Tag: politics

Who subsidizes whom?

California politicians are worried about their taxpayers’ new inability to offset against their Federal taxes:

The Republican-backed federal tax bill flipped the tables on a never-ending question for California politicians: Will high taxes lead the state’s wealthiest residents to flee the Golden State for the comparable tax havens of Florida, Nevada and Texas?

Republicans reliably raise that alarm when Democrats advocate for tax increases, like the 2012 and 2016 ballot initiatives that levied a new income tax on very high-earning residents.

But now, with the federal tax bill cutting off deductions that benefited well-off Californians, the state’s Democrats suddenly are singing the GOP song about a potential millionaire exodus.

“People with higher incomes pay a lot more money, and some of them may be tempted to leave,” Gov. Jerry Brown said when he unveiled his 2018-19 budget proposal last week. “This was an assault by the Republicans in Congress against California.”

That fear animates Senate President pro tem Kevin de León’s bill that would allow California residents to write off their state taxes on their federal returns as a charitable deduction, as well as other proposals that Assembly leaders have hinted they’re preparing to offer. De Leon’s bill cleared a second committee this week and is on its way to a vote on the Senate floor. Trump administration officials say it won’t pass muster with the IRS.

Democratic state lawmakers are worried because California relies so heavily on the income taxes it collects from high earners to fund government services. The state’s wealthiest 1 percent, for instance, pay 48 percent of its income tax, and the departure of just a few families could lead to a noticeable hit to state general fund revenue.

“It is a genuine concern and that’s why the legislatures in high-tax states are swinging into action immediately,” said Katie Pratt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who specializes in taxes.

The new federal tax law poses problems for high earners in the Golden State because it caps two deductions that Californians used to limit their federal income tax liability, restricting their ability to write off mortgage interest and their state and local taxes.

Come now. Every time the issue gets raised in Minnesota, the newspapers produce one argument after another to explain why people don’t move based on tax rates. Because great schools! And art! And people!

Of course, since liberals and progressives are totally incapable of keeping two thoughts in their head at the same time, the fact that moving a bunch of Mexicans and Somalis might degrade the value of those competing factors never occurs to them.

That’s the idea, sport

As I have repeatedly noted, Trump is proving himself to be a much better president – a much better CONSERVATIVE president – than the great Ronald Reagan himself:

The Environmental Protection Agency is on track to slash 47{4bbad798630efc4433864d09618c79dc37ec93bd369a8697e8847adaf672eacc} of its total staff by the end of President Trump’s first term, according to a report in the Washington Examiner. After just one year, EPA chief Scott Pruitt has reduced his staff to levels unseen since the Reagan administration. If just those federal employees set to retire by 2021 do indeed leave, Pruitt will have cut more than 7,000 bureaucrats.

“We’re proud to report that we’re reducing the size of government, protecting taxpayer dollars, and staying true to our core mission of protecting the environment,” Pruitt boasted. Meanwhile, other federal agencies have followed suit after President Trump’s January 2017 hiring freeze hit large swaths of the executive branch. Trump’s order stated, “No vacant positions existing at noon on January 22, 2017, may be filled, and no new positions may be created, except in limited circumstances,” including those pertaining to national security. Although the freeze technically lifted in the spring, most agencies have continued to abide by its guidelines. The last president to enact a major federal hiring freeze was Ronald Reagan.

With the exception of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Interior, all Cabinet departments by September had fewer permanent staff than the day Trump took office. In addition, Trump’s proposed spending cuts triggered a spending slowdown across agencies despite the absence of a 2017 budget from Congress.

Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union representing 150,000 federal workers at over 30 agencies laments, “Morale has never been lower. Government is making itself a lot less attractive as an employer.”

Reagan laid off the air traffic controllers. Trump has already halved the size of the EPA and is slashing the payrolls at dozens of other agencies. There is no comparison.

Storm pressure?

Interesting to observe how more and more of politicians are offing themselves of late.

