Reality Check on "Tax the Rich"

Hillary Clinton is proposing a ton of new federal spending, including free college. So where is she going to find the money? Here's how she explained it recently in Tampa:

We are going to the top one, ten percent, the millionaires, the billionaires, they are the ones that are going to have to start paying.

What's that? To start paying? Where have you been all this time Mrs. Clinton? Don't you ever stop by usgovernmentrevenue.com to check up on the facts? If you did you would find out that the top 1 percent already pay about 40% of the federal income tax.

And do you notice something else about the chart on "Income Tax and the Top One Percent?" It shows that the share paid by the rich has been going up. Except when we get big hunking recessions. Then the income tax share paid by the 1% goes down, as their share of income goes down.

But hey, what about the rest of the rich, the top ten percent? What about them?

OK, let's to to the IRS data on income tax collections, because that gives us income tax return data on the top 1%, top 10%, top 20%, and top 50%. Here's a table showing the latest tax return data, for 2013.

	Income share	Income Tax share
Top 1%	19.0%	37.8%
Top 10%	45.9%	69.8%
Top 20%	61.9%	82.1%
Top 50%	88.5%	97.2%

Hello, Hillary Clinton? You say it's time for the rich to start paying? When the fabled One Percent is already paying 38 percent of all individual federal income tax receipts? When the top 50 Percent is paying 97.2% of income tax receipts? Which planet are you on, Madam Secretary?

Now stop me if I've got this wrong, but I thought that the central conceit of our ruling class that they were the educated ones; they were the informed ones. They knew the facts, and if they didn't they could get an expert to brief them. And I thought that the hit on Donald Trump was that he was a lying populist appealing to "hate" and "xenophobia." I thought that a politician that said Yeah! We're gonna make the rich pay! was a populist thug. Maybe even a demagogue. Maybe even a fascist demagogue.

Now, of course, I suppose there is a principled argument that the top 50% should really pay all of their income in tax, and that having them pay nearly all the income tax receipts doesn't really begin to provide the government with enough resources to meet human needs. Because, yeah! the rich can afford it.

Now Hillary Clinton, according to reports, wants to spend more money "for college education, child care, mental health, drug addiction, green energy, solar panels, and national infrastructure."

Really. Aren't we already spending a ton of money on all this stuff? And really, will spending more on all this stuff really make a difference? Isn't the problem with with government spending on colleges that it has alreadyramped up the cost of college so that students can't afford to go to college without loans? Child care? Isn't the problem that child care is already regulated out the wazoo? Aren't we already spending a crony capitalist's ransom on green energy and solar panels?

As I said. The conceit of our ruling class is that they are the smart guys.

Here is something even smarter. The Great Enrichment of the last 200 years came not from government programs and educated experts and politicians, but from nobodies with an idea that turned into a huge business that provided new products for the masses at low prices.

And I'd say we need to keep taxes low so that these inventive nobodies will keep doing more of it.

The Meaning of Phyllis Schlafly

Was Phyllis Schafly, who died over the Labor Day weekend at the age of 92, a brilliant conservative mastermind, as Ann Coulter suggests? Or was she a privileged wife of a wealthy lawyer, as the New York Times obituary suggests?

I didn't become aware of her until her activism to stop the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, and of course at the time, having been carefully taught as all middle-class children are, I thought she was bat-shit crazy.

And now? Today I reason backwards from the fact that women in first-world countries aren't having enough babies to achieve population replacement. I'd say that is a real problem. It is the first problem. If women aren't having enough babies then you are in a world of hurt.

Today I reason that all the world's problems stem from the mechanical Newtonian model of reality that imagines all the things in the world as billiard balls. It works, as far as it goes, in a lot of things having to do with mechanics: building bridges and stuff.

But the world has moved on. Today our fundamental understanding of life, the universe, and everything is the quantum mechanical state function. Everything is a cloud of uncertainty until something happens. And even then you can't be too certain about anything until a lot of things happen.

Notice that although we like to think of markets using mechanical and hydraulic metaphors like the push and pull of supply and demand, it is also possible to think of them in a quantum mechanical way. There is no such thing as a price until an actual exchange transaction takes place. And there is no such thing as a market until a bunch of transactions take place. So really, prices and markets are the most modern and sophisticated things around.

