Institutions Under Attack. Biden Attacks Minneapolis Police. Maxine Waters A Drip. U.S Loses War To China? Articles. Spend Not Invest. Nadler Still Dumb.

 

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Every sacred entity/institution in America is under attack by radicals and radical organizations from public schools, universities, colleges, corporations, the military and even  to our constitution.

The two main events being exploited are the Covid Epidemic and claims of police brutality towards black citizens. Both have become launching pads and the mass media has purposely sensationalized such events because it too fits their bias and helps generate revenue.

The Democrat Party has been taken over by radicals as well.  The party leadership is bankrupt and  sees opportunities of solidifying their control and power and express utter disregard, if not full blown contempt, for the nation they took an oath to defend and this attitude has penetrated even  into an accommodating  White House.

If the Republicans get their act together and wake up to the fact the best opportunity in decades is at hand they can recapture The House and Senate and set the stage for doing the same regarding the Oval Office is 2024.

Lamentably, if history is a worthwhile measure, they will fight among themselves in primaries and begin the war by attacking and injuring their own.  Republicans are undisciplined and, individually speaking,  are driven by cupidity, avarice and the desire for power as well. After all, they are politicians and these characteristics are associated with those who know better than those they profess they want to serve.

Stay tuned and watch it all play out

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/21/its-not-a-race-war-its-something-much-bigger/

And:

Biden Indicts the Minneapolis Police

Investigating the entire department will burden the crime-plagued city.

By The Editorial Board

 Derek Chauvin awaits his murder sentence at a Minnesota Correctional Facility, yet the federal government spared hardly a moment before shifting its scrutiny toward his former colleagues. A new Justice Department probe of the Minneapolis Police Department is targeting the city’s officers in an effort to prove the Democratic narrative of “systemic” police racism.

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday announced a pattern-or-practice investigation of Minneapolis police. Federal investigators in coming months will examine the department’s record and policing methods. If they find behavior they dislike, they have the power to force reform of the department through a consent decree. Mr. Garland referred to the process as a matter of straightforward oversight, saying “good officers welcome accountability.”

Yet Minneapolis police are right to suspect that Washington is probing them with a foregone conclusion. In his address after Mr. Chauvin’s conviction Tuesday, President Biden said his Administration’s next step would be “confronting head-on systemic racism and the racial disparities that exist in policing.” The man who drafted the 1994 crime bill that led to the arrest of countless black drug users is now claiming racism is endemic among American police.

Last May then-Attorney General William Barr launched a federal civil-rights probe into the death of George Floyd in police custody, and that investigation continues. But Democrats are now expanding the charge of wrongdoing to the entire department, seeking proof that Mr. Chauvin’s actions represent the culture of policing today. No matter that the Minneapolis police chief since 2017, Medaria Arradondo, testified for the prosecution in the Chauvin trial and has pushed to reform certain police practices like choke hold

The weight of suspicion on police under pattern-or-practice investigations often leads officers under scrutiny to pull back on protecting public safety. A June 2020 study by economists Tanaya Devi and Roland Fryer found that federal probes after “viral incidents” similar to the Floyd killing decreased police actions by almost 90% in Chicago and 54% in Riverside, Calif. The authors estimate that such pullbacks led to nearly 900 excess homicides and 34,000 felonies across five cities in the two years after each Justice investigation began.

The burden on police doesn’t end when the probe does. The consent decrees that often follow pattern-or-practice investigations usually require departments to pay for external monitors and new training regimens, for whatever period a federal judge certifies. The evidence that this improves police practices is scant, but we know they increase crime.

The impact on Minneapolis could be particularly grave, as the city has experienced a sustained crime spike since the Floyd killing and ensuing riots. Violent crime increased by 21% in 2020 compared with the previous year.

Disorder in the streets has led residents to rethink the antipolice fervor of last summer. The Minneapolis City Council voted to disband its police department last June, but it later opted to retain officers after residents spoke up in months of public hearings. Minneapolis police were deployed in force before the announcement of the Chauvin verdict Tuesday, in case of riots after an acquittal.