An Idaho Republican state lawmaker who was under investigation for possible sexual abuse, died in an apparent suicide, according to authorities on Tuesday. Canyon County Coroner Vicki DeGeus-Morris said Brandon Hixon was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head in his Caldwell home early Tuesday morning. A family member discovered his remains.

Hixon, 36, was elected to the Idaho Legislature in 2012. At the time, Hixon was one of the youngest lawmakers elected to the Idaho House of Representatives.

He flew relatively under the radar during his time in the Statehouse until October, when he abruptly resigned from office after reports broke he was the subject of a criminal investigation for possible sexual abuse.

And there are still a lot of major figures who seem to have considerably lowered their media profile since the leadup into Christmas. I doubt this is a coincidence.

Bannon out at Breitbart

Steve Bannon has resigned from Breitbart News:

Stephen K. Bannon stepped down on Tuesday from his post as executive chairman of Breitbart News, ostracized for now from conservative circles and the Republican Party he brazenly predicted he would remake.

Mr. Bannon’s departure, which was initiated by an estranged financial patron and Breitbart investor, Rebekah Mercer, came as Mr. Bannon remained unable to quell the furor over remarks attributed to him in a new book in which he questions President Trump’s mental fitness and disparages his son Donald Trump Jr.

Mr. Bannon and Breitbart will work together on a smooth transition, said a statement from the company’s chief executive, Larry Solov. Separately, SiriusXM, which broadcasts a radio show on which Mr. Bannon was a host, said it was also cutting ties with him.

If this is all a charade, Team Trump are going to unprecedented lengths to make it look legitimate. But I’m more than a little dubious about all the sudden charges that both Bannon and Trump are mentally unstable and so forth. The vultures really have it in for him.

Will Bannon recover?

Katie McHugh thinks so, and has some interesting insights into Bannon’s character when she’s not talking about herself:

Will Bannon recover from this nuclear strike? Probably, but the radiation will hang around for a long time. What if Breitbart decides to drop its mask of acting like Trump and the MAGA movement’s conscience and decides to begin trashing Trump? It won’t end well for them: The Left will use them as a weapon against Trump and the base will thrash them before they stop reading them.

As for the White House Leaks — why do people talk to the media at all? Because every human being has an innate need to confess. That’s why people leak to the press and why they talk to the Opposition Media. Bannon is a Catholic, but has he heard of a priest?

Bannon is a warrior and a brilliant man; White House work was not for him. He wanted out. Sigmund Freud talks about “the death drive” and that may have been an unconscious cog turning in Steve’s mind as he spoke to the media….

Bannon has an excess of Logos and Pathos, but little Ethos. He rarely helps people whom he used as an energy source. More importantly, because he shoots from the hip, he doesn’t have a good sense of Kairos, which means striking at the opportune moment, while the iron is hot. When all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail, and Steve struck without discrimination and with wild abandon, cold or hot irons. Sometimes he hit the mark. Other times — no.

Bannon runs on a frantic energy that propels him forward. During my first phone conversation with him when I was interviewing with Breitbart, he kept asking me what I thought of this and that, and kept getting more and more amped up as I reeled off my thoughts. “What do you think of immigration?” he asked. “I think it affects everything,” I said offhand as I wandered around the art section of a Barnes and Noble. “Yeah!!!!” he yelled back. Whoa, I thought as I pulled the phone away from my ringing eardrums. This job is going to be awesome. Later, I thought, did I make a mistake by not majoring in studio art and going into journalism? Maybe these people should have left well enough alone and let me draw and paint all day instead of letting the velociraptor out of the pen. “That one: When she looks at you, you can see she’s working things out.” And at eight months, Bannon’s Valkyries are what is called “lethal”… When you’re blessed with the gift of aggression and you’re permitted to use it, establishments will fall before your eyes. With one jawbone, you can dispatch an entire army.

That same energy that drives Bannon and drives me also drives many talented and intelligent people who never learned to harness their energy like the bucking bronco it is. It brings people in and then it repulses them, because every action has an equal and opposite reaction. You must learn to tame it and reign it in, so it’s yours and it doesn’t run you. Fall asleep in the lap of your vices and you’ll wake up in the hands of your enemies.

