Quick links

Three Ideas to End the Rot on College Campuses
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/29/three_ideas_to_end_the_rot_on_college_campuses_143564.html
The author, Charles Lipson, is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security. 

What ‘woke’ whites get wrong about blacks’ priorities
https://nypost.com/2020/06/28/what-woke-whites-get-wrong-about-blacks-priorities/
Which is just about everything. Most of all that woke white people really do think they can decide what is best for black people, without asking them.

I had to hear what whites were saying. I listened to the protesters, talked with my white friends and read articles and social media posts. What I found was white people overwhelmingly depicting black people as desperate and defeated, with no way to pull themselves out of their misery.

“I understand your point,” a white friend said when I objected to this simplistic narrative. “But don’t you think blacks are being oppressed?”

That’s when I realized that white wokeness is the new factor in our national life. It has been embedded into the consciousness of whites that all blacks are the same and that they all face impossible barriers to improvement — from standardized tests to the black men being arrested on the nightly news. A growing number of whites believe that black life is unrelentingly grim. 

One of the most respected environmentalist activists and scholars in the whole world was published on Forbes.com, but got deleted because environmental absolutists went nuts.

What was his crime? Pointing out the corruption of the Green groups and environmental activists around the world. It is now on Quillette: "On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare."
https://quillette.com/2020/06/30/on-behalf-of-environmentalists-i-apologize-for-the-climate-scare/

Read it all. I have saved it for reference as a PDF.

Biden's record-setting tax increases will take your money — and your job
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/504536-bidens-record-setting-tax-increases-will-take-your-money-and-your-job

The Dems' operate always on the principle that all our money really must be handed over to them. And what do they do with it? Purchase votes and launder it through contracts and foreign aid to the pockets of their family members (coff, Hunter Biden, coff) and crony companies and non-profits.

Some Republicans do this, too, of course, but it is a fundamental operating principle for Democrats.

The coming crash and what it portends

If we continue on the present course, we will enter a depression that might make the 1930s a distant competitor. The number of jobless Americans could reach tens of millions.

WSJ: Rethinking the Coronavirus Shutdown:

Yet the costs of this national shutdown are growing by the hour, and we don’t mean federal spending. We mean a tsunami of economic destruction that will cause tens of millions to lose their jobs as commerce and production simply cease. Many large companies can withstand a few weeks without revenue but that isn’t true of millions of small and mid-sized firms. ...

The deadweight loss in production will be profound and take years to rebuild. In a normal recession the U.S. loses about 5% of national output over the course of a year or so. In this case we may lose that much, or twice as much, in a month.

Our friend Ed Hyman, the Wall Street economist, on Thursday adjusted his estimate for the second quarter to an annual rate loss in GDP of minus-20%. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s assertion on Fox Business Thursday that the economy will power through all this is happy talk if this continues for much longer.

This is the first time ever that the US Government has deliberately shut the economy down, and the idea that it can just be turned back on like flipping a switch is delusional.

Consider: We will never be able to determine how many lives were saved from the virus. But we will easily know how many people died because of the economic crash to come - just count increased suicides and even some homicides, to say nothing of untold numbers of people thrown into permanent poverty.

The lockdowns and stay-at-home orders are saving lives now. But if they continue much longer, they will cost lives later and cause economic, literal suffering for years and years to come.

Also, The Atlantic, "Suicide and the Economy."

On April 12, 1937, the express train to New York roared across the New Jersey countryside. The train, a Pennsy Railroad electric locomotive the color of bull’s blood, usually passed through the station at Elizabeth at about 50 miles per hour. On this particular morning, it came to an unanticipated stop. As the express rounded the curve, my great-grandfather jumped down from the platform, where witnesses reported he had been pacing for 10 minutes, and lay down across the tracks.

When the engineer was finally able to halt the train 100 feet past the platform, Roy Humphrey had disappeared beneath its wheels. His last act: raising his head to look at the oncoming train.

Roy was one of at least 40,000 Americans who took their own lives that year and the next, the two-year span that suicide rate spiked to its highest recorded level ever: more than 150 per 1 million annually. 

Update: "US unemployment could surge to 30% next quarter and GDP might plunge 50%, Fed's Bullard warns"

Also relevant: "The luxury of apocalypticism -- The elites want us to panic about Covid-19 – we must absolutely refuse to do so."

