During his first term, Donald Trump signed a bill significantly reducing corporate tax rates and lowering personal income tax liability for most Americans. He has promised to further lower income tax rates for corporations and individuals in his forthcoming second term.
This has provided the opportunity for Democrats and other opponents of tax reductions to make the perennial claim that tax cuts signed by Republican presidents have and will continue to blow up the national debt. This claim is demonstrably false.
There are some economic issues that provide room for argument depending upon which economic school one adheres to. However, this issue is not debatable. No tax cut signed by a Republican in the past fifty years has increased the debt more than it would have otherwise increased had the tax cut not been implemented.
It’s easy to understand why the public believes this superficially plausible claim. If the government is running deficit X under the current tax schedule and that tax schedule is reduced, the government will collect less revenue and the deficit will increase to X + less revenue collected. It makes perfect sense.
The only problem is it has never been the case that the government collected less revenue after a Republican tax cut. Never. Ever.
Don’t take my word for it. Just look at tax receipts. Since this tax cut/debt fable began during the Reagan years, look at tax receipts after the tax cuts he signed. They increased so significantly that by his last year in office the government was collecting almost double the amount of taxes it was collecting in Carter’s last year.
While this may seem counterintuitive, it is nevertheless true. The explanation probably lies in what has come to be known as the “Laffer Curve,” named after economist Art Laffer. This theory also has its own little Democratic Party myth built into it. Democrats like to claim Laffer was wrong when he said “tax cuts pay for themselves.” This myth is wrong in two ways.
In 2016, Donald Trump shocked the world. With no political experience whatsoever he ran for president and defeated two political dynasties, the Bushes and Clintons, in the Republican primary and general election, respectively.
Trump came out of nowhere and took the bipartisan ruling establishment completely by surprise. At first, they ridiculed him, Huffpo going so far as to relegate any articles about his campaign to the Entertainment section.
However, it didn’t take long before they recognized Trump was a credible threat not only to the Republican Party side of the establishment, but the whole, corrupt, globalist cabal. That’s when they began demonizing him. And once he won the presidency, the establishment committed itself to two objectives:
Neuter his presidency to the best of its ability with investigations, impeachments, and resistance to his directives by the executive branch bureaucracy and,
Make sure electing him or anyone like him could never, ever, happen again.
And so, the public was regaled with anti-Trumpism nonstop, during and after his presidency, for eight straight years. Trump and his supporters weren’t the only victims of this psychological waterboarding. Tens of millions of American liberals became consumed with irrational fear planted in their psyches by the media that Trump would “end democracy” and replace it with 1930s-style fascism a la Hitler or Mussolini.
Even after Trump’s first term, during which none of this happened, liberals as high profile as actor Robert De Niro truly believed they would be in physical danger were Trump to be elected again. Certainly, Trump made the media’s job easier with some of the undisciplined things he said, but no one can point to any overt act of his as president that remotely justifies this animal terror.
What would motivate the political establishment to go this far, to demonize one half of the electorate along with their candidate, and to inflict psychological terror on the other half? To go so far as to prosecute Trump in multiple jurisdictions on spurious charges even after he secured the Republican nomination?
“Trump Ratchets Up Threats on the Media” reads a New York Timesheadline this morning. It refers to Trump’s suggestion that CBS should lose its broadcasting license over its editing of an answer Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris gave to a question during her recent 60 Minutes interview.
During the interview, Harris was asked pointedly whether the U.S. government has any sway over Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu given the massive financial support it has given him in fighting Hamas. Based upon footage 60 Minutes released to Face the Nation, Harris responded with one of her signature word salads that failed to answer the question. However, what aired on the 60 Minutes broadcast was a succinct, one sentence answer that also failed to answer the question or really mean anything at all, but which made Harris appear less like the babbling nonentity her detractors say she is.
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Whether the edit was intended to help Harris or not is anyone’s guess. Of course, CBS denies its edit was misleading or so intended. And while Trump’s general complaint that the media treat him and his campaign with a completely different standard than they do Harris and hers, the 60 Minutes interview of Harris did not come off that way at all. Interviewer Bill Whitaker asked Harris challenging questions and pressed her with follow-up questions when her answers were unclear.
While Trump and his supporters have every reason to suspect there may be footage even more damaging to Harris than what was aired on the 60 Minutes broadcast, the interview was nevertheless a train wreck for Harris. The real question here isn’t whether CBS violated FCC regulations and should therefore lose its broadcasting license. It is, “Why is there a five-member board of bureaucrats who can make this decision at all?”
