RUTHFULLY YOURS

So let me understand this

Bill Clinton sexually frolicked with Gennifer Flowers, apparently sexually abused Paula Corbin (paying her an $850,000 litigation settlement) and Kathleen Willey. Leveraged his workplace supervisory position over Monica Lewinsky to convert the Oval Office into a sexually hostile workplace environment, even as he gazed into her gullible eyes, inter alia, and promised that he would divorce Hillary and would marry Lewinsky after his presidency. If we are to believe the accuser — as Hillary tells us we must — he raped Juanita Broaddrick. Ultimately, the state bar of Arkansas disbarred Bill Clinton for perjury.

Bill Clinton is the modern-day hero of the Democrat Party. He appears as the star of the Democrat convention every four years. His words inspire Democrats. He is legend. The mainstream media cannot praise and glorify him enough. Hillary Clinton sends him on the campaign trail to stump for her, to speak for her. His word, his endorsement, is sacrosanct.

And yet he has been a serial sexual abuser for decades — “because [he] could.” Alongside him, always defending him and thereby assuring her own continued access to power, to serve her own voracious ambitions, Hillary Clinton actively helped destroy women victims who spoke out.

Suddenly now the same mainstream media, who have found no one more suited in character and temperament for the presidency than Bill Clinton, instruct us that Donald Trump contrarily is disqualified for the presidency because a “hot mic” eleven years ago caught him ogling and boasting disgustingly about sexual exploits?

It is impossible not to be disgusted with all of these characters. We are mired in a kakistocracy of epic proportions. Trump with his bizarre ego, the insults and calumny and falsifications and exaggerations that have allowed others to puncture the urgently important and pure message that he repeatedly has compromised as its leading messenger. Even more, Hillary Clinton with her congenital lying, to the point of lying about why she was named “Hillary.” She inspires no trust in its most absolute vacuum. Travelgate. Rose Law Firm billing records. Cattle Futures. Lincoln Bedroom. Missing White House furniture. Leaving the White House “broke” and emerging a Top One Percenter, worth hundreds of millions without building a thing but instead selling access and influence to government contracts and regulations, while delivering 15-minute backroom “speeches” at $225,000 a pop to Wall Street insiders.

The death tax is an inevitable point of disagreement in a presidential campaign. Donald Trump would eliminate it to promote growth. Hillary Clinton would raise it—up to 65%, while lowering the exemption for estates to $3.5 million—to promote equality. The outcomes would be as different as their intentions.

What’s less remarked upon is that estate taxes are always double taxation. Estates are built with savings that have already been taxed as income, or soon will be. Even contributions to tax-deferred retirement accounts will be subject to the heirs’ income taxes over time.

The superrich can afford to give away assets during their lives or hire estate planners to help minimize the tax. Their estates often wind up being taxed at a lower effective rate than those of merely affluent individuals. The main victims of the death tax are middle-income savers and small-business owners who die before transferring ownership to their children.

The estate tax is badly structured, with very high rates—up to 40% today—but a very narrow tax base. That’s why it produces so little revenue, only $19 billion last year. But because the tax has recoil effects, even this revenue is illusory.

Because the tax reduces the stock of capital, it lowers the productivity of labor and reduces wages and employment. Much of the burden of the tax is shifted to working people. Research suggests that the estate tax depresses wages and employment enough to actually lower total federal revenue over time.

So what about the plans offered by Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton? Analysts at the Tax Foundation, where I work, have run the numbers using two models: one of the estate tax, based on historical filings, and another to estimate the economic effects on capital formation, GDP, profits, wages and federal revenue from those sources.

Mr. Trump plans to eliminate the estate tax. As a partial offset, he would end step-up in basis—which currently excuses unrealized gains in an estate from capital gains tax—for estates over $10 million. Our models suggest that these changes would raise GDP by 0.7% over 10 years and create 142,000 full-time equivalent jobs. After-tax incomes for the bottom four-fifths of Americans would rise by 0.6% to 0.7%, mainly due to wage growth. For the top fifth of the population, after-tax incomes would rise between 0.9% and 1.7%.

The Treasury would lose $288 billion in estate-tax revenue over the 10-year budget window, assuming no effect on the economy, but only $46 billion after taking the rise in GDP, wages and other income into account. Revenue losses in the first six years would be almost entirely offset by gains later in the decade, with more gains thereafter. Both the public and the government would be net winners.

