• Cut the Army and Marines? By Richard C. Young
• Hillary’s Support of a 25% Gun Tax By E.J. Smith
• War With Russia? By Richard C. Young
• “Islamic Invasion of Europe” By Richard C. Young
• No Investigation? No Accountability? By Debbie Young
• Hordes of Non-Assimilable Migrants Inundating Europe By Richard C. Young
• VIDEO: SIG MCX: Exceeding the Standard By E.J. Smith
• “Hillary Parties Like It Is 1938” By Debbie Young

USS Freedom

In “Budgetary Savings from Military Restraint,” Cato Institute scholars Benjamin H. Friedman and Christopher Preble offer an initial harvest of restraint cuts. The authors tell readers that the initial menu does no “preclude consideration of further reductions.”

From an initial list of nineteen specific actions, I have selected the following as an initiation for readers:

• Cut the active-duty Army to 360,000 personnel.
• Cut the size of the Marine Corps from 202,000 to 145,000.
• Cancel the Littoral Combat Ship and develop a less expensive alternative.
• Build and operate fewer Air Force fighters.
• Make national missile defense a research program.
• Cut the Pentagon civilian workforce.

The United States confuses what it wants from its military, which is global primacy or hegemony, with what it needs, which is safety. … We can defend ourselves with far more restrained military objectives. … A policy of restraint that discourages state-building and permanent alliances would allow us to plan for fewer military actions and cut the size and cost of the military.

Back in 1993 Sen. Bill Bradley, D-NJ gained Hillary Clinton’s support for his idea of slapping stiff taxes on “purveyors of violence:” a 25 percent tax on guns and $2,500 license fees for gun dealers reported the AP. “Hillary’s 25 percent gun tax would discourage gun ownership and be a backdoor route to gun registration,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “Hillary has a long history of attacking gun owners.”

Writing at The American Conservative, founding editor Scott McConnell tells readers:

Americans will fairly soon come to see Iran both as a market for American goods and ideas and as a valuable ally against ISIS, the Sunni jihadist group that controls much of Iraq and Syria.

…

Everyone in Washington knows that Obama and his top aides have devoted 10 times more attention to Iran than to Russia, assuming perhaps that the logic of geopolitics would keep American-Russian relations on relatively even keel. But events have a way of surprising. Oh bitter irony were we to have peace with Iran, war with Russia. It could happen.

…

Hillary Clinton facilitated the rise of former Cheney aide (and wife of neocon strategist Robert Kagan) Victoria Nuland to the most powerful European post in the State Department. Obama had to placate Hillary, and the country looked the other way while Nuland pulled the levers to foment an anti-Russian coup in Kiev. Without this bit of caprice, would we be in the present showdown?

Reuters reports:

Tens of thousands of people, many fleeing war and Islamic State in Syria, are trying to get to Germany where Merkel has said they will be allowed to stay.

Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders called the wave of refugees pushing into Europe an “Islamic invasion,” [he continued] “Masses of young men in their twenties with beards singing Allahu Akbar across Europe.”  [and that it’s] “an Islamic invasion of Europe, of the Netherlands.”

Wilders’ “Party for Freedom leads Dutch opinion polls. Roughly 54 percent of Dutch voters are opposed to accepting more than roughly 2,000 refugees previously agreed.”

In early August, the EPA accidentally released over three million gallons of toxic waste water into one of America’s most scenic river systems—a tributary of the Animas River near Durango, Colorado. The EPA knew for over a year the risk involved in the cleanup, yet not one EPA employee is going to face criminal charges. Federal law protects EPA employees, even though staff at the abandoned mine failed to accurately gauge the water pressure within the mine. Americans will have to find comfort that EPA administrator Gina McCarthy is “absolutely, deeply sorry this ever happened.”

Bill Wehrum, a former administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, writes in the WSJ, “The agency (EPA) often criminalizes actions that are nothing more than accidents, many far less damaging to the environment than the Animas River disaster.” There is a serious problem within the EPA in how it conducts business. Read more from Mr. Wehrum here.

Former CIA bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer on Europe’s migrant invasion:

The migrants will produce further lawlessness, a debilitating level of societal tensions, enormous increases in the expense of social services and public housing, and contribute nothing worth having to the nations of the EU.”

The major and nearly only cause of the EU’s overwhelming influx of unwanted migrants is the relentless interventionism of the EU, NATO, and the United States in the Islamic world, and their refusal to win the wars they start there. Although such Western interventionism has been a constant since 1945, it has become a tool of first resort since the attacks of 9/11.

EU leaders ought, for a change, give some thought to Europe’s survival and station their member-states’ navies along the coast of North Africa and order them to forcibly return refugee-filled boats to the shore, even as they direct the EU bureaucracy to prepare the migrants return to their home states.

As Hillary’s poll numbers continue to slip and slide due to uneasiness about her integrity and candor in her State Department email chicanery, the Cato Institute’s Senior Fellow Alan Reynolds looks at Hillary Clinton’s “most memorable economic proposal,” ushered in this summer. Hillary is borrowing a page from Franklin D. Roosevelt, writes Mr. Reynolds in the WSJ, but she would be wise to note how that played out.

Clinton’s capital-gains tax proposal has been tried before—by FDR with disastrous results.

It is ironic, then, that Hillary Clinton’s fix for an economy suffering under 2% growth is resuscitating a tax scheme with a history of ushering in recessions.

A 2011 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis concluded that monetary policy tightening can’t explain the 1937-38 recession.” Instead, the “1936 tax rate increases seem more likely culprits in causing the recession.”

Read more here from Mr. Reynolds who explains how, after a 1938 congressional tax revolt, stocks rose immediately and the recession ended the following month.