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Economy

Budweiser-America

Budweiser, the King of Beers, is offering beer drinkers a taste of nationalism in a nod to the U.S. presidential election and changing its name to America. The name change will last at least until the election in November, where coincidentally one of the party’s presumptive nominee is a nationalist.

Ricardo Marques, a vice president from Budweiser, said it “maybe the most American summer ever.”

The company seems to view its name choice as something of a patriotic duty. The rebranding is a nod to the 2016 presidential race, Tosh Hall, the creative director at the branding firm behind the name change, offered some more clarity.

“We thought nothing was more iconic than Budweiser and nothing was more iconic than America,” says Tosh Hall, creative director at the can’s branding firm JKR.

Summer is peak beer-selling season and Budweiser, as well as the rest of the industry, projects double-digit increases in sales. Since 2011, Budweiser has released special summer-edition cans that have donned patriotic images such as the American flag and the Statue of Liberty, full with red-white-and-blue packaging including a full salute.

The summer hosts Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, and Americans consume a lot of beer. But this year, Budweiser has decided to take it a step further and the summer cans and bottles will be extended through the November election.

Budweiser, the King of Beers, is offering

Opinion

Statist Hillary Hypocrisy Meter

I wrote last month about Secretary of State John Kerry being a giant hypocrite because he’s been a critic of so-called tax havens, yet he and his family benefits immensely from investments in various low-tax jurisdictions.

But perhaps that’s something that Barack Obama requires when selecting people for that position. It turns out that Kerry’s predecessor also utilized tax havens.

Earlier this year, the New York Post editorialized about Hillary Clinton’s attack against tax havens, which they found to be absurd since the Clinton family benefits significantly from places such as the Cayman Islands.

Hillary Clinton last week lunged into her most flagrant fit of hypocrisy yet. …she took new aim at the rich — including their use of tax dodges. She told MSNBC: “We can go after some of these schemes … the kind of…routing income through the Bahamas or the Cayman Islands or wherever.” Huh. …the Clintons’ family wealth has grown big-time thanks to firms with significant holdings in places like . . . the Caymans. As The Daily Caller notes, Bill Clinton spent years as a partner in his (now-ex-) buddy Ron Burkle’s investment fund Yucaipa Global — registered in the Cayman Islands. …It’s a family thing: Chelsea Clinton’s hubby, Marc Mezvinsky, is a partner in a hedge fund with multiple holdings incorporated in the Cayman Islands.

This isn’t to criticize Cayman, by the way. It’s one of the best jurisdictions in the world if you want high levels of honest governance and very sensible tax and regulatory policies.

But shouldn’t politicians practice what they preach? So why aren’t Kerry and Clinton instead investing in France or Greece to show their support for high tax burdens?

By the way, the editorial also cited the Clinton family’s house, which is owned by a trust to help dodge the death tax, something that I also called attention to back in 2014.

Let’s shift from taxes to the environment. Writing for Real Clear Politics, Ed Conard takes aim at the moral preening of Leonardo DiCaprio.

Time Magazine released its list of the top 100 Most Influential People and placed Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover of its magazine for the personal example he sets on climate change. How Ironic! …According to the leaked Sony documents for example, DiCaprio took six private roundtrip flights from Los Angeles to New York over a 6-week period and, a private jet to the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland. Pictures of him vacationing on big yachts… What hypocrisy! He enjoys the very luxuries that he admonishes others not to indulge.

Oh, wait, he buys carbon offsets, the modern version of purchasing an indulgence.

But Mr. Conard is not very impressed by that bit of moral preening.

So who really paid for DiCaprio’s grossly polluting ways? The rest of the world of course, not DiCaprio. …A person’s consumption is their true cost to the rest of society, not their income, nor their unspent wealth. Does the tax DiCaprio imposes on himself for polluting the world reduce his polluting consumption? Hardly! In fact, it encourages more of it. …DiCaprio, and others like him, buy carbon offsets to sooth their guilt—guilt they never needed to incur in the first place. …they sooth their guilt by voting to spend someone else’s income helping others. They think they have done a good deed when they have really done nothing at all.

I’m not sure I agree that carbon is pollution, and I also don’t like referring to consumption as a cost, but he’s right on the money about DiCaprio being a fraud or a phony (something that Michelle Fields exposed in a recent interview).

Let’s now shift back to taxes.

When I was in Montreal last year for a conference on tax competition, one of the highlights was hearing Governor Sam Brownback talk about his pro-growth tax policy. My least favorite part of the conference, by contrast, was hearing Margaret Hodge, a politician from the United Kingdom, pontificate about the evils of tax avoidance.

