At the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, then-New York businessman Donald J. Trump laughs as then-President Barack Obama makes him the punchline of the evening.
President Donald J. Trump may be the biggest name to announce he will not attend the White House Correspondence Dinner, but he definitely isn’t the only one. The president shocked D.C. media elites and politicos when he announced on Twitter Saturday that he would be skipping the event where the commander-in-chief is the most-anticipated speaker.
I will not be attending the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner this year. Please wish everyone well and have a great evening!
The decision demonstrates just how deep the president’s mistrust of the elite liberal media runs. The annual black-tie dinner is the one event each year in which the traditionally adversarial relationship is put aside for a little fun. Still, there’s never been such an openly hostile environment created by openly agenda-driven media, who not only missed the mood of the country but also seem incapable of introspection and humility.
On Friday, during his historic speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland, President Trump continued his blistering attack on the media. The speech, which was the first given to CPAC by a sitting president in his first term since Ronald Reagan, was filled with White House Correspondents Dinner-like jokes.
“The dishonest media will say he didn’t get a standing ovation. You know why? Because everyone stood and nobody sat,” he quipped, eliciting laughter from the conservative crowd. “But that’s what they’ll say. They’re the worst.”
He said he wanted “all to know that we are fighting the fake news,” repeating his claim that the media was “the enemy of the people.”
But the event this year, which was scheduled for April 29 was already unraveling before President Trump’s announcement on Saturday. Worth noting, before President Trump was even elected or taken seriously by mediates, many of whom still do not, it was already being referred to as “the nerd prom.” The event, particularly under Mr. Obama, grew into nothing more than an excuse for Hollywood elitists to go to D.C. and get close to the president.
With Tinseltown taking too great of a role, outlets such as Bloomberg, The New Yorker and even Vanity Fair all announced before the president they would not hold exclusive parties before or after the event. Further, the casts of “Veep,” “House of Cards” and “Scandal” also said they would not even be attending the White House Correspondents Dinner this year.
Jeff Mason, a Reuters reporter and president of the White House Correspondence Association, told Fox News on Saturday that the dinner has “no chance” of being canceled. He then went on to make a childish statement that President Trump was not yet formally invited, though it is an event he has attended in the past.
In fact, at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, Mr. Obama made the then-New York businessman the punchline of the evening with him in the crowd. Multiple sources have confirmed that Mr. Trump had decided that night to seriously consider running for president.
A suspect is in custody and 28 people were injured after a truck plowed into a crowd watching a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans on Saturday night. Police said victims range in age from as young as 3 or 4-years-old to adults in their 30s and 40s, while 21 people were hospitalized after the crash.
Five victims were in guarded condition and 7 others declined to be hospitalized, according to city Emergency Services Director Dr. Jeff Elder.
Police Chief Michael Harrison said in a press conference after the incident that the suspect was traveling in the opposite direction of the parade and crashed into two other vehicles before veering off to the other side, plowing into a number of pedestrians.
When asked whether the incident was a potential act of terror, Chief Harrison said it appears to be a drinking and driving case.
“Again, it appears it was a subject who was highly intoxicated who struck a number of vehicles and veered off hitting a number of innocent people.”
The DWI office, where the suspect was brought, is investigating.
The Iranian Navy fires a missile in the Persian Gulf. (Photo: Reuters)
Iran conducted naval drills at the mouth of the Gulf of Oman and the Indian Ocean on Sunday after U.S President Donald J. Trump put Tehran “on notice.” The exercises are meant to provoke and test the new administration, which unlike its predecessor, vowed to take a tougher stance against the Islamic Republic regime.
Iran conducted a ballistic missile test on Jan. 29 and the U.S. responded by saying all options were on the table.
The regime’s annual exercises will be conducted in the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Oman, the Bab el-Mandab and northern parts of the Indian Ocean. Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said they are aiming to train their navy in the fight against terrorism and piracy, though the U.S. lists Iran as the largest state sponsor of terrorism.
