WOULD YOU BUY A CAR FROM THIS GUY?

The Rubio-Schumer Amendment
Florida’s Republican tries to blow up the Senate tax reform.
The Editorial BoardNov. 29, 2017 6:34 p.m. ET

The GOP is pushing forward on tax reform, though a receiving line of Republican holdouts are slow-rolling progress. One who deserves special mention is Marco Rubio, who contributed nothing to ObamaCare repeal and now aspires to dilute the tax bill. Voters ought to remember this when he’s next pitching himself for President.

LITTLE MARCO - ZERO SUM GAME OF CHANCE ... WHO'S SIDE IS THIS LOSER ON?

On Wednesday Mr. Rubio and his political sidecar, Mike Lee of Utah, announced that they’ll file an amendment to the tax bill to change the $2,000 child tax credit. They want to make the credit refundable up to a person’s payroll tax liability, among other expensive tweaks. To pay for the changes, Messrs. Rubio and Lee would increase the corporate tax rate to 22% from the bill’s 20%.


If Mr. Rubio thinks payroll taxes are too high, he can propose a payroll tax cut. But then he’d have to weather the political fight of going after funding for Medicare and Social Security. So instead his back-door plan is to expand a refundable credit, which delivers checks to folks who owe no federal income tax. This is a disincentive to work and we would have thought antithetical to conservative principles.

More destructive is his increase in the corporate tax rate, which is the most pro-growth plank in the bill and could significantly increase what Americans earn since much of the tax falls on labor. A point or two more may seem like no big deal but it might be the difference between making the U.S. more competitive than the OECD’s roughly 24% average—or not. And that’s a mere average. One competitor for investment is Ireland’s 12.5% rate.

LITTLE MARCO HAS GONE OVER TO THE DARK SIDE

Mr. Rubio knows this, or ought to, yet his press release could have been written by Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. “Right now, 70 percent of the tax cuts we’re considering would go to businesses,” the Rubio-Lee dispatch says, “and only 30 percent to individuals.” This is a false choice—individuals earn income at businesses—and apes the left’s class-war politics.

Senate tax writers have already indulged the Rubio-Lee caucus beyond what any two Senators deserve. The original proposal increased the credit to $1,650 from the current $1,000. The pair demanded more. So when Republicans received a revenue windfall from repealing the ObamaCare coverage mandate, they raised the credit to $2,000. Now that also isn’t enough. Senators who demand ransom should at least stay bought.

Messrs. Rubio and Lee are inviting Democrats to join them to pass the amendment on the Senate floor, though Democrats will oppose the final bill. Republicans will have to hang together to defeat Rubio-Lee, which creates a tough vote for incumbents running in 2018. This could also pick a fight with the White House, which has laid down a marker on the 20% corporate rate.

Mr. Rubio may be setting himself up to run as a social conservative hero in 2024, or even 2020 if President Trump declines to run, and the child credit obsession is a down payment on that brand. Yet voters looking for a candidate who understands what makes America—and American families—prosper will have to look elsewhere.

Appeared in the November 30, 2017, print edition.

TRUMP THE MEDIA MASSAGIST ... DISTRIBUTED POLITICS

“[Another main theme of course will be that] the medium is the massage and not the message—it really works us over, it really takes hold and massages the population in a savage way.”

The old media is centralized. It’s one way, it’s one to many; it’s controlled by powerful forces, and everyone is a passive recipient. TRUMP HAS DISRUPTED THE METAPHOR! The new web and it's globally distrubuted new media is no longer filtered it’s highly distributed, and it’s not centralized. Everyone’s a participant, not an inert recipient. Check you blood pressure! This has an awesome neutrality. It will be what we want it to be, and we can craft a much more egalitarian, prosperous society where everyone gets to share in the wealth that they create. Lots of great things have and will continue to happened, but overall the benefits of the digital age have been and continue to be asymmetrical.  It’s owned by a tiny handful of powerful companies, players or governments.  The "Deep State" is a thin disguise for the conflict within the Republic the people's vote is on one side of the equation, rule of law on the other.  They monetize the "collective" in our digitally altered presence or, in the case of governments, use it to spy on us, and our privacy is undermined. 

COGNITIVE LIBERTY IN THE AGE OF NEO-FEUDALISM

Presence, Privacy, Identity and Rights Management the four pillaars of our cognitive liberty.  What if there were a second generation of the Internet that enabled the true, peer-to-peer exchange of value? We don’t have that now. If I’m going to send some money to somebody else, I have to go through an intermediary—a powerful bank, a credit-card company—or I need a government to authenticate who I am and who you are. What if we could do that peer to peer? What if there was a protocol—call it the trust protocol—that enabled us to do transactions, to do commerce, to exchange money, without a powerful third party? This would be amazing.

