Do you want an example of pure demagoguery? Well, here it is! Watch Elizabeth Warren appeal to the prejudices and emotions of her crowd.
Her speech is filled with all the lingo in the quiver of any power-hungry firebrand. When democracy becomes a substitute for morality, as it is for Warren, Bernie, and the Squad (AOC and company), such people are free to go out and advocate theft if they can garner a large enough throng. And in this Democratic Party, the rhetoric does. This, the wealth tax, is thievery through the tax code, pure and simple. Her rationale is utterly fantastic and also very frightening. It is frightening not just for its lunacy but for the moral corruption of the masses who buy into it.
Elizabeth Warren addresses a large crowd for an August campaign rally in California. Frederic J. Brown/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The wealth tax ploy is too easy to take apart, as economists even in the Democratic Party stable (Larry Summers, et al) have done. Fact: you’ll get a small fraction of what you expect. It’s too easy to legally dodge. And if that doesn’t work, simply flee and have your assets electronically transferred to Zurich. Wealth is remarkably portable. Of course, you can attempt to stop the flight with more draconian measures, but then you’re mimicking Maduro, or Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao, or Castro …. Elizabeth, do you really want to go there? Some in the base are certainly hot for it.
Venezuela’s illegal traders have proliferated as grocery stores are fast becoming empty. Credit: Eneas De Troya / Flicker
I’m reminded of other crusades to stick it to the rich, real or imagined. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane to 1929. The story actually begins in 1906. The farsighted Russian Prime Minister, Pyotr Solypin, starting in 1906, uplifted the peasants by giving them land and thus they became property owners. Some were successful and became richer than others. By October of 1917, a revolution for forced “equality” – that’s what communism and Bolshevism are all about – seized power and would spend the next decade trying to eliminate the so-called “kulaks”, or rich peasants. Many were not so much rich as they simply owned their own land. Stalin had enough of peasant resistance. Party activists and armed cadres descended on the countryside to rile the many less-well-off. They seized land, food, crops, livestock, equipment, and herded peasants into state farms and the gulag. That’s the beginning of the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33.
A dispossessed kulak and his family in front of their home in Udachne village in Donets’ka oblast’, 1930s. (Image credit: Central State Archives of Photo, Audio, and Video Documents of Ukraine named after G. S. Pshenychnyi)A family with starving children during Stalin’s de-kulakization campaign. Wikimedia Commons.
What’s interesting about the episode is the requisition squads left no stone unturned. Peasants resisted by hiding all they had, all to no avail. Everything was taken, even the seed grain for next year’s crop. What does this mean? Famine and 50 years of shortages. Warren will have to follow in the footsteps of the lefty activists of 1930’s Russia to realize her anticipated $2.75 trillion windfall. It’ll be a replay of 1930’s Russia. Capital will be hidden or flee with the same devastating effects on our country. Warren has company of the sort nobody should relish.
As in the October Revolution, Warren and company are offering “equality” through a series of massive wealth transfers. The “equality” will come in the form of freebies offered up to the alleged dispossessed. It’s a promise with a sordid past. Beware America, she plans to revisit the horror on us and our progeny.
Progressive/left protesters crowd and shout into Rep. Chris Stewart’s (R, Utah) townhall in Salt Lake City, March 31, 2017. George Frey/Getty Images
Our times seem to be especially fraught with some of the worst invective, character assassination, and outbursts of anger bordering on rage. Disruptive chants and slogans have replaced reasoned discourse. I’ve complained about this often. Astonishingly, it has taken place at a time when we are spending trillions on education. As it turns out, mass education hasn’t produced mass wisdom. The situation raises serious questions about our educational system. Are we educating citizens or producing close-minded activists?
Watch this episode of young climate-change activists making demands at a recent (August 22) DNC meeting in San Francisco. The Sunrise Movement is most certainly the Sundown Movement, the sundown of reasoned discourse.
Very little intelligent dialogue takes place, nor is there any evidence of its presence in the short cognitive histories of these young people. They jump from rash conclusion to street activism with nothing prior or between.
The same is true in much of our political landscape. Brusque knee-jerk reactions take the place of thoughtful discussion and civil discourse. I doubt if the groundwork in the form of sufficient knowledge has been made in order to make it possible. So, it’s back to chants, slogans, disruptions, and hectoring. I cringe just thinking about what will happen if Pres. Trump gets the chance to fill another Supreme Court vacancy.
