RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s always important to understand how you know what you know, or what you think you know. It’s particularly important in the case of the Trump dossier.

Consider the increasing number of claims that the incendiary allegations of the dossier “check out,” in the words of New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.

Bankrolled by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, guided by the dirt-digging opposition research firm Fusion GPS, and compiled by the former British spy Christopher Steele, the dossier’s key allegation is this: “There was a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership.” Steele attributed that claim to “Source E,” whom he described as “an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.”

“What’s relevant is [Steele’s] credibility, the reliability of his sources and the truthfulness of their claims,” Stephens wrote recently. “These check out.”

But do they? In reality, most reasonable people not named Mueller would have to say we don’t know.

“As it relates to the Steele dossier, unfortunately the committee has hit a wall,” Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr noted last month. The committee’s investigation, the best probe outside of the Mueller special prosecutor operation, has not even been able to discover who Steele’s sources were, Burr said.

So how do outsiders conclude that the document’s key allegations check out? How do they know what they know?

Consider one of the dossier’s underlying claims in support of the “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and the Russians. In a section of the dossier dated July 19, 2016, Steele wrote Carter Page, who was briefly on Trump’s little-used foreign policy advisory team, held secret meetings with two high-ranking Russians, one in the Putin government and one the head of Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, during a visit to Moscow early in the month of July. Here are the relevant portions of the dossier, written in spy style, from the July 19 Steele memo:

Speaking in July 2016, a Russian source close to Rosneft President, PUTIN close associate and US-sanctioned individual, Igor SECHIN, confided the details of a recent secret meeting between him and visiting Foreign Affairs Advisor to Republican presidential candidate Donald TRUMP, Carter PAGE.
According to SECHIN’s associate, the Rosneft President (CEO) had raised with PAGE the issues of future bilateral energy cooperation and prospects for an associated move to lift Ukraine-related Western sanctions against Russia. PAGE had reacted positively to this demarche by SECHIN but had been generally non-committal in his response.
Speaking separately, also in July 2016, an official close to Presidential Administration Head, S. IVANOV, confided in a compatriot that a senior colleague in the Internal Department of the PA, DIVYEKIN (nfd) also had met secretly with PAGE on his recent visit. Their agenda had included DIVYEKIN raising a dossier of ‘kompromat’ the Kremlin possessed on TRUMP’s Democratic presidential rival, Hillary CLINTON, and its possible release to the Republican’s campaign team.

In multiple embassies around the world, particularly those staffed entirely by career Foreign Service officers, no portrait of President Trump or Vice President Pence has been hung. Up until last week, the swamp had an excuse – there was no official portrait and the swamp refused to go to the trouble to find unofficial ones.

But it’s not just the entrances to embassies where it seems the 2016 election never happened. All throughout the government, Obama holdovers who rabidly oppose President Trump and his policies still hold positions of extraordinary power. The swamp is alive and well.

Consider the National Security Council, where Fernando Cutz is enabling Trump’s most mortal enemies – George Soros and the globalist Left – to threaten to topple the pro-American government of one of America’s closest allies, Guatemala.

Cutz is the director of South American policy at the National Security Council. He is a graduate of the Clinton School of Public Service, managed Obama’s cozying up to the Communists in Cuba, was on the Obama National Security Council staff in the “global engagement” office, and is a committed swamp creature of the foreign service genus.

Back to Guatemala. George Soros money and United Nations officials are attempting to use an activist leftist “Constitutional Court” in Guatemala to undermine, and perhaps ultimately remove, President Jimmy Morales. One effect of this judicial coup is to impair the rights of American mining interests in the country. The Guatemalan government has been very helpful in stemming human trafficking and drugs that ultimately wind up in the United States.

Instead of defending American interests and the Guatemalan government against coordinated Soros-driven attacks, the American embassy, with Cutz’s support and oversight, has enabled it. Cutz controls the information flow to Trump loyalists. A maelstrom of swamp bureaucrats at State are in full agreement.