Trump and his surrogates have said things encouraging to libertarians and terrifying to the media about their supposed intention to dismantle the administrative state. In a video speech, he Trump promised to “dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption.”
Those words in a vacuum would suggest he had a plan to undo the unconstitutional transfer of legislative power from Congress to the executive, born in the early Progressive Era and institutionalized by the New Deal, as well as reclaim executive power also usurped by federal agencies. However, what follows during the speech significantly waters down the promise of its opening statement.
Another presidential election is upon us and, as usual, there is really no way to avoid it. Less than three weeks from today, either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will begin preparing to assume the most terrifying, destructive power the world has ever known. And regardless of which one wins, the relentless destruction of our lives, liberties, and estates will continue.
The one thing we can look forward to after November 5 will be the temporary cessation of ritual election year slogans blaring at us from every corner of the media sphere. It isn’t merely that these slogans are hysterical and dumb. They are mostly completely wrong.
Let’s take one we hear every presidential election year that no one seems to question: “We need a president who will unite the country.” Heated arguments occur between pundits over which candidate is more “divisive” and even supporters of a candidate will say he is better but reflectively ask, “Can he unite America?”
If anyone has any idea what this means, then please tell me. I have none. It seems to suggest that 330 million people are all supposed to either believe the same thing or pretend they do. It is suggested there is some common thing these 330 million are working on that will benefit them all equally if only the right dear leader would show them the way.
The truth is the whole “unite the country” premise is wrong. It’s the opposite of the truth. A free country is one where people are left alone by their government to pursue their very separate interests. It is that from which all good things come as Adam Smith so astutely observed during the USA’s birth year. The only time the whole country is united behind a president is during a war. And those are all disasters.
A related sophism is the hackneyed refrain about the president “moving us forward.” Every presidential candidate promises this and virtually no one stops to ask what it means. It is just another variation on the theme that “we” are all working on some project vital to each and every one of us. What that project is I have no idea. This one employs fictional start and end points as metaphors for achieving this great work.
Most people, when not under the spell of these incantations, are working on their own lives, taking care of their own families, and at most helping make their own communities a nicer place to live for themselves.
And that’s perfectly ok. That’s what they’re supposed to be doing. History shows that leaving them alone to do precisely that makes the whole world better for everyone.
Mao Zedong had everyone united and working on the same project, whether they liked it or not. About fifty million of them ended up dead. Do you know what his project was called? The Great Leap Forward. I kid you not.
Really, as soon as a politician utters the word “we” or “us,” you should be suspicious. Nothing good ever follows. When you hear the words “move forward,” run like hell. Or prepare to defend yourself.
Then there is the perennial call for a president who can “get things done.”
“Dow closes at record high after blow-out jobs report” proclaimed NBC News on Saturday. It is not surprising the story would ignore all historical perspective, even history within the past few months. Incumbent presidents routinely take credit for job creation during their administrations and the gullible American public largely believes them. Perceived as prospectively continuing the policies of the Biden administration, good news from the jobs report helps Kamala Harris’s election chances.
It isn’t just ignoring that only two months ago, the Bureau of Labor statistics revised downward their previously reported number April 2023 – March 2024 by over 800,000 jobs (around 27 percent)*. It’s the surreal practice of even talking about supposed job creation over the past four years as if most of it weren’t just recovering jobs lost during the 2020 Covid lockdowns.
During March and April of 2020, the BLS reported net job losses of almost 22 million. Of course, these were not the type of job losses sustained during the 2008 financial crisis. These were people ordered to stay home by the government as part of a suite of responses to Covid that did nothing but harm.
As people were allowed to go back to work, there were several months for which the BLS reported millions of “jobs created.” But everyone understood these were mostly just people previously ordered to stay home returning to work. At least while Trump was still president.
But once Joe Biden was inaugurated, the national media started ignoring that reality and treating higher than usual jobs reports as vindication of “Bidenomics.” The truth is it took years just to recover the number of jobs lost during March-April 2020. The 22 million jobs reported lost during that period were not added back until September 2022.
That’s 31 straight months of zero jobs created on net while millions of undocumented mouths to feed entered the country. That is an economic blow the likes of which modern Americans have never experienced in their lifetimes. And the problems it created were by no means solved after September 2022 when the economy finally began adding new jobs on net. One cannot just start counting jobs created after September 2022 as “net jobs.” One also has to recognize the opportunity costs of the lockdowns.
Former President Donald Trump has survived yet another assassination attempt less than two weeks after a judge postponed his sentencing on thirty-four felony convictions related to hush money paid to Stormy Daniels. For the moment, all obstacles to Trump standing for the November presidential election seemed to be cleared away.