Several years ago, an unknown person or persons named Satoshi Nakamoto came up with the Blockchain technology and protocol. Everyone is connected, bound by time and order.  Once again, creativity and the human desire for liberty has unleased the genie from its bottle. It gives us another grasp at the brass ring to try and rethink the economic power grid and the old order of things. The combination of Quantum Computing and Blockchain Technology will be a "New World Order" ... 

THE DRIVEN MEDIA AND BLUNT FORCE TRAMA ...

WHEN ALL YOU HAVE IS A HAMMER EVERYTHING LOOKS LIKE A NAIL

Unhinged coverage of Trump is hurting the media


By Kyle Smith
 

Turn down the volume. Unclench your fist. Turn the dial back down from 11. Trump isn’t going anywhere for a while. Deal with it.

A year ago this week, I marveled at the pot-boiling-over frenzy of Donald Trump Derangement Syndrome in the media. Well, today, the media’s kitchen is a shambles. Spaghetti sauce is splattered all over the walls, and the Fourth Estate is pouring more Prego marinara into the pot while keeping the heat turned up to the level marked “thermonuclear.” 

Not only is everything (still) hyper-politicized, but the lines between news media, lifestyle media and flat-out activism have faded into irrelevance. On Wednesday, the lead story in Teen Vogue, next to stories about how “I Will Never Use Regular Soap Again After THIS $6 Foam Body Wash” and “Everyone Basically Wore Lingerie to the VS Fashion Show After Party,” was this screaming headline: “The United States Voted ‘No’ on an Anti-Nazi UN Resolution.” It ran over a terrifying picture of crowds carrying banners, some featuring swastikas, with smoke in the background suggesting a terror attack. Only when you click through do you discover that there is no news here whatsoever: The US votes against this meaningless, nonbinding UN gambit every year because the US has this thing called the First Amendment. President Obama’s appointees also opposed the resolution.

Meanwhile, “Black-ish” star Tracee Ellis Ross addressed a Women of the Year Summit earlier this month hosted by Glamour magazine. Her speech was ostensibly about being 45 and childless, but it could easily have been made by a women’s-studies professor at Barnard instead of a sitcom star: “I look back and think about all the ways we’re told that those two goals: being chosen and having kids, are what makes you worthy . . . this narrow story of ‘husband plus child equals woman.’ And the patriarchy — the patriarchy is not pleased with me right now. I’m failing at my function. Let me tell you, Mike Pence is f—ing confused by me right now.”

It seems unlikely that Vice President Pence is wandering around the White House buttonholing aides and saying, “My gosh, did you know that Tracee Ellis Ross is 45 and is unmarried with no children? I’m so confused by this information!” At the same Glamour magazine event, Congresswoman Maxine Waters called out, “You recognize when a leader is dangerous” and got the crowd chanting, “Impeach him! Impeach him!”

These days the drop-down menu on the website for Teen Vogue has “fashion” in the No. 2 spot. No. 1 is “news and politics.” Its latest edition stars Hillary Clinton on the cover alongside the headline, “Nevertheless, WE RESIST.” Readers resisted right back.

Teen Vogue has done so badly trading teen fixations for lefty harrumphing that this latest issue, which is also guest-edited by Her Hillaryness, will be the last to hit newsstands.Modal TriggerTeen Vogue

The culture warriors’ incessant politicization of everything has reached new levels of the ridiculous. At Newsweek on Monday, a story about a sociological study that revealed women like men who appear to be strong and wealthy was headlined in all caps: “MEN WITH MUSCLES AND MONEY ARE MORE ATTRACTIVE TO STRAIGHT WOMEN AND GAY MEN — SHOWING GENDER ROLES AREN’T PROGRESSING.” What’s more, this story was filed under “Tech & Science” rather than “Opinion.”

Over at Cosmopolitan, they’ve been running headlines like “This Theory About Why Donald Trump Actually Won the Election Will Leave You Worrying About Humankind.” Suddenly Cosmo’s unofficial motto is “Hot Sex Tips — and Why You Should Be Worrying About Humankind.” The GQ Resistance, meanwhile, is being run by the left-leaning Keith Olbermann, whose style is reflected in pieces with titles like “It’s Your Civic Duty to Ruin Thanksgiving by Bringing Up Trump.”

The unhinged coverage of all Trump scandals, real and imagined, has cost the media in the eyes of the public, among whom only 39 percent said they had a “great deal” or even “some” confidence in news outlets last November.