In reality, the Iranian navy is conducting these exercises near the waterways where millions of barrels of oil are transported daily to Europe, the United States and Asia. The Bab el-Mandab and the Strait of Hormuz are waterways that run along the coasts of Yemen and Iran, the former being a failed state run by Iran-backed Houthi rebels.
Navy ships, submarines and helicopters will take part in the drills across an area of about 2 million square kilometers (772,000 square miles) and marines will showcase their skills along Iran’s southeastern coast, the state news agency IRNA said.
The U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet is based in the region and protects shipping lanes in the Gulf and nearby waters.
Last month, a U.S. Navy destroyer fired warning shots at four Iranian fast-attack vessels near the Strait of Hormuz after they closed in at high speed. The vessels belonged to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards which are not participating in the current war games.
Let’s look at just one piece of that puzzle. James Capretta of the American Enterprise Institute has a very sobering summary of how Medicaid has metastasized into one of the largest and fastest-growing entitlement programs.
You should read the entire article, but if you’re pressed for time, I’m going to share two grim charts that tell you what you need to know.
First, we have a look at how the burden of Medicaid spending, measured as a share of national output, has increased over time.
What makes this chart particularly depressing is that Medicaid was never supposed to become a massive entitlement program.
It was basically created so the crowd in Washington could buy a few votes. Yet the moment politicians decided that it was the federal government had a role in subsidizing health care for the indigent, it was just a matter of time before the program was expanded to new groups of potential voters.
And every time the program was expanded, that increased the burden of spending and further undermined market forces in the health sector.
This is why entitlement programs are so injurious to a nation.
But Medicaid isn’t just a problem because of its adverse fiscal and economic impact.
Which brings us to our second chart from Capretta’s article. Here’s a look at the share of the population being subsidized by Medicaid.
As a fiscal wonk, I realize I should care more about the budget numbers, but I actually find this second graph more depressing. In my lifetime, we’ve gone from a nation where the federal government had no role in the provision of low-income healthcare, and now nearly one out of every five Americans is on the federal teat.
Even though we’re far richer than we were in the mid-1960s when the program was created, which presumably should have meant less supposed need for federal subsidies.
For further background on the issue, here’s a video I narrated for the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.
I urge you to pay close attention to the discussion that starts at 1:48. I explain that programs with both federal and state spending create perverse incentives for even more spending. This is mostly because politicians in either Washington or state capitals can expand eligibility and take full credit for new handouts while only being responsible for a portion of the costs. But it also happens because the federal match gives states big incentives to manipulate the system to get more transfers.
Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who is a candidate to run the Democratic National Committee, speaks during the general session of the DNC winter meeting in Atlanta, Saturday, Feb. 25, 2017. (Photo: AP)
Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez has been elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on Saturday, defeating Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison. The vote came in at 235 votes to 200 votes.
Rep. Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, was previously the favorite and was backed by the hard leftwing of the party, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. But he was derailed when his anti-semitic views were revealed in audio and publicly opposed by predominant Jewish members of the party, such as Alan Dershowitz.
Mr. Dershowitz, a liberal law professor at Harvard, wrote an op-ed threatening to leave the Democratic Party if Rep. Ellison was elected to head it up. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which originally backed the Minnesota Muslim representative, bailed on his bid to be the new chair after the audio surfaced.
The leftwing group, which bills itself as an anti-bigotry organization, released a statement saying it “raises serious concerns about whether Rep. Ellison faithfully could represent the Democratic Party’s traditional support for a strong and secure Israel.”
However, his ties to the radical Nation of Islam and his defense of anti-Semitic leaders such Louis Farrakhan had already been well known. And the new victorious DNC chair isn’t without controversy, either.
