Twitter is not a good format for extended comments. I occasionally publish tweet threads up to a half dozen or more and impressions of component tweets can vary considerable, many with nominal counts. This commentary is more of potpourri of extended comments when I didn't necessarily necessarily want to write a dedicated post.
Pelosi/Taiwan
Some background notes: I was given an opportunity during high school of doing a self-directed research course, and I selected China as my topic. This wasn't an obvious choice at the time; China was still a largely closed country with a largely agrarian economy under a hardline Communist dictatorship, headed by Mao Zedong. We started to see the beginnings of ping pong diplomacy and Nixon's historic 1972 visit. I, of course, became very familiar with the power struggle between Chinese Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists, eventually resulting in the former government's withdrawal from the mainland to Taiwan by 1949. Each government has seen itself as the legitimate government of both mainland China and Taiwan. Diplomatically, most nations accept the One China Principle, headed by the mainline Communist Chinese regime, which has exclusively represented China at the UN since 1971, The People's Republic of China does not allow diplomatic relations with any country recognizing Taiwan. Today a baker's dozen nations have diplomatic relations with Taiwan; the US, among a number of other countries, have non-diplomatic relations.
I haven't met many from either the PRC or Taiwan; the ones I do remember I met as a residential PhD student at UH. Two of my office suite mates, BEB and MY were CPA's as well as fellow MIS majors. (Ironically I chose accounting for my minor. The college didn't let me take EDP auditing courses for my minor. I took, e.g., the traditional graduate auditing course.) MY was a naturalized citizen from Taiwan; I think her late husband was the same. We never really discussed Taiwan or her naturalization.Ironically SQL (the lingua franca of relational databases, developed by IBM) was a focus of her dissertation, and I have professionally worked as a relational database DBA (principally Oracle) since leaving academia in the early 1990's. We worked on a research project together, and she is the only one I've published jointly with. (I had offered to put my dissertation chairman's name on some of my papers and he turned me down). She and her (late) husband had this yearning to live in Alaska, and the last time we were in contact (it may have been when our old office mate Bruce passed) she was still living in Anchorage. We had a good relationship; in fact, I wrote a letter of recommendation for her tenure, the only time I've done that for anyone.
At UH, we also had a male MBA student from PRC in one of our suite's cubicles. He was a nice guy, but we didn't talk much, never mind politics; as I recall, his command of English was limited.
So don't blame MY for my own idiosyncratic opinions...
First of all, Speaker Pelosi's visit to Taiwan was knowingly provocative in the context of already strained relations with China. It made Biden's position of conducting foreign policy more difficult given the One China policy.
It's bad enough that China was Trump's scapegoat for a large trade imbalance and target for a still ongoing mutually destructive trade war. You have a bipartisan push, including former Secretary of State Pompeo, eager to confront China on Taiwan.
China, on its part, is playing hardball, bristling at US meddling in its internal affairs. However, as I've tweeted, I feel China's saber-rattling, at one time even seeming to suggest Pelosi's plane might be a military target, was counterproductive, exacerbating the military interventionist neo-con pressure on Capitol Hill.
As a libertarian, I believe that any reunification of China and Taiwan should be voluntary and peaceful in nature. I want an end to the trade war; I have repeatedly cited Mallory's "If soldiers are not to cross international boundaries, goods must do so." China and the US have no incentive for a war on their customers.
Jon Stewart and the PACT Act
I wrote an earlier post on the kerfuffle. A brief summary: a number of soldiers during the recent Gulf Wars were allegedly exposed to toxic chemicals during their service. (Since then, the grievance has expanded as far back as Vietnam and Agent Orange.) The VA basically has put the burden on the applicant for proving a veteran's ailments can be traced to his service exposure before providing medical coverage. So for years, veterans have been lobbying for a more veteran-friendly approach to getting treatment, some dying in the interim.
