George Rebane
The 2018 Tax Reform Act is legislation that I believe will overall reduce taxes for almost all Americans, and with its business-friendly provisions will give a significant boost to GDP growth. However, its SALT (state and local taxes) provision disturbs me because it is intrinsically flawed both functionally and, yes, ethically. The latter because it allows the various taxing jurisdictions to make the wage earner pay more in taxes than the total amount he earned. SALT bases its tax amounts on the total amount earned before any other mandated taxes, fees, and tributes are paid. If all taxing jurisdictions practice SALT – say local rate is 25%, state rate is 35%, federal rate is 45% – then the taxpayer may wind up owing more than a 100% of his earnings in taxes. Such policies are intrinsically unfair and unethical. The jurisdictions should decide their sequence of taxation – say, first local then state then federal – and each apply their rates to the amount that the taxpayer has left after paying his prior tax obligations. That way the total taxes may approach 100%, but they will never exceed it like in the above example where the taxes sum to 105% of earnings.
America’s Left either does not understand the use of force by nations, or is consciously working to have our country capitulate to or be destroyed by a foreign power. As outlined most recently in ‘America’s Checkpoints’, I believe in the former. It is unconscionable that Democrats like Schumer and Pelosi will hold defense upgrades hostage to their vote buying spending programs. Without a formidable military feared by our enemies, diplomacy sings castrato. In short, without credible arms there will be no United States to earn the redistributed monies for our entitlement programs. And the Left knows this as it plays brinkmanship with what should be a non-partisan funding priority were we truly all Americans. Mark Helprin of the Claremont Institute lays out the details of the current dire situation in his ‘America’s Alarmingly Archaic Arsenal’.
And jumping from perfidy to insanity, the Left’s class warfare and identity politics cadres have come up with a new one for the campus wars, soon to be seen on a lamestream commentary near you. The core contention in understanding the new black-white dialogue on campuses is, “One, that civility, as currently practiced in America, is a white construct. Two, that in a campus setting, the “woke” white student’s endeavor to avoid microaggressions against black peers is itself a microaggression—a form of noblesse oblige whereby white students are in fact patronizing students of color. Not only that, but by treating black students with common courtesy and expecting the same in return, white students elide black grievances, bypassing the “race talk” that is supposed to occur in preamble to all other conversations. Got it?”
And it gets worse in the context of reasoned debates in which reason is now considered racist. So, “increasingly at major competitions, there must be a pre-debate debate on the terms of engagement: whether students are required to cite proof or are free to argue wholly from their feelings and so-called lived experience. Far from being banned or even maligned by debate judges, such antics increasingly win converts and, not coincidentally, matches.” And there is no requirement that your “lived experience” bears any resemblance to the real world. “Students are pointedly discouraged from rebutting feelings that don’t jibe with verifiable reality.” (more here)
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