Today, physicists say that the basic principle of life, the universe, and everything is asymmetry.

Yet our culture and our politics is driven by the totalitarian mechanical mindset and the rage for symmetry and sameness. Everything must be determined by government force. Everything must be equal. Everyone must be shamed into the correct opinion.

I don't know what Phyllis Schafly knew or what she thought. She was such a controversial character that everything written about her had the taint of partisan apology.

But I think that, when the modern era -- with its big government, its totalitarian politics, and its heaven-on-earth theology -- grinds into dust, the new thing that replaces it will look a lot more like Schafly's notion than the Newtonian mechanical force machine of liberal/progressive/cultural Marxism and the top-down rule of the experts.

Here's My Detroit Speech

Last Saturday Donald Trump committed lèse majesté and addressed an African American church in bombed out Detroit. He was very nice to the church members, and I would be too, if I had an opportunity to speak. Here's what I would have said.

Thank you for inviting me to speak to you. Because I am not a politician I am not going to tell you what you want to hear. I am going to tell it like it is, in the immortal words of Howard Cosell. I hope you will not be too angry with me.

In the last few weeks, Donald Trump has been reminding us that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, and that the KKK was a Democratic militia group, and Jim Crow was Democratic Party policy.

But it is also true that the Republican Party, after freeing the slaves, walked away from the freedmen, and left them to the tender mercies of the KKK and Jim Crow. Why was that? Well, it was because by the election of 1876 the Republican Party had other fish to fry, and spending blood and treasure on protecting African Americans in the South wasn't on the menu.

Still, African Americans voted for Republicans up until the Great Depression and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. What else were they to do? Meanwhile Republicans in the North were acting to curb the Great Migration with laws like the Davis-Bacon Act (Davis and Bacon were both Republicans) to prevent black laborers from the South from undercutting the wages of unionized whites in the North.

Northern Democrats and Republicans participated in the civil-rights legislation of the 1960s, even though Barry Goldwater voted against, on the libertarian grounds that he didn't want the government getting involved in private transactions.

Nevertheless, northern liberal Democrats took the credit for passing the civil rights laws and they deserve the credit. But let no one doubt that the great genius of the civil rights movement was Martin Luther King and his policy of non-violent protest adapted from Mohandas Gandhi in India.

Why then have not African Americans taken their place as full participants in the American Dream?

It is because, just as Republicans in the 1870s abandoned African Americans to the KKK and Jim Crow, the Democrats in the years after the 1960s abandoned African Americans in the inner cities to drugs and gangs. And eight years of America's First Black President hasn't made a difference. Black inner cities are still victimized by drugs, by crime, by joblessness, by lousy education, and by gangs.

Maybe it is time for a change.

But what? Can Donald Trump make a difference, with his promise to bring back manufacturing jobs and bring school choice to inner cities? Probably not. Would Black Lives Matter and its program of targeting police abuse make a difference? Probably not.

What will make a difference? I'd say that the only thing that can make a difference for African Americans is African Americans.

I'd say that the difference will come from African Americans deciding that they don't care about racism, don't care about police brutality, don't care about institutional racism. Because America lives on people deciding to go out and get a job and take care of their family, and do the best they can. African Americans have tried everything else. Maybe it is time to just go out and look after their own.

Because the thing about politicians is that they don't care about you, they only care about your vote. And the same goes for activists. They don't care about you, they only care about how many people they can get into the streets.

If you sign up with the politicians it is not different that signing up for the military. At some point you will cease to be useful to the generals, and they will cast you aside.

I can understand how African Americans might feel about things. As a conservative, this last year has seen the burial of all my hopes; the conservatism I believed in has been smashed to pieces.

So what do I do? Well, I keep on living, a day at a time, doing what I can in my small personal world.

I dare say the same applies to African Americans, after fifty years down the toilet. You go out, and work, and look after your family. Because nothing else matters.

The Spectre of White Identity Politics

When the young rich kids Karl Marx (son of the best lawyer in Trier) and Friedrich Engels (son of the textile firm of Ermen & Engels) wrote their Communist Manifesto they began:

A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power?

