Quotulatiousness

September 26, 2024

Glimmers of hope for lower taxes on US taxpayers

Filed under: Business, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

J.D. Tuccille welcomes the discussion among the Presidential candidates about lowering the taxes Americans have to pay, and points out that the economic distortions of the current tax code (including “temporary” measures introduced during WW2) make everyone less well-off:

Three months after proposing to end federal taxing of tips — an idea promptly confiscated without compensation by Kamala Harris’s campaign — Donald Trump doubled down by saying “we will end all taxes on overtime” if he’s elected president. Without a doubt, millions of Americans who resent government’s ravenous bite out of their paychecks immediately began contemplating just how much of their income they could shield from the tax man that way.

Tips and Overtime for Everybody!

“Can someone get paid in primarily tips and overtime?” quipped the Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome. “Asking for a few million friends.”

On a more serious note, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Sean Higgins thought exempting overtime pay “wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea … but, overall, it is not likely to make that much of a difference to most workers because overtime isn’t that common”. He’d been more strongly supportive of exempting tips because that “would put more money directly in the pockets of working Americans without either costing employers more or raising prices for customers”. He also liked that freeing tips from taxation would “keep tipping out of the reach of the regulatory state”.

But what if overtime pay becomes more common precisely because it’s not taxed?

The people at the Tax Foundation expect that’s exactly what will happen, just as Lincicome joked. Thinking through the implications of exempting overtime pay from taxation, Garrett Watson and Erica York warned that “exempting overtime pay from income tax would significantly distort labor market decisions. Employees would be encouraged to take more overtime work, and hourly or salaried non-exempt jobs may become more attractive if the benefit is not extended to salaried employees who are exempt from Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) overtime rules.”

The Tax Foundation’s Alex Muresianu had a similar reaction to the proposals to exempt tips from taxes from both Trump and Harris. He thinks “the proposal would make more employees and businesses interested in moving from full wages to a tip-based payment approach”. He foresaw “substantial behavioral responses, such as previously untipped occupations introducing tipping”.

Of course, a world in which more Americans receive their pay beyond the reach of the tax man is a welcome prospect to many of us. If politicians want to phase out income taxes, even unintentionally, who are we to complain? Hang on a minute while I set up my virtual tip jar. In fact, there’s precedent for government policy around wages to cause major unintended consequences. Take, for example, employer-provided healthcare coverage.

Government Policy Has Distorted Compensation Before

“One of the most important spurs to growth of employment-based health benefits was — like many other innovations — an unintended outgrowth of actions taken for other reasons during World War II,” according to the 1993 book, Employment and Health Benefits: A Connection at Risk. “In 1943 the War Labor Board, which had one year earlier introduced wage and price controls, ruled that contributions to insurance and pension funds did not count as wages. In a war economy with labor shortages, employer contributions for employee health benefits became a means of maneuvering around wage controls. By the end of the war, health coverage had tripled.”

Given that health benefits became a substitute form of compensation to escape a wage freeze, it’s not difficult to imagine the United States moving toward a situation in which a lot more people receive the bulk of their pay from untaxed tips and overtime pay.

September 19, 2024

German opinions are changing on the migration question

Filed under: Germany, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On of our key European commentators is back from a brief internet vacation and reports on recent changes in official German views on mass immigration:

There are other matters too, but before I can get to any of them, I must get this piece on the changing politics of mass migration in Germany off my chest. This is the most important issue facing Europe right now – more important than the folly of the energy transition, more crucial even than the fading memory of pandemic repression.

For nearly ten years, migration has felt like one of the most intractable problems in our entire political system. However crazy the policies, however contradictory and irrational, there was always only the towering mute wall of establishment indifference. It felt like the borders would be open forever, that we would have to sing vapid rainbow hymns to the virtues of diversity and inclusivity for the rest of our lives.

Suddenly, it no longer feels like that. Over the past weeks, a perfect storm of escalating migrant violence and electoral upsets in East Germany have changed the discourse utterly.

The cynical among you will say that none of this matters, that the migrants are still coming, that our borders are still open, and of course that’s true – as far as it goes. But it’s also true that there’s an order of operations here. A lot of things have to happen before we can turn return to a regime of normal border security, and I suspect they have to happen in a specific sequence: 1) Migrationist political parties have to feel electoral pressure and taste defeat at the ballot box first of all. 2) Then, as the establishment realises they are up against the limits of their ability to manipulate public opinion, the discourse around mass migration will have to shift, to deprive opposition parties of Alternative für Deutschland of their political advantage. Specifically, the lunatic oblivious press must begin to question the wisdom of allowing millions of unidentified foreigners to take up residence in our countries. This will then open the way for 3) the judiciary to revise their understanding of asylum policies and begin to interpret our laws in more rational, sustainable ways.

In Thüringen and Saxony, we have already had the electoral defeat of 1), and we will soon have more of it in Brandenburg. As a consequence of 1), we are now seeing some powerful glimmerings of 2). This is very important, because as the press expands the realm of acceptable discourse, a great many heretofore tabu thoughts and opinions are becoming irreversibly and indelibly conceivable.

Ten years ago, diversity was our strength, infinity refugees were our moral obligation and there were no limits to how many asylees we could absorb. Since August, not only Alternative für Deutschland but also that offshoot from the Left Party known as the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, the centre-right Christian Democrats, a substantial centrist faction of the Social Democrats, and many others beyond whatever “the extreme right” is supposed to be, agree that migration is in fact an enormous problem. They also agree that our moral obligations to the world’s poor and disadvantaged are finite, and that there are indeed clear limits to the number of asylees Germany can support. What is more, they are saying all of these things in the open.

