Rebane's Ruminations

Happy Independence Day 2022!

George Rebane

Think of all the things that have happened in and to our beloved Republic during the last twelve months since we last celebrated our country’s birthday.  In this interval the country has again grown more apart than it has been since our 19^th century’s ante-bellum days.  The two sides seek markedly different futures for America – one side decrying the nation’s past and publicly denying their desired destination, while the other side spells it out and celebrates the historic road that, with some miles unpaved, we have traveled.  But even with our life-threatening wounds, we all should celebrate that we still live in a land which allows both sides access to sufficient public podia from which to make their case for America’s best future.  (A couple of years ago this was our 4^th of July outlook.)

 

SCOTUS to Congress: Legislate!

Know how to let the blame slip upon another ... .  Gracian #149

George Rebane

The overwhelming share of congress critters don’t like to make laws that spell out what we citizens can/should do in conducting our lives and businesses.  They know that if they put down what they really mean, then a good fraction of us would get pissed off at them and let it be known at the next ballot box.  So members of both parties have figured out how to avoid this pesky aspect of law-making.  They know the ideological and bureaucratic tenor of the various departments and agencies that will implement the laws, and they write the laws in a namby-pamby language that leaves a lot of leeway for interpretation by the unelected and anonymous bureaucrats who also regularly get sub-rosa offline directions from the camouflaged politicians.  Sleazy politics and corrupt governance.

Given that our federal and state bureaucracies are staffed overwhelmingly by incompetent leftwingers, it is the Democrats who are the architects of the most cynical, ambiguous, and amorphous legislation, while the Republicans stand by grumbling with their thumbs up their … well, you know.  In the 1jul22 WSJ Kim Strassel writes (here) -

Conservative Republican legislators report that this cynicism has now reached new heights. They note that their Democratic counterparts routinely write legislation that is deliberately vague, so as to give the administrative state maximum flexibility to impose programs Congress won’t take responsibility for passing. This also ensures that the federal bureaucracy—which largely shares the left’s political ideology—can continue its work even under Republican presidencies and Congresses.

America’s informed readers have known this for years, but they (we) too have yet to raise hew and cry about the matter that impacts the behavior of the bums they (we) send to state houses and Washington.  Perhaps this oversight is due to our having become too comfortable and ignoring our duties required to maintain the republic.  But the evidence of electoral ignorance and neglect are visible all over the land.  So finally, we get a SCOTUS with a majority that recognizes the problem and has the backbone to correct it.

Scattershots – 1jul22

George Rebane

Legal lying that powers today’s lamestream.  The lamestream has been exposed for its lies, misinformation, fake news, and defamations in general.  As a result, its shrinking audiences are made up of the most dedicated and/or ignorant leftists in the land, augmented by some residual uninformed mid-roaders.  Their legal underpinnings to carry on with this atrocious so-called journalism is provided by today’s defamation, libel, and slander laws which have been purposely degraded by leftwing lawyers and politicians in order to continue delivering their substance-free narrative to the hoi polloi.  This may be coming to an end if Justices Thomas and Gorsuch have their way, and get SCOTUS to rule on a case that would finally mandate Congress to pass a strict and clear law which demarks ‘public figures’ and ‘private individuals’ as targets of purposed and publicized sleaze.  (more here)

Biden’s open border policy makes him guilty of killing thousands of illegal aliens as they attempt to gain entry and disappear into our hinterlands.  Open border invites hundreds of thousands of economic migrants to start their long journeys from all over the world to our southern border.  It is an easy argument to make that many more of these people die from divers causes and are killed en route than the alien deaths counted only on our side of the southern border.  Mexican President Obrador blames the US for the deaths because we don’t control our border.  Of course, he omits the fact that Mexico has facilitated the transit of these millions of migrants over the decades.  As a terminally corrupt and criminal country, Mexico’s economy does not generate the jobs needed to sustain employment at levels required by its formerly high birth rate.  (Things have gotten so bad that the country’s birth rate has plunged in recent years.)  So first and foremost, the hordes of illegal aliens entering the US still consist mostly of Mexicans.  Their government abets this exodus for obvious reasons – relieves population pressures on the economy and increases the inflow of foreign capital.  And our anti-American Bumblebrain has elevated this game of import vote buying to a whole new level with his and his shills' daily declarations that our border is "secure" and "closed" while millions pour in. (more here)

Woke’s Assault on STEM Education

George Rebane

I was shocked to read in the 75^th anniversary issue of ACM Communications, the flagship publication of the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery, that computer science education in the US needs to be revamped.  Three maximally woke socialist (communist?) professors of education spell out their proposals in ‘Toward Justice in Computer Science through Community, Criticality, and Citizenship’.

