RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

A new report tallying the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States from the beginning of the year through the end of September found a 67 percent surge compared to last year.

The Anti-Defamation League audit found the greatest increases in schools, with jumps in bullying and vandalism seen from grade school through college.

A bump in anti-Semitic incidents was also recorded after the August “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., at which one counterprotester was killed when a suspect photographed earlier in the day with white supremacists ran his car into a group of demonstrators.

In the first three quarters of the year in 2016, there were 779 reported anti-Semitic incidents, including 29 cases of assault, 322 cases of harassment and 428 cases of vandalism.

In the first three quarters of this year, harassment reports more than doubled: there were 1,299 reported anti-Semitic incidents, including 12 cases of assault, 703 cases of harassment and 584 cases of vandalism.

ADL CEO and national director Jonathan A. Greenblatt said he was “astonished and horrified” by the steep rises in anti-Semitic incidents.

“While the tragedy in Charlottesville highlighted this trend, it was not an aberration,” Greenblatt said in a statement. “Every single day, white supremacists target members of the Jewish community — holding rallies in public, recruiting on college campuses, attacking journalists on social media, and even targeting young children.”

Greenblatt said many school incidents go unreported. “We are deeply troubled by the rising number of anti-Semitic incidents, bullying, and hate in our nation’s schools and we don’t think the statistics paint a full picture of what is happening,” he said.

In Healdsburg, Calif., in May, students taunted a sixth-grade boy with swastikas and lighters, telling him he would burn “like they did in the Holocaust.” In Radington Beach, Fla., in March, a Jewish student was taunted with Holocaust memes and a classmate drew a swatiska and concentration camp prison number on his arm. In Longmont, Colo., in April, a Jewish high school student who had been the target of anti-Semitic slurs for weeks was assaulted.

After Charlottesville, where white nationalist demonstrators carried Nazi imagery and chanted “Jews will not replace us,” the daily average of 2.36 anti-Semitic incidents rose to 4.3 per day.

The ADL’s global index of anti-Semitic sentiment around the world found in 2015 that 10 percent of Americans, or some 24 million Americans, hold anti-Semitic views, with even distribution across gender, age groups and religion. Thirty-three percent polled on a number of canards said Jews are more loyal to Israel than America, 16 percent said Jews have too much power in the business world, 16 percent said Jews have too much power in international financial markets, 20 percent said Jews talk about the Holocaust too much, and 14 percent said people hate Jews because of the way they behave. CONTINUE AT SITE

Virginia’s gubernatorial race was rocked recently by a commercial, paid for by the Latino Victory Fund, depicting a white man trying to run down a group of nonwhite children with his pickup truck. As a black boy and a girl wearing a hijab walk on a peaceful sidewalk, they hear the roar of a turbocharged engine, and a companion yells, “Run!” The truck, flying the Confederate battle flag, and bearing a don’t tread on me Gadsden-flag license plate in front, is otherwise unadorned, except for a gillespie for governor bumper sticker, as its driver aims to slaughter the innocent kids. Ed Gillespie, the Republican candidate in what has become a national bellwether campaign, is presented as the standard-bearer for white racist political violence.

Just a few days after the ad aired, of course, a Muslim terrorist from Uzbekistan drove a truck into a walkway of pedestrians and bicyclists in Manhattan. Sayfullo Saipov was devoted to the triumph of the Islamic State and the preservation of its vanishing caliphate. The Latino Victory Fund’s anti-Gillespie commercial would have been more accurate if its pickup-truck driver had turned out to be the dad of the little hijabi girl running for her life.

The ad was pulled after yesterday’s attack. “We knew our ad would ruffle feathers,” said Latino Victory Fund president Cristóbal Alex, as if congratulating himself. Alex didn’t address the cognitive dissonance that his commercial would surely evoke in any informed viewer, or the inversion of reality that is the hallmark of leftist political rhetoric about immigration and the jihadi threat. The Virginia governor’s race has focused heavily on the immigration debate, with Gillespie—who holds positions somewhat to the left of the national Republican Party on amnesty and reform—taking a firm stance in favor of enforcement against illegal immigrant gang members, including MS-13, which has a strong presence in Virginia. Democratic candidate Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam has focused his campaign on the blue suburbs of northern Virginia, reaching out especially to the state’s expanding Asian population.

Casting electoral politics as the old, white America versus the new, vibrant, multiethnic America is a seductive strategy for Democrats, who can’t resist looking at actuarial charts and population graphs that show a nonwhite-majority electorate by 2050, at the latest. But as Hillary Clinton’s disastrous 2016 campaign demonstrated, politicians must be elected by today’s voters, not tomorrow’s. The “inevitability” strategy backfires, in part because white voters generally don’t like being told to expedite and celebrate their coming demise.

The strategy also backfires because rhetoric about the wonders of unfettered immigration meets the reality of horrible terrorism committed by immigrants or their children. The Latino Victory Fund—whose very name suggests ethnic triumphalism—tried to cast even mild immigration-restrictionist sentiment as white supremacism, and to depict Charlottesville murderer James Fields as the typical Gillespie voter. But the reality of terrorism in America is that it is widely and correctly associated with political Islam.