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 I recently received my concealed weapons carry permit for Rhode Island. During the lengthy permitting process, I had a number of excellent and most informative conversations with police officers, which were worth their weight in gold. One such conversation was about the dangers we knowingly and unknowingly face on the streets today. One officer told me that since 9/11, the sheer number of threats is through the roof.
Here in Newport, RI there have been bomb threats at the public schools all week leading to evacuations yesterday. And that’s only what the public hears about. It’s time you think long and hard about protecting yourself and your family in every legal way possible. I am.
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Traders at Goldman Sachs have a keen sense of value, and it is most unlikely that they are trading $675,000 just for the entertainment value of Hillary Clinton appearances, suggests the WSJ.
The long-standing arrangement between Democrats and financial giants like Goldman is that the politicians collect money and get to pose as populists by publicly attacking the big banks, and in return the big banks enjoy high regulatory barriers that prevent smaller firms from competing with them. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer has perfected this bargain, which may have reached its zenith with the Dodd-Frank law of 2010, which brought Wall Street giants and Washington into a historically intimate embrace.
President Obama has railed against Wall Street for the last seven years, arguing—quite truthfully—that the U.S. economy is rigged for the benefit of wealthy financiers. The conundrum now facing the Democratic Party is how it will persuade voters to support Wall Street’s favorite Democrat, even as Mrs. Clinton promises that she is going to break up the big banks and “jail them if they should be jailed”?
She can tell people whatever she wishes. But according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which maintains a searchable database of contributions reported to the Federal Election Commission, the securities and investment industry is Mrs. Clinton’s single greatest source of support. Financiers have given her campaign and other pro-Clinton political operations more than $17 million, compared with a little less than $78,000 for Mr. Sanders.
It’s not hard to connect the dots as to why Goldman Sachs paid Hillary Clinton $675,000 for giving three speeches. Is the bill for the political price of accepting money from Wall Street’s den of thieves finally coming due for Hillary Clinton? Read more here.
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You get a real clear picture looking at this map (from the Tax Foundation) on corporate income tax rates by state as to why so many businesses are moving, for example, from California to Austin, Texas. Businesses go to where they’re well-treated. For start-ups, meaning entrepreneurs, that means moving from state to state. For global players it’s moving from country to country.
The latest hit to American business comes from Johnson Controls’ merger with Tyco International, headquartered in Ireland. The other real kicker here is it that JC had plenty of your (taxpayer) help to stick around.
Johnson Controls Inc. was as patriotic as they come back in 2008, when the U.S. auto industry was teetering on bankruptcy and the Glendale-based maker of car parts knew it desperately needed help from U.S. taxpayers.
The company’s president at the time, Keith Wandell, didn’t hesitate to ask Congress to support the massive government bailout that ultimately rescued two major U.S. automakers, along with uncounted businesses that provide parts and services to them.
“It saved a whole lot of suppliers that would have gone out of business,” said Steve Roell, then Johnson Controls’ chief executive.
And the auto bailout wasn’t the only government handout to benefit Johnson Controls in the past decade. In 2010, for example, it received $299 million from the Energy Department to ramp up production of hybrid batteries. The state of Michigan awarded it millions of dollars for the same project.
Our friend, Dan Mitchell, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, writes in Fortune:
In the words of the late Yogi Berra, it’s déjà vu all over again. The merger of Johnson Controls JCI -1.90% and Tyco International has triggered a lot of whining and complaining in Washington because the combined company will be based in low-tax Ireland instead of high-tax America.
Not that anyone should be surprised. In almost all cases of high-profile, cross-border mergers, such as the Pfizer-Allergan deal last year and the Burger King- Tim Horton deal the previous year, the new company chooses to be domiciled where there’s better tax laws.
Some U.S. politicians respond to these mergers with demagoguery about “economic treason,” but that’s silly. These corporate unions are basically the business version of a couple in a long-distance relationship that decides to live where the economic outlook is brighter after getting married.
The bottom line is that U.S.-domiciled firms are being forced to compete while burdened with a tax code that is uniquely destructive.
So instead of blaming the victims, the folks in Washington should do what’s right for the country by trying to deal with the warts that make America’s tax system so unappealing for multinational firms.
There are two main problems. The first is that the United States now has the world’s highest corporate tax rate. With a 35% levy from Washington, augmented by smaller state corporate taxes, the combined burden is more than 39%.
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With growing and stunning evidence of Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information, Andrew C. McCarthy writes that we have an egregious situation in which:
(a) Obama knowingly communicated with Clinton over a non-government, non-secure e-mail system.
(b) Obama and Clinton almost certainly discussed matters that are automatically deemed classified under the president’s own guidelines.
(c) At least one high-ranking government official (Petraeus) has been prosecuted because he failed to maintain the security of highly sensitive intelligence that included policy-related conversations with Obama.
As Mr. McCarthy notes, President Obama is under intense political pressure “not to permit an indictment that would doom his party’s presumptive presidential nominee. Now, factor in the embarrassment a prosecution could cause the president personally.”
“Many have asked why Hillary Clinton has not been charged already.” Read NRO’s Andrew McCarthy explanation of Obama’s growing conflict of interest in the Clinton e-mail scandal.
More from McCarthy on Hillary Clinton here:
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Pat Buchan explains to readers, “Marco is the fallback position of a reeling establishment that is appalled by Trump, loathes Cruz, and believes Rubio — charismatic, young, personable — can beat Hillary Clinton.”
Cruz, Trump, Carson — the outsiders — won over 60 percent of all caucus votes. Their anti-Washington messages, Trump and Cruz’s especially, grew the GOP turnout to its largest in history, 186,000, half again as many as participated in the record turnout of 2012.