And the reason that was such an unpleasant experience is that she’s a glaring hypocrite. Here are some excerpts from a report published by the International Business Times.

Labour’s Margaret Hodge was, according to The Times, among the beneficiaries in 2011 of the winding-up of a Liechtenstein trust that held shares in the private steel-trading business set up by her father. The Times reports that just under 96,000 Stemcor shares handed to Hodge in 2011 came from the tiny principality, which is renowned for low tax rates. Three quarters of the shares in the family’s Liechtenstein trust had previously been held in Panama, which Ms Hodge described last month as “one of the most secretive jurisdictions” with “the least protection anywhere in the world against money laundering”.

Let’s close by identifying one more hypocritical “champagne socialist” from the United Kingdom, as reported by the U.K.-based Telegraph.

Dame Vivienne is now accused of hypocrisy over tax avoidance allegations that put her in direct conflict with one of the Green Party’s main policies. The most recent company accounts show Dame Vivienne’s main UK business is paying £2 million a year to an offshore company set up in Luxembourg for the right to use her name on her own fashion label. Tax experts have described the arrangement as “tax avoidance” that cheats the UK Treasury out of about £500,000 a year. The model is similar to one used by Starbucks, the coffee chain, which found itself at the centre of a protest over its use of Luxembourg to reduce its tax bill in the UK. …One City accountant, who studied the accounts of Vivienne Westwood Ltd, said: “This has to be tax avoidance. Why else would you make these payments to a company in Luxembourg? It makes the Green Party hypocrites for taking her money and Westwood a hypocrite for backing a party with policies she does not appear to endorse.”

So we can add Ms. Hodge and Ms. Vivienne to the list of American leftists who also utilize tax havens to minimize their tax burdens.

And all of the people above, as well as those above, will be charter members of the Statist Hall of Fame whenever I get around to setting up that page.

And there are a lot more that deserve to be mocked for their statist hypocrisy.

Perhaps they are something that Barack Obama

Policy

greek-debt-crisis-flags

Greek flags shadowed by the Parthenon in Athens, Greece.

In my presentations about how to deal with budgetary deterioration and fiscal crisis, I often share with audiences a list of nations that have achieved very positive results with spending restraint.

The middle column shows how these countries limited the growth of government spending for multi-year periods. The next column of numbers reveals how multi-year spending restraint leads to significant reductions in the amount of economic output that is diverted to the government.

And when you address the underlying problem of excessive government spending, you automatically ameliorate the symptom of red ink, as shown in the final column of numbers.

golden-rule-examples

Source: IMF World Economic Outlook database.

At this point, I usually ask the audience whether they’ve ever seen a similar table that purports to show nations that have obtained similarly good results with tax increases. The answer is no, of course, though it’s not really a fair question to people who don’t study fiscal policy.

More important, I ask the same question when I have debates with my statist friends from left-wing organizations. They generally try to change the subject. Some of them bluster about “fairness.” And a few of them think Sweden is an acceptable answer until I point out that it became rich when government was small but began to lose ground once a large welfare state was imposed beginning in the 1960s (as explained in this video).

But Sweden wouldn’t be a good answer even if its economy hadn’t slowed down. That’s because the question is how to climb out of a fiscal hole. In which case Sweden actually provides evidence for my position!

To understand why tax increases aren’t the right way to deal with a fiscal mess, let’s look at Greece. From the moment the crisis began, Greek politicians started raising taxes. And they haven’t stopped, with many of the tax hikes being cheered by international bureaucracies.

This is a never-ending story.

With new chapters being written all the time. Here’s a report from Reuters on the latest “reform” package from Greece. As you might suspect, it’s basically a bunch of tax hikes. Here’s what the politicians approved on social insurance taxes.

Sets social security contributions at 20 percent of employees’ net monthly income – with 13.3 percent burdening employers and 6.7 percent employees. Reforms the social security contribution base from notional to actual incomes for the self-employed, including farmers and lawyers, forcing them to make a contribution to pension funds which is phased in over a five-year period to 20 percent of their income.

There are also income tax increases.

Lowers the income tax-free threshold, or personal allowance, to an average of around 8,800 euros a year from around 9,500; makes income bands narrower, increases tax coefficients. Lowest tax band is now 22 percent on a gross income of 20,000 a year compared to 22 percent for 25,000 euros which existed previously. The upper tax band, of 45 percent, is now imposed on gross incomes exceeding 40,000 as opposed to 42 percent on income above 42,000 under the previous arrangement. Includes EU farming subsidies on taxable income.

And there are further income tax hikes as part of the “solidarity” levy, which is basically another income tax.

