RUTHFULLY YOURS

A war for the future of the world is going on right now. It includes some regular military action, but the outcome is going to be settled by control over the global supply of fuel and funds. That is why there can be no more important issue facing our next commander in chief than energy policy.

The Democrats are worse than hopeless in this respect, and unfortunately, many of the GOP campaigns have been mired in atmospherics and irrelevancies. But at least one of the Republican aspirants has risen to the challenge: Marco Rubio.

In a word, Rubio’s energy policy is excellent. It consists of three major thrusts; optimize America’s resources, minimize government bureaucracy, and maximize private innovation. I discuss each of these in turn.

At the last Republican presidential debate, I presented the Simple Flat Tax — which, for a family of four, exempts the first $36,000 from all income tax, and above that amount collects one low rate of 10 percent for all Americans. It eliminates the death tax, the payroll tax, the corporate income tax, and the Obamacare taxes; ends the corporate carve-outs and loopholes; and requires every business to pay the same simple business flat tax of 16 percent. That plan will unleash unprecedented growth, create millions of new jobs, raise after-tax incomes for all income levels by double-digit percentages — and abolish the IRS as we know it.

But eliminating the IRS is only the first step in my plan to break apart the federal leviathan that has ruled Washington and crept into our lives. We can’t stop there. In addition to eliminating the IRS, a Cruz administration will abolish four cabinet agencies. And we will sharply reduce the alphabet soup of government entities, beginning with the ABCs that should not exist in the first place: The Agencies, Bureaus, Commissions, and other programs that are constitutionally illegitimate and harmful to American households and businesses. It’s time to return to a federal government that abides by our constitutional framework and strips power from unelected bureaucrats.

Momentum is a concept that applies to criminal investigations almost as much as it does to sports teams. And from the signs available, it looks as if the probe into potential criminality in the Hillary email scandal has got the Big Mo.

Despite the FBI’s efforts to remain tight-lipped over the ongoing investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, it looks as though substantial resources are being devoted, so that a political kill of the query would be difficult to justify if push comes to shove. Politico has been interviewing as many people as it can, both on and off the record, to get a sense of where theinvestigation is leading, and the indications are that Hillary should be worried. Rachel Bade writes:

The FBI’s recent moves suggest that its inquiry could have evolved from the preliminary fact-finding stage that the agency launches when it receives a credible referral, according to former FBI and DOJ officials inteviewed [sic] by POLITICO.

“This sounds to me like it’s more than a preliminary inquiry; it sounds like a full-blown investigation,” said Tom Fuentes, former assistant director of the FBI. “When you have this amount of resources going into it …. I think it’s at the investigative level.”