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A “Woke” Walmart, Part III

I got a reply from “cushelp.com” at Walmart regarding my comment on the company’s new gun policies.  The company’s online respondent indicated that the comment will go up the chain of command, and included a link of the newsletter/memo from President and CEO, John McMillon, to the employees (see the first edition of “A ‘Woke’ Walmart” for the link).  This only further drew my ire.  After reading McMillon’s missive to employees, I pounded a reply.  Here is my rebuttal:

Thanks so much for your timely reply to my email which contained a link to a company circular from Doug McMillon, President and CEO, to associates about the new policy.  Apparently somebody read my detailed response to your new policy on guns and ammunition.  Again, thanks for taking the time to read it. However, rather than allay my concerns, they have been heightened.

McMIllon’s announcement to associates reads like a heated reaction to an issue-of-the-moment.  Indeed, it goes further.  It adopts wholesale the line of argument of partisan gun control activists such as the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, the Brady Campaign, etc., etc.  All in all, Walmart is gradually aligning itself with the center/left.  McMillon is confirming John O’Sullivan’s famous aphorism: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”

Let me count the ways.  Surprisingly, I am not bothered so much by the company’s decision not to allow open carry in the stores.  The problem lies with joining well-publicized nationwide gun-control crusades, emblematic in the demand that “the status quo is unacceptable”.  It’s part of the usual rhetoric coming from the usual hive of gun-control groups and the Democratic Party.  Parts of the memorandum could just as easily come out of Chuck Schumer’s office (D, NY).

I’d like to remind Walmart that the Second Amendment is part of the “status quo”.  The Supreme Court defined the ownership of firearms to be an individual right, not a collective one.  It’s presence in the Constitution is not for hunting or protection from MS-13. The Amendment is an avatar for citizen control of their government.  A lesson in the English Civil War would work wonders in the corporate boardroom at Walmart.

So, what parts of the “status quo” is to be subjected to change?  Well, it’s inanimate things like guns and ammo that are to be targeted (no pun intended) for punishment.  The unstated premise is that the availability of these things constitutes a danger to the public.  You tout the the company’s previous decision not to sell “military-style rifles”.  The policy is nonsense as is the call to join a debate on resurrecting the Assault Weapon Ban.  Calling for a debate are weasel words for establishing one (Ban).  The debate on the Ban has been over for quite some time: the thing didn’t work, was allowed to lapse, and the Democrats refused to bring it back when they had the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress.

Further, the “military-style” nomenclature is silliness on stilts.  It’s all about a gun’s cosmetic qualities.  These guns are no more dangerous than any semi-automatic gun.  By the way, guns are by their nature “dangerous” … as are crossbows.  If they weren’t, they’d be no good for hunting.  The AR platform and its knock-offs are associated with the miscreants of mass shootings because they are broadly popular with the gun-buying consumer base in the general public.  They are the most highly demanded product in a gun manufacturer’s inventory.  Hopefully, you’re not suggesting that all these buyers are crazed lunatics.  If semi-auto shotguns with more compact barrels were to be all the rage in the murderous-loser class, would a call for a ban on semi-auto shotguns be next?  Strange legal principle: find out what’s popular with lunatics and prohibit it.

The ludicrous nature of the Ban can be seen in the bumbling attempts to codify the concept into law.  Is it the pistol grip?  Is it the semi-auto nature of the thing?  Is it the magazine capacity of over 4 rounds?  Is it because it looks like something in a John Wick movie?  Going from state to state examining their bans is an exercise in chaos theory.  Usually the laws are written by people with the least knowledge about firearms.  Watching them at a press conference is a real hoot.  The big problem with the ban stems from the quixotic desire to proscribe a product for its cosmetic qualities. That’s it!

Then Walmart stacks its current silliness with more silliness on the ammo front.  No handgun and .223 ammo.  What’s the logic behind that?  Clearly, the company associates those cartridges with mayhem.  Why else put them on the no-go list?  What’s next, a ban on 12 gauge?  Any cartridge’s survival on Walmart’s shelves hangs by the thread of a killer’s choices.