The new Justice Department investigation resumes a trend begun during the Obama Administration, which launched 23 pattern-or-practice probes of local police. The probe may win Messrs. Biden and Garland plaudits from the political left that is pushing an antipolice narrative. But residents of Minneapolis could pay the price in more crime as police stand down from protecting the public.

Finally:

Maxine Waters is a disgrace to her people or they are too dumb to know she is or a combination of both.

The Maxine Waters Problem

When America’s officials desert any standards for public or personal behavior, expect violence.

By Daniel Henninger

The emptiest, most meaningless statement in American politics in our time is: “No one condones violence.” That weaselly default word, “condone,” may be one reason the violence now never seems to stop.

It was astonishing in the runup to the guilty verdict in Derek Chauvin’s trial to see reports of cities preparing for more riots, not only Minneapolis but New York, Philadelphia, Oakland, Calif., Portland, Ore., and Washington. But as with Covid, social distancing from violence is mandatory.

When Rep. Maxine Waters of California (Los Angeles) was asked whether she was inciting violence by telling the demonstrators arrayed around her in Brooklyn Center, Minn., to “get more confrontational,” she responded with the politician’s user-key response that she isn’t “about violence.”

Don’t bother looking, Ms. Waters, but you—like all the rest of us today in the United States—are engulfed in violence: the political violence of street protests, the violence of rising urban crime, the violence of cops either shooting suspects or getting shot by suspects, and the violence committed routinely by homicidal shooters.

In the largest U.S. cities, the number of murders is rising. This is only the fourth month of 2021, and in New York City there have been more than 100 murders, nearly 180 in Chicago, at least 97 in Los Angeles. Minneapolis’s 21st homicide victim, a teenager, was found dead the day of the Chauvin verdict.

These are all individual deaths, but they’ve become banal and barely noted. Urban killing and other crime runs as background noise to the more publicized street protests, cop incidents and serial shooters.

It might seem like a stretch to conflate political riots, violent inner-city crime and individual shooters, but I’m not so sure they aren’t related. Obviously something is spinning out of control in the U.S. Whatever status quo exists to mitigate each of these forms of violence, it isn’t working anymore. It is failing.

There used to be widely shared boundaries on personal and public behavior. Not anymore. A lot of people no longer know how to behave or where the lines are that one shouldn’t cross.

Or, as with last summer’s political street protests, the former lines and limits have been erased. That July’s Democratic National Convention passed without one person addressing the destruction in numerous cities was a big event, a turning point, for U.S. society generally.

We are paying a high price for this transition to few limits. Derek Chauvin is about to pay a very high price for not knowing when to let up on George Floyd.

Most striking is how many people have become unconscious of or psychologically detached from the consequences of what they are doing.

In Wisconsin last weekend, the Kenosha tavern shooter got angry, went home, got a gun, and went back to the tavern to kill three people. What did this formerly free man think was going to happen next?

On the same day, an Austin, Texas, shooter, a former cop, went to an apartment complex, killed three people, and was next seen on TV standing on a highway with his hands on his head while the police put him in handcuffs—basically forever.

How could the postelection Washington mob that invaded the Capitol think that was no different than attending a rally on the Mall?

Whatever happened to the thought, “Maybe I don’t want to do this?” Or shouldn’t do this.

Somehow, that internal brake on behavior eroded, and now we too often find ourselves dealing with the grim, out-of-control results. An epitaph is the awful phrase of the mother of the FedEx shooter in Indianapolis, who informed the authorities that she feared her son was going to commit “suicide by cop.”

The system let him fall through the cracks, as it did in 2018 in Parkland, Fla.—as it has with other shooters. Made passive by its own rules, the public mental-health system—the so-called administrative state—has proved incapable of providing basic protections for individuals and communities. Whatever the reasons, the resulting catastrophes proliferate. More gun-control inevitably will be another such administrative failure.

There is a pattern here of miss-governance and misjudgments. Black Lives Matter and its advocates argue, correctly, that the criminal-justice system arrests and jails too many young black men. Their solution is de-minimas policing and prosecution, explicitly to repair “systemic racism.”

This is a consequentially dangerous error of judgment. They are absolving young men of personal responsibility for acts of violence against their neighbors.