Solidarity Levy…on net incomes ranges from the lowest 2.2 percent on incomes from 12,000 to 20,000 a year, to 5.0 percent up to 30,000, and 6.5 percent up to 40,000. The highest band is 10 percent on incomes above 220,000. By comparison, the highest band in that category was 8.0 percent before the new reform was pushed through, on earnings exceeding half a million euros.

And there also will be more double taxation.

Dividends Tax: Increases to 15 percent from 10 percent.

You would think this big package of tax hikes might satisfy the crowd in Athens for a year or two.

But that would be a very bad assumption. Amazingly, the politicians in Greece already are looking for additional victims, as reported by ABC News.

Already, a new bill is being prepared, calling for higher taxes on a range of products, from tobacco to beer to broadband Internet connections. This bill is expected to pass later in the month.

And they’re not exactly apologetic about their tax-aholic actions.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his ministers defended their plans, saying…that taxes were better than spending cuts. …Labor Minister George Katrougalos, who introduced the bill, said that…the bill’s provisions showed the way forward for social policy in a Europe dominated by pro-market “neoliberals.”

Sadly, Mr. Katrougalos may be correct. I won’t be surprised if the rest of Europe follows Greece off the cliff.

Though he’s smoking crack if he thinks the rest of the continent is dominated by neoliberals (i.e., classical liberals or libertarians).

Not that we’ve established that Greece has been trying to solve its fiscal mess with tax hikes, let’s look at the results.

Has debt been reduced? Hardly, though to be fair it seems to have stabilized.

In any event, we haven’t seen the big reductions in debt that are associated with spending restraint

And what about the economy? Here, the news is uniformly grim, doubtlessly in large part because of all the tax hikes.

It’s rather ironic this chart is based on periodic IMF forecasts since that bureaucracy is infamous for advocating endless tax hikes.

One wonders if the IMF bureaucrats will eventually learn some lessons?

I’m not holding my breath, just like I’m not optimistic that Greek politicians will address the real problem in their country of excessive dependency caused by a bloated public sector.

But maybe the rest of us (other than Hillary and Bernie) can learn what not to do.

P.S. For more information, here’s my five-picture explanation of the Greek mess.

P.P.S. And if you want to know why I’m so dour about Greece’s future, how can you expect good policy from a nation that subsidizes pedophiles and requires stool samples to set up online companies?

P.P.P.S. To offset the grim message of today’s column, let’s close with my collection of Greek-related humor.

This cartoon is quite  good, but this this one is my favorite. And the final cartoon in this post also has a Greek theme.

We also have a couple of videos. The first one features a video about…well, I’m not sure, but we’ll call it a European romantic comedy and the second one features a Greek comic pontificating about Germany.

Last but not least, here are some very un-PC maps of how various peoples – including the Greeks – view different European nations.

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To understand why tax increases aren’t the

Elections

Trump-Rally-Charleston-WV-Coal-Miners

People show their support as Donald Trump speaks in Charleston, West Virginia, on May 5, 2016. (Photo: Chris Tilley/Reuters)

West Virginia primary voters are heading to the polls today and early estimates show a record turnout in both the early vote and Election Day voting. The Charleston County Clerk’s Office said they had already far surpassed the previous record on Monday for the early vote and traffic at polling stations has been heavy and steady.

According to officials, there have been 100,962 early voting ballots received and 5,252 absentee ballots for a total 106,214 early votes. In 2008, they had less than 66,000 early ballots. Registration by party, officials say, can confuse just who exactly is heading to the polls. Traditional registered Democrats are flocking to presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, who won endorsements from coal mining groups that have back Democrats in all of the last six elections.

“People just like his no-nonsense, take-the-gloves-off attitude,” Chris Hamilton, vice president of the West Virginia Coal Association said. Mr. Hamilton’s group represents 95% of the state’s coal production. The trade group officially endorsed Mr. Trump earlier this week and Mr. Hamilton handed him a white miners’s helmet onstage at the Charleston rally on May 5 (see below).

Mr. Trump is running essentially unopposed for the first time this cycle in the West Virginia Primary. The PPD average of polls shows Mr. Trump had an enormous lead even before his two rivals dropped out after Indiana.

donald-trump-charleston

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump models a coal miner’s helmet during his rally in Charleston, West Virginia, on May 5, 2016. (Photo: Mark Lyons/Getty Images)

On the Democratic side, there are 29 delegates are up for grabs in the populous state. Based upon the PPD average of polls, Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders is expected to defeat frontrunner and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

Sen. Sanders has clobbered his rival over anti-coal remarks she made and called for investing $41 billion to rebuild the coal-mining communities and create clean energy jobs.