September 13, 2024

“The problem [with America] is and has always been the people and their beliefs”

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray puts on the old biohazard suit and goes wading into the political book section, this time looking at two recent tomes by NeverTrumpers Robert Kagan and Tom Nichols:

Robert Kagan speaking in Warsaw, 2008-04-17.
Photo by Mariusz Kubik via Wikimedia Commons.

If you want to know where we are as a country, get your hands on a copy of Robert Kagan’s new book, Rebellion. Don’t worry, you won’t even need to crack the spine and open it. Kagan, who married the Queen of Eternal War Victoria Nuland and helped found the now defunct neoconservative Project for a New American Century, has written a warning about the dangerous renascence of antiliberalism in American political life: intolerance, a rejection of minority rights, hatred of progress. America is in deep trouble, Kagan warns. We’re close to losing our democracy! You can already see the freshness and originality of his thought.

Flip it. Take the book, turn it around, and look at that back cover, which carries an excerpt from inside, getting right to the meat of the thing. The problem isn’t the media, Kagan concludes. And it isn’t government. It isn’t a problem with institutions at all: “The problem is and has always been the people and their beliefs”. The thing that’s wrong with America is Americans, full stop. The country works brilliantly, except for the existence of the population. Imagine how healthy we would become if we could just get rid of them.

Should you make the mistake of opening the book, your experience will get worse in a hurry. The intellectual muddle is fatal. Here’s Kagan’s summary of the one big problem that runs through all of American history: “A straight line runs from the slaveholding South in the early to mid-nineteenth century to the post-Reconstruction South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the second Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, to the Dixiecrats of the 1940s and 1950s, to Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society of the 1950s and 60s, to the burgeoning Christian nationalist movement of recent decades, to the New Right of the Reagan Era, to the Republican Party of today.”

All of those movements are precisely the same, you see. Ronald Reagan was a latter-day Ben Tillman, the Birchers merely a rebrand for the 1940s Southern Democrats, and Barry Goldwater was a fitting heir to Nathan Bedford Forrest. A shrewd mind is at work here. All, Kagan concludes, were figures representing “antiliberal groups”: “All have sought to ‘make America great again,’ by defending and restoring the old hierarchies and traditions that predated the Revolution.” The American Revolution, he means. The Dixiecrats and the Birchers and Reagan and Trump all want to restore Parliamentary supremacy and the landed aristocracy, or … something.

But pretend, for a moment, that Kagan has made some form of coherent statement about American history. He is arguing for the protection of the liberal order, the dignity of the common man and the premise that we’re all created equal. At the same time, he says, the biggest problem with America is … the American people themselves. How do those two claims fit together? What kind of politics can we frame around the dignity and inherent worth of the common man, who is stupid and worthless?

See also, on this theme, anything the former U.S. Naval War College professor Tom Nichols has written in the last decade, such as his warning in Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy that “our fellow citizens are an intolerable threat to our own safety” — a claim that closely mirrors Kagan’s warning about America being plagued by Americans. Consider this framing very carefully: if a threat is intolerable, what do you have to do about it?

Kagan’s base argument sounded better in the original German.

September 11, 2024

“You call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye”

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Upheaval, N.S. Lyons reviews The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies by Auron MacIntyre:

Even when our nation’s dysfunction becomes too obvious to ignore, average Americans tend to comfort themselves with the story that it at least remains a democratic, constitutional republic. For such Americans, it’s probably been a confusing summer.

One moment the sitting president was, according to the near-universal insistence of mainstream media, sharp as a tack — all evidence to the contrary declared merely dangerous disinformation. The next he was suddenly agreed to be non compos mentis, unceremoniously ousted from the ballot for reelection, and replaced, not in a democratic primary but through the backroom machinations of unelected insiders. Overnight, the same media then converged to aggressively manufacture a simulacrum of sweeping grassroots enthusiasm for that replacement, the historically unpopular Kamala Harris. To call this a palace coup via The New York Times would seem not to stray too far from observable events.

What, some may wonder, just happened to our sacred democracy?

For those on the growing segment of American politics broadly known as the “New Right,” none of this was a surprise. The basic premise of the New Right — whose ranks notably include now-vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance — is that the governance of our country simply doesn’t function as we’re told it does. In fact, the United States has not operated as a constitutional republic for some time now; it is only the façade of one, effectively controlled by an unevictable cadre of rapacious plutocratic elites, corrupt party insiders, unelected bureaucrats, and subservient media apparatchiks — in short, a wholly unaccountable oligarchy.

Among the sharpest recent guides to this argument—and, in my view, to our current broader political moment—is a slim new book by the columnist and influential young New Right thinker Auron MacIntyre, titled The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies.

MacIntyre provides a dispassionate dissection of how, without any cabal or specific conspiracy, an elite class captured all our major public and private institutions, hollowed them out, set them all marching in lockstep against the American middle-class, and made a mockery of the notion of constitutional “checks and balances”. The resulting “total state” now operates in increasingly flagrant contradiction to the interests of the American people and democratic government while “wearing the old regime like a skinsuit”.

Essential to understanding this total state is the concept of managerialism, an idea first pioneered by an older generation of political thinkers like James Burnham which has been recovered from relative obscurity and re-employed by the New Right. In this framing, America is today effectively run by a “managerial elite”, which presides over a broader professional managerial class — think college administrators, corporate HR managers, and non-profit activists. Fundamentally, the business of such people is not producing or building anything, providing any essential service, or even making critical leadership decisions, but the manipulation and management — that is, surveillance and control — of people, information, money, and ideas.

The story of the fall of the American republic is the story of the managers’ rise to power everywhere.