The reality across the U.S.—on the streets of protest, in the toughest neighborhoods or in the minds of the homicidally deranged—is that the simple and utilitarian concept of behavioral “pushback” has lost consensus support.

Without pushback’s demarcation of limits—whether with accepted norms of behavior, a basic police function, or the credible defense of limits by public officials (not least U.S. presidents)—the future will bring more crude violence. Which no one will condone.

This was the original meaning behind the idea of maintaining social guardrails. They’ve been taken down—again.

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Projecting the coming war with China and the authors are dour:

WTH will the next world war look like? Adm. James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman imagine war with China in 2034, and it’s not pretty for America   Danielle Pletka, Marc A. Thiessen, Adm. James Stavridis, and Elliot Ackerman | April 22, 2021   Is a major war with China inevitable? How can the United States prepare for the changing nature of conflict? In their new book, Admiral James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman warn of a cataclysmic war between the US and China in the South China Sea. “2034: A Novel of the Next World War” also explores America’s weaknesses and the growing role of technology in future armed conflict. Adm. Stavridis and Ackerman joined Dany and Marc to discuss their book, future foreign policy threats, and the need to reassess America’s technological capabilities. They also talk about policymakers’ failure of imagination, which left the country unprepared for tragedies such as 9/11 and Covid-19. Admiral James Stavridis is a retired four-star naval officer. He also served as Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and previously commanded US Southern Command. Elliot Ackerman is the author of four novels. He is both a former White House Fellow and Marine, and served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan .   LISTEN NOW