Computer science is a vast field that encompasses and entwines many technical disciplines.  It has boggled many capable minds in the task of developing undergraduate CS curriculum that fits into a four-year baccalaureate program.  Now there has started a neo-Marxist initiative in education that seeks to inject into the curriculum the propagandizing of students with the tenets of critical race theory, social justice, equity, and inoculation against white supremacy, racism, and other social sins that originated in white Europe.

To accomplish this added and/or integrated layer of indoctrination will require the elimination or diluting beyond recognition of core subjects required by entry level practitioners in the field.  The authors already specify that merit and acquiring technical skills must be moved aside due to their longstanding systemic racist and white supremacist taint.  Time must be made instead for integrating students’ race, cultures, and life experiences which should shape the revised curriculum.  Added to that, the students will be encouraged (required?) to consult with their “community elders” to make sure that their CS training encompasses community, criticality, and citizenship.

The introduction of leading-edge technology has involved taking risks as the bugs are worked out of early-adopted commercial products.  Well, if something goes wrong with, say, an autonomous vehicle involved in an accident, then the new-age CS practitioners should be able to critically assess and assign blame to the appropriate participating agents ranging from the vehicle’s design, all the way to the way it was fielded to drive on the roads.  Our triumvirate of educators expand on this –

In order to bring such criticality to computing education, we will need to move away from focusing solely on developing technical skills and move to understanding and challenging the role of CS in maintaining and perpetuating systemic injustices. As a first step, we must engage educators in critical conversations that explore their own identities in order to move away from color-blind approaches to teaching CS. In addition, we must support educators by developing curriculum and pedagogy that challenges the “unbiased” and “objective” nature of computing. As educators develop their own critical computing competencies, it will lead them to “create spaces for collective development of critical consciousness, help develop plans for action to make the world a better place, and develop a sense of agency among learners.”

One thing is certain.  The Russians and Chinese are laughing their collective asses off, and doing everything they can to fund, through well-oiled circuitous channels, more of these woke initiatives to infect STEM education in the US and the west.  Read the short article to get a better picture of what we're up against.

Right v Left Reporting

George Rebane

The most recent SCOTUS rulings on abortion and gun rights got me thinking again how the Left and Right differ in the manner their outlets report the news, debate issues, and frame their commentaries.  As shown here for years, the asymmetry is pronounced since the Left has never had supporting arguments for their positions and policies that survive in the light of the record and reason.  It is easy to confirm this claim by just tuning in to, say, FN, and then to MSNBC, CNN, or any of the big three.

Sandbox – 26jun22

[It appears that the pro-abortion Left is continuing to violate laws and practice violence in demonstrating its opposition to the SCOTUS ruling that overturned Roe v Wade.  Compare the coverage of these protests on the various ideologically oriented media outlets.  None of the protesters seem to know what the ruling really said and how it preserves democracy in the land. gjr]

Roe v Wade RIP (updated 26jun22)

George Rebane

It warms the cockles of me heart to hear that SCOTUS has put the abortion issue back into the jurisdiction of the several states where it belongs. (more here)  The Constitution is very clear on this – if the issue is not specifically covered in the Constitution, then its resolution and/or application does NOT ‘revert’ to, but 'remains' with the states to dispose of as they individually will.  Constitutionally, abortion never was a federal affair.  My own take on abortion has been covered extensively in these pages, and is accessible from here.

[26jun22 update]  As the lamestream lies continue about the SCOTUS ruling, shown below is the real state of abortion laws across the country.  The ruling will now remove a 50-year-old unconstitutional law of the land which SCOTUS had no business legislating in the first place, and put it back into the hands of Americans living in the several states to elect representatives and/or vote on initiatives to determine the legal state of abortion where they live – democracy in action.

SCOTUS on gun rights

George Rebane

SCOTUS on a good day for gun rights that removes the 'proper cause' requirement many states require/allow CCW granting jurisdictions to impose.  The suit was brought against the state of New York.  Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, with Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan dissenting.

