RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/27/art-of-the-deal-trading-the-income-tax-for-tariffs/

While speaking Saturday in Las Vegas, President Donald Trump suggested, as he had during the 2024 campaign, replacing the federal income tax with tariffs on foreign imports. We don’t need to see an economic analysis to believe this is debate worth having. Of all the good Trump could do as president in the next four years, eliminating the federal income tax would be one of his greatest achievements.

“If the tariffs work out like I think, a thing like that could happen, if you want to know the truth,” he said.

Trump also reminded the fussbudgets and change-fearing conventionalists who will predict that without a federal income tax the country will fall into a decline that until the 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913, there was no federal income tax. That’s right, establishing a federal income tax required a change to the Constitution. The Supreme Court in 1895 struck down an effort in the year before to establish a national income tax. It was, said five justices, unconstitutional.

An income tax at any level is insidious. Internal taxes, Thomas Jefferson said, were an assault on liberty, which “covered our land with officers and opened our doors to their intrusions.”

“Jefferson would be horrified by the power of today’s IRS to break down our doors and seize our property, and he surely would have led a revolt on seeing the powers added to the IRS under Obamacare,” the Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards wrote nearly a full decade before the Biden administration and the Democrat Congress weaponized the IRS with a plan to add 87,000 new agents.

The federal income is an economic assassin. According to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Americans burned more than 7.9 billion of their hours last year complying with IRS filing and reporting requirements.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2025/01/24/the_cold_civil_war_is_over_we_won_152244.html

The civilizational inflection point in our cold civil war happened sometime between Donald Trump’s second inaugural address on Monday and the end of his new presidency’s second day on Tuesday. At some indeterminate moment between Monday’s soaring midday speech, in which the first nonconsecutive two-term president in over 130 years artfully took a sledgehammer to the entire Obama-Biden era legacy without so much as uttering the men’s names, and Tuesday’s epochal executive order coming as close as legally possible to banning wokeism throughout the republic, the war ended. And as with the English capturing New Amsterdam from Peter Stuyvesant and the Dutch centuries prior, it happened without firing a single shot.

The maestro of Mar-a-Lago is known to fancy the Village People hit “Y.M.C.A.,” but perhaps the more apropos tune to blast at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue this week is Queen’s anthem “We Are the Champions.”

Let’s take a step back.

Barack Obama, a Chicago radical in the Saul Alinsky/Bill Ayers mold, declared war on America during his 2008 presidential campaign. We know he declared war because he more or less said it: He vowed on Feb. 19, 2008, to “fundamentally transform America,” and one does not seek to “fundamentally transform” that which he loves and seeks to conserve. If that Freudian slip was our cold civil war’s Fort Sumter, then Obama’s presidency that followed was the extended opening campaign. Indeed, Obama did “fundamentally transform” America: He passed the nation’s largest new entitlement program since the Great Society, maligned cops and soured race relations, helped constitutionalize same-sex marriage, realigned our Middle East interests toward the fanatical Iranian regime, and more.

The first Trump presidency was, in many ways, the American people’s reaction to the rise of the woke Obama-era Democratic Party.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/01/uncommon_communicators_churchill_reagan_trump.html

After four years with a mumbling fool stumbling around in the role of “president,” we have a strong communicator back in the White House.  The difference is striking.  

While President Trump was simultaneously signing executive orders and answering questions from the press on his first day back on the job, he suggested to those in attendance that he might have taken more questions in those first few hours than Joe Biden had taken during all four years in office.  The assembled journalists seemed to quietly concur.  Joe’s handlers spent every minute protecting him from even the most trivial journalistic inquiries; President Trump handles hostile questions while juggling ten other things at once.  Consequently, the first hundred hours of Trump’s restored presidency were historic. 

President Reagan was the “Great Communicator,” and no honest listener could doubt that deserved appellation.  Reagan’s unique combination of eloquence, strength, and wit made him a formidable adversary for anyone who got in his way.  Reagan could be pithy or expansive as the occasion demanded, and some of his sharpest verbal attacks required only a few words.  He summed up his entire Cold War strategy in just four: “We win; they lose.”  It worked.

President Trump achieves much with concise rhetoric, too.  Only six days after Republican backstabber Mitt Romney lost a winnable election to Barack Obama in 2012, Donald Trump signed his name to an application seeking trademark approval for his four-word strategy for igniting a political revolution: “Make America Great Again.”  

