by Michael Swartz: As conservatives are painfully aware, the GOP congressional majority has thoroughly botched its top agenda item of repealing liar-nObamaCare. The horrendous law has just enough popular giveaways to leave “moderate” Republicans in both chambers short on backbone and fearful of a ballot-box backlash next year. But an even longer-standing maxim for the Grand Old Party is that of reducing taxes in the belief that lower tax rates will bring more economic activity and prosperity while actually increasing the government’s take. It worked for Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s and, to a lesser extent, for George W. Bush a decade and a half ago. (Alas, government also increased its spending of this newfound revenue so quickly that deficits increased, but that’s a story for another time.) Just like favoring entitlement spending that’s “free” money to the recipient, it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t think a little more in their pocket is a good thing — so tax cuts are always an easy sell. Democrats, however, relish the role of making people jealous over who else gets the money.
Donald Trump won his presidency by, among other things, promising to cut taxes and simplify the tax code. But given the record of this Congress, he also must have felt a booster shot at the bully pulpit was needed, and the Heritage Foundation was happy to lend him its platform.
“At the heart of our plans is a tax cut for everyday working Americans,” said the president. And if his “once-in-a-generation opportunity to revitalize the economy” through tax cuts is realized in full, Trump vowed, “We will lift our people from welfare to work, from dependence to independence, and from poverty to total beautiful prosperity.”
That all sounds great, but a lot of sausage must first be made, and it’s not going to be a pretty process. There’s no doubt that Democrats who have already ratcheted up their age-old mantra of “tax cuts for the rich” aren’t going to hand Trump a victory, so the ball will once again be squarely in the court of a handful of Senate Republicans least likely to get with the program.
The Senate did manage to pass a budget Thursday night in the first step toward tax reform. “Tonight, we completed the first step toward replacing our broken tax code,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said. “We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to replace a failing tax code that holds Americans back with one that actually works for them.”
As far as policy goes, on the one side, we already hear shouts from the sidelines about putting more emphasis on the corporate tax cuts or responding to the Democrats’ tired mantra by conceding that they may be right: “Neither the economic nor the moral arguments (for cutting the top tax rates) are compelling,” argues Ramesh Ponnuru in National Review. Unfortunately, people don’t react as well at the voting booth to corporate tax cuts unless they’re an ancillary benefit to their own pocketbooks — nor do they really care that the more well-off get more money back because they put more money into the system. (Second only to the race card in the Democrats’ hierarchy is the class envy card.)
And simplifying the system will be a mean feat as well, given that so many special interests have carved out their own goodies from the fatted calf that is the American taxpayer. Case in point: Realtors are whining that an enhanced standard deduction, a major feature of the initial Trump plan, will obviate the need for people to deduct their mortgage interest and thus “nullify the incentive” to buy a house. As many middle-class taxpayers can likely attest, there have been times where having this deduction helped lower the bill or increase the refund, but raising the standard deduction to nearly double its current level would have done a lot more good. Multiply that by the overt or covert persuasion of a thousand other businesses — for example, do you think H&R Block is interested in an easier tax system? — and you can see why this will be a struggle perhaps even more so than the failed repeal of liar-nObamaCare.
Yet the stakes are high, and not just politically, as The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman writes. “American workers are still living in an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other economy, rather than a booming economy. They need a policy change in Washington that emphasizes expanding opportunity over wealth redistribution.” With $3 trillion in assets waiting to be brought back to our shores — another point Trump made in his Heritage speech — the American economy would get a powerful shot in the arm. And if better days arrive prior to the 2018 election, those dire predictions of a Republican electoral bloodbath may be about as useful as selling short in this bull market.
But taxation’s “power to destroy” is what Washington insiders live for — which is why draining the swamp will help the rest of us keep more of what we earn.
~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/51964
As bad as Chuck clown-Schumer, Nancy Pulosi and Bernie Sanders, are, they would hardly make the list of the top 100 villains running around loose these days.
Take the U.N. Please. Even if their major mission in life wasn’t to destroy America’s sovereignty and to promote its own globalist agenda, they would be near the top of the list because for decades the so-called peace-keeping forces of the U.N., you know the guys in the blue helmets, have been raping children in Africa and Haiti and operating the largest sex-slave ring in the world.
The U.N. uses a dove as its symbol; the creeps should use a vulture.
● No list of villains would be complete without liar-Hillary Clinton. It’s bad enough that she ran for president on a platform that consisted almost entirely of her reminding voters that she was a female. Worse yet is that she has pretended to be the champion of women in spite of the fact that, as Tucker Carlson has labeled her, she has acted as the Enabler-in-Chief.