The irony is thick. Soros money and international leftists are Trump’s most mortal political foes at home, while abroad the same gang is seeking to undermine one of America’s strongest allies, and yet a man who enables this Soros agenda — Cutz — works in the National Security Council.

CNN parted ways with political commentator Donna Brazile after leaked e-mails demonstrated what appeared to be improper collusion with Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Donna Brazile was fired from CNN after leaked e-mails suggested she used her position to pass information to the Clinton campaign about upcoming appearances.Veteran Democratic operative Donna Brazile finally admitted that she used her former position as a CNN commentator to relay questions ahead of debates to Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary.

For months, Brazile has avoided confirming that hacked emails from the campaign showed her forwarding the questions, which were asked at separate debates. But in a new essay for Time magazine looking back on the hackings, she said it was true.

WASHINGTON—Democrats became embroiled in an intraparty fight Friday over last year’s presidential election.

Donna Brazile, the interim chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee during the election, asserted in a new book that the fundraising agreement between the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign was unethical because it gave her too much influence on the party’s infrastructure.

In excerpts published on Politico, Ms. Brazile said Mrs. Clinton’s campaign raised money for the DNC and helped fund it, and in return took control of its finances and strategy as well as the funds. Ms. Brazile noted that it is common practice for a presidential nominee to take control of his or her party’s operations and fundraising.

But she said Mrs. Clinton’s campaign signed the agreement with the DNC in August 2015, almost a year before she clinched the party’s nomination. That disadvantaged Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in his primary fight with Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Brazile wrote.

Late Friday, Mrs. Clinton’s supporters pointed to a memo obtained by NBC News that said the agreement related only to the general election.

“Enough of this. If you’re a Democrat, we have things to do,” wrote Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, Nick Merrill, in a Twitter message referencing the reported memo.

WSJ’s Gerald F. Seib explains what have we learned after Special Counsel Robert Mueller unveiled his first two big actions in his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Photo: Getty

DNC Communications Director Xochitl Hinojosa said in a statement Friday morning that “there shouldn’t even be a perception that the DNC is interfering” in the primary process. She noted that both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders had the option to raise money through joint DNC accounts.

The two campaigns set up joint fundraising accounts with the DNC during the Democratic primary, though the accounts were ultimately used very differently. Joint fundraising accounts allow campaigns and parties to solicit larger individual donations that are then divvied up between the entities that sign the agreement.

Mr. Sanders shunned big-dollar fundraising, relying instead on small donors to fuel his campaign. Mrs. Clinton, however, routinely held large-dollar fundraisers for her joint account with the DNC and state parties—some of which would then transfer the funds they received back to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. CONTINUE AT SITE

Robert E. Lee is back in the news thanks to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. In a Fox News interview Monday, Mr. Kelly called Gen. Lee “an honorable man” and observed that “men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had made them stand.”

Mr. Kelly has a point. It is worth remembering that Lee, who has lately been painted as a traitorous caricature, embodied in countless ways the poignancy and tragedy of the Civil War. It would be a gross misfortune if the political debate obscures his story.

Lee’s lineage was impeccable. His father was Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee III, the celebrated Revolutionary War general and close friend of George Washington. Lee himself descended from two signers of the Declaration of Independence, and his wife, who later became an ardent Confederate, was none other than Mary Custis, a great-granddaughter of Martha Washington and, through adoption, of George Washington himself.

Lee agonized over whether to fight for the Confederacy. As war loomed, Abraham Lincoln offered him command of the new Union Army, a position he had always coveted. Despite being an avowed Federalist who longed for compromise to save the Union, Lee, like so many others, gave in to the permanency of birth and blood. “I cannot raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children,” he wrote a friend, “save in defense of my native state.” Instead he became the commanding general of the Confederate armies, while predicting that the country would pass “through a terrible ordeal.” He was right.

