RUTHFULLY YOURS

A Good Start on Tax Reform
By The Editors
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372097/print

It is a testament to the scale and absurdity of the U.S. tax code that it takes a 979-page bill to reform and simplify it. That’s how much paper Representative Dave Camp’s proposal, from the House Ways and Means Committee, uses to reduce marginal rates for businesses and individuals, limit tax deductions and exclusions, and simplify the system overall. And a great deal of the proposal is good.

It’s hard to object, for instance, to the 89 sections of the bill devoted just to removing “deadwood” (provisions that no longer affect taxes paid) from the tax code. We can’t count the number of distortionary or costly active provisions in the individual and corporate income-tax codes that Camp’s bill eliminates. Of course, each of these changes will attract opposition from somewhere, but such is the price of tax reform.

What are the benefits? It would cut the top corporate tax rate, one of the highest in the world, to 25 percent, while the top individual-income rate would fall to 35 percent. It would reduce the complexity of the code significantly — allowing 95 percent of Americans to take just the standard deduction — while maintaining similar levels of revenue and encouraging business investment. In other words, we can reliably expect to move in the right direction along the Laffer curve. (Simplifying the tax code also reduces the incentives and opportunities for mischief by tax collectors, and Camp’s bill includes further measures to insulate taxpayers from political abuse by the IRS.)

Across income levels, Camp’s proposal is essentially neutral: Incentives are improved without giving Democrats any chance to wail about tax cuts for the rich. Of course, some will pay more and some will pay less. The bill’s redistribution is largely from single Americans to families, and from firms that have won special advantages in the tax code to those that have typically seen high tax bills. Both of these are, besides any considerations of fairness, good economic policy.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372077/print
The history of Obama’s foreign-policy posturing bodes ill for the future of Ukraine.

Don’t step over the line and re-militarize the Rhineland. Absorbing Austria would cross a red line. Breaking up Czechoslovakia is unacceptable. Get out of Poland by the announced deadline. The rest was history.

Don’t dare blow up another American military barracks overseas. Don’t even consider another attack on the World Trade Center. Don’t even try blowing up one more American embassy in East Africa. Don’t ever put a hole in a U.S. warship again. The rest was history.

President Obama issued yet another one of those sorts of warnings to stop the violence to Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych just before protesters drove Yanukovych out of office. “There will be consequences if people step over the line,” Obama threatened.

Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, amplified that veiled warning. He called the Ukrainian government’s repression “completely outrageous” — as opposed to just outrageous or completely, completely outrageous.

Secretary of State John Kerry joined the chorus of condemnation by hinting at economic sanctions if Yanukovych didn’t stop his violent crackdown on protesters.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372094/print
President Obama rejects risk out of arrogance.

‘The price of greatness,” Winston Churchill once said, “is responsibility.”

There can no longer be any doubt that President Obama is unwilling to pay that tariff.

In a world defined by uncertainty and ever-stronger enemies, the president’s administration announced this week that American armed forces would be cut to historically low levels. But the sad farce doesn’t end there.

Last Thursday, we also learned that the president’s new budget won’t include a minor but useful reform he’d proposed last year to trim entitlement spending. The rejection of these changes — ones that every citizen capable of basic arithmetic should know are necessary to save America’s pension program — is telling.

After ten years of war, that is, the military gets gutted while civilian entitlements remain sacred.

This is a White House in which short-term ideological calculations always rule the roost.

Less than a month ago, the president spoke of “working together” with Congress — now he is calling for an end to the era of austerity. (Did it ever begin?) The president’s budget next year proposes increased spending on favorite (wasteful) programs. This is playing to the favorite liberal myth that austerity doesn’t work, that only continued binging can end the hangover. The president knows that the U.S.’s fiscal position remains tenuous, and knows that ballooning deficits will make recoveries much harder in the future.

http://americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/02/waking_up_to_defense_cuts.html

If you are surprised by this week’s announcement of major manpower cuts to the U.S. Army, you haven’t been paying attention. For a long time. There are two components to understanding America’s defense spending choices — the political and the budgetary; they are not the same. The Administration has made the political case clear.