Astoundingly, McMillon applauds the likely decline in the company’s market share in ammo.  Now that’s a first: a company defining success as a decline in market share.  Sears and JCPenney should be popping champagne corks instead of wringing their hands.  It seems like the national Walmart is taking its cues from California Walmart.  California is a mess and hardly an example to be imitated.  I fled the state as a third generation native Californian to Montana. The state is no place to raise kids.  Are the Walmarts in Montana soon to be looking like the ones in that lefty loony bin?

As always in these kinds of circulars, there are some palatable suggestions.  Shoring up FixNICS and competently-written red flag laws are things to consider.  But the gun and ammo ideas are just warmed over goofiness in Democratic Party bullet points.  None of the ideas have a scintilla of relevance to curbing these mass shootings. Ditto for the much-vaunted “universal background checks”.  Try to enforce that idea when family heirlooms are passed down from parent to child.  The dribble is trotted out each time for the sole purpose of hammering more traditional and conservative circles in our population.

I suspect a general leftward orientation in corporate boardrooms.  Others have noticed it as well.  Walmart has not been inoculated.  I attribute the phenomena to an increasing isolation in corporate governance from the common people, particularly in flyover country.  Socio-economically, the “suits” identify with each other and the urban values of their location.  Much has been written about this.  Now these collectivist values appear to be seeping into Walmart.  O’Sullivan might be proven right once again.

For your information, I shifted my recent tire purchase from Walmart to Discount Tire.  In fact, I used your cheaper price to get a price match from them.  You are to be thanked for providing the price leverage.  But to be honest, I would have agreed to a higher price to avoid doing business with a company who appears to be lurching left.  I will be doing the same with our other consumer purchases.  Don’t look for my car in your parking lot.

……………………………………

Once again, the online receptionist indicated that my response will go up the chain of command.  I suspect the reply is boilerplate.

Roger Graf

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A “Woke” Walmart

Currently, I’m in a spat with Walmart.  No, my complaint isn’t about Walmart as an unabashed exploiter of the working poor, the complaint common among illiterate social justice warriors.  Au contraire, I’m referring to Walmart’s gradual alignment with the cultural left.  Surprise, surprise.

What drew back the curtain was the company’s new policy on guns and ammunition.  An emotive reaction to a horrible incident like the one at the El Paso Walmart is understandable, but don’t mistake “understandable” with “reasonable”.  For many reasons, much in Walmart’s new stance on guns is absurd.  More about this later.

Walmart’s approach is encapsulated in this memo to employees shortly after the El Paso shooting.  It can be found here: https://corporate.walmart.com/…/mcmillon-to-associates-our-….

John McMillon, President and CEO, of Walmart.

A Wikipedia search of the memo’s author, John McMillon, President and CEO, uncovered more.  Guns and religion are two of the most salient issues in the culture war.  And McMillon weighed into both.  In 2015, McMillon proclaimed that a “religious freedom” bill before Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson “threatens to undermine the spirit of inclusion present throughout the state of Arkansas and does not reflect the values we proudly uphold”.  Cut through the gobbledygook and we see that Walmart has joined the LGBTQ crusade to punish religious dissenters for disagreeing with them.  McMillon sounds like Pelosi.  Religious freedom laws have become a necessity as government agencies and commissions under the sway of the powerful LGBTQ lobby have targeted private individuals for taking the Bible seriously.  Talk to Jack Philips, or take a look at the Houston mayor’s attempt to subpoena pastors’ sermons, or governments’ efforts to force religious organizations to facilitate abortion.

Jack Philips of Masterpiece Cakeshop and the target of legal action by Colorado’s Human Rights Commission. Their actions against Philips were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

But now we have the big cheese at Walmart declaring “inclusion” trumps (no pun intended) “religious freedom”.

A scan of the company’s website will find it littered with the eco-lobby’s hobby-horses.  I suspect that the “suits” in charge at Walmart chafe at those viral pics of unsightly-dressed shoppers.  They want to upscale the company’s image by showing that they too are like the swank Malibu types with fashionable views to go along with a fashionable look.

A page from the “Global Responsibility” link on walmart.com.

McMillon’s personal history, though, presents a conundrum.  He’s a born-again Christian.  He’s also a lifer Walmart employee.  On the religious angle, he’s confused in trying to mesh his haute couture views with Jesus of Nazareth.  As an employee, he’s been in management for at least 20 years, and much of that in corporate management.  Somewhere along the line he has absorbed many of the values of a university’s Sociology faculty.  It’s a familiar development in the backgrounds of many corporate execs.