Still, he was never much of a hater. Like Lincoln, more often than not Lee called the other side “those people,” rather than “the enemy.” Nor was it clear that he loved war itself. “It is well that war is so terrible,” he once said, “or we should grow too fond of it.” With words that could have been uttered by Lincoln, Lee talked of the cruelty of war, how it filled “our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors.”

Nor was he fond of slavery, once describing it as “a moral and political evil.” True, he did benefit from slavery. But in 1863, one day after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, Lee went a step further than Thomas Jefferson ever did and freed his family slaves, fulfilling the wishes of his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis. And in 1865, as the Confederacy stood on the throes of destruction, Lee supported a dramatic measure to put slaves in uniform and train them to fight, which would have effectively emancipated them.

Upon the conflict’s close, Lee gave a forceful interview to the New York Herald in which he strongly condemned Lincoln’s assassination and claimed that the “best men of the South” had long wanted to see slavery’s end. Later he declared, “I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished.”

Arguably his most powerful statement about race relations came at war’s end in St. Paul’s Church, the congregation of the Richmond elite. To the horror of many of the congregants, a well-dressed black man advanced to take communion, and knelt down at the altar rail. The minister froze, unsure what to do. Lee knelt down next to the black man to partake of the communion with him.

Finally, Lee’s greatest legacy was not in war, but in peace. Lee went to great pains to heal the bitterness that cleaved the country after Appomattox. When Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, in arguably one of the most moving scenes in American history, the military situation remained quite perilous. The war was still raging. Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, was on the run, calling on Southerners to take to the hills and wage guerrilla warfare. This at a time when there were still three Confederate armies, and hatreds between North and South were at their peak. Lincoln was assassinated five days later. Had the South undertaken guerrilla warfare, it’s more than likely the U.S. would have broken up into two countries.

Clinton: There Is A Difference Between Paying For Trump Dossier And “Collusion” With Russia

On Wednesday’s broadcast of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Hillary Clinton told host Trevor Noah that there is a difference between the Clinton campaign and the DNC working together to obtain the infamous Russian-tainted Trump dossier and the possibility that “Trump’s people” worked with Russians…

Sen. Warren: “Yes,” The Democratic Presidential Primary Was Rigged For Hillary Clinton

On Thursday’s broadcast of The Lead, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told CNN host Jake Tapper she believes that the 2016 Democratic presidential primary was rigged in favor of the party’s eventual nominee Hillary Clinton. JAKE TAPPER: I want to ask you one other question, Senator, we learned…
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard: “The DNC Needs To Be Completely Overhauled… No More Games, No More Retaliation”

TULSI GABBARD: Earlier today we heard from Donna Brazile that what many people had suspected for a long time turned out to be true. The DNC secretly chose their nominee over a year before the primary elections even occurred.

This shines a light on how deeply broken the campaign finance laws are — and how they have weakened individual candidates while strengthening and empowering political parties and special interests.

These laws essentially allowed the Clinton campaign to bypass individual campaign contribution limits by funneling millions of dollars through the DNC and state parties — taking control of the DNC in the process.

Along with the recent retaliatory purge of Bernie Sanders and Keith Ellison supporters from the DNC’s executive committee, this is just further evidence that the DNC needs to be completely overhauled, to take our party back from the special interests and the powerful few, and put it back in the hands of the people.

We must bring about real campaign finance reform. We must get rid of the undemocratic system of superdelegates. We must implement instant or same-day registration in Democratic primaries, and actually encourage voter engagement.

The stunning revelation by longtime operative Donna Brazile that the Hillary Clinton campaign secretly took control — literal control — of the Democratic National Committee a year before Hillary became the party’s nominee is the talk of American politics.

As it should be.

