The left now loves the IRS…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and says you have nothing to fear from the agency going on steroids, if you haven’t cheated on your taxes.

Perhaps they know they won’t be the ones targeted.

Not your father’s left.

The old left was afraid of the feds because it hadn’t yet become the feds. Today’s left loves them. The old left championed free speech for unpopular views because it wanted free speech for itself. Now it wants to shut down views that oppose it, because it can.

Open thread 8/8/22

The New Neo Posted on by

This is hard to watch, if real. Of course, those who knew the answers were edited out. But just to find anyone this ignorant is horrifying. I don’t even think these people are especially dumb. I just think they were allowed to sleep through school.

I think it’s real. And if it’s real, it explains a lot:

Royal gowns through the years

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was a kid, women dressed up like this quite a bit (minus the real jewels), and when I was a child I thought I’d have many such gowns when I grew up. But I’ve had perhaps three long gowns in my life, not including my wedding dress (which was rather simple), and all of them were worn by me prior to the age of twenty-one, mostly to attend other people’s formal weddings. After that, long gowns became passe, at least for us common folk.

But not for royalty. Here’s a photo album of quite a few worn by British royalty.

Several things strike me, looking at those gowns. The first is that the British royals – especially Princess Margaret – used to have quite a thing for the one-shouldered approach, something I favor as well. The second is that Queen Elizabeth and her sister really were lookers in their day. Here’s Margaret, for example:

The third is that I’ve gotten used to the Queen’s dowdy clothing, including dowdy but classic gowns, and I was surprised to see her showing a bit more skin when she was younger and had a great figure.

The fourth (no surprise) is that Kate looks lovely in almost all her gowns, and it’s not just her model-like form – it’s her smile and her choice of elegant designs.

The fifth is how retro some of Diana’s gowns look, but of course they do; it’s been a long time.

And the sixth is that Princess Anne has intermittently unflattering taste in clothes. She much prefers jodphurs and being on a horse.

The Breonna Taylor indictments

The New Neo Posted on by

Andrew Branca covers the federal indictments of the previously-acquitted police officers involved in the death of Breonna Taylor. As with everything I’ve seen from Branca, it is very comprehensive and very clear.

This is another example of the federal government pursuing in Ahab-like fashion police officers who unfortunately caused an accidental death, and charging them with capital offenses (for example, “deprivation of civil rights under color of law under circumstances in which death results”) with very poor evidence to support their guilt of that particular charge.

The laws against double jeopardy give the defendants no protection, because of the distinction between state and federal charges. I would like to see SCOTUS take up the question of whether this sort of federal charge after state acquittal is actually double jeopardy or not. But until that happens, AGs such as Merrick Garland will be bringing charges like this against defendants who have been acquitted by a state, particularly if they are white and the death was of a black person. These charges are political, in my opinion, and the left must think they serve their cause.

Please read the whole thing.

As you read it, please also consider that these extremely serious charges are for a killing that occurred when officers had already been fired upon and one was very gravely wounded, and the police return of fire was through a closed door. They could not see what was behind it. It is interesting to apply that to the Uvalde situation and imagine what would have happened had the police fired blindly through those classroom doors (there was a small window, but smoke and darkness made it impossible to see inside) and been responsible for the death of a student or teacher behind those doors. That’s not a full explanation for what happened there that day on the part of police, but I assume it may have been operating at some level.

At any rate, I cannot imagine that anyone would ever want to be a police officer anymore.

The Taylor case has other issues, including whether police actually announced themselves and whether no-knock warrants are a good or bad thing generally. But this post is about the federal charging itself.

[NOTE: By the way, I haven’t forgotten that promised follow-up post or posts analyzing some of the Uvalde testimony in depth. It’s just a big mouthful, and other concerns and events have intervened. I am still planning to tackle it in the not-too-distant future.]

Are the lights going out all over Europe? Trump warned them

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This ties in somewhat with the post I just published, about China buying US land.]

It was obvious that Europe’s dependence on Russia for energy would be a bad thing. But for some reason it doesn’t seem to have been obvious to the leaders of various European countries who let it happen. It’s also obvious that it was virtue-signaling at its finest, because if the goal – for those who believe in AGW as a grave danger – was to save the planet by reducing the use of fossil fuels, an easier and more self-sufficient way would have been to invest more in nuclear power. Using Russian fuel just changes the source of the fossil fuel, after all.

Donald Trump warned them, but they didn’t listen. Such a stupid clown, and such a puppet of Russia!

Well, now this sort of thing is happening:

Also Spain:

Also please see this.

I mentioned Trump and what he told Europe – especially Germany – about its dependence on Russian fossil fuels. It’s instructive to actually have a look and listen; this is from 2018:

Here was Merkel’s response:

In less blunt language than the US president’s, the German chancellor made the point that she needed no lessons in dealing with authoritarian regimes, recalling she had been brought up in East Germany when it had been part of the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence.

