Free Republic

Oops. Wrong thread. Trump has apostatized on two economic policy questions today. And there’s still plenty of time before the election for him to pander even more.

Every step is takes is now hard to the left.

Imposing the cap on state and local tax deductions was a huge fight. It went on for years, running back to when Trump was still a democrat and long before he got into politics. Trump probably remembers the big deductions he used to take as a wealthy NYC developer; it must’ve been nice for chumps in red state America to pick up some of the tab for lefty governance in New York, and I’m sure Trump never saw a tax deduction he didn’t like.

The blue state socialists wanted, and still want, full deductibility on the federal form of state and local taxes because it is a gigantic subsidy for high tax, high spending blue states. Conservatives fought for years to impose a cap — full elimination of the deduction would be even better — because there is no reason for low tax jurisdictions to subsidize the profligates. Let the libs reap the full consequences of what they vote for.

But Trump doesn’t care. He will throw it all away for a cheap, off-the-cuff applause line.

This isn’t a matter of Trump proposing something I don’t like. It’s a question of Trump carrying on like a deranged loon. What he is proposing here is stupid. We all know it. The personality cultists won’t care, but when the man on the white horse goes off track, we have a problem.

If Trump is going to continue with the madcap pandering, why doesn’t he propose something really useful — bring back 25 cent ice cream cones and $1 movie tickets and maybe even Norman Rockwell’s America. Apparently all it takes is a tweet.

Yes, Kamala is worse. But Trump keeps trying to close the distance.

And once again, Trump scrambles to get to the left of the democrats.

This is wrong, stupid, and destructive. But Trump is in full pander mode and doesn’t care.

The movie has already been made, with Tom Hanks playing the Larry Ellison role: The Circle, 2017. It starts with the utopian ideal and descends into the reality of incorporation into the hive mind of the Borg.

Private behavior matters. Private remarks matter. This includes sexual misconduct.

Anyone who denies that needs to shut up about JFK, LBJ, and Bill Clinton, not to mention innumerable other people on the left — Senators, congressmen, governors, big donors, the Harvey Weinstein types in Hollywood, the NBA players, rock stars, and actors, the big donors, the corrupt corporate moguls, the sleazoid leftist intellectuals and academics, etc.

This isn’t limited to sexual misconduct, btw. We also have innumerable examples of public figures saying one thing privately and lying publicly on core issues. Of course this sort of thing is fair game for criticism.

Is there anyone here who hasn’t rained hell and damnation down upon such people on the left? Of course the democrats are going to hammer Trump’s sexual conduct and sexual boasting (which are two different things) as hard as they can. And of course it is going to have an impact.

Vetting of candidates still happens at lower levels, but even there it has taken a beating. We have several congresscritters who out to be taken out with the trash. And let’s not get started on the churches and universities. The fish rots from the head.

I wouldn’t have used those exact words but Brittany and Taylor are adults so act like an adult.

Brittany and Taylor aren't the ones acting childish here. TS made an endorsement. Celebs are known to do this. Hers was fairly tame. Trump did what he always does and unleashed his internal 13 year old drama queen. One might think he has better things to do and bigger fish to fry, but ....

Trump is 78 years old. One might think he would be capable of ignoring a celebrity pop tart. But of course, he isn't. He may or may not win the election, but he's determined to chase every squirrel that ventures into the twitterverse.

Poor Kamala. She wants us to know that she was raised in a working class family -- as the daughter of two academics, a research scientist (endocrinology) and developmental economics (tenured faculty in the struggling working class hellhole of Berkeley, California). If her mom didn't buy a house until Kamala was a teenager, it's because her parents moved around the country to various universities (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana; University of Wisconsin, Madison -- practically ghettos ....) in the earlier stages of their academic careers before ending up back in California. Then they got divorced. And in fairness, Kamala's mom, as a single mother, might have been stressed to buy a single family home in Berkeley, even on a professor's salary. Her dad had joint custody and she split time between the two; he was tenured at Stanford and was undoubtedly struggling in Palo Alto.

Yes, she identifies with us for sure.

Social Security is an intergenerational income transfer program. The taxes we paid into it went to pay benefits for our grandparents and parents. Our children and grandchildren will pay for ours. And on top of that, the benefit formula is heavily redistributive; check out the bend points. It is a thinly camouflaged old age welfare system. When the crunch comes, the democrats will try to make "saving Social Security" the wedge issue for dramatically higher taxes, which they want for their own sake (control and dependency). When they finally hit the wall on tax increases, they will means test benefits. Not only the rich, but middle and upper-middle class people, will be cut off. That's the road we are on.

The last national candidate to talk sense about this was Bush 43, who actually ran for election on a platform calling for the shift to a fully funded system -- and won. It is not the third rail if it is properly framed. But that takes work and message discipline. Trump is not interested (and seems incapable of message discipline); he is busy pandering, and currently he is trying to out-demagogue the democrats as we ride the bankruptcy express.

