Sedona in the evening.
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Glick's perspective. (See 1 below.)
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Phil Gramm went to my military school long after I had graduated. He is a sound economist and I supported him in his unsuccessful run for the presidency. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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The Ruleof Law, ruled for Bill Clinton. (See 3 below.)
Dick
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1) Al-Baghdadi and Trump's Syrian chess board
By Caroline Glick
U.S. President Donald Trump's many critics insist he has no idea what he’s doing in Syria. The assassination of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi last weekend by U.S. special forces showed this criticism is misplaced. Trump has a very good idea of what he’s doing in Syria, not only regarding ISIS, but regarding the diverse competing actors on the ground.
Regarding ISIS, the obvious lesson of the al-Baghdadi raid is that Trump's critics' claim that his withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria's border with Turkey meant that he was going to allow ISIS to regenerate was utterly baseless.
The raid did more than that. Al-Baghdadi's assassination, and Trump's discussion of the mass murderer's death, showed that Trump has not merely maintained faith with the fight against ISIS and its allied jihadist groups. He has fundamentally changed the U.S.'s terror-fighting doctrine, particularly as it relates to psychological warfare against jihadists.
Following the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration initiated a public diplomacy campaign in the Arab-Islamic world. Rather than attack and undermine the jihadist doctrine that insists that it is the religious duty of Muslims to conquer the non-Muslim world and establish a global Islamic empire or caliphate, the Bush strategy was to ignore the jihad in the hopes of appeasing its adherents. The basic line of the Bush administration's public diplomacy campaign was to embrace the mantra that Islam is peace, and assert that the United States loves Islam because the United States seeks peace.
Along these lines, in 2005, then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice prohibited the State Department, FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies from using "controversial" terms like "radical Islam" and "jihad" in official documents.
The Obama administration took the Bush administration's obsequious approach to strategic communications several steps further. President Barack Obama and his advisers went out of their way to express sympathy for the "Islamic world."
The Obama administration supported the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood against Egypt's long-serving president and U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak and backed Mubarak's overthrow with the full knowledge that the only force powerful enough to replace him was the Muslim Brotherhood.
As for the Shi’ite jihadists, Obama's refusal to support the pro-democracy protesters in Iran's attempted Green Revolution in 2009 placed the United States firmly on the side of the jihadist, imperialist regime of the ayatollahs and against the Iranian people.
In short, Obama took Bush's rhetoric of appeasement and turned it into America's actual policy.
The Bush-Obama sycophancy won the United States no goodwill. Al Qaeda, which led the insurgency against U.S. forces in Iraq with Iranian and Syrian support, was not moved to diminish its aggression and hatred of the United States due to the administration's efforts.
It was during the Obama years that ISIS built its caliphate on a third of the Iraqi-Syrian landmass, opened slave markets and launched a mass campaign of filmed beheadings in the name of Islam.
In his announcement of al-Baghdadi's death on Sunday, Trump unceremoniously abandoned his predecessors' strategy of sucking up to jihadists. Unlike Obama, who went to great lengths to talk about the respect U.S. forces who killed Osama bin Laden accorded the terrorist mass-murderer's body, "in accordance with Islamic practice," Trump mocked al-Baghdadi, the murdering, raping, slaving "caliph."
Al-Baghdadi, Trump said, died "like a dog, like a coward."
Al-Baghdadi died, Trump said, "whimpering and crying."
Trump posted a picture on his Twitter page of the Delta Force combat dog who brought about al-Baghdadi's death by chasing him into a tunnel under his compound and provoking him to set off the explosive belt he was wearing, and kill himself and the two children who were with him.
Trump later described the animal who killed Allah's self-appointed representative on earth as "our K-9,' as they call it. I call it a dog. A beautiful dog — a talented dog."
Obama administration officials angrily condemned Trump's remarks. For instance, former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell said he was "bothered" by Trump's "locker room talk," which he said, "inspire[s] other people" to conduct revenge attacks.
His colleague, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff retired Admiral James Winnefeld said that Trump's "piling on" describing al-Baghdadi as a "dog" sent a signal to his followers "that could cause them to lash out possibly more harshly in the wake."
These criticisms are ridiculous. ISIS terrorists have richly proven they require no provocation to commit mass murder. They only need the opportunity.
Moreover, Trump's constant use of the term "dog" and employment of canine imagery is highly significant. Dogs are considered "unclean" in Islam. In Islamic societies, "dog" is the worst name you can call a person.