In the case of the above video, the instigator is the previously-mentioned Sunrise Movement. When I look into the faces of these young people, I slump into depression thinking of what our media and schools have done to their minds. All is not lost though. There are still a few golden and older voices in the wilderness, even if they’re no longer with us. Two of those voices belong to the late Milton and Rose Friedman. Their legacy continues in the Free to Choose Network. Airing this month on Amazon Prime Video are “The Real Adam Smith: Ideas That Changed the World” and “Sweden: Lessons for America?”. I viewed both recently.
The first should be a must-see for Pres. Trump and some of the hosts on Fox News. Are you listening Tucker? The second one should be required viewing for – wait, it’s a list – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, her political soul mates, the activist base of the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders, much of the rest of Democratic Party’s wannabee presidents, and those protesters pushing their way into the DNC’s meeting in San Francisco.
Pres. Trump reacts to trade issues in the same way as a developer dealing with his project’s immediate circumstances and the relevant people before him. Tariffs for him are like the rent charged in Trump Tower. It adds to his bottom line. The “trade deficit” is treated as a debt or loss in his books. It isn’t quite that simple. Tariffs are taxes paid by consumers in one way or another. Call it a value-added tax on imports, and operates in like manner. As for the “trade deficit”, it is just one component in the balance of payments. A shortfall in it will lead to surpluses in the other two components: the financial and capital accounts. The importer gets dollars and we get their goods. The dollars end up in financial instruments (bonds, government debt for example) and foreign direct investment.
For Trump, the dollars flow in the pockets of foreign fat cats as they live in, get this, a non-dollar society. How does that work? It doesn’t. The fat cat must translate his dollars into his country’s currency to buy that swank penthouse in Shanghai or keep the Benjamins to spend them on a Montecito mansion. He’ll need renminbis in the PRC or hand over the dollars to the old-moneyed seller in posh Montecito. Another option is parking the money in our government debt. Whichever way, dollars eventually come back here.
Dollars or renminbi (yuan).
Could trade deficits have downsides? Yes, they could. Some regions could fall into depression as they lose out in the international competition. The social effects of economic decline aren’t pretty. Shuttered factories and businesses, distressed neighborhoods, family breakdown, substance abuse, people locked into a cycle of life with few prospects, and welfare dependency are symptoms of the malaise.
Abandoned and dilapidated factory complex in Detroit, Mi.Injecting opioids.
This is one weak spot in the film. Free trade has a ying and yang quality. It works best among countries with free economies, more or less. The role of similar social expectations and norms among nations can’t be counted out. I suspect that the PRC sees trade as another weapon in the long twilight struggle for national and ideological dominance. If their people get richer in the process, that’s icing on the cake. The country is certainly one for us to be very leery.
Nonetheless, the first film – “The Real Adam Smith” – lays out a useful primer for the value of free trade, one that Trump and his courtiers should understand. It might restrain them in their enthusiasm for punishing our literal and natural allies with tariffs. But we can hold two ideas at the same time (per Hillary’s iteration, and true). President-for-life Xi may be Trump’s friend, but he isn’t ours.
The second film – “Sweden: Lessons for America?” – is a necessary corrective to a popular urban myth for self-styled urban sophisticates. They pride themselves in being smarter, more intelligent, and better informed than the rubes. For them, the right side of the political spectrum is populated with Morlocks.
The Morlocks in the 1960 movie, “The Time Machine”.
The prejudice was on full display when Paul McCartney accepted the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2010 and bellowed this insult at ex-President George W. Bush while President Obama and wife were in attendance: “After the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is.”
McCartney and Pres. Obama at the award ceremony, June 2010.
Ironically, the rank condescension of an accomplished pop music star is rooted in a profound ignorance that is common in places like bein pensant circles in Georgetown. For the beautiful people, all the smart people are on the left side of the spectrum. In reality, they’ve adopted John C. Calhoun’s outlook, but the target isn’t African-Americans. It’s anyone who might wear a tool belt, pay a mortgage, attend a Bible-believing church, and just might register Republican. Johan Norberg, the documentary’s host, unwittingly presents proof of the presence in chic quarters of the “Ignorant” stamp on the forehead with a frequency equivalent to tattoos in the crowd of heavy metal concertgoers. Norberg does it by shattering their fantasies about Swedish socialism.