“While I strongly believe we need to combat climate change … let me be clear: We cannot abandon communities that have been dependent on coal and other fossil fuels,” Sen. Sanders said at a May 4 rally.

Mrs. Clinton, who won the state with more than 60% of the vote in 2008 against then-Sen. Barack Obama, has been trying to walk back comments the New York senator made on CNN in March.

“We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” Mrs. Clinton said.

The former secretary of state held a series of events last week vowing to develop an economic support package for struggling residents. She secured the endorsements of fellow Democrats in the state, including West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin. However, Mrs. Clinton was approached by a voter about the comment and claimed it was taken out of context. Of course, it wasn’t and the remark hasn’t gone over well.

Bernie-Sanders-Rally-Morgantown-WV

Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders holds a rally in Morgantown, West Virginia on May 5, 2016 at the Waterfront Place Hotel. (Photo: Video/PPD)

In 2015, coal production in the U.S. fell to its lowest level in nearly three decades, or less than 900 million tons. Dozens of U.S. mining companies, to include Peabody Energy Corp. (OTCMKTS:BTUUQ) and Arch Coal Inc. (OTCMKTS:ACIIQ), filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in recent months as their earnings declined and debt loads soared.

What’s plaguing the coal mining industry?

First, power plant operators are switching from coal and burning cheap, federal government-pushed natural gas to power their electricity. Second, China’s slowing economy has resulted in a lower global demand for metallurgical coal used in steelmaking, which has weighed down prices significantly considering prior trade deals allowed further manipulation.

Last but not least, strict federal clean air and water regulations are making it too expensive to operate coal plants, especially in older facilities. It’s the fulfillment of a campaign promise Obama made in 2008, which Mrs. Clinton promised to continue going forward.

As a result, six of the state’s southern counties have lost as much as a third of their employment in the last few years, and poverty numbers are now at record highs. West Virginia now has the highest per capita food stamp recipient number and by just talking to residents for a few minutes it becomes clear they don’t like it. They’d rather work.

West Virginia primary voters are heading to

Politics

Chris-Christie-Concord-NH-Town-Hall

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, addresses a town hall in Concord, N.H., on Monday. (Photo Credit: Sarah McCammon/NPR)

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has tapped New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to lead his White House transition team ahead of the general election.

“Governor Christie is an extremely knowledgeable and loyal person with the tools and resources to put together an unparalleled Transition Team, one that will be prepared to take over the White House when we win in November,” Trump said in a statement.

Gov. Christie was the first rival to endorse Mr. Trump for the GOP nomination and second to be chosen for an important role. His job is one any presidential nominee needs to get done. Dr. Ben Carson, who endorsed Mr. Trump following the New Jersey governor, is heading up his vice presidential vetting team–or the veepstakes.

Mr. Trump said Christie will oversee an “extensive team.” The Trump campaign said the candidate was moving into a general election mode and “implementing an infrastructure capable of securing a victory including making key hires, building a finance operation to benefit the Republican Party and unifying the party by working with several Republican leaders now voicing their support for Mr. Trump and his candidacy.”

Gov. Christie threw his support behind Mr. Trump after dropping out in February. Following his loss and Mr. Trump’s win in New Hampshire, Gov. Christie has been campaigning with the New York billionaire.

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has tapped

Polls

Trump Leads Clinton on Every Major Issue, Outperforming McCain and Romney, But Does Have Weaknesses

Trump-Clinton-NY

New York businessman Donald Trump, right, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, left, campaign for their party nomination on the trail. (Photos: AP/Getty)

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, leads Hillary Clinton in the battleground state of Ohio and is statistically tied in Florida and Pennsylvania. A new [content_tooltip id=”38038″ title=”Quinnipiac University (Q-Poll)”] survey released Tuesday finds Mr. Trump ahead 43% to 39% in the Buckeye State, a state he lost to Ohio Gov. John Kasich with more votes than Mrs. Clinton won it by against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

In Florida, which serves as Mr. Trump’s second home, Mrs. Clinton has a statistically insignificant 1-point lead, 43% to 42%. In Pennsylvania, a state Republicans haven’t carried since 1988, the poll finds the exact same margin.

“Six months from Election Day, the presidential races between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the three most crucial states, Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, are too close to call,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac Poll. “At this juncture, Trump is doing better in Pennsylvania than the GOP nominees in 2008 and 2012. And the two candidates are about where their party predecessors were at this point in Ohio and Florida.”

iOhio

Mr. Trump would do a better job than Mrs. Clinton handling the economy by a 52% to 40%. He also leads on who would be better on terrorism, 48% to 43%, according to the poll. Independent voters break 40% for the presumptive Republican nominee and 37% for his likely Democratic rival.