In part, this was the inevitable outcome of technological and economic change following the industrial revolution, which made it necessary to expand the ranks of people schooled in managing large, complex organizations. But, as MacIntyre demonstrates, it was also the result of a deeply misguided urge, pioneered by early progressives, to de-risk and “depoliticize” politics by handing over decision-making to technocratic “experts”. The hope was that these experts could rationally and neutrally administer government and society from the top down, through the same principles and processes of “scientific management” first applied to the assembly line.

This proved disastrous.

September 9, 2024

Update your Overton Window – “[A]nyone to the immediate right of 2024 liberal democracy is a fascist”

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In Niccolo Soldo’s weekly commentary, a few insights into European “mainstream” political views on extreme right-wing crypto-fascists like … everyone who doesn’t support far left positions:

If you think that US media is bad, you should check out just how awful their German colleagues are. Their media is filled to the brim with daily hysteria about the Russians, Nazis, fascists, and so on. Every single day is a struggle to survive against these existential threats.

To the mainstream German media, a conservative Christian Democrat (the kind that ruled much of Western Europe during the Cold War) like Viktor Orban is a fascist in disguise. To the mainstream German media, a statist centrist like Vladimir Putin is Hitler without the disguise. A 90s Clinton Liberal like Donald Trump is both.

Thankfully, Der Spiegel reached out to writers and researchers who specialize in fascism to tell us that all of the above are fascists, and some are Nazis too:

    The reversion to fascism is a deep-seated fear of modern democratic societies. Yet while it long seemed rather unlikely and unimaginable, it has now begun to look like a serious threat. Vladimir Putin’s imperial ambitions in Russia. Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism in India. The election victory of Giorgia Meloni in Italy. Marine Le Pen’s strategy of normalizing right-wing extremism in France. Javier Milei’s victory in Argentina. Viktor Orbán’s autocratic domination of Hungary. The comebacks of the far-right FPÖ party in Austria and of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. Germany’s AfD. Nayib Bukele’s autocratic regime in El Salvador, which is largely under the radar despite being astoundingly single-minded, even using the threat of armed violence to push laws through parliament. Then there is the possibility of a second Trump administration, with fears that he could go even farther in a second term than he did during his first. And the attacks on migrant hostels in Britain. The neo-Nazi demonstration in Bautzen. The pandemic. The war in Ukraine. The inflation.

Meloni, Modi, Milei, Wilders, Bukele … all are suspected of crypto-fascism here.

Trump? “Fascist”, says neo-conservative Robert Kagan:

    In May 2016, Donald Trump emerged as the last Republican standing following the primaries, and the world was still a bit perplexed and rather concerned when the historian Robert Kagan published an article in the Washington Post under the headline “This is how fascism comes to America.”

    The piece was one of the first in the U.S. to articulate concerns that Trump is a fascist. It received significant attention around the world and DER SPIEGEL published the article as well. It was an attention-grabbing moment: What if Kagan is right? Indeed, it isn’t inaccurate to say that Kagan reignited the fascism debate with his essay. Interestingly, it was the same Robert Kagan who had spent years as an influential member of the Republican Party and was seen as one of the thought leaders for the neocons during the administration of George W. Bush.

    The article has aged well. Its characterization of Trump as a “strongman”. Its description of his deft use of fear, hatred and anger. “This is how fascism comes to America, not with jackboots and salutes,” Kagan wrote, “but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac ‘tapping into’ popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party – out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear – falling into line behind him.”

Jason Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, says that fascism has already come to America:

    Six years ago, Stanley published a book in the U.S. called How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. The German translation only appeared two months ago, a source of annoyance for Stanley. He also has German citizenship and says that he loves the country despite everything.

    So how does fascism work? Modern-day fascism, Stanley writes, is a cult of the leader in which that leader promises rebirth to a disgraced country. Disgraced because immigrants, leftists, liberals, minorities, homosexuals and women have taken over the media, the schools and cultural institutions. Fascist regimes, Stanley argues, begin as social and political movements and parties – and they tend to be elected rather than overthrowing existing governments.

Timothy Snyder says that both Trump AND Putin are fascists:

    Timothy Snyder speaks thoughtfully and quietly, but with plenty of confidence. Putin is a fascist. Trump is a fascist. The difference: One holds power. The other does not. Not yet.

    “The problem with fascism,” Snyder says, “is that it’s not a presence in the way we want it to be. We want political doctrines to have clear definitions. We don’t want them to be paradoxical or dialectical.” Still, he says, fascism is an important category when it comes to understanding both history and the present, because it makes differences visible.

Austrian Political Scientist Natascha Strobl says that fascists are now everywhere:

    But this kind of violence can be seen everywhere, says the Austrian political scientist Natascha Strobl. It merely manifests itself differently than it did in the 1920s, when, early on in the fascist movement in northern Italy, gangs of thugs were going from village to village attacking farmer organizations and the offices of the socialist party, killing people and burning homes to the ground. Today, says Strobl, violence is primarily limited to the internet. “And it is,” says Strobl, “just as real. The people who perpetrate it believe they are involved in a global culture war, a struggle that knows no boundaries. An ideological civil war against all kinds of chimeras, such as ‘cultural Marxism’ or the ‘Great Replacement’.”

For Bulgarian think-tanker Ivan Krastev, AfD is a fascist organization:

    It is all rather perplexing. Back in Berlin, Ivan Krastev makes one of his Krastevian jokes. An American judge, he relates, once said that he may not be able to define pornography, “but I know it when I see it”. The reverse is true with fascism, says Krastev: It is simple to define, but difficult to recognize when you see it.

    The “F-word”. F as in fascism or F as in “Fuck you”. It is permissible, as a court in Meiningen ruled, to refer to Höcke as a fascist. The question remains, though, what doing so actually achieves.

So there you have it: anyone to the immediate right of 2024 liberal democracy is a fascist.

