RUTHFULLY YOURS

Congress is making good progress on rolling back Obama Administration regulations, but a case of political nerves is protecting two obvious targets for repeal that are still standing: a Labor Department exemption from the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (Erisa) for state-run retirement plans and the Education Department’s borrower defense rule.

Such left-leaning states as California, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey and Oregon have passed laws to set up state-administered retirement accounts for workers in the private economy who aren’t covered by employer plans. Employers would be required to automatically enroll workers in the state plans and deduct payroll contributions—up to 10% of wages in California—though employees could opt out.

The putative goal is to reduce administrative fees through economies of scale. But workers can easily sign up for a low-cost Roth IRA over the internet and choose how much to contribute. Liberals don’t trust workers to make their own financial decisions, so Democrats want to “nudge”—the behavioral economist’s euphemism for compel—them to sock away more money while giving politicians control of their investments.

Many workers would unknowingly contribute a share of their wages to retirement plans they don’t know exist and may not be able to exit. They also wouldn’t be protected by Erisa since former Labor Secretary Tom Perez last year exempted state plans with automatic enrollment. Thus, an employer in Wisconsin who enrolls workers in a 401(k) would be deemed a fiduciary. But in California an employer’s fiduciary obligations would be waived if he enrolls his employees in the state plan. Employers would have a new incentive to drop workers on the public plans that would be guaranteed by taxpayers.

The House has passed a resolution overturning the Erisa exemption, but the Senate isn’t moving. Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker appears to be the main obstacle, arguing that states should be able to experiment. But they don’t need an Erisa waiver for that. The issue is that the Labor rule unfairly favors government plans in a way that could hurt workers.

Meanwhile, Republicans should also move to rescind a midnight rule by the Obama Administration that lets borrowers who claim they’ve been duped by their colleges to discharge their student loans. The Education Department estimated the rule would cost taxpayers between $9.5 billion and $21.2 billion over the next decade, though Obama officials repeatedly underestimated the cost of loan forgiveness.

“The Trump principles show the President has made growth his highest priority, and they are a rebuke to the Washington consensus that 1% or 2% growth is the best America can do. Now Mr. Trump has to show results. If anything close to his this reform can survive the political maelstrom, it will go a long way toward returning to the abundance of the 1980s and 1990s.”

The White House rolled out its tax principles on Tuesday, investing new energy in the first serious reform debate in 30 years. While the details are sparse and will have to be filled in by Congress, President Trump’s outline resembles the supply-side principles he campaigned on and is an ambitious and necessary economic course correction that would help restore broad-based U.S. prosperity.

Many voters heard Mr. Trump’s make-America-great-again slogan as a promise to raise their incomes and improve economic opportunities after a long stagnation. Eight years of 2% growth since the recession ended in 2009 is the weakest recovery in the postwar era, and the result has been rising anxiety and diminished expectations for millions of Americans.

Faster growth of 3% a year or more is possible, but it will take better policies, and tax reform is an indispensable lever. Mr. Trump’s modernization would be a huge improvement on the current tax code that would give the economy a big lift, especially on the corporate side. The reform would sharply cut the business income rate to 15% from 35%, while simplifying the code for individuals and cutting some marginal rates.

Though Mr. Trump’s proposal dabbles in some politically fashionable tax redistribution, at its core it is an exercise in growth economics. The cuts would be permanent and immediate, and the rates are low enough to enhance the incentives to work and invest.
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The plan also fits the economic moment, because a main source of U.S. malaise is poor business investment. Spending on the likes of new factories, equipment and software is soft, which in turn has undermined the productivity gains that produce more jobs, higher wages and higher living standards. Productivity growth in the 2000s and 2010s is only about half the average of the 1980s and 1990s.

And from Brooklyn, yet, with an exaggerated Brooklyn accent, making a career of selling America her Islamic version of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Everyone with half a brain has fallen for Linda Sarsour’s stealth jihad in a hijab. But not me. Never me. Virtually every time I see her photo flashing the ISIS symbol of a finger pointed in the air (to Allah, he’s the greatest, don’t you know?), I want to reciprocate with a middle finger. And I do, even if it’s to a picture of her carefully made-up mug.

Nathaniel Zelinsky writes in Foreign Affairs that the gesture refers to thetawhid, “the belief in the oneness of God and a key component of the Muslim religion.” More specifically, though, it refers to their fundamentalist interpretation of the tawhid, which rejects any other view, including other Islamic interpretations, as idolatry. Zelinsky writes that when ISIS uses the gesture, it is affirming an ideology that demands the destruction of the West, as well as any form of pluralism. For potential recruits around the globe, it also shows their belief that they will dominate the world.

Sarsour to say the least, is not a nice person. Daniel Pipes published a long list of Sarsour’s publicity stunts and consummate narcissism and alleged achievements in a long post in March 2010.