The point is, there is such a thing as doing too little and also such a thing as doing too much. Doing too little against Covid-19 would be perverse and nihilistic. Society ought to devote a huge amount of resources, even if they must be commandeered from the private sector, to the protection of human life. But doing too much, or acting under the pressure to act rather than under the aim of coherently fighting disease and protecting people’s livelihoods, is potentially destructive, too. People need jobs, security, meaning, connection. They need a sense of worth, a sense of social solidarity, a sense of belonging. To threaten those things as part of a performative ‘war’ against what ought to be treated as a health challenge rather than as an End Times event would be self-defeating and utterly antithetical to the broader aim of protecting our societies from this novel new threat. To decimate the stuff of human life in the name of saving human life is a questionable moral approach.

Why we can't afford 99-cent gasoline

If you like the very low gasoline prices, even though we are not supposed to drive anywhere, get used to it. Oil's spot price may drop some more, yes (it plummeted today after Thursday's highest-rate increase ever in one day). But production is going to drop. Usually, that means gas prices rise. Not this time. And that is actually very bad news.

Cheap gas and nowhere to go. That's bad.

American oil frackers operate at a loss much below $60 per barrel (depending where they are located). The largest such operation, the Permian Basin, needs about $65 per barrel to make a profit. It straddles Texas and New Mexico.

The drop in oil price was triggered by Russia's refusal to cut production at the Saudis' request. So the Saudis jacked production up to drive the price down and punish the Russians. Well, good luck with that:

After oil prices collapsed in the worst drop in nearly three decades—courtesy of the renewed Saudi-Russia rivalry on the oil market – Russia’s Finance Ministry said on Monday that Moscow had enough resources to cover budget shortfalls amid oil prices at $25-30 a barrel for six to ten years.  

Not coincidentally, both the Saudis and the Russians would like to see America's frackers permanently closed and the United States to return to a major importer of oil, not net exporters as we are right now.

One way or another oil prices will rise. That seems a cloud but actually it is the silver lining. The cloud is cheap oil. Active-rig counts fell this week in the US by 160, year over year, to 722. On the other hand, US oil production remains near an all-time high at 13.1 million barrels per day. Go figure.

And next month may be even more dramatic.

Analysts say that the month of April could see the largest supply overhang in the history of the oil market.

“We now expect the y/y demand loss to peak in April at 10.4 million barrels per day (mb/d), and annual demand to fall by a record 3.39mb/d in 2020,” Standard Chartered wrote in a note.

In the short run, the oil market surplus could reach a peak of 13.7 mb/d in April, Standard Chartered said, with an average surplus of 12.9 mb/d for the second quarter. The inventory buildup could reach a gargantuan 2.1 billion barrels by the end of the year, “stretching the midstream of the industry to its limits,” the bank wrote. That figure represents an upward revision of 50 percent from the 1.4-billion-barrel inventory surplus the bank predicted…just a week ago.

Other analysts have even more dramatic scenarios. Eurasia Group says demand could fall by as much as 25 mb/d in the next few weeks and months. The historic glut means that the world could run out of storage space. “The combination of weakening demand and excess supply is hardly going to be accommodated by onshore storage,” Giovanni Serio, head of analysis at Vitol, told the FT. “At a certain point…we will need to fill all the boats.”

 So severe is the situation that for practically the first time in long memory, "Texas Weighs Curtailing Oil Production for First Time in Decades."

Texas regulators are considering curtailing oil production in America’s largest oil-producing state, something they haven’t done in decades, people familiar with the matter said.

Several oil executives have reached out to members of the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the industry, requesting relief following an oil-price crash, the people said. U.S. benchmark oil closed around $25 a barrel Thursday.

Texas, which hasn’t limited production since the 1970s, was a model for the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which has sought to control world-wide oil prices in recent decades. OPEC and Russia were unable to reach a deal on reducing output in response to the coronavirus pandemic, which helped trigger the current collapse in prices.

It is unclear whether regulators will ultimately act to curtail production, but staffers are examining what would be required in such an event, the people said.

Oil prices have always been manipulated by producers. Even so, at the end of the day, demand has always been in control. And now the worldwide demand has dropped like an anvil and will continue to do so. The largest users of petro products - shipping and aviation - are harboring vessels and canceling flights. That will likely accelerate.

That said, oil production is going to plummet because, as stated above, we are running out of places to put it. That does not mean that gas prices will suddenly rise. The huge over-supply will see to that. But cheap gas prices are not going to offset the real pain dropping demand will cause: higher unemployment not only of oil-industry workers, but businesses whose revenues depend on customers using oil just to buy or get to their products or locations, such as hotels, tourist attractions, airline workers, dock workers, gas station owners and workers, the list is very long.