September 7, 2024

Trump’s visit to Arlington broke all the norms – no President has ever done this before!

Filed under: History, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Not being an American, I didn’t realize that sitting and former Presidents were banned from the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery, so Trump’s norm-obliterating visit has attracted widespread vilification from all corners of the nation:

If you read the news, Donald Trump recently did something so shocking and unprecedented that observers are staggered by his descent into evil:

He went to Arlington National Cemetery and brought a photographer, so the only possible comparison is to Literally Adolf Hitler. It was so outrageous for Trump to perform the Nazi maneuver of being photographed at Arlington that the son of the late Senator John McCain was forced to make an announcement to the world, revealing that the horror of the event had forced him to change his party registration and support the Democratic presidential candidate:

Sample framing from that story:

    Jimmy McCain, who has served for 17 years in the military and is an intelligence officer, said he was angered by Trump’s conduct at the cemetery last week, adding “it was a violation.”

    “It just blows me away,” he told CNN. “These men and women that are laying in the ground there have no choice” about being in a political ad.

See how evil Donald Trump is? No McCain man would ever stand for some bastard shooting a political ad at Arlington National Cemetery. Also, you can click here to watch the political ad that John McCain shot at Arlington National Cemetery.

[…]

September 6, 2024

“I support Jagmeet Singh’s right to terminate his half pregnancy”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Matt Gurney on NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh’s decision to pull the plug on the Confidence and Supply Agreement that had propped up Justin Trudeau’s government, long after it became clear that the Liberals were garnering all the benefits and the NDP were losing core supporters over the arrangement:

Let us start with words of affirmation and support: I support Jagmeet Singh’s right to terminate his half pregnancy. How could anyone not? His constant daily humiliation was getting uncomfortable to observe.

I know you might be expecting some kind of political analysis here. What will the end of the Confidence and Supply Agreement — or Supply and Confidence Agreement (we probably should’ve settled on one before the thing collapsed)—mean for Canadian politics, the upcoming elections, and the next general federal election? But the truth is, I don’t know. No one does. All we can say with any particular certainty is that our minority government situation has become more complicated. The Conservatives will keep trying to bring the government down. Don’t be surprised if they try to make everything a confidence motion, if only to further embarrass Singh. The NDP, for their part, will face some brutal decisions. Most polls show them heading for a wipeout, with half of their seats looking likely to flip to someone else. They’d need a huge spike in the polls just to break even. So, that’s going to be fun for them to navigate. Then, of course, there’s Justin Trudeau and the Liberals. Their prospects look awfully bleak, too. But it’s entirely possible they might decide to rip the Band-Aid off and call an election at some point in the reasonably near future.

Am I predicting any of these things? No. Like I said, I have no idea what’s going to happen. If I had to guess, I’d say the NDP will continue to support the government unofficially for the foreseeable future while all the parties reassess the new reality on the ground. But that guess is entirely subject to revision as events unfold. Time will tell. What more can I offer you?

So, in terms of political commentary on yesterday’s news, that’s about it. I don’t expect any immediate changes, and we’ll see where things shake out. Thanks for reading.

But there is a related point I’d like to make. And though it may sound snarky, I mean it with total sincerity. I am so, so happy for Jagmeet Singh. Since the deal was announced, he’s had to keep Trudeau in office while also acting like he was as disgusted with the PM as the typical Canadian voter seems to be. It was, truly, cringe-inducing, a real-life manifestation of the first half of the Hot Dog Car sketch (the back half gets weird).

I wasn’t kidding when I said it was painful to watch. And it wasn’t just me who noticed — a few podcasts ago, Jen and I had a laugh at Singh getting hit by Twitter’s Community Notes fact-checking service. After one of his regular tweets attacking Trudeau, a note was added to it, reminding readers that Singh was officially, as per a signed agreement, responsible for keeping Trudeau in power. It was laugh out loud funny, and, alas for the NDP leader, we were very much laughing at him, not with him.

That’s finished now. His nightmare is over. He can stop looking so goddamn ridiculous every day now. The deal is dead.

And now that it is, we can finally take a long look back at it and wonder how the hell Singh ever decided that the deal, or at least how he behaved during the deal, was a good idea.

In the National Post, Chris Selley seems a bit less charitable toward Singh, for largely the same reason … the pain and humiliation was almost entirely self-inflicted:

So, the deal is off. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh apparently located a few scraps of dignity in some long-forgotten kitchen drawer or closet. Just minutes before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was set for a press conference to give himself yet more credit for the NDP’s national school-lunch program, Singh announced he was calling off the NDP’s two-and-a-half-year-old confidence-and-supply agreement with the governing Liberals.

“Canadians are fighting a battle … for the future of the middle class,” Singh pronounced. “Justin Trudeau has proven again and again he will always cave to corporate greed.” Reports suggest it was the Liberals last month ordering the railway unions back to work and into binding arbitration with their employers that finally soured the milk in Dipperland.

“In the next federal election, Canadians will choose between Pierre Poilievre’s callous cuts or hope” Singh continued, casting himself as the Barack Obama figure in the forthcoming contest — “hope,” he specified, “that when we stand united, we win; that Canada’s middle class will once again thrive together.”

Because a Canadian political announcement must come with some impenetrable bafflegab, Singh added the following: “It’s always impossible until it isn’t. It can’t be done until someone does it.”

Up is left. Forward is up. United we dance. The future.

All the reasons for the NDP to cut the Liberals loose on Wednesday were so myriad and obvious that it’s difficult to remember what on earth the point of this agreement was supposed to be. Singh got no cabinet seats out of it, maybe just a few “thanks for your contribution” pats on the back from Trudeau and his ministers along the way. But the NDP essentially gave away any policy wins to the Liberals.

