Tag: Politics

Bribe Not Needed

Budgets, Politics

So The Donald wants to give us $5,000 after the November midterm elections:

“If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, because of our… tremendous economic success, like in history we’ve never had anything like what’s happening, but because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000,” Trump said on night one of the convention, comparing the move to “a successful company” that does a “cash distribution to its shareholders.”

I know what I’d do if I were a shareholder in a company drowning in debt and unfulfilled obligations and the CEO stated that he wanted to pay a cash dividend because of a recent short-term upturn in sales.  I’d tell him to do something better with the company’s money, like retire some of the debt the company has been incurring under his stewardship — firstly, from 2015 to 2019, and likewise from 2025 until today.

Failing that I have a question:  how, exactly, is he going to fund this so-called “dividend”?

Look, it’s all very well to dress up this little bit of voter bribery in corporate-speak, but the fact remains that it’s essentially a political action, and therefore it’s going to be paid by the Treasury.

Memo to the President:  what you really need to do, Mr. President, if you want to offer us a bribe, is not offer us cash — cash which, by the way, we’ll have to pay taxes on — but instead promise us to pass a permanent cut in the tax rates (all brackets) after the mid-terms.  Drop the top rate (37%) to 25%, and by similar percentages all the way down the line.  (The DSA Communists want to increase our taxes; make the Republican point of difference to lower taxes.  See which one works better come election time.)

If you thought the economy was doing well before, see what happens after that.

And when the tax revenues increase hugely as a result — and they will, of course —  use that growth in income to pay down the debt, buy back T-bills from foreign investors (like China), or use at least some of it to fund the terminations of federal employees.  (I know you’ve been doing okay so far in terms of the latter activity, but you need to do better.  Try to get the non-Defense federal workforce to fall to the equivalent levels of, say, the Coolidge Administration.)

On that topic, feel free to get rid of the busybody government departments — you know, the ones that have crippled industry and innovation by adding more and more federal regulations.  (And on that topic:  FFS, why are the Dept of Education and ATF still in existence?)

Anyway, to return to the main point:

Don’t give us a cheap “dividend” that is only valuable until it’s spent;  give us lasting relief through lower taxes.

We’ve been doing our bit to help you by eliminating ur-Democrats and RINOs like that Cornyn weasel in the Republican primaries.  When Ken Paxton gets to D.C., he’s going to be on your side, I promise you.  He’s not the best we Texans might have done, by the way, but he sure as hell is going to be a better MAGA Senator than Cornyn.  And he sure as hell will be a “yes” vote on lower tax rates when that legislation come up for a vote in the Senate.

We’ll do our best in November to get you the Congressmen and Senators that you’ll need in 2027 and onwards;  do your best to lower taxes and get government off our backs.

That would be a real dividend for us.

Colorado: California 2.0

Elections, Immigration

When all those Californians fled to Colorado a decade or two ago, several things happened soon thereafter:

  • more anti-gun laws
  • higher taxes
  • woke prosecutions (actually, non-prosecutions)
  • more industry-choking regulations
  • …to name but some (I’m sure Stephen Green could come up with a lot more).

And now, still more California:

Colorado regulatory burden, affordability drives business exodus

98 large businesses have left Colorado since 2019, taking nearly 14,000 jobs with them. These aren’t failed companies or departures caused by mergers and acquisitions, but companies relocating operations to other states, with Texas, Florida, Utah and Tennessee among the biggest beneficiaries of the Colorado exodus.

I just hope that there aren’t too many California-thinking people among those 14,000 jobs.

Amidst my glee about reports like the above, here’s my problem with this trend.

The earlier ex-California movement to states like Texas and Florida contained, I believe, many people who saw what California had become and decided they didn’t want any more of that — but more importantly, saw that there was no profit in re-creating California-style business and social environments in their adopted states.

I’m not so sure that this is true, anymore.

And I still think that newcomers to a state should be barred from voting in state- and local elections for five years (federal elections, of course, are exempt) until they’ve properly assimilated into their new home state’s culture.

In the meantime, Colorado can go and suck eggs — unless they can’t, because there’s a regulation against sucking raw eggs (for health reasons).

