Monthly Archives: January 2018

The Immediate Impact Of The Tax Cuts

Posted on by

The Daily Signal posted an article today about the immediate impact of the tax cuts recently passed by Congress.

I would like to remind people of what happened the in the 1980’s when President Reagan and Congress passed major tax cuts.

According to a Washington Post article April 10, 2015:

…the government’s budget numbers show that tax receipts expanded from $517 billion in 1980 to $909 billion in 1988 — close to a 75 percent change (25 percent after inflation),” Moore (Stephen Moore of The Heritage Foundation) wrote.

We checked the historical records of the White House budget office, and those numbers are right. But it’s devoid of important context.

First of all, revenues as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), which is the best way to compare across years, dropped from 19.1 percent in 1981 to a low of 16.9 percent in 1984, before rebounding slightly to 17.8 percent in 1989. One reason the deficit soared during Reagan’s term is because spending went up as a share of the economy and revenues went down.

A HeraldNet article of December 15, 2012 reminds us that President Reagan made a deal with the Democrats that included spending cuts as well as tax cuts. Conventional wisdom concerning that deal was that for every dollar in tax cuts there would be a three dollar cut in spending. Unfortunately, the Democrats never kept their end of that bargain.

The HeraldNet article reports the plan:

Here’s the actual breakdown of the three-year agreement, according to a June 1982 chart prepared by the GOP-controlled Senate Budget Committee staff, which appears in the 1989 book “The Deficit and the Public Interest,” by Joseph White and Aaron B. Wildavsky. (Note: The numbers represent reductions from anticipated outlays.)

Revenue:

$98.3 billion (26 percent)

Defense cuts: $26.4 billion (7 percent)

Nondefense cuts: $34.8 billion (9.1 percent)

Entitlement cuts: $30.8 billion (8.1 percent)

Other reductions/offsets: $7.8 billion (2 percent)

Freeze federal pay raise: $26.1 billion (6.9 percent)

Management savings: $46.6 billion (12.3 percent)

Net interest: $107.7 billion (28.4 percent)

Total non-revenue:$280.2 billion (74 percent)

Total: $378.5 billion

…At best, the spending savings that Congress could deliver, including defense cuts, amounted to a 1:1 ratio.

As Congress debates spending, we can hope that they will not repeat this mistake. Increased government revenues due to tax cuts should not lead to increased federal spending.

So far the results of the recent tax cut have been positive.

The article at The Daily Signal reports:

More businesses are announcing bonuses, higher minimum wages, and new benefits for employees after passage by Congress of Republicans’ tax reform bill. 

An email from House Speaker Paul Ryan’s press office highlights 33 businesses—including Aflac, Associated Bank, and PNC Bank—that have announced raises, bonuses, and other improvements for employees.

In moves that may defuse efforts to mandate higher minimum wages across the nation, at least nine of the 33 businesses announced they are boosting their minimum wage for thousands of workers to $15 or more an hour.

The article at The Daily Signal includes a partial list of companies offering benefits to their employees as a result of the tax cut. The article also includes a link to a complete list.

All working Americans have many reasons to celebrate the tax bill.

 

Awaiting A Constitutional Crisis

Posted on by

The Conservative Treehouse reminded us today that tomorrow is the deadline for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to turn over to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes documents related to their investigation of the Donald Trump campaign. These documents are under subpoena.

The article reports:

The FBI Counterintelligence Division began an official investigation on/around July 15th, 2016. The target of the investigation was the Donald Trump campaign. The FBI has refused to answer questions or allow investigative oversight toward the origin of their endeavor.

Numerous leaks from the FBI imply the leadership is attempting to shape the narrative surrounding the origin.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It is complicated and detailed. I will do my best to hit the highlights, but there is a lot here.

The article states:

In October 2016, immediately after the DOJ lawyers formatted the FBI information (Steele Dossier etc.) for the FISA application, the head of the NSD, Asst. Attorney General John P Carlin, left his job.  During his exit John Carlin informed the FISA court the DOJ-NSD frequently provided false information to the court to gain FISA warrants – Read Here.

Chairman Devin Nunes wants answers to the origin of the FBI counterintelligence operation.  Back in February 2017 Devin Nunes went to a secure SCIF and saw some of the unmasking reports that stemmed from that operation.

A copy of that letter is included in the article.

The story includes the timeline that led to the surveillance:

Those who have followed the back-story closely can see clear political outline of the 2016 operation. Here’s the way the entire construct looks in simple outline.

Career officials, managers and staff within the DOJ and FBI wanted to help ensure Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election. Those people were ideologically aligned with President Obama, and held the goal of maintaining progressive advances as part of their motive.

A “small group” was formed within the DOJ and FBI to facilitate this goal. The first goal was to remove Clinton from the burden of the FBI email investigation.

Once that goal was achieved, they moved on to Clinton’s 2016 challenger. By the time the 2016 GOP convention drew near, everyone accepted that challenger would be Donald Trump.

As such the FBI “small group” began monitoring candidate Donald Trump in June/July 2016 as part of a plan toward the benefit of candidate Hillary Clinton.