Bernie Sanders has frequently tried to distinguish himself from the brutal socialism in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. He does it by attaching his socialist vision to Scandinavian “social democracy”, not Pol Pot. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , a younger Bernie Sanders with different genitalia, imitates him. Both invoke the experience of “democratic socialism” in Scandinavia.
CNN quotes Bernie Sanders as follows: “I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and learn what they have accomplished for their working people.” The Danes recoil from the “socialist” label. Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen responded in a speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, “I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”
Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, October 30, 2017.
Bernie and AOC continue to maintain that these countries are working examples of a successful socialism. They try to do so, in spite of the Scandinavian leaders’ rejection of the “socialism” label, by emphasizing “democracy”. It’s rhetorical sleight of hand. The fact of the matter is that the scheme is all about government control. It matters little if the control is exercised through a small claque of ideological oligarchs or a mob of 50% plus one. Private property becomes meaningless if it is at the mercy of any assemblage of 50%-plus-one. “Democracy” is the cover for all sorts of sins.
To say it is “democratic”, also, doesn’t mean the administrative state goes away. Rules to avoid chaos and give direction will have to be promulgated by a commissariat approaching the size of the Soviet Gosplan. The likes of Bernie and AOC have all kinds of social and eco “justice” to pursue. AOC helped author one incoherent version of the Green New Deal and Bernie later came up with his own monstrosity. Whichever of the two routes you take, you’ll end up in the same place: central planning!
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (right) speak during a press conference to announce Green New Deal legislation on Feb. 7. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Plus, the two carnival barkers act as if nothing has happened since the heyday of Scandinavian socialism in the 1970’s. It’s here that the Swede, Johan Norberg, and “Sweden: Lessons for America?” clears away much of the verbal smog. To make it simple for Bernie and Alexandria, Sweden had a free market economy, lost it, then gained it back. How did they do it? They reined in their “social democracy”. Business taxes were lowered; pensions became contribution-based rather than benefit-based; universal school vouchers were implemented to the point of private high schools becoming half of all high schools; unions became cooperative rather than combative; the vaunted universal health care system is remarkably decentralized with vouchers and a growing number of private healthcare providers; and on and on and on. In many ways they are freer than us.
Bernie wishes that we could be more like Sweden. Oh really, Bernie? I don’t think so. There is one area that should especially draw the ire of Bernie and much of the Dem Party. Sweden makes everyone pay taxes. If you will receive government benefits, you will pay. They don’t have a tax structure that attempts to shoulder the burden of government on the pocketbooks of the wealthy and the businesses who are the engine of jobs. They tried that in the 1970’s and saw their economy slump and businesses flee. Don’t doubt for a moment that Bernie and AOC won’t try to inflict the horrible history on us.
Really, the amazing part of the story is the abject ignorance of the story. Bernie, AOC, and the like, stop history in the 1970’s. Democratic socialism’s failures are deleted from the record so they can ignore Scandinavia’s movement toward free markets. Our democratic socialist icons take the system of its heyday, pretend the failures and reforms didn’t happen, and attribute the successes of its reforms to the socialism of the earlier misbegotten period. This is circularity with a huge bite out of its circumference. It’s nonsense.
In Scandinavia, particularly Sweden, Adam Smith has made a comeback … out of necessity. Socialism failed. In America, especially among the Democratic Party base and millennials, Marx is making a comeback. Go figure. AOC tries to distance herself from Marx to be more politically palatable. So does Bernie. Yet, do they really understand Marx? I kinda doubt it. Marx is socialism with an eschatology. Strip the violent eschatology and you still have socialism. Our lefty politicos want socialism to be elected into power. But does the means of implementation matter? Socialism is socialism and it doesn’t work. Isn’t the emphasis on 50%-plus-one just another attempt at putting lipstick on a pig?
A return to a sound understanding of human nature and the modes of social organization that are attuned to it would be huge step forward in removing needless chatter and destructive venting. I doubt, though, that it will ever get a hearing in today’s toxic climate. Too many people just don’t know a damn thing. Many of them are on the left, but that won”t stop them from being oh so confident. There is nothing more dangerous than an over-confident ignoramus.