Beginning in 2011, President Obama pronounced himself committed to “ending the wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan “responsibly.”
The president committed to a turn inward, beginning with a 2011 statement that “the nation we need to build is our own,” coupled with the promise to cut troops deployed abroad in half.
The refrain “no boots on the ground,” is the mantra of many administration officials, resurrected again last weekend by Susan Rice regarding limits to U.S. support of rebels in Syria — although no one appears to have suggested so much as a huarache.
Secretary Kerry’s visit to Indonesia prompted him to declare global “climate change” as big a threat in Asia as “terrorism, poverty and WMDs.” He skipped China’s increasingly bold assertions of hegemony in Asian waters and increasingly large defense budget (still miniscule compared to ours, but one heads one way, the other the other way).

It really doesn’t matter that none of those things are true, meaningful, or helpful in terms of American national security policy. The president’s political message has been consistent and expedient — except for the large, not-very-truthful explanation of the war in Libya and its aftermath — and resonates with an American public that is “war wary” (if not “war weary”), creepingly (if not yet creepily) isolationist, and happy with a presidential plan to “save money” after years of rise in the national debt.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/of-armies-and-libraries-the-end-of-western-civilization?f=puball

Two items of news have flashed across my eyes in the last few days that appall me. One is that the United States plans to reduce its armed forces, the men and women who protect all of us from enemies all around the globe, to pre-World War II levels. The second is that New York City was planning to transform the big Public Library on Fifth Avenue-the one with the lions in front-into a lending library and somewhat glorified internet café-the seven stories of ancient and modern books, one of the greatest research collections in the world-to be sent into cold storage in far-off New Jersey.

We all should know from history that a principal reason why the United States did not react to the threats increasingly manifest to its security and that of its closest allies during the 1930s-and why it took so long to get into action properly after Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941-was that the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines were woefully undermanned and lacking in adequate arms. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan took advantage of American inability to defend itself. Today, as the Putin threaten another Crimean War, the Middle East (for all its vaunted Arab Spring) is more unsteady and volatile than ever, North Korea and Iran posture and pose real dangers as nuclear powers, Syria commits atrocities beyond imagining and falls into the hands of Al-Qaida–and thus all around the strategic map where there is a need for flexibility rather than total reliance on huge technological systems and miniature unmanned drone-like weapons. We have known that for a long time that the United Nations has become worse than a farcical house of racist palaver: it is a source of potential-and often enough, very real-provocations to anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Israeli actions. The European Union, Nato and other international alliances are stymied by their own petty squabbles and mental blocks. Without a strong, alert and multi-layered United States military, what hope is there in the world?

And so to the New York Public Library, though this is a story that seems t6o have broken in 2012 and was settled in the next year, the very diea remains a possibility-and this is what frightens me. In the days of electronic-readers reductivity of books to mere information and digital technology, surely the breakdown of one major collection would be a sign of the collapse of knowledge, study and understanding as it has been built up for the past several millennia. What comes next, the closing down of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Bronx Zoo, the Botanical Gardens-in brief, the end of New York as one of, if not the, greatest city in the world…that history has ever known? This would be the triumph of Philistinism, managerial and sociological jargons and political know-nothingism, and the phantasmagoria of celebrity and narcissism that is popular culture.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/its-not-scaremongering-its-love-of-country

On Feb. 9, 50.3 percent of Swiss voters passed a referendum to cap immigration from the EU. In the course of a (very hostile) Spiegel Online interview with Christoph Blocher, leader of the Swiss People’s Party, the impetus becomes clear. The EU’s so-called freedom of movement — read: untrammeled immigration into decreasingly sovereign states — has approached a crisis for Swiss nationhood.

“Some 23.8 percent of Switzerland’s population is comprised of foreigners, and almost 15 percent are first-generation naturalized Swiss citizens,” Blocher said. “No similar European state has anything like that.”

Once the shocking fact that nearly one in four people in Switzerland are foreigners sinks in, it seems logicial to conclude, as Galliawatch does, that many if not most non-native voters probably opposed the immigration cap. That means that the outcome among native Swiss was likely a more resounding majority than 50.3 percent indicates.

For now, then, the Swiss have affirmed they are still a nation, a culture — rather an amazing feat given these demographics. Spiegel puts it down to “scaremongering.”

SPIEGEL: In your campaign for the referendum, SWP drafted horror scenarios of an overflowing Switzerland, a country that has become a cement jungle. The truth is that your country is doing better than ever before. Why the scaremongering?