Arriving at Nato headquarters only hours after Trump singled out Germany for criticism, Merkel said: “I have experienced myself how a part of Germany was controlled by the Soviet Union. I am very happy that today we are united in freedom, the Federal Republic of Germany. Because of that we can say that we can make our independent policies and make independent decisions.

And then there was this sort of thing:

Har de har har har.

NOTE: The title of this post is a riff on this famous quote:

On 3 August 1914 Sir Edward Grey made his famous quote: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime”. He was speaking to his friend, the journalist John Alfred Spender, editor of the Westminster Gazette, in Grey’s room in the Foreign Office. Looking out from his window, across St. James’ Park, it was dusk and the first of the gas lights along the Mall were being lit. The next day Grey would have to face the Cabinet and to persuade them that the time had now come to declare war on Germany.

It’s a little like selling the rope, but it’s selling the land instead

The New Neo Posted on by

It was Lenin (or Stalin, or Marx) who supposedly said: “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

Whoever really said it, it’s one of those pithy witticisms that encapsulate some sort of truth, in this case the fact that under a capitalist system there’s a large risk that some people (or perhaps many) will, in order to make money, do something that ends up undermining the entire system. Either they’re not far-sighted enough, don’t care or would like to actively sabotage the system, or they have decided that the short-term gain is worth the risk.

The decades-long outsourcing to China of so much of what used to constitute the US economy is a good illustration. Trump tried to stop or reverse it, but Trump is no longer president and there were and still are a lot of people set to lose money if it were to happen.

China is still a Communist country in which the ruling and only party is the Communist Party. But it’s not your father’s Communist Party, if your father was Stalin or Mao. It’s this kind of Communist Party:

During the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping directed the CCP away from Maoist orthodoxy and towards a policy of economic liberalization. The official explanation for these reforms was that China is still in the primary stage of socialism, a developmental stage similar to the capitalist mode of production. Since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the CCP has emphasized its relations with the ruling parties of the remaining socialist states, and continues to participate in the International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties each year.

So China got into the capitalism game, but it’s a capitalism controlled by Communists (kind of like the way we might be headed?). Here’s some news that’s relevant:

One of the most underreported stories in the media right now is the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party to buy large areas of land throughout the United States…

Republican senators Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Tom Cotton of Arkansas are introducing a bill to stop this from going further.

Here’s the bill. From a press release:

“Chinese investments in American farmland put our food security at risk and provide opportunities for Chinese espionage against our military bases and critical infrastructure. Instead of allowing these purchases, the U.S. government must bar the Communist Party from purchasing our land,” said Cotton.

“We cannot continue giving our top adversary a foot in the door to purchase land in the United States and undermine our national security,” said Tuberville. “I hope my colleagues will recognize the importance of our bill and join the effort to prohibit Chinese Communist Party involvement in America’s agriculture industry.”

In the olden days – and not all that long ago – this would have had bipartisan support. Now I believe it has zero chance of passing. I’m not sure it would pass even if Republicans had control of Congress, although it certainly might. But too many people in US government are also compromised by their own ties to Chinese interests and Chinese money.

NOTE: This post made me think of the first line of Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright.” It’s far from my favorite poem of his and I don’t think it’s one of his best, but I like that first line:

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

Even if you remember Frost reciting that poem at JFK’s inauguration, as I do, you may not realize this:

Robert Frost was the first poet to speak at the inauguration of a president, reciting from memory “The Gift Outright,” when the glare of the sun prevented him from reading “Dedication,” a poem he had written specially for the occasion.

Looking at the text of that poem today, I’d say it’s not the least bit memorable, just a bit of verse tossed off to order and nothing like Frost’s great, great works, of which there are so many I’d be hard-pressed to choose my favorites. I do know the list would be long.

And then there’s the increased funding for the IRS

The New Neo Posted on by

One less-discussed part of the new spending bill about to be passed is the money being appropriated for the IRS to go after taxpayers with greater vigor. The following is from a WSJ editorial:

The $80 billion [proposed funding for the IRS] is more than six times the current annual IRS budget of $12.6 billion. The money will be ladled out over nine years and comes with few strings attached. The main Democratic command is for the tax agency to bring the hammer down on taxpayers.

The bill earmarks $45.6 billion for “enforcement,” including “litigation,” “criminal investigations,” “investigative technology,” “digital asset monitoring” and a new fleet of tax-collector cars. The result will be far more audits, civil suits and criminal referrals.

The main targets will by necessity be the middle- and upper-middle class because that’s where the money is. The Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s official tax scorekeeper, says that from 78% to 90% of the money raised from under-reported income would likely come from those making less than $200,000 a year. Only 4% to 9% would come from those making more than $500,000.