And so on.

But are we not now facing the spectre of white identity politics? The reason is not hard to find. Back in 1930, according to La Wik, the US was 89.8 percent white. As late as 1970, it was 87.5 percent white. But the 2010 census put whites at 72.4 percent.

Of course, this change is mainly a result of the 1965 immigration act that opened up the gates to immigration from areas other than Europe. Not to mention the elite benign neglect of illegal immigration.

Back in the 1960s, when the US was overwhelmingly white, it seemed to be a small thing to give blacks a helping hand in the job market with Affirmative Action. And anyway, as it turned out, the folks that paid for Affirmative Action were not upper-class white tolerant liberals but working class whites.

In the decades since, of course, liberals have discovered, thanks to Frankfurt School types like Herbert Marcuse, that race and gender politics is electoral gold. If you scare up blacks enough they will vote Democrat by 90-10. If you create a racial and gender spoils system, people will vote for race and gender loot. And who cares about the racist, sexist, bigoted Archie Bunkers left behind?

The answer is, of course that when the Archie Bunkers are hurting enough, from years of de-industrialization, and embattled enough, because the Democratic Coalition of the Fringes starts outvoting them, they start to see the point of identity politics. After all, blacks do it; Hispanics do it; Jews do it; women do it; gays do it. Why not us?

This is something that our liberals friends have not really thought about, bless their hearts. They think of themselves as enlightened activists battling against the patriarchy and the white-archy, just as haut bourgeois Marx and Engels saw themselves battling against the bourgeoisie for the liberation of the working class.

Liberals do not think, cannot think, that, just as Marx and Engels proposed a politics that would rain misery upon the working class, so liberal encouragement of racism in blacks and sexism in women, mixed-gender bathrooms for transgenders, would rain misery on just the people they pretend to help.

And so the result of a half-century of race and gender politics is to create a movement of white identity among people that used to think of themselves as Americans of German, Irish, British, Italian, Jewish origin.

Yes, did you know that German-Americans are the biggest US white ethnic group, at 50 million? and then Irish at about 33 million, and British merely in the 20-something range? Who knew?

Now you know the reason for my catchphrases: Government is force, Politics is division, Government is injustice. It's easy to play politics and divide up the electorate imagining that you are smart enough to manipulate all the divided groups with your superior intelligence. But government is force, and is experienced by the people on the receiving end as injustice. The more politics divides people by race and gender and the more the victors force injustice on the losers the more that the losers get angry and start to coalesce into a rebel coalition.

It is going to be much harder to put America back together again that it was to split it apart. I don't believe in the alt-right argument that America was to be willed to the British Posterity of 1790 America. It's too late for that. The slaves are here, the Germans are here, the Irish are here, the Italians are here, the Mexicans are here, and now the Chinese and the South Asian Indians are here.

Yes, but what happens next? Really, nobody has a clue. But I think we can guess that the political parties will realign along a different axis than today. And we will still have Big Government at the end of it.

Despite Univ Chicago Move, College PC Will Get Worse

Everybody is encouraged by the statement on freedom of expression sent out to entering freshmen at the University of Chicago this fall.

Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.

But I do not think that this will make a difference. The reason is that colleges are transforming from institutions that were primarily male to places that are predominantly female. According to the Washington Post in 2014,

Federal data show that female students became the majority in 1979 and for the past decade have accounted for about 57 percent of enrollment at degree-granting institutions. 

And that says nothing about the administrative staff at universities that appears to be predominantly female.

Conservatives like to complain that the culture of trigger warnings, safe spaces, and microaggressions is all a leftist plot, yet another attempt to bury the bourgeoisie. And I am sure that it is all of that.

But I believe that the PC university is also a reflection of its femaleness.

The fact is that men are fighters; women are lovers. Men meet each other at the drinking den, and relate to each other in what I call an insult culture. The normal way of interacting with other men is to banter and verbally spar with them. An acquaintance that grew up in Worcester, Mass., implied to me that the normal man-to-man form of address back there was "yer bastard," said with the proper Boston accent.

Women relate to each other in the kaffee klatsch, where never is heard a discouraging word, except about women not present. Women have a niceness culture, even though they are as socially ruthless as men. There is no "yer bastard" between women in the kaffee klatsch.