“The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees,'” ... “The exercise of other constitutional rights does not require individuals to demonstrate to government officers some special need. The Second Amendment right to carry arms in public for self-defense is no different. New York’s proper-cause requirement violates the Fourteenth Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms in public.”

See also 'The Many Ways to Regulate Militias'.

Scattershots – 21jun22 (updated 25jun22)

George Rebane

Solar Tax – California, as regular as the sunrise, is again showing the world that it knows how to expand its unchallenged butt-stupid ways to govern possibly the most blessed land mass on God’s green earth.  Sacramento, led by our idiot governor, is contemplating levying a tax on homes that have installed solar panels.  These are housing units that use less electricity from the grid, and also pump back electricity into a grid that is already overloaded, poorly maintained & managed, and expensive to boot.  Instead of encouraging the installation of more environmentally friendly photovoltaics, the state wants to dun those who already have them, and provide more reasons why not to install more of these home power-generating systems.  Call your governor and tell him what you think of the Democrats’ latest brainchild.  (info here)

Right/Left Polarization is a Myth

George Rebane

This is proposition is presented by Verlan Lewis and Hyrum Lewis, professors at Harvard and BYU respectively, in their ‘The Myth of Ideological Polarization’.  They use a series of weak arguments and erroneous facts to conclude that “polarization is a myth” and the Left/Right labels are better thought of as names of tribes whose belief systems change over time.  The claimed changes are so radical that their tenets even switch sides over the years.

For example, one of their claims is that today’s Left supports free trade that used to be supported by the Right.  Given the Left’s desire to double-tax US corporations that do business overseas, this characterization is clearly wrong, as is their representation of the Right’s opposition to free trade.  The Right imposes tariffs on selected foreign goods only 1) when foreign governments subsidize certain products/industries to distort competitive markets, and 2) when certain such products/industries are critical to maintaining our sovereignty and national security.

The authors claim that the Right has turned ‘statist’, which formerly was a forte of the Left.  Well, statism still is the Left’s overarching prescription to solve the nation’s ills.  The Right cannot support any kind of statism through its constant initiatives to reduce taxes (i.e. government revenues) and regulations (i.e. the currency of government bureaucracies).  Without a blink or further justification, our scholars write, “Republicans favor lower taxes than they did in the 1960s, but so do Democrats.” (emphasis mine)  Mind boggling.

The Lewises even miss the claim about free speech that “the Democrats ‘moved left’ when it was once a defining value of ‘the left’.”  The Left was never a proponent of free speech, even during the anti-war years of the 1970s.  Anyone claiming membership of that ‘tribe’ who did not parrot the anti-war party line soon found themselves abandoned and shunned by their former comrades.  While the Left’s party line narratives have always been malleable – they regularly rewrite history to serve their ideological needs du jour – they have always demanded instant recommitment from their loyal constituents when, sometimes overnight, north turns into south and east turns into west.  And we see this happening daily in the lamestream with its asymmetrical coverage of events that favor the Left’s retention of power.

Finally, the good professors entirely miss the nature, role, and utility of the ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ labels.  They misunderstand these as single-dimensional attributes like temperature, instead of names of umbrellas under which are gathered the more or less stable collections of ideological tenets that continue to point their adherents toward their unchanging global government collectivism or open market capitalist sovereign nation-state futures.  These seminal reasons for our ideological polarization are completely missed by our scholars.

As if to underline all of the above, today’s (18jun22) Union features the sentiment of its editorial board in the op-ed section – ‘There’s always another election’ (not yet online).  Therein the editorial board exhorts Nevada County voters to participate in greater numbers and in all elections, primaries and the November main events.  They wonder what really sparks a big turnout and lament that some significant offices – e.g. sheriff and DA - really had but one contender, the incumbent.  Surprisingly what they totally miss is the issue of election integrity on motivating voter turnout.  Half the country is concerned about the confirmed reports of fraud and irregularities, and why many of these failed to gain traction in our judicial system.  Letting this sentiment fester unresolved does not invite the sometime voter to get educated, involved, and cast a vote. 

The thing that sticks out to readers paying attention is that only one of our polarized sides is concerned about voter integrity, and those are the Republicans.  The Democrats care only about voter access, seeking to maximize those qualified to vote that may include some who no longer can even fog a mirror.  The Republicans on the other hand demand that only franchised citizens should be able to cast ballots, and want procedures in place to vet these qualified voters.  To the Left, this all amounts to voter suppression and the diminishing of our democracy.