Today, Bernie Sanders unveiled his plan for the Green New Deal, a $16.3 trillion monster. You can read about it here in the New York Times. The number – 16.3 trillion – is so huge that we lose sight of its magnitude. To break it down, if the dollars were miles, it would be a little less than three-quarters of the distance to Alpha Centauri, an entirely separate planetary system “far far away”. The size of the number means that the bill can’t be paid by anyone. The projected payback will extend beyond generations “far far away”. It’s essentially an invitation to join the Stone Age for anyone and everyone in generations from now to those “far far away”.
That dingbat congresswoman from the Bronx would like to stampede us into the Stone Age with hysterical cries that we have only 10 years before the Götterdämmerung if we do nothing. For her, better the Stone Age than extinction. Apparently, Bernie also favors the choice of the Stone Age. For me, the difference is marginal. The Stone Age was best captured in Thomas Hobbes’s famous dictum: life is “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short”.
Making flints in the Stone Age.
But is the U.S. in the catbird seat to stave off disaster anyway? Remember, our government’s decisions to economically harm us only harms … us! China and the rest of the developing world have a keen interest in indoor plumbing and air conditioning. They’ll burn down their jungles and the fossil fuels in a long list of Saudi Arabias to get out from living in the dirt. So, unless Bernie appoints himself to be the Maoist General Secretary of the World and embarks on a Genghis Khan-style conquest of the planet to enforce the resultant poverty, he’ll just end up destroying us. The rest of the world will continue to pollute, albeit at a faster clip.
BEIJING, CHINA – DECEMBER 20: Citizens walk in smog on December 20, 2016 in Jinan, Shandong Province of China. Air quality index (AQI) readings exceeded 400 and some schools have suspended classes in Jinan. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)Burning coal in China to generate electricity.
A few numbers might help Bernie, his fellow ideological asylum inmates, and the Squad in understanding the extent of the craziness. The U.S. is about a quarter of the world’s economy. China comes in second at 15%. The numbers are nearly reversed in global CO2 emissions: China at 30%, the U.S. at 15%. So – I’ll go slow for the woke crowd – we produce 25% of the world’s product at only 15% of emissions, and China knocks out 15% of the world’s product at 30% of emissions. What’s that mean? I’ll go slow once again for all those with degrees but show no sign of better judgment: It means that China is dirtier, much dirtier at a rate twice ours. The lesson, therefore, is to smash the cleaner nation’s economy only to clear the way for the dirty one. Bernie must have skipped Math class in high school.
The hope is that China will be inspired by our example to voluntarily follow suit. What example? It’s the example of how to level a first world country into the third world. I suspect that they’d like to avoid the experience as if it was a leper colony.
California prides itself in being a ground breaker. They have adopted the greenie snake oil through a variety of measures over the past couple of decades. As of 2017/18, though, the state accounts for only 1.1% of global CO2 discharges. Even if they knock it down to zero – probably by running the rest of the economy out of the state – their slot will be more than replaced by India as it ramps up.
What’s the upshot of all the greenie caterwauling? Say goodbye to the future for your kids, their kids, and their kids’ kids. Maybe they might feel better if they know that they were making a sacrifice for the good of … no one. Not!
Outbursts of murderous mayhem in addition to an undercurrent of political incivility – the exhibitionism of barbaric rudeness and physical assault – have become common and sometimes shrugged off as simply folks being a little too exuberant. Much of it emanates from our cities and universities (the two are often synonymous). It sounds like the seething cauldron of pre-revolutionary Russia as described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his novel “August 1914”. We have a city and university problem like Russia of a century ago.
We have Antifa, the Resistance, and a Democratic Party in the grip of the worst bombast coming from the other two – frequently the three groups are synonymous. Similarly, Russia had radical student activism in the cities and campuses. Rudeness, outbursts of pandemonium, and violence were incessant.
Antifa in Portland, Or.
The tie that binds our and their activists through time and space is leftist ideology. The leftist belief system has three basic planks: (1) the overthrow of tradition, (2) collectivism, and (3) an unquestioning faith in pure equality, equality in everything and in almost every way. Our lefty activists have much in common with those running around in Russian towns, cities, and campuses of a century ago.