The gender and racial gaps are wider than usual in Ohio, where Mr. Trump holds a 4-point lead over Mrs. Clinton. He carries men by a whopping 51% to 36%, while she only leads among women 43% to 36%. White voters go for the Republican candidate 49% to 32%, a margin that is all but certain to increase based on prior patterns, but non-white voters vote are only back the Democratic candidate 76% to 14%.

Mr. Trump is actually more well-liked than the former secretary of state, where Mrs. Clinton gets a negative 34/62 favorability, compared to Trump’s 36/57.

“Ohioans oppose ‘The Wall’ 52 – 45 percent, while they are overwhelmingly in favor of requiring a photo ID for anyone wanting to vote,” Brown said. “They are happy with the economy and satisfied with the way things are going in the state – all of which is a nice testament to Gov. John Kasich, who dropped out of the White House race last week, but might be back as Trump’s running mate.”

IFlorida

Voters in the Sunshine State say by a 54% to 40% margin that Mr. Trump would do a better job than Mrs. Clinton handling the economy, and prefer him by 49% to 43% on who would be better on terrorism.

lPennsylvania

Pennsylvania voters say by a 51% to 42% margin that Mr. Trump would do a better job than Mrs. Clinton handling the economy, while they are divided on who best would handle terrorism–47% for Mr. Trump and 46% for Mrs. Clinton.

Until now, PPD’s senior political analyst Richard Baris has been a lone voice in the wilderness in agreement with The Donald on the Keystone State. In this cycle, we have witnessed one of the most significant shifts in partisan allegiance ever. This year alone, 61,500 Democrats have switched over to Republican registration and there has been a 145,000 jump in Republican registrations since the fall 2015 election.

“That’s more new Republicans than in the previous four years combined,” Mr. Baris said. “We typically view any generic GOP presidential candidate entering the state with a deficit of at least 200,000 votes. Not Donald Trump. The trend in those numbers has exploded with his candidacy and the primary vote indicated the typical rules in the state don’t apply to him.”

Overall

While the survey is undoubtably good news for Mr. Trump, there are weaknesses.

“By wide margins, voters in all three states say Clinton is more intelligent than Trump and by smaller margins, voters in all three states say she has higher moral standards,” Mr. Brown noted.

Voters question his temperament in each of the states polled and believe she is better equipped, at least now. Further, he is seen as less intelligent, despite his accomplishments. His demeanor during the primary no doubt contributed to this, and it is something he will have to work on considering Republicans need at least two of the three states to win the White House.

“This election may be good for divorce lawyers. The gender gap is massive and currently benefits Trump,” Mr. Brown added. “In Pennsylvania, Clinton’s 19-point lead among women matches Trump’s 21-point margin among men. In Ohio, she is up 7 points among women but down 15 points with men. In Florida she is up 13 points among women but down 13 points among men.”

Worth noting, Sen. Sanders performs far better against Mr. Trump than Mrs. Clinton, though only in Pennsylvania does that disparity have any statistical significance. Sen. Sanders gets 43% to Mr. Trump’s 41% in Ohio; 44% to 42% in Florida; and, 47% to 41% in Pennsylvania.

Based upon polling, it would appear Sen. Sanders is headed for another win on Tuesday in West Virginia, making the Mountain State his second straight win after Indiana. Nevertheless, particularly when factoring in superdelegates, Mrs. Clinton’s dominance in the South and among minority voters has resulted in a large delegate lead.

On the Republican side, Mr. Trump is set to easily stomp his rivals, both of whom have suspended their campaign. He leads on the average of polls by double-digits and received the first coal miners endorsement for a Republican candidate in the state since Ronald Reagan. He remains on track delegate-wise to sow up the nomination.

“The most noteworthy findings in these polls is that rank-and-file Republican voters have already and largely coalesced behind Donald Trump,” Baris added. “The media obviously obfuscates division among party leaders with actual Republican voters. Talking conservative heads on cable and network news just don’t represent the electorate. Shocker.”

Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, leads

Opinion

Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump Holds Indiana Primary Night Gathering In New York

NEW YORK, NY – MAY 03: Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump speaks to supporters and the media at Trump Tower in Manhattan following his victory in the Indiana primary on May 03, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Another week has passed and I’m still unenthusiastic about Donald Trump’s presumptive GOP presidential nomination. Instead of allaying our fears, he’s intensifying them — as if on purpose.