So the House and the Senator in recent months have worked on their own approaches. Many (including GOP Congressmen) thought the Senate bill was better. One item that the Senate included was a tax-free buyout provision to better recruit physicians to rural facilities. This caused a problem. In addition, retiring Sen. Toomey ((R-PA), a budget hawk, objected to shifting VA spending, not just PACT funding, from the discretionary to the mandatory spending budget. (The latter has automatic funding, not going through annual budgeting, like DoD funding.) In mid-June, over 80 senators, including most Republicans, voted for PACT, despite Toomey's accounting objection.
The House got the Senate's version and quickly spotted the buyout provision and raised a red flag, noting that technically this provision had not started through the House, a Constitutional necessity. So Tester (D-MT) procedurally asked for unanimous consent to strike the offending provision from the bill. Toomey used the opportunity to object on the accounting issue.
The House, on its own, removed the provision, then passed the revised bill. I can't find a good summary of what, if anything, happened before Schumer put up the revised bill on a cloture vote, e.g., did Republicans ask to bring up amendments and were turned down? There is also a matter of timing with Schumer and Manchin announcing a reconciliation agreement (the "Inflation Reduction Act"), essentially bypassing Republicans, between the PACT votes. For whatever reason, enough original Republicans flipped to prevent cloture to allow a floor vote. Schumer voted no, a procedural gimmick to enable a re-vote later.
I don't the kabuki dance of Senate procedures, but I know the GOP sees veterans as part of its constituencies and most Republicans were on the record supporting PACT, with or without Toomey's accounting worries over Democrats exploiting a $400B hole in the discretionary budget over 10 years. Typically the minority party will leverage its position to win votes on amendments. Most amendments, in my experience, fail; quite often failed amendment sponsors will vote against the final bill but not necessarily the rest of his caucus. So I expected a quid pro quo of amendments, including Toomey's; I knew the 50 Dems would block cloture on any of them, but the original GOP supporters of PACT would let the bill go to the floor.
In the interim, Jon Stewart, celebrity comedian who had adopted the PACT cause, exploded on a personal basis against the GOP, especially against the vote flippers on cloture, accusing them of voting against vets, ridiculing notions of balancing the budget on the backs of sick veterans, etc. I didn't want to hear Dems chiming in with a Grayson-like view of the GOP healthcare plan for sick veterans was to hurry up and die. The key Senate GOP leaders were all but promising a happy ending. I don't know if Stewart was simply ignorant of the political gamesmanship in DC, but I thought his temper tantrum didn't help a single bit. I think the senators were more concerned over being flamed by veteran groups, not knowledgeable in the ways of Congressional give and take.
In the end, the GOP allowed cloture despite losing the amendments, and the PACT Act passed with an even higher vote. (I would have probably voted no, like Toomey, over the accounting issue. And yes, I'm a veteran, but no I was not exposed to toxins. I would have supported the bill without the accounting gimmick.)
The Inflation Reduction Act
I oppose the Schumer/Manchin budget reconciliation deal of clean energy/ObamaCare subsidy spending and tax hikes in the form of a corporate minimum tax and closing the so-called carried interest loophole.
This is almost nothing I like about this. The promised deficit reduction is in the outer years of the decade, vs. our shorter-term inflation problem. The minimum tax issue is at the expense of business investment, what I see as a prerequisite for economic growth and an improved standard of living. Let me quote the following relevant excerpt from the WSJ and Scott Sumner:
Start with the 15% minimum tax on corporate book income over $1 billion, which Democrats claim will raise $313 billion through 2031. This new alternative minimum tax will slam businesses whose taxable income is lower than the profits on their financial statements owing to the likes of investment expensing, tax credits and business deductions.Reason explains why the carried interest "loophole" is bad economics:
Many companies pay less than the 21% corporate tax rate because they can expense investments under the tax code up-front. Hence, the new tax will increase the cost of business investment
The media often report this sort of policy change as representing higher taxes on “the rich.” But investment is a key factor in boosting productivity, which is what ultimately determines the living standards of ordinary workers. Taxes on investment have the effect of taxing future consumption at higher rates than current consumption, which reduces saving and investment and slows economic growth.