New Democrats understand better than anyone else the fundamentally amoral nature of the Liberal Party of Canada. They understand the Liberals’ all but total conflation of the party’s best interests with the country’s, and therefore its utter lack of shame. Anything the Liberal party does, anything it says, even if it’s completely the opposite of it did and said yesterday, is precisely the medicine Canada needs. And the NDP understands as well as the Conservatives do how mainstream Canadian media privileges the Liberals in that regard.

September 5, 2024

CASA doloroso, or Jagmeet finally locates a pair

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ding, dong! The long-running deal between the New Democrats and Justin Trudeau’s Liberals has finally been terminated. It was Jagmeet Singh’s support that kept Trudeau in power and had been intended to run until next summer, but Singh announced he was no longer going to provide confidence and supply votes in Parliament. The editors at The Line warn us that this doesn’t automatically mean we can start heating up the tar and ripping open the feather pillows quite yet:

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh in happier days at a 2017 Pride parade.
Photo via Wikimedia.

On Wednesday, Jagmeet Singh finally took longstanding criticism to heart, and announced he would be tearing up the Confidence and Supply Agreement, the deal that allows the Liberals to hold the confidence of the house.

That said, don’t expect an election just yet.

CASA has been an unmitigated disaster for the little sister of the non-alliance alliance between the two parties. As we’ve previously noted here at The Line, Singh proved to be a weak negotiator, agreeing to support Justin Trudeau with nary a cabinet seat nor a concrete spending promise. To date, the only real concessions the NDP have landed amount to, essentially, half-baked Pharmacare and dental programs that are little more than targeted subsidies to the poor. The merits of these programs in and of themselves is a debate for another day; however, what benefits they do bring have not benefited the NDP one whit.

That’s because the Liberals will — and have — taken full credit for these programs, while Singh has been left in the unenviable position of having to criticize a sitting government that he continues to buttress through the CASA. In other words, for virtually no spending concessions, the NDP has fatally undermined its position as a credible critic of the government.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Party — still strong in the polls — can lean on the NDP’s hypocrisy in order to gather up traditional blue collar and even union workers into the bosom of its culturally cozy embrace.

Obviously, this position is untenable. However, we at The Line admit to being surprised that Singh is actually ripping it up ahead of the deal’s natural expiry in June of 2025. Rather, we expected the Liberals to rag the puck on this government for as long as constitutionally possible — and, to be honest, we thought the NDP would stay in step because the party is, at its heart, weak.

Lo! We were surprised.

By ending CASA, the party has time to restore some of its spent credibility, bashing Trudeau hard to drum up fundraising ahead of the next election. Without the NDP’s support, the Liberals can carry on only until they are required to pass a confidence motion — likely the Spring budget. This gives the NDP a few months to generate support. Of course Singh won’t win that election, but he can now leave his party in a stronger position to live to fight another day.

That is … unless Trudeau decides to respond to the collapse of CASA by simply dropping the writ now, catching his opponents on the left off guard and unprepared to run a full election campaign.

September 4, 2024

There’s always been “BC weird”, but today’s BC politics is weirder than ever

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Although I can technically say I’ve been to British Columbia, a couple of hours driving around just west of the BC/Alberta border in 1988 doesn’t give me any real understanding of Lotusland’s, uh, unique political landscape. Fortunately, here’s Rob Shaw in The Line to give a somewhat better-informed view of BC politics today:

British Columbia politics has always been weird.

This is a province in which an obese Taiwanese billionaire once bought a premier’s personal amusement park using envelopes stuffed with cash in his underwear; where the clerk of the legislature was convicted of fraud; where the Speaker claimed the legislature’s ceremonial mace was bugged by spies; and an MLA stole from a children’s charity for the disabled.

In short, the province has a bit of a reputation. So it might be tempting to view the most recent headlines about the implosion of the former dominant B.C. Liberal party — and the meteoric rise of the B.C. Conservatives — as keeping with British Columbia’s unique brand of zaniness.

Except, it isn’t.

B.C.’s political realignment mirrors one that’s already occurred in several other provinces and is playing out federally, as well, as a tired, middle-road centrist party is squeezed out by a harder-right, hungrier, more-energetic conservative movement.

At the leading edge of it all is an unlikely figure — a 61-year-old former Liberal cabinet minister with a low profile, who was booted from the B.C. Liberal caucus in 2022 by leader Kevin Falcon for sharing a social media post questioning the role of CO2 in climate change. Rather than retire quietly, John Rustad took the ejection, pivoted and joined the moribund B.C. Conservative party, which had clocked only 1.9 per cent of the popular vote in 2020. He gave the party a seat in the legislature, and a profile to grow. Since then, it has skyrocketed.

“Of course nobody thought you could do this in a year, take a political party from two to three per cent to challenge to form government,” Rustad told me. “Lots of people ask me about it and I put it down simply to people are really desperate and looking for change.” Last week — two years and 10 days after he was fired — Rustad stood in a Vancouver hotel ballroom to accept Falcon’s political surrender. The leader of the B.C. Liberal dynasty, a party that ruled the province from 2001 to 2017 under premiers Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark, announced that he was disbanding B.C. United ahead of the next election. Supporters were encouraged to flock to the Conservatives.

“This is the right thing to do for the province,” Falcon said at the Aug. 28 press conference. “I said to John: I may only agree with about 75 per cent of what you might believe in, but I do know this, that on his very worst day John Rustad would be a far better premier than (B.C. NDP premier) David Eby on his very best day. And I’ve never lost sight of that bigger picture.” The Conservatives have been within striking distance of the governing NDP for months, according to polling done by almost every firm in the country.