However, the FBI and DOJ officials also needed an actual basis, a legal justification for their behavior and the time they were spending. The plan to justify that behavior was to create an official counterintelligence operation.

To get the counterintelligence operation going, they needed a reasonable basis for creating one. That basis was the formative seeds of claims of Russian connections to the Trump campaign.

To establish the basis the Russian elements needed for the operation; the DNC and Clinton campaign has earlier paid Fusion GPS (April ’16) to contract Christopher Steele to write a dossier that would form the legal grounding for the counterintelligence operation.

The wife of Glenn Simpson (Fusion GPS), Mary B. Jacoby, with years of Russia-angled reporting –including Donald Trump– visits the White House on April 19th 2016.

Fusion GPS (Mary B. Jacoby, and Glenn Simpson) hired DOJ Deputy Attorney Bruce Ohr’s wife, Nellie Ohr, who was well versed in counterintelligence operations, CIA operations, and using CIA tradecraft to create illusions.

This is just ugly. Please read the entire article to learn the rest of the story. It is a chilling example of using the power of government for political purposes. Thank God it didn’t work.

At Least Congress Is Paying Attention

Posted on by

The case of Hillary Clinton’s emails is a disgrace to our justice system. A young sailor’s life was ruined because he took a picture of his workplace on his cell phone–he did jail time and is on probation. Hillary Clinton had classified information on an unsecured server and subsequently destroyed information that was under subpoena and was charged with nothing. Something is dreadfully off balance here.

The Hill is reporting tonight on Congressional investigations into this injustice.

The article reports:

The investigators also confirmed that the FBI began drafting a statement exonerating Clinton of any crimes while evidence responsive to subpoenas was still outstanding and before agents had interviewed more than a dozen key witnesses.

Those witnesses included Clinton and the computer firm employee who permanently erased her email archives just days after the emails were subpoenaed by Congress, the investigators said.

Lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee who attended a Dec. 21 closed-door briefing by FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe say the bureau official confirmed that the investigation and charging decisions were controlled by a small group in Washington headquarters rather the normal process of allowing field offices to investigate possible criminality in their localities. The Clinton email server in question was based in New York.

In normal FBI cases, field offices where crimes are believed to have been committed investigate the evidence and then recommend to bureau hierarchy whether to pursue charges with prosecutors. In this case, the bureau hierarchy controlled both the investigation and the charging decision from Washington, a scenario known in FBI parlance as a “special,” the lawmakers said.

This part of the story should make General Michael Flynn furious:

The FBI also confirmed that a key witness, a computer technician who deleted Clinton emails from her server in March 2015 after a congressional subpoena had been issued for them, originally lied to the FBI during his interviews, memos show. The witness’s name was redacted from documents released by the FBI but he was identified as an employee of a computer firm that helped maintained Clinton’s email server.

His admission of false statements came one day after the Comey statement was already being drafted, investigators told The Hill.

The computer employee originally told the FBI in a February 2016 interview that he did not recall making any deletions from Clinton’s server in March 2015, FBI records show.

But then on May 3, 2016, the same employee in a subsequent FBI interview told agents he had an “oh shit moment” and in late March 2015 deleted Clinton’s email archive from the server, according to FBI documents reviewed by The Hill.

Lying to the FBI is a federal felony, a crime that former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn recently pleaded guilty to. But the FBI decided not to pursue criminal charges against the witness, and instead gave the technician an immunity deal so he could correct his story, congressional investigators said.

The article concludes:

The longtime Senate chairman went to the Senate floor before the holidays to raise another concern: the FBI did not pursue criminal charges when Clinton’s email archives were permanently deleted from her private server days after a subpoena for them was issued by a congressional committee investigating the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi.

The deletion occurred on the same day Clinton’s former chief of staff and her lawyer had a call with the computer firm that handled the erasure using an anti-recovery software called BleachBit, Grassley said.

“You have a conference call with Secretary Clinton’s attorneys on March 31, 2015, and on that very same day her emails are deleted by someone who was on that conference call using special BleachBit software,” Grassley said. “The emails were State Department records under subpoena by Congress.

“What did the FBI do to investigate this apparent obstruction?” Grassley asked. “According to affidavits filed in federal court — absolutely nothing. The FBI focused only on the handling of classified information.”

Can you imagine any ordinary citizen destroying evidence and not being charged? I am not a person who wants to see Hillary Clinton in jail, but I think it’s time to investigate the Clinton Foundation and deal with the mishandling of classified information she engaged in while Secretary of State. Breaking the law needs to have consequences.

Some Policies Are Simply A Bad Idea

Posted on by

Baltimore, Maryland, has had a rough year. After riots followed the death of Freddie Gray in April 2015, the Black Lives Matter movement insisted that the police be withdrawn from predominately black neighborhoods. It turns out that was not the solution. Yesterday Breitbart reported on the results.

The article reports:

Since the riots, police morale has collapsed, and city officials began planning a lighter police footprint in response to complaints of residents and protest leaders.