I am not an economist by a long shot, but unless we stop our "insane over-reaction," there is going to be a lot of pain to come that 99-cent gasoline will not pay for.

Update: How low can it go? "How Low Can Oil Go? One Forecast Sees $5 a Barrel." Which means that gasoline will be not much higher than free - and yet it will be also more difficult to find because gas stations will be closing at accelerated rates as oil prices plummet.

The "wicked problem" of Social Security in one chart

This has been well known for many years and so is no news flash. But is an excellent illustration of a political "wicked problem," as distinguished from a simple problem or a complex one. But briefly, a wicked problem is that which all parties agree exists but do not agree on how to describe it, nor on what a solution can be, nor even on how to implement a resolution or know when it has been accomplished.

This chart is why everyone knows the problem exists. But because of its "wickedness," everyone has also united in kicking the can down the road.

Ratio of Covered Workers to Beneficiaries

Ratio of Social Security Covered Workers to Beneficiaries Calendar Years 1940-2013
Year	Covered Workers(in thousands)	Beneficiaries(in thousands)	Ratio
1940	35,390	222	159.4
1945	46,390	1,106	41.9
1950	48,280	2,930	16.5
1955	65,200	7,563	8.6
1960	72,530	14,262	5.1
1965	80,680	20,157	4.0
1970	93,090	25,186	3.7
1975	100,200	31,123	3.2
1980	113,656	35,118	3.2
1985	120,565	36,650	3.3
1986	123,400	37,322	3.3
1987	126,287	37,951	3.3
1988	130,142	38,420	3.4
1989	132,478	38,859	3.4
1990	133,672	39,470	3.4
1991	132,969	40,172	3.3
1992	133,890	41,029	3.3
1993	136,117	41,840	3.3
1994	138,197	42,516	3.3
1995	141,446	43,107	3.3
1996	143,909	43,498	3.3
1997	146,736	43,792	3.3
1998	149,692	44,075	3.4
1999	152,453	44,366	3.4
2000	155,295	45,166	3.4
2001	155,546	45,668	3.4
2002	154,894	46,176	3.3
2003	154,954	46,752	3.3
2004	156,900	47,367	3.3
2005	159,081	48,133	3.3
2006	161,852	48,863	3.3
2007	163,057	49,603	3.3
2008	162,485	50,420	3.2
2009	156,021	51,860	3
2010	156,725	53,398	2.9
2011	158,988	54,816	2.9
2012	161,672	56,176	2.9
2013	163,221	57,471	2.8

"Every man for himself"

As you are probably aware, the United Methodist Church is committing hari-kiri, which will be completed (well, mostly) before the end of May, 2020. Today a long-term friend and law-enforcement officer posted this article from lawofficer.com: "The End of Law Enforcement." Here is how LE and the UMC are suffering from the same malady.

Law enforcement:

• Retirement eligible officers are retiring even though they have many years of useful service ahead of them.
• Mid-career officers are miserably trying to make it to retirement and are "are trying to get off the streets, afraid of the next 'viral' video showing them doing nothing wrong but ruining their reputation and ability to work forever." Some are leaving LE anyway.
• Less than 10-year officers "have now realized that they work in the only profession that can ruin you for doing nothing wrong. They have stopped working. Some call it the 'Ferguson Effect' but they just call it trying to save their ass. It’s not worth staying and the majority are looking to leave."

I responded thus:

There is a French phrase from maritime history that was adopted by some other nations' services that is usually, though inaccurately, translated as, "every man for himself." The French is Sauve qui peut, and don't ask me how to pronounce it.

It was the command given when a vessel's captain decided the ship was lost and was going to sink no matter what. So he would order, "May he save himself, whoever can" (literal translation) or basically, "Stop trying to save the ship and save yourselves."

ISTM that is what this writer has concluded about the profession of law enforcement.

Regarding my own profession, I had a conversation recently with a staffer of one the UMC's general councils - an agency that works on behalf of the whole denomination. It was clear to me that Sauve qui peut has already been adopted by large numbers of our laity. Both attendance and giving have plummeted at UM churches across the nation, including mine. The laity who have left because of all the intra-church fighting over the homosexuality question have absolutely abandoned ship and are not even looking back.