September 1, 2024

The supermarket master plan to defeat the “far right” in Germany

Filed under: Business, Food, Germany, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

There are elections ongoing in the German states of Thüringen and Saxony, and the polls show that the “far right” Alternative für Deutschland is potentially going to get 30% of the votes, which would give them more representation in those states than any of the other parties. Panic and hysteria have set in not only among the politicos and the mainstream media, but even among some businesses:

In Germany, all political parties have a colour. The Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union are black, the Social Democratic Party is red, the liberal Free Democratic Party are yellow and the evil fascist Alternative für Deutschland are blue. This coming Sunday, Thüringen and Saxony will hold state elections, and the blue AfD are leading the polls in both states with about 30% support. This has a lot of people very, very upset. Most of them are merely upset with the AfD, but some psychologically unstable people have allowed their anger to embrace the colour blue more generally, because there can be no limits when it comes to resisting the evil antidemocratic forces of fascism.

Among the new sworn enemies of the blue band of the visible electromagnetic spectrum are the marketing team at Germany’s largest supermarket corporation, the Edeka Group. A few days ago, this supermarket chain, whose own logo strangely enough is primarily blue …

… ran an ad in Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung explaining “WHY BLUE IS NOT ON OFFER AT EDEKA”.

That wall of text in the middle reads as follows:

    Yellow bananas, red tomatoes, green lettuce, purple grapes, orange carrots, pink dragon fruit … EDEKA’s fruit and vegetable department is full of colourful diversity. Or is it?

    If you look closely, there’s one colour you won’t see: blue. And that’s no coincidence. Because blue food is nature’s way of warning us: ‘Watch out! I could be harmful!”

    Evolution has taught us that blue is not a good choice.

    And speaking of choices: Blue is not only the natural enemy of a healthy diversity of fruit and vegetables. In Germany, “the blues” are also the biggest threat to our diverse society.

    So let’s read the warning signs correctly ahead of the state elections in Saxony, Thüringen and Brandenburg in September – and ensure that we can live together in harmony. Because we love diversity.

For those wondering whether Edeka have decided to cease selling fascist blue fruits like blueberries, there is a helpful note down in the corner:

There we learn that, while “‘Blueberries’ or ‘Blue cabbage'” may have “‘blue’ in their names”, their “colour pigments” are not blue. This is “at least what Science tells us – and as we know you should always listen to Science more”. Nothing about this is remotely obnoxious; indeed, if current-year Germany needs anything, it is more blind platitudinous calls to Follow the Science – particularly when it comes to exonerating innocent fruits and vegetables from suspicion of blue fascism.

August 31, 2024

Kamala deigns to speak to the loyal, pantingly eager sycophantic press … briefly

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill seems somehow underwhelmed by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz descending from Olympus to grace poor mortals as they appeared on CNN on Thursday night for their first big media appearance:

Yesterday, finally, the kween deigned to engage with her subjects. Yes, Kamala Harris did her first sit-down media interview since replacing Joe Biden on the Democratic presidential ticket nearly 40 days ago. For more than a month she’d maintained a monarchical distance from the grubby presses, flat-out refusing a one-to-one with any of its probing hacks. Now she’s relented and had an exclusive chat with CNN’s Dana Bash. The end result? Only one word will do, and it’s a word normally aimed at the other side: weird.

Seriously, can we talk about this shitshow? It is hands down the oddest “first big interview” I’ve seen with a candidate for high office. It took place at Kim’s Cafe in Savannah, Georgia and none of it made sense. Even the lighting was off – it’s the first time I’ve seen Kamala look bad. The angles were all wrong, meaning Harris, the supposed colossus of joy who will transform America, looked scrunched and tiny between Tim Walz and Ms Bash. And what was VP pick Walz even doing there? Chaperoning? “Strong, Capable Woman Asks Man To Come With Her To Job Interview In Case They Ask Any Hard Questions”, quipped the Babylon Bee.

They had no worries on that front. There were no hard questions. The ass-kissage was off the scale. Bash didn’t only give Harris easy questions – she gave her the answers, too. The most extraordinary moment was when she gently prodded Harris on her flip-flopping over policy. Finally, I thought, a tricky query. But then she told Harris what to say. “Is it because you have more experience now and you’ve learned more about the information?”, she wondered. The way Harris’s face lit up when she was handed this oven-ready excuse for her chameleon-like politics – even in the bad lighting you could see her glee at CNN’s servility to the Kamala cause.

A more objective broadcaster – hell, a kid with a camera fresh out of journalism school – would have dragged Harris for her vagueness. She issued flat platitudes. She engaged in Orwellian gobbledygook about how her policies might have changed but her “values” haven’t – eh? She spoke in tongues about climate change – it’s “an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time”, she said, like a schoolkid padding out an essay with superfluous adjectives. And Bash just sat there, smiling. Maybe everyone in DC speaks like this?

Some of Harris’s volte-facing really is extraordinary. She once said she would ban fracking, now she says she won’t. And how on Earth did she go from comparing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the KKK and saying “an undocumented migrant is not a criminal” to now saying we must sternly enforce our nation’s borders? “I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed”, she said. There’s that padding again. Sixteen words in that sentence are unnecessary. And the remaining five – “My values have not changed” – are not true.

August 26, 2024

David Friedman – “my fargroup … are being attacked by my outgroup. My enemy’s enemy …”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I’m much of David Friedman‘s opinion on the candidates for both the Democratic and Republican parties in the current US presidential election … and I also find myself leaning more toward Trump even though his re-election would almost certainly be worse for Canada:

Donald Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents, raises his fist after an attempt on his life during a campaign speech in Butler, PA on 13 July, 2024.