Brazile’s piece in Politico describes her shock at the discovery of formal legal paperwork between the two entities when she took the reins at the DNC in August 2016. Brazile had been tapped for the job when DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign. Leaked emails had shown how Schultz had been putting her finger on the scale to help Clinton while the insurgent Bernie Sanders campaign was making a serious bid to seize the party nomination away from New York’s favorite carpetbagger.

Her account features ridiculous and unbelievable melodramatics — she says she “gasped” when she found out the truth and that she “lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music” to calm her before she called Sanders to deliver the awful news.

But silly though Brazile’s prose is, her account is vitally important not only for all those who want to understand how American politics works but also for the future of Brazile’s beloved party.

First, it raises key questions about what was happening as Clinton faced a time of trial in the middle of 2015. Her reputation was taking hits as her evasions and denials and untruths about what had happened to the private email server she had set up illegitimately in 2009 seemed to mushroom on a daily basis.

As this was happening, she found herself with only two semi-serious challengers for the nomination — Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

There was another person out there — then-Vice President Joe Biden. Though grieving over the tragic loss of his son Beau, Biden was still seriously considering a late entry into the race. Indeed, it would not be until October that Biden would declare himself out of contention.

Consider, then, that a formal agreement signed by the DNC and the Clinton campaign was executed in August 2015, two months before Biden made his decision.

The agreement, according to Brazile, “specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics and mailings.”

Since assuming office, the Trump administration has been dogged by allegations of either harboring or promoting anti-Semitism. This false narrative has primarily been spearheaded by Trump’s detractors whose motives are at best questionable.

The sudden interest in the subject of anti-Semitism by the Left is puzzling to say the least. During Obama’s tenure, there were over 7,000 recorded acts of Jew-hatred in the United States, many of which occurred at America’s institutions of higher learning. Campus hate groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) have been the driving force behind Judeophobic activities on college campuses. Yet the New York Times, Washington Post and other establishment media outlets have been largely silent on the issue of Islamist inspired anti-Semitism.

Few among the Left took the Obama administration to task for failing to recognize the seriousness of the situation. Obama exhibited little interest in addressing this scourge and seemed content with limiting his anti-Jewish bias initiatives to hosting yearly Passover Seders with his obsequious friends and wishing Jews a Happy New Year on Rosh Hashanah. Obama’s allies, including those within the establishment media, seemed content with this do-nothing approach.

Contrary to what the establishment media and many within the Left would have us believe, it is in fact the Obama administration that allowed the malevolent cancer of antisemitism to fester and expand. By contrast, the Trump administration has adopted a robust, proactive approach toward combatting antisemitism both nationally and internationally.

Last week, Trump appointed Kenneth L. Marcus assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education. Marcus has been an outspoken critic of the Office for Civil Rights under Obama’s term for what he characterized as its failure to address anti-Semitic incidents masquerading as anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism. In 2010 he wrote, “On college campuses — and especially in protests brought by the anti-Israel boycotts, divestment and sanctions movement — it is now widely understood that attacking ‘Jews’ by name is impolitic, but one can smear ‘Zionists’ with impunity.”

Marcus advocates the use of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to combat anti-Jewish and anti-Israel activity on college campuses. Under Title VI, “If a recipient of federal assistance is found to have discriminated and voluntary compliance cannot be achieved, the federal agency providing the assistance should either initiate fund termination proceedings or refer the matter to the Department of Justice for appropriate legal action.” The statute has teeth, and universities falling into non-compliance risk losing taxpayer funding.

The appointment, which barely registered a blip on the mainstream media’s radar, was highly significant for those monitoring incidents of Jew-hate on college campuses and comes of the heels of a revealing report issued by the campus watchdog group AMCHA, documenting how pro-BDS faculty pose a direct threat to Jewish students.

Past reports submitted by AMCHA documented the direct link between Muslim Brotherhood front groups like the SJP, and anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses. For example, According to AMCHA, anti-Semitic incidents are eight times more likely to occur at the universities that host groups like the SJP and its alter ego, the Muslim Student Association (MSA). The new study however, provides troubling proof of the existence of a direct link between pro-BDS faculty and anti-Semitic activity.

