Britain Escapes the Brussels Bureaucracy Plus, major tax reform could be coming to the U.S.By James Freeman
http://www.wsj.com/articles/britain-escapes-the-brussels-bureaucracy-1466765647
U.S. markets are in for a rough ride today following the British vote for freedom from the European Union and its anti-democratic Brussels bureaucracy. Investors should look beyond the short-term uncertainty and transition costs and consider the significant competitive edge the U.K. gains with this massive de-regulatory stimulus. The EU did not make London a world financial center—smart British policy makers and businesspeople did. Going forward, the U.K. can likely cut a trade deal with the EU along the lines of what Norway and Switzerland have done. Even if Britain can’t, as Matt Ridley noted this week, “container shipping, budget airlines, the internet and the collapse of tariffs under the World Trade Organization” have made it “as easy to do business with Australia and China as with France and Germany.”
“For the first time in modern history, most workers and families will be able to file their taxes on a form as simple as a postcard,” writes House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, who is rolling out a tax plan today with his Republican colleagues. Mr. Brady adds that the “current IRS will not exist,” and that Washington’s 35% corporate income-tax rate will fall to a flat 20%, among other significant reforms.
A Journal editorial calls the Democratic sit-in disrupting the House of Representatives “the most disgraceful floor spectacle since Preston Brooks beat Charles Sumner with a cane in 1856.” The editorial board adds that the Pelosi Democrats “are betraying the public trust they hold. The first obligation of political leadership is to maintain order, and better still if politicians show respect for the rules of the government to which they belong. Democrats will ride to November on a protest politics that is antithetical to self-government, but they do America no good by bringing the methods of the bullying radical left to America’s House.”
A 4-4 Supreme Court deadlock means that President Obama’s lawless immigration order “is dead for the rest of his Presidency, as it deserves to be,” notes a separate editorial. “He said multiple times that he couldn’t issue such an order because there was no justification in law and ‘I am not a king.’ But he later decided to act like a king anyway when he couldn’t get his version of immigration reform through Congress. His order has further poisoned the politics of immigration and assisted the rise of Donald Trump. Thanks, Barack!” …Meanwhile Peggy Noonan reminds us today that Mr. Trump is no Reagan.
Economic forecasting has never been easy, but it may now be more wrong than ever. “Unpredictability may be the new normal,” says Roger Altman, founder and chairman of Evercore, as “financial markets and financial investors are increasingly driving the world economy.”
“It isn’t every day that a Supreme Court Justice guts his own precedent, but that’s what happened Thursday when Anthony Kennedy voted to uphold racial preferences in admissions at the University of Texas,” writes the editorial board.
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