RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-biden-plan-for-economic-sclerosis-11617907075?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

President Biden has proposed a back-to-the-future tax plan. When President Trump took office, the U.S. had the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world and had experienced a decade of slow growth, low investment and stagnant employment and real wages. The Obama economy was especially toxic for low-earning and less-educated groups. The assault on business was so widespread that capital’s contribution to economic growth was lower during the Obama expansion than it had been during any other period of growth since World War II.

The academic literature on corporate taxation pointed to the problem. High corporate taxes, a regulatory assault and social programs that discourage work and advancement led many U.S. multinational companies to locate their activity and profits overseas. This reduced or eliminated their tax in the U.S. while also reducing their demand for American labor. Wages dropped and tax revenue dropped, a double hit.

The idea of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was to make America an attractive location for capital formation again, and to drive wages up by increasing productivity. Mr. Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers estimated that wages for a typical family would grow about $4,000 over the first three to five years. Though the Obama administration proposed a corporate tax cut in 2015 for the same reasons, opponents of the bill ridiculed the Trump team’s numbers.

The economic data vindicated Mr. Trump. Actual gross domestic product by the end of 2019 was about $300 billion higher than the Congressional Budget Office had projected in July 2017. Business investment was about $100 billion higher and 2.8 million more workers were employed. U.S. firms repatriated $1.4 trillion in cash that was previously stuck overseas. And in the first two years after the tax cuts were passed, real median household income increased $4,900. Employment surged, especially among the long-term unemployed, the poor and minorities. Wealth for the bottom 50% of households advanced three times as fast as for the top 1%.

http://politicalmavens.com/

Jews comprise 13% of the population of New York and have been here since the 17th century. There are approximately 1.5 million Jews in New York City, the largest population of anywhere outside of Israel. To get some idea of what Jews have contributed to our city, look at the names carved on walls at colleges, hospitals, libraries and Lincoln Center – these represent just the charitable contributions Jews have made without mentioning their othercontributions to our lives – the most recent of which is development of the Pfizer vaccine by the son of a Holocaust survivor.
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So it is with surprise bordering on disbelief that neither the NYTimes nor the Wall Street Journal called attention to the April 8th commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Instead, the Journal had a front page article about Muslims giving up coffee for Ramadan, including a picture of Palestinians at a festive Gaza Market on p. 18. The NYTimes chose to cover Biden’s cancellation of Trump’s boycott of U.S. funds for Palestinian “refugees” while they supported and rewarded terrorists. Instead, we will now afford them $235 million dollars of assistance. It’s interesting that both papers chose to deal with Muslims whose population in New York is roughly half that of Jews.

438,500 Americans lost their lives in World War 2. When our G.I.’s liberated the Ohrdruf concentration camp, General Eisenhower insisted that members of Congress and journalists be summoned to see and report on the atrocities that were performed there. Eisenhower’s statement was: “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, we know what he is fighting against.”
Anti-semitism in America is on the rise and is part and parcel of Black Lives Matter. Local t.v. news has headlined the vicious attacks on Asian people but few channels covered the attack on a Chasidic family pushing a baby carriage in Brooklyn a few days ago. They were assaulted by a man who slashed the father, mother and year old baby on their faces. It would seem that we are in very desperate need of remembering what happened to six million Jews and nearly half a million Americans who lost their lives during the Holocaust. How shameful that the editors of New York’s most important newspapers chose to forget them.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/04/08/americas-elites-want-a-racial-apocalypse/

Jamil Ford still recalls the disorders of late May. ‘It was like Baghdad’, he recalls, even as jurors listen to the arguments during the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer accused of killing George Floyd. ‘I constantly think about it. The past history does not go away’, the African-American architect recalls, noting with trepidation possible National Guard deployments. ‘The mental part is still there.’