“The studies found that schools with one or more faculty boycotters were between four and seven times more likely to play host to incidents of anti-Jewish hostility, and the more faculty boycotters on a campus, the greater the likelihood of such anti-Semitic acts.”

President Trump and congressional Republicans unveiled their huge tax reform bill focused on the middle class yesterday, promising the proposed “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” will stimulate strong economic growth as it makes the mammoth, out-of-control tax code simpler and fairer.

The proposal is “a great bill,” and “another important step toward providing massive tax relief for the American people,” the president said, adding he hoped the measure will become law before Christmas.

“Today is a great day for the American worker,” Trump said. “Over the past 10 months, we’ve witnessed something remarkable happening to our country, a lot of change, a lot of difference. We’ve hit close to 60 records in the stock market since November 8, that very big day,” Trump said, a reference to the day he was elected president.

“Ninety-five percent of people will be able to fill out a tax form the size of a postcard,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) said.

“It’s going to make life very simple,” Trump said. “The only people that aren’t going to like this is H&R Block, they’re not going to be very happy.”

The promise of tax reform has already gotten the Singapore-based high-tech business Broadcom Limited to commit to returning to the United States where it was founded, Trump said. “With this commitment, more than $20 billion in annual revenue will come back to our cities, towns, and the American workers.”

At the White House, the head of Broadcom, Hock Tan, explained that he is an American, “as are nearly all my direct managers, my board members, and over 90 percent of my shareholders. So today, we are announcing that we are making America home again.”

“Our commitment to re-domicile into the United States is a huge reaffirmation to our shareholders, to the 7,500 employees we have across 24 states in America today, that America is once again the best place to lead a business with a global footprint.”

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) yesterday unveiled the “chairman’s mark,” an early version of the legislation. Undoubtedly changes will be made when Brady’s committee takes up the measure, a process expected to begin next week. The Senate and its committees of jurisdiction will also weigh in. There is a chance the legislation will be substantially rewritten over the weekend before the markup in the Ways and Means Committee.

The reform plan would collapse the current seven individual income tax brackets – 10, 15, 25, 28, 33, 35, and 39.6 percent into just four – 12, 25, 35, and 39.6 percent – according to a summary of major details of the legislation provided by Jared Walczak and Amir El-Sibaie of the Tax Foundation.

The retention of the top marginal rate of 39.6 percent is an example of a pointless appeasement effort aimed at social justice warriors. The gambit has already failed. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California) is already portraying the tax plan as a giveaway to “the wealthiest one percent” of Americans “at the expense of the great middle class.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) decried the plan as “everything America doesn’t want,” adding, “like a fish, if it stays out in the sunlight too long, it stinks.”

The proposed tax cuts aren’t enough for Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky). “If you don’t cut the top 1 percent, you don’t really have a significant tax cut,” Paul said. “What they’ve done is, they’ve bought into the class warfare on the individual side.” Those at “the top part of the spectrum” need tax relief “because the top part of the spectrum pays most of the taxes.”

“We have to understand that the owners of our businesses — the people we work for — are richer than us. They pay more taxes,” he said. “But if you lower their taxes, they will either buy stuff or hire more people. If you raise their taxes, it goes into the nonproductive economy, which is Washington, D.C., and it will be squandered.”

“So at the top, there’s not going to be much of a tax cut. There will be some. And in the middle, there’s going to be a little bit — there’s mostly going to be eliminating deductions. And at the bottom, the bottom already don’t pay much income tax and will continue not to pay much income tax,” Paul said.

Lowering the corporate tax rate to 20 percent, as proposed, however, would “be huge” for the country, he said.

The best news out of this is, lowering the corporate rate will help the country. And I think we will see growth. Already we’re seeing about 3 percent growth in the country because of the enthusiasm for President Trump and his policies. I think we’re going to get 4 or 5 percent growth if we get this thing through, within a year or two.