My opinion of the election is “a plague on both your houses”. Kamala Harris is an extreme representative of an ideology I have opposed for most of my life. Donald Trump has three major positions on two of which, immigration and trade, he manages to be even worse than his opponent. While I have some sympathy for his views on the third — I have been arguing against an interventionist foreign policy for something over fifty years now — I do not trust him to execute a consistent and competent alternative. His disinterest in whether what he says is true, extreme even for a politician, I find offensive.

That is my intellectual view of the matter. It is not my emotional view. Reading news stories and observing the effect on my feelings, I note that I am reacting like a Trump partisan. Poll results that look good for him make me happy, poll results that look bad for him make me sad. Accounts of outrageous statements by Trump or Vance I ignore — I don’t expect them to tell the truth. Accounts of demagoguery by Harris or Waltz arouse feelings of indignation. If Harris wins I will feel disappointed. If Trump wins I will feel relieved, at least until the first outrageous thing he does.

The explanation of my inconsistent reaction is provided by Scott Alexander in “I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup“, one of the best of his many good essays. In it he points out that someone’s outgroup, the group for whom he feels and expresses strongly negative views, is typically made up not of people distant from him, geographically and intellectually, but of people close. The outgroup of the Nazis was not their Japanese allies or the Chinese the Japanese were fighting, it was German Jews, people with the same language and, in most respects, the same appearance and culture. The outgroup of American leftists is not Muslim fundamentalists but American conservatives.

Conservatives have doubts about gay marriage. Muslim fundamentalists view homosexual intercourse as a capital offense.1 American conservatives would like their schools to be more tolerant of creationism. Muslim fundamentalists want their schools to teach the truth of Islam. And yet, when conservatives criticize Muslims, leftists defend them. When Muslims kill Jews and Jews respond by killing Muslims, it is the Muslims that the American leftists support, the Jews that they blame — although Israelis have much more in common, ideologically as well as culturally, with American leftists than Palestinians do.

    We think of groups close to us in Near Mode, judging them on their merits as useful allies or dangerous enemies. We think of more distant groups in Far Mode – usually, we exoticize them. Sometimes it’s positive exoticization of the Noble Savage variety (understood so broadly that our treatment of Tibetans counts as an example of the trope). Other times it’s negative exoticization, treating them as cartoonish stereotypes of evil who are more funny or fascinating than repulsive. Take Genghis Khan – objectively he was one of the most evil people of all time, killing millions of victims, but since we think of him in Far Mode he becomes fascinating or even perversely admirable – “wow, that was one impressively bloodthirsty warlord”. (Scott Alexander, “Post-Partisanship Is Hyper-Partisanship“)

Conservatives are the leftists’ outgroup, Muslims their far group. The far group can be ignored; large parts of the world are more sexist and more racist than any part of America but invisible to progressives campaigning against sexism and racism. The far group can even be supported, at least if the outgroup is attacking it. My enemy’s enemy is my friend. Muslim fundamentalists. Hamas.

Kamala Harris is an American leftist. American leftists are my outgroup. Trump and Vance are American populists. I disagree with their views, in some cases more than I disagree with the views of American leftists, but I have nothing against them, just as I have nothing against believing Catholics or Orthodox Jews or Black Muslims or believers in Christian Science.

Trump and his movement are my fargroup. They are being attacked by my outgroup. My enemy’s enemy …

    1. In some times and places Muslim culture has been tolerant of homosexuality; there are two famous medieval essays on the relative attractions of homosexual and heterosexual intercourse and quite a lot of poetry celebrating homosexual love. But the religious doctrine, which fundamentalists take seriously, holds homosexuality to be forbidden.

August 25, 2024

“Does your vote count?” or how to set up an automatic vote-generation scheme

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson on recent reporting about voting scams in various US states:

After engineer and data scientist Kim Brooks worked on cleaning the voter rolls in Georgia for a year, she realized she was on a stationary bicycle. She’d clear a name for various reasons, dead, felon, stolen ID, living at a seasonal campground for twenty years, duplicate, moved out of state, 200 years old, etc., and back it would come within a month. At that juncture she realized that a program within the Georgia voter registration database was methodically adding back fake names.

She looked deeper. For new registrants, the culprit was principally Driver’s Services creating new registrations and in this case, the manufacturer was a person, or persons. Within the government office, someone was stealing names and duplicating, even tripling that person’s vote and then forging their signature. Sometimes it was someone who just died, or a teacher who had no voting record. In the case of a nurse who died in 2022 with three registrations, she was registered to vote in two counties, and all three of her voted in the 2022 election and the 2024 primary. Each signature was slightly different, the last three letters spelled, ly, ley, and lley

This operation works under AVR, or automatic voter registration, and is being used to register migrants. They will not vote, but their names have been entered into the Voter Registration database when they apply for a driver’s license and their vote will be voted for them. I imagine that this is repeating something everyone knows, but the borders are open for precisely this reason, so the Democrat/RINO machine can steal their votes. By the way, the process for advancing permanent residency has been cut from 11 months to two.

In 2020, twenty states used operation AVR. Of those, Trump lost 18.

That’s because there are registration fraud rings, as identified in the Arabella doc. and in the work of Omega4America. This worked well in Michigan, where, according to Captain Seth Keshel, who is one of the leads on this fight, believes that Trump likely got 576,443 more votes than were counted and won Michigan by 8.5%.

Every state is host to a dozen or more NGO’s which do nothing but fill out ballots for the faked registrants. Peter Bernegger’s team in Wisconsin has video of NGO functionaries doing just that in Wisconsin in 2020 at 1 am, early morning after Election Day.