Mar. 8, 2011 update: Sarsour has tweeted a stunningly crude and vicious attack on two anti-Islamist leaders: “Brigitte Gabriel= Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She’s asking 4 an a$$ whippin’. I wish I could take their vaginas away – they don’t deserve to be women.”

Feb. 8, 2015 update: Sarsour just can’t get enough of her alleged beauty. Her remarks (ignorant typo left as is) on this Instagram picture: “Blue is a power color. Maybe your born with it, Maybe it’s Maybelline, I praise the lord that I am born with it. #media #womenarebetterateverything #women.” Oh, and what to make of the infantile feminism, “women are better at everything”?

Sep. 9, 2014 update: Sarsour squealed “hate crime” when a street person in Brooklyn accosted her on Sep. 3, winning national attention for her plight and the alleged problem of anti-Muslim bias. For example, the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, wrote her a tweet: “New Yorkers stand with you, @lsarsour. Our city will never condone such glaring acts of bigotry and intolerance.”

Donald Trump vigorously defended law enforcement during his presidential campaign. He pledged to restore order to the nation’s cities—where violent crime is surging—and to reinvigorate the rule of law. His appointment of conservative Republican senator Jeff Sessions as attorney general was a strong signal that Trump’s words were more than campaign rhetoric. Now that the Trump administration and the Sessions-led Justice Department are up and running, where should they focus their efforts?

The most immediate goal of the Trump administration should be to change the elite-driven narrative about the criminal-justice system. That narrative, which holds that policing is lethally racist, has dominated public discourse since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. In response, officers are backing off of proactive policing, and violent crime is rising fast: 2015 saw the largest one-year spike in homicides nationwide in nearly 50 years. That violent-crime increase has continued unabated through 2016 and into the early months of 2017. A Trump administration official—perhaps Attorney General Sessions, or the president himself—should publicly address the question of what we expect from police officers: Do we want them to be proactive and to try to stop crime before it happens? Or do we want them to be purely reactive, responding to crime only after someone has been victimized? The administration should explain that data-driven, proactive policing made possible the country’s 20-year, 50 percent violent-crime decline that began in the mid-1990s.

In February, Sessions made a good start in turning around the false narrative about policing, addressing the National Association of Attorneys General. Sessions warned that the nation’s violent-crime decline is now at risk, while acknowledging that the crime increase is not happening in every neighborhood. Yet we are diminished as a nation, he said, when citizens “fear for their life when they leave their home.” (To be blunt, the violent-crime increase has hit almost exclusively in black neighborhoods. Nine hundred additional black males were murdered in 2015 compared with 2014, bringing total black homicide deaths that year to more than 7,000. It is a marker of the perversity of elite rhetoric about race that both Trump and Sessions have been fiercely attacked as racist for pledging to save black lives.)

Sessions noted that officers have become reluctant to get out of their cars to conduct discretionary stops and other “up-close” preventive policing. The administration should go further: it should convey the charged, hostile atmosphere in which officers in many urban areas now operate, thanks to the hatred spread by the Black Lives Matter movement. Gun murders of officers increased more than 50 percent in 2016, led by the targeted assassinations of cops.

A frontal assault on the dominant narrative about a racist criminal-justice system will require laying out the stark racial disparities in criminal offending and victimization. The public has been kept in the dark for decades about how vast those disparities are: blacks commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined, for example, and die of homicide at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. Lifting that veil of ignorance is necessary to explain why officers operate more actively in minority neighborhoods—in order to save lives. The public must also understand that it is law-abiding members of high-crime communities themselves who beg the police to maintain order, and that such public-order policing was central to the now-jeopardized 20-year crime decline.

The Atlantic’s May cover features Alec Baldwin covered in orange makeup holding up a Trump wig. The cover asks, “Can Satire Save the Republic?”

What is satire saving the Republic from? Republicans. While making America safe for Socialism.

After Bush won, Democrats fought back by doubling down on the ridicule. Before long they were getting their news from Jon Stewart’s smirk. Stewart spawned a whole range of imitators. Today you can find numberless clones of the Daily Show across cable and even on CBS and, soon, on NBC.

The left is devoutly convinced that this snickering can save America. That it’s better than the news.

The Peabody awards celebrated the Daily Show as “a trusted source of news for citizens united in their disappointment and disgust with politics and cable news”. But the media was the first in line to anoint the politics of contempt, ridicule and disgust as the future of journalism. Now the future is here.

The Washington Post, once a paper of record, swarms with snarky Stewartesque headlines like, “Jeff Sessions doesn’t think a judge in Hawaii — a.k.a. ‘an island in the Pacific’ — should overrule Trump”. Journalism is dead. And replacing it with snarky lefty spin hasn’t saved the Republic. Or anything else.

But the left’s faith in the power of its contempt has nothing to do with its tactical effectiveness.