Throughout the primaries I’ve expressed doubt that Trump is a reliable conservative, and my skepticism has already been vindicated.

Yes, I’ve held my nose and supported RINO nominees before, always believing that less damage to the conservative cause and nation would come in supporting those candidates. But with Trump we have a different situation than ever before.

Trump opponents have not only denied Trump’s conservatism; they’ve also warned that it would be a gamble to bank on any of Trump’s campaign promises.

His supporters insist that he has changed, like “Ronald Reagan changed.” But Reagan became the national spokesperson for conservatism for years. Trump, on the other hand, has never even claimed to have a conversion, and he speaks of conservatism as if it’s a chain around his neck, not the best remedy for America. Further, Trump seems to change his stance on issues every other day. How can anyone feel comfortable with that?

Now that he’s virtually the nominee, Trump is beginning to change his positions on major issues — defiantly. It’s obvious he doesn’t believe he’s accountable to voters, only to himself.

Trump said on ABC’s “This Week” that he’s very different from everyone else who’s ever run for office, so perhaps the party doesn’t need to be unified in the traditional sense. He thinks he’s going to get millions of Democrat voters. “I’m going to get Bernie people to vote because they like me on trade. I have to stay true to my principles, also, and I’m a conservative, but don’t forget this is called the Republican Party. It’s not called the Conservative Party.”

None of this bothers Trump’s supporters, who say he’s electable despite his negative approval ratings because he’ll put blue states in play.

But if true, which I doubt, at what price — being liberal on many issues, including trade?

And what does Trump mean that he’ll have to be true to his principles? How can we possibly know what those principles are, as they don’t appear to be moored in any coherent philosophy of governance?

Is Trump firm on any position, other than the wall and tariffs? Those may be all that matters to some voters, but forgive me for not being so narrow in focus.

Putting aside his secret interview with The New York Times in which he allegedly confessed that even his positions on immigration would be negotiable, he’s already hinted that he supports “touchback” amnesty.

Plus, last week he also said he was going to tax the rich — not just hedge funders, but all high-income earners. Never mind that he put out a written tax plan promising to reduce the highest income tax rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent. That was just his opening gambit, you see. To him, everything is a negotiation. He shamelessly admitted on “This Week” that his plan shows those taxes going down, “but by the time it’s negotiated, they’ll go up.”

I pointed this out to Trump supporters on Twitter and they cynically said he had to say what he needed to say to win. Just like they defended him as a buyer of political influence because he had to protect his empire. Just as they’ll doubtlessly defend his ludicrous statement that he’ll reduce the national debt by negotiating with our creditors, full faith and credit of the United States be damned.

I then asked them how they know he isn’t just saying what he needs to say now to win the general. Ah, but who cares? A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little Lyin’ Ted Cruzers.
Trump has also reneged on his pledge not to raise the minimum wage, and he’s rationalizing his flip like he did his transgender bathroom support — it’s a states’ rights issue. Oh, yes, he’s now a 10th Amendment crusader.

Trump’s boast that he would finance his own campaign to be free of political influence has also gone by the wayside, but don’t expect his supporters to object, though it was one of their main stated reasons for supporting him.

Though it is the Trump supporters’ prerogative to be blindly forgiving on his brazen flip-flops and his behavior, how can they be surprised that the rest of us won’t fall in line?

His campaign manager, Paul Manafort, arrogantly proclaimed that the people have endorsed Trump’s agenda, so the onus is on Republicans to move toward Trump and not the other way around. May we at least ask, “Just what is that agenda? What Trump statements can we rely on? Are any non-negotiable?”

Conservatives are more nervous than they’ve ever been about a GOP presidential nominee. We’ve always understood the threat Obama represents to the nation, but we could fight him like blazes because he’s on the other team. Now we have a guy, ostensibly on our own team, who is problematic in too many ways to count, and is all over the board and mostly moving left — as we predicted.

Despite his supporters’ blithe dismissal of Trump’s unlikability, FiveThirtyEight reports, “Trump’s average ‘strongly unfavorable’ rating, 53 percent, is 20 percentage points higher than every candidate’s rating besides Clinton’s.” Even if Trump continues moving left, it’s doubtful Democrats will trust him any more than conservatives do.

