op ed review 12/24
President Trump signed tax cut legislation on Friday, the
most significant piece of legislation since he took office. While not the
biggest tax cut in history, White House staff argues that the tax cuts together
with the tax reforms make it the most significant tax policy bill in the
history of the United States.
Five Key Facts About the Republican Tax Reform Bill Signed
by President Donald Trump
Five ways the media tries to convince us tax cuts are bad.
Democrats plan tax cut protest, have to cancel when no one
shows up.
In response to the tax cut, Comcast announces 100,000
employees will get $1000 bonus; will spend $50 billion on investment…
AT&T announces 200,000 employees will each get a $1000
bonus in response to tax cuts.
Boeing announces $300 million in initiatives in response to
tax cut.
Wells Fargo says it will boost its minimum wage to $15 an hour, and will target $400
million in donations to community and nonprofit organizations next year.
Economic optimism soars, boosting Trump's approval rating
“….polling
measures of economic optimism are reaching new records. …..a specific
choice of words
(in the CNBC survey was) used to describe the economic conditions being
measured: …”We’re not measuring a marginal change in the economy, we’re
measuring a different economy.”…
Trump Year One List: 81 major Trump achievements, 11 Obama
legacy items repealed. Here’s the list:
Dow rises 5,000 points in a year for the first time ever
Black unemployment rate lowest in 17 years.
US home sales hit 11 year high.
Trump makes regulations disappear.
Environmental Protection Agency officials are “leaving in
droves”, reports the New York Times.
Congress opens Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil
exploration.
Here's how much ground ISIS has lost since Trump took over
Does illegal immigration cost us money? DOJ has released new quarterly numbers, requested by
President Trump, detailing how many foreign born individuals are currently
incarcerated in the U.S. federal prison system. The answer? One in 5. The majority are here illegally.
Liberals tell us we can’t afford a border wall. Would it surprise you to learn that
another country built a 1,700-mile wall to keep illegal aliens out?......a
small, impoverished country with only a fraction of the resources of the United
States?
The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook.
Seattle Seahawk Players Account for More than Half of NFL’s
Anthem Protesters in Week 15
The deadly train derailment near Lacey WA was on tracks
built with Obama stimulus money. $187
million to shave ten minutes off commuter time.
Legalizing ‘Dreamers’ would cost $26 billion, says the
Congressional Budget Office.
The Democrats’ draft Dream Act amnesty would likely add as
many chain-migration foreigners to the United States population as are added by
the total number of Americans who are born in four years’ time.
California Democrats Proposing Spending $1 Billion Giving
Health Care To Illegal Immigrants
https://www.dailywire.com/news/24750/ca-dems-proposing-spending-1-billion-giving-health-hank-berrien
We Now Know Trump Accusers are Paid $750,000 by Dem Donors
to Say Trump Abused Them
___________________________________________________________________
COLUMN OF THE WEEK
Investor’s Business Daily
As
tax cuts become a reality, Democrats have gone ballistic, claiming that the
GOP's sweeping tax plan will rob the middle class and the poor, line the
pockets of the rich, and tank the economy. It's all false, class-warfare
clap-trap, and they know it.
Following
passage of the Republican tax reform, Democrat politicians and leftist media
celebrities have become nearly unhinged, and that may be an understatement. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called
the tax cuts a "scam" and "simply theft, monumental, brazen theft from the
American middle class and from every person who aspires to reach it." She
added that it was "not a vote for an investment in growth or jobs,"
but "a vote to install a permanent plutocracy in our nation." Plutocracy?
Not
to be outdone, former Democratic presidential candidate and millionaire
socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders
of Vermont called it "a great day for the Koch brothers and other
billionaire Republican campaign contributors who will see huge tax breaks for
themselves while driving up the deficit by almost $1.5 trillion."
Celebrity
leftists fared no better. "Woman, mother, grandmother, sister, daughter,
you have betrayed us all," former comedian and TV host Rosie
O'Donnell tweeted at Maine
Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who voted for the tax cut plan. "Dear god,
ask for forgiveness, redeem your soul tomorrow." She even offered her $2
million in cash to vote "no."