So the Union’s piece on voting that completely ignores election integrity and voter qualification confirms that the newspaper is another politically tinged outlet of the nation’s progressive wing and a solid member of the Left’s lamestream.  This assessment would be incomplete without acknowledging that the privately owned newspaper has every right to be a handmaiden of the county’s purple-to-blue transition as it caters to its leftward marketplace.  However, it would suit me more if The Union would admit to its ideological leanings and not attempt to represent itself as traveling close to the nation’s political center stripe.  After all, a media outlet identifying itself as tacking Left or Right would be a refreshing change and provide useful clarity to the many readers still in doubt.

Right vs Left – what distinguishes us (updated 17jun22)

George Rebane

Of the several correspondences in which I am currently active, one is on the perennial topic of the Great Divide and America’s irredeemable polarization.  In these correspondences with two of my left-leaning intellectual friends, we are attempting to create a mutually acceptable inventory of ideological belief tenets.  These would form a starting point for another attempt at finding any common ground to support dialogue from which some form of rapprochement could result.  This is a work-in-process in which I think some of our readers might be interested, and to which they could contribute their own thoughts toward progress in this enlarged conversation.

I attach the following pdfs for your critical comments and perhaps even reading pleasure.  The first piece - 'Versions of Fundamental Transforms (2020) - serves as background, and the second piece - 'Right/Left Belief Inventory' (v14jun22) - is a WIP currently in discussion with my correspondents.  Notwithstanding general interest, I do want to include these in the RR archive.

Download VersFundTransforms

Download BeliefInventory_220614

[17jun22 update]  A longtime RR reader posted the link to an important or possibly a milestone essay – ‘Heading Toward the Abyss’ - by David Horowitz on the nature of the Left, and particularly the Democratic Party, with which America is contending today for its survival.  The points that Horowitz expands on are familiar to RR readers.  I highlight the essay in this update so that it does not get lost in the comment stream below.  H/T to Mr Tozer.

Sandbox – 16jun22

[Millions of workers are in their hammocks enjoying govt checks and depressing the labor participation rate to 62.3% from 63.4% at the end of Trump’s administration during which time it was increasing for the first time since the 2008 Great Recession.  Yes, during the entire ‘Obama recovery’ more and more people were leaving their jobs.  The participation rate includes worker with jobs and those actively looking for jobs.  This makes the cited 3.6% unemployment rate a hokey statistic; millions more are sitting on their butts enjoying govt handouts while employers are looking for workers and paying excessive wages to those working.  These high labor costs are another one of Biden’s Blunders which contributes to our soaring inflation.  Bumblebrain has given new meaning to ‘loser’. gjr]

Scattershots – 11jun22 (updated 12jun22)

George Rebane

The professionally produced prime-time J6 congressional kabuki has the obvious dual objectives to 1) divert the electorate from the incompetence and trumpeted disastrous policies of Bumblebrain’s administration (here), and in the process 2) pillory Trump as the Dems’ perennial punching bag.  The one-sided charade is celebrated by the lamestream’s idiot pundits, and the latter objective is even uncritically abetted by conservative outlets such as FN and the WSJ.  Therein my critique of the WSJ’s editorial policy centers on their dismissal of the 2020 election ‘fraud and irregularities’ allegations is based on nothing but citing a chain of opinions by certain judges, Trump administration officials, and Republican politicians – a chain of he-said, she-said reports.  A more persuasive indictment of Trump’s attributed Big Con of his supporters would be to also cite major attempts to support the ‘stolen election’ claims such as what happened in Wisconsin (here), as shown in the ‘2,000 Mules’ documentary (here and here), and Mollie Hemingway's Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections (2021).  Heads up journalism would have presented the existential evidence as to why these were dismissed by those investigating last November’s election.  Instead, they leave knowledgeable readers with obvious questions unanswered.