And of course you probably recall how, during the Obama administration, the IRS became a tool of the Democrats and went after political groups on the right. Looking for a link for that assertion just now, I came across this ABC article from 2013, and I thought I’d reproduce some of it because it’s such a fine example of what “journalism” has come down to [comments in brackets are mine]:

Conservative groups have rejected an Internal Revenue Service apology for unjustifiably scrutinizing tax-exempt conservative groups during the 2012 election cycle. The IRS apology has seemingly validated conservatives’ fears of politically motivated regulation.[What is this “seemingly” business? It obviously validated, not their fears, but their realistic fact-based assessment of what actually occurred.]

House Republican leaders, meanwhile, have vowed to investigate.[Mean old Republicans pounce!]

Lois Lerner, the director the IRS unit that oversees tax-exempt organizations, said that organizations had been given additional scrutiny if their applications included the words “Tea Party” or “patriot.” [Does this not resonate with the recent FBI targeting of things such as the Betsy Ross flag and the Gadsden flag? Why yes, yes it does. Fancy that!] The practice originated with “low-level” employees in Cincinnati, according to an Associated Press report. [Those “Sergeant Schultz” higher-ups again.]

…”They didn’t do it because of any political bias,” Lerner said, adding that singling out groups with specific names was an ill-thought-out organizational “shortcut.” [This remark of Lerner’s would be funny if it weren’t so sad, and so typical of the denials we hear from government higher-ups almost every day.]

“It was an error in judgment and it wasn’t appropriate but that’s what they did,” she said. [And strangely enough, none of the higher-ups had a clue, right? Hey, what do those upper-level agency people do, anyway – when they’re not fabricating charges against Donald Trump, I mean?]

“We’ve now corrected these issues, and we don’t expect that any of these will be repeated going forward.”[Not exactly and precisely the same things in the same way – but other things in other ways.]

Despite the apology, conservative groups are now seizing on the news [Republicans pounce and seize!], which they say proves their long-standing complaints of mistreatment by the IRS. [They say, but what do they know? After all, Lois Lerner has denied it was purposeful.]

“President Obama must also apologize for his administration ignoring repeated complaints by these broad grassroots organizations of harassment by the IRS in 2012, and make concrete and transparent steps today to ensure this never happens again,” said Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator for Tea Party Patriots.[This represents an interesting example of the naivete of someone like Martin. The thought that an apology from Obama would matter if it were issued, and that he’d actually try to stop the persecution of right-wing groups, is absurd.]

But let’s return to the current bill and that recent WSJ editorial:

The federal government isn’t starving for revenue. Congress wants more tax revenue because it can’t control its appetite for spending. That’s why it wants a tax agency in beast mode.

True, but I think it’s more than that. It’s purposeful targeting of the middle class, although many people in that group won’t realize it. And because the IRS has become a political tool for the Democrats, giving the IRS more power and resources makes perfect sense for the Democrat goals of not just defeating the right but crushing it.

Sinema joins Manchin in fighting inflation with inflation

The New Neo Posted on by

Or something like that.

Sinema has agreed to this bill, and as far as I know that means the Democrats have the 50 Senate votes – plus the tie-breaker vote of Harris – to pass this by reconciliation. The only remaining question, as far as I can see, is whether the CBO will score it as acceptable, and since the bill-writers know how to game the system, that will probably happen as well. Then there’s also the Senate parliamentarian, and if I’m not mistaken, even if there’s an objection there the Senate majority does whatever it wants.

The act will help people save money on prescription drugs and health premiums, Biden said in a statement on Thursday.

“It will make our tax system more fair by making corporations pay a minimum tax,” he said.

And I’m quite sure the corporations involved will never, never ever, pass the charge on to the consumer.

Sinema said she had reached an agreement with other Democrats to remove a provision that would impose new taxes on carried interest. Without the provision, private equity and hedge fund financiers can continue to pay the lower capital gains tax rate on much of their income, instead of the higher income tax rate paid by wage-earners.

She cautioned that her agreement to “move forward” was subject to the review of the Senate parliamentarian. The parliamentarian has to approve the contents of the bill to allow it to move forward through the “reconciliation” process that Democrats plan to use to bypass the chamber’s normal rules requiring 60 Senators to agree to advance most legislation.

About the bill’s effect on inflation:

A letter sent to House and Senate leadership from 230 economists argues that the Inflation Reduction Act is expected to contribute to skyrocketing inflation and will burden the U.S. economy, contrary to President Biden and Democrats’ claims.

The economists wrote in the letter first obtained by Fox News Digital that the U.S. economy is at a “dangerous crossroads” and the “inaptly named ‘Inflation Reduction Act of 2022’ would do nothing of the sort and instead would perpetuate the same fiscal policy errors that have helped precipitate the current troubling economic climate.”…

The economic experts point to the $433 billion in proposed government spending, which they argue “would create immediate inflationary pressures by boosting demand, while the supply-side tax hikes would constrain supply by discouraging investment and draining the private sector of much-needed resources.”