For the many different business ventures organized as partnerships— which often include private equity, venture capital and hedge funds, as well as nonfinancial industries such as real estate—a carried interest is simply the share of a capital gain that is allocated to the general partner. The general partner manages the fund or business, while the limited partners provide investment capital.
Not only do many partnerships pay a management fee to the general partner but also some award a share of the venture's profits above a certain minimum rate (the carried interest) as an incentive to maximize the fund's return. Whereas the management fee is taxed as ordinary income, the carried interest is appropriately taxed as a capital gain. Assuming the partnership's income qualifies as a long-term gain, that means it's taxed at the lower long-term capital gains rate.
[Late note: Sen. Sinema (D-AZ) announced support for the package apparently in exchange for getting the carried interest provision dropped.]
I've addressed other points in multiple tweets. Business taxes are ultimately paid by other stakeholders, like consumers, employees, and owners, many of whom make under $400K a year (remember Biden's pledge not to raise taxes on them?) Speaking of which the Joint Committee on Taxation showed the effect of the act adversely affected ALL income classes. And a group of 230 prominent economists sent a letter to Congressional leadership warning that the bill doesn't reduce inflation but rather perpetuates it.
The Kansas Abortion Amendment Vote
I am pro-life, and I really don't like to write about abortion, but I've been forced to post and tweet in the aftermath of the Dobbs opinion (reversing the Roe v Wade/Casey precedents liberalizing abortion nationally) late in May.
The Kansas vote is unique enough to merit additional discussion. In 2019, the liberal Kansas Supreme Court basically ruled an implicit right to abort from a constitutional reference to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"); as far as I know, "abortion" itself isn't referenced in the Kansas constitution. I don't know what Kansas abortion law was at the time of Roe, but one of the references I cited in an earlier essay noted all states had restrictive abortion laws on the books. It's inconceivable to me that it took over 100 years of Kansas regulations of abortion to figure out abortion had been constitutional all that time. This is the same type of hubris and rubbish that Alito had debunked in his Dobbs majority opinion. You can read any kind of action under "liberty" but we libertarians have a non-aggression principle: you do not have a "right" to take my life, liberty or property. Probably most libertarians are, in fact, pro-aborts, bur the rest of us are pro-life: we believe that the preborn child has her own rights, worthy of protection. A "right" to abort (or its deceptive euphemism "choose") conveniently defines away the reality of the preborn baby and her rights. Surely the Kansas Supreme Court does not argue one has the right to kill another human life in other contexts; arguing it is different in the case of the child's biological dependency on her mother at that stage of development is, at best, arbitrary. A newborn baby is also utterly defenseless and dependent on her parents/surrogates to address her needs to grow and thrive, a sacrifice of one's separate liberties and property
The situation is exactly the kind of judicial tyranny that led to Proposition 8 in California after its Supreme Court ruled traditional marriage laws unconstitutional. So the question is, how do you reinstate the prior status quo? Proposition 8 simply defined marriage as between a man and a woman; Of course, the Left would refer to it as a "ban" on gay marriage, not an uprising against judicial tyranny. California had for years up to Proposition 8 recognized civil unions for gays with marriage-like protections. Of course, leftist love for "democracy" didn't extend to Proposition 8's victory. But American leftists still had a reliable judicial trump card to play: the federal judiciary, which set aside the revised California constitution on the way to Obergefell, where SCOTUS imposed legality of gay marriage across the states. Never mind the fact that the federal government has no enumerated right to regulate marriages, traditional state regulation, Tenth Amendment.
The devil is in the details in terms of the Kansas constitution, and timing is everything. Pro-aborts were spoiling for a fight since May, never mind when Dobbs was finally released. I don't underestimate the challenges in reversing 5 decades of Roe precedence, 2 generations of American women growing up in pervasive feminist ideology, when most abortions up through 6 months of pregnancy were unfettered and taken for granted. We are talking up to a million or more a year; and some arguing up to a quarter of American women have had the procedure done. I have little doubt most American women using the service are unlikely to challenge the legal foundation of what they did and likely to agree other women should have the same option. I similarly felt many men would be relieved of the financial burden for raising a child.