In the following months, the media tried to sell the idea that Trump supporters had been conned by “fake news” (based on a minuscule amount of Russian spending on Facebook propaganda that added up to the cost of less than a single airing of one commercial on a prime-time network TV show). But the cry of “fake news” was thrown right back in their face by Trump fans who sensed the claim was simply an attempt to distract from uncomfortable truths about Clinton’s shortcomings.

As of last month, still only 48 percent of Americans said they trusted the media, with 45 percent saying they have “hardly any” confidence in it. In other words, it’s basically a coin flip as to whether or not any given American thinks the media is just making stuff up. They aren’t, usually. But with every fashion glossy and sitcom star still beating a drum for Hillary a year after the election, while bashing Trump and everything he stands for from the front page to the sports section, can you blame people for losing respect for the press?

The media are correct in thinking they have an important duty in the Trump era. But the people are correct in noticing that the media is filtering everything through an obsessive hatred for Trump.

Kyle Smith is critic-at-large for National Review

CLARION CALL FOR THE HOMELESS STORIES ... COME AND GET IT!!!

“We haven’t seen homeless numbers like this since the Great Depression!”  A more accurate quote would’ve been, “A Republican is in the White House again! Let’s trot out some stories about homeless people that we’ve kept in storage for the past 8 years while a Dem was in the White House”!

Every Republican administration is greeted by homeless stories with regularity. For the 8 years of Obama's cartel the subject virtually never came up! Obama parted the waters and magically homelessness disappeared for 8 years. Now it will be a serious problem again.

I find it amazing how we had a serious homeless problem from 1980-1991, 2000-2007, and now the homeless problem is the worst since the depression! Let's see, stock market is thru the roof, unemployment is at it's lowest since 2003. Maybe they are homeless because of laziness? Oh wait ... that can't be true they are all hard workers, right?

AND NOW FOR THE STORY ... FROM THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA!!!

Thanksgiving help for the homeless: 'We haven't seen numbers like this since the Great Depression'

By LA TIMES ... City News Service

Thanksgiving meals will be served to thousands of homeless and near-homeless individuals today on Skid Row and in Pasadena and Canoga Park amid calls for donations and volunteers for the rest of the year.

The Midnight Mission will serve Thanksgiving brunch to nearly 2,500 homeless and near-homeless men, women and children, according to Georgia Berkovich, its director of public affairs.
 

Scheduled volunteer servers include gubernatorial candidate and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, entertainer Dick Van Dyke and actress Nicolette Sheridan.

The Midnight Mission is seeking donations of $5 to $10 to help it cover the costs of the meals. Donations can be made by texting "Meals" to 71777, Berkovich said. The mission serves meals seven days a week, distributes hygiene kits after its meal service and conducts drives for food and clothing to distribute to its guests.

Berkovich said the group has been serving nearly 1 million meals a year each year since 2013.

"We haven't seen numbers like this since the Great Depression," she said.

The nearby Fred Jordan Mission expects to serve more than a ton of turkey drumsticks, along with 500 pounds of mashed potatoes, 80 gallons of gravy, hundreds of pounds of traditional cornbread stuffing, 560 pounds of candied yams, 585 pounds of green beans, glazed carrots, spiced peaches, cranberry sauce and 400 pumpkin pies, according to the mission's Suzanna Choi.

The mission is seeking donations of unwrapped toys worth $15 to $20 each to be given to thousands of poor children for Christmas. The toys can be dropped off at the mission on Thanksgiving or any other day through Dec. 15, Choi said.

Union Station Homeless Services will be serving thousands of meals at its annual Thanksgiving Dinner in the Park at Central Park in Pasadena, continuing a tradition that began in 1972. Donations of store-bought pies will be accepted Thanksgiving morning, CEO John C. Brauer said.

SO WHERE WERE AS THE STORIES DURING OBAMA ADMINISTRATION ... IF THIS IS THE 30th. Annual ...

More than 2,000 people will be served a sit-down meal of turkey with trimmings at the 30th annual Community Thanksgiving Day Dinner for San Fernando Valley homeless and low-income families at the Guadalupe Community Center in Canoga Park.

DOES DIGITAL CLAPPING MAKE A NOISE?

China mobile users tap phones to 'applaud' president's speech

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Beijing | Thu, October 19, 2017 | 03:41 pm

This photo illustration shows a woman playing a game called 'Clap for Xi Jinping: A Great Speech', in Shanghai on October 19, 2017. (AFP/Chandan Khanna)

Missed out on the orchestrated applause at China's Communist Party Congress? Cheer up: this being China, you can join the praise through your mobile phone.