I can only wonder how many serving clergy will decide the same between now and the end of General Conference in May 2020. I already know I cannot stay in my present appointment at the end of my third year next June, but I am retirement eligible and just bought a home in 2017. Have not made up my mind whether to move or retire.

Just as law enforcement, the UMC still has many strengths and still is doing great work. But we are more and more resembling Centralia, Penn. Our foundation and "solid rock" on which we stand is being destroyed from underneath us. Seems like that is happening in LE, too.

The ground burning beneath our feet applies to much more than the UMC or law enforcement. I would be hard-challenged to find any national-level institution not affected by this threat. I hope our military is standing fast; Machiavelli wrote that a nation's final repository of its virtues is its military, and that when the military goes, there is nowhere else to turn. The Romans, of course, are proof of concept.

Here is a short YouTube explaining the Centralia reference. It was a coal-mining town in Penn. where the mine shafts caught fire in 1962 and the town was destroyed from underneath. The fire is still burning and estimates are that it will burn at least 250 more years.


I attended a Mon-Wed. GCFA conference last month with pastors from across the nation present, although the majority from the southeast and eastern seaboard. Here is my takeaway summary:

Basically, retirement-eligible pastors are doing so, even if they have years left to 72. I met some who are younger than I who are retiring in 2020, including two who pastor mega-churches (neither in my conference).

Several ministers from about age 50 openly told me that when they hit 62, they're gone. Very few were there much younger than that, but if I was 44 rather than 64, I almost certainly would be covertly making contingency plans.

And the denomination is going broke. Giving across America is way down. Way. Down. This is not going to be reversed and will, if anything, accelerate. At current trend, the GCFA's episcopal fund will be at zero dollars by the end of 2024

One minister told me that giving is down so much in his present appointment (not only because of people leaving a strife-torn denomination, also several major donors died) that his church can no longer afford his compensation. But he wonders what the point in a new appointment will be if it will probably run out of money also within a year. May as well retire, right?

BTW, even apart from people voting on the "issue" with their feet and checkbooks, the UMC will still be in accelerated rate of decline due to increasing deaths of an aging laity and our inability (and frankly, denominational unwillingness) to evangelize, especially evangelize unconnected to politics.

Elizabeth Warren hates retirees

I am adding or updating links here as they become available.

Forbes: Elizabeth Warren Wants To Cut The Value Of Your Retirement Account.

Her "Accountable Capitalism Act" directly requires government-mandated management of corporate and mutual funds - in fact, almost every kind of security and equity sold on the American markets -- and 80 percent of equities are held by institutions; 37 percent of all equities are held specifically by retirement funds  such as 401(k) and 401(c)3 accounts and similar funds.

A detailed assessment of why this Act  is simply "bonkers" is at Patheos.

Wall Street Journal: Warren’s Assault on Retiree Wealth - Her vision of ‘accountable capitalism’ would destroy savings built over a lifetime—and sink the economy.

What will happen to your personal retirement account? A sharp plunge in value immediately which will never be recuperated compared to today's arrangement. If you are in or near retirement, get ready to drastically scale back your standard of living.

Because fairness, comrades!

International Business Daily: Sen. Warren Reveals Democratic Socialists' Hidden Agenda. Oh, I do not think it is hidden at all. It is quite out in the open.

Hard to get more open than this - Wall Street Journal: King Warren of the Roundtable -- The Senator orders the ‘stakeholder’ CEOs to endorse her agenda.

Reason: Elizabeth Warren's 'Wealth Tax' Is Punishment, Not Taxation

The Hill: Why Elizabeth Warren will fail to shine in her moment on the trail

Warren also proposes a frightening Office of United States Corporations through her Accountable Capitalism Act. Under this plan, workers must represent 40 percent of corporate boards of companies worth more than $1 billion. It also institutes new strict controls on political spending and requires a corporate charter approved by the federal government. This plan is Orwellian. The idea of government control of private industry is among the textbook definitions of fascism and its concept of corporatism. That means charters to do business could be revoked.

The link in the excerpt goes here: Elizabeth Warren, Corporatist

"Corporatism” is one of the most misunderstood words in the political vocabulary. American progressives use it to indicate the domination of the state by business interests, when in fact it means something closer to the opposite: the subordination of commerce and industry to political mandates.

Meanwhile (Issues & Insights): Trump’s Economy: 1.6 Million More Jobs Than The ‘Experts’ Predicted

For the purpose of comparison, we used the Congressional Budget Office’s 10-year economic outlook released in January 2017. The CBO’s economic forecasts tend to mirror the consensus of other economists.