That’s a fascinating glimpse into his long-term thinking.  Before Romney repeatedly tried to sabotage Trump’s campaign and presidency, he begged Trump for an endorsement.  Trump obliged and privately gave Romney some advice on how to win the 2012 election.  Romney trumpeted Trump’s endorsement but ignored his counsel.  After watching Romney crash and burn, Trump surveyed the damage and scrawled out a simple message.  The rest, as they say, is history.  Trump used MAGA as a rallying cry for pursuing Reagan’s clear objective: “We win; they lose.”  It worked, too.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/houston-ft-worth-san-francisco-mayors

Urban leaders have greeted the return of Donald Trump with about as much enthusiasm as they would have for a reprise of the bubonic plague. The National Urban League imagines an “extreme right-wing” administration that will ban abortion, threaten the civil service, and end both immigration and racial quotas. Trump has even proposed building new planned cities—so-called freedom cities—that could compete with the existing urban landscape. Some urban leaders fear Trump’s actions will force them to “go it alone”—to grapple with their cities’ problems without the benefit of federal funding. But perhaps this is less of a problem than it seems. After all, cities have declined over the past four years with a Democrat in the White House. Weaning cities from federal assistance may be just what’s needed to spur change.

Indeed, several mayors seem ready, if not eager, to go it alone. These include Houston’s John Whitmire, Fort Worth’s Mattie Parker, and San Francisco’s newly elected Mayor Dan Lurie. They are seeking to adjust to harsh urban realities by discarding the often-dreamy progressive notions that tend to dominate urban political discourse. They are keenly aware how cities have lost much of their appeal in recent years to fast-growing suburbs and exurbs and are intent on fighting a patient battle against these tides.

As we know from the 1990s and early 2000s—under reform mayors like New York’s Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, Houston’s Bob Lanier, Indianapolis’s Steve Goldsmith, Philadelphia’s Ed Rendell, and Los Angeles’s Richard Riordan—good governance can restore urban vitality. Some of these mayors were nominal Democrats, others were Republicans, but all were effective in enacting regulatory reform, restraining taxes, and, most importantly, increasing public safety.

Unfortunately, many were succeeded by progressive mayors like Bill de Blasio in New York, who undermined the reformers’ achievements, notably in law enforcement. The new generation of urban leaders is today epitomized by Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, who is rapidly driving his once-great city, the nation’s third largest, into financial ruin. Johnson’s formula for destruction: borrowing massively to fund big raises for his teachers’ union backers while driving away many of his most productive citizens.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/26/trump-2-0-a-shockwave-of-change-in-just-six-days/

It’s almost as if elections have consequences. Donald Trump hasn’t been in office for a full week yet, but already the mood of the entire country seems to have undergone a beneficent metanoia. Sure, there have been hundreds of executive orders on matters large and small. There were many pardons, for 1500 people who engaged in that self-guided tour of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and also for many others.

But it is more than that. In his first term, Trump endeavored to “drain the swamp” and counter the woke ideology that had infiltrated so many university campuses and government agencies. But Trump was a political greenhorn, surrounded by people who were not on board with his program. He said many of the right things. But in many cases when it came time to implement the policies he outlined, the message got lost or garbled in transmission.

This time, older, wiser, and now surrounded by better counselors, Trump is not fooling around. Within hours of taking office, bang! Trump suspended the security clearances of the 51 intelligence officers who had, for partisan reasons, signed a public letter announcing that Hunter Biden’s laptop bore “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” He lifted the security details assigned to former National Security Advisor and current anti-Trump fanatic John Bolton. Ditto the security detail for Anthony “Mr. Science” Fauci.

One of the hallmarks of Trump 2.0 is his attention to the importance of moving past words to deeds. On Tuesday of last week, he sent a memo to the heads of all government agencies, ordering them to shut down their DEI offices by 5 p.m. the next day. All DEI hires were to be placed on paid administrative leave “immediately.”

That’s not all. Aware that the order would spark panic among the sinecured bureaucrats in and around the DEI apparat, the memo went on to say, “We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language. If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5, 2024, to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies, please report all facts and circumstances.” And just in case that wasn’t enough, the memo included this warning: “There will be no adverse consequences for timely reporting” on efforts to disguise DEI programs. “However, failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences.”