This means that the idea of a rough-and-tumble of ideas makes complete sense to men, but not to women. To a woman safe spaces, trigger warnings, and the avoidance of controversy are just the way that things ought to be done. So it is no surprise that three women teaching a course in "Medical Humanities in the Digital Age" at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs would announce "We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change." Of course not. Good little girls do not debate; they share.

Men go to college to get credentialed, so that they can earn good money and win a high-status woman as a mate. If university becomes a kaffee klatsch, a safe space for sharing, then it won't be much use for men.

What will replace university? I suspect we already know. It is the startup culture. I know a bright young man that dropped out of college to join a Bitcoin startup. Now he's working with his buddy as a contract software developer in a "co-working space" in New York City. Startups, with their promise of fabulous loot and the fear of catastrophic failure, appeal to the warrior mind. They do not appeal to the feminine mind, and that is why women, well represented in corporate software in the days of COBOL and mainframe IBM, were not too interested when the software startup culture started in the 1980s.

The university started out as a seminary preparing second sons for the priesthood in the established church. Then the Germans turned it into a vehicle for national greatness. Then the left turned universities into secular seminaries, turning out well-born political activists.

I wonder what comes next. 

Trump Starting to Look Like a Leader

I watched some of Donald Trump's stump speech made up the road in Everett, Washington, where they make Boeing airplanes.

If you are passing by Everett, be sure to visit Boeing's Future of Flight museum and take the factory tour. You get to see the 747, 777, and 787 assembly lines, and look at the difference between 1960s manufacturing processes and 2010s processes.

You have to say that Trump has got the cojones. Imagine any recent GOP presidential nominee talking frankly about the horror of life in the black inner city. About lives wrecked by gang violence. About how the Democratic Party is the party of slavery, and the Democratic Party is the party of Jim Crow. About the Republican Party being the party of Abraham Lincoln.

Oh, and Trump's going to bring jobs to the inner city and school choice too.

Yes, why haven't Republicans been saying this for the past 30 years? And why haven't Republicans been calling out black racists on race the way that Democrats like to suggest that the few cranky KKK groups are representative of the whole party? Why has the GOP spent the last 30 years cringing on race?

That's why dear old Jonah Goldberg is wrong to want to write the alt-right out of decent conservatism. Sorry Jonah, but decent conservatism is dead, because of the cringe on race. No doubt William F. Buckley, Jr, was a gentleman and was right to read the John Birch Society out of the gentlemanly conservative movement. But the proof is in the pudding. What good did it do to write the whacko-birds out of the movement?

The left has never written its whacko-birds out of the movement. Indeed, actual terrorists like Bill Ayers were rehabilitated to become the mentors of chaps like Barack Obama. And actual racists like Reverend Al Sharpton flourish and have their own TV shows.

And now Donald Trump has amazed us all by going to Mexico to meet with the president of Mexico. Who would have thunk it? Didn't Trump so infuriate the Mexicans with his meme about Mexico paying for the wall that dialogue would be impossible? Hmm. Apparently not. I dare say that we might find a clue about all this by perusing Trump's Art of the Deal. You start a negotiation with a bit of braggadocio. Then you get down to serious negotiating.

The more we see of this the more we unconsciously realize that Hillary Clinton is not a leader. She can go through the motions of being a leader, but she just isn't one. That's why she lost in 2008 and nearly lost the presidential nomination in 2016. She just isn't a leader.

Look, there is nothing wrong with not being a leader. Most people aren't leaders. They don't have the cojones to risk and threaten, and "boldy... outdare the dangers of the time." It is perfectly obvious that Hillary Clinton is not a person that is constituted to do such a thing. That is what Benghazi should have taught us. Her instinct is to hide in the bunker and then lie about it. I dare say that is true of most of us.

But hiding in a bunker and lying about it doesn't compute for a political leader.

When you watch Trump's stump speech it seems pretty over the top. I don't think, for instance, that we will revive manufacturing like it used to be.