Mr. Perez, a former Department of Justice (DOJ) assistant attorney general, also came under a microscope after President Barack Obama announced his nomination for secretary of the Labor Department. Before his confirmation, an inspector general report concluded the department was grossly mismanaged, career attorneys were abused and intimidated by and under him.
The report also revealed threats made toward black employees who were willing to work on cases like the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, as well as another case in Mississippi. All involved civil rights violators and perpetrators who were black and white victims. In one such case, then-Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King complained to then-Attorney General Eric Holder over Voting Section Chief Chris Coates.
King didn’t like that Coates, who had brought and managed the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, was willing to use civil rights laws to protect white voters. Perez got the order to “take care” of King.
He also found himself in political hot water previously after he was caught abusing his power during a secret quid-pro-quo deal in 2011 with the city of St. Paul, Minnesota. He later perjured himself when he told Congress that the DOJ agreed not to intervene in two whistle-blower cases against St. Paul–in exchange for the city dropping its Supreme Court petition–because the cases were “weak.”
However, emails obtained after the Mr. Perez gave his congressional testimony clearly demonstrated career lawyers at DOJ believed those cases were strong.
Following their defeat up and down the ballot in the 2016 election las November, the party infighting has been intense. Now that they hold the weakest electoral position across nation since the 1920s, the party is looking to overhaul their image and brand after they suffered the devastating defeat.
The one faction believes the Democratic Party should move even farther to the left and another that believes they have completely lost touch with middle America and the working class. Neither frontrunner gave a voice to the latter, and House Democrats again reelected Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to lead the fractured caucus for an 8th term.
Because I’m worried about the future of the nation, I want a national discussion and debate about big issues such as the entitlement crisis and our insane tax code.
No such luck. The crowd in Washington and the media have been focusing on sideshow topics such as which side has the most fake news, the purported sloppiness of executive orders, and the Trump-Putin “bromance.”
And we now have a culture-war fight in DC thanks to Trump’s new policy on transgender bathroom usage.
The Justice and Education departments said Wednesday that public schools no longer need to abide by the Obama-era directive instructing them to allow transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms of their chosen gender. …The agencies said they withdrew the guidance to “in order to further and more completely consider the legal issues involved.” Anti-bullying safeguards for students will not be affected by the change, according to the letter. …There won’t be any immediate impact on schools, because the Obama guidance had been temporarily blocked since August by a federal judge in Texas, one of 13 states that sued over the directive.
Though, to be fair, Trump didn’t start this culture war. He’s simply responding to a battle that Obama triggered.
Moreover, even though I prefer that we focus attention of big-picture fiscal and economic issues, I’m not asserting that this issue should be swept under the rug.
That being said, I think the issue would largely disappear if we simply recognized boundaries. Not everything should be decided in Washington. Yes, it’s the federal government’s job to guarantee and protect universally applicable constitutional rights, but some decisions belong at the state and local level. And most decisions should take place in the private sector and civil society.
One of the great things about being a libertarian is that you have no desire for government sanctions against peaceful people who are different than you are, and that should be a very popular stance. You can be a libertarian who is also a serious fundamentalist, yet you have no desire to use the coercive power of government to oppress or harass people who are (in your view) pervasive sinners. For instance, you may think gay sex is sinful sodomy, but you don’t want it to be illegal. Likewise, you can be a libertarian with a very libertine lifestyle, yet you have no desire to use the coercive power of government to oppress and harass religious people. It’s wrong (in your view) to not cater a gay wedding, but you don’t want the government to bully bakers and florists. In other words, very different people can choose to be libertarian, yet we’re all united is support of the principle that politicians shouldn’t pester people so long as those folks aren’t trying to violate the life, liberty, or property of others. …And when you’re motivated by these peaceful principles, which imply a very small public sector and a very big private sector and civil society, it’s amazing how many controversies have easy solutions.
Let’s look at some more recent sensible commentary on this topic.
Roy Cordato wrote about the controversy in his state of North Carolina.
