Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. DNC
2. Economics
3. Alaska
4. Breastfeeding
1. DNC. Democrats held their convention in Chicago over the last week. It was a not so well orchestrated lovefest for Kamala parallel with a hatefest aimed at Trump and his supporters. From here, it looks like the O’Bamaoids are fully in charge of Kamala, despite her close ties to the Clinton crime family over the years. Her speech was a reprise of O’Bama’s speech to the DNC in 2004 that launched his 2008 campaign. This campaign is going to look an awful lot like the O’Bama campaigns of 2008 and 2012. Biggest reason is that the best persuader on the democrat side, David Plouffe is running things. He was good enough to install O’Bama twice. He may be good enough to do the same thing with Kamala. Her only policy proposal so far was her economic plan, released Friday before the convention. It was just as awful as any of us would think. More on that later. Note with the Kamala campaign, we have smartly left the realm of politics and entered the realm of fantasy, a rather dark fantasy at that.
- The most obvious thing about all the speechifying at last week was a return to every single debunked hoax democrats and Biden have been using to terrify their voters since 2015. Note that every single one of these have been endlessly debunked. From a persuasion standpoint, this is an example of very smart people running the Kamala campaign. Return to all hoax, all the time, is an attempt to flood the zone, force the Trump campaign and Republicans to spend all their time and energy debunking the hoaxes. Any energy expended on debunking these lies on our side will be energy not used to defeat Kamala. From an energy standpoint, it’s brilliant. Note that today both sides are siloed, that is, not real interested in information outside whatever silo we’ve constructed for ourselves. The difference is that the right is inundated in leftist information and worldview every second of every day, so we at least get to see and sometimes consider the other side. Leftists don’t. They neither listen to nor consider anything from the political right, meaning that any Republican attempt to debunk the hoaxes on a general level is a waste of time and energy. There are as usual opportunities for debunking on a discrete level aimed at carefully selected groups of people. Flooding the zone with hoaxes has been remarkably successful.
- Second is the ease of turning what should have been a fully functioning nation into a dictatorship. While the example comes from China, we see the technique in operation from democrats and the media today. President Xi first came into office as a technocrat. His move up the political food chain was slow and careful from its beginning as a regional governor in 1999 to installation as president of the PRC in 2016. Once installed as president, the first thing he started doing was removing potential rivals from the board in the guise of cleaning up rampant corruption. It is not possible to be any more corrupt than the Chinese government, so any publicly announced attempt to clean up corruption has the tacit backing of the general public. The technique is pretty simple. He accuses a target of corruption. Launches the full power of the State against them. And removes them from the board. Then he moves on to the next target. Step by step, he has removed most of his real opposition from the board, and is now surrounded with yes-men. It has been slow, steady, and utterly impossible to stop. Over here, we see the same thing underway as the O’Bamaoids in Biden – Harris accuse their political opposition of being criminals, use endless lawfare to turn them into criminals and take them off the political chessboard when they go to jail. One of the goals of the Charlottesville Fine People hoax is to turn the 72 million of us who supported Trump in 2020 into racists and criminals. It is why they use it.
- One of the things I was looking for during the convention was expected carnage outside the venue with anti-Palestinian protesters taking on Chicago police. Turns out the protests were relatively benign, meaning their backers don’t want to damage Kamala’s campaign, yet another clue that all protests like this are orchestrated, top-down affairs. Find who is paying for them, and you find who is in charge. My money is on the intel community, the same group who currently controls the democrat party and the media.
2. Friday before the convention, Kamala released at least an overview of her proposed economic plan for the nation. It is awful. At best, it paints her as an economic illiterate. At worst, it paints her as intentionally destructive, as every single proposal will undermine and further destroy an already wobbly economy. As an aside, this is a great example why democrats have been playing keep-away, hide the ball, with her campaign so far. From Breitbart last Thursday:
- Overall, Kamala wants to raise $5 trillion in new taxes over the next decade. Her two vehicles to do so is jacking up the Capital Gains taxes and allowing the Trump Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to expire. Among other things, this will instantly increase the corporate tax rate from 21%. Kamala wants to go to 28%.
- Her next proposal is to increase capital gains and dividends taxes to 44.6%. This is double that of China today. Where do you think investment money will go if she is successful? Note that under the Harris plan, combined federal – state capital gains taxes will exceed 50% in 5 states – 59% in Cali, 55% I NJ, 54% in OR, 54% in MN and 53% in NY.
- The plan calls for a 25% tax on unrealized capital gains for taxpayers making over $100 million. This is a reprise of the Hillary proposed tax on imputed income 30 years ago, where they wanted to tax whatever your property gained over the course of the year whether it was sold or not. Note that these taxes never, ever reimburse taxpayers for income lost over the course of the year. This one won’t either. And that $100 million cap won’t stay in place. It will be quickly lowered to the hundred-thousand-dollar range when they discover their targets get to choose not to pay the new tax. And that discovery will take place about 30 seconds after the tax is signed into law. Norway dabbled with this sort of predatory taxation with a wealth tax that chased enough millionaires out of the nation that they lost four times more than they thought they were going to make.