The left remains convinced that Jon Stewart brought down Bush and Tina Fey brought down Palin because ridiculing the right isn’t just an ugly tactic. Instead it carries an almost religious meaning. Mocking Republicans can save us. Every ideology expresses its superiority through its own triumphalism. Sneering is the left’s own invocation of its own superiority. These are the grown up politics of kids who were convinced that they were better than everyone else because they looked down on them.

Unless you are scheduled to appear on a college campus, that is, for example, at Berkeley, to deliver a culinary-themed lecture on the best way to prepare an egg and ham quiche, Antifa thugs and Social Justice Warriors (thugs-in-training) are not likely to appear to riot, destroy or damage property, and physically assault anyone in protest of your presence. But then who knows what mildewed nihilism, undigested grunge, and ideological sewage pass for thought in the minds of “activists” anymore?

Also, remember that the original “triggered minds” also include Muslim minds, who are the paramount “victims” of micro-aggressions by Western culture, such as freedom of speech, imaginative images of Mohammad, hijab-less women and women in alluring garb, and blasphemous talk about Islam and Allah. Jihadists and Islamic activists are also nihilists, whether they wear $1,000 suits or jeans and T-shirts and flash knives or machetes.

The poster boy victims of micro-aggression:

Triggered Muslims, brothers in

Spirit of Antifa

Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Insitute, in her Wall Street Journal article of April, wrote:

Student thuggery against non-leftist viewpoints is in the news again. Agitators at Claremont McKenna College, Middlebury College, and the University of California’s Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses have used threats, brute force and sometimes criminal violence over the past two months in efforts to prevent Milo Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray, Ann Coulter and me from speaking. As commencement season approaches, expect “traumatized” students to try to disinvite any remotely conservative speaker, an effort already under way at Notre Dame with regard to Vice President Mike Pence.

And then there is Pomana College, whose sociology students are demanding the firing of a white professor who teaches “black communities.” Addressed to the school’s sociology department, the dean, and the college president, it complained – nay – demanded the immediate firing (or not hiring) of Alice Goffman. The brave students ended their demand:

(128 names redacted for individual safety in recognition of the violence inflicted on communities of color by various publications, namely [and apparently solely] by the Claremont Independent) (square brackets mine)

Reviewing her subject of “black communities,” one is at a loss to understand why the students would object to her Pomana appointment. She is of the Left, as “her PhD dissertation on the impact of mass incarceration and policing on low-income African-American urban communities… when she immersed herself in a disadvantaged neighborhood of Philadelphia with African-American young men who were subject to a high level of surveillance and police activity….” She is a product of that bastion of Progressive causes, the University of Wisconsin.

Jonathan Marks agrees with my assessment of Goffman his Commentary article of April 24th, “New Rule: White Women Should Not Study Black Communities.”

Alice Goffman, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, is a controversial scholar. Her book, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City is based on Goffman’s six year immersion in a black neighborhood in West Philadelphia.

The book was published in 2014 to wide acclaim. But it soon attracted critics, including the estimable Steven Lubet, who thinks that Goffman embellished her experiences, repeated as fact things she had heard from her subjects though they were unlikely to have been true, and, most sensationally, became so caught up in the lives of the people she was writing about that she could have been charged with conspiracy to commit murder under Pennsylvania law. Goffman replies here, and Lubet takes up part of Goffman’s reply here. Suffice it to say that there is enough to the controversy to make it unsurprising that when Goffman’s hire as McConnell Visiting Professor of Sociology at Pomona College was announced, some people were disappointed.

Abraham Lincoln noted poignantly that a “House divided cannot stand.” Recent events indicate the Republican party has much to learn from the past. A party divided cannot govern. And a president with his majority party split cannot exercise his Constitutional authority.

The inability of the Republican leadership to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was a set back for President Trump. Freedom Caucus members in the House refused to pass legislation that they regarded as little more than tinkering with Obamacare. And despite the urging of President Trump and Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan consensus could not be achieved.

Then there is the schism over the border tax. A host of conservative organizations are launching a furious campaign against a new tax on imports proposed by many House Republicans, imperiling a Republican plan for a tax overhaul. Much like the failed repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the import tax is dividing conservatives, the business sector and deep pocket members of the party. Along the way, it is exposing the ideological divide between nationalist policies Trump has advocated and the free market – small government movement ensconced in the party.

For Trump, the free market generally benefits wealthy elites at the expense of American workers. For free traders, the border tax is a burden on consumers and a hidden factor in rising prices.

A profusion of strategic and political motives also divide Republicans. For Paul Ryan, who is a conventional free trade advocate, the new tax is a way to satisfy Trump’s protectionist impulse without imposing punitive tariffs. Free traders contend the new tax and a tariff represent a distinction without a difference.

It is also instructive that recent foreign policy decisions have encouraged the federal government’s GOP to look and sound like Democrats that have turned inward. Trump’s America First speech on foreign policy, came right out of the Charles Lindbergh playbook. Would Trump be willing to challenge the unilaterally established air perimeter zone in the South China Sea? Would a significant number of Republicans reject such an initiative?