Wealthy people in today’s world seem to be attracted to wokeness like a moth to light.

RogerG

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Stalking Horses

“Approaching the fowl with stalking-horse”, an 1875 illustration. (en.wikipedia.org)

Stalking horse: noun; a false pretext concealing someone’s real intentions. (Oxford Dictionary)

In the context of the verbal brawl that occurs in today’s America, the eagerness for gun control and large-scale immigration is a stalking horse for deeper and mostly urban cultural trends.  The popularity of gun control takes place in the urban womb of government services.  Think of it as mass infantilization.  Nearly unrestrained immigration is fashionable in districts whose knowledge of immigrants is limited to the domestic help of the cheap nanny, housekeeper, and landscaper.  Do you really think that they ever venture into the blighted neighborhoods that the hired help retreats into after work?  Ignorance of guns and the actual lives of immigrants plagues our cultural “betters” in our cities and their academic playgrounds, and ironically informs (“informs”, maybe a bad choice of words) their political enthusiasms.

In May of 2019, Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker (D, NJ) called for national gun registration.
In August, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris expressed the willingness to send cops to people’s homes to confiscate banned firearms. (Washington Examiner)

What brought this personal reflection to mind was Michael Lind’s piece in American Affairs, “Classless Utopia versus Class Compromise” (Summer 2018, Vol. II, Number 2).

The article is about the large scale social, economic, and political trends mostly affecting native blue collar workers.  In it, Lind makes the point that nearly unfettered immigration has led to the evisceration of native low-skilled and blue collar workers, no matter their ethnic or racial backgrounds.  He writes, “… globalization, operating mainly through corporate-orchestrated labor arbitrage—in the form of offshoring jobs to foreign workers or importing immigrants to compete with native workers—weakened the bargaining power of immobile native workers in the developed democracies.”  Do you think that the loss of bargaining power for the native lower-skilled worker crossed the minds of upper-middle-to-upper-class urbanites?  For them, it’s simply a matter of compassion and nannies.

Victorina Morales, undocumented worker at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J.

Also, I must admit that it could be something more sinister.  For everyone else outside their pampered social circles, though, massive immigration had a devastating effect.

Think of it this way: open borders is a stalking horse for gutting the power and influence of the hoi polloi, knowingly or unknowingly.  Regarding the stalking horse of gun control, it’s a matter of everyone being forced to adopt an urban lifestyle with its norms, expectations, and requisite politically correct views, no matter its unfitness for folks outside the suburban/urban bubbles.

Stalking horses are stalking about these days.

RogerG

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Why the Dissatisfaction?

Church in Boston, Massachusetts @mattbannister via Twenty20

I’m constantly reminded of the general wrong-track numbers in opinion polls even when economic conditions have been improving.  Why does there seem to be a nagging sense that things aren’t going well?  Two books make a mighty attempt at an answer: “Dignity” by Chris Arnade (a self-described socialist) and “Alienated America” by Tim Carney (commentary editor of the Washington Examiner).  Both books elucidate the deep social ills that accompanied the absolute deterioration of civil society in areas frequently referred to as “left behind”.  The problem is far, far more than economic.  The accompanying review of the books presents the case.

     

Why the rise of Trump and a resuscitated loony left with a home in the Democratic Party?  I’ve heard some Trump supporters call for a government takeover of health care, adopting the nonsense language of turning an economic good or service, governed by scarcity, into a “right”.  The loony left is the loony left, always has been, and has an off-the-shelf answer for all that plagues us: big, centralized government; it’s the Progressive way.  The two elements have a nexus.

The roots of the current fascination with big, omnipresent government – or looking for saviors in large personalities on the public stage – may be found in the decline of something vital for personal well-being according to Arnade and Carney.  Some call it civil society.  Others, like Carney, refer to “social capital”.  Both recognize the critical role of church, an institution beleaguered by the rising tide of secularization, another by-product of Progressivism.  In so doing, the props of connection and support in the vast array of personal social networks have collapsed, leaving behind alienated folks in the vast stretches of the poorer sections of flyover country and young people facing declining opportunities.  In our time, the default answer is a savior (Trump, Bernie, the nitwit Squad), vapid sloganeering (“Make America Great Again”, “Structural Racism”, “Make the rich pay their fair share”, “Equal [fill in the blank]”, “There are no illegal immigrants”, and so on), and the elevation of government as a super daddy and mommy.  Church and family are replaced by commissars.