The results of this comparison are stark.

So yeah, we should turn all our government to "experts" who know what is going to happen long ahead of time.

Issues and Insights, 11/5/19: "Government’s Dictatorial Powers Under Warren’s ‘Medicare For All’ Should Scare You," written after Warren released her MFA cost proposals.

Warren’s Medicare For All: The Longest Political Suicide Note In Recorded History

Recession soon? It can go either way

Forbes: How You Can Financially Prepare Yourself For A Recession. Seems like pretty good advice to me.

I am not forecasting a recession, but I do think it is prudent to hedge one's bets.

Friday Stuff Going Down

If you get it wrong predicting the end of the world, just predict it again. Doomsdays that didn’t happen: Think tank compiles decades’ worth of dire climate predictions. But this ain't all, because Environmental apocalypse predictions have failed for half a century and get a good dose of schadenfreude:

Al Gore predicted in 2009 that the North Pole would be completely ice free in five years. A U.S. Navy scientist in 2013 concluded that the Arctic’s summer sea ice cover would all be melted by 2016.

Bogus predictions confidently made are not always harmless. The Maritime Bulletin reported that on Sept. 3, 16 “climate change warriors” making a documentary film on the melting polar icecap had to be rescued by helicopter from their ship because it was stuck in the ice halfway between Norway and the North Pole.

And Time Mag has been on it from the beginning!

If you sin against the climate - and who doesn't? - you can now confess for all to see at NBC News. But who will there be to give you absolution?

Environmentalism is religion with sin but no salvation and now it wants confession with no pardon. In other words, it has become a cult.

Noted scientist Freeman Dyson wrote that, "Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion." I demur. Environmentalism has not replaced socialism at all. Instead, the old-line socialists, faced with decades of the failure of political socialism, have jumped on the environmentalist bandwagon to keep socialism alive.

I wrote that 11 years ago. Today, observe the Democrat candidates and discern how socialism and environmentalism have merged so that they are now the one and the same.

Because the Ruling Party there is really just a Destructor: Why California Keeps Making Homelessness Worse. In fact, half of all America's homeless people are in California.

No matter who wins next November, people will be killed in the civil unrest to follow.

Should Donald Trump prevail in his bid for a second term, the left will go insane, deploying every “insurance policy” weapon at their disposal to negate four more years of the Orange Man.  What Obama, Comey, and Brennan et al. did to Trump in his first term will seem mild in comparison to what the left is planning should he win.

If the Democrat wins,

Eventually, the president will overreach, signing an order for gun confiscation ... .

And for the right, that will be the last straw (plastic or paper). 

The left doesn’t understand that every gun owner is a single-issue-voter; millions will refuse to give up their guns.  And, many gun owners in this country will not go “meekly into the night,” there will be “rage” against what they will see as a usurpation of their constitutional rights. 

But as I explained in November 2016, we entered that month a low-intensity civil war in the true meaning of the term. After next November, it will not be low intensity any more.

Beto O'Rourke tore down the curtain concealing what Democrats really want ("First, let's shoot all the gun owners"), and now Senator Elizabeth Warren rips it to shreds: Sen. Warren Reveals Democratic Socialists' Hidden Agenda.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, made this quite clear on Wednesday when she introduced the "Accountable Capitalism Act." A more accurate name would have been the "First Step to Overthrowing Capitalism Act," because a long-term objective of the Democratic Socialists of America is crushing capitalism. They want an economy that isn't free and open but subject to their boot on its throat.

Under what we'll call Warren's Decree, "American corporations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue must obtain a federal charter from a newly formed Office of United States Corporations ... . The new federal charter obligates company directors to consider the interests of all corporate stakeholders — including employees, customers, shareholders, and the communities in which the company operates."

Read the whole thing. And when a Harvard economics professor characterizes the bill "as a means for destroying capitalism," then even a blind person can see what the Democrats really have in mind.

Are you retired or nearing retirement? If you vote for a Democrat next year, enjoy eating your Campbell's condensed soup for breakfast after Jan. 20, 2021. And for lunch. And for dinner. Because your retirement accounts will be drained by the socialists. Remember, Warren excitedly exclaims she is not going to tax mere income. She is going to tax every dollar you have, no matter how long you have had it and no matter what taxes you have already paid on it.

Her “Accountable Capitalism Act” would wipe out the single greatest legal protection retirees currently enjoy—the requirement that corporate executives and fund managers act as fiduciaries on investors’ behalf. ...
 