But now, black leaders are blaming cops for the spiraling murder rate, saying that the police pullback has put them in danger.

The Rev. Kinji Scott, a Baltimore activist, is blaming city hall for leaving the neighborhoods unprotected.

“We wanted the police there,” Scott insisted. “We wanted them engaged in the community. We didn’t want them beating the hell out of us, we didn’t want that.”

Scott and others are now pressuring the city to bring police back in as a deterrent to the soaring crime rate.

Despite the loud proclamations from BLM activists that the police are the problem, Scott and his fellow activists are now claiming that they never wanted police to go away.

This is an example of trying to have it both ways. During the protests in Baltimore, protestors wore t-shirts saying, “Disarm the police.” The police were a convenient scapegoat to blame for the problems in black neighborhoods. People much wiser than I have stated that one of the first things than can be done to reduce the crime rates in black neighborhoods is to bring fathers back into families. Children of all races who are raised in families with their two biological parents are much less likely to get involved in gangs and illegal activity. We need to fix the family and then improve the education in black neighborhoods. That is a goal all of us can work toward.

The article concludes:

The reverend’s claims also seem to fly in the face of a list of 19 demands issued by protesters in 2015, one of which demanded that police be barred from entering certain buildings or parts of neighborhoods they had designated as “safe” from police. Clearly, the protesters wanted police removed from Baltimore’s neighborhoods. But now that they’ve gotten their wish, community leaders have suddenly realized what a bad idea such a pullback is.

The police are a force for good. There are occasional exceptions, but they are rare. Generally speaking, where there is a police presence, there is less crime. The recent events in Baltimore illustrate that.

Some Good News In The Field Of Medicine

Posted on by

CBS News New York is reporting today that scientists may have accidentally stumbled upon a drug that will help treat people with Alzheimer’s disease. The scientists were working with a drug they hoped could be used to treat diabetes.

The article reports:

According to a press release from researchers at Lancaster University, a new drug being tested for diabetes patients was found to have “significantly reversed memory loss” in test subjects and is now being examined as possible treatment for neurodegenerative disorders.

The medication, known as a triple receptor drug — or “triple agonist” — reportedly works in multiple ways to protect the brain against degeneration and promote growth. Researchers say that a study of mice being given the drug found that the animals had an increased ability to learn and retain memories.

“These very promising outcomes demonstrate the efficacy of these novel multiple receptor drugs that originally were developed to treat type 2 diabetes,” Professor Christian Holscher said in the release.

The scientists added that the mice showed a decrease in chronic inflammation and amyloid plaques in the brain, which have been linked to the development of Alzheimer’s in people.

The article further explains that scientists have found a link between some of the symptoms of diabetes and Alzheimer’s–insulin desensitisation has been observed both in people suffering from Alzheimer’s and people suffering from diabetes.

I wonder if in the future we are going to find out that the amount of sugar in the average American diet is causing some of the health problems that were rare in previous generations.

How Is This Not A Violation Of The Second Amendment?

Posted on by

The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution states:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Keep in mind when reading that amendment that the Bill of Rights, which includes the Second Amendment, was added to the Constitution to further insure the rights of citizens–not the rights of the government. This Amendment is there to insure the rights of the people to possess arms.The Revolutionary War battles of Lexington and Concord occurred because the British, under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, were ordered to capture and destroy military supplies that were reportedly stored by the Massachusetts militia at Concord. From our beginnings as a nation, Americans have wanted to protect their right to bear arms.

California seems to have forgotten America‘s history and the U.S. Constitution. Breitbart posted an article today about new regulations going into effect in California starting today.

The article reports:

Currently, law-abiding Californians must buy their ammunition from a licensed in-state ammunition dealer. This means that Californians who buy ammunition online must have that ammo shipped to a licensed in-state dealer and pay that dealer a fee when picking up the ammo.

These controls immediately lessen the supply of ammunition, thereby driving up the price for those who demand it. Also, these controls set the stage for phase two of ammunition control, which will consist of requiring a point-of-sale background check for ammunition purchases starting January 1, 2019. The point-of-sale background check will also carry a processing fee, which will drive the price of ammunition even higher.

These controls are in addition to the requirement that law-abiding Californians obtain a firearm safety certificate from the state before buying a firearm, endure a ten-day waiting period for gun purchases, pass a universal background check, register all firearms with the state, and live under the shadow of gun confiscation laws. There is an “assault weapons” ban, a ban on campus carry, and a new law against K-12 teachers being armed to shoot back if under attack at school.

California also has a “good cause” requirement for concealed carry, which allows bureaucrats within the issuing system to strictly control the number of permits given to law-abiding citizens. This single gun control has resulted in limiting the number of permits issued in Los Angeles County to 197; Los Angles County has a population of 10.2 million, yet only 197 concealed carry permits have been issued to the law-abiding citizens residing there.

That looks like infringement to me! Unfortunately the result of these laws will be more guns in the hands of those who do not follow the law and fewer guns in the hands of those who do follow the law. That is not the way to lower the crime rate.