“Inaptly named”? The economist authors need to brush up on their Orwell. The bill is very aptly named.

This is from yesterday:

Last week, Graham asked CBO about the current fragile state of our nation’s economy and the potential impact of this latest Reckless Tax and Spend bill.

“When it comes to the Manchin-Schumer so-called ‘inflation reduction’ proposal, another shoe has just dropped. According to CBO analysis, the proposal’s effect on inflation is negligible at best. The estimate ranges from reducing inflation by 0.1 percent to increasing it by 0.1 percent in the near term. The idea that this tax and spend proposal is going to blunt inflation is yet again rejected, this time by CBO. Democratic statements about the proposal are quite frankly wrong and misleading.

“Further, CBO indicates that the Obamacare subsidies can go to a family of four earning $304,000 a year. This is, by any reasonable definition, people who are doing well and not in need of subsidies from the government. Also, CBO confirmed my suspicion that the way the 15 percent corporate minimum tax is constructed would hurt economic growth.

“So what have we learned today from CBO? The bill does not lower inflation, it hurts economic growth and the Obamacare subsidies are absurd.

Par for the course. It will pass.

Commenter “PA Cat” calls our attention to this; it’s not just about inflation or no inflation:

This week news broke that congressional Democrats had finally reached a deal on the largest piece of climate legislation in American history. The bill is a tax-and-spend cornucopia of some $369 billion for wind, solar, geothermal, battery, and other industries over the next decade, along with generous subsidies for electric vehicles and incentives to keep nuclear plants open and capture emissions from industrial plants. . . . Understand that the Senate bill isn’t the end, it’s the beginning. Climate activists and ideologues are working at the highest levels to transform not just the global food supply, but the nature of private property and property rights, all in the name of saving the planet. What Rutte and his government are doing to Dutch farmers, Schumer and Biden are planning to do to American farmers and American industries. So pay attention to the roadside fires and blocked highways and mass civic unrest in places like the Netherlands and Sri Lanka. America is next.

One thing I’m very much in favor of from that list is keeping nuclear plants open. And I have nothing against other alternative sources of power – except that many are unrealistic and don’t do what they’re cracked up to do.

NOTE: Here’s some speculation as to what Manchin might think he’ll get from acquiescing to the bill. I’ve not seen much about what Sinema thinks she’ll get, except that the removal of the carried interest provision (eliminated at her insistence) will curry favor with groups that have contributed quite a bit of money to her in the past.

Jobs, jobs, jobs

The New Neo Posted on by

There was a good jobs report for July, much better than expected. What does it mean? Your guess is as good as – probably even better than – mine. But don’t jobs often go up in the summer because of summer jobs? And isn’t hiring going on in a sort of rebound effect from the COVID drop?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, total nonfarm employment has increased by 22 million from its low in April 2020 and has fully recovered to return to its pre-pandemic level…

“The July employment report was an absolute knock-out, a major upside surprise relative to my expectations and indeed much of the labor market data released up to this point,” Renaissance Macro Research Head of U.S. Economics Neil Dutta said in a note. “Talk of recession and a monetary policy pivot is premature.”

“That said, this jobs report is consistent with an inflationary boom,” Dutta added. “The Fed has a lot more work to do and in an odd way, that the Fed needs to get more aggressive in pushing up rates, makes the hard-landing scenario more likely.”…

Markets reacted negatively to the report, which served as affirmation to investors the U.S. central bank is likely to stay on track with aggressive rate hikes.

One thing I do know from personal observation is that a lot of restaurants and stores where I live are seeking workers and having trouble finding them.

Head of the FBI Wray testifies in the usual manner

The New Neo Posted on by

Not that these sorts of hearings generally matter, but Ted Cruz had quite an exchange today with current FBI director Christoper Wray:

If you want some clarification on the Gadsden flag, see this, which also describes the leftist reaction to the fact that Florida now has a Gadsden flag variant available, proceeds from the sale of which will go to benefit veterans.

More from Cruz and Wray:

By the way, Wray’s retort to Cruz, beginning at 00:48, that the Michigan case “is now pending a retrial” is quite misleading. The first reason is that it’s only two out of four defendants who are being retried, because the jury in the original trial was hung for two of them and acquitted two others outright. Both the original trial and the retrial were federal cases, and so it’s the federal government that made the decision to keep going after the two defendants – the same federal government that entrapped them in the first place. The acquittals and the hung jury were a great embarrassment to the federal government and the FBI – as Wray certainly knows despite his Sergeant Schultz impersonation – and the feds refuse to drop the case because they are determined to redeem themselves even though the evidence remains lousy. Who knows, they may even get their convictions. If they don’t, it won’t be for lack of trying.