Under this new Warren charter, companies currently dedicated to their shareholders’ interest would be reordered to serve the interests of numerous new “stakeholders,” including “the workforce,” “the community,” “customers,” “the local and global environment” and “community and societal factors.”

Eliminating corporations’ duty to serve investors exclusively and forcing them to serve political interests would represent the greatest government taking in American history. Sen. Warren’s so-called accountable capitalism raids the return that wealth provides to its owners, the vast majority of whom are present or near retirees.

Oh, you say, she is only going to tax "the rich." But in their minds, if you have a job, you're rich.

You won't be able to afford a car, but Andrew Yang is going to take them all away anyway.

Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang said the United States may have to eliminate private car ownership to combat climate change during MSNBC's climate forum at Georgetown University Thursday morning.

Instead, he wants a "constant roving fleet of electric cars" for everyone to use - as common property, like all proper socialists.

And finally, the Democrat debate:

The Left has no self awareness

The writer of this New Republic piece is utterly without a sense of irony that every city he mentions in the article has been under Democrat rule for decades.

The New American Homeless -- Housing insecurity in the nation’s richest cities is far worse than government statistics claim. 

As a longtime renter, Goodman was acquainted with the capriciousness of Atlanta’s housing market. She knew how easily the house could slip away. Seeking to avoid this outcome, she ensured that her rent checks were never late and, despite her exhausting work schedule, became a stickler for cleanliness. So strong was her fear of being deemed a “difficult” tenant that she avoided requesting basic repairs. But now, reading the landlord’s terse notice, she realized that these efforts had been insufficient. When her lease expired at the end of the month, it would not be renewed. No explanation was legally required, and none was provided. “You think you did everything you’re supposed to do,” she told me, “and then this happens.”


A clue lay in the neighborhood’s accelerating transformation. Up and down her street, old, shabby dwellings—many of them, like the one she rented, casualties of the previous decade’s foreclosure crisis, purchased at rock-bottom prices by investors who had simply waited around until they appreciated in value—were being sold, gutted, and reconstructed. In retrospect, a flyer on her doorstep from Sotheby’s International Realty, offering to “pay cash, close quickly, and save you the hassle of multiple showings and cleaning/renovating/staging/pictures,” was an ominous sign. Goodman’s landlord, a doctor who runs an international nonprofit, told me recently that she didn’t renew the lease for financial reasons. “With the area taking off,” she explained, “it was the perfect time to unload the property.” When we spoke, she was preparing to sell the house.


Goodman had 30 days to relocate her family. 

This absolutely is a real problem for many people, and not just black Americans (though probably proportionally more). I have talked with more than a few people in this kind of situation who could not afford to live closer than 45-60 minutes to their wage jobs. In the north-of-Nashville town where I live, there are many white men and women who also commute 45 minutes or more to their jobs - but they are not making only $10 per hour or so, either.

In many franchised service businesses, such as styling salons or fast-food chain, workers cannot rely on working as a set location day to day. There is a Great Clips where I get my hair cut. I have never had it cut by the same stylist twice. Its staff on the job changes almost daily. One of them told me their location assignments are usually day to day, and sometimes they are told to go work at a salon very far away.

My very basic haircut costs about $10 with my military-vet discount. I put a twenty on the counter and bid her farewell.

New Republic does not propose a solution for the "working homeless" problem, but I will offer one now: Stop electing Democrats. I mean, as someone once said, What do you have to lose?

More taxes for thee but not for me

If you want to see a bunch of hypocritical leftists squirming with embarrassment, there’s a very clever video showing what happens when a bunch of pro-tax hike millionaires are asked to voluntarily pay more money to the IRS.


I’ve even debated some of these rich, pro-tax statists on TV, telling them not to make the rest of us victims of their neurotic guilt feelings.

They definitely don’t put their money where their mouths are. There is an official government webpage where people can voluntary send extra cash to Washington, but the amount of money raised doesn’t even qualify as an asterisk in the federal budget.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that people elsewhere in the world also are not keen on the idea of deliberately giving politicians extra money to spend.

Voluntary Taxation
Bloomberg has a rather amusing story about the utter failure of a voluntary tax in Norway.