Of course fringe benefits should be counted as income for tax purposes. And so should welfare benefits. If taxpayers have to file every April 15, so should welfare recipients. Genuinely poor people would not see their taxes increase because they would be below the zero bracket amount, but even for them, the educative benefit would be substantial. The welfare baby mama in the projects should have to total up the full cost of her housing subsidy, her Medicare, her food stamps and WIC benefits, and whatever else she's getting, and duly report it. If nothing else, this should puncture the bubble of invincible ignorance that surrounds many of these people. Let them see how much working stiffs -- including her parents, functional siblings, cousins, etc -- are shelling out to support her in idleness. At the same time, this would also be a powerful check against welfare fraud, which is not well-policed, mostly because democrats want income redistribution by any means and will tolerate -- even enable -- fraud to achieve it.

Now, the obvious response to that would be to reduce government spending to pay for it. But, I won’t hold my breath.

Government spending is dominated by entitlement spending, and that is where the uncontrolled outyear growth is. Aside from defense spending and debt service, everything else is chump change.

If you want spending cuts to offset the cost of X, start with Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps.

The Europeans jumped down this black hole long before we did, and they ended up emasculating their military establishments because they were able to freeload on the U.S. defense umbrella. We are headed the same way.

Discretionary domestic spending -- well, there is a lot I would cut and a lot that I would keep. (The air traffic control system, the National Park Service, USDA inspectors in the food chain, etc.) I'd abolish the EPA, turn education back to the states and, at the state level, fully voucher the schools. I'd abolish HUD, and if cities and states want to play in the welfare housing market, let them do it on their own dime.

There are 1001 incidentals to cut -- and none of them matter in the long fun, at least for budgetary purposes, unless we control entitlement spending. That would mean Social Security "privatization," i.e. shifting the Ponzi scheme to a fully funded, individually owned, investment based thrift savings program. We need free market reforms in health insurance with a decent safety net for low income people, but otherwise people should own their own health insurance and (above a mandatory basic catastrophic care package) pay for the additional coverages they desire. Etc. From the Reagan era through the Contract With America period and into the Bush 43 reelect, this is what the GOP stood for. Trump has walked away from all of it. Trump is a populist, and he basically wants the democrats' welfare state with a MAGA hat for camouflage.

If we are going to have an income tax, all income should be treated equally regardless of source. This includes fringe benefits. Capital gains taxation is trickier because in principle, long term capital gains should be adjusted for inflation and that would require massive record keeping for many asset classes.

Trump is in full pander mode right now, and he is providing a clear example of how the tax code has become a corrupt monstrosity. No gimmick is too low if it buys votes. We can’t win a pander contest with the dems, because the GOP is ultimately the party of people who want a functional rules-based society with equal standards equally applied, vs the dems who want a patron-client society with political bosses distributing favors.

At the rate we’re going, Harris might as well propose to make Taylor Swift concert tickets tax deductible, and Trump will counter with deductibility of greens fees at golf courses.

In a perfect world, we’d get rid of the income tax entirely. I would shift to a consumed income tax with a high zero bracket amount to protect really low income people. Alan Simpson was a champion of this for years and headed up a group that developed the idea in great detail. Many conservatives endorsed it in principle but it never quite squeezed past the gatekeepers onto the field of play.

Democrats always hated the consumed income tax because it was consistent, honest and fair, and because it would have ended the byzantine complexity of the current tax code, which provides the essential cover for systemic corruption.

We miss people like Alan Simpson.

When did 1-3,000 meters become high altitude? 1,000 meters is common enough on the Appalachian Trail. Plenty of the Rockies are above 3,000 meters. I guess we should mask up to go hiking.

Trump looked as though he was winging it. I do wish Trump would learn to not take the bait and not become needlessly defensive. He could have pressed Ms. Harris on specifics more, because ABC wasn't going to.

Trump has done this since 2015. Why would anyone expect anything different tonight?

The dems are establishing political risk as a cardinal point of business planning. Companies can work the process, dot the it’s and cross the t’s, get all required permits in heavily regulated fields, and proceed in good faith with billions of dollars in investments ... and while all corporate obligations are binding, none of the government permits are worth the paper they are written on. This is the abolition of the rule of law, as is retroactivity in regulatory and court decisions.

Owning the politicians and controlling the activist groups through large grant’s are the only safe harbors. Corruption become the only ways to achieve reasonable certainty. To corrupt pols, this is a feature, not a bug.

2017 Best Supporting Actor, Moonlight.

2019 Best Supporting Actor, Greenbook.

I had to look him up. I’ve not seen either movie.

That was a memorable night/morning/afternoon and several succeeding days on FR. I miss a lot of the oldtimers.

I had been thinking that America’s first pogroms would be in Detroit, but NYC is edging ahead in the futures betting.

Al Sharpton was ahead of his time.

It’s no longer college football. It’s portalball. I wonder how long it will be before midseason trades are allowed.

Your #25: yes.

Whatever Epstein’s game was, the cover and opening gambit was big league schmoozing in every elite or elite-adjacent forum into which he could buy access. His modus operandi was to meet and cultivate high status people. What percentage of them he was able to compromise, we don’t know. Call that his “conversion rate.”

If and when the names are released, the guilty will try to hide in the crowd. Not everyone who socialized with Epstein in New York or on his island was compromised. And I strongly suspect that many people who went to his island didn’t know, at least initially, what was going on there. The instinct for self-preservation would have warned them off.

Honey traps work by luring in the unwary, and not all the unwary who find themselves in a compromising situation will take the bait. Sorting this out is going to be tricky.