TRANSCRIPT ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Interesting articles: Capitalism Vs. Socialism featuring Edward Paul Lazear, Lee Ohanian, Joshua D. Rauh, John F. Cogan, Daniel Heil, Terry Anderson, Scott W. Atlas, Russell A. Berman via PolicyEd Over the last century countries have experimented with variations on both capitalism and socialism. So how do socialism, capitalism, and their many variants compare? +++  HOOVER Daily Report (edited.) How Much Ruin Do We Have Left? by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness Friends and enemies abroad are becoming variously shocked, disheartened—and gleeful—as the United States cannibalizes itself. +++ Waste not want not: Biden Wants to Spend, Not Invest His plan draws down private capital to fund current consumption, not actual infrastructure. By Glenn Hubbard The Biden administration’s $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan promises a revival of the nation’s infrastructure. But an infrastructure program should increase productivity and future wealth. That is, it should focus on investment, not current consumption. Over the long term, such a program would use federal funding to support aggregate demand, giving businesspeople further confidence in private investment. The American Jobs Plan doesn’t do this. Worse, if passed, it will actually make future attempts to invest in the nation’s infrastructure more difficult. The Biden plan proposes to spend only $115 billion on roads and bridges—much less than the $400 billion it earmarks for long-term care for the elderly and disabled. Even counting as infrastructure the plan’s $180 billion for research and development, the program spends far more on consumption than it does on investment. This isn’t semantics. Productivity-enhancing infrastructure can be partly debt-financed and still be fiscally wise, as it adds to future wealth, private income and federal revenue. Particularly given the significant long-term U.S. fiscal imbalance, new spending on social programs—a k a consumption—should be funded by current tax revenue, not borrowing. Projected revenue from raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, and substantial further tax increases on U.S. multinational companies, won’t pay for the long-run additional social spending (even accepting a longer “window” for revenue increases than for the proposed spending). Going deeper, the corporate tax increase as a funding mechanism is itself at odds with the goals of boosting investment and wealth through infrastructure improvements. Past infrastructure programs generally received support from user fees, as economists going back to Adam Smith have argued. By contrast, the corporate income tax reduces business investment and corporate capital. Higher taxes reduce the profitability of new investment, so you get less of it. Lower capital stock reduces productivity and wages. Workers suffer. My research shows that labor bears more than half the burden of the corporate income tax. The wage-reducing feature of the proposed tax increase torpedoes the administration’s claim that no one earning under $400,000 a year will notice the difference. And the revenue from the proposed corporate tax increase of $1.8 trillion over 10 years far exceeds the net corporate tax cut in 2017 of at most $650 billion over 10 years. The Biden administration will surely argue that the burden of a higher corporate tax falls on capital alone. That’s not true, but even if it were, it wouldn’t square with the purpose of an infrastructure program, which is to increase national wealth. Higher corporate tax rates and additional base broadening risk the competitiveness of U.S. multinationals, reducing profits and pushing down equity values. Hence, the tax increase reduces private wealth. It also extends a grasp beyond the rich; non-rich households will see the effects on their individual retirement accounts and 401(k) plans. In addressing a need for revenue, the Biden administration could have proposed user fees or a carbon tax, a mechanism recommended by many economists (myself included) and business leaders as a way to reduce costly negative externalities associated with climate change. Such a tax is an excellent complement to the administration’s focus on a “greener” capital stock. The political problem here centers largely on progressive Democrats, who favor command-and-control regulation over market-based solutions. With the American Jobs Plan, President Biden has asked Congress to approve modest infrastructure spending and significant new social spending, funded by an increase in corporate taxation and higher debt. A Congress focused on enhancing America’s future productivity and wealth would take an exit ramp before entering this new highway. It ends in a dirt road. Mr. Hubbard, a professor of economics and finance at Columbia, was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush. +++++++++++++++++++++++ Jerry Nadler has lost a lot of weight.  That is good. Larry Nadler remains stupid.  That is not good. Jerry Nadler’s Double Taxation Lesson He unwittingly calls to abolish the corporate and estate taxes. By The Editorial Board 1x Democrats from high-tax blue areas are asking President Biden to restore an unlimited federal deduction for state and local taxes (SALT), and here’s New York Rep. Jerry Nadler’s pithy pitch on Twitter : “No one should ever be taxed twice on the same income. It’s not fair and it’s not just.” Deal! Quick, shake on it, before he realizes what he’s saying. Conservatives have been making arguments about double taxation for years. We’re glad to hear Mr. Nadler thinks the death tax and the corporate-income tax are unjust and should be repealed. Also, it’s nice to see him pledge never to vote for any sort of wealth tax. This is a joke, alas. In reality Mr. Nadler is simply trying to reframe the unlimited SALT deduction, which is a tax break for wealthy urbanites mostly in New York and California, as a matter of justice. What makes his complaint especially unpersuasive is that it involves overlapping taxes by different bodies: The federal government has an income tax. So does New York state. So does New York City. This kind of thing happens all the time. Property taxes are assessed by cities, counties, school districts, fire districts and the like. The federal government taxes gasoline, as do states. When you buy a pack of gum, by Mr. Nadler’s logic, the local sales tax should be deducted on the receipt before the state sales tax is calculated. More pernicious double taxation is when the same level of government takes multiple bites, which is what business profits face. Say you own part of a corporation that makes $1. Setting aside deductions and whatnot, the federal corporate tax on that money is 21%, and Mr. Biden wants to make it 28%. When the profits hit your tax return, the feds take another cut, with a top rate of 23.8% on capital gains or qualified dividends. That’s not all, as they say on TV. Imagine that instead of celebrating the remaining fruits of your work by taking the family on vacation, you prudently save and reinvest. If you die after managing to accumulate a sufficient sum, your reward is to have the feds swoop in again to assess the estate tax, with a rate of 40%. As if three mouthfuls of that original $1 weren’t enough, Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants an annual wealth tax, with rates up to 6%. Mr. Nadler’s interest is something else entirely. Since 2018, the SALT deduction has been capped at $10,000. If the unlimited deduction were restored, according to a report last year from the left-leaning Brookings Institution, 96% of the benefits would go to taxpayers in the top quintile, with “essentially no benefit to the middle class.” When the Tax Foundation crunched the 2016 data, the SALTiest place in America was Manhattan, which Mr. Nadler partially represents, with deductions of $25,627 per filer. Uncapping the SALT deduction would subsidize and induce higher state and local spending, since legislators and county councilors could impose a tax of $1 without inflicting $1 of pain on their residents. It’s bad policy, and a sop to Mr. Nadler’s constituents. If he’d really like to worry about double taxation, the corporate revenue code is the place to look. ++++++++++++