I know how he feels. In 1992 we went through this same process in Los Angeles when the police were exonerated in the beating of Rodney King. This unleashed a three-day explosion of often violent protests, resulting in $1 billion in damages and over 50 fatalities. In the end, the disorder led to some necessary shifts in police procedures but ultimately left the area relatively poorer and considerably less black than before.

Will things be different this time around? No politician in American history owes more to African-American leadership and voters than Joe Biden. His flailing campaign was rescued from the respirator by South Carolina’s heavily black Democratic electorate. African Americans sustained his path through states such as Texas. Since taking office, Biden’s commitment to battling the ‘sting of systemic racism’ and encroaching ‘white supremacy’ has accompanied his early actions and seems to have shaped many of his appointments.

The left’s and the media’s embrace of racial apocalypse, both in the US and in Britain, remains sadly selective. The recent Atlanta murders, given exhaustive coverage, appear to be the product not of Trumpista brownshirts but a singular, screwed-up madman. Meanwhile, attacks on Asians historically have come in large measure from minorities, largely African Americans. The most recent attack on Capitol Hill came not from Trumpistas but a follower of the ultimate anti-white, Louis Farrakhan.

The same media that hypes anti-Asian violence by whites usually ignores that by other ‘people of colour’. When the perpetrator is a Muslim jihadi, as was the case in Colorado, coverage has been less, even if the body count was twice as high. The ‘people of colour’ solidarity that bleeds over the pages of mainstream media has little room for nuance. It tends to ignore the fact that many Asians, and many Hispanics, oppose such things as quotas to selective high schools and colleges.

Similarly, most minorities seem not to share common ground with posturing politicians, and progressive intellectuals, who have excused looting as a form of racial redress. Minority business people generally don’t regard random violence as justice; the impact on business enterprises is felt particularly keenly in Minneapolis. A focus on police abuse is clearly needed, but the vast majority of Americans – including millennials and minorities – do not favour defunding law enforcement. They may be more concerned with the resurgence of violent and other crime in our core cities, even though it is often downplayed in the media.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/soccer_moms_might_turn_on_biden_if_they_learn_hes_attacking_their_homes.html

Stanley Kurtz noted that part of Biden’s alleged “infrastructure” bill continues the left’s war on the suburbs. Even though affluent suburbs are increasingly filled with Democrat voters (college grads who passed through the propaganda mill), the administration wants to make them more densely urban because that ensures reliable Dem voting. However, if Republicans can get the word out about this feature in the bill, they might get an unexpected ally: Soccer moms.

First, let me share some of Kurtz’s analysis with you, although I urge you to read the whole thing:

How, exactly, does Biden plan to end single-family zoning? According to the fact sheet released by the White House, “Biden is calling on Congress to enact an innovative new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate [‘exclusionary zoning’].” In other words, Biden wants to use a big pot of federal grant money as bait. If a county or municipality agrees to weaken or eliminate its single-family zoning, it gets the federal bucks.

The wildly overreaching Obama-Biden era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation — which Biden has pledged to revive — works in a similar fashion. The difference is that by adding another gigantic pot of federal money to the Community Development Block Grants that are the lure of AFFH, Biden makes it that much harder for suburbs to resist applying — and that much more punishing to jurisdictions that forgo a share of the federal taxes they’ve already paid so as to protect their right to self-rule.

The practical effect of ending single-family zoning means that you just bought a lovely 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom home for your growing family, on a quiet street with large lots, each boasting a big garden. It’s the perfect place to play. However, when your neighbors move out, a developer buys his property, razes it, and builds a Section H multifamily unit on it. When this happens a few more times, you just overpaid for a large home on a busy street, complete with Section H housing – and the drugs and crime that inevitably follow when Section H comes to your neighborhood.