I support many of Trump’s initiatives, but he, like Bernie and the nitwit Squad, come to think of it, might be a sign of the times.

RogerG

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California Taxes and Gas Prices, Part II

Substitute Gavin Newsom for Brown. Gavin’s got more hair, and its gelled, but the straitjacket fits just as snugly.

I’ve previously posted about the new federal tax law’s possible effects on California and the rest of the deep blue states.  Ditto about California’s astronomical gas prices.  More has come to light, so the need for “Part II”.

I. California and Blue State Taxes.

April 15 has come and gone. Many Californios – of which I used to be one, like millions of others scattered throughout the country – and others in deep blue states are cutting checks to the IRS instead of receiving refunds.  Curtailing SALT (the federal tax subsidy to high-tax states, the Hillary electorate) and the home mortgage interest deduction (HMID), and a few other tax changes, have wreaked havoc with their expectations.  Now, they really know what it means to live in a high-tax state.

Michael Ramirez / Weekly Standard

First, lower refunds across the country are expected since withholding was reduced in each one of your paychecks.  Paychecks were bigger as the feds took less.  We could go back to the old system of the feds lopping off more from each one of your paychecks and giving a pittance back at the end of the tax year.  Let’s face it; withholding is a scam.

Second, the caterwauling from California about getting less from the feds than they send to DC has reached a fever pitch.  The only problem: it probably isn’t true. George Skelton in the LA Times raised serious doubts, as does Ann Hollingshead with the Legislative Analyst’s Office and the Tax Foundation (see here).

The old wives’ tale was born of a flawed study with gimmicky assumptions.  Among other things, not properly accounted was California’s peculiar demography.  The state’s age pyramid is distorted with a mass of the young and proportionally fewer elderly.  I suspect that’s probably due to massive foreign immigration over the past 5 decades and the hemorrhaging of retirees to other environs.  As a result, the accounting contains less federal Social Security and Medicare payments.  How much of this is due to the policies championed by the state’s ruling party?  Hmmmm, I wonder.

Also, the military draw down since the end of the Cold War didn’t help.  Still, in the end, the accounting gimmicks in the earlier study exaggerated the monies going to DC and undervalued the monies to the state.  It’s just more proof of Disraeli’s old line: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

As for the clamps on the HMID, any adverse effects can be traced to California foot-shooting.  Real estate is very pricey in the state, and getting pricier.  It’s a good bet that much of the state’s middle class have mortgages that greatly exceed the limits in the tax law.  Why is that?  You need look no further than the Leviathan of taxes and regulations smothering housing in the state.  Eco-craziness and taxaholism leaves a hangover.  It comes in the form of homeless encampments – the usefulness of human poop maps (SF, but applicable elsewhere) as a result – skyrocketing rents, and a strangulation of supply.

Aiming a cocked-and-loaded gun at your foot is an appropriate metaphor.

II. California’s Gas Prices.

Self-serve gasoline prices at Chevron in Malibu exceed $4 a gallon mark on April 15. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

Once again, foot-shooting reigns supreme regarding the state’s astronomically high gas prices.  But the mandarins of the ruling party are looking for scapegoats.  A Berkeley prof of Business Administration, Severin Borenstein, gave the goons ammunition by apparently identifying a 24-cent “surcharge”, an amount that he couldn’t account for.  The near-socialist ruling party didn’t need much of an excuse to go on a jihad against capitalism.  Borenstein gave them one.

Prof. Severin Borenstein, UC Berkeley

Well, Severin, here’s one factor that you didn’t think of: the state has so mangled the market for fuel that supply and demand have nowhere to reach but up.  Sorry, Newsom and the other chiefs of the ruling party, you can’t suspend the laws of supply of demand like you tried with immigration law.  There’s no such thing as a sanctuary from supply and demand.  The Soviets took that route to prosperity, and discovered poverty and social collapse.