Take a look at collectivism, with socialism being the political expression of it. Collectivism was popular among Russia’s young at the time as it is today among our young. Look at socialism’s positives in our 18-26 age cohort. Collectivism treats people as a generality. To the collectivist, people are a group, not individuals. To ensure the well-being of all, they say, everyone should control nearly everything. “Everyone” means the state. Personal possessions are at the behest of the group.
A mass meeting with a Bolshevik agitator in the Putilov Works in Petrograd in 1917.A demonstration against the Provisional Government, in Petrograd in July, 1917.
Sound familiar? Sounds like Barney Frank’s famous quote, “Government is simply a word for the things we decide to do together”? Sounds like free [you name it], the schemes of confiscatory taxation, the Green New Deal’s massive overthrow of our constitutional order, and expansive government powers to advance the alleged interests of any fad-of-the-moment victims’ group, as expounded in the talking points of Democratic politicians?
It doesn’t stop there. Tradition is the harbinger of all evil to the leftist. Family, faith, and old principles of civil order are to be eliminated or refashioned to fit the vision. The metric to govern the social engineering is “equality”, equality in nearly all things. If disparities exist, it is assumed to be the result of a systemic or hidden [you name the evil].
Herein lies the totalitarian temptation. Equality of outcome doesn’t come naturally. People vary so much in so many different ways as to make its attainment impossible … if left alone. For a leftist, you can’t leave it alone. Equality will have to be forced. Thus, the Leviathan must be huge and intrusive.
We seem to be repeating Russia’s path of the last couple of decades of the 19th century to the penultimate explosion of 1917. The centers of upheaval in Russia were the towns, cities, and college campuses as they are today in our country. And they were as horribly misguided and destructive as they will be in our own time if given the power. I hope cooler heads prevail.
Famine victim at an Ukrainian orphanage, 1920’s.
I’m a fan of the aphorism frequently attributed to Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes”. So true. So true.
Democratic Party presidential contenders debate, 7/30/19.
The morning after last night’s Democratic Party debate I was reading Jay Nordlinger’s story (National Review, 7/29/19) about the Russian dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now in exile in Britain. It brought to mind an inextinguishable need in the enthusiasts of socialism, whether openly declared or as quiet fellow travelers (much of the Democratic presidential field), to constantly point to a non-existent, never-realized form of it. It’s a phantom only possible in the mind’s eye of the true believer and nowhere else. Bernie exhibits it in great bounty, and so does an increasing portion of the party’s activist base, the party’s stable of presidential candidates, and its giddy zealots in Congress (the dimwit Squad for instance). In addition to Stalin’s Socialist Realism in art, we must add Socialist Longing – the longing for a future and purer socialism that somehow will get it right – to the doctrines of the Church of Socialism.
Bernie sounds like he was mentally put into a cryogenic state during his glory days of the 1970’s and 80’s. Mentally, he’s still honeymooning in the Soviet Union. Khodorkovsky mentioned the everywhere-stated party slogan: “The Party solemnly promises that this generation of the Soviet people will live under Communism.” Bernie is stuck there as well. For Bernie, the promise is always in the future, or in a northern European country that, in reality, shed much of its experiment in socialism. Bernie’s socialism is the Sweden of 1970, for example, not the Sweden of today.
Does he know that Sweden isn’t far behind the US in Heritage’s economic freedom rankings? (The US position was bolstered by the recent tax cut law.) Still, Sweden has no minimum wage law, abolished its inheritance tax in 2004, and let go of much of its state-owned enterprises. It’s vaunted public healthcare system is remarkably decentralized, a far cry from Bernie’s sovietized Medicare for All. Bernie’s idea of socialism is the failed version, and can’t point to a functioning one this side of North Korea and Cuba.
Bernie wants to impose something that Sweden ran from. Does he know it? Don’t know, but the longing continues for a decrepit idea in the hope that it will be magically transformed into a success. Bernie is the chief exponent of a made-in-America cargo cult.
I didn’t watch the Democrat debate last night. It’d be too painful. Anyway, the general script for the primary has already been written. The parade of the ambitious are functioning like the old March of Dimes telethon … in reverse. Instead of calling in to donate money, the candidates act like the volunteers in the phone bank announcing the latest request for more of other people’s money. It’s a marathon about how much to give away, not contribute.