What Biden’s handlers might not realize is that suburban moms, the ones who worked hard and delayed childbearing so that they could raise their children in a safe, healthy environment, don’t like plans to turn their green retreats into copies of the same busy cities they left. And it’s not just Republican suburban moms who don’t like this idea; it’s Democrat suburban moms too.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/who-cares-if-nation-islam-racist-killed-white-cop-john-perazzo/

Last Friday, a 25-year-old Nation of Islam supporter named Noah Green rammed his car into a barricade outside the U.S. Capitol, killing police officer William Evans and injuring another officer in the process, before Green himself was shot and killed by a cop at the scene. In stark contrast to the countless lamentations – by media outlets and elected Democrats – that the people who stormed the Capitol building on January 6 were an undifferentiated pack of “racists” and “white supremacists,” Democrats and their leftwing allies have been remarkably uninterested in the element of race vis-à-vis Mr. Green and the white policeman he killed on Friday. Senator Chuck Schumer, for one, soberly claimed, without reference to race, to be “heartbroken for the family and loved ones” of the fallen officer. President Biden offered his “heartfelt condolences” to Evans’ family. And Nancy Pelosi called Evans “a martyr for our democracy” — a far cry from her July 2020 statement comparing federal anti-riot police in Portland to Nazi “storm troopers.”

Why the sudden, uncharacteristic reluctance to jump to stupid, uninformed conclusions about the motivations of a criminal perpetrator?The colossal hypocrites who run social media platforms have been similarly averse to wading into racial waters in their dealings with Noah Green. Consider Facebook, whose militant censors and “fact-checkers” have been so keenly on the lookout for messages conveying even the baresttrace of support for “hate,” “misinformation,” or “conspiracy theories” promulgated by white conservatives. For some mysterious reason, those same censors were apparently asleep-at-the-wheel when Mr. Green, as recently as March 17, used his Facebook page to express his deep admiration for former Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. Neither did the censors object when Green again used Facebook on March 21 to describe Louis Farrakhan, who has been the Nation of Islam’s principal leader for more than 40 years, as “the man who can carry us through the dark hour.” Nor did the censors balk when Green recently stated on Facebook that “my faith is centered on the belief of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan as Jesus, the Messiah, the final divine reminder in our midst.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/biden-admin-revives-funding-to-anti-semitic-u-n-agency/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=

The United States, Antony Blinken announced this afternoon, will “restart U.S. economic, development, and humanitarian assistance for the Palestinian people.”

In addition to reviving direct U.S. funding to a variety of projects in Gaza and the West Bank, this will also include $150 million to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, a specialized organization that aids Palestinian refugees. The Trump administration had suspended funding to UNRWA in 2018, calling the agency “irredeemably flawed.” And it remains so today.

First, it’s worth recalling the true purpose behind UNRWA’s creation. Consider that of all the millions of people displaced around the world, only Palestinian refugees have their own, distinct U.N. agency. Refugees from every single other country on the planet instead seek assistance from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

In addition to that, although the agency purports to represent over 5 million refugees who it claims may one day return to Israel, most of them don’t actually qualify as refugees according to the U.N.’s criteria. Most have never even stepped foot in the country, since they were born well after the 1948 conflict. According to a recently released U.S. government assessment, the number of true refugees, applying the standard criteria, ends up at around 200,000, and perhaps even less than that.

So why stand up this separate organization? The very existence of the program, and the widespread support that it consistently receives at the U.N. General Assembly, stands as yet another example of the U.N.’s pervasive, institutional bias against Israel. After the U.N. Human Rights Council, which disproportionately singles out the country in its every session, UNRWA is the single most obvious example of this discrimination, which is designed to make Israel into a pariah state on the international stage.

https://americanmind.org/features/lefts-war-free-speech/end-nationalism-end-america/

Today’s globalist dogma is incompatible with our country’s survival.

Twenty-First-century progressive liberalism sees the American nation as a problem. There are three core points of contention: 1) the concept of nation-state sovereignty; 2) the actual American nation itself—its culture, history, and people; and finally, 3) the prospects for constitutional republican self-government in America.