…lost in all the rhetoric surrounding this issue is the truth about both the original Charlotte law and the state’s response to it. …the Charlotte, North Carolina, city council passed an “antidiscrimination” law… The centerpiece of this law was a provision that prohibits businesses providing bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers from segregating usage of those facilities by gender, biologically defined. Biological males or females must be allowed to use the facilities of the opposite sex if they claim that that is the sex they identify with psychologically. …This ordinance was an assault on the rights of private property owners and economic freedom, regardless of one’s religious beliefs. …In a free society based on property rights and free markets, as all free societies must be, a privately owned business would have the right to decide whether or not it wants separate bathrooms strictly for men and women biologically defined, bathrooms for men and women subjectively or psychologically defined, completely gender neutral bathrooms with no labels on the doors, or no bathrooms at all.
And Roy says that the state law (which overturned the Charlotte ordinance) was reasonable in that regard.
The law in North Carolina that so many progressives are up in arms about does not prohibit businesses from having bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, etc., that allow use by people of all genders defined biologically, psychologically, or whatever. …the state of North Carolina codified a basic libertarian principle: the separation of bathroom and state.
Government needs to get out of culture war issues as much as possible, the question of transgendered people in bathrooms included. …In North Carolina, Charlotte’s City Council made the first mistake. …the city passed a non-discrimination ordinance…that…basically legislated bathroom admission. …Charlotte passed this law, exposing private business owners to lawsuits and legal punishments. …The ordinance also stirred up fears of predators — men getting into a ladies’ room thanks to this law, and then assaulting or leering at vulnerable women. Nobody showed that this was a real threat, but the same mindset behind the Charlotte law — we need a law to ban a possible bad thing — drove the state legislature to pass HB 2. HB 2 blocked Charlotte and other cities from implementing their antidiscrimination laws. …both the liberal legislation and the conservative reaction were out of place. Charlotte shouldn’t have stuck itself into private restrooms, and the state shouldn’t have stuck itself into the city’s sticking itself into restrooms.
By the way, Tim’s column also makes the key point that people should be decent human beings. A bit of civilized consideration and politeness goes a long way when dealing with potentially uncomfortable situations.
Writing for Reason, Scott Shackford opines on the topic, beginning with an appropriate defense of transgender people.
Transgender citizens have the same right as everybody else to live their lives as they please without unnecessary government interference. …As a legal and ethical matter, …it generally shouldn’t matter why somebody identifies as transgender. It’s their right. In the event that somebody decides to pose as transgender in order to engage in some sort of fraud or criminal behavior, there are already laws to punish such actions. …so it would be appropriate that in any situation where the government treats a transgender person on the basis of his or her identity it respects their form of gender expression. That means the government should allow for any official documentation—such as a driver’s license—that requires the listing of a person’s sex to match the identity by which a person lives, as much as it’s feasibly possible. …Transgender citizens are seeing some big inroads both culturally and legally, and we should all see these generally as positive developments. …Transgender citizens have the right to demand the government treat them fairly and with dignity.
But Scott correctly observes that the government should not have the power to use coercion to mandate specific choices by private individuals or private businesses.
In the private sector, it’s all a matter of cultural negotiation and voluntary agreements. The law should not be used to mandate private recognition of transgender needs, whether it’s requiring insurance companies cover gender reassignment surgeries or requiring private businesses to accommodate their bathroom choices. The reverse is also true: It would be inappropriate for the government to forbid insurance coverage or to require private businesses to police their own bathrooms to keep transgender folks out.
Last but not least, my colleague Neal McCluskey explains that federalism is part of the solution.