But think of this. Suppose Trump brings corporate income tax down to 15% and proposes a profit repatriation amnesty. I dare say that Apple might bring home that $200 billion they have stashed in Ireland and that the Eurocrats want to grab hold of. Suppose he frees energy from the renewables racket. Suppose he replaces the administrative juggernaut of Obamacare. Suppose he frees up all kinds of other administrative stupidities of the Obama administration.

I dare say that with all that we might see two or three years of 3-4% GDP growth. Wouldn't that make a difference to the US?

What is George Soros' Game?

There are still a number of things in this world that I don't get. So I have a trigger in my mind looking for explanations.

For instance, I have been wondering about Karl Marx's famous phrase from Das Kapital.

A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.”

What was going on, I wondered? Then I got the answer. The absolute monarchs were disarming the nobles, ending their private armies. So the nobles "hurled" the peasants off their lands. If the peasants couldn't be used as soldiers, who needed them?

One of my questions is: What does George Soros want? Why is he funneling money at the Democratic Party in the US? In the American Thinker today editor Thomas Lifson calls Soros "a brilliant mastermind, the closest thing to a real-life Bond villain in human history." Soros is trying to influence the election of district attorneys.

I am willing to judge Soros a mastermind as a speculator and investor, but I doubt if he is a political mastermind. Actually, he seems merely to be pouring money into the global elite's program for global, supranational governance. And the central drive in that program is to delegimitize nationalism and the nation state.

I get this. I understand that the global elite is trying to save us from ourselves, we poor deluded rubes, from the evils of aggressive nationalism, and trying to substitute rule by a wise and educated global elite that knows what's what and what is good for us.

So the global elite is building supranational institutions like the European Union to undermine the nation state and fostering sub-national identities to undermining nationalism and national identity, substituting race and ethnic and gender identity for national identity.

The supranational project is foundering because, in the words of British anti-immigration politician Enoch Powell, he of the Rivers of Blood speech, the EU could not work because there was no European demos, no European people.

Powell was arguing that a wise and providential elite needs to foster a popular identity that matches up with the political identity. If you are going to have a nation state, then you need to create a national myth that creates loyalty in the people to the nation. If you are going to have a supranational state then you need to teach the people to love the supranational identity.

How do you do that? You start a war. That's how Bismarck unified the German peoples into a single nation state. That's how the patriots of 1776 created the American identity, by making war on the Brits.

Our leaders and betters understand this perfectly when it comes to their sub-national race and gender politics. You gin up wars on women, police wars on young blacks, evil Christian wars on gays and you inspire young mixed-race quarterbacks to snub the national anthem.

And Soros is in the middle of all this, with his support for Black Lives Matter. His strategy seems to be to support anything that weakens the nation state. This is because, for him, coming to adulthood as a Hungarian Jew in the mid 1940s, aggressive nationalism is the worst thing ever.

Only I'd say that aggressive progressivism, aka the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Pol Pot, is worse by an order of magnitude.

Personally, I think this is all a dreadful mistake. It is a mistake to push supranational states until you have a supranational demos. And I don't just mean the educated elite. You have to get the ordinary people identifying as Europeans if you want to have a European state. Problem is that the only way this worked in the past is to have a war.

It is also a mistake to weaken the national identity with race and gender and localist identity politics. The global elite thinks that its support of race and gender identity politics is a cunning way to dislodge the nation state. But I think that they are mistaken. I think that the race and gender identity politics will lead in the end to civil war, because at some point the wise and accomplished ruling class will lose control of its identity groups.

I don't think that George Soros, brilliant mastermind, has really thought this deeply about things. He just thinks as his globalist clique pals think, that they must stop the slide to fascism.

But fascism arose out of the chaos and governmental ineptitude in the years after World War I, in response to the first big failure of the educated and wise European elite. It is a conceit to imagine that today's educated and wise elite is any better than the elite of a century ago. Governments and ruling classes always blunder from one disaster to another, because they really don't have a clue what they are doing; they only think they do.

It is pretty obvious, to me, that today's ruling class is blundering into a new disaster, right now. That's because, like all humans, the ruling class doesn't have a clue. That's why we have religion, to persuade ourselves that we really do understand life, the universe, and everything.

Only we don't. We don't understand life, the universe, and everything, and we probably never will.

And that includes George Soros.