This
is how desperate the left has become, and how divorced from reality. For all
the talk of how tax cuts will line the pockets of the rich and destroy the
economy, virtually no one in the mainstream of the economics profession, left
or right, agrees.
The
Tax Policy Center
(TPC), a liberal think tank, noted that more than 80% of Americans will get tax
cuts under the plan just passed. And the benefits will go to every income
group, not "billionaires." This, by the way, is bolstered by other
recent analyses by Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation and by the widely
respected nonpartisan Tax Foundation. TPC estimates an average tax cut of about
$2,140 per person. By the way, some 16% of the richest Americans — those
in the top 0.1% of incomes — will face an average tax increase of
$387,610.
Brian
Riedl of the Manhattan Institute, further crunching the TPC numbers, found that while the top 1% of
incomes now pay 27% of all federal taxes, they will get just 21% of the tax
cuts. The bottom 80%, including the middle class, pays only 33% of all taxes,
but will take home 35% of the tax cuts.
Of
the 12% who will face tax hikes, they're overwhelmingly among the rich —
not the middle class. So, no, it's not "tax cuts for the rich."
That's a totally bogus argument. For that matter, so are the arguments that tax
cuts tank the economy. History is replete with examples of why that isn't true.
The
tax cuts on corporations and small, pass-through businesses, along with letting
companies immediately expense the cost of new equipment, should lead to more
business investment. So should shrinking the death tax, which should encourage
more small-business investment.
How
much more is an open question, but the Heritage Foundation, which employs a widely used economic
model, estimates that the tax cuts will tack on 2.2% to long-term GDP, or
roughly $3,000 per household.
That
estimate includes a 4.5% jump in capital investment, mainly in equipment, and a
hefty 9.4% gain in business structures. Along with expected rises in both the
number of jobs and hours worked, after-tax wages for the average worker will be
3.5% higher than they would have been without the tax cuts. Others see more
modest, yet still significant, gains. The Tax Foundation, for instance, forecasts a long-term permanent rise of 1.7% in GDP and 1.5% for wages. It also sees
339,000 new jobs.
These
aren't pie-in-the sky guesses. As history clearly shows, growth-oriented tax
cuts such as these almost always have major benefits for the economy and for
average workers. During the 20th century, big tax cuts in the 1920s (Harding,
Coolidge), 1960s (Kennedy) and 1980s (Reagan) all yielded major growth
dividends for the U.S. economy.
What's
more, those past major tax cuts were to varying degrees bipartisan. Sadly, not
this time. Not one Democrat voted for them. Not one. That's why the
Democrats and progressive left have become so utterly unhinged. They've failed
to stop the one thing that might deny them a chance to retake both houses of
Congress in the 2018 midterm elections: an economic boom.
When
the economy really begins cooking, with the economy growing close to 3%,
hundreds of thousands of new jobs being created and workers seeing more in
their paychecks, how will they explain that to their constituents?
Another good read: “Defending
country, not climate: Trump’s ‘principled realism’
prevails over radical environmentalism”
____________________________________________________________________
OTHER COLUMNS
“I like when the poor get tax cuts. I like when the middle
class get tax cuts. I like when the rich get tax cuts. I like when the super
rich get tax cuts. I like everybody keeping the money they earned.”
-Frank
Fleming
“What are the lessons for the nation from 21st-century
California? Fix premodern problems before dreaming about postmodern solutions.
Loudly virtue-signaling about addressing misdemeanors does not excuse quietly
ignoring felonies. Learn how an entire culture is fed, housed and fueled before
faulting those who address such needs…….Remember that voting progressively in
the abstract does not automatically translate into living progressively in the
concrete.”
-Victor
Davis Hanson:
____________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
BuzzFeed science editor:
“All I Want For Christmas Is Full Communism Now”
Twitter Leftists Beg Baseball Shooter To 'Finish The Job'
After Rep. Steve Scalise Votes For Tax Cut.