Much of this debate has been framed as conservatives versus liberals, or traditionalists versus social change. But the root problem is not differing views. It is government — especially federal — imposition. …Single-sex bathrooms and locker rooms have long been the norm, and privacy about our bodies — especially from the opposite sex — has long been coveted. …Of course, transgendered students should — must — be treated equally by public institutions, and their desire to use the facilities in which they feel comfortable is utterly understandable. By fair reckoning, we do not have a competition between good and evil, but what should be equally protected values and rights. How do we resolve this? …not with a federal mandate. …So how, in public schools, do we treat people equally who have mutually exclusive values and desires? We cannot. Open the bathrooms to all, and those who want single-sex facilities lose. Keep them closed, and transgender students lose. The immediate ramification of this is that decisions should be made at state, and preferably local, levels. At least let differing communities have their own rules.
But the real answer, Neal explains, is school choice.
…the long-term — and only true — solution is school choice. Attach money to students, give educators freedom to establish schools with their own rules and values, and let like-minded people freely associate. Impose on no one. …We live in a pluralist society, and for that we should be eternally grateful. To keep that, and also be a free and equal society, people of different genders, values, etc., must be allowed to live as they see fit as long as they do not impose themselves on others. That is impossible if government imposes uniformity on all.
But I’ll admit that these libertarian principles don’t solve every problem. States will need to have some sort of policy. Not because of private businesses, which should get to choose their own policies. And not because of schools, which will be privately operated in my libertarian fantasy world and therefore also able to set their own policies.
But how should states handle bathrooms in public buildings? Even if there are less of them in a libertarian society, the issue will exist. And what about prisons in a libertarian world?
I don’t pretend to know exactly how these issues should be resolved. Conservatives argue that you should be defined by the gender on your birth certificate and leftists say you should be to choose your identify.
My gut instinct is to cut the baby in half (I’m such a moderate). Maybe the rule for prisons is not how you identify or what’s on your birth certificate, but what sort of…um…equipment you have. If you were born a man but had surgery, which is your right so long as you’re not asking me to pay for it, then you’re eligible for a women’s prison. Likewise, if you were born a woman and surgery gave you male genitalia (I confess I don’t know if that’s even possible), then you get assigned to a men’s prison.
Government bathrooms are an easier problem. From a practical perspective, I’m guessing the net result of this fight – at least for schools and public buildings – will be a shift to single-use bathrooms. In other words, multi-person facilities for men and women will be replaced by a bunch of private bathrooms.
This will be bad news for taxpayers, because it is more expensive to build and operate such bathrooms.
And it will be bad news for women because that means they will be forced to use bathrooms that are less pleasant because men…um…tend to be less fastidious about…um…personal habits such as lifting toilet seats before…well…you know.
Men only have to deal with the messes made by other men when we have to sit down in a bathroom. And even then, the problem is minimized since other men generally will use urinals when they…um…don’t need to sit down.
But if we have a world of one-person-at-a-time bathrooms, women’s lives will be less pleasant.
Pedestrians walk through the Canary Wharf financial district of London January 16, 2009.
For more than 30 years, I’ve been trying to educate my leftist friends about supply-side economics and the Laffer Curve. Why is it so hard for them to recognize, I endlessly wonder, that when you tax something, you get less of it? And why don’t they realize that when you tax something at high rates, the effect is even larger?
And if the tax is high and the affected economic activity is sufficiently discouraged, why won’t they admit that this will have an impact on tax revenue?
Don’t they understand the basic economics of supply and demand?
But I’m not giving up, which means I’m either a fool or an optimist.
In this Skype interview with the Blaze’s Dana Loesch, I pontificate about the economy and tax policy.
[brid video=”117058″ player=”2077″ title=”Dan Mitchell Discussing if Trump and the GOP Will Deliver Tax Reform”]
But for today, I want to focus on the part of the interview where I suggested that a lower corporate tax rate might generate more revenue in the long run.
Last decade, the experts at the American Enterprise Institute calculated that the revenue-maximizing corporate tax rate is about 25%.
More recently, the number crunchers at the Tax Foundation estimated the long-run revenue-maximizing rate is even lower, at about 15%.