The peculiar CARBOB blend, cap-and-trade, greenie taxes, and the constant finagling of CARB (Ca. Air Resources Board) have given the state the least consumer-friendly fuel market in the country.  Such markets still have supply and demand.  It’s just that they intersect at a place above almost any red state. Call it the lefty “surcharge”.

A beleaguered California resident?

This postscript to previous posts only makes the plight of blue states bleaker.  The fact that this is democratically-chosen bleakness doesn’t alter the reality.  If you want the clowns, accept what happens when you’re ruled by clowns.

And that includes sending more money to the state, any metroplex in the state, and DC.  And add to it the high prices for almost anything, including gas.  I guess that you get what you vote for.

RogerG

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Wow! Blue America Cheats.

Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin

A few decades is more than enough time to evolve a system to game – or cheat – the rules.  With the so-called “undocumented”, it’s as simple as getting into the country by whatever means at hand and a network of fraudsters will greet you with jobs, crooked documents, sanctuary, and the open arms of sympathizers.  Maybe even before long, the right to vote.  For today’s haute couture mavens, it’s greasing the skids for their kids.  Well, they got caught.  A slew of blue-America’s finest were indicted in Boston federal district court on charges of bribery to advance their kids to the front of the line into America’s allegedly “elite” schools, ahead of any of the more meretricious hoi polloi.  Hypocrites, hypocrites, hypocrites.

(See here for more)

All the gnashing of teeth for the marginalized and oppressed is a mere pose that they mistake for virtue.  They do this as they steamroll a tiger mom’s child or a young family’s struggles with two jobs to save enough for their kids’ education.  It’s disgusting!

I understand the pull to cheat.  They want the prestige of an elite school’s piece of paper (degree), not necessarily wisdom, for their kid.  Chances are, the kid won’t get much enlightenment anyway.  The curriculums are too corrupted with ideologized nonsense.  It’s particularly true of the big-time schools with big-time sports and big-time endowments.

So, what are they cheating about?  It must be all about how to get the piece of paper.  No wonder we have kids flocking to socialism in spite of its history as a hot mess.  Go figure.

RogerG

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The Flavor of Bigotry in the Democratic Party

Ilhan Omar (D, Mn. 5th Dist.)

What’s the difference between Ilhan Omar’s (IO) comments about the Jews and the slurs of more famous vintage?  Not much that I can tell.  As a historian, she draws from the same scurrilous anti-Jewish tropes that would reach a crescendo of hate in National Socialism.

Here she is in comments before a microphone and in tweets:

“I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

“It’s all about the Benjamins baby” – IO tweet, 2/10/2019.

“Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel. #Gaza #Palestine #Israel.” – IO tweet in 2012.

Take a look for yourself.  The Nazi posters below were typical of the disgusting genre, and are emblematic of a growing sentiment in the Democratic Party.

However, Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie would find objectionable the negative aspersions directed at the USSR in one of the posters.

Best of buds: Ocasio-Cortez and Omar.

For these rising stars in the Dem firmament, they might agree with Lincoln Steffens’s assessment in a visit to the USSR (1921?), “I have seen the future, and it works”.  The USSR is probably the “shining city on a hill” in the Bernie/AOC/Omar wing of the party.

RogerG

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Warning: Opinion Journalism Rampant at National Geographic Magazine

A sad scene at National Geographic Magazine headquarters after the 2016 election …. Not!  It could have been given the way these people write.

Distraught Hillary campaign workers on election night, 2016.

I’m not sure how much more I can stomach of the corruption of science in popular publications like National Geographic.  The magazine is not about the furtherance of geographic knowledge.  It’s opinion journalism. It’s newfound mission is the chaining of the subject to a political agenda.  The agenda is one that could be found among the babblings of campus social justice warriors or The Resistance.

“Social justice warriors”, also referred as the “Resistance”, protesting the Trump administration in New York City, 2017.

Time and again, issue after issue, the magazine never fails to disappoint.  Pior issues led with cover stories like “Why We Lie”, “Gender Revolution”, and “Black and White”.  “Why We Lie” came hot on the heels of the howling from the Left about Trump’s exaggerations and misstatements.  Come on, when has hyperbole become unusual for politicians and activists?  “Gender Revolution” pushed the “T” in LGBTQ. “Black and White” advanced Marxism with “people of color” replacing the oppressed and alienated proletariat.  A favorite hobbyhorse is what I like to call “totalitarian environmentalism”.