This is why I always thought it was mildly amusing when people talked about Bannon as if he was some sort of master strategist, the Bill Belichick of politics. The truth is that Bannon is a superb tactician and he isn’t a strategist at all. It was always Trump who was the strategist; what confuses people is that Trump is a better strategist than tactician even though he verbally shoots from the hip as if there is no tomorrow.

Bannon made several several mistakes – what part of DON’T TALK TO THE MEDIA is hard for the Right to understand? – but the worst one was that he judged Trump by his own standards, thinking his achievements justified a modest amount of disloyalty. But Trump always, always, always places loyalty first and foremost. That’s why he often puts more responsibility in the hands that are less than competent than one might like to see. Fortunately, what keeps this from being a fatal flaw is that he is also a strong enough executive to not hesitate to remove that responsibility once he sees they cannot handle it to his liking.

Bannon will recover because, being a tactician, he has cornerback memory. Tacticians tend to bounce back quickly, as if nothing ever happened. Once he recovers his energy, no doubt he’ll be causing serious heartburn for the mandarins of some industry, somewhere. But it could be anything; it won’t necessarily have anything to do with U.S. politics.

That being said, it’s unfortunate to see that even at the very top levels, the Right remains almost totally incapable of working productively together or looking out for each other’s interests. There are a few, a very few, who play well with others, Mike Cernovich and Stefan Molyneux being the foremost examples, but for the most part, if you’re on the Right, you’re either wholly-owned by an interest group or you’re on your own.

Marvel’s biggest screw-up in 2017

At least, according to the SJWs in the comics media:

#1: Marvel Chairman Ike Perlmutter continues to be good friends with, official advisor to, and financial supporter of President Donald Trump

Marvel has made a big effort to brush off criticism that they’ve abandoned their commitment to diversity in 2017 after saying that they heard from retailers that people didn’t want it and then canceling a crapload of books with LGBTQ and POC leads at the end of the year. Marvel editor Jordan White even took to Twitter to ask people to please keep buying Marvel books so that they can get their diversity back on in 2018.

But how can Marvel Comics be a positive force for social justice when their Chairman is good friends with Donald Trump and financially supported his presidential campaign? Do a couple of comic books with more representation even out financial support for a President that has tried to ban Muslims from entering the country, wants to deport immigrants, has openly bragged about sexual assault on tape, and done so many other terrible things that it would take a dozen listicles to name them all? For every dollar spent on a book promoting a positive social message, how many ended up in the coffers of the Trump campaign through donations from Perlmutter? What would the ratio need to be before any positive benefit is canceled out?

Right. THAT is certainly the problem. Any more questions about what convergence is?

Credit where credit is due

It’s always embarrassing when writers who have never worked a single day in their lives at any business that actually makes anything try to opine on matters related to management:

Conservative writer Roger Simon argues that all “remaining Never Trumpers” must apologize for being wrong about the president. He chalks up Trump’s “astoundingly successful” first year to the fact the president is a “quick study.”

But what evidence is there that Trump has actually learned the art of presidential management?

Aside from the mandatory flattery required of Republican elected officials, there’s remarkably little testimony that Trump has involved himself in the process of governing. Tax reform was carried across the finish line by the GOP congressional leadership. Net neutrality was repealed by independent Republicans at the Federal Communications Commission. Foreign policy is a more mixed bag. If the president deserves credit for the defeat of Islamic State, it’s because he let “the generals” do their thing. On the other hand, credit (or blame) for recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel or pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris accord on climate change certainly goes to him.

In general, it seems to me that Trump’s success (such as it is) is less attributable to sudden mastery of the issues than to staying out of the way of rank-and-file Republican policymakers, activists, and bureaucrats.

What Goldberg fails to recognize is that staying out of the way of competent subordinates is the key to the art of all successful executive management. Donald Trump is the exact opposite of Richard Nixon Lyndon Johnson, who didn’t hesitate to get on the phone with a lieutenant in the field in Vietnam in setting a ridiculous new standard for micromanagement in foreign policy.