Cartoon #1
In the first cartoon – “Bernie Panders” – Bernie Sanders proclaims he’ll call and raise the bids of the faux indigenous candidate (Elizabeth Warren) and our giddy sophomore class president (AOC) in their demands to write off the student loan debt of people who voluntarily stoked up their debt in their halcyon days on campus, much of it accumulated in grad school. Now they have to pay it back with a payback schedule bent-over-backwards to make it easy.
Who’ll pay for the giveaway? It won’t be the young scions of the upper income and upper middle income families who mostly ran up the debt. The favorite target of our politically ambitious rabble-rousers is the rich, out of which they won’t get anywhere close to retiring the $1.4 trillion price tag. All the while, the targets hide their money or flee the country, and the millstone around the neck of toddlers and the yet-to-be-born – called the national debt – will only get heftier. Too bad. Toddlers and the yet-to-be-born don’t vote. Not yet anyway.
Cartoon #2
Cartoon #2 brings up another antic of the spendthrifts. Here, the presidential wannabes magically transform an economic good/service into a “right”, resurrecting FDR’s old ploy. FDR, great guy, but occasionally he spouted nonsense. How do you turn something produced with limited resources into a “right”? Answer: you can’t. It’d be like reducing obesity by legislatively repealing gravity. Economic behavior is as natural to us as our teeth. The behavior can’t be repealed.
You make it a “right”, and therefore “free” to the user, and the demand floodgates are thrown open. The concept of a checking account with limited funds has no relevance. You want it; it’s a “right”; you get it. The only real limit is politics, and that is based on how much the people will tolerate the declining quality, the delays, and the denial of services. It plays out whether in the Soviet Union or the British Health Service.
It’s silly beyond belief to equate a “right” to an economic good/service to the right to free speech. Free speech has guard rails (Schenck v. United States, 1919), like a highway, but there is no set limit to the number cars taking the route in the course of its life. Healthcare is limited to the number of people who are capable of providing it and other resources not committed to other necessities. Healthcare isn’t geared to be a “right”.
Don’t tell that to the politically ambitious panderers. Also don’t tell them that “payer” in single payer means “taxpayer”, not “government”.
Cartoon #3
I heard that there was much Spanish speaking at the pander-fest in Miami. Spanish is a beautiful language, but I suspect the display was identity pandering. If it’s a “dog whistle” (using woke language), it’s one tuned to the ears of the multicultural barkers. Their agenda includes the practical erasure of the border. Thus cartoon #3.
Clause 4 of Section 8 of Article I is about to be read out of The Constitution. Once you eliminate border enforcement by dismantling ICE and turning the rest into a construction battalion to build bridges across the Rio Grande, any person living in a dirt floor hut is a soon-to-be-an-American. Would you ever again be able to connect the word “manage” to the word “immigration”? Would there be relevance of “rule of law” to the subject of “immigration”? Hardly. Where’s the law since you trampled it into the ground?
Cartoon #4
Cartoon #4 gives a clue about the state of mind of the Democratic Party. Gargantuan offerings of free government stuff is a certain path to ruin. It’s a race to emulate Argentina, or maybe Venezuela, or maybe the Soviet Union. Ruination can be a democratic choice.
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.
A Berkeley economist has got the “woke” doofuses running the California madhouse – aka state capitol – in a tizzy over the state’s high gas prices. The number cruncher gave them an excuse for a pogrom [mass violence against a minority] against the oil industry in the state, shape-shifting blame from themselves to the buccaneers of capitalism. Now that’s quite a trick.
Gasoline prices have jumped nearly 60 cents in the past month in Southern California. The average price of $4.30 for a gallon of self-serve regular in Los Angeles County Thursday is the highest in California. The statewide average is $4.20 a gallon. (ED JOYCE/KPCC)
Below is a map of current gas prices by county. Notice the flaming red of California.
Let me count the ways that the screwballs – not Exxon/Mobil – have shafted the California motorist, starting with cap-and-trade. Back in 2015, people knew that the thing would hike fuel prices 11-13 cents per gallon by its lonesome. The dream was to dent global warming; the reality is to dent residents’ pocketbooks. (see here)
Let’s not forget that the state wacks each gallon of gas with a 41.7 cents/gal. levy – soon to rise to 43.7 cents. Couple that with the 18.4 cents federal tax and a commuter starts right out of the gate with each squeeze of the pump handle over 61 cents in the hole, second highest in the nation.