    Michigan has two million more registered voters than they should have. 83.5% of the state is registered to vote but only 77.9% is over 18. – Seth Keshel

Seth works with demographic trends and does detailed statistical analysis; travelling almost ceaselessly to teach Americans how to stop the cheat. AVR was launched in Michigan, after Trump’s win in 2016. By 2020 there were 547,460 net new registrants in Michigan. Today, more voters are registered to vote than there are people old enough to vote. Keshel:

Per Keshel’s analysis, the Democrats and RINOs are frantically operating a dying political coalition which began to shift hard after Obama’s performance in his first four years, when not only did nothing change for the working class, it worsened. Democrat registrations in Michigan collapsed to the point where the Dems lost 16,000 as of 2016. Enter AVR and boom, 500+K new registrants.

August 21, 2024

The pro-Kamala coup

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At UnHerd, Edward Luttwak walks through the steps behind the scenes that led to Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic Party’s Presidential candidate for the 2024 election:

We are stuck with the French phrase coup d’état because nothing else describes so well the sudden removal of an old ruler by secret manoeuvrings — and their replacement with a chosen successor who happens to be endowed with every possible virtue. Of course, Kamala Harris is not a dictator because she must still face a nationwide election. But secret manoeuvrings did make her the presidential candidate of her Democratic Party, a position that is also intended to be filled by primary elections up and down the country before delegates agree on the victor at the Party Convention.

Nor was her vice-presidency enough to secure her candidacy. Far from it, given the unpromising electoral record of that most peculiar office, not inaccurately described as “not worth a bucket of warm spit” by John Nance Garner, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president. In fact, in all of American history, only seven vice presidents were elected to the presidency (eight replaced a dead president). This reflects the habitual role of vice presidents: emphatically not presidents-in-waiting but rather politicos serving as symbolic figures who are selected to attract voters that the president cannot attract with his policies.

[…]

What happened next could not possibly have occurred if there were not a single directing hand behind the scenes. Suddenly, the very same voices from Nancy Pelosi down, who had just told the American people that Biden was fit and ready to win in the upcoming elections and rule for four more years, said the very opposite: that Biden should immediately announce his withdrawal from the elections. Nor is it any mystery who pulled the switch: Barack Obama, the only American President of recent times who has continued to live in Washington DC after leaving the White House — and it is not for the Potomac river-fishing that he has stayed there.

[…]

Obama had definitely not wanted Harris in that position, fearing that she would come under attack for her San Francisco career launched by an older mayor who was also her romantic partner. After Biden had locked himself into his vice-presidential choice of a black woman, Obama proposed his former National Security Advisor, Susan Rice. But even the faithful Biden could not accept that: in his own eight vice-presidential years, Biden often tried to influence foreign policy only to be overruled by Obama’s appointees, who knew very much less than he did after his decades of attentive service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And none was more arrogant with him than Rice. And so, even faithful Biden would not accept her, which meant that Obama could ensure Biden’s withdrawal, but not his replacement with his own candidate.

So, what is the party left with? Because Kamala Harris did not win even one primary, and her vice-presidential role was more unremarkable than most, it is possible, just possible, that this week’s gathering will not unfold as a Chinese Communist Party Congress, and one or more delegates will call for a choice. And because there are in fact candidates ready and waiting among the Democratic governors, eight of them women, an open convention need not devolve into chaos or coup — but rather into a democratic election.

August 19, 2024

If you’ve never worked in the private sector, you have no idea how regulations impact businesses

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the National Post, J.D. Tuccille explain why Democratic candidates like Kamala Harris and Tim Walz who have spent little or no time in the non-government world have such rosy views of the benefits of government control with no concept of the costs such control imposes:

The respective public versus private sector experiences of the 2024 Presidential/Vice Presidential candidates.
New York Times

In broad terms, Democrats have faith in government while the GOP is skeptical — though a lot of Republicans are willing to suspend disbelief when their party controls the executive branch.

The contrast between the two parties can be seen in stark terms in the resumes of the two presidential and vice-presidential tickets. The New York Times made it easier to compare them earlier this month when it ran charts of the career timelines of Trump, J.D. Vance, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Their roles at any given age were colour-coded for college, military, private sector, public service or politics, federal government and candidate for federal office.

Peach is the colour used by the Times to indicate employment in the private sector, which produces the opportunities and wealth that are mugged away (taxation is theft by another name, after all) to fund all other sectors. It appears under the headings of “businessman” and “television personality” for Trump and as “lawyer and venture capitalist” for Vance. But private-sector peach appears nowhere in the timelines for Harris and Walz. Besides, perhaps, some odd jobs when they were young, neither of the Democrats has worked in the private sector.

Now, not all private-sector jobs are created equal. Some of the Republican presidential candidate’s ventures, like Trump University, have been highly sketchy, as are some of his practices — he’s openly boasted about donating to politicians to gain favours (though try to do business in New York without greasing palms). I’m not sure I’d want The Apprentice on my resume. But there must be some value to working on the receiving end of the various regulations and taxes government officials foist on society rather than spending one’s career brainstorming more rules without ever suffering the consequences.

In 1992, former U.S. senator and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern penned a column for the Wall Street Journal about the challenges he encountered investing in a hotel after many years in government.

“In retrospect, I … wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day,” he wrote. He bemoaned “federal, state and local rules” passed with seemingly good intentions but little thought to the burdens and costs they imposed.

The lack of private sector stints in the career timelines of Harris and Walz means that, like pre-hotel McGovern, they’ve never had to worry about what it’s like to suffer the policies of a large and intrusive government.

That said, it’s possible to overstate the lessons learned by Republicans and Democrats from their different experiences. Vance, despite having worked to fund and launch businesses, has, since being elected to the U.S. Senate, advocated capturing the regulatory state and repurposing it for political uses, including punishing enemies.

Not only does power corrupt, but it does so quickly.

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