URLs du Jour

2020-10-28

  • Want to know what can turn me into a full-blown rage monkey? Much like that cute little capuchin over there on your right? Well, you can ask Mrs. Salad, since she was in the room with me when a Biden campaign commercial came on the TV.

    And Joe triggered me: "Oh, please just shut up!" Or maybe worse. At least there was no poo-flinging, or at least I have no recollection of any, Senator.

    I can't find the ad I saw online, but here's a transcript of a speech Biden made yesterday in Atlanta, and … grr … here it is:

    If you make less than $400,000 a year, you won’t pay a penny more in taxes. But we’ll ask the wealthiest people and the biggest corporations — the 91 of the top companies that paid zero in federal income taxes — to pay their fair share.

    That little word "ask" drives me nuts, especially when combined with "pay their fair share".

    Government does not "ask". It demands, regulates, prohibits, controls, fleeces, forbids, assesses,… but it doesn't ask.

    I despise the intelligence-insulting lie embedded in that small word "ask". If/when a tax increase is passed, nobody will be "asked" to cough up more money to the US Treasury. That money will be demanded. By implying otherwise, Joe might as well add: "I'm wording things that way because I think anyone listening is stupid enough to believe me."

    Damn few listeners will recognize how deeply their intelligence is being insulted. Joe uses "ask" this way because his contempt for his audience is paired with (unfortunately) an accurate estimate of their abilities for critical thought. It focus-groups well, which is why it's been a perennial rhetorical device for Democrats for years.

    That lie is invariably accompanied by the bullshit phrase "fair share", which I've also loathed for a long time. As if there's a secret mathematical formula behind the curtain for "fair". Exactly how much is that fair share, Joe? Why, my friends, it always really means "more than they're paying now". And it's never enough.

    Here's the Tax Foundation with the most recent data:

    Reflecting the increasing progressivity of the federal tax code, the share of federal taxes paid by high earners has increased in recent decades. The top one percent paid 25.3 percent of all federal taxes in 2017, up from an average of 14.3 percent in the 1980s.

    The underlying CBO document says the "top one percent" earned 17% of all income. So: is that "fair"? What would that number have to be in order to be "fair"?

    [Apologies if you've seen versions of this rant in the past. But if Democrats keep uttering this bilge, I'll probably get irked enough to blog about it.]


  • Of course, the Trump campaign, reflecting the ethics and intelligence of the President, can't attack Biden's tax position without lying about it. The WaPo fact checker, Glenn Kessler awards four big Pinocchios: Trump ad snips Biden’s comments on taxes out of context.

    The Trump presidential campaign is the master of the mischievous clip job. Time after time, the president’s campaign has released ads that snip and clip Biden’s speeches and remarks to make the former vice president appear to say the opposite of what he was saying.

    I wouldn't trust Kessler, but it's clear that the Trump campaign managed to portray Biden's dishonest and lousy tax proposals by layering on even more dishonestly.

    Kessler dismisses the Trump campaign's citation of a Hoover Institution study that predicts poor economic outcomes from Biden's tax plan. ("[I]t’s clearly designed for campaign weaponization"). I'd bet his skepticism is asymmetrically deployed against conservative/libertarian analysis, but make your own call on that.


  • [Amazon Link]
    (paid link)
    Speaking of "never enough": William Voegeli, the author of a great book with that title, link at your right, writes in the City Journal on Unfriending Free Speech. Assuming you know about the efforts to suppress the Hunter Biden story…

    If Facebook and Twitter intended to make the Biden laptop story go away, however, their intervention had the opposite effect. Questions about a political family’s corruption became part of a larger debate about the power of social media platforms. Do the proprietors of our digital public squares censor and curate our discourse there? Are the rules for what can and can’t be said clear and universally applicable, or arbitrary and selectively enforced?

    Other media platforms, too, have moved on from disinterested presentation and examination of the facts to explicitly supporting particular political causes. National Public Radio, for example, announced that it would have nothing to do with the Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories,” a managing editor explained, “and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” (In August, NPR felt that an excellent use of its journalists and listeners’ time was a long, sympathetic interview with Vicky Osterweil, who had written the book In Defense of Looting.) Similarly, Glenn Reynolds devoted one of his weekly USA Today columns to Facebook and Twitter’s efforts to halt the spread of the Post’s story on the Bidens. USA Today spiked the column without explanation; it was available only to readers of Reynolds’s blog.

    Voegeli notices (as many have) the left-progressive faction's increasing hostility to classical liberties, specifically the notion that wide-ranging debate on all topics is the only way individuals can judge those topics fairly and with confidence.

    We're told, ever more often, that the citizenry must be protected from Thoughtcrime. The end of that process isn't pretty.


  • Kevin D. Williamson suggests some creative destruction: We need to burn the Affordable Care Act and rebuild it.

    So, how do we fix it? Sometimes, it is better to think small. Health care is too complex to be “fixed” once and for all by a single piece of legislation, no matter how well-crafted the legislation or generously funded the program. Instead of a sweeping but ultimately futile grand legislative gesture, the GOP should focus on discrete, narrow reforms that link conservatives’ market-oriented model with Americans’ workaday anxieties regarding health care. Work to make prices lower, work to make coverage more predictable, work to make health insurance work more like any other product — but don’t try to do everything at once.

    Congress could give families more control over their health spending by passing Sen. Ben Sasse’s Health Savings Account Expansion Act and Qualified Health Savings Account Distribution Act, which together would make HSAs available to more families, allow them to put more pre-tax money into them, and keep them from losing their saved funds at the end of the year or when changing jobs. HSAs are a great benefit for those in high-deductible plans. Sasse’s proposals may not satisfy the crusading zealots, but they represent real reforms that would make life better for real people. Surely that would count for something.

    Other good ideas at the link. Unfortuately, the upcoming election probably will make them all impractical to implement: they require transfer of power from the state to the individuals and the market. That's like garlic to statists, who demand increasing dependence on government. (See The Life of Julia.)


  • And David Harsanyi does some psychologizing at National Review: The Left Doesn’t Fear Amy Coney Barrett, It Fears the Constitution. I'm not a fan of belittling one's intellectual opponents as big ol' fraidy cats (sorry for the times I've done that myself), but:

    Nothing threatens the progressive project more than the existence of a Supreme Court that adheres to the Constitution. It’s really that simple.

    That’s what the tantrum over Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation is all about. The notion that the same Democrats who shelved the judicial filibuster and now threaten to destroy the separation of powers with a Court-packing revenge scheme — the same people, incidentally, so fond of smear-drenched confirmation hearings — are sticklers for process or decorum is simply ludicrous.

    For one thing, no norms have been undone by the confirmation of Barrett. If Democrats won a Senate majority in 2016, Merrick Garland would already be ensconced in the Supreme Court, election or no election. Many of the same Democrats now feigning outrage over Barrett’s confirmation, including Joe Biden, argued back then that it was the constitutional duty of the Senate to take up a vote. Our living constitution apparently offers contradicting directions from one election to the next.

    While I don't like imputing fear to progressives, it's pretty clear that they're big on making people afraid, very afraid. See, for example yesterday's first item and the garbage rhetorical twitterings of Senator Ed Markey.


Last Modified 2024-01-21 10:40 AM EDT