As such, Team Trump better reconsider its apparent decision to continue to snub and insult the conservative base. Constitutional conservatives are not about to go down without a fight — not because of sour grapes or ego, but because they know the country can’t survive the destruction of the conservative movement, as the nation can’t turn itself around without reaffirming its founding principles. To win their support, Trump will have to prove to them he’ll mostly govern like a conservative, not like a liberal or a guy who constantly flips a coin.
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Instead of allaying my fears, Donald Trump

Opinion

Bernie-Sanders-National-Press-Club

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders holds a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Sunday. (Photo: Getty Images)

Bernie Sanders is almost certainly not going to be the Democratic nominee. Though he retains a devoted following, the crowds, the attention and the money are no longer what they were — death for a campaign built on momentum. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, holds a virtually insurmountable lead in both delegates and votes.

Passion is a valuable commodity in politics, and the time has come for team Sanders to redirect it. There are two useful paths at this point. No. 1 is joining Democrats, sensible Republicans and the rest of civilization in defeating the appalling Donald Trump. If Sanders and his troops can graft their idealism onto the realism of Clinton’s campaign, then Trump goes down in a pink puff of stage powder smoke.

No. 2 is turning that liberal energy into an enduring political force. That would require making the “movement” less about Bernie and more about ideas.

The thorny question is, how much of Sanders’ support is tied to one man? Sanders has won many young hearts, but turning a fan base into a voting bloc is not easy.

Some of Sanders’ more ardent backers seem to have taken Clinton’s criticisms of Sanders personally. A few vow to wave the bloody shirt, rather than support Clinton in the general election. It is Sanders’ job to lay out the stakes for them.

Whether he will wield that shovel is not entirely clear. Sanders says he will work to prevent a Trump presidency. But is he able to join a parade in which he is not grand marshal?

And there remain opportunities to get final digs in on Clinton. The greatest one will be the Democratic National Convention, where Sanders vows “to fight as hard as we can … to make sure that we have a progressive platform.” You wonder whom he might want to smite and about what.

This might pain some of the revolutionaries, but in terms of getting progressive policies into law, Clinton has done worlds more than has Sanders. So have Elizabeth Warren and other members of the party that Sanders chose not to be a member of.

On the plus side, Sanders gives a rousing speech, and that’s not a small thing. (If only Clinton could borrow some of his populist thunder.) And for all the misgivings many have about his quixotic visions and youthful rumblings about “the establishment,” Sanders beyond a doubt has emboldened Democrats to champion their beliefs without apology.

And on the plus-plus side, some former Sanders staffers have started a group called Brand New Congress to turn the focus toward electing strong liberals to Congress. Without a cooperative Congress, the most progressive president is hampered. Just ask Barack Obama.

Opportunity knocks. With the scary Trump at the top of the ticket, Republicans risk losing their large House majority. There’s a reason, beyond conservative principles, why House Speaker Paul Ryan has taken the extraordinary step of withholding support for Trump.

By the way, Brand New Congress is a PAC. It’s into raising money for candidates. As Sanders correctly keeps saying, campaign finance overhaul is desperately needed. But as realists say, you need money right now to elect the people who would do the overhauling.

If Democrats retake the Senate majority, which is a strong possibility, Sanders would be in line to head the Senate budget committee. This is a choice chairmanship offering much power over taxes and spending.

But there’s a general election standing between now and that prospect. Can Sanders move his fiercest devotees to cast a ballot for her? And would he actually campaign for Clinton in earnest? The answer to this we are “Berning” to know.

Bernie Sanders is almost certainly not going

Opinion

Wall Street Journal editor Jason Riley (Photo: Fox News)

Wall Street Journal editor Jason Riley (Photo: Fox News)

Jason Riley has now joined the long and distinguished list of people invited–and then disinvited–to give a talk on a college campus, in this case Virginia Tech.

Mr. Riley is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and, perhaps most relevantly, author of a very insightful book titled “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.”

In short, Jason Riley’s views on race are different from the views that prevail on most college campuses. At one time, 50 years ago or earlier, exposing students to a different viewpoint was considered to be a valuable part of their education. But that was before academia — and the education system in general — became virtually a monopoly of the political left.

Today one can literally go from kindergarten to becoming a graduate student seeking a Ph.D., without ever hearing a vision of the world that conflicts with the vision of the left.
Conservative critics who object on grounds that the views of the left are wrong miss the point. Regardless of whose views become a monopoly, education suffers. John Stuart Mill understood this back in the middle of the 19th century.

As a young Marxist in college during the 1950s heyday of the anti-Communist crusade led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, I had more freedom to express my views in class, without fear of retaliation, than conservative students have on many campuses today.

After being invited by conservative students to give talks at various colleges, Jason Riley has then been surprised at how little those conservative students have said during the question and answer periods after these talks. But a Wellesley student explained: “You get to leave when you’re done. We have to live with these people until we graduate.”