The collectivists of the Left don’t understand human nature – that has been the evidence cited over the last century by many political observers (including me in these pages).  They simply have no clue about how or what individual motivations contribute to sustainable social orders and organizations.  The only human response the Left has discovered is the elicitation of confessions under torture as demonstrated in the dungeons of Stalin, Mao, Castro, … .  This overall deficit has been uniformly absent in today's political commentaries by the Right, who dun the Left’s policies without giving the underlying reasons why they have never worked, and can never work.  Finally, we have an exception in the WSJ’s 11jun22 piece by Peggy Noonan – ‘The Boiling Over of America’.  Therein she covers a litany of fundamental and unredeemable deficits of the progressive’s mind.  Examples –

• They don’t listen to anybody. To stop them you have to fire them. They’re not like normal politicians who have some give, who tack this way and that. Progressive politicians have no doubt, no self-correcting mechanism.
• They are more loyal to theory than to people. If the people don’t like the theories the progressives impose, that’s too bad; the theory is pre-eminent.
• The progressive can’t understand why. (E.g. SF’s recalled progressive DA Boudin) tells reporters the voters are “in a bad mood” because of inflation and housing costs.
• A final characteristic of progressive politicians is that they tend to be high-IQ stupid people. They are bright and well-educated but can’t comprehend the implications of policy. They don’t understand that if an 18-year-old is repeatedly arrested for assaulting people on the street and repeatedly let go, his thought may not go in the direction of, “What a gracious and merciful society I live in, I will do more to live up to it.” It is more likely he will think, “I can assault anyone and get away with it. They are afraid of me.”

[Update]  Dead people are voting, no matter how vehemently it is denied in the lamestream and by their grassroots sheeple.  And our corrupt LE authorities and judicial system do nothing to get hundreds of thousands of the dead off the country’s voter rolls.  “The Public Interest Legal Foundation’s database of the country’s voter rolls found nearly 350,000 deceased registrants before the 2020 election. The inevitable question is always, well did any of them vote. Unfortunately, some always do.” (more here)

[12jun22 update] Re the J6 imbroglio and Pence's constitutional power over the proceedings to certify the vote. I am reposting this from a recent comment stream where I answered a liberal commenter about possible outcomes of the 6jan21 congressional certification of the electoral college votes.  “First, we presume that the congressional certification was never meant to be a pro-forma kabuki ritual. Were that not so, then all attendees could have been replaced by their cardboard cutouts, or they could have mailed it in. Second, given that the certification, by those gathered, was to be performed after due consideration of the submitted materials, then the designated process had to have the ability for more than one canned outcome. … Constitutional scholars are still debating what that decision space should look like - e.g. accept as submitted; reject submittal and return to states with instructions for resubmittal; table proceeding to give time for further study of any material contentions, inviting both sides to come and testify before resuming the certification process; and so on. You and yours, of course, were awaiting a kabuki performance; the other half of the country had concerns about the election.” 

Readers should note that this aspect of the J6 proceedings has never been discussed in the media, which presumes without pause that only one outcome is supported by the Constitution.  Is this an intellectual bridge too far, or does the media correctly assess the public’s inability to parse the unexamined requirement of the proceedings to end with certification, arrived at through several possible contingencies ranging from immediate acceptance of the electoral votes to going through various further procedures of vetting the votes before finally certifying them?  To the nation’s hoi polloi it is presented as immediate certification or our democracy comes crashing down.  President Trump was right insisting that VP Pence did not have to immediately certify the votes, but wrong in restricting the only alternative to summary rejection of the November 2020 election results - another nuance beyond the media and the public.

The Many Ways to Regulate Militias (updated 21jun22)

[This post also appears here in the op-ed pages of 14jun22 Union.]

George Rebane

In his 10jun22 ‘Read it yourself – ‘A well-regulated militia’’ Union columnist Taylor Carey seems focused only on the interpretation of the nation’s leftwing anti-gunners.  The Left has always held that the Founders' intention for the Second Amendment was that members of the local militias were to be unarmed until their government decided to assemble them and issue guns from the local armory.  That was and is the only mode of regulation that makes sense to the big government, command/control progressive.

Private possession and ownership of guns is not necessary in a well-regulated and organized collective because the government will fulfill all functions of internal security and external defense, arming trained citizens to augment the standing LE and military only as and when the leadership determines that the need arises.  Being at the mercy of armed criminals or the insane until, or if, LE arrives is just the price people must pay to live in a civilized society.  Your personal safety is the responsibility of the collective, and your home is definitely not YOUR castle.

And perish the thought that either the state or its LE cadres go rogue.  In the socialist ideology there is no provision for such an eventuality, no matter the abundant historical evidence to the contrary.  A centralized state under the leadership and administration of educated elites dedicated to the proposition of their interpretation of common good, that benefits everyone equitably, there is no provision for such roguish contingencies – by definition, the state is always fair and just, and as such, brooks no challenge to its power to organize and administer society.  Revolt and revolution by an armed populace in the embrace of a “rabidly corrosive cult of individuality” is “inimical” to such governments that deliver and sustain “ordered liberty” according to Mr Carey.