Most significant, 15,000 more Iowans voted in GOP caucuses than the Democratic caucuses, where participation plummeted 30 percent from 2008.
…
just as a stifling of the Trump-Cruz-Carson rebellion, with another establishment favorite like Rubio, would bank all the fires of enthusiasm in the GOP, Clinton’s rout of Sanders would cause millions of progressives and young people who rallied to Bernie to give up on 2016.
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 Jonah Goldberg brings up an interesting point about Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton—neither is a natural politician. But with Sanders it works, says Jonah; with Hillary it doesn’t. Whatever you think of Sanders, “it’s pretty apparent that he is sincere. The man is drawn in indelible ink and there’s no erasing the contours of his soul.”
Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has been drawn in pencil, erased, re-drawn and re-erased so many times — like a little kid doing over a stick figure again and again on the same piece of paper — that the gray smudges and worn-away tears in the paper are far more permanent than the lines.
It’s not that Hillary can’t be sincere, it’s that she’s faked sincerity for so long, about so many things, she can’t really be sure if she’s being sincere.
This helps explain why her sense of humor can be so awful. When you joke, by definition you’re not being sincere. But if you don’t know what sincerity is, you can’t successfully craft something fake. It’s like trying to forge a painting with no clear memory of the image you’re trying to copy.
When asked if she “wiped” her server, she responded, “Like with a cloth or something?” No doubt she thought this was a clever retort, but the retort landed squarely in the land between sincerity and humor known as failed sarcasm. Almost all of her “jokes” and a lot of her “sincerity” land there because the only feeling she’s really in touch with is resentment at having to answer to all the little people.
But Mr. Goldberg has a problem with Bernie. Mr. Sanders—a man who denounces the political system as corrupt—is a coward. Bernie Sanders refuses “to connect the corruption of the political system to the corruption of House Clinton.”
By Bernie’s standards, Hillary Clinton is incredibly corrupt. Isn’t the Clinton Foundation—masquerading as a charity—a violation of everything Sanders stands for?
“If Bernie Sanders had the conviction of a real Communist, or even one of America’s great socialists, he would make this personal, he would recognize the opportunity he has and seize upon it.” Read more on Hillary and Bernie from NRO’s Jonah Goldberg here.
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I much like the polling work done by Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight gang. As such, I turned to them first for a confirmation look at the last Republican debate before the New Hampshire primary. In their excellent review, Rubio was the big loser, which works for me. Also at the bottom of the rankings was Dr. Ben Carson, who, hard to believe, has not yet thrown in the towel. The New Hampshire debate Blue Ribbon was taken by Chris Christie, who I would like to see make some headway. Ted Cruz failed to impress, and Donald Trump just sailed along without making many Trumpian waves.
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The only way to get out of a debt disaster without making hard choices about spending cuts or raising extra revenue via taxes, is to ruin your currency through inflation. The problem for politicians though, is that the U.S. dollar is the nicest house in a bad neighborhood, for now anyway. And the U.S. government can’t let that continue forever if they want to avoid an austerity reckoning.
Inflation, for the most part, is how we regularly get out of debt as a country. “The post-WWII debt decline was partly due to strong economic growth, but mainly due to the government shafting bondholders with unexpected inflation. Inflation reduces the real value of outstanding debt, and thus imposes losses on creditors. The ability to cut real debt by inflation depends on the debt’s maturity and whether creditors expect inflation. If the average maturity is long, the government can reduce the real debt load with unexpected inflation,” writes Cato’s Chris Edwards.
The problem today is that the average maturity on the debt is half of what it was in the 40s (you need more time on the clock to let inflation do its ruinous work) and the ownership, rather than 100% U.S. investors, is half owned by foreigners. Inflating the money supply quickly to deal with the shorter term debt could anger Americans and damage political careers. And don’t expect foreign creditors to go quietly into the night if they get paid back with mini dollars. Unlike the post-World War II era, politicians and Federal Reserve bankers will have to use more finesse if they want to employ inflation to manage America’s debt without causing trouble for themselves at home and abroad in the process.
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The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison writes about “the awful State of Republican foreign policy debate” and bemoans the loss of Rand Paul from the field. Writers at The American Conservative, along with the Cato Institute and regular posts from Pat Buchanan and Michael Scheuer, are among a handful of sources you can turn to for foreign policy and national security intelligence based on prudence and restraint.
Daniel tells readers that none of the Republican candidates gives the slightest sign of valuing prudence or restraint. I unfortunately agree 100% with Daniel. Given my bad feelings there are two potential openings from the remaining group of Republican candidates.
Number one regards Jeb Bush. And yes, I recognize that to date Jeb has been the biggest disappointment of all the Republican pretenders. In fact, I believed from the start of the campaign season that Jeb would make the best president by a wide margin, which I still believe. I am convinced that Jeb has learned from the errors of his brother that the Iraq invasion was a disaster from the start and that the Paul Wolfowitz/Bill Kristol-led neocon crowd steered George W. wrong from the start. As such, I think Jeb has been blowing a lot of foreign policy smoke and that if elected could be counted upon to tack toward a Brent Scowcroft sort of foreign policy realism. Moreover, I think Jeb Bush is a good guy who would really have the best interests of Americans at heart.
Next Ted Cruz. To date Ted has made a complete hash of his foreign policy position. Cruz has absolutely astonished me with the stupidity of his remarks. Ted Cruz is just too smart to actually believe the nonsense he has been putting forth. I say this even though the group of foreign policy advisors surrounding Cruz has an all too obvious neocon slant. If elected, I think that Cruz, like Jeb Bush, could be counted on to take a foreign policy approach based upon prudence and restraint.
FLASHBACK VIDEO: Some foreign policy common sense from Rand Paul:
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