Captain Obvious Pays A Visit

Marxists

Apparently, there is a strange antipathy to Marxism in one particular part of the country.  And some Democrat bint has just found that out:

Florida Democrat Party Chair Nikki Fried admitted that socialism is not selling as easily in Florida — home to many people who escaped communist or socialist regimes.

“You know, we have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people that call Florida home, that left communists and socialists and authoritarian regimes to find a better way of life here in the state of Florida,” Fried said.

So the people who actually had to live under Communism don’t want to repeat the exercise in their adopted country… who knew?

Cutting Fat & Fraud

Budgets

Over among the Big Brains at American Thinker, Rhys Read offers these ideas for cutting back government spending and getting our spending deficit under control:

First, eliminate the fraud in the system, which is estimated at between $200 billion and $500 billion per year.

Second, end the subsidies and government control regimes implemented to “combat climate change.”   Total spending on these programs total about $300 billion per year.

Third, moving to individual health accounts would reduce much of the middle-man expenses and regulatory expenses imbedded in the Affordable Care Act.  Eliminating these unnecessary bureaucratic expense and bloated health care costs would save about $300 billion per year.

Then we need to tackle the big expense: the cost of the bloated bureaucracy.  A one-third reduction in staffing plus a one-third reduction in average total compensation would save about $600 billion per year.

As for getting additional moolah into the system:

I propose increasing the Medicare tax from 1.45 percent to 2 percent and the Social Security tax from 6.2 percent to 6.5 percent. In addition, I propose tripling the FICA maximum, currently at $184,750, with a new 7.5-percent crediting rate to preserve the defined benefit nature of the payouts. Implementing these increases would generate about $300 billion per year.

And so on.  As the man once said (adjusted for inflation):  a (hundred) billion here, a (hundred) billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about serious money.

How much of this has any chance of ever happening?

Yeah, right.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

From The Divine Sarah:

“I am slowly coming to the conclusion that Heinlein was right during WWII to only read the papers two weeks late, when it was pointless to get angry about old news.”

Me, too.  I think that this has been at the heart of my current blogging malaise, of thinking that my writing is pointless and silly, not to mention (occasionally) harsh and anarchic.  Like Sarah, I find myself reading headlines and thinking, “Ah, the hell with it” — hence the sometime-appearance on these pages of a “news summary” including a headline and at best a short,  pissy  pithy comment.

Thus, I read about the election/voting shenanigans in California, wherein non-Democrat mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt was doing pretty well in the polls, until an (unexpected!) flood of mail-in ballots found their way into the counting-houses which resulted in (surprise!) the promotion of the third-place (Commie) candidate into the second place — which, in the “top two” election system in California, means that the runoff election will be between Thing 1 and Thing 2, both Commies and either quite likely to hasten the Golden Shower State’s steady progress into the abyss.

And I don’t actually care, and refuse to get all worked up about it.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for a little trip to the range.

No Authority

Immigration, Legal Stuff

I’m getting really sick of the judiciary usurping the Constitutional power of the POTUS.  Here’s the latest little tick on the hide of our republic:

A federal judge, appointed by former President Barack Obama, has blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from halting legal immigration and asylum applications from nearly 40 countries deemed “high-risk” by officials.

“Each of the Challenged Policies — the Global Asylum Hold Policy, the Benefits Hold Policy, the Comprehensive Re-Review Policy, and the Country-Specific Factors Policy — are declared unlawful and are hereby VACATED and SET ASIDE,” McConnell wrote in his ruling.

See, I thought that we Americans — and most especially the President — could absolutely decide who and who not to allow into the country.

Needless to say, the aforementioned judge is not only an Obama pustule, but also resident in Rhode Island (as if we needed any more proof of his Leftism).

I’m curious as to what grounds this creep used to classify all those policies as “illegal” — I’m hoping that one of my Powdered Wig Readers will be sufficiently interested to cast an eye on the actual ruling and decipher it for us.

Also just out of curiosity:  how many federal judges has Trump appointed in the past eighteen months?  Because that seems to be the only (legal) way we can overwhelm assholes like this from subverting the Executive.

Note that I’m not advocating this:

… although some might.