Inflation Tax – Silent Rape by Government (updated 10jun22)

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."  Will Durant

George Rebane

The ongoing rape of America by the evil party has more dimensions than just government induced inflation and higher taxes.  Victor Davis Hanson gives a short yet comprehensive summary in his ‘The Subordinate Citizen’ of this unbelievable yet ongoing injustice against all Americans, perpetrated by our federal government under the Biden administration and the Pelosi/Schumer Congress.

In these pages we have covered extensively the impact of taxed inflation on investment returns, and made the quantitative case showing how inflation is an added tax that is confounded with the apparent IRS and state-quoted tax rates.  The details are found here, here, and here.

In this little review I want to draw your attention again to the four important formulas that let you calculate the impact of taxed inflation on your own finances.  These are given in the figure below.  The image is from a spreadsheet tool I made that allows you to change the blue numbers denoting R, the nominal return on an investment, the inflation rate I during the investment, and the overall tax rate R_T that must be paid when realizing the nominal return.

Here R = 10%, I = 8.5%, R_T = 30%.  Note that inflation reduces the effective return of the investment to RI = 1.38%.  But now comes the hit.  The 10% nominal return is taxed at 30% which further reduces the actual return to a negative 1.38%.  This is what really happened to the buying power of every dollar you invested.  Not only did you not make any money, you lost some.  In this situation you would have done better by keeping it under your mattress.  Your invested dollar now buys only 98.62 cents of stuff.

In this double whammy inflation/tax environment you need to make at least 12.14% just to maintain the buying power of your invested dollar.  And, of course, 12.14% returns don’t come without any risk.  Does that turn on any lights in liberal heads as to why the economy suffers under government induced inflation and rapacious tax rates?  Since Karl Marx the answer has been a resounding NO.  Socialists have no clue as to what causes inflation, and they all know that tax rates don’t impact economic behavior.

This preposterous situation arose because, as we see in the figure, the effective total tax rate, R_ET, in the above scenario turns out to be a whopping 113.82%, taking all you nominally gained and then some.  And all of this outright larceny is so well hidden from the average Joe, that it doesn’t even make a visible ripple.  Joe just bitches a bit about the high prices and that he’s not making enough money.  His government tells him that it’s all the fault of the greedy corporations and the rich who don’t pay their ‘fair share’.  Apparently this is totally acceptable, as witnessed by the comment stream below.  But I may be wrong, and people really do care.

[10jun22 update]  Lest you wage earners with no investment portfolios think that you have been spared – ‘fraid not.  The inflation formulas above apply equally to your take-home pay.  Suppose you’re fortunate enough to have gotten, say, a 10% raise and your overall pre-raise tax rate is 20%.  We’ll let inflation stay at 8.5%.  When you bring home that paycheck containing the raise, it’s exactly the same as if you sold your stock portfolio that has increased 10% at the end of the year.  But fasten your seat belt, the results don’t look good.

Assume first that your overall tax rate stays at 20%.  Then your effective raise considering only inflation turns out to be 1.38%.  And taking out taxes reduces your effective raise into a pay cut of 0.46%.  You would have required a raise of 10.63% to just maintain your wage’s buying power.  When all is said and done, you have paid an effective total tax rate of 104.61%.  In short, the government took from you more in taxes and buying power than your employer’s raise, and then some.

But what if your increased wages now put you into a higher tax bracket, say, at 22%?  Then the above 1.38% remains unchanged, since it does not involve tax rates.  But your former effective pay cut now increases from 0.46% to 0.65%.  And now you would have required a 10.90% raise instead of the previous 10.63% raise to maintain buying power.  Finally, your total effective tax rate has now increased from 104.61% to 106.45%.  Oi weh!  

We must always remember that government revenues increase during inflation because inflation pushes nominal wages into higher tax brackets, which for the consumer/investor is the monetary equivalent of a tax increase.  And the final kick in the gonads is that the government knows that most average Joes out there don't do numbers, and therefore to them the above discussion is boooring.