The standard deduction for single personal income tax filers will rise from the current $6,350 to $12,000, according to the Tax Foundation. For heads of household, it will jump from $9,350 to $18,000. For married couples, it will climb from $12,700 to $24,000. The additional standard deduction and the personal exemption will be eliminated. The alternative minimum tax (AMT) on both individuals and corporations will be abolished.

Charitable deductions will remain but the property tax deduction will be capped at $10,000. The remaining state and local tax deductions and other itemized deductions will be eliminated. The proposal on state and local taxes is already running into opposition from lawmakers representing high-tax states. Chairman Brady has acknowledged the concerns of blue-state Republicans and is trying to come up with a compromise.

The mortgage interest deduction will be retained but will be capped at $500,000 of principal for new home purchases. The construction industry seems certain to fight the change. There will also be changes to the exclusion of capital gains on home sales. The moving deduction, educator expense deduction, and exclusions for employer-dependent care programs, among others, will be eliminated.

The plan would not eliminate the tax penalty established under Obamacare for failure to have health insurance, as some had hoped.

On Wednesday President Trump had seemed to hint repeal of the provision was in the works. “Wouldn’t it be great,” he tweeted, “to Repeal the very unfair and unpopular Individual Mandate in ObamaCare and use those savings for further Tax Cuts[.]”

The health care expense deduction, first instituted during World War II, would be scrapped, according to Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News. Only taxpayers whose medical expenses exceed 10 percent of their adjusted gross income may take advantage of it.

Because of that threshold, and because it is available only to people who itemize their deductions, the medical expense deduction is not used by many people — an estimated 8.8 million claimed it on their 2015 taxes, according to the IRS.

But those 8.8 million tax filers claimed an estimated $87 billion in deductions; meaning that those who do qualify for the deduction have very high out-of-pocket health costs.

Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, ranking Democrat on the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, said getting rid of the deduction was “anti-senior.”

The Ways and Means Committee denies that gutting the deduction would “be a financial burden.”

Our bill lowers the tax rates and increases the standard deduction so people can immediately keep more of their paychecks — instead of having to rely on a myriad of provisions that many will never use and others may use only once in their lifetime.

Changes will be made to the regime of family tax credits.

The personal exemption for dependents will be replaced with a child tax credit that will rise from the current $1,000 to $1,600. The phaseout threshold will go from $115,000 to $230,000 for those filing as married. “The first $1,000 would be refundable, increasing with inflation up to the $1,600 base amount,” according to the Tax Foundation. There will also be “a new $300 nonrefundable personal credit and a $300 nonchild dependent nonrefundable credit, subject to phaseout. The $300 credit expires after 5 years.”

Grave-robbing will be phased out. The widely hated tax on dying after a lifetime of paying taxes will be abolished after six years. In the meantime, the estate tax exemption will go up to $10 million, which will be indexed for inflation.

The corporate income tax rate would fall to 20 percent from the current 35 percent. Trump had pushed a 15 percent rate during the election campaign. There would be a new 25 percent maximum tax rate on pass-through business income, which would be subject to anti-abuse rules.

Slashing the corporate income tax rate “is an extremely important move,” according to Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center. “We still need to see how they will treat revenue earned overseas to assess the corporate plan fully.”

The reform proposal would do away with the Section 199 manufacturing deduction and the New Market Tax Credit along with “like-kind exchanges for personal property (retained for real property), and deductions for entertainment.” It also cancels “credits for orphan drugs, private activity bonds, energy, rehabilitation, and contributions for capital, among others,” according to the Tax Foundation.

The plan also appears to drive a stake through the heart of the extraterritorial enforcement of U.S. tax laws, moving to “a territorial tax system, in which foreign-source dividends and profits of U.S. companies are not subject to U.S. tax upon repatriation.” The move will lead to the repatriation of trillions of dollars from outside the country, the Trump administration says. Extraterritoriality in tax law is destructive, eliminating the possibility of countries competing to be tax havens, and used to be considered fundamentally unfair in this nation of ours that was founded on limited government principles.