- She wants small businesses to pay taxes on their individual returns. This increase is from the current 37% – 39.6%.
- She wants a second, mandatory capital gains tax payable on death in addition to the current death tax.
- She wants to impose a 21% global tax rate. This one is a third greater than OECD’s current proposed global minimum tax rate of 15%. No explanation why the US needs to play in a global minimum tax rate.
- She wants to quadruple the tax on stock buybacks, a levy aimed directly at 401(k)s and other retirement accounts.
- She wants a 30% excise tax on electricity used in cryptocurrency mining.
- She wants a $37 billion tax on energy (fossil fuels).
- She wants a 32% increase in Medicare taxes.
- Harris proposes to reprise the 2008 stock market bubble by once again juicing the housing market to the point of failure. She promises construction of 3 million new homes over the next three years. Vehicle for this is a promise of a subsidy from her regime for up to $25,000 for first time home buyers. Such a build rate (750,000 new homes/year) is half of the number of new homes built in 2023. Good luck with that, as this is the same regime that promised to build half a million EV charging stations by 2030. The $7.5 billion allocated in 2021 has only built eight of them, though Biden in his dementia claimed full credit for building all of them Monday night, off a mere 499,992 phantom charging statioins.
- Last, but certainly not least, Kamala promised price controls on foodstuffs to protect consumers from price gouging. Over 4,500 years of economic history, price controls only end up producing shortages, lines, and corruption.
Note that none of Kamala’s proposals will do anything to grow the economy or make taxpayers, investors or business owners wealthy. They aren’t intended to.
3. Alaska. We here in Alaska held our primary Tuesday. The primary in AK today is a jungle primary, in which members of every party run on one ballot with the four top vote getters moving on to the General Election Nov 5 where they will be selected by the Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) technique we so foolishly embraced in 2020. This time around, there is a ballot initiative to repeal RCV on the ballot in Nov. Whether it passes or not remains to be seen. The pro-RCV side is incredibly well funded and has been successful with their lawfare aimed at the repeal side. Their problem is that none of their promises (a control on dark money from outside the state) have been realized. Worse, they are demonstrated as out and out lies. We have recent experience with how this system preferentially elects democrats with the example of current congress critter Mary Peltola, a democrat elected when votes were split between two Republicans (Sarah Palin and Nick Begich) in 2022. The technique attempted by Republicans then was to simply rank the red, list only Republicans as your second and subsequent choices. This blew up when perhaps 17,000 Begich voters refused to vote for the crazy woman, Palin. The plan this time around is for the second place Republican to drop out of the race. This time around, we also have a pair of Republicans, current LtGov Nancy Dahlstrom and Nick Begich again. Peltola ended up with just under 48,600 votes. Dahlstrom and Begich split 45,300 with another 2,600 split between another 9 candidates. Begich outperformed Dahlstrom by some 6,300 votes. Dahlstrom wavered for a day or so sending messages that she was thinking about running anyway. Pressure on her was intense and she dropped out the following day. The incredible thing about this is that Dahlstrom was endorsed by Trump and had access to a lot of Outside money, wasting nearly half a million carpet bombing the state with ads. Wasted money. Begich is the selection of the grass roots and quite popular among the activist community. He has a fighting chance to defeat Peltola. Should the Presidential race end up in the House, having Begich in office rather than Peltola is important, as Peltola is little more than a rubber stamp democrat, and will vote for Harris. Begich will vote Alaska for Trump, who should easily win Alaska.
4. Breastfeeding. The more we find out about the Secret Service, the more odd things we end up hearing about it. In some ways, this is the functional equivalent of a preference cascade that took place after the Boeing 737 Max crashes and 737 door plug loss inflight. The more things we heard about Boeing, the more incidents involving Boeing hardware end up getting reported. Similarly, with the apparent malfeasance by the Secret Service during the Trump campaign rally in Butler, PA 5 weeks ago, we are hearing an increasing number of stories out of the Secret Service. Last week’s example was a female agent who left her post at a Trump rally in NC to breastfeed her youngster. Ignoring the obvious question about how Bring Your Child to Work works in the Secret Service, we are left with the question of how breastfeeding trumps the duty to be on station, doing your mission as assigned, and not leaving without permission to leave. It could be worse, I suppose, as it could have been a gay guy with a Mayor Pete breast feeding apparatus, Father’s Nursing Assistant. Note that the meme making the rounds is not an actual photo. It has been altered to include Pete’s head and face. The Secret Service is in real trouble. It would seem that it was a mistake to move it from Treasury to DHS in 2003 when DHS was created.
More later –
- AG