Trump’s supporters are reeling from what they perceive as the unprecedented assault on America’s republican norms. That’s understandable given the relative stability of electoral politics in the decades before Trump came on the scene. However, those of us who grew up in the 1970s remember the assassination attempts on Presidents Ford and Reagan just a few years after the successful assassinations of both President John Kennedy and his brother.
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People of my generation considered being shot at a normal part of the job for U.S. presidents and presidential candidates.
Nor are deep state machinations to remove a sitting president anything unprecedented. President Nixon was removed from office by a Naval intelligence officer posing as a reporter working with the number two man at the FBI. As with Trump, the media dutifully swayed the public against the popular president for reprisals that would be considered minor today, post-Snowden.
But many Americans believe something is fundamentally different about today’s Democratic Party establishment. Even some prominent Democrats see the party as breaking from its core values by repressing speech and undermining the democratic primaries to install Kamala Harris as its nominee.
Ironically, the truth is stranger than this fiction. The progressive movement has always been authoritarian, anti-democratic, and reactionary.
Since “save our democracy” is the call to arms (literally, for some of its deranged supporters) of today’s progressives, let us begin with progressivism being anti-democratic. Since the beginning of the movement, when it was led by Republicans, progressives have attempted to transfer power away from elected assemblies and to unelected bureaucrats or judges.
This began with the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. Although passed by Congress, it empowered an unelected board of commissioners to both set rates and conduct quasi-judicial proceedings to settle disputes. It set the precedent for Congress to unconstitutionally transfer both its own exclusive power to legislate and the judicial power to the executive.
The New Deal massively expanded on that precedent in creating myriad executive branch regulatory agencies that effectively usurped most legislative power from the elected Congress. This trend has metastasized ever since. Thus, when President Biden wanted to mandate Covid vaccines, he didn’t even bother to approach Congress. He went straight to a regulatory agency of unelected bureaucrats and directed it to write a new rule. No democracy needed.
Throughout the 20th century, progressives were fervent supporters of Supreme Court decisions that similarly usurped legislative power from the elected Congress. Where the Constitution clearly required an amendment for the federal government to exercise a new power, the unelected Supreme Court dutifully found that power hiding between the lines. This was just another way to avoid putting progressive ideas to a popular vote.
None of this is to say democracy is any guarantee of individual liberty. But it is preferable to the autocratic rule of an unelected oligarchy.
As far as being authoritarian, all political movements suffer from that defect, but the progressive movement particularly so. Apart from the obvious enormities of jailing journalists and political opponents during WWI and imprisoning Japanese Americans in concentration camps during WWII, progressivism is more fundamentally authoritarian in its modus operandi for achieving all its societal goals. Without exception, progressives seek to forcibly override the personal choices of individuals and replace them with regulations imposed by the state.
Where Thomas Jefferson famously defined liberty as “unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others,” Woodrow Wilson took a perverse turn on the “unobstructed” idea. In The New Freedom, he answers the question, “What is liberty?” as follows:
“You say of the locomotive that it runs free. What do you mean? You mean that its parts are so assembled and adjusted that friction is reduced to a minimum, and that it has perfect adjustment. We say of a boat skimming the water with light foot, “How free she runs,” when we mean, how perfectly she is adjusted to the force of the wind, how perfectly she obeys the great breath out of the heavens that fills her sails. Throw her head up into the wind and see how she will halt and stagger, how every sheet will shiver and her whole frame be shaken, how instantly she is “in irons,” in the expressive phrase of the sea. She is free only when you have let her fall off again and have recovered once more her nice adjustment to the forces she must obey and cannot defy.
Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and human activities and human energies.”
Where Jefferson saw government as the obstructor of liberty, Wilson saw it as the “adjuster” of human activity. This “adjustment,” of course, is regardless of the individual’s will or rights. Only by allowing the government to adjust your activities can you truly be free.
Monstrous.
That progressivism is reactionary would probably surprise Americans the most. But it is nonetheless true. Calling the movement “progressive” follows the proud American tradition of giving your party or movement a name opposite to its nature. The Federalists weren’t in favor of federalism; they were nationalists. The Anti-Federalists were in favor of federalism. The Whig Party were quite the opposite of the British party after which they were named. And progressivism isn’t about progress; it’s about returning to an earlier, illiberal past.