There's also a Lucky Strike Extra for you fastidious number crunchers who have survived this far.  Fiscally pernicious governments like ours, that purposefully create inflation by flooding the economy with new money not supported by increased productivity, they get a bonus by being the first able to spend the new cash (the Fed prints it and buys govt bonds from the Treasury) which always has the buying power that is subsequently to be reduced by the inflation caused by the new tranche of money into the economy.  Inflation does not increase suddenly and in lock-step across a large economy like ours.  It takes some time for the new cash to work its way through the various commercial highways and byways, bidding up the prices of what is bought by successive handlers of those new 'crisp dollar bills'.  Or is it 'crisp dollar bits'? 

Sandbox – 8jun22

[RCP numbers just out on Bumblebrain’s overall approval rating – drumroll please – 25% approve, 61% disapprove.  This is lowest approval rating ever for an American president.  We have a few select readers who should take special note of this rating on arguably the most incompetent and worst performing president the republic has ever suffered under.  And then to demonstrate once more the intellectual capacity of Democrat politicians, Sen Maggie Hassan (D-NH) announced from the Senate floor that she doesn’t have to suffer high fuel costs, because she drove from New Hampshire to DC in her EV, and didn’t have to worry about stopping at any gas station charging astronomically high fuel prices.  You see, charging your EV batteries is free, and that’s how you fight inflation.  Reminds me of the Dem congressman who was worried at a committee hearing that a Pacific island would “tip over” if too many of our troops were stationed on a military base there.  gjr]

Who should vote? – Redux

George Rebane

In these pages we have circled this barn without resolution.  My own sentiments, and those of readers at the time, are available here.  The politically correct among us regularly encourage all should vote who can fog a mirror and are citizens.  Well, not exactly.  In recent years the anti-American woke and progressives have reduced that requirement to just the foggers, or even to those who just recently lost that ability.

Bryan Caplan did a landmark study on the electorate and voting – The Myth of the Rational Voter – in which he showed that in our history informed and rational voters were few and far in between.  But the saving grace during those times was that the ignorant voter cohort pretty much split themselves evenly on candidates and issues.  This left the small percentage of knowledgeable and reasoning voters to essentially determine the outcome by how they divided themselves on the margins.  See the top part of the figure below for an explanatory graphic.

All of this changed, beginning around 1920 with the advent of radio broadcasting – the birth of mass media which spread to phone banks, TV, internet, etc.  Now it was possible for those with monies to spend to get their messages out in proportion to their available funds.  And it turned out that this kind of campaigning worked wonders – the more you could blast out your candidate’s voice, the more assured you were of tilting the scale toward your side among the great unwashed.  The small number of knowledgeable and informed voters were overwhelmed, and thereby lost their ability to influence election outcomes.  See the bottom part of the figure.

This absence of rational voter influence has had an enormous impact on our country, delivering huge coastal urban areas and even entire states into perpetual social disasters and economic destitution.  We now have ignorant cohorts continuing to vote against their own best interests, who guarantee single-party monopolies of entrenched politicians in perpetuity.

Proof of this is provided by a coven of distressed states that includes New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut, …, headed by its most prominent member, California.  The once golden state has been the posterchild of voter ignorance for the last fifty years.  Over this period the state’s voters initially ensconced a spate of well-meaning liberal politicians, and then later continued to refill their ranks with know-nothing socialists and charlatans.  Today we have sinecured a bevy of functional idiots and scoundrels whose only reliable political talent is using the public till to invite more double dummies (aka reliable constituents) to partake of our insane welfare programs, thereby insuring that California’s recovery remains evermore beyond the horizon. (more here)

So what should a well-meaning but poorly-read citizen do when an election rolls around.  My own recommendation is that such a citizen should excuse himself from that particular election, unless he has the ability to educate himself on the candidates and/or issues.  And unless you know what is at stake in the election, and how the various outcomes will affect you, your neighbors, the country, stay out of the voting booth but remain interested in the election results and prepare yourself for the next time.  If you are a citizen who loves his country, know that it is the voters who determine the state of the nation and its future.  So just because you have the right to vote, there is no law that requires you to cast an ignorant vote based on what you saw on TV the most, the loudest, or the most recent. (more here)

Today my counsel is considered elitist and even anti-American by those who want everyone to vote regardless of their preparation.  (See the exhortations in our local newspaper.)  They tell you that democracy is intrinsically strengthened by high voter turnouts.  History shows us that nothing could be further from the truth – democracies inevitably ended their lives by suicides through emotional plebiscites, referendums, and other summarily catastrophic ballot box ‘opportunities’.  So, get informed first, then vote.