Even liberal professors can be adversely affected by the narrow groupthink that prevails. Without an opposition to keep them on their toes, they can develop sloppy habits of dismissing or even demonizing differing viewpoints, instead of practicing and teaching their students how to come to grips with opposing beliefs.

A well-known Harvard professor, for example, recently referred to Justice Clarence Thomas by remarking: “He’ll say he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. I say I was in the right place at the right time.”

It so happens that I first met Clarence Thomas back in 1978, when he was a young lawyer in Missouri. In all these years, I have never heard him say anything even resembling what has been blithely attributed to him by this Harvard professor.

On the contrary, Justice Thomas has attributed his good fortune to his grandfather who raised him, especially in his autobiography, “My Grandfather’s Son.”

When he was sworn in as a Justice of the Supreme Court, he brought the nuns who had taught him in school, down in Georgia, to the ceremony in Washington, at his own expense, to let them know that what they had done for him was appreciated, and had not been in vain.

There is no reason why our Harvard professor has to agree with Justice Thomas’ judicial philosophy or his social views. But, as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan once put it: “You’re entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.”

It was much the same story when a faculty member at the University of California at Santa Barbara referred to economist Walter Williams as someone “committed to the welfare of the top few.”

It so happens that I have known Walter Williams since 1969. In all those years, I have never once known him to express the slightest concern for the welfare of rich people. But what I have seen repeatedly has been his expressing his concern for people who are poor, both in words and in deeds.

As an economist, Professor Williams knows that high tax rates on investors chase investments — and American jobs — overseas, where American working people cannot get those jobs. But, whether the academic in Santa Barbara agrees or disagrees with that analysis, it is no good for him, or for his students, to dismiss opposing views by misrepresenting them.

These are just a few samples of the intellectual and moral dry rot on the many campuses across the country where the groupthink of the left substitutes for education.

[mybooktable book=”wealth-poverty-and-politics-an-international-perspective” display=”summary” buybutton_shadowbox=”true”]

Jason Riley has now joined a long

Politics

Obama-Lynch

Attorney General Loretta Lynch, left, speaks at the U.S. Mission in Geneva, while President Barack Obama, right, speaks in the Oval Office in the wake of San Bernardino. (Photos: Getty)

On Monday, the Justice Department and North Carolina filed dueling lawsuits over the state’s controversial transgender bathroom law, the in the Tar Heel State showdown. The Obama administration filed their brief after the state filed a declaratory judgment asking the federal courts to clarify federal law.

“They created state-sponsored discrimination against transgender individuals,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a press conference late Monday afternoon.

In a suit filed late Monday in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, the Justice Department alleged a “pattern or practice of employment discrimination on the basis of sex” against the state of North Carolina over the law requiring transgender people to use bathrooms that correspond with the sex on their birth certificate.

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory was sent an ultimatum in a letter on Wednesday May 4 claiming the law violates the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964. The state law requires transgender people to use bathrooms that match the sex printed on their birth certificate and it applies only to government offices, universities and road-side rest stops, not every bathroom in the state.

“This is not just a North Carolina issue, this is now a national issue,” Gov. McCrory said at a press conference Monday afternoon. “We believe a court rather than a federal agency should tell our state, our nation and employers across the country what the law requires.”

To be clear, the Civil Rights Act was intended to protect racial minorities against discrimination in education and the workplace. There are separate laws targeted toward gender, but they are meant to protect women, not men who say they are women and visa versa.

“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not address gender or sexuality,” said Judge Andrew Napolitano, a columnist at PPD and Fox News’ senior legal analyst. “This is a typical clash of a 50-year-old statute that was written in a time when transgender wasn’t even an issue.”

In his lawsuit, Gov. McCrory accused the administration of a “baseless and blatant overreach” and argued their opposition to the law was based on a “radical interpretation” of the Civil Rights Act.

“This is an attempt to unilaterally rewrite long-established federal civil rights laws in a manner that is wholly inconsistent with the intent of Congress and disregards decades of statutory interpretation by the Courts,” the state’s suit, filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of North Carolina, said.

The Tar Heel State has been the target of a relatively insignificant boycott from certain businesses. PayPal Holdings Inc.(NASDAQ:PYPL), for instance, cancelled the opening of an office in the state, though they also do business in nations that punish homosexuality with death. PPD requested the company’s comment to the obvious contradiction but have received no response.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration will push the issue of transgendered bathrooms even further. They will seek to ensure transgender students are protected under federal law. A source in the White House, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the push will cite a federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in federally funded education programs and other related activities. The source said the president will deploy multiple agencies in a multi-pronged approach.

The Justice Department and North Carolina filed

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