  

What chaps my hide is the complete absence of peer review. Claims are made without any caution.  The words “scientists” and “experts” are used without modifiers like “some” (I saw it only once in the cover story in “Black and White”).  Opposing views are treated as if they don’t exist.  Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised since the articles are written by non-scientists with an all-too-often reliance on politicized scientists.  Going back to the aforementioned cover story, the author – Elizabeth Kolbert – was a literature major at Yale.  Surely she has great interest in the study of race, but she is no scientist and has a definite ideological bias.  There’s no filter of the scientist as she writes.

If you sit on the left side of the political spectrum, by all means, subscribe.  In this instance, you would be approaching National Geographic as you would Mother Jones.  Indeed, there’s not much difference between the two.

RogerG

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Techie Lefties

California’s hard left lurch is a matter of much discussion.  As a side-bar but related matter, there exists tech’s similarly hard left climate of opinion, much of it originated and housed in the state.  Tech’s leftist orientation was made glaringly obvious in a Stanford Graduate Business School study of December 2017.*  Next question: Does tech’s hard left lurch correspond to California’s transformation into a hard left bastion?

I’ll start off by saying, I don’t know. Correlation ain’t causation.
There’s no doubt, though, that tech is an overbearing piece of California’s fiscal and economic puzzle.  Has its prevailing ideological bearings bled into the state’s political bloodstream?  A connection can only be intimated, not necessarily proven.

The Stanford study makes clear that an incoherent blend of self-interest and lefty tropes blanket Silicon Valley and its offshoots like a thick layer of smog.  Techies overwhelmingly, almost militantly, stand four-square with the cultural left in the culture war. LGBTQ everything, multiculturalism, racial/ethnic/gender victimology, environmentalism, gun control, unrestrained abortion, a rejection of traditional institutions, open borders – the usual stuff of the left-wing orthodoxy – feature prominently.

All the while, techies don’t like anybody telling them what to do, especially the government.  Yet, government isn’t treated like Christianity, something for the unenlightened and hide-bound rubes.  While they don’t like regulation, they seem to be fully on-board with government-directed redistribution.  Is the inconsistency an attempt to paper over their guilt about their riches?  Could be.

Somehow their brains allow them to harbor “no government” alongside “lots of government”.  All the isms and assaults on traditional institutions, and the Robin Hood regime, mandates a whole lotta government.  I suppose that they want government to make everybody else live and believe like them.  At heart, then, this is Stalinism.

Some have attributed this motley collection of beliefs to the hippies of yore as there appears to be a line of mental and lifestyle, if not genealogical, descent.  The hippies were a mess, though.  Their hedonism and gross naivete about human nature gave us STD’s, a drug epidemic, and a new generation of Democratic Party activists.  Have the techies taken over where the hippies left off? Quite possibly.

The hippies of yore (1960’s).

Now we have the techie industry taking root throughout the country, and with it, implanting its mental smog and lifestyle.  In that sense, California is the future – a dystopian one.

RogerG

* The sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/technology/silicon-valley-politics.html?fbclid=IwAR1kVh0oXukXJxvSR8XO88SJAqIHZRmZj8OzRrb5-ERZQrU-q6qvUnjn630

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/political-behavior-wealthy-americans-evidence-technology?fbclid=IwAR0n0px25Vc_mdi-m5CueF8EchRsFmS7jA6ZoNs3xh72LkKZStRHjJIC5eU

 

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Tax Drunkenness in the Golden State

How is it possible that California gave the country Ronald Reagan, especially seen from this point in time? In 2016, Hillary’s victory margin over Trump in California was 4.3 million votes. Her nationwide popular vote bested him by 2.9 million. That means she lost by 1.4 million everywhere else. California is to the Democrats what Saudi Arabia is to the oil market. California’s blue is darkening to black – and “black” as in black hole of intergalactic fame, not race. And that means an intoxication with taxes. All that government with its programs and fashionable crusades is expensive.