It’s no secret that progressive elites despise religion, but it’s still striking to see their contempt expressed so bluntly as in the leaked email chains that include Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

The source for these documents is WikiLeaks. The Clinton campaign won’t confirm or deny their authenticity, and Mr. Podesta is implying that Russian intelligence hacked his email to help Donald Trump. Maybe so, and these hacks should be met with a forceful U.S. response. But the emails are now in the public domain, and the left celebrated WikiLeaks that damaged the U.S. effort in Afghanistan.

The emails show that in 2011 Mr. Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri, who is now a senior Clinton campaign official, received a note from their Center for American Progress colleague John Halpin. Mr. Halpin notes a media report that our News Corp. superiors, Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch and CEO Robert Thomson, raise their kids Catholic. Mr. Halpin observes that many leading conservatives are Catholic and opines that they “must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations.”

Ms. Palmieri responds, “I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.”

This is a window into the intolerant secular soul of the Democratic establishment and perhaps explains why it has done so little to accommodate requests for religious liberty from the Little Sisters of the Poor. Team Clinton apparently views religion merely as a justification people adopt for their views on politics and gender. Don’t Clinton campaign advisers think it’s at least possible that a person might be motivated by sincere belief?

Mr. Halpin’s response to Ms. Palmieri was: “Excellent point. They can throw around ‘Thomistic’ thought and ‘subsidiarity’ and sound sophisticated because no one knows what the hell they’re talking about.”

We’ll leave Thomism to the theologians, but subsidiarity is a concept that the left would do well to consider. It is the idea that social problems are best addressed by the nearest and smallest competent authority, rather than by a faraway state. Individual acts of charity can be highly effective, but the Clinton platform sees virtue only in a centralized bureaucracy sending out welfare checks regardless of results.

Clinton advisers would also rather force the church to accept their teachings. In 2012 activist Sandy Newman emailed Mr. Podesta to say there “needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship.” As if people are forced to believe at the point of a gun. Mr. Podesta responds with an update on what he’s been doing to prepare “for a moment like this.”

The kingdom of Saudi Arabia donated more than $10 million. Through a foundation, so did the son-in-law of a former Ukrainian president whose government was widely criticized for corruption and the murder of journalists. A Lebanese-Nigerian developer with vast business interests contributed as much as $5 million.http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/us/politics/hillary-clinton-presidential-campaign-charity.html?_r=0

For years the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation thrived largely on the generosity of foreign donors and individuals who gave hundreds of millions of dollars to the global charity. But now, as Mrs. Clinton seeks the White House, the funding of the sprawling philanthropy has become an Achilles’ heel for her campaign and, if she is victorious, potentially her administration as well.

With Mrs. Clinton facing accusations of favoritism toward Clinton Foundation donors during her time as secretary of state, former President Bill Clinton told foundation employees on Thursday that the organization would no longer accept foreign or corporate donations should Mrs. Clinton win in November.

But while the move could avoid the awkwardness of Mr. Clinton jetting around the world asking for money while his wife is president, it did not resolve a more pressing question: how her administration would handle longtime donors seeking help from the United States, or whose interests might conflict with the country’s own.

The Clinton Foundation has accepted tens of millions of dollars from countries that the State Department — before, during and after Mrs. Clinton’s time as secretary — criticized for their records on sex discrimination and other human-rights issues. The countries include Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Brunei and Algeria.

Saudi Arabia has been a particularly generous benefactor. The kingdom gave between $10 million and $25 million to the Clinton Foundation. (Donations are typically reported in broad ranges, not specific amounts.) At least $1 million more was donated by Friends of Saudi Arabia, which was co-founded by a Saudi prince.

Saudi Arabia also presents Washington with a complex diplomatic relationship full of strain. The kingdom is viewed as a bulwark to deter Iranian adventurism across the region and has been a partner in the fight against terrorism across the Persian Gulf and wider Middle East.

At the same time, though, American officials have long worried about Saudi Arabia’s suspected role in promoting a hard-line strain of Islam, which has some adherents who have been linked to violence. Saudi officials deny any links to terrorism groups, but critics point to Saudi charities that fund organizations suspected of ties to militant cells.

Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said the Clintons and the foundation had always been careful about donors. “The policies that governed the foundation’s activities during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state already went far beyond legal requirements,” he said in a statement, “and yet the foundation submitted to even more rigorous standards when Clinton declared her candidacy for president, and is pledging to go even further if she wins.”