California seems to be always red on these matters. This map sets the combined gas tax burden in the state at almost 66 cents per gallon as of 2015:
It doesn’t stop there. California demands boutique fuels: unique fuel blends just for the not-so-golden state. In fuel-speak, it’s called CARBOB and according to experts, “CARBOB is even more expensive, and is the main reason why California gasoline prices are typically higher than anywhere else in the country.” (see here)
The result is a stunted and mangled market within the narrow confines of one state. Those kind of markets don’t work very well. You can’t impose some of the highest gas taxes, pursue the fantasy of counteracting China and India with California’s adherence to a cap-and-trade straitjacket, and play footsie with fuel blends and not get jacked at the pump. Get real.
It’s simple economics, or – better yet – it’s simple math. I guess it goes to the difference between knowing economics and math and actually believing in them. Apparently, some people think that they can suspend the rules with no ill-effects.
How about a mandatory blood test for those folks in the clown car called the California State Legislature?
Shriner clowns or the California State Legislature in a parade?
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.
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
Who said this? Bernie Sanders? AOC in one of her Twitter fits? Any of our “woke” college activists rampaging at a Charles Murray presentation? Good guesses, but wrong. The author is Karl Marx in his “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”.
In one sense, though, it sounds like the kind of thing they would say (maybe not AOC because that would ask too much of her facile understanding). And it sounds like the kind of thing rattling the synapses of the vast majority of those manning our broadcast studios, newsrooms, and much of the publishing industry. It’s a view of the world smothering the mental faculties of many in the chattering classes, whether chattering with the mouth or a word processor.
The notion has infected much of what we read, watch, and learn in our classrooms. It’s the idea that a hidden structure of oppression exists to ensnare us no matter what we do. For Marx, the idea justified a complete revolution in the individual’s mind to the family to social relations to government. Everything was to be managed, and that means big, really big government. Sounds like the Green New Deal?
I’m reminded of Marx’s influence, now, almost every time I pick up my National Geographic Magazine (NGM). The magazine reads like a series of op-eds in The Daily Worker. A common tactic in its articles is to quote opinionated academics to buttress an opinion. Add some stats and a few graphs, and, voilà, an opinion becomes “science”. Marx also liked to say that his opinions were “science”.
Race is a field rich with possibilities for exploitation by those inclined to see the world as Marx did. For instance, NGM’s April 2018 issue, “Black and White”, blathered about race as some “social construct” while veering off into Confederate statues and racial profiling. The opinions of opinionated profs were replete in the issue’s articles. The confusion of opinions with science has become a hallmark for the magazine, just like Marx.
Let’s examine the magazine’s treatment of racial profiling. There’s more to the story than “racist” cops, but you wouldn’t know it from the piece. Absent from the author’s angle on the issue is any recognition of something called “context” – context as in any other considerations. What about the uneven distribution of chaos in the home, the uneven distribution of violent crime on the streets, the war on drugs, the debilitating effects of made-in-America welfare, other issues like the epidemic of illegal immigration to the tune of an accumulated 11 million to 21 million “undocumented” (Who knows?), and the attendant presence of the Sureños/Norteños/MS-13 and Crips/Bloods? Circumstances exist beyond the hidden, unconscious prejudices of a police officer and the Man.
2 Sureños and 2 Norteños.
An interesting aside that’s never been adequately explained by the race hustlers: There was a time when NYC black cabbies would avoid fares from young black males. In advertising, it’s called branding. Past experience can brand an entire demographic, even among black cabbies tired of being crime victims by the very same demographic. I would think that something else is at work other than racism (hidden or otherwise) against blacks by black cab drivers.
Police are searching for answers after a Flash Cab driver was found shot to death inside his taxi in the Lincoln Square neighborhood. Feb. 23, 2016. (CBS Chicago)
Instead, NGM and its stable of writers traipse off into the fantasy of Marx’s world. Evil has always resided in the souls of our species. Racism and general mayhem have always been there. Marx’s non-stop revolution won’t change that fact. An ever-bigger government to police human thought and conscience won’t either. A healthy civil society – the very thing that the Left is systematically dismantling – with appropriate public sanctions is the answer.
Adopting Marx is a descent into the snake pit of totalitarian control. Bad, very bad.
