of all federal, state and local transfer payments as income to the recipients and fails to treat taxes paid as income lost to the taxpayer. The Census Bureau measure overstates current income inequality between the highest and lowest 20% of earners by more than 300% and claims that income inequality has risen by 21% since 1967, when in fact it has fallen by 3%.
Our most significant finding from correcting the census income calculations wasn’t the overstated inequality between top and bottom earners. It was the extraordinary equality of income among the bottom 60% of American households, regardless of employment status. In 2017, among working-age households, the bottom 20% earned only $6,941 on average, and only 36% were employed. But after transfer payments and taxes, those households had an average income of $48,806. The average working-age household in the second quintile earned $31,811 and 85% of them were employed. But after transfers and taxes, they had income of $50,492, a mere 3.5% more than the bottom quintile. The middle quintile earned $66,453 and 92% were employed. But after taxes and transfers, they kept only $61,350—just 26% more than the bottom quintile.
Even these figures don’t tell the whole story. In the bottom quintile, there are on average only 1.92 people living in a household. The second and middle quintiles have 2.41 and 2.62 people respectively. After adjusting income for the number of people living in the household, the bottom-quintile household received $33,653 per capita. The second and middle quintile households had on average $29,497 and $32,574 per capita, respectively. The blockbuster finding is that on a per capita basis the average bottom quintile household received 14% more income than the average second-quintile household and 3.3% more than the average middle-income household.
It should be noted that while per capita comparisons are widely used, they tend to overstate the effects of household size. Two people living together can achieve the same material well-being for less than they could living separately. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has developed a measure widely used internationally to adjust for household size, and the Census Bureau has a similar adjustment it uses in its supplemental poverty measure. Since the results produced by the OECD and the Census Bureau adjustments are so similar, we simply use the average of the two below.
The nearby chart compares the after-tax, after-transfer incomes of the bottom three quintiles of American households with no adjustment for household size, on a per capita basis, and using the average of the OECD and census adjustments for household size. We found that the average bottom-quintile household has $2,401 (or 6.6%) more income than the second quintile and only $3,306 (or 7.8%) less than the middle-income quintile.
The average second-quintile household earned almost five times as much as the average household in the bottom quintile, because it had 2.4 times as many working-age members working and on average each worker worked 80% more hours. The average middle-quintile household earned almost 10 times as much and had 2.6 times the percentage of its working-age people working, each working twice as many hours. Yet the bottom 60% of American households received essentially the same income after accounting for taxes, transfer payments and household size.
Given the surge in transfer payments since the war on poverty, it isn’t surprising that the percentage of working-age people in the bottom quintile who actually worked plummeted from 68% in 1967 to 36% in 2017. With transfer payments giving recipients about as much for not working as they could earn working, only a mandatory work requirement as a condition for receiving means-tested benefits will bring them back into the labor market. While official statistics don’t count two-thirds of those transfer payments and don’t show the income equality they produce, Americans who work hard to make ends meet are aware of it. Despite Democratic politicians’ efforts to provoke resentment against the rich, when was the last time you heard working people complain that some people in America are rich? The hostility of working people is increasingly focused on a system where those who don’t break a sweat are about as well off as they are.
This justifiable resentment is the economic source of today’s American populism. It is ravaging the increasingly unstable Democratic political alliance between welfare recipients and blue-collar workers. It was already building in the 1980s, with what were then called Reagan Democrats, and it was fully manifested in the Trump blue-collar political base. It is now driving political realignment among Hispanic voters, who are disproportionately middle-income earners.
By eroding self-reliance, worker pride and labor-force participation, government-generated income equality undermines the very foundations of American prosperity. A democratic society won’t knowingly tolerate it.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, ECONOMY, GOVERNMENT
Katherine Blunt’s WSJ article, “Why Your Electric Bill is Soaring — And Likely To Go Higher” absolutely ignores (or just possibly misses) that soaring gas prices are caused as much by Biden production restriction policies nationally. They are further exacerbated by policies like the New York State pipeline and fracking prohibitions just as much as they are by recent Ukraine issues. She should know that gas prices (unlike oil) are a local, not global market. Furthermore, most of New York increases are from a vast push into incredibly more expensive wind and solar mandates. Her own editorial board writes about this all the time, and she would do well to read it.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, EDUCATION, FED, GOVERNMENT
Recently, a young PhD student came to terms with the fact that academia was no longer based on merit. Rather, as a scientific researcher interested in procuring grant funding, he was dismayed to learn that certain terms such as “equity,” “diversity,” and “inclusion” were not only social goals, but now also scientific ones; in other words, they were increasingly being used in descriptions of actual scientific work.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awards millions in grants each year and the agency which renders their decision does so on two accounts: intellectual merit and broader impact. It is within the broader impact realm that the aforementioned social terms, among others, were being applied and interpreted. The appearance of particular terms related to identity politics in award abstracts, including “equity,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” “gender,” “marginalize,” “underrepresented,” and “disparity” increased substantially over the last thirty years.