Blocher: It’s not scaremongering. If things continue, we will surpass the 10-million mark in 2033. By 2061, we will have 16 million inhabitants, more than half of whom will be foreigners.

Bravo, Blocher, for at least halting the slide.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304255604579407112591695536?mod=Opinion_newsreel_4

The smarter Republicans are trying to reclaim the mantle of economic opportunity, and on Wednesday Dave Camp climbed into this phone booth by proposing a detailed tax reform. The Chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee wants to lower tax rates and create a fairer, more efficient code, and his plan ought to shift the debate over taxes to growth from redistribution.

The American tax system has changed for the worse since the last reform in 1986, and Mr. Camp has spent three years learning about the dispiriting specifics, including more than 30 hearings. The Michigan Republican is a serious legislator who cares about policy, and his effort shows. We disagree with many details in his 979-page bill, but overall his direction is right. Even if his bill doesn’t pass this year, its legwork will inform any future reform.
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The heart of the Camp plan would collapse today’s seven income tax brackets into three, with about 99% of taxpayers paying 10% or 25%. The top statutory marginal rate would fall to 35% from 39.6% for individuals earning wage income over $400,000 ($450,000 for joint filers).

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304709904579406784236827274?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop&mg=reno64-wsj

Susan Rice’s latest claims about the attacks are no more credible than the ones she made in 2012.

The worst part of National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s comments on Sunday’s “Meet The Press” was that she expressed no regret for saying that the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on U.S. outposts in Benghazi were “absolutely” the result of protests against a “very hateful, very offensive video that has offended many people around the world.” (She made these comments while she was ambassador to the United Nations, less than a week after four Americans were killed.)

Almost as bad was Ms. Rice’s statement that she was merely sharing “the best information that we had at the time.” That is a contemptible falsehood. The government knew long before Ms. Rice went on five Sunday television shows that the assaults were carefully planned terrorist attacks unconnected to a video.

Gen. Carter Ham, then head of Africa Command, knew “this was not a demonstration, this was a terrorist attack” within minutes of learning about the assault, according to testimony he gave last June to the House Armed Services Committee that was declassified this month. Gen. Ham almost immediately informed Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey before their previously scheduled Oval Office meeting with President Obama. Mr. Panetta told the Senate Armed Services Committee last year that he informed Mr. Obama of the attack. “There was no question in my mind this was a terrorist attack,”

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304255604579406962384624906?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecond&mg=reno64-wsj

MORE TRASHING OF THE TEA PARTY….THE WSJ “CONSERVATIVES” ARE GETTING BORING ON THE SUBJECT….THE TEA PARTY IS A LEGITIMATE GROUP WITH LEGITIMATE CONCERNS ABOUT THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT AND STATE RIGHTS AND THE FREEDOMS GUARANTEED BY THE CONSTITUTION…..IT IS AMAZING TO ME HOW MANY REPUBLICANS SHUN THE TEA PARTY BUT ARE WILLING TO “WORK ACROSS THE AISLE” WITH HARRY REID….RSK

The tea party certainly isn’t over, but after nearly five years is it starting to die down?

Tea party supporters will mark the movement’s fifth anniversary in Washington on Thursday. Scheduled speakers include politicians like Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, as well as conservative media stars such as Sean Hannity and Mark Levin.

Karlyn Bowman and Jennifer Marsico, two American Enterprise Institute scholars who study public opinion, write at Forbes.com that the tea party’s national popularity has held steady by some measures and waned by others. “But as more Americans have come to know the Tea Party movement, unfavorable views have risen sharply,” they write.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/02/26/the-new-war-on-israel-our-e-book/

Just out from COMMENTARY is our first topical e-book, The New War on Israel—and How to Fight Back. Over the past year especially, efforts to delegitimate the Jewish state have taken on a new urgency and force, much of it from liberals and leftists who are using their own Jewishness as a weapon. We have assembled several of our best articles and blog posts in a coherent whole to expose the hollowness and injustice of the arguments and the highly problematic nature of the way in which they are conducted. The ebook features pieces by me, Joshua Muravchik, Jonathan Tobin, Rick Richman, Ben Cohen, Adam Kredo, and others. It is essential reading. You can purchase it here.