Micromanagers like LBJ reliably fail for the obvious reason that no one can know everything, master everything, prioritize everything, and be everywhere at once. Only Reagan had similarly developed delegation skills, but he did not choose his subordinates as well as Trump has, and more importantly, Reagan did not hold his subordinates accountable the way Trump does.

None of this should be a surprise. Back in November 2016, I observed, “The God-Emperor is absolutely ruthless when it comes to taking action on underperforming team members. He doesn’t care how it looks, he just shuffles the deck and draws.”

That’s why I expected, and continue to expect, the Trump presidency to be vastly more successful than anyone anticipated. It’s why I expect him to easily win re-election in 2020. The great CEOs have always been able to master the delicate balance between staying out of their subordinates’ way and stepping in to deal with matters themselves when personal intervention becomes necessary. And lacking business experience as he does, Jonah completely fails to understand Trump’s demonstrated mastery of this balance, as he absurdly credits the Republican establishment for Trump’s success.

To listen to Trump’s cheerleaders, the biggest obstacle to conservative victories is the party establishment, when in reality it looks more like it’s running the show.

Not only is the GOPe not running the show anymore, it has been largely broken to heel by Trump, as evidenced by the Republican Congress’s sudden ability to pass tax reform after repeatedly failing to do anything. The large number of pre-2018 retirements and resignations will further demonstrate that the GOPe is no longer in control, as will the success of Trump-endorsed candidates in the Congressional and Senatorial elections.

Alabama: It’s not technically over

The Alabama Secretary of State is still counting the votes:

December 18, 2017 – MONTGOMERY – Pursuant to Act 2016-450, regarding the identification and recordation of write-in votes, the Secretary of State has determined that the individual write-in votes cast in the U.S. Senate Election will be identified and documented for the results of Special General Election on December 12, 2017.

This decision on whether to count these ballots was made based on Act 2016-450 which provides, upon a determination that the number of write-in votes for Office of United States Senator is greater than or equal to the difference in votes between the two candidates receiving the greatest number of votes for the Office of United State Senator.

The difference, as of today, in the two candidates total votes received is 20,634 and the total number of write-in votes cast was 22,814. Upon the introduction of UOCAVA ballots and approved provisional ballots, these numbers are subject to change.

Upon completion of the count of write-in votes, the write-in votes are to be included in each county’s final canvass of results that will be certified to the Secretary of State on December 22, 2017.

Now, if these were normal times, it would not matter. However, the probability that there was significant voter fraud involved in creating that 20,634-vote lead for Jones may – MAY – turn out to be relevant here.  Or it may not. But the point is, Moore has not conceded and the Secretary of State has not certified the election, and this may be for a good reason.

It seems incredibly far-fetched, but there does seem to be something strange going on with the Alabama election count, and it won’t surprise me if we see more weirdness out of there before it’s finally over and someone is seated in the U.S. Senate.

The wind picks up

Is there a storm on the way? The Dailywire claims that “more than a dozen” Congressmen will be resigning before the end of the year.

An investigative reporter with The Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) announced on Friday that Congress’ human resources scandal is about to break wide-open and predicted that over a dozen members of the House of Representatives will resign.

DCNF reporter Luke Rosiak tweeted on Friday: “Congress’ human resources scandal is just getting started. I anticipate we will see the resignation of more than a dozen House members over harassment and secret settlements, and soon.”

Last week Rosiak broke the story that Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) had made a settlement with a former congressional aide that he fired after she reported being sexually assaulted at the business of a major campaign donor. The first congressmen to go down in the post-Weinstein era of sexual misconduct was Michigan Democrat Rep. John Conyers, who eventually resigned after accusations against him snowballed.

Mike Cernovich says the number may be as high as 50. However, based on what the chans are saying, this Congressional scandal will only be part one of three, as both Hillary and Obama are now reportedly in the investigative crosshairs. For what, I don’t know exactly, but it appears to be considerably more serious than the usual “lying to the FBI” sort of thing.

You will note that we have heard virtually nothing from either of the Clinton or Obama in recent weeks. This may be why.