China's ubiquitous WeChat platform has released a game allowing the country's hundreds of millions of smartphone users to retroactively applaud President Xi Jinping's more than three-hour opening speech -- by tapping their phone screens.

As usual with highly-choreographed Communist spectacles, Xi's speech Wednesday outlining party priorities was punctuated by bursts of applause in which more than 2,300 party delegates at Beijing's Great Hall of the People seemed to start and stop clapping in eerily precise unison.

In the online game, called "Clap for Xi Jinping: A Great Speech", short video clips of various passages from Xi's address are shown.

After the roughly 10-second clips are finished, players tap on their phones along with the assembled delegates while an image of two applauding hands appears on screen.

Read also: 'Oh, bother': Chinese censors can't bear Winnie the Pooh

Players compete to see how many times they can "clap" within the allotted period of 19 seconds -- chosen apparently in honour of the Congress, the 19th in party history.

Nearly 1 billion individual taps had been logged by the game as of early Thursday afternoon.

China's masses of smartphone users use them for everything from messaging to online shopping and paying for restaurant bills and taxis. WeChat itself claims nearly 1 billion users.

The game was developed by Tencent, China's leading gaming and social media company, which operates WeChat.

Tencent and other leading Chinese internet firms are known to make gestures to stay in the good graces of Communist authorities to ensure their continued success.

Tencent in July began limiting daily playing times on its smartphone smash hit "King of Glory" amid official complaints that Chinese youths were becoming addicted to the game.

IS IT POLITICALLY CORRECT TO SAY "HAPPY BIRTHDAY?"

SO HERE'S MY QUESTION ... HOW DOES THIS TECHNOLOGY ADVANCEMENT CHANGE "OUR SOCIAL CONTRACT" ...?

WHEN ALL YOU HAVE IS A HAMMER ALL YOUR FOCUS IS ON THE NAIL

New York Post:

I do not understand how living in a country with its democracy established over 200 years ago, and now, for the first time in history, suddenly we have one of our former presidents set up a group called "Organizing for Action" (OFA).

OFA is 30,000+ strong and working to disrupt everything that our current president’s administration is trying to do. This organization goes against our Democracy, and it is an operation that will destroy our way of governing. It goes against our Constitution, our laws, and the processes established over 200 years ago. If it is allowed to proceed then we will be living in chaos very much like third world countries are run. What good is it to have an established government if it is not going to be respected and allowed to follow our laws?

If you had an army some 30,000 strong and a court system stacked over the decades with judges who would allow you to break the laws, how much damage could you do to a country? We are about to find out in America!

Our ex-president said he was going to stay involved through community organizing and speak out on the issues and that appears to be one post-administration promise he intends to keep. He has moved many of his administration's top dogs over to Organizing for Action.

OFA is behind the strategic and tactical implementation of the resistance to the Trump Administration that we are seeing across America, and politically active courts are providing the leverage for this revolution.

OFA is dedicated to organizing communities for "progressive" change. Its issues are gun control, socialist healthcare, abortion, sexual equality, climate change, and of course, immigration reform.

OFA members were propped up by the ex-president's message from the shadows: "Organizing is the building block of everything great we have accomplished Organizers around the country are fighting for change in their communities and OFA is one of the groups on the front lines. Commit to this work in 2017 and beyond."

OFA's website says it obtained its "digital" assets from the ex-president's re-election effort and that he inspired the movement. In short, it is the shadow government organization aimed at resisting and tearing down the Constitutional Republic we know as AMERICA.

Paul Sperry, writing for the New York Post, says, “The OFA will fight President Donald Trump at every turn of his presidency and the ex-president will command them from a bunker less than two miles from the White House."

Sperry writes that, “The ex-president is setting up a shadow government to sabotage the Trump administration through a network of non-profits led by OFA, which is growing its war chest (more than $40 million) and has some 250 offices nationwide. The OFA IRS filings, according to Sperry, indicate that the OFA has 32,525 (and growing) volunteers nationwide. The ex-president and his wife will oversee the operation from their home/ office in Washington DC.

Think about how this works.. For example: Trump issues an immigration executive order; the OFA signals for protests and statements from pro-immigrant groups; the ACLU lawyers file lawsuits in jurisdictions where activist judges obstruct the laws; volunteers are called to protest at airports and Congressional town hall meetings; the leftist media springs to action in support of these activities; the twitter sphere lights up with social media; and violence follows. All of this happens from the ex-president's signal that he is heartened by the protests.

If Barack Obama did not do enough to destroy this country in the 8 years he was in office, it appears his future plans are to destroy the foundation on which this country has operated on for the last 241 years.

If this does not scare you, then we are in worse trouble than you know.