Portland’s Disgraceful Anarchy: A city’s besieged businesses close rather than deal with unchecked
urban degradation.
As socialist Venezuela Collapses, Scores Of Children Are
Dying Of Starvation–And The Government Is Trying To Hide It
University teaches white employees how to cope with the
‘discomfort’ of being white.
Liberals Celebrate Christmas with ‘I Am So Sick of White
Guys’ Coloring Book
Student at UCSD accused of racism and hauled into the Office
for the Prevention of Harassment & Discrimination for posting pictures of
Kate Steinle with the caption “She had dreams too.”
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/dec/20/uc-san-diego-students-file-complaint-tear-down-rac/
Branded “hate chicken” by the left, Chick-fil-A feeds
Atlanta's stranded travelers at the airport during the power outage last week.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/12/branded_hate_chicken_by_the_left_chickfila_feeds_atlantas_stranded_travelers.html#ixzz520c8FLnY
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
ISLAM
Muslim
convert and would-be domestic terrorist Everitt Aaron Jameson, who planned to
carry out a Christmas Day massacre on Pier 39 in San Francisco, was a supporter
of Antifa and counted amongst his favorite news organizations CNN, BuzzFeed and
Al-Jazeera.
__________________________________________________________________
FILM
Chappaquidick trailer
__________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
Record snows in Alaskan mountains.
Too many polar bears, not too few.
__________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
“The Democracy Dies in Darkness Café is located conveniently
near the Capitol, the Hill and the FBI headquarters. It’s open all night and I
stopped in for a late-night coffee with my friend, a fiction novelist who was
depressed. “I spent a year writing about a coup attempt against an outsider who
by strategic brilliance defeated the handpicked candidate of a cabal of
establishment powerhouses. It involved the highest officials of the FBI and
Department of Justice. They manipulated a FISA Court into letting them
electronically surveil the candidate and all who worked with him, unmasked their
names, leaked what they found, and they still couldn’t beat him. Then they
engineered the recusal of the attorney general, got his deputy to appoint their
bestest pal to be special counsel. Given free rein, he hired fierce partisans
of the defeated candidate, used the ill-gotten information against her
opponents to prosecute three people with minimal connection to the campaign --
one for a dubious process crime dependent on the notes of an FBI agent who had
earlier orchestrated lies about Benghazi, covered up for the misuse of
classified information by the losing candidate, and oversaw the investigation
into the president.” “Sounds great,” I said, so why are you depressed?” “Every
publisher I sent it to rejected it as being too implausible to sell to readers.”
Trump
offers a daring program to restore US dominance…..US President proposes a
muscular kind of global activism, fostering new alliances while reinforcing
America’s existing commitments; plus a layered missile defense shield
Never Trumpers: The good (who have re-evaluated), the bad
(who can’t get over themselves) and the ugly (who have thrown in with the Left)
…it
is time for the remaining NeverTrumpers to apologize for a reason far more
important than self-castigation or merely to make things "right."… More
conservative goals have been achieved or put in motion in eleven months than in
any time in recent, or even distant, memory. It's an astonishing reversal for
our country accompanied by the beginnings of an economic boom. The next
year seems poised to be an ideological duel as close to the death as we have
seen in a long time. If the right does
not win, the gains of 2017 will be stymied by the election of 2018 and
completely washed away in 2020. It's an all-hands-on-deck situation and we need the
NeverTrumpers' help. We need -- to borrow a hoary leftist term – a united
front.
Thousands of students attend conservative boot camp.
Why I quit teaching (college)..
___________________________________________________________________
WISE
WORDS
“There is no part of the administration of government that
requires extensive information and a thorough knowledge of the principles of
political economy, so much as the business of taxation. The man who understands
those principles best will be least likely to resort to oppressive expedients,
or sacrifice any particular class of citizens to the procurement of revenue.”
-Alexander
Hamilton
posted by gary at
10:19 AM
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