The Reagan Era Laffer Curve that shows tax revenue increasing as tax rates decrease, is alive and well. According to the Congressional Budget Office, following the 2017 tax cuts, individual income tax collections are poised to reach $2.6 trillion, and would mark a record in its 109-year history topping the war-tax receipts of 1944 and the dot-com boom of 2000.
We understand the need for politicians to “Do Something” after the recent spate of tragic mass shootings, in schools and on city streets. Horrific acts we can’t begin to understand. And, we agree that strong background checks and “Red Flags” for the mentally unstable should make a difference and don’t threaten the Second Amendment, IF, and that’s a big if, they are practicably enforceable. But an even bigger problem, attested to by the recent 3-day body count of fifty-two on Chicago streets, is the lack of criminal enforcement in the courts with woke, Progressive DAs, “No Bail” judges and higher thresholds of criminality.
Writer Arthur Somers Roche believed that “Worry is a thin stream of fear tricking through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.”
It’s unfortunate that, while trying to stop fossil fuels development, climate activists are, at the same time, blocking efforts to mine minerals such as copper and gold or ban lithium brine extraction all of which are essential to building electric cars and the batteries to run them. You just can’t have it both ways.
In California, one half of one percent of taxpayers paid 40% of the state’s income tax in 2019. That’s twice as bad as at the federal level where, nationally, it’s the top one percent that pays 40% of federal income tax.
The recent conference of financial poohbahs in Davos, Switzerland has been called the World Economic forum “Where billionaires gather to tell millionaires how to live.”
Judge Douglas Ginsberg in commenting on the “genius” of representative democracy notes that “We’re all disappointed on some aspects and satisfied on some other, and we accept that as authoritative because it was reached through a democratic process.” And, we would add, that’s the problem when a President, ANY President, whether Democrat or Republican, governs through fiat by executive order. The democratic process is taken out of the equation.