Ten days ago, President Biden was adamant he would be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president and defeat “threat to democracy” Donald Trump. Trump was still promising to “drain the Swamp” in Washington, D.C., expurgating DEI and critical race theory from federal agencies, deporting illegal aliens who entered the country in record numbers during Biden’s administration, and end the Swamp’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
As of this morning, Biden is out of the race and out of sight and mind. The Democratic Party’s national media is already in high gear promoting Kamala Harris. And Trump, following an assassination attempt by yet another “lone gunman,” has been brought to heel.
The only thing unprecedented about Biden’s decision not to seek reelection is its timing. Lyndon Johnson similarly announced he would not seek reelection in 1968 – only one of many similarities between this year and that one – but he did it far earlier in the year. That gave the Democratic Party much more time to select and rally around a replacement candidate, albeit in an unsuccessful effort to hold onto the White House.
The change in Trump over the past ten days is much more striking, if unreported. It is understandable that Trump was shaken by the assassination attempt. That explains the lack of fire in his voice while delivering his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention just a few days later. But what is of much greater significance was the content of the speech, not the style.
Trump said himself that he completely threw away the speech he intended to give at the RNC and now would deliver one centered around national unity. Since the acceptance speech, he has disavowed Project 2025 as a product of the “extreme right,” attempting to position himself as a moderate.
He may not have used that word, opting for “common sense” instead, but what else could it mean? If there is an extreme right that he says he is not a part of, then what else could he be but a moderate? Rumors that his campaign is already second guessing the selection of J.D. Vance as running mate due to the liability of his “extremist” positions only further confirms that Trump has been effectively neutered by the assassination attempt in terms of any threat he may have posed to the establishment.
Don’t forget that Trump’s ideological difference from the establishment was always greatly exaggerated. He never questioned the existence of a global standing army, just that it shouldn’t be used so often and for such insubstantial benefit. He promised “not to touch” Social Security and Medicare, which together with the military comprise about two thirds of federal spending.
He claimed to have cut regulations significantly during his first term but did not fundamentally threaten the New Deal regulatory bureaucracy in any way. Even years into his presidency, prior to the Covid pandemic, nothing much had changed. And in 2020, nothing changed for the better.
A Trump now positioning himself as even more moderate than the Trump of his first term is not going to get the job done. Project 2025 may be “extreme,” but extremism is just what is needed right now. There is nothing moderate about the left’s program. They swing for the fences during every at bat and have rarely struck out during the past several decades. If the juggernaut is going to be stopped it won’t be by a president seeking to “unite the country” and meet far left extremism with “common sense.”
Every newsworthy event prompts a narrative from imperial media and the Trump assassination attempt was no different. Rather than do what journalists purport to do, which is subject public officials to the blinding light of scrutiny, they immediately went into narrative mode. And the narrative chosen for this event was clear: free speech is dangerous.
There are various strains of this message. Some particularly TDS-affected propagandists have tried to blame Trump himself for the attack, saying it was his “extreme” political rhetoric that “raised the temperature” and somehow resulted in a 20-year-old malcontent deciding to shoot him.
Republicans dismiss this theory, of course, saying it has been the left’s nonstop demonization of Trump for the past eight years that drove the shooter to murder and drove thousands of more “mostly peaceful protestors” to loot, pillage, and occasionally assault or kill innocent people.
While the Republican version is more superficially plausible, it still rests upon the same assumption: that people using nothing more than words are somehow responsible for the immoral actions of others. This false premise cannot be allowed to stand.
Every individual is responsible for his own actions. Once you abdicate that position and place the responsibility for one person’s actions on another’s words, you no longer have a free society. You have agreed in principle that people in general cannot be allowed to be free; that there are some words or phrases they must not be allowed to hear. Thus, there are some words and phrases others may not be permitted to speak.
For all their talk about “democracy,” this has always been the fundamental premise of the progressives. They believe most people are incapable of self-government. They were much more explicit about it during the early Progressive Era when they were openly eugenicist. Today, those same instincts are simply clouded in euphemism and doublespeak.
They are all for “free speech” if it doesn’t threaten their rule. They are all for “democracy” as long as the right leaders are elected (here as well as abroad). Consider how absurd it is to suggest “democracy” must be saved from the candidate who gets the most votes. They say it and many still nod their head in agreement.
They don’t really believe the commoners are capable of managing a single aspect of their own lives. All must be “regulated” by the elite. And there is nothing more vital to regulate than what the commoners are allowed to hear, say, and think. This is why the media come on so strong and why people are deplatformed on the internet. Compelling the right thoughts is literally the entire basis of the establishment’s rule.
Enough people thinking the wrong thoughts could end it overnight.