So, do your part. You have read it, so at least pass this on so others will know what we are up against. We are losing our country and we are so compliant. We are becoming a "PERFECT TARGET" for our enemy!

Charles Krauthammer

A BETTER MOUSE TRAP WAS THE WORLD BEATS A PATH TO YOUR DOOR

Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett are wealthier than poorest half of US ... So what! Did they break any laws? Was it corruption that got them where they are? Perhaps the moral indignation is misplaced! For a new and different perspective check out "Shadow Banking" ... where you will learn more than 60 Trillion Dollars (USD) is being used on a daily basis which brings into focus just what is "money"? The carrot and the stick! So what is your motivation and value in life?

Institute for Policy Studies warns of a ‘moral crisis’ and says Trump tax change proposals will exacerbate disparities

Thursday 9 November 2017 07.15 EST

ECONOMIC CLASS WARFARE BY FORBES

Since the Forbes 400 was published in October, Amazon’s share price has risen by more than 10%, lifting Jeff Bezos’s fortune to around $95bn and making him the world’s richest person. 

The three richest people in the US – Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett – own as much wealth as the bottom half of the US population, or 160 million people.

Analysis of the wealth of America’s richest people found that Gates, Bezos and Buffett were sitting on a combined $248.5bn (£190bn) fortune. The Institute for Policy Studies said the growing gap between rich and poor had created a “moral crisis”.  Give me a break!

In a report, the Billionaire Bonanza, the thinktank said Donald Trump’s tax change proposals would “exacerbate existing wealth disparities” as 80% of tax benefits would end up going to the wealthiest 1% of households.

“Wealth inequality is on the rise,” said Chuck Collins, an economist and co-author of the report. “Now is the time for actions that reduce inequality, not tax cuts for the very wealthy.”

The study found that the billionaires included in Forbes magazine’s list of the 400 richest people in the US were worth a combined $2.68tn – more than the gross domestic product (GDP) of the UK.

“Our wealthiest 400 now have more wealth combined than the bottom 64% of the US population, an estimated 80m households or 204 million people,” the report says. “That’s more people than the population of Canada and Mexico combined.”

The report says the “billionaire class” continues to “pull apart from the rest of us” at the fastest rate ever recorded. “We have not witnessed such extreme levels of concentrated wealth and power since the first gilded age a century ago.”

THERE ARE MORE BILLIONAIRES IN CHINA

Forbes celebrated 2017 as “another record year for the wealthiest people in America”, as “the price of admission to the country’s most exclusive club jumped nearly 18% to $2bn”. That was a tenfold increase on the amount of money needed to enter the list when it first started in 1982.

Josh Hoxie, another co-author of the thinktank report, said: “So much money concentrating in so few hands while so many people struggle is not just bad economics, it’s a moral crisis.”

The report says many Americans are joining an “emerging anti-inequality movement”. “A century ago, a similar anti-inequality upsurge took on America’s vastly unequal distribution of income and wealth and, over the course of little more than a generation, fashioned a much more equal America,” it says.

WHO'S FAULT IS IT THAT "THESE INDIVIDUALS" HAVE GRABBED THE BRASS RING ON THE MERRY-GO-ROUND OF LIFE?  THE GOVERNMENTAL SYSTEM CAN NOT BE BLAMED BECAUSE IN EVERY SOCIETY THERE ARE THOSE LIKE CREAM RISING TO THE TOP. SO HERE'S THE QUESTION, "WHY SHOULD IT BE SOMEONE'S FAULT ... ?"

The rise at the wealthiest end of society comes as one in five US households live in what the report’s authors call the “underwater nation”, with either zero or negative wealth. Inequality is even more stark among minorities. Three in 10 black households and 27% of Latino ones have zero or negative wealth, compared with 14% of white families.

CAN'T BLAME ETHICITY!

Just two African Americans made the Forbes 400: Oprah Winfrey (number 264 with $3bn) and the tech investor Robert Smith (226 with $3.3bn). Five members of the Forbes 400 have Latino backgrounds, including the property magnate Jorge Pérez, the LA Angels baseball team owner Arturo Moreno and three members of the family of late Colombian beer magnate Julio Mario Santo Domingo, a major shareholder of SABMiller.

CAN'T BLAME RACE!

The top 25 people in the survey are all white. The richest is Gates, the Microsoft founder, with $89bn, followed by Amazon’s Bezos with $81.5bn, then investor Warren Buffett with $78bn and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg with $71bn.

Since the Forbes 400 was published last month, Amazon’s share price has increased by more than 10%, lifting Bezos’s fortune to an estimated $95bn, putting him in the provisional number one spot.

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