As the Supreme Court articulated in 1991 in EEOC v. Aramco, it is widely accepted nowadays that “Congress has the authority to enforce its laws beyond the territorial boundaries of the United States,” but it hasn’t always been that way. Taxing Americans overseas had long been considered an abuse of the government’s powers until the modern era.

In the 1909 Supreme Court case, American Banana Co. v. United Fruit Co., Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes introduced what is now called the “presumption against extraterritoriality,” expressing his disgust that the U.S. could apply its laws to other sovereign countries. In Holmes’ time, “U.S. law was based almost exclusively on the territorial principle – the idea that the power of American law ends at the country’s boundaries,” according to law professor William S. Dodge.

It’s important to remember that Thursday’s roll-out of the House plan for pro-growth tax reform is just the first step in a long legislative path. It’s important to remember that the current economic recovery, slow as it’s been, is getting very old and won’t last forever. It’s important to remember that health care policy remains unreformed. Stocks are not cheap and the federal debt is not small. Last week this column noted that it’s still too early to call Trumponomics a success. Still, recent news is making it harder to stifle a sense of optimism about the prospects for American revival.

The National Federation of Independent Business survey of owners of small firms shows another solid month of job creation in October and there’s more good news for both longtime employees and recent hires: “Owners are raising compensation at rates not seen since 2000,” says NFIB chief economist William Dunkelberg.

Long term, workers need to keep getting more efficient at making goods and services to earn raises. Across the economy, there’s good news on that front as well. The Journal reports:

U.S. workers boosted output per hour this summer at the best rate in three years, a sign that long sluggish productivity gains might finally be breaking out.

Nonfarm business-sector productivity, measured as the goods and services produced per hour worked, increased at a 3.0% seasonally adjusted annual rate in the third quarter, the Labor Department said Thursday. The gain was better than economists had expected and the largest quarterly improvement since the third quarter of 2014.

Last quarter’s increase could be skewed due to the effects of the recent hurricanes, but the broader trend points to firmer productivity gains after the measure trended near zero much of 2015 and 2016. Through the first nine months of this year, worker productivity advanced at a 1.5% annual rate—putting 2017 on pace to be the best year for efficiency gains since 2010, when the economy was first emerging from a deep recession.

Employers and employees are still waiting for the promised tax relief from Washington but it seems that other parts of the Trump agenda are beginning to have an impact. This morning your humble correspondent was fortunate to appear on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox Business program and also fortunate to be able to ask Mike Ryan of UBS about the impact of the Trump deregulatory agenda. Mr. Ryan, who is the chief investment officer for the Swiss bank’s wealth management business in the Americas, said that Washington’s new regulatory restraint is not only fostering business confidence but already helping companies improve earnings. Mr. Ryan added that the benefits go beyond the repeal of particular burdensome rules. He said that ”stopping the regulatory encroachment”—providing assurance that Washington is not preparing to spring expensive new surprises on the private economy—is a boon to business investment.

As of the start of October, federal red tape scorekeeper Wayne Crews found that Mr. Trump was off to an historic beginning. Mr. Crews measures the number of pages of new and proposed rules spewing forth from Washington. Last month he reported:

The Federal Register stands at 45,678 pages. Last year at this time, Barack Obama’s Federal Register stood at 67,900 pages. (Obama’s 2016 Federal Register set an all-time-record: 97,110 pages).

Compared to Obama at this time last year, Trump’s page count is down 32 percent so far in his first year.

It took a few years for Ronald Reagan to achieve his ultimate, one-third reduction in Federal Register pages following Jimmy Carter’s then-record Federal Register. So by this metric, Trump is moving much faster. CONTINUE AT SITE