Winds of uncertainty swirl inside the imperial beltway as prominent Democrats continue to call on President Biden to abandon his campaign for the presidency due to his now acknowledged cognitive issues. The Atlantic last week went so far as to call for Biden to resign as president, saying it would “give American democracy its best chance of surviving.”
The Democratic Party and the media (but I repeat myself) would have you believe Biden’s cognitive issues present America with two grave problems. One, that he is presently unable to fulfill his present duties as president; two, that he will be unable to defeat former President Donald Trump in November and “save democracy” from the candidate who could potentially get the most votes.
Trump supposedly presents a third problem, that being the “danger to democracy” he represents. This despite the fact that we’ve already lived through four years of Trump being president and “democracy,’ at least the way the empire defines it, is alive and well.
None of this is true. The first clue to its falsity is the media saying it. Since Trump first entered politics and at least since 2020, the national media has served as a perfect contraindicator for the truth and the narratives related to the 2024 election are no exception. Biden’s incompetence poses no danger to everyday Americans in the present. It will likely matter little for his chances to defeat Donald Trump in the November election, just as it mattered little in 2020.
And no, Donald Trump represents no danger to “democracy,” whatever the power elite actually means by that, nor to the republican form of government created by and guaranteed to every state in the union by the U.S. Constitution.
Make no mistake, Biden and Trump are a problem, but not for Americans. They are a problem for the empire. Ultimately, they represent the same problem for the empire, although it would have you believe otherwise.
To understand this, one must put aside civic fairy tales and acknowledge how the American political system really works. The fairy tale says the American system is “a democracy,” and the president is elected by a majority vote of the people and directs the federal apparatus according to the “will of the people.”
The Congress is also elected by a majority vote of the people in the states and districts therein and writes the laws the president executes and must abide in fulfilling his duties.
That is certainly what the Constitution says, but it is not how the American political system works. Nor has it worked that way for close to a century.
In reality, that system of government was replaced during what Garet Garrett called “The Revolution Was,” referring to the New Deal. The revolution consisted of Congress creating myriad federal agencies to “regulate” the economy and then delegating its legislative power to the unelected bureaucrats comprising those agencies.
At first, the bureaucrats took their direction from the president, drawing praise from both Hitler and Mussolini due to the system’s similarity to the fascism that had inspired it. But over time, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. The bureaucrats began telling the president what they were going to do instead of the other way around.
Yes, the elected president may still make the final decision on this or that policy. But he makes that decision between two choices presented by the bureaucrats, their Choice A and their Choice B. This is why so little seems to change even when the incumbent party is swept out power in an electoral landslide. Thus, even after the Republican Revolution of 1996 or the election of supposed ubermonster Donald Trump in 2016, nothing really changed. The imperial machine kept grinding on as if there had been no election at all.
After WWII, foreign policy was reconstructed in similar fashion. A national security state was created wherein permanently employed bureaucrats in the State Department, Pentagon, and “intelligence community” assumed the power to direct foreign policy in the same way the administrative state runs domestic policy. Again, the president may make the final decision but it’s usually after being presented with a binary choice between two options amenable to the bureaucracy.
“Mr. President, do you want to bomb Syria or merely impose economic sanctions?”
All of this begs an obvious question: if the permanent bureaucracy is really running things, how do either Biden or Trump pose a problem?
The Libertarian Party held its national convention over the Memorial Day Weekend, nominating its presidential ticket and hosting high profile guest speakers including Vivek Ramaswamy, RFK, Jr., and former President Donald Trump. While controversial within the party, inviting these non-libertarians to speak to the party’s delegates garnered massive national attention for the party which is traditionally only lightly covered by the media outside C-Span.
Thanks to the Herculean efforts of party Chair Angela McCardle and the support of one of the highest profile libertarians in the country, Dave Smith, the net result of the convention was to once again signal to all paying attention for the first time that the party poses no threat to the establishment.
It was supposed to be different this time. After uninspiring presidential campaigns for four straight presidential election cycles, the party was taken over in 2022 by the Mises Caucus, which promised to bring a more “hardcore,” Ron Paul-style brand of libertarianism to the party. While Jo Jorgensen was certainly a marked improvement over Johnson/Weld and (ugh) Bob Barr – she’s actually a libertarian – her campaign’s decisions to support Black Lives Matter and offer no resistance to the Covid Regime disappointed those who would eventually take over the party.
Yet, despite winning supermajorities in 2022 and re-electing their preferred chair, McCardle, the party’s convention ended up, intentionally or not, broadcasting the same signal to America as had Johnson/Weld: we won’t rock the boat.