It is hard to imagine that al-Baghdadi's death at the paws of a dog is likely to rally many Muslims to his side. To the contrary, it is likely instead to demoralize his followers. What's the point of joining a group of losers who believe in a fake prophet who died like a coward while chased by "a beautiful dog — a talented dog?"
Then there is Russia.
Trump's critics insist that his decision to abandon the U.S. position along the Syrian border with Turkey effectively surrendered total control over Syria to Russia. But that is far from the case. The American presence along the border didn't harm Russia. It helped Russia. It freed Russian President Vladimir Putin from having to deal with Turkey. Now that the Americans have left the border zone, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is Putin's problem.
And he is not the main problem that Trump has made for Putin in Syria.
Putin's biggest problem in Syria is financial. The Russian economy is sunk in a deep recession due to the drop in global oil prices. Putin had planned to finance his Syrian operation with Syrian oil revenues. To this end, in January 2018 he signed an agreement with Syrian President Bashar Assad that effectively transferred the rights to the Syrian oil to Russia.
But Putin hadn't taken Trump into consideration.
U.S. forces did not withdraw from all of their positions in Syria last month. They maintained their control over al-Tanf airbase, which controls the Syrian border with Jordan and Iraq.
More importantly from Russia's perspective, the United States has not relinquished its military presence adjacent to Syria's oil facilities in the Deir ez-Zor province on the eastern side of the Euphrates River. Indeed, according to media reports, the United States is reinforcing its troop strength in Deir ez-Zor to ensure continued U.S.-Kurdish control over Syria's oil fields.
To understand how high a priority control over Syria's oil installations is for Putin, it is worth recalling what happened in February 2018.
On Feb. 7, 2018, a month after Putin and Assad signed their oil agreement, a massive joint force comprising Russian mercenaries, Syrian commandos and Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards forces crossed the Euphrates River with the aim of seizing the town of Khusham adjacent to the Conoco oil fields. Facing them were 40 U.S. Special Forces deployed with Kurdish and Arab Syrian Democratic Forces troops. The U.S. forces directed a massive air assault against the attacking forces which killed some 500 soldiers and ended the assault. Accounts regarding the number of Russian mercenaries killed start at 80 and rise to several hundred.
The American counterattack caused grievous harm to the Russian force in Syria. Putin has kept the number of Russian military forces in Syria low by outsourcing much of the fighting to Russian military contractors. The aim of the failed operation was to enable those mercenary forces to seize the means to finance their own operations, and get them off the Kremlin payroll.
Since then, Putin has tried to dislodge the U.S. forces from Khusham at least one more time, only to be met with a massive demonstration of force.
The continued U.S.-Kurdish control over Syria's oil fields and installations requires Putin to continue directly funding his war in Syria. So long as this remains the case, given Russia's financial constraints Putin is likely to go to great lengths to restrain his Iranian, Syrian and Hezbollah partners and their aggressive designs against Israel in order to prevent a costly war.
In other words, by preventing Russia from seizing Syria's oil fields, Trump is forcing Russia to behave in a manner that protects American interests in Syria.
The focus of most of the criticism against Trump's Syria policies has been his alleged abandonment of the Syrian Kurds to the mercies of their Turkish enemies. But over the past week we learned that this is not the case. As Trump explained, continued U.S.-Kurdish control over Syria's oil fields provides the Kurdish-controlled SDF with the financial and military wherewithal to support and defend its people and their operations.
Moreover, details of al-Baghdadi's assassination point to continued close cooperation between U.S. and Kurdish forces. According to accounts of the raid, the Kurds provided the Americans with key intelligence that enabled U.S. forces to pinpoint al-Baghdadi's location.
As to Turkey, both al-Baghdadi and ISIS spokesman Abu Hassan al-Mujahir, who was killed by U.S. forces on Tuesday, were located in areas of eastern Syria controlled by Turkey. The Americans didn't try to hide this fact.
The Turkish operation in eastern Syria is reportedly raising Erdogan's popularity at home. But it is far from clear that the benefit he receives from his actions will be long-lasting. Turkey's Syrian operation is exposing the NATO member's close ties to ISIS and its allied terror groups. This exposure in and of itself is making the case for downgrading U.S. strategic ties with its erstwhile ally.