You can (and should) read their studies, but all you really need to understand is that companies will have a greater incentive to both earn and report more income when the rate is reasonable.
But since the U.S. rate is very high (and we also have very punitive rules), companies are discouraged from investing and producing in America. Firms also have an incentive to seek out deductions, credits, exemptions, and other preferences when rates are high. And multinational companies understandably will seek to minimize the amount of income they report in the United States.
In other words, a big reduction in the corporate rate would be unambiguously positive for the American economy. And because there will be more investment and job creation, there also will be more taxable income. In other words, a bigger “tax base.”
P.S. Economists at the Australian Treasury calculated the effect of a lower corporate rate and found both substantial revenue feedback and significant benefits for workers. The same thing would happen in the United States.
President Donald Trump signs an executive order to withdraw the U.S. from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact agreed to under the Obama administration, Monday, Jan. 23, 2017, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
President Donald J. Trump on Friday signed an executive order repealing or simplifying federal regulations, marking the second such action he has taken on regulations. The move comes only hours after telling an audience of conservative activists that his administration would “put the regulation industry out of work.”
The order, signed by President Trump in the Oval Office with chief executives of major U.S. corporations standing behind him, directs all federal agencies to seek out and eliminate regulations deemed unnecessary and burdensome to the U.S. economy.
Each federal agency is to establish a regulatory reform task force to ensure every one has a team to research all regulations and. They will make recommendations on which regulations to simplify or outright repeal, the president said.
In January, President Trump signed another executive order aiming to implement his “one in-two out” proposal that was part of his campaign vow to “Drain the Swamp.”
With the order, the president made it a requirement “for every one new regulation issued, at least two prior regulations be identified for elimination.” Further, the order requires “that the cost of planned regulations be prudently managed and controlled through a budgeting process.”
The Commerce Department said Friday new home sales rose 3.7 to a seasonally-adjusted 555,000 units, which is 5.5% higher than a year ago. That’s a sign the housing market is healthy enough to withstand previous and future mortgage rate hikes, after a decline the previous month.
Solid job gains and some signs of rising wages have driven up consumer confidence, which has also risen since the presidential election. More confident consumers are more likely to buy homes. Sales of existing homes jumped to their highest level in a decade, according to data released earlier this week.
The rebound has occurred despite, or perhaps because of, a jump in mortgage rates since the fall. Many buyers could be accelerating purchases to get ahead of any further rate increases.
The Survey of Consumers, a closely-watched gauge of consumer sentiment, ticked down slightly in February but remains higher than anytime in 13 years. The median forecast, derived from economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected a reading of 96 in February.
“While consumer confidence edged upward in late February, it remained slightly below the decade peak recorded in January,” Surveys of Consumers chief economist, Richard Curtin said. “Overall, the Sentiment Index has been higher during the past three months than anytime since March 2004.”
Deep partisan divisions are cancelling each other out, the head of the survey said.
Democrats expect a recession and Republicans robust growth, as the difference between these two parties is almost identical to that found during the all-time peak and trough values in the Expectations Index, – 64.6 versus 64.4.
“The overall gain in the Expectations Index was due to self-identified Independents, who were much closer to the optimism of the Republicans than the pessimism of the Democrats,” Mr. Curtain added.
Still, the level of current consumer sentiment is far higher than in October before the presidential election, when it matched a two-year low. The index’s three month average is also at the highest it has been for nearly 13 years.
The Survey of Consumers indicated a growth rate of 2.7% in consumption during 2017.
Final Results for February 2017
Feb
Jan
Feb
M-M
Y-Y
2017
2017
2016
Change
Change
Index of Consumer Sentiment
96.3
98.5
91.7
-2.2%
+5.0%
Current Economic Conditions
111.5
111.3
106.8
+0.2%
+4.4%
Index of Consumer Expectations
86.5
90.3
81.9
-4.2%
+5.6%
Next data release: March 17, 2017 for Preliminary March data at 10am ET
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