From Democratic Sovereignty to Global Governance

For decades, mainstream liberal foreign policy experts who have served at the highest levels of American government (John Kerry, Strobe Talbott, Harold Koh, Anne-Marie Slaughter) and in the academic world (G. John Ikenberry, Robert Keohane) have advocated transferring aspects of national sovereignty from nation-states, including ours, to global institutions. Indeed, President Obama himself told the United Nations General Assembly in 2016: “We’ve bound our power to international laws and institutions—I am convinced that in the long run, giving up freedom of action—not our ability to protect ourselves but binding ourselves to international rules over the long term—enhances our security.”

Harold Koh, the State Department’s chief legal advisor under Obama, recommended that U.S. courts “download” international law into American law, stating that it is “appropriate for the Supreme Court to construe our Constitution in light of foreign and international law.” Anne-Marie Slaughter, an international lawyer who served under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, argued that nations should cede a degree of sovereign authority “vertically” to supranational institutions such as the International Criminal Court. She declared that transnational networks “can perform many of the functions of a world government—legislation, administration, and adjudication—without the form,” thereby creating what the American Bar Association has endorsed as the “global rule of law,” with transnational law logically superior to the U.S. Constitution.

Liberal scholars have recognized that global governance is often at odds with democratic self-government. The liberal internationalist argument is that nation-state democracies like the United States cannot be relied upon to develop fair “global rules” because they ignore the interests of non-citizens.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-clean-up-phase-of-bidens-presidency-is-about-to-end/

“Biden has spent these early months dealing with the lingering reminders of the man he replaced. But this chapter of his presidency might be drawing to a close.”

One rarely emerges empty-handed from an hour or two in the C-SPAN archives. I spent some time the other day watching a 2009 episode of Q&A, where Brian Lamb interviewed Christopher Hitchens. A passing reference to the debate over post-9/11 interrogation methods reminded me that it is far too early to make oracular judgments about Joe Biden’s presidency — much less to classify him as a “transformative” president like Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan. The event, decision, speech, or law that will define Biden in American history has yet to happen.

Presidents spend the first months of their tenure in office dealing with issues and problems left over from the previous administration. George W. Bush, for example, wanted his first tax cut to increase economic growth after the bursting of the tech bubble. Barack Obama’s first tasks after taking the oath were stabilizing the financial system and lessening the fallout of the Great Recession. Donald Trump had to manage, in his inimitable style, the portfolio of ISIS, the southern border, and North Korea that Obama handed him in January 2017.

And yet all of these chief executives will be remembered not for what they accomplished before the arbitrary and overblown milestone of the “first 100 days,” but for how they responded to challenges that did not appear until long afterward.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-infrastructure-bill-aims-to-end-single-family-zoning/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=first

With the introduction of his massive, $2.3 trillion “infrastructure” bill, President Biden’s campaign to end suburban single-family zoning has begun. If you think this issue was debated and resolved during the 2020 presidential campaign, you are mistaken. It’s true that Biden’s campaign platform openly and unmistakably pledged to abolish single-family zoning. As soon as President Trump made an issue of that pledge, however, Biden went virtually silent on the issue and the Democrat-supporting press falsely denied that Biden had any designs on single-family zoning at all. Now that he’s president, Biden’s infrastructure bill openly includes programs designed to “eliminate” single-family zoning (which Biden calls “exclusionary zoning”).

How, exactly, does Biden plan to end single-family zoning? According to the fact sheet released by the White House, “Biden is calling on Congress to enact an innovative new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate [‘exclusionary zoning’].” In other words, Biden wants to use a big pot of federal grant money as bait. If a county or municipality agrees to weaken or eliminate its single-family zoning, it gets the federal bucks.

The wildly overreaching Obama-Biden era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation — which Biden has pledged to revive — works in a similar fashion. The difference is that by adding another gigantic pot of federal money to the Community Development Block Grants that are the lure of AFFH, Biden makes it that much harder for suburbs to resist applying — and that much more punishing to jurisdictions that forgo a share of the federal taxes they’ve already paid so as to protect their right to self-rule.