Even worse for Turkey, due to Trump's public embrace of Erdogan, the Democrats are targeting the Turkish autocrat as Enemy Number 1. On Tuesday, with the support of Republican lawmakers who have long recognized Erdogan's animosity to U.S. interests and allies, the Democratic-led House overwhelmingly passed a comprehensive sanctions resolution against Turkey.
The al-Baghdadi assassination and related events demonstrate that Trump is not flying blind in Syria. He is implementing a multifaceted set of policies that are based on the strengths, weaknesses and priorities of the various actors on the ground in ways that advance U.S. interests at the expense of its foes and to the benefit of its allies.
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2)
The Truth About Income Inequality
The census fails to account for taxes and most welfare payments, painting a distorted picture.
The published census data for 2017 portray the top quintile of households as having almost 17 times as much income as the bottom quintile. But this picture is false. The measure fails to account for the one-third of all household income paid in federal, state and local taxes. Since households in the top income quintile pay almost two-thirds of all taxes, ignoring the earned income lost to taxes substantially overstates inequality.
How Redistribution Works
Average earned and net income by quintile, 2017
The Census Bureau also fails to count $1.9 trillion in annual public transfer payments to American households. The bureau ignores transfer payments from some 95 federal programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, which make up more than 40% of federal spending, along with dozens of state and local programs. Government transfers provide 89% of all resources available to the bottom income quintile of households and more than half of the total resources available to the second quintile.
In all, leaving out taxes and most transfers overstates inequality by more than 300%, as measured by the ratio of the top quintile’s income to the bottom quintile’s. More than 80% of all taxes are paid by the top two quintiles, and more than 70% of all government transfer payments go to the bottom two quintiles.
America’s system of data collection is among the most sophisticated in the world, but the Census Bureau’s decision not to count taxes as lost income and transfers as gained income grossly distorts its measure of the income distribution. As a result, the raging national debate over income inequality, the outcome of which could alter the foundations of our economic and political system, is based on faulty information.
The average bottom-quintile household earns only $4,908, while the average top-quintile one earns $295,904, or 60 times as much. But using official government data sources on taxes and all transfer payments to compute net income produces the more complete comparison displayed in the nearby chart
The average bottom-quintile household receives $45,389 in government transfers. Private transfers from charitable and family sources provide another $3,313. The average household in the bottom quintile pays $2,709 in taxes, mostly sales, property and excise taxes. The net result is that the average household in the bottom quintile has $50,901 of available resources.
Government transfers go mostly to low-income households. The average bottom-quintile household and the average second-quintile household receive government transfers of some $17 and $4 respectively for every dollar of taxes they pay. The average middle-income household receives $17,850 in government transfers and pays an almost identical $17,737 in taxes, while the fourth and top quintiles of households receive government transfers of only 29 cents and 6 cents respectively for every dollar paid in taxes. (In the chart, transfers received minus taxes paid are shown as net government transfers for low-income households and net taxes for high income households.)
The average top-quintile household pays on average $109,125 in taxes and is left, after taxes and transfer payments, with only 3.8 times as much as the bottom quintile: $194,906 compared with $50,901. No matter how much income you think government in a free society should redistribute, it is much harder to argue that the bottom quintile is getting too little or the top quintile is getting too much when the ratio of net resources available to them is 3.8 to 1 rather than 60 to 1 (the ratio of what they earn) or the Census number of 17 to 1 (which excludes taxes and most transfers).
Today government redistributes sufficient resources to elevate the average household in the bottom quintile to a net income, after transfers and taxes, of $50,901—well within the range of American middle-class earnings. The average household in the second quintile is only slightly better off than the average bottom-quintile household. The average second-quintile household receives only 9.4% more, even though it earns more than six times as much income, it has more than twice the proportion of its prime working-age individuals employed, and they work twice as many hours a week on average. The average middle-income household is only 32% better off than the average bottom-quintile households despite earning more than 13 times as much, having 2.5 times as many of prime working-age individuals employed and working more than twice as many hours a week.
Antipoverty spending in the past 50 years has not only raised most of the households in the bottom quintile of earners into the middle class, but has also induced many low-income earners to stop working. In 1967, when funding for the War on Poverty started to flow, almost 70% of prime working-age adults in bottom-quintile households were employed. Over the next 50 years, that share fell to 36%. The second quintile, which historically had the highest labor-force participation rate among prime work-age adults, saw its labor-force participation rate fall from 90% to 85%, while the top three income quintiles all increased their work effort.