The blueness has tailed off into self-flagellation. California voters this year had the opportunity to free itself of its 12 cents/gal gas tax increase but Prop. 6 failed spectacularly (51-45 early in the count) . People in the state like their high taxes. Oh, I suppose at least partly, they see it as absolutely essential in saving the planet, even though the scheme was billed as a way to pay for roads and bridges that couldn’t be paid by the state’s other astronomically high taxes.

But I don’t see how California’s 36 million population will have much sway in lowering the planet’s temps when compared to 2 billion Chinese and Indians (the subcontinent variety). The denizens of the rest of the world now know that living in the dirt isn’t the only option. Their elevation out of the hut isn’t going to happen by forsaking carbon and living according to the precepts of Marin County “sustainability” … and Zambians know it. Don’t expect such inescapable logic to penetrate the state’s semi-literate hipsters and coastal fashionistas in their wine soirées.

Evidence of tax inebriation didn’t have to wait for the 2018 midterms and Prop 6. No sooner had the Republican House and Senate blasted their tax cuts to the president’s desk for his signature in 2018 than the suzerains of the state’s ruling party went into hyper-drive to undermine them even before Trump’s ink was dry.

Bills began popping up in the state’s legislature to stick it to “corporations”, the nomenclature of virtue-signaling for today’s hip lefties. The Dems’ Kevin McCarty boasted, “It’s time for middle class tax justice”. What does “middle class tax justice” look like? Well, it means to shaft California businesses with a jump in the corporate tax rate from 21 to 35 percent. The “middle class” shtick is more virtue-signaling to the state’s real overburdened and shrinking middle class – overburdened by the likes of McCarty and his colleagues.

Getting beyond the boilerplate rhetoric, though, it’s just plain ol’ vengeance for losing in 2016.

Now, what to do about the tax-cut bill’s undeniable justice in refusing to continue to force low-tax states to bail out high-tax states with a complete federal write-off of exorbitant state and local taxes, the “state and local tax deduction” (SALT)? The puppy love of tax-happy states for nearly everything government is the well-spring for ingenious ways to hide some of their grossest taxes in other deductible categories. That other tax-drunk jurisdiction – NY – wants to disguise them in the payroll tax. Gov. Brown and his fellow lefty bootleggers in Sacramento – I’m not kidding you – want to turn their taxes into charitable giving. Yeah, it’s called the California Excellence Fund. But there’s a problem with the ploy: the IRS code declares that the giver can’t benefit for it to be genuine charity. Oh well, back to the drawing boards.

As of April 9, 2018, $269 billion in new taxes were wafting through the California state legislature. And to top it off, the midterms ushered into power more tax-happy Dems. I’m beginning to wonder if many of the state’s voters should be tested for alcohol poisoning before entering the voting booth. This goes way beyond the .06 limit. What’s holding them up as they punch the ballot?

RogerG

Bibliography:

  1. “It’s Official: Clinton’s Popular Vote Win Came Entirely From California”, John Merline, Investor’s Business Daily, 12/16/2016,   https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/its-official-clintons-popular-vote-win-came-entirely-from-california/
  2. “Election results 2018: Proposition 6 gas tax repeal crashes, burns [Updated]”, Adam Brinklow, Curbed: San Francisco, 11/7/2018,   https://sf.curbed.com/2018/11/7/18071282/election-night-2018-california-prop-6-gas-tax-repeal-rejected
  3. “High-Tax States Reach For Gimmicks”, Milton Ezrati, Forbes, 2/16/2018,   https://www.forbes.com/sites/miltonezrati/2018/02/16/high-tax-states-reach-for-gimmicks/#6fddec4185c5
  4. “$269 billion in new state taxes and fees proposed”, Dawn Hodson, Mountain Democrat, 4/9/2018,  https://www.mtdemocrat.com/news/269-billion-in-new-state-taxes-and-fees-proposed/
  5. “‘Time for middle class tax justice’: California corporate tax bill offsets Trump cuts”, Alexei Koseff, The Sacramento Bee, 1/18/2018,  https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article195434569.html
  6. “California Bills Acknowledge Federal Tax Changes, Don’t Conform”, Laura Mahoney, Bloomberg News, 5/4/2018,   https://www.bna.com/california-bills-acknowledge-n57982092512/