Pollsters had been telling us that the majority of Americans favored some accommodation of abortion, more than what the minority of us more restrictionist pro-lifers would prefer. Still, polls have shown up to half or more Americans personally profess pro-life beliefs, and only about a fifth to a third espouse an abortion on demand position. Where do you draw the line? If you've read my recent post-Dobbs posts, you may know: I've pointed out by 12 weeks the baby is well-formed and recognizable with all organs formed, a functional heartbeat and nervous system and reflexes (the baby can suck her thumb), etc. I've pointed out the median cutoff for legalized abortion in the EU is 12 weeks, and roughly 90% of American abortions are performed in the first trimester. I would, in fact, argue that with more modern understanding of child development, that the 12 week criterion is consistent with the ensoulment/quickening criterion used in earlier American abortion law and English common law. (Today the quickening or when the mother can feel her baby move is roughly 16 to 20 weeks.) Roe basically extended the state regulatory criterion to viability, or when the baby can live outside her mother's womb; with improved technology, that is roughly 21-22 weeks.
I lived in Kansas for a year when my Dad went to Southeast Asia for a year during the Vietnam War (he was originally assigned to Vietnam but his orders got changed once there) I really didn't/don't know the state's politics that well, although I realize of course that it's been a reliable red state with the GOP mostly dominating state-wide races. I didn't see any Kansas polls on abortion.
Still, I was concerned going into the recent Kansas vote. I knew the pro-abort side had been chomping at the bit to embarrass pro-lifers ever since Dobbs--and where better than in a traditional red state? They vastly outspent pro-lifers; I haven't seen or heard the ads, but I could easily imagine an updated version of coat hanger abortions, women dying from black market abortions, and other forms of fear-mongering, manipulative rubbish.
I was more worried about pro-life legislators overplaying their hands and misreading the issues caused in reverting 5 decades of liberalized abortion precedence. I was particularly concerned about how a 10-year-old Ohio rape victim denied a local abortion (having to go to Indiana) becoming a pro-abort poster child; I've repeatedly pointed out that rape/incest pregnancies are less than 1.5% of pregnancies with clueless red state figures arguing a 10-year-old should go to full term and have the baby. (Don't get me wrong: I understand the equal protection argument, that a child is not at fault for his father's sins.) It's like the red states have totally forgotten how Akins in 2012 completely blew a US Senate race against Claire McCaskill over his "legitimate rape" soundbite. Similarly Mourduck of Indiana lost his election over thoughtless comments on how pregnancy from rape reflects God's will. You would think the GOP would have learned a lesson from losing 2 gimme seas although losing the Massachusetts and Maine seats also cost the GOP a Senate majority flip. You see other clueless statements, like Trump wanting to prosecute women who have had an abortion. We pro-lifers have never been in favor of punishing women who have lost their babies. Trump is not a pro-lifer; he just wanted their political support.
Kansas voters rejected the amendment to restore abortion regulation to the Kansas constitution with almost 60% of the vote, a tragedy. My guess is Kansas voters did not want to enable a red state debate over exceptions like rape and incest. Would s more pragmatic approach have carried the day? I don't know. I have some some anecdotal reports of pro-lifers who voted no by mistake, thinking they were voting against abortion. I would have probably preferred a more direct statement "there is no constitutional right to abort". It should have been a referendum on judicial tyranny.
I'm not happy over the pro-abort victory laps, particularly by Catholic-in-Name-Only Joe Biden, and predictions of a pro-abort silent majority sweeping the South. I do think some pro-lifers, just like pro-aborts, misread the Dobbs case. I don't know if or when Kansas will make a second attempt to protect preborn babies. I do think the Kansas vote was a special case, and pro-aborts are overplaying their hand.