Any debate about further redistribution of income needs to be tethered to these facts. America already redistributes enough income to compress the income difference between the top and bottom quintiles from 60 to 1 in earned income down to 3.8 to 1 in income received. If 3.8 to 1 is too large an income differential, those who favor more redistribution need to explain to the bottom 60% of income-earning households why they should keep working when they could get almost as much from riding in the wagon as they get now from pulling it.
Mr. Gramm is a former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Mr. Early served twice as assistant commissioner at the Bureau of Labor Statistics
2a) Warren Has a (Fantasy) Plan
Her financing and savings ideas for Medicare for All bear no relation to reality.
By The Editorial Board
Now we know why Elizabeth Warren took so long to release the financing details of her Medicare-for-All plan. The 20 pages of explanation she released Friday reveal that she is counting on ideas for cost-savings and new revenue that are a fiscal and health-care fantasy.
You certainly can’t criticize the new Iowa Democratic caucus front-runner for lack of ambition. Despite criticism from fellow Democrats, she is sticking to her plan for a government takeover of American health care, including the elimination of private insurance that 170 million or so Americans now have. She continues to claim that this will cost “not one penny in middle-class tax increases.” She walks on water too.
Start with the overall fiscal math, which by itself is staggering. She concedes that her plan will cost only “slightly” less than the $52 trillion that the U.S. is expected to spend on health care in the next 10 years. She deducts from that what the feds now spend on Medicare and Medicaid, plus $6 trillion that the states contribute to Medicaid, the state-federal children’s health program and government worker benefits.
That leaves $30 trillion to finance, but Senator Warren waves her wand and says the bill will really be $20.5 trillion. She makes the rest vanish by positing magical savings from things like “comprehensive payment reform.” One of her ideas is the hardy perennial known as “bundled payments,” which have failed to reduce costs as promised by Obama Care.
She says hospitals would be reimbursed at an average of 110% of current Medicare rates, which is supposed to address the criticism that Medicare currently under-compensates patient care. But hospitals now rely on private insurance payments to stay in business, and 110% of what Medicare now pays will hardly be enough to compensate for the loss of that private money.
Amusingly, she also proposes savings from “restoring health care competition.” Because everyone will have good insurance, she says, “providers will have to compete on better care and reduced wait times in order to attract more patients.” But if government is controlling all prices and reimbursements, what incentive is there to compete at all?
There’s a reason every government-run health system in the world rations care. Ms. Warren won’t admit this explicitly about her brave new health world, but she comes close. If U.S. health-care spending exceeds GDP growth, she says, “I will use available policy tools, which include global budgets, population-based budgets, and automatic rate reductions, to bring it back into line.”
In a word, rationing. And that’s no surprise, since she credits the advice for developing much of her plan to Donald Berwick. He was an advocate for ObamaCare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board—known uncharitably as the death panel—that Congress repealed last year in a bipartisan vote.
Ms. Warren would also impose foreign price controls on U.S. drug makers, which is why patients in France and the U.K. have access to only about half of new medicines that are available in the U.S. Manufacturers that don’t agree to Ms. Warren’s price negotiation would get whacked with a hefty excise tax on their profits. She also threatens to confiscate their patents.
The details of how she’d pay for the other $20.5 trillion are even more fantastical. Start with her “Employer Medicare Contribution.” Instead of paying employee health-care premiums, businesses would cut a check to Uncle Sam to the tune of $8.8 trillion over 10 years based on what they pay now.
She says per-employee health costs for every employer would remain about the same, but payroll costs of this sort are essentially middle-class taxes on employees. Fixing per-employee business costs at some future date would also be an incentive for companies to reduce their coverage now to reduce future costs. So employees would get worse coverage than they have now. If this “employer contribution” raises less money than projected, her fall-back is to whack “big companies with extremely high executive compensation and stock buyback rates.”
Meantime, she’d also raise the corporate tax rate back to 35% from 21% and extend it to income earned worldwide with no deferrals for foreign taxes. She claims this would generate $1.75 trillion over 10 years, which is fanciful since it would be an immediate incentive for companies to relocate overseas.
She also doubles down on her plans to soak the rich, assuming there are any left after her other tax proposals. She wants a new annual tax on unrealized capital gains of the wealthiest 1% of households (raising $2 trillion over 10 years), which would mean you owe a tax even if you haven’t sold the asset. She graciously says taxpayers could offset the gains with losses in bad years, but that would lead to extreme revenue fluctuations from year to year.