In 1990, only 3 percent of award abstracts contained one of the terms, while in 2020, 30 percent of all award abstracts included at least one of those terms. Notably, the category which changed the most was Education and Human Resources, which went from 4% to 54% during that time span.
The problem with scientific research playing politics means that social causes as a scientific end are being elevated while intellectual merit and other similar criteria are being diminished.
This reminds me of the observation Rasmussen made, that “the more that scientific institutions are viewed as conduits for promulgating ideology, the less capable they will be of swaying public opinion on important issues.” Science and science funding should stick to being concerned with searching for truth among empirical evidence, not social activism.
by | BLOG, ECONOMY, FED, GOVERNMENT, POLITICS, TAXES
It’s kind of disgusting that when Congress talks about raising tax revenue, all the CBO thinks about and includes in their analyses is gross revenue. They don’t think about the costs of what the IRS, agencies, businesses, and taxpayers need to do to implement the policies that were created in order to raise that revenue. Those costs should always be factored in the computation and subsequently deducted to arrive at net revenue raised..
What’s happening now is that the compliance costs are not being considered. Congress says, for instance, that something will raise “$50 billion dollars” but then ignores that the complications, regulation issuance costs, compliance and other implementation expenses that will arise may cost $30 billion. So only $20 billion is actually raised. These hidden but true costs have to be included and come out of the CBO revenue forecast if we are to craft realistic, equitable, and efficient tax policy
by | BLOG, BUSINESS, ECONOMY, GOVERNMENT, POLITICS, TAXES
Have you ever heard any progressive who claims that the wealthy are not paying their “fair share” actually say what fair share is? Neither have I. It is probably because the wealthy in the US already pay a far higher percentage of income taxes than in any other developed country. Therefore, anyone who says the wealthy are not paying their fair share is either being a hypocrite or lying.
However, there is a group that is absolutely not paying their fair share. These are the vast number of the taxpayers who actually pay nothing. The Tax Policy Center’s newest report released in August 2021 found that in 2020, about 60.6 percent of households did not pay income tax, up from 43.6 percent of households in 2019; This closely mirrors the IRS preliminary estimate of 61.1 percent of households not paying income tax in 2020. It should be noted that much of the 2020 increase was due to pandemic-related factors, but the growing share of households paying no income tax should be kept in mind when evaluating the progressivity of the federal income tax system and proposed tax hikes on higher earners. There is virtually no other developed country in the world where this is the case.
This scenario reminds me of a true story from many years ago. When I was getting divorced, I was making about 75% of the money that my ex and I earned together. As part of our agreement, I asked her to pay 10% of the costs when our two kids went to college. At first she agreed; later on, however, she began to protest on the premise that if she got remarried and stopped working, she didn’t want to have to be responsible for having to pay the 10%! The fact that my ex had a responsibility to contribute toward college costs for her own children was totally lost on her. That’s what’s going on here. If the lower income earners don’t have any skin in the game, how can they be a responsible member of society? When they vote for new programs are they assuming that they have no obligation to pay any part of it?
The wealthy already pay a disproportionately high proportion of taxes. And yet Congress wants to fleece them more. They just assume that gullible taxpayers (I mean constituents) will just continue to vote for free stuff that others will pay for.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, CONSTITUTION, ECONOMY, GOVERNMENT, TAXES
Capital gains are the profits realized from the sale of an asset and are included as part of taxable income. A handful of states have favorable rates toward capital gains (or don’t tax them at all because they do not have an income tax).
Other states tax capital gains as ordinary income. Among the most offensive states are NY, NJ, and CA. These states have concentrations of high income individuals and businesses who pay tax at high state tax rates. And they give no rate reduction for capital gains.Such tax policy discourages the sale of less productive assets and thereby reduces investment opportunities and economic growth.
Furthermore, taxes on capital gains (just like dividends) are subject to double taxation. This means every dollar of capital gains taxed to an individual has already been taxed at the entity level. No other major country double taxes this income. And for states to not even give a rate break for this double-taxed income is as mean-spirited as it is egregious.
High capital gains taxes are inequitable, destructive, and detrimental to the economy. They should be lower, not higher.