Eager to pay more taxes? Then look no further than Norway. …Launched in June, the initiative has received a lukewarm reception, with the equivalent of just $1,325 in extra revenue being collected so far, according to the Finance Ministry. That’s not much for a country of 5.3 million people… “The tax scheme was set up to allow those who want to pay more taxes to do so in a simple and straightforward way,” Finance Minister Siv Jensen said in an emailed comment. “If anyone thinks the tax level is too low, they now have the chance to pay more.” …Jonas Gahr Store, the wealthy Labor Party contender…, has so far refused to take up the government’s offer.

I’m not surprised that the ordinary people of Norway aren’t sending extra cash to their politicians.
After all, the country already has a costly welfare state financed by very high tax rates as well as lots of oil revenue. So why enable an even bigger burden of government?

But Mr. Store hardly seems a very ethical proponent of higher taxes if he’s not willing to lead by example. Again, this is not very shocking. It’s a pattern among rich leftists.

The Biggest Proponents of Higher Taxes
The state of Massachusetts has a program for voluntary tax payments, but the Boston Globe revealed that Elizabeth Warren somehow couldn’t bring herself to cough up additional money to finance bigger government.

Elizabeth Warren acknowledged this morning that she does not pay a voluntary higher tax rate on her state income taxes, a question her campaign had previously refused to answer. …state Republicans have criticized Warren, who has earned a six-figure salary and owns assets worth millions, for her previous refusal to answer whether she pays a voluntary higher rate, calling her an “elitist hypocrite” who “lectures others about their responsibility to pay higher taxes.”

And John Kerry also decided that he wouldn’t pay extra tax to his state’s politicians.

Sen. John Kerry (D. Mass.) sailed into hot water last year when tax returns revealed that he also paid the Bay State’s lower tax rate. …perhaps he intended to pay Massachusetts’ higher rate, but his calculator slid off his yacht.

Though Kerry uses tax havens to protect his wealth, and even keeps a yacht in a neighboring low-tax state, at least he’s consistent in his hypocrisy.

Though according to New England Public Radio, there are a few people in Massachusetts who actually do contribute extra money.

Lenox accountant William Keen said it’s his job to save his clients money, so he just assumes they want to pay their state income tax at 5.1 percent, and not the optional rate of 5.85 percent. 

“If somebody specifically asked to be set at the higher rate, I would do it,” Keen said Friday. 

“Nobody has ever even asked for that. It’s never even come up.” And very few taxpayers across Massachusetts do pay at that higher rate. According to the state Department of Revenue, on average since 2002, 1,200 people each year check the box on the tax form to voluntarily pay more. That’s contributed to just over a quarter million dollars to the state’s coffers each year – a drop in the bucket since Massachusetts has a budget of about $40 billion.

I think people who deliberately over-pay to government are very misguided, but it’s better to be naive than to be hypocritical. Like the Clintons. And Warren Buffett. Or any of the other rich leftists who want higher taxes for you and me while engaging in very aggressive tax avoidance.

Reprinted from International Liberty.

Daniel J. Mitchell

Daniel J. Mitchell is a Washington-based economist who specializes in fiscal policy, particularly tax reform, international tax competition, and the economic burden of government spending. He also serves on the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review. 

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Free Money Socialist Fantasy Wealth, by Andrew Yang

Democrat presidential candidate Andrew Yang tweeted this yesterday.

How to begin? Let's start here:

"As of 2018, the U.S. Census Bureau counted about 83.09 million families in the United States. The average family consists of 3.14 persons in 2018, down from 3.7 in the 1960s" (link).

What Yang proposes is to increase that $60K household income by $37,680 per year (3.17 * $12K per year), or 62.4 percent. Remember - every person is getting that payout, not just heads of households. Now, suddenly, the median household income is almost $100,000 per year.

What do do with all that extra money? Invest? Go on a fabulous vacay? Buy a huge house? Diamonds? Enormous home theaters?

Nope! You will use it to buy groceries because this loaf of bread at your local Kroger ...

... will jump in price to about $5.30. And that $22,000 car that median family was thinking of buying? It's now almost $36,000. "That which is subsidized increases," and when you flood money into the country, your are subsidizing higher prices, and they will come as surely as night follows day. After all, if you are selling goods to richer people, you raise prices. In fact, you have to. Don't believe it? Ask the people of Zimbabwe:

Yes, that is real. Which is to say, Yang has devised the most effective inflationary federal program ever. More money, higher prices, no one's standard of living will change. In fact, huge numbers of people, if not most, will actually see a fall in standard, because:

• that extra $12K per year per person will lead them to add debt before prices reach their peak. 
• Wage and salary workers will not see pay increases at the level before the Monopoly money scheme; why should an employer pay them more when the government is doing it? Some increases will still be paid, of course, if the labor market is tight. But the overall effect will be decreases in amount and frequency of pay raises. 