After all, she has spent the last several decades providing cover for the likes of liar-Bill Clinton, Anthony Wiener and Harvey Weinstein, three little pigs who, between them, have committed just about every sexual offense, except for bestiality, and even that might be explained by the fact that sheep can’t testify.
Moreover, although Mrs. liar-Clinton has insisted that, along with Russia, Macedonia, Wikileaks, James Comey and sunspots, misogyny played a crucial role in her defeat, she has displayed her own indifference to the plight of women by not only accepting bribes from Saudi Arabia, but by never uttering a word of condemnation regarding the Islamic subjugation of women.
● No list of villains would be complete with those parents who, as Stephen Hanover pointed out in a recent email, nearly yank the arms off their two and three-year-old boys and curse them out in public for the unforgivable crime of behaving like, well, two and three-year-old boys.
Whenever I witness the brutality committed in a department store or a supermarket, I always find myself wondering if I am seeing the making of a future sociopathic killer or just a run-of-the-mill schoolyard bully.
● I would love to know how many Democrats have come down with a low-grade fever or a case of the vapors over the decline and fall of Harvey Weinstein. How they must wish that he had been a Republican or had at least kept a lower profile so that we wouldn’t all be seeing pictures of him being embraced by the liar-Clintons, Chuck clown-Schumer and the liar-nObamas.
However, as one of my subscribers, who prefers to be identified as Citizen X, has pointed out, what did the women who went to Weinstein’s hotel room think was likely to take place? Business meetings take place in offices; money business takes place in hotel rooms.
The same could be said about all the actresses who were brutalized by Bill Cosby. Didn’t they even wonder why their agents weren’t invited?
Or, for that matter, what did the young woman who showed up in Mike Tyson’s hotel room at midnight expect? That they would spend the wee hours discussing the philosophical nuances of Schopenhauer?
Just for the record, one of the major motivations for guys to become movie producers, directors and actors, in the first place is because of the endless stream of young, attractive women who make themselves available to them. Of course, as with most generalizations, that’s not true of all of them. But that’s because a certain percentage are homosexuals.
● Something I’m at a loss to explain are those things that go viral on the internet and always arrive in my in-box as over-hyped as most movies. For instance, the other day a photoshopped picture of RINO-John McCain, Barack liar-nObama and Chuck clown-Schumer, showed up with the three of them looking like the Three Stooges.
At best, I would have said it was cute or slightly amusing. But whoever sent it out labeled it PRICELESS!!! Isn’t it high time that people stopped claiming that some photo is the best one ever taken and that a run-of-the-mill cartoon was the funniest of all time?
● Not only is the so-called Iran nuclear deal not a treaty -- which it isn’t simply because Barack liar-nObama knew that he could never even have convinced the Democrats in the Senate to pass it -- but as Bob Altom recently pointed out, Iran never signed the damn thing. The mullahs were simply overjoyed to accept the $1.5 billion bribe liar-nObama gave them in exchange for having their photos taken while sitting at the table with hanoi-John Kerry.
When President Trump referred to it as the worst deal in American history, he was, for once, guilty of understatement. It was the worst deal in world history.
● In case you ever find yourself wondering why cities run by liberal mayors always appear to be tottering on the edge of bankruptcy, wonder no longer.
It was recently reported that Mayor Bill de Blasio paid out $2 billion in overtime to city employees. It explains why one in four of those employees is taking home in excess of $100,000-a-year. When you discover that, on occasion, overtime can run as high as $135-an-hour, you have to wonder why three out of four city employees aren’t pulling down those six-figure salaries.
● For decades, radio talk show host Dennis Prager has been asking people who they would rescue if the choice came down to a stranger or their dog. Because he is very religious, as he incessantly reminds his listening audience, he always faults those who say they would rescue their dog and let the stranger drown. Because man is made in the image of God, Prager insists we should let our dogs die. To which I say: Prager is a dodo.
He’s certainly free to rescue whomever he likes, but, for one thing, the set-up is fraudulent. What if the stranger were Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or Castro, all presumably made in God's image? Surely, the moral imperative would be to make certain we drown them if the opportunity presented itself.
But what if the stranger weren’t a famous barbarian? What if he merely had a shaved head and was covered in tattoos indicating a symbiotic relationship with Satan or the Ku Klux Klan? Am I still expected to save him and let Whiskers or Duke or Angel drown?
Also, unless one has his head stuck so far up his behind he could remove his own appendix with his teeth, what about the responsibility a person accepts when he takes a puppy into his home and his heart? Just because the bundle of joy has a tail and four legs, is the relationship really all that different from adopting a baby?
When all is said and done, I’ll let Prager rescue Harvey Weinstein. I’ll rescue Harvey Weinstein’s dog.
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