Here are my observations on the news of the day.
HOW ARE WE GOING TO SELL THE TAX PLAN to voters is the mantra now that the bill has been passed and signed. Some say the president should go on the road and rally public support. I don’t have a problem with that, but I don’t think it’s necessary.
With the majority of Americans getting more money in their paycheck via individual tax cuts, and benefiting from the results of the lower corporate rate, it seems a bit incongruous that the plan needs to be sold.
We are already seeing signs of corporate buy-in with announcements of expansion plans, bonuses and pay increases and that will continue. Come February, workers will see more in their paychecks as deductions are reduced.
As the midterm election campaigning heats up, Republicans won’t pass up an opportunity to remind voters of promises fulfilled, while refreshing their memories that not a single Democrat supported the tax plan.
Incidentally, we learned this week why Democrats weren’t invited to the negotiation table on tax reform/cuts? Actually, they were. Forty-Five Senate Democrats sent a letter offering to come to the table, but they closed the door on themselves with “conditions (that) were obviously designed to take them out of the room,” said Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), one of the GOP tax plan architects. They wanted “veto power,” and said, “There can be no net tax relief for the people who pay 40 percent of all of the taxes”– namely the top 1 percent of American taxpayers. The Democrats forgot who was in power.
It shouldn’t be difficult for the GOP to hold their eight Senate seats while helping to bring down the 25 Democrats who voted against the plan, especially those in Indiana (Donnelly), North Dakota (Heitkamp), West Virginia (Manchin), Missouri (McCaskill) and Montana (Testor), where Donald Trump won by 19 percentage points or higher.
In her Saturday Wall Street Journal column, “This Tax Bill May Do Some Good,” (a not so optimistic outlook), Peggy Noonan recalls public reaction to Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts. “I noticed a funny thing about public opinion and tax policy. When you run for office and promise you’ll cut taxes, the crowd cheers lustily. Then once in office you put together a tax bill and the polls show public support is lukewarm. Then you pass it and its popularity bubbles around the polls. Then an election comes and you win and the voters tell pollsters they backed you because you cut taxes.
“Polling doesn’t matter right now,” she writes, “Down the road it matters.”
A SURPRISE FROM THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA – CBS evaluated three different households and the effects of the tax bill. A single mother renting a home in Cary, North Carolina with an income a little under $40,000, will receive a tax cut of $1,300 in taxes next year. Married homeowners with no kids in Providence, Rhode Island, who earned more than $150,000 will owe $650 less than before. Lastly, a married couple with three children in Fresno, California, who made around $300,000 last year could eligible for nearly $13,000 less in taxes.
“A WIDE BODY OF RESEARCH suggests that corporate tax reform that lets companies retain a greater share of earnings will benefit workers in higher wages,” according to The Wall Street Journal editorial board.
GET OUT THE CRYING TOWELS – With student tuitions already reaching the moon, Harvard President Drew Faust writes, “The new tax on university endowments will weaken financial aid, faculty and research initiatives and other institutional programs that support students, professors and medical and scientific studies. Boo Hoo.
TOWNHALL REPORTS that about one in five inmates in federal prisons are foreign-born, with illegal alien incarceration costing taxpayers nearly $2 billion each year, according to the Department of Justice.
EVIDENCE OF SWAMP DRAINING – More than 750 people have left the Environmental Protection Agency since President Trump took office, putting the organization nearly a quarter of the way toward its goal of shrinking the agency to levels last seen during the Reagan administration.
THOSE CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES that have consumed about 1.2 million acres, are not a laughing matter, but you have to laugh at the liberal state’s politicos who, as I reported earlier, have blamed the fires on climate change. “The fires are burning in California,” said Gov. Jerry Brown, who was in Paris to announce his support of the Paris accord, “They’ll be burning in France, burning all around the world. The world is “on the road to hell.”
I have also told you about the emission control regulations enforced by the left coast. California’s wildfires in 2003, which burned more than 750,000 acres, produced the monthly carbon equivalent of about half of the state’s fossil fuel burning sources, according to The Wall Street Journal, “ditto the September 2006 wildfires,” negating all of the state’s anti-carbon policies.
While Brown ignores the warnings of the U.S. Forest Service about the buildup of acres of deadwood and brush, he has proposed just $200 million of this year’s projected $2.4 billion in cap-and-trade revenues to go for fire prevention, while the rest goes to high-speed rail, electric car subsidies and public housing.