This is what happens when politicians do what economists call "static analysis," which treats in this case personal and family income as a variable but assumes that everything else relating to income is static, or non-variable. But in economics, everything is variable.

Such as taxes paid. Nothing Yang has said indicates that the Monopoly money is tax-excluded. If (when) that $12K bounces someone into a higher bracket, Yang will not only have introduced the most inflationary federal policy ever, he will also have exacerbated income equality because of bracket creep.

Here are the federal tax brackets for 2019:

So an unmarried woman making $50,000 per year owes income tax thus:

• $50,000 minus standard deduction of $12,000 equal $38,000 taxable income.
• Tax owed on first $9,700 is zero 
• 12 percent on the remaining income of $28,300 is $3,396. 
• Total income of $50,000 minus $3,396 tax paid equals $46,604 in her pocket.

But now instead of a total income of $50K, it is $62,000. That means her after-deduction taxable income is $50,000 - or all of her former income.

• Tax owed on first $9,700 is zero 
• 12 percent tax owed on $9,701 - $39,475 equals $3,573.
• 22 percent tax owed on $39,476 - $50,000 equals $2,315.
• Total tax bill of $3,573 plus $2,315 equals $5,888.
• Total income of $62,000 minus $5,888 equals $56,112 in her pocket. 

Of that $12K "free" money Yang wants to send her, she actually gets to spend or save only about $9,500 of it. Which is not chicken feed until you remember that higher costs of living (like the rent she is paying) are going to take it all away and then some.

Compare that to a professional business woman whose "before" total income is $82,000, after-deduction, taxable income is $70,000. She is paying the same tax rate of 22 percent as her working-woman counterpart on dollars greater than $39,475. But the "free" $12,000 does not push her into a higher bracket as it does the other woman. 

But let's look at the macro picture also, which requires math (which socialists seem to hate). If you Google population of the USA, you learn that as of today, there are 329,211,912 (~329 million) people living in the United States. But let's take Yang at his word and include only those who are US citizens, which means, I assume, that Yang wants to put the citizenship question on the Census next year.

Let's assume the high side of non-citizen residents, which would be about 20 million from south of the border and let's say about 5 million from elsewhere. That means he will pay $1,000 per month to 304.2 million people.

That means the monthly payout is $304,200,000,000. Which is $304.2 BILLION. Per. Month.

A year's payout comes to $3,650,400,000,000. That is $3.65 TRILLION per year.

On Yang's Twitter feed is a graphic showing how he will do this "without borrowing a cent." Here it is:

Add them up and you get a "savings" of 2.35 trillion per year. Which means he still has an annual shortfall of $1.3 trillion per year.

But don't worry - there may be enough Monopoly money to cover it!

I replied to Yang thus because I could not resist:

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the American public will endure until the Congress discovers it can bribe the people with their own money. And so here we are.

But remember:

Update: Even the WaPo recognizes socialist hypocrisy and reality, like that of Bernie Sanders.

You should pay more taxes but I should not

It's the Bee so it is (supposedly) satire, but actually, some of my colleagues really do believe this. 

Over time, I have had some conversations with progressives who are angry (as progressives generally are) that people are not paying enough in taxes. After all, we still have the poor, etc. etc. etc. So I have asked then, "Are you personally paying too little in taxes? That is, do you think that you personally should be paying more in taxes?"

I have not one time received an affirmative response. Not. Once.

And then I tell them, "Anyone who wants to pay more in taxes can do so at any time. So lead the way! Show us how it's done!"

Here is how to pay more in taxes.

How do I make a contribution to the U.S. government?

Citizens who wish to make a general donation to the U.S. government may send contributions to a specific account called "Gifts to the United States." 

This account was established in 1843 to accept gifts, such as bequests, from individuals wishing to express their patriotism to the United States. Money deposited into this account is for general use by the federal government and can be available for budget needs. 

These contributions are considered an unconditional gift to the government. Financial gifts can be made by check or money order payable to the United States Treasury and mailed to the address below. 

Gifts to the United States
U.S. Department of the Treasury
Funds Management Branch
P.O. Box 1328
Parkersburg, WV 26106-1328Any tax-related questions regarding these contributions should be directed to the Internal Revenue Service at 800-829-1040.

As you can imagine, progressives are not exactly lining up to send in a check.