Ms. Warren has already proposed a 2% wealth tax on assets of more than $50 million, which is supposed to pay for her education, child-care and college-debt forgiveness plans. She now wants to add a 6% annual tax on Americans with more than $1 billion in assets that she says would raise $3 trillion. Most economists, including Democrat Larry Summers, believe a wealth tax would raise far less due to tax avoidance, which is why so many European countries have repealed their wealth taxes.
But, no worries, Ms. Warren would hire a new army of tax collectors to close what she calls the 15% “tax gap” between what people owe and what they pay. The Senator says this will be worth $2.3 trillion in additional revenue. This is another old Congressional standby that never yields what is predicted.
Oh, and she’d save $800 billion by cutting defense spending for Overseas Contingency Operations. Senator Warren calls this a “slush fund,” but it’s really the account to finance current overseas operations as well as readiness. This would return to the Obama years of slashing defense even as global threats from regional powers and new technology are increasing. This is a hyper-fantasy.
The political vulnerability of all this isn’t lost on Ms. Warren’s Democratic competitors. A spokeswoman for Joe Biden said Saturday that Ms. Warren is “lowballing the cost of her plan by well over $10 trillion” and isn’t telling the truth about her taxes “that would come out of workers’ pockets.” The likeliest outcome, if her plan ever became law, would be a value-added consumption tax on the middle class.
Ms. Warren is trying to sell an illusion and make it sound like political courage. Donald Trump’s boast that Mexico would pay for the wall was more believable.
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3)
The Clinton Impeachment Was Fair
We were on the House prosecution team. Unlike Pelosi and Schiff, we safeguarded due process.The Clinton Impeachment Was Fair
We were on the House prosecution team. Unlike Pelosi and Schiff, we safeguarded due process.
By Jim Sensenbrenner and Steve Chabot
Tensions ran high 20 years ago as we stood in the well of the Senate before Chief Justice William Rehnquist, all 100 senators and the nation. As House impeachment managers, we presented our case against President Clinton. We were somber but confident, knowing that we had afforded Mr. Clinton every due-process right to defend himself.
Now we find ourselves on the verge of another presidential impeachment. But this time the process is so fundamentally unfair that justice cannot be served. For the past two months, House Democrats, led by Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, have conducted a sham investigation with predetermined conclusions. It will do unthinkable damage to the credibility of the House and to the nation.
Since President Trump took the oath of office, Mr. Schiff has led a quest to overturn the 2016 election. We have both worked with Mr. Schiff on the Judiciary Committee, and one of us (Mr. Sensenbrenner) has managed two judicial impeachments (of Samuel B. Kent and G. Thomas Porteous Jr. ) alongside him. While in those cases he was fair and reasonable, here he has let his blind hatred of the president poison his conduct and destroy his credibility.
For more than two years, Mr. Schiff misled the public about having clear evidence that Mr Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the election. Special counsel Robert Mueller found no such evidence. Mr. Schiff then set his eyes on the next “scandal.” A seemingly too-good-to-be-true report appeared, accusing the president of improper action. Mr. Schiff took to cable news to propagate the new narrative, but it soon began to crumble. We learned that the biased “whistleblower” had contacted Mr. Schiff’s committee before filing his report, and Mr. Schiff lied about it.
Nevertheless, Speaker Nancy Pelosi decreed the House to have begun an impeachment inquiry and Mr. Schiff launched three weeks of closed-door hearings. He played judge and jury, selectively leaking private testimony to fuel a smear campaign. In blatant disregard of congressional practice, he has prevented elected members from asking certain questions of his “star witnesses.”
The American people saw through this charade, and Mrs. Pelosi brought the rules for this process up for a vote last week. But it’s too little and too late.
The rules resolution falls woefully short of the Constitution’s due-process standard. Every American has the right to hear all evidence presented against him, face his accuser directly, and mount a defense. We made sure to afford Mr. Clinton these rights in 1998-99.
The president’s counsel must have the right to participate in all impeachment proceedings. The congressional minority must have an equal right to call witnesses, subpoena documents and cross-examine witnesses.
Last week’s resolution is an absolute failure to protect those rights. It permits Mr. Schiff to continue with his closed-door depositions, and it grants him sole authority to decide which information is relevant, which witnesses can testify and which evidence will be transferred
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